The end of poverty will require new policies, it will require new movements for sure. I want to end poverty in America. Why settle for anything less? Like why accept the boring, pernicious, best-week-and-doism that has gripped the American imagination in recent years?

That's Matthew Desmond. This is Alternative Radio. I'm David Barsamian. This edition of AR features Matthew Desmond ending poverty in America. Why does the United States, the richest country on earth, have more poverty than any other advanced democracy? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permitted citizens to live and die on the streets, and allows its corporations to pay poverty wages? There's plenty of money for F-35s, aircraft carriers, and military bases all over the world, but very little for the least advantaged among us. What perpetuates poverty, and what can be done to end it? Poverty persists, says Matthew Desmond, because the rest of us benefit from it. He's a professor of sociology at Princeton University. He's a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. He's the author of Evicted, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and his latest book is Poverty, by America. He spoke in Seattle in late March 2024. And now, Matthew Desmond.

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I'm from the West Coast. I was born in San Jose, California, but I grew up in Winslow, Arizona. Our family never had a lot of money, and that was a preacher, and we experienced some of the indignities of poverty and scarcity. Family declared bankruptcy. The bank took our home before it was all the rage. And I think that started me on this journey. That started me on this question about why. Why is that how you handle a family when they follow hard times? Why do we have so much poverty in America? Because we have way more poverty than other peer democracies. Our child poverty rate isn't just higher than other countries. It's double. It's double what it is in Canada. It's double what it is in South Korea or Germany. You go to Europe, Europeans have this phrase, American-style deprivation. So about one in three of us live in homes making 55K or less. And many of those families aren't officially considered poor, but literally what else do you call it? Trying to raise two kids in Seattle on $55,000 or less.

As a lived experience, there's plenty of poverty above the poverty line. And there's plenty far below it, too. Thirty-eight million Americans fall below the official poverty rate drawn by our government, which means that if America's poor got together and founded a country, that country would have a bigger population than Australia. There's growing evidence that this country harbors not just poverty, but this hard bottom layer of poverty. The kind of deprivation we thought only existed in faraway places of bare feet and swollen bellies. Poverty is measured at these different income levels, right? But that's not how it's experienced. It's experienced. This is exhausting piling on of problems. As chronic pain on top of tooth rot, on top of debt collector harassment, on top of the nauseating fear of eviction, it's the suffocation of your talents and your dreams. It is death come early and often. So far from a lie in poverty is like this tight knot of humiliation and agonies, and its persistence in American life means that millions of us are denied safety and security and dignity in the richest country in the history of the world.

So why? So some have suggested, well, there just ain't nothing you can do about it. You're going to always have the poor, and the government shouldn't help, really can't do anything. And that's just a lie. There's a ton of evidence showing that government programs are effective, are essential, lifting millions of families above the poverty line every year. And just think back a little bit in history when the war on poverty and the great society was launched in 1964. LBJ launched it, first year in his inauguration. These were this deep investment in the poorest families in America. There's a bundle of domestic policies that made food aid permanent. Expanded Social Security. Finally, we got a public health insurance through the war on poverty. Real investments, real reach. So what was the return on that investment?

Ten years after the war on poverty was launched, the poverty rate was cut in half. It was half of what it was in 1960. It's a big difference. So if we have a lot of evidence that government programs work and we have a clear historical case of their working, maybe we have so much poverty in America because we've stopped trying to help. We've rolled back spending. And I used to think that was a story, but that's not the story, actually. The reality is a lot messier. So if you look at the 13th biggest means tested programs in the country, these are programs we usually think about when we think about welfare, food stamps, housing assistance, Medicaid, things like that. So spending on those programs went from about $1,000 a person the first year into Ronald Ring's administration to about $3,400 a person the first year in the Trump's administration. That's a big increase, about 230% increase. It's adjusted for inflation. So the country hasn't got stingier over time.

The opposite is true when it comes to fighting poverty. And this makes the persistence of poverty even more baffling and confusing because decade after decade poverty persists. Even as anti-poverty spending is increased. It's hard to measure poverty. What's very hard to ignore is the fact that like evictions have increased by 22% since 2000, the share of families visiting food pantries to eat, that's up 19% since 2000. The number of homeless public school kids has increased by 74% since the Great Recession. Not debt, non-mortgage debt held by low-income families.

That's up 200% since the 80s and since the 90s, the number of Americans receiving food stamps but claiming no other cash income has more than quadrupled. These are troubling signs. They mean that for scores of us, American life is indignity. American life is unsafety. American life is hunger. Why? So I think we could start getting at this question by realizing a dollar in the budget isn't a dollar in someone's hand necessarily.

