Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, written by Matthew Desmond almost a decade ago, is widely regarded as a shape-shifting force in the field of urban sociology: a must-read for academics and activists alike. In Evicted, Desmond sheds light on complex dynamics between renters and landlords, exposing the business models of landlords who target, trap, mistreat, and make money from impoverished renters. It’s a book written with fiction-like levels of character and narrative development. In the public eye, it ultimately elevated eviction as an issue affecting black women near to the status of the mass incarceration affecting black men. Yet Desmond’s newest release, Poverty, By America, has strayed quite a way both in form and force from Evicted.

The book is organized into nine chapters seeking to answer various sub-questions related to the book’s central ask: Why is there so much poverty in the United States? Desmond begins by attempting to define the problem of poverty — and spends much of the rest of the book trying to convince the upper-middle and upper classes of the nation that they, or “we” as Desmond puts it, are largely to blame for its persistence. “We” benefit from poverty primarily through the labor exploitation that gives rise to cheaper consumer goods. But this tone is also aimed at ruffling feathers. Desmond wants to connect — and create a causal relationship between — omnipresent poverty and all of the ways in which the well-to-do are subsidized. It is not, in Desmond’s telling, the government or multinational corporate monopolies that produce and reproduce poverty: rather, it owes to a myriad of interchanges, scalable from an everyday cheap product bought without care for the worker, to a tax break exclusively for homeowners. What truly entrenches poverty is the exchange between those with and those without.

In the fifth chapter, “How We Rely on Welfare,” Desmond makes a vitally important point — that the wealthy are subsidized at higher rates than the impoverished, and that the nation just doesn’t call their benefits “handouts.” He calls this “the invisible welfare state.” Desmond writes that Americans’ hardwired belief in meritocracy leads them to “conflate material success with deservingness.” He explains: