There's been a fair bit of interesting commentary on Jacob Hacker's The Great Risk Shift lately. I've been keeping my powder dry in anticipation of a forum I'm doing with Hacker on Tapped. My first piece is up, though, and here's the beginning:
As preamble, however, I'll say that I found The Great Risk Shift massively informative and potentially dangerous. This isn't Jacob's fault, but by crafting a compelling narrative that universalizes economic hardship, he plays into a pernicious political instinct among Democrats to drop the specific problems of poor people for the more broadly palatable concerns of the middle class. At a dinner party earlier this month, talk turned to John Edwards and his (in the view of the attendees) misguided focus on poverty. Why, wondered my tablemates, would he focus on such a narrow, politically unpalatable issue, when insecurity affects the poor and rich alike?
But the problem for the poor isn't that they oscillate between very poor and pretty poor, it's that they're poor. And their concerns simply are not the same as that of the middle class. My worry is that Jacob is -- possibly unwittingly -- offering liberals a way to feel economically populist while actually ignoring those who most need their help. Obviously issues that affect broad cross-sections of the population rather than those affecting smaller, politically marginalized groups are going to prove more politically popular and appealing for a party seeking the quickest route back to power. But the risk for progressives of such universalism is a myopia in the face of problems that demand serious policy attention.
That said, I slightly disagree with Matt's focus on inequality. What Jacob does, which is helpful, is identify a specific problem in the economy that materially degrades the lives of workers. The inequality conversation, which I often push, is an important one, but the left needs to decide what it is about inequality they don't like. There are questions of justice, and there are also a number of problems that inequality can generate -- lack of social cohesion, reduced economic mobility, class resentment, even ill health, to name just a few. But I tend to think the focus on inequality as a cause rather than an effect is wrongheaded. What worries me about inequality isn't what it does, but what's doing it, namely, a decades-long decline in worker bargaining power and the resultant redirection of productivity increases and corporate profits away from compensation and salaries.
