What does it take to make it in America?

What combination of circumstances, intervention, gumption, and good luck creates a path for more people to live a life of fulfillment?

As Americans, we have so much to be proud of-- technical ingenuity almost beyond measure, scientific initiative and achievement, not to mention our crazy mission to stand as a model for multiracial democracy-- but we are also alone in this distinction-- the side-by-side realities of record-breaking wealth and record-breaking poverty.

Matthew Desmond is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Evicted" and the number-one "New York Times" best selling book "Poverty, by America."

He is a Princeton professor whose home was taken when he was a kid.

He is a social scientist who is quick to name his culpability in the economic unbalance that surrounds us all, and when it comes to figuring out what it takes to make it in America today, he is as facile with demographic data as he is with personal story.

I'm Kelly Corrigan.

This is "Tell Me More," and here is my conversation with informed, insightful, and determined American Matthew Desmond.

♪ Hi.

Hey.

How are you?

Good.

Come on in.

I'll take you to my office.

Thank you.

So there's a lot of ideas that have been circulating about why poverty exists and why we can't get on top of it as a nation.

Can you talk about what you think it is?

There's so much poverty in this nation because many of us benefit from it, and that's the cold, hard truth of the matter, you know, and I think that-- There's this line by the novelist Tommy Orange that I quote in the book where he writes, you know, "These kids are jumping "out of the windows of burning buildings, "falling to their deaths, and we think that the problem is that they're jumping"... Mm-hmm.

and when I read that, I was like, "Man, that sounds like the poverty debate," so many distractions, so much attention on the poor themselves.

We should have been focusing on the fire and who lit it, who's warming their hands by it.

Yeah.

Tell me about your childhood home.

I grew up in a little town called Winslow, Arizona, and so a little Route 66 town, railroad town, and my dad was a preacher, and my mom worked kind of a lot of jobs, different kind of jobs growing up, and we grew up in this little home.

It cost $60,000, wood-paneled, small ranch home, 3 kids and two adults.

And what happened?

So my dad lost his job at the church, and that put the family in really tough spot.

You know, we never had a lot of money growing up.

Our gas got shut off sometimes, but when he lost his job, that's when we really kind of fell into a state of poverty as a family, and we lost our home, and I remember feeling embarrassed about that.

I remember feeling confused about why that happened.

I remember feeling the loss.

You know, the house wasn't anything really special, but it was our home.

It was where we grew up, and there were little things about it that I really loved.

So there's a lot of ways to think about what it's like to live in America, lot of ways to learn about it.

There's all the imagery, so if you think of, like, Dorothea Lange or Sally Mann.

There's demographics.

There's a moral lens.

There's an economic lens, but it's easy to forget that all these things are creations, and so I wondered if you would tell us about Mollie Orshansky at the Social Security Administration.

Sure, so Lyndon B. Johnson launched the War on Poverty.

He used his first State of the Union address in 1964 to launch an unconditional war on poverty in America.

Johnson: We have declared unconditional war on poverty.

Our objective is total victory.

Desmond: Big words, big language, big moment for the country.

We needed a way to know if we were gonna win this thing or not and how we were doing, and so Mollie Orshansky, she was a bureaucrat at the Social Security Administration, and she was like, "OK.

If poverty is "not meeting your basic needs-- "and nothing is more basic than food-- "you can calculate a poverty line by saying, "How much does a basic food diet cost?"

"and if it costs more than a third "of the family's income, that family's gonna be considered poor," and that's the poverty line today still, adjusted for inflation every year.

But it's an unchanged calculation.

Like, the formula is the same.

That's right.

The formula's the same.

How would you change it?

What's a better formula?

So the Census launched a different poverty measure in 2011.

It's called the Supplemental Poverty Measure, so it doesn't replace, but it does supplement our official poverty rate.

The official poverty rate doesn't count certain forms of government aid, like food stamps and housing assistance, and it doesn't count regional differences in housing costs, so if you live in rural Alabama and I live in Manhattan, it's the same line, and so that's a problem, so the Supplemental Poverty Measure takes those two things into account, and when they launched, we, as a country, gained about 3 million more poor people, actually, because reductions in poverty that you would get by counting certain forms of aid were more than offset by accounting for rising housing and health care costs.

Poverty is incredibly complicated, and it's more than just a number, income number, right?

It's about not going to the dentist and getting an untreated cavity.

It's about depression.

It's about the nauseating, like, feeling that you get when you tell your kids, like, you can't give them more food that night, and so I think any kind of measure of poverty needs to take in all of it, this lived experience of poverty that is this tight knot of social agonies.

There's this tendency to get to a point in the conversation where you say, "It's too complicated," Hmm.

and then there were times when I was reading your book, and I was thinking, "Or it's not," like, "or we could just collect all the taxes."

Yeah.

