thesis on poverty in america

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Book Reviews

'poverty, by america' shows how the rest of us benefit by keeping others poor.

Jennifer Ludden

After Matthew Desmond won the Pulitzer for Evicted , about families struggling to stay housed, the Princeton sociologist realized he still didn't understand why the U.S. has more poverty than any other advanced democracy.

His new book Poverty, By America , provides a provocative and compelling answer: It's because the rest of us benefit from it, and act to keep it that way.

Desmond admits it feels rude to accuse ordinary people of exploiting others, especially as many don't even realize they're doing it. But he says to understand poverty requires examining not just the relentlessly demonized 1% but "ourselves ... we the secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the protected, the lucky."

This means Poverty, By America is not an immersive attempt to bear witness to suffering like Evicted. Instead, Desmond lays out public policies, laws, and tax breaks to show how the U.S. actually spends big on social programs — second only to France! — but gives the most to those who need it the least. Welfare dependency? Yes indeed, for the richer half.

He packs in a sweeping array of examples and numbers to support his thesis and it can be overwhelming to absorb. But the accumulation has the effect of shifting one's brain ever so slightly to change the entire frame of reference.

One example among many he offers: In 2020, the federal government spent more than $193 billion on subsidies for homeowners — "most families who enjoy this benefit have six-figure incomes and are white" — but just $53 billion on direct housing assistance for low-income families. That's not for lack of need. Because of chronic federal underinvestment, only 1 in 4 extremely low-income Americans who qualify for housing aid get it.

The U.S. needs more affordable housing – where to put it is a bigger battle

Desmond notes that more affluent Americans also disproportionately benefit from subsidized retirement and college savings plans. Exclusionary zoning laws keep their segregated neighborhoods prosperous with well-funded schools, while concentrating poverty elsewhere.

Meanwhile, lower-income families locked out of those neighborhoods — disproportionately Black and Latinx — pay more at every turn. Higher interest rates on mortgages when they can get one — and higher rent when they can't. Desmond's analysis finds U.S. landlords in poor neighborhoods typically make double the profit as those in richer ones. Poor people are also hit with billions in bank overdraft fees every year, a policy that became more widespread after banking deregulation in the 1980s.

These inequities and others are self-perpetuating. The wealthy have more political power, Desmond says, and wield it by lobbying for lower taxes, lower wages, and other laws that give them even more money and power.

When it comes to solutions, Poverty, By America first offers its own reality check.

Two of the biggest U.S. anti-poverty programs are the Earned Income Tax Credit and housing vouchers to subsidize rent. But Desmond says writing this book has forced him to see how they "rescue millions of families from a social ill, but they do nothing to address its root causes." The tax credit allows companies to keep wages low, he says, and housing vouchers don't keep landlords from raising rent when their tenants' wages go up .

"We need to ensure that aid directed at poor people stays in their pockets," he says.

To that end, Desmond calls for policies that give the poor more power in the workplace and housing market, and sees hope in the growing push for unions and a resurgent tenants rights movement.

He also wants a return to bigger investments in the general welfare, which he says would amount to "more poor aid and less rich aid" and less segregation. How to pay? "We could just about fill the entire poverty gap in America if the richest among us simply paid all the taxes they owed ," he says.

The Picture Show

How one photographer is using his camera as a weapon against poverty and racism.

The IRS recently did get more money to go after rich tax dodgers. Maybe it's a start.

But by this point in the book, Desmond has made crystal clear just how difficult it is to change policies that keep so many cozy in their relative prosperity. In 2015, President Obama proposed ending the tax credits in 529 college savings plan; the uproar from his own party was so intense that it was quashed the next day.

Then Desmond suggests something that felt contrived at first, but stuck with me and seems smart for this moment. Taking a cue from the anti-racist push and consumer movements, he says Americans can join to create change by being "poverty abolitionists."

"Poverty in America is not simply the result of actions taken by Congress and corporate boards," he says, "but the millions of decisions we make each day when going about our business."

Changing those decisions can be simple, like choosing UPS over FedEx because their drivers are unionized. Or more disruptive, like examining whether your company exploits workers or your stock market portfolio includes some that do.

Of course, for those who are able, investing and buying to counter poverty can be time consuming and even costly. But Desmond says it's precisely in understanding those costs that we acknowledge our shared complicity.

• housing vouchers

Why Poverty Persists in America

A Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist offers a new explanation for an intractable problem.

A mother and son living in a Walmart parking lot in North Dakota in 2012. Credit... Eugene Richards

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By Matthew Desmond

• Published March 9, 2023 Updated April 3, 2023

In the past 50 years, scientists have mapped the entire human genome and eradicated smallpox. Here in the United States, infant-mortality rates and deaths from heart disease have fallen by roughly 70 percent, and the average American has gained almost a decade of life. Climate change was recognized as an existential threat. The internet was invented.

On the problem of poverty, though, there has been no real improvement — just a long stasis. As estimated by the federal government’s poverty line, 12.6 percent of the U.S. population was poor in 1970; two decades later, it was 13.5 percent; in 2010, it was 15.1 percent; and in 2019, it was 10.5 percent. To graph the share of Americans living in poverty over the past half-century amounts to drawing a line that resembles gently rolling hills. The line curves slightly up, then slightly down, then back up again over the years, staying steady through Democratic and Republican administrations, rising in recessions and falling in boom years.

What accounts for this lack of progress? It cannot be chalked up to how the poor are counted: Different measures spit out the same embarrassing result. When the government began reporting the Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2011, designed to overcome many of the flaws of the Official Poverty Measure, including not accounting for regional differences in costs of living and government benefits, the United States officially gained three million more poor people. Possible reductions in poverty from counting aid like food stamps and tax benefits were more than offset by recognizing how low-income people were burdened by rising housing and health care costs.

The American poor have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn’t mean they can access what matters most.

Any fair assessment of poverty must confront the breathtaking march of material progress. But the fact that standards of living have risen across the board doesn’t mean that poverty itself has fallen. Forty years ago, only the rich could afford cellphones. But cellphones have become more affordable over the past few decades, and now most Americans have one, including many poor people. This has led observers like Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, to assert that “access to certain consumer goods,” like TVs, microwave ovens and cellphones, shows that “the poor are not quite so poor after all.”

No, it doesn’t. You can’t eat a cellphone. A cellphone doesn’t grant you stable housing, affordable medical and dental care or adequate child care. In fact, as things like cellphones have become cheaper, the cost of the most necessary of life’s necessities, like health care and rent, has increased. From 2000 to 2022 in the average American city, the cost of fuel and utilities increased by 115 percent. The American poor, living as they do in the center of global capitalism, have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn’t mean they can access what matters most. As Michael Harrington put it 60 years ago: “It is much easier in the United States to be decently dressed than it is to be decently housed, fed or doctored.”

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Poverty, Racism, and the Public Health Crisis in America

Bettina m. beech.

1 Department of Health Systems and Population Health Science, University of Houston College of Medicine, Houston, TX, United States

Chandra Ford

2 Department of Community Health Sciences, Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice and Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Roland J. Thorpe, Jr.

3 Department of Health, Behavior, and Society, Program for Research on Men's Health, Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions, Johns Hopkins Alzheimer's Disease Resource Center for Minority Aging Research, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, United States

Marino A. Bruce

4 Program for Research on Faith, Justice, and Health, Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences, University of Houston College of Medicine, Houston, TX, United States

Keith C. Norris

5 Department of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Associated Data

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

The purpose of this article is to discuss poverty as a multidimensional factor influencing health. We will also explicate how racism contributes to and perpetuates the economic and financial inequality that diminishes prospects for population health improvement among marginalized racial and ethnic groups. Poverty is one of the most significant challenges for our society in this millennium. Over 40% of the world lives in poverty. The U.S. has one of the highest rates of poverty in the developed world, despite its collective wealth, and the burden falls disproportionately on communities of color. A common narrative for the relatively high prevalence of poverty among marginalized minority communities is predicated on racist notions of racial inferiority and frequent denial of the structural forms of racism and classism that have contributed to public health crises in the United States and across the globe. Importantly, poverty is much more than just a low-income household. It reflects economic well-being, the ability to negotiate society relative to education of an individual, socioeconomic or health status, as well as social exclusion based on institutional policies, practices, and behaviors. Until structural racism and economic injustice can be resolved, the use of evidence-based prevention and early intervention initiatives to mitigate untoward effects of socioeconomic deprivation in communities of color such as the use of social media/culturally concordant health education, social support, such as social networks, primary intervention strategies, and more will be critical to address the persistent racial/ethnic disparities in chronic diseases.

I used to think I was poor, then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me underprivileged was overused, that I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime, but I have a great vocabulary—From a Jules Feiffer cartoon, 1965 .

Poverty is one of the most significant, yet understudied social conditions of the 21st century ( 1 ). This social condition can be defined in a number of ways; however, it can be summarized as the lack of resources necessary to meet basic human needs. Prosperity has been a primary focus in recent years with the rise in overall global wealth ( 2 ). But, the growth in economic and financial resources has not been equally distributed. The gap in resources between the affluent and the poor has been steadily increasing and global extreme poverty (individual income < United States [U.S.] $1.90/day) increased in 2020, the first time in over two decades to 9.2%, after falling to a low of 8% in 2019 ( 3 ). Over 40% of the world lived on less than the U.S. $5.50 a day in 2017 with most of the extreme poverty concentrated in Africa ( 3 ). The prevalence of extreme poverty in the U.S. is very low by global standards ( 3 ). However, the U.S. has one of the highest rates of poverty in the developed world and the worst index of health and social problems as a function of income inequality ( 4 ). For each additional household member, the level increases by $4,480 a year. The level of relative poverty in the U.S. is determined by the federal poverty level (FPL), and for a single-person household, the 2020 poverty level was $12,760 a year, or just under $35 a day. The prevalence of communities being below the FPL varies by race and ethnicity with 24.2% American Indian/Alaskan Native, 21.2% of Black, 17.2% of Hispanic, 9.7% of Asian/Pacific Islander/Native Hawaiian, and 9% of White American families falling below 100% of the FPL ( 5 ). Furthermore, the inequities in wealth are even greater than income differences across racial and ethnic groups.

Black families in the U.S. have about one-twentieth the wealth of their White peers on average ( 6 ). For every dollar of wealth in White families, the corresponding wealth in Black households is five cents. Wealth inequality is not a function of work ethic or work hour difference between groups. Rather, the widening gap between the affluent and the poor can be linked to unjust policies and practices that favor the wealthy ( 2 , 7 – 9 ). The impact of this form of inequality on health has come into sharp focus during the COVID-19 pandemic as the economically disadvantaged were more likely to get infected with SARS CoV-2 and die ( 10 ).

For many health providers, the link between poverty and health among health care providers has been primarily grounded in access to health care with several downstream effects of poverty that may include poor nutrition and substandard housing. This understanding is often influenced and perhaps confounded by the correlation between race and poverty, or racism and classism ( 11 ). A common narrative for the relatively high prevalence of poverty in marginalized minority communities is predicated on notions about them having poor work ethics and poor innate inabilities to achieve wealth. An over-reliance on the myth of meritocracy and a failure to understand root causes of poverty operating at community and individual levels can exacerbate poor patient-provider relations and perpetuate suboptimal patient outcomes among marginalized minority groups. Racial and economic marginalization has contributed to public and population health crises in the United States (U.S.) and across the globe ( 12 , 13 ). However, poverty is much more than just a low household income. Poverty has been characterized in the following three ways: (1) economic well-being, commonly linked to income; (2) ability to navigate society as a function of an education or health status of the individual; and/or (3) social exclusion as a result of institutional behaviors, practices, and policies ( 1 , 14 ). The purpose of this article is to discuss poverty as a multidimensional factor influencing health and explicate how racism contributes to and perpetuates the economic and financial inequality that diminishes prospects for population health improvement among marginalized racial and ethnic groups. We believe this discussion will help to inform a realistic way forward in the pursuit of health equity.

