working poor

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Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

Below the working class in the social hierarchy is the working-poor category (about 13 percent of the U.S. population). Members of the working poor live just above or below the poverty line. Typical annual household income is about $25,000. Individuals identified as the working poor often hold unskilled jobs, seasonal migrant jobs in agriculture, lower-paid factory jobs, and minimum-wage service-sector jobs (such as counter clerk in restaurants). As some people once in the unionized, blue-collar sector of the workforce have lost their jobs, they have faced increasing impoverishment. A large number of the working poor hold full-time jobs, and some hold down more than one job, but they simply cannot make ends meet.

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However, as goods-producing jobs have decreased, union membership has dropped to a small fraction of 9781442202238.print.indb 123 2/10/11 10:46 AM 124 Chapter 5 the labor force.10 Consequently, the power of the working class to influence economic and political decisions has diminished; today, the media frequently characterize the working class as low in political participation. Some scholars believe that the working poor should be a category separate from the working class, but my examination of media coverage suggests that the working class and working poor are discussed somewhat interchangeably, particularly as more working-class employees are “only a step—or a second family income—away from poverty.”11 As a result, societal lines, like media distinctions, between the working class and working poor have become increasingly blurred. Global shifts in the labor force through outsourcing, downsizing, and plant closings have created more fluidity between the two groups.

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Global shifts in the labor force through outsourcing, downsizing, and plant closings have created more fluidity between the two groups. Some analysts place the working poor at 13 percent of the U.S. population; so, when combined with the working class (30 percent), these two categories together constitute approximately 43 percent of the population. Even under the best of circumstances, the working poor hold low-wage positions with little job security, few employee benefits, and no chance to save money. Their work conditions are frequently unpleasant and sometimes dangerous.12 The working poor may include illegal immigrants (known as undocumented workers) who worry that they will be incarcerated or deported if they complain to employers about wages or working conditions.

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

It concludes that the “well-being of low-income Americans, particularly the working poor, the near poor, and the new poor, are at substantial risk,” despite politicians’ and Wall Street’s declarations of an economic recovery.37 With the economic reality that real wages for the American working class have not increased for the past four decades, it is past time to challenge the distorted language and accompanying political rhetoric about the poor. We must move past Republican and Democratic versions of trickle-down economics—the belief that helping the rich and middle classes will magically improve the lot of the poor and working poor. Job growth has stalled so badly that several economists predict that, even if the economy rebounds, unemployment levels by the end of 2013 may return only to 2007 levels—around 4.6 percent, or almost 14 million people.

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We want to pin the tail on any available donkey that will keep us from having to define poverty as “being unable to make a living because we can’t find a job.” LONG LIVE THE LIE For at least the past four decades, most Americans have been able to ignore the poor and deny the extent of poverty. Middle class people would disparage low-income people, low-income people would dog the working poor, and the working poor would beat down on the homeless poor—because we all want to feel like we have some sort of stature in life. Be it shame and blame or utter disdain, all these attitudes were justified by stereotypes, distortions, and lies about the poor. It took the Great Recession to make poverty a real threat to the American psyche.

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We are concerned about poverty in America because it has impacted our lives, our outreach, the missions we’ve embraced, and our roles as democratic thinkers. For my dear brother, Tavis, poverty is not an abstraction; it was the story of his childhood. He didn’t grow up associating poverty with Black ghettos, run-down barrios, or slums. Tavis, the oldest of ten kids, grew up in a Bunker Hill, Indiana, trailer park with mostly poor whites. His working-poor, struggling parents, Emory and Joyce Smiley, and his grandmother (Big Mama) ran a strict Pentecostal household in a space that wasn’t built for 13 people. When Tavis’s aunt was murdered, the Smiley home became the safety net for her four children. He still recalls the humiliation of going to school in hand-me-down clothes and shoes with cardboard stuffed in them to cover the holes in the soles.

Shortchanged: Life and Debt in the Fringe Economy by Howard Karger

Alan Greenspan, big-box store, blue-collar work, book value, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, delayed gratification, financial deregulation, fixed income, illegal immigration, independent contractor, labor-force participation, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, microcredit, mortgage debt, negative equity, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, predatory finance, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, underbanked, working poor

Sixty percent of American workers earn less than $14 an hour, and unskilled entry-level workers in many service occupations earn $7 an hour or less.15 The working poor are also more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life than the middle class. For example, more than 40 million Americans lack health insurance, and unanticipated events such as illnesses or family emergencies may require workers to take off time without pay, leading to a temporary shortfall in income and increased debt. Given the low incomes of the working poor, it’s not surprising that a fringe economy that promises quick cash with few questions asked has become a high-growth sector.

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Chapter 1 looks at the scope and size of the fringe economy and the characteristics of its customers. It then examines the major players in the fringe economy, including mainstream financial institutions. Chapter 2 explores key factors that explain the phenomenal growth of the fringe sector, including stagnant wages, the rising numbers of working poor, the impact of welfare reform, immigration, and the rise of the Internet. Chapter 3 looks at the functionally poor middle class, an economic group increasingly targeted by the fringe sector. It also investigates the role of household debt in the growth of the fringe economy. Having a credit card is almost a necessity in America’s plastic-driven society.

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–ACE Cash Express, 2004 Annual Report 2 Why the Fringe Economy Is Growing The almost exponential growth of the fringe economy during the mid-1990s was baffling, especially since real incomes were rising and the numbers of people in poverty were dropping. Nonetheless, many factors came together to foster the phenomenal growth of the fringe economy, including the rise in numbers of America’s working poor, welfare reform, high levels of immigration, the growth of the Internet, the increased financial stress that slow wage growth and the rising cost of necessities placed on the middle class; and liberal federal banking laws. In simple terms, a major reason for the growth in the fringe economy is that 43% of Americans annually spend more than they earn.

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, basic income, benefit corporation, big-box store, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, government statistician, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, job automation, Kickstarter, land bank, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Contents Acknowledgments PROLOGUEA Scandal in the Making PART ONE: THE VOICES OF POVERTY CHAPTER ONEPoverty in the Land of the Plutocrats CHAPTER TWOBlame Games CHAPTER THREEAn American Dilemma CHAPTER FOURThe Fragile Safety Net CHAPTER FIVEThe Wrong Side of the Tracks CHAPTER SIXStuck in Reverse PART TWO: BUILDING A NEW AND BETTER HOUSE INTRODUCTIONWhy Now? CHAPTER ONEShoring Up the Safety Net CHAPTER TWOBreaking the Cycle of Poverty CHAPTER THREEBoosting Economic Security for the Working Poor CODAAttention Must Be Paid Note on Sources and Book Structure Notes Index Acknowledgments The American Way of Poverty is a book with many benefactors and champions. I wish I could say that I woke up one morning with the concept fully formed in my mind, but I didn’t. Rather, there were an array of themes that I was exploring in my journalism and a slew of economic and political issues that, in the years surrounding the 2008 economic collapse, I found to be increasingly fascinating.

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And then there were the pantry denizens escaping domestic violence who had run up against draconian cuts to the shelter system. One client, Wallace recalled, was a woman in her late forties, about to enter a shelter. “We got a request to provide her food because she has to bring her own food to the shelter. The programs that assist the working poor and the poor are in dire straits.” Variations on the stories from Appalachian Pennsylvania could be encountered in cities and regions across America. After all, an economic free-fall of the kind that the United States underwent after the housing market collapse and then the broader financial meltdown leaves carnage in its wake.

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Unable to claim unemployment insurance, they live entirely on savings, on the largesse of friends and family, or on charity. Yet this isn’t a story only about those without work. In fact, America’s scandalous poverty numbers also include a stunning number of people who actually have jobs. They are author David Shipler’s “working poor,” men and women who work long hours, often at physically grueling labor, yet routinely find they can’t make ends meet, can’t save money, and can’t get ahead in the current economy. At the bottom of that economy, income volatility is peculiarly high; casual laborers and hourly employees routinely see their hours cut, their wages reduced, or their jobs eliminated during downturns.

The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler

always be closing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, classic study, David Brooks, full employment, illegal immigration, late fees, low skilled workers, payday loans, profit motive, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, working poor

—Austin American-Statesman “Splendidly animated by Shipler’s empathy—his ability to see people and more important to depict them, not as statistics or symbols of injustice, but as human beings.” —The Miami Herald “The Working Poor will make any relatively well-off reader look at the struggles of the poor differently.… [It] deserves a place on the American bookshelf next to Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed.” —The Boston Globe “Shipler steers clear of diatribes, looking at human frailty and a spectrum of bosses and social services. With moving under statement, he develops a compassionate picture of the working poor.” —The Star-Ledger (Newark) “A work of stunning scope and clarity.… He brings the reader close enough to the challenges faced every day by his workers to make them feel it when the floor inevitably drops out beneath them.”

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.… He brings the reader close enough to the challenges faced every day by his workers to make them feel it when the floor inevitably drops out beneath them.” —The Buffalo News “The scope and importance of David Shipler’s The Working Poor brings to mind Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.” —Deseret News (Salt Lake City) “A powerful exposé that builds from page to page, from one grim revelation to another, until you have no choice but to leap out of your armchair and strike a blow for economic justice.” —Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed “There is no better book on poverty in America than The Working Poor because it describes in vivid detail the sort of day to day problems and the cycles that these folks are involved in … really thought-provoking in a very important way.”

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I use it as imprecisely as it should be used, to suggest the lowest stratum of economic attainment, with all of its accompanying problems. No discussion of the working poor is adequate without a discussion of their employers, so they also appear in these pages—entrepreneurs and managers who profit from cheap labor or who struggle to keep their businesses alive. In addition, this journey encounters teachers, physicians, and other professionals who try to make a difference. Although I have not sought to be demographically representative, most of the working poor in this book are women, as are most of them in the country at large. Unmarried with children, they are frequently burdened with low incomes and high needs among the youngsters they raise.

$2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn Edin, H. Luke Shaefer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, business cycle, clean water, ending welfare as we know it, future of work, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, indoor plumbing, informal economy, low-wage service sector, machine readable, mass incarceration, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, The Future of Employment, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Drawing on Ellwood, the new president’s plan would add time limits to AFDC, but it would also increase the benefits of work to poor parents through a dramatic expansion of the EITC. By doing this, he argued, the country would “make history. We will reward the work of millions of working poor Americans by realizing the principle that if you work forty hours a week and you’ve got a child in the house, you will no longer be in poverty.” As Clinton was announcing plans to bolster the efforts of the working poor—whom many saw as deserving, but for whom there was little to no aid—he once again borrowed from Ellwood, making the case that the working poor “play by the rules” but “get the shaft.” It was time to “make work pay.” According to Jason DeParle, however, Ellwood worried that Clinton’s rhetoric on welfare time limits was too harsh.

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We’ve seen that David Ellwood’s 1988 manifesto, Poor Support, called for replacing welfare, not just reforming it. He turned a spotlight on a portion of the poor who rarely got any attention—or much help—from the government: the working poor. Ellwood believed that by shifting the social safety net to support those who worked but remained in poverty, America could design a form of poor support that would avoid the criticisms lodged against welfare. In the 1990s, President Clinton and Congress acted on Ellwood’s ideas and bolstered the well-being of working-poor parents dramatically through tax credits that provided a substantial pay raise in the form of a wage subsidy. The largest of these programs, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), is now generous enough to lift more than 3 million children above the poverty line each year.

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Perhaps his only mistake was in assuming that this failure at the very bottom of the economic distribution would be visible and obvious, when in fact, throughout history, American poverty has generally been hidden far from most Americans’ view. America’s cash welfare program—the main government program that caught people when they fell—was not merely replaced with the 1996 welfare reform; it was very nearly destroyed. In its place arose a different kind of safety net, one that provides a powerful hand up to some—the working poor—but offers much less to others, those who can’t manage to find or keep a job. This book is about what happens when a government safety net that is built on the assumption of full-time, stable employment at a living wage combines with a low-wage labor market that fails to deliver on any of the above.

Creating Unequal Futures?: Rethinking Poverty, Inequality and Disadvantage by Ruth Fincher, Peter Saunders

barriers to entry, classic study, ending welfare as we know it, financial independence, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, open economy, pink-collar, positional goods, purchasing power parity, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

The idea that government transfers are able to offset inequalities in the labour market is central to the current debate. It implies that Australia can ‘deregulate’ its labour market and yet not develop a working poor comparable to the United States (see especially the BCA 1999). How soundly based are these arguments? THE WORKING POOR AND LOW-WAGE HOUSEHOLDS Does Australia already have a ‘working poor’? In his overview of income poverty since the 1970s, Anthony King observed: Signs of the emergence of a group of working poor have been a repeated feature of recent poverty estimates and are in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1970s when employment was a virtual guarantee against poverty.

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(King 1998, p. 100) Research by Buchanan and Watson (1997) and Eardley (1998) suggests that the working poor is still a minor presence in the economic landscape. It is, however, a group whose numbers are growing and whose presence could mushroom if extensive labour market deregulation were to occur. An important part of the argument favouring labour market deregulation relies on the distinction between the hourly wages paid to individuals and the income received by households. Low hourly wages, it can be argued, do not actually place a person among the working poor. Sue Richardson, for example, has argued: There are a number of reasons for being cautious about the presumption that low wages equate with low incomes.

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Employers would simply substitute ‘subsidised’ workers (those on the lower pay) for ‘unsubsidised workers’. On the other hand, a large reduction in relative wages would lead to a major decline in living standards among the low-paid workforce and an increase in the size of the ‘working poor’ in Australia. In recognition of the problems of the ‘working poor’, the Five Economists have also suggested an earned income tax credit (EITC) scheme to compensate low-paid workers for their wage cuts. The American experience of the EITC suggests that earned tax credits are a successful response to the problem of welfare poverty traps and may warrant further examination (Ellwood 1999; Burtless 1998a and 1998b; Hout 1997).

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The new programs also offered insufficient support to people with mental illnesses and substance abuse problems that hampered their ability to get jobs.49 Clinton’s administration had greater success in addressing inequality caused by low wages. Americans had been distinguishing between the unworthy poor and the worthy, working poor since the era of the Great Society. During the Clinton administration some questioned the existence of the category “the working poor.” For example, the economist Bradley Schiller denied that people could work full time and still head poor families, showing little understanding that contingent workers are not in control of their schedules, yet often have to maintain open availability, and that one can work less than full time but still too many hours to have the sort of availability that permits a second job.50 Clinton’s administration combatted working poverty by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, acting on the premise that that no family with a fully employed household head should be living beneath the poverty line.51 The administration also managed to increase the minimum wage, although only through a bargain with Republicans that resulted in tax cuts for small businesses.52 Health care costs, and the costs of untreated illnesses, were major sources of inequality.

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The New York Times in 2005 ran a series of articles on class, pointing out for its readership that, contrary to popular belief, the United States is not the most upwardly mobile country in the world.9 A number of recent books question the notion that deregulation, budget cuts to safety nets, free trade promotion, and privatization have promoted growth to benefit all.10 Despite its length and serious subject matter, economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) was widely read and reviewed. Historian Steven Fraser’s Age of Acquiescence (2015) compared the modern American public unfavorably with Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who were not afraid to call out class warfare against the working poor when they saw it.11 Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s documentary Inequality for All (2013) reached a wide audience, with an accessible message: the prosperity of the United States hinges on the middle class having an income to spend. After all, a multimillionaire can only drive one car at a time, wear one change of clothing at a time, sleep on one or two pillows at a time.

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They traveled more than 2,000 miles before one of their leaders absconded with their entire treasury.112 Coxeyites in Oregon also attempted to steal a train; Attorney General Richard Olney foiled their plans by using federal troops to protect the trains because the transcontinental lines were in federal receivership.113 Coxey’s own Massillon, Ohio, contingent of only a few hundred protesters reached the nation’s capitol in May 1894, singing songs set to the tune of popular folk songs: There’s a deep and growing murmur Going up through all the land From millions who are suffering Beneath Oppression’s hand No charity, but justice Do the working poor demand And justice they will gain.114 While Attorney General Olney filed injunctions to keep Coxey’s Army from important buildings, these protests showed that, pushed far enough by inequality, the American poor could take direct action. Coxey himself lived until 1951, long enough to claim that his demands had been the basis for Roosevelt’s New Deal.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

While performing identical tasks, they’re the ones wearing brown, not Nissan blue or gray. This downward spiral in wages has caused many reliable employees with solid job skills, but without college educations, to fall from the middle class to the ranks of the working poor. As labor economist Harley Shaiken at the University of California, Berkeley noted, family incomes for many now hover around the eligibility level for food stamps.19 Eroding wages has made this cohort of working poor enormous, as described by MIT economist Paul Osterman in August 2011: “Last year, one in five American adults worked in jobs that paid poverty-level wages. Worker displacement contributes to the problem.

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While worksite relations have deteriorated, jobs offshored, and wages flattened for most employees, the most severely impacted may be the most vulnerable: Working poor men and women victimized by employers violating national wage and hour laws. An authoritative analysis of employer wage embezzlement was jointly conducted in 2009 by the University of California at Los Angeles, the Center for Urban Economic Development, and the National Employment Law Project. Their analysis focused on the working poor, that 20 percent of adults earning around the minimum wage. These employees tend to be the least assertive and informed and consequently more subject potentially to employer abuse.

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Raising the minimum wage is also preferable to expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), an income-based welfare benefit program targeted at the working poor. Funded from general revenues administered through the federal tax system, the EITC can be carefully targeted, making it a cost-effective favorite among economists. However, unlike the minimum wage, it does not incentivize employers to upskill. In addition, it has limited coverage, because the working poor must file tax returns to obtain benefits. Moreover, it’s bureaucratic and expensive to operate. Its complexity further reduces its effectiveness: there are 50 pages of instructions for single mothers and others to follow when filing for the tax benefit.51 Finally, like food stamps and other support received by the working poor, the EITC is an opaque taxpayer subsidy to low-wage employers whose balance sheets in many instances are far stronger than those of taxpayers.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, Deep Water Horizon, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, full employment, greed is good, guest worker program, invisible hand, knowledge economy, man camp, McMansion, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, payday loans, precautionary principle, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, working poor, Yogi Berra

Families are classified either as married-couple families or as those maintained by men or women without spouses present. Bureau of Labor Statistics, A Profile of the Working Poor, 2013 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor, 2015), http://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/cps/a-profile-of-the-working-poor-2013.pdf. For the racial composition of working-poor families, see Deborah Povich, Brandon Roberts, and Mark Mather, Low-Income Working Families: The Racial/Ethnic Divide (Working Poor Families Project and Population Reference Bureau, 2015), http://www.workingpoorfamilies.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/WPFP-2015-Report_Racial-Ethnic-Divide.pdf. 256the rest was payment for work According to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2011 (the latest available), households in the lowest quintile of income (adjusted for household size) received an average of $9,100 in government transfers (cash payments and in-kind benefits from social insurance and other government assistance programs from federal, state, and local governments); that amounts to about 37 percent of an average pre-tax income of $24,600.

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PunditFact, January 28, 2015, http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/jan/28/terry-jeffrey/are-there-more-welfare-recipients-us-full-time-wor (based on Census and Bureau of Labor statistics). 256Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program recipients Ken Jacobs, Ian Perry, and Jenifer MacGillvary, “The High Public Cost of Low Wages,” April 13, 2015, under section entitled, “The High Cost of Low Wages,” http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/the-high-public-cost-of-low-wages. 256All Earned Income Tax Credit recipients work Jason Furman, Betsey Stevenson, and Jim Stock, “The 2014 Economic Report of the President,” March 10, 2014, https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/03/10/2014-economic-report-president. 256among homecare workers, 48 percent did so Jacobs, Perry, and MacGillvary, “The High Public Cost of Low Wages.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics produces a yearly “profile of the working poor.” In 2013, the BLS found that 5.1 million families in the United States were living below the poverty level, despite having at least one member in the labor force for half the year or more. The “working-poor rate”—the ratio of the working poor to all individuals in the labor force for at least twenty-seven weeks—was 7.7 percent for families (which the BLS defines as a group of two or more people residing together who are related by birth, marriage, or adoption).

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Department of Labor, 2014 (accessed September 2, 2014). http://stats.bls.gov/ces/#data. _______. Mass Layoff Statistics [2012 data]. Washington, D.C.: Department of Labor, 2012 (accessed March 13, 2014). http://www.bls.gov/mls. _______. A Profile of the Working Poor, 2013. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor, 2015. http://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/cps/a-profile-of-the-working-poor-2013.pdf. _______. “Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages [December 2014 estimates]” (accessed June 18, 2015). http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/dsrv?en. “Cancer Facts and Figures 2015.” American Cancer Society. http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@editorial/documents/document/acspc-044552.pdf.

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Still a Bernie Sanders supporter a year after the election, Bellamy bristled at the memory of the 2016 primaries. She was now researching her new book project, “Jyeshtha, the Hindu God of Misfortune.” Misfortune was indeed a subject that for her would seem apropos for our times. THERE ARE BOTH SMALL AND LARGE REMEDIES FOR THE PLIGHT OF the hyper-educated working poor—those earning around $36,000 a year, with kids, and just getting by, only a few false moves away from the poverty line. For underpaid and often desperate adjunct instructors, one particular remedy is what I think of as “unusual unions.” The last five years have seen a rise of atypical union members, like adjuncts, despite the downturn in labor membership overall.

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Unlike those who must put their children in extreme day care and the day-care workers who overwork to serve them, Blanca was both the most squeezed of parents and day-care providers—so pressed that she had to leave her son for a decade back home, where he grew up without her. Now Blanca had to make another hard choice: whether to pay the price of getting her son back by replacing his middle-class life in Paraguay with becoming part of the working poor in America. This hasn’t always been the only choice: as the Columbia University historian Alice Kessler-Harris, author of Women Have Always Worked, tells it, at the turn of the last century and at different points in the twentieth century, America was indeed a land of opportunity. Immigration was always difficult, but it could be a pathway to success.

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Guido’s life itself resembled a linear equation, with determinate factors and indeterminate ones, Y and X variables, like in math class. The good determinate factors were his inherent physical grace and the love of his mother and grandmother. The bad determinate factors were the language barrier and living in near poverty in a fractured family. And the indeterminate factor was luck. When working-poor New Yorkers like Blanca and Guido seek spots at the city’s more desirable schools, they often must compete with middle-class New Yorkers. The competition isn’t set up to be even. So many challenges face those who are knocking on the door. There is a persistent failure in urban schools to find bilingual communicators, even in the most diverse cities.

The Last President of Europe: Emmanuel Macron's Race to Revive France and Save the World by William Drozdiak

Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, centre right, cloud computing, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, UNCLOS, working poor

But for those earning an average income of 1,700 euros (about $2,000) per month, it has become harder to make ends meet with the rising cost of basic necessities like food, shelter, and transport. Over the past fifteen years, the tax burden on French citizens has grown by 25 billion euros ($28 billion) a year, with a disproportionate share borne by the working poor. By the time of the Yellow Vest movement, the steady erosion of purchasing power for lower-middle-class families over the past decade had evolved, almost unnoticed by the government, into a genuine social emergency. Although many protesters said that they approved of the government’s ambition to do something about climate change, they objected to carrying so much of the fiscal burden, particularly when cosmopolitan elites were spared onerous taxes for traveling in planes, which pollute more than cars do.

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During an eight-day tour of World War I battlefields ahead of the centennial anniversary marking the armistice that ended one of history’s most hideous wars, Macron confronted many resentful citizens across France, who complained that he was too remote from their everyday lives and did not seem to care or understand the true nature of their hardships. They, like him, were frustrated that the fruits of his reform efforts were so slow in coming. Even Macron’s wealthiest supporters accused him of being tone-deaf to the problems of the working poor. François Pinault, whose business empire includes the Gucci fashion house, told the newspaper Le Monde that “Macron doesn’t understand the little people. I’m afraid he’s leading France toward a system that leaves the least favored behind.”9 Matthieu Pigasse, a prominent financier who heads the Lazard investment bank in France, told the business newspaper Les Echos that Macron needed to show more empathy for the lower classes.

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The anger and frustration showed the depth of resentment in the rural areas that had not thrived in recent years. The growing divide between rich and poor—the richest 20 percent of French people, according to the World Bank, now earn nearly five times as much as the bottom 20 percent—makes a mockery of French pretensions of “liberty, equality and fraternity.” That yawning divide, in turn, heightens the working poor’s disillusionment with Macron, who took office on a cloud of euphoria amid hopes for a resurgence in economic growth that would lift up the entire nation. “The system is in crisis,” said French political scientist Dominique Reynié. “It’s the provinces against Paris, the proud and contemptuous capital.

Brave New World of Work by Ulrich Beck

affirmative action, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, job automation, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, mini-job, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, scientific management, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

For it increases the supply of flexible temporary labour and weakens the individual's position in the grey economy, resulting in a further loss of income. ‘If there are no mechanisms to limit cost-cutting competition among the suppliers of labour, a danger arises of self-reinforcing processes of impoverishment.’62 And this arises as a result of work. Work and poverty, which used to be mutually exclusive, are now combined in the shape of the working poor. Unemployment, non-work, grey work Unemployed people have a lot of time on their hands and are financially very insecure. But paradoxically, their receipt of unemployment benefit obliges them to do nothing. They might almost be compared to thirsty people who have to promise not to drink one drop of extra water, because they are officially given one glass a day to moisten their parched throat.

