Focus 580; Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class

Lewd for her own good 150 years of advice to women and the hearts of men. American dreams and the flight from commitment. Her most recent book is entitled fear of falling. And it is about the middle class. It looks closely at one segment of that class. That is the segment that includes teachers scientists doctors lawyers government bureaucrats and journalists all of those people whose status rests mostly on their education. It is a class that she says once took pride in it's concern for those less well off. Then however things changed. Poverty was still there certainly that didn't go away. It seemed however that this this part of the Middle Class Lost interest in the 60s she writes liberalism as defined by the intention to achieve a more egalitarian society was an affiliation worn with pride. But today that term has denigrated into a slur. What happened in the life of this class. She asks. Because this retreat from liberalism that is the question that the book Fear of falling attempts to answer it is published by Pentagon.

And we will talk about it this morning in this part of focus 580 as we talk and we get you thinking you may have some questions or some reaction to some of the things that our guest has to say and we welcome your participation in the conversation locally here the number to call 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We also have a toll free line so that no matter where you are you can be a part of the show and will pay for the call. That's 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 3 3 3 W I L L eight hundred two to two w o island please. At any point here if you want to jump in. Do that. Ms Ehrenreich Hello. Hi thank you very much for being with us. Well I'm glad to join you. As your title would suggest this book is in large part about about middle class fears. What is what is the fear of falling. What is it that that these people that you're writing about are afraid of. Well one there are two parts to it one is a sort of obvious fear of just losing

status economically which is a very very real fear these days is these are days of tremendous amount of I guess confusion in terms of. Our whole social stratification system some people are slipping down some are rising up and there is a justifiable fear of losing ground quickly through losing a job losing a spouse. All sorts of things I think we have many of us who are might otherwise be quite affluent have suffered from what some psychologists call bag lady syndrome where we can imagine losing our our jobs our homes whatever. So it's partly about that kind of economic anxiety but the other theme is something I don't know what to call more psychological more slightly more irrational which is a fear of losing it of losing willpower self discipline a fear of being spoiled by the

affluence the very affluence in the middle class seat and then losing that kind of energy that it takes to fix. Well the book is also about the about over time the ways in which the middle class and in particular the segment of the middle class has realized that they were not alone that there were other classes at their end that in some of them had very strong feelings about some of these other people in these other classes had very strong feelings about the middle class or at least the middle class thought so. You began your story in the in the post-war years in the 50s which you explained was a time when the middle class came to believe that they and their way of life were America. They looked around them and looked out of their picture windows and over their lawns and across the street to the lawn of the house across the street and somehow felt that all America was was like this that life would only continue to improve and that the main way we would measure quality of life would would mostly have

to do with with material terms. It was a time when in the minds of many people we at least some of these middle class people we had finally achieved a classless society because everybody was middle class. Certainly there were some people who were who were worried about that. They were worried about this ethic of consumption. There were some people who. Boy we've got a terrible telephone connection. Yes I am. I tell you I tell you what how about if we if we I get my director to read read dial the number and see if that might well now see. Now it's OK now just saying that OK I'm going to ask Mike if you will re dial the number and maybe we'll get a better line about that. OK. I apologize here to people who are listening. We're going to we're going to redial our guest and see if we get a little bit better phone line. That's the problem with technology sometimes it doesn't always work very well for you. And there we're kind of at the

mercy of the long distance phone lines we get and it's generally a matter of luck or accident sometimes we get the good ones and others are not very good from time to time over the years I've talked to people here. Within this state and other places and sometimes you would think you were calling somebody who was on the moon. It was that bad and other times it's very good so it's just a matter of chance. We're going to read the guest again and as we don't want to make you have to make you sit there and listen to our conversation through all this static and and crackling let me just tell you real quick that on our afternoon magazine today the topic will be how the UA VI responded to the Chinese crisis course we're talking about the the brutal putdown of the democracy movement in China back in the spring at that time there were a lot of Ewa by people in China both faculty and students. And we'll be talking with Nancy Marks who is the associate director of the U.S. II International Office of Student Affairs and that will be our guest in the conversation part of the afternoon magazine of course the afternoon

