Poverty Abolitionism

“I just don't think the left has fully committed to poverty abolitionism.” — Matthew Desmond, The Daily Show

Photo by Matthew Lancaster on Unsplash

Post 13: 1 April 2025¹

Poverty, By America, Matthew Desmond’s recent book, is important. I took away three lessons from his mix of clear-eyed analysis and principled jeremiad: what poverty really is; how we are all responsible for its persistence; and that it is fixable.²

Poverty is about Freedom

Desmond’s analysis of poverty returns again and again to freedom. Mostly, he puts it this way:

Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice. (78)

This is not so far from how I defined freedom as having a set of life choices comparable to others in society and the ability to choose among them. He mostly avoids the terms freedom or liberty, but this is what we are talking about. Near the end of the book, he sums it up by concluding that, “Without poverty, we’d be more free” (181). In my margin notes I put a big star and wrote “Yes!”

Poor people don’t have enough money, sure, but the recurring theme is how the structures of everyday life work to systematically limit choice, forcing the poor, again and again, to “choose the best bad option” (78). The simple barrier of not having enough money becomes more and more difficult to overcome as the vulnerability and insecurity of poverty deepen.

While not explicitly defined as such, the injury is to liberty understood in civic republican terms:

Our economic freedom is limited when we don’t have resources at our disposal. When we don’t own property or can’t access credit, we become dependent on those who do. (63)

Contrast this to my description of civic republican liberty a few weeks ago, when I wrote that “individual freedom depends on the ability to make undominated choices, a degree of economic, social, and political independence from the undue influence of others.” This is at the heart of what it means to be poor: our choices are defined by, prescribed by, others.

Consider housing, the area Desmond understands best. He shows how the poor are “forced to accept housing options no one else wanted” (64) and often forced to pay higher rents than more advantaged renters for similar apartments. Moves are not seen as a choice to pursue “opportunities” but as “emergencies”, something people do because they “have to” as a “last resort”, and the available choices are also limited by landlord and banking norms.³

Desmond’s examination of the banking system (71-78) is as compelling: Those with the lowest bank balances carry the bulk of all banking fees in America (71), pushing many out of traditional banks altogether (5.4% of Americans were “unbanked” in 2019),⁴ making them vulnerable to usurious payday lenders. “Where there is exclusion, there is exploitation”, he writes (72).

An even more basic problem is the inability to earn a decent wage (Chapter 3). Low minimum wages and systematic efforts to undermine workers’ collective bargaining power restrict workers’ choices and keep them dependent on their employers. I found the discussion of independent contractors and other devices used to fragment and control large workforces especially insightful (53-55). Desmond writes that noncompete clauses, a topic I did not know much about,

…intimidate poorly paid employees and diminish one of the few powers they have left; the power to quit. (54)

If there is any doubt that this is all about freedom, listen to how Julio, a minimum wage worker in California, described the effect of the state adopting a living wage:

“Before I felt like a slave”, Julio told me. “But now I feel, ¿Cómo se dice, más seguro? Safer, he said, “I feel safer.” (62)

Poverty is about Us

Writing about poverty is usually about the poor, or, to be more precise, about what’s wrong with the poor. Since the earliest days of industrial capitalism, the standard view has been that the poor (workers, really) lack the proper bourgeois values—rationality, prudence, temperance, delayed gratification, attachment to family. They are lazy and short-sighted. Money, for these people, only leads to idleness and vice, so wages and welfare must be low. We are less directly insulting today, but these stereotypes are still with us. Desmond reminds us that virtually the same arguments were made during the debate about emergency aid during the pandemic (80-83).⁵

Of course, the poor are mostly like the middle-class.⁶ In the scenarios of restricted choice described above, the poor act rationally, it’s just that all the choices are bad. Crisis and emergency explain what Desmond calls, “the feverish present-mindedness of the vulnerable” (76). Far from tending to become “dependent” on government aid, many fail to claim benefits for which they qualify. And when large scale experiments tracked what poor people do with extra income, they found the money went to groceries, utilities, and repairs—Desmond calls it “pretty boring stuff”—not tobacco and alcohol (87). I’ll have more to say about this in a later post.⁷

Desmond flips the script and asks us to consider how we all contribute to the persistence of poverty.

Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to. (40)

This is easy enough to talk about when we focus on the specific forms of exploitation, sometimes augmented with discrimination, that limit the choices and life chances of the poor—the low minimum wage, the high rent, the usurious loan terms. In these cases, we can hunt for a villain, the person or company that profits from the exploitation—the slumlord, the payday lender.

But all landlords face the same economic incentives: “exploitation can be brought about by the prudence of landlords as much as by their greed” (68). Payday lenders simply fill the space that commercial banks abandoned, even though the big banks could serve these populations profitably. As shareholders and consumers, we all push corporations to save on labor costs. This is the hardest lesson in the book. All of us in what Desmond calls “the protected classes” (90) are responsible.

