← New Books Network
New Books Network
A. Mechele Dickerson, "The Middle-Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream" (U California Press, 2026)
00:55:54
Loading summary
Transcript51 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Tom Disena from the Department of Communication, Journalism and Public Relations at Oakland University. My guest today is Michelle Dickerson, the author of the Middle Class New Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream. Rigorous and highly readable, the middle Class New Deal breaks down the policies that have decimated working families and proposes reforms to reverse this trend. The US Middle class was a product of state and federal policies enacted in the wake of the Great Depression. But since the 1980s, lawmakers have undermined what they once built, shredding the social safety net and instituting laws that virtually guarantee downward mobility for all but the most privileged. As Dickerson shows, part of the problem is that politicians disingenuously conflate the middle class with white lower rich. Such propaganda hides how state and federal lawmakers consistently favor education, labor, housing and consumer credit laws that erode the bank accounts of lower and middle income people, especially those who are not white and don't have college degrees. Weaving together the latest research with the personal stories of Americans struggling to make ends meet, Dickerson provides a clarion call for political leaders to enact a bold agenda like the one that created the middle class almost a century ago, and asks, how can we restore what has been lost? My guest today is Amy Shell Dickerson, the Arthur L. Mohler Chair in Bankruptcy and Practice at Univers, and University Distinguished Teaching professor at the University of Texas School of Law. Professor Dickerson is a nationally recognized scholar on financial vulnerability, consumer debt, housing affordability, and racial and economic disparities. She regularly teaches remedies and federal civil procedure at the School of Law, has taught a class on civil procedural disputes that arose between the two Trump presidencies, and has taught numerous cross listed interdisciplinary graduate level courses on the American middle class and the COVID pandemic. She is also the author of Homeownership in America's Financial Flawed Premises, Broken Promises and New Prescriptions. Michelle Dickerson, welcome to the Newt Books Network. So you start your book by describing it as a labor of love. So tell me a little about what brought you to this project.
- [03:28]
C
Well, I'll talk about sort of how I landed on this project and then why it was both a labor and also it was love. As I was completing my first book on homeownership, I realized something that I suspect a lot of authors realize when you get to the end of the book. Oh, there's something else there. So when I completed the book on home ownership, I realized the problem that the problems that are facing lower and middle income families, it's not just that they can't find affordable homes to buy, they can't find affordable housing, whether rented or to purchase. And so then I started thinking, what's going on here? It has been a labor to get this book to publication because it's taken up about a decade of my life. So to defend myself for why it took me so long to get this book written, a couple of things happened along the way. One of them was the 2016 election. And at that time we kept hearing about the angry middle class voter and economic anxiety. And so I stopped and thought as I was sort of preparing the original manuscript, which have now rewritten twice. But as I was preparing the original manuscript, I thought, something's going on here. It's true that there are a lot of angry middle class voters, but only some of them are speaking in certain ways and taking certain positions now. And that's why my book has somewhat of a racial dimension. Because black and Latino middle class Americans have always struggled and suffered. What we saw leading up to the 2016 election is now the challenges that the non white middle class has always faced. Now all members of the middle class are facing. So I sort of joked in 2016 when we talked about the angry middle class voter, the white part was silent and was just never said. So that's the labor part. It took me a decade because of 2016, but then this other thing happened in 2016, 2020, known as the pandemic. And it's kind of hard to write a book about the middle class, have the pandemic, you know, be thrust upon all of us and not incorporate that into the book. So I had to write it again. The love part is that I dedicated the book both to my parents. They are the reasons that I am who I am. They were solidly middle class for their entire lives. They never became rich, but they were always comfortably middle class. And also to my sons. I have a 22 and a 25 year old children and I'm not sure that they're going to have the same types of opportunities certainly that I had. And they're facing some obstacles that even my parents didn't face as black young adults in the 1960s and 70s.
- [06:38]
B
That is such an interesting again. And you weave the stories of yourself and your parents throughout the entire book in some really informative and useful ways.
- [06:49]
C
But you don't talk about.
