March 17, 2023
Dear Interested Readers,
Desmond Implies that Progressives and Conservatives Share Some Responsibility for Poverty: What Needs to Change to Improve the Social Determinants of Health?
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! Before you drink too much green beer or eat a dinner of salty corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, and carrots, as I will, I hope that you will read today’s letter. I apologize for its length, but there is a lot to discuss. Poverty has always been a concern within minority and migrant communities. Many people came to America from Ireland because of poverty, and when they arrived they faced bigotry and exclusion. There is much to celebrate about those Irish immigrants. They were hard-working, determined, and unwilling to be broken by the challenges they faced.
Today, we have presidents, supreme court justices, captains of industry, engineers, scientists, artists, athletes, and academics who are justly proud of their Irish heritage. Today, we have new immigrant populations that face much of the same resistance that the Irish encountered. They are also economically stressed. Many are fleeing from danger and oppressive environments. Like the Irish immigrants of the nineteenth century, they want a better opportunity here.
We treat them as “other,” and further divide them from us by race and ethnicity. Whether they are legal or not they usually are first integrated by joining a large resident population of Americans who are poor. All of our poorer neighbors suffer from adverse social determinants of health. If we ever hope to improve the health of the nation, we must treat everyone equally and take on the challenge of irradicating poverty.
When I think about poverty, Matthew Desmond frequently comes to mind. He wrote the best nonfiction book I have read in the last ten years, Evicted: Poverty and Profit In the American City. Evicted won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2017. I was delighted to discover this week that Professor Desmond has a new book, Poverty, by Ameirca, being published next Tuesday, March 21. I have already ordered my copy.
I usually read a book before I write about it, but this time is different because last Thursday (March 9) Desmond published a 6,000-word article in the New York Times Magazine entitled “Why Poverty Persists in America: A Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist offers a new explanation for an intractable problem.”The article is a preview of the book.
Before I launch into a review of the magazine article which I think will present most of the points I would want to make after I finish the book, let me introduce you to Matthew Desmond, You may already know who he is from your own reading or from reading these notes because I have mentioned him many times since the publication of Evicted. His personal story illuminates his motivation. I will lift the introduction to him from one of the reviews of his new book that appeared this week in an online article from The New Yorker written by Margaret Talbot entitled “How America Manufactures Poverty: The sociologist Matthew Desmond identifies specific practices and policies that consign millions of Americans to destitution.” Ms. Talbot gives us a good bio. I have bolded her words that capture the central question that Desmond has tried to answer with his continuing research and writing.
More manifesto than narrative, “Poverty, by America” is urgent and accessible. It’s also austere. There aren’t many stories about individuals [Evicted was full of stroies]; Desmond seems to dole these out with purposeful spareness, perhaps so that we won’t get distracted by them. But the one he tells about himself is affecting. Before he went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, or won a MacArthur, or became a professor at Princeton, Desmond grew up outside a little town near Flagstaff, Arizona, living with his family in a modest wood-panelled house that he loved. Then his father, a pastor, lost his job, and the bank took the family’s home. “Mostly I blamed Dad,” he writes. “But a part of me also wondered why this was our country’s answer when a family fell on hard times.” He kept wondering while he was in college, using scholarships and loans, at Arizona State University, supporting himself as a barista, a telemarketer, and a wildland firefighter. The question compelled him to write “Evicted.” Behind that question, always, were the bigger questions that animate this new book: How is it that the United States, a country with a gross domestic product “larger than the combined economies of Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Italy,” has a higher relative poverty rate than those other advanced democracies? Why do one in eight Americans, and one in six children, live in poverty—a rate about the same as it was in 1970? Why do we put up with it?
Evicted was written from the research and work Desmond did while writing his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Wisconsin. Like sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, who lived with working-class people of Louisiana so that she could understand why they voted against their own best economic interests, Desmond, lived for a year in inner-city Milwaukee and got to know people who were constantly under the threat of eviction. He also talked with landlords and public officials to develop the entire picture from multiple perspectives.