Poverty in America is not simply the result of actions taken by Congress and corporate boards but the millions of decisions we make each day when going about our business. (155)

A particular challenge centers on housing, our subject for the past two weeks (I, II). One way we perpetuate poverty is by separating ourselves from it, withdrawing from public spaces and public services, and removing ourselves into substantially separate residential communities where we “acquire access to exclusive public goods” (112) like the best public schools. Desmond is very critical here, arguing that “progressive cities have built the highest walls, passing a tangle of exclusionary zoning policies” and that “maybe above a certain income level, we are all segregationists” (115). But he also understands that, for those who benefit from this exclusivity, the reflexive thing to do is to protect it. The resources provided by exclusive communities—“the externality of stockpiled opportunity” (121)—play a central part in the long-term success of their residents, just as the concentration of poverty makes success harder for individuals raised in slums. It is true that “opposing segregation is vital to poverty abolitionism” (163) but this part of the problem may be the most difficult.

We Can Fix Poverty

“Economic justice,” Desmond writes, “does not seem to be among our top priorities” (60). The reason, I think, is our discomfort with our own culpability for continued poverty. There are bad guys in the story, but finding real solutions

…will also require that each of us, in our own way, become poverty abolitionists, unwinding ourselves from our neighbors’ deprivation and refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor. (8)

This starts with money. Desmond calculates that raising everyone’s incomes above the poverty line would have cost $177 billion in 2020. That’s 0.8% of GDP that year. This is obviously affordable; it is just a matter of priorities. We could end poverty, Desmond argues, just with better tax enforcement, but he lists a number of other revenue and policy options, none of which are especially radical: bringing back tax rates similar to those that prevailed in the 1960s, reducing tax breaks that mostly help the rich (“subsidization of affluence” (120)) and expanding tax credits targeted to lower-income households.

Any, or all, of that would help, but we would still need to fight exploitation directly. The answer here is freedom:

Choice is the antidote for exploitation. So a crucial step toward ending poverty is giving more Americans the power to decide where to work, live, and bank, and when to start a family. (139)

What does more freedom look like? It’s a living wage, collective bargaining, public and cooperative housing, banks that serve all Americans without excessive fees or usury, paid parental leave, free (or at least affordable) childcare, and better public education.

This still leaves the problem of residential segregation. This is often the missing piece in antipoverty proposals (162). It is the one that demands the most of us. We may support it in principle, but we often perceive any real efforts at integration—economic or racial—as threats to our social position, property values, or our children’s futures. Better zoning practices can have a real impact over time at remarkably little economic cost but we cannot achieve these goals without some psychological and cultural discomfort.

Social Citizenship is Poverty Abolitionism

Matthew Desmond does not use the language of social rights but this book is about social rights. Any reasonably complete scheme of social rights would have the effect of eliminating poverty. These protections are not a response to poverty; they provide broad based insurance against its very existence. That’s why I will rarely write about poverty per se. Desmond’s poverty abolitionism comes to a similar point:

We could, of course, ensure that no child in America is born into poverty. (154)

Desmond shows that this goal is well within our power. Instead of focusing on abatements aimed at reducing the pain of poverty, “This country of ours should be in the business of helping its people create wealth” (132), creating opportunity, and giving people more choice. If I may re-phrase: we ought to be in the business of making everyone more free.

Next post: The Social Rights of Producers (8 April 2025)

Find Poverty, By America at Amazon.

<All of the posts in On Social Citizenship connect. I recommend that readers go back and read the first entry in the series.>

1. The Daily Show, 10 Mar 2025. Here’s the clip:

2. Matthew Desmond, Poverty, By America, Crown 2023. (Amazon link). In case it is not obvious from what follows, I think you should buy this book and read it, then get someone else to read it.

3. See Matthew Desmond, Evicted (Broadway Books, 2016). The discussion of housing exploitation in Poverty is on pages 63-70.

4. FDIC, How America Banks: Household Use of Banking and Financial Services https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/household-survey/2019/2019appendix.pdf

5. After the Civil War, we added a racial overlay for working class Blacks, but these assumptions about workers go back to the beginning of capitalism. The racial twist allows propagandists to cultivate the false belief, now widely held, that only Black Americans are poor or on welfare.

Desmond is always careful to add race back into his narrative. Poverty, he writes, “is no equalizer”. Poor white families often are able to get the social benefits of living in proximity to advantage and this has a large positive effect on long-term outcomes (22). This finding just reenforces the degree to which this is about membership. Poverty excludes, but the effect is greater for people already excluded for non-economic reasons. Discrimination adds to exploitation based on income –“it’s not because they can’t afford better alternatives; it’s because they often aren’t offered any” (70).

6. The “mostly” is important here. The stories of individual poor people often include unusual early-life crises (family instability, violence, or abuse), untreated mental illness, or extraordinary financial burdens (brought on by personal or natural disaster, extended illness in the family, etc.), among other things. These circumstances are causal (at least given our policies)—they dramatically increase the chance of “failure” in the marketplace—but none of them suggest fundamentally different values, virtues, or rationality. They fall into the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God category of causes.

7. The framing of the research question in these experiments reveals the depth of our negative assumptions about the poor. Of course they used the money for things they needed. The fact that the researchers felt obliged to prove that just exposes our prejudice. Frankly, it’s insulting. The key issue is what the extra money will do to the prices faced by the poor and how it will affect the behavior of those who prey upon them.