Set Up to Be Poor

Matthew Desmond, sociology professor at Princeton University, 2015 MacArthur fellow, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown, 2016) and his latest, Poverty, by America (Crown, 2023), draws on research and reporting to make the case that poverty persists in the U.S. (at higher levels than in other advanced economies) because affluent Americans benefit from it.