Poverty, By America Prologue & Chapters 1 & 2 Summary & Analysis

Prologue
Chapter 1: The Kind of Problem Poverty Is
Chapter 2: Why Haven’t We Made More Progress?

The book opens with Desmond’s central question: why is there so much poverty in such a rich country? The United States is the richest country on earth, yet one in nine Americans lives in poverty, unable to afford the basic necessities of life. Desmond presents his early life as an example of this contrast. Raised in rural Arizona in a low-income family who lost their home to foreclosure, he was shocked when he went to college in suburban Phoenix and saw the immense wealth on display there. His classmates drove expensive cars, and the town of Tempe paid hundreds of millions of dollars to create an enormous lake that lost most of its water to evaporation in the desert climate. This opulence was a stark contrast to the lives of the homeless people he met near campus. Desmond reasoned that a country wealthy enough for these luxuries could surely provide a basic standard of living for all its citizens, so why, he wondered, does poverty persist?

Read about the background of Poverty, By America author Matthew Desmond.

Desmond contends that while there have been many previous books claiming to examine American poverty, they have instead focused solely on poor people. This pattern suggests a belief that poor people are somehow inherently different from the affluent, as if some aspect of their character makes them poor. Desmond rejects this idea wholeheartedly. Although he uses specific people throughout the book to illustrate the effect poverty has on people’s lives, his analysis remains focused on poverty as a condition forced upon them, not something they have brought upon themselves. Desmond maintains that poor people are not to blame for poverty, but he does not accept the passive explanation of poverty as inevitable or natural. Rather, he argues that understanding poverty requires looking closely at the affluent, a group he includes himself and his readers in. In the prologue, he refers to the idea that poor people’s lives are restricted so that affluent people can have more, a theme he returns to later in the book. He closes the prologue calling upon his readers to become “poverty abolitionists,” working actively to end poverty.

Read about Main Idea #1: Poverty in America is not inevitable but rather created by unjust systems.

In Chapter 1: The Kind of Problem Poverty Is, Desmond describes American poverty using a combination of individual stories, statistics, and analysis. The simplest definition of poverty is living below the Official Poverty Measure (OPM), commonly called the “poverty line.” Developed in the 1960s by Mollie Orshansky, a Social Security Administration official, the OPM uses the cost of food as its basis. While the poverty line calculation has its weaknesses, including the failure to account for regional variations in the cost of living, its creation was revolutionary. It forced Americans to face the reality of the number of people living in poverty in the richest nation on earth. While the OPM is simple, Desmond argues that living in poverty is complex, an intersecting knot of misfortunes that lead to further setbacks. The story of Crystal, a Milwaukee woman born into poverty with an abusive father and and a family history of drug addiction, illustrates his point. The problems she faced from birth leave her in a precarious position, and each new disaster leads to another, leaving her disabled, impoverished, and forced into homelessness and prostitution.

Crystal’s story underscores Desmond’s analysis that poverty in the United States causes pain, trauma, instability, and the sense of being abandoned by one’s own country. In low-wage jobs like home health care and meatpacking, poverty brings on physical pain through repetitive injury and sudden danger. Although the Affordable Care Act has expanded health care access, 30 million Americans still have no health insurance. People who cannot afford medical care are often forced to suffer through physical problems without treatment, the way Desmond’s uninsured friend Woo suffered through a treatable foot injury that ultimately led him to lose his leg. Crystal’s traumatic life left her disabled by mental illness—a common circumstance given the trauma inherent to poverty. As wages have fallen and housing costs have risen, housing insecurity has become an epidemic among poor people, leading to 3.6 million evictions a year. In the job market, temporary work has become the norm, creating additional instability. Desmond draws attention to the ways poverty puts a person at odds with their environment and government. Vagrancy laws punish people for homelessness, and Desmond argues that many laws are enforced more harshly against poor people than the affluent. Poverty diminishes the quality of people’s lives.

Read an explanation of a quote about how poverty is not a result of the actions of poor people.

In Chapter 2: Why Haven’t We Made More Progress?, Desmond examines many commonly held beliefs about why poverty rates have remained unchanged for the past 50 years. While standards of living have improved in many ways, making luxury goods increasingly affordable, prices for housing, food, and other necessities remain high enough that millions of people can afford cell phones but not stable housing. The political left often blames these issues on the massive structural changes brought on during the 1980s by President Ronald Reagan, who radically cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy and advocated cutting aid to the poor. However, Desmond points out that despite Reagan’s desires, he was largely unsuccessful at cutting social welfare programs. This spending has continued at a similar rate over the decades, but less money goes directly to people in need. The political right often blames immigrants and single mothers for poverty, but Desmond shows that immigration has little effect on the poverty rate. He also shows that other countries with increasing numbers of single-parent households do not have the United States’ issues with poverty. He closes this section of the book declaring that poverty continues to be such a problem in a wealthy country because affluent people benefit from it.

Read about Main Idea #2: Affluent people benefit from systems that maintain poverty.

Next section Chapter 3–Chapter 6