I remember watching this process play out in real time with my friend Wu. So Wu and I lived together in Milwaukee. We met when I was working on my last book, Evicted. And we shared a rundown rooming house in the inner city. And one day Wu stepped on a nail in that rooming house and didn't pay it in his mind. You know, he just worked two jobs. He never sat down. But that injury started getting infected. And when that infection was accelerated by his diabetes, the doctor decided to take his leg before the infection took all of them. And so Wu and I had a good cry in the hospital together. But then we got down to work. I helped him apply for disability. His application was flat out rejected. Wu was not surprised about this at all. He was like, this is how it always is. And he hired a lawyer. The lawyers working on contingency can receive about a quarter of the back pay their clients receive when they are waiting for aid. And I started looking into this and I realized that Wu's story is part of a bigger pattern every year in America, $1.2 billion in Social Security aid, doesn't go to people that have disabilities. It goes to people like Wu's lawyer to help them get on disability. And that's Wu's story.

You know, with the lawyers help, he was able to win his case. He received $300–400 in back pay. He bought a wheelchair accessible van that ran for a couple of years and lit on fire. And his lawyer took him a few hundred bucks. Wu never lost any sleep that his lawyer got paid. And I get it. That lawyer performed a great service. But like I also can't get over the fact that every year a billion dollars in Social Security aid is not flowing to folks that need it the most. So a dollar in the budget doesn't necessarily mean a dollar in the hand. But sometimes the welfare state is a leaky bucket.

But it's also important to recognize that I feel that a lot of this dynamic is caused by the fact that people are not getting connected to programs that they really could use.

We hear so much about welfare dependency in America. We heard about it like nonstop during COVID for like paying people to stay home. If you look at the data, there's not a lot of evidence for welfare dependency. You know what there's a lot of evidence of? Well for avoidance. You know the fact that billions and billions of dollars in unused aid are left on the table every year. So about seven million workers who could receive something called the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is a wage subsidy for our poor spade workers, they pass on us. They collectively pass on $17 billion a year. If you add that up to the amount of money that goes unclaimed by people who could receive but don't claim food stamps and unemployment insurance, government health insurance, supplemental security income, just those handful of programs, you're already up to over $140 billion in unclaimed aid every single year.

That's not a picture of welfare dependency. That's a picture of us doing a crummy job, connecting families to these programs that they need and deserve.

But an even bigger reason why we have so much poverty in America today is that the job market is not pulling its weight. Now a few years ago I met Julio Pejez in Imrivial, California. So this is what Julio's life looked like. He'd start his day at 10 p.m., clock in a McDonald's and work the graveyard ship from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. And then he'd have two hours to rest and shower. And then he'd clock in an arrow tech, going anywhere the temp service sent him between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. and then he'd sleep as much as he could and then it was back to McDonald's. Each job paid a minimum wage. Julio told me he had to work this much to afford the little room he shared with his brother and his mom in the Bay Area. But he was like, 'Matt, I feel like a zombie'. You know, he was either working or sleeping with no life in between.

And one day his little brother, Alexander, who was eight at the time, went up to Julio and was like, bro, I'm saving up my money. And Julio was like, why, little man? And Alexander was like, I want to buy an hour of your time. How much for an hour to play with me? And then Julio heard that he just wept. And not long after he collapsed in the aisle of a grocery store, he fainted from exhaustion. He was 24 years old.

It wasn't always this bad. In the 1950s and the 1960s, a third of the American workforce, Charity Union card. Wages were going up pretty steadily every year. CEO pay was rained in and we experienced the most equitable time in modern history. But as workers lost power, their jobs got a lot worse. One sociologist put it like this. Our grandparents had careers and our parents have jobs and we complete tasks. Like the story of the working poor, the working class anyway. And this is a key reason why poverty has persisted in America, decade after decade, even as anti-poverty spending has increased. When the War on Poverty and Great Society were launched in the 60s, unions were strong. And wages were coming in at a strong living rate, even for the poorest workers.

But in today's economy, unions are weak and wages are falling. For men today without a college degree, their inflation adjusted wage is less on average than it would have been 50 years ago. When the job market was delivering for the average worker, anti-poverty programs were cures. Today, the job market has turned those programs into something like dialysis, a treatment to make poverty less lethal, but not make it disappear. So this is one answer to our puzzle. We have so much poverty because the poor are exploited, which is a word I feel like we should use a lot more than we do today. And they're exploited not just in the labor market, but in the housing and financial markets as well.

As this city well knows, the rental housing market is brutal. Since 1985, rents have outpaced income gains by 325%. Or consider every year $11 billion in overdraft fees. $1.6 billion in check-caching fees, almost $10 billion in payday loan fees are pulled from the pocket of the poor. That is $61 million just in fines and fees pulled out of their pockets every single day. When James Baldwin famously wrote how expensive it is to be poor in America, I don't think he could have imagined these receipts. I read across this line by Tommy Orange, a novelist. It goes like this, kids are jumping out of the windows of burning buildings falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they're jumping. And when I read that, I was like, that's the American poverty debate.