magazine starts at noon. There is news and weather and all kinds of things but they also have a period where they take telephone calls from people who are listening as we do here this morning on focus. And that is the one o'clock hour of the show. That will be the topic today and not only will there be that interview but you can participate in it. OK we will try again here with Barbara Ehrenreich. Sounds sounds better. Yes I can hear you anywhere that OK good. OK. Anyway I was talking about this. This post war era in which the middle class folks came to believe that they and their way of life really were America. And while some people might have been worried about this all this consumption thinking maybe it wasn't very healthy. Certainly some people rebelled against the conformity of middle class life in large part the middle class felt fairly satisfied until they discovered poverty. Why was that such an important discovery and how did that happen.

Well I would just underline David you know how strange it is that poverty had to be discovered by Michael Harrington Testament and his book The Other America which played a quite a role in waking the middle class up to the existence of poverty. He estimated that about 20 percent are one out of five Americans lived in poverty at that time early 60s. And yet this one fifth of America just hadn't been noticed because this myth was so contentious that we were a classless society. Very important myth of the 50s. So when with the discovery of poverty which certainly President Kennedy had something to do. It was the civil rights movement had a great deal to do with it then that was the first sort of click you might say of awakening for the professional white collar middle class to the idea that America was not a land of just universal affluence. And first that was a very I think very important liberal sort of discovery because the mood was well we could do something about

poverty. Well it did in fact. Most experts believed it would be. But it's sort of a mop up job you know that it was a small thing and then we'd just be on our way to. Well having to deal with what they saw as the real problem which was too much affluence. I think it's interesting is as you point out that when people started to think about poverty in America one of the things that they told themselves was well it's not so bad because our poor aren't as bad as everybody else is poor Some like like the trickle down of affluence at least done that that America's poor Ward is as bad off as the poor of the of the second or third world. Yes and even this discovery was really a big media event. Magazine cover stories TV specials everything and you know in amongst all the sort of shock of finding these poor people were it is a theme of well look they do have television sets they do have refrigerators.

We really have very affluent poor people it's interesting. Today I don't think that could be sent out. America's poor. You know that the bottom level of poverty here is homelessness which you know puts a sort of global sense that of our refugee status. You don't get any porn than that. Well is that the case then that you know when we talk about middle class fears that this was a time when when people shifted from worrying that they had too much to worrying that they might lose what they had you know the fear was still of affluence I mean as our leading intellectuals defined it that was America's biggest biggest problem. It was spoiling the young. It was destroying the willpower it had produced a conformist society that was probably even too soft to keep up with the Russians. That was the fear. That what interested me then was it in the discovery of the poor. If we can pull of quote marks around

the word discovery that very quickly a kind of a period type was attached to the poor. Which resembles very much. I mean you could say it was a projection of what the middle class feared for itself because in thing middle class stereotypes the poor were described as lazy I guess as people always see the poor as lazy but self-indulgent and incapable of deferring gratification. Promiscuous really a people don't sort of. They'd almost describe the poor as the ultimate consumers sort of people who could not control their impulses and so then I think that was you know already a step away from a more liberal problem solving approach to poverty to what became the dominant attitude by the 80s if the poor are poor because that's a mental problem they have they have a I care character.

But I think this is very much a projection of the middle class. Thank God I didn't know what was happening to the middle class in the 60s the middle class found itself under attack by its own children and you. You seem to be suggesting that their response to that attack was again another another step in this process of the middle class inching itself over towards the right. That and that the elders of this generation blamed themselves for the student movement of the 60s. They took this this point of view that said you know we gave them everything. We made it too easy for them. And now look what they've done. They're turning around and they're attacking everything that we believe in and we stand for and that they're really not interested in building anything up. They're only interested in tearing things down. You suggested that. It was a key turning point. And to tell you the truth I didn't expect that when I

started working on this book that I just hadn't weighed the student movement of of the radicalism of the 60s as being that important to the kind of political direction we had our leadership taken by the 80s. But it was really right there that so many important intellectuals professors journalists commentators who had been leading lights of liberalism in the 60s responded with real war to the left to the counterculture of the hippies because they saw their own positions in society being threatened because the student movement really criticized the university. It criticized the store. Already the so-called experts and professionals and invariably you know sometimes you could say this with an anti-intellectual. Sometimes I think it was a very profound and important question to say what is the basis of authority or expertise in our society. And why does.

