Tightrope

The authors open Chapter 3 describing a boy Kristof grew up with in Yamhill named Kevin Green. Green and Kristof were similar—so similar people sometimes confused them—but their trajectories were different. Encouraged by his parents, Kristof went on to university; Green, by contrast, was raised by parents who’d grown up in poverty with little schooling but had nonetheless been able to secure a place in the middle class. That trajectory stopped with Green, however, whose inability to find work comparable to what his father had had undermined his self-esteem and led him to abandon attempts to find work altogether, such that he survived on $520 a month in disability payments instead. This pattern is replicated for working-class people across the economy, the authors write; since 1980, “those in the top 1 percent did very well, those below them in the top 10 percent enjoyed incomes growing at the same pace as the economy, and those in the bottom 90 percent lost ground—their incomes grew more slowly than the overall economy” (33).

Unemployment statistics don’t fully capture the scale of the problem as they don’t include people who, like Kevin Green, have stopped looking for work that doesn’t exist anyway. This long-term unemployment contributes to mental and physical health problems, the authors write, and is part of an epidemic of loneliness, which in turn causes obesity, heart disease, and other problems. In Green’s case, his loneliness and lack of purpose as a result of chronic unemployment led to a premature death.

In Chapter 4, the authors note that while the United States does not have a class system per se, health problems such as diabetes, heart disease, and liver disease are a clear marker of class, as they’re at least twice as common among low-income Americans, compared to wealthy citizens. Meanwhile, wealthy Americans are constructing palatial homes that hearken back to eras like France’s ancien regime, when the palace of Versailles was built. The answer, the authors write, involves both wealth redistribution and policies that enhance opportunities for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Education is an important pillar of this approach. As it currently stands, 77% of kids in the top quartile of incomes go to college, compared to 9% in the bottom quartile, a difference at least partially attributable to the amount of resources wealthy parents devote to helping their children get into university. The fact that public schools in poor areas are under resourced, as well as segregated by race, is due to the fact that schools are paid for by local property taxes. This inequality is therefore due to a policy choice.

Other policy choices also fuel inequality, such as subsidies for the wealthy, including mortgage subsidies for yachts, and loopholes that allow wealthy people to dodge paying income tax. Meanwhile, lobbying by wealthy individuals has reduced government capacity to combat use of loopholes; the authors note that only 6% of tax returns for those earning more than $1 million are audited, whereas a third of all audits are focused on those making less than $20,000. Society is structured to benefit the wealthy and corporations in other ways, too, including in the criminal justice system and in the economy; for example, noncompete agreements prevent even low-wage fast food workers from finding work at a competing company, thus limiting their bargaining power. At the close of the chapter, the authors note that rather than leading to public outrage and political change, this system risks becoming self-perpetuating: “the accumulation of wealth often leads to accumulation of political power that is then harnessed to multiply that wealth” (51).

Kevin Green, the classmate of Nicholas Kristof mentioned in previous chapters, died in 2015, at age 54. The authors reflect on other former classmates of Kristof, including Mary Mayor, who fell into drug addiction, alcoholism, and homelessness as a result of a wave of poverty and despair that swept through Yamhill. For these individuals, who came into adulthood in the 1970s and later and who’d struggled much more than their parents, “the bad decisions were a symptom of larger economic malaise” (54).

For the previous generations, nearly universal basic education—which put the United States ahead of European countries in educating its citizens—and safety net programs such as unemployment insurance and Social Security granted many people entry into the middle class. Starting in the 1970s, however, America began to take a different path, with inequality growing and educational attainment shrinking. Meanwhile, as tax revenue came to make up a larger portion of gross national product in other countries, it stagnated in the United States, meaning there was less money for public services.

To highlight just how much the United States has adopted a different approach from other wealthy countries, the authors compare the US response to the 2008 financial crisis to that in Canada. While people in both Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, were affected by layoffs in the auto industry, Canadian workers fared better, in part because of universal healthcare in the country, and also because of government initiatives to help workers retrain and find other work. The authors attribute the difference to a more compassionate approach to workers, as opposed to the American “narrative that outcomes are simply about personal responsibility, a doctrine that left workers in the United States often feeling like failures” (66). The kind of resentment that results from under-investment in training and assistance for the working class, as well as a failure to promote inclusive growth, fuels racism and bigotry. A particularly clear manifestation of this chain effect was the 2016 election of Donald Trump, who was particularly popular among whites with a high school education or less, nostalgic for the more prosperous America of their childhoods. As the authors note, this nostalgia is problematic—given that in the 1960s and earlier, women had minimal opportunities and Black citizens were living under Jim Crow—but nonetheless speaks to a longing for a more equal, stable society.

In Chapter 6, the authors look at another source of working-class suffering in America: the opioid epidemic. They recount the story of Daniel McDowell, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, who became addicted to opioids after a combat injury left him struggling with physical pain and post-traumatic stress disorder. When McDowell was cut off prescription opioids, he turned to heroin—a common path to heroin addiction for many Americans. By the time the authors encountered him, McDowell had been estranged from his family and served time in jail for dealing drugs.

While McDowell had found his way into a treatment program for veterans, which encouraged him to take responsibility for what had happened to him, the authors note that the real causes are societal and structural. One of these structural factors is the way in which the United States allowed the pharmaceutical industry to recklessly market opioids as a solution to chronic pain. While some of these companies, like Purdue Pharma, have been convicted and fined for their fraudulent claims about opioids being nonaddictive, these fines pale in comparison to their profits, and executives have never served jail time. The authors compare those consequences to the life sentence imposed on an African American woman in Alabama named Geneva Cooley. In 2002, Cooley was given a package by a friend and was promptly stopped by police. The package turned out to contain opioids; because she had prior felony convictions, she was sentenced to nearly a thousand years in prison.