Sophie 🏳️⚧️💜🎹 @sophiously.com · Sep 15 Just finished Matthew Desmond’s “Poverty, by America,” (2023). An amazing (and amazingly readable) overview of how #poverty is manufactured and sustained in America. There were so many #quotes that I loved. Here are some of my favorites 👇 #books
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“There was a time when Americans wished to be free of bosses. Now we wish to be free of bus drivers. We wish for the freedom to withdraw from the wider community and sequester ourselves in a more exclusive one, pulling further and further away from the poor…”
“The question that should serve as a looping incantation … every time we drive past a tent encampment … every time we see someone asleep on the bus, slumped over in work clothes, is: ‘Who benefits? ‘ Not ‘Why don't you find a better job?’ or ‘Why don't you move?’ … but ‘Who is feeding off this?’”
“Many writers have depicted America's poor as unseen, shadowed, and forgotten people: as ‘other’ or ‘invisible.’ But markets have never failed to notice the poor, and this has been particularly true of the market for money itself." - Poverty, by America, p. 71