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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Since we're talking about it, an interesting review of the Warren book.

Choice grafs:

[T]hey point to the entry of women into the paid labor force as a major contributing factor. One result of women going to work was that families lost their safety net. When there’s no stay-at-home parent to provide care, the hardship of having a sick child or an aging parent takes on a new, financial dimension. It used to be that in a pinch, the wife could go out and get a job to tide the family over. That’s obviously not an option if she’s already employed. With 75 percent of their earnings consumed by fixed expenses (leaving little margin for error), middle-class families need that safety net more than ever—and it’s not there.

When women entered the workforce en masse, "they ratcheted up the price of a middle-class life for everyone" by making it more difficult to subsist on a single income. You would think that a family’s financial muscle would be doubled with both parents working, but that’s not the case. Indeed, while today’s double-income family takes in 75 percent more than a single-breadwinner family a generation ago, it has 25 percent less discretionary income at its disposal. This steep decline in discretionary income is largely due to a sharp rise in fixed costs. Access to the very things that define the middle class, such as good education and owning a home, has become more expensive. Indeed, the crisis, as Ms. Warren and Ms. Tyagi portray it, has sprung from good intentions: the fundamental desire of parents to do well by their children, to provide them with the trappings of the middle class. Not long ago, for example, preschool and college (the bookends of a child’s education, and both paid for out of pocket), were seen as "extras." Today, doing without is widely viewed as a handicap. And tuition has soared: In-state college costs have almost doubled in less than 25 years. Even public education—what the authors identify as "the heart of the problem"—is not free. Fierce bidding wars have erupted over the limited supply of housing within good school districts. Fanning the fire is the two-earner family, which, with its extra earning power, has helped to push housing prices off the charts.

I'm also posting it because I think the author is the little sister of my best friend in the 8th grade, though I can't tell.