So I want to begin with you because something you say in the book, which I didn’t realize from past work, is that you come at the subject from really your own perspective. As always, my email, Desmond, welcome to the show. So the question of why that choice isn’t made year after year - that is really a question worth asking. It could, if it chose, have much, much less poverty. That there’s a good, wonky bit here about how to measure poverty.īut I also want to keep people focused on the big picture here - America has a lot of poverty. His new book has been a lot more controversial, in part due to disagreements about the way he reads the poverty data. It was beloved by Desmond’s fellow social scientists. He’s the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Evicted,” and “Evicted,” which was a book about housing markets, particularly for the poor - it was a smash hit. So this is a book, in other words, not so much about the poor as it is about the rest of us. It’s a book about everyone who benefits from the poor, their existence, their exploitation, all the people more comfortable with the perpetuation of poverty than what would be demanded of them for its abolition. “Books about poverty tend to be books about the poor.” Matthew Desmond writes that in his new book about poverty, “Poverty by America.” But “Poverty by America” is supposed to be something a bit different. Transcript Matthew Desmond on America’s Addiction to Poverty The Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist examines America’s reliance on exploiting the poor.

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