The poor are always with us because so many of us benefit from their exploitation. That’s the thesis of Matthew Desmond’s new book, Poverty, by America, which recently hit the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list.

Desmond is a Princeton sociology professor whose previous book, Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American city, won a Pulitzer prize. So perhaps it’s not surprising that so many readers are eager to discover all the ways in which they are complicit in America’s scandalous levels of poverty and destitution. Still, it’s a little shocking to realize that the bien pensant upper middle classes who care about the poor, and form the target audience for this book, are among the people the author holds responsible for the problem.

Based on years of fieldwork in trailer parks and rooming houses, Evicted told the story of eight families struggling to pay rent in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Poverty, by America is a different kind of book. It sets out an extended moral argument, illuminated by striking facts and personal anecdotes, grounded in the literature on poverty and its causes. Written in direct, jargon-free prose, with most of the scholarly apparatus consigned to endnotes, it aims at a general audience. Poverty experts will be familiar with the material, though they are unlikely to have seen the facts explained in quite this way.

Desmond begins by depicting the lived experience of poverty, rendering its meanings in precise, evocative terms that convey its all-consuming character. Being poor, he says, is “a relentless piling on of problems”. It is insecurity, anxiety, ill health, loss of liberty, social exclusion, shame and embarrassment: “material scarcity piled on incarceration piled on depression piled on addiction”.

The US, despite being one of the richest countries on earth, has “more poverty than any other advanced democracy”, much of it concentrated in racially segregated neighbourhoods. One in nine Americans, and one in eight American children, is unable to afford necessities such as food and housing. And an increasing number of them live on less than half the “poverty line” income – a form of extreme poverty more often associated with the developing world. For Desmond this situation is not an intractable social problem or a policy failure. It is a moral stain on the American nation for which he and millions like him bear responsibility.

The author conceptualizes poverty not as an...