You know why do we we have to find a hierarchy that says that some people should earn so much more because their kind of knowledge is so much more important than others. That was very distressing I think to a very important liberal stratum of the liberal intelligentsia. And you know I devote a chapter of my book to their responses to the student movement which were pretty very real and by the end of the 60s and early 70s these liberal intellectuals had become neo conservative. They were no longer felt the same kind of overall commitment toward solving problems like poverty or becoming a more egalitarian society. You suggest that that you know as I said that these people really they blame themselves for for this rebellion of the youth and that that that it was first of all that it was a mistake and that it

didn't really have anything to do with their style of parenting. And it also helped to lay the groundwork for this this this resurgence of conservatism what in your view what what was the real cause for the the rise of the the student movement and and how did the way that these formerly liberal intellectuals react. How did that that have this effect of laying the groundwork for the for this rise of conservatism. I think that the reasons for the student movement the youth movement of the 60s. You know pretty much what we said they were at the time I say we because I was one of those student activists in the 60s. Now the racism the war in Vietnam other social problems we were addressing. But I also think you can you can say that there's a deeper tension in the professional middle class between

youth and adults which is bound to keep cropping up. Because this is a class which well to put it somewhat dramatically really exploits its young cannibalizes its young. You do you cannot really become an adult in the fullest sense of the professional middle class until you've finished high school finished college and beyond that done what maybe two to eight years of further educational work and then you may have another period of apprenticeship in that as a resident if you want to be a doctor as a lower level lawyer if you want to become a partner sometime in the firm. Passing a judgment too much on that that's our system. Except to say that that invariably creates a tension and in the 60s when we had in a sense a whole generation of young people it's a we're not we're not really interested in being apprentices and being sort of adults for so

long. We really feel we have something to say contribute now. So I think that there is that dynamic in Iraq into the middle class now that the the intellectual response you don't intellectuals response was your problem you kids your problems are to spoil that which was of course another way and you know it's returning to that problem. They had seen in affluence the affluence that spoiled people and this seemed to be the living proof now. You know that whole generation and and their minds gone bad. I would just point out here one reason I emphasized the backlash by intellectuals professors and so on is I think in a way that we have conventionally rewritten history. The big backlash is the blue collar backlash against the civil rights movement against the student movement I think we need to be reminded that the probably the most influential

backlash and right turn came from relatively privileged relatively well-educated you know members of the professional middle class the working class. You know I think it's also interesting that you point out that that like their elders the the the student activist of the 60s really bought into this myth this stereotype of the working class that they had been. They had been handed and certainly the media you know played its role there that this characterization of the working class as basically being a lot of guys like Archie Bunker they bought into that and missed an opportunity for. There is that there is a natural convergence there in the goals of the the student the students and a lot of people in the working class and that they miss the opportunity to come together there because they had bought into this stereotype of what the working class was all about. That

was was in fact rather far from the truth. Oh yes. I think there's no question about that. Just to backtrack a minute you know that the working class had to be discovered too. And just as we had the discovery of poverty in 1963 64 there really was a very parallel media discovery. Right. Blue collar working class in 1969 again news magazines had cover stories saying you know here are these neglected forgotten Americans. You know Nixon had talked about the silent majority and middle Americans. And this became a big theme in 1969 but again we had a very stereotyped discovery. We the discovery of the working class was not a discovery from a middle class point of view of all the diversity of the American working class but did focus in on the stereotype which was as you said Archie Bunker.

