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foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign montia and you are watching PBS books thank you for joining us PBS books and collaboration with WTTW is pleased to host a conversation with Pulitzer Prize winning author Matthew Desmond author of poverty by America PBS books is a proud partner of the Library of Congress to promote their 2023 National Book Festival let's take a moment to hear from the librarian of Congress Dr Carla Hayden I'm Carla Hayden librarian of Congress and I want to give a thank you to PBS folks for supporting the national Book Festival hope you can join us in Washington and online for this year's Festival on Saturday August the 12th well as Dr Carla Hayden said the festival has already happened it happened on August 12th earlier this month but do not fear the festival is still able to be accessed to everyone so go to loc.gov bookfest and over the last week everyone at the library has been working to prepare all of the festival conversations to be available to all of you it represents the voices of 80 outstanding authors and it is just a wonderful resource to be able to curate your own experience well now through August 31st PBS books and PBS stations across the country host a series of 10 virtual events with 11 authors they are also available on demand on PBS books and at the national Book Festival website let's take a moment to hear from my friend and colleague wttw's Tim Russell hello I'm Tim Russell vice president Community engagement and diversity Equity inclusion for WTTW and wfmt WTTW is committed to producing and presenting trusted best-in-class content fueled by distinctly Chicago sensibility we have served as Chicago's window to the world and our purpose is to enrich lives engage communities and Inspire exploration I am so thrilled to be here to talk about the importance of this event for PBS and I only want to welcome the Chicago Community for joining us today but also welcome viewers Nationwide I am honored to be part of this event that gives all viewers an inside look into the thoughts and ideas of some of the most renowned authors our programming and content across all our platforms expressed this purpose and today's event with PBS books and the library at Congress National Book Festival is the perfect example of WTTW bringing his purpose to life WTTW is proud to partner with PBS books in this interview with Matthew Desmond like Matthew wtcw explored intergenerational poverty in Chicago through our first hand living and poverty series for an entire year we focus on the first-hand perspectives of people facing this critical issue in first hand living with poverty WTTW presents a documented series reported Tech stories expert talks and Community discussions with a supporting discussion guide all of which can be found on wttw.com slash first hand today's author talk is critically important as we attempt to emerge from the economic uncertainties of the pandemic conversations such as this is important for shedding light on the issues that impact our society once again thank you PBS books for your partnership and thank you all and I hope you enjoy today's discussion well thanks Tim we are so proud to be able to partner with WTTW on this important conversation well today's event features Matthew Desmond to discuss his work and involvement in the festival his latest book poverty by America reimagines the debate on poverty and draws on History research and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and sometimes unknowingly keep poor people poor well let's meet Matthew Desmond he is the Maurice P during professor of Sociology at Princeton University and the founding director of the eviction lab a lab that studies housing insecurity and evictions in the United States his previous book evicted poverty and profit in the American city won a Pulitzer Prize a national book critics Circle award and a pen award among others the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship Desmond is also a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine his latest book poverty by America will be featured at the 2023 National Book Festival it is my extraordinary honor to welcome Matthew Reed thanks for having me it's so great to have you here your book is it's outstanding it's filled with Statistics and stories and personal experiences and observations it really helps to bring crucial understanding to the extraordinary challenge of poverty in the U.S it raises awareness and also provides a call to action in your own words can you summarize your book for all of us sure so the novelist Tommy Orange um has this line in his book there there where he writes you know it's like these kids are jumping out of the windows of burning buildings falling to their deaths and we think that the problem is they're jumping and when I read that line I was like man that's the American poverty debate you know for over 100 years we've we focused on the poor themselves the the Jumpers in a way and we should have been focused on the fire Who lit it who's warming their hands by it and this book is about the fire it's about why there's so much poverty in this land of dollars and how we can finally end it thank you your book that came before this that we've discussed evicted um how did that work Inspire or relate to this book and where your approach is similar or different so when I reported out evicted I lived in two very poor neighborhoods in Milwaukee I moved into a mobile home park and lived there for about five months and I moved into a roomy house on the north side of the city and lived there for about 10 months and from those two neighborhoods followed families getting evicted and I went everywhere with those families I fall into an eviction court and abandoned homes and shelters and slept on their