- [06:50]
B
This is the first time I don't hear this discussion about your sons. It's interesting that, and I tell my students this sometimes, that their lives really are dramatically different than ours.
- [07:03]
C
It's completely different. And it's funny, I don't mention my sons directly in the book, although my sons are all over the book. So, for example, some of the colleges that I happen to mention in the book happened to be colleges that my children went to. But also as I've talked about both the project and more importantly, as I've taught middle class courses to graduate students and I've talked to my sons, I realized, oh, we've done something really bad to our young adults. And I would say pretty much anyone under the age of 40, even if they are college graduates, their job prospects are very different from the prospects that we had that most boomers had and certainly that members of the silent generation had. In the chapter on jobs, I mention Amazon a lot and I talk about sort of the independent gig workers. And it's because my older son, in between college and graduate school, worked not for Amazon, but he drove an Amazon truck and had the little blue Amazon vest on. But he was an independent contractor. So a lot of what my children, now adult children, have gone through, informed the way I approached a lot of the chapters of the book.
- [08:25]
B
So let's start at the start. How was America's middle class born?
- [08:30]
C
America's middle class was born because US political leaders decided to create the middle class. One of the most frustrating things I have when I talk to different people about the middle class or when I see that political leaders are wringing their hands and whatever can we do about the affordability crisis? And my is you can do the same thing that your predecessors did after the New Deal and World War II. We didn't have a middle class in that country and our political leaders decided to create one. They went big, they went bold. They enacted the GI Bill, which dramatically increased the college attendance and graduation rates both at the community college level or the two year level and also at the four year level. They went big and bold on housing. So before the Depression, the types of mortgages that most Americans would use to buy a home were you had to put down 50% down payments. They were very short term. If you were lucky, five year mortgage terms. What that meant is even after you made the payments on the five year loan, you still didn't own your home because it didn't amortize. By that I mean now when we have 15 to 30 year mortgages, when you make that last payment, you've paid interest, you've paid principal, you own the home. Political leaders changed banking laws, finance laws, housing laws to make sure that more Americans could become homeowners. We have a middle class because our political leaders decided they wanted to create one. The middle class is struggling now because our political leaders have ignored them.
- [10:25]
B
I've been attending and getting close to this point in my life, a series of retirement seminars offered here at the university. And yesterday's was on taxation in retirement. It's a fascinating topic. And at one point the person offering the seminar said, if you talk to a financial advisor who is, I don't remember the age exactly, let's say under the age of 50, they have never known a period in which taxes have increased. And he showed us a graph of what the tax rates looked like at the period that you are talking about where the top marginal rate was at something like 90% and we're not even close to that. I think the top marginal rate is less than half of that.
- [11:13]
C
So I'm not a tax law professor, but one of the things I regularly tell people when I'm talking about class issues is you can tell what our political leaders value by looking at the tax code. And so the fact that they are not taxing billionaires at the rate that billionaires were taxed when we had a strong, thriving and robust middle class tells you that they favor and they like billionaires much More than they like the middle class. Even though they're always talking about how much they love the middle class and it's the backbone of society. My response is show it. Change the tax codes. Because you're absolutely right. When we look at what the highest earners are being taxed now relative to what they were taxed when we had a robust middle class, something clearly has shifted. We'll leave it at that.
- [12:11]
B
There you go. So you devote the first two chapters of your book to education. Why in your estimation, is education so fundamental to raising the middle class for both children and the adults that they become?