It was a hard hat. It was a bigoted reactionary very conservative parochial sort of person. And I seriously think that the student movement bought into that stereotype and did not see on the whole the American working class as real allies for the change in step one and that's ironic because of any class with you know most opposed to the war in Vietnam. It was the working class more than the professional middle class. And again here it seems to be that the fear of falling operates because the the the middle class perceived real hostility directed at them by the working class and what they were trying to do and perhaps one of the things that that fostered this again there is this creeping towards the right was they were trying to blunt what they saw as an

attack which may in fact not have been there for him. My Am I reading right. Yeah pretty much I think. You know I think the spirit in which poverty was discovered was one of paternalism All right we have these people will help them somehow. So of course they weren't helped much the spirit in which the working class did was quote discovered in 1969 was much more negative kind of feeling because the working class no matter how exactly you define it is an American majority. Now if you include blue collar pink collar people and various white collar people who really are not professionals or manage. But should be called working class. You've got the maturity there. And according to the stereotype in the late 60s this was a very conservative majority. And that made those who were still liberals in the you know and commentators and

opinion makers in the middle class say whoa wait who are we that we thought we were everybody we thought we were of the middle class and if you the majority doesn't agree with us. And it is so much more conservative. And then when we better we have some catching up to do. But I think that there was a sort of a spirit of self-hatred that arose in among the middle class intelligentsia at that point that a real America the sort of salt of the earth types now we're supposed to be reactionaries are supposed to be racist. So those say you know were media executives or newscasters or journalists started suddenly reassessing who they were. That the stereotype of the working class is wrong. You know that's OK here's another irony and a painful one that if anything the working class is more liberal not less than the

professional middle class and this is sound and how people vote for president for example you know. Look at the exit polls and the breakdown by education or income. It's shown in party alignment that the less you are in the you know you don't wear white collar the more you are likely to be a Democrat than Republican. I mentioned other issues like the war in Vietnam. Polls showed more resistance and anger about the war from the working class. But that was the stereotype and a movie threat the 70s kept repeating that stereotype dumb bigoted somewhat violent macho men. And then it's like Saturday Night Fever on Deer The Deer Hunter. So I think these stereotypes don't have persisted in parts of the professional class and very

cerebral about the rest of society. It's about an illusion I think. We're talking this morning with Barbara Ehrenreich about some of the ideas in her recent book Fear of falling the inner life of the middle class. Again this morning our guest is Barbara Ehrenreich. She's the author of a number of books and her her work her writing regularly appears in The Washington Post The New York Times Magazine and also magazines such as the Atlantic the nation and the New Republic. She is currently a regular columnist for Ms Magazine and Mother Jones and her most recent book is fear of falling of the inner life of the middle class. If you have comments or questions on anything we've talked about so far you can certainly be a part of the show. 3 3 3 WRAL 800 to 2 to WLM those are the numbers too to call. I wonder what you think about this notion. It seems to me as I as I read your book that I keep coming back to this feeling that that in the middle class it has in a

way always been at war with itself. Ed there has always been a great deal of an ease about what the middle class stood for and whether that was good or not. And it seems that even even today when we're or in the period where you talk about the rise of the neoconservatives in the new right that even that is still a form of it still a form of this war within the middle class as it seems to me that well people on the right might not agree that and that in many ways the new right is not much different from from the from their enemies on the left I mean certainly their ideological differences. But it seems to me and so in some rather fundamental ways this is still a family squabble.

