The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America by Newman, Katherine, Chen, Victor Tan(September 1, 2008) Paperback

by Katherine S. Newman

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Economics, Poverty, Society

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Katherine Newman is Professor of Sociology and James Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Author of several books on middle class economic instability, urban poverty, and the sociology of inequality, she previously taught at the University of California (Berkeley), Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton.

Reviews

[Meghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has a lot of very good information, but it was a little hard to follow because of the way it was organized. It's hard to keep track of which family is which and I think the overall message of the book was weakened a little by the lack of continuity in the narrative. It would have also been useful to have examples from other parts of the country besides New York City, possibly in some more suburban and rural areas as well. I'm sure the near poor exist there as well.

[Diane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this at the suggestion of my sociology professor. It's about a bunch of people who make stupid mistakes with their money that they can't afford to make. Not that anyone is perfect, but hello! If you're making $7.50 an hour at a factory job, you can't afford a $3500 liposuction, or a $10,000 wedding. I'm just saying.

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Newman and Chen spent 7 years following 9 New York families who they deemed part of the missing class. According to them the missing class is that class of people who fall just above the poverty line, but do not make enough money to qualify as lower middle class. In some respects they may often be worse off then those people who fall below the poverty line because they are usually no longer eligible for certain types of aid like Medicaid or AFDC. On the other hand they are often more likely to be able to pull themselves into a higher class because they are slightly better off living in better neighborhoods where children can often attend better schools than the poverty stricken. Despite these better circumstances they are often just one illness, layoff, or lost paycheck away from falling into poverty. The book is divided by topic not by family. The authors discuss various issues affecting the missing class such as education, housing, healthcare, and employment using examples from the lives of the families they followed to illustrate their points. It was an excellent book that gave great insight into an often overlooked class of people.

[Jim]

What ever happened to the American Dream? Talk radio in America would have you think that hard work and sacrifice will lead to success in America. But that isn't the case for many people as The Missing Class documents.

[Dee · Rating 3 out of 5]

book was interesting but dry in many places - i had a hard time feeling sympathetic/emphathetic for some of the featured people

[Krystina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book because I’m enjoying another book by its co-author, Victor Tan Chen, and I’ve been using some of his recent research in presentations I’ve been giving about living paycheck to paycheck. This book was written over a decade ago and captures the lives of people financially struggling just before the Great Recession. The authors call the hidden demographic living above the poverty line but struggling to make ends meets, “the missing class” or the near poor. The majority of this book is qualitative research on the lives of, oh gosh, maybe 9 households. This is personal preference, but I get bored reading this type of writing unless quantitative data is mixed in. I felt like the authors were sometimes demeaning of their subjects. Each chapter begins with a snippet of a news article, which frustrates me because the article bits would quote something like “Even though single women of all ethnic groups bemoan the lack of available men, it’s not just an empty lament for blacks. Whereas white, Hispanic and Asian men in their 20s significantly outnumber their women, there are just 89 black men for every 100 black women. - Chicago Sun-Times, Dec 7, 2005”. It’s like, please just quote an official data source and explain why it’s relevant. Odd and borderline offensive newspaper clippings are useless to me. The final two chapters were the best. One chronicles a new mother whose husband was just deported, and the last was full of the authors’ policy suggestions.

[Josh Singer · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this was a lot of new information for my public health brain, it only made me hate our lovely pluralistic health system more than I already do. We often thing about the poor as the community we need to work with the most; however, the near poor actually have things a bit worse in some ways. These communities make too much to receive social benefits such as food stamps, but really not enough to get by. In Canada, one can get free healthcare, even if they’re visiting. In Germany, sick funds ensure that everyone gets the care they need regardless of how much money they make. Even Cuba, a country with a fraction of the net worth of the US, spends a tenth of what the United States does, but is able to provide healthcare for every citizen. The U.S. needs an update, and The Missing Class is indicative of that.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subtitle, "Portraits of the Near Poor in America", is right. While I can understand that a tremendous amount of time had to be spent interviewing the families, I can't understand the need to show it off rather than tie these personal stories to particular policy proposals that might one day help them. Each look into a different family's struggle is distressing, leaving one with the feeling that we need to throw more money into the system. But WHERE. HOW? People know that poverty exists and can be devastating. What makes people glaze over poverty issues is that they have no idea where to start.

