As a country, Americans have to find a way to keep our cities solvent. If large numbers of cities no longer have the necessary tax base, we have to find federal methods to intervene. If we don't, there's a risk of dozens of cities simply being left to their bankrupt fates - and I can't see how that serves anybody's interests in the long run.

When I talk about an "empathy bank," I don't mean literally opening up a bank and putting in deposits. What I mean is that the more we can, as individuals and as members of a community, empathize with, understand the pain and uncertainty economic crisis causes other people, the more we lay the groundwork for political change.

I do think there are ways to increase wages significantly, even in a global era. But you have to take voters and consumers with you on this journey - and that involves a tremendous, and long-term, public education campaign.

To really tackle poverty, politicians, activists, academics will all have to think outside their boxes, will have to start developing much more integrated approaches to these problems. And a large part of this will involve working out ways to push for living wages. Partly this will involve re-empowering the union movement, which has been massively weakened in recent decades. Partly it will involve a willingness to restructure tax codes to penalize companies that don't provide basic benefits and decent wages to employees.

It seems to me that large numbers of people are now paying attention to poverty and that large numbers now understand that blaming the poor and the insecure for being poor and insecure is as unseemly as is schoolyard bullying. In that realization lies hope for a reinvigorated discourse around poverty and inequity in modern-day America.

Detroit is a fascinating place, because things are so bad there that the dystopia has almost become utopian. People know they can't rely on the state, that public infrastructure is broken, and they've taken their own measures. People are growing their own food and selling their produce to local stores and restaurants. It's certainly not a fix-all; Detroit's problems are too deep-rooted for quick-fix solutions. But it's a hopeful sign. Detroiters are crafting their own solutions rather than being passive in the face of the city's and state's actions and inactions.

The failure of the first Barack Obama administration to really deliver on a new War on Poverty and a new language to explain these societal challenges in some ways provided the fuel that led to the Occupy Movement a few years later. And, while Occupy was a somewhat transitory phenomenon, many of the activist groups that emerged during this period are still out there, and still working on reshaping the political debate around taxes, around welfare, around government assistance to the poor, around debt relief for students, and so on.