“Desmond writes, “poverty is the feeling that your government is against you, not for you; that your country was designed to serve other people and that you are fated to be managed and processed.””
“In Poverty, by America, he wants to know why. Why is there so much poverty in the richest country on earth, who is responsible, and what can be done about it?”
“When the US poverty rate was first measured in 1959, it stood at 22.4 percent. In the next 15 years, it fell to just over 11 percent, drawn down by a combination of the burgeoning postwar economy and Great Society initiatives like the 1964 Food Stamp Act. Then progress ground to a halt. Since 1970, the US poverty rate has fluctuated between 10 and 15 percent, despite increased spending on anti-poverty and social services programs like Medicare and Medicaid”
“Slumlords can demand a higher percentage of their tenants’ income because their tenants have nowhere else to go”
“In a 2019 study, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve found that after the city raised the minimum wage, landlords raised the rents. “This happened after the COVID-19 rescue packages, too,” writes Desmond, “but commentators preferred discussing the matter using the bloodless language of inflation.””
“Desmond has plenty of anti-poverty proposals. He suggests everything from more effective taxes on corporations and the wealthy to companies listing their anti-poverty policies the way they currently list anti-racist ones, which would allow poverty abolitionists to “shop and invest based on their commitments to human dignity and material well-being.””
“A more ambitious option would be decommodification. In his classic works on social democracy, the Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen defines decommodification as removing certain goods from the market and distributing them universally, to the point where (as he puts it in his 1990 book The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism) “individuals, or families, can uphold a socially acceptable standard of living independently of market participation.””
“the first form of commodity in a capitalist system is labor”
“Housing is another commodity”
“And what about another necessity, food?”
“Hunger is a class weapon, but it could be taken away”
“Decommodification wouldn’t just give people more food and housing security. It would let them enter economic life on more equitable terms. “When work approaches free choice rather than necessity,” writes Esping-Andersen in Three Worlds, “de-commodification may amount to de-proletarianization.””
“Poverty is about food, shelter, and clothing, but what Desmond says (and what Townsend knew too) is that, ultimately, “this is largely about power.””