What frustrates me is how the policy ideas are squirreled away in the last chapter, with little more than a paragraph's worth of discussion each, even though the poor situations themselves (banking option shortages/problems, childcare costs, access to health clinics or fresh food, etc.) are well-documented elsewhere in the book. Why not put the policy examples ideas within each chapter, instead of more and more examples of hardships that people are too overwhelmed to begin addressing?

The portraits are intriguing, but I was pretty disappointed.

[Danni Green · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book shows the intimate and personal details of the lives of real families who fall into the category which the authors define as "near-poor". It definitely has some issues. The writing style seems intended to dramatize the stories in ways that are unnecessary; these stories really speak for themselves and the editorial attempts at attention-grabbing weakened the narratives rather than enhancing them. It also led to some microaggressive moralizing that really made it challenging to just take in the details of the stories. In addition, it seemed like the co-authors did not read each other's work; the shift in voice between chapters was perceptible and sometimes jarring, and in one instance led to the same story being told so differently between two chapters that the narratives contradicted each other. The organization of the book was also somewhat confusing; it wasn't clear why certain stories had been grouped together or what connections the reader was supposed to be making between them. I am glad to have read this book, but would encourage others reading it to also seek out personal narratives written by the people whose lived experience is reflected in the stories.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Missing Class discusses the class of people sandwiched between the truly poor and the middle class. The authors call this class the "missing class" because they are not quite poor enough to be included when poverty issues are discussed, but they are not as well-established as most middle class people. These are the people who are on the edge of falling into or back into poverty. The authors follow nine families in New York City for seven years to see what their lives are like and what kinds of hardships they face over the years. They examine the factors that contribute to poverty and to the missing class, but they also include possible solutions as well. This is a more interesting look at the issue of poverty or near-poverty since the authors follow the same families over seven years, the reader really gets to see how their lives change for the better or worse over time. I would recommend this book to anyone who is comfortably middle or upper class as a wake-up call of just how good we have it.

[Stefani · Rating 3 out of 5]

You know, I originally wrote about a few paragraphs about this book and then decided it wasn't worth the space on Goodreads, and hit the delete button. I have kind of maxed myself out on sociology books recently, and this book kind made me hit my threshold. Essentially, the author profiles a few families in the "Middle Class", who work, but are still poor, who only miss the definition of "impoverished" by a few thousand dollars a year, according to the government standard. They linger somewhere between the desperately poor and the stable middle class. 300 pages later, the authors propose a few policy changes, some of which are stunningly ludicrious. One example is suggesting that a mother of 3, who had previously been on welfare for years, quit her job to be able to essentially "police" her children's schools on a full-time basis. I couldn't get over the overwhelmingly liberal bias, and felt that most of the solutions they proposed would not work in the real world.

[Carla Herbert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Upon reading the title, I had hoped that the authors would reach outside the bounds of traditional reporting and find the true missing class. Unfortunately they allowed their book to become nothing more than a book that highlights the plight facing one of our most impoverished people, immigrants. They highlight they issues facing immigrants, but fail to bring any new knowledge or information to he subject matter. In addition, they also fail to help create sustainable solutions. I expected a well balances view and instead read a book that simply highlights all that is wrong. In order to address the issues facing the missing class, we need to address that the missing class isn't simply the immigrant community, but many of our multigenerational families. Part if addressing the issue is also not to simply highlight the problems but to help brainstorm solutions.

[Shelby Stump]

The book The Missing Class, in my opinion was not a good read. This is a non-fiction book that deals with different families and their struggle of being below middle class but above the poverty line. It skipped around from a lot of different families and wouldn't tell their end of the story until some where later on in the book. It dealt more on immigrants and races. The book was very unorganized in my opinion. The issue of this book is poverty and how it is affecting below middle class families. I think this book puts a personal face on the issue. It talks about a bunch of different families and their lives. Although I wish it would've gone more into detail on the tragic parts of their lives. I liked that it had a lot of different stories and sides but I wouldn't recommend the book due to the fact that it didn't go very in-depth.

