The Roots of Poverty in America

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2024

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, yet over 10 percent of people – nearly 40 million – live in poverty. It's something we see, say, if we live near a tent encampment. And it's also something we feel. More than a third of people in the U.S. say they're worried about being able to pay their rent or mortgage. Medical bills and layoffs can change a family's economic status almost overnight.

These issues are on the minds of Democrats and Republicans, city-dwellers and rural households. And in an election year, they're likely to be a major factor when people cast their votes for President.

In this episode, we talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning author and sociologist Matthew Desmond, whose book Poverty, By America, helps explain why poverty persists in the United States, how it's holding all of us back, and what it means to be a poverty abolitionist.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Christian nationalists want to turn America into a theocracy, a government under biblical rule.
0:07.0	If they gain more power, it could mean fewer rights for you.
0:12.0	I'm Heath Drusen and on the new season of Extremely American
0:16.0	I'll take you inside the movement. Listen to Extremely American from Boise State Public
0:21.2	Radio, part of the NPR Network.
0:25.0	In May 1831, a Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville arrived on a ship in Newport, Rhode Island.
0:33.0	35 days had passed since our departure
0:36.0	when we heard the first cry of land.
0:39.0	He had passed through thousands of miles of open ocean.
0:43.6	Above, below, and around reined perfect solitude
0:48.2	and absolute silence.
0:50.5	Moonless nights and furious storms.
0:53.8	Our vessel pitched violently, throwing up on each side huge clouds of foam.
0:58.9	This foam looked like fire.
1:01.5	The 25 year old son of looked like fire.
1:09.0	The 25 year old son of French aristocrats had come all this way to see America.
1:19.0	Technically, the French government had sent toqueville and a close friend to investigate the prison system in the United States and they did that. But for De Toqueville, the prison research was just an excuse. The thing that truly fascinated
1:26.1	him was American democracy. So he ventured off, around the northeast, out into the western frontier, then down the Mississippi.
1:36.0	We set forth with the intention of examining as fully and as scientifically as possible all the
1:41.6	springs of that vast machine, American society, everywhere talked
1:47.4	of and nowhere understood.
1:51.2	As the Tocqueville grew to understand how 19th century America worked, he also started to see some ways in which it didn't.
	...

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