Poverty and Health Disparities, A Historical Perspective

In the mid-1800's, Dr. James McCune Smith was the leading voice in the medical profession to argue that the health of the person was not primarily a consequence of their innate constitution, but instead reflected their intrinsic membership in groups created by a race structured society ( 15 – 17 ). This articulation of health disparities being linked to the racial caste system of America and inequitable social conditions is one of the earliest written descriptions of racism as the cause of health inequities and ultimately health disparities by a member of the American healthcare community. His arguments were scientifically validated when Dr. William Edward Burghardt Dubois reported his findings in 1899 from the first sociological study of Blacks in America, The Philadelphia Negro, demonstrating that racial differences in mortality in Philadelphia were explained by social factors (e.g., economic, sanitary, and education) and not innate racial traits or tendencies ( 18 ). Dr. Dubois documented how white supremacy policies, actions, and beliefs leading to discrimination, oppression, and more contributed to structural poverty and increased levels of despair, disease, and death ( 19 ). Thus, Drs. James and Dubois are considered by many to be the true pioneers who laid the foundation for future work clarifying racism rather than race as the cause of health disparities ( 20 , 21 ).

Explicit notions of Black biological, intellectual, and moral inferiority often categorized as scientific racism have gradually moved from the mainstream to the margins over the last century as social movements advocated for the full citizenship of Black Americans. Despite the passing of civil rights legislation in the U.S. prohibiting discrimination in public arenas and civic engagement (e.g., Civil Rights Bill of 1866, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Civil Rights Act of 1968), structural racism, discrimination, and other harmful forms of bias continue to persist today ( 22 – 24 ). Many factors, such as explicit and implicit provider biases, medical and institutional mistrust (due to historic and contemporary mistreatment), and low self-esteem and stereotype threat, from internalized racism continue to impact our nation and further contribute to the genesis and perpetuation of health disparities ( 25 ). This was reified in the 1985 Report of the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (U.S. DHHS) Task Force on Black and Minority Health, known as the Heckler Report, the first government-sanctioned assessment of racial health disparities ( 26 ), followed nearly two decades thereafter by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Report on Unequal Treatment ( 25 ). The Heckler Report noted mortality inequity was linked to six leading causes of preventable excess deaths for the Black compared to the White population (cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, infant mortality, chemical dependency, and homicide/unintentional injury) ( 26 ). The IOM Report focused on health care disparities and highlighted the role interpersonal racism can have on health outcomes for members of minoritized groups ( 25 ). These reports and others ( 9 , 27 – 35 ) have led to a more robust focus on population health over the last few decades that has included a renewed interest in the impact of racism and social factors, such as poverty on clinical outcomes ( 1 , 33 ).

Poverty and the MYTH of Meritocracy

The race is an antecedent and major determinant of socioeconomic status (SES) in the U.S.; therefore, it is not surprising that the successful implementation of discriminatory race-based policies premised on racial inferiority would produce racial disparities in SES. The term structural racism is used to capture the ways in which inequities are perpetuated through the racialized differential access to resources, opportunities, and services that are codified in laws, policies, practices, and societal norms ( 23 , 32 , 33 , 36 – 40 ). This system harms marginalized populations at the expense of affording greater resources, opportunities, and other privileges to the dominant White society ( 23 , 32 , 33 , 36 – 40 ). Importantly, a single identifiable perpetrator is not visible making its denial easy and its identification and dissolution challenging ( 41 ).

However, the role of structural racism in creating and sustaining poverty is rarely discussed in scholarly and public circles despite the publishing of seminal works, such as Caste, Class and Race, Black Metropolis , and An American Dilemma during the mid-20th century ( 42 – 44 ). These groundbreaking books laid the foundation for several sociological studies documenting key structurally racist policies and practices (i.e., residential segregation) that created communities comprised of racial and ethnic minorities that are beset with poverty and related factors, including high unemployment, poor schools, substandard housing, and limited social mobility ( 45 – 47 ). Most White Americans were not exposed to this scholarship nor the overwhelming financial and economic disadvantages faced by African Americans and other marginalized groups. As such, public discourse has been largely shaped by a narrative of meritocracy which is laced with ideals of opportunity without any consideration of the realities of racism and race-based inequities in structures and systems that have locked individuals, families, and communities into poverty-stricken lives for generations. Pervasive public policies spanning from slavery to voter suppression have and continue to severely limit opportunities for social mobility among marginalized groups, thereby perpetuating and hardening vast inequities in power, status, and resources that define our racial caste system and structure ( 9 , 34 , 48 – 50 ).

The narrative of meritocracy has also been extended to immigrants, but it is framed through a narrative of European immigrants who work hard and become successful. However, immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America, in particular as well as many refugees from poor Asian and African countries are also exposed to laws and policies that create and perpetuate a life confronting persistent inequality and perceptions of inferiority.

These practices of race-based, community-level disinvestment in each of the domains of the social determinants coupled with a lack of a national health program condemn oppressed populations such as Black and Hispanic Americans, American Indians, and disproportionately non-English speaking immigrants and refugees to remain in poverty and suffer from suboptimal health. Thus, poverty represents a critical public health condition that is both determined by and perpetuated by structural racism.

Conceptual Framework of Poverty and Health

Socioeconomically disadvantaged populations across the globe bear a disproportionate burden of chronic diseases and are least likely to receive evidence-based care leading to optimal clinical outcomes ( 51 , 52 ). A basic understanding of the vulnerabilities of the marginalized and oppressed populations will facilitate the adaptation and adoption of the necessary policies to support disease treatment and prevention guidelines ( 52 ). The WHO has identified three key tenets to improving health at a global level that each reinforces the impact of socioeconomic factors: (1) improve the conditions of daily life; (2) tackle the inequitable distribution of power, money, and resources, the structural drivers of those conditions of daily life, globally, nationally, and locally; and (3) develop a workforce trained in the social determinants of health and raise public awareness about social needs and the social determinants of health ( 53 ). Social factors and health behaviors have contributed substantially to the growing non-communicable disease epidemics (e.g., obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and mental health disorders). A deeper understanding and integration of social and behavioral sciences is needed to equip medical and public health communities to address the challenge of providing quality care in the setting of contrasting financial and public health policies to control costs ( 54 ). A conceptual framework emphasizing the key pathways through which poverty and structural racism may influence wellness and health outcomes is shown in Figure 1 .

A conceptual framework emphasizing the key pathways through which poverty and structural racism may influence wellness and health outcomes [adapted from Wen et al. ( 55 )].

Perniciousness of Persistent Poverty

The Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) are macro-level factors that shape the economic, physical, psychological, and social environments in which people live ( 56 ). They are often viewed as having the capacity to enhance or diminish the resources available to individuals to promote health, including but not limited to the food supply, housing, economic and social relationships, transportation, employment, criminal justice, education, and health care, whose distribution across populations effectively determines length and quality of life and the programs and policies that direct them ( 23 ). The World Health Organization Commission on Social Determinants of Health has found that the poor health status of low resource persons, communities, and nations is directly related to the unequal distribution of power, income, goods, and services ( 53 ). Social structures and institutions with unequal and unfair social policies, economic arrangements, and practices have contributed to much of the health inequity present in the world. A brief overview of select medical conditions follows.

Communicable diseases: Poverty can contribute to many communicable diseases including many acute and chronic infectious diseases. Poverty and the associated disadvantage of personal and social resources often lead to unsafe habitation and lack of cleanliness, unhealthy diets, and malnutrition (including maternal-fetal), poor water quality, increased exposure to infectious diseases, environmental pollution and toxins, and more ( 57 ). The rates of infectious disease morbidity and mortality in low resource households, communities, and nations over decades bear witness to the considerable impact of economic inequality on health ( 53 ).

Maternal and child health: Poverty has been strongly linked with poor reproductive outcomes, both independently and in combination with exposure to discrimination ( 58 – 61 ). Maternal and child health among low-income and racial/ethnic minority groups are particularly susceptible to psychological stress, nutrition, substance use, and more ( 58 , 62 , 63 ).

Incarcerated youth: Globally and in the US, incarceration rates are higher among poor and marginalized groups ( 64 ). For children within the criminal justice system or otherwise deprived of liberty are at particularly high risk of violence, rape and sexual assault, sexually transmitted diseases, substance use disorders, mental illnesses, and physical disorders, many of which will continue throughout the life course ( 65 , 66 ). Furthermore, adult incarceration can create health deficits in familial youth ( 64 ).

Chronic non-communicable diseases: Similar patterns of disparities negatively are observed in the incidence and prevalence of chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, kidney disease, and others ( 67 – 70 ). Poverty can also have indirect implications for health ( 5 , 71 ). Race-based economic disadvantages can influence other social determinants as the intersection with poverty can further limit housing, educational, and employment opportunities, and these have also been linked to worse health outcomes ( 58 , 72 – 74 ). Poverty can also influence individual perceptions and behaviors ( 75 ). Relative and absolute economic deprivation can shape expectations and perceived life chances in a manner that individuals focus on surviving rather than thriving.

Mental health: In addition to the more traditional mental health conditions that may limit daily functioning, the additional chronic stress associated with navigating basic needs in a state of poverty can impair cognitive processing and the ability to remember and to perform implementation tasks ( 76 ), along with mistrust which may impact the ability of the individual to follow up on medical appointments, provider recommendations and more to conspire to limit health outcomes ( 77 ).

In summary, the impact of poverty on both the physical and psychological aspects of a person can play an important role in the many dimensions associated with the development and progression of diseases. The socioeconomic status of the individual may considerably impact the perception of the individual of many life issues, such as food, education, language, and time ( 75 ). While these concepts may be apparent and easily recognizable in other social disciplines, their presence and implications may be lost or concealed to many health care providers. Therefore, an understanding of how poverty may influence worldviews is critical for health professionals to truly understand the diverse group of patients they care for and how to better connect with those in an impoverished situation to optimize the effectiveness of traditional and alternative health strategies and recommendations. Table 1 highlights the influence of socioeconomic class including income on the context of patient-specific needs, values, and preferences, as well as considerations as to how racism may be operating in that setting.

Socioeconomic class and values of key determinants of health [adapted from Payne and Blair ( 75 )].

Poverty, Refugee, and Migration

As a large nation founded by immigrants, the United States inevitably and receives a large number of refugees, documented, and undocumented immigrants seeking a better life. The national narrative is that immigrants will find employment, gain some measure of socioeconomic equity and become eligible for health insurance. Unfortunately, this ideal only holds true for a subset of preferred immigrants largely from wealthy European countries. Individuals from formerly colonized nations in Central or South America, Asia, or Africa who come to the United States are often beset with persistent marginalization, poverty, and poor health ( 78 , 79 ). Furthermore, the likelihood that groups will be placed in such a situation is grounded in racial and ethnic discrimination as well as religious discrimination ( 11 ). Many immigrants with limited resources experience a combination of stressors, including discrimination, isolation, uncertainty, and mental health disorders from posttraumatic stress symptoms, depression, anxiety alcohol, and substance use to posttraumatic stress symptoms ( 80 , 81 ). In addition to researchers, providers have acknowledged the importance of poverty, discrimination, and other structural barriers on the lived experiences of immigrant clients and how it may impact their health ( 80 ).

