Risky Living

Live At Your Own Risk

By David Moberg

In This Article

All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy

(BK Currents)
By Jared Bernstein
Berrett-Koehler Publishers · $12.00

The American Dream vs. The Gospel of Wealth: The Fight for a Productive Middle-Class Economy (The Future of American Democracy Series)
By Norton Garfinkle
Yale University Press · $22.00

For three decades, the gap between the rich and everyone else has grown in the United States. At the same time, working people have faced greater economic uncertainty, their incomes have fluctuated more dramatically, and both employers and governments have cut back on measures such as pensions and health insurance that helped mitigate the uncertainties of life. Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker calls this the great risk shift—transferring the burden of risks in life from collective institutions to individuals.

Hacker observes that “Social Security, Medicare, private health insurance, traditional guaranteed pensions—all sent the same reassuring message: someone is watching out for you, all of us are watching out for you, when things go bad. Today, the message is starkly different: You are on your own.”

The greatest victims of this shift are the poor, and the biggest beneficiaries are the rich. However, in The Great Risk Shift, Hacker uses statistics and illuminating anecdotes to show how the shift also threatens the “middle class.”

Many of the same changes in the economy increase both inequality and risk. However increased individual exposure to economic uncertainty raises slightly different political questions. It endangers and often wreaks real hardship on many who thought their lives were secure. These middle class workers found their health insurance was inadequate, their jobs were off-shored, or, like many Enron employees, their 401(k) retirement accounts collapsed with their employer.

As a result, Americans are increasingly anxious. Everyone except the rich are at risk, and no individual solution, including education, can adequately compensate for the insecurities that loom over Americans’ lives...