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But this is a transition, and as long as it lasts it will be painful to many people – especially to men, who cannot get used to the fact that the rigid idea of a lifetime career opportunity will no longer mean much in the future.63 But the downward elevator effect into the world of job insecurity does not affect everyone equally. As in the past, it is true internationally that insecure and temporary forms of employment are increasing faster among women than among men. Women make up by far the larger part of the working poor, and for them in particular the systemic change that is opening up a grey area between work and non-work takes place as a descent into poverty. Nor does the growing number of men confronted with insecure and fragmented working lives result in any positive easing of the gender conflict. Indeed, in so far as the reign of the short term also undermines relations of partnership, love, marriage, parenthood and family, men suffer as much as women – and public life too dies out.

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Leisure time is a foreign word, social life – ‘vacations’ – an endemic problem. Anyone who cannot be reached anytime and anywhere is running a risk. Such ‘individual responsibility’ lifts a burden from the public and corporate coffers and makes the individual the ‘architect of his or her own fortune’. The working poor. The jobs of ‘low-skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ workers are directly threatened by globalization. For they can be replaced either by automation or by the supply of labour from other countries. In the end, this group can keep its head above water only by entering into several employment situations at once.

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson

affirmative action, business cycle, citizen journalism, classic study, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, desegregation, Donald Trump, edge city, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, jobless men, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, school choice, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, work culture , working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

As I pointed out earlier, the most impoverished inner-city neighborhoods have experienced a decrease in the proportion of working- and middle-class families, thereby increasing the social isolation of the remaining residents in these neighborhoods from the more advantaged members of society. Data from the UPFLS reveal that the non-working poor in the inner city experience greater social isolation in this sense of the term than do the working poor. Nonworking poor black men and women “were consistently less likely to participate in local institutions and have mainstream friends [that is, friends who are working, have some college education, and are married] than people in other classes” and ethnic groups.

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Graduated job ladders would provide rewards to workers who succeed on the job, “but wages would always be lower than [that which] an equally successful worker would receive in the private sector.” These wages would be supplemented with the expanded earned income tax credit and other wage supplements (including a federal child care subsidy in the form of a refundable income tax credit for the working poor and refundable state tax credits for the working poor). The Danziger and Gottschalk proposal obviously would not provide a comfortable standard of living for the workers forced to take public service jobs. Such jobs are minimal and are “offered as a safely net to poor persons who want to work but are left out of the private labor market.”

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Drug abuse was cited as a major problem by as many as 86 percent of the adult residents in Oakland and 79 percent of those in Woodlawn. Although high-jobless neighborhoods also feature concentrated poverty, high rates of neighborhood poverty are less likely to trigger problems of social organization if the residents are working. This was the case in previous years when the working poor stood out in areas like Bronzeville. Today, the nonworking poor predominate in the highly segregated and impoverished neighborhoods. The rise of new poverty neighborhoods represents a movement away from what the historian Allan Spear has called an institutional ghetto—whose structure and activities parallel those of the larger society, as portrayed in Drake and Cayton’s description of Bronzeville—toward a jobless ghetto, which features a severe lack of basic opportunities and resources, and inadequate social controls.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

The gap between richest and poorest in New York City is comparable to that of Swaziland; Los Angeles and Chicago are slightly more egalitarian, comparable to the Dominican Republic and El Salvador.4 Meanwhile, in the vast areas of low-density, low-rise residential and commercial zones around and among the hierarchical hubs, a radically different society has evolved. In the national heartlands, apart from expensive rural resort areas, there are fewer rich households and therefore fewer working poor employed by the rich as servants and luxury service providers. In the US and Europe, the population of the heartlands is much more likely to be native-born and white. But the heartlands are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, making the familiar equation of “urban” and “nonwhite” anachronistic.

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Heartland communities are more likely to be sensitive to the costs of environmental policies than hub city managers and professionals. What is more, the property-owning, working-class majorities of the heartlands are also likely to be more sensitive to environmental restrictions on what property owners can do with their property than the denizens of the hubs, where not only the working poor and the working class but also many professionals must rent because they cannot afford to own homes. And most working-class individuals in low-density regions rely on their personal cars or trucks for commuting, shopping, and recreation. The French yellow vest riots of the winter of 2018–19 illustrated the intersecting fault lines of class and place in environmental policy.

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As split labor market theory would predict, the native working-class backlash has been greatest against particular groups of immigrants, nonwhite or white, who are viewed as competitors for jobs or welfare and public services. * * * — THE GEOGRAPHIC POLARIZATION that is evident in Western democracies, then, reflects the social divide among classes who live in different areas—college-educated overclasses and the disproportionately immigrant working poor in the high-density hubs and the mostly native, mostly white working classes in the low-density heartlands. Their differences over environmental policy, trade, immigration, and other issues reflect conflicting interests, values, lifestyles, and aspirations. Can today’s new class war, fought on all of these different fronts at once, give way to a new class peace?

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Allegretto, Marc Doussard, Dave Graham-Squire, Ken Jacobs, Dan Thompson, and Jeremy Thompson, “Fast Food, Poverty Wages: The Public Cost of Low-Wage Jobs in the Fast-Food Industry” (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the UC Berkeley Labor Center, Oct. 15, 2013). 9.5 million people…remained below the poverty line: Center for Poverty Research, “Who Are the Working Poor in America?,” https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/​faq/​who-are-working-poor-america. the bottom half of earners: Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman, and Emmanuel Saez, “Share of Income for the Top 1 and Bottom 50 percent of the Income Distribution,” raw data, World Wealth & Income Database, wid.world. The middle class is shrinking: Pew Research Center, “The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground: No Longer the Majority and Falling Behind Financially” (Washington, DC, Dec. 9, 2015).

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Luis and Josefa talked about the pressure and the stress of their uncertain schedules, and the strain of knowing their children were growing up deprived. At the end of her shift at Raising Cane’s, climbing into Luis’s car, one of the Ortiz daughters told me that she often did not eat dinner. “The smell of the chicken fills me up,” she said. The working poor, the precariat, the left behind: this is modern-day America. We no longer have a jobs crisis, with the economy recovering to something like full employment a decade after the start of the Great Recession. But we do have a good-jobs crisis, a more permanent, festering problem that started more than a generation ago.

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“Now that I have a basic income, I know my work has value. I know my time has value. I know I have value.” In Santens’s mind, a UBI is not a salve for a world of technological unemployment, or a powerful antipoverty measure, or a form of social dividend, or a way to boost the earnings of the working poor. Rather, it is all those things and more: a paradigmatic shift that would free people from having to do work that they did not want to do at all. A UBI would, in essence, lop off the bottom of the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” where air, food, water, and shelter reside, with self-transcendence up at the other end.

Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save the Economy (Bicycle) by Elly Blue

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autism spectrum disorder, big-box store, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, congestion pricing, Donald Shoup, food desert, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, job automation, Loma Prieta earthquake, medical residency, oil shale / tar sands, parking minimums, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, ride hailing / ride sharing, science of happiness, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

National Housing Conference and Center for Housing Policy, “Losing Ground: Housing and Transportation Costs Outpacing Incomes,” 2012. 24 The working poor spend more on both housing and commuting; homeowners living in poverty spend on average 25% of their income on housing, compared with 15% among the non poor. Renters spend 32% of their income on housing, compared with 20% among the non-poor. Brookings Institute, “Commuting to opportunity: The working Poor and Commuting in the United States,” 2008 25 The first paved bike path in Oregon was privately funded, with local wheelmen kicking in $1 each to pave the road to The White House, a bar in southwest Portland.

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In 2009, people at every income level spent more on transportation than they did on food.8 Among households that made under $70,000, nearly 20% of their annual spending went to transportation (though even with incentives that year to buy new cars, including the huge federal Cash for Clunkers9 program, people were clearly economizing—far less was spent overall than in the year before). And the working poor seemed to have it the worst that year—65% drove a car to work and reported spending between 8% and 9% of their income on gas alone.10 For further perspective, the poverty line in the U.S. in 2011 was calculated at $10,830 for a single person a year. This measure is based on the cost of food; a cost which has gone down over the last century even as other expenses, particularly transportation and housing, have gone up significantly.

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Car ownership was seen as a path to employment, especially for low-income single mothers, and as a viable alternative to subsidizing public transportation. They made some good points. When you’re poor, you are often geographically isolated and lack good access to jobs. Transit systems in many cities don’t well serve the needs of the working poor, and most have cut back service even from where it was a decade ago. Low income people often resort to predatory loans in order to get a car. And there is a real correlation between employment and car ownership. In many cases, it’s the best of the bad options available. My sympathy for this case was dismantled piece by piece over the course of the morning.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

Are the French citizens, and French dissatisfied people, spoilt citizens that fear the end of welfare improvement, or is dissatisfaction mainly an issue of composition effects (Murphy and Topel 2016; INSEE 2017)? We should go further in the investigation of the paradox. The second point is dissatisfaction with pay and low confidence in the future. France’s choice has been to reject the ‘working poor’ model. The minimum wage is among the highest of OECD countries. Over the last 55 years, it has increased faster than the inflation rate and faster than the average wage over the last 20 years. France has indeed a fairly redistributive policy that lowers income inequality and manages to have a rather low share of people below the poverty line.

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Yet, this generates dissatisfaction with pay, especially among those who invest in higher education and expect a good return from it (Artus 2017). The so-called talent drain in France builds on this unbalanced return on education and advancement. There is now also a growing concern about the momentum that the working poor model gains in France and about the costs of the fairly tight safety net used to buffer it. In fact, the polarisation of the labour market paves the way for a growing structural inequality. Jobs are concentrating at the two extremities: skilled and well-paid jobs in sophisticated sectors, and unskilled and/or deskilled low paid jobs in unsophisticated services.

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When asked about how confident they are in their ability to keep their job over the coming months, the French are amongst the most likely to say they are not very confident. For sure, unemployment in France is high and has remained so for more than three decades, yet it mainly hits the low skilled to a greater extent than in the US or the UK, due to the rejection of the working poor model. At the same time, unemployment benefits and unemployment compensation duration in France are among the highest in Europe. The combination of strict employment protection laws and generous unemployment insurance has backed a strong insider/ outsider duality in the labour market, with strong discrepancies between permanent jobs and temporary fixed term contract jobs (OECD 2017).

Off the Books by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", business climate, gentrification, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, new economy, refrigerator car, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban renewal, working poor, Y2K

That research culminated in a book, American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern American Ghetto, that documented everyday living conditions in these high-rises, which are now being demolished in the effort to deconcentrate poverty and revitalize inner cities. Along the way, I was hanging out in the working-poor communities surrounding the housing development. These streets were the epitome of the ghetto—-that fabled place in American culture that countless journalists have lamented, almost as many academics have analyzed, and more than a few politicians have promised to fix. These neighborhoods conformed to, but also showed the gross oversimplification of, our stereotypes about the ghetto.

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Commercial corridors filled with low-income retail outlets—currency exchanges, liquor and "dollar" stores, fast-food chains—were slowly attracting the attention of real estate speculators who envisioned large shopping malls and who were resting their bets on rising incomes (or an influx of wealthier families). But in the early and mid nineties, much of Chicago's Southside was still primarily a working-poor black community. Families had been there for generations, living modestly and in a near-continuous state of economic vulnerability. I was drawn to a community of roughly ten square blocks in Chicago's Southside that I will call "Maquis Park" (most of the names for places and people in this book are pseudonyms).

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However, as we have seen, the underground economy manages to touch all households, whether as a direct source of income, as a place to acquire cheap goods and services, or as a part of the public theater. Thus, it is not so easy to separate the innocent from the perpetrator. The same person who despises the gang's drug trading may depend on a member of the household to bring money into the home by fixing cars off the books. Fixing cars is not equivalent to dealing drugs, but as Chicago's working poor entered the year 2000, the gang's advances were making very blurry the lines that divided shady traders from one another. When good and bad have become very relative terms, how do you solve your problems? Since the early twentieth century, kids growing up in cities have been tempted to join their local street gang.

The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong by Barry Glassner

Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Gary Taubes, haute cuisine, Helicobacter pylori, income inequality, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, placebo effect, profit motive, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Saturday Night Live, stem cell, sugar pill, twin studies, urban sprawl, working poor

Mark Warbis, “Suit Says Albertson’s Forces Unpaid Work,” Associated Press, April 22, 1997; “Supermarket Strike Averted,” East Bay Business Times, January 24, 2005. 6. See also Egger, pp. 107–8; “A Profile of the Working Poor,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, March 2005. 7. Jianghong Liu, Adrian Raine, et al., “Malnutrition at Age 3 Years and Externalizing Behavior Problems at Ages 8, 11, and 17 Years,” American Journal of Psychiatry 161 (2004): 2005–13; David Shipler, The Working Poor (New York: Knopf, 2004), chap. 8; Irwin H. Rosenberg et al., “Statement on the Link Between Nutrition and Cognitive Development in Children,” Center on Hunger and Poverty, Brandeis University, 1998. 8.

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Furthermore, he had acknowledged earlier in our interview that low-paid workers routinely show up in food lines. Many of the people America’s Second Harvest assists “have to make decisions between rent and food and medicine, or food and housing, or food and utilities,” Forney said. “Those are the decisions that working poor people have to make, and unfortunately, that means that we’re seeing a lot more people.” Each of the several leaders of hunger-relief agencies I consulted commented on the absurdity (immorality, some called it) of a wage system in which people who work forty or fifty hours a week cannot afford basic food and shelter for themselves and their children.

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Cost information is from Kroc, p. 178; Burger King’s and McDonald’s Web sites; www.entrepreneur.com; and “McDonald’s Makes Franchising Sizzle,” BusinessWeek, June 15, 1968, pp. 102–3. 49. Talwar, chap. 8. 50. Talwar (quote is from p. 2). 51. Quote is from Talwar, p. 2. See also David Shipler, The Working Poor (New York: Knopf, 2004), p. 19. 52. Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, pp. 75–83, 265. 53. Recycling quote is from Donna Fenn, “Veggie-Burger Kings,” Inc. (November 2001): 44. 54. McDonald’s quote is from the company’s Web site; Anderson is quoted in Josef Woodard, “Her Private Happy Meal,” Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2002.

A People's History of Poverty in America by Stephen Pimpare

affirmative action, British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dumpster diving, East Village, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, green new deal, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral panic, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, payday loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

I have a family to support—I need a real job.16 One former welfare recipient, a Native American woman, said it this way: I want to give my kids someone to look up to. People should work if they can. I was embarrassed being on welfare. People think you’re lazy. I wanted to better my future. I don’t want to depend on my family. I’m an independent woman.17 But the desire for work does not necessarily translate into the ability to work: poor Americans often have less education and fewer skills, which limits their options to jobs with low pay, few benefits, and little security.18 Such jobs seldom pay enough to cover child care. Poor women are twice as likely as those with incomes above 200 percent of the poverty line to have health problems, and about half of all women on welfare report having poor physical or mental health (other studies suggest that about one in four women with experience of welfare had problems with their mental health).

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There have to be some mothers in the neighborhood who are going to do this, or none of the mothers, even the ones who want to work, are going to be able to work.17 As Katherine Newman attests:It takes time to monitor public space. Mothers on welfare often shoulder the burden for working mothers who simply cannot be around enough to exercise vigilance. They provide an adult presence in the parks and on the sidewalks where it is most needed. Without these stay-at-home moms in the neighborhood, many a working-poor parent would have no choice but to force the kids to stay at home all day.18 This is the point that urbanist Jane Jacobs has made about the importance of a watchful eyes and mutual policing for a healthy, safe neighborhood. 19 And there’s this interesting observation by one journalist writing about recipients in Washington, D.C.

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Official data will not get us far in evaluating or understanding the lived experience of poor Americans, which is why I have chosen not to privilege these measures in this book. Poverty over the Life Course There is another problem with most poverty data. Official rates are snapshots: they seek to count how many people are poor at any one point in time. But Americans move in and out of poverty over the course of their lives—the line between working, working poor, and poor can be very thin indeed. Many families are poor one year, not poor (at least officially so) the next, and then poor again the following year. One harsh winter, a fire, an epidemic or illness (cholera, smallpox, and yellow fever swept through the ghettoes in the past; today poor households face AIDS, diabetes, asthma, tuberculosis, or gun violence), divorce, the death or incarceration of the main breadwinner, an injury or disability, or the sudden loss of a job—these can push a family from just getting by into dire crisis.12 Thus, it would seem useful also to ask how many Americans are ever poor.

The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market by Frank Levy, Richard J. Murnane

Atul Gawande, business cycle, call centre, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, digital divide, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gunnar Myrdal, hypertext link, index card, information asymmetry, job automation, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, talking drums, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, working poor

Had the rest of the economy remained unchanged, the declining importance of blue-collar and clerical jobs might have resulted in the rising 4 CHAPTER 1 unemployment feared by the Ad Hoc Committee. But computers are Janus-faced, helping to create jobs even as they destroy jobs. As computers have helped channel economic growth, two quite different types of jobs have increased in number, jobs that pay very different wages. Jobs held by the working poor—janitors, cafeteria workers, security guards— have grown in relative importance.3 But the greater job growth has taken place in the upper part of the pay distribution—managers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, technicians. Three facts about these latter jobs stand out: they pay well, they require extensive skills, and most people in these jobs rely on computers to increase their productivity.

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At any moment in time, the boundary 6 CHAPTER 1 marking human advantage over computers largely defines the area of useful human work.5 This boundary shifts as computer scientists expand what computers can do, but as we will see, it continues to move in the same direction, increasing the importance of expert thinking and complex communication as the domains of well-paid human work. What is true about today’s rising skill requirements will be even more true tomorrow. Who will have the skills to do the good jobs in an economy filled with computers? Those who do not will be at the bottom of an increasingly unequal income distribution—the working poor. The disappearance of clerical and blue-collar jobs from the lower middle of the pay distribution illustrates this pattern of limited job options. People with sufficient workplace skills can move from these jobs into one of the expanding sets of higher-wage jobs. People who lack the right skills drop down to compete for unskilled work at declining wages.

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Smith used the term to describe the increased efficiency that came when a particular job—making a straight pin, in his example—was divided into a series of narrow tasks—making the heads of pins, making the stems, sharpening the points—with each task assigned to a specialized worker. 3. On the increase in the number of the working poor, see Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (New York: Owl Books, 2001). 4. One of a limited number of exceptions was the mechanical calculator, which could perform basic arithmetic. 5. Strictly speaking, the determining factor is not humans’ absolute advantage but humans’ comparative advantage.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

researchers found that 40 percent of American households: Natasha Bach, “Millions of Americans Are One Missed Paycheck away from Poverty, Report Says,” Fortune, January 29, 2019, https://fortune.com/2019/01/29/americans-liquid-asset-poor-propserity-now-report/; “A Profile of the Working Poor, 2017,” US Bureau of Labor Statistics, April 2019, https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2017/home.htm. Workers who received welfare payments: Henry Aaron, “The Social Safety Net: The Gaps That COVID-19 Spotlights,” Brookings Institution, June 23, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/06/23/the-social-safety-net-the-gaps-that-covid-19-spotlights/.

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These growing expenses disproportionately affect low-income families, who already spend a larger chunk of their earnings on basic necessities than wealthier households. In 2019, researchers found that 40 percent of American households were one paycheck away from falling into poverty. The figure rose to 57 percent for nonwhite families, and that was before COVID hit. Today, millions of Americans belong to the working poor, living right around the poverty line despite holding a job. Private benefits also only work when people have jobs. As unemployment soared in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of people lost health coverage at the time they needed it most. As people filed for unemployment, food stamps, and other benefits, US government safety net programs became overwhelmed.

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There were 234 strikes involving a thousand or more workers per year on average in the United States in the five years before the PATCO strike. In the five years after it, the number fell to 72. Over the course of the 2010s, the average was 15. Joseph McCartin, director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, said without the ability to strike, unions lost all their leverage. “More and more, employers wanted strikes because they could use a strike to break the union or severely weaken it,” McCartin told me. “As workers lost the ability to engage in strikes, even when they were in unions, they didn’t have the power they used to have.

Global Financial Crisis by Noah Berlatsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, social contagion, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, working poor

The crisis finds the Israeli society in worse shape than it was during the last recession, that of 2000–2003: currently about a quarter of Israeli citizens live below the official poverty line, among whom the percentage of minority groups, such as Israeli Arabs and Orthodox Jews, is extremely high. A large part of the Israeli poor population are defined as “working poor,” meaning people who are employed and yet do not earn a minimum living wage, a phenomenon which is usually regarded as a symptom of the crumbling of the middle classes. The Financial Crisis Will Hurt Israelis Despite the fact that many governments around the world, from Europe to Mexico, are intending to increase spending in order to combat the oncoming recession, the Israeli government has already declared that it will keep a balanced budget 122 Effects of the Global Financial Crisis on Wealthier Nations and that, to do so, further cuts in social spending will be necessary.

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The center also suggests that while some nations in Latin America have pursued responsible economic policies, others such as Nicaragua and Venezuela have not and may now experience instability. Despite possible turmoil, speakers note, the region is much more politically stable overall than in the past. As you read, consider the following questions: 1. According to Rebeca Grynspan, how many working poor people are there likely to be in Latin America in 2009? 2. According to Arturo Porzecanski, which countries are part of the “responsible left and right”? 3. When was the last military coup in Latin America, according to Jorge I. Domínguez? Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, “The Global Financial Crisis: Implications for Latin America,” A summary of an event hosted by the Latin American Program, Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and the Council of the Latin Americas/Americas Society at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on Febuary 5, 2009.

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The middle class is also suffering, and a large population goes back and forth above and below the poverty line. The International Labour Organization estimates that the number of people living in “work poverty”—those active in the labor market but earning an income below the poverty line established by the World Bank—will rise from 6.8 percent in 2007 to 8.7 percent in 2009, constituting 7 million working poor. An additional 4 million people will lose their jobs in 2009 if growth rates, as projected, are only around 1 percent. Grynspan argued for a larger system of social protection to prevent huge reversals of the gains in reducing poverty in recent years. Programs should emphasize women and young people, who are twice as likely to be unemployed, while infrastructure investment should include small and community-based projects, not just largescale ones.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Yet the language that framed the proposal maintained strict divisions between those who were working and those who were on welfare, despite the plan effacing such a distinction. The working poor ended up rejecting the plan out of a fear of being stigmatised as a welfare recipient. Racial biases reinforced this resistance, since welfare was seen as a black issue, and whites were loath to be associated with it. And the lack of a class identification between the working poor and unemployed – the surplus population – meant there was no social basis for a meaningful movement in favour of a basic income.125 Overcoming the work ethic will be equally central to any future attempts at building a post-work world.

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William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), pp. 29–31. 34.Michael McIntyre, ‘Race, Surplus Population, and the Marxist Theory of Imperialism’, Antipode 43:5 (2011), p. 1500–2. 35.These draw broadly upon the divisions Marx drew between the floating/reserve army, latent and stagnant, but are here offered as an updating of his historical example. 36.Gary Fields, Working Hard, Working Poor: A Global Journey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 46. 37.This is what Kalyan Sanyal describes as ‘need economies’. See Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development. 38.The area of ‘vulnerable employment’ now accounts for 48 per cent of global employment – five times higher than pre-crisis levels.

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, New Left Review II/84 (November–December 2013), p. 137. 101.Sukti Dasgupta and Ajit Singh, Manufacturing, Services and Premature Deindustrialization in Developing Countries: A Kaldorian Analysis, Working Paper Series, World Institute for Development Economics Research, 2006, at ideas.repec.org, p. 6; Breman, ‘Introduction’, p. 2; Fields, Working Hard, Working Poor, p. 58; Davis, Planet of Slums, p. 15. 102.Davis, Planet of Slums, p. 175; Breman, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–8; George Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), Chapter 9. 103.Sassen, Expulsions, Chapter 2. 104.Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development, p. 69. 105.Davis, Planet of Slums, pp. 181–2. 106.Rather than a 30–40 per cent manufacturing share of total employment, the numbers are closer to 15–20 per cent, and manufacturing now begins to decline as a share of GDP at per capita levels of around $3,000, rather than $10,000.

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks. by Steven Johnson

call centre, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Dean Kamen, digital map, double helix, edge city, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, peak oil, side project, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route, unbiased observer, working poor

(Unlike the typical new urbanist environment, however, Soho also had its share of industry: slaughterhouses, manufacturing plants, tripe boilers.) The neighborhood’s residents were poor, almost destitute, by the standards of today’s industrialized nations, though by Victorian standards they were a mix of the working poor and the entrepreneurial middle class. (By mud-lark standards, of course, they were loaded.) But Soho was something of an anomaly in the otherwise prosperous West End of the city: an island of working poverty and foul-smelling industry surrounded by the opulent townhouses of Mayfair and Kensington.

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He had encountered the gossip that had been circulating in the past day, folk wisdom that would eventually find its way into the papers in the coming weeks: the residents of upper floors were dying at a more dramatic rate than those living on ground or parlor floors. There was a socioeconomic edge to this contention, one that reverses the traditional upstairs/downstairs division of labor: in Soho at the time, the bottom floors were more likely to be occupied by owners, with the upper floors rented out to the working poor. An increased death rate in the upper floors would suggest a fatal vulnerability in the constitution or sanitary habits of the poor. The notion, in its crude and haphazard way, was a version of Snow’s tale of two buildings in Horsleydown: put two groups of people in close proximity, and if one group turns out to be significantly more vulnerable than the other, then some additional variable must be at work.