floor and ate from their table watched their kids went to bunch of funerals with them went to a birth and I was exposed to a kind of poverty that I had never seen before in America I grew up poor in Arizona but this was something a whole other level you know I I met Grandma's a little bit without heat in the winter time you know buried under blankets and praying the space heaters didn't go out I was on this eviction um move once with the sheriffs and we knocked on a door and um young kid opened the door maybe she was 12 13 and we went in to do the eviction the sheriff's did and there was just kids living in the house you know there's no adult that mom had died and the kids had just gone on living and there until the landlord had had enough and they evicted the kids and they put their stuff out in the curb and changed the locks and someone called social services and they were off to the next eviction and I think seeing those kinds of scenes um really drove this question of why inside of me and when something else happened too in Milwaukee which is you know the mobile home park I was living in the landlord you know gave me access to his books his his rental book so I could calculate his profit and by my calculations you know the landlord of the poorest trailer park in a very poor City at the time he was making over four hundred thousand dollars after expenses and you know his tennis were collecting cans to get by and get living on disability and that made me think whoa you know um that's that's a kind of direct inequality his his gains are there losses often that that we needed to confront in a real way and I think that really drove some of the questions here in in poverty and it is a different reported book right evicted is in the spirit of bearing witness um and it's about looking at the human cost of the housing crisis but poverty by America is a book about how the other other half lives right and it is a book about how many of us profit from poverty and that required a different kind of writing and a different kind of register than evicted was your new book it tackles societal systematic structural and institutional issues that really perpetuate poverty at Large how how can there be so much poverty here in the richest country in the world and shouldn't we all be ashamed for it on some level I mean I think 12 of Americans live in poverty is that correct I I I 30 million people I mean it's extraordinary numbers what do you think I mean obviously that's what your book is but how are we at this moment so you're right you know this is the richest country with the worst poverty there's about 38 million Americans that live below the official poverty line if those Americans formed a country that country would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela um but there's a ton of poverty above the poverty line in a way you know lived in a lived Experience One in three Americans lives in a home making fifty five thousand dollars or less many aren't officially considered poor but what else do you call trying to raise a couple kids in Portland OR Miami or Chicago on 55k you know and there's just hard bottom layer of poverty in America too you know by some estimates five million of us are getting by on four dollars a day or less abject poverty by global standards so why and this is a choice this is a choice that the country has made the biggest myth about poverty in America is that it's inevitable that we have to live with it it's not we have doubled the child poverty rate of South Korea Germany and many of our Pure Nations so why are we falling so far behind and the answer is because a lot of us profit from it there's so much poverty in America not in spite of our wealth but because of it many of us consume the cheap goods and services the Working Poor produce many of us are invested in the stock market don't we don't we benefit when we see our returns going up even when those returns cost workers something in terms of poor wages the United States has an incredibly imbalanced welfare state you know we give the most to families that need it the least especially in the form of tax breaks and then we have the audacity to say that we can't afford to do more so we do a lot more to subsidize affluence in America than to fight poverty and then finally the country is still segregated and many of us continue to build walls around our communities to hoard opportunities behind those walls and that creates neighborhoods of concentrated opulence but also neighborhoods of concentrated poverty the side effect of that opportunity hoarding and so yeah you know this is this is not just about policy and structure it's often about us too and the recognition that we're connected to the problem and connected to the solution all right so you said a lot there it's breaks breaks for this country's horse families often seem to be a controversial topic right it's it's one of those things that you hear and there are people who think it's not fair but the reality of tax breaks is something very different can you discuss that and also you you alluded to it a little bit there's been a lack of progress on fighting poverty or addressing poverty since the 1970s all right so a lot of times people will say you know poor folks don't have to pay any taxes and that's because the federal income tax has a standard deduction if you fall below a certain income level you you don't really pay a federal income tax but thinking about tax burden by only looking at federal income tax is like counting calories by only counting breakfast you know there's a lot of ways we're taxed there's sales tax there's insurance tax and so if you add up all the taxes that are levied on the American uh people you come to a pretty surprising conclusion that basically we have kind of a flat tax in America in in reality and low income folks