Speaker 1: Today, we're going to be speaking with Matt Desmond, who's a professor of sociology
at Princeton University and also author of the book Poverty by America.
Really appreciate your time today.
Looking forward to this conversation.
Speaker 6: Me, too.
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: So when we talk about poverty in the United States, we know that on average,
and we can define average a few different ways.
The United States is a very, very rich country.
We've all heard, you know, you put Bill Gates in a room with poor people.
The mean net worth gets very high, but it doesn't really represent the situation for
everybody other than Bill Gates in that room.
Is it a mathematical reality that even though there are very rich people in the United States
and that sort of skews these averages, poverty is still very high.
Do we need to go beyond that to really understand the source of it?
Speaker 6: The United States stands alone, is the richest country in the world with the
worst poverty.
So our child poverty rate is double that of other poor nations like Canada, South Korea,
Germany.
Angus Deaton, The Economist, estimated that over 5 million Americans live in abject poverty.
By global standards, getting by on $4 a day or less.
And look, one in three of us live in homes making $55,000 or less.
A lot of those homes aren't considered officially poor.
But what else do you call trying to raise two kids on 55 K in Boston?
So there's a giant amount of insecurity and poverty in this rich land.
Speaker 1: When we think about poverty, part of what we have to talk about is how we're
measuring it.
And as you're talking about, there are people who, by the definition in the United States,
aren't poor, but that the practical day to day realities certainly mirror poverty as
we understand it.
Can you talk a little bit about how the definition of poverty in the United States has changed
over time?
Speaker 6: So there's a lot of different ways to measure poverty.
Researchers do not agree on what the best measure is.
You know, for me, one way to measure hardship is just to measure hardship.
And so you can look at something like evictions.
They're up 20% since 2000.
Look at the share of families visiting food pantries, up 19% since 2000.
The number of our homeless school kids is up 74% since the Great Recession.
There's a lot of incredibly troubling signs that poverty is not only persistent in America,
but growing.
You know, the poverty line is a is a pretty flawed measure, but it also tracks pretty
well with those hardship measures.
The government introduced another measure called the Supplemental Poverty Rate, the
Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2011, and it counted for a lot of kind of government
programs the official poverty measure ignores.
But it also counted for like housing costs and regional variation and cost of living,
which the official poverty measure also ignores.
And when they released that line, that new poverty line, the country officially gained
3 million more poor people, actually, because any reductions in poverty, offset by counting
aid, were more than kind of canceled out by counting rising housing and medical costs.
Speaker 1: I want to really delve into one of the aspects you write about in the book
that goes above and beyond defining some of these terms, establishing what the situation
currently is and what it has been.
And you talk about how affluent Americans knowingly or unknowingly contribute to poor
people remaining poor.
And this may be a difficult thing for for some people to hear and to understand.
Can you talk a little bit about that and how you lay out the case for the knowing or the
unknowing aspect of that?
Speaker 6: I ran across this line by the novelist Tommy Orange, and it goes like this These
kids are jumping out of the windows, of burning buildings, falling to their deaths.
And we think that the problem is that they're jumping.
And when I read that sentence, I was like, man, that sounds like the American poverty
that they know for for hundreds of years, really.
Our focus has been on the poor and the poor themselves, the jumpers.
You know, we should have been focusing on the fire.
Who lit it?
Who's warming their hands by it?
And many of us, when we have that kind of conversation and we want to talk about the
guy that's just a little richer than us or a lot richer than us.
But the book is really trying to get a lot of us.
And by us, I mean those of us that have found some security and privilege in this country
to really yet look in hard in our lives and realize how we're connected to the problem
and the solution.
A lot of us consume the cheap goods.
The working poor produce.
A lot of us are invested in the stock market.
Don't we benefit when our savings go up, even if that savings comes at a human sacrifice?
Many of us benefit from tax breaks and we don't think of those as welfare programs.
But they are.
They cost the government money and they put money in our pocket.
And, you know, a lot of us hold on to those tax breaks which starve anti-poverty spending.
And then we have the audacity to ask how can we afford to do more as a country?
So I think that when you start looking at the poverty problem by looking at the fire,
you kind of realize there's so much poverty in America, not in spite of our wealth, but
because of it.
And I think that opens up new possibilities for change.
Speaker 1: I'm interested in your thoughts about to what degree there is moral, moral
responsibility at the individual decision level.
Maybe this is analogous to you know, I've talked with my audience before about how if
you think taxes should be higher, sending the IRS more money isn't really policy.
It's not a solution to the problem.
It's not how we got here.
