 You know, I've been researching and reporting on poverty all of my adult life. I've lived in really poor neighborhoods. I've done into the dug into the statistics, but I, I just didn't feel like I had an answer to this really pressing question, which is why, why there's so much poverty in this incredibly rich country. And so this book is my response to that question. Matthew Desmond is a Princeton University professor and the recipient of that MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, a Penn John Kenneth Galbraith Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His recent book, A New York Times Best Seller that was ecstatically well reviewed in many mainstream outlets, attempts to reframe the national policy debate around poverty. Like the muckrakers of the progressive era, Desmond is a master storyteller who gathers firsthand anecdotal material to illuminate social problems, but his novelist eye for detail can cause readers to overlook the absence of big picture analysis or useful solutions. What causes poverty in America? According to Desmond, he answers with bland, awkwardly worded slogans, such as poverty persists because some wish and will it to. He says we need policies that refuse to partner with poverty, policies that threaten its very survival. Desmond gets more specific about what doesn't cause poverty. He dismisses cultural explanations, such as single parent households and declining marriage rates. He quickly dismisses the idea that the welfare state traps people into cycles of dependency, claiming that these arguments rely on anecdotal evidence, even though there's a vast systematic literature on the subject. Desmond doesn't take up political scientist Charles Murray's basic challenge to explain why it is that between 1949 and 1964, the American poverty rate dropped 22 percentage points before the federal government did practically anything to help. After President Lyndon Johnson launched his war on poverty, the decline leveled off considerably. Desmond approaches his firsthand investigations with the preconception that poverty is a byproduct of capitalist exploitation. Prices aren't set in a competitive marketplace in his view. They're just a projection of greed. It's tempting, he writes, to blame rising housing costs on anything other than the fact that more than a few of us have a god-awful amount of money and are driving prices higher and higher through bidding wars. A chapter on the real estate market titled How We Forced to Poor to Pay More argues that it's twice as profitable to be a landlord in the inner city, but doesn't bother explaining why even more unscrupulous people don't tap into this lucrative business opportunity. His evidence for this claim is a 2019 paper he coauthored in the American Journal of Sociology that uses data so crude that it really tells us nothing. It omits important costs like the return on equity capital and important benefits like real estate appreciation that strongly bias the results in the direction Desmond wants. It ignores how landlords in poor areas are shamed, sued and occasionally jailed, forced to go to court to evict families and must routinely travel to dangerous areas. These headaches scare away most investors, which means that those who stick it out charge more. The way to reduce costs in poor areas is to do the opposite of what Desmond advocates and make it easier for landlords to do business, such as streamlining the process of evicting tenants who don't pay rent. Another chapter attacks government welfare for the rich and middle class, and though he makes some valid points, again Desmond is sloppy with numbers. In 2020 he writes, the federal government spent more than $193 billion on homeowner subsidies, mostly benefiting white people with six-figure incomes, as compared to $53 billion for direct housing assistance for low-income families. By limiting his tally of what low-income families get to direct housing assistance, he leaves out the entire $260 billion budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and by limiting it to federal, he excludes roughly $70 billion in state and local housing subsidies. He also excludes tax breaks, tax credits, and other indirect federal low-income housing subsidies. The largest share of the $193 billion figure that Desmond counts as homeowner subsidies is an income tax that doesn't exist. An estimate of what people who own their own homes would pay if they were taxed on the imputed rental value of their real estate. The logic is that if you buy a house and rent it out, the rent you receive is taxable income, so if you live in the house yourself instead of renting it, you should pay tax on the rental value. This policy change would do nothing to reduce poverty. If the government started taxing homeowners on imputed rental value, home owning would be less attractive and home prices would fall. This would reduce construction jobs and housing supply. Desmond has a tendency to juxtapose the hardship of the poor with the resources of the rich, but he also concedes that there's no evidence the United States has become stingier over time, and in fact, federal relief for the poor has surged even under Republican administrations. He seems to want homeowners to pay more taxes simply because he thinks homeowners are rich and punishing them with higher taxes is a good in itself. Desmond's initial celebrity came from his bestselling 2016 book, Evicted, poverty and profit in the American city, which was excerpted in The New Yorker. The book argues that eviction is a major cause and exacerbator