pay just as much of their income to taxes as middle and even upper income folks the richest Americans actually have the lowest tax rate in America and so I think that the tax debate is often is often muddled and wrong it's also the case that a lot of us have a hard time seeing a tax break is something that's akin to like a housing stipend for example or food stamps but let's think about it you know um both a welfare check and a housing tax break cost of government money for example they both put money in our pockets and they both incentivize certain Behavior and so if we get the mortgage interest deduction for example we could get that by deducting it to come tax time or the government could issue us a check it's the same difference and so by my calculation if you add up everything the government does for for families means tested programs like food stamps housing assistance social insurance things like Social Security and tax breaks you learned that the average family in the bottom 20 of the income distribution our poorest families they get about twenty six thousand dollars a year for the government but the average family the top 20 percent are richest families they get about thirty five thousand dollars a year for the government that's almost a 40 difference that's what I'm talking about when we're talking about this unbalanced inequal welfare state and how we do a lot more to guard fortunes than to fight poverty me like and a policy person so how'd that happen how are how right or is that sociology is that true sociology how are you you know you're able to bring in all of these other factors because what we're talking about is of course society and people but you are taking a very different look at it than than we often hear from sociologists yeah I mean I'll I'll pull whatever tool out of the toolbox I can you know and uh and if it's in econ I'll I'll draw on that if it's in a literature or poetry I'll draw on that I think that uh sociology brings a unique Focus uh to this problem which is focus on Power and exploitation and the fact that you know um there are winners and losers in America and sometimes there are losers because there are winners and I think that perspective is one that sociology takes incredibly seriously the book makes an argument that exploitation in the labor market the housing market the financial Market that's a main driver of poverty in America and exploitation is kind of a scary charged word but it just means when you don't have a lot of choice you kind of have to take the best bad option and we've all been in in this situation you're just stuck and you got to pay for it and that kind of situation really defines uh the lives of the American poor that's look at just Financial exploitation so every year Banks charge 11 billion dollars in overdraft fees 1.5 billion dollars in check-cashing fees is levied on the poor almost 10 billion dollars in Payday loan fees that's like 61 million dollars and just in fines and fees pulled out of the pocket of the poor every single day so when James Baldwin famously remarked like how expensive it is to be poor in America he couldn't have imagined these receipts that kind of exploitation matters so much to the lives of the poor and that kind of exploitation is something that often benefits us you know many of us have free checking accounts but it turns out they're not free they're subsidized by Massive levies and fines that are that are um that are issued to basically nine percent of Bank users the poor made a pay for that poverty well there's a lot in there when we think about exploitation one of the things obviously is workers right and and how Americans are able to get what they get at the price they get it uh let's discuss American workers and how you have a chapter even on how they are undercut um and so if we can think about how that a group of workers right how they can't can't even afford basic necessities can you discuss basically the role in unions where that's going and also just overall the deterioration of American jobs so a few years ago I met a young man named Julio Perez he was working two jobs for minimum wage living in California he started his shift at McDonald's working 10 P.M to 6 A.M then he'd have two hours of Russian shower and then he clocked in on a second job Aerotech going anywhere the temp service sent him between 8 AM and 4pm and he rested and showered as much as he could and then it was back to McDonald's but he had to put in those those hours to afford the um the low-cost apartment uh in the Bay Area for his mom and his younger brother and one day his younger brother went up to Julion was like Hey I'm saving up my money man and he's like yeah why and he said well I want to buy an hour of your time you know how much for an hour to play with me and Julio heard that he just he just wept and not long after he collapsed in the aisle of a grocery store from just sheer exhaustion he was 24 years old that that's the situation for a lot of American workers today but it hasn't always been like that you know in the 1960s 1970s one in three workers belonged to a union it was the most economically Equitable time in our country incomes climbed CEO pay was reined in but his workers lost power because unions were kind of destabilized and undercut their jobs got a lot worse you know one sociologists put it like this like our grandparents had careers and our parents had jobs and we complete tasks and I think that's a pretty efficient way to describe the story of the American working class and Working Poor if you're a man today without a college degree your wages are less in real terms and inflation-adjusting terms they are less than they were 50 50 years ago this is a big part of the story right because like when the war on poverty and Great Society were launched in 1964 these things that did things