Transcript of Interview of Matthew Desmond - Washington Post

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Transcript: Matthew Desmond, Author, “Poverty, by America”
March 30, 2023 at 1:42 p.m. EDT


MR. PALETTA: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m deputy business editor Damian Paletta, and I’m honored to be joining Matthew Desmond today, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and sociologist, to discuss his new book, “Poverty, by America.”

Matthew, thanks so much for joining us.

MR. DESMOND: Thanks for having me, Damian.

MR. PALETTA: So, you know, your last book, "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City," in 2016 was widely read and revered and similarly, you know, made people, rightfully, very uncomfortable so that they could understand what was happening in places where many, many Americans would never go, you know, in scenes that people would never see. What made you decide, you know, based on "Evicted" to go from there to this? Talk to us about your journey as a sociologist and a writer from that experience to this book.

MR. DESMOND: When I was researching "Evicted," I saw a kind of poverty that was mean and cruel and violent. You know, I met grandmas that were living without heat in the winter, just spending their time under blankets and hoping the space heater didn't go out. I saw kids being evicted every day, you know, going into eviction court and just seeing tons of kids running around and cast into homelessness.

And it provoked in me a question which is, why? Why so much poverty in this incredibly rich nation? And I think to answer that question, you need a different kind of book. A book that bears a witness, like my last book, is a book that shows the human cost of all this poverty in this country, but this is a different book. This is a different book that looks at how we tolerate so much deprivation amongst so much wealth.

MR. PALETTA: Mm-hmm. And, I mean, it seems like a simple question: Why? Right? But as your book points out, the answer is very complicated, and I think a lot of people have one answer that they'd like to attribute to why. But in reality, it's not so simple. Can you walk us through some of the reasons? I mean, you opened your book with this question: Why is there so much poverty in America? Can you walk us through some of the answers to that question?

MR. DESMOND: Sure. So, the novelist, Tommy Orange, has a line that goes, "These kids are jumping out of burning buildings, falling to their deaths, and we think that the problem is that they're jumping." And when I read that, I was like, that sounds like the American poverty debate. We've spent so much time focusing on the poor, when we should have been focusing on the fire. Who lit it? Who's warming their hands by it?

So, this is a book about the fire. It's a book about how many of us--and by us, I mean those who are privileged, who have found some economic security in this country--how many of us benefit from poverty in ways that are known and unknown to us.

MR. PALETTA: One of the things, I think, that I found really powerful about your book as well is you're not writing as a third party who's just studying this from afar. You know, you kind of are very up front about your own experience as a child, you know, even as a college student with poverty and how you almost have been--I mean, obviously, no child is drawn to poverty, but as a college student, you just were interested in the voices of those people, of the poor around campus. Can you just kind of walk me through a bit of that and how this has not only shaped how you grew--who you grew to be, but also how you decided to pursue sociology and this kind of calling?

MR. DESMOND: Sure. So, I grew up in a little town in northern Arizona. Money was always tight. Our gas got turned off sometimes, and then I--we lost our home when I was in college. And that was a confusing time for me. That was an embarrassing time for me, honestly.

But one thing I was also seeing in college was just money, just so many of peers driving what I thought were very fancy cars. I was driving an old truck with a junkyard engine that we installed ourselves, and it really confused me and motivated me to understand this massive, vast inequality in this country.

And one thing I did was just start spending time with homeless people around my campus, not serving them in a charitable capacity, just listening to them, talking to them, befriending them, and that helped me, I think, in my own youthful way kind of try to reconcile that, that tension or that confusion that I was seeing every day.

I think that impulse is really important for those of us that are writing and working on anti-poverty measures. I think we need to be accountable to the people that are closest to the problem.

MR. PALETTA: And hear their stories and listen to their experiences and, and I think what's interesting about this--one of the things--many things that's interesting about this book is it's not just data. I mean, it's easy to show people, yes, there's millions of people who live in poverty, but when you pepper in the book, as you did, examples and their stories and you listen to them in a way that many people would not, I think it makes it all the richer. And I wanted to get to that.

Some of the examples you use, you know, the people who are living in poverty talk about drug use and how--the roles that drugs have played in their lives. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between drugs and poverty and what you, both in "Evicted" and in this book, have come to understand and learn about drugs and poverty?

