《制造贫困》内容简介
美国是世界上最富裕的国家，一个符合想象的美国纸醉金迷、机遇遍地，实在很难与“贫困”二字联系起来。然而，这样由中产和精英阶层代表的美国只是社会现实的一面，现实的另一面是，美国的贫困问题是所有发达国家中最严重的：在这片富饶的土地上，每9个人中就有一个缺乏生活保障；在公立学校就读的学生中，有100多万人无家可归；因为被房东驱逐、居无定所，每年有许多人在街头流浪、死亡……
这样的现实触目惊心，在这个富有的国家，为什么存在这么多绝望和苦难？这正是社会学家马修·德斯蒙德想要回答的问题。他确实得出了答案：这个丰裕社会的贫困无法消除，是因为有人乐见其成并从中获益，一个人的贫困，就是另一个人的利润。显而易见，这本书中想要解释的美国式贫困并非绝对贫困，而是赤裸裸的不平等——要彻底理解贫困，我们不能只盯着穷人的生活。穷人无法改变现状，正是另一部分人“以贫为壑”的结果。他们压低穷人的工资，迫使穷人为基本的生存缴纳更多费用。他们总是优先考虑累积自己的财富，而不是缓解贫困问题，这就使得富愈富、贫愈贫，一地的贫穷与绝望在聚集，另一地的资源和财富却不断滋长、日益集中，导致最终筑起了贫富间难以逾越的高墙。
这样的高墙使得社会分裂失序。那些未曾经历贫困的人或许难以理解，贫穷并非只是低水平的物质生活这么简单，“饥饿和尊严是无法并存的”——在贫困线那一行简单的数字背后，是一部分人日复一日具体的痛苦，这意味着生理上的痛苦、心灵的创伤，意味着漂泊无依、提心吊胆，意味着尊严被践踏、人格的矮化、自由的丧失……因此，要彻底解决贫困问题，需要的绝不止做慈善这么简单，在一个丰裕的社会，如德斯蒙德所述，也许我们需要的并不是多么高明的办法，而是解决问题的意志。
作者简介
【美】马修·德斯蒙德（MatthewDesmond）
社会学家、城市民族志学者，普林斯顿大学社会学教授、驱逐实验室（EvictionLab）主任，《纽约时报杂志》特约撰稿人。
德斯蒙德的研究主要集中在美国的贫困和公共政策方面。前著《扫地出门：美国城市的贫穷与暴利》获普利策奖、美国国家书评人协会奖、卡内基奖等，被评为过去100年中最好的50本非虚构图书之一，获选有史以来100本最佳社会政策图书。德斯蒙德也因此获麦克阿瑟天才奖，被列入“影响全美政治议题的50位人物”。
Brief introduction to Making Poverty
The United States is the richest country in the world, and it is difficult to associate the word "poverty" with the imagined United States, which is full of money and opportunities. But this America, represented by its middle class and elite, is only one part of the reality. The other part is that America has the worst poverty of any developed country: one in nine people in this land of plenty is insecure; More than 1 million students in public schools are homeless; Because they are evicted by landlords and have no fixed abode, many people live on the streets and die every year.
This is a shocking reality. Why is there so much despair and suffering in this rich country? That's the question sociologist Matthew Desmond set out to answer. He did arrive at the answer: the poverty of this affluent society cannot be eliminated because some people enjoy it and benefit from it, and one person's poverty is another person's profit. Clearly, the American-style poverty that this book seeks to explain is not absolute poverty, but outright inequality - and to fully understand poverty, we need to look beyond the lives of the poor. The inability of the poor to change the status quo is the result of the "beggar-thy-poverty" of another part of the population. They hold down the wages of the poor and force them to pay more for the basics of survival. They always prioritize the accumulation of their own wealth rather than the alleviation of poverty, which leads to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, poverty and despair gathering in one place, but resources and wealth growing and becoming more concentrated in another, resulting in the building of an impenetrable wall between the rich and the poor.
Such walls divide society. Those who have never experienced poverty may find it difficult to understand that poverty is not just a low level of material life, "hunger and dignity cannot coexist" - behind the simple number of the poverty line is the daily concrete suffering of some people, which means physical pain, mental trauma, which means being homeless and afraid. It means the violation of dignity, the diminution of personality, the loss of freedom... So, to solve the problem of poverty completely, we need more than just charity. In a society of plenty, as Desmond says, perhaps what we need is not so much clever solutions as the will to solve the problem.
About the author
[US] MatthewDesmond
Sociologist, urban ethnographer, professor of sociology at Princeton University, director of the EvictionLab, and staff writer at The New York Times Magazine.
Desmond's research focuses on poverty and public policy in the United States. His previous book, Swept Away: Poverty and Profiteering in Urban America, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Society of Book Reviewers Award, the Carnegie Prize, and was named one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the past 100 years and one of the 100 Best Social policy Books of all time. Desmond received a MacArthur Genius Grant and was named one of the "50 People who have influenced national political issues."