After writing Evicted, Desmond spent some time at Harvard as a fellow before accepting the Maurice P. During Chair of Sociology at Princeton where he leads the Eviction Lab which studies eviction and poverty and publishes an online map that allows one to see how poverty, economics, politics, and eviction interact from state to state.
Desmond’s article, Why Poverty Persists In America, in the New York Times magazine last week begins:
In the past 50 years, scientists have mapped the entire human genome and eradicated smallpox. Here in the United States, infant-mortality rates and deaths from heart disease have fallen by roughly 70 percent, and the average American has gained almost a decade of life. Climate change was recognized as an existential threat. The internet was invented.
On the problem of poverty, though, there has been no real improvement — just a long stasis. As estimated by the federal government’s poverty line, 12.6 percent of the U.S. population was poor in 1970; two decades later, it was 13.5 percent; in 2010, it was 15.1 percent; and in 2019, it was 10.5 percent. To graph the share of Americans living in poverty over the past half-century amounts to drawing a line that resembles gently rolling hills. The line curves slightly up, then slightly down, then back up again over the years, staying steady through Democratic and Republican administrations, rising in recessions and falling in boom years…What accounts for this lack of progress?
In complex matters like poverty and healthcare, it is often hard to answer questions of causality because of ambiguities and the complexity and interactions of so many factors. Inherent biases and self-interest may further make it hard to get a clearer picture of complex issues like healthcare and poverty. There are problems of methodology that make finding answers difficult. Who is poor? How is poverty determined? How does poverty vary from state to state? How does it vary from rural to urban environments? How much of the problem of poverty is related to personal failures? How many of poverty’s determinants are beyond the control of the individual?
What we individually believe is often a function of the economic and social status of our family of origin. I am reminded of the joke about the second President Bush. The punch line was that he was born on third base and thought that he had hit a “triple.” Another compounding factor in the analysis of poverty and what to do about it is that to be poor today is not exactly the same as when John Steinbeck wrote Grapes of Wrath about the Joad family struggling with the duality of the Great Depression and the disaster of the “dust bowl.”
Today’s poor can have cell phones and big screen television, but still, be poor and suffer all of the healthcare risks that are driven by the social determinants of health. As the years have gone by, how we measure poverty and what poverty is have changed, but the improvements in methodology have not done much to inform us about why it persists or why the good faith efforts to improve it have failed.
Further complicating the analysis of why the percentage of Americans who are in poverty has not gone down is the fact that no country other than France spends more on social services than we do. Desmond makes the point that when we make progress in one area of poverty we often lose ground in another dimension, and the percentage of those in poverty stays the same.
Possible reductions in poverty from counting aid like food stamps and tax benefits were more than offset by recognizing how low-income people were burdened by rising housing and health care costs.
Desmond points out that the poor, like those of us who are more affluent, can buy a lot of cheap goods at places like Walmart, but they still have problems getting what they really need like good food and child care that allows a parent to work. Access to cheap consumer goods does not cancel the impact of exclusion from acceptable housing in a community where their children can thrive. He writes:
The American poor, living as they do in the center of global capitalism, have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn’t mean they can access what matters most. As Michael Harrington put it 60 years ago: “It is much easier in the United States to be decently dressed than it is to be decently housed, fed or doctored.”
In these notes, you have probably learned that I don’t have a reverence for Ronald Reagan. I have implied that he undermined Johnson’s Great Society and the war on poverty. Desmond points out that despite Reagan’s attitudes about welfare and his desire to greatly reduce social services, neither he nor any subsequent president has succeeded in reducing what we spend on programs that we hope will reduce poverty. What has happened is that we reduce what we give directly to the poor. Much of the money that we now spend on poverty programs is filtered through the states or private enterprises with the result being that we spend more without improved outcomes. He asserts that only 22 cents of every federal dollar spent on poverty actually gets to someone in poverty.
