Matthew Desmond

Matthew Desmond (born 1979 or 1980) is an American sociologist. He is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, where he is also the principal investigator of the Eviction Lab. Desmond was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. He was formerly the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.

Quotes

• During slavery, "Americans built a culture of speculation unique in its abandon," writes the historian Joshua Rothman...That culture would drive cotton production up to the Civil War, and it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since. It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us the Panic of 1837, the stock-market crash of 1929 and the recession of 2008. It is the culture that has produced staggering inequality and undignified working conditions. If today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism — a union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs and normalized insecurity; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but awarding financial rule-bending; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider — one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is.
  • "In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation", The New York Times Magazine (August 14, 2019)

• Those who have amassed the most power and capital bear the most responsibility for America's vast poverty: political elites, who have utterly failed low-income Americans over the past century; corporate bosses who have spent and schemed to prioritize profits over people; lobbyists blocking the will of the American people with their self-serving interests; property owners who have exiled the poor from entire cities and fueled the affordable housing crisis.
  • Poverty, by America (2023), p. 189

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Matthew Desmond on Wikipedia