Oh I think that's one of my points here that you know when I'm looking in the book it's shifted toward the more conservative. Outlook on the part of the professional middle class but it's all within the one class that we're watching that sets whereas there hasn't for example been an overall rightward shift on the issues as measured by opinion polls and surveys. But there certainly has been such a shift on the part of our opinion makers who are you know almost by definition turn out to be members of the professional middle class. And you see some of the same prejudices toured other classes in both sides in the liberal and conservative side the liberal view of the poor that we were talking about a very paternalistic view of the poor become a the more up to date 1980s spirit type of the underclass which is very much a conservative stereotype where now the promiscuity isness and the laziness of the poor have become almost an almost

incurable in the right's outlook. But yes there are certainly a lot of commonality the fact if you want to be really sweeping about it you could. Say though the professional middle class is a minority class it's only about 20 percent of the population at most if it wants to get anywhere and wants to get its class interests advanced. It has to either ally with those who are less affluent poor people working people or with the people who are more affluent the very wealthy. And if you do the latter that's that's the conservative approach. Step the approach where you see the big money people as they know the corporate elite etc. as the best forces in society and that would be the neo conservative tack them. The liberal strategy you could say just to be quite sweeping and provocative. That this is to say no we're not. We won't get anywhere unless we ally with the majority that is less at fault. So you could say that left or right

you know I'm out to the side for the middle class I'm out there deciding who to line up with the wealthy minority or the working class majority. Well I have a couple callers who would like to bring into our conversation. Let's do that. We'll start with your line number one. Hello oh hello on the ferrite I've read your book and I found it really fascinating and I have a couple questions. In one part of the book you speak about how the middle class is becoming so insular that they're only marrying within their class and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that. And also later on in the book when you talk about who's really in charge and how a middle class couple who's earning over $100000 a year is really kidding themselves if they think they have much power. Well I'm glad to find someone who. At the book fair and I want to hear the three point on marriage was interesting because the cookbook is by no means all about

economics it's also about child raising marriage even diet fad. All these aspects of the inner life but in the same 50s it was not are unusual for a an executive to marry his secretary a doctor to marry his nurse. Today things have changed. The doctor will marry another doctor a secretary an executive would be looked down upon if he married a secretary. So there's been a kind of tightening of the ranks and only made possible because of the inroads that middle class women have made into the professions that used to be just for middle class men. So yeah I think they did and I cites OCR. Just who are observing this closing of ranks in the middle class. $100000 year crapola is saying do they really have much power I think the people I was quoting. This is as we come to the end of the book Toward

that end of the 80s are complaining a hundred thousand dollars a year isn't enough money for a family that we seem to have got on a new treadmill where no amount is enough if you count in the extremely high cost of housing and many of our cities and caught count in college tuitions which can be over $20000 a year now in the Ivy League. And average about $7000 a year in the State University. So theres a new feeling of being just unable to break you know to stop what became the kind of yuppie pattern of unspent fast as you can. Thank you very much. The call received the call. Let us go on to another caller here line number two. Hello. You indicated your corporate workers were more liberal than most people think they are workers are liberal on economic issues that affect them. So Security unemployment comp workman's comp minimum wage and so on so on

they tend to be much more conservative on some of the social issues which makes them vulnerable to the. Mr. Ellison Mr. water and other advisers of Republican presidential candidates who are then able to move away from the economic issues and never discuss them and instead discuss capital punishment prayer in schools gun control flag issues and so on. And I had to get workers staked out to some degree to where they vote on those issues not understanding that they are the only group in our society that doesn't vote its own economic self-interest. For instance. Well excuse me if I'm a doctor I vote on one issue my own economic self-interest which has to do with Medicare and and what the government do about capping my my fees and so on from the Big Business Man I vote Republican because my own economic self-interest if I'm a wealthy lawyer I tend to vote Republican because of the tax breaks and so on

and sort of the working people are the only group in our society. Half of them I should say who vote against their own economic self-interest and get faked out by the Roger Ailes and me Lee Atwater's of the world into voting on such things as capital punishment and prayer in schools and flag issues. And soon. Well I think you're right about that the right strategy with which it has been to use those social issues to get working people to vote against their economic self-interest. That's absolutely true but I do think it's we exaggerate sometimes the conservatism of the working class also on social issues. I'll give you one example just my right but because i have happened of what then to the front pretty carefully is a degree of support for feminism for women's liberation. This stereotype right is that the typical feminist is a young woman