- [12:26]
C
The main reason I focus so much on education, certainly I opened the book with education, but it's woven throughout the book, is because it's the backbone for everything. And let me explain why. If you can't get a decent job, which I know we'll talk about soon, because that's another chapter. If you can't get a decent job, it's game's over. You will not have financial security. You will never become middle class. You will never remain middle class even if you become middle class. And so I look at so what's going on in K12 public education and I focus exclusively on K12 public education because most children in this country are educated in public K12 schools. We hear a lot of, I think unfortunate chatter and policy proposals about vouchers and charter schools and choice. But the simple reality is most children in this country are educated in public schools. Rich people send their kids disproportionately to private schools. That is not the reality for most lower and middle income families. And so I look at what happens in our public schools. One of the things that we saw during COVID is that public schools do more, much more than just educate children from the 8 or 9 o' clock in the morning when they're there, until the 3 or 4 o' clock when they leave. They feed our children who you have in the schools. So if it is a high performing, high income school, you're likely going to have more experienced and higher quality teachers. If for no other reason, then those school districts go to lower income schools and cannibalize the teachers, the assistant principals, the coaches. Everything is sort of being skewed toward educating upper income children. And so I focus on so what happens from the time, and I spent a bit of time talking about high school because we've become a society of college for all, the college for all mantra. Now obviously you and I both teach at university, so we, we like colleges. But when I was I used to teach at the College of William and Mary and while I was there I was actually the board chair for a local community college. So I'm a strong supporter of community college education. But the reason I focus so much on college is because that's what employers do. And so if they have decided that the bachelor's degree is the gateway to the middle class, the gateway to higher income jobs, we have to at least acknowledge the benefits of more people going to college. So if children are receiving a very different K12 education than when they become seniors in high school, their college opportunities are going to be very different. Which is one of the reasons when we look at colleges now, there are a disproportionate number of higher income students who are going to college. So I talk about certainly in the first two chapters, but also in the last chapter of the book about the shadow education that rich children receive that lower and middle income children simply don't receive. That shadow education includes SAT ACT college prep courses so that when you sit and you take the test to see if you can get into the college of your choice, you've been prepared in ways that a lot of poor children have not. I spent a lot of time in the athletic space and so there's also the club sports. So your child may be able to get into a college because they are a gifted fencer or lacrosse athlete. Well, that takes a lot of money to get a child to the point that they will be recruited to college based on their athletic skills. And so I focus so much on what happens to children before they turn 18 because that largely shows us what, what they're probably going to encounter either going to college or not and what type of college they may attend.
- [17:10]
B
It's interesting. There's just so much of this that resonates. I have a 17 year old son and the whole idea of his sport is rowing, which, it's varsity but it's.
- [17:27]
C
It'S expensive, it is fair.
- [17:28]
B
Yeah, those boats don't come cheap.
- [17:31]
C
And, and I won't say anything about rowing because I'm going to defend your son with rowing largely because Texas has a quite good women's rowing team. So I'm not going to say anything about rowing other than, you know, go.
- [17:44]
B
Go, go, you know, the, the, the whip. Well and it's interesting like the, we've, we were told right at the, at the outset that the boy rowers probably couldn't hope for a college scholarship. But that's not the case with the.
- [17:58]
C
Women rowers, most decidedly not the Case with women rowers for a whole host of reasons which have nothing to do with my book.
- [18:06]
B
I, I understand but. Sorry. But the, the interesting thing is, you know, when I was going to college, the whole idea of act prep courses and all of that thing was just not even on the, not on the radar. And now it just, it's in the atmosphere. For everything that my son is going.
- [18:24]
C
Through, it is an industry and depending on the school you go to, if it's a relatively higher income school, high performing school, When I say high performing, the students have high graduation rates, the students have higher college attendance rates. If your children go to one of those schools, it's built into the curriculum. They start prepping them for those tests in seventh and eighth grade for the psat. They actually have the test administered at their schools sometimes as authentic sites, other times as test prep. And then there's what the parents do for their children outside of what the school is providing. So you're absolutely right. For anyone, any parents of 12 year olds get ready because once they're 13 through 18, the whole college test prep thing is going to be a part of your child's life and therefore a part of your life.
- [19:22]
B
And again, this isn't the subject of your book, but I'm not sure it's good for them.
- [19:27]
C
It isn't the subject of this book, but it is most decidedly what my research is going toward, which is what's going on with our young adults. And when we have done things like put our children in these pressure cooker obsessive. The most important thing to you in life is to get into fill in the blanks elite college. It changes who they are and I would argue who perhaps they should become.
- [19:56]
B
Yeah. When my son was in the fifth grade, he had a teacher tell him that he had to choose a major.