You know, for over 100 years, we've focused on the poor themselves. And we've asked every conceivable question we can about their family and their work ethic and their children and their jumpers. We should have been focusing on the fire. Like who lit it, who's warming their hands by it? So who benefits from all this exploitation? So corporations benefit from labor exploitation, of course. But so do many of us who consume the cheap goods and services they're working for produce. It's easy to talk about shareholder capitalism like its 12 dudes in a Manhattan boardroom. But half the countries invested in the stock market, don't we benefit when we see our savings going up like magic, even when that comes at the kind of a human sacrifice that people like Julio bear, payday lending industries, banks, they benefit from the financial exploitation of the poor. But so do those of us with free checking accounts because it turns out they're not free. They're subsidized by billions of dollars in overdraft fees charged basically to 9% of bank clients.

The poor made a pay for their poverty. And I know this can be a hard pill to swallow. And it can sometimes cause us to reach for more absolving theories of poverty, even stupid ones. So I've been on the housing beat for a long time and everywhere I go talking about the affordable housing crisis and trying to find out the causes of that crisis, someone will pull me aside and tell me in a very grown up voice, you know what it is? It's the Russian oligarchs. It's the Russian oligarchs. That's why Seattle has a housing crisis. They're buying up all the buildings, they're haunting the housing markets of LA and Honolulu and Austin, Texas. And pretty soon I was like, bro, how many oligarchs are there though? Can't be that many. But it is easier to talk about them than to talk about us.

The fact that it's not only landlords that profit from the housing exploitation of the poor, it's also homeowners. Our property values propped up by our collective efforts to make housing scarce and expensive. I told you that spending on poverty has gone up and that's true. No one disputes this. But that doesn't mean we've caught up with our peer nations in this regard. With respect to the share of our GDP dedicated to expanding opportunity, we're lagged behind a lot of advanced democracies. And that's because we decided to do something else with our money.

We decided to subsidize affluence instead of alleviate poverty.

So every year in the country we spend about $1.8 trillion on tax breaks for like you name it. Right? Color savings plans, retirement plans, health insurance plans, wealth transfers. That's double what we spend on the military actually. And it's far, far outpacing everything we do to help the neediest Americans today. So if you think of like everything the government does for us, and if you add all that up, if you count things like every means tested program that flow to the poorest Americans, things like food stamps, housing assistance, if you count social insurance programs like Social Security, which many of us receive today or will receive someday, and if you count tax breaks and you got to count tax breaks, you know, they cost the government something and they put money in our pocket. If you receive a tax break, you could deduct that from your income or the government could just smell your check. It's the same accounting.

So if you add all that up, here's the bottom line. You learn that the average family in the bottom 20% of our income distribution are poorest families. They receive about $26,000 a year from the government. But the average family in the top 20% are richest families. They receive about $35,000 a year from the government. That's almost a 40% difference. Like this is the true nature of our welfare state, and it's another core reason why poverty persists in America because we give the most to families that need it all, like have plenty already.

And then we have like the audacity, like the shamelessness to then fabricate stories about poor people's dependency on government aid and shoot down proposals to reduce their hardship because, man, they cost too much. You know, glancing at the price tag of some program that would reduce child poverty by half or make sure all of us have access to a dentist, a representative, suck their teeth and ask like, yeah, it's a great idea, but like, how can we afford it? I just don't know how we can afford it. It's such a dishonest question. It's a sinful question. One asked if the answer wasn't staring a straight in the face. We could afford it if the richest among us took less from the government. We could afford it if we did less to guard fortunes and mortified poverty.

I want to talk about one other way, affluent Americans create poverty. We build walls around our communities. These walls are made up of laws. There may be no phrase more soulless in the English language than municipal zoning ordinance. But it's a pretty good window into the soul of a community, actually. So today on most residential land, it is illegal to build anything other than a single detached family home. This is a very strange way to have a civilization. And it's another key way we create poverty today because when we create communities of concentrated affluence, there's a side effect: communities of concentrated poverty.

Democrats are more likely to support the idea of public housing. But they are no more likely to vote for in their own neighborhoods. A recent study showed that conservative renters are more likely to support affordable housing in their community than liberal homeowners. Maybe we're not so polarized after all. Maybe above a certain income level we're all segregationists.

