- The United States is both the richest country on Earth, and yet beset with a crushing poverty that saddles too many Americans.

Today's guest is a Pulitzer Prize winning author and sociologist who says the reality of American poverty is sustained by those who benefit from it.

He's Dr. Matthew Desmond this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music fades out) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- This week we're joined by Matthew Desmond, a professor of sociology at Princeton University.

Dr. Desmond is the author of a new book, "Poverty by America," and we should know he previously won the Pulitzer Prize for an earlier book, "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City."

Matt, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you, Jim, for having me, really appreciate it.

- You know, we were chatting beforehand and I told you that "Poverty by America" was a phenomenal read and I kept setting it down and saying to my wife, "Did you know this, did you know this?"

And it's a powerful, powerful story that you're telling.

We'll get to that in a second.

I'm curious, though, what drew you to study poverty in the first place?

- Well, thanks for that, thanks for engaging with the book so deeply.

You know, I grew up poor in a little town in Arizona.

My family knew the slights and cuts of poverty, our gas getting shut off and making $5 act like $10, we lost our home to foreclosure when I was college.

And I think that set me on a certain path.

And then for my last book, you know, following families that were evicted in Milwaukee, I saw a kind of poverty and desperation that I had never experienced before personally or seen, you know, seeing kids losing their homes on a daily basis, seeing grandmas live without heat in the wintertime.

And it really drove me to this question about why, you know, why so much poverty in this land of dollars?

- And it's a profound question.

I mean, when I lived in Washington, DC, I had a friend who was a Ukrainian economist at the World Bank, and she said before she got to the United States she'd heard about this incredibly rich and wealthy land.

And then when she got to the United States, the reality of the poverty she saw really stunned her.

Can you put that into some sort of context globally?

How does the United States compare in terms of poverty with other countries around the world?

- Compared to other advanced democracies, the United States stands in a disgraced class all by itself.

Our child poverty rate is not just higher than our peer nations, it's double that in Germany and South Korea and other advanced nations.

About 1/3 of our country gets by on $55,000 or less, so a giant chunk of the country is feeling really economically insecure.

My colleague Angus Deaton, the Nobel Laureate economist, estimated that over 5.5 million Americans are living on $4 a day or less.

That's considered abjectly poor by global standards.

So one way to think about America is to say we have the biggest economy, we're the richest nation in the world.

And another way to think about it is to say and yet we have more poverty than any other rich democracy.

- So, how can this be possible in America?

- I think the quick answer to that question is because we have designed it so.

You know, and for over 100 years, books about the poor have been about the poor, you know, and they've beared witness to poverty in our midst by looking at the lives of those suffering.

And those books are important.

But I think that if we wanna really truly understand why there's so much poverty in America, we have to look beyond the poor themselves to understand how many of us, many of us who are safe or are college educated, who are privileged, are deeply implicated in this problem all around us.

There are systematic ways that some lives are made small so that others may grow.

- Does poverty diminish our freedom?

- It does in fundamental ways.

It makes the country less safe.

It makes us scared.

It makes us have that pit in our stomach when we're worrying about the future of our children or wondering if we're one divorce or car accident away from real economic destitution.

And then for those who are under the weight of poverty themselves, it reduces people born for better things.

You know, think of all the doctors and poets and diplomats that poverty has stolen from us.

So, F.D.R.

was right when he said, "Necessitous men are not free men."

And there are so many folks who are not free because poverty is keeping them in chains today.

- You know, Matt, you said something that I think was very provocative.

I think a lot of Americans have come to terms in the last, let's say 10 years, with the idea of systemic racism.

You're talking about a systemic form of poverty.

What does that actually look like?

- So, many of us consume the cheap goods and services the working poor produce.

Many of us are invested in the stock market.

We have pensions and, you know, retirement plans.

Don't we benefit somewhat from poverty when we see our returns going up when those returns are coming often at the cost of workers whose wages are kept low?

We have an unbalanced welfare state.

You know, the government gives most to families that have plenty already, especially in the form of tax breaks.

And I know that many of us don't like to think about tax breaks as a kind of government benefit, but you know, a tax break and a housing voucher, for example, they both cost the government money and they both put money in my pocket.

And so, you know, we have this kind of deep investment in guarding fortunes much more than we invest in fighting poverty.

And then we continue to be a nation that's segregated.

You know, we continue to build walls around prosperous exclusive community.

We, you know, concentrate and hoard opportunity.

But that concentration of wealth has a side effect, and that's the concentration of poverty for those that are kept outside of our walls.

And so I think that many of us are kind of connected to the problem and connected to the solution in ways that we often don't realize just by going about our daily lives.

