[The study of poverty has flourished in recent decades. Why
haven’t the lives of the poor improved?]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOW THE WAR ON POVERTY STALLED  
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Kim Phillips-Fein
August 28, 2023
The New Republic
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_ The study of poverty has flourished in recent decades. Why
haven’t the lives of the poor improved? _

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_Poverty, by America_
Matthew Desmond
Crown
ISBN: 9780593239919

In 1962, a 33-year-old freelance writer
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who had little institutional or academic standing published a book
widely credited
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with helping inspire the creation of Medicaid, Medicare, Head Start,
and food stamps—representing the commitment of the federal
government to a war on poverty. No one expected _The Other America
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to have such an effect, including its author, Michael Harrington, who
insisted he’d be pleased if it managed to sell a couple of thousand
copies. Instead, boosted by a glowing review
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_The New Yorker_, it sold 70,000 in its first year.

 

Harrington came slowly to write about poverty. By the time he did, he
was himself on the social margins, albeit by choice. He had grown up
the only child of a middle-class family in St. Louis, gone to college,
and flitted in and out of law school and a Ph.D. program in English.
In the early 1950s, he joined the Catholic Worker movement, the
radical lay Roman Catholic organization
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led by Dorothy Day, which asked believers to take a vow of poverty. He
lived in the communal Catholic Worker house on Chrystie Street in New
York’s Lower East Side, ministering to the impoverished denizens of
the Bowery. As his spiritual faith waned, he left Day’s orbit and
joined another band of outsiders: the Young People’s Socialist
League, a group [[link removed]] of Trotskyists and former
Socialist Party members who denounced the Communist Party and
capitalism with nearly equal ferocity. That’s where he was when the
editor of _Commentary_ asked him to write an article
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looking into the problem of poverty in the “affluent society” (to
quote [[link removed]]
John Kenneth Galbraith) of 1950s America.

The opening pages of _The Other America_ set out the problem: There
was a “familiar America” of postwar prosperity, of televisions and
radios and automobiles and suburban homes, and then there was a
shadowland—“another America”—of between 40 and 50 million
people who lived in poverty. The poor might not be literally starving,
as they were in other countries, but they were “maimed in body and
spirit,” their lives twisted and deformed by material lack, and
their existence “invisible” to the broader society.

Matthew Desmond’s latest book, _Poverty, by America
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sets out from a very different starting point. In the early 1960s,
when Harrington published his book, poor people were hardly part of
political discourse
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at all; today, there are few who would be so naïve as to claim to
simply not know poverty exists in American society. As a result,
Desmond presents his book not as an exposé but as an effort to answer
the question: _Why_? Why is there still so much poverty in the United
States? Poverty for Desmond is not the result of invisibility, of
being left behind. Rather, the root cause of poverty is exploitation.
People are poor because other people _benefit _from the presence of
poverty: “To understand the causes of poverty, we must look beyond
the poor. Those of us living lives of privilege and plenty must
examine ourselves.”

Desmond is in many ways better placed than Harrington ever was to
launch an appeal to the moral conscience of the nation. From
precarious, just-about-middle-class origins, Desmond has risen to
become the equivalent of academic royalty: He teaches sociology at
Princeton University, has won the MacArthur “genius” grant, and
received the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction
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_Evicted
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which made the striking argument
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that losing one’s home affected future economic chances and position
at least as much as incarceration. Yet _The Other America_ has a moral
hopefulness that _Poverty, by America_ cannot quite summon, and
today’s political circumstances make it almost unimaginable that
Desmond’s book will have a similar effect. The institutionalization
of the study of poverty has changed what it means to chronicle it.

_The Other America_ emphasized the tremendous variety
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poor. Harrington wrote that American poverty deserved a novelist to
chronicle its textures and sensibilities, and in the spirit of George
Orwell going to Wigan Pier
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he observed communities of impoverished people: migrant farmworkers;
the aged poor; the alcoholic poor; the Black residents of poor, urban
neighborhoods; bohemians who were “voluntarily” poor. But in all
these cases, his analysis of poverty treated it as a problem, in large
part, of exclusion. Poor people were those shut out of middle-class
affluence. They lived in geographically remote regions, in segregated
inner cities or in rural Appalachia. They lacked the skills and
education to participate in the great postwar economic boom. Leaving
some people out and including others, technology and progress
generated poverty just as they generated wealth.

