Factually! with Adam Conover - The Real Cause of Poverty with Matthew Desmond

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

The United States is one of the wealthiest nations on the planet, so why is it that our poverty rates surpass those of so many other countries? In this episode, sociologist Matthew Desmond shares a hard truth with Adam: we are constantly reinforcing wealth inequality in invisible ways. The good news is that we're capable of divesting from the ways we may inadvertently contribute to the system. Pick up Matthew's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing things that they know that I don't know and that you might not know. Both of our minds are going to get blown together and my God, we're going to have so much fun doing it. Now this week we're talking about a somewhat serious subject. This week we're talking about poverty. See subject. This week, we're talking about poverty. See, poverty isn't just an inconvenience. It is a life destroyer. When you don't have enough money to live, everything that could be worse is worse about your life.

Poverty increases your risk for mental illness and chronic disease. If you're a child in poverty and children are the largest impoverished group in this country, you're going to face developmental delays and toxic stress. If you're elderly and you don't have cash, you're more likely to be disabled. And America, the richest country on earth, has an absolutely enormous number of people living in poverty. According to the government's official poverty rate, it's 11.6 percent. That's 38 million people, nearly the entire population of California living in poverty today. And by the way, pretty much everyone agrees that the official poverty rate is way too low. And we're actually talking about millions of more people than that.

And the poverty rate, by the way, has been stable for decades. We've gone decades under these conditions. We made huge strides with LBJ's war on poverty in the 60s, but then we just parked the bus and let the problem persist. So how is it possible that the richest country on earth has so many poor people living in desperate conditions within it? Poverty can't be a natural fact about the universe. We know it's not. There's got to be a reason why countries like Poland, Germany, Portugal, Greece, Denmark, Slovenia, France, or the Czech Republic all have way lower rates of poverty than the U.S. despite having less money

than us. So why on earth does poverty persist? Well, as sociologist Matthew Desmond argues in his new book, Poverty by America, it's our fault. Our society has been structured in ways that benefit affluent people, yes, like myself, at the direct expense of those living in poverty. And you know, I always talk about how there are no real individual solutions to structural problems. And clearly, poverty in America is a structural problem that was set up by people other than me before I was even born. But we still need to ask which people in society support that structure and which people benefit from it, especially when the answer might be us. And in this searing book, Desmond does not let us off the hook. It is not an easy thing to hear, but it is an important one if we ever want to change

the structure and end poverty in America. And that is why I am so grateful to have Matthew on the show today so he can chart the path forward for us. He is so brilliant. He's a Princeton sociologist, a MacArthur Genius Award recipient, and previously the author of one of my very favorite nonfiction books, the Pulitzer Prize winning Evicted. I know you are going to love this conversation, but before we jump into it, I just want to remind you that if you want to support the show, head to patreon.com slash adamconover to get every episode of this show

ad-free and join our community. And if you want to come see me live, I am on tour. If you live in Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, or Rhode Island, head to AdamConover.net for tickets and tour dates. We'd love to see you there. And without further ado, let's get to my interview with the brilliant Matthew Desmond. Matt, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Oh, it's an honor to be here. It's always great to talk with you, Adam. You're the absolute best.

Your previous book, Evicted, was such a searing portrayal of housing insecurity in America. On the ground, you really showed in a way that a lot of folks like me don't always have access to, just Arnold was reminded of, of the day-to-day lived reality of folks struggling in poverty in America and how pervasive it is that in every single city you have people who are spending 70, 90% of their income on rent, are food insecure, are living incredibly precariously at the, you know, just trying to struggle to make a life amid all of these systems that we have built that are grinding them down. Your new book blew my mind equally. It's called Poverty by

America. And to me, it seemed like your attempt to answer the question, why the fuck is it like this? When we're in a country that is so wealthy, why do we have such grinding poverty still? Is that the question that animated you? Yeah. I mean, I grew up poor. We got our gas shut off a lot as a kid. A bank took our home. And I think that that started this question inside of me. Why? Why is this how we deal with hardship?

But then when I wrote my last book in Milwaukee, I saw a kind of poverty that I had never seen before, never experienced before. You know, kids getting evicted on a regular basis. I met grandmas living without heat in the winter in Milwaukee, you know. And I think that I saw this hard bottom layer of deprivation, which, you know, when you lift your head up and look around the country and see so much wealth, you wealth, this land of dollars, I think we have to ask ourselves why. Why are we different? And we are different. Our child poverty rate is double. Canada, South Korea, Germany, we are the richest country with the worst poverty. There's something wrong about how we've designed our society. And the book is called really specifically, it's not poverty in America, it's poverty by America. I have to imagine that that title is

meaningful and contains some of the answer to the question. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is by design. This is something that we have done on purpose. I'll tell you how I thought of the title. I was in an airport. You know when you're in the airports and you see those fancy perfume posters? It's like- Right. Cartier. By Chanel. And I was kind of thinking in a mocking or ironic way, what if I wrote a book that's called Poverty by America? And I put a comma in the title title and it just kind of stuck with me and it worked because the book is like, look, this isn't some sad accident. This isn't just something that we can put on the shoulders of the poor themselves, God forbid, or even kick down the road to whoever

you want to kick it down to. That other political party, that one senator, that one guy that's a little richer than you. This is about us. And when I say us, I mean a lot of us who are contributing unwittingly often to the perpetuation of poverty in our country. Now, that's a really hard message to hear, to hear that it's us who are responsible. So tell me what you mean by that. I mean, I'm sure there's many folks listening who are saying, well, I had nothing to do with it. I didn't make any choices about this. I didn't create these systems. So let's drill down a little bit. What does that mean to you? So many of us consume the cheap goods and services the working poor produce.

We talk a lot about shareholder capitalism, but who are the shareholders? Half the country's invested in the stock market, indirectly or directly. Don't we benefit when we invest our money in companies who participate in labor market exploitation? When we see our savings going up and up because people's wages are going down and down, don't we have some skin in this game? Our welfare state is imbalanced. We give the most to families that need it the least, especially in the form of tax breaks. And it's hard to think of a tax break like a housing voucher, right?