- [20:02]
C
Exactly. In the fifth grade. In the fifth grade. And one of the things that I mention in the there is exactly right. Well. And as you and I both know, they can pick a major coming into college or in my case, coming into law school. They are sure they want to be fill in the blank type of lawyer they get. Their first job is completely different from what they thought they wanted to do.
- [20:23]
B
Yeah. So there's a phrase that recurs throughout your book that I think is clear, but that might conjure different ideas in different people's minds. Can you explain a little of what you mean by markers of the middle class?
- [20:37]
C
So when I talk about the middle class, I have a very clear view of what the middle class is or at least what the middle class was. And to answer the markers, I also need to talk about another term that I use throughout the book, and that's the lower rich. When I first started talking about this work, and you know, you're shopping your paper or your ideas to other colleagues, and I would talk to law professors about how hard it is for people to become and remain middle class and they would start talking about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we, blah, blah, blah we. I'm like, oh no, no, no, we are not middle class, we are rich. And they would push back. And so I created the term lower rich because no one wants to think of themselves as rich unless they're like that billionaire class who are happy to call themselves rich, but everyone wants to think they're middle class. And economically, rationally, that simply can't be true because the word middle is part of middle class. And so when I talk about the markers of the middle class, I'm talking about housing. It used to be homeownership. The American dream of homeownership. You work hard, you play by the rules, you can buy your own home. Now I'm talking about just the ability to have affordable housing that doesn't take up half of your income. It's college. It's the ability to help your children go to college without either you or your child having to plunge into ruinous student loan debt to do it. It's the ability to find a good job. Good. I'm defining as a 40 hour a week job with benefits, where when you show up at your workplace, you are called an employee and not an independent contractor. It's avoiding credit card debt, massive credit card debt, subprime auto loans, payday loans. It's having savings. So if you're driving and you run over a nail and it blows out your tire and you have to buy a tire, you don't have to go into debt to pay for that because you have emergency savings. And then it's the topic that you just mentioned, retirement savings. So historically, people weren't as stressed out about what's going to happen to me, how am I going to pay my bills when I retire? In the way lots of people are stressing out and have been for the last, I'd say five to 10 years and it's only going to get worse. So when I talk about the markers, it's what does it take for a family that has worked hard and played by the rules to have a normal, average life? Not anything, you know, luxurious, but things like taking a family vacation each year to, you know, whatever state park you're near, Yosemite or Federal park. To be able to go to Myrtle beach, to be able to take just a conservative family vacation to visit relatives in another city, is now getting outside the reach of a lot of middle income families.
- [23:58]
B
Well, thank you. That was an excellent description of that phrase. I really appreciate it. The fourth chapter of your book focuses on how the American labor market has been fundamentally transformed in the last 50 years or so. And we've already talked a little bit about this, but here I'd like to ask you to read, if you would, to turn to page 76 and the first full paragraph after the subhead. Low wages in the part time gig.
- [24:23]
C
Economy during much of the Great Compression, the largest employers were high wage unionized manufacturing companies like General Motors, Exxon, DuPont, AT&T and US Steel. These employers typically offered permanent and full time jobs that provided retirement plans, health insurance and other employee benefits. Since the 1980s, these jobs have decreased at roughly the same percentage as temporary low wage jobs have increased. Now lmi, which is lower and middle income workers, are forced to patch together income through a piecemeal of low wage and often part time and temporary jobs.
- [25:15]
B
Again, this is. I've done a number of podcasts on issues related to this idea. So tell us a little bit about, you know, what effect those transformations have had on people.