And so you can simultaneously pay, I think, pay what you legally owe while advocating
that large swaths of people, maybe including yourself, should be paying more.
If we apply that to the conversation that we're having about poverty, how should the
individual look at their level of responsibility here?
Speaker 6: I think we should commit ourselves becoming poverty abolitionists.
You know, we should view poverty not as an unfortunate aspect of American life, but as
an abomination.
And I think like other abolitionist movements, the movement to abolish slavery, the prison,
you know, we should recognize that profiting from someone else's pain corrupts all of us.
And so that's a that's a political project that's going to take renewed political movements
and policies.
But it also is a personal project.
And that requires us to shop differently, invest differently, thinking about taxes,
you know, for those of us that benefit from this lopsided welfare state, the fact that
the country does so much more to guard fortunes than to fight poverty.
Maybe we start a letter writing campaign.
We write our congressperson saying like, let's wind down these things.
I don't need this.
This is also a neighbor to neighbor conversation over the fence line conversation, not because,
you know, these little kind of personal moves will abolish poverty, but those personal moves
multiplied over and over again built a political will that empowers our lawmakers to act.
Speaker 1: One of the areas that's a topic of much, much discussion with lawmakers and
in communities and with neighbors is about zoning practices, approval boards for condos,
restricted income condos, all all these different things.
Can we talk a little bit about that in the sense of, you know, we know about the long
history of exclusionary zoning practices, practices in lending.
Many of us have talked about those realities we now sometimes see.
I mean, recently in Brooklyn, I was talking with some friends about a project that was
putting in, I think it was a dozen or so units.
And the idea is we're going to sell the dozen units to six buyers and these are going to
be income limited.
So everybody buys two units.
You live in one, we create lower income landlords.
It all sounds interesting, but is it really going to are we really going to deal with
this problem piecemeal in that way?
Or does the solution really have to come from higher and be broader and bigger?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think both and everything, all of the above, you know, and I think that
segregation continues to be a driving force of poverty in America.
There's probably no more soulless phrase in the English language than municipal zoning
ordinance, you know?
But like, that's a really good way to look at the soul of a community.
You know, and 75% of our land, you can only build a single, detached family home.
You know, we build these walls around our community and we hoard affluence behind those
walls.
And that not only concentrates wealth, but it concentrates poverty outside of our walls.
So we have to tear down the walls.
We have to start reaching for broader inclusive communities, which really means, you know,
going down to your zoning board meeting at Tuesday night and standing up and saying,
Look, I refuse to turn.
My kids opportunities.
My kids get living in this place.
We got to build this thing.
I refuse to be a segregationist.
So again, here's a conversation that sounds very like policy and abstract.
Yeah, but it's also very personal.
You know, it's about how we vote, how we move.
The conversations we're having with our workers at the WaterCooler, you know, in studies show
that, you know, Democrats are more likely to embrace affordable housing in the abstract,
but are no more likely than conservatives to vote yes in their own backyards.
You know, studies show that conservative renters are actually more likely to vote yes on an
affordable housing project than liberal homeowners.
So I think our values cannot stop where our property line begins.
We really have to live out these values in our own lives.
Speaker 1: How do those values apply or connect to?
Just to pick something that's often discussed to get your take on it.
Something like mobile phones and in particular in the context of activism.
Most of us have heard that and are aware that mobile phones are connected to so-called conflict
minerals, typically from other countries.
We're now talking outside the U.S., even though companies like Apple and others will say,
no, everything's fine.
We're ensuring this, that the other thing isn't going on.
Videos have surfaced where we see that there are very young looking, young looking people.
Hard to say.
They aren't kids digging by hand, etc.
Then they're manufactured.
They're sold in places like, you know, a T-Mobile store, Apple store in the United States.
And we can look at the wages that are paid there.
And they're not astronomically high, but they're sort of like, okay, and a lot of these are
creating local jobs, etc., in the United States.
How do we take that panorama total and combine it with the fact that many people who want
to be activists for exactly the issues you're talking about use the devices to to that end.
Right.
So it also plays a role in their activism.
How do we unwind something so seemingly, seemingly complicated when we apply the sort of standard
and critique you're applying?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I would love us to apply that kind of critique to poverty abolitionism.
You know, many of us know not to eat chocolate from certain brands because of these things,
or we are aware of the climate consequences of certain purchases or flights or certain
meals.
But, you know, we know that our our cucumbers, it's local, organic.
We don't know how much the farm hand picked it.
We know where to get our coffee if we want to signal certain political values.
But we don't ask how much the workers are getting paid in there.