I get it. But a housing voucher and a mortgage interest deduction, for example, they both cost the government money. They both put money in our pockets. seduction, for example, they both cost the government money. They both put money in our pockets. And so we are really doing a lot more to guard fortunes, to subsidize affluence than to fight poverty. And then we have the audacity to be like, how can we afford to do more? The answer is staring us right in the face. And then a lot of us continue to be segregationist. We build walls around our

affluent communities. We hoard opportunities behind those walls. And that creates concentrations of wealth, but also concentrations of poverty, which is the side effect of our hoarded opportunity. And so I think in many ways, we have so much poverty in America, not in spite of our wealth, but because of it. I mean, God, that is so, you could not have put it any more strongly than that. And it brings me back to the thesis of Evicted, which by the way, if folks haven't heard the interview we did about that book, please go listen. It's in our podcast archive. But the point that you make that stuck with me the most in that book is that there is an immense amount of money to be made off of the poor that you can soak the poor because

no one is protecting them. If you look at payday lending, the debt industry more generally, but then also the landlord industry, the renter industry is designed to suck money out of the pockets of the poor and they have no protection. There's so many protections if you're a homeowner, if you're an affluent person, or especially if you're a wealthy person with many homes, if you are someone just scraping by, it's so easy to just suck that money out of your pocket. And you listed a lot of ways there that you listed a lot of ways there that you listed a lot of ways that our society is perpetuating this, that we're complicit. And some of those

you went through and I said, well, I don't do that. Right. You said some of us are segregationists. I really have dedicated a lot of my personal time to not being a segregationist in my own community. I go to neighborhood council meetings and things like that. I'm literally an activist around housing justice in Los Angeles. I do my best to be. You also listed some things that I absolutely do participate in. You know, I have a retirement account like many people do. I'm happy that it's I feel very lucky that I'm able to have one because I worked in TV for a little bit and I had a couple of good years. I was able to sock a bunch of money away. And, you know, but even before that, I, you know, when I was just working for a website, I had a Roth IRA with a couple thousand bucks in it. And, you know, that's, that was invested in the, the stock market overall, this very broad,

I'm not buying shares of, you know, Raytheon or whatever. It's just a big index fund. Like, you know, the, the financial planners tell you to do. But that does mean that when that account goes up, I'm participating in the system. And I have a mortgage and it's a mortgage for a home that's a lot smaller and more modest than someone would have been able to afford in Los Angeles a couple of years ago because of how housing prices are. I feel lucky to have it. I don't feel I'm like I'm living extravagantly. I'm doing the best I can with what I have. But at the same time, I'm aware my mortgage is massively subsidized in ways that my rent was not. And certainly the rent of the working poor in Los Angeles is not. And I have to acknowledge that. And I guess it's

to acknowledge that. And I guess it's, I mean, this is early in the conversation to get into it, but I have to imagine that you maybe benefit from some of those systems as well. How do you think about it on a daily basis, right? Because I don't think it's helpful to sit around and A, point fingers at each other. You have a mortgage. No, you have a mortgage. We're both complicit, you know? And it's also not helpful to sit around and be wracked with guilt. So how do you deal with that feeling? Yeah, I think that this is like a daily practice. And I want to become a poverty abolitionist. I want to commit my life to divesting from poverty. And I think that sometimes folks will say, well, you got to give everything up. You got to walk away from everything and that kind of thing. That's not what I'm calling for in the book. I'm calling for something radical,

but something completely attainable. And I think something that a lot of us want, you and I, we don't want to be exploiters. We don't want our security to come at someone else's vulnerability. We understand that profiting from someone else's pain corrupts us, corrupts us all. And I think that, so this is kind of a day-to-day practice. A lot of times, we know what shoes to buy or a beer to drink to signal our political affiliations, right? Like we know that our cucumbers came from this local organic farm, but we have no idea what the farmhands got paid picking it. We have no idea if the folks making that one coffee we drink to signal this is the politics we subscribe to are getting paid. Suisse has arrived to are getting paid. So I think shopping and solidarity with folks,

try to shop at unionized shops, try to shop at shops that are B Corp certified, not because that's enough. It's not. But those mall acts build a political will that I think can be used to change the conversation, that can be put to use for a larger change. Or think about the way you and I are talking about taxes, right? I have a mortgage to house too. So every time tax season rolls around, usually the neighbor leans over the fence or you run into a coworker in the elevator and someone's like, oh my gosh, taxes. That's like a thing in the air. Left, right, and center, this is how we talk about taxes. But what if we started disrupting that? What if we talked about it like you and I are talking about? And the next time someone kind of said that, we said, yeah, it's crazy.

I get the mortgage interest deducted. That's an insane thing. And I wouldn't lose a lot of sleep over it if like street homelessness now wasn't built into the architecture of LA, you know? And there's kids getting evicted by the millions every year. And so I've donated my mortgage interest deduction. I've written my congressperson saying, wind this down for me. So bit by bit, I think that's a way to shift what we consider normal in the country and start treating these things that are in the air and invisible as something that are very visible

and very strange. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the strangeness of the mortgage interest deduction and then return back at the end to this point about what we can all do about it. Because the mortgage interest deduction is kind of, I mean, first of all, it's existed for decades. People treat it almost like a birthright, I think, in the middle class of, well, of course you get this mortgage interest deduction. But it is kind of a weird phenomenon in that I receive a tax break for my housing costs, but a person in the working poor who is paying rent does not. Rent is not deductible, a mortgage is. Why is that and what is the effect of that on poverty? How does that system create poverty? So why is that? It's a historical accident. The mortgage interest deduction started in the tax code before the nation was a nation of homeowners. And then after the GI Bill

kind of created the white middle-class homeownership society, we suddenly had this thing in the tax bill that a lot of people were taking. And we were kind of like, oh, crap. We got caught off guard. But by then it was baked into the budgets of a lot of families. And then lobby power started coming around the mortgage interest deduction. And today, the second most powerful lobby in DC, just by the sheer number of dollars spent every year is not big pharma. It's not big guns. It's the realtors. And one of their top issues- The realtor is like literally the real estate agents, not even the housing constructors or anybody else. It's just the person who puts the sign out front and takes a fee when the place

sells. Yeah. And one of the biggest issues is maintaining the mortgage interest deduction. Yeah. Because what this thing does is make your house and my house more expensive than it would be without it. Yeah. There's no evidence that the mortgage interest deduction helps people buy homes.

