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Not Keeping Up With Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class | 
 enlarge | Author: Nan Mooney
Publisher: Beacon Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $12.44
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 182143
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 080701138X
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.973008622
EAN: 9780807011386
ASIN: 080701138X
Publication Date: May 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Perfect condition .. dust jacket intact.
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Product Description
The first book to exclusively target the struggles of the professional middle class?educated individuals who purposely choose humanistic, intellectual, or creative pursuits?Nan Mooney's (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents is a simultaneously sobering and proactive work that captures a diversity of voices.
Drawing on more than a hundred interviews with people all across America, (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents explores how stagnant wages, debt, and escalating costs for tuition, health care, and home ownership are jeopardizing today's educated middle class. Teachers, counselors, nonprofit employees, environmentalists, journalists, and the author speak candidly about their sense of economic?and hence emotional?security, and their plans and fears about what's to come.
With up-to-date and accessible research, including a short history of the middle class, Mooney explains what it has meant historically to be middle class and how these definitions have changed so dramatically over the decades. She shows that social programs once aided the growth of this class but shifts in policies and labor practices?and increases in fixed costs, such as health care, housing, education, childcare, and household debt?are making it increasingly difficult for families to retain their middle-class status.
Throughout the book, Mooney uses real people's stories and an analysis of the new economic reality to put middle-class struggles in perspective: College tuition has increased 35 percent in the past five years, and while the average college undergraduate's debt is $20,000, earnings for graduates have remained stagnant since 2000. In addition, only 18 percent of middle-class families have three months' income saved, and 90 percent of those filing for bankruptcy are middle class. Finally, raising one child through age eighteen costs a middle-income family around $237,000, while the costs of housing, health care, and education are all rising faster than inflation.
Despite this difficult reality, Mooney offers concrete ideas on how individuals and society can arrest this downward spiral. Reigniting a sense of social responsibility is crucial?this ranges from improving government-backed education, health care, and childcare programs to drawing on successful models from individual states and other countries. Intimate personal accounts combined with Mooney's incisive analysis will make (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents resonate deeply for America's professional middle class.
"What happens when the center cannot hold? With great empathy and infectious alarm, Nan Mooney charts the travails of America's middle class in this important book."
?Anya Kamenetz, author of Generation Debt
"If you're wondering why, in our age of plenty, the financial treadmill keeps moving faster and faster for America's increasingly educated – and increasingly insecure -- middle class, you owe it to yourself to read this book. It's all here: the big trends, the compelling portraits, the ideas for personal and political change, and the call to arms we so desperately need."
?Jacob S. Hacker, author of The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care and Retirement and How You Can Fight Back
"A book for the distressed and confused because their life plan has gone to pieces. Mooney illuminates what has happened to them?and why."
?Nicholas Von Hoffman, columnist for NY Observer and regular contributor to The Nation
"This is the kind of book that you wish was fiction. But, as Nan Mooney's incisive new book shows, the fact is that this generation has inherited an economy with too many low-paying, no benefit jobs and an eroding middle class. Millions of young families wonder where they went wrong when, in fact, their economic problems are largely the result of policies that generated higher incomes for a select few and rising economic insecurity for the rest of us. In this timely book, Ms. Mooney pushes us to demand an economy that works for all of us, not just the very wealthy."
?Heather Boushey, Senior Economist, Center for Economic and Policy Research
"We hear a lot about the runaway wealth of American professionals. In this important book, Nan Mooney reminds us that most have no such luck. Working in jobs they love provides a sense of moral worth, but doesn't cover the bills for teachers, legal aid lawyers, practicing artists, and others. Something has gone wrong in America and this book gives us a grip on the crisis."
?Katherine Newman, coauthor of The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America and the Forbes Class of 1941 Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton
Facts from Not Keeping Up with Our Parents
• Ninety percent of those filing for bankruptcy today are middle class.
• Average college loan debt is nearly $20,000; average graduate school loan debt is $46,000.
• Credit card debt has risen 31 percent in the past five years; already indebted, middle- and low-income households owe an average of $8,650; a third owe over $10,000.
• Health care premiums have increased at five times the rate of inflation since 2000.
• The median wealth of white households is $86,100, as opposed to $19,010 for black households and $11,450 for Latino households.
• Between 1979 and 2003, income for the middle fifth of the population grew just 9 percent, while the income for the top 1 percent jumped by 111 percent.