- So Matt, it seems that a factor here is empathy, or more precisely lack of empathy, that some perhaps many people feel toward their fellow residents of this country.

Is is that true?

And and if so, can you expand on that a little bit?

- I think that has been true for many, many years and I think that we especially saw this during Covid.

We saw talking point after talking point, for example, about welfare dependency.

You know, we're paying people to stay home, you know, how do people get so lazy?

But the data show that welfare dependency isn't very widespread.

There's just not a lot of evidence for it.

There's a lot more evidence for the opposite, welfare avoidance, folks not getting connected to programs that they need and deserve.

I do think that empathy is changing in America.

It's interesting, you know, if you look at the survey data, most Democrats and most Republicans today confess, believe that poverty result of unfair circumstances, not a moral failing, that's different.

Most Americans think the minimum wage is far too low.

Most Americans think the rich aren't paying their fair share of taxes and they're right.

And so I think on the ground level I think there is a different story building.

I think a lot of Americans, both left and right, are done with the old myths and tropes about poverty.

But it's kind of like that old Gramsci saying, you know, like the old is dying and the new hasn't been reborn yet.

And I think part of our job is to create a new story about poverty and inequality in America to kind of activate and spread that empathy.

- Do do you think that that change that you're describing that is building will translate into political response, political action, and leading to change in some of the systemic issues here that are are responsible?

- I think that's exactly the challenge, and that is the challenge that this book addresses itself too.

You know, all the time we hear, for the poverty debate we hear, well, we have the resources, we can make a bigger difference and we know what to do, but we don't have the political will.

And so this book is my attempt to answer that challenge.

It gives readers both very tangible, everyday little things that we can do to become poverty abolitionists, to start divesting from our neighbor's suffering, and it suggests big policies and social movements that people can get involved with too, to really put it into poverty.

And I'd love to kind of get down and talk about that in detail if you want to.

- Yeah, I think we're gonna go there for sure.

Before we do, though, I want to ask you, you know, one of the big takeaways for me on all of this is that poverty touches every other major issue that we might care about.

So if you think about mobilizing people, what do they care about if it's not specifically poverty?

Well, they care about education, they care about healthcare, they care about the climate.

Can you unpack that a little bit?

How does poverty intersect with all of those different issues in America?

- There's an old book called "The Book of Sands" which says, if you want your people to build a boat, you know, you don't wanna assemble the team or gather the wood.

You make them long for the edge of the sea.

And I think that part of the work that I'd like to do is not just make a case for the abolition of poverty because it's the right thing to do, which it is, but because that's a better country, that's a freer country, it's a safer country, it's a more vibrant country.

It's a country where you don't feel so diminished and kind of icky when you find yourself at a restaurant where you don't know if folks are getting paid a living wage or sleep in a hotel and don't know if the folks that are making your bed and taking care of room are taken care of at night.

And so I think many of us are pining for that kind of country.

Now, this book isn't a win-win book.

This book makes a clear argument that many Americans, the richest, most privileged Americans, we need to take less from the government.

But I think that what we get from that bargain is just a straight up better country.

And you're right, whatever issue you care about, whatever issue keeps you up at night, whether it's public safety, the rising cost of healthcare, kind of our flagging economy, the housing crisis, poverty is sitting at the heart of that issue.

- So, a couple minutes ago you offered to get into more depth about political change, what is possible, what might lie ahead.

Can you get into that in a little bit more depth now?

Because I took a little bit of optimism hearing that.

- I see this book as an optimistic book.

I want to end poverty in America.

I want to end it.

I do not want to reduce it or fiddle at the edges or nudge it.

I want to abolish it.

Because poverty is something that we shouldn't tolerate.

And so, how do we actually do that?

How do we end poverty in this country?

I think we need to do three things.

First, we need to deepen our investments in anti-poverty programs.

We need more investment in fair, affordable housing.

We need to make deeper investments in families.

And we have the resources to do this.

A recent study showed that if the top 1% of Americans just paid the taxes they owed.

Not paid more taxes, just stopped evading taxes so successfully, that we as a nation could raise $175 billion.

That's almost enough to lift everyone above the official poverty line every year.

We can do this.

But we don't just need deeper anti-poverty programs, we need different ones.

We need programs that attack poverty at the root.

And that means addressing all the forms of exploitation that poor families face in the labor market, housing market and financial market.

So we need to expand worker power, we need to make sure jobs are delivering for workers all over America.

We need to expand housing choice so that poor families aren't just stuck paying most of their income to landlords in the private market, which is the typical poor family today.

And we need to end the unrelenting financial exploitation of the poor, which pulls over $61 million in fines and fees from overdraft payday loan and check cashing places every single day.

And then the last move is we need to finally end our embrace of segregation.

We need to fight and strive for broad inclusive communities.

