Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and is best known for his work on race and poverty in America. Alongside Mustafa Emirbayer, he authored Racial Domination, Racial Progress: The Sociology of Race in America (2009) and The Racial Order (2015). He has also written a monograph on the housing crisis, which was titled Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016).

Desmond frequently refers to his own background, personal experience, and the lives of his friends to illustrate his work. In the prologue to Poverty, by America he says that he grew up in a small town in Arizona; his family’s home cost $60,000 but was repossessed when his father lost his job. He later describes his first car, a 1978 Ford F-150 with an engine from a junkyard and “decent-sized holes in the floorboard, allowing me to see the road rip past as I drove.” Several of the individuals presented as case studies in the book are personal friends of Desmond’s. Desmond also refers to his experience of living in a trailer park and a temporary rooming house.

Poverty, by America contains numerous personal narratives, but the author is scathing when discussing his ideological opponents, who fail to examine data because they prefer to rely on “anecdote and appeals to common sense.” Thinkers from Malthus onwards have relied on these tactics when attacking governments for taking action to alleviate poverty, using outrage and defeatism to deter change. The balance between personal and academic writing remains constant throughout the book, as Desmond uses anecdotes for illustration rather than evidence and provides tangible evidence in the form of almost eighty pages of endnotes and citations. However, there is a shift in tone as the argument progresses and becomes more urgent and impassioned.

This change is signaled in the prologue, where Desmond announces his intention first to investigate why there is so much poverty in America, then to “make a case for how to eliminate it.” Although he approaches his investigation of poverty from a number of angles and considers various explanations—from neoliberal economic policies to immigration—his conclusion is remarkably simple. Poverty is widespread and persistent in America because people want it to be, and they want it to be because it is convenient for them. This applies not only to the very rich, who benefit from the poverty of workers on a massive scale but also to the middle classes, who have investments in the stock market and can have whatever consumer goods they want delivered to their door within twenty-four hours.

Having made this case, Desmond describes feeling impatient with the objections he has encountered to his ideas for the elimination of poverty. In chapter seven, he describes “a yelling match with an economist in a New York City restaurant” over Elizabeth Warren’s tax proposals. The economist said that taxing the rich was a lost cause, as they would simply find a way to evade any imposition placed on them. Desmond was infuriated by this attitude and admits: “Chests may have been poked.” The reader may feel that they are being poked in the chest as well, upon reading such statements as this one:

Help from the government is a zero-sum affair. The biggest government subsidies are not directed at families trying to climb out of poverty but instead go to ensure that well-off families stay well-off. This leaves fewer resources for the poor. If this is our design, our social contract, then we should at least own up to it. We should at least stand up and profess, Yes, this is...