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Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class

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This is exactly the kind of sociology text that every person in America, those in the middle class in particular, should read and discuss. Barbara Ehrenrich does a fascinating and completely absorbing job of tracing, explaining and analyzing the history/rise of the professional middle class in America from post-WWII through the Reagan Era. She also points out quite perceptively how pervasive middle class ethos are in shaping our culture, politics and the media, and how as a result the working poor, who constitute the majority of U.S. citizens, are often ill-defined and underserved. Her thoughts on everything from the media to student revolts to yuppies to the fitness craze are razor sharp, in addition to being a very telling mirror to hold up to America's excess and increasing social stratification. I sincerely hope that Ehrenreich decides to update this book and look at this last decade of our social/class history. A must read.

I read "Fear of Falling" out of curiosity. Can a book published in 1989 about the American middle class still be relevant? Sadly -- for reasons that will be detailed below -- it still can be. The middle class in 2004 is still as selfish, self-seeking, and elitist as it was when Ehrenreich wrote this book. There are quaint features to the book. The author speaks indignantly of business executives earning $1 million per year -- a big salary in 1989, but chump change for the CEO of 2004.

Ehrenreich defines the middle class as the professional and managerial workers -- the doctors, lawyers, professors, and mid-level executives -- of our society. In 2004, members of the professional middle class would have incomes of at least $60,000 up to about $250,000 per year. They would comprise nearly one half of the American population. Over the middle class would be the rich, two or three percent of the population, and below would be the lower or working classes, comprising about one half of the population.

Ehrenreich provides a mini-history of the professional middle class from 1960 up till the late 1980s. What one sees over these three decades is increasing distance between the middle and the lower classes -- plus increasing disinterest in addressing problems of poverty and social injustice in the U.S. The middle class "is too driven by its own ambitions, too compromised by its own elite status, and too removed from those whose sufferings cry out most loudly for redress." She attributes the middle class's anxiety to "fear of falling" into the nether-world of Walmart workers and trailer park living. Her (vague) prescription for wholesome social change is expanded educational opportunity and removing "artificial barriers."

The trends Ehrenreich identifies in 1989 have not only continued but intensified. The distance between rich and poor, socially and economically, has increased. The professional middle class has lost much of what social conscience it once had and movement toward an equalitarian society, discernible in 1960, has been reversed. Is that a bad thing? I think so.

Smallchief

I really learned so much from this book. The unfortunate thing is that she wrote it in 1989 and I don't think she's planning another one... but it's amazing to just read the history from the perspecive of a person in 1989. She spots some very bad trends in corporate america / industrial society which have subsequently worsened now that it's 15 years later. A lot of her predictions (or subtle suggestions at what might go wrong) have come true - and it's not surprising because her hypotheses and analyses are based on solid data. There was some passage where she talked about CEOs getting paid absurd salaries like 650k and she didn't see an end to the rise... well, she hit that nail on the head.

In "nickel and dimed" you really heard her voice, but this book is very very factual - and she interjects with her everpresent wit now & again - but not as often as her recent work. Her writing style is an absolutely beautiful combination of wry wit, confidence, vast intelligence, humor, and deep understanding of the issues (through research). I would LOVE to read a 2004 version of this book but I don't know if it's top of mind for her these days. Either way - you still learn a lot from this book. I love it. I wish I were a sociology major in college now so I'd have someone to talk about this book with! It's DEFINITELY worth finding someone with an out of print copy to buy from. The book is priceless.

I hope that with the success of her acid dipped expose of what's really going on in the marketplace of the working poor( Nickel and Dimed) all of Barbara Ehrenreich's books will be back in print because she is a species of writer on the verge of extinction. Unabashedly pro union and anti compassionate conservatism and faith based charity and decidedly not glamorous in her pursuit of topics and people to interview she does the grind work of looking statistics in the eye and debunking some of our more vigorously pandered myths. This volume in particular does a fantastic job in holding a mirror up to the paranoias and greed of the middle class who suspects every contrarian to be after what they have accrued and fenced in and considers its possessions and spouses( is that one category or two?) its natural born right as long as the community is drawn with an infantile crayon and nobody knows who works the sewers.
It illustrates a society where everyone wants to purchase their own fringes of good taste, the rich beg more than the poor because they can always afford the bail for atonement and where every transgression spawns a fresh bombardment of analysts trying to mine the national soul, subtlety is never profitable medicine and the chosen few worry about the calories in walnut raspberry dressing. In the honored tradition of Studs Terkel Ms Ehrenreich points out that there is one airwave for the brash winners, the losers of all stripes remain unseen unless they are truly interesting criminals but the large portion of the silent middle class is stuck in a morass of anger, fear and wall building to leave everybody out who can't be labelled with a corporate golf pass, a church membership or a Neiman Marcus preferred customer I.D. The result is that they have mortgaged about every particle of their humanity to one vendor or another.

Right on the money sad but true.Well researched and documented. Should make people think about the world we are creating. It's too bad the people who won't read this book are the ones that should. We take too much and give too little.

It's very easy for a book on a topic like this to be a lot of fluff, facts molded to fit perhaps outdated ideological frameworks and that sort of thing. This book is not like that, it's a thoughtful analysis of the American "professional-managerial middle class" in the late 20th century. It was also not a boring read, at least not for me. Whether she has analyzed things correctly or not I don't know, she does have some good insights and I agree with her judgements on certain topics like on the "silent majority". I also enjoyed her book "Nickled and Dimed". Thomas Frank of The Baffler gives very high praise for this book, I think he even said everything he has written after reading it is just footnotes to this book. He is a good writer as well so that is quite a compliment.