Perhaps the most famous idea in _The Other America_ is that of a
“culture of poverty,” Harrington’s borrowing of a concept
developed by anthropologist Oscar Lewis, whose scholarship focused on
poverty in Mexico. Being poor in the United States meant more than not
having money; it was “a culture, an institution, a way of life.”
On one level, Harrington was describing the escalating series of
crises that might define life in poverty and prevent an individual
from rising out of it. A child might develop asthma, an allergic
response to a dusty, run-down building; her mother might have to miss
work for a day to take her to the doctor. For a middle-class employee,
this would be covered by a sick day; for a poor worker, it could mean
getting fired. Lost wages might mean lost rent and then eviction. The
older sister of the asthmatic child might then shoplift to get food or
medicine or a trinket, leading to a stint in jail—and so forth. The
complex web of forces that shaped the life of an impoverished person
gave the lie to glib ideas about individualism whereby hard work
equals upward mobility.

But Harrington went further still, to argue that poor people lived in
a cultural universe apart from the rest of the United States. “There
is, in short, a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a
worldview of the poor,” he wrote. “To be impoverished is to be an
internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different
from the one that dominates the society.” Because poor people were
so radically distant from the larger society, they could not act on
their own politically. Any solution to their plight would have to
depend on appealing to liberal middle-class people and the labor
movement, to create the “vast social movement” that would be
needed to end poverty. Harrington believed that middle-class America
would rise to the challenge. He ended his book with a call to this
constituency. “How long shall we ignore this underdeveloped nation
in our midst? How long shall we look the other way while our fellow
human beings suffer?”

The war on poverty
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of the 1960s had many limits and challenges. Its means-tested programs
were targeted only at the poorest of the poor, rather than being
universal in scope, like Social Security. It was accompanied by
funding
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for local police that helped to swell the carceral state. But at the
same time, it did represent the sole expansion of the American welfare
state in the twentieth century to follow that of the 1930s and 1940s,
which had grown out of the national emergencies
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Depression and war. The national health insurance programs that it
established remain the major form of public health insurance, an
essential xxxxxx and commitment to human dignity and well-being. The
food support it created kept millions from the worst hunger (and still
does, though weakened by repeated attacks
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The number of people living in extreme poverty
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fell to 30 million from 39 million between 1959 and 1966, and despite
Harrington’s pessimism about poor people’s capacity for political
activism, the civil rights movement—with its broad call to recognize
the dignity of subaltern Americans—and the power of organized labor
created the politics that made this possible.
 

And yet, over 60 years later, how different are conditions really?
Recent decades have seen the social safety net hollowed
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out in countless ways, with time limits and work requirements imposed
on programs that were already means-tested—like food stamps. More
than a million American schoolchildren are homeless. Almost two
million
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American households lack running water. And, Desmond writes, “if
America’s poor founded a country, that country would have a bigger
population than Australia or Venezuela”—37.9 million
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as of January 2023. Desmond describes poverty as living in a sense of
constant emergency. The constant danger and fear that comes with being
poor are core to his vision: “Poverty is the colostomy bag and
wheelchair, the night terrors and bullets that maimed but didn’t
finish their cunning work.” He is also powerful on physical pain:
the two amputations a week in the meatpacking industry when an arm or
a hand gets caught in a band saw; the “skin rashes and migraines of
maids who clean our office buildings, homes, and hotel rooms with
products containing ammonia and triclosan.”
Poverty, for Desmond, results from the myriad forms of “predatory
inclusion
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to use Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s phrase, rather than exclusion.
People are poor because they are underpaid, charged too much in rent,
and exploited by financial institutions such as payday lenders. Poor
people do not occupy some distant cultural universe; their labor and
their needs create opportunities for wealth for others. They are
people like Julio Payes, a Guatemalan immigrant (a permanent resident
of the United States) who lives in a small city in Northern California
and works 80 hours a week at two minimum-wage jobs—an overnight
shift at McDonald’s and a day shift at a temp contracting firm that
sends people to jobs in construction, maintenance, distribution, and
facilities. Or Crystal Mayberry, who survived a violent childhood to
find herself paying 73 percent of her income in rent; following
eviction, she lost her Supplemental Security Income, and ultimately
found herself homeless, engaging in prostitution to survive.

These conditions, Desmond argues, persist because employers,
landlords, loan sharks, and—less directly—large swaths of the
upper middle class benefit. In this analysis, Desmond is building on
his work on evictions, which pins much of the blame
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for the high eviction rate and consequent disaster on small landlords,
whose own economic security rests on the apartments they rent to even
poorer people. Many of these landlords are people who have little
access to steady or stable jobs, and so turn to property ownership
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as an alternative. But then they behave with ruthlessness toward
tenants like Mayberry. Similarly, in the broader economy, the low
wages and precarious conditions of poor workers like Payes underwrite
the economic security of well-off professionals. If upper-middle-class
people can afford takeout food
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household help, childcare, restaurant meals out, new clothing each
season, and much else, it’s in large part because the workers in
those fields are paid so poorly.

