I'VE OFTEN HEARD that Michael Harrington's The Other Americans (1963), an account of the persistence of poverty during the country's post-war growth boom, was read by enough of the right people at the right time to influence the Great Society programs that came along a couple of years later. I earnestly hope something like that happens with Desmond's book. An astonishing synthesis of passion and precision, it could change the policy landscape...if heeded.
Most of us too quickly assume that the poverty of the poor has to do with their own shortcomings--things they failed to do, like finish high school, or things they did that they ought not to have done, like tumble into substance abuse. Desmond makes it clear that the poverty of the poor has much more to do with advantages maintained by the rich--employers who benefit from keeping wages low, property owners who benefit from keeping rents high. Add in the broad American reluctance to support public goods (e.g., strong public schools, adequate public health care, subsidized childcare) and you see why the poverty rate hardly budges (except during COVID--but that influx of support for public goods ended all too soon).
Desmond underlines that despite the Nazarene's line that "the poor are with you always," poverty is an eradicable problem if we have the will. Raise the minimum wage, foster low-income housing in all neighborhoods, collect all the taxes that are owed but not paid, and the landscape could change in a generation.
We can all think of several reasons why that may not happen--racism, lingering pseudo-Calvinistic notions, the disproportionate political power of the wealthy--but the key and possibly revolutionary idea is that it is not impossible. We could, if enough of us so chose and worked towards it, bring about the end of poverty as we know it.
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