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Death was omnipresent, particularly for the working class. One study of mortality rates from 1842 had found that the average “gentleman” died at forty-five, while the average tradesman died in his mid-twenties. The laboring classes fared even worse: in Bethnal Green, the average life expectancy for the working poor was sixteen years. These numbers are so shockingly low because life was especially deadly for young children. The 1842 study found that 62 percent of all recorded deaths were of children under five. And yet despite this alarming mortality rate, the population was expanding at an extraordinary clip.

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives by Catherine Lutz, Anne Lutz Fernandez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, car-free, carbon footprint, collateralized debt obligation, congestion pricing, failed state, feminist movement, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, inventory management, Lewis Mumford, market design, market fundamentalism, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Zipcar

While Crash’s Anthony is right—there remains a stigma to riding the bus in most cases—that shame could and should be transformed into pride in being environmentally responsible citizens. The ultimate goal should be to create more equality of opportunity without making additional car-dependence part of the solution. THE WORKING POOR: ONE PAYCHECK AWAY FROM CARLESS One step up from these poorest households cut off from jobs, health care, and reasonably priced goods are the working poor or near poor who, by 106 Carjacked rough estimate, include about 50 million Americans. These are individuals with low-wage jobs without benefits and families with two minimumor low-wage earners. The near poor are those who, as Katherine Newman, an expert on poverty and mobility, has said, are “one paycheck, one lost job, one divorce or one sick child away from falling below the poverty line.”7 They are one car repair or car crash away from poverty as well.

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She gave her car to her sister. Things just got worse, though: the initial $50 ticket for the missing plate had swollen to $325. With the other fine, the new license and registration fees, it would have cost over $1,000 to get Amy back in a car, and that’s before even buying one. As with many of the working poor, a tax refund was the only thing that T H E C AT C H : T H E R I C H G E T R I C H E R 107 counted as savings, and she eventually had one large enough to show up in court that day. Amy should get a “going green” award for her use of public transit throughout that period (her husband, too: he carpooled with his boss or rode a bike to his job).

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And of course, the company could repossess and resell the car if she missed a payment.11 Poor and working families are more likely to own older cars that guzzle gas and oil and have higher maintenance costs. Drive through any poor urban neighborhood in America and you will find a striking number of auto repair and body shops working on the old, unreliable cars that have “trickled down” to these neighborhoods. Behind these official shops are more informal but not always reliable networks: one working-poor Baltimore man, Dwayne, described his typical struggles with an older car. To afford the repairs his auto needed to get back on the road, he took it to the backyard garage of a neighbor with mechanic skills. Two weeks later, he was still badgering the neighbor to get to work on his car and scrambling for rides to work.

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Brooks, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, epigenetics, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobless men, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Shai Danziger, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, The Spirit Level, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor

The custodians in the buildings don’t have artful options like these to avoid paying taxes. Similarly, Amazon paid zero federal income tax in 2018 despite profits of $11.2 billion; indeed, it managed to get a $129 million “rebate” from taxes it didn’t pay. That’s an effective tax rate of negative 1 percent. Something is wrong with America’s tax structure when the working poor pay taxes so the federal government can make a payment to an e-commerce giant owned by the world’s richest man. Then there are the incentives for economic development awarded by states and local areas, often never made public. Oregon awarded Nike $2 billion for five hundred jobs, or $4 million per job.

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The wealthy have also fought to underfund and defang the Internal Revenue Service, so it doesn’t have the resources to audit or fight dubious deductions. Only about 6 percent of tax returns of those with income of more than $1 million are audited, along with 0.7 percent of business tax returns. Meanwhile, there is one group that the IRS scrutinizes rigorously: the working poor with incomes below $20,000 a year who receive the Earned Income Tax Credit. More than one-third of all tax audits are focused on that group struggling to make ends meet, even as the agency cuts back on audits of the wealthy—while the top 5 percent of taxpayers account for more than half of all underreported income.

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Friends in Yamhill often saw Trump as the outsider who would drain the swamp, bring back jobs in manufacturing and primary industries and restore a period when working-class lives were steadily getting better. Working-class voters are not uniformly conservative in their views. Polls show that they favor higher taxes on the rich, paid family leave and a higher minimum wage. But the working poor are disdainful of government benefits, even though they sometimes rely on them, partly because they often see firsthand how neighbors abuse those benefits; there’s far more anger at perceived welfare abuses than at larger subsidies for private jets. The resentment is more visceral when it is people around them who are bending rules and benefiting unfairly.

Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City by Mike Davis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, edge city, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, invisible hand, job automation, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, market bubble, mass immigration, new economy, occupational segregation, postnationalism / post nation state, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, The Turner Diaries, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor

The Latino educational crisis is rooted in a vicious family poverty and declining national school systems. leaving, based A commitment circle of to big city major study of the causes of Latino school- on interviews with 700 dropouts in San Antonio, EDUCATION GROUND ZERO 113 pointed to the "lack of bilingual and English as a Second Lan- guage programs, the concentration of Hispanics schools, lack of teacher preparation and panic students whole. can "^^^ testify, among in high-poverty low expectations teachers, administrators for His- and society as a In addition, as every inner-city high school counselor there are intense pressures on immigrants' teenage children (often the only citizens in the household) to supplement family incomes as soon as possible. Similarly, working poor pursue the child's classic many families of the strategy of subsidizing one education by sacrificing the schooling of others. Table 10 College Enrollment of 18- to 24- Year-Olds (Percent) Whites 1980 1990 20.8 35.9 Blacks 15.6 27.1 Asians 30.3 55.1 Latinos 14.2 22.9 Source: Marcelo Siles, Income Differentials in the Socio-Economic Development, JSRI US: Impact on Latino Working Paper No.

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As Latinos begin to acquire majority power in the early 2000s (the retiring of the California Assembly Antonio Villaraigosa, Speaker already a de- is clared candidate for mayor), the scope for ameliorative politics will be largely defined by social investment decisions the 1980s and 1990s. Apart from jobs (and the force is made during service work- civil essentially frozen in place), the vital public resources for the working poor are education, healthcare and transit. In each instance, the future has been looted in advance. "Red Line" subway - one of the great public-works history - has devoured a generation's worth of Los Angeles's disasters in transit US investment while failing to build an extension to the Eastside and beggaring the bus system upon which most people of color depend.

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Latinos out of told Fears, "We're "^^^ One can only hope power has become Dorn a suicidal is sincere. Locking course for African- Americans. By the same token, Latino retaliation - dispossessing Blacks of their political capital - simply works to the advantage of Giuliani and other enemies of the unity, working poor. Black and Latino however imperiled, remains the fulcrum of all progressive political change. Building Black-Latino unity is also the main challenge con- fronting Antonio Villaraigosa, the retiring left-Democrat Speaker of the California Assembly, as he prepares to run for mayor of Los Angeles in 2001.

A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby K. Payne

conceptual framework, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, gentrification, impulse control, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, post scarcity, War on Poverty, working poor

Their circumstances demonstrate how the definition of poverty is relative to the situation." "The rise of the single-parent family has led to increased poverty among both adults and children." "Perhaps the most important factor in the increase of poverty during the 198os has been the steady decline in wage levels, so that we now have in America a group we call the working poor-people who do have jobs, who work hard, who try desperately to stay afloat as providers [for) families (sometimes men, sometimes women) but who earn such wretchedly low wages that they sink below the poverty line." Ibid. Seligman, Ben B. The Numbers of Poor. Penchef, Esther, Editor. Four Horsemen: Pollution, Poverty, Famine, Violence.

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This inaccurate mental model is fed by media reports that favor soap operas to conceptual stories and individual stories to trends and the broader influences. The public hears about a fictitious "welfare queen" but not comprehensive studies. What is needed is a thorough understanding of the research on poverty. STUDYING POVERTY RESEARCH TO FURTHER INFORM THE WORK OF AHA! PROCESS David Shipler, author of The Working Poor, says that in the United States we are confused about the causes of poverty and, as a result, are confused about what to do about poverty (Shipler, 2004). In the interest of a quick analysis of the research on poverty, we have organized the studies into the following four clusters: ? Behaviors of the individual z Human and social capital in the community A Exploitation r Political/economic structures For the last four decades discourse on poverty has been dominated by proponents of two areas of research: those who hold that the true cause of poverty is the behaviors of individuals and those who hold that the true cause of poverty is political/economic structures.

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The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization. New York, NY: Currency Doubleday. Sharron, Howard, & Coulter, Martha. (1996). Changing Children's Minds: Feuerstein's Revolution in the Teaching of Intelligence. Birmingham, England: Imaginative Minds. Shipler, David K. (2004). The Working Poor: Invisible in America. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Sowell, Thomas. (1998). Race, Culture and Equality. Forbes. October 5. Sowell, Thomas. (1997). Migrations and Cultures: A World View. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Taylor-Ide, Daniel, & Taylor, Carl, E. (2002). Just and Lasting Change: When Communities Own Their Futures.

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, business cycle, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Brooks, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, school choice, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Steve Jobs, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, working poor, zero day

American Sociological Review 69: 613–635. Drutman, Lee. 2012. “Why Money Still Matters.” The Monkey Cage, November 14. Duncan, Greg J. and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, eds. 1999. Consequences of Growing Up Poor. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Duncan, Greg J., Aletha C. Huston, and Thomas S. Weisner. 2007. Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Duncan, Greg J. and Richard J. Murnane, eds. 2011. Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances. New York: Russell Sage Foundation and Spencer Foundation. Duncan, Greg J., Kathleen M. Ziol-Guest, and Ariel Kalil. 2010.

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“Wage Subsidies for the Disadvantaged.” Pp. 21–53 in Generating Jobs: How to Increase Demand for Less-Skilled Workers. Edited by Richard B. Freeman and Peter Gottschalk. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Kaus, Mickey. 1992. The End of Equality. New York: Basic Books. Kemmerling, Achim. 2009. Taxing the Working Poor. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Kenworthy, Lane. 1995. In Search of National Economic Success. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ———. 2004. Egalitarian Capitalism. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. ———. 2006. “Institutional Coherence and Macroeconomic Performance.” Socio-Economic Review 4: 69–91. ———. 2008a.

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America’s Misunderstood Welfare State. New York: Basic Books. Marx, Ive, Lina Salanauskaite, and Gerlinde Verbist. 2012. “The Paradox of Redistribution Revisited.” Unpublished paper. Marx, Ive and Gerlinde Verbist. 2008. “Combating In-Work Poverty in Europe: the Policy Options Assessed.” Pp. 273–292 in The Working Poor in Europe. Edited by Hans-Jürgen Andreß and Henning Lohmann. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Mayer, Susan E. 1999. What Money Can’t Buy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mayer, Susan E. and Christopher Jencks. 1993. “Recent Trends in Economic Inequality in the United States: Income versus Expenditures versus Material Well-being.”

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

As a pioneering industrial city, Manchester experienced stark inequalities, but a similar story can be found across other industrializing metropolises of that era. Charles Dickens famously brought the plight of London’s working poor to life in novels like David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. In the US, the inhumane working conditions and unsanitary practices of Chicago’s meatpacking district, known as the Union Stock Yards, were brought to the public’s awareness by Upton Sinclair’s fictionalized 1906 account The Jungle. Of Chicago’s working poor, Sinclair wrote: ‘They are penned up in filthy houses and left to rot and stew in misery, and the conditions of their life make them ill faster than all the doctors in the world could heal them.’9 As industrialization led to the mass migration of the poor from the countryside, it profoundly altered the structure of cities.

…

By one estimate, such cellar dwellings contained 12 per cent of the city’s population in 1835.6 Another notable traveller to Manchester around the same time was Friedrich Engels, who in 1842 went to work at the headquarters of his family’s textile company. In his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Classes in England, Engels described how the working poor of Manchester lived ‘in wretched, damp, filthy cottages’ in which ‘no cleanliness, no convenience, and consequently no comfortable family life is possible’.7 Originally sent by his family in an attempt to cure him of his radical political views, his experience had the opposite effect. Engels’ experience of Manchester forged him into one of the most ardent critics of early capitalism.

…

Perhaps the most powerful mechanism for reducing disparities in educational outcomes within cities is to tackle the challenge of affordable housing, which prevents poorer families from accessing better schools in wealthier neighbourhoods. In the early decades of the twentieth century, as public concern continued to grow over the quality of life for the working poor in overcrowded and ramshackle inner city housing, many rich countries began major efforts to clear such areas and replace them with social housing, a process that accelerated in the aftermath of the Second World War. Britain was a particularly enthusiastic adopter, building over four million social houses between the end of the war and the start of the 1980s.43 Such initiatives were not without their critics.

Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution by Emma Griffin

agricultural Revolution, Corn Laws, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, full employment, gentrification, informal economy, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, labour mobility, spinning jenny, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

Here is a collection of personal stories freely narrated by the ordinary men and women we wish to understand and it is worth emphasising the rarity of historical testimony of this kind. For all their shortcomings, the autobiographies offer the best way – indeed the only way – to examine the lives of working people during a critical epoch in world history. In looking at the encounter between industrialisation and the working poor, this book takes up a theme – that the industrial revolution degraded and exploited workers – that has exercised writers and thinkers since the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Not that there was anything new about poverty and exploitation. Toiling away for scant reward had been the lot of mankind since the dawn of time.

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Until at least 1850, 4017.indd 54 25/01/13 8:21 PM m e n at w o r k 55 many of those who stayed faced an ongoing struggle to make ends meet: low wages, insufficient work, and positions or masters that they disliked yet could not leave. It is time to end this chapter; but this, perhaps, is where any attempt to understand the impact of the industrial revolution on the working poor ought to begin. Since the moment when commentators recognised that Britain was undergoing an irrevocable transformation, informed opinion has betrayed an unshakeable uneasiness that those at the bottom did not share equally in the advantages. Running like a thread through more than a century of historical analysis is the belief that the ordinary worker enjoyed a healthier, simpler and less frenetic life before the smoke and steam of the industrial revolution.

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Their hasty marriage reveals the unspoken values and expectations that guided and governed the behaviour of the labouring poor. Looking at the processes by which working people went from ‘walking out’ to walking down the aisle illuminates aspects of working-­class culture that are usually hidden from view.2 It would be difficult to exaggerate the place of matchmaking, wooing, and walking out in the lives of the working poor. Some of the autobiographers admitted to spending much of their early adulthood falling in and out of love, making and breaking vows of fidelity, and generally devoting the best part of their attention to matters of the heart. Undoubtedly, emotional attachments and sexual intrigue brought interest and excitement to lives characterised above all by long hours of hard work.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

One reason that it is an evil is because energy, independence, industry, and self-reliance are undermined by it.”14 Why didn’t the working poor demand more redistribution? One reason is that the early democratization of America came with its own set of problems. In the succeeding decades, the party system that emerged had to gather support from a new group of poor and uneducated voters. The promise of a job or other personal favors turned out to be the most effective way of mobilizing them. Clientelism soon became widespread at virtually every level of government. The lucrative short-term benefits offered to the working poor meant that their long-term interests suffered. Because ordinary citizens got individual favors in return for political participation, it proved much harder to recruit them into the kind of working-class or socialist parties that popped up in Europe, where people demanded more redistribution, universal health care, and so on.15 Both the Republican and Democratic Parties gained support from working-class Americans by offering short-term benefits rather than long-term policy involvement.

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.… The English middle classes prefer to ignore the distress of the workers and this is particularly true of the industrialists, who grow rich on the misery of the mass of wage earners.”2 The attitudes of laborers and the “middle sort” toward technological progress differed greatly.3 As David Landes writes, the middle and upper classes were convinced that they were living in the best of all possible worlds. To them, technology was a new revelation, and the factory system provided the evidence to justify their new religion of progress. But the working poor, “especially those groups by-passed or squeezed by machine industry … were undoubtedly of another mind.”4 While industrialists marveled at the rise of machines, workers often resisted their introduction and expressed their fear of unemployment in verses like the following one: Mechanics and poor labourers Are wandering up and down There is nothing now but poverty In country and in town; Machinery and steam power has The poor man’s hopes destroyed, Then pray behold the numbers of The suffering unemployed.5 The laboring poor surely had much to complain about.

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Together with Autor, in their pioneering 2004 book, The New Division of Labor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, two economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were among the first to note this pattern: As computers have helped channel economic growth, two quite different types of jobs have increased in number, jobs that pay very different wages. Jobs held by the working poor—janitors, cafeteria workers, security guards—have grown in relative importance. But the greater job growth has taken place in the upper part of the pay distribution—managers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, technicians. Three facts about these latter jobs stand out: they pay well, they require extensive skills, and most people in these jobs rely on computers to increase their productivity.

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

Significant numbers of people are also facing poverty because they are underemployed, seeking full-time work but only able to find part-time jobs. The 2013 JRF report estimated that, shortly before its publication, 1.4 million UK citizens were in this category (MacInnes et al, 2013). The working poor form a significant but largely overlooked proportion of the population in supposedly affluent societies, their experiences proving that work is not always a ticket out of poverty. Many of the working poor are employed through agencies or on a temporary basis, and may be insufficiently protected by employment legislation or trade unions. These workers are therefore likely to be excluded from the benefits of permanent employment contracts, such as paid holidays or sick leave.

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On top of this, the failure of the labour market to deliver an adequate supply of decent jobs to those who want them is producing all manner of new travesties. The high demand for jobs seriously weakens the power and inclinations of workers to stand up for issues like pay, rights, and job quality. In recent times, we have witnessed the relatively unmitigated rise of the working poor,7 and the zero-hours contract.8 For those attempting to insulate themselves from the shifting currents of the labour market by investing in education, the old guarantee that educational credentials ensure a future of secure, well-paid and interesting work is also being eroded. An extensive analysis by Philip Brown and colleagues suggests that a combination of factors – the rapid expansion of higher education, the globalisation of job competition, and the deskilling of work – are leading huge numbers of graduates into an ‘opportunity trap’, as they fail to find a home for their specialised skills in the labour market (Brown et al., 2011).9 Even if economic growth could manage to keep pace with the demand for jobs, what would be the environmental costs of continuing expansion?

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, 71 Williams, Pharrell, ‘Happy’, 71 women, 206; claimed possibility of liberation through work, 115; double shift working by, 230; right to work, 22 work: as aesthetic creation, 18; as main centre of social life, 14; as means of income distribution, 225; as moral test, 192–9; as playlike activity, 31; as route to personal development, 98; as source of gratification, 30; as source of sociality, 137; as unreliable source of income, rights and security, 43, 46, 93; beginning of, 23–9; central in parliamentary politics, 15–16; compression and control in, 12–13; concept of, 9; critique of, 21, 23, 105–6 (in Marx, 32); definition of term, 17–22; disdained as symbol of necessity, 23; end of, 29–35; enjoyment and achievement in, 22; ethical status of, 2; future of, 41, 43; hidden expenses of, 178; in traditional society, 24; maldistribution of, 229; marks passage to adulthood, 14; morally loaded term, 18; perceived ethical superiority of, 5, 25; producing to consume, 179; re-evaluation of, 46, 105, 116; reinventing of term, 233; related to realm of necessity, 32; ritualistic quality of, 26; seen as a medicine, 105–17; spiritual costs of, 45, 48; term used in artistic circles, 18; transformed into source of pleasure, 31 see also domestic work; resistance to work; true work; and work dogma work and worklessness, inquiry into, 228 Work Capability Assessment (WCA), 104, 152, 153 work dogma, 1-–10, 190; dismantling of, 222, 227–37; re-evaluation of, 94; research intervention into, 231–2; resistance to, 230 work ethic, 5, 9, 23–9, 34, 80, 96, 98, 111, 113, 123, 124, 191, 233; fortification of, 102; reinforced in sociology, 106; rejection of, 154; resistance to, 97, 114, 207 work experience, gaining of, 136 work-centred ambitions, lack of, 196 work-centred nature of society, 14–17, 29, 41, 112, 117, 122, 209, 232; moving away from, 234; research into, 97; strains of, 229 work–life balance, 3, 5, 16, 68, 115, 217–18; a depoliticising notion, 219 worker-consumers, 92 workfare policies, 105 working conditions see conditions of work working for ourselves, 19–20, 185 working hours, 5; in the USA, 83; length of, 139; reduction of, 32, 36–7, 38, 82, 95, 117, 131, 155, 178, 220, 222, 226 (in Sweden, 224; without loss of income, 225); statistics for, 68 working less, 7, 29, 31, 37, 124, 187, 211; obstacles to, 117 working poor, 42 working tax credits, 101 working time, 14, 82–3; reduction of, 33, 223 worthwhile ethic, 233–4 writing, pleasure of, 194–5 X Xbox One console, 172–3, 177 Y yuppie lifestyle, disillusionment of, 114 Z Zawadzki, Bohan, 204 zero-hours contracts, 42

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, open borders, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, price mechanism, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, systematic bias, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

Many claimants did not want to run the risk of owing money back at the end of the fiscal year.27 The advantage universal schemes possess in this reÂ�spect over means-Â�tested guaranteed income schemes easily generalizes to the comparison with refundable credit schemes targeted at workers with low earnings. Yet the main difference between a basic income or negative income tax and the EITC is obviously that the latter focuses exclusively on the working poor. This is no doubt why it enjoys a wider appeal than means-Â�tested public assistance. The operation of such schemes, as Jennifer Sykes and her colleagues put it, “shows that government programs aimed at assisting families do not need to be universal to avoid stigma, as long as they are associated with beÂ�havÂ�iors most Americans condone, such as work.”28 This key difference explains, for example, why the EITC has benefited from bipartisan support in the United States, and seems to remain one of the least controversial components of the American welfare state.

…

Similarly, in Germany, where negative income tax proposals have been made from the right and the left since the 1970s (Engels, Mitschke and Starkloff 1973, Mitschke 1985, Scharpf 1993, 1994), the structure in place since the 2005 “Hartz IV” reform (see chapter 7) is also one that facilitates the combination of benefits and low earnings, with a strengthened willingness-Â�to-Â�work test. About half of the 297 NO TES TO PAGES 163–165 recipients of the means-Â�tested minimum-Â�income scheme [Arbeitslosengeld IIâ•›] are “working poor.” 77. Â�Meade (1989: 37) argues that it is impossible to achieve an adequate social dividend with a proportional tax “simply Â�because the marginal rates of tax on increased earnings and profits combined with the assurance of the substantial unconditional income represented by the social dividend introduced an unacceptably large general disincentive for enterprising work and investment.”

…

American Economic Review 74(3): 433–444. Shaviro, Daniel. 1997. “The Minimum Wage, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Optimal Subsidy Policy.” The University of Chicago Law Review 64(2): 405–481. Sheahen, Allan. 2012. Basic Income Guarantee: Your Right to Economic Security. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shipler, David K. 2004. The Working Poor: Invisible in AmerÂ�iÂ�ca. New York: Vintage Books. Shirky, Ckay. 2008. Â�Here Comes EveryÂ�body: The Power of OrganÂ�izing without OrganÂ�izations. New York: Penguin Books. Shulevitz, Judith. 2016. “It’s Payback Time for Â�Women.” New York Times, January 8. Simon, Herbert A. 1998. “Letter to BIEN on the Flat Tax and Our Common Patrimony.”

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Anti-poverty programs haven’t just been unsuccessful at leading more poor people to join the labor force—they’ve encouraged many to stay out of the labor force. We’ll look at the data in a moment, but it’s worth noting that this is a view shared by a lot of low-income workers. In her study of Harlem’s working poor, No Shame in My Game, Princeton sociologist Katherine S. Newman quotes several fast-food workers who believe that welfare undermines the work ethic. Here’s one young worker, Ianna: I’m not knocking welfare, but I know people that are on it that can get up and work. There’s nothing wrong with them.

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,” Career Bear, April 17, 2012, http://careerbear.com/plumber/article/how-much-do-plumbers-make (accessed May 20, 2015). 39. Katherine S. Newman. Interview by Russ Roberts, “Newman on Low-Wage Workers,” EconTalk, March 8, 2010, http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/03/newman_on_low-w.html (accessed May 20, 2015). 40. Katherine S. Newman, No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City (New York: Vintage, 2000), chapter 5. 41. Jason DeParle, American Dream (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 79. 42. Miles Corwin, And Still We Rise (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), pp. 36–37. 43. What explains the decline of opportunity-nurturing values is a difficult question.

…

Elias Isquith, “Paul Ryan’s ‘Blame the Victim’ Disease: How He Epitomizes a Horrible New Consensus,” Salon.com, July 26, 2014, http://www.salon.com/2014/07/26/paul_ryans_blame_the_victim_disease_how_he_epitomizes_a_horrible_new_consensus/ (accessed April 28, 2015). 47. Interview with Don Watkins, May 2015. 48. Newman, No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City, chapter 4. 49. Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 120. 50. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), p. 157. 51. Quoted in Joe Gelonesi, “Is Having a Loving Family an Unfair Advantage?