And I think that's how we end poverty in America.

- Are there any politicians on the national scene or non-politicians, for that matter, who are leading this or inclined to lead this or could lead this?

I mean, it takes leadership to do this, I would think you would certainly agree.

- I would, I think there are plenty of folks that we can point to in the Democratic Party who have been champions for serious anti-poverty legislation for a lot of their careers.

You think of someone like Rosa DeLauro who represents New Haven, Connecticut.

Or you think of Barbara Lee in California, you think of Cory Booker in New Jersey or Elizabeth Warren.

I think that there are, you know, champions of tax fairness and champions of the poor today.

You know, the Republican Party used to have serious ambitions about getting, you know, expanding economic opportunity for all Americans too.

You know, if you look back not too long ago in modern history, you know, the negative income tax, which is basically a basic income idea, that came out of the Nixon administration.

The first Secretary of HUD, George Romney, had real serious policy ideas for ending segregation in America.

This is Mitt Romney's father and a Republican.

But I think those ambitions have been fading away in the modern Republican Party, and I think Republicans today, Republican voters should start asking and demanding of their leadership, what are you doing?

What's your idea to end poverty in America?

- You know, Matt, how much does the United States spend currently on anti-poverty programs?

And I think probably it's important to distinguish that from public expenditures more generally.

- I think one way to answer that question is to look at spending on our 13th biggest means-tested programs.

This is a little wonky, but stay with me.

Means-tested programs are just programs designed for the poorest families in America.

These are things we know, food stamps, Medicaid, public housing.

So, spending on those programs went from about $1,000 per capita the first year, $1,000 per person, I should say, the first year into Ronald Reagan's administration, to about $3,400 per person the first year into Donald Trump's administration.

That's a 237% increase in those kind of spending, in those programs, adjusted for inflation.

So that's interesting and that's a paradox because, you know, the data on those programs are very strong.

These programs work.

They could be better, they're not perfect.

But man, they're lifesavers for millions of families pulling folks outta poverty every year.

And yet poverty has been persistent.

So why, you know.

And the book addresses that paradox and it says, you know, a big reason why is the fundamentals of American society, specific breakdowns in the job market and the housing market are just failing for a lot of Americans today.

So, rents have increased income gains by 325% since 1985, just far outpacing what folks are bringing in.

And then, you know, as unions lost power since the 1970s, American jobs got a lot worse.

And you know, if you're a man today, for example, without a college degree, your wages are less today than they would be 50 years ago adjusting for inflation.

So, in a way we have to kind of spin more just to stay in the same place.

And so the book does make an argument that we need to deepen those investments, but we also have to think new, we need new policies that really try to like cut poverty at the root.

- Yeah, so, what do you say to somebody who might contend that, look, the poor have always been with us, right?

I hear people cite the Bible, right?

The poor have always been with us and they always will be.

What do you say to the folks with that mindset who basically say that what you're talking about is that the boogeyman in American politics is socialism?

- I'd say that's a boring and defeatist and un-American view.

You know, we used to have real ambitions to end poverty in this country.

And when I think about the best of the American spirit, it's the bombastic, ambitious, we can do anything-ism that has long characterized what it means to be an American.

And so when the Johnson administration launched the war on poverty in 1964, this big bundle of packages that were directed at suffering families, struggling families all over the country, they set a deadline for the end of poverty.

They weren't playing around.

And I love that, I love that we once at the highest levels of government had this real ambition to end scarcity in this land of dollars.

And I think we should rekindle that ambition today.

It's just untrue that we have to tolerate and live with all this poverty in our midst.

Other countries don't, and we shouldn't have to either.

And we don't need socialism to get there.

We do need a different kind of capitalism, though.

We need a high road capitalism, capitalism for the people, not the other way around.

- So, Matt, this question is related to what Jim just asked.

How do you address the mentality that some people have, which is, if you're poor, it's your fault.

It's something you did, it's a blame situation.

It's the old, you know, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and blah blah blah.

How do you address that?

'Cause there are people, a lot of people, I'm guessing, who still have that mentality who would not accept what you're proposing.

- Yeah, I don't know if it's a mentality as much as propaganda.

And I kind of make that distinction, as Hannah Arendt did in her book on totalitarianism, where she said, you know, propaganda, we didn't necessarily believe it, but it organized us.

And I think that myths about poverty do the same thing.

And a lot of us kind of shut down conversations with those kind of responses.

Well, they didn't work hard enough.

Well, they aren't trying hard enough.

But I think that feels so completely far away from the lived experiences of the poor today.

And I don't think if you scratch beneath the surface we really believe it.