There's no evidence because it's just the bigger what's, what was your biggest barrier when you bought your first home? I mean, it's just the bigger what's what was your biggest barrier when you bought your first home uh i mean honestly it was just finding a place at all in la that was in a location that we could find livable that we were able to afford that didn't have holes in the floor or wasn't falling apart you know like it was it was the straight up housing stock being unavailable yeah right and then finding that place and saving enough money for the down payment right correct. Correct. That's the, that's the barrier. And that, and that is what it took, you know, me and my partner, both, uh, we both had to create successful television shows that ran for more than one year before we were able to afford a

down payment for a small middle-class starter home in Los Angeles, which is, you know, how the, how the housing market is. So yes, that was our big barrier was it took us a number of years to build that up. Yeah. The mortgage interest deduction didn't really play a role, right? Yeah, it's true. We didn't go, oh yeah, because the mortgage interest deduction, we'll be able to afford it. That's a really good point. So housing, this matters. This is a wonky esoteric conversation, but it matters. Because it matters because it means the government, like two years ago, the government spent $193

billion in homeowner tax subsidies. Wow. And only $53 billion on direct housing assistance to the needy. Every single homeowner in America is entitled to the mortgage interest deduction. It's universal. Only one in four families who qualify for any kind of housing assistance, rental assistance, public housing, only one in four receive it. And the waiting list for public housing in a city like LA is not counted in years anymore, it's counted in the decades. The reason that waiting list is so big is because we haven't invested deeply in housing for our poorest families. And one

of the reasons we don't have enough money to go around is because we have things like the mortgage interest deduction. And so these things are connected. This is what I mean when we say we subsidize affluence a lot more than we do to fight poverty. And you made so many good points in there. First of all, whenever there's a new subsidy for the poor of any kind being proposed, talk about the student loan forgiveness plan, right? Then the various debates about that over the past year, the demand is always for means testing the, Hey, we, we, well, we can't give the subsidy to people who have a lot of money. We have to make sure you got to be really poor to get it. You have to prove that you're poor

enough. Now, first of all, that creates a huge problem because there's the person. What if they're $1 above the limit, right? You're $1 above whatever the poverty line is for that program. Well, then you don't get the subsidy. You still need it. You need it just as much as if you made $2 less that year. So that's the first problem. But second of all, it ignores the fact that most of our current subsidies, as you say, for the affluent are universal. Everybody gets them. Literally, I don't know how many houses Ted Sarandos or Mark Zuckerberg has. They get the full mortgage interest deduction on every single one, I assume. Do they?

You can take a mortgage interest deduction on your second home. It's not as big, but that second home can be a ski cabin or a yacht. Exactly. Okay. So there's a couple of limits at the very high end. But if you're making $20 million a year, you get the full mortgage interest deduction on your first home. And that is unnecessary. We're not asking for means testing for the upper class or for the rich.

Exactly. But explain to me also how the mortgage interest reduction, you say the main thing it does is it makes the homes more expensive. It drives the price of homes up, which benefits the retailers. How does that work? Well, one thing it does is give you more money. And so it allows you to- Me as the homeowner. Yeah. And so because of that, you can do things like put more money in your basement refinishing or build a desk or something like that. And so it does it like that, but it also does it just by making the property more valuable than it would without this kind of tax hate.

And so a lot of times when politicians talk about this, they call it a middle class benefit. But if you look at the data, you realize that most of the mortgage interest deduction, it goes to families with six figure incomes, goes to families in the top 20 percent. Of course. Income distribution. Most white Americans own their home. Yeah. You know, and most black and Latinx Americans are renters, you know, because of our systematic dispossession of people of color for the land. So it's really hard to think of a better social policy for amplifying our economic and racial inequality. And the reason I come back to these kind of topics again and again is because every time we talk about doing something serious about fighting poverty. We always hear someone suck their teeth and say, how can we afford it? How can we afford it? And the answer is just, it's right here, man. We could afford it if the richest among us took less from the government. And I'm not talking about redistribution. I want you to keep all the money you've earned. I'm talking about us taking less from the government. And I think

that's a different kind of frame than often we talk about in these debates. You're actually talking about, in a sense, reducing redistribution because we literally have a system currently that is redistributing money from the poor to the rich to some extent. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That, you know, again, it's, it may not be as direct, but you know, as you show on the low end of our rental market, it is designed to take money from the poor. And on the mid to high end, we have a housing system that is designed to give money to people who don't need it in the form of direct government handouts. And if we were to just, just like read, like re-level that a little bit, right. And have

a, have a progressive system of housing subsidy, then, uh, you know, that just gave a little bit more to people who need it the most and a little bit less to people who don't need it as much. Uh, that's all it would take in your view, it sounds like. There's a clear pay for. And so I just want us to have this, develop this reflex when anytime someone says, how can we afford it? Or that costs too much. We just find a way of saying that is utter bullshit. And it's just a lie and pushing back on that. And so I read the study a few years ago, it blew me away. It showed that if the top 1% of us just paid the taxes we owed, not paid more taxes, just stopped evading taxes so successfully, that we as a nation could raise

$175 billion a year. Now, $175 billion a year is almost enough to pull everyone below the official poverty line above it. We have the money. We know how to do this. We just need to stop spending so much money on the rich. Wow. And this is something that other nations do successfully, I assume, that there is a way, in fact, to structure a welfare state that reduces poverty and I would imagine improves living conditions for everyone. Like if I lived in LA and there were not tents on the street, I would be happier if everyone in my community lived better. Is this attainable as a goal? Yeah. Yeah. It's totally attainable. So when the War on Poverty and Great Society were launched in 1964 under the Johnson administration, they set a deadline. They set a deadline and they weren't

playing around. There was a plan. Now they didn't end poverty, but they cut it in half in 10 years. Wow. And there was a time- I didn't know it was that successful. I knew about the war on poverty. They cut poverty in half in 10 years. I had no idea. Now, but they didn't fight poverty themselves. And this is the key point, actually. So the War on Poverty Great Society, these did things like establish food aid permanently, expand social security benefits, Medicaid, Head Start was invented. These were really serious, deep investments in the poorest families in America. But they were also rolled out at a time when unions were strong, when one

in three Americans who are in the labor force belong to a union where wages were climbing seriously every year. Like between 1960 and 1973, 74, I think, men's wages increased almost like 40% across the board, like very strong wage growth during this time. So it was like a one-two punch. And that really mattered for lifting a lot of Americans out of poverty. But then, you know, as unions got weak and wages started stagnating, our jobs got a lot of Americans out of poverty. But then as unions got weak and wages started stagnating, our jobs got a lot worse. And those programs had to work harder for us to kind of stay in the same place. Government programs are work and they're really essential, but we can't get where we need to get, which is a 0% poverty rate, which is the abolition of poverty in this land of dollars without ending exploitation in the labor market and the housing market.

And you talked about other countries. And, you know, it's funny because sometimes when you talk to folks about this, like at a party or over dinner, they're like, oh, it's so complicated. That's so complicated. And then you just look at other rich democracies. And it's not so complicated. And then you just look at other rich democracies, and it's not that complicated. And the big tell is how much of your GDP do you collect in taxes? And with countries like the Netherlands, Germany, for example, collect about 38% of their GDP in taxes every year. We collect only about 25% of our GDP in taxes.

