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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / “The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class”, ca. 2007

“The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class”, ca. 2007

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This is Elizabeth Warren, at the beginning of 2007 (you can safely skip to 4:50 if you’re not interested in the lecture setting). I considered posting this a few weeks ago; now that Warren’s actually campaigning for the Senate, several different commentors have linked to/emailed it. Sunday seems like a good time for watching a longer — and, frankly, somewhat sombre — dissection of what in 2007 the Very Serious People were saying couldn’t happen.
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Professor Warren, in her capacity as a specialist in bankruptcy law, uses actual facts & statistics to back up her Cassandra predictions. Despite the Burkean vapors of Brooks & Doubthat, she pins the decline of the American middle class not to our moral decay and piggish consumerist lusts, but to the “rational” decisions of powerful industries (and the governments that served those industries) to shove an ever-increasing percentage of public-utility social costs like health care and education onto individuals and families.
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If you haven’t got the time or strength to watch the whole lecture, I recommend listening, starting at about 47:30, to what she has to say about bankruptcies in America, even before the Great ‘maybe if we insist it’s only a recession it won’t hurt so much’ Collapse of 2008. Why do I suspect that 85% of middle-class bankrupts are no longer able/willing to hide the “stigma” from even their closest friends and family members?

Reader Interactions

36Comments

  1. 1.

    SRW1

    She’s one of the people who were right before the sh*t hit the fan? Doesn’t that mean she’s, like, totally unelectable?

  2. 2.

    WyldPirate

    These bankrupt middle class people are nothing more than sinners facing the wrath of an angry, righteous God who can only tolerate those who are successful and have plenty of money.

    God loves the sound of coins jingling. It is music to His ears….

  3. 3.

    Mino

    Ron Suskind’s book will be widely read. She’s gonna look good. Others, not so much.

    Frank Rich has a book chat up in New York Magazine. Ouch. I’m just glad the book came out now and not closer to the election.

    And I don’t see how Obama could have done anything about Geitner–how would he get a new one through the Senate?

  4. 4.

    Trentrunner

    Would it be awesome if the Great Populist Hope turned out to be a woman? And a self-made Harvard professor?

  5. 5.

    MikeInSewickley

    Anne,

    Thanks so much for posting this. This is the video I mentioned in a posting to one of John’s discussion threads.

    It should, no MUST, be required viewing for anyone who wants to know the Republic agenda.

    To tell the truth, I’m beginning to think some of these folks are so stupid and short sighted, they really don’t know this is what’s happening – they are just listening to their master’s voice. God help us if they get full control of Congress…

  6. 6.

    Kathy

    This lecture needs to be required viewing. She is so smart and so articulate. Bet her students adored her. Hope she fired some up to political activism.

  7. 7.

    Brian S

    I thought about going through bankruptcy when I was 22 or so. I didn’t, partly out of a misguided sense of shame, and partly because I couldn’t even scrape together the legal fees. I actually filed 3 years ago, just before turning 40, and didn’t feel badly about it at all. I got hit with bills for some absolutely necessary dental work and I had to choose between paying credit cards and eating regularly.

  8. 8.

    MikeInSewickley

    That’s what these leaders (Dems and Reps together) have done.

    They have succeeded in making bankruptcy for absolutely valid reasons a horrible dirty word and people who do it “losers, slackers, system-users, welfare queens, etc.”

    Interesting they never mention that one of the biggest reasons for bankruptcy in the U.S. is due to unforeseen medical expenses.

    Wow…if people knew that they might want to work on changing the medical system. Wow…what a great idea!!!

  9. 9.

    harlana

    It is absolutely worth listening to the whole thing! Thanks for posting, I’m going to be following her campaign from now on.

    Kennedy’s seat must be redeemed and detoxified! Scott Brown leaves a nasty stain.

  10. 10.

