Wow.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/20/matthew-desmond-poverty-by-america-book-review That looks like a thought provoking read.
In fact, one of the more encouraging findings Desmond cites is a 2020 Pew survey showing that a large majority of Americans have come to blame structural obstacles, not personal failings, for poverty, and to believe that most of the rich got that way not through hard work but through advantages. That’s a big shift in a country that has long been enamored of bootstrap mythology. It seems like a precondition for taking poverty abolition seriously and believing it to be possible. And presumably some of that shift can be attributed to structural analysis of inequality and the way it has trickled down into familiar talk about the one per cent. Moreover, even if, as he notes, “systemic” racism and poverty are “made up of untold numbers of individual decisions motivated by real or imagined self-interest,” some kinds of self-interest—that of international corporations, for example—are a lot more powerful than other kinds.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/20/matthew-desmond-poverty-by-america-book-review That looks like a thought provoking read.
In fact, one of the more encouraging findings Desmond cites is a 2020 Pew survey showing that a large majority of Americans have come to blame structural obstacles, not personal failings, for poverty, and to believe that most of the rich got that way not through hard work but through advantages. That’s a big shift in a country that has long been enamored of bootstrap mythology. It seems like a precondition for taking poverty abolition seriously and believing it to be possible. And presumably some of that shift can be attributed to structural analysis of inequality and the way it has trickled down into familiar talk about the one per cent. Moreover, even if, as he notes, “systemic” racism and poverty are “made up of untold numbers of individual decisions motivated by real or imagined self-interest,” some kinds of self-interest—that of international corporations, for example—are a lot more powerful than other kinds.