[Shelby Stump]

Shelby Stump's review Dec 11, 13

The book The Missing Class, in my opinion was not a good read. This is a non-fiction book that deals with different families and their struggle of being below middle class but above the poverty line. It skipped around from a lot of different families and wouldn't tell their end of the story until some where later on in the book. It dealt more on immigrants and races. The book was very unorganized in my opinion. The issue of this book is poverty and how it is affecting below middle class families. I think this book puts a personal face on the issue. It talks about a bunch of different families and their lives. Although I wish it would've gone more into detail on the tragic parts of their lives. I liked that it had a lot of different stories and sides but I wouldn't recommend the book due to the fact that it didn't go very in-depth.

[RF · Rating 4 out of 5]

I heard about this on NPR and got it at the library. It is very similar to "Nickeled and Dimed." The book follows the story of 9 families who are above the poverty line, but below "stability." We learn about the challenges of those who are working hard to provide for their families, and the precariousness of their economic position. Issues of education, gentrification, broken families, parenting, generational success or failure, immigration are all part of this complex issue.

These issues can be so politicized - but the stories of these families makes it personal and gets you thinking in a compassionate way.

[Maria Ziemer]

I heard about this book from my friend Charity Fesler, whose reading group was discussing it during my visit to Princeton in January 2008. Written by a Princeton University professor, the book presents the issues faced by "the missing class," the working poor hovering on the brink of poverty, those families who are just one accident/tragedy/hospitalization/layoff away from falling into poverty. Though I had only read the first chapter prior to the discussion, the group conversation was fascinating. I'm looking forward to continuing my reading of this book.

[Scott Jensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ahh, a real treat for a person who can relate with the title. Based on a rather large socio-economic study conducted in the New York City area, this book really paints portraits of families and individuals that I could relate with (geographically and financially). It was a fantastic read, right up until the final two pages when the authors began to get opinionated. The ideas (so-called solutions) they had for helping the Missing Class were off-the-wall. My advice: just skip the last two pages.

[Bela · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of many books I've read about the poor (or in this case, almost-poor) working class in America. However--I recently had the revelation that it really doesn't matter how much money you make, it's how much money you spend and save that truly matters. Still, this book was interesting to read but I wish they hadn't concentrated on NYC-based families. I would've liked to seen a scattering of families across the country to see stories of the working almost-poor in different areas and lower cost of living places.

[Victoria Grusing · Rating 3 out of 5]

Learned that I had been part of lowest paid missing class; but paid for my home and both daughters to get there Bachelor Degrees. No fancy, clothes, hair or nails. Five vacations in 32 years of marriage. We are fortunate and happy. Much depends on saving whatever is left over from paying rent, utilities and basic food prepared at home, economical transportation. We have a content life in our retirement. Both daughters are employed. Sometimes working three jobs is necessary; but saving all the extra earnings is vital. Wish people understood that they can do it.

[Tiffany Conner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating, accessible read. The authors do a fantastic job telling the stories of this 'Missing' Class whose good fortune is often not enough to pry them from the grip of disadvantage. If more social scientists wrote in this fashion I'd probably read more social science. As it is, I tend to lean more toward humanistic examinations of these very important subjects. I enjoyed this book.

[Benjamin]

This book delivered in exactly the way promised by the title and the jacket. Yet, I was hoping for a bit more. To be honest, I wanted more of a policy discussion, rather than details of the 7 year histories of 9 families living on the edge of poverty. But if you want to understand the way certain decisions can cause consequences that spiral out of control, this is a very good book.

[Audrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This sounded like an interesting book. It is somewhat interesting. I'm a bit disappointed that the author only uses examples from New York City. They can't possibly represent the U.S. as a whole.

[Gabrielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

More liberal/progressive doing a whole bunch of analysis, but this time failing to connect the dots...really, it would be great if just once I weren't left disappointed by going, "ok, this academic is finally going to come out and say the system is oppressive beyond repair...nope, missed it."

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Case studies of families in NYC's poorest neighborhoods

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book offers a fascinating (and daunting) look at a number of different families living just above the poverty line in America.

[Weavre]

OST NON-FICTION ADULT STK 305.5 NEW
Maybe

[Jaena4 Beadling · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book - very easy to read but also nuanced and detailed in its analysis of the "near poor."

[Chrisolu · Rating 5 out of 5]

About that group of working class people who make too much for government benefits but too little to be truly middle class. Any small emergency plunges them into debt.

[Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

More anecdotal than analytical.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Up close stories of families who are working hard to stay above the poverty line.