I was in London a few weeks ago and I saw these stickers on stores and they said, you
know, we plight, we pay a living wage.
And I went into a store and I said, Well, tell me about the sticker.
And they're like, well, you know, the standard is here, but, you know, our companies decided
to bring it up to here.
I would love to see that kind of thing happening in America, that consumer push and process.
And so there's groups like Union Plus that say, hey, you know, you want a candy bar,
you want a beer, These are these are union made.
These are then there's organizations like B Corps that says, you know, these companies
have really high standards of environmental and social consciousness.
They pay their workers well.
And so I think that like shopping and investing a little bit in solidarity of the poor makes
a lot of sense.
As you as the cell phone example relates.
Right.
A lot of us kind of feel, you know, embroiled in these kind of morally compromising networks
and we want out of it, you know, and this is where kind of an argument for poverty.
Abolitionism isn't just an argument for the end of this depravity and scarcity.
It's about a freer country, a safer country, a happier country, and a country where you
don't worry so much about our kids.
Speaker 1: You know, I was I was in London a couple of weeks ago as well, and saw the
exact same stickers and found them interesting.
Should we be economic nationalists in this conversation in the sense of prioritizing,
For example, like with coffee, there's very little coffee grown in the U.S., I think maybe
some in Hawaii, and that's basically it.
So it's coming from other parts of the world in having this conversation.
Should we be economic nationalists in the sense of focusing on the metrics that relate
to the workers in the U.S.? Or should we be considering the farm in Costa Rica or wherever?
And then with coffee, there's a middle person that's often involved where sometimes a lot
of that money actually gets sucked in.
To what degree should we focus on within the U.S. versus outside of it?
Speaker 6: I think there is and there is something to be said by starting here.
And the reason is building a political will to abolish poverty in America.
And I mean that for real.
You know, I think we can and should end poverty in this land of abundance.
Getting to that goal, I think, motivates further investments in countries that have far more
poverty in the United States and and could could could get us there.
But if we can't do it here right in our own backyard, I don't think we have a chance of
doing it abroad.
So I don't think we have to choose.
And I think that often we have these kind of scarcity arguments, right, where we're
kind of setting up this false scarcity narrative.
I don't think we have to.
But I think just pragmatically, there is something to be said about, okay, let's tackle poverty
right here, right now.
Then let's broaden broaden the aperture.
Speaker 1: Last thing I wanted to ask you about, particularly in the context of the
COVID stimulus bill, is the earned income tax credit has been a topic of discussion.
I think, generally speaking, it's a good program.
I like the higher numbers.
I think it makes sense in a lot of ways, but it also has limitations which which you've
talked about.
Certainly it doesn't seem to address the root causes of poverty and the reasons people might
qualify for an earned earned income tax credit, child tax credit to begin with.
Can you talk a little bit about that treating symptom versus disease maybe.
Speaker 6: Right.
So the earned income tax credit is kind of a wage subsidy that our poorest paid workers,
many of them parents, get every year.
It's a big part of the safety net.
It's about $61 billion a year.
And for a lot of families, man, it's a life saver.
You know, it is a life saver.
It lifts millions of families out of poverty, but it doesn't address that problem, that
low wage problem.
Do I think that yes, it is a good idea?
Do we need it?
Absolutely.
Do I think that we need other things that really cut at the root of poverty?
Yes.
So those would be things like worker power, expanding representation on corporate boards,
for example, for workers.
Yes.
Finding out ways of making organizing easy instead of this incredibly hard, slow process
that it is now things to really kind of build up wages and fight worker exploitation.
And, you know, as we're doing that, let's definitely make sure those families have enough
to get by with things like the EITC.
So short term solutions and long term solutions.
Speaker 1: Do you see that Democrats or Republicans are definitively better on this issue, or
is that a lot of political framing and posturing when there may not be as much daylight as
some would believe?
Speaker 6: No, I think Democrats are definitely better on this issue.
They're I think on the ground level, there's a lot of Americans that want this, right.
Most Americans want a higher minimum wage.
Most Americans think the rich aren't paying their fair share taxes.
Yes, most Democrats and most Republican voters think poverty now is a result of unfair circumstances,
not a moral failing.
So I think there's a lot of us on the ground level, neighbor to neighbor to neighbor that
actually agree on these basic issues, economic justice.
But our electeds are polarized from us, and that's a problem that we need to fix.
Speaker 1: The book is Poverty by America.
We've been speaking with the book's author, Professor Matt Desmond, sociology department
at Princeton University.
Really appreciate your time and insights.
Speaker 6: Thank you, David.
Appreciate you.