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Author: OECD
Publisher: OECD Publishing
Published: 2019-05-01
Total Pages: 173
ISBN-13: 926415034X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMiddle-class households feel left behind and have questioned the benefits of economic globalisation.
Author: Benjamin Lee
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-12-04
Total Pages: 183
ISBN-13: 147352122X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA hilarious collection of the most agonizing real-life inconveniences faced by the iPhone-losing, polenta-burning, Eurostar-missing middle classes, illustrated by Matt Blease ‘My pug has hiccups’ ‘I've given myself a croissant headache’ ‘I just dropped batteries in my quinoa’ ‘Think I’ve forgotten how to ski’ Can't find your melon baller? Wrestling with wrapping paper? Struggling to figure out how to properly pronounce quinoa?? Get your daily trials into perspective with this hilarious collection of the top #MiddleClassProblems from around the globe. Since 2010, Benjamin Lee has run the hugely popular @MiddleClassProb account, and in this book he has selected the all-time highlights.
Author: Nancey Green Leigh
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-04
Total Pages: 277
ISBN-13: 1351488104
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAre Americans as well-off as they used to be? The answer affects everything from product markets and housing sales to social tranquility and presidential (and local) elections. This volume examines what is happening to the American middle class. In a detailed and comprehensive analysis, Nancey Green Leigh tracks changes in the pattern of income distribution over a twenty-year period. While earnings have increased, there is a widening gap between what middle-level earnings can purchase and the cost of a middle standard of living.Due to the fact that this decline has not been experienced equally in all regions, separate analyses are reported for urban and rural locations, major census regions, and the largest states. To identify which workers have been most affected, Leigh compares earning trends by race, gender, educational level, industry of employment, part- or full-time status, and fringe benefit recipiency. Rejecting short-term and demographic explanations, Leigh links the decline of the middle class to economic change and industrial restructuring.Leigh concludes her work by examining planning and policy prescriptions to improve the prospects of members - and aspiring members - of the middle economic class. She documents the decreasing ability of middle-level earners to purchase a middle standard of living and attributes the decline in part to failures in planning. Failures of planning, she observes, have contributed to the growing divergence between middle-level earnings and the middle standard of living. Stemming Middle-Class Decline provides comprehensive data and trends on workers, communities, regions, and the nation that all policymakers and government officials should read and examine with care.
Author: Hattie Hamilton
Publisher: Summersdale
Published: 2018-05-10
Total Pages: 145
ISBN-13: 1786857057
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHave you ever had to buy cava because the shop's out of champagne? Ever put too much wasabi on your sushi? Or maybe your latest lifestyle post on social media didn't get enough likes? Well, you're not alone. This cheekily illustrated book showcases these and other first-world problems that might find you wincing in self-recognition.
Author: Alissa Quart
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-06-26
Total Pages: 326
ISBN-13: 0062412272
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOne of TIME’s Best New Books to Read This Summer “Brilliant—a keen, elegantly written, and scorching account of the American family today. Through vivid stories, sharp analysis and wit, Quart anatomizes the middle class’s fall while also offering solutions and hope.” — Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed Families today are squeezed on every side—from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours. Many realize that attaining the standard of living their parents managed has become impossible. Alissa Quart, executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children. Through gripping firsthand storytelling, Quart shows how our country has failed its families. Her subjects—from professors to lawyers to caregivers to nurses—have been wrung out by a system that doesn’t support them, and enriches only a tiny elite. Interlacing her own experience with close-up reporting on families that are just getting by, Quart reveals parenthood itself to be financially overwhelming, except for the wealthiest. She offers real solutions to these problems, including outlining necessary policy shifts, as well as detailing the DIY tactics some families are already putting into motion, and argues for the cultural reevaluation of parenthood and caregiving. Writtenin the spirit of Barbara Ehrenreich and Jennifer Senior, Squeezed is an eye-opening page-turner. Powerfully argued, deeply reported, and ultimately hopeful, it casts a bright, clarifying light on families struggling to thrive in an economy that holds too few options. It will make readers think differently about their lives and those of their neighbors.
