Half Changed World

Today’s book is Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead, by Tamara Draut.  In many ways, this book could be called The Two-Income Trap, Jr.  Like Warren and Tyagi, Draut analyzes the ways that families today get into economic trouble through little fault of their own, with wages failing to keep up with the spiraling costs of housing, health insurance, and child care.  The hook is that Draut focuses on the experiences of young adults, 20-34, and compares their (our) experiences to those of the Boomers in the 60s and 70s.

The most convincing part of Draut’s case is her discussion of the rising costs of college, the diminishing availability of grants to cover those costs, and the ways that student loans hang over young people’s lives.  She also writes persuasively of the ways that lower-income students’ educational options are limited because of their reluctance or inability to take on that debt burden.

Nicholas Von Hoffman had an article in the Nation a bit back where he argued that the increased cost of education is a form of social control, forcing young people to focus their energies on earning money rather than fomenting social change or following their dreams.  I’m not sure I think it’s a deliberate plot, but I do think there’s a lot of truth to the story.  At my reunion, the Dean gave a speech in which he said that they did a study of the career paths of graduates.  Of those who left without student loans, he said, 95 percent took first jobs in the public or nonprofit sectors.  Of those who had more than $80,000 in loans, only 45 percent took first jobs in those sectors.

Draut’s argument becomes less convincing in other chapters where she lumps together the struggles of a teacher hoping to have an apartment to himself one day and an affluent couple buying a home in suburban Connecticut.  They both may be living paycheck to paycheck, but that’s the extent of their similarities.  And while this generation may be struggling compared to the Boomers, it is NOT the first generation in history not to be as well off as their parents.   Living with your parents was the norm for unmarried young adults for most of history; the recent increase isn’t really a sign of the collapse of the American economy.

Draut is the director of the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos.  The book ends with a chapter of proposals for how to solve these problems (expanded student aid, support for unions, paid parental leave), many of which I agree with, but none of which will convince anyone who doesn’t already support them.

Following up on the theme of last week’s book, today’s review is of Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, by Barbara Ehrenreich.  After the success of Nickel and Dimed, her report on her undercover experience as a minimum wage worker, she planned to go similarly undercover in corporate America.  But she couldn’t get hired, so the book turned out to be her exploration of the various services being offered to the desperate white-collar unemployed.

The book isn’t nearly as good as Nickel and Dimed.  Compared to the deep sympathy Ehrenreich showed for her low-wage counterparts, she shows nothing but scorn for her fellow travellers on this journey.  She doesn’t believe that corporate public relations (which is what she’s trying to get hired to do) actually involves real skills, and so sees her efforts as purely a matter of puffery.  She even seems to suggest that it’s somehow unethical or misleading to target your resume to each job you apply for.  (By contrast, see Kristie Helms’ killer advice for job seekers.)

Moreover, Ehrenreich seems to have checked her common sense at the door, pouring hundreds of dollars into job coaches and networking groups that offered absolutely nothing of value.  She reserves her worst scorn for church-based job search groups, not knowing whether she is more concerned for other atheists who might wander unwittingly into their midst or for the poor fools who actually believe that God will help them find a job.

But, as The Disposable American makes clear, there really is a problem.  The reason there are so many people selling half-baked services to job seekers is that there are a lot of very desperate people out there who are willing to buy.  And the more you (used to) make, the harder it is to convince a potential employer that your job can’t be done for half the price by someone right out of college (or one-tenth the price by someone overseas).

The most persuasive part of the book for me was Ehrenreich’s anger at the way so many of the job search services she encountered encouraged workers to blame themselves for their failure to be hired, rather than looking for systematic causes.  While there’s a lot of sense to idea that workers should focus on the things that they can control — including their own attitude — rather than things they can’t, Ehrenreich is right that the focus on the personal prevents workers from organizing to demand societal change.

Today’s book is The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences, by Louis Uchitelle.  It’s the book from which his NY Times article about displaced airline mechanics came from.

The book alternates chapters in which Uchitelle discusses the overall growth of layoffs as a phenomenon with ones in which he profiles specific laid-off workers.  One of the the arguments he makes is that white-collar workers who lose their jobs to "downsizing" or "outsourcing" or who accept early retirement packages are as much laid-off as the blue-collar workers that we associate with the word "layoffs."  (He notes that the specific questions that the government uses to ask workers if they’ve been laid off refer to "plant closings" and make it less likely that a professional will answer yes.)

