Summary of Poverty, by America By Matthew Desmond

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Poverty, by America By Matthew Desmond

 

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Matthew Desmond's Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument that it persists in America because the rest of us benefit from it. He draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans exploit the poor, prioritize the subsidization of wealth over the alleviation of poverty, and stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities. This compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem and helps us imagine solutions. Desmond calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and true freedom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Mar 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215789247

Willie M. Joseph

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PROLOGUE

I wrote this book because I needed an answer to the question of poverty in America. I have researched and reported on poverty for most of my adult life, but still lacked a fundamental theory of the problem. I began paying attention to poverty when I was a child, living in a small home with a woodburning stove and Russian olive trees. After my father lost his job, the bank took our home, and we learned to fix things ourselves or do without. I went to college, applied for scholarships and loans, and worked as a barista, telemarketer, and wildland firefighter.

When attending Arizona State University, a student began hanging out with homeless people around campus. This helped him process the inequality he was seeing all around him, which was so much money. He began studying the housing crisis in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, where he befriended families who had been evicted and followed them for months and then years. He met grandmothers living in trailers without heat and saw kids evicted on a rainy day. He also saw a two-mile-long artificial lake in the middle of the desert, a giant puddle that loses two-thirds of its water to evaporation each year.

The United States is the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Almost one in nine Americans live in poverty, with more than 38 million people living in the United States who cannot afford basic necessities and more than 108 million getting by on $55,000 a year or less. More than a million of our public schoolchildren are homeless, and many incarcerated Americans find that their health improves because the conditions they faced as free (but impoverished) citizens were worse. The United States annually produces $5.3 trillion more in goods and services than China, and its gross domestic product is larger than the combined economies of Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Italy. America's poverty is not for lack of resources, but for something else.

The most important details in this text are that to understand the causes of poverty, we must look beyond the poor and examine ourselves. This book is an attempt to answer the question of why there is so much poverty in America and make a case for how to eliminate it. It also suggests that each of us become poverty abolitionists, unwinding ourselves from our neighbors' deprivation and refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.

THE KIND OF PROBLEM POVERTY IS

The Official Poverty Measure was created by Mollie Orshansky, a bureaucrat working at the Social Security Administration, to calculate poverty based on the cost of food in a given year and the share of a family's budget dedicated to it. Orshansky determined that bare-bones food expenditures accounted for roughly a third of an American family's budget, so any family making less than $3,000 a year (or around $27,000 at the beginning of 2022) would be considered poor because they would be devoting more than a third of their income to food, forgoing other necessities.

The Official Poverty Measure is still based on Orshansky's calculation, and in 2022, the poverty line was drawn at $13,590 a year for a single person and $27,750 for a family of four. Crystal was born prematurely in 1990, shortly after her pregnant mother was stabbed eleven times in the back while being robbed. Her father beat her mother and her mother smoked crack cocaine. Crystal's mother found a way to leave her father, and Crystal and her mother moved in with another man and his parents. Child Protective Services stepped in, and Crystal was placed in foster care.

She bounced around between dozens of group homes and sets of foster parents, and the longest she lived anywhere was eight months. When she reached adolescence, Crystal fought with the other girls in the group homes, picking up assault charges and a scar across her right cheekbone. Crystal was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, reactive attachment disorder, and borderline intellectual functioning, and had been approved for Supplemental Security Income (SSI). She was barred from low-income housing for two years due to an assault charge, and secured her first apartment in a run-down two-bedroom unit in a majority-Black neighborhood. However, her rent took 73% of her income and she experienced her first official eviction, making it likely that her application for housing assistance would