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

The small proprietors on 192 went into the hospitality business to service nightly guests and ended up as reluctant landlords, hosting long-term residents whose rights as tenants are unclear. It is by no means a wholly local predicament. Despite their original aspirations, moteliers across the country have become providers of affordable housing for the working poor and are unofficially joining the ranks of small landlords, who own almost half of the rental buildings in the US. The housing crisis has presented an opportunity for them to generate steady income from a new supply of customers. But the responsibilities of landlordship are quite different from the task of catering to nightly guests.

…

Notably, Orange County’s hotel industry is dominated by large corporate owners with substantial influence over officials. Osceola’s mom-and-pop owners have less political leverage. And the interpretation of the law adopted by the Osceola sheriff aligns with the county’s economic priorities. The motels have become a convenient way of warehousing the working poor with just enough income to stay off the streets and out of the woods. After all, the visibly homeless population who panhandle on 192 or who rest or sleep on its benches and sidewalks are considered a grave threat to the county’s economic backbone: the tourist industry. In the absence of alternatives, motels across the United States have become an all-purpose solution, serving at one and the same time as welfare housing, workforce housing, and transitional housing.

…

Laugh Floor Montana Moore, Charles Moore-Willson, Minnie moratorium Morgan Stanley Mormon Church mortgage moteliers motel landlord “motel-Patel” motels as affordable housing option association criminal activity in designated as extended stay designed to meet customer needs evictions families living together in as low-income housing projects motorists in occupancy rates public health self-perception among motel dwellers as warehousing for working poor Mulligan’s Murrin, Greg and Linda Nana, KJ Nashville, Tennessee National Association of Real Estate Brokers National Association of Realtors National Homes Guarantee National Low Income Housing Coalition National Old Trails Road National Press Photographers Association Negrin, Metin NeoCity Ñeta Association Netflix Netherlands Nevada New 21st Century Public Housing Vision New England “new homeless” See also homeless New Jersey New Mexico New Urbanism New York New York City New Yorker Ninth Circuit Ninth Congressional District “nontransient occupancy” nonurban housing crisis See also housing North Carolina Northeast District Northeast Oregon Northern Virginia North Florida North Ranch Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria Occidental College Oconee Creek offenders Ohio Oklahoma Old Town One Stop Housing Opalka, Jesse opioid crisis Orange Blossom Family Health Orange County, Florida Orange County Housing Trust, California Oregon Organize Florida Orlando, Florida Orlando-Kissimmee tourism corridor Orlando Sentinel Osceola County, Florida commercial to industrial land use Comprehensive Plan evictions fair market rent higher-wage employment household incomes housing problems jobless rate low-income housing projects motel owners owners’ right to evict Parkway planners tax collector tourist attractions urban grown boundary (UGB) vacation homes Osceola County Ninth Circuit Court owners business condo corporate mom-and-pop motel multiunit second-home stores and restaurants ownership shift Oxy Express Oyo Hotels and Homes Palm Beach County, Florida Palm Motel pandemic.

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

The savings bank would not cure poverty, but it would give the poor a place to build capital. At the time, commercial banks actively repelled the poor. With typical hours of operation between 9:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. (when everyone but the aristocrats was working), their doors were literally closed to the working poor. But it was more explicit than that. One Chicago banker described his disinterest in small deposits: “The bank with which I am connected not only does not invite savings deposits but imposes a prohibitory charge upon all accounts which average less than $300 for the express purpose of driving them away.”79 Massachusetts was the first state to pass legislation, creating the Provident Institution for Savings in Boston in 1814.80 The legislation was specifically designed to ensure that these banks stayed focused on their mission of helping the poor.

…

.… I urge favorable action by Congress on the important recommendations of the Postmaster-General for the establishment of United States postal savings depositories.30 The advocates of post office savings banks were not just trying to expand savings banks across the country; they were interested in providing a state-supported institution. In 1882, Congressman Edward Lacey said, “Private enterprise alone does not, and cannot, in this respect, meet the necessities of the industrious poor in any country, and least of all in the United States.”31 The point was that “the working poor … would be more inclined to deposit earnings in the Post Office, a public institution, than in the local savings bank run by sanctimonious clergymen and philanthropists.”32 The post office, with its rich history and public mission, proved the obvious choice for providing this service. With branches in communities where no bank and certainly, no savings bank, would go, the post office could potentially do with savings what it had with information—democratize banking.

…

He is laboring under a serious misapprehension.”64 The Boston Globe stated that “it is easy enough for anybody to find a savings bank; the trouble is to find the savings to put in it.”65 Others just stated that the reason rural dwellers were not saving in banks was because of the “ignorance of the common people” or that “the inhabitants of remote rural districts are not so well posted in the world’s wicked ways as those who have the opportunity of perusing the daily papers.”66 In other words, rural dwellers were too poor and too stupid to bank. But much like today’s banks, the private banks of that time were out of reach to most of the working poor. These banks were “not open enough of the time, nor at the most convenient hours for working people, nor for long-continued periods; they are not situated at all the convenient points.” These private institutions, Butler claimed, “do not care to deal with small sums” and were “not sufficiently adapted to the convenience of our population, nor have they either the incentive of philanthropy or of gain to induce them to become sufficiently so.”67 Savings banks simply weren’t reaching the lower strata of income.

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea by James Livingston

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bear Stearns, business cycle, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, Internet of things, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, obamacare, post-work, Project for a New American Century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, warehouse automation, working poor

The big idea here was to abolish the perceived disincentives to marriage in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program by making it easier for households and harder for single parents to acquire an adequate income. Second, the experiments and the legislation provided income supplements to the working poor, rather than grants or a baseline sum to everyone, or to people without jobs. The point—the result—of the experiments was to show that time on the job didn’t decline as income without work increased, not to discourage job-seeking or steady employment; the legislation of 1970 that called for income supplements, Nixon’s Family Assistance Program, took these findings for granted.

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On these grounds, for example, social workers, the most liberal of interest groups, became the most outspoken critics of the legislation. These work requirements were in fact minimal. But they were a necessary part of the ideological package Nixon was selling; for a substantial bloc of voters—not just the Chamber of Commerce—worried that the working poor would quit their jobs and loaf around all day if given the chance. A Gallup Poll in 1968, for example, showed that 58 percent of Americans opposed a guaranteed annual income of $3,200 to a family of four; the typical sentiment reported by this majority was “nobody should get something for nothing.”

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

It’s true that trade with low-wage economies lowers the cost of goods more than the wages of domestic lower-skilled labor. Were that not the case, it would be cheaper to produce goods domestically, rather than import them. But middle- and working-class workers bear 100 percent of the burden of lower wages for only a portion of the benefits of lower-priced goods. The rich, retirees, and the non-working poor also enjoy the benefits of lower-priced goods but without suffering the cost of lower wages. So while international trade benefits everyone on average, because the costs are shared disproportionately, it slows middle- and working-class wage growth relative to the growth of everyone else’s income.

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If trade with low-wage economies didn’t lower the cost of goods more than the wages of domestic lower-skilled labor, it would be cheaper to produce the goods with domestic labor. So trade makes everyone better off on average. Lesser-skilled workers, however, suffer the entire burden of lower wages but capture only a portion of the benefits from lower-priced offshore goods. Much of the benefit is captured by the rich, retirees, and the non-working poor, who enjoy lower-priced goods but without the cost of lower wages. As a result, trade lowers the relative incomes of the middle and working classes. An influx of low-skilled immigrants only adds to the strain on constrained resources. If risk-takers and properly trained talent fail to create jobs for low-skilled immigrants that are as productive as the jobs of the lesser-skilled, native-born workers on average, lower-wage immigrants working in less productive jobs will bid down wages, further lowering the relative incomes of the middle and working classes.

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But while it’s true that trade with low-wage economies may lower prices more than wages, an economy like America’s buys products made with low-wage, lesser-skilled labor and sells products made with high-skilled labor—such as operating systems produced by Microsoft, Apple, and Google. Middle- and working-class workers bear the burden of lower wages while retirees, the non-working poor, and higher-skilled workers and their families—where 20 percent of the families earn 50 percent of the after-tax pay—share the benefits of lower-priced goods. The cost and benefits are not distributed proportionally. As such, trade will slow middle- and working-class wage growth relative to the rest of the economy.

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

“In Los Angeles, they might be Mexican Americans, in… West Virginia or Pennsylvania, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. All of them are poor; regardless of race, creed, or color, all of them are victims.” In 1963, 20 percent of full-time employees earned less than $3,000 a year, which was under the poverty line for a family of four. The term “working poor” had entered the American vernacular. In certain industries, such as retail, earnings were notoriously low. “It is a fact that our economy has a lot of jobs that pay low wages,” Labor Secretary George Shultz acknowledged in 1969. And still, this was also undeniable: as US corporations flourished, so did a huge swath of the population.

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Raskin, a veteran labor reporter for the New York Times, said that Harrington’s book was nothing less than “a scream of rage and a call to conscience.” In the end, it fell mostly on deaf ears. The government’s War on Poverty “never truly mobilized the country, nor was it ever fought to victory,” David Shipler concluded in his 2004 book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America. “Forty years later,” he wrote, “after all our economic achievements, the gap between rich and poor has only widened.… Yet after all that has been written, discussed, and left unresolved, it is harder to surprise and shock and outrage.” We are 18 years further along now, and an ever-bigger army of low-paid workers serve us food and scrape our plates.

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Rolf, David. The Fight for $15: The Right Wage for a Working America. New York: New Press, 2016. Rosenfeld, Jake. You’re Paid What You’re Worth: And Other Myths of the Modern Economy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2021. Ryan, John A. A Living Wage. New York: Macmillan, 1920. Shipler, David K. The Working Poor: Invisible in America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Stern, Andy. Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream. New York: PublicAffairs, 2016. Stone, Brad. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. New York: Little, Brown, 2013.

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

A. Roger Ekirch, back-to-the-land, British Empire, California gold rush, colonial rule, Copley Medal, desegregation, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gentleman farmer, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The children of “wandering beggars,” having been “kept from idleness, and made able by their own honest and easy labor,” would grow up responsibly, “without surcharging others.” Children who escaped pauperism, no longer burdens on the state, might reenter the workforce as honest laborers. The poor fry sent overseas would now be “better bred up,” making the lot of the English people better off, and the working poor more industrious. It all sounded perfectly logical and realizable.16 Seeing the indigent as wastrels, as the dregs of society, was certainly nothing new. The English had waged a war against the poor, especially vagrants and vagabonds, for generations. A series of laws in the fourteenth century led to a concerted campaign to root out this wretched “mother of all vice.”

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There was no guarantee that restlessness ensured social mobility.15 Poverty was increasingly common as the eighteenth century wore on. Philadelphia had its economic slumps, brutally cold winter weather, and shortages of wood that caused the poor nearly to freeze to death. In 1784, one man who was part of the working poor in the city wrote to the local newspaper that he had six children, and though he “strove in all his power,” he could not support them. Hard work by itself was not the magic balm of economic self-sufficiency, nor was Franklin correct that big families were always a boon. He was even wrong about his tabulations on American birthrates.

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He too loosely clothed the language of class in the garb of continental races and commercial impulses. Indians and slaves are marginalized in his grand vision of a new world order. Neither did he allow the ignoble waste people to make any appearance in Common Sense; the vast numbers of convict laborers, servants, apprentices, working poor, and families living in miserable wilderness cabins are all absent from his prose. For Paine, the crucial issue for Americans in 1776 was not whether but how soon a new and independent regime would advance toward its destiny as first among nations. He assumed that the mighty forces of commerce and continental expansion would eliminate idleness and correct imbalances.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

There was already a sense, even then, that they were doing more than enriching themselves at the expense of the workingmen whom their devices were making redundant; they were using those machines to impose an entirely new mode of work onto the populace. Theirs were the guiding hands on new technologies that were helping to forge the very shape of industrial capitalism. Footnote 1 Also crucial were the ideas of the economist Thomas Malthus, who held that periods of mass suffering among the working poor were inevitable in any prospering economy as the population grew too fast for food production to keep pace. B November 1811 In a secret meeting at the Falstaff Hotel in Manchester, in the middle of a black November night, a man who dressed and presented as a cloth worker listened in as a delegate from the town of Royton spoke up.

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Soldiers, the royal dragoons, and organized militias had been the face of the Crown’s opposition to the Luddites in Nottingham. The spies kept quietly to the shadows, as spies do, though the workers were well aware they were out there. The Nottingham Luddites had, after all, begun to win some victories and concessions. Not only were they popular with the working poor, but they had driven some shop owners to abandon the new machines, raise wages, and return work to the craftsmen. The Luddites were nothing less than a threat to the ruling class’s economic power. Magistrates like Ralph Fletcher were convinced that, whether by rifle in broad daylight or by arrest at night, these threats had to be rooted out immediately—or else they’d spread.

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Life expectancy wasn’t long in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and most working people were fortunate if they lived past their forties. And progress was beginning to cut its forked path. There was a vaccine for smallpox now—even Blincoe got a dose—and yet conditions in factories for the working poor left them worse off, physically stunted from malnourishment, or killed prematurely in the machinery. And it was a certain kind of death—to be killed by the cutting-edge technology, for a profit—that cast so dark a shadow. When these deaths were reported, they made the news, plainly underscoring the dangers of the factory and how commonplace this kind of carnage risked becoming.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Alan Greenspan, business process, full employment, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, McMansion, PalmPilot, place-making, post-work, sexual politics, telemarketer, union organizing, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero day

When someone works for less pay than she can live on—when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently—then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, “you give and you give.”

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On a Thursday after work, I drive to the Mobil station across the street from The Maids and call the Prebles Street Resource Center, which is listed in the phone book as a source of free meals and all-around help. I get a recorded message saying that Prebles Street closes at 3:00 P.M.—so much for the working poor!--but to try 774-HELP after that. There I wait on hold for four minutes before someone picks up. I tell him I am new to the area and employed but need some immediate food aid or cash assistance. Why do I need money if I'm employed, he wants to know—didn't I bring any money with me? It got used up on housing, I tell him, which was more expensive than I'd expected.

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

Hirsch, The Social Limits to Growth, 6; Phillip Brown, “The Opportunity Trap: Education and Employment in a Global Economy,” European Educational Research Journal, 2, no. 1 (2003): 142–180; revised and abridged as “The Opportunity Trap,” in H. Lauder et al. (eds.), Education, Globalization and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 11. Raymond Boudon, Education, Opportunity and Social Inequality (New York: Wiley, 1973), 6. 12. David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York: Vintage Books, 2005). 13. Ivar Berg, Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery (New York: Penguin, 1970). 14. Randall Collins, Four Sociological Traditions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 146; Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (New York: Academic Press, 1979). 15.

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If the same principles were applied to tackling poverty in America, it could be abolished tomorrow. See Simon Caulkin, “Stock Exchange: A Casino Where the Rich Can’t Lose,” The Observer, October 5, 2008; James K.Galbraith, The Predator State (New York: Free Press, 2008). 32. Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1996), 267. 33. The Working Poor Families Project, Still Working Hard, Still Falling Short (2006). http://www.workingpoorfamilies.org/still_working.html 34. See Brown and Lauder, Capitalism and Social Progress. Notes to Pages 161–164 187 This page intentionally left blank Index Page numbers in bold indicate figures. A. T.

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See also high-skill, low-wage workforce hourly wages, 117, 118 income inequalities, 124–25 industrial policy, lack of, 158 industrial revolutions, 21 Wilensky, Harold, 80 Williamson, Peter, 43, 57–58 Wilson, Timothy, 68 The Winner-Take-All Society, 122 IT revolution, 127 knowledge wars, 45–48 winner-takes-all, 11, 123, 160, 165n7 win-win scenario, 20, 111, 152–53 National Institute on Drug Abuse, 146 opportunity trap, 137 R&D (research and development), 44, 45 World Bank, 59, 130, 149 The World Is Flat, 66 World Trade Organization (WTO), 41 STEM subjects studies, 37–38, 39, 153 trade imbalance, 108–9 World University Rankings, 95 WTO (World Trade Organization), 41, 52 war for talent, 86 working poor, 163 universities. See colleges and universities 198 wage inequalities, 59–60 Wall Street, 111, 148 war for talent, 9, 83–90, 93–97, 148, 176n8, Young, Michael, 133, 182n3 value chain, 52, 54–56, 58, 98, 108–10, 128 Zeng, Ming, 43, 57–58 zero-sum game, 22 venture capital, 114–15 vertical integration, 103 Zhou, Eve, 45 ZTE, 42 Index

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, data science, delayed gratification, desegregation, don't be evil, Edward Jenner, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, microbiome, microdosing, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pre–internet, profit motive, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Streisand effect, TikTok, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, working poor

And miserly benefits continue to subsidize the disgracefully low wages paid by fast-food restaurants and retail giants. In this way, society keeps the working poor on a hamster wheel, struggling mightily just to get by, with no money to spare if their car breaks down or their kid gets sick. And it condemns the unemployed poor to abject poverty. In short, it punishes people for failure and accepts their misery as the status quo. This is both shortsighted and immoral. The key to changing it—which goes against all of our shaming instincts—is to help people in need, and to stop making assistance contingent on work. Poor people, like everyone else, should have childcare, shelter, healthcare, food, and access to decent education.

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That’s a horrifying statistic, and worse when you consider that this homelessness epidemic expanded during a period of economic boom. Statisticians choose what they count. That’s axiomatic. State and local governments in the United States often configure the poverty line to undercount expenses like rent, food, and healthcare costs. This saves taxpayer money, at least in the short term, and punishes the working poor. If you set the threshold, for example, at $2,100 for a family of four, a struggling Uber driver who works crazy hours to make $2,200 per month counts as someone who has pulled himself up from poverty, even while he may be homeless or drowning in credit card debt. But the biggest shortcoming of poverty statistics is that they reduce the experience to numbers and ignore the human pain and despair of being poor.

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump by Tom Clark, Anthony Heath

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, Greenspan put, growth hacking, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, income inequality, interest rate swap, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unconventional monetary instruments, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Using regression analysis on UK data, the respected labour market experts Paul Gregg and Stephen Machin find that whereas ‘a doubling of unemployment at any point in the period between 1986 and 2002’ would have driven down wages by 7%, in more recent years the same proportional rise would ‘push typical pay down by 12%’.10 That amounts to a serious intensification of hard times – as experienced not by the traditional jobless victims, but by people who have remained in employment. This nasty spillover from redundancy notices onto workers who kept their jobs is most marked at the bottom of the scale – and in the US it is stark. The Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps track of America's working poor, defined as those who spend the bulk of the year in the labour force, but who nonetheless live below the poverty line: the 2010 tally of 10.5 million was the highest since records began, in 1987.11 One study concluded: ‘during … the Great Recession, the bottom of the US earnings distribution has fallen dramatically … In terms of earnings, the bottom 20 percent of the US population has never done so poorly, relative to the median, during the whole postwar period.’12 The only reason this did not produce an immediate surge in inequality in family incomes, the same paper notes, was rising government redistribution; redistribution that reflects such moves as the extension in unemployment compensation that we reported on in Chapter 2.

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In his own estimation at least, however, his troubles are less to do with being unemployed as such, and more to do with being desperately poor: ‘Losing a job is nothing, compared to what I'm going through right now, because I am on the breadline.’ The anxiety of the workless was, perhaps, somewhat more marked in our interviews, but there was little difference between them and the working poor in the sorts of things that stirred fear – those dramatic words about homelessness and being haunted by broken fridges came from case studies of people in work. All this suggests that serious anxiety may be gripping the more weather-beaten sections of the workforce. The next question is whether there is any sign of that in the hard data.

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Whereas he used to ‘cycle into London twice a week … [to] go see my son’ (whom he otherwise sees only at weekends), his workfare obligations – and his terror of breaching them – now mean that he cannot make the trip. A wider slice of the population could soon experience such workfare-type requirements, as policy adjusts to the reality that much benefit spending now goes to the working poor. Changes in the pipeline could extend such obligations from the unemployed proper to the underemployed and the low-paid: the government has taken powers to allow it to extend a sanctions regime to the tax credits of poor working families, so that their payments can also be docked if their personal efforts to increase their hours of work or their rate of pay are deemed inadequate.

The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London by Judith Flanders

anti-work, antiwork, centre right, Corn Laws, Dutch auction, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, Ralph Waldo Emerson, traveling salesman, urban sprawl, working poor

Whitecross Street market, another Sunday market, was much larger. Near Old Street, towards the Barbican, it opened at 7 a.m. on Sundays, with sellers including butchers, bakers, grocers, provision dealers, linen drapers, hosiers, milliners, furniture brokers, ironmongers, hardware and trinket shops, leather sellers and curriers. The working poor arrived first, but by nine the market was filling with the ‘hungry, meagre, and unwashed’. Many men spruced themselves up while their wives shopped. ‘Sunday morning is always an exceedingly busy time in a barber’s shop in a working-class neighbourhood,’ as men had their weekly shave, or the ‘swells’ who were going out for the day came in ‘to have their hair brushed and “done up”’.

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One walked four miles to and from her dairy: after a 5.30 start she trudged her routes until 7 p.m., earning 9s a week and her meals. The next sellers were the watercress girls, followed by the costermongers, then the fishmongers’, the butchers’ and the bakers’ boys to take the daily orders. The cress girls and the costers wore the standard street-dress of the working poor. Early in the century, for the men, this was breeches, thereafter replaced by cord trousers, with shirts and waistcoats or smocks, sometimes a jacket, a cloth cap and always a silk kingsman neckerchief – a coster had to be very hard up not to have one. The girls wore cotton dresses, usually pinned up out of the mud, frequently with two aprons, a coloured one covered by a white one, with a shawl, a silk neckerchief if it was affordable, and a black velvet or straw bonnet, or, if they carried their goods on their heads, a folded handkerchief.

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In a series of views of London, which Rowlandson illustrated between 1808 and 1810, the caption to a picture of the Westminster Workhouse, with its happy, well-fed paupers, reads: ‘The establishment of a permanent and certain provision for the aged and the helpless, not of occasional bounty, but of uncontrovertible [sic] right, and the anxious care which has watched...over every abuse or neglect in the execution of them, may be placed in competition with the greatest of our national achievements.’ Workhouses were shelter for the very aged or the ill; the healthy and working poor who could not make ends meet received ‘outdoor relief’ of both money and food, supplemented sometimes by clothes, shoes and assistance in finding apprenticeships for their children. By the 1830s, however, increasing urbanism, population and inequality of income, creaking infrastructure and the rise in evangelical morality helped to create a view that the poor were poor not because of misfortune, or because wages were too low, but because they were drunken and lazy, probably immoral and dissolute, and no doubt rogues and thieves to boot.

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Known as a pragmatic and decisive leader, Paulson will likely be more proactive than Snow, whose sole job essentially was traipsing up to Congress once a year and urging lawmakers to raise the U.S. debt cap by another tril lion dollars so we wouldn’t default on our interest payments to China. Bush’s economic legacy is a weak dollar (who wants to invest in a country teetering on the brink of default?) and tax cuts for the super-wealthy that have created an outrageous deficit and debt. And that legacy benefits men like Paulson at the expense of middle-class Americans and the working poor. It will be a stretch for him to argue for prudent budgeting, while facing the country’s highest national debt ever, without cutting social programs to get there. This shaky economic legacy also makes Paulson’s possible appointment more challenging and hence more potentially dangerous than Rubin’s.

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The housing boom also spawned the now infamous subprime mortgage—a scheme devised by Main Street realtors and Wall Street bankers to finance home buying with loans that let the borrower buy in with little money down but carried high interest rates. The expensive payments would be made later by refinancing the mortgage as prices continued to rise. These subprimes were sold to middle-class strivers upgrading to McMansions as well as to the working poor. The increased demand pushed housing prices further into the stratosphere—until, inevitably, they fell back to earth. When the subprime borrowers could no longer make their payments, foreclosure signs went up, lowering the value of other houses in the neighborhood. The refinancing spigot shut off, retail sales sputtered and by January the economy was shedding jobs.

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The pain of homeowners has now spread throughout the economy. We must challenge plans that bail out the rich, put out the poor and put down the middle class. We can’t just bail out Wall Street and ignore Main Street. The bailout must be bottom up, not just top down. The poor—the unemployed poor, the working poor and the fixed-income poor—must benefit from the investment of their tax dollars. Any “solution” or remedy must be judged by how it affects “the least of these.” The oversight committees and the overseers must come off the payroll of Wall Street. They cannot eat from the same trough and retain any credibility as regulators.

Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself by Peter Fleming

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, anti-work, antiwork, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon tax, clockwatching, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, David Graeber, death from overwork, Etonian, future of work, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, neoliberal agenda, Parkinson's law, post-industrial society, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Results Only Work Environment, scientific management, shareholder value, social intelligence, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, transaction costs, wealth creators, working poor

We saw this most clearly in the United States and the United Kingdom when public funds (derived from income tax) were used to bail out the banks following the 2008 crisis. This instance of welfare to the rich is not an exception but the norm. For example, in the United States, tax breaks for the top 5 per cent of income earners have placed a huge burden on the remaining 95 per cent, and have, in effect, entailed an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the working poor to the rich. Lazzarato explains this in relation to the 2010 Bush–Obama law that extends the tax cuts to those making more than $250,000. The income bracket represents only 5% of the population … in exchange for peanuts for the unemployed, the rich received $315 billion over two years. To have an idea of the handout, one should remember that the US government investment in the economy came to $800 billion in 2008.

