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The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America | 
 enlarge | Authors: Katherine S. Newman, Victor Tan Chen
Publisher: Beacon Press
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 51311
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 258
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.8
ISBN: 0807041408
Dewey Decimal Number: 305
EAN: 9780807041406
ASIN: 0807041408
Publication Date: September 1, 2008 (In 2 Days)
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Product Description
Named one of the Best Business Books of 2007 by Library Journal
The Missing Class gives voice to the 54 million Americans, including 21 percent of the nation's children, who are sandwiched between poor and middle class. While government programs help the needy and politicians woo the more fortunate, the "Missing Class" is largely invisible and ignored. Through the experiences of nine families, Katherine Newman and Victor Tan Chen trace the unique problems faced by individuals in this large and growing demographicathe "near poor." The question for the Missing Class is not whether they're doing better than the truly poorathey are. The question is whether these individuals, on the razor's edge of subsistence, are safely ensconced in the Missing Class or in danger of losing it all. The Missing Class has much to tell us about whether the American dream still exists for those who are sacrificing daily to achieve it.
"In this compassionate and clear-eyed analysis . . . Newman and Chen contribute significantly to the dialogue on America's widening inequities."
aPublishers Weekly
"The Missing Class is a call to action to change America."
aSenator John Edwards
"At last, a focus on people who struggle from month to month with housing, health care and education costs but don't fit into the government's comfortingly minimalist definition of poverty. Newman and Chen give us a vivid, close-up, and often moving look at the urban 'near poor.' An excellent follow-up to Newman's essential body of work on America's economic anxieties."
aBarbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed
"Just above the artificial 'poverty line,' millions of hard-working people struggle invisibly to gain a foothold on the promise of the American Dream. Their raw hardships and persistent hopes, collected in this book of unflinching portraits, ought to sound the alarm for an America grown complacent."
aDavid Shipler, author of The Working Poor: Invisible in America
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human face to the economic underclass July 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a very welcome, topical book, on a segment of the American population which is quite sizable and is growing, but is often overlooked. The ongoing economic downturn has expanded the size of those who fall short of the middle class but who earn enough to avoid designation as being in poverty. It is this group which authors, Kathleen Newman, Yale sociologist, and Harvard grad student Victor Tan Chen call "the missing class". The authors track the challenges which those in the "missing class" face. These challenges are largely interrelated and make the point, made repeatedly in the book, that membership in the missing class is so insecure that all elements of it are vulnerable when one element of it is de-stabilized. This is one of the major points of the book.
The authors define the missing class as above the poverty-line but still economically uncertain enough that members are only a paycheck or two from being on the streets, and they are certainly not in the middle class. Such economic insecurity can bleed into all aspects of lives, from familial relations, to monetary planning, from child-care to marriage. The authors show that if one's job situation changes, key elements of a person's life are thrown into chaos quite easily.
The thesis of the book is that membership in the missing class is not a sustainable escape from poverty. Membership is tenuous and taxing and far from certain. The authors cite many examples in which being in the missing class does not significantly separate people from poverty. The authors make the point that work conditions for those in the missing class may provide entree into the white-collar world, but that the membership is usually on the bottom rung of this class and so such membership is far from secure. One of the things which makes the missing class problematic is that there is often a lot of reliance on family, who sometimes may be caught in poverty and may be unjustifiably demanding of the family member who has done a little better. If relationships within the extended family are troublesome, it can be more difficult to address some of the significant challenges of being in the missing class. Perhaps kids are not trusted with family and so they are given more unregulated freedom. The kids might make decisions and those decisions may be good or may not. They may create more challenges. The tenuousness of the job situation may also present challenges with regard to health care. Health care might be not be available on reasonable terms, or even at all, from their employer. This will necessitate undertaking other, perhaps more short-term expensive but still necessary, health care, which might in turn require cutbacks on other crucial expenses like credit cards. Skimping on this payment can of course unleash more unpleasant results from unsympathetic multi-national corporations. This is one instance in which the tenuousness of membership in the missing class can be very unsettling and problematic. These are the sorts of Hobson's Choices which characterize life for those in the missing class.
The authors tracked nine families who were in the missing class from the tough district of Washington Heights, an area of Manhattan. Washington Heights had suffered through its own struggles during its recent history, in which time it had suffered from a major escalation of gang problems bought on, at least in part, by changing migration patterns into the area, and of course partially by decreased local government funding and the neglect of government institutions with little interest in the well-being of the poor and ethnically diverse. However, once population patterns settled, it seemed that greater stability meant for a better living and labor environment. While not a complete departure from the conditions which had troubled the area, it was more able to support those working hard to advance. Newman and Tan Chen had clearly spent a great deal of time at intervals over the course of approximately ten years. Given sufficient financial support to track stability over this time, the authors are able to reach conclusions on the challenges and shortcomings of those whose lives they document. The judgments are not value judgments, but observations on the effect of living, economically speaking, on a knife's edge. The results are not totally unexpected. One should imagine that some will struggle, some will encounter terrible hardships not of their own making, and that some might make poor decisions in the wake of unprecedented wealth in their lives. The vast majority of the people who are featured in the book are immensely sympathetic characters for who one roots. Most of their decisions are good. The bad thing about being in the missing class, however, is that one bad decision can unleash a cascade of dreadful consequences, which consequences would not accrue to those in the upper or lower middle-class were they simply to make one bad decision. Most seem to be doing their utmost to grasp their piece of the American pie. If one is to exclude the barrier of legal immigration, they do it by the book also.
