America keeps choosing poverty — but it doesn’t have to
Welcome to the first issue of Within Our Means, a biweekly newsletter about ending poverty in America. If you’d like to receive it in your inbox, please sign up here:
I’ve always been interested in how race and class shape our society and my work often focuses on topics like criminal justice, housing, and the social safety net. But while I like to point out problems, I also think that’s only half of my job. The other half is to ask, “Now what?”
That’s what this newsletter will do. Some issues will dig into the specific ways that poverty punishes people across the country. Others will look at policies that either exacerbate or alleviate poverty. The overarching goal is to find tangible solutions to improve people’s lives. And so if you, like me, think that poverty is a problem that can be eradicated in the United States, then think of this newsletter as a way for us to envision what a realistic path toward that future could look like.
America has gone through many ups and downs since the civil rights era, but one thing has remained remarkably constant: In 1970, 12.6 percent of Americans were considered poor; in 2023, that number was 11.1 percent — or 36.8 million people. “To graph the share of Americans living in poverty over the past half-century amounts to drawing a line that resembles gently rolling hills,” the sociologist Matthew Desmond wrote last year.
