Early in my college teaching career, upon sharing an incidental detail of my biography—I was raised primarily by a single mother who worked as a home health aide—a colleague could barely hide her surprise: “You were raised by a single mom?” Yes, a tenured professor of history at Georgetown University was raised by a single mother. Like the few Americans who have experienced upward class mobility, I was able to find ways to cosplay middle-class status along the way. I learned how to fill out scholarship applications before I acquired a driver’s license. I budgeted my babysitting wages to cover school clothes and bus fare. I learned not to discuss too many details about my home life in front of people who were not like us. Today, my mother bristles at the idea that we were among the poor in America; as an immigrant from Haiti, she claims to know what real poverty looks and feels like. Yet in a nation as resource-rich as the United States, I wonder what she made of her experiences working multiple jobs that brought her constant back pain, with no union to appeal to when things got really bad. It wasn’t until I became a parent that I realized how taxing it must have been for her to rely on our city’s network of public health clinics and emergency rooms for immunizations and basic health care, and how much anxiety there must have been in knowing that what was needed for the monthly bills was greater than what was coming in.

I thought a lot about my own past and present while reading Matthew Desmond’s new book, Poverty, by America. A MacArthur Fellow who is also the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, Desmond has dedicated his career to examining poverty. His previous book, Evicted, focused on one of the most devastating consequences of the 2008 financial crisis: the eviction of renters who already faced a paucity of affordable housing. In an ethnographic study of people in Milwaukee, Desmond recounted their personal struggles and, most important, the policy failures that had led to housing insecurity among a wide swath of Americans. For those who are lucky enough to be unfamiliar with the cruel practice of removing people and all their possessions from their homes or who are unaware of the profits made by exploiting those most desperate to find a place to live, Evicted was a revelation. In 2017, Desmond won a Pulitzer Prize for the book, and has found audiences in the housing policy world, as well as in popular media, as an expert on the struggle to achieve housing security.

In Poverty, by America, Desmond returns to many of the same questions, but from a different angle. Instead of ethnographic profiles of people struggling against systems that neglect and exploit the poor, he now takes aim at the ways in which poverty is considered in this country. Instead of focusing on the actions of the poor themselves, Poverty, by America seeks out the root causes of their plight. Poverty is not produced by the poor, Desmond insists, and so we must take into account “those of us living lives of privilege and plenty,” who too often think that we have little to do with the poverty of others.

Desmond’s scholarly focus is not only political but personal. He is unabashed in discussing how his own experience of growing up poor led him to the central questions in Poverty, by America. “After my father lost his job, the bank took our home, before it was all the rage, and we learned to do without that, too,” he writes. “Mostly I blamed Dad. But a part of me also wondered why this was our country’s answer to when a family fell on hard times.” These moments of memoir are few, but they are fundamental to Desmond’s argument that poverty persists because it is lucrative for everyone who doesn’t experience it themselves. The poor experience poverty—but it is the rest of us who help generate and sustain it.

In Poverty, by America, Desmond provides some of the history of how the nation has framed and understood the problem of poverty. In the late 19th century, the growth of cities by way of immigration and industrialization led to some of the most troubling aspects of poverty, especially overcrowded slum housing and labor exploitation. Yet who was responsible for dealing with this problem? The captains of industry, who underpaid their workers? The state, which sought to control and sometimes criminalize the poor? Or the local churches and community groups devoted to charity? At the time, piecemeal approaches to addressing poverty—almshouses, mutual aid societies, and settlement houses—failed to meet the challenge of keeping the poor fed, housed, and healthy.

The early 20th century introduced a wave of new approaches to addressing poverty. Many Progressives sought to improve the quality of urban life through the establishment of free kindergartens and the building of public parks. They believed in the spirit of reform, but their interventions on behalf of the poor were sometimes shaped by contempt and racism. The next major shift came as a result of the Great Depression, which brought state officials into the conversation about how to alleviate poverty, thus providing the draft for some of the most ambitious New Deal programs, which established the federal government’s key role in ending poverty.