    Gromitt Gunn (formerly JMC_in_the_ATL)

    I declared bankruptcy back in March and it was completed by July. I have no qualms with telling anyone and see no stigma to it. I had two options – function as an indentured servant for the rest of my life to Bank of America, Chase, and Citigroup, or move forward with just student loans. It wasn’t a hard choice.

  11. 11.

    Brian S

    @MikeInSewickley: What I was trying to say is that I felt way less shame about bankruptcy three years ago than I did twenty years ago the first time I thought about it. Most of that came from me, I suppose, but I think there’s just less stigma now regardless.

  13. 13.

    Montysano

    Let me second the previous commenters: this is a must see. As a bonus, she’s a wonderful speaker and truly one of the compelling intellects of our age.

  14. 14.

    mem from somerville

    This is the video that explained to me so clearly what had happened over the course of my life that made things so different from my parent’s generation. It really is worth watching in full. I’ve been deeply affected by it, and have never forgotten it.

    What I also like is that she understand the data, and makes it accessible to everyone. She has depth + communication, which is rare in data geeks.

    And although I’m generally skeptical of people who come in and suddenly want Senate jobs (like Alan Khazei, who I know is a nice guy, but…), yet she’s been up on the Hill for other purposes and knows what’s wrong there too. She has my support in this race 100%.

  15. 15.

    superdestroyer

    Elizabeth Warren always mentions that people are buying good schools but never mentions what she means by “good schools.” What she actually means is that white and Asian parents are will to spend a lot of a mortgage to avoid having their children attend school with large numbers of blacks and Hispanics. That is why parents in Boston and NYC spend a huge amount of money on private schools and why people in the suburbs of any large urban area spend money to purchase a home in the “correct” neighborhood.

    Warren also does not mention why the college degree and soon the graduate degree is so important. It distinguishes people to employers who have lost most of the ability to hire hard working people but now are forced to hire credentialled people.

    Progressive love to listen to Ms. Warren talk about the problems but they never want to think about the solutions.

  16. 16.

    Short Bus Bully

    Our Galtian Superhero Overlords want the return of the formal Aristocracy (aka: The removal of the “Death Tax”), the return of Debtor’s Prisons to formalize the shame to each individual and their extended family, and just generally return our degenerative society to the outright worship of money. After all, according to Galtian Superhero Overlords and their squirming, mewling lickspittle followers amongst the Punditocracy (Brooks, Douhat) possession of vast quantities of money is the sole arbiter of a sound moral and ethic compass.

  17. 17.

    Ohio Mom

    IIRC, at the end of the video she addresses why she focuses on the middle class rather than the (even in worse shape) poor: without a middle-class, there is no stair-step out of poverty. So strengthening the middle-class is essential to efforts to relieve poverty. It was something I hadn’t thought of.

  18. 18.

    harlana

    explained: why i wasn’t seeing what i thought i should be seeing, when i looked at my erstwhile neighbors, why isn’t anyone i personally know affected by this economy? they’re just hiding it. it explains so much, this “secret bankruptcy” – the revelation at the end of lecture. because i see a lot of consumption in these parts.

    seeing but not seeing. i’ve been looking right at them all along.

  20. 20.

    cckids

    Yeah, we declared BK in 2006. Ours was indirect medical expenses, I guess you’d say. Our son, who has severe CP & lots of physical/mental handicaps, spent 147 days in the hospital in 2005. Medicaid paid his medical bills, but all the associated expenses ate us alive (gas, eating out more, taking time off work, paying someone else to take care of the other kids, etc.)

    If you have a seriously ill person in the family, your financial pathways disappear very quickly. One family member has to be the caretaker, because who else will? If that throws the rest of the family into financial hell, that is just how it is. There is no support system at all.

  21. 21.

    Social outcast

    I would listen to the entire clip if only the situation was not so obvious to anyone who rejects all the usual economic reporting from media that recites whatever is fed to them by Wall Street, corporate, and republican leaders. The right wing has done a tremendous job in making the media view all left-wing criticism of economic or military policy as “unrealistic” or “too idealistic” or “anti-growth.”