This kind of self-interest, Desmond argues, has also distorted the
welfare state, so that poor people have to scramble for scraps of aid
while the affluent receive handsome tax breaks
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Even though government spending on means-tested programs that are
aimed at poor people, such as Medicaid and food stamps, has grown
since the early 1980s, from $1,015 per person in 1980 to $3,419 a
person early in Donald Trump’s presidency, the programs are more
difficult
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to access than they were in the past. Money that is supposed to go to
poor people in fact is devoted to the state apparatus that determines
whether they’re poor enough to receive it.

Desmond illustrates this point with the story of his former roommate,
Woo. Woo stepped on a rusty nail in his dilapidated apartment; unable
to take the time and money to go to the doctor, he developed an
infection that spiraled due to his diabetes and ultimately lost his
lower leg. Woo’s initial application for Social Security was
denied—as are about two-thirds
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all first-time applications—although later, with the help of a
lawyer, he was able to access the program, which paid him much less
than his work as a security guard once had. These pointless legal
hassles and barriers to access help to explain why, as Desmond puts
it, “a dollar allocated to an antipoverty program does not mean a
dollar will ultimately reach a needy family.”

On top of this, states get block grants
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Assistance for Needy Families (the revamped Clinton-era welfare
program) and can spend money on things like abstinence-only sex
education and Christian summer camps that have a dubious relationship
to ending poverty. Of the $31.6 billion in federal welfare spending in
2020, only $7.1 billion actually was realized in cash payments to poor
people. Compare this system to Aid to Families With Dependent
Children, the welfare program
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in place from the Great Depression until the early 1990s, which
Desmond argues managed to deliver “almost all” of its funding into
the hands of poor people themselves.

Government assistance has become tilted toward
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those who have money already. Desmond contrasts the labyrinthine and
inefficient programs for the poor with the considerable welfare state
for the affluent, comprising a host of tax benefits. Many of these
benefits are invisible—tax-advantaged IRAs, for example, or 529
college-savings plans, or mortgage-interest tax deductions. But just
imagine what it would look like if people paid the “full” amount
of their taxes and then got a check equivalent to the credit. Desmond
suggests that the average household in the bottom 20 percent of the
income distribution receives about $25,700 a year in government
benefit, while the average household in the top 20 percent gets about
$35,300. Why is this welfare state politically acceptable, but not one
that effectively serves poor people?

The answer may not be that complex or ideological. Starving the public
sector allows the affluent to purchase ever-larger cars, houses, and
consumer goodies. We have lavish vacations, giant SUVs, and McMansion
second homes—but we get to them by driving past homeless
encampments, and our public school teachers pay out of pocket for
school supplies. This is no accident, but rather marks the complicity
of the upper middle class in the sustenance of poverty.

Harrington was a socialist when he wrote _The Other America_, but he
refrained in the book from any direct or explicit criticism of
capitalism that might prevent it reaching a wider audience. Desmond
makes a similar move, insisting that he is not calling for anything as
radical as “redistribution,” but simply for the IRS to start
cracking down on tax cheats and for a little rebalancing of the social
safety net so that it offers less help to the rich and more to the
poor. (He estimates that the government could lift all poor families
above the poverty line for about $177 billion—an amount far less
than what it loses through tax avoidance each year.) Raising the
minimum wage and making it easier
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for workers to organize unions are, for Desmond, among the most
important anti-poverty programs. A higher minimum wage, he writes,
would be a “sleep aid” and an “antidepressant.”
Desmond calls attention to the political movements of poor people in a
way that Harrington never did. Although Harrington was writing after
the Montgomery bus boycott, as the civil rights movement rose in the
South, he said relatively little about it—although this was a
mobilization in large part of the working poor
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Desmond, by contrast, cites tenants’ movements, the Fight for $15,
and union campaigns such as those at Amazon and Starbucks
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He calls on the middle class to support, participate in, and learn
from these movements, rather than engaging with them superficially.
“It’s now common for local businesses to hang trans rights flags
or BLACK LIVES MATTER signs in their store windows,” he observes,
but “how about also posting starting wages?” Right-thinking
liberals seek out organic, sustainably produced fruits and vegetables,
but rarely ask what the farmworkers are paid; they boycott chains
because of their political donations and public stances
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their pay and benefits. Desmond asks that we treat these seemingly
economic issues as the moral and political ones they really are.
People should become “poverty abolitionists,” invoking a tradition
of abolitionism from the abolition of slavery to the campaign to
dismantle the carceral state.