- [25:30]
C
It has caused pretty much everybody under the age of 40 to have a life of employment instability. So if we go back to the time when people went to work and I'll talk about the city of Detroit because it was the hub of our auto industry, you graduate from high school, you didn't necessarily have to go to college because you may have been able to get a job at General Motors or at Ford with just a high school education. Ford and GM may have had on the job training, some apprenticeships so you could get training that way. And you were in a unionized workforce, so your wages were going to be stable and steadily increasing. You were going to have that thing called a pension where the company provided it for you. You didn't have to worry about am I going to run out of money if I retire at age 65 and I live to be 83 and I need to die at 82 or I'm going to run out of money. You had health insurance and you knew generally speaking that you were going to have a job as long as you were a good worker. That's no longer the case. So we have lots of students that are graduating from college and they can't find a full time, 40 hour a week job. So I'll start at sort of the worst end. There are a lot of college graduates. Their first job is an internship which may be unpaid or it may be a stipend. Now that's terrific if your parents are rich or lower rich because you can still pay your bills. If you are a lower or middle income college graduate, you don't have the economic luxury to take a job that doesn't pay you and your parents can't pick up the rent because you want to have this terrific job opportunity in Manhattan or in Seattle or in Austin or in the Bay Area. It may be great for you occupationally, but it's going to be expensive for you for everything else. The other thing that a lot of our young adults are facing is they're called independent contractors rather than employees. So I'll tell the story of my son in between college and graduate school, which is what he's doing now. He worked, no, he drove an Amazon truck and wore an Amazon vest, but he actually wasn't employed by Amazon. He was employed by a delivery service provider, I think DSP. And they paid him. He didn't ever have 40 hours a week. He didn't have health insurance. But if you saw him dropping a package on your front porch, you would assume he worked for Amazon because he had the appearance of being a full time worker. But in fact he was a part time worker who was an independent contractor or temporary worker because he worked for a company that had a contract with Amazon. So everything is different. And that's the reason that our middle class is so economically friendly, fragile, because they don't have employment stability.
- [29:03]
B
So I have also done work on college internships and am highly critical of them, especially from the vantage point, as you say, the folks who just simply can't afford to take them. And I use as an example my father, he got married before he finished college and had a baby on the way and he got a job at a retailer, a big retail company that used to be in this area, we're near Detroit. And they paid for his college, right? They paid for him to become, to get the education while he worked for them. And now students basically almost have to have that free work experience before they can get hired into a similar kind of job. And it just is so backwards, it's awful.
- [30:03]
C
And our parents were similar. My dad also, mom and dad got married when I was in college. He took a part time job. It didn't lead to the job that he got right after college he ended up first job was as a public school teacher, but he worked in a chicken processing plant and for Campbell's soup. And so the experiences that college students are having now is, you're absolutely right, flipped. So they borrow heavily to go to college. When they come out of college, they are told, well, you don't exactly have the experience that we're looking for. But if you can take an internship to get experience, that would be terrific. Except the internship doesn't pay them. But if you don't take that internship, you're never going to get in the door. If you do take the internship, either you're going to need to have family with wealth that can pay your bills or you're going to have to borrow and take out loans to pay your expenses while you're working. With this unpaid job and with AI now entering into the lives of college graduates, it's only going to get worse.
- [31:15]
B
In your chapter on K12 education, you make the point that educational opportunities are largely determined by where a person lives. This authorization points us in the direction of how access to housing has been altered and the middle class often priced out of housing markets.
- [31:33]
C
Yeah, so when I talk about the high performing, high achieving K12 public schools, they are almost always going to be in neighborhoods with rich and lower rich people. And so in some cities you can transfer your child from a low performing school to a high performing school, but you have to get your child there. There's not going to be public transportation that allows you to do that. So you're going to have to have as a parent a fair amount of occupational flexibility. So I don't have to be there at a certain time and then I can leave and maybe pick my kid up from school because there's not going to be transportation, it's all tied to housing. And one of the things that again, people are not reluctant or I'm sorry, people are quite reluctant to talk about if they're rich and lower rich, is that they don't want affordable housing in their neighborhoods and they don't want poor children to attend the schools where their children attend. So if you want to see a well organized effort and a well attended meeting, show up at a school board meeting where they are proposing to change the districting lines for a high income public school. The parents will be there, they will have T shirts on, they will have placards, they will all have signed up to oppose changing the lines and they'll have a lawyer. And so we need, we have to talk about housing as I do in the book, and when I'm talking generally about economic inequalities, we have to talk about housing, because housing affects where your child likely will be educated.