MR. DESMOND: Sure. So, when I was living in Milwaukee, living in a mobile home park, living in a rooming house building in the inner city, I met some people that had serious drug addictions, opioid addictions, and most of those stories were stories about self-medicating pain. It was about people who had experienced trauma, who, you know, society didn't medicate them or come around them and support them, and so they found their own ways to kind of blunt the pain. And I kind of understand that. That's a very human impulse to me.

I'm in California right now, and there was a recent study that showed that a lot of homeless folks here in California start using meth after they become homeless, not before, and the reason is because homelessness is incredibly scary. You know, they're--they want to stay up. They want to, you know, not fall asleep at night, and so they medicate to do that. So, I think that we need to really focus on how this, like, deep, hard bottom layer of poverty in this country causes folks to turn to things because we're not supporting them as a nation.

But I should--I want to say that most of the folks that I've met below the poverty line don't use drugs and don't drink even, you know, and I drink, you know. And when I was in Milwaukee, there was a lot of times I wanted to take the edge off with a glass of whiskey or a beer or something, and the friends that I met that were struggling we're scandalized by that, you know. And if you look at the data, rich folks drink a lot more than poor folks do, and so I think it's interesting. Yeah.

MR. PALETTA: So, I think one of the--one of my big takeaways from "Poverty, by America" is that our progress as a country has stalled, and I think what you do really effectively is you kind of confront head on this belief that many people have, including people on the left, who say, hey, look, it's much better for the poor now than it was 20, 30 years ago. You might see homeless people. They have cell phones. Like we couldn't fathom a world in which that existed 30 years ago. Can you help explain how that really is misleading and a misleading way to think about poverty?

MR. DESMOND: Yeah. You can't eat a cell phone. You know, can't trade a TV in for a living wage. You know, a lot of folks who are below the poverty line today, they have access to cheap mass-produced goods, like many of us do, but as the cost of those cheap goods have declined over the past decades, the cost of the most basic and important necessities have gone up. So, the cost of fuel and utility has risen by 115 percent since 2000. Median rents have doubled over that time. Health care costs have gone up, and so, I think those are the costs that are most important to families that are struggling today. And we shouldn't let the fact that the decline of prices and toasters and TVs and cell phones signal anything like progress on poverty. Like Michael Harrington wrote over 60 years ago, it's much easier to be well clothed in America than to be well housed and well doctored.

MR. PALETTA: Was there a time--kind of going--looking bMR. DESMOND: Absolutely. I mean, there are so many government programs that are effective and essential and save millions of families, frankly, from homelessness and hunger every year.

Let's talk about the war on poverty and the Great Society. This was launched during the Johnson administration in 1964, and it was a bundle of programs directed at the poorest families in America, things like establishing food stamps permanently, making Head Start something that we invested in, Job Corps, expanding Social Security benefits. Those programs cut poverty in half in 10 years, and what I love about the war on poverty was its ambition.

You know, when Lyndon B. Johnson announced on the floor of Congress that he wanted to end poverty in America, he was not just playing around. It wasn't just rhetoric. They set a deadline, and we once had ambitions for poverty abolitionism in this country, and I think we need to rekindle that sense of moral urgency.

MR. PALETTA: And one of the--one of the many points you make in your book is that there is obviously a lot of federal support for anti-poverty programs, but you sort of raised the question as to whether that money is being used efficiently and effectively. You know, what lessons could Washington take from that? I mean, what are--maybe some programs were designed originally in the '60s, but we live in a much different, you know, country and world now. What are some areas where we could maybe--we should be rethinking how we're using the money that we do spend?

MR. DESMOND: Yeah. I'll give you two examples. One of the things we need to do is make sure that money we budget for families actually reaches those families.

MR. PALETTA: Mm-hmm.

MR. DESMOND: And it's not doing so as much as it could for two reasons. One reason is that a lot of programs, the money is not spent on direct assistance to the poor. You know, for every dollar we budget for cash welfare--this program that's called TANF, or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families--for every dollar we budget for that, only 22 cents ends up in the pockets of a poor family. Why? Well, states have a lot of leeway about how to spend that money, and they spend it on all sorts of things. They spend it on Christian summer camps, abstinence-only education, marriage initiatives. Other states just sit on the money.