We spend more on improving healthcare and have less to show for it than other economically developed nations. Likewise, we also don’t get much real improvement from the substantial sums we spend trying to improve poverty. Perhaps, we are inept. Perhaps, something else is the explanation. Desmond thinks he knows what the problem is. We, both conservatives and progressives, are not going to like his answers.
…There are, it would seem, deeper structural forces at play, ones that have to do with the way the American poor are routinely taken advantage of. The primary reason for our stalled progress on poverty reduction has to do with the fact that we have not confronted the unrelenting exploitation of the poor in the labor, housing and financial markets.
This is where Desmond begins stepping on both conservative and progressive toes. Collectively, we exploit the poor. We have all benefited from the virtual abolition of unions. I get many of my books from Amazon. I would like to think I get a deal because of Amazon’s efficiencies, but a lot of the benefits that I enjoy in lower prices and convenience from Amazon, and what other Americans enjoy from Walmart and other corporations are derivative of how the poor are treated in the workplace.
The poor don’t get the full value of federal support for housing. Landlords charge as much or more for apartments in poor areas as in neighborhoods where the rents should be higher and where there are no housing shortages. The poor pay enormous penalties for overdrafts and higher interest rates on loans that disadvantage them compared to higher-income Americans. Desmond pounds on the concept of “exploitation of the poor” and implies that we all benefit economically from their being forced to work for less, live in marginal housing, and pay higher rates for almost everything.
As a theory of poverty, “exploitation” elicits a muddled response, causing us to think of course and but, no in the same instant. The word carries a moral charge…
…A larger share of workers in the United States make “low pay” — earning less than two-thirds of median wages — than in any other country belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Desmond posits that low wages make prices lower for the rest of us whether we are conservative or progressive or personally ever supported the effective attack on unions. Whether we are conservative or progressive, we appreciate getting the good deals that lower wages make possible.
Desmond contends that the unions have contributed to their own difficulties. A watershed moment that demonstrated that most Americans had a lack of interest in unions was the air traffic controller strike of 1981.
Unions harmed themselves through their self-defeating racism and were further weakened by a changing economy. But organized labor was also attacked by political adversaries. As unions flagged, business interests sensed an opportunity. Corporate lobbyists made deep inroads in both political parties, beginning a public-relations campaign that pressured policymakers to roll back worker protections.
A national litmus test arrived in 1981, when 13,000 unionized air traffic controllers left their posts after contract negotiations with the Federal Aviation Administration broke down. When the workers refused to return, Reagan fired all of them. The public’s response was muted, and corporate America learned that it could crush unions with minimal blowback. And so it went, in one industry after another…
… the American economy is less productive today than it was in the post-World War II period when unions were at peak strength.
Desmond has many points to make beyond the loss of protection from unions:
Poor Americans aren’t just exploited in the labor market. They face consumer exploitation in the housing and financial markets as well.
There is a long history of slum exploitation in America. Money made slums because slums made money. Rent has more than doubled over the past two decades,…Why have rents shot up so fast? Experts tend to offer the same rote answers to this question. There’s not enough housing supply, they say, and too much demand. Landlords must charge more just to earn a decent rate of return. Must they? How do we know?
We need more housing; no one can deny that. But rents have jumped even in cities with plenty of apartments to go around…National data also show that rental revenues have far outpaced property owners’ expenses in recent years…A study I published with Nathan Wilmers found that after accounting for all costs, landlords operating in poor neighborhoods typically take in profits that are double those of landlords operating in affluent communities.
