Books – Abolish the Poor

Matthew Desmond argues that poverty persists because we let it.

- By Margaret Talbot

"Books about poverty tend to be books about the poor," the sociologist Matthew Desmond writes in "Poverty, by America" (Crown). That's true whether the motivation is to blame the poor for their lot-chronicling the supposed pathologies creating a "culture of poverty"-or, more commonly nowadays, to generate empathy via detailed ethnographies of survival and agency amid deprivation. It was true of the first books that set out to systematically map and measure poverty, such as the Victorian reformer Charles Booth's seventeen-volume "Life and Labour of the People in London," and of Progressive Era attempts to rattle the consciences of the well-off, like Jacob Riis's document of New York tenement life, "How the Other Half Lives."