And that's the big difference. 25% of our GDP in taxes. And that's the big difference. So we don't need to outsmart this problem. We just need to commit ourselves to ending it. Incredible. Well, we're going to take a really quick break. I can't wait to keep talking with you more about this. We'll be right back with more Matthew Desmond. Okay, we're back with Matthew Desmond. We just talked about how our housing system is designed to perpetuate poverty by basically sucking money out of the pockets. The poor giving it to folks who don't need it that much in the form of subsidies. How is our broader monetary system designed that way, our financial system, banking and the like? So let's look at financial exploitation of the poor. And I use that word

exploitation. And I know it's a charged word, but for me, it just means when you don't have a lot of choice, you got to take the best bad option. And we've all been in this situation. We've all been in a situation where someone's got us over a barrel and you just got to pay. You're at the airport and you're hungry and like, fuck, I'll pay $20 for the goddamn chicken wrap. Yeah, there you go. And so that's the life of the poor all the time. And so let's look at financial exploitation. $11 billion in overdraft fees, over $1.6 billion in check cashing fees, almost $10 billion in payday loan fees are charged to the lowest income Americans. That's like $61 million pulled out

of the pockets of the poor every single day. Wow. So when James Baldwin famously said it's really expensive to be poor in America, he couldn't have imagined these receipts. This is real exploitation. Who benefits from that? So the banks and the payday loan companies do, but you and I probably do too, you know, because we probably have free checking accounts. And it turns out those accounts aren't free. You know, they're subsidized by all those overdraft fees charged mostly to just 9% of bank clients. And who are those 9%? They're the poorest bank clients made to pay for their poverty.

So these are ways that like these little invisible ways where we don't think about, you know, but the banking that a lot of Americans experience is completely different than the banking that poor Americans experience. And you know what they need? They don't need financial counseling. You know, they don't. They're not making mistakes. They are taking the best bad option. You know, if you look at why people take out payday loans, for example, it's like to pay rent. It's to keep the lights on. It's to meet a basic daily expense.

And so I think that what we need to do to end exploitation is expand their choice, give them more access to credit in a way that's less exploitative or non-exploitative. The way that you put it, that the benefit that I receive from my financial institution is coming at someone else's expense is so often invisible. I have a credit card for my airline miles because I travel so much. I fly with just one airline. I got the status. I got the lounge. I got all this other stuff, right? I fly so much. I, I, God, I need it right. Just to get through, just to get through the flight. However, why is it that every time that I use my credit card, I receive a financial benefit, right? I receive a reward that gives,

you know, it might be worth one or 2% of the purchase price every single time. And I receive that benefit, even though I pay off my credit card statement in full every single month. So I'm not giving any extra money to the credit. There's a yearly fee for the credit card. That's about it, right? Other than that, it's zero cost neutral for me. Why are they offering me essentially free money to use the credit card? It's because, well, I'm able to pay the bill every month. If you're not able to pay the bill every month, then you're suddenly paying 30% interest to these people for the same credit card.

And that's just like, I'm still at the high end of the market. If you look at what Citibank or Chase or whatever it is, is charging the people on the low end who are really not able to make ends meet for the privilege of having a banking system at all. It's enormous. You know, I don't, as you say, I don't pay anything. I don't pay anything in those fees, but someone who makes less money is paying a lot more. And then the folks who don't even have enough money to have a bank, instead they're doing their banking at a payday lending place, which is incredibly rapacious. The rates that are charged people is, it just, you end up paying more and more and more.

And we've all experienced that, I think, in our lives that, you know, at the low end, you get soaked more, right? If you have less, you pay more. The lower you get on the totem pole, the more you get soaked by the system. The way that I don't normally think of it is that I'm receiving a subsidy because the money's coming in from other people. And that's a hard thing to realize. Something that I think about sometimes when I have a, when I have a benefit is I try to imagine, is this a benefit that everybody could have?

Or am I sitting in a first-class seat? The problem with a first-class seat on an airplane, you sit in a first-class seat and you're like, wow, this is, this is nice. Everyone should get to fly in the first-class seat. This is so, wow, I have so much leg room. And then you realize, well, the reason that you have more leg room in first class is because everyone in the back has less, right? Because there's a limited amount of amount of amount on the plane. And if they want to add an extra row of first class, they got to squeeze everyone in the back a little bit more. And there's, uh, and, and when you

realize that that's the, that, that is the type of benefit that you have. It can be a little emotionally difficult. Right. And so I want to run with this metaphor because this is how America feels to a lot of people that are in first class. America feels like it's working great because for them, it's working great. You board easily. Someone offers you a drink before the flight takes off. I got a hot towel. You got a hot towel if you need it. You got the nuts. You know, you got room for your bag.

You don't have to sweat your bag. And so then it's like, oh, air travel's working, you know? But if you're in, you know, group 789, you know, they got to check your bag, your cramp. And so that's kind of how America feels. And that's why a lot of affluent Americans don't really kind of understand life below the poverty line for millions and millions. And let's just pause to recognize how big our poverty problem is. Yeah, please.

Because there's a ton of people in the back of the plane. You know, so there's 38 million Americans who are officially poor by our standards. That's like, if they formed a country, it would have a bigger population than Australia. That's a giant number of people in America. But there's also plenty of poverty above the poverty line, right? Like one in three of us are living in a household making 55K or less, one in three. So if you're making 55K in LA, raising two kids, you often aren't considered officially poor, but what else do you call that, right? You certainly don't call it economically secure. Yeah, that's the entire household is making that amount of money. Yeah, that's right. And that was like, look, I mean, 55K in a major city in America hasn't been a decent

middle-class living for decades and decades. I mean, there's so much poverty in America and everyone agrees that the poverty line is too low, right? It's $27,000 for a family of four. That's just a number that we set the poverty line. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we can get in the weeds about how to set it and how to measure poverty if you want. And there's plenty of disagreement, but you know what everyone agrees on? This is too low. If you're below the poverty line, you are in a really desperate situation. And there are millions and millions of us there. And yet, we continue to live these segregated lives. And so one of the arguments of the book is reaching for broad, inclusive communities. It is really pushing

back against segregation. And there's a lot of reasons to do that. But one key reason is that if you have this massive amount of racial and economic segregation, this dynamic sets in, where if you have enough money, you start having this desire to pull away from the public, right, to the best from everything public. Be like, I don't want to take the bus. I don't want to, I don't, I don't need that park. I can buy my park. I don't need that pool. I can buy my pool. I don't need your school anymore. I can buy my school. You're describing Los Angeles. Los Angeles was built on this principle, basically. There's very few public amenities in the city compared to other cities because it was a,

it was a city that was, or it was a really a County that was built on private property and private goods and a disinvestment in public goods. Right. And as that gets more and more, you know, is that momentum shifts in, you shifts in, you have this like a rise of,