  22. 22.

    Cain

    @cckids:

    we are all one health event away from bankruptcy. It’s just the way it is. And we allowed those noobs to make bankruptcy harder for us middle class an easier on the rich.

    Seriously, we are fucked up.

  23. 23.

    different church-lady

    I’ve got the strength to watch the whole thing, but not the time. So I’ll just observe that the rot in the system was right there for anyone who wanted to see it as far back as 2005. All the money of the Bush years was fake money, driven by ‘new paradigms’ that quite obviously were not going to hold up forever. I called it the “Potemkin Economy“. And unfortunately the middle class signed up for it. In a big way.

  25. 25.

    AA+ Bonds

    @Social outcast:

    I would listen to the entire clip if only the situation was not so obvious to anyone who rejects all the usual economic reporting from media that recites whatever is fed to them by Wall Street, corporate, and republican leaders. The right wing has done a tremendous job in making the media view all left-wing criticism of economic or military policy as “unrealistic” or “too idealistic” or “anti-growth.”

    You need to watch it anyway to learn how to tell people about this, because the way you’re doing it doesn’t cut it. It makes the Republicans sound powerful, and you need to make them sound impotent and bratty and unqualified. You need to offer people the chance to fear and resent what they’d do if they REALLY had power.

    Not to mention you sound defeatist as shit and that’s catching in America. No one likes to hang out with a loser.

  26. 26.

    Mino

    @superdestroyer: …employers who have lost most of the ability to hire hard working people but now are forced to hire credentialled people.

    Correct me if I am wrong, but this sounds as if you don’t believe hard-working Americans are available to employers? I wonder why you have that impression? Do you know any working class Americans?

    And if no one is talking about the class war, it goes on unopposed. Which is why we have come to today’s situation. But enough people are speaking now, that it won’t be hidden any longer.

    And finally, why should you think progressives would object to excellent schools everwhere? Progressives usually don’t believe one side must be hurt to improve the other. That is a divide and conquer tactic.

  28. 28.

    AA+ Bonds

    “Republicans are against the middle class. They’re against its existence. They say they’re for it but all their policies are all against it. They want to eliminate the middle class. If Republicans get elected, they will try to end the middle class in America.”

  31. 31.

    Katie5

    The destruction of the middle class also has the diabolical outcome of turning more middle class towards Republicanism. With increasing vulnerability comes fear, which can draw people to the party of fear. I see no easy way to turn the middle class towards hope (or whatever that means now under a centrist president). It certainly doesn’t turn the middle class towards a party that supports enfranchising the poor, because that’s what the middle class is afraid of, becoming poor, and the redistribution of their income to the undeserving poor (at least their vision of reality in a zero sum game).

  33. 33.

    mclaren

    Your link to Ms. Warren’s 2007 lecture proves especially timely, Anne, in view of the latest cover story of The Atlantic magazine: “Can the Middle Class Be Saved?” from the September 2011 issue.

    Here’s an extended excerpt:

    In October 2005, three Citigroup analysts released a report describing the pattern of growth in the U.S. economy. To really understand the future of the eocnomy and the stock market, they wrote, you first needed to recognize that there was `no such animal as the U.S. consumer,’ and that concepts such as `average’ consumer debt and `average’ consumer spending were highly misleading.

    In fact, they said, America was composed of two distinct groups: the rich and the rest. And for the purposes of investment decisions, the second group didn’t matter; tracking its spending habits or worrying over its savings rate was a waste of time. All the action in the American economy was at the top: the richest 1 percent of households earned as much each year as the bottom 60 percent put together; they possessed as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and with each passing year, a greater share of the nation’s treasure was flowing through their hands and into their pockets. It was the segment of the population, almost exclusively, that held the key to future growth and future returns. The analysts, Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod, and Narendra Singh, had coined a term for this state of affairs: plutonomy.

