Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by Matthew Desmond. He is professor of sociology at Princeton University.

His book evicted won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. His latest book is Poverty by America available from

Crown Books. Thank you for joining us on Current Affairs today. Thanks, Nathan. So I hear a lot,

especially from some people who are now, you know, tried to get the president reelected, that this economy

is doing great. I just saw an economics blogger with the headline, if this is a bad economy,

please tell me what a good economy would look like. Unemployment is down. Inflation is down.

Bidonomics are working. But one of the reasons people appreciate your work is that you never allow us to shut our eyes to the

situation of the least fortunate.

So can you tell us what the situation is like in the other America?

I think if you look at the economy by standard measures, unemployment, inflation, those kind of things,

I think there is a case that the economy is doing okay by those standard measures.

But that does leave behind tens of billions of Americans who are still trapped in poverty.

America is really weird when it comes to other rich democracies.

You know, we are an advanced, incredibly wealthy country

with extreme levels of poverty. You know, by some measures, five million Americans get by on

$4 a day or less. Thirty-eight million of us live below the official poverty line. That's like

the country of Australia. So we have a lot of economic hardship and insecurity

in this land of dollars. Now, the standard conservative line in this country is that we may

have people who are technically poor on paper, but the poor aren't actually poor because

John D. Rockefeller never had a cell phone, I think is a common talking

point. Poor people in this country have fridges and air conditioning and what have you. You have a

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