of private opulence among public poverty. Yeah. And so, you know, I think that describes LA, but a ton of America too. And this is, to go back to your point about poverty bringing us all down, this is a place where you can extend a great riches and still be surrounded by poverty and also fear it, fear your kids. And so so I think that a society that

invests in broad prosperity and the end of poverty, even if that means that the richest among us must take less from the government, is a society that's safer, healthier, happier, freer. Yeah. But I think that that mindset that comes from the segregation that you're talking about is becoming so entrenched or risks becoming entrenched. You know, I have a friend who lives in LA now, grew up in India and, you know, in India, the poverty disparity go to any city is so immense and so right in front of you. You know, it is, it's not segregated. It's right there. I'm sure there's

plenty of segregation, but walk down any street in India, you'll see immense wealth and you'll see the most desperate poverty in massive numbers. And there's sort of, the way she described it, there's a mindset that's been that way for so long, people accept it. It's kind of the way it is. There's poor people and there's rich people. And you're lucky if you're born rich, you're born into the right family, right? And if you're, hey, we do what we can to help them, but what can you do? It's got that kind of attitude. And she said her fear was that people in Los Angeles, young people growing up here are growing up with that same sort of belief now. Hey, I'm doing great. There's tents on every corner. What can you do? That's just the way the

world is. Some people are just like that. And then the stories start about, well, it's drugs, it's X, Y, Z, those sort of justifications. Oh yeah, what can you do? They don't want to be helped. That sort of story that we tell ourselves for all the reasons, oh, it's so complicated, we can't do much. When in reality, this is a problem that we could solve if we put our mind behind it. We don't need to accept it. We don't need to believe that it's baked into the structure of our society. Right. Absolutely. I mean, the biggest myth about poverty in America is that we have to live with it, that there's nothing we can do with it, that the poor will always be with us. That's the biggest

myth about poverty. And it's a lie. Look at COVID, right? Look at what happened during COVID. So COVID hits and the Biden administration flexes, issues bold relief. And we had something called the child tax credit, which was just basically a guaranteed basic income for middle and low income families. What did that do? That cut child poverty by 46% in six months. 46%. It took LBJ 10 years to do it, and we did it in six months.

It was the most powerful thing we've done for low-income families in generations. Wow. And we had this massive investment. We rolled out something called our emergency rental assistance because we knew so many renters were in the red after the eviction moratorium lifted. So we doubled HUD's budget and we got it out the door to over 10 million families. And it dropped evictions to lowest they've ever been on record, ever recorded. And so the idea that we just have to, it's complicated, somehow we have to live with this, or this is our new society, our new future,

is just wrong. We should reject it. And where did this pernicious, boring, best we can do-ism come from? It strikes me as such an un-American way to think. We used to be like, we can go to the moon. We can do that. Like, you know, like, we used to be bummed. Like, the whole reason LA exists is because, like,

train barons were like, I'm going to lay train all over the country. Like, I'm just, you know? And, like, there was definitely corruption and evil there, you know, and exploitation.

But there was also ambition. And I would love us to channel that old American ambition in the service of poverty abolition. Well, when you look at what LBJ did, a very complicated man, a lot of horrible things he did too, but that step to say, hey, we're going to fight a war on poverty. We are going to win. Here is our plan. And to go through with it and do it, that was him carrying on a great American tradition that harkens back to the New Deal. And even before that, you can see the echoes of that also in JFK saying, you know, we will go to the moon, all of these statements. And for some reason, that's not moon, all of these statements. And, uh, we, for some reason, that's not something that we say in America anymore. We say, uh, well, no, we need to budget the country, like an American sitting

at their dining room table. We can't, uh, we can't spend too much money on these frivolous things. Uh, let's just let, you know, the private enterprise truck along and et cetera. Uh, maybe it's a different topic for a different podcast. What changed in america or i don't know maybe do you have a view on it like fuck it let's dive in what why why don't we believe in ourselves anymore why why did we lose faith in the power of our government to actually correct social ills in america because when you look at the 20th, the entire history of the 20th century was Americans trying to do that from the progressive era in the 1910s to up until really the 70s. What happened? Yeah.

I mean, I think one way to meditate on that for the listeners of this podcast is to ask ourselves, why were we so damn quiet after COVID when it comes to poverty reduction? The government just allowed the child tax credit to disappear, and it allowed rental assistance to disappear. And we're going to return to normal. And man, we were quiet. You know? And, you know, a lot of times we talked about that one senator that didn't vote that way or that other political party. And that's fine. Like, that's a good conversation to have.

But like, did we pick up the phone? Did we write a letter? Did we call our congressman? Did we write a letter? Did we call our Congressman? Did we send an email? And, you know, when things were, were happening with the emergency rental assistance program, for example, at the beginning, it was stumbling, you know, it was tripping. It was, it was kind of hard to get out the door. Actually, it's hard to drop $46 billion. You can't drop it by a plane. You know, we had to create these distribution channels and when it was happening,

we were all tweeting about it and writing about it and complaining about it. And then it started working and we were silent. And I think a lot of times when we get together at parties and we're like, boy, the Democrats, they have a messaging problem. And I think there's something deeper among progressives in America. We are very fluent in the language of critique and we are bumbling in the language of repair. And I think that we need to find that voice to be like, look, we're not at the mountaintop, but all right, this is it. This is good.

Let's do this. Let's celebrate this. Let's give Congress some political cred and cover and reward them for this. And I think this is one of the lessons for us, I think, that we can pull out of that silence or that loss of ambition. We don't say, look at what we fucking did. Look at what we accomplished. Look at what we achieved. We say, oh, the effects were disparate and it was hard to access and we were screwed

by that senator we don't like. And, you know, I actually, a friend of mine who works in politics and leftist politics described it as, sometimes we have an addiction to losing. That no matter what happens, all we can do is talk about how things should have been better. It's scary to celebrate, right? I mean, you don't get on Twitter and celebrate, you know. It's scary to be like, hey, this is great. I like this.