Uchitelle makes a convincing case that layoffs have extensive hidden costs — beyond the well-documented loss of earnings — especially the emotional toll on workers who are told that they’re no longer needed, and who often can’t find a job at a comparable wage.  He also argues that they often don’t provide the expected economic benefits to companies that use them, as the remaining workers are demoralized and less productive.

His discussion of solutions is less convincing.  Even a die-hard liberal like me finds it hard to believe that increasing the minimum wage to $12 an hour would automatically result in productivity increases enough to cover the costs.  He suggests massive governmental public works spending, prohibitions on compensating executives with stock options, and a complicated system of reporting all layoffs.  By contrast, he sees most of the political solutions of the past decades — promoting lifetime learning, increasing the portability of health insurance and pensions — as acquiescing to layoffs.

At times, Uchitelle’s criticisms seem simply contrary.  For example, he writes: "Like Stiglitz, and many other academics, he [Robert Reich] accepted the findings of empirical research concerning education.  In virtually all of this research, people with a college degree earned more than workers with only a high school degree."  The implication seems to be that it was a mistake to accept this empirical research, but Uchitelle doesn’t offer any explanation of his critiques.  (The problem is that there’s also been an increase in within-group inequality, so the averages don’t mean that a college education is a guarantee of security.)

Today’s book is Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, by Jerome Armstrong (of MyDD) and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (of DailyKos).  It’s their breezy take on why the Democrats can’t win elections, in spite of being demonstrably better at governing.

As Peter Beinart pointed out in the NY Times, Jerome and Kos deliberately don’t discuss "message" — they argue that we need to stop trying to achieve the perfect platform, and start focusing on winning some elections.  (Peter, of course, has a book coming out this summer in which he argues that Democrats should be talking about a liberal foreign policy agenda.)

Parts of their analysis are totally on target — the incestuous relationship between the party committees that control the money and don’t take candidates seriously unless they hire the "right" (insider) consulting firms, the failure of progressive organizations to pay their employees enough to make them a career path for all but the most dedicated (or independently wealthy).  And I liked their argument that campaign dollars don’t have to be a limited resource that need to be hoarded for the most competitive races — by running serious candidates in even less competitive districts, more people are energized to participate and contribute, expanding the pot.

But the heart of the book is, I think, their claim that the biggest problem of the Democratic party is single-interest groups like environmentalists, the labor movement, and pro-choice activists.  They argue that these groups give Republicans easy targets, and hold candidates hostage to ideological purity.  The explicit comparision is to the Religious Right, which has used its power to support Republicans for the long-term benefits, even when their issues weren’t front and center in a given campaign.  They are particularly angry at pro-choice groups which have mobilized against pro-life Democrats. 

The irony of the argument is that Jerome and Kos are generally opposed to the DNC and other party insiders coming down from above and trying to annoint a candidate.  And, my reading of the situation is that NOW and NARAL have only really dug in their heels against candidates when they feel like the Democratic party leadership is trying to annoint a anti-choice candidate before the primary (cf Pennsylvania).  Obviously, they’re not happy when a pro-life Democrat wins the primary, but they generally just quietly look away, and recognize that the Democrat is usually still the better candidate on their issues.  But they’re trying to draw a line in the sand and say that they’re not going to acquiese when someone else tries to play kingmaker and expects them to fall quietly in line.  In other words, they’re not going to be the labor movement, which has loyally provided the muscle for Democratic campaigns for decades and gotten essentially bupkes in return. (Jerome and Kos also don’t seem to notice the irony when they proudly recount how bloggers knocked Tim Roemer out of contention for DNC chair because of his pro-life stance.)

The conventional wisdom seems to be that contested primaries are a bad thing, by draining resources from the general election, and causing the victor to be tarnished.  I’m not entirely convinced of that, for some of the same reasons that Jerome and Kos argue that Dems ought to be fighting in more districts.  I think primaries can draw more attention to campaigns, expand the pool of interested people and reduce public cynicism about elections.  The key is to figure out how to have real primaries and then still be able to talk to each other at the end of the day.

The Republicans seem to be better at this than Democrats these days, but I don’t think it’s because they have a magic strategy that the Dems are missing.  I think it’s something about being the majority party.  When you’re in charge and control the goodies, people fall into line even if they’re furious.  When you don’t have goodies to give out, the backbiting begins.

Other interesting reviews of the book:

• Mark Schmitt in the Washington Monthly
• Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise (particularly addressing the abortion issue)

If you have a chance to go to a MotherTalk event, go!  I went to the one last night, and had an absolute blast.  It was worth staying up way past my bedtime, and walking around in a haze much of the day.

