That system and its dehumanizing toll are the subjects of Disposable: America’s Contempt for the Underclass, Jones’s incisive new book expanding on her 2020 essay. In the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich, she combines interviews and firsthand observation of poverty with deeply researched history. The devastation of Covid-19 is nothing new, she contends. A reactionary politics has long prioritized the profits of the ruling class while using up the lives of the working poor. Against official indifference, she recounts the stories of people living on America’s margins. Many are family of the Covid dead, people like her who barely got to say goodbye to a loved one who caught the virus at a nursing home or front-line job. “Working-class death can be less likely to claim our attention,” Jones writes. “Their lives and their loves pass away with them, as they move from shadow to shadow. But disposable people have something to say.”