What Might be the Way Forward?

An aphorism commonly attributed to the former Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) director Don Berwick is “Every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results it gets.” Our society has been outstanding in perpetuating the conditions that lead to and maintain poverty for a disproportionately high percentage of people of color. Unlike many narratives about poverty and the innate values of people of color, no one wakes up wanting to be poor or sick. Similar to most other major institutions, the health profession has chosen to work around the margins of poverty and to study and practice what is the best way to treat patients with limited resources, limited social support, and multiple exposures that develop or worsen the disease. While the stature of the health profession has given it an immense level of privilege and power that could be used to achieve different results in a nation with immense wealth, we have chosen as a collective not to address the root causes because it would conflict with the white supremacy ideology of a caste-based society. Continuing the same approach to medical education in the setting of our rapidly increasing wealth gap will lead to training physicians and other healthcare providers on how to most effectively care for fewer and fewer people. Creating a new generation of healthcare providers dedicated to mitigating the many social factors that conspire to perpetuate health disparities is one important step toward how the profession can rebuild patient trust and ultimately improve patient outcomes.

The solutions must involve stakeholders from across diverse sectors ( 82 ). The medical community and related stakeholders should adopt a strategic approach to address the financial and related public policy issues that will enable the delivery of appropriate clinical care to marginalized patient populations including low those with low SES, minoritized communities, and non-European immigrants and refugees ( 40 , 48 , 54 , 83 ). The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was one such policy that dramatically increased the insurance coverage eligibility for a large number of low-income young Americans ( 84 ), with important consequences for mitigating health disparities as well as possibly reducing bankruptcy related to health care costs ( 85 ), although other data suggest that there has been no impact on bankruptcy ( 86 ). Barcellos et al. ( 87 ) reported persons with a lower income (100–250% FPL) were 31% less likely to score above the median on ACA knowledge and 54% less likely to score above the median on health insurance knowledge vs. persons with higher income levels (>400% FPL). These findings highlight the need to not only implement health policies to increase access to care for lower-income individuals but also the need to ensure such policies and associated programs are reaching those in need. The ACA may set the stage for not only more available care but also more structured medical care systems which can help improve health outcomes ( 88 ). However, improved outreach and education of the potential benefits of and access to the ACA in lower-income communities and support to ensure people are enrolled is still required ( 87 ).

A major challenge for the broader medical community is to reconceptualize how it might improve each domain that impacts health outcomes, beyond those limited to a procedure or prescription. Increasing the awareness of environmental and social factors that contribute to health disparities must be followed by actions, such as cost-effective policies, to improve disease prevention and care in impoverished communities, especially in the setting of increasing inequities in wealth and many of the other SDoH ( 88 – 92 ). Healthcare providers can directly address many of the factors crucial for closing the health disparities gap by recognizing and trying to mitigate the race-based implicit biases many physicians carry ( 93 ), as well as leveraging their privilege to address the elements of institutionalized racism entrenched within the fabric of our society, starting with social injustice and human indifference ( 91 , 94 ). Examples of evidence-based initiatives to mitigate untoward effects of socioeconomic deprivation include the use of videos and/or novellas ( 95 , 96 ), the use of social support, such as social networks ( 97 ), and primary intervention strategies including the use of mobile clinics, lay health workers, and patient navigators to address chronic diseases ( 98 – 101 ). Finally, the healthcare sector should not miss the opportunity to learn important lessons as it strives to advance the necessary policies to improve social welfare and health outcomes, as the existence of health inequities provides unique, unrecognized opportunities for understanding biological, environmental, sociocultural, and healthcare system factors that can improve clinical outcomes ( 88 – 92 ).

“ Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life”—Nelson Mandela former President of South Africa .

Data Availability Statement

Author contributions.

KN wrote the first draft of the manuscript. BB, MB, CF, and RT wrote sections of the manuscript. All author contributed to conception and design of the study, contributed to manuscript revision, read, and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Funding. This work was supported in part by NIH grants K02AG059140-02S1 (MB), P30AG059298 (MB and RT), R25HL126145 (MB, BB, KN, and RT), UL1TR000124 (KN), P30AG021684 (KN), K02AG059140 (RT), and U54MD000214 (RT). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Discovery: Research at Princeton

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The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America

Harper Collins, August 2023

Kathryn Edin , William Church Osborn Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs; Director, Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing

Timothy Nelson , Lecturer in Sociology and Public Policy, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

H. Luke Shaefer , University of Michigan

Three of the nation’s top scholars —known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America — turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there. The unfolding revelation in The Injustice of Place is not about what sets these places apart, but about what they have in common — a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations demand a reckoning and a commitment to wage a new War on Poverty, with the unrelenting focus on our nation’s places of deepest need.

View: The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America

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The War on Poverty Is Over. Rich People Won.

The sociologist Matthew Desmond believes that being poor is different in the U.S. than in other rich countries.

Why do so many Americans live in poverty? Because so many rich people benefit from it.

This is the thesis of the lauded sociologist Matthew Desmond’s new book, Poverty, by America . The best seller is at once a careful exploration of poverty statistics; a deeply reported depiction of the lived experiences of the poor; an examination of the ways America’s wealthy exploit the masses; and a case for ending poverty. Desmond shows how the country’s employers, financial institutions, and landlords extract money from low-income families while rich families hoard opportunity for themselves. He also demonstrates how America’s safety-net programs are not just too stingy but poorly designed.

Desmond is a professor at Princeton. His previous book— Evicted , about the low-income rental market in Milwaukee—won a Pulitzer Prize. We discussed how the rich came to win the War on Poverty and what’s necessary to end poverty.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Annie Lowrey: How is poverty different in America than in its peer countries?

Matthew Desmond: We have more of it. We have double the child-poverty rate of Germany and South Korea. We have a lot less to go around with, in terms of fighting poverty. We collect a much smaller share of our GDP in taxes every year.

It’s different because it’s so unnecessary. We have so many resources. Our tolerance for poverty is very high, much higher than it is in other parts of the developed world. I don’t know if it’s a belief, a cliché, or a myth. You see a homeless person in Los Angeles; an American says, What did that person do? You see a homeless person in France; a French person says, What did the state do? How did the state fail them?

Government programs obviously work. I’ve been with people when they receive a housing voucher. They praise Jesus. They fall on their knees. They pray and weep and cry. We have massive amounts of evidence about the benefits of government spending on anti-poverty programs. But poverty is also about exploitation. We have all these anti-poverty programs that accommodate poverty without disrupting it. They’re not eliminating poverty at the root.

Read: The one cause of poverty that’s never examined

Lowrey: Who benefits from that exploitation? Who benefits from a person being homeless?

Desmond: A lot of us benefit from it. I don’t just mean the guy that’s a little richer than you or a lot richer than you. I mean a lot of us, those who have found security and comfort in America consuming the cheap goods and services that the working class produces for us.

Half of us are invested in the stock market. Many times, we see our savings going up and up and up when someone’s pay is going down and down and down. Those two things are related. Or think about the housing crisis: Many times, it’s not just corporate landowners who are benefiting from high rents. It’s homeowners whose housing values are propped up and kept high by a scarcity of housing that they contribute to.

Lowrey: Let’s drill down on housing. Talk me through how something wealth-generating for some families is wealth-sapping for others.

Desmond: This is a unique feature of American life. If you go to Germany, a lot of professionals live in social housing. It’s not stigmatized. They’re living shoulder to shoulder with folks that might be in a very different place than they are economically.

Here, the housing market is bifurcated. For two-thirds of the country —people who own homes—the housing market is almost miraculous. Homeownership is not a winning proposition for everyone—that was a resounding lesson of 2008. But for a lot of folks, it is their biggest source of wealth creation. It’s one of the biggest carve-outs in the tax code, with the mortgage deduction and other housing subsidies. And there are no rent hikes when you’re a homeowner. Then you have this other one-third. The rental market is just utterly brutal, especially for the poorest among them.

Those two experiences aren’t just different; they’re connected. If you think of zoning laws—that is how we build walls around our communities, how so many affluent communities keep out not just affordable housing, but any multifamily housing. That doesn’t just create these pockets of affluence; it also creates pockets of concentrated poverty.

Lowrey: How do wealthy neighborhoods fight against poorer families coming in?

Desmond: I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a zoning-board meeting where folks are debating affordable housing. It shows you just how much work and effort and force goes into defending segregation. The folks who show up for those meetings are really not representative of the broader community. They tend to be whiter, more affluent, more likely to be homeowners. It’s this interesting thing wherein a democratic process has an undemocratic outcome, because representation in this case is a defense of the status quo.

Lowrey: How do these dynamics affect lower-income families?

Desmond: It boils down to choice. You have no choice, you get screwed. Are poor renters being overcharged for housing? There’s really strong evidence that the answer is yes, because they have no other choice. They’re shut out of homeownership. They’re shut out of public housing, because the waiting lists are stretching into the years, even into the decades. They’re shut out of other kinds of housing assistance, because only one in four families that qualify for them receive any kind of help. So they have to take the best of bad options. They rent at the bottom of the market and still fork over enormous chunks of their income.

Lowrey: How much can you reduce this to a white desire to not have Black folks in their neighborhoods, to not have Black kids in their schools?

Desmond: It is impossible to write a book called Poverty, by America without writing a book about racism. It is crucial. It is huge. One of the big things that makes Black poverty and white poverty different is segregation. In white America, there’s no equivalent of the incredibly segregated and poor neighborhoods so many Black families find themselves in.

It’s interesting to read the histories of segregation in the 1950s or 1930s. The segregationists used the same exact arguments that we do today. They talk about property values, schools, and crime.

Lowrey: As you point out, this segregation benefits higher-income homeowners.

Desmond: I did a study with Nate Wilmers at MIT showing that landlords in poor neighborhoods don’t just make more than landlords in affluent neighborhoods. They make double. That blew me away. When I started my research for Evicted , I was like, Why would you want to buy a trailer park? The landlord of the mobile-home park I lived in let me see his rent rolls, his books. He was bringing home over $400,000 a year after expenses, running the poorest trailer park in the fourth-poorest city in America.

I checked to see if it was anomalous or a national pattern. And it was a national pattern. The reason I think this isn’t a bigger news story is that it isn’t the case in San Francisco, D.C., or Seattle, places where we all live. It is better to be a landlord in SoHo than the South Bronx. But in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, the opposite is true.

Lowrey: What’s the policy solution for housing exploitation?

Desmond: We need to stem the bleeding. Then we need policies that treat the disease. Evicted concluded with this call for a massive expansion of housing vouchers. Housing organizers are calling for rent control and rent-stabilization measures. I totally think that should be on the table. Even eviction-diversion programs —they have high success rates, and keeping families housed really, really matters.

Then let’s think about how to end housing exploitation among poor families. What works in New York or San Francisco is probably not the solution for rural Alabama or Cleveland. I’m for extending our investment in permanent affordable housing. That could be through a land bank and building out more co-op and tenant-run buildings. We could be building more of this amazing public housing that we started building over the last 10, 15 years, stuff that blends into the community and is just full of pride and color and life. I am totally for expanding homeownership opportunities to low-income families. There’s a strong case that there are huge returns on investment when you do that.