And we can decorate our walls with rainbow flags or "don't tread on me" flags, but the wall remains the wall in different to our decorations. I think there's so much poverty here, not in spite of our wealth, but because of it. So how can we finally put it into it? How can we abolish poverty in America? Well, one way to get this question, I think, is just to ask, well, what's the price tag? How much would it cost?

How much would it cost to end poverty in America? So it would take about $177 billion a year to bring everyone below the official poverty line above it. This is a very rough estimate, but it's a good place to start. It gives us a sense of what we're talking about when we're talking about ending poverty in America because what we're talking about is something that's just so utterly attainable. Like this is less than 1% of our GDP. By one estimate, we waste more in food every year than this. Recent studies show that if the top 1% of income earners just paid all their federal income tax, not got taxed more. Just pay their tax. We as a country could raise an additional $175 billion a year.

We could just about close a poverty gap, but the richest among us paid what they owed. Please don't tell me this rich nation of dollars can't afford to do more. But we don't just need deeper investments. We need different ones. We need policies that disrupt poverty that threaten its very survival. Because if we fail to address all those forms of exploitation at the bottom of the market, we could get policies that get watered down even canceled out, which means we have to find ways to empower the poor.

Let's start with jobs. The best way to address worker exploitation is through worker empowerment. Unions have a pretty good track record of bringing power into the workplace. But as today's labor movement stands, unions are weak and organizing a workplace is incredibly hard.

Do you remember how excited we were that one Amazon warehouse may be unionized? How are we going to get hundreds and then thousands of them to follow suit? You got to go one Starbucks location, one warehouse at a time. There's no way we're going to empower America's workforce like this. This is why the new labor movement, a multiracial, not your father's labor movement, is trying to organize entire sectors instead. Here's how it might work. Say everyone in a certain sector of the economy, like food and hospitality, took a vote. If all the workers said, or enough workers said, yeah, I want to go for it, it would trigger a process where the secretary of labor would bring together worker representatives, corporate representatives, government officials to organize and collectively bargain for terms that would cover the entire industry. This is the way to organize all those baristas or all those warehouse workers in a single go. Nerds call it sectoral bargaining and it's alive and well in Europe.

This isn't an anti-capitalist proposal. It's an anti-exploitation proposal. This is a proposal that I think could get us closer to something like the capitalism we deserve. What about housing? What about the fact that most renting families below the poverty line are spending most of their income on housing costs? I think what works in Seattle is not going to work in Milwaukee and what works in Milwaukee is not going to work in the Delta. I think there's a lot of different ways to address the housing crisis. So here's just one solution out of many.

What if we made a real attempt to bring home ownership to more working families? So a few years ago I met Lequia Higbee, she was an Amazon picker. She lived in this house in North Cleveland, Ohio with her two adult kids, few grandkids. She paid 950 bucks on rent for this house. She lived there for years and years and years. Now if Lequia bought that house under conventional mortgage standards, her monthly payment would drop to about $570 a month. That means she would be $4,500 richer every single year with no rent hikes. That's real money.

But even if Lequia had perfect credit, and even if she was able to stay for a down payment, the chances of a bank doing business with her are really slim. Not because she's a riskier investment, the foreclosure rates for low-income mortgages, low-income housing, they're the same as the foreclosure rates for high-income housing, very expensive mortgages. But those two mortgages bring in a lot different profits. If you're a bank, you'd much rather underwrite a million-dollar mortgage than a $50,000 one. This is where philanthropy and government can step in, incentivizing lenders to get in the business of doing business with people like Lequia.

And Seattle, you might be thinking there's no affordable homes left. Like last year across the country, 27% of homes sold in America were sold for under $100,000. But only 23% of those, a minority of those were financed with a mortgage. Most others were gobbled up by real estate speculators or landlords. Look, this is one solution out of many. There isn't a right way, I think, to solve the affordable housing crisis. I think there is a wrong way. The thing, this thing, the thing we're doing now.

Okay, we've got to take one more step. We've got to do one more thing. And this is a word especially for my affluent whites in the audience, which is our walls. Our walls have to go. Like what are we teaching our kids? When they plainly see us bar in the doors of opportunities for other kids and doing it in their names? The best thing we can do policy-wise is to take all of those exclusionary zoning laws that riddle cities like Seattle and replace them with inclusionary zoning. Exclusionary zoning says it's illegal to build any kind of affordable housing. The best inclusionary zoning laws say it's illegal not to. Study after study after study shows that when affordable housing is well built, when it blends the community, it has zero effect on property values: zero.

But the segregationists don't care. And they spend so much time and energy defending that wall. They show up at those zoning board meetings and they yell at the aldermen and they come up with a process. And those of us seeking a different kind of community, a more open and inclusive community. We've got to start showing up at those zoning board meetings too. And we've got to stand from our seats. And we have to tell our elected officials like, look, I am not going to underwrite this community's longstanding tradition of segregation. I am not going to deny those kids opportunities my kids get live in here. Build it. So that's the proposal.

