Matthew Desmond’s latest book, Poverty, by Americsets out from a very different starting point. In the early 1960s, when Harrington published his book, poor people were hardly part of political discourse at all; today, there are few who would be so naïve as to claim to simply not know poverty exists in American society. As a result, Desmond presents his book not as an exposé but as an effort to answer the question: Why? Why is there still so much poverty in the United States? Poverty for Desmond is not the result of invisibility, of being left behind. Rather, the root cause of poverty is exploitation. People are poor because other people benefit from the presence of poverty: “To understand the causes of poverty, we must look beyond the poor. Those of us living lives of privilege and plenty must examine ourselves.”
Desmond is in many ways better placed than Harrington ever was to launch an appeal to the moral conscience of the nation. From precarious, just-about-middle-class origins, Desmond has risen to become the equivalent of academic royalty: He teaches sociology at Princeton University, has won the MacArthur “genius” grant, and received the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for his 2016 book, Evicted, which made the striking argument that losing one’s home affected future economic chances and position at least as much as incarceration. Yet The Other America has a moral hopefulness that Poverty, by America cannot quite summon, and today’s political circumstances make it almost unimaginable that Desmond’s book will have a similar effect. The institutionalization of the study of poverty has changed what it means to chronicle it.
The Other America emphasized the tremendous variety of ways to be poor. Harrington wrote that American poverty deserved a novelist to chronicle its textures and sensibilities, and in the spirit of George Orwell going to Wigan Pier, he observed communities of impoverished people: migrant farmworkers; the aged poor; the alcoholic poor; the Black residents of poor, urban neighborhoods; bohemians who were “voluntarily” poor. But in all these cases, his analysis of poverty treated it as a problem, in large part, of exclusion. Poor people were those shut out of middle-class affluence. They lived in geographically remote regions, in segregated inner cities or in rural Appalachia. They lacked the skills and education to participate in the great postwar economic boom. Leaving some people out and including others, technology and progress generated poverty just as they generated wealth.
