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Matthew Desmond made his name writing a detailed, searingly blunt book about the effects of eviction on poor American families. His new book tackles an even bigger subject: Poverty, and why it persists in the U.S. despite our nation’s great wealth. And — perhaps a bit incongruously for someone who writes about the myriad ways poverty, racism and a lack of opportunity grind people down — he thinks we all fall too readily into the trap of cynicism, resignation and even despair.
“I’m asked what I think the biggest myth about poverty is. I always say that we have to live with it, that it's like the normal state of affairs. Our ambitions have become very boring, you know, and defeatist,” said Desmond. He spoke Monday at Crisis Assistance Ministry, in advance of a public discussion held in Davidson, to a small room of attendees wearing stickers with his big ambition emblazoned on them: Poverty Abolitionist.
Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton University, backs his work on eviction and poverty with detailed statistics that he makes accessible to the public through projects such as Eviction Lab and End Poverty in America. You can find a myriad of numbers and facts about your state, many of which are fairly depressing. (North Carolina’s child poverty rate is 17.9%, or almost one in five, while almost half of renters pay more than 30% of their income for housing, for example.)
But Desmond says we — and by “we” I mean the media — focus too much on criticism without spending a similar amount of effort exploring solutions.
“I feel that my responsibility, if I'm going to critique, is to give you just as much of ‘How do we climb out of it?’” he said. “I feel like a lot of writers and pundits right now are making a choice to be pessimistic and hopeless. And I feel that choice is damaging to the people we care about and are writing about.”
And there are solutions we can point to pretty easily, Desmond contends. His most powerful argument is his simplest: Poverty isn’t intractable and eternal, but rather a set of problems we can solve with policies. In previous generations, the U.S. tackled huge challenges like rural electrification that lifted the standard of living for millions in relatively short order. More recently, the expanded child tax credit during the COVID-19 pandemic cut child poverty by half, according to the left-leaning Brookings Institution. Other developed countries with universal healthcare have healthier citizens, longer lifespans and lower costs.
Trumpeting those successes and pointing people toward them should be just as much a part of advocates’ toolbox as any other strategy, he said.
“I would love more marketers,” said Desmond. “I think that social movements are really great at this language. They often just don't have boosters … I think that means finding ways to brag about real change, even if that change is, you know, a few more steps up the mountain and we're not at the summit.”
In attendance at the Crisis Assistance Ministry event were local leaders like County Commission Chairman George Dunlap, City Council member and N.C. Department of Labor commissioner candidate Braxton Winston, former Project Lift co-chair Richard “Stick” Williams and Johnson C. Smith University’s new president, Valerie Kinloch.
In other words, many of the attendees are the people who are in a position to do something about the problems facing Charlotte. One of Desmond’s key messages: Don’t stop hoping for big changes.
“I’m glad that our social movement foremothers and forefathers weren't hopeless,” he said. “I feel that we have a responsibility to be hopeful.”
And Desmond said he thinks that people can find common ground around economic issues, regardless of how acrimonious our politics are around most other things.
“I love the moral ambition and setting very high expectations, being bombastic about that. To me, that feels very American,” he said. “I think there's a lot of folks, red and blue, that really want higher wages. I think that we shouldn't just rely on one party to get this done.”
