“Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.” In other words, poverty exists because people who are not poor - by that I mean people like me who have a roof over our head and don’t have to worry about where our next meal is coming from - want it to exist. And the explanation he comes up with is both simple and deeply provocative: “Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct,” he writes. This is the paradox that Matthew Desmond explores in Poverty, By America. If the American poor founded a country, that country would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela. With all this wealth, all this bounty, all this stuff - why is there so much hardship and suffering? Roughly one in nine Americans live in poverty. We have supermarkets with 50 different brands of potato chips and mega-mansions sprouting like buffalo grass across the prairie and TVs the size of barns.
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