[Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic]

This older interview with Matthew Desmond is doing the rounds again, and I discovered it for the first time. If you haven't read his books Evicted, and Poverty, by America, you owe it to yourself to do that. They're revealing, important works that shed light on the lived experience of many, many Americans.

On why American poverty is different, Desmond says:

"It’s different because it’s so unnecessary. We have so many resources. Our tolerance for poverty is very high, much higher than it is in other parts of the developed world. I don’t know if it’s a belief, a cliché, or a myth. You see a homeless person in Los Angeles; an American says, What did that person do? You see a homeless person in France; a French person says, What did the state do? How did the state fail them?"

It's only half-baffling to me why America has such bad social infrastructure. As Desmond points out here, social programs do work, but in America they address the symptoms and not the root cause. That's because the root cause is endemic to the entire American economic system.

"Half of us are invested in the stock market. Many times, we see our savings going up and up and up when someone’s pay is going down and down and down. Those two things are related. Or think about the housing crisis: Many times, it’s not just corporate landowners who are benefiting from high rents. It’s homeowners whose housing values are propped up and kept high by a scarcity of housing that they contribute to."

To solve poverty - which is something we absolutely must do - we have to change more than many people are comfortable with. You often hear complaints about "socialism" that are nothing of the sort - they're just the same kinds of social programs that every other developed nation has. But here they're weaponized as some kind of anti-democratic force rather than a democratic force that enhances the lives of huge swathes of the population.

The whole interview, as with Desmond's books, is worth reading: he's unflinchingly direct about what we need to do. I've personally given up hope that America will do these things. And that, quite frankly, cements other countries as far better places for most people to live.

#Society

[Link]