You don't get as many retweets when you celebrate. Yeah. I think we just have to find that voice. I've become so tired of absolving theories of poverty, things that led us off the hook. Right, left, and center, we have these actually. And so I just, any way we can bring this back to us and personalize the problem and take responsibility for it in a real way, I think that's kind of the stuff of political will building. So man, this is fascinating to me because I speak to many activists who talk about structural problems on this show are structural bad actors who are causing a lot of the problems who we need to fight against, but we need to do so through collective action. And you individualize the problem so much. And I just find that very interesting because it

sort of runs counter to a lot of the messaging of the movement. And so I want to poke at it a little bit because I really find it helpful what you're bringing to me. And so I want to poke at it a little bit because I really find it helpful what you're bringing to me, but I just want to poke at it because maybe some folks are having some friction with it. Like I could imagine someone saying, say an activist here in LA,

hold on a second. I did speak up about renter assistance, about that expiring. I called the city council. I gave public comment. I did all that shit. You know who I was up against? I was up against the landlords who screamed and yelled that they couldn't evict people as much as they used to, who spent billions, not billions, millions of dollars here in LA, but billions

nationally lobbying, right? As you say, one of the biggest lobbying groups in the country. So, I mean, it is the case that there are these big institutional powers that are causing some of these problems. And so, how does that connect to what I can do individually as a person? Yeah. I'm a sociologist. I'm a card-carrying sociologist. So, I get structural change and structural problems. I've devoted all of my adult life to studying those. But I've also become kind of suspicious about this division that we make between individual and structural change, you know?

And so let's think about that activist that did all that work, right? Yeah. Well, I want to create more of her or him. You know, I want more of them. And I want more people being like, I'm going to put some skin in this game. So we could talk about segregation as the result of historical and legal

and economic and racial structures that created our cities like this. That's true. But they're also created because the segregationists today get their butts to that eight o'clock zoning board meeting on a Tuesday night. Yeah. They stand up and they say, do not build this in my community. And if we don't take responsibility

and get our butts to that zoning board meeting too, and stand up and be like, no, no, no, I, I refuse to deny other kids opportunities my kids get living here. Then what's that structural narrative going to do? So I think the best way, I mean, the best way to think about climate change is to hold these two things together, right? We're not going to solve climate change by hanging dry in our laundry, right? But I think it's really hard for me to see something like the Inflation Reduction Act coming out of Congress. If a lot of us weren't like, what am I eating? What am I driving? Do I need to take that flight? I'm going to buy that carbon offset. I'm going to buy solar.

It was like this. We started building a political will through individual action, not because that's enough. It's not. But because that's part of it and that helps put upward pressure and literally changes the common sense of America. And so the book doesn't end by here's five things you yourself can do. The book ends by saying, here's the policies we need. Here's the new ways we need to address exploitation. Here's how we can finally turn away from segregation. But it also ends with this call for us to become poverty abolitionists.

And so I think that is that balance that I'm trying to strike because for the poverty movement to have power, it has to grow. And for it to grow, a lot of people, I think, need to enter that tent. And for that you said really stuck with me that, you know, when the segregationists show up to the meeting and we stay home, right? What are the segregationists always complaining about? Their big complaint, why shouldn't the low-income housing be built? It's because it's going to hurt my property values. My property values are going to go down. And they say that explicitly or implicitly. And that is sort of the original sin of housing in America, right? That we have turned housing into an asset.

And those folks who are being segregationists, a lot of them, maybe they're just worried about their retirement. This is what I've been told is my only sinecure. This is my only pension. I don't have a pension plan. I have a 401k. That's okay. All my money's in my house, right? And they're worried about their housing prices going up.

Right. And they're worried about their housing prices going up. And when we stay home and we don't go to that meeting and we live in our home where we have a mortgage and the price of the housing is going up, then that is really staying complicit in that. Being like, oh, well, hey, you know, you look around, oh, man, my price of my house went up a lot in five years. You know, I went up 30 percent in a couple of years. Well, guess what? It's a fucking problem for your neighborhood because if housing prices are rising 30% in five years, as they are in many places in LA, that means that it is that much more unaffordable. And so it sounds like to me, what we need to do is we need to be willing to give something up and say, I'm okay with it. If my housing prices, if the price of my home doesn't rise as quickly as it might have in past years, um, or, or as it might have, if that, if that housing isn't built, uh, and that to me is where the rubber meets the

road in inequality in America, because so often when you look at where the backlash starts against the welfare state or against any kind of program designed to ameliorate racism or anything like that, it's when the affluent folks, the white folks, the rich folks, they're on board with it until they have to give anything up until, you know, poorer kids are going to go to their school until the price of their house might not rise quite as fast until a little bit of political power leaves their hands and goes to someone else. They have a violent reaction. They said, no, how can you take something away from me? Well, guess what? Something maybe needs to be taken away from us to a certain, we can still have a life, but other people need more and they need a piece of what we have.

And we need to be fundamentally okay with that. And in fact, help that process happen. Does that, do you agree with that? Yeah. We're also giving up a lot now. Yeah. You know, I mean, we're, we're often giving up public safety. Yes. We're giving up the security, knowing that whatever happens to our kids, we're not one

car accident or one divorce away from them falling on really hard times. We're giving up the American dream for the younger generations who are looking at impossibly expensive cities and $100,000 college degrees and are just wondering, is this working at all for me? We're giving that up. We're giving up neighborliness. And we're living in these pockets of incredibly frightened affluence. And I think that my argument in the book is that some lives are made small so that others may grow. And so I am asking those of us who have found security and prosperity to take less from the government. Maybe to take less returns on your stock portfolio.

Maybe to spend a little more shopping because you're buying from unionized shops where people get a fair wage. I'm asking us to reach for broad, inclusive communities, but I think the deal is better. The deal is better. There's a lot of work that shows that if you build affordable housing in a way that blends into the community, there's no effect on property values, none. And like when you see today's affordable housing, man, it's not your father's affordable housing. I took my students to a development in New Jersey called, it's in Mount Laurel. It's a famous affordable housing development here. And it was a big fight. You know, the homeowners around it were like, you know, just scared that their property

values would tank. And it was a big fight and it went through because of a lawsuit. And we were on the bus with the students and I said, just look around. These are the houses that people worried about. Take a look around. And then we pulled into this gorgeous, beautiful, completely affordable housing complex. And it made it look ridiculous, right? Because you're like, of course the property values didn't go down. And in fact,

years later when folks survey those homeowners and were like, well, what do you think about affordable housing being in your neighborhood? They were like, what affordable housing? They forgot about it. And so I think that those concerns are totally understandable, but they're not concerns that are super supported by data. And I think that we have to just push beyond them. Our values can't stop where our property line begins. And, you know, it's interesting to read the history of segregation too, because the arguments that our dads, our white dads were making last generation and our white grandfathers are making last generation, they're making the same arguments people are making today. Really?

School's crime of property value, same arguments. Wow. And so I just think we have to reach for something more. we have to reach for something more. And I've lived in affluent white neighborhoods and I've lived in poor multiracial neighborhoods. And I mean, the places where I felt the most neighborliness and cared for by my neighbors were not in those affluent white neighborhoods. And my property value went up or they would have if I could afford a home and I lived in those neighborhoods. And my property value went up, or they would have if I could afford a home and I lived in those neighborhoods. But I traded joy and community for that.