Desmond is no kinder to banks than he is to employers and landlords in his analysis of acceptable business practices that keep the poor in a state of poverty. I have certainly seen the trauma of overdraft penalties on the personal finances of some of the people that we have tried to help through our local nonprofit activities. He writes:
…[In the 1970s] over a third of banks offered accounts with no service charge. By the early 1990s, only 5 percent did. Big banks grew bigger as community banks shuttered, and in 2021, the largest banks in America charged customers almost $11 billion in overdraft fees. Just 9 percent of account holders paid 84 percent of these fees. Who were the unlucky 9 percent? Customers who carried an average balance of less than $350. The poor were made to pay for their poverty.
The problem is getting worse:
In 2021, the average fee for overdrawing your account was $33.58. Because banks often issue multiple charges a day, it’s not uncommon to overdraw your account by $20 and end up paying $200 for it. Every year: almost $11 billion in overdraft fees, $1.6 billion in check-cashing fees and up to $8.2 billion in payday-loan fees.
…Black and Hispanic families were nearly five times as likely to lack a bank account. Where there is exclusion, there is exploitation. Unbanked Americans have created a market, and thousands of check-cashing outlets now serve that market. In 2020, Americans spent $1.6 billion just to cash checks…
… When James Baldwin remarked in 1961 how “extremely expensive it is to be poor,” he couldn’t have imagined these receipts…
I have a client whom I have advised for several years. He suffers from a brain injury and tries to live on $1300 a month plus SNAP benefits. When I first started working with him I discovered that he had many overdraft charges of $36. Most of the charges were the result of using his credit card at the end of the month to buy sodas at a convenience store. He did not realize that when he used his bank card to buy a Mountain Dew when he had no funds in the bank, he was paying almost $36 for a $2 drink. Even with the knowledge that he will pay a penalty, he still occasionally feels that he must overdraw his account to get what he needs in the moment. His disability check is automatically deposited in the bank, and the bank collects its penalties the moment the government puts money in his account.
…Poverty 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. When we ignore the role that exploitation plays in trapping people in poverty, we end up designing policy that is weak at best and ineffective at worst.
Desmond has much more to say in his description of poverty. It is likely that few of us really understand what keeps so many people in poverty. It’s easier to be thankful for what we have, and explain what the poor don’t have in the context of their bad choices and personal habits. We do spend money to try to improve the lots of those living in poverty, but much of the money we spend doesn’t end up getting to the people in need. As in healthcare, for real change to occur, there are policies and attitudes that need to change. The alternative is to continue to spend in ways that don’t improve the problem. We do a lot and spend a lot, but because of biases, self-interests, and a culture that allows exploitation, we don’t make much progress in solving the problem of poverty.
Antipoverty programs work. Each year, millions of families are spared the indignities and hardships of severe deprivation because of these government investments. But our current antipoverty programs cannot abolish poverty by themselves…
…Today multiple forms of exploitation have turned antipoverty programs into something like dialysis, a treatment designed to make poverty less lethal, not to make it disappear.
This means we don’t just need deeper antipoverty investments. We need different ones…We need to ensure that aid directed at poor people stays in their pockets, instead of being captured by companies …by landlords, or by banks and payday-loan outlets who issue exorbitant fines and fees. Unless we confront the many forms of exploitation that poor families face, we risk increasing government spending only to experience another 50 years of sclerosis in the fight against poverty.
Desmond has many suggestions about how to improve our poverty programs in ways that might be more effective. He issues a challenge to all of us:
Those who have amassed the most power and capital bear the most responsibility for America’s vast poverty.: political elites…corporate bosses…lobbyists blocking the will of the American people with their self-serving interests…property owners who have exiled the poor from entire cities and fueled the affordable-housing crisis. Acknowledging this is both crucial and deliciously absolving; it directs our attention upward and distracts us from all the ways (many unintentional) that we — we the secure, the insured, the housed, the college-educated, the protected, the lucky — also contribute to the problem.
