Poverty, by America

“Why all this American poverty? I’ve learned that this question requires a different approach. To understand the causes of poverty, we must look beyond the poor. Those of us living lives of privilege and plenty must examine ourselves. Are we—we the secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the protected, the lucky—connected to all this needless suffering?”

The literature on poverty overwhelmingly deals with the plight of the poor. Desmond affirms that this is important but asserts that such an approach obscures how poverty is connected to society at large. The contrast mentioned here between those living “lives of privilege and plenty” and those in poverty hints at the two-tier phenomenon of Private Opulence and Public Squalor that Desmond will later explore.

“Poverty is about money, of course, but it is also a relentless piling on of problems.”

Desmond emphasizes that poverty is as much a social and psychological problem as an economic one. Lacking money to satisfy basic needs is a profound source of stress and severely narrows a person’s choices. In gesturing toward all the elements of poverty that are not just about money, Desmond introduces a key aspect of his analysis: the idea that poverty is a structural issue that affects the impoverished in all areas of life, not just economics.

“There is growing evidence that America harbors a hard bottom layer of deprivation, a kind of extreme poverty once thought to exist only in faraway places of bare feet and swollen bellies.”

There is a myth that the poor in America are poor in only relative terms and that they are nothing like poor people in less developed parts of the world. Desmond shows that this is simply not true, revealing that many Americans go without basic needs, such as running water. Americans living in “deep poverty” (See: Index of Terms) thus face conditions similar to those even in the most deprived areas of the world.