Read: America’s insidious eviction problem

Lowrey: What about federal spending on housing?

Desmond: We’re giving a patient with Stage 4 cancer an Advil and wondering why it doesn’t work. In 2020, we spent $53 billion on direct housing assistance to the needy, through public housing, Section 8 vouchers. We spent $193 billion on homeowner tax subsidies. Most of the benefit goes to families with six-figure incomes. Most white Americans are homeowners . Most Black and Latinx Americans aren’t, because of our systematic dispossession of people of color from the land. It is really hard to think of a social policy that does a better job of amplifying our economic and racial inequalities than our current housing policy does.

Lowrey: There was this old line on Medicaid: that it wasn’t insurance worth having. Is public housing really housing worth having?

Desmond: This image of old, Soviet, segregated housing is stuck in the American psyche. But we’ve learned from our sins. And today, we have these low-slung, often integrated, affordable housing units. The kids grow up in this stable environment. I don’t mean to romanticize it. It’s not perfect. But it is stable.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to eviction court. But if you go, there are just tons of kids. Until recently, one in the South Bronx had a day care inside it because there were so many kids coming through housing court. What we are comparing is not a family growing up in public housing versus a homeowner in Naperville, Illinois . We’re comparing a family growing up in public housing versus another family paying 50, 60, 70 percent of its income on housing and facing eviction on a routine basis, and maybe homelessness.

That has a profound effect on kids. They lose their school, their teachers, their neighborhood. There are massive health implications and job implications for the parents. I think it’s worth a tour. Go look at the affordable housing in your community. Change your mindset about it.

Lowrey: How much of the exploitation is driven by gentrification, by wealthy people displacing poorer people from a neighborhood and shutting them out as it gets richer?

Desmond: Eviction is not rare. Gentrification is. If you want to study eviction, you typically aren’t studying gentrified neighborhoods. You’re studying poor, segregated neighborhoods where, even there, housing costs have outrun people’s incomes.

But if we care about community change, if we care about the people investing their lives in neighborhoods getting the benefit of that investment, we should care about those families paying this externality for the neighborhood getting a new subway stop. They don’t get to benefit. That’s hugely important to think about. But if we are asking questions like Why are so many people losing their homes? Why is eviction so commonplace? Why is it affecting so many kids? , to answer those questions, we have to expand the aperture.

Lowrey: The book points out that our financial institutions, housing markets, and labor market all extract money from low-income families. How does that work for banking, given that wealthy families are the ones with all the money to begin with?

Desmond: By my calculation, financial institutions pull $61 million a day out of the pockets of the poor in fees—just fees, so they can access their money. Often this is just straight-up exploitative. Banks don’t have to charge overdraft fees. That’s not a thing they have to do to keep the lights on. That’s an incredible source of revenue. And people like you and me benefit from it, because we get free checking accounts subsidized by other people’s overdraft fees. Only 9 percent of bank users pay 84 percent of those fees, $11 billion a year . Payday-loan fees and check-cashing fees are part of that, but the overdraft costs are higher. This isn’t just about check-cashing stores with the bright-red signs in the poor neighborhoods. It’s also about the banks that you and I use.

Lowrey: Tell me more about your critique of the earned-income tax credit—which is usually considered one of our biggest and most effective means-tested programs, in terms of moving people above the poverty line.

Desmond: There’s strong evidence that it depresses wages. It’s both super helpful and vital for families, given the hand they’ve been dealt in today’s market. But it isn’t attacking the root cause of the problem. We don’t have the market doing its job.

Lowrey: I want to go back to this idea that there isn’t just more poverty in America, but that poverty in America is different , more precarious.

Desmond: In Evicted , I followed this woman I called Arlene. After one eviction, she started applying for housing. She applied to 20 apartments. Then 40 apartments. Then 60. Then 80. I was counting, and she was accepted to none of them. Finally, the 90th person said yes. She got rejected 89 times before she heard yes. Rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection , then to have someone ask you to think about job training? Or even showing up at your kid’s parent-teacher conference? Poverty just taxes your mind. It captures your mind.

That’s so crucial to our policy debate, because many times we have the causality backwards. Folks will say, If you want to get out of poverty, get a better job and make better decisions. But the evidence is that once we have a floor under people, that’s when they can start self-actuating. I love the health research about what happens when states raise the minimum wage. People stop smoking. Their babies are healthier at birth. Child-neglect charges go down. All these massive prosocial events.

The theory behind that: When you’re like Arlene— rejection, rejection, rejection, eviction, rejection, where are my kids going to sleep at night? —the willpower you might have to stop smoking is diminished. This is crucial to understanding the lived experience of poverty.

From the June 2021 issue: A simple approach to ending extreme poverty

Lowrey: We’ve seen large declines in the poverty rate in the past few years, after decades of slower progress. How and why did that happen?

Desmond: During COVID, we saw this incredible, bold relief, unmatched since the War on Poverty and the Great Society. If you look at the extended child tax credit, it dropped child poverty 46 percent in six months. If you look at emergency rental assistance, eviction rates drop to the lowest on record. If you look at incomes of families in the bottom half of the distribution—after the Great Recession, it took them 10 years to recover. This time, it took a year and a half. Night and day.

I see this as incredible, incredible evidence of what robust government spending can do. But those things are going away. We’re seeing evictions tick up again. We’re seeing the poverty rate tick up again. That should be troubling.

Lowrey: Do you think the policy response to the COVID recession changed how we understand poverty in America?

Desmond: I think it opened up the Overton window . In my world, when COVID hit, we immediately started worrying about the eviction crisis. Advocates started arguing for an eviction moratorium, and they were getting laughed out of the room at first. Even liberal activists thought this would never happen. One state passed it. Another state passed it. Pretty soon North Dakota had an eviction moratorium! And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention passed it under the Trump administration. It lasted almost a year and decreased the COVID death rate by 11 percent, according to a study out of Duke . It completely changed our imagination about what’s possible.

Lowrey: Yet there’s been relatively little agitation for the restoration of, say, the child tax credit.

Desmond: There’s this idea that the CTC didn’t gain popularity because it was pitched, marketed, and reported on as an anti-poverty project. That it didn’t poll well. The lesson was: Let’s pitch it differently. For me, that’s not the lesson. The lesson is How do we change common sense? It is time to push back against these old, tired, boring debates: Can we afford the CTC ? I just feel like that question is deeply dishonest and even immoral. We can clearly afford it if we had real tax enforcement that made sure that the richest among us paid the taxes they owed. This isn’t just talk.

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Mental health effects of poverty, hunger, and homelessness on children and teens

Rising inflation and an uncertain economy are deeply affecting the lives of millions of Americans, particularly those living in low-income communities. It may seem impossible for a family of four to survive on just over $27,000 per year or a single person on just over $15,000, but that’s what millions of people do everyday in the United States. Approximately 37.9 million Americans, or just under 12%, now live in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau .

Additional data from the Bureau show that children are more likely to experience poverty than people over the age of 18. Approximately one in six kids, 16% of all children, live in families with incomes below the official poverty line.

Those who are poor face challenges beyond a lack of resources. They also experience mental and physical issues at a much higher rate than those living above the poverty line. Read on for a summary of the myriad effects of poverty, homelessness, and hunger on children and youth. And for more information on APA’s work on issues surrounding socioeconomic status, please see the Office of Socioeconomic Status .

Who is most affected?

Poverty rates are disproportionately higher among most non-White populations. Compared to 8.2% of White Americans living in poverty, 26.8% of American Indian and Alaska Natives, 19.5% of Blacks, 17% of Hispanics and 8.1% of Asians are currently living in poverty.

Similarly, Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous children are overrepresented among children living below the poverty line. More specifically, 35.5% of Black people living in poverty in the U.S. are below the age of 18. In addition, 40.7% of Hispanic people living below the poverty line in the U.S. are younger than age 18, and 29.1% of American Indian and Native American children lived in poverty in 2018. In contrast, approximately 21% of White people living in poverty in the U.S. are less than 18 years old.

Furthermore, families with a female head of household are more than twice as likely to live in poverty compared to families with a male head of household. Twenty-three percent of female-headed households live in poverty compared to 11.4% of male-headed households, according to the U.S. Census Bureau .

What are the effects of poverty on children and teens?

The impact of poverty on young children is significant and long lasting. Poverty is associated with substandard housing, hunger, homelessness, inadequate childcare, unsafe neighborhoods, and under-resourced schools. In addition, low-income children are at greater risk than higher-income children for a range of cognitive, emotional, and health-related problems, including detrimental effects on executive functioning, below average academic achievement, poor social emotional functioning, developmental delays, behavioral problems, asthma, inadequate nutrition, low birth weight, and higher rates of pneumonia.

Psychological research also shows that living in poverty is associated with differences in structural and functional brain development in children and adolescents in areas related to cognitive processes that are critical for learning, communication, and academic achievement, including social emotional processing, memory, language, and executive functioning.

Children and families living in poverty often attend under-resourced, overcrowded schools that lack educational opportunities, books, supplies, and appropriate technology due to local funding policies. In addition, families living below the poverty line often live in school districts without adequate equal learning experiences for both gifted and special needs students with learning differences and where high school dropout rates are high .

What are the effects of hunger on children and teens?

One in eight U.S. households with children, approximately 12.5%, could not buy enough food for their families in 2021 , considerably higher than the rate for households without children (9.4%). Black (19.8%) and Latinx (16.25%) households are disproportionately impacted by food insecurity, with food insecurity rates in 2021 triple and double the rate of White households (7%), respectively.

Research has found that hunger and undernutrition can have a host of negative effects on child development. For example, maternal undernutrition during pregnancy increases the risk of negative birth outcomes, including premature birth, low birth weight, smaller head size, and lower brain weight. In addition, children experiencing hunger are at least twice as likely to report being in fair or poor health and at least 1.4 times more likely to have asthma, compared to food-secure children.

The first three years of a child’s life are a period of rapid brain development. Too little energy, protein and nutrients during this sensitive period can lead to lasting deficits in cognitive, social and emotional development . School-age children who experience severe hunger are at increased risk for poor mental health and lower academic performance , and often lag behind their peers in social and emotional skills .

What are the effects of homelessness on children and teens?

Approximately 1.2 million public school students experienced homelessness during the 2019-2020 school year, according to the National Center for Homeless Education (PDF, 1.4MB) . The report also found that students of color experienced homelessness at higher proportions than expected based on the overall number of students. Hispanic and Latino students accounted for 28% of the overall student body but 38% of students experiencing homelessness, while Black students accounted for 15% of the overall student body but 27% of students experiencing homelessness. While White students accounted for 46% of all students enrolled in public schools, they represented 26% of students experiencing homelessness.

Homelessness can have a tremendous impact on children, from their education, physical and mental health, sense of safety, and overall development. Children experiencing homelessness frequently need to worry about where they will live, their pets, their belongings, and other family members. In addition, homeless children are less likely to have adequate access to medical and dental care, and may be affected by a variety of health challenges due to inadequate nutrition and access to food, education interruptions, trauma, and disruption in family dynamics.

In terms of academic achievement, students experiencing homelessness are more than twice as likely to be chronically absent than non-homeless students , with greater rates among Black and Native American or Alaska Native students. They are also more likely to change schools multiple times and to be suspended—especially students of color.

Further, research shows that students reporting homelessness have higher rates of victimization, including increased odds of being sexually and physically victimized, and bullied. Student homelessness correlates with other problems, even when controlling for other risks. They experienced significantly greater odds of suicidality, substance abuse, alcohol abuse, risky sexual behavior, and poor grades in school.