Author: Richard V. Reeves
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Published: 2020-10-06
Total Pages: 51
ISBN-13: 0815739133
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA better future for the middle class is no longer an aspiration. It is a necessity. The disintegration of the American Dream is more visible than ever before. The understanding—the contract—that existed between individuals willing to work and contribute and a society willing to support those individuals when they needed it is falling apart. Now is the time to draft a new contract with America's middle class. One that rewards work and service, improves upward mobility, and reduces inequality. In A New Contract with the Middle Class Brookings senior fellows Isabel Sawhill and Richard Reeves outline the foundations of what that new contract should be, based on discussions they had across the country with middle-class Americans. Sawhill and Reeves' recommendations provide solutions to issues that came up time and time again in these conversations: money, time, relationships, health, and respect. Some of the bold recommendations included in A New Contract with the Middle Class: • Eliminate virtually all income taxes paid by the middle class. • Raise the minimum wage and subsidize wages below the median with a worker tax credit. • Offer scholarships for those who undertake at least a year of national service. • Ensure four weeks of paid leave per year. • Align school and working hours and boost child care to help working parents. America is only as strong as the American middle-class. A New Contract with the Middle Class proposes a new way forward.
Author: Katherine Porter
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-01-11
Total Pages: 322
ISBN-13: 0804780587
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAbout 1.5 million households filed bankruptcy in the last year, making bankruptcy as common as college graduation and divorce. The recession has pushed more and more families into financial collapse—with unemployment, declines in retirement wealth, and falling house values destabilizing the American middle class. Broke explores the consequences of this unprecedented growth in consumer debt and shows how excessive borrowing undermines the prosperity of middle class America. While the recession that began in mid-2007 has widened the scope of the financial pain caused by overindebtedness, the problem predated that large-scale economic meltdown. And by all indicators, consumer debt will be a defining feature of middle-class families for years to come. The staples of middle-class life—going to college, buying a house, starting a small business—carry with them more financial risk than ever before, requiring more borrowing and new riskier forms of borrowing. This book reveals the people behind the statistics, looking closely at how people get to the point of serious financial distress, the hardships of dealing with overwhelming debt, and the difficulty of righting one's financial life. In telling the stories of financial failures, this book exposes an all-too-real part of middle-class life that is often lost in the success stories that dominate the American economic narrative. Authored by experts in several disciplines, including economics, law, political science, psychology, and sociology, Broke presents analyses from an original, proprietary data set of unprecedented scope and detail, the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project. Topics include class status, home ownership, educational attainment, impacts of self-employment, gender differences, economic security, and the emotional costs of bankruptcy. The book makes judicious use of illustrations to present key findings and concludes with a discussion of the implications of the data for contemporary policy debates.
Author: Richard V. Reeves
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Published: 2018-05-08
Total Pages: 206
ISBN-13: 0815735499
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDream Hoarders sparked a national conversation on the dangerous separation between the upper middle class and everyone else. Now in paperback and newly updated for the age of Trump, Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard Reeves is continuing to challenge the class system in America. In America, everyone knows that the top 1 percent are the villains. The rest of us, the 99 percent—we are the good guys. Not so, argues Reeves. The real class divide is not between the upper class and the upper middle class: it is between the upper middle class and everyone else. The separation of the upper middle class from everyone else is both economic and social, and the practice of “opportunity hoarding”—gaining exclusive access to scarce resources—is especially prevalent among parents who want to perpetuate privilege to the benefit of their children. While many families believe this is just good parenting, it is actually hurting others by reducing their chances of securing these opportunities. There is a glass floor created for each affluent child helped by his or her wealthy, stable family. That glass floor is a glass ceiling for another child. Throughout Dream Hoarders, Reeves explores the creation and perpetuation of opportunity hoarding, and what should be done to stop it, including controversial solutions such as ending legacy admissions to school. He offers specific steps toward reducing inequality and asks the upper middle class to pay for it. Convinced of their merit, members of the upper middle class believes they are entitled to those tax breaks and hoarded opportunities. After all, they aren't the 1 percent. The national obsession with the super rich allows the upper middle class to convince themselves that they are just like the rest of America. In Dream Hoarders, Reeves argues that in many ways, they are worse, and that changes in policy and social conscience are the only way to fix the broken system.
