![]() ![]() there has been no real improvement - just a long stasis”? Is it true, as he posits, that the large increase in government spending on antipoverty programs in recent decades (a 130 percent increase from 1980 to 2018, by his numbers) hasn’t made a dent in poverty? ![]() ![]() But I do know a little bit about how we measure poverty, and I want to back up briefly and interrogate Desmond’s fundamental premise: Has poverty in America persisted? Is it true that in recent decades, as Desmond writes, “On the problem of poverty. ![]() Laid out in a long essay for the New York Times Magazine that is adapted from his forthcoming book Poverty, by America, Desmond’s theory implicates “exploitation” in the broadest sense, from a decline in unions and worker power to a proliferation of bank fees and predatory landlord practices, all of which combine to keep the American underclass down.ĭesmond, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for Evicted, is an original and nuanced thinker and I cannot do his 6,000-word argument justice in a short article. Matthew Desmond, the acclaimed Princeton sociologist and author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, thinks that poverty has barely improved in the United States over the past 50 years - and he has a theory why. ![]()
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