The subject book by Mathew Desmond is way way longer than it needs to be unless you have REALLY lived a very sheltered life. Being amoung the poorest Americans trying to rent appartments and stay in a rental in American cities is not "the good life" to say the least -- I suspect all of us knew that. The repetitive struggles went on long enough so it just causes compassion fatigue.
The book chooses to follow a series of people through the squalor, massive inconvienience and dehumanization of that sort of life ... Arleen, the Hinkstons, Larraine, etc. One of the landlords covered is "Tobin", who is the owner of a very low quality trailer park and makes a high income (like $400K) by essentially renting a concrete pad and making the low income people keep the usually rotting away trailer up. I'd say a trailer court owner is only nominally a "slum lord". The other pair of landlords followed are Shereena and Quentin -- African Americans who on paper have a "high net worth", but who actually make very little money due to all the costs of trying to keep their slum level properties rentable, and collecting rents from people with very little in the way of assets.
There are a host of "bad guys" in the book, and really no "good guys". All levels of government ... local, state, federal, police, judges, HHS, HUD, etc, etc come in as slow, inefficient, underfunded, and having all sorts of unintended consequences for basically all of their many and various programs -- the sheriffs force people out because of too many 911 calls to a property, they assist with eviction, most of the various agencies are either reject or rubber stamp. As I've observed many times, "the govnernment" can't care for you ... it MAY "send you a check" in one form or another, but "it" MUST be a faceless bureaucracy with lots of layers, people, agencies, policies, programs, forms, rules, etc -- it is simply too large (enough just the "local" city government) to be anything else.
The author plays it pretty straight up until he gets to the epilogue on page 293 ... "a different kind of society is possible, and solutions are within our collective reach. But those solutions depend on how we answer a single question: do we believe that a right to a decent home is part of what it means to be an American?".
The basic question there again is what country is "America"? In America, there was a written Constitution, and it CLEARLY did NOT include a "right to a "decent" home". Partially because the definition of a "decent home" is very very difficult to arrive at for starters. Say if you are a single mom ... if you keep having more and more kids, does that mean that the square footage of a "decent home" keeps going up? Also, one of the values of America was private property -- the wealth of the nation was created because people got to keep the vast majority of what they earned. The money to create this right has to be taken by force from somebody else who is earning it.
One of the things I appreciated about the authors honesty in the book -- on page 214, we find that Crystal, one of the people followed has an IQ of "about 70" ... which would make her inelligeable for the US military (minimum 85). If you want to consider a sobering fact, consider that in 1959, below 85 would have classified you as "retarded". Since there is a lot of stigma associated with mental retardation however, we have LOWERED the threshold in the face of a society that demands increasing cognitive ability, so "70" is now that threshold. Alomst certainly, the "housing" that Crystal needed was a "group home", or some other sort of hopefully compassionate environment. However, in our zeal for "mainstreaming" and "reducing stigma", Crystal was on the street turning tricks.
The world view of the author is displayed very well on page 293.
There are winners and losers. There are losers because there are winners. "Every condition exists" Martin Luther King once wrote, "simply because someone profits by it's existence.This economic exploitation is chrystalized in the slum"Only in a zero sum world, and that is not the one that we live in. Bill Gates or Steve Jobs creating new compaines and making billions of dollars CREATED wealth -- not just for them, but for tens of thousands of employees, suppliers, retailers, etc. More importantly, they created VALUE -- something that billions of people wanted and made use of to create all sorts of other useful and entertaining things.
One old adage is to "follow the money" ...
One would not know it from this book, but poverty in the US has DECLINED since 1960 ... and yes, it has been urbanized.
Here’s one way to follow the money in the United States: look past the Washington Monument and the Capitol to the D.C. suburbs. Half of the richest counties in America are roughly an hour away from the capital.
As a result, many of the nation’s biggest counties by population had high poverty rates in 2010, though that was not the case in 1960. Twelve of today’s most populous counties had poverty rates above the national average in 2010, including Los Angeles, Cook (Chicago) in Illinois, Maricopa (Phoenix) in Arizona, Kings (Brooklyn) in New York, and Dallas. In 1960, eight of these 12 counties had poverty rates below the national average. Another three had poverty rates above the national average in both 1960 and 2010: Bexar (San Antonio) in Texas, Miami-Dade in Florida, and New York (Manhattan). And one county, Broward (Ft. Lauderdale) in Florida, had a poverty rate that was above the national average in 1960 but dipped below the average by 2010.
It’s worth noting that as the geography of poverty-stricken areas has shifted, the nation’s official poverty rate has declined over the past half-century, from 22.1% in 1960 to 14.5% in 2013, according to Census Bureau data.The first point to be made is that King is right that "profits" or "rent seeking", DOES matter, but not quite as much as he thought. First of all, there will AWAYS be a "bottom 10%", and unlike Lake Woeboegone, all of our children really can't be above average!
Secondly, there is no magical suspension of human nature when people move into government employment. They STILL want to improve their personal and family situation -- they want to have a better more secure position, higher salary, nicer home, etc -- it is just as true for the government sector as the private sector, and as the government sector has gained more and more power, they have increasingly succeeded in gaining as evidenced by the richest couties and the fact that government employees on average do better than private sector employees.
While the author of the book certainly believes it is a tale that proves that simply that more government money will "solve" this problem (as he likely believes it could solve ANY problem). In the 3rd from the last paragraph he declares what he really believes about economics ... "Each year we SPEND three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost in total on homeowner benefits like mortgauge interest deduction and capital gains exlusion".
The government produces nothing. All it's funds arrive because they are TAKEN from someone or increasingly from future generations through massive debt. If the government was to switch to a flat tax or a consumption tax, rather than using tax policy to incent and disincent behaviors, the entire discussion of what is SPENDING would be totally clear. The only universe in which tax deductions is "government spending" is a universe in which government is God, and all assets and income are the governments -- it only deigns to let various people retain any income or assets at it's pleasure.
Venezuala is a great recent example of how well that works. When we believe that we have a "right" to our physical and even recreational "needs", we believe that others have a "responsibility" to work to cash the checks on those "rights". That is the essence of corruption -- "taking without making". The lives followed in this book should be adequate evidence as to what this philosophy creates -- hopelessness, amorality, addiction, despair. The author would tell you that "the material circumstance makes the man".
Spirit or material? If you believe in only material, then you likely agree with the assessment of this author, and likely "felt the Bern" in 2016. Please read this and consider the day after "the Bern" burns down the remaining wreckage of what was once America.
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