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Author: A. Ricardo López
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822351293
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 461
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Book Description
The contributors question the current academic understanding of what is known as the global middle class. They see middle-class formation as transnational and they examine this group through the lenses of economics, gender, race, and religion from the mid-nineteenth century to today.
Author: A. Ricardo López
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822351293
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 461
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Book Description
The contributors question the current academic understanding of what is known as the global middle class. They see middle-class formation as transnational and they examine this group through the lenses of economics, gender, race, and religion from the mid-nineteenth century to today.
Author: David Roediger
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1642597279
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
The Sinking Middle Class challenges the “save the middle class” rhetoric that dominates our political imagination. The slogan misleads us regarding class, nation, and race. Talk of middle class salvation reinforces myths holding that the US is a providentially middle class nation. Implicitly white, the middle class becomes viewed as unheard amidst supposed concerns for racial justice and for the poor. Roediger shows how little the US has been a middle class nation. The term seldom appeared in US writing before 1900. Many white Americans were self-employed, but this social experience separated them from the contemporary middle class of today, overwhelmingly employed and surveilled. Today’s highly unequal US hardly qualifies as sustaining the middle class. The idea of the US as a middle class place required nurturing. Those doing that ideological work—from the business press, to pollsters, to intellectuals celebrating the results of free enterprise—gained little traction until the Depression and Cold War expanded the middle class brand. Much later, the book’s sections on liberal strategist Stanley Greenberg detail, “saving the middle class” entered presidential politics. Both parties soon defined the middle class to include over 90% of the population, precluding intelligent attention to the poor and the very rich. Resurrecting radical historical critiques of the middle class, Roediger argues that middle class identities have so long been shaped by debt, anxiety about falling, and having to sell one’s personality at work that misery defines a middle class existence as much as fulfillment.
Author: Richard V. Reeves
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815739133
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 52
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Book Description
A 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: Robert Wuthnow
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691210713
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
How American respectability has been built by maligning those who don't make the grade How did Americans come to think of themselves as respectable members of the middle class? Was it just by earning a decent living? Or did it require something more? And if it did, what can we learn that may still apply? The quest for middle-class respectability in nineteenth-century America is usually described as a process of inculcating positive values such as honesty, hard work, independence, and cultural refinement. But clergy, educators, and community leaders also defined respectability negatively, by maligning individuals and groups—“misfits”—who deviated from accepted norms. Robert Wuthnow argues that respectability is constructed by “othering” people who do not fit into easily recognizable, socially approved categories. He demonstrates this through an in-depth examination of a wide variety of individuals and groups that became objects of derision. We meet a disabled Civil War veteran who worked as a huckster on the edges of the frontier, the wife of a lunatic who raised her family while her husband was institutionalized, an immigrant religious community accused of sedition, and a wealthy scion charged with profiteering. Unlike respected Americans who marched confidently toward worldly and heavenly success, such misfits were usually ignored in paeans about the nation. But they played an important part in the cultural work that made America, and their story is essential for understanding the “othering” that remains so much a part of American culture and politics today.
Author: Bryn Rosenfeld
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691192197
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
"The conventional wisdom is that a growing middle class will give rise to democracy. Yet the middle classes of the developing world have grown at a remarkable pace over the past two decades, and much of this growth has taken place in countries that remain nondemocratic. Rosenfeld explains this phenomenon by showing how modern autocracies secure support from key middle-class constituencies. Drawing on original surveys, interviews, archival documents, and secondary sources collected from nine months in the field, she compares the experiences of recent post-communist countries, including Russia, the Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, to show that under autocracy, state efforts weaken support for democracy, especially among the middle class. When autocratic states engage extensively in their economies - by offering state employment, offering perks to those to those who are loyal, and threatening dismissal to those who are disloyal - the middle classes become dependent on the state for economic opportunities and career advancement, and, ultimately, do not support a shift toward democratization. Her argument explains why popular support for Ukraine's Orange Revolution unraveled or why Russians did not protest evidence of massive electoral fraud. The author's research questions the assumption that a rising share of educated, white-collar workers always makes the conditions for democracy more favorable, and why dependence on the state has such pernicious consequences for democratization"--
Author: Mark W. Robbins
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472130331
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
Examines the birth of the American middle class as white-collar workers used their growing consumer identity to organize politically
Author: Katherine Porter
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804780587
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
About 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: Jim Tankersley
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541767845
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
A vivid character-driven narrative, fused with important new economic and political reporting and research, that busts the myths about middle class decline and points the way to its revival. For over a decade, Jim Tankersley has been on a journey to understand what the hell happened to the world's greatest middle-class success story -- the post-World-War-II boom that faded into decades of stagnation and frustration for American workers. 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 understanding how to create a more widespread prosperity. He begins by unraveling the real mystery of the American economy since the 1970s - not where did the jobs go, but why haven't new and better ones been created to replace them. His analysis begins with the revelation that women and minorities played a far more crucial role in building the post-war middle class than today's politicians typically acknowledge, and policies that have done nothing to address the structural shifts of the American economy have enabled a privileged few to capture nearly all the benefits of America's growing prosperity. Meanwhile, the "angry white men of Ohio" have been sold by Trump and his ilk a theory of the economy that is dangerously backward, one that pits them against immigrants, minorities, and women who should be their allies. At the culmination of his journey, Tankersley lays out specific policy prescriptions and social undertakings that can begin moving the needle in the effort to make new and better jobs appear. By fostering an economy that opens new pathways for all workers to reach their full potential -- men and women, immigrant or native-born, regardless of race -- America can once again restore the upward flow of talent that can power growth and prosperity.
Author: Peter Earle
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520068261
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476
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Book Description
This is the first major study of a neglected yet extremely significant subject: the London middle classes in the period between 1660 and 1730, a period in which they created a society and economy that can be seen with hindsight to have ushered in the modern world. Using a wealth of material from contemporary sources--including wills, business papers, inventories, marriage contracts, divorce hearings, and the writings of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys--Peter Earle presents a fully rounded picture of the "middling sort of people," getting to the hearts of their lives as men and women struggling for success in the biggest, richest, and most middle-class city in contemporary Europe. He examines in fascinating and convincing detail the business life of Londoners, from apprenticeship through the problems and potential rewards of different occupational groups, going on to look at middle-class family, social, political and material life--from relationships with spouses, children, servants, and neighbors, to food and clothes and furniture, to sickness, death, and burial. Stimulating, scholarly, and constantly illuminating, this book is an important and impressive contribution to English social history.
Author: Chrystia Freeland
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101595949
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
A Financial Times Best Book of the Year Shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize There has always been some gap between rich and poor in this country, but recently what it means to be rich has changed dramatically. Forget the 1 percent—Plutocrats proves that it is the wealthiest 0.1 percent who are outpacing the rest of us at breakneck speed. Most of these new fortunes are not inherited, amassed instead by perceptive businesspeople who see themselves as deserving victors in a cutthroat international competition. With empathy and intelligence, Plutocrats reveals the consequences of concentrating the world’s wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Propelled by fascinating original interviews with the plutocrats themselves, Plutocrats is a tour de force of social and economic history, the definitive examination of inequality in our time.
