For reasons that are not clear to me, I do not know how to change the email header and footer. Since I did it before, I know it can be done; I just do not recall how to do it now. My long- and short-term memory is not what it once was.
Dear Family, both blood and chosen:
Here is the first podcast in which Rob and I discuss books. The book that we are discussing is
Matthew Desmond’s previous book, “Evicted,” was a depiction of low-income housing in American cities. It won a Pulitzer Prize. In the book, he showed how tenants in Milwaukee were struggling not only as a result of larger forces but as a result of specific acts of exploitation by those a rung or two up the economic ladder — the landlords, trailer park owners and payday lenders who were profiting from others’ desperation. In Milwaukee, and by extension everywhere else in the USA, there are good guys and bad guys and gradations in between.
Desmond’s insistence on personal agency is even more explicit in his new book, “Poverty, by America.” He believes that entrenched poverty in the United States is the product not only of larger shifts, such as deindustrialization and family dissolution, but of choices and actions by more fortunate Americans. Poverty persists partly because many of us, with varying degrees of self-awareness, benefit from its perpetuation. “It’s a useful exercise, evaluating the merits of different explanations for poverty, like those having to do with immigration or the family,” Desmond writes. “But I’ve found that doing so always leads me back to the taproot, the central feature from which all other rootlets spring, which in our case is the simple truth that poverty is an injury, a taking. Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.”
In the March 13, 2023 New York Times Review
This taking assumes many forms. There are the most obvious types of exploitation, such as employers paying undocumented workers less than minimum wage or denying them overtime; prisons charging inmates exorbitant fees to make phone calls; or banks assessing heavy overdraft fees. There is the winner-take-all nature of the tax code, under which, to cite only one notorious provision, private-equity partners are entitled to have most of their compensation for managing others’ investments taxed at the lower capital-gains rate, rather than as ordinary labor. There is the housing market, in which landlords are able to charge surprisingly high rents even in inexpensive cities to low-income tenants who feel they have few alternatives. “Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money,” Desmond writes. “It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.” Desmond’s ideological allies on the left will nod along with many of these points. Where things get more interesting is when he considers the ways that upper-middle-class Americans, many of them proud progressives, are complicit in the taking. Affluent families benefit from tax breaks on their mortgages and college savings plans, leaving less revenue for programs that serve those in greater need.
…
The problem, Desmond concludes, is … so much of it is lost to the economic exploitation that is his chief target. And to address this exploitation, he calls for nothing less than an “abolitionist” crusade against poverty: a moral awakening that combats the scourge in ways big and small, through legislation, legal action and union organizing; through our decisions about what we buy, where we live and where we send our kids to school. “Becoming a poverty abolitionist,” he writes, “entails conducting an audit of our lives, personalizing poverty by examining all the ways we are connected to the problem — and to the solution.”
While Rob and I are not willing, yet, to be poverty abolitionists, we are willing to do more and to hold each other accountable, and hold ourselves accountable to you, for doing something.
Perhaps some of you are also willing to do more and be accountable.
As always, we would love to hear from you.
Much love,
Fred
Rob and I discuss "Poverty, by America"