You lift the floor by rebalancing the safety net. You empower the poor by rating and exploitation. And you turn your back on segregation and opportunity hoarding and you embrace broad prosperity. This is how we can end poverty in America. I think it's frankly hard to put into words. But this would mean for millions of kids and parents and grandparents below the poverty line. This would mean a whole different existence. This would mean a life mark by more fairness and safety and security. This is a full incorporation finally of the poor into the union to the benefit of the union. I mean, think of all the nurses and diplomats and poets and scientists that poverty has stolen from us, reducing people, born for better things.

The end of poverty will require new policies. It will require new movements for sure. But it will also require that each one of us become poverty abolitionists. Like abolitionist movements against slavery or against the prison, poverty abolitionism views its enemy as an abomination. And like other abolitionist movements, this one holds fast to the conviction that profiting from someone else's pain corrupts all of us.

This is a personal and political project. Those who seek it out divest from poverty and our consumption choices and our investment decisions. We support governments actively trying to end poverty by rebalancing the safety net through fair tax implementation. We detest all forms of exploitation even if, maybe especially if, we believe that we benefit from them. And we reject scarcity and we reject segregation and we stand for broad prosperity. I want to end poverty in America. I want to end it. Why settle for anything less? Like why accept the boring, pernicious, best-we-can-doism that has gripped the American imagination in recent years?

When the Johnson administration launched the war on poverty in 1964, they set a deadline. They set a deadline for the end of poverty. For real zis, we once had ambitions to eradicate scarcity from this land and I hope we can rekindle those ambitions today. And for those of you in the audience that are eager to connect with the anti-poverty movement, either at the national level or here in Seattle in your own backyards, we have a website for you. It's just called in-poverty USA. It does two simple things. It's designed to connecting families to social services that they could really use and it's designed to connect all of us to organizations putting in the work, fighting poverty here in Washington and elsewhere.

So if you want to get plugged in with your time and resources, if you just want to know what people are fighting for here, check it out. If you're homeless or unemployed or if you're on a fixed income, if you've been incarcerated or evicted, excluded, stepped on, exploited, yeah, this is your fight. If you're one of those millions of Americans floating in that space between poverty and security, like cutting coupons, dreading the bills coming, this is your fight. If you're a young person, just fed up with impossibly expensive cities and $75,000 college degrees, but also fed up with all our polite excuses for how things have to be the way they are, this is your fight. And if you've found prosperity, some security, if you wish the same for your neighbor, if all this deprivation and hunger and harm around you offends your sense of decency and morality, I think this is your fight too.

I think we have to ask of ourselves and our communities, our faith institutions, our businesses or schools, what are we doing to do best from poverty? Because the end of poverty is something to stand for, to fight for, to sacrifice for. All this poverty in our midst relies any claim to our greatness. The people of the richest nation in the world can and should put it into it. We don't need to outsmart this problem. We just need to hate it more. Thank you for your time.

Q&A

Q: You talk a lot about the why, right? Why? I mean, it's the book, right? Poverty by America. How do we get to this specific space? Yeah. And you end by getting to this notion of how do we become abolitionists? How do we do this? I'd love to just start there. Start with some inspiration, we'll head into some meat and then maybe we'll end with a little inspiration too.

A: Yeah, I love that question. Here's five tangible things you can do right now. One, we all have got some influence somewhere, right? I'm a university professor. I should be asking my university how we treat our landscapers, guys. We've taken care of our first generation college students. I've got a bit of influence. We all have a bit of influence. Somewhere flexed.

Second, we can shop and invest differently. A lot of us are like, here's my organic cucumber that was grown on this farm down the road. Now, I'm married to an organic farmer. I appreciate the organic cucumber. But we often do not know how much the farm hand got paid picking that cucumber. We can consult groups like Union Plus or B-Core when we're choosing to spend our money. Those of us that have retirement accounts, saving accounts, a lot of us were like, we're divesting from Exxon. I don't want to put my money in dirty fuels. Are we asking that question about corporations that are screwing over their workers? We want to invest in those two. So I think we can invest and shop differently.

Third, we can talk about our taxes differently. Maybe even respond to tax time differently come April. A lot of times come April, this is how all of us talk about taxes. And you know, taxes should hurt Reagan famously sad, and they do hurt in America. But that blinds us to the fact that how many tax breaks really accrue to the top 20% of Americans, especially white Americans, if you look at the data, like 84% of the more indigenous deduction, top 20% of Americans, 95% of capital gains deduction, top 20%. Even pensions and retirement funds, 64% top 20% of Americans. So a big part of the tax code is set apart for literally white wealth fair.

