Why the United States has developed an economy divided between rich and poor and how racism helped bring this about. The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Temin employs a well-known, simple model of a dual economy to examine the dynamics of the rich/poor divide in America, and outlines ways to work toward greater equality so that America will no longer have one economy for the rich and one for the poor. Many poorer Americans live in conditions resembling those of a developing country—substandard education, dilapidated housing, and few stable employment opportunities. And although almost half of black Americans are poor, most poor people are not black. Conservative white politicians still appeal to the racism of poor white voters to get support for policies that harm low-income people as a whole, casting recipients of social programs as the Other—black, Latino, not like "us." Politicians also use mass incarceration as a tool to keep black and Latino Americans from participating fully in society. Money goes to a vast entrenched prison system rather than to education. In the dual justice system, the rich pay fines and the poor go to jail.
In this book, some of the country’s most prominent scholars, businesspeople, and community activists answer with a resounding yes.
In The Riches of This Land, Tankersley fuses the story of forgotten Americans-- struggling women and men who he met on his journey into the travails of the middle class-- with important new economic and political research, providing fresh ...
Russell Jacoby, author of The End of Utopia and The Last Intellectuals, contributes a new Afterword to this edition, in which he reflects on the impact White Collar had at its original publication and considers what it means to our society ...
The book argues that it is not only the income for the middle class that has fallen, but that the costs of healthcare, education, and taxes have increased at such a higher rate, which makes it impossible for an average American family to ...
An abundance of evidence suggests that we here in the United States are about to find out. America's Shrinking Middle Class documents trends that have been building not just since the Great Recession, but for over four decades.
... New York: Broadway Books, 2005 . Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta . “Barack Obama's Original Sin: America's Post-Racial Illusion ... The Vanishing Middle Class .” In Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream, edited by John ...
... the Disappearing Middle-Class,” Institute of New Economic Thinking, Working Paper No. 4, February 2015. 83 John Komlos, “Growth of Income and Welfare in the U.S., 1979–2011,” NBER Working Paper no. 22211, 2016. 84 Richard Easterlin ...
This book is considered a standard on the subject of the new middle class in twentieth-century America.
A labor lawyer and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist argues that, even as organized labor seems to be crumbling in the United States, a revived—but different—labor movement is now more relevant than ever in America's ...
This book follows ten families in ten representative counties to examine their lives and how the decisions they make impact consumer behavior.