• Twenty-three percent of public college graduates and 38 percent of private college graduates would have an unmanageable level of debt if they were to live on a teacher's starting salary.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Too Snooty and Anecdotal; Fails to Address Root Causes! July 18, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Kamenetz writes as though her subjects are entitled to a good living, and above others (eg. blue-collar workers) encountering the same problems. Further, her primary recommendations (various subsidies) would simply encourage others to fall into the same problems and acerbate the underlying problems (eg. rising health care and tuition costs).
Lamenting the life of American teachers, as Kamenetz does, is ridiculous. Public school teachers enjoy wages far above most of their private school counterparts, as well as unmatched job security and benefits. In fact, their pay and benefits, compared to actual workloads and insecurities, outdo those of most college graduates. As for social workers and counselors, most studies that I've seen show very little benefit from their services - primarily because the underlying "science" is extremely weak.
Journalists are another matter - often providing invaluable service but negatively impacted by declining newspaper readership and advertising revenues. The answer, unfortunately, is find another line of work and don't even attend journalism school. As for non-profit workers and artisans, if you really love the job, go ahead and take it, along with the low pay - otherwise, don't even think about that area.
It is also difficult to cry over the indebtedness of many college graduates - after all, it is they that chose to attend schools (often higher-cost private ones) away from home, necessitating expensive additional living expenses, dragged out their educations through poor course selection, failure to attend summer school, and changing their fields of study. Then there are the frequent after-graduation tours of Europe, and relatively expensive apartments and new cars once back in the U.S. Worse yet, data show about half of college graduates take jobs that do not require a college degree!
As for fixing the high costs of education and health care - we're already spending about twice/capita that of other industrialized nations, with inferior outcomes! Colleges and universities already have endowments nearing $2 million/student (Harvard; Amherst - $1 million/), and normally do not require students to work. Subsidizing these areas just further encourages their spendthrift ways, and results in "The Hospital That Ate Chicago," or "The University that Ate Phoenix" scenarios.
Why do these areas spend so much? Because they can! Education expenditures at all levels have risen far faster than the cost-of-living - pay and # of employees have risen, while days and hours worked declined. As for health care, repeated research has shown wide variations in expenditures by area, with no outcome benefit.
Finally, Mooney fails to identify the underlying problems that affect almost everyone's job negatively - globalization and automation.
Bottom Line: "(Not) Keeping Up With Our Parents" identifies a serious GENERAL problem (not limited to the groups the author focuses on), but is way too whiny.
P.S.: I have an MBA but can no longer find work in that field - so I work as a truck-driver. My wife (secretary at a non-profit) and I worked hard, saved our money, spread out our children, and now live in an exclusive community, own a nice five-year-old car, and help our sons with their education (MBA, CPA) and housing expenses. Works a lot better than whining, and helps explain why I don't want increased taxes to pay for the author's ideas!
 Must read this enlightening book June 18, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a really important book... I highly recommend it. It gives an enlightening perspective to our generation's career choices. Many of us struggle with our career choices. Should I choose a career path that I find socially responsible, creative, and fulfilling? Or should I choose a career that will provide my family financial stability and opportunities? It seems that our dream job should have all those aspects, but we often find ourselves having to make the choice. Nan's book analyzes how we got to the place we are at now. She uncovers all the uneasy topics and facts that we don't like to discuss at dinner table, much less barbecues or cocktail parties. I found the book to be very well rounded with thoughtful analysis with good practical recommendations for change.
Strait forward and honest June 16, 2008
I always like this author's books and this read was no exception. I was most surprised by what a fast read it is, considering my hesitancy to look at what my perceptions are about my finances vs their reality. Though the facts of the book are troubling, it's great to know I'm not alone as I try to build security in my life.
Smart, Timely Book June 16, 2008
In this book, Nan Mooney strikes a cord with those in today's middle class. The real stories are fascinating. A smart, timely read. We all thought we'd find it easy to have a better live/make more money than our parents did. The reality isn't what we all expected. This book is full of great insights into the situation; I recommend it.
awesome book June 13, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I thought this book was quite fantastic. Growing up my friends and I were told that if we went to college and got "a good job" we would be able to own our own home and send our own children to college. Well, guess what? This has turned out to not be even remotely true. I think this book is very important and is addressing a problem that I see everywhere and yet does not seem to get talked about anywhere. The housing market collapse and resulting economic slowdown have just been icing on the cake. Thank you Nan Mooney for putting into words
the experience of the disappearance of the middle class.
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