The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [93]
The families we studied weren’t so different from our own. There were people who made everyone laugh, people who dreamed big, and people who made some really stupid choices. More than anything else, the families whose lives animate this book worked hard, played by the rules—and failed. They made many of the same choices we made—they went to college, they bought homes, they sent both parents into the workforce—but they got caught in a trap of circumstances that would not let them go, and they ended up in a study of financial failure.
We believe in these families. But the rules they played by are no longer the rules that govern financial success for the middle class. In a single generation, the world has changed, and families are struggling to adapt. They committed themselves to thrift and hard work in exchange for a promise of economic security and a better future for their children. That promise has disappeared. There was a time when families sent mothers into the workplace only in times of distress. Today, women go to work every day just to maintain a tenuous grasp on a middle-class life. Plenty of families make it, but a growing number of those who worked just as hard and followed the rules just as carefully find themselves in a financial nightmare.
The collective pressures on the family—the rising costs of educating their children, the growing insurance payments and medical bills, the rising risks of layoffs and plant closures, and the unscrupulous tactics of an unrestrained credit industry—are pushing families to the breaking point. America’s middle class is strong, but its strength is not unlimited.
The evidence we assemble is unrelenting, but we remain optimistic. The American middle class was forged by families who knew hardship and conflict and who dreamed of giving their children something better. It has survived wars, scandal, epidemics, the Great Depression, and massive transformations in the U.S. economy. It is under assault, but the families that make up the great middle are not quitters. They are ferocious fighters, for themselves and for their children. Their willingness to send 20 million mothers into the workplace had unintended fallout, but it was rooted in a powerful desire to create a better future for their children. Their failure to demand accountability from their politicians and the organizations that purport to speak for them has left them weakened. But we believe that collectively and individually these families have the tools to change the structure of their schools, to bring their politicians to heel, and to fight back against big businesses that would steal their economic vitality. They can release the trap.
APPENDIX
The Consumer Bankruptcy Project, 2001
In 1999 and 2000, a group of scholars began to assemble the pieces of what would become the Consumer Bankruptcy Project of 2001. A dozen professors from seven different research universities contributed to the design and implementation of the study. Dr. Teresa A. Sullivan, Executive Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs of the University of Texas System and Professor of Sociology; Professor Elizabeth Warren, Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard University; and Professor Jay Lawrence Westbrook, Benno Schmidt Professor of Law at the University of Texas, took principal responsibility for designing the basic questionnaire and telephone survey questions for the 2001 study. In addition, Professor Michael Schill, Professor of Law at New York University and Director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, and Dr. Susan Wachter, Professor of Real Estate and Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, were principal drafters of survey questions about housing and real estate. Dr. David Himmelstein and Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, both Associate Professors of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, designed the medical questions. Bruce Markell, Doris S. and Theodore B. Lee Professor of Law, and Robert Lawless, Professor of Law, both at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, drafted the small business questions.