The Pulitzer Prize–winning author reimagines the American debate on poverty, making an original and ambitious argument about why it persists here: because too many of us benefit from it. For event details and more, visit https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2023/05/01/matthewdesmond


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Why does the United States, the richest country on earth, have more poverty than any other advanced democracy? How can one in eight children go without basic necessities, scores of citizens live and die on the streets, and corporations be authorized to pay poverty wages? In his new book, sociologist Matthew Desmond shows how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor, exploiting them and driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. It is, Desmond argues, a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least.

Desmond speaks with journalist Andrea Elliott about his new ways of thinking around this morally urgent, uniquely American problem—and imagines practical, achievable solutions for making poverty disappear.


ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and the founding director of the Eviction Lab. His last book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, among others. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Desmond is also a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.

Andrea Elliott is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who has documented the lives of poor Americans, Muslim immigrants, and other people on the margins of power. She is an investigative reporter for The New York Times and the author of Invisible Child, published by Random House, which won The New York Public Library's 2022 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, as well as the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. She is also the recipient of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, a George Polk award, an Overseas Press Club award, and was awarded a 2007 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.


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