What can you do to help children and families experiencing poverty, hunger, and homelessness?

There are many ways that you can help fight poverty in America. You can:

• Volunteer your time with charities and organizations that provide assistance to low-income and homeless children and families.
• Donate money, food, and clothing to homeless shelters and other charities in your community.
• Donate school supplies and books to underresourced schools in your area.
• Improve access to physical, mental, and behavioral health care for low-income Americans by eliminating barriers such as limitations in health care coverage.
• Create a “safety net” for children and families that provides real protection against the harmful effects of economic insecurity.
• Increase the minimum wage, affordable housing and job skills training for low-income and homeless Americans.
• Intervene in early childhood to support the health and educational development of low-income children.
• Provide support for low-income and food insecure children such as Head Start , the National School Lunch Program , and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) .
• Increase resources for public education and access to higher education.
• Support research on poverty and its relationship to health, education, and well-being.
• Resolution on Poverty and SES
• Pathways for addressing deep poverty
• APA Deep Poverty Initiative

Introduction: How American Literature Understands Poverty

Clare Callahan is assistant lecturer at Sacred Heart University, where she teaches courses in poverty and literature and the health humanities. She is currently working on her first book project, “Abandoned Subjects.” Her writing on women and poverty in modernist American literature has been published in Twentieth Century Literature .

Joseph Entin is professor of English and American studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is coeditor of three books and the author of Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (2007) and Living Labor: Fiction, Film, and Precarious Work , which is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press in its Class: Culture series.

Irvin Hunt is associate professor of English and African American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement (2022). His writing on class and social movements in the Black radical tradition has been published in American Literary History, Public Books, American Quarterly , and in the collection African American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950 (2022).

Kinohi Nishikawa is associate professor of English and African American studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground (2018). His writing on class and gender politics in African American print culture has been published in American Literary History , the Edinburgh History of Reading , and in the collection Are You Entertained? Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century (2020).

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Clare Callahan , Joseph Entin , Irvin Hunt , Kinohi Nishikawa; Introduction: How American Literature Understands Poverty. American Literature 1 September 2022; 94 (3): 383–397. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10084470

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Public rhetoric tends to present poverty as a static condition, often a condition of abject and total deprivation, rather than recognize it as an ongoing act of dispossession. Yet the word poverty itself has the potential to open up quite different connotations. Based on a somewhat uncommon etymology, poverty derives from the Old French poeste , which means power, and poeste gives form to in poustie , which means possibility. 1 As possibility, poverty is a dilemma for governance and, likewise, for the way poverty studies often treats the poor: as “a discrete and singular category,” as apprehensible and governable (Goldstein 2018 : 83). This special issue is a call to reflect on interpretive approaches: to consider how the very attempt to govern people betrays the way poverty poses a problem not only for governance but also, by exuberant extension, for representation itself. We say exuberant , productively overflowing, to mark how literature gives us the elasticity to think poverty beyond the disciplinary walls that segregate thought around it and beyond the representational need to make the poor, and even impoverishment, apprehensible. We have put together this special issue because we believe literature can renovate the word poverty in ways that illuminate conditions it has been wielded to hide, as well as the new coalitions and forms of relationality poverty makes possible. Across two centuries, literature has unsettled the term poverty , and we need this disruption now more than ever. The essays in this special issue show that literature uniquely exceeds the terms of poverty’s representation. It alights our attention on our manner of attending, beyond attempts to reduce, resolve, or otherwise impoverish our understanding of these terms.

• The Pervasiveness of Poverty

In December 2017, Australian professor Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, arrived in Los Angeles for a two-week tour of the United States to investigate the contours of economic suffering in the world’s wealthiest nation. Accompanied by a reporter and photographer from the London-based newspaper The Guardian (but not, notably, a representative from the New York Times ), Alston traveled from California to Alabama; Washington, DC; West Virginia; and Puerto Rico. 2 He found, The Guardian reported, “a land of extreme inequality,” and his conclusions were blunt: poverty in the United States is pervasive; “contrasts between private wealth and public squalor abound” (Pilkington 2017 ). Drawing on statistics provided by the US Census Bureau, Alston reported that, as of 2016, 41 million Americans, almost 13 percent of the population, lived in poverty. Forty percent of those lived in “deep” poverty, with incomes less than 50 percent of the official poverty threshold. In addition, he noted, the United States had the highest infant mortality rate in the so-called developed world; 18 percent of American children lived in poverty, comprising over 30 percent of the nation’s poor (Alston 2017a ).

Alston presented economic hardship and deprivation in the United States as a striking paradox: expansive poverty amid America’s affluence and its foundational dedication to equality and opportunity. In the report on his findings, Alston ( 2017b ) noted that, during his tour, “American exceptionalism was a constant theme in my conversations. But instead of realizing its founders’ admirable commitments, today’s United States has proved itself to be exceptional in far more problematic ways that are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights.” This notion, that American poverty is a paradox of plenty, is a venerable, common framing. Noted poverty scholar Mark Robert Rank ( 2011 : 16) likewise describes poverty as “a fundamental paradox: in America, the wealthiest country on earth, one also finds the highest rates of poverty in the developed world.” Challenging the deeply embedded notion that poverty is a product of individual faults or pathologies—a refusal to work hard, a lack of adequate skills, a psychology of dependency—Rank contends that “American poverty is largely the result of failings at the economic and political levels.” While contesting the idea that poverty constitutes an individual rather than an institutional problem is laudable, the assertion that poverty is a structural “failing” nevertheless suggests that economic deprivation is a contradiction rather than a constitutive element, a bug and not a design feature. Such framing obscures the possibility that poverty is endemic to US capitalist society—a predictable, integral, even necessary, outcome of the way America’s profoundly racialized economy is structured.

Despite the undeniable statistical evidence for economic privation and suffering in the United States, poverty continues to be “poorly understood” and too-little discussed, especially in the humanities and certainly in literary studies (Rank, Eppard, and Bullock 2021 ). Poverty presents not only a policy problem but also a conceptual problem of seeing and representation; if and how poverty can be addressed as a collective social and political concern depends on how it is depicted and understood. Historian Alice O’Connor ( 2001 ) contends that the institutionalized study of poverty, which she calls “poverty knowledge,” has privileged the expertise of professional researchers and academics while largely excluding poor people themselves as sources of insight. In the twentieth century, poverty emerged as an object of intense public interest and debate in key moments: the Progressive era, when muckrakers and reformers set out to uncover and remedy the contradictions roiling an emerging industrial modernity; the 1930s, when writers, artists, and documentarians, many employed by the US government, surveyed economic hardship across the country and forged support for New Deal policies; and the 1960s, when the federal government launched a “war” on poverty. But the public’s attention to poverty has waned over the past fifty years, under neoliberalism. In the 1980s and 1990s, the war on poverty became a de facto war on the poor, as liberals and conservatives alike breathed new life into long-standing ideas about the “unworthy” poor to focus policy on individual pathology and dependency, infamously personified in President Ronald Reagan’s spurious image of the “welfare queen.” Mobilizing the “culture of poverty” thesis to blame the poor—especially poor people of color—for the poverty they faced, this line of thinking was weaponized to justify the 1996 passage, under President Bill Clinton, of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which aimed to “end welfare as we know it.” In the ensuing neoliberal era, US social policy, under the guise of promoting “hard work” and “healthy marriages,” has functioned effectively to punish, humiliate, and control the poor, especially those who are Black, Latinx, and Indigenous. 3

Propped up by corporate and academic interests, the neoliberal consensus on economic inequality has shown significant cracks since the turn of the century. Over the last decade in particular, economic inequality and extreme wealth have emerged as prominent topics of American political and public discourse, from Occupy Wall Street and its framing of the 1 percent versus the 99 percent; to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, which openly criticized corporate greed and the consolidation of wealth in the hands of a few billionaires; to the swelling membership of the Democratic Socialists of America. All of these developments raised spiking economic disparity to national prominence. Yet such attention to the growing inequality of our society seems to go hand in hand with relative silence on poverty, whether from voices of the poor or voices for the poor. 4 We may be living in a second Gilded Age, but it seems that our capacity for critique has not kept up with the intensified, and ubiquitous, realities of economic hardship in the United States. The fact that images of dependency, poor choices, and individual and communal pathology continue to represent the most readily available ways to understand poverty suggests that our contemporary political and media cultures are suffering a poverty of the imagination.

The same might be said of our literary culture. In a 2009   Inside Higher Ed op-ed, Keith Gandal predicted that the economic crisis would lead to literary studies finally putting “poverty near the top of the agenda and the center of the field.” More than a decade later, poverty remains stubbornly marginal to literary studies. While poverty constitutes an enduring topic of research in the social sciences, with numerous efforts to correct for the biases embedded in the shockingly durable “culture of poverty” thesis devised originally by Columbia University–trained anthropologist Oscar Lewis in the late 1950s, 5 literary studies and the humanities more broadly have had little to say about it. To be sure, there is a growing, and important, focus in criticism and theory on wealth inequality, precarity, dispossession, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and other forms of domination and subordination. Yet poverty is not reducible to the dynamics named by these keywords, even as it is connected to them. There is a lacuna in humanistic inquiry around not so much the conditions that create poverty as the very recognition of impoverishment as such.

This special issue of American Literature addresses that blind spot by asking what literary culture distinctively has to offer an understanding of poverty in the United States. What theories and methods of reading does literature about poverty demand? What language for talking about poverty does literature provide? In turn, what kinds of demands and pressures do efforts to address poverty, dispossession, and extreme economic inequality place on literary form and language? If the social sciences have claimed this area of inquiry for decades, what can literary studies do to help complicate and challenge dominant forms of poverty knowledge? Might literature offer a poverty knowledge of its own?

In addressing these questions, we build on critical work that has attended to the vexing dilemmas of literary and cultural representation raised by poverty as a category of analysis. Gavin Jones’s American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945 (2007) suggests that poverty has generated “a sophisticated literary strain” (Jones 2007 : xv) that has not been adequately examined because the focus in literary studies “on oppressed subject positions has tended to evade the problems of economic inequality by centering social marginalization on the cultural identity of the marginalized” (7). Gandal, author of The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum ( 1997 ) and Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film ( 2007 ), and Walter Benn Michaels, author of The Trouble with Diversity ( 2007 ), agree with Jones that the problem of economic privation in US literature has been subsumed by the language of identity. Elsewhere, Michael Denning ( 2007 ; 2010 ) argues for reassessing the categories of labor and class to account for global poverty, precarity, and unemployment. This special issue contributes to these reassessments. Yet rather than juxtapose identity and economics, marginalization and class, subjectivity and structural power, we aim to explore the literary interplay of these categories.

As an economic and social condition, poverty is often perceived as a static state of lack, exclusion, and invisibility rather than, more actively, as a process, a relation, and a matter of “predatory inclusion” or “organized abandonment” (Taylor 2019 ; Gilmore 2015 ). As a form of structured economic deprivation, poverty is always contextual, defined by and against specific social and national norms and expectations; the poor are always conceived against the well-to-do, although individuals often move across those economic categories over time. (In fact, Rank [2011: 18] and his colleagues have found that most Americans will spend at least one year below the poverty line during the course of their lives.) Where to draw the “poverty line” is a subject of debate and struggle. In this special issue, we are concerned with poverty not only as a material condition but also as an object and source of knowledge and art; poverty presents an epistemological and representational problem as well as an economic and social one. To be sure, a great deal of American writing has tended to reinforce the abject incapacity of the poor and the seemingly intractable boundary between the poor and well off. By contrast, this special issue turns primarily to the work of writers who expose the damaging incapacity of those very literary frameworks, suggesting both the failures of top-down efforts to render the poor legible and the possibilities that literature can render poverty otherwise, beyond the conventional liberal categories and conceptualizing lenses that have come to dominate representations of poverty in the United States.

