Middle Class Economics

Although middle-income families don't earn much more than they did several decades ago, they are buying bigger cars, houses, and appliances. To pay for them, they spend more than they earn and carry record levels of debt. In a book that explores the very meaning of happiness and prosperity in America today, Robert Frank explains how increased concentrations of income and wealth at the top of the economic pyramid have set off "expenditure cascades" that raise the cost of achieving many basic goals for the middle class.

Peter Georgescu arrived in this country as a penniless Romanian refugee and rose to become the CEO of Young & Rubicam. Which is why he's so heartsick that in America today, with flat wages, disappearing jobs, and a shrinking middle class, his kind of rags-to-riches story doesn't seem possible now. But he has a message for his fellow CEOs: we're the ones who must take the lead in fixing the economy.

In a wide-ranging narrative that takes us from a downsized marketing executive in Massachusetts, to a father of three in Appalachia finding purpose and meaning working in a convenience-store chain, to an unemployed autoworker retraining in "advanced manufacturing", Shell reveals how work is essential to our flourishing and pyschological well-being - and how so many of the avenues to well-paid and meaningful work will be challenged in the years ahead.

Weaving the brackish humor of Chuck Palahniuk with the empathy of Barbara Ehrenreich, J. R. Helton brings to life an obscured underside of the American psyche in this unflinching account of life inside the working class of Texas in the 1980s. We first meet Helton as a struggling writer succumbing to the bleak reality of what it means to support himself and a wife. That despair is transformed into resilience as Helton insightfully narrates his wayward years, enduring hateful employers and mind-numbing manual labor.

Through meticulous research, author Gini Graham Scott paints a stark portrait of this growing division in modern society, drawing surprising accurate parallels to the Middle Ages and telling how our present course is ripe for social and political upheaval.

There was a time in this country when people who were well-off had two homes, and the super-rich may have had three residences. In 2008 a prominent politician was asked how many homes he had. He didn’t know. The number was eight...and in the ensuing years the income gap has only widened. Billionaires now have so much money and power that the very fabric of our nation is coming unraveled. Tax policy is fundamental to a nation’s stability. We need to return to the system that brought us a large, dynamic, educated middle class.