This is a headgun podcast.

Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Connover.

Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing things that they know that I don't know and that you might not know, both of our minds are going to get blown together and my God we're going to have so much fun doing it now this week we're talking about a somewhat serious subject this week we're talking about poverty see poverty isn't just an inconvenience it is a life destroyer when you don't have enough money to live everything that could be worse is worse about your life poverty increases your risk

for mental illness and chronic disease if you're a child in poverty and children are the largest impoverished group in this country you're going to face developmental delays and toxic stress if you're elderly and you don't have cash you're more likely to be disabled and America the richest country on earth has an absolutely enormous number of people living in poverty according to the government's official poverty rate it's 11.6% that's 38 million people nearly the entire population of California

living in poverty today and by the way pretty much everyone agrees that the official poverty rate is way too low and we're actually talking about millions of more people than that and the poverty rate by the way has been stable for decades we've gone decades under these conditions we made huge strides with LBJ's war on poverty in the 60s but then we just parked the bus and let the problem persist so

how is it possible that the richest country on earth has so many poor people living in desperate conditions within it poverty can't be a natural fact about the universe we know it's not there's got to be a reason why countries like Poland Germany Portugal Greece Denmark Slovenia France or the Czech Republic all have way lower rates of poverty then the US despite having less money than us so why on earth does poverty persist well

as sociologist Matthew Desmond argues in his new book poverty by America it's our fault our society has been structured in ways that benefit affluent people yes like myself at the direct expense of those living in poverty and you know I always talk about how there are no real individual solutions to structural problems and clearly poverty in America is a structural problem that was set up by people other than me before I was even born

but we still need to ask which people in society support that structure and which people benefit from it especially when the answer might be us and in this searing book Desmond does not let us off the hook it is not an easy thing to hear but it is an important one if we ever want to change the structure and end poverty in America

and that is why I am so grateful to have Matthew on the show today so he can chart the path forward for us he is so brilliant he's a Princeton sociologist I'm a Carthor genius award recipient and previously the author of one of my very favorite nonfiction books the Pulitzer Prize winning evicted I know you are going to love this conversation

but before we jump into it I just want to remind you that if you want to support the show head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover to get every episode of this show ad free and join our community and if you want to come see me live I am on tour if you live in Illinois Maryland Missouri or Rhode Island head to Adam Conover.net for tickets and tour dates we'd love to see you there and without further ado let's get to my interview with the brilliant Matthew Desmond Matt thank you so much for coming back on the show

Oh it's an honor to be here it's always great to talk with you Adam you're the absolute best your your previous book evicted was such a searing portrayal of housing insecurity in America on the ground you really showed in a way that a lot of folks like me you don't always have access to or don't just Arnold was reminded of of the day to day lived reality of folks struggling in poverty in America and how pervasive it is that in every single city you have people who are spending

70 90% of their income on rent our food insecure are living incredibly precariously at the you just trying to struggle to make a life amid all of these systems that we have built that are grinding them down your new book blew my mind equally it's called poverty by America

and to me it seemed like your attempt to answer the question why the fuck is it like this when we when we're in a country that is so wealthy why do we have such grinding poverty still is that was that the question that animated you

yeah I mean you know I grew up poor you know we got our gas shut off a lot as a kid a bank took our home and I think that that started this question inside of me you know why why is this how we deal with hardship but then when I wrote my last book in Milwaukee I saw kind of poverty that I had never seen before I never experienced before you know kids getting evicted on a regular basis I'm at grandma is living without heat in the winter in my world

Milwaukee you know and I think that I saw this hard bottom layer of deprivation which you know when you lift your head up and look around the country and see so much wealth you know this land of dollars

I think we have to ask ourselves why you know why are we different and we are different right our child poverty rate is double Canada South Korea's Germany we are the richest country with the worst poverty

there's something wrong about how we've designed our society and the book is called really specifically it's not poverty in America it's poverty by America I have to imagine that that title is is meaningful and contain some of the answer to the question

yeah absolutely I mean this is by design you know this is something that we have done on purpose I I'll tell you how I thought of the title I was in an airport you know when you're in the airports and you see those fancy like perfume posters

you know it's like right it's like party a yeah by Chanel you know it's like you know I was kind of thinking you know in a mocking or ironic way like what if I wrote a book it's called like poverty by America and I put like a comma in the title

and it just kind of stuck with me and it worked because you know the book is like look you know this isn't some sad accident this isn't just something that we can put on the shoulders of the poor themselves God forbid or even kicked down the road to whoever you want to kick it down to that other political party that one senator that one guy that's a little richer than you this is about us and when I say us I mean a lot of us who are contributing unwittingly often to the perpetuation of poverty in our country

hmm now that's a that's a really hard message to hear to hear that you know it's it's us who are responsible so I want to tell me what you mean by that I mean I'm sure there's many folks listening or saying well I had nothing to do with it I didn't make any choices about this I didn't create these systems so so let's drill down a little bit what what does that mean to you so many of us consume the cheap goods and services the working poor produce

we talk a lot about shareholder capitalism but who are the shareholders you know half the country's invested in the stock market indirectly directly don't we benefit when we invest our money in companies who participate in labor market exploitation when we see our savings going up and up because people's wages going down and down don't we have some skin in this game you know our welfare state is imbalanced you know we give the most to families that need to do it

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