https://www.nytimes.com/2023/
~~ recommended by emil karpo ~~
an excerpt.....
EZRA KEIN: I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.”
“Books about poverty tend to be books about the poor.” Matthew Desmond writes that in his new book about poverty, “Poverty by America.” But “Poverty by America” is supposed to be something a bit different. It’s a book about everyone who benefits from the poor, their existence, their exploitation, all the people more comfortable with the perpetuation of poverty than what would be demanded of them for its abolition.
So this is a book, in other words, not so much about the poor as it is about the rest of us. Desmond is a sociologist at Princeton. He’s the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Evicted,” and “Evicted,” which was a book about housing markets, particularly for the poor — it was a smash hit. It was beloved by Desmond’s fellow social scientists.
His new book has been a lot more controversial, in part due to disagreements about the way he reads the poverty data. And so we talk about. That there’s a good, wonky bit here about how to measure poverty.
But I also want to keep people focused on the big picture here — America has a lot of poverty. It could, if it chose, have much, much less poverty. So the question of why that choice isn’t made year after year — that is really a question worth asking. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
Matt Desmond, welcome to the show.
MATTHEW DESMOND: Oh, it’s great to be here.
EZRA KLEIN: So I want to begin with you because something you say in the book, which I didn’t realize from past work, is that you come at the subject from really your own perspective. Tell me a bit about your own history with poverty and how it led you to this inquiry.
MATTHEW DESMOND: I grew up in a little railroad town in Arizona, Northern Arizona, Winslow, which is an Eagles song. And my dad was a pastor, and we never had a lot of money. Things were tight. Our gas got turned off from time to time.
And then we lost our home when I was in college, and I think that experience worked its way inside of me, made me see how poverty diminishes and stresses a family. And then I kind of took that to Milwaukee for my last book and followed families getting evicted and saw a level of poverty that I’ve just never seen before or experienced.
I saw grandmas living without heat in the winter, just piling under blankets. I saw kids getting evicted on a routine basis, and I kind of saw a hard bottom layer of deprivation that was just shocking and disturbing.
EZRA KLEIN: You mentioned losing your family’s home when you were in college, and that brings up the book that other people may know you for earlier, “Evicted.” but for people who aren’t as familiar with that dimension of your work, tell me a bit about that book, the nature of the research that led to it, and how, in a large scale way, it changed your thinking on the structure of American poverty.
MATTHEW DESMOND: So for “Evicted,” I moved into a mobile home park on the South Side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I lived there for about four or five months. And then I moved into a rooming house on the North Side of the city. It’s the inner city of Milwaukee.
And I lived there for about 10 months and, from those two neighborhoods, followed families getting evicted and went everywhere with those families, followed them to eviction court and to shelters, abandoned homes, watched their kids, slept on their floor, ate from their table, went to a bunch of funerals, went to a birth.
But I also recognize that if I wanted to understand how the low-income housing market worked, I needed to get close to landlords, too. So I got just as close to landlords doing the evicting as I did with tenants getting evicted, and I helped them pass that eviction notices and fix up their properties. And I learned a bit more about what makes landlords tick and what ticks them off.
And “Evicted” is the result of that work, and it’s a way of saying, look, if we’re going to understand inequality in America today, we have to understand the human cost of the housing crisis. And for me, seeing that toll on people, seeing folks lose not only their homes but their neighborhoods, kids losing their schools — families often lose all their stuff, which is piled on the street by movers or taken by neighbors. It takes so much time and money to build up at a home, and eviction could just delete all that.
Eviction comes with a mark, a blemish. It’s a court order, and that can prevent you from moving into a good neighborhood and a good home because many landlords see that blemish and say no. So we pushed those families into bad neighborhoods, and we pushed those families into really degrading housing situations, and on and on it goes. And I think that my conclusion was that eviction isn’t just a condition of poverty. It’s a cause of poverty. It’s making things worse.
EZRA KLEIN: It can be easy — and I’m certainly guilty of this at times — to try to apprehend questions like eviction, like poverty by reading some big policy reports, by looking at macro data, by trying to follow the lines on a chart. You do a bunch of that in this book, and you’ve done a bunch of that in your work. And there is a dimension of your work that is quite quantitative. But what do you think you see differently when you actually immerse yourself in it? What looks different from the ground than from the appendix table?
