December 21, 2011

• The sweat of your brow

  Meet the Toil Index, which might be the chart of the year. If you’re think it’s getting harder to live as well as your parents, you’re absolutely right.

  
  

  It shows why it’s so hard for working people to live decently these days. Working families are running faster and faster just to afford the same things their parents enjoyed, namely decent homes and decent schools for the kids.

  This is the same territory Elizabeth Warren began mapping in the early 2000s, with The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke. The thesis from Ms. Warren was that families need to have two parents cranking away all the time in order to stay in the middle class. If something happens to one parent, she wrote, like a layoff or an injury, then it’s all falls apart.

  
  

  • 6:03 pm
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