The people in the book are not giving others short shrift in order to secure their own piece of the pie and they sacrifice and work very hard, simply in order to drag themselves out of poverty. The very fact that the subjects of this book are not grasping even for membership in the upper middle-class but only in the "missing class" is something of a cutting indictment of the opportunity for advancement in the United States. It is a fascinating book and one which should prompt thought about what is sufficient money to live on and whether the American system is sufficiently sympathetic to the people who live under it.
 Statistics in the flesh July 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The top 1% of America's population received 8.83% of national income in 1976 but were getting 21.93% by 2005. On average, a Fortune 500 C.E.O. made 40 times a worker's pay in 1980 but that ratio is 364 to 1 today.
That erosion of America's middle class has led to what authors Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen use as the title of their book: THE MISSING CLASS. Individuals living the in the missing class are one job loss, medical bill, or maxed-out credit card away from poverty.
While I quoted statistics, THE MISSING CLASS reports on America's underpaid workforce in human terms. The book's nine stories tell of people who live hoping they won't come home to an eviction notice. Of course, first they have to hope the repo man does not take their cars before they can drive home from their low-paying jobs.
Those who saw the documentary film THE BIG ONE will recall the tragedy of the woman whose small son died because the Workfare program forced her to take employment so far from home she could not watch him. Each of the nine THE MISSING CLASS narratives made me think of that family. Yet America closes hospitals and cuts education spending while it builds more prisons. Is that the plan?
Read THE MISSING CLASS.
too rich to be poor--too poor to be rich December 6, 2007
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
more important than we know.
our society is built by people in the middle -- too rich to be poor--too poor to be rich
the missing class is only missing society's attention on their struggle to survive
medical care for all generatiions--education for the young and older--language skills for
communication should be available to all
The Missing Class Is a Hit October 6, 2007
26 out of 29 found this review helpful
The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America
by Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen
Beacon Press ? 2007 258 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Tony Sipp
Note: Victor Chen mentions me on page 229 of The Missing Class as having been one of his journalistic mentors. I did "teach" and "advise" Victor for four years...But more: I respected and admired him...still do...always will...so...
The Missing Class tells the stories of nine families struggling and working assiduously to do more than keep their heads above water. They all want to earn their rightful place in the "middle class."
The research team and primary authors, my friend Victor and, though I have never met her, Katherine (if I may), are all certified academics.
Every time I come to the work of "certified academics," it is with a twinge of trepidation: The all-too-familiar expectation of a cloistered, pedantic voice speaking to me with hesitant semantics. I dread the first pages.
No worry here.
Victor and Katherine write in a delightfully fresh style which is crystalline without being fragile or precious. In the 1980's and 1990's, mainstream journalism embraced "writing for story." A style I called PHD/CNF: personalized, humanized, dramatized/creative non-fiction. That's their style.
Victor and Katherine tell the nine life stories (presented thematically not familially) in clear, concise, compassionate detail which gives us disturbing yet, at the same time, wonderful biographies.
These nine families are people who have experienced quiet desperation, powerful self-discipline, elation, miscalculation, self-destruction and whatever else composes the human experience.
About halfway through the first chapter, I thought of James Agee's and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. These books, vastly different on the surface, are identical in impact: stark, human, bright.
Poetry is simple, sensuous and passionate. That being so, Victor and Katherine are poets.
But another crucial element of good writing is surprise. At one point, we are engrossed in the story of a family that is struggling with a myriad of troubles and then we learn that one of their daughters...but let Victor and Katherine tell it:
Aaliyah, a junior at Yale, went to a pool party in Brooklyn. Two men, upset that they were being kept out of the private party, forced their way into the building and sprayed the pool area with bullets from a .22-caliber gun. Aaliyah was hit in the neck. By the time she arrived at the hospital the bullet lodged in her chest. The doctor opened her chest, but Aaliyah suffered a stroke and died (91)
Or
The story of a strong, self-actualized single mother who finally gets a job with a good salary but who has to face a new cost:
At the same time, it is important to consider the price exacted by those rising earnings--the disappearance of crucial hours at home, which is all the more costly in the context of uneven child care and troubled schools. Neither the money nor the satisfaction that comes from having a job will help very much if there is no one around to mind the children. (116)
Here is the dilemma: What are "they" to do? What are "we" to do?
Victor and Katherine do not let anyone off easily. They hold everyone accountable for the results of their own actions, but they do understand that they are, in the words of my cousin Charlie, "homo hapless."
The last chapters present some scenarios already in place to help.
What I have taken from this book is a new slant on Pogo's "They is us." They are not the enemy; they are the same as I am--a shaky being trying to make the best of it, not always sure how--but always sure why--because.
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