• Reading Poverty Otherwise

Several critics have turned to literature as a wellspring for thinking through such alternatives. Asking, after Jones’s American Hungers , why scholarship in the United States has so far failed to produce “a theoretical discourse that describes the contemporary experience of poverty,” Gayle Salamon ( 2010 : 176) calls for a theory that would enable thinking about the lives of the poor in terms of “their conditions of possibility otherwise,” suggesting that literary scholars are in a position to produce such a theory. The relentless present that seems to organize the experience of poverty and beyond which Salamon calls on literary theory to think is, we suggest, not only a temporal but also an ontological problem, one that has often encouraged the bare life conception of poverty that this special issue seeks to contest. 6

In an effort to understand poverty in terms of power and potentiality, Patrick Greaney takes up this ontological problem by turning to literature. “The thematic representation of the poor,” Greaney ( 2007 : xv–xvi) writes, “as an actual individual or group characterized by socioeconomic misery alternates with the non-representative moments in which literary language . . . reduces itself to the potential for representation.” Greaney turns to literary language, then, precisely because it does not seek to capture and negate the agential aspects of poverty that seem otherwise to evade representation. “Literary language,” he continues, “acknowledges in moments when it becomes poor that poverty creates not an identity but a capacity, even if it appears,” through the lens of deprivation, “as an incapacity.” In other words, for Greaney, literature, in its juxtaposition of theme and form, understands the ontological contingency of poverty as both less and more than the possessive individualism of the neoliberal subject. This special issue calls for literary scholars to take up the work of navigating this persistent conflict between the ongoing ontological dispossession that denies the poor the right to exist—even as they perform productive social and material labor that is critical to society and the economy—and the ongoing emotional, psychological, and physical labor by impoverished people of ontological repossession in the form of covert capacities and potentiality. By ontological repossession , we mean the ways in which poor people are continually reclaiming their status as social and human subjects despite sociopolitical systems that would deny them such status.

Greaney’s reading calls to mind the writer Dorothy Allison’s ( 1992 ) observation, in the context of her coming out as a lesbian when she was a young girl in a poor and working-class churchgoing community, that being an “endangerment to society . . . gives you a lot of power.” Along these lines, this special issue suggests that the literature of poverty does not merely represent poverty but in effect offers a theory of reading poverty otherwise—a theory that might help us to recognize the forms of social, epistemological, and even material power the poor possess despite their active dispossession. The United States has an especially rich tradition of literature by and about the poor, from its inception and extending into our contemporary moment. 7 Contemporary texts that surpass the paradigm of representation as a mode of objectification, pathologization, or surveillance, or of imagining a futurity for the poor only by way of uplift, include fiction by Allison, Gloria Naylor, Jesmyn Ward, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Junot Díaz, and Tommy Orange, as well as poetry by Rafael Campo and C. D. Wright, to name only a few. Analyses of these authors’ writing has focused primarily on issues of race and gender and only secondarily on poverty. This trend has had the perhaps inadvertent effect of treating poverty as a socioeconomic condition or circumstance in which more organic forms of identity are grounded. In such readings, poverty becomes background rather than an active subject, process, or relation.

Together with the contributors to this special issue, we want to ask how an academic conversation around such a set of texts might be transformed if the question of poverty became a primary critical framework through which they were read. One challenge this possibility poses is that, while writers and scholars have sought to recuperate minoritized racial and gender identities through affirmative and celebratory narratives, a similarly recuperative approach to understanding poverty seems to run a greater risk of romanticizing material deprivation; at the same time, lamenting these material realities of poverty risks framing the poor as abject. 8 Extending poverty studies to include literary studies, or vice versa, offers the opportunity to reflect on how the literary as a unique mode of representation can elucidate the ways in which scarcity is manufactured in order to disinherit targeted populations, while also valuing the alternative epistemologies, forms of sociality, and aesthetic and cultural practices that communities produce in response to disinheritance.

Literature and literary studies can, moreover, shape an understanding of poverty by theorizing a mode of address that can resist forms of representation that have historically enabled, for example, criminalization of the means of survival among the poor; at the same time, literature can navigate the critical representational structures through which the poor demand resources necessary for more durable, less provisional modes of living. That the literary as a form of representation grapples with its own conditions of possibility situates it as having a privileged relationship to modes of being, like poverty, that have historically and methodologically posed a problem of representation. Consider, for instance, the scene from Jacob A. Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) in which the early flash technology of Riis’s camera causes him to set fire to one of the tenement buildings he’s touring and attempting to document. How the Other Half Lives depicts a city riven between genteel society and the tenements. Riis’s ( 1997 : 38) voyeuristic tour through the tenements’ “dark bedrooms” frequently followed the police, who at times burst into apartments and rooming houses at night to expose the dangers lurking within. In the cited scene, Riis acknowledges that “once, in taking a flash-light picture of a group of blind beggars . . . I managed to set fire to the house” (30). Riis’s incendiary mode of expression here betrays the violence that underlies certain forms of representation: in attempting to bring to light—to expose and enclose—the dark spaces of the tenements, he nearly burns one down. Only the thickness of dirt on the walls, a violation of standards of hygiene, keeps it from burning (30). What Riis ultimately illuminates, then, is the capacity of impoverished spaces themselves to interfere in their negation. In this way, literary language, as a reflexive form that mediates what escapes or resists representation, speaks to the mechanics of this interference. This scene acts as a reminder that poverty , in its etymological relation to aporia , suggests both a without and also a kind of exuberance, what we have evoked here as the “sociality” and “potentiality” and what might also be called the threatening alterity or “collective living otherwise” of the poor (Goldstein 2021 : 117). If certain literary, photographic, and journalistic texts and traditions have variously sought to enclose the poor through exposure, then the work of literary criticism in poverty studies today is twofold: to identify contemporary rhetorical practices of such enclosure and to elaborate narrative countermovements and alternative vocabularies.

• Beats per Minute

In many respects, centering poverty in literary studies is work that remains to be done. We consider this introduction, as well as the essays assembled here, a collective step toward that work. In taking that step, we believe a broad range of criticism may begin to find common ground where it is otherwise siloed into disciplinary knowledge formations. Literary poverty studies might bring together scholarship on financialization and debt; settler colonialism and dispossession; racial capitalism and the carceral state; foreclosure and homelessness; class and proletarianism; and the psychic lives of precarity. It also has the potential to bridge period studies on the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the War on Poverty era, and our present moment. But in order to do these things, critics must be willing to name, address, and engage poverty in literary and cultural representation, even and especially when it refuses to identify itself as such. For why should it not be the case that, given the trajectory of poverty discourse over the past century, literature would struggle to represent an alternately pathologized and obscured life experience? As critics delve into the literary and historical archives of forgotten or buried experience, perhaps we ought to train our senses on a population whose very existence challenges the norms by which we assign value to social and political identities.

As we worked on this project, we considered how we might convene a special issue in which much of the editorial work involves bringing that field into critical discourse. Our method of curating the articles and review essays that appear here identifies poverty as a critical keyword in literary studies. This process of identification is open-ended, carried out with contributors as they presented and revised their work. The articles represent original research across two centuries of American literary history, drawing on sundry subfields. Likewise, the review essays reflect on recent monographs that address questions of poverty and dispossession in literature and criticism even if not all are explicitly about those topics. In bringing these pieces together, neither we nor the authors proceeded from a predetermined set of disciplinary or even interdisciplinary moves. The task was to think together about what it means to center poverty in literary studies at all. A welcome result of that work is five articles that do much to expand the critical imagination. In their own ways, they approach poverty not only as a socioeconomic condition but also as a mode of experience that exceeds racialized and capitalist taxonomies.

Jean Franzino’s “Tales Told by Empty Sleeves: Disability, Mendicancy, and Civil War Life Writing” begins the issue. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials, from street-corner ephemera to federal pension files, Franzino analyzes the textual forms and reception contexts of printed media sold by disabled Civil War veterans for their economic support. These so-called mendicant texts, whose first-person literary accounts lent support to face-to-face financial transactions, highlight traits of authenticity, individuality, and agency in a process Franzino theorizes as a scene of “prosthetic narrative.” Not coincidentally, such traits lie at the heart of how scholars value life writing as both validating and informing the critical orientation of disability studies and poverty studies alike. Yet the powerful connection between material impoverishment and literary creation in mendicant texts means that these traits cannot be taken at face value: some disabled people had to invent the truth they knew people wanted to hear. Thus mendicant texts are, in Franzino’s terms, canny performances of need to a public that risks becoming indifferent to disabled veterans’ plight. In a remarkable critical turn, she contends that approaching mendicant texts precisely for their fictionality and serial or generic authorship allows us to apprehend the actual deprivation from which these people suffered. Moving beyond the need to find “proof” of intersectional oppression, Franzino suggests that mendicant performativity outlines the social dynamics that produce disabled, impoverished subjects in the first instance.

In her article, “Picturing Poverty in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Lori Merish similarly enlists the archive; here, she uses the photographic archive of the same era in order to trace a correspondence between the emerging conception of poverty as a social problem, rather than as an inevitable condition, and the emergence of the modern conception of childhood as a state of dependency. Tracing this correspondence in philanthropic photographic images of poor children, Merish shows that the modern appreciation for childhood innocence surfaced simultaneously and dovetails with the perceived innocence, which is to say, the representational authority, of the photographic medium. In this way, philanthropic photography of poor children in the mid-nineteenth century seeks to void what we have already described here as the threatening alterity of the poor. Merish, considering the work of pioneering urban reformer Samuel B. Halliday and his collaborator, the photographer Richard A. Lewis, before she turns to an examination of “the literary afterlife” of Halliday’s images in Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick (1868), argues that mid-nineteenth-century visual and literary imagery of poverty configured the poor as morally legible by picturing their deprivation; in this sense, she advances Franzino’s reading, with regard to Civil War writing, of the fraught deprivation narratives of mendicant texts. “Picturing Poverty” thus also contributes to this special issue’s taking issue with historical and ongoing efforts to render the poor and poverty itself apprehensible through narratives of incapacity and privation. Merish builds on our critique not only in showing how philanthropic photographs of poor children act as a form of capture but also by further arguing that this body of photography and the literature it haunts, as seen in Alger, signifies a willingness on the part of the subject to be captured, to be made visible, a willingness that renders its subject worthy of philanthropic resources.

