Americans have never been particularly good at seeing the poor. Whether your cable news channel is MSNBC or Fox, you will hear very little about poor people. The middle class tends to imagine poverty as a problem of developing nations, its worst forms in the distant past and reminiscent of a Dickens novel. The cultural impulse to make the poor “invisible” is undeniable, but the so-called invisible hand of the market, writes Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, does more than notice the poor; it preys on them. Despite common assumptions about opportunity, Desmond shows how Americans of means support a government that thwarts real solutions and perpetuates inequality while never really trying to eliminate poverty.
Desmond's book is a jeremiad, a wake-up call about one sad, simple (1939), in which a tractor driver is hired to tear down a tenant farmer's home. As the farmer threatens to shoot him, the driver protests that he's not to blame, that someone else would invariably take his place. “[O]ne man's poverty,” writes Desmond, “was another man's profit.” In this dog-eat-dog existence, Desmond implies, the poor are pitted against each other.