A lot of times like progressive folks that have some means often say, the government should tax us more. But since they don't, I guess it makes sense to take this deduction. But we could start taxing ourselves more. Like now, by a coordinating campaign about those deductions. So I'm a homeowner now. For years, I've spoken out against the mortgage deduction, which is ridiculous and aggressive. And there's zero evidence that increases homeownership. I don't think people like me should receive this benefit. So our family calculates it every year and gives it away to local affordable housing. And we write our congressperson saying, I do not want this. Please take this away from me. If you guys have this this year, why don't you join me? And then when your neighbor says, taxes, you can be like, I know, dude, check out my crib. I get a government benefit for this. And there's a million public school kids that are homeless. That's absurd.

And so I gave this away to my local eviction defense and I wrote my congressperson saying, you should take it away. That's an awkward conversation. But like that's how we change the common sense in America. I've got two more. You have to be a question. Go to the zoning board meetings and join anti-poverty movement. So I think like some of us are like, yeah, I'm there. I'm going to join the movement. Some of us are down to spend our money a little differently. I think we can all plug in. Thank you for that. How do we get more first adopters, right? You can act. And I think in your action, you can help spread this. So I know that some of you might be like, well, this is a drop in the bucket. But as the philosopher G.A. Cohen wrote in his perfectly titled essay, if you're a egalitarian, why so rich? You're already dropping a smaller drop in the bucket. Why do you drop a little bigger drop in the bucket? And those drops matter. We see this with climate change. You drive down the street and you're like, did Cheryl get solar panels? Cheryl got solar panels. And then you might really care about climate change, but you don't push that button for solar panels until Cheryl gets it. And then someone sees your solar panels and on it goes. We got this great policy from the Biden administration, right? The inflation reduction act. The biggest thing that Congress has done for climate.

I do not think it would be possible for us to get that giant structural change if many of us were like, what's you eating, Daniel? What's you eating, bro? What's you driving, bro? You need to take that flight, bro? And so I think that those kind of things can add up to build political will. So I think starting little and spreading and talking about that matters. In London, when you walk down the streets, the stores have this sticker on the door. It says, this store pays a living wage. Our store's got a lot of stickers, but often it's not that one. And I'd love us to be like, those are cute shoes. Where'd you get those shoes? I found this amazing fair wage shoe department. I have done this. It's called Simon and Becca. I ordered dress shoes from them. It takes forever. But when you get the shoes, they're beautiful and you get a note from the person that made them. They're like, thank you. This company pays me a living wage. So now I get to have a different conversation about my shoes.

And so I think those kind of things can build up to something. So I think that a lot of us are like, how do we do this though? And often we're often like, yeah, how do we do this for those guys? And I'm often like, why don't we start with us guys? And then we'll see. Yeah. Thank you.

Q: We as a nation seem to struggle in these dualities, right? That we have capitalism and government subsidies. That we live in a state of historic slavery, but then talk about freedom or currently have worker exploitation. And so I'm wondering, you know, is what you just, you know, just discussed right there? And we think about the notion of low road capitalism. How do we translate that into something that is more morally sound?

A: I think the younger generation is totally interested in a different kind of conversation. They're like, why do we need capitalism at all? And I think what they're saying is this is not working for us. This is different. When I went on the road for evicted, no one is really having like the capitalism conversation. And every single talk now I give someone like in their twenties will stand up and be like, you know, capitalism. And so I think that's a signal for us that there's a growing discontent among younger folks.

Practicing that discontent is really important. There's a growing discontent across party lines on this. You know, most Democrats and most Republicans, according to poll data, think that the minimum wage is too low. Most Democrats and most Republicans think that the rich are paying their fair share taxes. They're right. Most Republicans and most Democrats think that poverty is a structural failing, not an individual failing. So like these old narratives are shifting and dying. They're getting stale and weak. And so I think that one thing that we can do to get to another place is start changing this story.

But the other thing we can do is start taking moral action now. Like, why are we always waiting around for Congress to get their act together? How have we learned that we need to act? And like a big lesson from the 60s, right, is like Congress is a mess. The Dixie Crats are a line of the Republicans' block and reform. Senators are sleeping in their offices at filibuster. Sounds a little familiar. Yeah, right. And like we get major pieces of civil rights legislation and we got the war on poverty and the great society. And we got it because the labor movement and the civil rights movement put unrelenting pressure on policymakers. And I'm just so glad that they weren't like, well, we'll wait for the next election. It might fall on our side next time.

