It’s a funny thing for me to say immediately after publishing an edited volume about Britain’s desperate poverty crisis, but it could be worse. Consider just two tales drawn from two new books on the penury that lurks amid American opulence.
In Poverty, by America, Matthew Desmond, a sociologist who has previously taken an anthropological approach—moving into a trailer park for a close-up view of the problems covered in his 2016 book, Evicted—writes about his former roommate, Woo. He “stepped on a nail one day in a run-down duplex apartment we used to share in Milwaukee, ignored the injury because he couldn’t afford to pay it any mind, and lost his lower leg when the infection, accelerated by his diabetes, threatened to take all of him”. Meanwhile, journalist Monica Potts, in The Forgotten Girls, tells of her second-cousin George in Arkansas, who “moved out of his trailer— which was easy, since he owned nothing, and started hiking through the woods… He apparently slept out there”.