Miriam Peskowitz talked about her anti-mommy wars book, and then read her essay from It’s a Girl, about what’s a feminist mother to do when her daughter is obsessed with all things cheerleader.  Andi Buchanan read her essay about her daughter’s use of writing to separate from her.  Marion Winik read a hysterical essay from The Lunchbox Chronicles about the 10 stages of dealing with lice, and a tender essay about grieving the loss of the infants and toddlers her children once were, as they grow up.

The place was packed — 50 or 60 women were there (and RebelDad).  I saw some old friends, and met some new ones.  I had a really good conversation with Devra Renner, co-author of Mommy Guilt, about the tension between wanting to be the best parents we can, but knowing that we’re going to screw up some of the time, and needing to be able to accept that and move on.  (Devra, if you’re reading this, here’s the post I mentioned.)

There was an intense conversation about girls’ fascination with pink and princessy dresses, and I was reminded of Jo(e)’s post a while back about the role of shoes in holding girls back.  (I concluded that someone ought to market sneakers that are hot pink and sparkly, but have good treads.)  Someone asked Marion (who has kids ranging from 5 to 18) about the idea that daughters grow up to be closer to their moms than sons do, and she said that after going through an awful teenage stage where they cursed at her and didn’t want anything to do with her, her sons were now incredibly sweet and communicative and she couldn’t imagine that a daughter could be closer.

A group of us also talked about the spate of high-profile, divisive books about mothers (apparently Linda Hirshman has a book coming out this summer) and whether each book had to be even more shrill than the last one to get published, and whether there was a backlash coming, and if so, would it open the door for non-shrill books, or would publishers just say "we’re all done with books about mothers."

So, check the calendar, and if there’s one in your area, go!

I’ve written so much about Leslie Morgan Steiner’s Mommy Wars book and the press it’s gotten that it almost seemed beside the point to read the book.  But when I picked up the book in a store and realized how many of the authors I’ve written about here — Lonnae O’Neil Parker, Jane Juska, Anna Fels — I decided to give it a second chance, in spite of the dreadful title and the worse subtitle (Stay-At-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families).

The good news is that the book is far better than media coverage or Steiner’s blog would suggest.  Many of the essays are thoughtful, some are funny, others tender.  Almost all of them come to some soothing conclusion about how we’re all doing our best:

• Parker: "I can have it all, just not on the same day."
• Leslie Lehr: "I also hope they’ll respect all women, no matter what choices are made in terms of work and motherhood."
• Ann Misiaszek Sarnoff: "There is no formula for success, but there are many individual solutions, and I’ve found mine."
• Page Evans: "Happy children.  That’s the bottom line for mothers."
• Juska: "I am in favor of choosing, consciously, to have a good time with kids."

Only a few of the essays conclude with what I would call true "mommy wars" moments.  Interestingly, both authors attribute the stinger lines to their 10 year olds —  Catherine Clifford’s son’s asking "Yeah, you love him so much, how come you leave him with some nanny person all the time?" Sara Nelson’s son saying "There once was a time when women didn’t work, wasn’t there?  Is that what they call the Dark Ages?"

The downside of the book is that, as Sandra Tsing Loh nastily points out in the Atlantic, the writers lack a certain diversity.  (Thanks Sandy.)  It’s not just that they’re almost all white and affluent.  It’s that they almost all seem to work (or used to) as writers, editors, or television producers and use brand names to prove their credentials.  That said, I think Loh takes her criticism to an extreme (and is somewhat hypocritical, as she’s the one who turned a book review last year into a tale of her own troubles getting her kid into preschool).  And, as we discussed last week, I think the work-family issues of the affluent are worth discussing.  The problem is what Steiner writes in her introduction:

"Most of the debate in the United States about the benefits of working versus stay-at-home motherhood has been taken over by experts: researchers, academics, politicians, journalists.  Many of them aren’t women.  Some aren’t even parents.  The most authoritative (and fascinating) answers come from moms themselves."

I just don’t think that’s true, especially when the only moms you’re talking to are the ones like you.  I enjoyed many of these essays, but I learned a lot more from reading journalists like Jason DeParle and academics like Annette Lareau and Kathryn Edin. 

A more fundamental problem is that — as usual for these work-family discussions — fathers and husbands are all but invisible (with Sarnoff’s "I Do Know How She Does It," where she explicitly says that she couldn’t have succeeded in her high pressure career without her husband’s sharing of parenting duties, as a notable exception).  One passage in particular stood out for me, from Beth Brophy’s "Good Enough":

"It’s been eight years since I quit my job.  I’ve never looked back.  My husband has glanced back, usually with a calculator in one hand and a stack of mortgage and orthodontia bills in the other.  He misses my paycheck and I do too.  When I had a steady one and I wanted something, I usually bought it.  Now I can’t.  Or if I do buy it, I feel guilty…. While I’m feeling a lot more relaxed with the new world order, my husband is developing an ulcer.  As I’ve made abundantly clear to him and anyone else who asks, I hope never again to work full-time in an office."