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There is only one winner. Welcome to neoliberal Britain. According to Meek, when Thatcher came to power in 1979, the top rate of tax was 83 per cent and the basic rate 33 per cent. Now they are 45 per cent and 20 per cent respectively. But it is the flat taxes that really put the boot into the working poor. In 1979 value-added tax (or VAT, whereby everybody pays the same rate regardless of income) was 8 per cent. Now it is 20 per cent, which disproportionately sucks money away from working people. Meek goes even further. In addition to VAT, there are others, and they are onerous; they just aren’t called taxes, though they should be – private taxes.

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Governmental economic ideology is primarily guided by class politics, with the social construction of ‘work’ being a central factor for garnering legitimacy and justifying false scarcity. For example, it is largely state governance structures that has allowed the 2008 financial crisis to become a veritable boon to the rich as it sucks the life out of the working poor. It was recently noted that ‘the 400 wealthiest Americans are worth a record $2.02 trillion (£1.4tn), up from $1.7tn in 2012, a collective fortune slightly bigger than Russia’s economy’ (The Guardian, 2013). Indeed, the old Marxist debates in the 1970s about whether or not the state was semi-autonomous from capital look quaint and naive today.

Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power by Rose Hackman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, cognitive load, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Graeber, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, game design, glass ceiling, immigration reform, invisible hand, job automation, lockdown, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, performance metric, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

“Women CEOs of the S&P 500 (List),” Catalyst, March 25, 2022, https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-ceos-of-the-sp-500/. 11.  Karry A. Dolan (ed.), Chase Peterson-Withorn (deputy ed.), and Jennifer Wang (deputy ed.), “The Forbes 400 2021,” Forbes, accessed February 7, 2022, https://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/. 12.  “A Profile of the Working Poor, 2016,” BLS Reports, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, July 2018, accessed June 16, 2020, https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2016/home.htm. 13.  “The Great Resignation: Why People Are Leaving Their Jobs in Growing Numbers,” NPR.org, October 22, 2021, accessed February 12, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2021/10/22/1048332481/the-great-resignation-why-people-are-leaving-their-jobs-in-growing-numbers. 14.  

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As of February 2022, there were 31 women holding CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies, representing an abysmally low 6.2 percent total.10 In 2021, the ten wealthiest people in America were all men and were all white.11 On the flip side, women continue to be more likely to be living in poverty than men and are more likely than men to be among the working poor, with the greatest rate among Black and Hispanic women.12 Yes, we have made progress, but this is a society that is still plagued by male domination, and in which it is no coincidence that women are expected to take on the lion’s share of emotional labor. And frankly, we have reached breaking point.

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Consequently, inequality is far wider in the United States than it is in any other advanced country, and the American middle class is no longer the world’s richest. Considering taxes and transfer payments, middle-class workers in Canada and much of Western Europe are better off than in the United States. The working poor in Western Europe earn more than do the working poor in America. Globalization or technology cannot account for these differences because all these nations face much the same international competition and deal with the same technological changes. The answer is to be found in the different organization of these countries’ political-economic systems.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

affirmative action, Cass Sunstein, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, dumpster diving, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, housing justice, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jobless men, Kickstarter, late fees, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, payday loans, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, statistical model, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, working poor, young professional

History repeated itself 100 years later, when wage gains that workers had made through labor strikes were quickly absorbed by rising rents. In the interwar years, the industrial job market expanded, but the housing market, especially for blacks, did not, allowing landlords to recoup workers’ income gains. Today, if evictions are lowest each February, it is because many members of the city’s working poor dedicate some or all of their Earned Income Tax Credit to pay back rent. In many cases, this annual benefit is as much a boost to landlords as to low-income working families.44 In fixating almost exclusively on what poor people and their communities lack—good jobs, a strong safety net, role models—we have neglected the critical ways that exploitation contributes to the persistence of poverty.

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The shame of rejection not only can pressure people to accept undesirable circumstances today; it can also discourage them from striving for something better tomorrow. On the experience of rejection when job hunting for entry-level work, see Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chapter 4; Katherine Newman, No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City (New York: Vintage, 1999), chapter 3. 11. Some months later, Betty received a letter from Tobin threatening eviction for boarding Larraine. Larraine responded by paying Tobin what he said she owed in back rent and court costs. That amount was twice what the court records said Larraine owed.

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Applying matching techniques as well as discrete hazard models to the Milwaukee Area Renters Study data set with Carl Gershenson, I found low-wage workers who involuntarily lost their homes to be significantly more likely to lose their jobs. When we examined the effects of forced removal for renters with relatively stable work histories and those with fairly unstable employment, we found forced removal to be an actuator of job loss for both groups. Matthew Desmond and Carl Gershenson, “Housing and Employment Insecurity Among the Working Poor,” Social Problems, forthcoming. 2. Consider Tina’s story. A single mother of three, Tina worked part-time for a landscaping company, entering data and making customer-service calls. After serving her an eviction notice, Tobin began calling Tina’s work and threatening to carry out the eviction unless she paid him $600.

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

The “chariot of the poor” encouraged the creation of decent, walkable neighborhoods—places like Jackson Heights in far-flung Queens, conceived as a prototypical garden suburb (and later the lumpen Shangri-la of television, inhabited by the likes of Frank and Estelle Costanza). In the outer boroughs, virtually all new construction clustered within a quarter-mile of the tracks. By following the taproots of mass transit, the working poor were able to escape industrial squalor for greener pastures. Before the subway, over half of all New Yorkers lived in Manhattan; forty years later, only a quarter lived there, and Brooklyn had become the city’s most populous borough. While the subway reduced population density in Manhattan, it also intensified downtown commercial development.

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By 1930, 94 percent of all dwellings in the city were suburban-style single-family houses, largely inhabited by the “middle-aged middle class from the Midwest”—who were also the world’s earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of the private automobile. As of the 2010 census, however, L.A. is a majority Latino city, and a further 20 percent of the population is African and Asian American. The city’s enormous population of working poor, many of whom live in car-dependent subdivisions built for past generations of migrants, is disproportionately dependent on transit. The money the city is about to spend on a new subway line, this argument goes, could buy working-class Angelenos a whole lot of buses. Ironically, it is a line of reasoning that puts the far-left Bus Riders’ Union in the same camp as libertarians who oppose “big-government”-built rail transit, and favor privately owned buses as the market-driven, and fittingly second-class, solution for those who can’t afford cars.

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Buses, it’s true, can be excellent forms of transit, especially when they run along dedicated rights-of-way, as they do on the Orange Line. (And as I would discover later in my travels, citywide rapid transit bus networks are providing superior service in developing-world metropolises.) But subways are permanent infrastructure that benefit the working poor and middle class alike—and unlike bus lines, which can be cut overnight when civic budgets get tight, rail transit lasts. No subway system in the world has ever permanently stopped running. Most Angelenos support the subway. In 2010, they ignored the Bus Riders’ Union position on Measure R, and voted 68 percent in favor of the transit-supporting sales tax.

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

In the Netherlands, the conditions governing disability benefits have been tightened up in the hope of saving more than $2 billion a year in public spendingP Some European officials, such as European Union (EU) Commissioner Padraig Flynn, are urging caution in the debate over lowering the social net. He warns that "you're going to see more low-wage jobs being created ... and more part-time work." In both cases, says Flynn, "the key is to have a satisfactory level of social protection ... so that you're not creating working poor and increased levels of poverty."28 The lowering of the social net, at a time when growing numbers of workers are being displaced by new technologies and management restructuring, is increasing tensions throughout Europe. In March 1994, tens of thousands of students took to the streets in cities across France to protest a government decree lowering the minimum wage for young people.

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Historian Paul Kennedy asks whether countries like India can "take the strain of creating world competitive, high-tech enclaves ... in the midst of hundreds of millions of their impoverished countrymen." Noting the growing disparity between the new symbolic analyst class and the declining middle and working poor in countries like the United States, Kennedy asks whether developing countries like India might fare even more poorly in the new high-tech world. "Given the even greater gap in income and lifestyles that would occur in India," says Kennedy, "how comfortable would it be to have islands of prosperity in a sea of poverty?"

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In both the Reagan and Bush White House, third-sector themes were continually manipulated in a cynical effort to mask a free-market agenda. "Returning the government to the people" became a convenient euphemism to push for deregulation of industry, fewer corporate taxes, and cutbacks in social services and entitlement programs for the working poor and those trapped below the poverty line. In the end, the third sector was seriously compromised and undermined by the very political forces that professed to be its champions and advocates. To avoid a similar occurrence in the future, it is necessary to understand both the disarming ways the Reagan people were able to manipulate third-sector images and the responses they evoked from Democrats and progressive forces.

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber

Bretton Woods, British Empire, company town, corporate personhood, David Graeber, deindustrialization, dumpster diving, East Village, feminist movement, financial innovation, George Gilder, John Markoff, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, Lao Tzu, late fees, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, planetary scale, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, working poor

Some of it, perhaps, lies in the fact that the lines between students and workers have somewhat blurred. Most students turn to paid employment at least at some point in their college careers. Furthermore, while the number of Americans entering college has grown considerably over the last twenty years, the number of graduates remains about the same; as a result, the ranks of the working poor are now increasingly filled with dropouts who couldn’t afford to finish their degrees, still paying for those years they did attend, usually still dreaming of someday returning. Or who still carry on as best they can, juggling part-time jobs and part-time classes.8 When I wrote the story in The Guardian, the discussion section was full of the usual dismissive comments: these were a bunch of pampered children living off someone else’s dime.

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As a result student loan debt continues to balloon at a giddy rate, the total amount owed having long since overtaken total credit card debt and other forms of debt as well: TOTAL DEBT BALANCE AND ITS COMPOSITION Mortgage 72% HE Revolving 5% Auto Loan 6% Credit Card 6% Student Loan 8% Other 3% *2011Q3 Total: 11.656 Trillion Aside from students, the other group stuck in the debt trap is the working poor—above all working women and people of color—who continue to see huge chunks of their already stagnating earnings culled directly by the financial services industry. They are often called the “subprimers,” since they are those most likely to have signed up for (or been tricked into) subprime mortgages.

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A dramatic case is Stockton, California, which declared bankruptcy in early 2012. The city announced it intended to find the revenue to pay its creditors through massively increasing “code enforcement”: essentially, through parking tickets, and fines for unkempt lawns or not removing graffiti quickly enough; such penalties will inevitably fall disproportionally on the working poor. See “Stockton Largest U.S. City Going Bankrupt,” Daily News, June 26, 2012. 10. “Parsing the Data and Ideology of the We Are 99% Tumblr,” http://​rorty​bomb.​wordpress.​com/​2011/​10/​09/​parsing-​the-​data-​and-​ideology-​of-​the-​we-​are-​99-​tumblr/. 11. See, for example, http://​lhote.​blogspot.​com/​2011/​10/​solidarity-​first-​then-​fear-​for-​this.​html, http://​attempter.​wordpress.​com/​2011/​10/​12/​underlying-​ideology-​of-​the-​99/, and the accompanying comment section. 12.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

In Japan, the term has been used as synonymous with ‘the working poor’, although it evolved as a distinctive term as it became associated with the Japanese May Day movement and so-called ‘freeter unions’, made up of young activists demanding better working and living conditions (Ueno, 2007; Obinger, 2009). Japan has produced a group of young workers known as ‘freeters’ – a name peculiarly combining ‘free’ and Arbeiter, German for worker – who have been pushed into a work style of casual labour. It is not right to equate the precariat with the working poor or with just insecure employment, although these dimensions are correlated with it.

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National Equality Panel (2010), An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK: Report of the National Equality Panel, London: Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion and the Government Equalities Office. Needleman, S. (2009), ‘Starting Fresh with an Unpaid Internship’, Wall Street Journal, 16 July, p. D1. Nink, M. (2009), ‘It’s Always about the Boss’, Gallup Management Journal, 25 November. Obinger, J. (2009), ‘Working on the Margins: Japan’s Precariat and Working Poor’, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 25 February. OECD (2010a), International Migration Outlook 2010, Paris: OECD. OECD (2010b), A Profile of Immigrant Populations in the 21st Century: Data from OECD Countries, Paris: OECD. Paine, T. ([1795] 2005), Common Sense and Other Writings, New York: Barnes & Noble, pp. 321–45.

The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science by Paul Krugman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, declining real wages, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, new economy, Nick Leeson, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, trade route, very high income, working poor, zero-sum game

That is less than one worker in 300—a tiny blip in the number of workers who lose or change jobs every year, even in the healthiest economy. And the great majority of downsized workers do find new jobs. Although most end up making less in their new jobs than they did before, only a fraction experience the much-publicized plunge from comfortable middle class to working poor. No wonder Stiglitz found that the destruction of good jobs by greedy corporations is just not an important part of what is happening to the American worker. The point is that Reich’s style of economics—which relies on anecdotes rather than statistics, slogans rather than serious analysis—cannot do justice to the diversity and sheer size of this vast nation.

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Should we, as some in the administration wanted, focus our attention on preserving the jobs of well-paid employees at big corporations? Should we pressure those companies to stop announcing layoffs? Should we use the tax system to penalize companies that fire workers and reward those that do not? Or, instead, should we fight tooth and nail to preserve and extend programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit that help the working poor? It is disingenuous to say we should do both: Money is scarce and so is political capital. If we focus on small problems that make headlines, we will ignore bigger problems that don’t. So let’s give Joe Stiglitz some credit. No doubt his political masters allowed him to downsize the issue of downsizing at least partly because they believed that good news reelects presidents.

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

A family with two children and two full-time earners, both working at minimum-wage jobs, will make $29,000 a year before taxes, too much to qualify for federal assistance available to those below the poverty line ($22,050 for a family of four) but too little to be able to afford health care, child care, or savings for education or emergencies. If growth in the low-wage service sector continues to be a primary feature of the information economy, too many full-time workers will remain working poor. As Annette Bernhardt and Christine Owens argued in their 2009 Nation article, “Rebuilding a Good Jobs Economy,” we are presented with a unique opportunity in the current global financial crisis. They argue that deep and growing inequality is the biggest challenge for America’s economic recovery: while a handful of people prosper and workers are more productive than ever, a decreasing share of corporate profits goes to wages, and ben- Conclusion 163 efits are shrinking.

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Though some members of the community would bristle at being described as “poor,” as they see themselves as resourceful women with a rich array of skills and powers, many other members of the community took on the label “poor” or “working-class” as a political identity and marker of solidarity. In my experience, all poor people work, either for wages or as unpaid careworkers. Thus, I find “working poor” redundant, and do not use the term. While many scholars and policymakers use the phrase “low-income,” to avoid the stigmatized connotations of “poor,” I find it does not adequately describe the struggles that many poor and working-class people face—which stem only partially from the level of their income.

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Fisher makes a similar point about the relationship between the pharmaceutical clinical trials industry and its “volunteer” research subjects. The industry responds in part to the decreasing availability of medical insurance for many Americans, and clinical trials are often the only kind of care available to the working poor in the United States, who make too much to qualify for Medicaid but too little to pay for private insurance when they are not covered by an employer. This is often the case for women, whose employment is more commonly contingent and temporary, and therefore less likely to qualify them for health insurance.

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

New York: National Employment Law Project. Newcomer, Eric. 2017. “In Video, Uber CEO Argues with Driver over Falling Fares.” Bloomberg, February 28. Newcomer, Eric, and Olivia Zaleski. 2016. “Inside Uber’s Auto-Lease Machine, Where Almost Anyone Can Get a Car.” Bloomberg, May 31. Newman, Katherine S. 1999. No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City. New York: Knopf. Newton, Casey. 2013. “Tempting Fate: Can TaskRabbit Go from Side Gigs to Real Jobs?” The Verge, May 23. New York Communities for Change and Real Affordability for All. 2015. Airbnb in NYC: Housing Report. New York: New York Communities for Change and Real Affordability for All.

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“Work at Home? Your Employer May Be Watching.” Wall Street Journal, July 30. Shepherd, Dean A., and J. Michael Haynie. 2011. “Venture Failure, Stigma and Impression Management: A Self-Verification, Self-Determination View.” Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal 5:178–97. Shipler, David. 2004. The Working Poor: Invisible in America. New York: Knopf. Shontell, Alyson. 2014. “All Hail the Uber Man! How Sharp-Elbowed Salesman Travis Kalanick Became Silicon Valley’s Newest Star.” Business Insider, January 11. Siegel, Reva B. 2003. “A Short History of Sexual Harassment.” In Directions in Sexual Harassment Law, ed.

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Byers. 2015. “First Look at Online Reputation on Airbnb, Where Every Stay Is above Average.” Social Science Research Network, January 28. Zinn, Howard. 1999. A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present. New York: HarperCollins. Zuberi, Dan. 2006. Differences That Matter: Social Policy and the Working Poor in the United States and Canada. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zukin, Sharon. 2009. Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. New York: Oxford University Press. Zumbrun, Josh. 2016. “Voter Discord Isn’t over Wages.” Wall Street Journal, August 7. Index Abundant Host, 46 acceptance rates, 1–2 access, 28fig. 2 accidental occupational liability policies, 110–11 Adshade, Marina, 127 advertisements: Airbnb, 44fig. 5; by Kitchensurfing, 57, 59; TaskRabbit, 100fig. 12; by Uber, 50, 51fig. 7 African-Americans: as Airbnb hosts, 35, 39; digital divide and, 193; discrimination against, 169, 193; economic issues of, 140; as Uber users, 35; wealth gap and, 195 age issues: age of chefs, 59; age of drivers, 53; age of hosts, 49; age of sharing economy workers, 62; age of TaskRabbits, 56; child labor, 65, 70, 224n12, 225n15; Schor on, 224n1; in textile industry, 67, 225n15 Airbnb: overview, 7, 21, 22; African-American hosts, 35–36, 39; background on, 43–49; bathroom use, 88; business use of, 182, 228n14; children and hosting, 12–13; choices, 168; commercial user crackdown, 20; communication issues, 63; Couchsurfing and, 9; cultural capital and, 165, 166–67; discrimination and, 170; as durable-assets-sharing sites, 27; economic impact of, 39; employee monitoring, 204; entrepreneurship and, 6, 164–66; flexibility, 168; high capital-barrier, 43, 43tab. 1, 166–68; for homeless people, 4; illegal rentals, 40, 41, 149–52; income potential, 19; Instant Book service, 170; interaction-free key transfers, 34; low pricing strategy, 231n8 (ch.7); marketing, 160; multilocation hosts, 40; participant recruitment and methodology, 42–43; Peers and, 72; promises of, 25; response rates, 81–82, 160; safety issues, 113–14; as sharing economy company, 26, 27–29; social interactions and, 33; striving workers and, 132; struggling workers and, 132; successful workers and, 19–21, 39–40, 131–32; trust and, 30; worker-client sexual interactions, 128–31 Airbnb hosts.

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

When employers control access to healthcare, workers either lose it when they lose their job or are more easily bullied into working in dangerous situations to keep it. When only half the working population has a right to sufficient paid sick leave, the other half lives and works at the behest of others. When the working poor are denied the right to Medicaid explicitly because lawmakers will not extend the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provision to grant it to them, as happened in seven states, they are the captive subjects of a ruling elite. These developments are the inevitable outcome of a system where one class places profits over people.

…

Forty-seven people jumped to their deaths that day. One hundred others were burned alive or died from asphyxiation. Bosses had locked the exits to the stairwells, a common practice then to ensure workers didn’t take unauthorized breaks, preventing workers from being able to flee the fire. Perkins had been an advocate for the working poor before the fire, but that single day transformed her thinking about what real change looked like. “The New Deal began on March 25, 1911,” she later said. Her memory of that day convinced her that “something must be done. We’ve got to turn this into some kind of victory, some kind of constructive action.”

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Early in her career, in 1897, she accepted a teaching position at a women’s medical school in Chicago and became a resident of Jane Addams’s famous Hull House. The settlement house brought the well-off, immigrants, and poor together, giving Hamilton an insider’s view of poverty-induced health defects among the working class. She lived with and treated the working poor and immigrants for diseases resulting from commonplace working conditions. It was at Hull House she was encouraged to pursue a particular life of the mind that combined rigorous research with a social agenda. “Life in a settlement does several things to you,” Hamilton noted in her 1943 autobiography, Exploring the Dangerous Trades.

The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches by Marshall Brain

Amazon Web Services, basic income, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, digital map, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Garrett Hardin, income inequality, job automation, knowledge worker, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Stephen Hawking, Tragedy of the Commons, working poor

But current workers are making less, retired workers are living longer, and the number of people retiring is immense. We will find ourselves in a situation where we have no way to support the growing elderly population. As medical science finds ways for people to live longer and longer, we as a society find ourselves wishing that the elderly would actually die sooner. That is dysfunctional. The working poor represent another area of dysfunction. We have a large segment of the American population - tens of millions of people - who are playing by the rules. They are working hard. Many of them are working two or three jobs - they are some of the hardest working people in our economy. Yet they cannot make ends meet because wages are so low.

…

And most minimum wage workers will still become unemployed as robots arrive. Should we reduce the work week, say to 30 hours per week (then 20, then 10), to decrease unemployment and increase leisure time? It would be outstanding if we could make this decision as a society, but all indicators today point in the opposite direction. The working poor are making so little money that they are having to work 60 hours a week in two or three jobs. Many salaried employees are compelled to work far more than 40 hours per week. We would have to reverse a number of trends to move our society to a 30 hour work week, and corporations will resist these changes every step of the way.

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn by Chris Hughes

"World Economic Forum" Davos, basic income, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, end world poverty, full employment, future of journalism, gig economy, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, new economy, oil rush, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, Potemkin village, precariat, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

While it’s true that addicts might spend an extra $500 on drugs, the solution to their challenge isn’t to keep them in poverty—it is better substance abuse programs to help them battle their addictions. A guaranteed income would also be a powerful antidote to homelessness. In fact, it could help prevent homelessness in the first place. A recent study examined what happens when you give a working poor person on the brink of homelessness a one-time $1,000 cash infusion. The recipients were 88 percent less likely to be homeless three months later, and 76 percent less likely after six months. “We found no evidence that this effect fades away,” the author of the report, James Sullivan from the University of Notre Dame, told Science magazine.

…

Our World in Data. “Price Changes in Consumer Goods and Services in the USA, 1997–2017.” November 7, 2017. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/price-changes-in-consumer-goods-and-services-in-the-usa-1997-2017. Oxfam America and Economic Policy Institute. “Few Rewards: An Agenda to Give America’s Working Poor A Raise.” 2016. https://www.oxfamamerica.org/static/media/files/Few_Rewards_Report_2016_web.pdf. Painter, Anthony, and Chris Thoung. “Creative Citizen, Creative State: The Principled and Pragmatic Case for a Universal Basic Income.” RSA, December 2015. https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/reports/rsa_basic_income_20151216.pdf.

Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders by Jason L. Riley

affirmative action, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Garrett Hardin, guest worker program, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, open borders, open immigration, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Normally, it’s liberals who traffic in class-envy statistics, fretting about “income inequality,” “stagnant wages,” “rising poverty,” “the disappearing middle class,” and the plight of the “working poor.” A 2004 BusinessWeek story was typical of this thinking. It noted that “one in four workers earns $18,800 a year or less,” and went on to prescribe the usual left-wing remedies, including higher minimum wages and more unions. But free-market conservatives know that such income data is misleading. A third of those people are part-time workers and another third are under twenty-five. That leaves us with one-third of one-fourth—or roughly 8 percent of this subgroup—who are actually “working poor” in any long-term sense. Poverty is transient for the overwhelming majority of Americans, so a snapshot of who’s in the bottom fifth of income earners at any one point in time doesn’t tell you much.

Big Capital: Who Is London For? by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land bank, land value tax, market design, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-truth, quantitative easing, rent control, rent gap, Right to Buy, Russell Brand, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, working poor

But it also impacts private tenants on housing benefit, who get pushed into shocking conditions in temporary accommodation, perhaps even as far out as Margate, which is becoming an unusual mix of priced-out London artists and creatives alongside a large homeless population in temporary accommodation. So from Kensington to Acton, from Acton to Forest Gate and from Forest Gate to the South Coast, individuals, couples and families – both the middle classes and the so-called ‘claimant cultures’ and working poor – are pushed out of London altogether. This is the ‘super prime crisis’, and it affects everyone. Very large injections of global capital into London’s safe haven, including corrupt money, have combined with quantitative easing, limited regulation, flexible employment and some of the lowest corporate tax rates in the world, to transform London in under a decade.

…

This means generation rent must pay through the nose to live in an increasingly hollowed out, sterile city which provides a playground for the rich in the centre, hipster gentrifying areas in the hinterlands and poor housing for cheap labour in our banlieues, in parts of Barking and Dagenham or Edmonton where the ‘working poor’ live.14 HOUSING AND MENTAL HEALTH It is a truism that moving house is the third most stressful life event. It’s rarely an easy experience even when the move is voluntary and wanted. But it’s incomparably worse when it involves being wrenched away from the support networks, daily routines and the sense of identity that comes with being able to call a place a home.

