Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America

by Alissa Quart

Before the 2008 crash, only one-quarter of Americans viewed themselves as lower-class or lower-middle-class. Even those who were struggling tended to view their problems as temporary. No longer. After the recession of 2008—which, though caused by the financial crash, could actually be said to have exposed or congealed decades of social class separation and downward mobility, since the Reagan era—a full 40 percent of Americans viewed themselves as being at the bottom of the pyramid. For the first time since pollsters had asked this question, fewer than half of those interviewed said that they were middle-class—only 44 percent, according to a Pew study. Meanwhile, the wealthy—with “wealth” here defined as assets minus debt—stand in stark relief to the Middle Precariat. A 2014 Russell Sage Foundation report puts the net worth of the top 5 percent at $1.3 million. The incomes of the top 1 to 5 percent have grown explosively in the past three decades, while the incomes of so many others have stagnated. For the median family of color, that wage and wealth stagnation can be pretty dire. In a study published in 2017 by the organizations the Institute for Policy Studies and Prosperity Now (full disclosure; IPS is the fiscal sponsor of my organization, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project), the median wealth—assets minus debt—of white households is now over sixty-eight times higher than that of black households. For black families, the median was just $1,700.