Like, do we really look at farmhands that can't stand up straight anymore 'cause they're picking our strawberries and our lettuce and ask them to work harder and say, "Your in poverty 'cause you're not bending and working as much"?

Are we gonna tell that to the maids and home cleaners who have chemical burns on their hands from cleaning our homes and offices, that they just need to put a little more elbow grease?

You know, I wrote about a young man named Julio Payes in the book.

You know, he was working two jobs.

He'd start at 10:00 p.m. at McDonald's, work till 6:00 a.m.

He'd have two hours to rest and shower then he'd clock in an aero tech working from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. going anywhere where the temp service sent him.

He'd rest as much as he could and then was back to McDonald's.

That's what he had to do to afford this basic bare bones apartment for he and his little brother and his mom in California.

And it got to the point that this young man, he was 24 years old, collapsed in the aisle of a grocery store from sheer exhaustion.

Are we gonna tell Julio he just needs to work harder?

So I think that that kind of propaganda is something we say, but I don't think it's something we believe, especially if we really tried to stress test it.

- [Wayne] I think you're right.

- Matt, you mentioned the minimum wage earlier.

It has been stagnant for longer than I can remember at this point.

What role does the federal minimum wage play in the persistence of poverty in America today?

- The federal minimum wage has not moved in 14 years.

And so, if you just think of what happened 14 years ago and all the change that we've seen, we have seen no change in the role of the federal minimum wage.

This is unconscionable because all other costs have gone up, especially the costs that matter most to the poor, energy costs and housing costs.

And so, it plays a huge role, because some states increase the minimum wage but a lot of states don't, and we just now have accepted a lot of working poverty, and even worse, working homelessness, where people are pulling 40 hours a week and living in their cars.

That's wrong, that shouldn't happen in America.

This is another thing that's very unique.

You know, many countries have a very boring, typical way of resetting the minimum wage.

You know, they don't need to wait around for legislative approval.

And so we should obviously raise the minimum wage, but we also should make it so that we don't have to wait for Congress to get their act together for the poorest paid workers to get another wage bump.

The data on what happens to you, to workers, when the minimum wage is raised is really moving to me.

Like, when cities raise a minimum wage, people quit smoking.

Problems with birth go down, maternal mortality goes down, people live longer, people eat healthier, child abuse and neglect charges go down.

And so, what we do when we rob people of a living wage is we literally rob them of life and family and happiness.

- Matt, what effect did the pandemic and the relief programs that emerged in the pandemic have on poverty in the United States?

- It was historic, it was historic.

I mean, for a moment there we had a different country.

We had a different country.

Let's just talk about a few things.

We rolled out something called the Extended Child Tax Credit and a lot of families got this credit.

You know, if you were middle working class or a poor family with kids, you basically got a subsidy for the government.

Governments investing in families.

That very simple intervention dropped the child poverty rate by 46% in six months.

- That's a staggering number.

- Wow, that's incredible.

- It's staggering, and so anytime I hear like, well, how can we do this?

We have to live with this, you know, we can't get over this.

This is just a clear piece of evidence for the effectiveness and power of government intervention.

One other thing, you know, we expanded emergency rental assistance to tenants who had fallen behind on rent because they lost our jobs during the pandemic and we dropped evictions to the lowest they've ever been on record, and study after study has shown that saved thousands and thousands of lives where your home was really protected during those early times of Covid.

And so, a big lesson for me is organizing works and government programs work.

And a tragedy, a real tragedy after the pandemic is we allowed those programs to expire.

We allowed them to dissipate.

And I think that we're going back to a status quo of high child poverty, of high evictions, and we didn't have to.

- So, Matt, we've only got about a minute left, so briefly, what can we as individuals do.

- Really quickly, if you wanna join an anti-poverty movement, figure out who's working in your state or at the federal level on these issues, you can go to a website that we launched with this book.

It's called EndPovertyUSA.org, EndPovertyUSA.org.

But let me give you two things you can do right now.

You can shop with your wallet.

You can invest in companies that are doing right by their workers, that are producing products through a unionized workforce.

And divest from companies that are busting up unions or exploiting their workers.

And you can fight segregation.

You can go to that zoning board meeting in your town at eight o'clock on a Tuesday night and you can stand up and say, "Look, I refuse to deny other kids opportunities my kids get living here.

I want this affordable housing complex in my community, build this thing."

- Matthew Desmond, the book is "Poverty by America" and it's outstanding.

Hey, before we go, we just wanna note that this is the end of a two-year run for our great colleague Carolyn Deady who's been the producer on "Story in the Public Square."

She's been a great colleague and a great friend for a lot of years, and we wish her the best in everything that comes next for her.

But that is all the time we have this week for "Story in the Public Square."

If you wanna know more, find us on PellCenter.org or look for us on social media.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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