with a test take a cent of sneakers and so on actually support for feminism rises slightly as you go down but down the socioeconomic scale. Well certain aspects of feminism they see either their sisters and their wives being abused at work in the sense of being underpaid and overworked and this sort of thing. And so they're very strongly in favor of equal wages for women in the plants and so on but that doesn't carry over as far as you would think in the feminism of only certain aspects of feminism. Well I don't see how you can say that with such certainty. It's our work with unions and with workers every day are two classes for them I came out of the working class myself and we discussed these kinds of things every day when we had classes and speaking with them. Well I've had I've had experiences mostly with working women as well as working class men which suggest a much

broader a broader tolerance and I think it's often attributed to them I think there's a tremendous bias on the part of the white collar and educated folks to look down and say well even if they are liberal it's just narrow self-interest unlike some of us were but one last comment I would agree that there is much more liberalism out there and much more goodwill and much more decency among workers than than than most most people would ever guess. And much more sensitive. Two to a hundred more on the issues. Many people think because a person's work are dirty from head to foot that he would not be a sensitive human being and he's just as sensitive as anyone else if not more so because of the hurts that are perceived. Yeah absolutely I'm just trying to turn over the ugly stereotypes that the affluent has always had on had for the last 20 years of the last apple and I just like to jump in here for a second we'll talk with some of the callers I'd just like to remind people listening

we have about 10 minutes left and to reintroduce our guest We're talking this morning with Barbara Ehrenreich about some of the ideas in her book Fear of falling the inner life of the middle class pantheon is the publisher. Let's go on to another caller here. Lie number three. Hello. Yes I want them to read my mind. This is and this is a miscarriage right there talking to start by myself thinking about President Reagan and what's his experience at the end of the classes and how it might have varied in his life time and how the number of loans he was with other classes and how those classes probably had been delivered and him and then my thoughts went to Lyndon Johnson and to Franklin Roosevelt and I wondered if anybody has done a study on its premise and then I believe there is a lot of slime that she knows

about. Well I think in our society we tend not to look at the class dimension often enough and it helps. Playing a lot helps clarify a lot of things. Reagan started in a poor working class family and as we all know it became a really a spokesman for the very rich. I mean certainly his economic policies favor to very rich can tax cuts for the very rich and social spending cuts for the poor. How that came about is we'll find out in his autobiography. But that's that's the picture there. Thank you. All right. Let's go to line number one for another caller. Hello hello. Yes Barbara would you want to comment on how the United States recent status as a debtor nation and the seemingly inevitable loss 30 in the future is going to impact the attitudes of the middle

class. I don't know if you deal with that in your book but that's what it's about. Oh hang up and listen. OK. Thank you for the go. It's a good good question. I suspect will we could we could continue to see more of what I call the yuppie strategy in the book that is there. A class of young people students deciding very early that they're not going to take a chance with a profession like even medicine. Definitely not history or literature or something like that that they're going to go try to make it into the what's really an international corporate managerial class to go into things like management to go into banking. They're very early in life that that's the kind of strategy that I think that certainly young people have been following in the 80s. Putting aside their

idealism very young and saying well how am I going to make it. And it's in what could be an ever more threatening world. It's a scary strategy. I don't know what we do when we have a you know in an educated class it's entirely come. Most bankers accountants and managers and we don't have people you know actually produce things or teach people and so on but that's what people are doing. Some people might say that it might be too hasty a conclusion but might say that that the yuppy strategy had tarnished pretty quickly and that we decided that we really dislike the conspicuous consumption and the self absorption that that seemed to be the hallmarks of of these people although one could argue that that might also be a stereotype and that what that what we're doing is we're once again on this embarked on this search for real values that we can live with. And that leads some to