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-bias training, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, George Floyd, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, white flight, working poor, young professional

Most of the books and columns and gossip aimed at the 1 percent come from people just a few percentage points below, implying that the high salaries of elite professionals are legitimately earned, while the capital windfalls of business executives and investors are crooked. Below the meritocrats are the vast middle and working classes, some with college degrees and some without—skilled tradespeople, government clerks, schoolteachers—all in constant peril of being right-sized or automated into the ranks of the working poor, where supermarket cashiers and warehouse workers toil for low wages. The hazardous lives of those below are a source of quiet self-congratulation for meritocrats, but smugness barely holds down a deeper feeling, which is fear. The fall is steep, and when parents on the fortunate ledge of this chasm look down, vertigo stuns them.

…

A woman in her sixties in Tampa, a retired municipal employee who had made and then lost money in real estate, described herself to me as a member of “the formerly middle class.” She meant that she no longer lived with any security. Her term could apply to a nonunion electrician making $52,000 a year and a home health aide making $12 an hour. The first still belongs financially to the middle class, while the second is working class—in fact, working poor. What they share is a high school diploma and a precarious prospect. Neither of them can look with confidence on their future, less still on their children’s. The dream of leaving their children better educated and better off has lost its conviction, and therefore its inspiration. They can’t possibly attain the shiny, well-ordered lives they see in the houses of elite professionals for whom they work.

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

He promoted meetups for aspiring tech entrepreneurs, organized informal hackathons and training programs, and sponsored speakers programs. By 2012, he recalled, “I could see that the most productive opportunity was to focus on using technology to boost the 64 percent of New Yorkers who lack college degrees and are the poor and the working poor into the middle class.” He also was inspired by his military experience, where, he says, “some of the smartest, hardest-working people I’ve ever met were soldiers who didn’t graduate from college.” Through a network of high school and college friends and others he had met through various local civic and business organizations, Hsu recruited a handful of managers and volunteer coding teachers.

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At the same time, because cash assistance was now so much less available, the $2.00-a-day economy that Edin and Shaefer wrote about became a reality for millions, including single mothers who, as the authors so vividly documented, spent their days trying to find jobs that would take them and their children off a relative’s couch or out of homeless shelters. Programs initiated by Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama to expand food stamps, school lunches, and Medicaid, to provide health care to lower-middle-class and poor children, and to give earned income tax credits to the working poor have been important factors in staving off still more poverty in an economy that is so tilted toward those at the top. Fifty-two percent of the nation’s fifty million public school students qualified for free or reduced-priced lunches in 2016, and 44.2 million Americans received food stamps. “We should not discount everything we’ve done,” said Edelman.

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While the unemployment rate that reached 10 percent in 2009 had come down sharply by 2017, the jobs that came back were typically lower-paying or part-time, and there were not enough to meet the needs of the more than seven million Americans who were still looking for work. Two thirds of Americans in one late 2016 poll agreed that “good jobs are difficult to find.” Much of the debate in recent years about poverty has included the term “working poor.”*2 As the number of working people using food stamps or requiring housing assistance indicates, millions of workers are poor or are on the verge of poverty. Millions more who have dropped out of the workforce out of frustration would welcome the training and the work that would make them un-poor.

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Paul Ryan’s Theory on Poverty Is Tricksy—and Wrong,” Slate, March 5, 2014, https://slate.com/business/2014/03/paul-ryan-war-on-poverty-federal-programs-are-not-a-poverty-trap.html; and “Read the House GOP’s Poverty Report,” Washington Post, March 2, 2014, http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/politics/read-the-house-gops-poverty-report/850/. 20. Sharon Parrott, “Rubio Proposal to Replace EITC Would Likely Come at Expense of Working-Poor Families with Children,” Off the Charts (blog), Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, January 9, 2014, https://www.cbpp.org/blog/rubio-proposal-to-replace-eitc-would-likely-come-at-expense-of-working-poor-families-with. 21. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “National Compensation Survey: Employee Benefits in the United States, March 2018,” September 2018, 311, https://www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs/benefits/2018/employee-benefits-in-the-united-states-march-2018.pdf. 22.

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Mothers receiving the biggest EITC increases had significant improvements across health indicators such as reduced mental stress, compared with otherwise similarly situated women who were not eligible for the increases. Additionally, EITC increases are linked to better academic outcomes for elementary and middle-school students as well as higher college enrollment for children from working poor families. The overwhelming weight of the evidence, even if not unanimous, has found the EITC has positive labor market effects, including being the biggest factor in the major increase in employment for single mothers in the 1990s.26 Yet to lead to a true economic dignity wage, the EITC needs to take a bold step forward with what I call an “EITC for All” proposal.27 The EITC, together with the minimum wage, needs to create a guaranteed living wage that not only raises every working American above the poverty line but ensures the capacity to care for and enjoy family and to be a greater buffer for economic security for those in the middle class.

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Eisenhower, “Special Message to the Congress Transmitting Proposed Changes in the Social Security Program,” Social Security Presidential Statements (August 1, 1953), accessed November 9, 2019, https://www.ssa.gov/history/ikestmts.html. 15. For Gingrich welfare comments, see Rob Wells, “Tax Bill Would Deny Key Benefit to Working Poor,” Associated Press, July 3, 1997. For “lucky duckies,” see “The Non-Taxpaying Class,” editorial, Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2002, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1037748678534174748; “Lucky Duckies Again,” editorial, Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2003; and “Even Luckier Duckies,” editorial, Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2003, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1037748678534174748. 16.

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction by Jamie Woodcock, Mark Graham

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Californian Ideology, call centre, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gig economy, global value chain, Greyball, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, inventory management, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low interest rates, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Network effects, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, precariat, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

These kinds of work involved a ‘link’ between the work relationship (i.e. between the buyers and sellers of time) and the ‘wider risk-sharing role of the welfare or social state’, which came to prominence by the middle of the twentieth century (Fudge, 2017: 379). This meant that the risks of work were increasingly mitigated through social agreements, particularly with social security nets that could cushion workers from some negative outcomes, such as lack of work, poor working conditions or illness and accidents. Of course, referring to ‘the standard employment relationship’ carries with it the implication that this is somehow the ‘normal’ state of affairs. It then follows that precarious work should be understood as a break from this norm, as an attack that newly undermines long-standing conditions and benefits.

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The availability of cheap (<$20) smartphones and pay-as-you-go mobile plans have made the mobile phone an essential piece of technology to communities from Brazil to Burundi to Bangladesh. Urban regions of low- and middle-income countries are characterized by even higher levels of connectivity, and many of the working poor in cities as varied as Cairo, Bangkok, Nairobi and Rio all find ways of connecting. As alluded to above, this connectivity for most people in low-, middle- and high-income countries is no longer confined to desktop machines plugged into a wall. A decade ago, internet access tended to be something limited to the home or the office, with many people still using dial-up modems.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

It’s a heck of a lot easier and less stressful to stay focused on 3D models of interplanetary spacecraft or animated renderings of interlinking seastead communities than to consider the lives of the people who would have to make the Doordash deliveries to such places. The only substantive difference between today’s reality and the one in their high-tech fantasies is the absence—or at least the invisibility—of the working poor. On some level, those who intend to create a future based on The Mindset understand the harm they must do in order to maintain their privilege. Their business models almost universally depend on exploiting both consumers and the labor who serve them. While these companies addict our tweens to social media and our crops to glyphosate, they also send slave labor into caves to mine for rare earth metals and out onto toxic waste dumps to forage for “renewables .”

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Where the people reforming today’s social media platforms may hope to mitigate the influence of alt-right extremists and conspiracy theorists on our beliefs and behavior, Lippmann and Wilson were concerned about early-twentieth-century nationalists who sought to keep America isolated and turned inward. Their concerns felt justified. They had lived through Teddy Roosevelt’s failed effort to engender a progressive populism. In a fashion vaguely similar to Trump, Roosevelt rose to power by articulating the complaints of the working poor against corporate elites. He demanded the press expose corporate corruption and the anger of the common people, but all this “muckraking” only frightened the middle class reading about angry crowds in the daily newspaper. Otherwise compassionate progressives found themselves more concerned about taming the mob than addressing whatever underlying issues were leading to the unrest.

Alcohol: A History by Rod Phillips

clean water, conceptual framework, European colonialism, financial independence, GPS: selective availability, invention of the printing press, Kickstarter, large denomination, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, New Urbanism, profit motive, restrictive zoning, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

The episode speaks not only to the virulence of anti-Semitism in medieval Europe but also to both the continuing suspicion and consumption of water. Jews, we might note, were not accused of poisoning barrels of beer or wine. For the most part, the diets of the homeless, the transient, and even the stable working poor are lost to us, but there is occasional, if uneven, evidence for the strata above them. In the village of Montaillou, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, peasants drank wine as part of the daily diet. The 250 inhabitants supported a wine-seller who made rounds of the houses selling wine brought by mule from Tarascon and Pamiers; but shepherds drank only sour wine and some milk on a daily basis, and good wine was reserved for festive occasions.22 Farther east and north, in wine-producing Lorraine, wine was consumed in households as grand as that of the Duke of Lorraine and as modest as those of peasants who made it for their own consumption.

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The stress on the particular evils of women’s drinking echoed a contemporary reassertion of the belief that women were destined by nature to be mothers and that they bore particular responsibilities toward their families. Excessive drinking by women was not only deplorable but unnatural. But affordable gin must have been attractive to many of London’s workers as a pleasant experience in a life that offered few. Many of the working poor were recent migrants from the country, used to drinking festivities reined in by informal social mechanisms that were either absent from or less effective in the urban environment. It is believable that the better-off interpreted any widespread public intoxication as evidence of social disorder and collapse.

…

This class-specific distinction marked a shift away from the undifferentiated condemnation of drunkenness as sinful and as a first step on a life of immorality and crime. By the mid-eighteenth century, elite drunkenness was more likely to be seen as a private vice that had no social consequences (and which society and the law might therefore overlook), while heavy drinking by the working poor (the very poor and the indigent could not afford to drink alcohol, let alone drink enough to get drunk) was associated with crime and social disorder.18 This perspective emerged from a vigorous debate, coinciding with the so-called gin-craze in the first half of the 1700s, about the legal consequences of drunkenness.

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike by Eugene W. Holland

business cycle, capital controls, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, commons-based peer production, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, deskilling, Eben Moglen, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lewis Mumford, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-Fordism, price mechanism, Richard Stallman, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, slashdot, Stuart Kauffman, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wage slave, working poor, Yochai Benkler

“In the history of primitive ac­ cumulation,” Marx says, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capital class in course of formation; but, above all, those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and “unattached” proletarians on the labor-market.55 Hence what the title of the first chapter of part VIII calls the “secret” of so-called primitive accumulation is that it really designates the ruthless des­ titution of the working poor, not the stockpiling of wealth in liquid form: The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation of the laborers from all property in the means by which they can realize their labor. . . .The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the laborer the possession of his means of production. . . .

…

Whereas the major accounts in Marx and Marxism (of the capitalist system as a functional totality; of its simple reproduction) take the existence of capital as a given, or derive it from exchange-value in a self-contained (or “latently contained”) dialectical progression, the minor accounts in Marx treat the contingent historical emergence and ongoing reproduction of capitalism as a function of the initially violent yet equally ongoing dispossession of the working poor. Such is the open “secret” of so-called primitive accumulation. This second theoretical displacement is clearly related to the first. There the question of who has the phallus and attempts to possess it was displaced by the problem of overcoming the effects of enforced separation from the Mother as source of the means of life and enjoyment.

…

Lest we get misled by M arx’s invocation of the “self-positing and selfrealization of exchange-value” once it circulates as capital in such a multi­ cycle system, we should remember the so-called secret of primitive accumu­ lation: that despite appearances and terminology, primitive accumulation is fundamentally about the forcible dispossession of the working poor and their ensuing consignment to the status of wage slaves. In making this point about the relative importance of money and labor to the forma­ tion of capital, in one of the few passages in the early chapters of Capital, volume 1 (chapter 6) that refers explicitly to history, Marx insists that the historical conditions of [capital’s] existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities.

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

He prefers to live a relatively modest, though comfortable, lifestyle.15 But enough about the rich. Let’s look at the other side of this coin—the myriad of talented people who work hard yet struggle all their lives for simple things that the elite take for granted. It’s easy to display statistics and charts showing just how difficult life is for the working poor, much less the nonworking poor. But somehow these tools don’t capture the real gravity of their circumstances. So instead, I’ve selected a single individual—typical in many ways—to profile, in the hope that his story will convey these struggles more graphically. Emmie Nastor is the perfect employee.

…

See income; salaries Wall Street, 51–53, 57–58, 95 Walmart, 139–40, 142–43 average revenue per employee, 139, 177 employee numbers, 116 warehouses, 101–2, 134–35 box unloading, 39 chaotic storage tracking, 135, 144 Waterloo, battle of (1815), 58 water quality, 168 Watson (IBM AI computer program), 26, 31, 36, 39, 150, 198 Watson Research Lab (IBM), 19 wealth, 3, 12, 109–19, 127, 132 from assets ownership, 14–15, 174–76 benefits of, 165–66 civic responsibility and, 58 disparities in, 164–65, 169–70, 176, 180–87 distribution of, 186 factors in creating, 12 fairer distribution of, 86–87 Forbes ranking of, 109, 113 HFT program transfer of, 57, 91 lifestyle embodiments of, 57, 109, 110–11, 112, 114 luxury item sales and, 117–18, 165–66 philanthropy and, 58, 113, 118–19 power from, 114–15 reinvestment vs. spending of, 117 super-wealthy and, 11, 111–13, 116–19, 118–19, 164–65 synthetic intellects’ accumulation of, 91–92 top 1 percent holders of, 11, 111–13 worker median salary and, 116 websites: advertising sale of space on, 64–72 electronic surveillance of visits to, 9, 64–75 individually targeted ads, 64–75 user identifier, 65, 66 WebTV, 127 weeding, 144 Weisel, Thom, 115 welfare recipients, 170 Wellington, Duke of, 58 Wellpoint, 150 wide-area high-bandwidth wireless communication, 126–27 wildfire extinguishers, 44 Winster.com, 119, 122–23, 124 wireless communications, 45 words, shifted meanings of, 191–92, 198, 203 workforce. See labor market working poor, 119–21 working women, 172 work-life balance, 171 workplace, 48 robot danger potential, 37–38 WPA (Works Progress Administration), 170 Yahoo, 67 Yeats, William Butler, 48 Zandi, Mark, 117 Zuckerberg, Mark, 223n15

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

And whereas the basic income debate under President Johnson had begun when experts signaled unemployment as becoming endemic, Nixon now spoke of joblessness as a “choice.” He deplored the rise of big government, even though his plan would distribute cash assistance to some 13 million more Americans (90% of them working poor). “Nixon was proposing a new kind of social provision to the American public,” writes the historian Brian Steensland, “but he did not offer them a new conceptual framework through which to understand it.”4 Indeed, Nixon steeped his progressive ideas in conservative rhetoric. What, we may well ask, was the president doing?

…

On August 7 of that same year, Nixon told Moynihan that he’d been reading biographies of the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and the statesman Lord Randolph Churchill (the father of Winston). “Tory men and liberal policies,” Nixon remarked, “are what have changed the world.”5 The president wanted to make history. He saw himself presented with the rare, historic chance to cast out the old system, raise up millions of working poor, and win a decisive victory in the War on Poverty. In short, Nixon saw basic income as the ultimate marriage of conservative and progressive politics. All he had to do was convince the House and Senate. To put his fellow Republicans at ease and manage concerns over the Speenhamland precedent, Nixon decided to attach an additional proviso to his bill.

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society by Paul Verhaeghe

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gregor Mendel, income inequality, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, The Spirit Level, ultimatum game, working poor

13 Those statistics appear in a somewhat different light once you know that since the neo-liberal Hartz reforms (2003–2005), German jobseekers have been forced to take virtually any job offered to them, collective labour agreements aren’t enforced in half of Germany’s companies, and the other half are increasingly staffed by temps who have little or no protection and often earn 30–40 per cent less than the staff on fixed contracts working alongside them. The result is that one in five working Germans (almost seven million in 2008) receive a net hourly wage of four to six euros, forcing many people to take on two jobs. The reduction in unemployment is matched by an almost equal increase in the number of working poor. According to official EU figures, poverty in Germany increased from 12.5 per cent in 2005 to 15.5 per cent in 2009. Between 2000 and 2009, real wages shrank by 4.5 per cent, causing social inequality to soar. By way of comparison: in the same period, Belgian wages increased by 7.4 per cent, roughly keeping pace with the cost of living.14 The news article celebrating the German model was followed shortly afterwards by a corresponding debate on the Belgian figures.

…

The system creates an underclass who regard themselves as failures, are ashamed, and seek to draw as little attention to themselves as possible. The old silent majority has now become an invisible majority of isolated groups who try to hide their difficult situation from the outside world. This also has the effect of undermining solidarity just when it is most sorely needed. Wallraff believes that these working poor will soon become a self-perpetuating problem because their children are so disadvantaged. In a society of this kind, there can be no question of a meritocracy for these youngsters.15 From Wallraff, we can move on to the impact on individuals of the misconception that to measure is to know. Figure-driven evaluation and performance interviews are lethal to job satisfaction, motivation, loyalty, and identification with an enterprise.

The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives by Lisa Servon

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, do well by doing good, employer provided health coverage, financial exclusion, financial independence, financial innovation, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, precariat, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

I discovered that chronic financial insecurity is growing among the middle class. In his book The Great Risk Shift, Jacob Hacker writes that “economic insecurity is not a problem faced by a small vulnerable segment of the population. It is a problem faced by a wide swath of Americans . . . Problems once confined to the working poor . . . have crept up the income ladder to become an increasingly normal part of middle-class life.” A recent study conducted by the Center for Financial Services Innovation found that 57 percent of Americans—138 million people—are struggling financially, more than double the number of adults the FDIC categorized as unbanked or underbanked in its most recent survey.

…

But the odds are stacked against all of us now, in ways they’ve never been before. It’s time to demand a change. It’s been two years since Ariane, my fellow Check Center teller, left for a better job at a veterinarian’s office. The regular hours and better pay meant that life was more predictable, but Ariane aimed higher. She wanted to leave the working poor and join the middle class—the “old” middle class, in which a college degree and a regular paycheck purchased financial security. So she paid off her payday loans, what Suze Orman would call “bad debt,” and took out student loans, considered “good debt” because she was investing in herself, in order to go to college full-time.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

But since then, "long-term economic growth has had little impact on poverty among full-time workers."^^ The poverty rate among such workers is admittedly low—only around 3%—but these are the best-positioned workers in the labor force, and the poverty line is a pretty undemanding benchmark. As the report's subtide said, "America's Full-Time Working Poor Reap Limited Gains in the New Economy." Inclusion of "the New Economy" isn't just PR spin; as the report points out, "an increase in the relative share of low-skill employment is one characteristic of this 'New Economy...,'" though "low-pay" is more relevant to the analysis than "low-skill."That's not what most New Economy rhetoric emphasized, of course, but the bubble's sales force never deployed much of rigorous evidence.

…

That's not what most New Economy rhetoric emphasized, of course, but the bubble's sales force never deployed much of rigorous evidence. Apologists were quick to point out that the Conference Board's report didn't include the beneficial effects of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which has boosted the incomes of the working poor dramatically: in 1998, almost 20 miUion returns claimed the EITC, and $32 billion was paid to those who filed them (Herman 2000).That works out to an average of $1,600 per return, which is a lot better than nothing, but which amounts to just $4.38 a day. But while the official measure, on which the Conference Board relies, doesn't include the EITC (or Food Stamps), it also doesn't account for taxes or child-care expenditures.

Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain by James Bloodworth

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Berlin Wall, call centre, clockwatching, collective bargaining, congestion charging, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, Greyball, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, low skilled workers, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, post-truth, post-work, profit motive, race to the bottom, reshoring, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, working poor, working-age population

A pessimist might even argue that the social democratic gains of the twentieth century depended to some extent on the existence of a class of semi-slaves toiling away behind an ‘iron curtain’. Once people had liberated themselves from the power of the commissars, capitalist countries could once again risk antagonising the working poor with little fear of communist subversion. But we also live in the world we do today because of conscious choices made by our own politicians. There exists a discernible thread running right the way from the Welsh Valleys and the men and women I met there to the dingy warehouses, private care homes, call centres and the fleet of Uber drivers who, as I write this, swarm around the West End of London searching desperately for riders.

