Poverty, by America with Matthew Desmond

The Preamble

Sharon McMahon

Government, History, Storytelling, Education

4.9 • 15.1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 August 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today on Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon is joined by Matthew Desmond, Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and the founding director of the Eviction Lab. Together, they discuss his best-selling book, “Poverty, By America,” and take a hard look at poverty in one of the richest countries in the world, while reimagining the debate on poverty. We all know that poverty is an existing problem in the United States, but what does that actually mean? How is the “poverty line” calculated, and why is there profound suffering in such close proximity to significant wealth?

Special thanks to our guest, Matthew Desmond, for joining us today.

Host/Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon

Guest: Matthew Desmond

Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello friends, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me today. My conversation with
0:09.7	author Matthew Desmond is going to be such an eye-opening one. We all know that poverty
0:15.9	is a huge problem in the United States that is not new in information, but I think so
0:21.0	many of us feel really powerless to do anything about it. And Matthew has some real tangible
0:28.3	things that we can consider. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon and here's where it
0:36.0	gets interesting. I am very excited to be chatting with Matthew Desmond today. I think
0:42.4	you so much for being here.
0:43.4	Thanks Sharon for having me.
0:45.1	Your book was so interesting and so eye-opening and I learned so much about the topic of poverty
0:52.4	in the United States. We all know it's a problem. It's not a mystery that it exists.
0:58.0	We all know that it is an issue, but even as somebody is well aware of many of the issues
1:03.2	related to poverty, I still had my eyes opened and so many ways reading this. And I love
1:09.9	to start by talking about what is uniquely American about this problem of poverty. How
1:18.9	is poverty in the United States different than it is from other places in the world?
1:22.7	There's way more of it here than in other advanced democracies. So about 30 million people
1:29.3	in America live below the official poverty line. So if all those folks I got together and found
1:33.8	in a country, that country would be bigger than like Australia. Just a huge number of folks.
1:39.8	Our poverty rates are not just higher. They're much, much higher than other rich democracies. So our
1:44.8	child poverty rate, for example, the share of kids live in below the poverty line in the United
1:50.1	States is double what it is in South Korea or Germany or Canada. So we're kind of like in this
1:56.8	disgrace class all our own. When it comes to the level of poverty, we tolerate amongst such
2:03.0	abundance. And I think that's the second thing that sets us apart, right? There are countries
	...

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