Down the Up Escalator

In her book, "Down the Up Escalator," Barbara Garson chronicles real life stories from the recent "Great Recession" showing us the personal pain and loss that so many ordinary Americans experienced. She interviews a group that she called the "Pink Slip Club" where no one's life has returned to normal after being laid off from their modest but solid middle class jobs. She looks at workers in retail sales and highlights how this once secure service sector job has now become part time work without benefits. 

She tells the story of many faced with losing their homes from the mortgage crisis. In many cases, we see individuals who made bad choices to refinance at the wrong time or buy up in a speculative manner only to end up losing it all. One point she makes is that many solid citizens who once would have thought it unthinkable to walk away from debt did just that and walked away from their homes and mortgages. I can't say that this all has a distant ring for me. Some of my own friends at work were laid off during this time and I know that they often dug themselves into a deep hole by living on credit cards and dipping into retirement accounts. Even once they found a new job, their salaries never met what they once had. And my own next door neighbors, going through a divorce, found a short sale on their house to be the best solution when they found that they had refinanced one too many times and now owed more than the house was worth. 

While the book is full of individual stories, her real focus is on the cause and consequences of this long period of history where wages have not come even close to keeping pace with productivity. This has been a time where the wealth in America has gradually transferred to the hands of fewer and fewer. From the dot com bubble to the real estate bubble, it is always the average American that comes out on the losing end because they simply do not have the access or the means to weather these storms.

She ends her book with a few profound thoughts. First, she acknowledges that this is not like the Great Depression. These folks are not hungry and by in large not homeless. But they are not sure if they will ever work again and have lost any sense of security around home ownership and retirement. Planning for their own future has become day to day. We as human beings do not like uncertainty and yet we have allowed an economic system to dominate where safety nets are considered a sign of weakness.