Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America

by Alissa Quart

Germany passed a law guaranteeing every child over twelve months of age a slot at a day-care facility in the hope that the policy would help reverse its birth rate, one of the lowest in Europe.

Finland, all children under the age of seven have the right to preschool.

Canada, the province of Quebec offers universal, government-subsidized day care for children ages four and under, at ...

2014, Colorado’s licensed day-care spots met the needs of only one-quarter of the state’s young children. In Minnesota, the number of in-home child-care providers in three counties declined by more than 17 percent from 2011 to 2016, leading to an extreme shortfall.

One large and crucial solution to limited day-care access would be a national and universal pre-K policy.

New York City’s Pre-K for All. It’s New York mayor Bill de Blasio’s premier achievement, in fact, and its scale is one reason for its success. In 2014, there were only twenty thousand free all-day pre-K seats: two years later, there were seventy thousand.

report from 2016, using data from the National Institute for Early Education Research, access to state pre-K varies wildly from state to state: 48.7 percent of four-year-olds in Texas have it, while only around 2 percent of their little counterparts do in Missouri, and roughly 10 percent do in Oregon.

Today, unstable hours are a bigger problem than low pay,

national movement is under way to create stable schedules via a national pilot program undertaken by the clothing franchise the Gap to phase out on-call scheduling—which,

“It was all about nine-to-five day care ten years ago,” said Deloris Hogan, director of Dee’s Tots. “But now that the stores are open till twelve at night or even twenty-four hours a day, we are needed. We have to do this.”

in 2013, 28 percent of children were living with a single parent, and 77 percent of those single parents were mothers.

those who were distinctly upper-middle-class but who were still running in place in order to stay that way. I did so because I knew they too felt an emotional and to a smaller extent a financial sting as a side effect of the extremes of income inequality in this country.

social science research demonstrates that living amid the wealthy even when you are reasonably well salaried yourself is damaging to your mental health.

2010, a study by researchers at the University of Warwick and Cardiff University found that money improves happiness only if it also improves people’s social rank.

“With respect to income and happiness,” they write, “what matters most is how much income a person has relative to his or her income comparison group.” Personal contentment is relative: it depends on how you

“People’s understanding of prosperity is shaped by what they see around them.”

If the merely middle-class reject the idea that the upper-middle-class also suffer, they deny solidarity with another group that is in fact being harmed by inequality, no matter how gently.

the rank of a person’s income and wealth, rather than the absolute of these things, was a better predictor of overall health outcome, including obesity and chronic illness.

To put it in social class terms, it was better to be at the top of the bottom economically, or the top of the middle, than at the bottom of the top. Being placed at the bottom of the top, it seemed, had a corrosive effect on physical health.

Research conducted, beginning in 1967, on British male civil servants by Sir Michael Marmot for a famous document known as the Whitehall Studies further demonstrated that income inequality has mental and physical health effects, even among executives who are one rank below top-level administrators.

the very lower-upper-class cohort had higher mortality rates than their bosses:

even those in the top tenth percentile of salary in the United States now see themselves as excluded from American power

“trickle-down consumption”: spending money to hire tutors to help their children compete against the progeny of the very rich,

EPI also found that child-care costs for a family with a four-year-old and an eight-year-old exceeded the average rent in 500 of the 618 U.S. communities it surveyed.)

between 2009 and 2015, 52 percent of real income growth flowed to the 1 percent.

the last decade, tuition debt in general has quadrupled. College costs have risen more than 1,000 percent since 1978, and what American students and graduates owe overall has surpassed $1.3 trillion.

“diploma mill” for-profit schools and colleges remind me of the insights in Didier Eribon’s 2009 memoir, Returning to Reims,

They enroll in programs in the belief “that they are gaining access to what has previously been denied to them, whereas in reality, once they have that access, it turns out to mean very little, because the system has evolved and the important and valuable place to be has now shifted somewhere else.”

The relation between the privileged and the less privileged “reproduces itself by changing location,” writes the sociologist Eribon.

One theory of social class from Marx onwards is this: in their lives, people are simply trying to replicate their own status position for their children and to cement their own class legacy. A social class, however, can be all too easy to drop out of, especially today.