The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America [Hardcover]

Katherine S. Newman (Author), Victor Tan Chen (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 1, 2007

Fifty-seven million Americans-including 21 percent of the nation's children-live a notch above the poverty line, and yet the challenges they face are largely ignored. While government programs assist the poor, and politicians woo the more fortunate, the "Missing Class" is largely invisible and left to fend for itself.

Missing Class parents often work at a breakneck pace to preserve the progress they have made and are but one divorce or unexpected hospitalization away from sliding into poverty. Children face an even more perilous and uncertain future because their parents have so little time to help them with their schoolwork or guide them during their adolescent years. With little supervision, the younger generation often flounders in school, sometimes falling prey to the same problems that are prevalent in the much poorer communities that border Missing Class neighborhoods. Paradoxically, the very efforts that enabled parents to get ahead financially often inhibit their children from advancing; they are in real danger of losing what little ground their parents have gained.

The Missing Class is an urgent and timely exploration that describes-through the experiences of nine families-the unique problems faced by this growing class of people who are neither working poor nor middle class. Katherine Newman and Victor Tan Chen trace where these families came from, how they've struggled to make a decent living, and why they're stuck without a safety net. An eloquent argument for the need to think about inequality in a broader way, The Missing Class has much to tell us about whether the American dream still exists for those who are sacrificing daily to achieve it.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this compassionate and clear-eyed analysis, sociologist Newman and journalist Chen posit that the middle class gains of the 1990s have been imperiled by the recent rollback of New Deal–style government aid. Millions of Americans climbed above the poverty line at the end of the 20th century, but since then, the risk of falling back has grown substantially. This policy-oriented collection of case studies addresses the plight of the 57 million near-poor, a largely overlooked missing class just out of reach of public assistance. Despite decent wages, the authors argue, the near-poor are saddled with various burdens that keep them hovering one disaster away from outright poverty and put their children at high risk of sliding down the economic ladder. Drawing on interviews conducted from 1995 to 2002 with families and public service professionals in the New York area, the authors chart in alternately uplifting and dismal detail the distinct perspectives of several low-income households. While they don't address those entering the missing class from above and perhaps too easily extrapolate from their conclusions, Newman and Chen contribute significantly to the dialogue on America's widening inequities. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

Although the poverty rate in the U.S. is the highest in the industrial world, there is a much larger segment of the American population that virtually no one pays attention to: the near poor. Fifty-seven million Americans live in this nether region, beyond the ranks of the "working poor," yet still struggling financially to maintain a decent standard of living. This is what the authors dub the "Missing Class." Through a series of profiles of families living on the financial edge, the authors demonstrate the challenges this group faces when it comes to housing, education, health care, and debt. Although this group has largely been left out of the rush to home ownership, these cash-starved households have proven to be cash cows for credit-card companies, whose biggest profits come from those who can only afford to make the minimum monthly payments. Too poor to enjoy the comforts of the middle-class and too wealthy to qualify for government assistance, the Missing Class is often trapped without a safety net. This revealing exposé gives voice to this growing segment of the population. Siegfried, David

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (September 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807041394
• ISBN-13: 978-0807041390
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,119,306 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Katherine Newman is the author of "The Accordion Family: Boomerang Kids, Anxious Parents, and the Private Toll of Global Competition" (Beacon Press, 2012). She is a professor of sociology and James Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Author of ten books on middle-class economic instability, urban poverty, and the sociology of inequality, Newman has taught at the University of California-Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton.

Photographer Copyright Credit Name: Will Kirk, 2012.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Missing Class Is a Hit October 6, 2007

By Anthony Sipp

Format:Hardcover

The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America
by Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen
Beacon Press ©? 2007 258 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Tony Sipp

Note: Victor Chen mentions me on page 229 of The Missing Class as having been one of his journalistic mentors. I did "teach" and "advise" Victor for four years...But more: I respected and admired him...still do...always will...so...