of misery for poor people. The evidence Desmond assembled actually shows that eviction is one thread in a tangled scheme of causes and one of the less tractable ones to address. Evicted concludes with an epilogue that pushes strident policy views completely at odds with the detailed stories about poor families forced out of their homes, which fill the rest of the book. Desmond is an engaging storyteller who manages to convey the experience of his extensive personal interviews and observations. He just doesn't know how to interpret his own evidence. The evidence is in and the evidence is clear. Eviction is not just a condition of poverty. It is a cause of poverty. None of the stories in the book support this contention. All the families he profiled had deep problems prior to their first evictions. Some are drug users or criminals. Others are victims of crime. Most are unemployed or have insecure low wage employment without benefits. Many have washed out of social programs like public housing and job training. There are two heartwarming success stories driven by quitting heroin in one case and getting a good job in another. Neither was triggered by finding secure housing. Desmond never grapples with the fact that housing is different from other forms of social welfare because it involves neighbors. Many of the tenants in his story are people no one is willing to live next to. So they get kicked out of shelters and public housing and turned down by landlords concerned with their effect on neighborhoods. If Desmond were a serious housing policy analyst, he would understand the trade-offs at play. High physical standards for occupancy eliminate much of the low cost housing stock. But lack of standards can mean people live in unhealthful and pleasant slums, allowing bad tenants to stay in good places degrades neighborhoods. Concentrating low income people and public housing projects can lead to conditions as bad as any urban slums. Making it difficult for landlords to evict non-payers, squatters and vandals reduces the available housing stock as landlords abandon properties or refuse to rent to poor people and it doesn't free up units for better tenants. Desmond's book actually tells an inspiring story of people working hard to solve these problems, usually with their own time and money. The solutions are never perfect, but lots of people are trying with patience and skill to keep everyone housed as best they can. This book repeats the claim at several points that the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half their income on housing and at least one in four dedicates over 70 percent, which is another misreading of the evidence. Those numbers come from the American Housing Survey, which yields very low quality information about family income. Desmond should have consulted the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Surveys, which use much higher quality economic data about households and actually cover the population Desmond is writing about. From those surveys as of 2021, we find that the poorest 10 percent of the population spends an average of twelve thousand four hundred sixteen dollars per year on housing, including not just rent or mortgage payments, but utilities, insurance, taxes, late fees and other charges. That is a hundred eighty percent of their average pre-tax income, six thousand nine hundred sixteen dollars, but only forty one percent of their average annual total expenditures, thirty thousand four hundred thirty three dollars mildly higher than the overall population average of thirty four percent. How do families spend more than four times a pre-tax income? It's not by taking on debt or dipping into savings. On average, the same families added five thousand five hundred seventy dollars to net assets. Low income households get more money back from the government than they pay in taxes and they receive subsidies and in-kind assistance that are not measured in most income numbers, including the American Housing Survey numbers. They also earn cash income from the underground economy. There are certainly people forced to devote the majority of their financial resources to housing and that's a problem worth caring about. But they account for a fraction of a percent of the US population or much less than what Desmond claims. Halting all evictions, which some policymakers have called for since the publication of Desmond's book, would have catastrophic unintended consequences. It would chase away honest landlords and emboldened abusive ones who will simply change the locks, cut off utilities, refuse ascension repairs or threaten their tenants with violence. Desmond misinterprets his own evidence and favors moral grandstanding over serious policy analysis. His stories actually point to the conclusion that the biggest cause of poverty is crime. If poor neighborhoods were safe, if middle class people didn't fear crime associated with housing projects, if poor people weren't routinely cheated and abused, poverty would be reduced to a simple problem of lack of money and could be eliminated for far less than the cost of current social spending. Desmond's analysis never goes deeper than his facile assertion that poverty persists because some wish and will it do. Abolishing poverty as he sees it means looking inside ourselves and finding the will to act. His books have had such a wide reach. I fear that this simplistic nonsense will cause policymakers to forget the hard one lessons of the 1960s in favor of policies that leave the American poor worse off than they already are.