    In plutonomy, Kapur and his co-authors write, `economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.’ America had been in this state twice before, they noted — during the Gilded Age and the Roaring twenties. In each case, the concentration of wealth was the result of rapid technological change, global integration, laissez-faire government policy, and `creative financial innovation.’ In 2005, the rich were nearing the heights they’d reached in those previous eras, and Citigroup saw no good reason to think that, this time around,they wouldn’t keep on climbing. `The earth is being held up by the muscular arms of its entrepeneur-plutocrats,’ the report said. The `great complexity’ of a global economy in capital transformation would be `exploited best by the rich and educated’ of our time. (..)

    Meanwhile another phase of the economy’s transformation — one more squarely involving the white-collar workforce — is really just beginning. `The thing about information technology,’ Autor told me, `is that it’s extremely broadly applicable, it’s getting cheaper all the time, and we’re getting better and better at it.’ Computer software can now do boilerplate legal work, for instance, and make a first pass at reading X-rays and other medical scans. Likewise, thanks to technology, we can now easily have those scans read and interpreted by professionals half a world away.

    In 2007, the economist Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, estimated that between 22 and 29 percent of all jobs in the United States had the potential to be moved overseas within the next couple of decades. With the recession, the offshoring of jobs only seems to have gained steam. The financial crisis of 2008 was global, but job losses hit America especially hard. According to the International Monetary Fund, one of every four jobs lost worldwide was lost in the United States. And while unemployment remains high in America, it has come back down to (or below) pre-recession levels in countries like China and Brazil. (..)

    Among the more pernicious aspects of the meritocracy as we now understand it in the United States is the equation of merit with test-taking success, and the corresponding belief that those who struggle in the classroom should expect to achieve little outside it.
    (..)

    The overall pattern of change in the U.S. labor market suggests that in the next decade or more, a larger proportion of Americans may need to take work in occupations that have historically required little skill and paid low wages. Analysis by David Autor indicates that from 1999 to 2007, low-skill jobs grew substantially as a share of all jobs in the United States. And while the lion’s share of jobs lost during the recession where middle-skill jobs, job growth since then has been tilted steeply toward the bottom of the economy; according to a survey by the National Employment law Project, three-quarters of American job growth in 2010 came within industries paying, on average, less than $14 an hour. One of the largest challenges that Americans will face in the coming years will be doing what we can to make the jobs that have traditionally been near the bottom of the economy better, more secure, and more fulfilling — in other words, more like middle-class jobs. (..)

    Yet productivity improvements at the bottom of the economy seem unlikely to be a sufficient answer to the problems of the lower and middle classes, at least for the foreseeable future. Indeed, the relative decline of middle-skill jobs, combined withe slow increases in college completion, suggests a larger pool of workers chasing jobs in retail, food preparation, personal care,and the like–and hence downward pressure on wages.

    Source: “Can the middle class be saved?” Don Peck, The Atlantic magazine, September 2011, pp. 60-78

  34. 34.

    superdestroyer

    @Mino:

    Intead of an employer deciding if someone is intelligent, motivated, hard working, or talented.

    However, with the increased emphasis on formal education along with changes in employment laws, employers and especially large employers have decided to use credentials as a proxy for evaluating talent. Thus, everyone has entered a credential “arms race” and employers are stuck managing more bad employees.

  35. 35.

    cmorenc

    @harlana:

    Kennedy’s seat must be redeemed and detoxified! Scott Brown leaves a nasty stain.

    If only we could get the chance to do the same for the shitstain Clarence Thomas who succeeded directly to Justice Thurgood Marshall’s seat on the US Supreme Court. If Clarence has his way, he’ll use his vote on SCOTUS to undermine, invalidate, and undo everything good Elizabeth Warren can accomplish as a US Senator.

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