Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America

by Alissa Quart

the problem of not being able to afford to live in America can’t be cured by self-help mantras.

When you break it down, society’s attitude toward pregnancy and children is bizarre, surreal, and much like the disregard for so much of nature itself.

According to a study written in 2013, the cost of delivery, for both vaginal and cesarean births, has nearly tripled since 1996: the average cost for a C-section in the United States in 2013 was $16,038, compared with $12,560 for a vaginal birth.

The number of people with graduate degrees receiving food assistance or other forms of federal aid nearly tripled between 2007 and 2010, and those with a Ph.D. who received assistance rose from 9,776 to 33,655.

the typical problems of the Middle Precariat: debt, overwork, isolation, and shame about their lack of money.

In 2015, only an estimated 16 percent of women in the workforce, across all professions and the whole of the country, made $75,000 or more,

In thirty-three states and the District of Columbia, the cost of center-based day care (let alone a nanny) for an infant is higher than the cost of a year at a public college.

Scholar Arlie Hochschild, who writes about day-care operators and workers like the Hogans, worries about the potential harm to workers who must sell the most intimate parts of themselves, manufacturing smiles and cuddles for low pay.

Here Eribon puts his finger on what seems so true and horrible to me—the formerly male-dominated professions that have become predominantly female are suddenly less desirable: once feminized, a profession’s pay stagnates.

The lack of mobility is best seen in American places like the Mississippi Delta, where there is less social movement statistically than in the rest of the developed world as a whole. (Of course, as Mississippi has one of the largest percentages of black citizens of any state, one can easily say that lack of mobility is not just about economics but where it meets up with racial discrimination.)

It was no accident that Barry was driving for Uber. For the last two years, the company had sponsored initiatives to encourage teachers to moonlight as chauffeurs.

Uber Oregon also trumpets that 3 percent of each fare goes back to a classroom, and it offers a $5,000 bonus to the schools with the most drivers, logging the most miles.

Yet, stripped of its “generous” veneer, Uber’s teacher-driver campaigns are also sharing in a more twisted Silicon Valley fantasy: low taxes, good schools, and teachers who drive you home after your expense-account meal with a venture capitalist!

When he began driving, he was a mass of road rage over his lost career and status. Then he discovered a potentially depressing new “Zen”—the nothingness that is being an Uber driver, as he put it. It was a balance borne of nihilistic resignation.

white applicants receive 36 percent more callbacks for jobs than equally qualified African Americans.

One percent TV goes some way toward explaining where we are politically, and it also partly explains why parents like myself and the ones in this book feel so bad about ourselves, blaming ourselves rather than a system failure for our plight.

The incentive for the AP is not only to save on labor costs but also to write up business news before anyone else can—literally, before a human being could—and with no misspellings.

The argument that these robots will save money over the long term relies on an absurdly long term.

IF I HAVE GIVEN SHORT SHRIFT TO THE ROBOT ENTHUSIASTS, IT’S due to my personal predilection for people over efficiencies.

If the societal need for work is gone, only the individual need for work’s income will be left, he writes. Then labor will no longer be how we should define ourselves. It will be less likely to be the source of a decent living, and no longer a way to measure our strength or our virtue.

There is a stigma around any care-related profession. Take school teaching: Americans and their representatives give lip service to teaching yet continue to ruinously underpay teachers, and now they are attacking teachers’ unions.