In “‘Ain’t Any Chance to Rise in the Paper Business’: Poverty, Race, and Horatio Alger’s Newsboy Novels,” Emily Gowen picks up where Merish left off, with a resonant study of what, she argues, is literature’s historical dependence on—rather than transcendence of—a mass print culture supported by the economic exploitation of another group of urban minors: newsboys. Like Merish, Gowen contends that Alger valorizes the impoverished adolescent who surrenders to surveillance, a willing capitulation that Alger associates with Anglo-Saxon whiteness. But in her readings of Ragged Dick and Rough and Ready (1869), Gowen takes a different tack, seeing in these novels a challenge to the nineteenth-century notion that cultural literacy could be a source of upward mobility for the newsboy. She thus interrogates and departs from the dominant reading of Alger as an apologist for philanthropic paternalism. Alger’s imagining of “a workable path up and out of poverty” through self-making, Gowen claims, actually functions to expose the impossibility of any class or individual transcending social and economic forces. In this way, Gowen’s reading of Alger’s novels treats literature as a reflexive mode capable of autocriticism in its laying bare the bankruptcy of the liberal notions of progress and the self on which literary value has historically been predicated. In this treatment of literature, Gowen does the work for which this special issue calls, that of identifying rhetorical practices of enclosure within a set of texts and recognizing narrative countermovements within the same set of texts.

Such reflexivity is expertly on display in Cody C. St. Clair’s “The Scene of Eviction: Reification and Resistance in Depression-Era Narratives of Dispossession.” St. Clair locates the problems of housing and homelessness at the center of modernism during the 1930s. Against the backdrop of newspaper reports on proliferating evictions (such reportage was a genre growing popular by the day with its pathologization of the poor), St. Clair compares eviction scenes in H. T. Tsiang’s The Hanging on Union Square (1935) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), with passing but perceptive treatment of works by Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, and others. This comparison produces both a material and aesthetic intersectionality: according to St. Clair, Tsiang uses a “flat” Cubist aesthetic, Ellison a “thick” collagist one, and together these horizontal and vertical approaches reflect the entanglements of racial and class mechanisms. St. Clair ultimately shows how these authors exploit the internal contradictions of dispossession. Forms of reification, St. Clair argues, are both marks of structural violence and means for being otherwise, for practicing alternative and potentiating ways of relating to housing and of building coalitions.

Continuing this vein of transfiguration, Crystal S. Rudds explores the manner in which literary representations bring to light individual and collective capacities that are typically rendered invisible by dominant discourses of urban poverty as a form of pathological failure. Rudds’s essay, “On Perspective and Value: Black Urbanism, Black Interiors, and Public Housing Fiction,” examines literary representations of one of the most recognizable, highly charged, and racialized spaces of poverty in US society—public housing, which prevailing depictions tend to render as a realm of abject Blackness, crime, and human incapacity that is effectively beyond repair or redemption. To exceed these reifying frames, Rudds contends, is a matter of both literary history and literary critical method; it requires knowing not only where to look—in this case, Frank London Brown’s novel Trumbull Park (1959) and Jasmon Drain’s short story collection Stateway’s Garden (2020), both part of a larger tradition of public housing fiction—but also how to read, in this instance, phenomenologically, through the grounded, subjective perspectives of public housing residents themselves, rather than through an exterior perspective that sees “the ghetto” as a symbol of material and cultural impoverishment. Reading public housing fiction phenomenologically, Rudds contends, makes visible what Elizabeth Alexander calls “the Black interior,” interior spaces of relation and sociality that lie beyond, and implicitly refuse and refute, the often condescending or castigating disciplinary gaze of the social and behavioral sciences. Thus, writing the social life of physical spaces—apartments, hallways, kitchens, and bedrooms—produces “a countercultural value system that speaks back to outsider rhetorical claims.” Public housing fiction offers an encounter with and an understanding of poverty, but it does so through the place- and value-making practices, relations, and struggles of residents rather than the pity, contempt, or fear of external commentators.

Together, these essays stage what is at stake in how literature understands poverty, elucidating not only the problem of poverty but also, and especially, the problem of how we see it. To see poverty differently, they might conclude, is not only a matter of what we see. It is a matter of reflecting on how we see. This work of reflection brings us to the art that graces this issue’s cover: Kevin Lane’s “Beats per Minute.” Lane’s painting mimics a mirror. It is an abstraction sensitively grounded in the material conditions of poverty, which have everything to do with the conditions of perspective. His inkblot technique, a paper fold (hold) that becomes a kaleidoscope, brings looking into crisis: color under duress should not be able to do that. The sheer visual force of it, its exuberance, its use of brown that fades with surprise into purple, pink, yellow, and green, all figured as a heart—to enter these pages this way is to disrupt all of poverty’s knee-jerk associations: darkness, deprivation, and so on. It is to look at vibrant forms of life and living hidden behind structures of confinement. We see wings that are more than wings, hence a heart that is more than a heart, more than what a body bears behind a cage. With Lane, as with everyone else in this volume, we mean not only to look again. We mean to look differently.

Oxford English Dictionary , “Poverty,” https://www-oed-com.sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/149126?redirectedFrom=poverty#eid (accessed April 14, 2022).

A search of the New York Times reveals no coverage of Alston’s American sojourn, although the paper did cover Alston’s ensuing trip to the United Kingdom.

See Wacquant 2009 and Goldstein 2021 .

A notable exception here is the contemporary Poor People’s Campaign, which aims “to build a broad, fusion movement that could unite poor and impacted communities across the country.” https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/about/ .

See Lewis 1959 , 1966 .

Salamon ( 2010 : 175) argues that poverty works to force the poor “relentlessly into the present.”

John Marsh ( 2011 : 606) notes that “American literature itself could be said to begin with the problem of poverty and inequality,” while “countless American writers . . . have at one point or another turned their thinking or their art toward the question of poverty.”

John Allen ( 2004 : 11) similarly notes that criticism on themes of homelessness has largely taken up literary romanticism or realism, categories, he argues, that should be questioned.

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System Publications

The Enduring Challenge of Concentrated Poverty in America: Case Studies from Communities Across the U.S.

by The Federal Reserve System and the Brookings Metropolitan Policy program .

In 2006, the Community Affairs Offices of the Federal Reserve System partnered with the Brookings Institution to examine the issue of concentrated poverty. The resulting report, The Enduring Challenge of Concentrated Poverty in America: Case Studies from Communities Across the U.S. , profiles 16 high-poverty communities from across the country, including immigrant gateway, Native American, urban, and rural communities. Through these case studies, the report contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of poor people living in poor communities, and the policies that will be needed to bring both into the economic mainstream.

In the Richmond Fed District, this special report looks at the factors that give rise to high-poverty neighborhoods in West Greenville, NC and McDowell County, WV and the challenges they face.

Poverty data highlights include:

West Greenville, N.C.:

• The neighborhood poverty rate was more than 40 percent, twice as high as the poverty rate for the Greenville MSA.
• One in five households was headed by a single parent.
• Nearly 60 percent of children lived in poor households.

McDowell County, W.Va.:

• The poverty rate was 38 percent.
• One in every three residents aged 18 to 64 does not have health insurance – the lowest rate of coverage in West Virginia.
• Of the county’s working-age population, 40 percent claimed a disability of some kind.

Additional Resources

The Enduring Challenge of Concentrated Poverty in America

America Looks at Poverty All Wrong

P overty in America has, for decades, been framed as an issue of “them” rather than “us.” The poverty stricken are routinely thought to reside far outside of mainstream America. Central to this understanding is the belief that the poor haven’t worked hard enough to pull themselves up by their bootstraps—or that they’ve made bad decisions and choices throughout their lives, resulting in poverty.

There is also a strong racial component to this perception. Poverty is typically portrayed as a Black or Brown problem rather than an American problem. Furthermore, the poor are depicted as largely confined to inner cities with high crime rates and other pathological conditions, mired in poverty for generations.

Would it surprise you, then, to learn that between the ages of 20 and 75, 75 % of all Americans will spend at least one year in or near poverty? Or that only 10% of the poor live in high poverty neighborhoods? Or that, according the U.S. Census Bureau, two thirds of the poor classify themselves as White? Or that most individuals in poverty remain poor for only one or two years? All of these facts describe the actual realities of poverty, rather than the myths.

It turns out that the reach of poverty is incredibly wide. Most Americans will at some point in their lives encounter poverty. The reason for this is that during the course of a lifetime, many unanticipated events can and do occur: losing a job, families splitting up, getting sick, or even experiencing a pandemic. When such events strike, there is very little in the form of a social safety net to protect people from falling into poverty in this country. The U.S. devotes far fewer of its resources to preventing poverty than most other industrialized countries. The result is that we have the highest rates of poverty and inequality among the group of wealthy nations. In America, the poverty-stricken can be found down nearly any street, within any demographic or racial group, and across the entire political and ideological spectrum.

Read More: Nobody Cares About Homeless People Until They Die

As a society, we each pay a hefty price for having such high rates of poverty in our midst, particularly among children. As researchers of poverty and inequality, my colleague Michael McLaughlin and I estimated the annual economic cost of childhood poverty in the United States. We relied on the latest government data and social science research in making our cost estimates. In particular, we examined the effect that childhood poverty has upon future economic productivity, health care, and criminal justice costs, as well as increased outlays as a result of child homelessness and maltreatment. Adding up these expenses resulted in an eye-opening estimate that childhood poverty was costing the U.S. slightly over $1 trillion dollars a year. This represented 28% of the entire federal budget, a jarring estimate.

Impoverished children grow up possessing fewer skills and are thus less able to contribute to the productivity of the economy. They are also more likely to experience frequent health care problems and to engage in crime. These costs are borne by the children themselves, but ultimately by the wider society, as well. In this sense, the economic costs of poverty becomes an issue of “us,” rather than “them.”

Most of us are familiar with the saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” It turns out that this is particularly true in the case of poverty. It is not a question of paying or not paying. Rather, it is a question of how we pay, which then affects the amount we end up spending. In making an investment up front to alleviate poverty, the evidence suggests we will be repaid many times over by lowering the enormous costs associated with a host of interrelated problems.

Shifting our understanding of poverty from a perception of “them” to one of “us” can begin to awaken Americans’ understanding of this deeply rooted economic and social problem. If poverty is no longer confined to strangers, we can’t comfortably sit back and believe that we’re unaffected. The reality is that, in one way or another, each of us are harmed by this scourge upon our landscape—either directly through experiencing poverty at some point in our lives or by sending our tax dollars to pay for the high cost of poverty. Such an understanding is essential to motivate both the general public and policy makers into confronting poverty.

Poverty can and must be reduced. But it starts with the simple recognition that each of us are harmed by the high rates of U.S. impoverishment. For, as Benjamin Franklin wisely pointed out at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

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Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Exploring school counselors’ perceptions of how poverty impacts elementary school students’ capacity for academic and emotional success: a phenomenological study.

Latesha Dixon , Liberty University Follow

School of Behavioral Sciences

Doctor of Education in Community Care and Counseling (EdD)

Mollie Evans Boyd

poverty, school counselors, executive functioning, self-regulation skills, academic achievement, interventions

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Counseling | Elementary Education

Recommended Citation

Dixon, Latesha, "Exploring School Counselors’ Perceptions of How Poverty Impacts Elementary School Students’ Capacity for Academic and Emotional Success: A Phenomenological Study" (2024). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects . 6063. https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/6063

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to investigate school counselors’ viewpoints regarding poverty’s influence on elementary school students’ executive functioning, self-regulation abilities, and academic performance. The impact of poverty on children’s academic achievement is widely acknowledged, and school counselors’ assistance to students from low-income families is considered paramount. The study provided a unique viewpoint regarding alleviating poverty by highlighting the crucial significance of education and skills. The guiding theory in the research study was the social cognitive theory that offers a conceptual structure for comprehending how school counselors’ observations and experiences within the educational setting influence their perspectives regarding the effects of poverty on students. The theory interprets how these perceptions impact individuals’ interventions, views toward policy interventions, and support strategies. The research employed a phenomenological approach to understand school counselors’ perceptions of the impact of poverty on self-regulation and executive function in elementary school students and the effectiveness of interventions put in place. The results will make a valuable contribution to the current body of literature by offering new perspectives on how school counselors perceive the effects of poverty on executive functioning, self-regulation abilities, and academic performance. Data collection was through interviews, whereas data analysis was through thematic analysis where common themes relating to the research phenomenon are identified, interpreted, and discussed.