And so I think that's the idea that we have to start talking about. We're like, yeah, we're asking to give something up, but we're asking to invest in a better country. Yeah. A country where people look out for each other and uh help provide for each other and have that sense of community i mean you a couple times in that answer you mentioned the fear and the separation that affluent people feel and i think that's really real and i think it's not remarked upon often enough that you know folks are making, folks in the upper middle class often who are people making a million dollars a year are often terrified that they are going to lose it all. And some of them are living on the edge, buying things they can't afford, buying car

payments and houses that they can't, so that if they have one bad year, they really do lose a lot. And that's whatever, personal choice, they could be more frugal, but our, because our society is structured with such a vast bottom of precarity and poverty, it makes you afraid that you're going to fall into it. You know, just having this conversation, just to use the plain metaphor again, right? A couple of years ago, I got the highest status on American airlines because I was flown business class across country for a gig one time. I was flown to England and that one flight was like apparently expensive enough that it got me like the highest tier of status. And then that was extended through the pandemic a couple of times because they extended the status. Right. So currently, when I fly, I fly around the country to do stand up and, you know, I get a lot of nice perks.

And last year I flew enough to maintain those perks. Right. And as a result, it's more comfortable for me to fly. But also I only have a year to fly enough and to earn enough miles to get those perks next year. Right. And so there's a little part of me that's like living in fear. Oh, what if I don't earn enough miles? And next year I'm in the back of the plane again,

right? And I'm like, maybe I should get the special credit card so I can earn the special membership miles so I can qualify again, right? Which is exactly what they want me to do. They want me to sink more money into that system so I can save my privileged status, right? And so even though I'm up in the front, maybe having a nice time, I'm not always, sometimes I am. Uh, I, uh, I, I, there's that little bit of fear in the back

that is, I would rather do without. And like, what if, what if there weren't fucking two tiers on the airline at all? Right. What if they just distributed all the seats evenly? Everybody got a nice drink. Everybody had a nice lounge to go to. You know what I mean? And it wasn't as high tier as it is now, but it was the emphasis was on an equal amount of comfort for everybody. And I could feel in community with my fellow passengers. And instead of us glaring at each other, oh, that motherfucker's in first class. You know what I mean? We were like, Hey, take a seat. You know, like we're all, all the seats are equal. It would be, it would be a relief to live in that world. And I think that applies to the entire society that if, if, if it, the division itself, even if you're on the, the, the, if you have the good end of the stick, you you'd be better off if you weren't constantly afraid that suddenly you're going to be in the back. That's the land of abundance. Yeah. That's the land of abundance. And that's the land we currently live in,

or could live in. You know what I mean? And so I think that there's this little Aesop fable that I write about in the book where it's like, there's a farm and the farmer's mean old dog climbs on the pile of hay and the cows come to eat the hay and he growls at them, you know, and they go away. And so what the farmer does is drop the cow's rations and snatches little snatches from the edges of the hay and feeds them and they go hungry and the mean old dog just sleeps on the pile. That's kind of how we think about poverty reduction. We should just move the dog. Just move the dog. And I think that we have enough abundance that we have to reject this scarcity diversion.

And a lot of times when we have this conversation, people will ask questions like, are you talking about the end of capitalism? Or, well, shouldn't work be rewarded? These kind of questions. And what I'm talking about is the end of poverty. And you can still have your designer sports cars in a poverty-less America. You can still have your perks. You can still have your motorboat.

I'm not talking about this kind of total upending of our society. I'm talking about a floor that no one should fall below. And I mean no one with no qualifications. I think that we have enough abundance in this country to make sure nobody falls below this kind of deep level. And I was talking to Angus Deaton, the Nobel Laureate economist the other day. Oh, we had him on the show a couple of years ago.

He's incredible. He's amazing. You know, he estimated that over 5 million of us live on $4 a day or less in America. Wow. 5 million of us that are abjectly poor by global standards. Wow. That shouldn't happen in this rich land. And so part of this work, I think also is just there's this tendency, right?

part of this work, I think also is just, there's this tendency, right, among upper class Americans to reject their status as upper class Americans, you know, to say like, we're just getting, well, here I'm middle class, you know, like in this city, I'm middle class, you know? And I think it gives this weird impression where everyone feels a little, that they have to clasp onto their thing. And I think you're right to identify poverty as this fear. I think the fall into poverty is kind of the ultimate American fear. Yeah. And wouldn't it be nice to have a society where you knew whatever happened, whatever happened, you'd be okay. Exactly. You might not be super rich, but you'd be okay. That's the society that I want. That's the society that I think a lot of Americans want.

Here, I'm pretty hopeful, actually. I think things are changing. I think the old is dying and the new hasn't been reborn here. Most Americans want a higher minimum wage. Most Americans think the rich aren't paying their fair share of taxes. They're right. Most Republicans and most Democrats think that poverty results of structural forces, not individual failing. So I think that there is a shift going on in the American public. We want a new story. We want to have a different conversation about inequality today. I completely agree with that. And it's funny, you talk about people grappling with their status. You hear me grappling with it over the course of

this conversation, right? Talking about here's what it's like when I fly, here's my situation with housing. It's something that I try to grapple with as much as I can. I take public transit in Los Angeles partially because I prefer it and partially because it's like an opportunity for me to be in community with like, uh, with the broader life of the city, you know, uh, that's one of the things I like about walking around, uh, as well in Los Angeles. Like it's, it's, you know, I want to be, I want to be in that community. I don't want to forget about it and I don't want to segregate myself. I want to be in that community. I don't want to forget about it and I don't want to segregate myself.

And I think a lot of people, a lot of people have that desire and there may be stuck behind some of the walls that were built by other people. And they've come to believe those walls are supposed to be there. And maybe they've even come to love the walls a little bit, but if they were to have a chance to peek out from behind them, right, get on the bus every now and again, or, you know, just sort of have that interaction, they would, you know, develop the consciousness that you're talking about, and they would love it, you know, because it truly is, I don't know, man, it's just American life. The more you understand what is happening in this country, it becomes unignorable, but it's also incredibly fulfilling to actually have a full view of how this fucking society is organized and your place within it and your ability to make change within it. Because you

do have quite a lot. I'm rambling a bit, but I hope this is making sense. No, I mean, I love that you brought up joy and love. And I think that joining the anti-poverty movement is a move into joy and love and meaning. And sometimes when I read critiques of cancel culture, I'm like, who are they talking to? Because the anti-poverty movement, which is led by poor people, is an incredibly warm-hearted, joyous place. Before the pandemic hit, I spent about a year and a half with a group of tenants organizing in Minneapolis. They were called United Renters for Justice. Undocumented immigrants spoke a lot of languages across Google Translate app, and they were fighting a negligent landlord. And if one of them got evicted, they'd all go

to eviction court. They'd all show up. They'd bring tamales and pizza. And the landlord attorney would be like, can I have a tamale? They'd be like, no, this is our tamales. Yeah. And that would, that would devastate me if I was denied a tamale. That's like my favorite food. It's a deep, it's a deep cut. Yeah. Oh my God. It was a deep cut. And they went to the landlord. They were like, look, sell us your buildings. And he's like, okay, $7 million. And they were like, be right back. And they started fundraising and working with land banks and they raised the money. And it all came to a head though. The landlord filed eviction on all of them and it went to a head. And there was a woman named