With the Depression and the coming of World War II, liberals and reformers began to view the state as having more responsibility for providing its citizens with their most basic needs, but the specter of racism and ethnocentrism persisted, shaping accessibility to Social Security, direct cash aid, and food assistance. While the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt’s administration emboldened labor and created new social safety nets, the political and social reforms of the era could only alleviate and ameliorate poverty; the notion of abolishing it had yet to come.

By the early 1960s, the discourse on poverty was being influenced by a White House that had ambitious goals to wage a “war” against it, as well as by a cohort of scholars from the fields of sociology, anthropology, and economics whose theories on the whys of economic inequality were beginning to inform the way that bureaucrats approached the hows of it. Building on an intellectual tradition of writers who explored the seeming puzzle of poverty in a country as rich as the United States, books like Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962) and studies by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis found their way to the desks of government officials like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of labor. If Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was to end poverty, it would essentially have to “fix” the poor: This became the predominant message of those who stressed the importance, first and foremost, of addressing the “culture of poverty.” Labor unions and taxing the rich would not be among the tools for improving the conditions of America’s poor; rather, rules about family composition, calls for patriarchal households, and the maligning of single mothers would be the ideological instruments of change. The personalization of these policy matters, although not necessarily a new approach to poverty, would be more strictly and nefariously applied to the increasing numbers of people of color who were able to access state benefits after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Poverty programs expanded throughout the 1960s, but the conventional wisdom on why people were poor came down to their individual choices—and, in turn, the poor were further marginalized and racialized, obscuring the number of white Americans who also accessed state benefits and entitlements, and redirecting the focus away from the larger labor market, banking system, and housing industry that maintained American inequality.

The United States, Desmond notes, is “the richest country on earth,” but the problem of poverty is so enormous that it affects Americans across a wide economic spectrum. Not all American poverty looks or feels the same, but the vulnerability of poor people to circumstances outside of their control keeps them from realizing economic security. “If America’s poor founded a country, that country would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela,” Desmond writes. “Almost one in nine Americans—including one in eight children—live in poverty. There are more than 38 million people living in the United States who cannot afford basic necessities, and more than 108 million getting by on $55,000 a year or less, many stuck in that space between poverty and security.” Notably, Desmond is not interested in simply documenting the statistics on the pervasiveness of poverty in the United States. He wants us to think about poverty in a different way in order to widen the net of accountability to fix it. On the right end of the political spectrum is the tedious talking point that “the poor are just lazy,” and therefore social policy should discipline them for their idleness and get them back to work. Meanwhile, although few self-described liberals would utter such a falsehood—and though many have since denounced Bill Clinton’s pernicious welfare “reforms” of the 1990s—well-heeled liberals still often fail to realize their own responsibility. Through their consumer choices to save money at all costs, many liberals as well as conservatives have come to depend on gig-economy industries. They have sometimes also played an active role in housing and school segregation, all in the name of doing what’s best for their families, even though they know that they are sustaining a regime that keeps the poor poor.

Desmond also takes liberals to task for holding on to the 1960s “culture of poverty” discourse that insists that poor people, through their behavior and individual choices, exacerbate their own suffering due to personal shortcomings. Rather than hew to the “culture of poverty” line, which liberals tend to share with the right-wing fluff of disingenuous screeds like J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Desmond wants them to focus on the catastrophic culture that poor people are forced to navigate in order to survive. In the United States, he writes, “poverty is the constant fear that it will get even worse.” If there is a culture that needs reforming, in Desmond’s eyes, it’s the culture of affluence that encourages the wealthy and the middle class to depend on government largesse, which feeds a machine of inequality that keeps many people poor for all of their lives. For Desmond, this culture is also born out of a set of material conditions—those related to how we work, how we consume, and how we distribute wealth. “We could afford to end poverty,” Desmond insists, but only “if we designed our welfare state to expand opportunity and not guard fortunes.”