- [33:26]
B
Well, so let's talk a little bit about housing and how do we make or again, this gets sorted to the last chapter of the book. But how has it become so wildly inaccessible for people?
- [33:39]
C
I'll talk about my favorite, and I should do the scare quote, favorite group of NIMBYs not in my backyards. These are the people that come up with every reason possible to make sure that cities keep exclusionary zoning. By that I mean zoning laws that say for you to build a home in this neighborhood, Mr. Or Ms. Developer, you must the home must be 3,500 square feet or larger. It must be on a lot. It must be set off from the street by a certain number of feet or yards. What you're doing is saying that the only homes that can be built there are large homes, and the only people that can afford large homes are by and large going to be rich and lower rich people. The other things that they will do is they'll say everyone in the house needs to be related in a certain type of way, which means that you can't have roommate situations, which could also help housing be more affordable for young adults that can't afford to buy but may be able to rent. And so is when we allow rich and lower rich people to decide whether apartments or duplexes or triplexes can be built in their neighborhood. What we're doing is giving them permission to legally increase the housing cost of folks that need to find affordable housing. So one of the things we, again, we just need to be honest about if we're going to keep exclusionary zoning laws. We need to say rich people who are existing homeowners are more important to us than people who need to find affordable housing to rent. If we're going to do it, we need to own it.
- [35:40]
B
So one of the great virtues of this book, I think, is that it highlights the degree to which all of the problems you discuss are intimately intertwined. A good job can facilitate access to good housing, provide for better educational opportunities, and so on. This is perhaps nowhere more clear than in your chapter on debt. How are middle class families drowning in debt? And correspondingly, what effect does this have on their ability to save middle class families?
- [36:12]
C
Families who have become middle class often use debt as an income replacement. Now, an economist would be giggling at me right now saying that debt could be income. But that's the simple reality for a lot of our lower and middle income families. So they went to maybe a low performing high school, maybe they went to college, maybe they didn't go to college. If they went to college, maybe they had to borrow. And it makes perfectly good sense to take out student loans because you're investing in your future. So you take out a student loan to get a college education. You need to make sure that the college that you attend provides a good return on investment. By that I mean you can get a job when you come out of the college. I'm not saying at what level, but you should go to college. If you're going to bar to go to college, you need to make sure that you can get a job when you come out of that college, which isn't true for a lot of the for profit institutions in this country. So let's assume that you have reasonable debt, you come out of college and you want to buy a home. Well, you can't find housing that's affordable, so you have to take on a massive mortgage, maybe a subprime mortgage, so it increases what you have to pay each month. Let's turn the homeowner into a parent. August comes every year and for a parent it is a horrifying prospect because all of the clothing that your children wore the year before, they can no longer wear. And so you have to go in debt if you don't have enough income, if your wages have been stagnant, which has been the case for most workers in this country since the 1980s, except for the highest earners. So you have to go in debt to buy your kid clothing. And for those of us that have, you know, that have either have young children or have had them, you get these lists when you go to school and your teachers need this and the schools need that. So you're sort of presented with this bill and you don't want to be that parent that doesn't send your kid in with all of those things. So it's again, if you have a job, even if it's a 40 hour a week good job, but you're not getting increasing wages, which is the norm for most lower middle and lower income workers, then you need to rely on debt just to be able to make ends meet. And that can't be what we think the middle class in this country should have to go through.
- [38:50]
B
So and also the thing about the list at the first day of school brought back some memories. But I also point out that schools have come to a state now as well. That part of that list is also donations to the classroom for basic supplies that you would think that schools should be able to put into the room.
