Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Twilight of the Middle Class?

April 30, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
picket-fence

NEW YORK (Reuters) - It's evening in America. That is the worrying news from the latest Heartland Monitor Poll, conducted quarterly and sponsored by the insurer Allstate and National Journal. The researchers made a striking finding: The U.S. middle class, long the world's embodiment of optimism and upward mobility, today is telling a very different story. The chief preoccupation of middle-class Americans is not the dream of getting ahead, it is the fear of falling behind. The poll found that 59 percent of its respondents—a group of 1,000 people selected to be demographically ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
Tags: , , , ,

Who’s Most Optimistic in America? The Answer Will Break Your Heart

August 24, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

This is a finding that has turned up in a number of studies, and it's always fascinating: Many of the demographic groups that have fared the worst during the recession—including young adults (ages 18 to 24), blacks and Hispanics—have the most upbeat assessments of their own economic mobility, their children’s economic prospects and the nation’s economic future. This comes from a new Pew report called "The Lost Decade of the Middle Class: Fewer, Poorer, Gloomier," which just about sums up where things stand. "Since 2000, the middle class has shrunk in size, fallen backward in income ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, The 101
Tags: , ,

Berkeley’s Ray of Hope Gets Brighter

October 20, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

Berkeley's stab at making solar installations affordable for homeowners has seen Vice President Joe Biden pinning it up as a model for a national effort. As Matt Jenkins explained in his profile of Berkley's Francisco DeVries in the July-August issue of Miller-McCune magazine, the California city's program fronts homeowners the money to install the rather costly solar setups through a special utility district bond. The homeowners, presumably using money saved on their subsequent power bills, pays off the cost in an extra charge on their property tax bill. (DeVries, who had been a city ... Read More

More like this: Findings
Tags: , ,

Obama Defines Green Jobs and Says He Wants Lots of ‘Em

January 31, 2009 • By • 1 Comment

Barack Obama on Friday returned to his campaign promise of creating millions of jobs in a new, renewable economy, announcing a task force on the middle class that next month will launch with a focus on 'green jobs.' Environmentalists have championed the phrase and the concept behind it, while conservative economists have dismissed "green jobs" as an empty slogan built on shady math. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are now taking another stab at the definition. They have called green jobs "good jobs," jobs that can't be outsourced. Today, they're explaining another point: Green jobs ... Read More

More like this: Findings
Tags: , ,

Counting on the Middle Class

November 4, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment

For a company intent on going global, one of the most difficult problems in determining the market potential for Westernized goods and services is knowing the number of potential buyers in any specific country. Population numbers are easy to get, but, for most countries, those numbers can be misleading. Buyers of Westernized goods are likely to be in the middle class or above, but — until now — there has been no reliable measure of the size of the middle-class market in various countries. It is easy to get gross domestic product data for most countries, but when one divides by the ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, News and Options, November-December 2008
Tags: , , , , , ,

The New College Try

October 21, 2008 • By • 1 Comment

Coming in from Chicago, it’s not a pretty ride to Thomas M. McDermott Jr.’s office. A mile to the north, you roll down from an unlovely concrete overpass that spans a trio of railroad tracks, greeted by a blighted strip of U.S. 41 that leads past the formerly marvelous structure that used to house the State Bank of Hammond. A wooden eagle, painted feathers slowly flaking off, is perched on the neoclassic building between tree-sized columns and golden gryphons on the edge of decay. The remainder of the road to McDermott is littered with similarly disused buildings, many plastered with ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Education, Magazine Feature Story, November-December 2008
Tags: , , , , , , ,