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Matthew Desmond
Poverty, by America
Crown, 2023
What's inside?
As income inequality worsens, the rich support public services less and the poor rely on them more.
Recommendation
The number of poor Americans exceeds the population of Australia. As Matthew Desmond, chair of sociology at Princeton University, reports, the poor accounted for 10.9% of the US population in 2019, compared to 12.6% in 1970, evidence of only scant progress from government efforts to reduce poverty. The culprits, Desmond reports, include a trend toward concentrating wealth in certain places and concentrating poverty in others, a tendency reinforced by exclusionary zoning laws. He argues convincingly – albeit sometimes controversially – that removing these and other obstacles facing poor people would lower crime rates and generate other benefits that would make America more equitable and Americans more free.
Summary
About the Author
Matthew Desmond, the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, also wrote Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award.
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