like expand food Aid expense Social Security these were deep investments in poor families in America but there were also Investments that were rolled out during a time when unions were strong and the job market was delivering for American workers but as unions lost power uh you know the job market is not pulling its weight and it's kind of turning anti-proverty programs into something like dialysis they're essential they're effective but they can't fight poverty with their you know one hand tie behind their back so to speak that's why we have to address exploitation if we're going to get serious about ending poverty in this country you wrote corporate profits rise when labor labor costs fall and obviously we know right when corporations get lots of money uh more money right when when the labor cost decreases that's just economics but who whose fault is this is it the lawmakers lobbyists is it the the corporation is it the consumer or the shareholder if you were to assign blame who is most to blame that we're at this moment yeah I think my answer is yes I think my answer is yes and um it's it's it's true that those who have amassed the most power uh in in politics and in in the economy they do bear the most responsibility that's a true statement and like deliciously absolving right we can always point the finger at the guy that's richer than us the corporation that's more powerful than us the politician that that that has the votes and um but like I just feel so tired of absolving theories of poverty and I do not think we're going to be able to build the political will that puts upward pressure and corporate and political Elites if we don't have skin in the game if we don't say man you know I I'm shopping according to my uh environmental values you know I I'm shopping local I do organic but I don't know how much the farm worker got paid by picking my you know local organic cucumber I I know what shoes to buy or what coffee to drink to signal I'm this kind of American you know I'm this politically oriented but I have no idea what the folks in those coffee Baristas are making or the the shoe factories making so I think that we do need to express uh a commitment to economic Justice in consumer choices and investment decisions and I think that if I do that and you do that you know that might be a lifestyle thing but that's not going to make a big dent but think if we did that by the thousands and the tens of thousands I think that could really matter we've seen consumer activism move the dial on other issues why can't we have it move the dial on ending poverty okay so I have a question about this personal experience post-coved I see more and more signs at least around where I live you know the the wage that they're offering is you know up to twenty dollars an hour even up to twenty two dollars an hour at grocery stores what I've also personally noticed is that what I'm spell spending on a grocery bill is probably 25 to 30 percent more than I I used to spend and so one of the things I can't help but think is that while these wages for the Working Poor might be increasing basic necessities have increased so much that that that wage the increases I don't want to say useless because obviously we want everyone to have a fair and living wage but it's almost uh defeating on some level is there anything can you respond yeah so I hear two questions one question is look if we if we increase wages or increase incomes is that enough and my answer is no it's not enough and it's because the housing market often catches up to those gains you know there's studies that show when when cities raise the minimum wage that really helps renters make rent for a while and then the housing market slowly kind of catches up to those income gains and dilutes the effect of the policy so if we want to get serious about ending poverty in America we have to think about increasing wages and incomes but we also have to thing about ending housing exploitation expanding Choice along that those kind of things but then I also heard a question about inflation and I think that there's been a lot of intellectual capture I think about inflation uh since covid and America often kind of talks about itself like it exists in a in a bubble in a way like if we if we deepen our investments in the American people do we have to just hit inflation inflation the cost of that investment but like you just look overseas you can find countries that are making much deeper investments in the public and they do not you know face inflation all the time as like a a lived experience the inflation debate is still ongoing it's pretty complicated but I am um I'm very interested in a growing body of evidence that kind of really points to the importance of corporate profits here actually and Mark what economists call markups and so study out of the Kansas City fed showed that like before covid labor costs really were the the biggest driving force for inflationary pressure but an after covid corporate profits were you know if corporations were well positioned in the market they could take advantage of that and really increase increased cost which means the federal government should think about policies that address that and not just policies that you know make poor workers take the hard medicine but I heard another question and I heard a question about inflation and you know there was this kind of running story that the inflationary crisis that we saw post covid was due to Big investments in the American people things like um the covet rescue Aid emergency rental assistance the child tax credit these were really really powerful historic policies I mean we cut child poverty by 46 percent in six months we drove evictions down to the lowest on record ever and so but do we have to just eat all this inflation uh because of that and I think the record