It is always dangerous to assume that the people that one knows constitute the majority. On the other hand, Barbara Ehrenreich's characterization of the middle class failed to include most of the people that I know (I was 36 when this book was published.) Ehrenreich did little to document that her characterizations were accurate; she may document economic facts, but not surveys of the attitudes of the people whose inner life she is supposedly chronicling. Mostly she relied on the scorn for the demonized "yuppies" spreading a plague of selfishness.

The people that I knew had lost confidence in the ability of the government to solve social problems. They expected the here-to-fore successful Social Security System to implode. Ehrenreich's title is right on point for their fears, but she mostly misses the implications in her text. Having lost confidence in the government's ability to meet crises, many middle-class people felt an increased need to fortify their own lives against disaster. They were certainly not encouraged to make sacrifices on behalf of the less well-off, especially if they thought that they would be futile in any case.

I don't think that Ehrenreich understands their feelings or the trends that lay behind them, and certainly not the involvement of the left in creating them. And as E.J. Dionne said in his brilliant book Why Americans Hate Politics: "Many young voters who had been drawn to the New Left and the counterculture because they attacked authority were drawn to conservatism because it attacked the state. Thus did the New Left wage war against the paternalistic liberal state and defeat it. The right picked up the pieces". Bruce J. Schulman's The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics also skillfully chronicles the transition.

Whatever truths she may have revealed about other people, this book had no resonance for this member of the middle class.

The main theme of this book is middle class achieves its station by working hard and self denial. This is so against human nature. Thus all people in middle class fear constantly that as soon as they stop working hard or denying themselves, they will fall out of the class. The author probably never thought that people can save money and take a slower pace later. But the author's main concern is, these two traits differentiate the middle class from the poor, thus must be removed from the requirements for professionalism. After that, she claims, learning and work will be enjoyable to everyone, and inequality will disappear from the society.

I disagree with the author, since I believe no matter how one enjoys learning and doing his job, one still has to work hard and experience self-denial. This does not only mean putting in long hour. This also means responsibility, dedication, focus, attention to details, pursuit of excellence, etc. I would not want my doctor to be without these traits.

Most people are unhealthy because they cannot deny themselves of pleasures, e.g, pizza, smoking, drinking, sloth. I know a lady who claims that she 'works out' everyday but is still awfully unfit, because she never exerts herself. She walks on the treadmill at 2 mph, while holding on the bar and reading a magazine. There is a lot truth in "no pain, no gain".

The author wants our education to de-emphasize competitiveness. I wonder if she is referring to sports or academics. Last time I checked, the schools do not encourage students to excel or compete on academics at all.

The author laments that unlike the old days, uneducated women with good looks cannot find husband with college degrees today. She forgot this is a blessing for well-educated plain-looking women. She is extremely concerned with people who were born without money. But it is just equally unfair for some people to be born without good looks. Life is not fair. To seek happiness, one has to do one's best, using whatever one is given by God.

The fundamental error of the author's thinking is, poor people do not have chance to get education. This is not true in Asian culture. For thousands years in China, poor kids could rise above their station by passing the civil service exam. What's at fault is the US education. It costs too much, yet delivers too little, because the US's culture of low expectation, and because the schools' main purpose is to meet the teachers' union's demands rather than to teach.

Some people are not born to like books. Many kids do not like to study because their parents don't. There are exceptions. Anita Hill was from a poor family which did not even have books. She love to read so much that she read Sears catalog. Those who like to study will probably somehow find a way to finish their college, especially with all the available student loans today. Those who don't like to study will not, no matter how rich their parents are.

Study is not the only way to gain success. But no matter what you do, hard work and self-denial are prerequisites for success. For example, if you want to start a business, you must be willing to work hard, and to save money for capital, probably by giving up eating out or buying expensive items.

The author thinks our society is too competitive, and wants everyone to relax, to stop the rat race, to renounce materialism. I agree with her to a certain degree. However, working hard and self-denial are necessary virtues, not for competition. Besides, even we don't want to compete, the foreigners will. We cannot isolate ourselves from the global economy.

Since the author loathes hard work and self-denial, perhaps the following quote from Chinese Mencius might give her something to think about:
"Thus, when Heaven is going to give a great responsibility to someone, it first makes his mind endure suffering. It makes his sinews and bones experience toil, and his body to suffer hunger. It inflicts him with poverty and knocks down everything he tries to build. In this way Heaven stimulates his mind, stabilizes his temper and develops his weak points."

I came across Barbara Ehrenreich's books by chance through an assignment for a course by a professor. The first book was "Nickel and Dimed", and found it thought-provoking, especially being a single mother and being there. This book shows the that the middle class is shrinking-now, in today's times-it's more like the working-class and the working poor. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. I am now reading her book, "Global Woman" and picked up "Bait and Switch". She writes to relate to the working person and understands their plight and struggle of "robbing Peter to pay Paul."

Some sociology texts, particularly those dealing with class issues, can be pretty boring to read but this book holds your attention beginning to end. I highly recommend it. Check out my used copy available for sale!