Author: Joan C. Williams
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
Published: 2017-05-16
Total Pages: 192
ISBN-13: 1633693791
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"I recommend a book by Professor Williams, it is really worth a read, it's called White Working Class." -- Vice President Joe Biden on Pod Save America An Amazon Best Business and Leadership book of 2017 Around the world, populist movements are gaining traction among the white working class. Meanwhile, members of the professional elite—journalists, managers, and establishment politicians--are on the outside looking in, left to argue over the reasons. In White Working Class, Joan C. Williams, described as having "something approaching rock star status" by the New York Times, explains why so much of the elite's analysis of the white working class is misguided, rooted in class cluelessness. Williams explains that many people have conflated "working class" with "poor"--but the working class is, in fact, the elusive, purportedly disappearing middle class. They often resent the poor and the professionals alike. But they don't resent the truly rich, nor are they particularly bothered by income inequality. Their dream is not to join the upper middle class, with its different culture, but to stay true to their own values in their own communities--just with more money. While white working-class motivations are often dismissed as racist or xenophobic, Williams shows that they have their own class consciousness. White Working Class is a blunt, bracing narrative that sketches a nuanced portrait of millions of people who have proven to be a potent political force. For anyone stunned by the rise of populist, nationalist movements, wondering why so many would seemingly vote against their own economic interests, or simply feeling like a stranger in their own country, White Working Class will be a convincing primer on how to connect with a crucial set of workers--and voters.
Author: Nan Mooney
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2008-05-01
Total Pages: 254
ISBN-13: 9780807097496
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe first book to exclusively target the struggles of the professional middle class-educated individuals who purposely choose humanistic, intellectual, or creative pursuits-Nan Mooney's (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents is a simultaneously sobering and proactive work that captures a diversity of voices. Drawing on more than a hundred interviews with people all across America, (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents explores how stagnant wages, debt, and escalating costs for tuition, health care, and home ownership are jeopardizing today's educated middle class. Teachers, counselors, nonprofit employees, environmentalists, journalists, and the author speak candidly about their sense of economic-and hence emotional-security, and their plans and fears about what's to come. With up-to-date and accessible research, including a short history of the middle class, Mooney explains what it has meant historically to be middle class and how these definitions have changed so dramatically over the decades. She shows that social programs once aided the growth of this class but shifts in policies and labor practices-and increases in fixed costs, such as health care, housing, education, childcare, and household debt-are making it increasingly difficult for families to retain their middle-class status. Throughout the book, Mooney uses real people's stories and an analysis of the new economic reality to put middle-class struggles in perspective: College tuition has increased 35 percent in the past five years, and while the average college undergraduate's debt is $20,000, earnings for graduates have remained stagnant since 2000. In addition, only 18 percent of middle-class families have three months' income saved, and 90 percent of those filing for bankruptcy are middle class. Finally, raising one child through age eighteen costs a middle-income family around $237,000, while the costs of housing, health care, and education are all rising faster than inflation. Despite this difficult reality, Mooney offers concrete ideas on how individuals and society can arrest this downward spiral. Reigniting a sense of social responsibility is crucial-this ranges from improving government-backed education, health care, and childcare programs to drawing on successful models from individual states and other countries. Intimate personal accounts combined with Mooney's incisive analysis will make (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents resonate deeply for America's professional middle class. From the Hardcover edition.
