Customer Reviews

High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families

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This is a GREAT book and I would encourage every citizen of America to read it, young or old. It's actually a hair-raising book. Well researched and each chapter has a personal, true life story of a family or individual that has been challenged with the topic being discussed.

Since the other reviews to date go over the book, I want to share what I took from it. First, I got out all my insurance policies after reading the chapters on how the insurance industry has slowly & slyly sandbagged us consumers. I read them with a fine tooth comb and voila! wouldn't you know it - just like the author said they were doing, well that is what they are doing. Sneaky company (and this is one of the Big Three property/casualty companies in California and the rest of the country) well guess what, they did exactly what the author said they were doing - changing the terms of the policy in such a way that the ordinary consumer, you & me, who (unfortunately) trust our agents so well ... are/were clueless that this got by us. Yep they changed me from the Guaranteed Replacement coverage on my home to the Limited Replacement + some percentage of cost overrun. And it got by me and I'm pretty smart (at least I thought I was). Just as it has probably gotten by most of you too. I called my agent last month and he told me it was the best policy money could by, Limited but with a 150% total replacement ratio, and furthermore the company I was considering replacing them with, well they had a reputation of quoting low and then next year WHAM they would sock it to me. I don't think so because that company is the one used exclusively by AARP and I just don't think AARP would stand for that kind of treatment. But back to my agent .. funny, but my policy said ... 125%. My agent disagreed with me and spoke to me in such a way that I would never want to go look further. But I did look further and HE WAS WRONG. I called the Home Office and got clarification and it is 125%. MY AGENT DIDN'T KNOW WHAT HE SOLD ME and my agent has been my agent since 1988 - or my agent wants that commission. He's a nice guy, I really don't know. But I'm not asking him. I got very angry when I realized that I had been sandbagged and g-d forbid if my house did burn to the ground, I would end up paying out of pocket over $200,000 to rebuild it just as it is.

Just as many of the Oakland/San Diego and other parts of California that have faced total losses have had to do.

The case studies in the book are all the same - about how the families of Oakland and San Diego fires really took it on the chin. The losses above the policy limits were/are staggering. Guess what, with rare exception, I'll bet you a zillion bucks that if you are reading this review or the book, chances are you are grossly underinsured.

I changed that. I changed companies and policies in the last 2 weeks. And surprisingly, between my car, home and umbrella policy, I went DOWN $600/year in premium along with going up from $1M to $2M in my umbrella. That was worth the book right there.

Then on to the ERISA chapters. What a shocker. I really was stunned at what I read. Imagine this law, passed to protect US the workers, in reality does not protect anyone except the insurance companies. Coincidentally there was a story in the LA Times last week about a woman whose 30-yr old husband died and was covered with $400,000 in his group life policy through his job. Guess what, the company and the insurance company refused to pay the death benefit even though the deceased employee paid the premiums for over the 3 years he worked there. The widow sued in state court, the insurance company knows its rights and got it into federal court (because this is ERISA) and the grieving widow was ordered by court to get the premiums paid returned to her and no payment for the policy. And it is not appealable. Who in the world ever knew that? Did you? I didn't. Does this mean that all life insurance policies through your job won't get paid? I guess I was lucky when my dad died 21 years ago because his group life policy did pay me. But then again my dad owned the company so suspect they didn't want to futz with that claim. However the gall of the company to deny the claim and then the courts, under ERISA precedent rulings, denying the payment. I almost fell off my chair. This is just as the author described is happening in the book.

So if ERISA is undermining employee's benefits (and this includes health coverage too, not just pensions, IRA's & other employer provided plans, employer offered disability and the rest of the benefits of the job) and if ERISA is stripping all our rights of we workers, what is left?

The chapters and stories on employeer provided disability coverage almost left me in tears. I usually shed tears only when reading fiction. This was just a scandalous nightmare to read. But I believe it. And the reason I believe it is that my former husband went blind in his last job due to a detached retina-like condition and his privately held disability company policy (coincidentally the same one talked about in the book) denied him his benefits for close to 4 years. Good thing my ex is an attorney and could take them on. 4 YEARS. While my ex is an attorney what he wasn't able to do was to pull money for living expenses out of a hat along with a few rabbits. He ended up on the brink of bankruptcy with this stunt the company pulled. How an attorney that goes blind can continue to be a litigator and read his briefs is beyond me - and the disability company plays the 'let's see who can hold out the longest' game.

This really is sick stuff.