- [39:17]
C
And it's not just at the beginning of the year, as you and I know. So when in Texas, it's probably February, you often would get an additional list or an email from the teachers for Kleenex because when the cold season kicks in, they have children in their class who need to blow their nose. And so we're providing things like Clorox wipes so that they can constantly hose down. And again, if you're in a school that's a fairly high income school that works, the parents, they show up with a case of tissue. You need bottled water. The other example I use is in K12 schools, one of the ones in Austin, I won't say which one. So the power went out and it was during August, and within a nanosecond, parents were showing up with cases of bottled water for the children's classrooms and the teachers. Well, in a lower income school, that water's not coming. And so for parents that can afford to do those things, debt is not an issue. For lower and middle income families that want to do those things so that their child doesn't seem like the odd one out, they may be using a credit card that they won't be able to repay to pay off the debt at the end of the month just to make sure their kids fit in.
- [40:48]
B
So, and we've sort of touched on this with our discussion about retirement. But why is, you know, again, it's fairly obvious that if you're in debt, you're not saving. But why is saving such an important marker for belonging to the middle class?
- [41:03]
C
Because savings are at least used to be the norm. You didn't have to go and take out a. Well, first, payday loans didn't exist, but you didn't have to go out and take out a payday loan to be able to do something that popped up immediately. There was an emergency. You need to go out of town to check on a parent that's not doing well. You need to replace the tire. Your refrigerator just died on you in the middle of July in Texas. So you're going to need to replace that one pretty quickly. Now, what lower and middle income families have to do is to effectively take out a consumer loan, whether they're charging it on a credit card, which they will repay off tenfold by the time they get through paying interest and potentially late fees, or they take out a payday loan which they have to roll over two or three times because they can't afford to repay that loan in the 15 or 30 day window that they're required to under the terms of the payday loan. If you are that deeply in debt, you're not saving. We don't have short term savings for lower and middle income families because they have so much short term debt. But the bigger crisis that we're facing is the retirement savings crisis. We don't have retirement savings. The middle class in this country doesn't have retirement savings for a of reasons. The main one being that employers decided that they didn't care about the long term retirement security of their current workers who will be former workers. And so we shifted in the beginning of the 1980s from a time when companies provided what is known as a defined benefit plan, which other people just called a pension. My parents are retired educators. They get two, I used to say paychecks. It's not a check, right. There's two deposits to their checking account each month based on their pension. Pensions were basically how many years did you work with the company and what was your. I mean it's based on whatever your highest salary was at the country. But you got that every single month my parents will receive a pension payment for the rest of their lives. That is simply not the reality for people under the age of 40 and it may be even under the age of 50. If you have retirement savings that are provided as part of your job, I won't say by your employer that are provided as part of your job, you are likely funding it, if not completely, then partially. So if your income has been stagnant, if you're drowning in debt and you're given the choice to contribute to a retirement savings plan, a lot of people are not taking or not making that choice. And as of now, it's not mandatory.
- [44:15]
B
Yeah, it's, it's. I work with our faculty union here and we've discussed at length our. We also have defined contribution plans and I think it's going to. It's had some interesting ramifications, I think. All right, so recognizing that this is a really big question with a lot of moving parts, you finished the book by offering a middle class new deal. So what are we going to do?
