The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement--And How You Can Fight Back (Hardcover)

by Jacob S. Hacker (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Jacob Hacker, a Yale University political scientist, has emerged as an incisive voice on issues relating to retirement security and income volatility."--AARP Bulletin
"Jacob Hacker's research on the uneven state of the American safety net has made the young Yale University political scientist a top idea merchant to Democratic think tanks."--Business Week
"Thoughtful Democrats like Clinton aide Gene Sperling and Yale professor Jacob Hacker have argued that Americans, even amid prosperity, are increasingly insecure in our globalized economy and wary of downside risks if they have to change jobs or learn new skills."--Michael Barone, Washington Times
"As Jacob Hacker argues persuasively in The Great Risk Shift, America's middle class finds itself living with far more risk and income volatility than it did a generation ago."--Christopher Hayes, The Nation
"Hacker's important and illuminating book--with its call for creating an insurance and opportunity society--should inform every discussion of progressive political strategy in the coming decade." --David Moberg, In These Times
"Jacob S. Hacker, a 35-year-old political science professor at Yale, has become something of an intellectual 'It boy' in the Democratic Party over the last decade.... The patchwork safety net created in the decades after World War II truly is shriveling, and there will be rewards for the party that comes up with a convincing solution. Hacker has done the Democrats a favor by developing a story and a catchphrase - the great risk shift - to describe the problem."--David Leonhardt, New York Times
"In cutting-edge polemics like Jacob Hacker's The Great Risk Shift, the smartest liberal voices are focusing on voter anxiety about health care and income volatility--anxiety that the GOP hasn't even begun to find a way to address." -- Ross Douthat & Reihan Salam, The Weekly Standard
"Democrats don't really have an answer to the economic anxieties of the middle class. They don't quite know how to deal with the complicated mix of optimism and anxiety that characterizes even the upper-middle class in today's economy. They know that the old language of economic security from risk doesn't stand up against the slogans of opportunity and ownership that the right offers, even though those you're-on-your-own policies make matters worse. There is a healthy debate going on in liberal intellectual circles about this. The best answer so far can be found in Jacob Hacker's new book, The Great Risk Shift, in which he proposes that we think of security as the basis for economic opportunity. However, this idea doesn't yet seem to have entered the consciousness of the political class." --Washington Monthly
"The essential policy book of the year." -- E.J. Dionne, Washington Post
"...an intellectual handbook for many on the left."--The Economist
One of the "two most important books on American politics to appear this year, maybe in many a year...Hacker's is one of those prescient books that names and anatomizes a potent, ubiquitous trend that has been hidden in plain view...His book deserves the widest possible audience, for having nailed the most powerful and underappreciated economic trend of our era, thereby inviting a discussion of the political opportunities." -- Robert Kuttner, American Prospect
"...a valuable new book...he presents data explaining the new sense of economic dread hanging over Americans. We all know that in this globalized, ultracompetitive age, job security has been beggared, but Hacker attaches startling numbers to the national anxiety."--New York Magazine "His most ambitious work yet."--The New York Times Book Review
"Within a unified thesis, Mr. Hacker tells a coherent story about economic insecurity. And, by and large, the thesis is compelling...his account is provocative and worth reading."--Roger Lowenstein, The New York Times
"Provides a fresh diagnosis of a familiar complex of problems from structural unemployment to the erosion of retirement plans you can retire on."---The Atlantic
"A powerful and timely account of the forces driving the ascendance of economic insecurity in America. But Hacker does more than describe the problem; he offers a thoughtful and ambitious policy agenda and explains how each of us can make our own families more secure. This is an important book for anyone concerned about the continuing vitality of the American dream."--John Edwards, former U.S. Senator and Director, Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at UNC Chapel Hill
"America's largest social class isn't upper-income, middle, or poor. It's our sprawling anxious class. As Jacob Hacker shows in this lucid and riveting account, American families are experiencing more and more uncertainty about their future, and the reigning conservative orthodoxy is exposing them to ever greater risk. Hacker lifts up the floor boards of conservative's much touted 'ownership society' and reveals the extended rot. But he also offers up a new foundation for economic security. This is an important book." --Robert B. Reich, Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley, and former U.S. Secretary of Labor
"Hacker seeks to call attention to another alleged failing of the new, more market-oriented economy: rising levels of risk and insecurity...he advances some interesting proposals... deserving of serious debate."--Wall Street Journal
"Risk aversion is why Americans are so nervous about the economy: As much as we prize stability, we find ourselves up to our necks in r