The American Working Class is in Crisis, Say Authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
“We have a capitalism that has worked for the very top, but it has left behind the very bottom.”
Crushing poverty, rampant drug addiction, underemployment, unaffordable health care, staggering wealth disparity, declining life expectancy — that’s just a partial list of the issues weighing down millions of people right here in the wealthiest nation on the planet.
Why is that happening? Why does it persist, across so much of our country and across generations? And what should we be doing to make opportunity more plentiful, and more accessible? Especially in rural America, which is increasingly isolated from the rest of the nation.
These are the questions at the heart of a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning husband-and-wife team Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. “Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope,” says the American working class is in crisis due to half-a-century of what can only be described as malign neglect.
“We have a capitalism that has worked for the very top, but it has left behind the very bottom,” says WuDunn on Detroit Today with Stephen Henderson.
“I do think that the basic problem, whether in urban African American communities or in rural areas, is that jobs went away and we as Americans under-invested in human capital,” says Kristof.
On the argument that other countries that make big investments in these areas are “socialist,” Kristof says “That’s not socialism, that is supporting your own citizens.”
