Buery is a New York City native, a graduate of Harvard and Yale Law School. Buery is a former Deputy Mayor of the City of New York, and previously was the chief executive officer at Achievement First, a charter school network and Children’s Aid Society, one of the city’s oldest and largest child welfare agencies. Buery, Jr., is the CEO of Robin Hood, New York City’s largest local poverty fighting philanthropy. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Desmond is also a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His last book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, among others. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and the founding director of the Eviction Lab. Some lives are made small so that others may grow. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit.

In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?

The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Join the Institute for Public Knowledge and the Robin Hood Foundation for a book talk on Poverty, by America, with the author Matthew Desmond in conversation with Robin Hood’s CEO, Richard Buery, moderated by Eric Klinenberg. The recording of this event will be available on IPK’s YouTube channel following the event. We are currently seeking a larger event space to accommodate more guests and will reach out if this occurs.

Poverty by america desmond