So I think we could start acting now. What is the role of not at the federal level but maybe not at the town hall meeting level in terms of ways that I think what this speaks here is like what we're seeing with housing authorities, what we're seeing with nonprofit or service programs like AmeriCorps, what role do they serve in this effort? They play this enormous role, right? I mean, the nonprofit sectors are fourth biggest sector of the economy. And often nonprofits are the thing that's standing between a family and homelessness or a family and hunger. So they play a huge role.

I would, for the philanthropists and founders in the room tonight, I'd love to see more money going into direct action. You know, anti-poverty movements that are really working on empowering the poorness in a specific way. I'd like to see more money flowing into new thinking about how to spur on the new labor movement or the new housing movement. And I think this is a space that philanthropy and funders have been a little hesitant to get into, but it's a space that I find very exciting and productive. This is also a space where funders in philanthropy can play a role in narrative change. This takes, like, it takes a lot more resources to tell a fire story than to tell a jumper story.

Tomorrow I could wake up, I could go down to eviction court, I could meet a family getting evicted, I could write about that family. And that's what we usually get in the press, right? Like with the housing crisis or other issues like this. Like, check out this family getting evicted. It's really sad. And it is sad. But like, to understand, like, who owns Seattle? Like who's doing all the evictions? What is the tie between Seattle City Council and, like, landlord interest? Those kind of questions are harder. And I think those kind of require a kind of different and deeper kind of investments. So I'd like to see more investments in that way.

Q:In, I think it was 2020, you stopped going to Home Depot and you started going to your local hardware store. But one of the things you referenced in that is I don't ask the question of do you pair fair wages? You know, what are your labor practices? And so it's sometimes easy to identify who the bad actors are. I think you named a few throughout the talk today. But how do we know, if there isn't a sticker on the window that we can easily identify, how do we do that self-reflection or that action to determine where we spend with our wallets?

A: I write about us going to Ace Hardware. And the other day I got an email from the CEO of Ace Hardware. He's like, we pay our workers, but, you know, I was like, okay. The, this is homework. We got to do our homework. And so I like consulting this organization called Union Plus. And it just like, so you got to mail a package like UPS is unionized FedEx isn't. So why don't you just mail in with UPS? Like if you're a university, why don't you contract with UPS? You know, if you want to drink like Snapple is Union Made, if you want a beer, Miller's Union Made. And so like Union Plus curates this list of Union Made products and you can kind of figure it out. B-Core is another great organization that you can kind of consults. You know, that ranks companies and gives them like high ratings if they treat the workers well and treat the environment well. These are small companies and large companies. So you can go to B-Core, you can go to Union Plus and curate it.

Oftentimes we think of like, oh, it's the Wal-Mart and stuff, but like, what's your florist paying its workers? You know, like we could just straight ask. And we can kind of send the signal to organizations that we value that we support. Like, this really matters to me and I'm going to shop here because of this. You know, and if you don't do this, I'm going to stop shopping here because of this.

And so I think it just takes a bit of homework. We've done this with other stuff. We have apps about like what kind of fish to order, right, at the restaurant, which is great. But like, can we get some more kind of attention and data and information about this kind of work? Yeah. Yeah. In the back we're talking. Also one thing. Go. We can slow down. So like, the shoes I talked about before, yeah, they took like a month or two to get to me, which is like a million years in American time.

But like, when we lean into it, and like, I'm not, like, I'm not a saint. I'm not like a consumption hero. Like, I do these things too. When we lean into quick and convenient apps, you know, someone often pays the price for that. So just a little slowness, a little check, a little pause, I think matters for this too. In this region, we love to learn. We love to hear. We love to talk with people about things. And we're not the best at kind of taking that further from there, right? And often we stay in our walled neighborhoods. We stay in our walled environments. And so, and so just wondering, kind of if you can speak a little bit more of how do we as a society actually become in community and be in relationship with those that we're living in poverty? Yeah, I don't think it's hard if you try. It's like the old journalist phrase like showing up is 90% of it. So I think that if we're really striving to be in real community with folks, including folks below the poverty line, not relationships of charity. Like relationships where like you call their BS, they call your BS, you know their kids' names, they know yours, that kind of relationship. I don't think that that's hard.

There are studies showing that the places where class, kind of people from different classes come mingle the most. Do you know where it is? Applebees. You know, Applebees. But there's play, you know, ride the bus, ride the bus. Don't look at your phone, strike up a conversation, you know, go in communities. And I want to say two things about this. One thing I want to say is like when you do that, you are holding yourself accountable in a very personal way to folks that are struggling. And for my line of work, this is like a requirement.

So one of the first book talks I gave was in Princeton where I teach big Presbyterian Church and I gave a talk and the first comment, this person stood up and was like, I volunteer in the poor neighborhood. And we give a lot of tutoring to kids, but shouldn't we be tutoring and mentoring these single moms? And she sat down. Jump her question. And so I look out in the audience and there's my friend Vanessa who's a single mom in Trenton. And I was like, there's no way I'm answering this question that doesn't hold me accountable to divinessa. So I was like, that's not the conversation we're having. You know, we need to have a new conversation. And so I think that really matters.