is really mixed on this um I think there is evidence that a lot of the inflationary pressure is driven by corporate markups and corporate profits and I think that just you can look at other countries that make deeper investments in the public and in anti-poverty programs and they don't live with inflation on a routine basis and so I think that I think that we should be just hesitant to accept kind of the normal story about inflation is something that you have like a consequence you have to deal with if you make these deep Investments I think that the story is a bit more complicated and I think we absolutely can deepen our investments in fighting poverty without facing uh inflationary pressure like we've faced post-covered thank you for that and well for those though Heather Marie Montiel you are watching PBS books it's my pleasure to be here celebrating the 2023 Library of Congress National Book Festival I am here with Matthew Desmond and we are discussing his latest book poverty by America back to the conversation all right so we have been talking about all sorts of things one theme that's been coming throughout which should be no surprise because you obviously want a Pulitzer Prize for evicted is housing right this critical role of the cost of housing especially when we know that rents the rental cost increases and often those costs outpace operating costs especially in in low income or or high crime communities what moral obligation do you think the government has to ensure that this Injustice does not happen as we think back to our founding documents as a country right I PBS books we've been struggling or thinking challenging ourselves to think about you know America 250 celebration is coming in three years let's think about our founding documents what do what is every American promise well we know we weren't the best on all men are created equal but we're working we're still working but that is part of this problem and part of this conversation but I would argue as we think of promising people right among other things life liberty and the pursuit of happiness without basic necessities how can you have happiness so what you know I I know you talk a lot about this in your book you say poverty is diminished life and personhood you know and you're talking also about the mental health the state of mental health can you talk about kind of this this irony or this just it's a tragedy right that we've promised one thing and as a nation we're delivering something else yeah I feel like you should keep going Heather I mean I feel like there was some power preach preach it um look I I think that if we want to get serious about Freedom yeah if we want to get serious about Economic Opportunity if we really are a nation of Economic Opportunity we we can't abide what we've created but we've allowed ourselves to become and I think that um I think there is a moral obligation uh from the highest echelons of political power to protect and support its people and everyone needs decent affordable housing because without stable shelter everything else falls apart no one in America should fall into destitution and poverty no one with no qualifications that no one should fall below a certain level where your life is threatened your health is threatened where you just you can't afford the most basic of basic necessities but millions of us do that's our situation here and so I think that um and and but I but I also think that we like we us you me also have a moral obligation to folks in our in our community um we are embroiled in all these morally compromised situations and relationships and I think even those of us who are the most privileged in America you know um are diminished by all this poverty in our midst and you know the end of poverty in America it doesn't mean a perfect country but it does mean a Freer safer uh healthier country I think a lot of us are pining for that in a way uh some situations it's failed um I mean I I'm from New York City and you know the places right public housing is very dangerous there are there are different not all but but some um but there are some success stories and you talk about those success stories within your book a little bit um and you even and and separate from that you talk about this the stuffed in California experiment and I was hoping you could maybe we've been talking about what's not going right but let's talk about some of the things that are going right yeah so public housing um is often remembered as this colossal public policy failure right we built these giant Soviet looking towers and segregated communities in Chicago and Atlanta and St Louis and then we defunded them you know President Reagan cut Hud's budget by 70 percent almost seven zero percent if you define anything like that that's a real recipe for failure on top of this just kind of cruel way that we segregated the poor through Public public housing and so these these buildings fell into disrepair and they became so bad you know it was kind of like dynamiting them was was a kindness that fell to many people but it wasn't the idea of public housing in and of itself that failed it was our execution and like anyone that doesn't um believe in the power of public housing anymore should just visit like these amazing beautiful public housing complexes that are springing up all across the country I think Washington DC has public housing and basically every Community then the city uh it Blends into the community it's low slang it's it's awesome it's beautiful it's it's prideful and pride inducing and the research backs us up you know kids that grow up in public housing they do a lot better actually later on in life than their cousins or their friends that are exposed to to the private rental market you know most poorrenting families today below the poverty line you know most poor renting