…

.: These Poor Hands 23, 149, 190 courier firms 211, 215, 217, 223, 236, 244–7, 250, 256, 257 Cwm, Wales 147, 148, 187, 190, 195, 196, 197 Cwmbran, Wales 143 Daily Express 124–5 Daily Mail 66, 134, 188 Dan (bicycle courier) 248, 249 Dangerfield, George 72 Davies, Idris 148–9 Gwalia Deserta (Wasteland of Wales) 148 ‘The Angry Summer’ 174 debt 62, 69, 146, 151, 153 Deliveroo 215, 217, 223, 250, 256, 257 democratic socialists 192 Department for Work and Pensions 133 Dickens, Charles 29, 205, 210, 249; Hard Times 138–9 Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) 88–90, 109–10, 214 Dorothy (housemate of JB) 203, 204–5 DriveNow 217 Dropit 217 Eastern Europe, migrant workers from 11, 13, 15, 21, 24, 26–7, 30, 32, 33, 34, 45, 57, 61–2, 75, 114–16, 128–9, 154, 203–4, 260–1 see also under individual nation name Ebbw Vale, Wales 147, 149, 154; legacy of de-industrialisation in 187–200 Elborough, Travis 93 emergency housing 96 employment agencies 1, 16, 19, 20, 23, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 56, 65–6, 70, 72, 73, 82, 86, 127, 130, 158, 189, 194 see also under individual agency name Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) 248 employment contracts/classification: Amazon 19–20, 53, 58 care sector 87–8, 107–8, 116 Uber 214–15, 222, 229–35, 243, 245, 250–2, 257 zero-hours see zero-hours contracts employment tribunals 38, 229–30, 243–4 English seaside, debauchery and 92–3 Enterprise Rent-A-Car 214 ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) programmes 115–16 European Economic Community (EEC) 195 European Referendum (2016) 61, 195–6 Evening Standard 208, 241 Express & Star 59–60 Fabian Society 109 Farrar, James 229–31, 232, 233, 234, 236, 238, 240, 241–2, 250, 254, 255–6 Fellows of the Academies of Management 17 Fernie, Sue 182 financial crisis (2008) 1, 2, 45, 125, 195, 209 Flash (former miner) 165–8, 170, 171–2, 174, 175, 176–8, 179, 188, 196 Fleet News 246 Foot, Michael 149 football 56, 58, 92, 94, 97, 98, 126, 135, 169 fruit picking 61 FTSE 123, 262 Gag Mag 122 Gallagher, Patrick 246 Gary (homeless man, Blackpool) 96–104, 105 Gaz (Gag Mag seller, Blackpool) 122 GDP 146 General Election (2015) 109 General Strike (1926) 148, 149, 173 gentrification 219 Geoff (former miner) 189, 190, 191, 193 ‘gig’ economy 2, 208–10, 217–18, 232, 236, 242, 243–4, 248, 249–50, 252, 257 see also Uber Gissing, George: New Grub Street 64 GMB union 36 grammar schools 261 Guardian 5, 235 Hamstead Colliery, Great Barr 169 Hazel (home carer) 110–11, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119 Heller, Joseph: Catch-22 235–6 Hemel Hempstead 54, 70 Henley, William Ernest: ‘England, My England’ vii Hoggart, Richard: The Uses of Literacy 45 home care worker (domiciliary care worker): Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks 88–90, 109–10 employment contracts 87–8, 107–8, 116, 118, 120 length of home care visits 108–9, 110 local authority budget cuts and 107–10 MAR (Medication Administration Record) sheets 114, 115 migrant workers as 114–16 negligent 86–7 privatisation of social care and 106–8, 109 recruitment 82–4 ‘shadowing’ process 88, 109–10 societal view of 106 staffing crisis 85–6, 119 suicide rate among 100 typical day/workload 110–14, 118 unions and 88 view job as vocation 86–7 wages/pay 107–8, 117, 118–19, 159 Home Instead 119 homelessness 95–105, 138, 187, 208 hostels 95, 96, 101, 102 housing/accommodation: Amazon workers, Rugeley 20–2, 24–6 Blackpool 80, 124, 137–8 buy-to-let housing market 24 emergency housing 96 homelessness and 95, 96, 101, 102, 137–8 hostels 95, 96, 101, 102 inability to buy 62 landlords and 12, 21, 24, 39, 67, 69, 95–6, 137–8, 164, 204, 206, 258 London 203–8 migrant workers and 20–2, 24–6, 197–8 social housing 62, 206 Swansea 124, 150 housing benefit 96, 137–8, 248 immigration 26–7, 61, 115–16, 128–9, 144, 193, 197–9, 236, 259–61 see also migrant workers indeed.co.uk 83–4 independent contractors 209, 248, 251–2 Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) 230, 257 inequality 18, 73, 123, 125, 207–8, 226, 238, 262, 263 inflation 2, 122 job centres 19, 96, 133–6, 139–40, 156, 158 Joe (housemate of JB) 22 John Lewis 23, 83 Joseph Rowntree Foundation 70, 159 June (call centre employee) 181–2, 183, 184 Kalanick, Travis 215, 228, 229, 233, 235 Kelly, Kath 66 Khan, Sadiq 256 Koestler, Arthur: The God that Failed 228 Labour Party 7, 57, 59, 61, 109, 144, 149, 150, 173, 174 Ladbroke Road, Notting Hill, London 219 Lamb, Norman 109 Lancashire Evening Post 104–5 landlords, private 12, 21, 24, 39, 67, 69, 95–6, 137–8, 164, 204, 206, 258 Lea Hall Colliery, Staffordshire 31–2, 54, 55, 56, 57 Lea Hall Miners’ Social Club, Staffordshire 55, 56, 74 Len (step-grandfather of JB) 143–4 Lili (London) 203–4 living wage 1, 85, 160, 246 Lloyd George, David 172 loan sharks 151, 156 local councils 104–5, 164 London 201–57 accommodation/housing in 65, 203–8, 218 gentrification in 219 ‘gig’ economy in 208–57, 263 homelessness in 95 migrant labour in 205–6, 213, 239 wealth divide in 207–8, 238 London Congestion Charge 254 London Courier Emergency Fund (LCEF) 247 London Metropolitan Police 90 London, Jack 205 low-skilled jobs, UK economy creation of 153 Lydia (Amazon employee) 70 Macmillan, Harold 3 manufacturing jobs, disappearance of 59, 139 Marine Colliery, Cwm, Wales 190 Mayhew, Henry 4, 205 McDonald’s 52, 68, 83 Merkel, Angela 196 Metcalf, David 182 middle-class 6, 39, 51, 67, 68, 69, 72–3, 74, 75, 149, 178, 205, 258, 259, 260, 262, 263 migrant labour: Amazon use of 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22–7, 30, 32, 33, 34, 44, 45, 46, 51, 53, 57, 61–2, 65, 71–5, 258, 260–1 care home workers 114–16 ‘gig’ economy and 203–6, 213, 239 restaurant workers 154 retail sector and 128–9 Miliband, Ed 109 mining see coal mining Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) 173 Miners’ Strike (1984–5) 3, 174–7 minimum wage 1, 7, 55, 62, 84, 107, 108, 118, 135, 155, 159, 173, 189–90, 209, 212, 235, 236, 245, 250, 262 Morecambe, Lancashire 137–8 Morgan family 156–8 Morgan, Huw: How Green Was My Valley 147 Moyer-Lee, Jason 257 National Coal Board (NCB) 54, 170, 171 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) 108 National Union of Miners (NUM) 174, 176 New York Times 222 NHS (National Health Service) 106, 108, 247 Nirmal (Amazon employee) 45–6, 51 Norbert (Amazon employee) 71–5 nostalgia 3, 60, 93–4, 216 Nottingham 2, 151–2 objectivism 228 oil crisis (1973) 122–3 Oliver, Jamie 154 Orwell, George 56, 169 Palmer, William 29 pay see wages and under individual job title and employer name payday loans 156 PayPal 216 Pimlico Plumbers 251–2 platform capitalism 215 PMP Recruitment 19, 189–90 Poland, migrant workers from 128–9, 130, 135, 197–8 ‘poor, the’ 145 Port Talbot, Wales 166, 176, 190, 196 ‘post-truth’ discourse 199 ‘post-work’ world 165 poverty: Blackpool and 132, 137 class and 4 darkness and 96 diet/weight and 137 ease of slipping into 5 Eastern Europe and 26 monthly salary and 156 as a moral failing 188–9 press treatment of 66–7 time and 67 working poor living in 194 Preston, Lancashire 100, 105, 138–9 private school system 123 progressive thought 262 Public Accounts Committee (PAC) 107 Putin, Vladimir 71 Rand, Ayn 228–9, 235, 236; The Fountainhead 228, 229 recession (2008) 1, 45, 104, 121, 125, 156 ‘regeneration’ 55, 60–1, 146 rent-to-own 157–8 retirement, working in 58–9 Reve, Gerard: The Evenings 160 Robin (Cwm) 196, 197 Rochelle (home care worker) 117–19 Romania, migrant workers from 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22–7, 32, 44, 46, 51, 53, 61, 65, 71–5, 203, 206, 258 Ron (former miner) 170, 195 Royal London 59 Royal London pub, Wolverhampton 71 Royal Mail 151 Rugeley, Staffordshire 28–35 Amazon distribution centre in 11–76, 79, 86, 119, 127, 128, 159, 258 decline of coal mining industry in 31–2, 54–6, 57, 169 disappearance of manufacturing jobs from 54–63 high street 28–35 immigration and 30–4, 193–4 Tesco and 58–9, 62–3 Scargill, Arthur 175 scientific management theories 17 Scotland Yard 90 self-employment: ’gig’ economy and 214–15, 222, 229–30, 234, 243–4, 245, 246, 249, 250–1 increase in numbers of workers 2, 209 ‘independent contractors’ and 209, 248, 251–2 Selwyn (former miner) 175, 178, 179, 263–4 Senghenydd, Glamorgan pit explosion (1913) 169–70 Shelter 104 Shirebrook Colliery, Derbyshire 55 Shu, William 250 Silicon Valley, California 210, 232 Sillitoe, Alan: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 2, 3, 94 Sky Sports News 126 social democracy 3, 263 social housing 62, 206 socialism 7, 56, 131, 144, 148, 149, 173 social mobility 58, 199, 261 South Wales Miners’ Museum, Afan Argoed 166, 196 South Wales Valleys 141–200 accommodation in 150, 197 Amazon in 145–6 beauty of 148 call centre jobs in 153–64, 180–6 coal industry and 143–4, 147–9, 165–79, 180, 188, 189, 190–1, 193, 195, 196 immigration and 197–9 JB’s family history and 143–4 legacy of de-industrialisation in 187–200 nostalgia and 147 radical history of 149–50 see also under individual place name ‘spice’ 95 Sports Direct 55 squatting 96, 99 steel industry 176, 180, 188, 189, 190, 196–7 Steven (housemate of JB) 124, 126, 127–31 Stoke-on-Trent 58–9 suicide 99–100 Sunday Times 175 ‘Best Companies to Work For’ 154 Rich List 125 Swansea, Wales 145–6, 150–2, 154–64, 176, 178, 197, 205 Tata Steel 190 tax 65, 69, 70, 118, 146, 158, 159, 163, 164, 212, 229, 244, 246, 248, 251, 255 Taylor, Frederick W.: The Principles of Scientific Management 17 Tesco 35, 57, 58–9, 62–3 Thatcher, Margaret 122, 123, 146, 174–5, 193, 207, 263–4 Thorn Automation 57 Thorn EMI 59 trade unions: Amazon and 36 B&M and 130, 131 call centres and 160, 181, 184–5, 186 care sector and 88 coal industry decline and 55–6, 173, 174, 263–4 decline of 2, 3, 35 ‘gig’ economy and 230, 257, 261 objectivism and 228 oil crisis (1973) and 122 Thatcher and 123, 174, 193, 263–4 Wales and 144, 149 see also under individual union name Trades Union Congress (TUC) 173 transgender people 40–1 Transline Group 19, 20, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 65–6, 86 Transport for London (TFL) 211, 212–13, 214, 233, 254, 256 Tredegar Workmen’s Medical Aid Society 247 Trefil, Wales 149 Trump, Donald 7 Uber 207, 211–57 ‘account status’ 221 clocking in at 218 corporation tax and 229 customers 221, 222, 226–7, 237–41, 244, 257 driver costs/expenses 214, 217, 233, 241, 246, 253–5 driver employment classification/contract 214–15, 222, 229–35, 243, 245, 250–2, 257 driver hours 221, 226, 230, 232, 233, 236, 246, 253, 255 driver numbers 211–13, 233–5 driver wages/pay 212, 218, 221, 229–30, 235, 236, 237, 240, 241, 244, 246, 252–5 employment tribunal against (2016) 229–34 flexibility of working for 213–14, 218, 230–3, 248, 250–1 James Farrar and see Farrar, James migrant labour and 213, 236 ‘Onboarding’ class 224–5, 238, 241, 256 opposition to 215–17 philosophy of 228–9, 235, 236 psychological inducements for drivers 222–3 rating system 225–7, 232, 238, 239, 243, 253 rejecting/accepting jobs 221–2, 224–5 ride process 219–21 surge pricing 237, 238, 253 TFL and 211, 212–13, 214, 233, 254, 256 Travis Kalanick and see Kalanick, Travis UberEATS 256 UberPOOL 225, 240–2, 253, 255–6 UberX 212, 225, 240, 241, 255 VAT and 229 vehicle requirements 214 unemployment 2, 32, 36, 62, 121–3, 132, 138, 148, 157, 172, 178, 179, 189–95, 199, 218 Unison 88, 108 Unite 55, 160 United Private Hire Drivers 230, 257 university education 3, 6, 61, 62, 123, 150–1, 152, 153–4 USDAW 130–1 Vettesse, Tony 138 Vicky (care sector supervisor) 86, 87 Wade, Alan 121, 123–4 wages: Amazon 18, 19, 37–9, 42–3, 65–6, 68, 69, 70, 159 call centre 155–6, 158–60, 164, 180 care sector 107–8, 117, 118–19, 159 living wage 1, 85, 160, 246 minimum wage 1, 7, 55, 62, 84, 107, 108, 118, 135, 155, 159, 173, 189–90, 209, 212, 235, 236, 245, 250, 262 Uber 212, 218, 221, 229–30, 235, 236, 237, 240, 241, 244, 246, 252–5 wage stagnation 2 see also under individual employer, job and sector name Wealth and Assets Survey 207–8 wealth inequality 18, 73, 123, 125, 207–8, 238 Wells, H.

Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

More generally, investment on infrastructure such as roads, canals and bridges should where possible be paid for by charges on those who use them, to inhibit frivolous or economically irrelevant schemes from being built. But, Smith suggests, unlike the societies of hunters or shepherds, commercial society also places particular strain on the working poor. ‘No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.’

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For Malthus, a keen student of Adam Smith, the prediction served to invalidate radical and utopian ideas of the perfectibility of man, while also pointing to economic factors and policy measures that could limit population growth. Yes, population growth might lead to subsistence wages, pressure on the working poor and economic volatility; but public policies on later marriage and education, among other things, could soften and shape its effects. Crucially, Malthus deliberately narrowed the scope of his analysis. He treated human beings in his theory as though they were simply subject to two fundamental drives.

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(Marçal), 218 Wilkes, John, 40 William and Mary, 11–12, 31 wisdom of crowds, 246, 248 Wolf, Martin, 259 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 220 women education of, 219–220 in Greek mythology, 214 households and, 216–217 Lectures on Jurisprudence on, 219 nature and, 214 rational economic man and, 213–214, 217 science and, 214–215 Smith, A., on, 217–220 The Theory of Moral Sentiments on, 218 The Wealth of Nations on, 219 Wollstonecraft on, 220 words, 42 working poor, 117 Wren, Christopher, 96–97

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

This was famously associated with the 1972 proposal by President Richard Nixon for a Family Assistance Plan, a form of negative income tax. He refused to use the term ‘guaranteed annual income’, and it would be an exaggeration to see Nixon as a convert to the basic income cause. He believed in supporting ‘the working poor’, by which was meant those in low-paid jobs, ignoring the many forms of unpaid work. Nevertheless, the measure was an advance in the basic income direction. It passed in the House of Representatives but died in the Senate, despite overwhelming support in public opinion polls. Ironically, the reform was killed by Democrats, some on the specious grounds that the proposed amount was not enough.

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Standing (2014), A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens. London: Bloomsbury. 9. M. Tanner and C. Hughes (2013), ‘The work versus welfare trade-off: 2013’, Cato Institute White Paper, cato.org, 19 August. http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/the_work_versus_welfare_trade-off_2013_wp.pdf. 10. R. Berthoud (2007), Work-Rich and Work-Poor: Three Decades of Change. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. 11. J. Drèze and A. Sen (2014), An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. This argument can be dealt with through the provision of food buffer stocks, which could be released when prices rise due to temporary shortages.

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

In the five years following the Great Recession, the percentage of people living in poverty rose to 15 percent, the highest level in 20 years, although it was significantly higher in 1960. Equally troubling, the ability of less-skilled workers to break into high-wage work has slowed, trapping many in a kind of permanent status as working poor. Increasingly these workers are older and better educated than low-wage workers in the past. Some 43 percent of non-college-educated whites now complain they are downwardly mobile.49 Particularly hard hit are many minorities, notably African Americans and Latinos, whose income has also dropped more than most and whose unemployment has remained stubbornly higher.

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Dylan Matthews, “Poverty in the 50 Years since ‘the Other America,’ in Five Charts,” Wonkblog (blog), Washington Post, July 11, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/11/poverty-in-the-50-years-since-the-other-america-in-five-charts. 89. Robert Samuelson, “How We Won—and Lost—the War on Poverty,” Real Clear Politics, January 13, 2014, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/01/13/how_we_won_--_and_lost_--_the_war_on_poverty_121197.html. 90. David Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York: Vintage, 2004), pp, 6–7. Chapter 5: Geography of Inequality 1. Encyclopæedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Vidal de La Blache, Paul,” http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/627886/Paul-Vidal-de-La-Blache. 2. William Bogart, Don’t Call It Sprawl: Metropolitan Structure in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), p. 10. 3.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, borderless world, business logic, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent control, Robert Solow, shareholder value, short selling, Skype, structural adjustment programs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The ‘pill’ and other contraceptives have had a powerful impact on female education and labour market participation by allowing women to control the timing and the frequency of their childbirths. And there are non-technological causes. Even with the same household technologies, countries can have quite different female labour market participation ratios and different occupation structures, depending on things like social conventions regarding the acceptability of middle-class women working (poor women have always worked), tax incentives for paid work and child rearing, and the affordability of childcare. Having said all this, however, it is still true that, without the washing machine (and other labour-saving household technologies), the scale of change in the role of women in society and in family dynamics would not have been nearly as dramatic.

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Especially if it is based on targeted, rather than universal, programmes (as in the US), it can stigmatize welfare recipients. The welfare state raises people’s ‘reservation wages’ and deters them from taking low-paying jobs with poor working conditions, although whether this is a bad thing is a matter of opinion (personally I think the existence of a large number of ‘working poor’, as in the US, is as much of a problem as the generally higher unemployment rates we see in Europe). However, if it is well designed, with a view to giving workers a second chance, as it is in Scandinavian countries, it can encourage economic growth by making people be more open to changes and thus making industrial restructuring easier.

Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain by Lisa McKenzie

British Empire, call centre, credit crunch, delayed gratification, falling living standards, financial exclusion, full employment, income inequality, low skilled workers, meritocracy, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, unpaid internship, urban renewal, working poor

After several serious outbreaks of cholera in the St Mary’s ward, an area to the east of the city, known as the Clay Field, was used to bury the hundreds who died in the outbreak, but was also taken into the city boundary to house the proletariat workers and their families. This area was at the edge of the city and was very close to the Lace Market, and is now known as St Ann’s, but originally it was called New Town because it was built and thought of as a new town within the city. New Town had been specifically built for the working poor, consisting of very basic workers’ cottages, the largest number of public houses in the city, a bakers, a butchers, a marketplace and ‘allotments’. The allotments started life as a green space situated between two of the three steep hills in the area. The workers were ‘allotted’ a slice of land where they could grow their own produce and continue their traditions of the rural life they had left behind.

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Wacquant argues that the ‘ghetto’ acts like a social condom, a way of allowing intercourse but without ever having to touch ‘those who are unclean’; but it also acts as a screen to balance out some of the negative effects of ‘inner-city’ life (2008, p 2). Within the ‘ghetto’ the stigmatising effects of low pay and poor living conditions and class racism can be offset to some extent through the buffer of community and local culture. New Town in Nottingham, and then, when it later became St Ann’s, was a place where the working poor lived, raised their families, engaged in their own cultural pursuits, and had little interaction except through work in other parts of the city. The labour of the residents within New Town/St Ann’s was vital to the wealth and the economy of Nottingham. Nevertheless, I would not go so far as to say that it was a ghetto within that period of time.

The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid by C. K. Prahalad

"World Economic Forum" Davos, barriers to entry, business cycle, business process, call centre, cashless society, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, do well by doing good, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, financial intermediation, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, information asymmetry, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, microcredit, new economy, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, shareholder value, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, time value of money, transaction costs, vertical integration, wealth creators, working poor

For those poor in India who had lost their limbs, continuing to earn a livelihood was the biggest concern. In the absence of an efficient social security system, being able to work was essential for their survival. It necessitated a prosthesis that supported their work and lifestyles. Jaipur Foot’s design process emphasized the activities listed in Table 4, which are commonly practiced by India’s working poor. Step 2: Overcoming Constraints However, the technical demands were not the only demands by the creators of the Jaipur Foot. In addition, they faced the constraints listed in Table 5. Jaipur Foot: Challenging Convention 251 Table 4 Considerations in the Jaipur Foot Design Process Activity Squatting Sitting cross-legged Walking on uneven ground Barefoot walking Mechanical Requirement Need for dorsiflexion Need for transverse rotation of the foot Need for inversion and eversion in the foot so that varying terrain is not transmitted to stump Cosmetically similar to natural foot Table 5 Constraints of Development for the Jaipur Foot Constraints Poverty Closed economy Work lifestyle Limited trained manpower Implication The vast majority of local amputees were poor.

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The next challenge was to construct an organization and operating system which could make the Jaipur Foot available to as many amputees as possible. The expectation was that nearly all prospective amputees would fall below the poverty line. Subsequently, Jaipur Foot’s custodians focused their attention on the financial and social needs of India’s working poor. Their efforts eventually took the form of the nonprofit society BMVSS, generally referred to as “the Society.” BMVSS was established in March 1975 by Mr. D. R. Mehta. In the first seven years after the development of the Jaipur Foot in 1968, hardly 50 limbs were fitted. In the first year after the formation of the society, 59 limbs were fitted.

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William LaJoie William LaJoie is from Denver, Colorado, and his primary interests are the underlying factors that drive exponential growth. After obtaining his BA in English literature from the University of Notre Dame, he spent two years volunteering at the Working Boys’ Center, a school for the working poor, in Quito, Ecuador, teaching in the elementary school, high school, and adult literacy program. After returning to the United States, William worked as a Program Manager for LinkShare Corporation, a provider of Internet-based affiliate solutions, where his clients included Dell and Ford. In 2004, William will earn his MBA from the University of Michigan Business School, where he has combined his interest in Marketing, Technology, and Emerging Economies.

Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, European colonialism, export processing zone, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Honoré de Balzac, imperial preference, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Philip Mirowski, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, scientific management, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, vertical integration, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Martí’s complexion disguised his family wealth.6 His father, though born poor, had amassed two farms comprising nearly five square miles of land in the coastal highlands. Yet as a young man Martí rejected the landlord’s life and began to fight against capitalism and imperialism, and for the cause of the working poor. At the time he was chosen to embed with Sandino in Nicaragua, Martí was hanging around the People’s University after leaving, through some combination of choice and expulsion, El Salvador’s national university, where he had studied law. The end of Martí’s career as a law student in good standing came in February 1920, when he was arrested as part of a group planning a demonstration against the Guatemalan dictatorship across the border.

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His first recommendation was that part of the customs revenue should be “set aside to pay the armed forces of the country for the months of November and December and if possible create a reserve sufficient to take care of a part of January. This has been suggested to the President who assures me that it will be done.” If the army was paid, “tranquility” might be maintained, labor costs might remain low, and the loan might just be repaid.39 Arturo Araujo had won the presidential election with strong support from the working poor, including agricultural workers mobilized by his vision of social harmony. So it came as something of a surprise to his supporters when, within weeks of his taking office at the beginning of March 1931, and within days of his emphasizing the importance of “peace and order” for productivity, Araujo too started using violence to achieve order, sending the National Guard to break up demonstrations and hold the coffee economy in place.40 He even pushed through a law that gave the police and the army expanded power to put down public protests by force.41 The repression undercut whatever hope there had been for reform and pushed the expanded Salvadoran left toward politics by other means

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Just as James Hill brought parts of Manchester to the Santa Ana Volcano, so too did the people who opposed the dictatorship of coffee. Their politics had also been developed in part in Manchester, and had also been shaped by the idea of energy. By the time Friedrich Engels left Manchester in 1844, he was no longer fixated simply on the lives of the working poor. Instead he wanted to understand the relationship between the poverty he witnessed in the city’s slums and the wealth created in its factories. At the heart of the larger economic puzzle was the question of how his own family’s wealth was connected to the “condition of the working class” he had described.35 On the way home to Germany, Engels stopped in Paris to visit an acquaintance, Karl Marx.

The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It) by Michael R. Strain

Bernie Sanders, business cycle, centre right, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, income inequality, job automation, labor-force participation, market clearing, market fundamentalism, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, public intellectual, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, working poor

Policy should encourage entrepreneurship and economic dynamism, advance free trade and the efficiencies and productivity gains (and thus wage gains) it brings over time, increase high-skilled immigration, and put the national debt on a downward trajectory by reforming middle-class entitlement programs. Economic opportunity and earned success are critical to the American Dream, so public policy should work aggressively to increase labor force participation. More generous earnings subsidies can pull more people into the workforce and can lift the incomes of the working poor and working class. Relocation assistance targeted to long-term unemployed workers in struggling local labor markets can offer those workers a hand up to better employment opportunities. Work-based learning programs, like apprenticeship programs, can build skills and increase wages by allowing market forces, rather than government bureaucrats, to determine which skills are taught to apprentices and can provide apprentices with marketable credentials.

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem by Tim Shipman

banking crisis, Beeching cuts, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Kickstarter, kremlinology, land value tax, low interest rates, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, working poor

A Corbyn aide said, ‘For the leadership, it’s not about the process, it’s about different visions for the future. The government has the low-wage, low-growth economy, we’ve got the high-wage, high-growth, high-investment, high-skill economy with an interventionist state.’ Labour warned that a chaotic – or sometimes ‘shambolic’ – Brexit would hurt the working poor. They demanded a ‘Brexit that works for Britain and puts jobs, living standards and the economy first’. Even as the leadership coup was still raging, John McDonnell gave a speech on 1 July laying out five Labour principles for Brexit. He called for existing workers’ rights to be protected; for UK businesses to have the freedom to trade with the EU and EU businesses with the UK; for protection of residency rights for EU citizens living in the UK, and for UK citizens elsewhere in Europe; for the UK to stay part of the European Investment Bank; and for UK financial services to keep their access to the EU.

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Hammond lacked Osborne’s sure touch with political tactics. Unlike Osborne, who made tackling the deficit a common-sense issue, Hammond talked about ‘austerity’ as if it was a virtue in itself. In the run-up to the autumn statement, Hammond refused to fund schemes designed to attract the ‘just about managing’ working poor – JAMs in Whitehall speak – who Team May had identified as their target audience. ‘Philip made it very clear that every pound in spending would have to be accounted for with cuts,’ said one ally. Distracted by Brexit, Hammond’s quiet victory over Timothy was little noticed but it fuelled the chiefs’ view that the chancellor was an impediment to May achieving the goals she had set herself that first day in Downing Street.

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Several frontbenchers went further, claiming on Twitter that the debts would be scrapped, a position from which Corbyn distanced himself after the election. While tuition fees inspired an army of students to rally to Corbyn’s flag, there was also concern among many that the manifesto had little to say about the most crucial public policy area for the working poor – the Tory policy of freezing benefits. Corbyn’s opposition to the freeze had been one of the issues which propelled him to the leadership in 2015. Debbie Abrahams, the shadow work and pensions secretary, wanted the cuts reversed and help given to the so-called WASPI women, those in their fifties whose retirement planning had been thrown into turmoil by rises in the state pension age.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

To quote the American architect and urban planner Andrés Duany: “In 1860, the capital city of Washington, with a population of 60,000, had unlighted streets, open sewers, and pigs roaming about its principal avenues. This condition was worse than the worst of our current cities. There is hope.” I cannot resist inserting a small personal note when writing about the rise of Victorian megacities and the plight of the “working poor.” Although I was born in a rural area of England, the county of Somerset, I have family roots in the East End of London and by a strange twist of fate ended up attending the last several years of my high school there. The East End is a product of the rapid expansion of London during the nineteenth century and became one of the poorest, most overcrowded areas of the city and, consequently, a breeding ground for disease and crime.

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Malthus concluded that in order to avoid such a catastrophe and ensure a sustainable population, some form of population control was needed. This would either arise through “natural” causes such as an increase in disease, starvation, and war or, more preferably, by changing social behavior, particularly that of the working poor, whose reproductive rates he perceived as the apparent cause of the problem. Being a devout Christian he didn’t much like the idea of contraception and preferred the concept of moral restraint such as abstinence, delayed marriages, and restricting marriage for those in dire poverty or with health or mental defects.

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It is hard not to perceive Masdar as effectively a large private suburban residential industrial park rather than a vibrant diverse autonomous city. In many ways its philosophy is derivative of Ebenezer Howard’s garden city concept brought into the high-tech culture of the twenty-first century, except that it appears to be designed for the privileged rather than for the working poor. Nicolai Ouroussoff, who was the architecture critic for the New York Times from 2004 to 2011, suggested that Masdar is the epitome of a gated community: “the crystallization of another global phenomenon: the growing division of the world into refined, high-end enclaves and vast formless ghettos where issues like sustainability have little immediate relevance.”

