It truly disappoints me that I could only get 10% in to this book before having to give it up - the format was unreadable and missing important facts and figures and letters so it was very difficult to understand.

An excellent skewering of the American government's pro-wealthy policies, regardless of which party occupies the White House. A poverty abolitionist manifesto that is a very important read.

Desmond’s definition of poverty is breaking with the conventional ones that emphasise on low incomes and show poverty as the result of deindustrialization and family dissolution. Instead, he argues that poverty is mainly the product of choices and actions by more fortunate Americans, who knowingly and unknowingly contribute to its persistence. He maintains that the better-off are fighting a class war, keeping the poor down by design, while government’s social policy acts in ways that perpetuate poverty in America.

Desmond uses a range of evidence to support his argument about the causes of poverty in America, including government policy, specific practices and policies, and societal attitudes towards poverty, such as excessive regulations on housing construction, segregated public schools, and lack of connection between people of different classes. “Poverty”, he says, “isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that, and he challenges social service organizations to focus on empowering the poor and expanding their choices, rather than simply providing them with financial assistance.

Countries that make the deepest investments in their people, particularly through universal programs that benefit all citizens, have the lowest rates of poverty, including among households headed by single mothers. In many European countries and Canada, for example, a wide range of social insurance programs help to keep families out of poverty. These include children’s allowances, unemployment assistance and universal health coverage, along with considerable support for child care. In the United States, childcare is increasingly privatised, making it impossible for many single parents or mothers to go back to work full time.

Matthew Desmond challenges social service organizations to think more broadly about the issue of poverty and to embrace new approaches to addressing it, through empowering the poor, more unionization, and new rules to make housing more affordable and lending less predatory. He calls for an “abolitionist” crusade against poverty, which would “oppose racism, segregation, and opportunity hoarding in our communities, and stand for shared prosperity.”

'Poverty is often material scarcity piled on chronic pain piled on incarceration piled on depression piled on addiction— on and on it goes. Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies. It is connected to every social problem we care about— crime, health, education, housing— and its persistence in American life means that millions of families are denied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest
nations in the history of the world.'

Sociologist Matthew Desmond combines statistics, history, research and the stories of people he has met over the course of a decades-long fascination with the unique problem of American poverty in this dense text which purports to not only explain why poverty is such a problem in the USA, but also what could be done to solve it for good.

'If America’s poor founded a country, that country would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela,' Desmond tells the reader in the opening chapter. Some of the statistics he deploys to make his points are truly staggering, and frequent unflattering comparisons with other developed nations serve to highlight how shocking the levels of poverty in America are, and how much could be being done to assuage them, because it is being done elsewhere. For a country that is often perceived as feeling loftily superior to the rest of the world, it is shocking to read statements such as the following: 'There is growing evidence that America harbors a hard bottom layer of deprivation, a kind of extreme poverty once thought to exist only in faraway places of bare feet and swollen bellies.' The early chapters, which take a deep dive into the reasons why such little progress has been achieved, are compelling. Stories of misused state welfare budgets abound, and Desmond goes into heartbreaking detail about the way the deregulation of banks in the 1980s forced the poor to pay for their poverty through audacious overdraft charges and check cashing and pay day loan outfits which take advantage of their customers' desperation.

Much of the text intends to dismantle the myth of meritocracy - the idea that poor people are just lazy and that the rich are rich because they deserve it, have earned their wealth. Desmond highlights the absurdity of blaming poor people for making bad choices - settling for a low-paying job, having more children than they can afford, taking out loans with exorbitant interest rates - when so much of society is set up to give them no alternative. Desmond also points out how racism underscores much of the current reasons why it is so hard for Americans to escape poverty, noting how segregating trade unions hobbled their power, how zoning laws dating back to the Great Migration make it virtually impossible for poor people to move to what Desmond refers to as 'high opportunity neighbourhoods', and how the legacy of government subsidised homeownership in white communities after World War II still means it's often easier for a white person to buy their first home than their Black counterpart. Through his unravelling of the very idea of the American Dream, Desmond forces the reader to look deeper and challenge the prevailing narrative: 'For the past half century, we’ve approached the poverty question by attending to the poor themselves— posing questions about their work ethic, say, or their welfare benefits — when we should have been focusing on the fire. The question that should serve as a looping incantation, the one we should ask every time we drive past a tent encampment, those tarped American slums smelling of asphalt and bodies, every time we see someone asleep on the bus, slumped over in work clothes, is simply: Who benefits? Not Why don’t you find a better job? or Why don’t you move? or Why don’t you stop taking out such bad loans? but Who is feeding off this?'