You know, Tennessee is sitting on over $7 million in unspent welfare funds. Hawaii is sitting on so much, they could give every poor kid in their state $10,000. And so, we need to do a much better job as a country, making sure when we budget that dollar, that dollar reaches families in need and deserve that aid.

We also have to face the fact--this is the second issue--that a lot of poor families just aren't taking advantage of programs that are designed to help them. One in five elderly Americans who could receive food stamps do not receive it. One in five poorly paid workers who could receive their earned income tax credit do not take it. So, what's going on? Is it stigma? Are people embarrassed?

There is something to that. You know, there is a degradation ritual that still happens when low-income families kind of connect to these programs, but the more evidence suggests that we just as a nation are really bad at making sure that aid is marketed to people and distributed to people. We've made these programs hard. We've wrapped them in red tape, and I think that we can do a lot of easy things to unleash kind of the power of these really important programs.

MR. PALETTA: Let's talk a little bit about what seems to be a disconnect between the labor market in this country and living wage because, you know, we're at 3.5 percent-or-so unemployment, which is as low as many of us will ever see in our lifetimes. But you still have tens of millions of families who are living in poverty, and I--of course, there's--as you said, there's a stigma and I'm sure there's a misunderstanding that people assume if you're in poverty, you're not working. A lot of people who live in poverty are working. In fact, they might be working longer hours than many other people. What is with that disconnect between the labor market and poverty?

MR. DESMOND: Yeah. In the book, I write about a young man I met a few years ago in California. His name was Julio Payes, and he was working two jobs, one at McDonald's for eight hours, took two hours to rest, and then went to a temp company for eight hours and then slept as much as he could, and he was back to McDonald's. And both jobs were paying minimum wage, but this is what he had to put in to afford, you know, a bare-bones apartment that he shared with his mom and younger brother.

And one day his younger brother, who was eight, you know, asked Julio, you know, "I'm saving up so I can buy an hour of your time. How much for an hour to play with me?" You know, this is a cruelty, and it didn't always used to be this bad. When the war on poverty was launched, one in three workers belonged to a union. Wages were climbing. You could advance in your company. Your job came with some benefits. But as worker power declined over the years, the job market got a lot worse, and wages have stagnated. So, one study shows that a worker without a high school diploma in 2017 made 10 percent less than he or she would have in 1979, adjusting for inflation. For a lot of workers, the job market just isn't delivering, and for us to confront poverty, we have to address this unrelenting exploitation, and we have to call it that in the labor market.

MR. PALETTA: So, there is something that really jumped out at me at the end of chapter two, I believe it is, when you're talking about, you know, why there's so much poverty. You say, "Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it too." I mean, that's really powerful writing. It made me very uncomfortable. I think it's, you know, designed to make people who read this book feel uncomfortable. Talk a little bit about how--you have a sense of urgency in this book, you know, an urgency to action and urgency for readers to feel like they need to be part of the solution. They can't just sit by and watch us continue to stall out for the next 10 years, next 20 years. Talk to us a little bit about your decision to kind of go at that complacency as a writer.

MR. DESMOND: Yeah. I love that word you used, "urgency," because this is a morally urgent problem. Poverty isn't just about not having enough--no money. It's about death. It's about violence. It's about tooth rot. It's about the nauseating fear of eviction. It's about hunger. It's about putting your life in the hands of a public defender. It is so bad. You know, it's this tangle of agonies and humiliations, and the citizens of the richest country in the world certainly can and should put an end to it.

And many of us who do enjoy a sense of economic security, we are connected to the problem, and so we're connected to the solution. We often consume the cheap goods and services that the working poor produce. Those of us invested in the stock market see high returns, but sometimes those returns come at the cost of another person's life and labor. We have a welfare state--and I hope we can get into the details here--that gives the most to families that don't need it. We really do more to subsidize affluence in this country than alleviate poverty.

And then, many of us continue to be segregationists. You know, we build walls around our community. We hoard opportunity behind those walls, and that concentration of affluence creates pockets of poverty, which is the side effect of our concentration of wealth. So, these are ways that many of us are connected to all this poverty around us.

MR. PALETTA: So, let's talk about the welfare state. Obviously, that's a big topic in Washington, and we expect there to be a big debate later this year as Republicans and Democrats kind of fight over the budget.