MATTHEW DESMOND: I think that it means that I’m accountable to folks that are struggling in a different way. In the university, there’s this old line that you have to have some distance and some objectivity to study a problem with rigor and truthfulness, and distance is not the problem of the university. We have plenty of distance.
And I think when you get proximate to families that are enduring a level of hardship that so many of us can’t even imagine, it really washes over you. It makes you accountable to the problem in a different way. I think we can write about these issues with conviction, and rigor, and truth and about people who we love and care about deeply.
So in this new book, I write about my friends, and I call them my friends. I don’t call them my research subjects because they’re not. They’re people that I’ve done a lot of life with.
And I think that experience not only is incredibly educational — I learned so much from just being on the ground with folks that are struggling, but it’s also this amazing reminder how beautifully, and elegantly, and gracefully people refuse to be reduced to their hardships, how poverty has not stolen folks’ humanity.
EZRA KLEIN: Tell me a bit about the scale of the poverty problem in America today. How would you describe it?
MATTHEW DESMOND: There is so much poverty in this rich land. If you just look at the official metric of poverty, there’s 38 million of us that can’t afford basic necessities, which means if folks below the official poverty line formed their own country, that country would be bigger than Australia. It would be bigger than Venezuela.
But the poverty line is very low, and there’s plenty of economic hardship above the poverty line. one in three people in America live in a home which is bringing in $55,000 or less, one in three of us. Now, many of those aren’t officially counted among the poor, but what else do you call like trying to get by on 55k or less and raising two kids in like Portland or Miami?
But poverty is not just a line. It’s not just an income level. Poverty is often pain and sickness. It’s living in degraded housing. It’s the fear of eviction. It is eviction and the homelessness. It’s getting roughed up by the police sometimes. It’s schools that are just bursting at the seams.
It’s neighborhoods where everyone around you is also struggling. It’s death, death come early, death come often. So for me, poverty isn’t a line. It’s this tight knot of agonies, and humiliations, and social problems, and this is experienced by millions of us in the richest country in the history of the world.
EZRA KLEIN: How has it changed over time?
MATTHEW DESMOND: So it depends what metric you use. If you look at the official poverty line, it hasn’t changed a lot — 1973, 50 years ago, there was 11 percent poverty, in 2018 12 percent, not a lot of change.
But the official poverty measures is flawed. It doesn’t account for a lot of regional variation and housing cost. It doesn’t count certain kind of government programs like food stamps, housing assistance. So in 2011, the Census launched a new poverty measure, the Supplemental Poverty Measure, and researchers at Columbia figured out a way to take that new poverty line and stretch it out over time.
And when you do that, you kind of come to the same conclusion. The supplemental poverty line, historically, in 1973, was 15.1 percent. In 2013, 40 years later, it was 15.5 percent. In 2018, it was 13 percent, so it had dipped down a little bit. That’s just not a lot of progress.
In Covid, the Supplemental Poverty Measure plunged, plunged to historic lows because of this bold relief that was issued by the federal government, things like the Child Tax Credit and Emergency Rental Assistance, but over the long view, a lot of measures are showing poverty being incredibly stubborn and stagnant.
EZRA KLEIN: One thing about the Supplemental Poverty Line, which I’ve seen really frustrating a lot of people who work on the poverty issue and I think are aligned with you on solutions is that where you start those dials really ends up mattering.
So you look at 1967. You see poverty falling from 25 percent then to about 8.4 percent in 2020 amidst all that stimulus spending. I think this matters because there’s real question as to whether or not these government programs are effective. You’ll hear people on the right say constantly, the Great Society did nothing. You spend more money on poor people, you get more poor people.
And the Supplemental Measure and some other measures that measure consumption do seem to show pretty sharp and significant drops over time. So defend for me a little bit more of this idea that there’s not been real progress, which is different than not enough progress.
MATTHEW DESMOND: Yeah, this is hard, and I think that we should all confront the problem of counting poor families with a lot of humility, a lot of curiosity. So one way to think about this is to say, OK, if poverty has declined, have other hardship measures also declined? If we’re seeing falling rates of poverty, we should see falling rates of eviction. We should see debt going down. We should see homelessness going down.