I wonder what he thinks about this.   

Today I’m catching up on the last of the books that I’ve been sent by publicists and have been feeling guilty for not getting around to.  It’s The Number: A Completely Different Way to Think about the Rest of Your Life, by Lee Eisenberg.

When I got the email asking if I’d be interested in the book, I said sure, because we’d been strugging with the question of how to think about our long-term finances.  As I’m sure I’ve said before, we’re doing fine on one income in the short-term, but I worry about the long-term impact.  And when I consider switching to a job that pays significantly less than I currently make, I don’t have any sense of how to evaluate the implicit tradeoffs that I’d be making, down the road as well as today.  Having read the book, I can’t say that I have any better of an answer than I started with.  And I’m not sure that I’d do any better going to a financial planner, because Eisenberg makes it clear that the types of places that are interested in serving people at my income scale generally don’t do a whole lot of individualized hand-holding.

The most interesting parts of the book are at the beginning, when Eisenberg talks to real people about what they think their "number" — the amount they need to live happily ever after — is.  Eisenberg had an article in New York magazine last fall that focuses on this aspect of the book.  Among other things, this section gave me a new operational definition of rich — if you have a concrete idea of the difference it would make to your quality of life to have $7 million instead of $3 million, you’re rich. 

Overall, I was underwhelmed by the book.  I’m surprised that it’s been on some of the best seller lists.  Eisenberg’s "completely different way to think about the rest of your life" turns out to be not all that different after all, unless it’s a new concept to you that the quality of your retirement will depend as much on whether you’re doing things that are meaningful to you than on the number of zeros at the end of your IRA balance.  To be fair, I’m at least 15 years too young to really be in Eisenberg’s target audience.

Today’s book is a collection of essays by Marjorie Williams, called The Woman at the Washington Zoo (after a poem by Randall Jarrell).  The subtitle is "Writings on politics, family, and fate" and the book is divided into three parts that roughly correspond to the three topics — political profiles, columns that appeared in the Washington Post and in Slate, and a set of essays about her diagnosis (in her mid 40s) with terminal liver cancer and how she lived with the disease and the knowledge of her impending death.

The political profiles are elegantly written, but seem like period pieces at this point, full of references that need to be footnoted to explain them to contemporary readers.  Even the joint profile of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, written just after the 2000 election, seems like a postcard from long ago. 

In her essays and columns, Williams writes about many of the issues that I cover in this blog.  She calls feminists to task for letting Bill Clinton off the hook for his pattern of sexual harassment, writes about the decline of the "political wife," and is dismayed by the inclusion of a makeup "advertorial" in Ms Magazine.  She reviews books likeThe Nuture Assumption, The Baby Boon, and The Marriage Sabbatical.  She is equally scornful of Real Simple and politicians’ false apologies.

Williams is not a soothing writer. In a review of I Don’t Know How She Does It (which she liked a lot more than I did), she writes:

"American women — can-do daughters of their country’s optimism — still secretly nourish a poignant hope that there is An Answer to the dilemna of work and family.  On a personal level, and as a matter of social policy, we often seem to be waiting for the No-Fault Fairy to come and explain at last how our deepest conflict can be managed away."

But unlike Caitlin Flanagan, Williams is never smug.  She never conveys any sense that she thinks she’s got things any more figured out than anyone else, or that her choices are superior to yours.  She admits that as the mother of young children, she enjoyed the time to herself that she got when she was commuting back and forth from Washington to New Jersey to visit her dying mother.

I think my favorite essay from the book is her previously unpublished memoir of her mother.  She unblinkingly writes about the joys and costs of her mother’s traditionally female path of service and reflected glory, and of her own ambivalence toward it:

"I never knew which would be worse: to be right or wrong in my hunch that her life was an unhappy one.  I suppose I will always wonder if it is self-justification that makes me see tragedy in the perfection of her kitchen.  I only know that, frozen in the passage between my mother’s mooon and my father’s sun, I made my choice many years ago.  but, although I always craved the gaudy satisfaction of my father’s sun, it is my mother’s life that fascinates me now.  And it is my love for her that both comforts and pains me more.  In life, I shrank from what I took (rightly, I still think) to be her judgments of me, her anger at my repudiation of the bargains she made.  Now, I dream about her often, and usually I wake from them with delight….