But, you know, there was--a few weeks ago, the government kind of rushed in to bail out the depositors of Silicon Valley Bank in Northern California, many of them billionaires. Obviously, it was kind of a complicated, messy situation. But after that happened, there were a lot of people who were frustrated that the government moved so quickly to help the depositors of that bank, but, you know, they've been less helpful for student loan, people with big student loans who are suffering and potentially falling into poverty by the cost of that. Is that the kind of example that you're talking about, how there seems to be--Washington seems to be more eager to help the people with resources and who can get access to Washington than maybe those who don't have as much access to Washington but are in much more dire straits?

MR. DESMOND: Yeah. So this is the headline this month, but, you know, every day, in a normal--you know, normal, everyday life, the government does much more to guard fortunes than it does to help the poorest among us.

So, let's look at the welfare state. If we count up tax breaks, social insurance, means-tested programs, programs for the poorest Americans, if you count all those together, you learn that every year in America, the richest of us, the families in the top 20 percent of the income bracket, they receive around $36,000 a year from the government. But families in the bottom 20 percent of the income bracket receive only $25,000 from the government. That's almost a 40 percent difference, you know, and then we kind of arrange our society like this, right? And then we have the audacity, the shamelessness really, to ask how can we afford doing more. We say, how can we afford to make sure everyone has a doctor? How can we afford to cut child poverty in half like we did during covid? But the answer is staring us right in the face. We could afford it if the richest among us took less from the government.

I know that many of us have a hard time viewing a tax break as the same thing as like a housing subsidy for low-income families, but it is. They both cost the government money. They both put money in our pocket, and so, I think that what I'm calling for is not necessarily redistribution but a reevaluation of our priorities. I'm calling for less aid to the rich and deeper investments in the poor.

MR. PALETTA: Matthew, I want to talk to you about generational poverty for a second. We received a lot of questions from the audience ahead of this interview, and Shari Campbell Kooister from Washington State asks, "I believe so much begins with education and would appreciate thoughts about transformative solutions to the baked-in inequities in funding of public schools and whether that might have a meaningful impact on poverty. I'd also appreciate any optimistic words about whether such funding changes are even remotely likely to ever happen."

What are your thoughts about the role education plays in this and whether we can make progress by focusing on education in addressing poverty?

MR. DESMOND: We've actually seen a lot of progress in education over the last recent years. The inequities of school funding have been somewhat corrected by education reforms, and now schools that are located in poor neighborhoods do receive funding that often is on par with schools in affluent neighborhoods. But it's not enough. We have to tear down the walls. We have to give parents more choice about where to send their kids to school.

I'm really influenced by a study out of Maryland that randomized public housing families, and some of those families lived in affluent neighborhoods and they sent their kids to integrated schools, and some of those families were provided housing in poor neighborhoods and sent their kids to school where most of the other kids were poor. But those schools had a lot of resources dumped into them, just like really state-of-the-art resources, and then the researchers followed the two kids. And the kids who went to the integrated schools did much better than the kids who remained in the economically and often racially segregated schools, even when those schools had a lot of resources. Integration works, and so I think we need to not only invest in more resources, but we also have to invest in broad prosperity and finally turn away from segregation.

MR. PALETTA: You talked about racial integration. Talk about the role that race plays in poverty in your research, both in "Evicted" and this book. Is there--are there conclusions you could draw from how this country continues to both, you know, misconnect a racial component of poverty and are--what could we do to address that?

MR. DESMOND: Yeah. It's impossible to write a book about American poverty without also writing a book about American racism. They are just connected in such an intimate way.

An important first step is to recognize that, you know, Black poverty and White poverty aren't the same thing.

MR. PALETTA: Mm-hmm.

MR. DESMOND: You know, most folks who are White and poor live in very different neighborhoods, more economically diverse and less poor neighborhoods, than a lot of families who are African American and live below the poverty line. That means if you are one of those Black families that are struggling, your kids are often going to much less-resourced schools. Your housing is more degraded. Your neighborhood is more concentrated with poverty and disadvantage. That really matters for kind of understanding the different relationships and experiences of poverty and how race shapes and bends those different experiences.

It's also important to recognize that, you know, many of us who are looking at the poverty problem, our views and attitudes can be shaped by racism. So, there's really a lot of convincing evidence that shows that Americans support certain welfare policies more if they don't think those policies are going to African American families. That's a really concerning finding.