But in recent years, we haven’t seen that. Since 2000, eviction filings have increased by about 22 percent. Since 2000, the share of families who visit food pantries have increased by almost 19 percent. The number of homeless public school kids in America has increased by over 74 percent since the Great Recession.
Since the late 1990s, the number of families reporting no cash income but drawing on food stamps has more than quadrupled. These are really troubling signs on the horizon, and it suggests that measures that are showing a decline in poverty might be out of touch with the lived experience of hardship in America today.
We can also dig into those measures if you want to and kind of look under the hood and say, well, how can they show a decline and this other one doesn’t? Like what’s going on? I’m happy to go there if you want to.
EZRA KLEIN: Well, a little bit because one thing I do want to check in on there is, you can have problems that correlate but don’t cause each other or don’t tell you as much as you want to know about each other.
So there is a great book, “Homelessness is a Housing Problem,” and one of the points they make is that you have a bunch of urban areas with very high rates of poverty with very, very low rates of homelessness, so Detroit, Philadelphia. You have places with quite low poverty rates, or at least relatively so, so Santa Clara County, San Francisco, and they have really quite high rates of homelessness.
So that suggests to me that when you’re looking at homelessness, which, as you say, has been quite on the rise recently, you’re dealing with a housing supply problem and a housing prices problem that might be distinct from a lot of the poverty problem.
The point is often made here in San Francisco, where I currently live, that West Virginia — it has very high poverty. It has very high rates of the things people blame for homelessness here, like drug addiction and mental illness. But it doesn’t have the homelessness problem we do, so rolling those all up into one set of social maladies can obscure more than it’s really revealing.
MATTHEW DESMOND: Yeah, I think there’s something to that, but it’s not just homelessness right that’s going up. Debt has gone up, bad debt. Just the number of families reporting that they are having a hard time paying their mortgage or their rent has grown amazingly, enormously since 2000. So I think there’s a lot of things on the horizon besides homelessness that do suggest that there is quite a lot of hardship as experienced on the ground level.
And I hear you on the political ramifications of this debate. There’s this text and the subtext, and a lot of folks say, well, look, if you don’t believe that poverty has declined, aren’t you also saying that government spending doesn’t work? Because government spending on anti-poverty programs has actually increased over the last 40 years, so what’s going on?
And I think that it’s a complicated story, but it’s one we have to embrace. There’s a paradox here that’s incredibly important. On the political liability side — there’s liability on both sides. So Reagan famously said, we fought the war on poverty, and poverty won. There’s nothing we can do to address poverty in America.
And then you fast forward to the Trump administration, and in 2018, the Trump Council of Economic Advisors issued this report enthusiastically embracing work requirements for some welfare programs based on this claim that poverty has gone down so much we can stop fighting it.
So it’s kind of like, Reagan’s like, we fought the war on poverty. Poverty won. And Trump was like, we fought the war on poverty, and we won. But they both had the same conclusion. So I think there’s political landmines on both sides of the thing.
I think what’s happening is that we’re spending more to stay in the same place because some of the fundamentals of American society, the job market and the housing market, are not doing their job basically to help reduce poverty in this country.
EZRA KLEIN: I want to hold on that for a second because I think that’s very profound. You talk a lot in the book and we’re going to talk broadly about this question of exploitation, and one thing reading the book got me thinking about is, to take the housing market as one example, the connection between exploitation and broken markets.
Now, I don’t want to say that you can only exploit people in a high housing market because clearly that’s not true, but the more you shift power in a market to, say, landlords because maybe you have way too few housing units the more they can discriminate, the more room they have to push really, really high prices on people.
And so there’s this kind of consistent problem, I think, for progressives where we’ll put a lot of money into something — maybe it’ll be housing, or health care, or whatever — but we won’t open up supply of that thing. In some cases, we’ll even constrict supply of that thing like we do in San Francisco with housing.
And then when you do that, you can give people all the money you want. You can give people all the Section 8 vouchers in San Francisco you want. You’re not going to house all that many people because there aren’t enough houses.
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