The Missing Class tells the stories of nine families struggling and working assiduously to do more than keep their heads above water. They all want to earn their rightful place in the "middle class."

The research team and primary authors, my friend Victor and, though I have never met her, Katherine (if I may), are all certified academics.

Every time I come to the work of "certified academics," it is with a twinge of trepidation: The all-too-familiar expectation of a cloistered, pedantic voice speaking to me with hesitant semantics. I dread the first pages.

No worry here.

Victor and Katherine write in a delightfully fresh style which is crystalline without being fragile or precious. In the 1980's and 1990's, mainstream journalism embraced "writing for story." A style I called PHD/CNF: personalized, humanized, dramatized/creative non-fiction. That's their style.

Victor and Katherine tell the nine life stories (presented thematically not familially) in clear, concise, compassionate detail which gives us disturbing yet, at the same time, wonderful biographies.

These nine families are people who have experienced quiet desperation, powerful self-discipline, elation, miscalculation, self-destruction and whatever else composes the human experience.

About halfway through the first chapter, I thought of James Agee's and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. These books, vastly different on the surface, are identical in impact: stark, human, bright.

Poetry is simple, sensuous and passionate. That being so, Victor and Katherine are poets.

But another crucial element of good writing is surprise. At one point, we are engrossed in the story of a family that is struggling with a myriad of troubles and then we learn that one of their daughters...but let Victor and Katherine tell it:
Aaliyah, a junior at Yale, went to a pool party in Brooklyn. Two men, upset that they were being kept out of the private party, forced their way into the building and sprayed the pool area with bullets from a .22-caliber gun. Aaliyah was hit in the neck. By the time she arrived at the hospital the bullet lodged in her chest. The doctor opened her chest, but Aaliyah suffered a stroke and died (91)

Or

The story of a strong, self-actualized single mother who finally gets a job with a good salary but who has to face a new cost:
At the same time, it is important to consider the price exacted by those rising earnings--the disappearance of crucial hours at home, which is all the more costly in the context of uneven child care and troubled schools. Neither the money nor the satisfaction that comes from having a job will help very much if there is no one around to mind the children. (116)

Here is the dilemma: What are "they" to do? What are "we" to do?

Victor and Katherine do not let anyone off easily. They hold everyone accountable for the results of their own actions, but they do understand that they are, in the words of my cousin Charlie, "homo hapless."

The last chapters present some scenarios already in place to help.

What I have taken from this book is a new slant on Pogo's "They is us." They are not the enemy; they are the same as I am--a shaky being trying to make the best of it, not always sure how--but always sure why--because.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Statistics in the flesh July 2, 2008

By J. L LaRegina

Format:Hardcover

The top 1% of America's population received 8.83% of national income in 1976 but were getting 21.93% by 2005. On average, a Fortune 500 C.E.O. made 40 times a worker's pay in 1980 but that ratio is 364 to 1 today.

That erosion of America's middle class has led to what authors Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen use as the title of their book: THE MISSING CLASS. Individuals living the in the missing class are one job loss, medical bill, or maxed-out credit card away from poverty.

While I quote statistics, THE MISSING CLASS reports on America's underpaid workforce in human terms. The book's nine stories tell of people who live hoping they won't come home to an eviction notice. Of course, first they have to hope the repo man does not take their cars before they can drive home from their low-paying jobs.

Those who saw the documentary film THE BIG ONE will recall the tragedy of the woman whose small son died because the Workfare program forced her to take employment so far from home she could not watch him. Each of the nine THE MISSING CLASS narratives made me think of that family. Yet America closes hospitals and cuts education spending while it builds more prisons. Is that the plan?