Is that the simplest way to get ahead of it, is to try to collect the taxes that were due?

If you can wave a magic wand and do one thing to fix poverty in America, what would you do?

My answer would be, we would make sure tax evasion that's happening from corporations and the richest families among us stops, and we would redirect the savings to the most vulnerable families in our country.

Let me just give you one statistic, study published recently that showed that if the top 1% of Americans just paid the taxes they owed-- not got taxed at a higher rate, just paid what they owed-- that we, as a country, could raise an additional $175 billion a year.

That's almost enough money to bring everyone out of poverty.

It feels like we have to push away and reject this scarcity mindset that the richest country on the planet can't afford to do more.

Of course we can.

So scarcity mindset's a really interesting thing, and it can seem like a natural law, but your contention is that that's not really a natural law.

It's a creation.

It's a creation, and it's a fairly dishonest way of viewing our country.

You know, when we look at a proposal to reduce child poverty or provide every family in the country with a safe, affordable home, and we say, "Pbbb, boy, can we afford this?"

I find that question fairly sinful, actually, and we can absolutely afford to do more if the richest among us took less from the government.

We're doing so much more to subsidize affluence than to alleviate poverty in this country.

To me, this means designing a welfare state that does more to lift up the bottom and to expand economic opportunity instead of guarding the fortunes of those who have plenty already.

I do think it's important for those of us that have found some privilege and some security to really take a hard look at our lives and ask how we're benefiting from government excess, so let's just talk about one concrete way, which is the mortgage interest deduction, so in 2021, the government spent about $53 billion on every housing program to poor families-- public housing, rent-reducing vouchers-- and that same year, we spent about $191 billion on homeowner tax subsidies, and most of that money went to families with 6-figure incomes, and a disproportionate share of that money went to white families.

Because of our legacies of racial discrimination in the housing market, most Black and Hispanic families are renters, so we have this massive disparity in priorities in the country.

I'm asking us to bring it more into balance.

What is the most generous interpretation of why we have that interest deduction?

So it started innocently enough.

It started as a way to help small business owners, and this is before most Americans were homeowners, but then World War II came, the G.I.

Bill came, and it was this massive intervention into homeownership, especially for white Americans, and once that happened, kind of a lobby came around it and kind of protected that, and today that lobby is called the realtors.

They're the second biggest lobby in D.C. next to the Chamber of Commerce measured on just dollars dedicated to lobbying every year, and their number-one issue is protecting that mortgage interest deduction.

What is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?

It's a lobby.

It's a lobby to protect business interests.

It's the biggest lobby in America.

One place you see the Chamber of Commerce coming into action is union busting and being against increases in the minimum wage.

Now, the federal minimum wage has not increased in over 13 years, and it only increases when Congress passes a thumbs-up, and so there are lobbies like the Chamber of Commerce that are interested in keeping wages low, and, I got to say, this is a weird part of America.

Most other countries, they reassess their minimum wage every year.

There's a panel that gets together.

You don't need full congressional approval to do so, and so this is something we could change now and should for so many Americans that are just getting by on poverty wages.

So that sort of takes me to this idea that when something becomes canonized, it takes on, like, this tremendous authority, so can you tell us about Stigler's Nobel Prize-winning work on how minimum wage affects unemployment?

George Stigler was a economist.

I think in the forties is when this paper was published, and there was a debate in the country-- should you increase the minimum wage?-- because Stigler was worried that if you increase the minimum wage, it would decrease employment, so if I was an employer and I had to pay people a dollar more or $2.00 more, I would hire fewer of them, and he did this beautiful kind of theory around it, but the theory actually didn't have any data.

It was something he called "hypothetical" data.

Two economists, David Card and Alan Krueger at Princeton, were looking at Pennsylvania and New Jersey one year, and New Jersey was gonna raise its minimum wage, and Pennsylvania was not.

They're neighboring, and so they were like, "This is a natural experiment.

Let's see if Stigler's right," and so they interviewed fast food chains before and after the minimum wage hike, and they found that Stigler was wrong.

Actually, employment grew in New Jersey, and it shrank in Pennsylvania.

They said, "Well, the datas tell a different story," and so that set off a big debate in economics, but I think we can confidently say years later that the best studies out there show that increasing the minimum wage has minimum to no effect on employment.

When you think about everything through the lens of behavioral psychology, if you tell me something that sort of makes sense to me on the face of it, it's really hard to override that with fact.

Yeah, so one way I think about this is to say, "Is this how it is in other countries, or have we accepted a bad bargain?"

and so if you go to Denmark and you meet someone working the grill at McDonald's, they're often getting paid twice as much as our folks are, and somehow Denmark is not collapsing unto itself.

Somehow they don't have huge unemployment bread lines.