"Yet still there are moments when it stops me in my tracks to realize that I will never peel an orange the way my mother once did for me.  And sometimes those moments are too much to bear."

In keeping with the housework theme for the week, today’s book is A Housekeeper Is Cheaper Than a Divorce: Why You Can Afford to Hire Help and How to Get It, by Kathy Fitzgerald Sherman.  It’s a quick read, in an easy conversational style, and I’m quite sure it’s the only book ever written to receive blurbs from both John Gray and Rhona Mahony.

In spite of the provocative title, Sherman really doesn’t have much to say about the division of household labor.  Her basic argument is that time spent doing housework is almost always time that could be spent on higher priority activities, whether working for pay, caring for children, volunteering, or just enjoying yourself.  For most middle-class and above families, time is more valuable than money, so why not spend some money to buy yourself more time? 

Lots of families do buy themselves time by hiring housecleaning services, eating out or getting takeout.  Sherman suggests that you can get more help for the same amount of money by hiring less specialized workers — housekeepers — and providing them with extremely detailed instructions about what to do.  She provides step-by-step guidance on how to figure out those instructions, as well as advice on recruiting, complying with tax requirements, etc.

I thought the book was interesting, but it didn’t make me want to rush out and hire a housekeeper.  Maybe if the boys were older.  But at this stage, a huge part of the work is just staying on top of the clutter, and I can’t imagine a housekeeper being able to make the judgements needed to know what to do with everything.  And I’m not willing to limit ourselves to a weekly rotation of meals.

The latest from the housework tracking experiment: Monday, T spent 1.25 hours shopping (I think that includes driving to Costco and back), 3 hours cooking (he made a triple batch of curried chicken buns to freeze), and 2.25 hours cleaning.  I spent about 20 minutes cleaning.  Today T spent 15 minutes cooking, and an hour and 45 minutes cleaning.  I spent 30 minutes cooking, and about 20 minutes cleaning.

For me, the most surprising part of this experiment is how much cleaner the house is getting.   The act of writing down how much he’s doing has clearly motivated T to clean more.  And he insists that it’s not because he wants to look good for all of you.  In fact, he’s planning to keep tracking it for himself, but not tell me each day.  He suggested that when he doesn’t track how much time he spends doing things, it can feel like he’s spending all the time cleaning, since it’s interspersed with hanging out with the boys.  Writing it down also clearly helps him remember that once he’s put a load in the washer, it really need to move along to the dryer and eventually to get folded.

This week’s book is I’m Every Woman: Remixed Stories of Marriage, Motherhood and Work, by Lonnae O’Neal Parker. It’s the book about a black woman’s perspective on the whole work-family thing that was mentioned in the Times article I discussed last month.

It’s an interesting book.  At times it delivers exactly what it promises — insight into the ways that work and family issues play out differently for black women.  Parker says that she never realized that some women feel guilt for working outside the home until she was in her twenties, as all the women in her families had worked for pay.  She writes about the extra time that she needs to carve out of her day to comb and braid her daughters’ hair, and illustrates her stories with quotes from the blues, R&B, and hip hop.

Parker also offers insights that cut across racial lines:

"I no longer ask the people around me to give me time.  I do not know if it is fair to ask them to go against their most basic nature, which is to want me there, available for everything they need me for, for as long as they can have me.  Instead I do the hard work of being completely clear about what I need.  Then they don’t have to give me anything.  They just have to respect the boundaries I insist on maintaining.  It can still be a tough sell, but at least I’ve got half the battle won."

But at other points the book wanders and loses focus.  The long discussion of 1960s television shows left me cold.  One chapter simply reprints Parker’s Post magazine article about her "white" cousin who lives with her.  It was interesting — I remember finding it interesting when it was first published — but doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the book.  Another chapter includes a random paragraph about Michelle Obama that seems to be a left-over remnant from a section that got edited out.  At times Parker can’t resist including every tangential bit of history that she knows about a subject.

In several places, Parker discusses the slave history of black women in the United States, and points out that her burden is light compared to what her foremothers endured.  How can she complain about juggling the demands of writing for the Post and caring for her family when women worked from sunup to dark in the fields, and stole moments with their children at night?  When women routinely lost their children to the slave trade and death?

It’s a brutal standard.  Given the horrors of history, and the suffering of millions worldwide today, who of us has any right to complain?  Certainly not me.  And such comparisons are often used as a silencing maneuver.  But Parker uses these stories as a source of strength, telling herself that she can handle whatever fate brings to her.  And I’m sure she can.