Read THE MISSING CLASS.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars human face to the economic underclass July 29, 2008

By T. Cooper

Format:Hardcover

This is a very welcome, topical book, on a segment of the American population which is quite sizable and is growing, but is often overlooked. The ongoing economic downturn has expanded the size of those who fall short of the middle class but who earn enough to avoid designation as being in poverty. It is this group which authors, Kathleen Newman, Yale sociologist, and Harvard grad student Victor Tan Chen call "the missing class". The authors track the challenges which those in the "missing class" face. These challenges are largely interrelated and make the point, made repeatedly in the book, that membership in the missing class is so insecure that all elements of it are vulnerable when one element of it is de-stabilized. This is one of the major points of the book.

The authors define the missing class as above the poverty-line but still economically uncertain enough that members are only a paycheck or two from being on the streets, and they are certainly not in the middle class. Such economic insecurity can bleed into all aspects of lives, from familial relations, to monetary planning, from child-care to marriage. The authors show that if one's job situation changes, key elements of a person's life are thrown into chaos quite easily.

The thesis of the book is that membership in the missing class is not a sustainable escape from poverty. Membership is tenuous and taxing and far from certain. The authors cite many examples in which being in the missing class does not significantly separate people from poverty. The authors make the point that work conditions for those in the missing class may provide entree into the white-collar world, but that the membership is usually on the bottom rung of this class and so such membership is far from secure. One of the things which makes the missing class problematic is that there is often a lot of reliance on family, who sometimes may be caught in poverty and may be unjustifiably demanding of the family member who has done a little better. If relationships within the extended family are troublesome, it can be more difficult to address some of the significant challenges of being in the missing class. Perhaps kids are not trusted with family and so they are given more unregulated freedom. The kids might make decisions and those decisions may be good or may not. They may create more challenges. The tenuousness of the job situation may also present challenges with regard to health care. Health care might be not be available on reasonable terms, or even at all, from their employer. This will necessitate undertaking other, perhaps more short-term expensive but still necessary, health care, which might in turn require cutbacks on other crucial expenses like credit cards. Skimping on this payment can of course unleash more unpleasant results from unsympathetic multi-national corporations. This is one instance in which the tenuousness of membership in the missing class can be very unsettling and problematic. These are the sorts of Hobson's Choices which characterize life for those in the missing class.

The authors tracked nine families who were in the missing class from the tough district of Washington Heights, an area of Manhattan. Washington Heights had suffered through its own struggles during its recent history, in which time it had suffered from a major escalation of gang problems bought on, at least in part, by changing migration patterns into the area, and of course partially by decreased local government funding and the neglect of government institutions with little interest in the well-being of the poor and ethnically diverse. However, once population patterns settled, it seemed that greater stability meant for a better living and labor environment. While not a complete departure from the conditions which had troubled the area, it was more able to support those working hard to advance. Newman and Tan Chen had clearly spent a great deal of time at intervals over the course of approximately ten years. Given sufficient financial support to track stability over this time, the authors are able to reach conclusions on the challenges and shortcomings of those whose lives they document. The judgments are not value judgments, but observations on the effect of living, economically speaking, on a knife's edge. The results are not totally unexpected. One should imagine that some will struggle, some will encounter terrible hardships not of their own making, and that some might make poor decisions in the wake of unprecedented wealth in their lives. The vast majority of the people who are featured in the book are immensely sympathetic characters for who one roots. Most of their decisions are good. The bad thing about being in the missing class, however, is that one bad decision can unleash a cascade of dreadful consequences, which consequences would not accrue to those in the upper or lower middle-class were they simply to make one bad decision. Most seem to be doing their utmost to grasp their piece of the American pie. If one is to exclude the barrier of legal immigration, they do it by the book also.

The people in the book are not giving others short shrift in order to secure their own piece of the pie and they sacrifice and work very hard, simply in order to drag themselves out of poverty. The very fact that the subjects of this book are not grasping even for membership in the upper middle-class but only in the "missing class" is something of a cutting indictment of the opportunity for advancement in the United States. It is a fascinating book and one which should prompt thought about what is sufficient money to live on and whether the American system is sufficiently sympathetic to the people who live under it.