But that goes to exposure, so to the idea that you could be in other countries and that you could know other kinds of people, which goes to this very big idea that's come up on "Tell Me More" a million times, so we've had Bryan Stevenson and Melinda French Gates and Father Greg Boyle, Dolores Huerta.

These are people who have told us you have to stay shoulder to shoulder in the work in the community.

You have to get proximate, as Bryan says it, and a huge message that you're trying to get across is, we need to enter into relationship with people up and down the socioeconomic ladder.

Yeah.

You have to be accountable.

When I think about minimum wage, I think of, like, my friend Julio Payes, right, who I met in California, who was working two minimum-wage jobs just to afford a single room for his mom and brother and how he collapsed in a grocery store at the age of 24 because he was just working around the clock.

I think having that relationship is different.

You know, it makes me see the data differently, see the problem differently... Yeah.

so I think that going down the line and being in real relationships with families that are struggling is incredibly important for those of us that are trying to represent those experiences to a broader public.

Tell me about Kimball.

Kimball, so I just talked to him the other day.

He's gonna turn 50 this month, so everyone calls him Woo.

We were roommates together in a rooming house on the north side of Milwaukee.

I wrote about him in this book because he went through a really tough time.

He stepped on a nail.

He has diabetes.

His foot got infected, and his leg was amputated, and I helped him apply for disability, and he got denied.

We got denied, and then he hired a lawyer and won his case, and he got $3,400 in back pay.

A lawyer took home $400 for-- you know, out of that back-pay chunk, and that never bugged Woo, but it bugged me, so I looked into the data, and I learned that over a billion dollars a year in Social Security funds is going to attorneys.

Sometimes a dollar in the budget doesn't mean a dollar in a family's hand like Woo's.

It's more like $1.00 gets down to 22 cents, right?

So that is a ratio that's definitely true for cash welfare, so this is our program called Temporary Aid for Needy Families.

Everyone knows it as welfare on the street, and but for every dollar budgeted for that program, only 22 cents lands in the pocket of a family, so what the heck is going on?

Where is it going?

What's going on?

And so states get a lot of leeway about how to spend that money.

Some states don't even spend the money.

They just sit on it.

They just sit on it, so and this isn't just a red state/ blue state thing, so, like, Hawaii is sitting on so much welfare funding that it could give every poor kid in its borders $10,000.

Tennessee was sitting on $700 million the last time I checked.

It's one of the poorest states in the nation.

I think more of us do need to start going to our legislatures and demanding kind of a real accountability for this kind of behavior.

We have a thing at "Tell Me More" where we try to shout-out someone who's been instrumental to your thinking or your well-being.

Who's your plus one?

So when I lived in Boston, there was a group called City Life, Vida Urbana, an old community organization, and during the foreclosure crisis, they would go to the court, and they would pull off the list of addresses of folks getting foreclosed, and they would knock on their door, and they said, "You're getting foreclosed.

"You know, Tuesday night, we have a meeting.

Come to our meeting," and this family who's facing this very vulnerable, embarrassing thing would come up to the front of the room, and they'd say, "Will you fight your foreclosure?"

and if they said, "We'll fight," the whole room would be like, "We'll fight with you!"

and it was such this empowering, community-based, shame-destroying ritual that I've always carried with me.

You know, part of this work is thinking about the policies that work.

Part of it's moving hearts and minds, but really, part of it is building that and reaching for that kind of level of community that City Life displayed, you know, in the heart and the guts of the foreclosure crisis.

♪ So in this series, we're thinking about what it takes to make it in America, which naturally takes you to is it too hard to make it in America?

What do you think the connection is between pain and poverty?

One connection is still inadequate health care.

Between 2001 and 2014, the richest women in America gained 3 years of life, but the poorest women gained 15 days.

Poverty is literally death, right?

It's literally a loss of life.

There are studies that show that when you raise the minimum wage, all these health benefits come to people.

They stop smoking.

It allows folks the energy, the mental bandwidth, you know, to quit.

One part of the connection between pain and poverty is exposure to violent crime, and so we often hear about homicides, but there's a lot more shootings that happen that just end in an injury, a wound, and sometimes those wounds are life-altering, so I think that the connection between pain and poverty is intimate.

Mm-hmm.

There's two things that come up every day when you open the paper.

One is climate change, and the other is AI.

How do you see AI factoring into changing poverty?

This is going to fundamentally alter the job market, and we have to also recognize, like, this wouldn't be a break.

It would be an extension of what has been happening.

It's kind of like our grandfathers had careers and our parents have jobs, and now we complete tasks.

You know, that's the story of America's working poor, anyway, and I could see this other move, right, where we don't even get to do that anymore.

It used to be the case that one in 3 of us belonged to a union.

Even those of us that weren't unionized, we benefited from that because, you know, if I was in a nonunionized shop and you were, you know, my boss would be like, "Man, we got to jump up the pay and benefits here, or else Matt's gonna go to Ford."