Despite Desmond’s exhortations, a note of impatience, frustration,
even disillusionment runs through his book. Harrington believed that
if only people knew and recognized the extent of poverty in the United
States, they would take action against it—how could they not? By
contrast, Desmond notes that he feels “rude” when he mentions that
“people benefit from poverty in all kinds of ways”—it’s like
“a dog urinating on a car.” One imagines academics shuffling their
papers and looking down, conference attendees staring into the middle
distance. They are happy to produce white papers and journal articles,
but not to support union drives or pay their housekeepers more.
“Complexity is the refuge of the powerful,” he writes. “Hungry
people want bread. The rich convene a panel of experts.”

It’s clear why Desmond is exasperated. After all, the United States
has been talking about poverty for six decades, and yet the problem
remains. Desmond himself has built an entire academic career
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out of documenting the causes and extent of poverty, part of a
professional subfield
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didn’t exist when Harrington wrote _The Other America_. Then,
Harrington positioned himself as an outsider bearing moral witness.
The extensive, rich footnotes of _Poverty, by America_—far more
extensive and scholarly than for Harrington’s book—testify that
the body of knowledge about poverty has vastly grown. Journal articles
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books
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conferences
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foundations
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and pilot programs
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proliferate, yet the poor remain poor. The contrast between the
studied concern of the sociologists and the actual lives of poor
people is painful—and enraging. It is as though an entire elaborate
intellectual edifice has been built to tell us what we already know:
that it is a horror to live in cities where thousands of people sleep
outdoors and wander the streets begging for change, where mothers
strap their children to their backs and sell candy on the subways,
where young men lose their feet because they cannot go to the doctor
to treat infected wounds. Desmond’s work is deeply rooted in this
academic universe, even as he acknowledges its limits. “We don’t
need to outsmart this problem,” Desmond writes. “We need to
out-hate it.”

Yet Desmond’s discouragement at the complacency of his class peers
does not fully capture the economic dynamics at play. Part of what has
happened over the 61 years that separate these two books is the turn
from a political economy that managed to distribute wealth more evenly
to the current level of extreme inequality and hierarchy. In the early
1960s, Harrington argued that the poor lived lives of insecurity and
deprivation that were far from the American norm “because so many
are enjoying a decent standard of life, there are indifference and
blindness to the plight of the poor.” Today, thanks to capital
flight, anti-unionism, deindustrialization, the proliferation of
low-wage jobs, and the proletarianization of many professional
occupations (such as academia), the insecurity of poverty has spread
to many of those who might once have occupied the middle class.

Despite the many differences of status and education, factory workers,
retail clerks, professors, and journalists (among other occupations)
alike share downward pressure on their wages and increased lack of
control over the conditions of their work. Although Desmond is
technically correct that the majority of the American population owns
some
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and thus indirectly benefits from exploitation that might boost share
prices, this does not translate into security and privilege—most who
do own stock do so as part of a retirement plan, which can easily be
wiped out in a downturn
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and few outside of the elite derive any significant part of their
income from finance. The middle class today in fact shares a great
deal with the poor, which means that its guilty self-excoriation can
only get so far.

There is some room for hope in this bleak fact. Many of the social and
political investments that Desmond suggests to reduce extreme
poverty—making it easier to organize unions, expanding investments
in affordable housing and tenant protections, raising the minimum
wage—hold the potential for broad and commanding appeal. Such
policies likely would provide a net material benefit for many beyond
the very poor. They could also extend less tangible gains in security
and in freedom. Desmond concludes by evoking the weariness that can
come from living in a society that tolerates human desperation, as
ours does—the tendency to dehumanize those who show that there is no
limit to how far one might fall, the dissociation that becomes
necessary to walk down the street and remain sane in the presence of
frightening misery. He asks that people imagine a different kind of
society: one no longer haunted in this way. Seeing the fight against
extreme poverty as a building of necessary solidarity might even help
to ignite a “new period of political creativity” in the United
States—as Harrington called for, more than 60 years ago.

 
 

Kim Phillips-Fein’s latest book is _Fear City: New York’s Fiscal
Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics_.

* poverty
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* War on Poverty
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* social safety net
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* budget cuts
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* Neoliberal public policy
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