- [44:43]
C
So I'll do education first. Since we started talking about education, I am not arguing, I'm not suggesting, because I know someone in the political leader or a candidate in the state of Ohio has recently proposed that the problem with American school children is they just don't go to school long enough. They need to go through the summer. I am not advocating that, but what I'm suggesting is we need to rethink how we use our K12 buildings. We saw during COVID as I mentioned earlier, that we're using K12 buildings to do more than just educate our children. During COVID they fed our children. They were used as food distribution centers. They actually fed the whole family, not just the children. They were used as COVID testing centers, they were used as vaccine centers. So the buildings are already there. Everything works in the buildings. The lights go on, there's running water. So what I argue in the last chapter is to view K12 schools as more than just places that educate children under the age of 18 or 19, but as things that can be used to benefit an entire community. So one of the things that I propose that we do more in high schools and lower middle income neighborhoods is the community banking. Can we have a credit union? And this has taken place in some high schools in the U.S. but if we thought, okay, so we, we want to give students some training, apprenticeships where they can be paid. How about if we have a bank that we have in the high school, it teaches children about saving. Maybe the juniors and seniors could actually work in the bank to get work experience, to get something they can put on their resumes. And it also provides for lower cost banking services for lower and middle income parents and community members that would otherwise maybe turn to a higher priced and riskier online product. The other thing that I stress with respect to the public school buildings is we need to radically rethink why we have decided as a society in 2026 that we need to have a public school calendar that is based on an agrarian economy. Again, not suggesting that either public school teachers should be forced to work year round, nor should children be forced to go to school year round. But can we think about what are we using those summers for? Could we have an optional summer trimester? Some of the things that we could do during a voluntary summer trimester is augment the income of public school teachers who often have to do things like work at Disney or work at other theme parks during the summer just to supplement their income. Can we use the summer trimester to close some of the educational gaps that lower and middle income children are facing because their parents can't provide them an expensive shadow education. So we've already talked about the ACT and the SAT test prep courses. Can we offer those during the summer for children who either don't want to go to college or maybe are not educationally suited to go to college? Can we teach them how to prepare a resume, can we give them job skills training? And so one of the sort of big ideas that I have in the book, and it won't fit in with every community, but we need to look at what we currently have and say how can we better use it? I'll discuss one other thing and that's housing. So one of the things we saw during COVID was we used all sorts of buildings in different ways. So before COVID we used restaurants for human beings to go in and sit down and eat together with each other at a table. Post Covid, we are seeing more restaurants being places where people go into to take food, to take it back to their home. Now there's always been takeout in restaurants, but during COVID that's all restaurants were being used for. I've mentioned the different uses that we saw of public school buildings, but what we also saw is hotels that were no longer operational were being used to house people in some cities that needed to quarantine because they had tested positive for Covid. We also need to think of some of the buildings that we have out there that aren't being used. Can we use them to create more affordable housing? So the main thing that I argue, or at least I'm trying to argue in the last chapter is we need to stop saying, oh well, we can't do this. Oh well, we can't do that. That's impossible. Because when political leaders decided to create the middle class, they did crazy radical things like the GI bill and create a 15 to 30 year mortgage. We view them as the norm now. They weren't the norm at the time. So if we do some bold and innovative things now, they will soon become the norm, just as the GI bill and the 15 to 30 year mortgage is the norm.
- [50:28]
B
Well, both all interesting ideas and again for our listeners, please take a look at the book because there's those and even more. Michelle Dickerson, thank you so much for taking the time to talk today about your work before I let you go. And I recognize that your book is just coming out this month. Correct?
- [50:44]
C
It came not the best day of the month, but it came out on January 6th.
- [50:49]
B
Okay. All right. But I still feel we need to ask, you hinted at this earlier. What are you working on next?
- [50:56]
C
What I'm going to be focusing on next largely because when you have a 22 and a 25 year old sons, you sort of think a lot. And given what I'm a law professor and that's sort of the age group that I teach, I'm looking at what's going on with young adults in this country and specifically young men. I'm sort of tired of hearing the conversations on sort of the polar conversations of toxic masculinity and they're all misogynist. And then on the other hand, you hate young men and this country is trying to tear men down. We need to have a more nuanced conversation for little things like why is it that we don't have longer recesses in elementary school? As both of my sons, both of them, well, one of them is still a college student athlete, but both of them were. And I sort of people would tease me when I talk about my children. Is she describing raising children running horses or greyhounds? Because it's like run them down. So there's certain things that we've changed in the K12 school, I think for good reason, but they've had some detrimental effects. And also, as we mentioned earlier, it's harder to. To have a lot of children involved in organized sports at the K12 level because so much of that has been privatized. And I think that sports and athletics, particularly in the lives of young boys, can have some very useful benefits that I'm going to sort of explore and talk about. So that's where my research is going, is sort of how have our laws and policies change things in a way that has negatively affected the lives of young men.
- [52:42]
B
Very interesting. I look forward to getting that once again. My guest today has been a Michelle Dickerson, the author of the Middle Class New Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream from the University of California Press. My name is Tom Disena and you are listening to the New Books Network.
- [53:05]
C
Sam.