We typically don't talk about poverty as a condition that benefits some of us. It seems we prefer more absolving theories of the problem. There is, of course, the old habit of blaming the poor for their own miseries, as if Americans were made of lesser stuff than people in countries with far less poverty. But structural explanations are more in fashion these days, explanations that trace widespread poverty back to broken institutions or seismic economic transformations. One popular theory for American poverty is deindustrialization, which caused the shuttering of factories and the hollowing out of communities that had sprung up around them. Such a passive word, “deindustrialization.” It leaves the impression that it just happened somehow, as if the country got deindustrialization the way a forest gets infested by bark beetles. In this telling, poverty is “a by-product of social causes,” as the sociologist Erik Olin Wright once put it. “No one intended this calamity, and no one really benefits from it.” But if arrangements that harm the poor have endured over the decades, doesn’t that suggest that they were designed to do so? At the end of the day, aren’t “systemic” problems—systemic racism, poverty, misogyny—made up of untold numbers of individual decisions motivated by real or imagined self-interest? “The system” doesn’t force us to stiff the waiter or vote against affordable housing in our neighborhood, does it? People benefit from poverty in all kinds of ways. It’s the plainest social fact there is, and yet when you put it like this, the air becomes charged. You feel rude bringing it up. People shift in their chairs, and some respond by trying to quiet you the way mothers try to shush small children in public when they point out something that everyone everyone sees but pretends not to—a man with one eye, a dog urinating on a car—or the way serious grown-ups shush young people when they offer blanket critiques of capitalism that, with the brutal clarity of a brick through glass, express a deep moral truth. People accuse you of inciting class warfare when you’re merely pointing out the obvious.