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Fixing America's poverty problem starts with telling a new story

In 2019, when I was mayor of Stockton, California, I launched the  Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration , the first major guaranteed income program in any American city. The pilot provided 125 randomly selected residents with $500 per month for two years — no strings attached and no work requirements. To be eligible, an individual only had to be at least 18 years old, reside in Stockton and live in a neighborhood with a median income at or below the city’s then-median household income of $46,033.

I was motivated to try something radically different because the status quo was unacceptable to me: Stockton’s median household income was far lower than the state median of about  $62,000 ; we were also  among the worst  in the nation when it came to child poverty.

The racial wealth gap didn't happen by accident.

The  findings  of our pilot were significant: Compared to the control group, the people receiving the benefit experienced significantly  less income volatility , so they were able to  plan , pay for unexpected expenses and pay down debt. They were also  healthier , exhibited less depression and anxiety and reported enhanced well-being. Recipients spent the money on  essentials  like food, utilities and transportation. And full-time employment  increased dramatically  for residents who were part of the pilot program (from 28 percent to 40 percent) as folks were able to stop working multiple jobs and take some time to find a single, better   job.

Many of these findings fly in the face of stereotypes that this nation has maintained for generations about people who are struggling, and particularly about people of color. However, for me, someone who grew up in poverty, the findings were not all that surprising. I’ve long known talent and intellect are universal, but resources and opportunities are not. 

Indeed the results of giving people more resources were so positive that now more than 60  mayors across the country  have committed to guaranteed income as a tool to abolish poverty, with about half already running pilots in their own cities.

We absolutely can implement bold policies on the local, state and federal levels that will dramatically change the trajectory of people’s lives, eliminate poverty and improve the nation’s productivity. But we can only achieve that kind of change if we disrupt and replace the current narrative on poverty based on racist, classist, sexist and xenophobic stereotypes. It’s a narrative that  blames  people for their struggles — labeling them as lazy, corrupt, unintelligent or worse — and deems them  undeserving  of our trust, our investment or even their own  dignity .

This framing allows politicians to ignore and maintain blatantly unjust systems that keep people trapped in poverty — like jobs that pay  unlivable wages  or students at poor schools not having adequate, if any, access to resources like  guidance counselors  and  extracurricular activities  that affluent schools provide.

We absolutely can implement bold policies on the local, state and federal levels that will dramatically change the trajectory of people’s lives.

By viewing poor people as less than wealthier people — or even as  disposable  — actions like treating their communities as America’s  dumping ground for hazardous waste  and  pollution  will continue, all while leaving them barren of  health care infrastructure . 

A narrative that blames people for not rising out of poverty also permits policymakers to look the other way as so many  young people  are denied access or priced out of continuing education, even when we know higher education is necessary (though  not a silver bullet ) for advancing in today’s economy. It’s a narrative that contributes to continual mass incarceration that breaks up families and strips talent and potential from Black and brown communities.

But what would happen if we were to replace this false and destructive narrative with an authentic one that centers the experiences of people who actually live in poverty? These are people like my mother, grandmother and aunt — my “three moms,” as I refer to them in my memoir  “The Deeper the Roots ”   — who together raised me while my father served a sentence of 25 years to life due to a  draconian  “Three strikes, you’re out” law. A fundamental shift in how communities like the one I grew up in are talked about would recognize the strengths, assets and dignity of individuals and families. It would look squarely at how people are set up for failure through under-resourced schools, low pay with no benefits, over policing and much more, and it would therefore create space for new policies that would, as I call it, upset the setup. 

The stakes for a new narrative, new politics and new policy around poverty couldn’t be higher. That’s why I launched that seemingly radical policy pilot in Stockton and why lawmakers from both parties in cities across the U.S. are now following suit. 

A fundamental shift in how communities like the one I grew up in are talked about would recognize the strengths, assets and dignity of individuals and families.

With approximately  37 million people  in the U.S. living below the official poverty line ($26,496 for a family of four) — a woefully  inadequate measure  that doesn’t account for the true cost of living — we are at a pivotal moment when we will make significant progress or retreat in the face of backlash. Government assistance in response to the pandemic kept 53 million people above the poverty line in 2020, according to a  Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis  of Census Bureau data. Stimulus checks (cash), expanded help with food, emergency rental assistance and extended unemployment insurance all played important roles and, in many cases, literally provided people with a lifeline. And since the child tax credit was expanded in July, 3 million children have been kept out of poverty each month, according to estimations from  Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy .

Yet we already see the backlash. As the Biden administration and most Democrats work to make the  child tax credit permanent  through the Build Back Better Act, others are urging to include  work requirements  and questioning whether parents are deserving of this benefit without some kind of extra  effort .

There is no harder work than raising children in poverty. Nothing demands greater effort: from advocating in schools to cobbling together transportation, child care and other essentials; dealing with dangerous health impacts from the environment; trying to keep your kids safe from state and neighborhood violence; juggling bills and multiple jobs in the formal or informal economy; and navigating byzantine bureaucracies to get a little help. 

Moreover, we’ve seen that hard work doesn’t necessarily guarantee anything but more hard work. You can do everything right and still not receive the promised payoff. The proverb “If you work hard and play by the rules, anyone can make it” just isn’t true.

What is true is that a little assistance can go a long way —  and we’ve known that for a long time . So it is past time to end paternalistic and stigmatizing policy and instead pursue bold solutions that are  morally just and economically smart . 

 In addition to giving people cash, other bold policies include creating  baby bonds  so everyone has access to capital to pursue education, entrepreneurship or home ownership when they reach adulthood. The  racial wealth gap  didn’t happen by accident: Among the contributing factors were Black and brown people being excluded from  Social Security  and New Deal labor protections, barred from  GI benefits , denied mortgages through  redlining , targeted by  job  and pay discrimination and  blocked from accessing capital  to create, sustain or expand small businesses.

 We also need to create good jobs with family-supporting wages and benefits — and if you visit any poor community in the country, that’s one of the first things they will say they want (the other likely being more resources for their schools). If the private sector can’t do it, then the government should provide a job. Call it a job guarantee or a Green New Deal (the climate change proposal  includes a federal jobs guarantee ) — call it whatever you want — but there is needed work to be done in many fields like elder and child care; public transit and infrastructure; building, rehabilitating and retrofitting affordable, energy-efficient housing; creating parks and green space; and more.

Finally, we will never eliminate poverty unless we create a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people already here — the vast majority of whom are already contributing to our economy and communities every day. Citizenship is one of the  clearest routes out of poverty . Compared to work authorization programs like Temporary Protected Status, it offers greater protection against  exploitation  by employers, ends the fear of deportation (as well as its abuse for political gain) and allows individuals and families access to support when they need it. Remember how undocumented immigrants — many of whom pay taxes and were front-line essential workers during the height of the pandemic — were deemed  ineligible for stimulus checks ?

How will we pay for these and other new policies? We can start by demanding —  as most Americans do  — that  wealthy corporations and people finally pay their fair share  in taxes. We can also revamp an upside-down tax code that largely rewards the already wealthy, drives economic inequality and widens racial inequities, according to  Prosperity Now .

When I was a child, my mother used to say to me, “Don’t tell nobody our business.” That was based in part on a sense of shame that she and many others absorbed just for having to struggle. Since then, I’ve learned that telling the truth in fact sets us free. It did for me in my life, it has in fits and starts for our nation and it can again if we resolve to identify and dismantle the systems that create, sustain and perpetuate poverty.

 It all begins with telling a new and authentic story.

Michael Tubbs is the author of the new memoir  “The Deeper the Roots ,” currently serves as the special adviser to California Gov. Gavin Newsom for economic mobility. He is the founder of  End Poverty in California , or EPIC, and founder of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income . He is the former mayor of Stockton, California.

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Argumentative Paper: Poverty in The United States

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Published: Mar 16, 2024

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Root causes of poverty, impact on individuals and society, potential solutions.

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Poverty in the United States Essay

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The poverty threshold of the United States (U.S) indicates that an approximate of (13-17) percentage of the United States’ population fall below the poverty line. This translates to 39.1 million poor people. Those living in the rural areas are poorer compared to those in suburban areas.

It has been found that the poverty is a cyclic process varying with time. The level goes up and down regardless of age, region, or family size. It is ironical that as poor as the country is, it registers the highest number of immigrants per annum. Inadequate fundamental learning, a wide gap between the incomes of the o-level learners and the professionals, among others, are some of the cited causes of the poverty, but lack of employment is the root cause.

According to Adams, the United States has failed to create enough jobs for its people (2001). A large number of its population is unemployed. It is from a job where the Americans ought to obtain their income, which in turn develops the country starting from the family level.

One can choose to create his/her own job or otherwise opt to be employed. In U.S, very few have their own jobs to absorb the jobless, and this affects much the American youth. The young people are much energetic and innovative and given the opportunity, they can develop and change the situation of a country. Since the reverse is the reverse is the case in U.S, unemployment remains the root cause of its poverty.

If a country could manage to provide basic education to more than half its people, poverty could appear nowhere in the country. Bradley says that a large number of the children in United States lack the elemental knowledge (2003). There exist a positive correlation between education and employment, which in turn correlates with poverty. It appears like a culture in America where children get the mandate to choose between leisure and education.

Majority prefer the former to the latter. Any employer focuses much on the educational background of a willing employee before giving him/her the job. In the case of U.S, countless never qualify for the jobs even if the opportunity arises because of their poor learning backgrounds. This brings the reason as to why learned strangers are ever securing the few jobs leaving the American redundant. Once they secure them, they expand their own countries rather than U.S and hence its high poverty levels.

Another problem associated with poverty in the U.S is the high government taxes. Majority of the employed people in U.S are foreigners and not citizens of the country. As it is the case for any employed person, he/she is liable of taxation by the government. The few employed U.S citizens suffer the high taxes though their salaries are equally high.

According to Hacker, they are unable to, not only develop their country, but also themselves (2006). The remaining category of employed non-citizens experiences a double taxation. They pay taxes for both U.S and their countries giving them not even a chance to uplift U.S, which is left poorer than before.

In conclusion, it is often mistaken that adequate food and good heath facilities can eliminate poverty. This is not the case because in U.S, these are there but poverty still prevails. Efforts have been made to improve the academic facilities of the country but foreigners only enjoy these services and in turn secure the available jobs rendering the American unemployed. This unemployment makes the United States a poor country.

Reference List

Adams, J., & Pearlie, S. (2001). Dealing With Diversity . Chicago, IL: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company.

Bradley, D. (2003). Determinants of Relative Poverty in Advanced Capitalist Democracies: American Sociological Review. 68 (3), 22-51.

Hacker, J. (2006). The Great Risk Shift: The New Insecurity and the Decline Of The American Dream . New York: Oxford University Press.

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IvyPanda . (2019) 'Poverty in the United States'. 7 February.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Poverty in the United States." February 7, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/poverty-in-the-united-states/.

1. IvyPanda . "Poverty in the United States." February 7, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/poverty-in-the-united-states/.

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