The One Cause of Poverty That's Never Considered
In the United States, a staggeringly wealthy country, one in nine peopleand one in eight childrenis officially poor. Those figures have fluctuated only slightly over half a century, during which scholars and journalists have exhaustively debated the reasons for the lack of progress. Training their attention on the lives of the dispossessed, researchers have identified barriers that keep people at the bottom of the social ladder from climbing its rungs and offered arguments that usually play out along ideological lines. According to conservatives, the most significant obstacles are behavioral: family breakdown and debilitating habits such as dependency and idleness, exacerbated, they believe, by the receipt of government handouts. According to liberals, the real problems are structural: forces such as racism and deindustrialization, which, they contend, have entrenched inequality and prevented disadvantaged groups from sharing in the nations prosperity.
But what if the focus on the disadvantaged is misplaced? What if the persistence of poverty has less to do with the misfortunes of the needy than with the advantages the affluent presume they are entitled to? In Poverty, by America, Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton, argues that we need to examine the behavior and priorities not of the poor but of those of us living lives of privilege and plenty.
Desmonds decision to spotlight the privileged may surprise readers familiar with his previous work, in particular his widely acclaimed book Evicted, which told the stories of eight impoverished families struggling to find and keep affordable apartments in Milwaukee. The prevailing assumption among scholars had been that most poor people in Americas urban areas lived in public housing. In fact, only 15 percent of low-income renters in the United States fell into this category, Desmond found. The rest had to navigate the private rental market, where many ended up spending more than half their income on dilapidated units with busted appliances and roach infestations. The indignity of living in such conditions was compounded by the fear of falling behind on the rent and getting evicted, traumatic expulsions that happened with shocking regularity in places like Milwaukees impoverished North Side. A similar convulsive pattern of dislocations played out in low-income neighborhoods all over the country.
Evicted revealed a fundamental fact about poverty in America that had gone largely unrecognized but caused indelible harm: Routine ejections dislodged children from schools, destabilized blocks, and upended the lives of vulnerable people stripped again and again of their possessions and their dignity. Desmond captured the human toll up close, spending extensive time with his subjectsamong them, a Navy veteran named Lamar with no legs and two sons to care for, circumstances that did not prevent his landlord from handing him an eviction notice one day. I love Lamar, the landlord told Desmond, but love dont pay the bills. As unsparing as his portrait of the callousness that fueled poverty was, Desmond studiously avoided portraying his characters as hapless victims or brushing over the flawed decisions they sometimes made (Lamar lost his legs after getting high on crack and jumping out a window, we learn).
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-one-cause-of-poverty-that-s-never-considered/ar-AA18TbhT
bucolic_frolic
(42,479 posts)The system is stacked against working people. Privileges are written into law, into power relationships that cannot be challenged. Money goes UP the income scale, and capital is rewarded. It's that simple.
PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,684 posts)I'm being a tad sarcastic, of course. But not having enough money is huge.
I've been relatively poor at various times in my life, but along with being white (not a particular virtue, merely a fact), having graduated high school, having decent skills, kept me from being stuck in poverty.
When I was in high school and desperately needed dental work, my mother found out about a charity clinic, and I was able to get my teeth fixed. I have never forgotten how important that was for me.
orthoclad
(2,830 posts)Whoda thunk it?
"What if the persistence of poverty has less to do with the misfortunes of the needy than with the advantages the affluent presume they are entitled to?"
You mean having the fat rich squatting on your shoulders makes people poor? And using their family money to do it? I'm shocked.
Never considered, huh?
My favorite graph again, courtesy of those Bolsheviks at the Congressional Budget Office:
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cachukis
(2,159 posts)We don't need no stinkin' taxes.
OldBaldy1701E
(4,915 posts)Because the bills are far more important than some dude with two kids and no legs, right? Because that green piece of paper is far more important than this man being able to have some place to live with his kids, right?