How the richest country in the world has allowed its poor to remain poor

I was in Oxford on a fellowship last year. U.S. poverty graphs over time, remarks Desmond, look like “gently rolling hills” — amounting to virtually no change over time, or as he puts it, “fifty years of nothing.” How does it happen, asks Desmond, that despite so much progress in every sphere — the eradication of smallpox, the mapping of the genome, the invention of the internet — America still lets one in seven of its people remain poor? At around the same time, social reformer Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago, a progressive social settlement aimed at reducing poverty among immigrants and the working poor by providing social services and education. Multiple social maladies The epigraph of Desmond’s book is from Leo Tolstoy: “We imagine that their sufferings are one thing and our lives another.” According to Desmond, the causes and consequences of enduring intractable poverty in America are deep and interlinked. It is connected to every social problem we care about — crime, health, education, housing — and its persistence in American life means that millions of families are denied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in the history of the world.” Nevertheless, Desmond points out, America has both the resources and policy options to solve poverty.