families today spend at least half of their income on housing costs and about one enforcement over 70 percent just on rent and utilities public housing is a buffer to that it's a life changer um it's really it's really moving to be with someone when they finally receive a Housing Voucher after like years and years and years on the waiting list and what they do when they finally receive that ticket studies show is that they they use their freed up income to take it to the grocery store and buy more food you know the kids become stronger less anemic it works we just need more of that we need to dose the problem uh in a more serious way policies that that the poor are given in this country by the government um I want to think a little bit about the policies that that help create some of those things and I have I'm not a researcher but I'm going to give some stories one is I've been part of a few conversations where someone needs more people to work at their workplace but if their workers work more they earn overtime when they get overtime they earn more and in fact they'll lose their government support right similarly this is not a surprising story but people who live in public housing often their rent is adjusted as they earn more so in fact there there was someone I knew who earned more they got a raise at work they ended up paying more rent than and basically receiving less income because the increase was more than their increase in their paycheck right and my and all of this provides disincentives for for people who are trying to get out of poverty right and so my question is kind of you know you've done a lot of research here why why do you think because the only I mean all of the writing is on the wall that they're that the policies are set up to keep people in a place um because if not like one of the thoughts is well why can't they save money you know instead of taking that extra money out of their paycheck um and having to go to rent why can't it go in a savings account to save money to be able to move out on their own when they're ready right there's lots of different I mean I am you know I'm an MPA but I am not a PhD and this is not there are lots of really smart people in this country we have an amazing Brain Trust you've done amazing work what's why are we here and how can we how can we solve it yeah I mean we're here for a lot of different reasons and often it's not nefarious you know often it's it's kind of bureaucratic culture it's butt covering it is um it's uh you know bureaucrats being incentivized when they follow the rules and comply instead of when they deliver you know in a way or innovate and so you know that that can clog up the system and make it um very unuser friendly but this is this thing especially this benefit Cliff is what we call it in the policy world it's really dangerous and damaging you know it divides the poor from the working class you know where there's a lot of folks that are just struggling and they're like why does this person have access to a housing assistance you know when I I can't access that I can't afford a mortgage you know I'm out in the cold and I think that the way we've devised some of these anti-poverty programs to make them most efficient um has been very divisive and we do not have to choose in this rich country between um between these we don't have to design our policies like this I should say um we have enough resources to kind of design bigger tint policies for example policies that are you know inclusive and Broad you brought up Stockton um a few moments ago and uh former mayor Michael Tubbs have had a really um played a real leadership role in the country by getting behind guaranteed basic income and you know in covid we had guaranteed basic income experiment actually it was just called the child tax credit you know it was checks that went out to moderate income families low-income families you know I think it was passed in March check started flying out in June fast efficient got to a lot of families massively reduced the poverty rate but also benefited a lot of working class and middle class families too and I think those kind of policies are really impactful and things that we should get behind and then the question is like can we afford those you know could we afford to keep doing war and I just feel like we have to push back against that scarcity mindset and scarcity division we have so many resources here a study published recently showed that at the top one percent of us just paid the taxes they owed like not pay more taxes just stop debating taxes so successfully we as a nation could raise an additional 175 billion dollars a year that's more than enough to re-establish that child tax credit that it's so much to help families during the pandemic that's almost enough to lift everyone above the official poverty line so we can do more we have the resources and we don't have to fight for crumbs okay so this is a solution right and this is what I love about your book it not only clearly outlines the problems gives you personal stories right but also you're you're outlining Solutions so can you go over you you say investing in more anti-poverty programs uh stopping the exploitation of low-income workers and embracing the idea that and I love this one that everyone can prosper um can you can you kind of go over and and describe some of those Solutions and how I know you even have a great website like how can we participate in this solution as an American citizen to make this country a better place and a place that fulfills what our founding documents stated okay so we used to as a country have Ambitions to end poverty right when the Johnson Administration launched the war on poverty 1964 they set a deadline they were like we got this by 1976 you know and you know it wasn't just talk they set a deadline and