predict that may be as the as the 80s were rather like the 50s that perhaps the 90s will be like the 60s. And I wonder what you think about all that. Well I don't know that there's any real reason to think there's going to be this 30 year cycle Arthurs licensor talks about this 30 year cycle. I need something like the 60s. I don't know. I don't see a lot of change in that trend I just mentioned that young middle class people are continuing their exodus out of the liberal arts and the natural sciences and into those things that look like. The lucrative real fast that goes on in 1978 Newsweek announced it was the end of the 80s the end of yet these the end of greed. I don't see really that it's happened yet I keep waiting. There are little straws in the wind. I think that the response for example to Malcolm Forbes is two million dollar birthday bash was interesting there

was a real revolt and I think we're coming out of the period of the 80s where we just romanticized the rich and famous. We're beginning you know we're raising questions about it's not how we really judge people are their different values. Haven't we gone too far with materialism. I think the the very vulgar behavior of some of our rich like the Trumps unlikely and the Helmsley. Then Forbes is contributing to it. Whether we actually find some new values or not. I know. Let's talk with someone else here will go to the toll free line. Hello. Yes Barbara I have noticed since the Reagan was President Putin has pitted one class against the other. In other words the middle class looks down on the lower class the upper class folks in the middle class and we the consumer has no lobbyists in Washington. The

laws are made by the rich for the rich against the poor. Well I think a certain unhappy truth to what you're saying because it's not only that it's the dependence today. I'm sure you're thinking of also politicians on the wealthy because our as our campaigns get more TV dependent our politicians get more dependent on the big money guys in their own right that they're owned by the rich people right and then you don't have a Democrat. Do you have a plutocracy. And I think you know that's where we ended up and now we have Bush campaigning to cut taxes for the very wealthy again with a capital gains tax cut. I don't see an end in sight and let's not people who are a middle class working class were never able to get together and you know say no we have to we have to start going in a more egalitarian democratic direction again. But they don't contribute to the lections just critique if the middle

class would describe it one dollar a week. There is no rich corporation that could muster as much money as the middle class could in this country for looks and purposes I'm talking about local state incredible. Not a bad idea and it's a good idea. You know they spend that much on our dog or little cups of cola every day. Maybe not on organized. They really don't need all those television campaign ads just telling us how bad the other guy is anyway. Right. Maybe there'd be a better way of getting the make you know getting the information out so we can make our judgments. They didn't really have to vote I think only 38 percent of the people voted in the last election their own voters only 38 percent. True I'm not I'm not sure I think it was even an honest marinaded and I might have been a little more this time to turn to people in Europe are really a good guy for to

be able to vote right. Yes and I think there's a model of democracy but I think I think we could improve and be a much better model for the world. I'm going to going to jump in here I hope the caller will will forgive me I hate to do that to focus just there we're pretty much down to the the wire here and we're out of time and we're going to have to stop. I would just like to add too if if the cog would mind ask one last question. You you write in your book that what we need is in this country is a revival of conscience and responsibility in the middle class and then raise the questions I'm not sure whether they're rhetorical with their questions you have answers for you know raise the questions how will that come. Will it come in from where will it come. What do you think. I think one place it. Going to come from is going to come from the heart I think of some of the young people who are making decisions like am I going to follow my ideals and be whatever it is an astronomer a social

worker whatever. Or am I going to try to you know go for the quick money and do the business related field that's one place. It's going to come from it's young people who are going to say it's to me it's self denial. I don't it's I don't want to go into banking. I really want to do the other. I think that people have been giving up a lot to be on this treadmill we've gotten ourselves into by the 80s that they've been really we've been repressing other values other needs and then those other values and other needs are going to pop a lot up. I don't think we can continue like this. As one caller mentioned I talk in the book about people couples complaining and make a hundred thousand two hundred thousand dollars a year and still can't make it. Still don't have enough now that there's something very very wrong then you know because that they're the they're the economically most fortunate. So I think we're on that we may be on the verge of a re-evaluation just because people can't live like this forever.

Well we must leave it at that. Thank you very much for talking with us today. You're welcome to our guest. Barbara Ehrenreich. And if you're interested in reading more of her thoughts on this topic look for her book Fear of falling the inner life of the middle class and it is published by Pantheon Books.