You know, you worked for a company, you were actually paid by that company.

You weren't an independent contractor.

Your wages went up.

You had room to advance in the company.

You got some benefits.

It was a fair shake with the American worker.

We have to find a way to empower American workers.

As workers have lost power, their jobs have gotten a lot worse.

Right now, unionizing workplace is incredibly difficult and time-consuming.

We have to find a way, as a country, to make unionizing easy, and I'm arguing-- in this book, at least-- that we should organize entire sectors instead, not go from one Starbucks location at a time, but actually organize everyone in food and hospitality all at once.

What did you call it, sectorial-- Sectorial bargaining.

I know it's a wonky term, but, you know, it's a big success in Europe.

Let's think about how this might work in practice.

Everyone that has a warehouse job took a vote-- every one in America took a vote-- and if that vote cleared a certain threshold-- 50%, 60%-- then the Secretary of Labor would activate a panel, and that panel would be made up of worker representatives and company representatives, and they would bargain, and they would try to come to the best agreement across the industry, and when that agreement locked in, every warehouse worker would benefit from it, and so this is one way to organize all those folks in one go and make organizing something easy, not something that's hard.

How do you think fear factors into all the policies that we have that make it easier or harder to make it in America?

I think it's really key because in the Land of the Free, you know, your kids can ascend to great heights, but they can fall to great depths, and we know this, and a lot of us are living one car accident, one divorce, one thing away, one pink slip away from a place of real economic insecurity and precarity.

When COVID hit, the country immediately had an eviction crisis, right?

That didn't happen in France or Germany, right?

It was us.

There were so many people living so close to the edge, especially in the rental housing sector, and so I think that that fear, knowing that you could fall so deeply in this country, causes us to close in or overinvest in kind of holding on to what is ours because who knows what's happening, and this is where I think a country without poverty is a freer country for all of us.

It's a happier country.

It's a safer country, and I think that what I'm trying to do with this book is make the case that, look, poverty's stolen from us scientists and poets and artists.

Like, poverty's stolen safety from us and a feeling of lightness in America.

It's created a stingy kind of affluence.

What do we want?

Something better, even if it means that some of us who have means have to take a bit less.

Mm-hmm.

How might we remember our power and, like, re-engage with our own potential to solve big problems?

It's, like, uncool today to be optimistic, and I think part of that is because when we say, "No.

We can do this," we make ourselves a little vulnerable, and I think part of that vulnerability is the recognition that we've created this, and so when I think, like, "How do I contribute to this problem?"

you know, "How can how can I divest from poverty?"

I think that's part of building the political will.

I think there's a lot of inspiration in the anti-poverty movement.

You know, a lot of us care about this issue, but we feel hopeless, and we feel despair, and our hopelessness is useless, you know, and so but folks that are out there on the front lines, folks that are closest to the problem and are closer to the solution, there's a lot of joy and warmheartedness there, and I think ending poverty is not only pushing for bigger projects and policies, but also just being like, "How am I connected to this problem and the solution?"

We've created this mess, you know?

We can uncreate it.

What do you love about America?

I love this experiment with multiracial democracy.

This is really unique for us.

I think that trying to bring together folks from all walks of life, trying, often failing, to have a moral reckoning with our past sins, trying to create something that really has never been created in the history of the world before and that, I love that experiment.

I love that.

OK, Matt Desmond, Pulitzer Prize winner, are you ready for the speed round?

I think so.

Ha ha ha!

Best live performance of any kind you've ever seen.

Veruca Salt, Phoenix, Arizona.

What was your first job?

Janitor when I was 11, with my mom.

We split the paycheck.

What's the last book that blew you away?

"How to Read Now," by Elaine Castillo.

It's erudite and funny and biting.

If your high school did superlatives, what would you have been most likely to become?

We did do superlatives, and my friend Aaron Ruby wrote that he hoped that I would one day find my personality, and I blended in pretty well with the jocks and the stoners and the nerds, and I think that has actually served me pretty well in my work, yeah.

What do you wish you had more time to do?

Chop wood.

What's your go-to mantra for hard times?

When I'm at my best, you know, recognizing that I'm just a little piece of a larger thing is very comforting.

I love that.

If you could say 4 words to anyone, who would you address, and what would you say?

"We can end poverty."

To?

All of us, yeah.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Thanks so much for joining us today.

I wanted to share a few of my takeaway notes from our conversation with Matthew Desmond.

Number one, everything changes when you look at who benefits from the continuation of poverty as is.

Number two, sometimes what we consider intractable is actually structures made by man that we long ago accepted as natural law.

Number 3, beware of scarcity mindset-- there is enough for all of us-- and number 4, you have to love people.

You have to love the public.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