Now You Can Be Broke *and* Depressed!

  The Great Risk Shift - The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care and Retirement and How You Can Fight Back, Jacob S. Hacker

In small doses, I like to read about finance, economics and current events, especially now with the apocalypse looming.  (Again, in small doses.)  Although short and easily readable, this book didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.  However, it was published in 2006, so if more people had read it when it came out, they may have been a little more prepared for the financial meltdown.  Even back in the early 2000s I was convinced we were in a real estate bubble, and it turns out I wasn’t the only one.  In the chapter “Risky Families,” Hacker discusses the “middle class squeeze” and how so much of the middle class’s spending is on big ticket items like college tuition and housing.  Page 97:

“The problem is that there is no guarantee that the housing market will remain hot.  (The sharp upward trend of the real-estate market in the past fifteen years is, in fact, even more historically anomalous than the run-up of stock prices in the 1990s.)  And if the air goes out of the housing bubble, families will be in serious financial trouble.”

So there you have it, folks - this guy warned of the housing bubble bursting.  I know that even later than 2008 people in Seattle were still drinking the NAR Kool-Aid.  Some of them still are.

Unfortunately, the book is short on solutions.  They amount to get wise, get mad, get even.  Aside from educating ourselves and voting, there is not much left that we can do.

Looks like they published a new edition because now the subtitle is The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream.  If you go to Amazon.com you can buy it with Barbara Ehrenriech’s Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, another worthy, albeit depressing, read.  Who needs Stephen King?  This stuff keeps me up at night.

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