Matthew Desmond PhD: Poverty, by America

Poverty, by America

Matthew Desmond, PhD, in conversation with Reuben Jonathan Miller, PhD

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

12:30 - 2:00 PM (CDT)

Doors open at 12:00 PM

The University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
Edith Abbott Hall, Lobby
969 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637

In-person event only. Free and open to the public.

First 200 attendees will receive a free copy of Poverty, by America. Registration required.

1.5-hour CEU’s available. Eligibility for CEU’s requires indication at registration and attendance to the in-person event.

Optional: Boxed lunch available for $10.

About the Book

The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?

In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.

Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.

About Matthew Desmond

Mathew Desmond, PhD, is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. After receiving his PhD in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. He is the author of four books, including Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, Desmond’s research focuses on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, Desmond was listed in 2016 among the Politico 50, as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”

About Reuben Jonathan Miller

Reuben Jonathan Miller, Associate Professor in UChicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity and a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. Professor Miller is the author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, which follows the lives of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. The recipient of many awards, Professor Miller was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2022.