Chloe Jackson and she had her eviction court hearing. The whole community showed up for her, and we were waiting to hear how the jury would rule, and I was waiting next to Takara, who's one of Chloe's closest friends, and Takara turns to me and is like, you know what? It's taken this jury so long. They're asking themselves, why do these tenants want this red-down building? And it's because people have forgotten how to dream.

And I was like, man, have I forgotten how to dream? You know, because they haven't. And Chloe won that case and they bought those buildings. And today it's a co-op. And I was there a few weeks ago and their rent went down during COVID during a time when everyone else's rent was going up. Wow. And Chloe told me, we used to just be neighbors, but now we're a family.

Doesn't that sound like a thing? That sounds like church, right? That sounds like something that we want to be a part of. And so I think for those of us looking for more meaning in our lives, I have a great suggestion, which is join an anti-poverty organization. Yeah. That is an incredible vision. I love the emphasis on joy as well and on how powerful it can be to be involved in this movement. So how do folks find an anti-poverty organization? I mean, I'm sure there's Google, but what do these organizations look like and

how do we tell the difference between when we're truly joining the movement and when we're doing the feel-good thing that maybe isn't making an impact? Yeah. I could totally live with the feel-good thing, to be honest with you. Someone asked me the other day, well, what if this turns into virtue signaling? And I was like, I would love that. I would love us to be like, I bought this shirt from a union shop. You know, what about you? Like, let's do it. Let's go. Let's do that. Virtue signaling gets a bad rap. Virtue signaling is a good thing. It's you showing your values to other people and spreading them. It could change the common sense. It can, you know? And so, you know, so one place you can go to get connected to organizations is a website called endpovertyusa.org.

It's just endpovertyusa.org. And we launched this website with this new book. And it is designed to do two things, to connect families to service providers in their communities. Sometimes it's really hard to know where to turn to get legal aid or eviction assistance or food help. So we wanted an easy, intuitive way for families to get connected to that aid. But it also highlights anti-poverty organizations that work in every single state in the country and all on the national level too. And when I hear join a movement, I often think of like marching the streets. And I don't really think of myself often think of like marching the streets. Yeah. And I don't, I don't

really think of myself as kind of a marching the street kind of guy actually. And I've done it before, but you know, it's just like, and I think a lot of folks probably listening probably feel the same way I do, you know? And, but like movements need, they need nurses, they need lawyers, they need accountants, marketers, they need just folks that'll be able to sit home and make a few calls. They need a writer or two. And so I think that whatever our talents and our gifts are, we can apply those to ending poverty in America. Yeah. They need people to be in community with that movement. The thing that I've noticed the most is when

you start showing up to anything right you attend a zoom meeting you start to meet people doing the work yeah uh then it opens a whole world to you of people who you never uh knew about in your own city who are you know when you're you know engaging in collective struggle and when you're able to join that it is one of the most powerful feelings that becomes really, really addictive. And at the very least the consciousness, you know, we'll, we'll stay with you of, of who exists in your city, what they're going through and what you should be thinking about when you're just moving through your day-to-day life. You know if you, if you ride the bus sometimes,

you can still be in a car sometimes, but you know what it's like to be on the bus. And you'll understand what it means when your local metro system is cutting bus times and things like that. And you'll know how to vote and you'll know where you think your money should be spent. And being in community is so powerful.

Yeah, it makes us accountable too. And it makes these debates, these abstract debates, personal. I gave a talk at Princeton where I teach about this book. And after the talk, the first question, this woman stood up and she said, I volunteer in Trenton, which is a poor city about 15 minutes away from Princeton. I volunteer in Trenton. And we give a lot of mentoring to the kids. And shouldn't we be mentoring the single moms? That was her question. And so I look out of the audience and I see my friend, Vanessa Sullivan, who's a single mom in Trenton. you know? And I was like, I have to answer this question that holds me accountable to Vanessa, you know? And I think when we have

these relationships, we will have a catch in our voice whenever someone kind of goes down these old lies or these old myths about the poor. I wonder how many folks that were just debating work requirements in Washington just actually know someone on food stamps, actually have been in a welfare office, have sat for five hours for a 10-minute appointment, who know how hard it is to work and work and work and never get ahead in America. I think if there was more genuine relationships across class lines, we'd have a completely different poverty conversation than we often do at the highest levels. Amen.

And that is, I think, the perfect call to action to end on is to place yourself in that community and meet the folks in your community. Because there are folks who are struggling exactly the way you describe in your community, wherever you live. Matthew, thank you so much for coming on. The book, again, is called Poverty by America. You can get it at our special bookshop at factuallypod.com slash books if you want to support the show in your local bookshop. Where else can people find your work? Oh, man. I run something called the Eviction Lab. You can go to evictionlab.org if you want to learn about housing insecurity and homelessness

and eviction in your own community. And yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of you out there. I'll be out on the road for a while talking about this book and stumping poverty abolitionism. And so looking forward to it. And Adam, always a pleasure, man. Thanks for this great conversation. Oh, Matthew, thank you so much. It's wonderful to have you back. I hope you write another book very soon so we can get you back on the show. Thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you once again to Matthew Desmond for coming on the show. If you want to pick up a copy of the book, head to factuallypod.com slash books. And if you want to join a local poverty

abolitionist organization in your area, head to endpovertyusa.org. I want to thank everybody who supports this show on Patreon, especially those who do at the $15 a month level. And if you do, I will read your name on this very show. Most recently, we had supporting at that level Sagar Matra, The Spicy, Nick Frazier, Transient Astronomer, and Ken Runner. Thank you so much to all of you. I want to thank our producers, Tony Wilson and Sam Roudman, everybody at HeadGum for helping make this show possible. You can find me online at Adam Conover wherever you get your social media. And don't forget, if you want to come see me on tour, head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. Thank you so much for listening,

and we will see you next week on Factually. I don't know anything. That was a HeadGum Podcast.