The second thing about this is like, how does your affluence feel? You feel safe? You feel connected? You know, like, and I think that I don't want to romanticize poverty and I don't. But like, I've lived in very poor neighborhoods and affluent neighborhoods, but I've never experienced the kind of neighborliness and generosity that I've experienced in poor neighborhoods. And there's a lot of us that are experiencing a spiritual poverty in America because we've settled for this lonely, stingy affluence. And I think an opening up of communities is not going to be easy for some of us. Let's not sugarcoat it. What we get from this bargain, from this difficult sacrifice is like just a better community too, a more vibrant, open-fluid community. And I think a lot of us are down for that bargain, even if it might sting a bit. Because wealth has created these enclaves where we start eroding some of the public spaces and then even more so don't want to engage with them. So I don't know if there's more you want to speak to that.

Yeah, this is this dynamic called private opulence in public squalor. This is an old term. Go back to the Roman times, but I really caught it in John Kenneth Galbraith's famous book, The Affluent Society. And it's this thing that happens when a lot of rich people live alongside a lot of poor people in the same country. And so what happens is that the rich people divest from things that are public. They stop taking the bus. They got a car. They stop swimming in the community pool. They can dig their own pool. They stop sending their kids to parks. They can get a country club. On and on it goes. Then pretty soon what happens is that dynamic increases that things that are public get increasingly and then sometimes exclusively be used only by the poor and then become disinvested, run down shabby. Pretty soon everyone hates them and things are blamed to be bad because they're public, not because we've taken money away from them. And then that makes things worse for all of us. So instead of investing in high speed trains, we got stuck in traffic in our nice cars. Instead of investing in nice beautiful parks, we have to drive 45 minutes.

And so I think that you see kind of public squalor and private opulence like an extreme like in cities in the developed world like Lagos in Nigeria, big beautiful mansions surrounded by a bar bar or private security firms. When I see that often, it looks kind of like us a bit, you know, in trending in that direction. And I think part of this kind of story is like, gee, wouldn't it be nice for parents not to have that pit in our stomachs all the time about our kids? Like are they going to fall all the way down? Wouldn't it be nice to go out to dinner and not worry like are they treating their restaurant workers okay?

I think a lot of us wanted to best from this kind of morally compromised relationships we find ourselves in. So I promise we'd start with some inspiration and with some inspiration. And one of the pieces in the book that really moved me was how you describe a day in the life of America once we've ended poverty. And so I'm wondering if you can share that as some inspiration for folks here. What does America look like then? How does it feel? So the end of poverty doesn't mean a utopia. It's not the only problem we have. It doesn't mean equality. It doesn't mean you have to give up your Tesla or Disney World. It does mean being able to walk down the street and feel a lot safer. It does mean not having to worry about your kid falling into real hard times. It means getting on the bus and not seeing all those exhausting faces of the working poor. You wouldn't be one of those faces.

You could go out to eat or spend the night in a hotel and rest assured that people are held and taken care of Oscar Wilde's to the best thing about socialism is that you don't have to care about anyone anymore. Because we're all kind of okay. That doesn't mean we're equal and there's every problem settled. But a lot of the problems that we care about, a lot of the problems that really keep us up at night, the taproot reaches back to poverty. So I think that the end of poverty, it's more vibrant. Democracy is more vibrant. You get a country that's a lot more dynamic because all this talent and opportunity isn't being denied people. So I don't know. When I hear that, I just feel like, yeah, I'm willing to give something to get that. And I hope you are too. Thank you.

And with that, we're just listening to Matthew Desmond [about] ending poverty. In America. He spoke in Seattle's Town Hall in late March, 2024. The moderator was Danielle Zavala. Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University. His latest book is Poverty by America. This program is produced by alternative radio, an independent nonprofit in our 38th year, is supported solely by individuals just like you. We feature such voices as Chris Hedges, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, and Arundhati Roy. To access our complete audio and book catalog, just go to our website, alternativeradio.org. Again, our website where we are podcasting, alternativeradio.org. For copies of today's program, Matthew Desmond ending poverty in America, and for his book, Poverty by America, call us 1-800-44-1977. That's 1-800-44-1977. Or online, our website, alternativeradio.org. That's alternativeradio.org. Thank you, Transcripts, PDFs, and MP3s of this program are free of charge. Just call us, 1-800-44-1977. Special thanks to Seattle Arts and Letters. Joe Ricci is our general manager and editor. I'm David Barsamian. Thank you for listening.