The 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.
"What happens when the
center cannot hold? With great empathy and infectious alarm,
Nan Mooney charts the travails of America's middle class in
this important book." —Anya Kamenetz, author of
Generation Debt
"If you're wondering why, in our age
of plenty, the financial treadmill keeps moving faster and
faster for America's increasingly educated—and increasingly
insecure—middle class, you owe it to yourself to read this
book. It's all here: the big trends, the compelling
portraits, the ideas for personal and political change, and
the call to arms we so desperately need." —Jacob S.
Hacker, author of The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on
American Jobs, Families, Health Care and Retirement and How
You Can Fight Back
"A book for the distressed and
confused because their life plan has gone to pieces. Mooney
illuminates what has happened to them—and why." —Nicholas
Von Hoffman, columnist for NY Observer and regular
contributor to The Nation
"This is the kind of book
that you wish was fiction. But, as Nan Mooney's incisive new
book shows, the fact is that this generation has inherited
an economy with too many low-paying, no benefit jobs and an
eroding middle class. Millions of young families wonder
where they went wrong when, in fact, their economic problems
are largely the result of policies that generated higher
incomes for a select few and rising economic insecurity for
the rest of us. In this timely book, Ms. Mooney pushes us to
demand an economy that works for all of us, not just the
very wealthy." —Heather Boushey, senior economist, Center
for Economic and Policy Research
"We hear a lot about
the runaway wealth of American professionals. In this
important book, Nan Mooney reminds us that most have no such
luck. Working in jobs they love provides a sense of moral
worth, but doesn't cover the bills for teachers, legal aid
lawyers, practicing artists, and others. Something has gone
wrong in America, and this book gives us a grip on the
crisis." —Katherine Newman, coauthor of The Missing
Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America and the Forbes
Class of 1941 Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at
Princeton
Facts from Not Keeping Up with Our
Parents
• Ninety percent of those filing for
bankruptcy today are middle class.
• Average college
loan debt is nearly $20,000; average graduate school loan
debt is $46,000.
• Credit card debt has risen 31
percent in the past five years; already indebted, middle-
and low-income households owe an average of $8,650; a third
owe over $10,000.
• Health care premiums have
increased at five times the rate of inflation since 2000.
• The median wealth of white households is $86,100,
as opposed to $19,010 for black households and $11,450 for
Latino households.
• Between 1979 and 2003, income
for the middle fifth of the population grew just 9 percent,
while the income for the top 1 percent jumped by 111
percent.
• Twenty-three percent of public college
graduates and 38 percent of private college graduates would
have an unmanageable level of debt if they were to live on a
teacher's starting salary.
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