I think that we can rekindle that moral energy and that ambition and audacity you know in a way that the bombasticness um of that today and we need to do three things in poverty we need to deepen our investments in fighting uh poverty and we can fund those Investments by fair tax implementation but we don't just need deeper Investments we need different ones we need policies that disrupt poverty that cut it at its root and this means we have to build worker power to increase wages we have to expand housing choice so that poor families don't have to just take the best bad option in the real to Market and we need to end the unrelenting exploitation of the poor in the financial sector and then we have to finally turn away from segregation we have to fight for broad inclusive communities we have to tear down our walls and that's how we can end poverty in America and that's just not on them you know whoever them is you know Congress or the mayor or the other party this is something that we can do today so here's five concrete things five concrete things that that you can do and I can do today to start fighting poverty to become a poverty abolitionist we can shop and invest differently you know we can kind of vote with our wallets in a way um second we can Flex our influence where we are so I teach at a university I should be asking what's my University doing to take care of its landscapers how are we treating them how we treat our adjunct faculty what is our endowment invested in you know I've got a little influence here I can Flex it and we all have that our faith community in our neighborhood and our families let's like start Where We Are third let's talk about taxes differently everyone in America right left Center we just complain about taxes we need to start disrupting that and we need to start talking about public Investments and the fact that so many of us get benefits that don't make a lot of sense actually and we should lose sleep over this when there's so much poverty in this country the fourth thing that we can do is fight segregation segregation is a result of history and laws but it's also a result of a lot of people doing the hard work of defending the wall they go to the zoning board meetings they yell at the Alderman and those of us seeking a different kind of community we need to go to those meetings too and we need to stand up and say look this community's long-standing tradition of segregation ends with me I want this building in my neighborhood I do not want to deny other kids opportunities my kids get living here build this thing and fifth we can join the anti-poverty movement and there's these amazing movements all over the country working at the state and federal level and if you're interested in this there's a website that I've built called endpovertyusa.org it's just end povertyusa.org it does two simple things it's designed to connect families to services in their communities that they need and deserve and it's designed to connect all of us to groups just putting in the work at the federal level or in your state fighting poverty right now well this has been a great conversation I can't wait to hopefully um be able to continue the conversation with you as I know you will be writing more you will be advocating more um but let's talk about the Library of Congress National Book Festival so earlier this month you went was this your first time was it fun it was my first time it was fun and inspiring and I mean it's just it's very a Book Festival a very special thing you know you're connecting with readers that might not come to your book talks right normally that maybe they're there for George Saunders and wondered in or advice you know and I think that you know that that's very exciting that gets you different audiences different questions different energy and it's just wonderful to celebrate books of all kinds you know with a festival like this so it was great to be there great to be invited well thank you so much and thank you for this conversation it's really been wonderful I know um everyone out there if you haven't yet picked up the book I recommend you do it will not be a disappointment um and if you let's say you're like oh it's a it's a big book the good news is and I have a friend who taught me this trick he said you know sometimes when I pick up big books and this isn't a very big book but he was like I always put a bookmark at the endnotes and and the amazing thing because I love back matter I like to read the end notes because I like to know all of where he's where authors are getting the information but the endnotes take up I want to say it's like over 100 pages so for those of you who are it's really you will get a lot from the whole book but 200 pages and you are going to learn so very much about poverty in America but poverty by America that's the book um so until next time um we are well I'm sorry we are going to close the show um and I just want to thank you for your Brilliance for for your research or thoughtfulness for delving into this really important topic um and helping to make us better Americans so thank you so much Matthew it was really wonderful conversation thank you so much for having me and thank you for being such a enthusiastic Ambassador for books and ideas and so really appreciated this conversation well thank you for those of you out there I just want to remind you all of the content is still available um at the Library of Congress National Book Festival website you can go to ello sleep loc Geo V slash book Fest now until August 31st there are still a few more new conversations but all of that content can also be gotten at the PBS books website or at the Library of Congress National Book Festival website until next time I'm Heather Marie montia and happy reading [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music]