I realize this is a long review. But I decided to list real life stories to support exactly what this book is all about. I have to say, anybody reading this review that is thinking about buying the book, STOP NOW and buy this book. I came upon it at Borders by accident, it was shelved under Economics and not my favorite category which is Investments - and I don't really like economics, but this is an easy & engrossing book to read. And the time has now come at this passage of time in our history that the public, ALL OF US, need to get our heads out of the sand and meet these challenges head on, informed, and not stupidly ignorant. Ignorance costs and at this point of our historical times, NOBODY can afford to be ignorant anymore.

Please read the book. And thank you for reading this review.

High Wire is a great book for two reasons. First, it presents a wealth of statistical and anecdotal evidence documenting the additional risk that many of us have sensed we are shouldering even in the best of times. Second, it does so in a reasoned, even-handed fashion that liberals and conservatives alike should find persuasive.

Among financial journalists, Gosselin stands out as a passionate moderate. He acknowledges the benefits that 25 years of market-focused policy changes have spread across the U.S. economy--faster growth, higher productivity, lower unemployment among them. But he perceives more clearly than most the trade-offs those policy changes have forced upon us--diminished pay and benefits, less secure retirements and a substantially increased risk of individual and familial catastrophe.

It's a scary portrait, but Gosselin has not lost faith. For nearly four centuries, he notes, American have been striving to strike the right balance between personal opportunity and mutual obligation. The past 25 years represent a pendulum swing that appears to have carried us well past the midpoint. Restoring balance to the system will require accurate data, perceptive analysis--and courage to change. In one book, Gosselin has served up plenty of each.

Gosselin's "High Wire" asserts that over the past quarter-century the "ownership society" is becoming the "on-your-own society," contrary to the thinking behind the Mayflower Compact that united everyone for the common good.

Insurance is Gosselin's biggest target, and anecdotal evidence provided by actual Americans his vehicle. Private sector health insurers were exempted from professional liability due to ERISA (1974) rulings, state laws notwithstanding. Thus, these insurers have every incentive to delay and with-hold payments, and plaintiff attorneys little/no incentive to sue for damages. Similarly, homeowners (about 60%) are often surprised to find their home insurance scaled back from "guaranteed replacement cost" to "extended replacement cost" ($X + Y%), while others find coverage unavailable at any cost. Finally, pensions are increasingly threatened by the vagaries of the stock market, coupled with the time and information demands associated with it. (Gosselin documents that even Nobel Prize winners in economics do take the time to do so.)

Gosselin's most alarming revelation, however, is the fact that the odds of a family seeing an income drop of 50% or more during any 2-year interval have gone from about 5% in the 1970s to about 9% in the 2000's. The pattern is the same for all ages, income levels, and amount of education. Further, the average size workplace slid 18% during the same period; 50% in L.A. - smaller firms have always had weaker job and benefit security.

Clearly there are fewer stable jobs and sources of reliable benefits. Gosselin also emphasizes that a college education is less than touted. Large debts hanging over graduates (the average private four-year school cost increased 8X over the prior three decades, public school costs rose 7X, while median incomes rose 23%). Most "increased aid" (the rationale offered for these increases) actually consists of loans.

A major Gosselin weak point is his overemphasis on anecdotes and an underemphasis on generalizable, clear statistics. (The lack of clarity is due to his continual failure to state whether various statistics that are offered are inflation-adjusted or not.)

"High Wire's" biggest weakness, however, is his failure to provide any information/data on why jobs, earnings, and benefits are weakening. Thus, readers cannot understand the overall logic behind these dark trends (temporary, or permanent) or develop reasonable solutions (eg. simply require better treatment of workers, or also shield American corporations from rapacious competitors).

Elephants in the room that Gosselin missed include: #1: Outsourcing to Asia, legal (eg. H-1B) and illegal immigration, and automation are causing major job losses. #2: Runaway costs in higher education are largely encouraged by government funding. #3: Runaway costs in health care are also encouraged by government funding; government also has missed a large opportunity to identify and decrease wasteful spending.

The "good news" is that President Bush's effort to privatize Social Security and add it to the "ownership society" failed - just before the latest market dive.

As we choose our next President, Peter Gosselin zeroes in on issues that have essentialy been ignored since the early 1980's and which need to be brought to the forefront of the political discourse. The book begins with the Mayflower compact and reminds us that America's greatness has been built on shared responsibility. Sadly, our nation has drifted from its moorings as we have lost much of the social safety net that was so carefully built beginning with the Progressive era and continuing through the Great Depression. That safety net protected Americans and set them on a course of unparalleled prosperity following World War II.

As Peter Gosselin points out, that safety net has been frayed and the compact broken. We hear much talk about the uninsured in America, but High Wire illustrates that even those who are fortunate to have insurance might only have a lottery ticket that may or may not lead to coverage when disaster strikes. Same for homeowners insurance and the same principle has also broken the compact that built American business where hard work and dedication is rewarded by an appreciative employer.