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Moving to bring budgets more into balance, Nixon called in 1969 for repeal of the business investment tax credit granted by Democrat John F. Kennedy, thus raising corporate taxes by nearly $3 billion. His package also included an increase in the capital gains tax rate; restrictions on the use of tax shelters by the wealthy; and a new “low-income allowance” that removed two million of the working poor from the tax rolls. As Ed Dale wrote in The New Republic, the Nixon tax package was “far and away the most ‘anti-rich’ tax reform proposal ever [sic] proposed by a Republican President in the 56 years of the existence of the income tax.” Business Mobilizes In this political climate, Lewis Powell’s corporate manifesto hit a responsive chord.

…

In the 1970s, the Federal Reserve reported that chief executives at 102 major companies were paid $1.2 million on average, adjusted for inflation, or roughly 40 times an average full-time worker’s pay. But by the early 2000s, CEOs at big companies had enjoyed such a meteoric rise that their average compensation topped $9 million a year, or 367 times the pay of the average worker. At Wal-Mart, which bills itself as the friend of the struggling middle class and the working poor, former CEO Lee Scott was paid $17.5 million in 2005, or roughly 900 times the average pay and benefits of the typical Wal-Mart worker. With America’s changing political climate and the rising influence of pro-business conservatism, CEOs went from being under fire in the 1960s and 1970s, as Lewis Powell observed, to being lionized as superstars in the 1990s and 2000s, supposedly entitling them to pay on a par with Hollywood celebrities and star athletes.

…

With the Senate filibuster rule working for Republicans, they refused to extend Bush’s tax cuts for the middle class unless Obama agreed to extend Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, including a 35 percent cap on the estate tax rate and a tax exemption for estates worth $10 million for couples instead of the old pre-Bush rate of 55 percent on estates larger than $3 million. To break the gridlock, Obama had to accept estate tax cuts for the rich. Those two policies—the failure of an increasingly polarized Congress to help the working poor and lower middle class by indexing the minimum wage to inflation and congressional approval of ever more generous estate tax cuts for the super-rich—have contributed to the great economic divide in America today. They illustrate the economic costs of polarized politics. “The fight over estate tax repeal seems uniquely symbolic of the skewed class politics of the New Gilded Age …,” commented Princeton University political economist Larry Bartels.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Poorer people must see the gain from urban life. They must feel the possibility of finding a brighter future. When that future fades, the desperate turn to demagogic calls for the bluntest forms of redistribution. There are smart and effective ways of promoting upward mobility, including better pre-K programs, tax subsidies for the working poor, and better vocational training. We should do all of these and more. But canceling commercial rents for prosperous businesses makes little sense, and neither does canceling student debt for the children of the wealthy. In a sense, the enthusiasm that many have for redistribution from the rich represents an awareness that our cities have become a rigged game that favors insiders over outsiders.

…

The less educated work in more physically demanding jobs, and suffer more pain in their backs, joints, and muscles. Even standing on one’s feet all day, something required of few Americans with advanced degrees, can create lasting pain, especially if one is carrying around extra pounds. The hope that OxyContin would create an escape from that physical pain made it appear a godsend for the working poor. It proved to be a curse. Low levels of life satisfaction—despair—can also leave some people looking for outs, and opioids are one such out. Across individuals and countries, more income is associated with more happiness and life satisfaction. The connection between unhappiness and rising mortality, especially among lower-income prime-aged American males, has led economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton to collectively refer to opioid overdoses, suicides, and alcohol-related liver disease as “deaths of despair.”

…

See also influenza pandemic (1918–19) Sprung-Keyser, Benjamin, 331 Stalin, Joseph, 325 Stanton, Christopher, 231 Stergios, James, 306 Stigler, George, 178–79 “stop and frisk” policies, 288–91 Strong, William Lafayette, 84–85 student debt, canceling, 16 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, 44 sub-Saharan Africa, 79 suburbs, 7–8, 215, 219, 268–69, 270 Sugar Research Foundation, 125 suicides, 98, 123, 204, 319 super-spreader events, 87 Sweden, 197, 302 Swift, Gustavus, 182 Switzerland, 134 Sy, Elhadj As, 323 Sydenham, Thomas, 118 Tabarrok, Alex, 282 Taiwan, 132, 149, 156, 165, 166 Tammany Hall, 73, 82, 268 Tan, Brandon, 300 taxes and taxation as centrifugal/dispersing force, 218 and corporate relocations, 209 and declines in tax base, 7 and funding of public services, 8 and home mortgage interest deductions, 216 impact of pandemic on revenues from, 6 tax subsidies for working poor, 16 of unhealthy products, 100, 128 teachers unions, 308, 311–12, 313–15, 316 Tebes, John, 290 telemedicine, 146 tenements, disease-infested, 81–83 terrorism car bomb in Times Square, 287–88 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 6, 243 testing for COVID-19 of asymptomatic populations, 18, 149, 164, 167, 198 countries with notable success in, 156 in Germany, 156, 167 governments’ responsibility for, 154–55 in New Zealand, 18, 156, 164–65 in the United States, 149, 150, 167 WHO’s test for, 150 Texas, 18–19, 214 Thatcher, Margaret, 224 The Third Wave (Toffler), 219–20 “three strikes” laws, 14, 277, 281, 282–85, 286 Thucydides, 25, 29–30, 34, 36, 46 Tito, Josip Broz, 54 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 14–15, 72 Toffler, Alvin, 22, 207, 219–23, 224–25, 226, 227, 229, 238 trade, 28, 32, 40, 42 transportation, 7, 210, 212–14, 215, 216–17 travel restrictions ability to quickly implement, 55 and cordon sanitaire at national borders, 53 and COVID-19 pandemic, 50, 54, 55, 149, 150 failures in, 50 of New Zealand, 163 Ragusa’s application of, 41–42 screening international travelers, 55 and yellow fever in Philadelphia, 47 Troesken, Werner, 78 Truman, Harry, 137–38, 140, 145 Trump, Donald, 132, 151, 152 Trump administration, 149–50, 168 tuberculosis, 175 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 268 “Typhoid Mary,” 38 unemployment/joblessness due to COVID-19, 2, 169, 196, 197, 228, 229, 233 and housing costs, 272 long-term, 272 and universal basic income, 204 United Kingdom commitment to urban sanitation in, 77 food consumption trends in, 108–9 health care spending in, 134, 142–43 manufacturing in, 189, 190 National Health Service of, 139–40 place-based health differences in, 103 rural population in, 221 service industry in, 2, 190 sewer system investment of, 76–77 vaccine preorders, 144 vaccine rollout, 77, 145 United Nations (UN), 57, 92, 325 universal basic income, 204 University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 91 upward mobility, 3, 16, 244, 257–58, 276 Urban Fortunes (Molotch and Logan), 267 urbanization, rate of, 173, 221 USA Today, 310–11 U.S.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

With good reason: as the tremendous hoarding (and hiding) of vast sums of wealth by a small and unaccountable global class of virtual oligarchs makes clear, those who benefit most from these radical social restructurings are a small minority, while the majority see their standard of living stagnate or slip, even in periods of rapid economic growth. Which is why, for those who are determined to push through these policies, majority rule and democratic freedoms aren’t a friend—they are a hindrance and a threat. Not every neoliberal policy is unpopular, of course. People do like tax cuts (for the middle class and working poor, if not for the super-rich), as well as the idea of cutting “red tape” (at least in theory). But they also, on the whole, like their taxes to pay for state-funded health care, clean water, good public schools, safe workplaces, pensions, and other programs to care for the elderly and disadvantaged.

…

Among the programs that were slashed: student loans, Medicaid, and food stamps. So, the poorest people in the United States subsidized the contractor bonanza twice: first, when Katrina relief morphed into unregulated corporate handouts, providing neither decent jobs nor functional public services; and second, when the few programs that directly assist the unemployed and working poor nationwide were gutted to pay those bloated bills. — New Orleans is the disaster capitalism blueprint—designed by the current vice president and by the Heritage Foundation, the hard-right think tank to which Trump has outsourced much of his administration’s budgeting. Ultimately, the response to Katrina sparked an approval ratings free fall for George W.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

This book offers a series of portraits of this elite-led, market-friendly, winner-safe social change. In these pages, you will meet people who ardently believe in this form of change and people who are beginning to question it. You will meet a start-up employee who believes her for-profit company has the solution to the woes of the working poor, and a billionaire investor in her company who believes that only vigorous public action can stem the rising tide of public rage. You will meet a thinker who grapples with how much she can challenge the rich and powerful if she wants to keep getting their invitations and patronage. You will meet a campaigner for economic equality whose previous employers include Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, and who wonders about his complicity in what he calls “the Trying-to-Solve-the-Problem-with-the-Tools-That-Caused-It issue.”

…

Like Rosenstein and other believers in win-wins, the founders of Even wanted very much to help, but thought it best to help in a way that would create some opportunity for them, too. Leibrock was among the Even founders’ first hires, and she was on the Nimitz that day driving from interview to interview, learning about the lives and needs of the working poor so that Even could most effectively serve them as customers. She is a graduate of Yale and the private schools of Austin, Texas, with no trace of an accent. She was part of the great brain rush to California that was turning the Bay Area into one of the most unaffordable, unequal, and tense parts of the country, with resentful locals famously throwing rocks at the Google buses that ferried employees to and from the South Bay.

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Paul Mason

anti-globalists, back-to-the-land, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, Chekhov's gun, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, disinformation, do-ocracy, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, informal economy, land tenure, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, Occupy movement, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rising living standards, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, union organizing, We are the 99%, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, young professional

Those vintage motel signs, which summon up the era of Elvis and full employment, are in reality flagstaffs for the hidden homeless. They are right next to you, on every highway in America. And, just like in the 1930s, there is a president in the White House elected on a platform of hope, radicalism and concern for the working poor. And like in the 1930s, Congress is determined to stop him—insofar as he has not stopped himself. As I leave Albuquerque the landscape becomes drier. The spectacular red canyon walls of the Mogollón Rim dwarf the mobile homes of the Pueblo nation, whose land this once was. There are no Native American shacks in Steinbeck, and no red canyons; no giant cacti, no endless days of blue sky, no vast gulches and ravines.

…

Although the name of this movement was not in any dictionary, it threatened ‘to bring the world face to face with the greatest crisis of modern civilization—perhaps of any civilization’.4 The name of this movement was ‘syndicalism’: a new kind of unskilled trade-unionism that sparked an upsurge of strikes, unionization drives and sit-ins across Europe, the Americas and the Pacific between 1909 and 1913. It had no leaders and no centralized programme, but it inspired a global fight-back by the working poor and a general feeling of defiance aimed at the rich, the media and conservative religions. Syndicalism was also a mass cultural movement, creating free social spaces such as secular schools, from Barcelona to Buenos Aires; an Oxbridge college run by workers in the UK; popular community centres in Italy—and, through the ‘Wobblies’, a whole underground network of camps and canteens for America’s itinerant workers.

The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banks create money, barriers to entry, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, complexity theory, corporate raider, currency risk, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Golden Gate Park, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invention of writing, John Perry Barlow, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, price stability, Recombinant DNA, reserve currency, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Future of Employment, the market place, the payments system, Thomas Davenport, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, working poor, world market for maybe five computers

The average rent for a twobedroom unit increased by 110% over the same time period, while rent for a vacant studio increased by a whopping 288%. This explains why 20% of the homeless families have at least one parent with a fulltime job. In short, the fastest-rising component of the homeless is the families of the 'working poor' of yesteryear. San Francisco is in no way a strange anomaly. Because the US Department of Education funds a project tracking schooling problems of homeless children in San Francisco Bay Area experienced by homeless children, it has prepared a report for the US Congress identifying the different ages of homeless children.

…

By the year 2000, more than 300 townships and social service programmes have started Time Dollar systems, most of them in Anglo-Saxon countries. 2. Ithaca HOURS Ithaca is a small university town with a population of about 27,000 in state New York. It is not a rich town. It has, for example, the high percentage of 'working poor' in the state of New York (people who are employed, but whose income is so low that they still remain eligible for stamps). Paul Glover, a local community activist, felt that the proximity of NewYork City kept diverting the community energy into the vastness of the city. He decided to do something about this problem.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

But far too many of the jobs they will end up taking will pay them too little support what our society considers a middle-class standard of living.” Benjamin M. Friedman, “Born to Be Free,” New York Review of Books, 12 October 2017. 37.  From Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Profile of the Working Poor, 2016,” https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2016/home.htm (accessed July 2018). 38.  Robert Reich, a public-policy professor and former secretary of labor for Bill Clinton, once estimated that by 2020 up to 40 percent of Americans would have “uncertain” work like this, the sort of work that makes up the “gig,” “share,” “irregular,” or “precarious” economy, and by 2025, most workers will.

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

In the corporate world, job openings elicit hundreds of résumés, and when foreign automakers open plants in the US South tens of thousands apply. A third of households have negative wealth or no assets, and three-fourths have less than six months’ income in savings. One in three people say that if they lost their job they wouldn’t be able to make their mortgage or rent payment within one month.5 While the working poor grew used to crushed dreams a long time ago, the emotional toll of the recent crisis on the middle class is stark. The New York Times recently reported that the US middle class is no longer the most affluent in the world: even economic self-help guru Suze Orman tells older middle-class people that they’ll need to work until at least age seventy and “live below their means” if they’re going to make enough to support themselves through their retirement.

Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It by Robert B. Reich

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, benefit corporation, business cycle, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, electricity market, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, job automation, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Middle- and lower-income Americans are shelling out larger portions of their sinking incomes in payroll taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes than they did thirty years ago. The Social Security payroll tax continues to climb as a share of total government tax revenues. Yet the payroll tax is regressive, applying only to yearly income under $110,100 (the ceiling in 2012). That means it takes a far bigger bite out of the pay of the middle class and the working poor than out of the rich. Sales taxes at the state and local levels are soaring, along with property taxes and tolls on highways, bridges, and tunnels. These also take bigger percentage bites out of the incomes of average Americans than they do out of those of the rich. What are the super-rich and big corporations doing with all their savings?

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

1960s counterculture, big-box store, blue-collar work, classic study, corporate social responsibility, crack epidemic, creative destruction, David Brooks, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, mass immigration, messenger bag, new economy, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

“Brooklyn-ness,” as the New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote in 2004, is now “a cultural ethnicity.”10 The contentious fate of the McCarren Park pool, a public recreational facility on the border between Williamsburg and Greenpoint, reflects this dramatic shift in Brooklyn’s image. Built by Robert Moses in the 1930s with funds from the federal Works Progress Administration, the swimming pool served an overcrowded tenement district of the working poor. During hot summer months in the 1930s and 1940s more than six thousand swimmers a day would pass through the majestic arch of its entry pavilion. In the 1970s, though, when more black and Puerto Rican residents moved into nearby neighborhoods and began to use the pool, racial conflicts broke out over who belonged there, as well as over who was responsible for mounting incidents of crime and vandalism.

…

Klein “on the Square,” opened across the street from the park during the 1920s, drawing crowds of factory workers and immigrants who grabbed bargains from the sales tables without any pretense of politeness. The humorist James Thurber described sale days at S. Klein as near-riots.10 From an elegant residential neighborhood and then a popular shopping and entertainment district, Union Square turned into a center of cheap stores for the working poor. This is how it remained until the 1970s, when, an architectural history of the city says, the square was “threatened … by a slow social decline that was turning it into a seedy and menacing corner of the city.”11 Like the privatization of other responsibilities formerly carried out by government, the privatization of public space in New York City begins with this narrative of urban decline.

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, business cycle, clean water, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, full employment, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, global village, haute couture, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market clearing, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Pareto efficiency, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, working poor

“Enemies of Exploration: Self-Initiated Versus Other-Initiated Learning,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35, 1977: 459-77. Consumers Union. “Air Quality: Special Report,” Consumer Reports 62, 1997: 36ff. Continelli, Louise. “Cheap Thrills in an Era of Downsizing,” Buffalo News, May 25, 1997: 1F. Cooper, Mary H. “The Working Poor: Will Funding Cuts Make Their Future Grimmer?” CQ Researcher, November 3, 1995: 969-92. Coppen, Alec. “Role of Serotonin in Affective Disorders,” in Serotonin and Behavior, ed. J. Barchas and E. Usdin, New York: Academic Press, 1973. Copple, James. “Prepared Testimony before the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources,” Federal News Service, April 18, 1997.

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., 10 Mercedes, 19 Merck Family Fund, 188 Metals, exposure to toxic, 54-55 Microsoft, 269 Middle-income earners, 4-5, 45 Miliband, David, 243 Military arms race, 156, 161-62 Mill, John Stuart, 213, 223 Mission Hills, Kansas, 28 Mondale, Walter, 226 Monopolies, 269 Mood, exercise and, 85 Moral dimension of altering spending patterns, 12 Morris, William, 187 Mortality, social integration and, 87-88 Motivation, purpose of, 135 Moultrup, Patrick, 52 Multiplier effects, 234 Municipal water systems, 54-55, 253-54 Music industry, 39 National Basketball Association, 166 National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 59 National debt, 252 National defense services, taxation for, 246-47 National Football League, 166 National income, 15 criticism of measure, 66-67 in golden age of economic growth, 244-45 Natural selection, 123, 148, 149-52 Nehring Bliss, Nanny, 190 Neiman Marcus, 25 Netsuke, 200 Neumark, David, 115-16 Neurological measurement of affect, 69-71 New York Times, 3, 227 Niarchos, Stavros, 5-6 1984 (Orwell), 198 Nixon, Richard, 256, 279 Noise, stress from, 81-82 Norms, against conspicuous consumption, 167-69, 201-3 Nozick, Robert, 65-66, 195 Nunn, Sam, 224, 225 Occupational choice in winner-take-all economy, 235-39 Omnibus highway bill (1998), 61 Onassis, Aristotle, 5-6 On-line retailing, 42 Opus One, 30 Orwell, George, 198 Osterholm, Michael, 57 Ottoman Empire, sumptuary laws in, 199 Overharvesting, 157 Overtime laws, 169, 170, 171 Overworked American, The (Schor), 49 Ozone, 55-56 Page, Marianne, 58-59 Paramecium, 94-95 Parking spaces, employee, 52-53 Particulate matter in air, 55-56 Part-time jobs, 190-93 Patek Philippe wristwatches, 16-17, 18, 212, 221 Pavarotti, Luciano, 38 Payroll tax, 103 Peacock, evolution of plumage of male, 150 Per capita income, criticism as measure of well-being, 241-42 Perception, context and, 129-30 Perks, higher tax rates and corporate, 231-32 Perlman, Itzhak, 23 Personal relationships, health and, 87 Personal savings rate, 5 Pigou, Alfred, 213, 223 Pinkerton, Brian, 29 Pleasure craft, 23-24 Pollution, 8, 156 air, 55-56 consumption spending as analogous to, 272-73 controlling cost-effective solutions for, 195 new approach to, 209-11 regulations, 102, 208-9 taxes, 102, 209-11 first attempts to solve problem of, 208-9 growth rates and, 101-2 incentive gap causing, 207 Poor, the children of, 255-56 Earned Income Tax Credit for working poor, 257 welfare reform and, 257-59 Pope, C. Arden, 55 Porsche automobiles, 19, 168-69, 180, 203, 218, 220, 221 Postlewaite, Andrew, 115-16 Postponement effect, 233 Potholes, 60 Poverty, 239-41. See also Poor, the Praag, Bernard van, 74 Pragmatism, radical, 199 Primark Decision Economics, 51 Princess Cruise Lines, 47 Prison inmates, increasing number and cost of, 263-64 Procter & Gamble, 174 Productivity, 97 growth in, 101 job specialization and, 190-91 Product quality evaluation, context and, 131-32 Progressive consumption tax, 211-26, 249-50 to change current spending trajectory, 277 consumption goods produced under, 219 defining, 213-14 effect on the wealthy, 217-19 employment changes from, 219 illustration of, 214-16 inconspicuous consumption and, 222 luxury tax compared to, 214 as mainstream idea, 223-24 major advantage of using, 218-19 money for nothing from, 279 reasons against, 224-26 as remedy for conspicuous consumption, 271-73 resources saved with, 217-18 ripple effects of, 222-23 savings and, 213-14, 215, 220-21, 232-35, 248-49 short-run prospects for, 278-79 stimulation of economic growth by, 232-39 consumption mix change, 235 occupational choice and, 235-39 savings increase and, 232-35 tax evasion and, 232 transition to, 219-21 Project DREAM, 62 Proulx, Tom, 29 Prozac, 142 Public good, high growth rate as, 246-47 Public investments, 53-62 in air quality standards, 55-56, 254 in beef inspection, 56-58, 254 in bridge and highway maintenance, 59-61 current trajectory for, 276-77 cutbacks in cost-effective, 251-54 in drinking water, 54-55, 253-54 in drug treatment and prevention programs, 61-62 in pay for public school teachers, 58-59 Public school teachers, better pay for, 58-59 Public-service employment, 259, 261-65 Putnam, Robert, 202 Radical pragmatism, 199 Railroad crossings, neglect of, 60-61 Rainwater, Lee, 74 Raleigh, Michael, 141 Rank dependence of reward on, 133-35, 136 serotonin levels and, 140-41 Rare coin market, 119-20 Rational actor model, 124, 127-28, 173, 174.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

This is counterintuitive for most entrepreneurs, who assume that more is more. But the kitchen sink approach—employ a few salespeople, place some magazine ads, and try to add some kind of viral functionality to the product as an afterthought—doesn’t work. Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished. Selling to Non-Customers Your company needs to sell more than its product. You must also sell your company to employees and investors.

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Adjusting to current dollars and for population growth, contemporary income-transfer programs—including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, ObamaCare, and the alphabet soup of TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly the food stamps program), CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program), SSDI (Social Security Disability Insurance), SSI (Supplemental Security Income), and EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit)—mean Washington transfers about four times as much, per recipient, as was transferred during the New Deal. It’s good that government aid to individuals is greater today than in the past—no one should live as many did during the Depression. But US federal spending for the poor, the working poor, the lower middle class, the disabled, and the retired is more substantial than generally understood. That federal entitlement spending is backed by two sources—taxes on the affluent and borrowing from the young through the national debt. Both are income-transfer mechanisms. Yet income inequality still is high.

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In 2015, economists led by William Gale of the Brookings Institution calculated that raising the top federal tax rate to 50 percent, then redistributing new revenue entirely to the bottom quintile, would have an “exceedingly modest” effect on inequality. The higher rate would increase federal revenue by about $95 billion; transferring the sum to the bottom would remit about $2,000 per year to poor and working-poor American adults, money that would be welcome, to be sure, but would not alter the basics of social equity. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton advocated federal tax increases at the top. The Sanders plan would have raised an added $150 billion per year, though the Vermont senator proposed to distribute most of the revenue not toward the bottom, rather, to senior citizens, who are already society’s most-favored group economically, and to the middle class, which already is fairly well off.

Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert D. Putnam

assortative mating, business cycle, classic study, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, full employment, George Akerlof, helicopter parent, impulse control, income inequality, index card, jobless men, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, school choice, selection bias, Socratic dialogue, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the built environment, the strength of weak ties, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, white flight, working poor

Originally conceived by conservative economist Milton Friedman and expanded by administrations of both parties during the last quarter century, this program is widely regarded as a reasonably efficient way of increasing the disposal income of poor parents who are working, and it has become one of the largest antipoverty programs in America (after food stamps and Medicaid). On the other hand, this program only helps the working poor, so it doesn’t reach the poorest of poor kids. • Expand the modest existing child tax credit (as advocated by Tea Party favorite Senator Mike Lee [R., Utah]), but make the credit fully refundable, so that it can benefit children in families too poor to owe any federal taxes at all, thus reaching the poorest kids

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Patrick Sharkey, “Neighborhoods, Cities, and Economic Mobility” (paper prepared for the Boston Federal Reserve conference on Inequality of Economic Opportunity, Boston, October 17–18, 2014), and sources cited there. Greg J. Duncan, Aletha C. Huston, and Thomas S. Weisner, Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children (New York: Russell Sage, 2009); Johannes Bos et al., “New Hope for People with Low Incomes: Two-Year Results of a Program to Reduce Poverty and Reform Welfare” (New York: MDRC, 1999); Aletha C. Huston et al., “New Hope for Families and Children: Five-Year Results of a Program to Reduce Poverty and Reform Welfare,” Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, 2003; Aletha C.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

Brooks, when it comes to charitable giving and volunteering, numerous quantitative measures debunk the myth of “bleeding heart liberals” and “heartless conservatives.” The opposite, in fact, appears to be true. Conservatives donate 30 percent more money than liberals (even when controlled for income), give more blood, and log more volunteer hours. And it isn’t because conservatives have more expendable income that they are more generous. The working poor give a substantially higher percentage of their incomes to charity than any other income group, and three times more than those on public assistance of comparable income. In other words, poverty is not a barrier to charity, but welfare is. One explanation for these findings is that people who are skeptical of big government give more than those who believe that the government should take care of the poor.

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