PanJacobin\"Desmond wants to connect — and create a causal relationship between — omnipresent poverty and all of the ways in which the well-to-do are subsidized. It is not, in Desmond’s telling, the government or multinational corporate monopolies that produce and reproduce poverty: rather, it owes to a myriad of interchanges, scalable from an everyday cheap product bought without care for the worker, to a tax break exclusively for homeowners. What truly entrenches poverty is the exchange between those with and those without ... For Desmond, the reason is plain: \'We like it.\' He calls this his \'rudest explanation\' for the persistence of poverty. But really, aside from being rude, it mostly functions to bolster a fictive \'we\' which narrates the book ... While Desmond’s reading is not entirely lacking in truth, the way it is conceived reflects rather than challenges neoliberal ideas of subjective choice: Desmond joins a concert of recent writers like Ibram X. Kendi, Patrisse Cullors, and Robin DiAngelo pushing various iterations of individualized guilt upon their audiences dressed up, at times, as a political-economic analysis ... Desmond, to make matters worse, attempts to walk a tightrope of self-absolution and collective guilt alongside the upper classes.\