Poverty, by America is intended to be a clarion call to those who are complicit in poor Americans staying poor, and at its best, it is humbling and inspiring. His arguments require the reader to take a hard, uncomfortable look at themselves and acknowledge that they are part of the problem, part of the reason why poverty levels have remained steady for the last fifty years. When Desmond condemns companies for stamping out any attempt at organising by its employees, for forcing workers to accept zero-hours contract and sign non-compete agreements that prevent them from quitting, it's not by chance that he name-checks Microsoft, Apple, Uber, DoorDash and Amazon. He wants the reader to face the truth: that our desire for goods and services immediately, and at rock bottom prices, has made it easy for companies to exploit their labour force. The language throughout the text is cultivated to hold the reader responsible for this systemic problem - with chapter titles such as 'Why Haven't We Made More Progress?' and 'How We Undercut Workers'. Even the title is provocative, making it clear that America is the author of this situation.

Large parts of Desmond's book are utterly riveting, particularly those which draw on the stories of people he befriended and lived alongside in the poorest areas of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He very deliberately strives to put a human face on a problem which the average American prefers to keep at arms' length and only consider in very abstract terms. It's one thing to reel off the reasons why universal health care is an impossible dream and disability benefits are being misused; it's quite another to make these claims after reading the story of Woo, Desmond's friend who struggled to claim disability benefits after his leg was amputated due to an infection caused by stepping on a nail in a dilapidated apartment building, left untreated because Woo couldn't afford to see a doctor.

However, the later chapters, which focus on what America should be doing to abolish poverty on local, state and federal levels, made for slow, challenging reading for someone without a background in economics. I understand that it was important to include because - as with climate change activism - our individual efforts are laudable but insignificant in terms of the difference they make, but these chapters felt dense to the point where I struggled to get through them, and that is surely not helpful to the cause. Additionally, because I found these sections of the book so hard to wade through, I wouldn't like to comment on the feasibility of Desmond's proposals.

Finally, British readers may feel that this book is not relevant to them or to our society. Indeed, as a British reader, it would be easy to smugly note how much more egalitarian British society is, with our universal health care and our capped bank charges, but that would be disingenuous. While the specifics of Desmond's manifesto are uniquely American, our society is also increasingly polarised and the working poor (reliant on food banks, choosing between heating their homes and feeding their families) exist here too in ever growing numbers. If the government continues to fail to properly fund education, health care and social care, poverty in the UK will only continue to metastasise.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Press UK for the opportunity to read and review an ARC of this book.

I regrettably couldn't read the book well because of the formatting of my ebook. None of the quotes were included. However, the overall structure of the book still was quite readable & exciting.

There are many false assumptions and misunderstandings about poverty and the people who live that reality in the US. In this excellent, informative, and important book, Matthew Desmond both illuminates the reality of poverty in the US and issues a call to action. He states that, "This is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy." (p 6) Desmond is interested in why-why is there so much poverty in the US? This book is his response to that question. He makes it clear up front that this is not another book about "the poor," but rather "a book about how the other other half lives , about how some lives are made small so that others may grow." (p 7-8) And by the other other half, he means not just the wealthy, but also middle class people. "People benefit from poverty in all kinds of ways. It's the plainest social fact there is, and yet when you put it like this, the air becomes charged. You feel rude bringing it up...People accuse you of inciting class warfare when you're merely pointing out the obvious." (p 42)

As someone who has studied US culture for over half a century, both formally and informally, and who has had the very experience he is describing when discussing many different issues that people don't like to or cannot comfortably face, I can say that not only do I agree with him, but I think more people need to start saying these things. Awareness is required. It's not that people deliberately set out to harm others by their actions--at least most of them--but rather that they take advantage of the breaks they're given without thinking much about it. We're all enculturated into our society and tend to see things as "just the way things are." This keeps a lot hidden from our consciousness. And there are politicians who will use misleading language to exploit that and gain support, which leads to poor public policy. When you drill a little deeper and get past the superficial, though, it really is obvious, as he says. That's not to say people want to hear these things--they definitely don't, at least in my experience. There is a lot of defensiveness and an unwillingness to be inconvenienced. But it's important to get this stuff out into the open.

I think this, for me, was the most important part of the book and why I am giving it 5 stars. The research and data is extremely important, as is the myth-busting that Desmond does throughout the book, but that still keeps those who are not poor at a distance, even if they're better informed. By talking about the ways in which those who don't live in poverty benefit from it and even help perpetuate it, he lets people know that we all have skin in the game. It becomes less a distant set of circumstances happening to someone else that has nothing to do with us and more something that everyone is actively involved in. Helping more people to see this is vital. I cannot recommend this very well-written, thoroughly researched, very relevant, eye-opening, important book highly enough.

Very interesting read. I haven't read the authors first book but didn't think I needed to to get in to this one. Very informative and I thought very well researched.

Another amazing informative look at poverty in America.Matthew Desmond won a Pulitzer for his book Evicted a book that brought us into the lives the world of the poor.This is an interesting look at poverty today the causes the people who struggle to survive a look at the reasons for the amount of poverty today.The author writes so well he explains in a style that we can all understand a very difficult topic.#netgalley #povertybyAmerica