153: Tangible Ways to Help Abolish Poverty with Dr. Matthew Desmond

In the words of French writer Antoine de Saint Exupéry, "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."  

In other words, cast a vision of what could be.

That’s exactly what Dr. Matthew Desmond is doing in his latest book, “Poverty, by America,” because the end of poverty, he says, is possible.

Dr. Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University. He’s the author of four books, including “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.

His latest book, already a #1 New York Times Bestseller, reimagines the debate on poverty, provocatively challenging all of us that the reason it persists in America is because so many of us benefit from it.

As he writes, “some lives are made small so that others may grow.”

But we can end poverty, he argues, and each one of us can become a poverty abolitionist.

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