Poverty is often material scarcity piled on chronic pain piled on incarceration piled on depression piled on addiction – on and on it goes. Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies. It is connected to every social problem we care about – crime, health, education, housing – and its persistence in American life means that millions of families are denied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in the history of the world.

Desmond ends the first chapter with a compelling image of poverty as a high and teetering pile of problems, repeating the phrase “piled on” four times to emphasize his point. The vivid imagery continues when he replaces the cliché of “the poverty line” with the idea of a “poverty knot,” using short, simple sentences to drive the point home. He goes on to give four concrete examples of the problems connected to poverty, then ends by emphasizing one of the key themes of the book: the contrast between the immense wealth of America and the poverty endured by millions of the people who live there.

My family stopped shopping at Home Depot after learning about the company’s hefty donations to Republican lawmakers who refused to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. We have yet to inquire about the pay and benefits offered at Ace Hardware.

Desmond often intersperses his political and sociological points with examples from his own life. These two sentences come at the end of a passage containing numerous examples of how people who pride themselves on making ethical consumer choices are usually more concerned with political affiliations than with economic justice. In this example, he admits that he is also guilty of this behavior: he will not give his business to Home Depot because he does not support their political stance but chooses not to discover how Home Depot’s rival behaves towards its workers. The second sentence sardonically undercuts the moral pretensions of the first, but the two sentences together make it clear that Desmond is not condemning people who fail to consider those who work for the businesses they patronize. He is simply pointing out that this is how many people, including himself, generally behave.

A sober empiricist on other matters, Malthus didn’t bother much with the facts when opining on the corrupting power of poor aid, admitting that “little more appears to [me] to be necessary than a plain statement.” Similarly, when in 2021 a journalist asked Michael Strain, who holds a PhD in economics and directs Economic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, what evidence led him to assert that he was “not eager to pay taxes so that somebody can buy drugs or buy alcohol or go to Vegas,” Strain responded, “This is kind of an evidence-free topic.”

Here, Desmond discusses “the propaganda of capitalism,” which he says has relentlessly attacked the notion of government help for the poor for hundreds of years. He gives a long list of examples, then turns to this point: that these views are based on anecdotes and appeals to common sense rather than evidence. Rather than giving another list, he juxtaposes these two examples, one from the eighteenth century and the other from the twenty-first. Malthus is one of the best-known economic and social thinkers in history, but readers are unlikely to have heard of Michael Strain, so Desmond lays out his credentials. These credentials, along with Malthus’s reputation for logical rigor, are sharply at odds with the lack of evidence that characterizes the thinking of both men on this topic.

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