The United States is the wealthiest large country in the history of the world. It also has, among affluent democracies, one of the highest rates of poverty, the weakest social safety net, the widest gap between rich and poor, and the lowest rates of upward mobility. These facts coexist without contradiction — they are, as the literature below documents, structurally related. American poverty is not a residual problem left over after prosperity has done its work; it is produced by the same political and economic arrangements that produce American wealth.
The official U.S. poverty measure, set in 1963 and based on a formula that multiplied a minimum food budget by three, is widely regarded as inadequate — too low, too crude, and insensitive to regional cost differences, medical expenses, and the value of non-cash benefits. The Supplemental Poverty Measure introduced in 2011 corrects some of these defects. By either measure, roughly 37–40 million Americans are poor in any given year, and many more cycle in and out of poverty. Child poverty was cut roughly in half in 2021 by the temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit and rose back to its prior level when the expansion expired in 2022 — a natural experiment that demonstrated, as clearly as any policy experiment can, that American poverty is a policy choice.
Amartya Sen's capability approach reframed the question: what matters is not income alone but what a person is actually able to do and be — to be adequately fed, sheltered, educated, to participate in the life of their community, to appear in public without shame. Two people with the same income may have very different capabilities depending on disability, location, and surrounding institutions.
Annotated bibliography
The reporting tradition
The most important American writing about poverty has come from journalists and reporters who went and looked. The tradition begins with Jacob Riis and runs through Harrington, Ehrenreich, and Desmond.
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890) — photographs and reporting on tenement life in New York's Lower East Side. The book that invented American poverty journalism.
Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962) — the book that made poverty visible to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Harrington argued that poverty in affluent America was "invisible" — hidden in rural hollows, urban ghettos, and migrant camps, unseen by the suburban middle class. Credited with helping launch the War on Poverty.
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001) — Ehrenreich worked as a waitress, hotel maid, and Walmart clerk and documented the impossibility of making ends meet on low-wage work. The most widely read book on American poverty since Harrington.
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016) — ethnography of eviction in Milwaukee; documents how the housing market extracts wealth from the poor and how eviction is a cause, not just a consequence, of poverty.
Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America (2023) — Desmond's argument that American poverty is sustained not only by the failures of government but by the choices of the affluent — the mortgage-interest deduction, the tax subsidies for employer-sponsored health insurance, the exploitation of low-wage labor.
Sasha Abramsky, The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (2013) — an updated survey of American poverty, deliberately echoing Harrington and Riis.
Race and poverty
American poverty cannot be understood apart from American racism. The racial wealth gap — white families hold roughly eight times the wealth of Black families — is the cumulative result of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, exclusion from New Deal programs, and continuing discrimination in housing, credit, and employment.
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (1899) — the first systematic sociological study of an American Black community; Du Bois documented the intersection of race and poverty in Philadelphia's Seventh Ward. Pioneering in method and still relevant in its findings.
William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987) and When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1996) — Wilson argued that the concentration of poverty in inner-city neighborhoods was driven by deindustrialization and the departure of middle-class Black families, creating "concentration effects" that compounded disadvantage. Controversial for emphasizing structural economic factors over racism, but the empirical work is essential.
Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (2017) — demonstrates that residential segregation was created by deliberate government policy at every level. The racial geography of American poverty is not an accident.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The Case for Reparations" (The Atlantic, 2014) — documents the specific mechanisms (redlining, contract selling, predatory lending) through which Black wealth was extracted in the twentieth century. The essay that reopened the reparations debate by grounding it in economic history.
Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America (2015) — documents the existence of extreme poverty (households surviving on less than $2.00 per person per day in cash income) in the United States, a phenomenon most Americans assume exists only in the developing world. The families they follow are disproportionately Black and living in the Deep South.
Rural poverty and the working poor
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (1977) and What Are People For? (1990) — Berry's argument that the destruction of agrarian communities — by agribusiness, by policy, by the culture's contempt for rural life — is a form of impoverishment that economic measures do not capture.
Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (1991) and The Shame of the Nation (2005) — Kozol's reporting on the radical inequality of American public schools; the poorest districts, serving overwhelmingly Black and Latino children, receive a fraction of the funding available to wealthy suburban districts.
J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy (2016) — Vance's memoir of growing up in a poor white family in Appalachian Ohio. Widely read and widely criticized: the memoir is vivid, but its explanatory framework (cultural dysfunction rather than structural forces) has been challenged by scholars of Appalachian poverty.
Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (2018) — a corrective to Vance; Smarsh grew up in rural Kansas poverty and emphasizes the structural forces (stagnant wages, lack of healthcare, the cost of education) rather than cultural pathology.
The structural and policy analysis
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (1999) — Sen's argument that poverty is not merely low income but the deprivation of capabilities. The framework redefines what "ending poverty" means: not just raising incomes but expanding what people can actually do and be.
Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (2012) — Stiglitz's case that American inequality (and the poverty it produces) is not the result of market efficiency but of rent-seeking, political capture, and deliberate policy choices.
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) — the empirical demonstration that wealth inequality, absent political intervention, tends to increase over time. The mid-century reduction of poverty was the exception, not the norm.
Jacob Hacker, The Great Risk Shift (2006, rev. 2019) — the shift of economic risk from institutions to individuals; the hollowing out of the safety net.
Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (2013) — Deaton (Nobel laureate in economics) on the global history of escape from poverty, and on why the United States has done worse than other rich countries at sharing the gains.
Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (2020) — documents the rise in mortality among white Americans without college degrees, driven by suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease. The argument is that deindustrialization and the destruction of working-class institutions have produced a crisis of meaning as well as a crisis of income.
The religious and moral tradition
Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement — Day's Houses of Hospitality, founded in the 1930s and still operating, are the longest-running experiment in direct service to the poor in American history. Day's position was that poverty is a scandal, that the works of mercy are obligatory, and that the structural causes of poverty must be challenged. See Jim Forest, All Is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day (2011).
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) — Addams's account of the settlement-house movement in Chicago; the argument, made through practice, that the poor are not objects of charity but neighbors whose lives have a logic and a dignity that the reformer must understand.
Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967) — King's last book, written after the Voting Rights Act, turns from civil rights to economic justice. King called for a guaranteed annual income and argued that racial justice could not be achieved without economic justice. The Poor People's Campaign, planned at the time of his assassination, was the political expression of this argument.