I’ve read the statistics, got up on the data, talked to policy makers, but I just didn’t feel like I had this answer to why there’s so much poverty in this country. “I’d spent most of my adult life researching, reporting on poverty,” Desmond tells me.

This is what’s radical about Desmond’s book. We hog all the tax benefits and subsidies and then complain that there is no money for better health care, child tax credits, or affordable housing. We live in walled-off neighborhoods that keep housing prices high. We get cheaper goods by allowing workers to be exploited. “Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.” In other words, poverty exists because people who are not poor - by that I mean people like me who have a roof over our head and don’t have to worry about where our next meal is coming from - want it to exist. And the explanation he comes up with is both simple and deeply provocative: “Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct,” he writes. This is the paradox that Matthew Desmond explores in Poverty, By America. If the American poor founded a country, that country would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela. With all this wealth, all this bounty, all this stuff - why is there so much hardship and suffering? Roughly one in nine Americans live in poverty. We have supermarkets with 50 different brands of potato chips and mega-mansions sprouting like buffalo grass across the prairie and TVs the size of barns.

Evicted desmond