Over the years I have come to the conclusion that individual actions, even in the context of national or even global problems do make a difference. Some authorities dispute whether Gandhi actually said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Whether or not he said it doesn’t make any difference; it is still a worthy aspiration. Another thought that is worth considering is, “What part of the problem am I?” That question couples with the idea that if we are not part of the solution we are probably part of the problem. Desmond seems to agree and suggests that the sacrifices we make in the moment by “living in solidarity with the poor” may yield long-term returns:
Living our daily lives in ways that express solidarity with the poor could mean we pay more; anti-exploitative investing could dampen our stock portfolios. By acknowledging those costs, we acknowledge our complicity. Unwinding ourselves from our neighbors’ deprivation and refusing to live as enemies of the poor will require us to pay a price. It’s the price of our restored humanity and renewed country.
The New York Times review of Desmond’s new book was written by Alec MacGillis of ProPublica, and was entitled In Matthew Desmond’s ‘Poverty, by America,’ the Culprit Is Us: The new book by the sociologist and author of “Evicted” examines the persistence of want in the wealthy United States, finding that keeping some citizens poor serves the interests of many.
In the second paragraph of his review, Mr. MacGillis begins his exploration of Desmond’s ideas by considering the personal moral relief that might accrue to each of us if poverty is explained by systemic and structural factors beyond our “personal agency.” It would be nice to say that I am not a part of the problem, but Desmond demonstrates that I am a contributor to the poverty of others.
The search for systemic and structural factors [to explain poverty] has much to recommend it in its attention to context and history. But it pushes to the side a crucial element: personal agency. If we can explain away so many problems as a result of larger forces — whether capitalism or racism or globalization or technology or countless others — where does that leave individual and corporate accountability? If everything is systemic, how can any of us be held to blame?
MacGillis knows that in the end, Desmond does hold us all responsible for the persistence of poverty. He reveals Desmond’s conclusion in straightforward language that should give us all a shiver and a little sense of guilt. Obviously, Desmond hopes that by holding up a mirror so that we can see our own participation in the perpetuation of poverty we will be motivated to change, but I fear that he will likely be ignored or will get pushback similar to the responses that are triggered by “critical race theory.” MacGillis gets Desmond’s point, and he says it much more effectively than I can. I have bolded the core of the painful point that both Desmond and MacGillis are making.
The insistence on personal agency is even more explicit [compared to Evicted] in Desmond’s new book. “Poverty, by America” is a compact jeremiad on the persistence of extreme want in a nation of extraordinary wealth, a distillation into argument form of the message embedded within the narrative of “Evicted.” And the central claim of that argument is that the endurance of poverty in the United States is the product not only of larger shifts such as deindustrialization and family dissolution, but of choices and actions by more fortunate Americans. Poverty persists partly because many of us have, with varying degrees of self-awareness, decided that we benefit from its perpetuation…
There is a little relief from guilt for a few of us from the phrase “varying degrees of self-awareness.” Before you had read this far you could claim some innocence on the basis of misinformation and ignorance. Now that you have been shown how we all participate in the perpetuation of poverty, you have a personal decision to make. The culpability for you and me in the decision to continue to ignore our complicity is even higher because we are more aware than most of our affluent neighbors that poverty is a social determinant of health that drives more susceptibility to disease and a shorter life expectancy. If we accept this reasoning, are we morally obligated to do more to try to end poverty beginning with our own participation in the “exploitation” of those in poverty?
Desmond and those who write about his new book all come to the same conclusion when we ask why should we care, and why should we understand, address, and correct our participation in the persistence of poverty. The short answer sounds transactional on one level and communitarian at a deeper level. At the transactional level it is that in the long run, we will all gain more than we lose by curtailing our participation in the exploitation of the poor. To explain the deeper level MacGillis writes:
Why should Americans who benefit from the status quo be open to such a reckoning? Because, Desmond argues, we are in a broader sense all being immiserated by poverty. “It’s there in the morning paper, on our commute to work, in our public parks, dragging us down, making even those quite secure in their money feel diminished and depressed,” he writes. “Poverty infringes on American prosperity, making it a barricaded, stingy, frightened kind of affluence.” Some of us even experience an “emotional violence” from “knowing that our abundance causes others’ misery”: “It’s there in that residue of shame and malaise coating our insular lives; that loss of joy, the emptiness; our boring satiation, our guilt and nausea.”