High Wire is a call for leadership by our next President and our other elected representatives at the federal, state and local levels and a manual for those leaders, pointing out the failures of today and outlining the necessary fixes for tomorrow.

I don't think this book will get much notice or have much impact. Sure, it will encourage those who agree with its points, but I can't imagine that it will reach the general population in a big way. The idea of the book is that Americans, all but the very richest, are being sacrificed on the alter of private ownership that only benefits that thin upper crust of wealthy people. The rest are losing their ability to retire, to have health care, to securely own their homes, provide college educations for their children (or get them for themselves), or even have a job with a good company.

The author does point out the very interesting idea of the "unjob" where many of us work because the traditional career is closed to us for a variety of reasons, yet we can't start our own profitable company (or are working towards that goal), and we scrape by making a living and providing our own benefits with consulting, contracting, or other short term work. Usually we have multiple gigs running at the same time.

My own view is that our system does put too much of the burden of dislocation and disruption on the workers and too little on the companies and executives who either create or decide to use these dislocations as part of their business strategy (even if that is bankruptcy). However, many of the examples Gosselin cites in his book, while unfortunate, are also fairly well to do people who chose to live a life of consumption rather than with prudence and thrift and now want someone to bail them out of their difficulties. Sure, some of them got some very bad breaks in health or dishonest companies. And others did not read their insurance policies closely enough. Still, there is no doubt that some insurance companies push those with expensive claims into court hoping that either the claimant will die before they can collect or that the legal approach will simply be more costly than they can bear.

I thoroughly disagree with Gosselin's notion that somehow we need to turn back the clock and go back a few decades to large corporations that employed people for life and provided pensions. We can't go back because the world has changed, people live too long after 65 to have that be the retirement age. Do you realize that when Social Security was first created only about 3% of the population lived to collect it? We would have to push the retirement age up past 72 or more to achieve similarly "secure" retirements that would not bankrupt companies or society.

While I appreciate Gosselin's good heart and like some of his observations, his prescriptions are faulty and too nostalgic to be taken as a serious prescription for what ails us.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

I have long enjoyed Peter Gosselin's interesting articles on the economy in the Los Angeles Times, and I was excited to see them expanded in this great book. Gosselin blends a researcher's keen eye for numbers and details with a journalist's empathy and lyricism. This is an enjoyable and fascinating work and should be read by anyone who lives and works in the current economy.

High Wire takes a fresh, new look at the economic stresses and strains facing American families today. Gosselin's statistical analysis is thorough and convincing and is paired with thoughtful, heart-breaking stories of folks reaching for the American dream stopped short by increasing costs for college education, medical care, and retirement. It's a down to earth consideration that balances families, friends, and neighbors with smart economic inquiry. Bravo, Peter!

I just finished reading High Wire and I learned a lot from it. Peter Gosselin really gets to the heart of what has been going on with the economy and the job market over the last 25 years. The books tracks the exact changes that have occurred since I graduated from college and got my first job. Peter does a great job at explaining very complicated subjects. Any one who is going to be in the workforce and is concerned about their security must read this book so they can understand what has got us to this point in the econony and job market and be prepared for what is to come. The book is not about doom and gloom. It is about explaining change and getting the reader to think about how they need to adapt to an uncertain future.

This is a decent enough book for someone interested in a "light" read on the subject material. The best part is the bibliography for further reading on particular subjects.

There is not enough "new" here in the content to make it a compelling read if you have already works like: "Screwed; the undeclared war on the middle class" and "The Two Income Trap" and "The Great Risk Shift". The general theme is there: economic conditions for middle- and lower-middle income households have deteriorated through the loss of union protection, pension elimination, outsourcing in fields that used to be fairly exclusive professions but technology has rendered internationally competitive, education costs are higher, etc.

On the other hand, if you are new to the field it is a nice starting point and the bibliography/notes are pretty good.

Peter Gosselin discusses real problems that American families face today, especially those of the working poor. However, he views the past nostalgically. Nostalgia can be comforting, as you retreat from an uncomfortable present to a better past. You imagine former times as simpler, richer and nobler than the reality with which you struggle each day. But people of the past faced problems, too, and those led them to make the choices that resulted in the current situation. Gosselin sincerely wishes to improve society. His perspective is progressive. Politically conservative readers may fear that his solution would turn more of the U.S. economy over to the control of politicians and bureaucrats, concentrating power and decision making into fewer hands. However, the book is a passionately written cry from the heart; if nothing else, it is a wake-up call. getAbstract recommends it to human resource personnel who are concerned about work-family balance and benefits, as well as to current-events junkies and observers of politics and the economy.