The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream By Jacob S. Hacker
Jacob Hacker argues persuasively in The Great Risk Shift that America's middle class finds itself living with far more risk and income volatility than it did a generation ago. "Problems once confined to the working poor - lack of health insurance and access to guaranteed pensions, job insecurity and staggering personal debt, bankruptcy and home foreclosure - have ... become an increasingly normal part of middle-class life," Hacker writes in his preface to this new and expanded edition. His vision is of a "security and opportunity society" that restores financial stability to ordinary Americans.