Overstated? I think not.
That was the end of this note before 11:30 last night when I decided to look at the New York Times before going to bed. Yesterday was a busy day, and I did not keep up with my reading while I had several meetings, tried to finish this work, and get in my walk. To my delight and surprise, I found a “Guest Essay” in the “Opinion” section of the Times written by Desmond. The piece is entitled “America Is in a Disgraced Class of Its Own.” It is “an 8-minute read.” Desmond’s tone is even harsher than in the earlier article, and he gives race an emphasis that was not prominent in the first article, but the major points are the same as is Desmond’s big conclusion that after all the data and all the explanations are processed, any poverty in a nation that has our wealth is morally wrong. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1964:
“There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”
Almost sixty years later poverty persists. Desmond agrees with Dr. King. He knows we can end poverty, and we should. The only obstacle is ourselves. The answer to our problem is a collective concern and collective action.
…the best hope we have of ending poverty is to bind ourselves together and demand this of our country. A mass movement for economic justice is necessary. One led by those who have had enough is stirring. We can join them, no matter our lot in life.
This rich country has the means to abolish poverty. Now we must find the will to do so — the will not to reduce poverty but to end it.
Mother Nature Gives Us the Back of Her Hand
It has been a very strange winter. My West Coast family lives in Felton, California which has been on the national news several times as the road down the mountain to Santas Cruz has been washed out, or a giant coastal redwood falls across the highway, or as the San Lorenzo River rages over its banks.
My folks live in redwoods that haven’t fallen on them. They live about a quarter of a mile uphill from the San Lorenzo River, so they have not been washed away. Before this winter, I had never heard of an “atmospheric river.” I think that there have now been at least ten to hit California and then march across the country. Some of the atmospheric rivers march across the country wreaking havoc on their way to dumping a lot of snow on New England.
As you might have guessed from this week’s header, we got about two feet of snow from the last dump that came late Monday and lasted through to the early hours of Wednesday. It is beautiful as it occurs. As has been true before, March has been our big snow month of the winter.
The day after the storm there is a lot of work cleaning up as one tries to return to the usual routine of the week. The cleanup is almost always followed by a need for ibuprofen and a soak in the hot tub. I am always impressed by how fast our town clears its roads. The road to my house was was clear even before the final flake fell. Turn left at the top of the picture into my drive.
This is “town meeting week” in New Hampshire. We usually vote for town officials on Tuesday, and then we have an open town meeting on Wednesday night. The voting was canceled and rescheduled for later in the month because of the storm. The roads were cleared in time for the meeting. A crowd of over three hundred people gathered in the old junior high school gym to determine many concerns.
The big issue this year was whether we wanted to buy seven acres of land at the edge of town to build a new police station that would cost 10 to 12 million dollars. We have five police officers on our force. In the end, after more than an hour of speeches, we voted with paper ballots by a large majority to not go forward with the purchase. I personally favor the renovation and expansion of the current police station near the town center. That decision will have to wait until next year. It was pure democracy in action.
Life goes on. This weekend is Maple Sugaring weekend in New Hampshire. Click on the link if you’re interested in enjoying the festivities this weekend. Spring is around the corner. Many of you will be watching a lot of basketball this weekend as “March Madness” gets underway. There have been big upsets already. My dad’s alma mater, Furman, surprised Virginia in the first round! The Red Sox open their season in Boston in two weeks which must mean that winter is almost over.
Daylight savings began early last Sunday morning. Spring begins officially this coming Tuesday. Mud season is knocking on the door! Sometime this next month the lake will thaw. I can hardly wait, but there is much to keep us busy as we wait for our first crocus. Have a great weekend as we wait for spring!
Be well,
Gene
