(Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class

(11)
(Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class image
ISBN-10:

080701138X

ISBN-13:

9780807011386

Author(s): Mooney, Nan
Released: May 01, 2008
Publisher: Beacon Press
Format: Hardcover, 264 pages
Related ISBN: 9780807011393

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.

Best prices to buy, sell, or rent ISBN 9780807011386




Frequently Asked Questions about (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class

You can buy the (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class book at one of 20+ online bookstores with BookScouter, the website that helps find the best deal across the web. Currently, the best offer comes from and is $ for the .

The price for the book starts from $8.99 on Amazon and is available from 8 sellers at the moment.

If you’re interested in selling back the (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class book, you can always look up BookScouter for the best deal. BookScouter checks 30+ buyback vendors with a single search and gives you actual information on buyback pricing instantly.

As for the (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class book, the best buyback offer comes from and is $ for the book in good condition.

The (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class book is in very low demand now as the rank for the book is 10,309,047 at the moment. A rank of 1,000,000 means the last copy sold approximately a month ago.

Not enough insights yet.