There's also a lot of evidence that shows that job market discrimination against African Americans looking for jobs hasn't changed in 30 years, no progress in a generation. So, I think that those are issues we have to confront alongside confronting the fact that this country can do so much more to address poverty and supporters.

MR. PALETTA: I mean, those are--those are heavy lifts. You know, I mean, it's one thing to kind of authorize a new government program that would allocate a billion dollars towards education or housing, but it's a whole--it's a much more difficult task, I think, to try to get at some of these deep-seated racial issues in this country and try to get, you know, the labor market to become more fair, for example, or even the rental housing market to become more fair and less discriminatory.

Is this just something that we have to start, you know, as a country and work on progress over the years, or how can we even fast-forward or accelerate change in those things that just seem kind of overwhelming to comprehend?

MR. PALETTA: So, on the one hand, I feel that ending poverty--and when I say ending poverty, I mean ending it.

MR. PALETTA: Mm-hmm.

MR. DESMOND: Ending poverty is an incredibly attainable goal for our country.

You know, a study published a few years ago estimated that if the top 1 percent of us just paid the taxes they owed--not paid more taxes, just stopped evading taxes--that we as a nation could raise an additional $175 billion a year. That's almost enough to pull everyone out of poverty. We have the resources. We can do this.

The hard part is political will, and that's where we come in, you know, us. And I think that the book calls for us to become poverty abolitionists, to recognize that poverty is an abomination, and to recognize that profiting from someone else's pain drags us all down. So, if you take something like integration that we were just talking about, part of that is a big policy change, right? But part of it means us, and right here and this "us," I think, needs to be--especially affluent White families--going down to zoning board meetings on Tuesday night, you know, and standing up and saying, "Look, I refuse to be a segregationist. I refuse to deny other kids opportunities my kids have had living in this community. I want to build affordable housing in this neighborhood."

So, I think a lot of times, you know, when we talk about these issues, we talk about it out there. You know, it's a policy. It's Congress. It's those other guys that vote for the other party. It's them. I think that we need to also start looking at--within ourselves because that's where we can start building the political will, and that's where we can start putting pressure on our lawmakers to do something ambitious.

MR. PALETTA: I think one of the things that--one of the many things that might make people feel uncomfortable in this book is that they're not--people whether are participating in making poverty as bad as it is don't even realize what they're doing. I mean, a lot of people don't get up in the morning and say I'm going to make poverty, the status quo, continue, right? But the way they shop, the way--the way they interact with others just perpetuates it more.

So, how do you kind of break through to them, besides writing a great book like this? How do you break through to people that they have to look at the decisions they make, the unconscious decisions that they're making every day, and look at how that affects poverty in this country?

MR. DESMOND: Yeah. I think a lot of us are open to this conversation. I think a lot of us want to have this conversation. We can feel it. We can feel it in our lives, how we're connected to each other, and how we're complicit often in inequality.

I think this can start on a very personal day-to-day basis. So, tax season is coming out, right? So, a lot of times, those of us left, right, and center, we don't like paying taxes. We complain about it. We run into each other at the coffee machine at work or in the backyard barbecue, and we say, "Oh, my gosh, my tax bill." So, what if this tax season when your buddy says, "Oh, my gosh, you know, I got this tax bill coming up," you said, "I know. I get this thing called a mortgage interest deduction. I get a lot of money from the government for my big suburban home. I don't need it, and gosh, we have an eviction crisis going on. It's incredible that the government spends money on me instead of spending money on families that desperately need a safe and affordable home. So, you know what I'm going to do this year? I'm going to donate what I save with that deduction, and I'm going to write my congressperson and say, look, wind down this program. You know, let's reevaluate our priorities." What if we started having that conversation? If one or two of us had that conversation, that's not a big difference, but what if we started having that conversation by the hundreds and the thousands and the ten thousands? I think that's one way to change the common sense of the country and start putting political pressure not only upwards but on each of us.

MR. PALETTA: Well, this was a fascinating conversation. We're out of time, but I just wanted to thank you again. Matthew Desmond, "Poverty, by America," such an important book and important topic, I really appreciate your time today.

MR. DESMOND: Oh, this was a great conversation. Thank you so much for it.

MR. PALETTA: So, to check out what interviews we have coming up, please head to WashingtonPostLive.com to register and find more information there.

I'm Damian Paletta at the Washington Post. Thank you so much for joining us.

[End recorded session]