Dispatches: Pinched Across America

NEW YORK -- For Pinched author Don Peck, it all began when he was reporting on the sputtering U.S. economy showing small signs of life for The Atlantic, where he is an editor. 

As he tried to get out in front of the next chapter of what had been a very painful American downturn saga, he heard one message from the sages: It’s not over.

That sigh of relief being heard across the land was premature. It would be years before the economy would revive and during that time Americans would be profoundly affected in ways many never imagined.

And so Pinched became Peck’s path, a journey that sent him to spot and make sense of the changes reshaping the American worker, family life, relationships, and more, and to explain them with a historian’s eye. The book, subtitled How the Great Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It, takes a hard look at the personal, social and cultural changes that resulted from the most severe economic shocks to strike this nation -- the depression of 1893, the Great Depression of the thirties, and the Great Recession of 2008 from which our nation is still recovering today -- and how they altered the character of society.

“The long run economic troubles that haunt the nation are not limited to a few disadvantaged places,” says Peck, who lives in Adams Morgan. “Left unaddressed they could produce an unwelcome sea change in American culture.”

Patch’s West Coast Editorial Director Marcia Parker  sat down with the author as part of the Patch/Huffington Post Media Group’s year-long Dispatches series of stories, blogs posts, conversations with thought leaders, and videos chronicling the changing American dream across the nation.

Peck’s book is one of those stories. A veteran journalist, Peck has been writing about economics and society for The Atlantic for several years, and admits to being “a little wonkish.” He’s comes to these complex topics armed with a B.A. in government and economics from Dartmouth College and a Masters of Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.

Patch: What was the impetus for this compact book with a big message?

Peck:  After the economy stopped its freefall, and everyone breathed a sign of relief, I asked expert after expert what do you think will happen next, and they all said the same thing:  The recovery is likely to be achingly slow and cause a lot of untold pain. Then I began reading economic histories, and I began to see the patterns. After having written my first cover story on long term unemployment in March 2010, I felt I owed it to people to look at solutions too.  Now it’s becoming very real… New college grads are experiencing just what young people experienced in the depression; it’s been a little bit surreal.

Patch: You advocate for several public policy solutions, from making wage insurance available to creating career academies in high schools to give them exposure to new careers and build workforce skills. Have any of those caught on ?

Peck: We are starting to see more conversation in Washington and elsewhere on these topics. President Obama’s jobs bill does include wage insurance. But we need more communities to become involved. An important goal for me was to propose solutions. 

Patch: You highlight several worrisome results of the long term economic distress, including the growing social distance that has grown between different American cliques and classes. How does that manifest itself today?

Peck: The rich have become disconnected. ...People have focused a lot on the rich, ... the bifurcated society… Because of the nature of this recession, which has been very uneven .. it has largely not affected the higher class. ..The result is that it has blunted the urgency of recovery and a national conversation.

Patch: You talk a lot about diminished jobs and how we need to create more middle skill jobs and make lower skill jobs more respectable and fulfilling and secure.

Peck: There’s been a slow decline in middle-skill jobs. In the next decade, a larger proportion of Americans may need to take work in occupations that have traditionally required little skill and have paid low wages. We need to do more to support these workers.

Patch: Why did you explore the impact of two key trends -- that during the Great Recession, for the first time in the U.S. history women came to hold the majority of the country’s jobs, and that since the recession fewer prime-age men have been employed than at any time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that stat in 1948 ?

Peck: These shifts underpin why family and community problems are spreading more widely. Women and men are struggling with partners who are no longer breadwinners. Experts I talked with spoke of the long term implications for our communities of unstable families and marriage as an increasingly fragile institution.

For more local Dispatches, see how in Catonsville, MD; how a farmer keeps his family farm afloat in Reisterstown, MD, and how a dress designer in Savage-Mill coming back for 40 years. You can find more articles from this ongoing series, “Dispatches: The Changing American Dream” from across the country at The Huffington Post.

Editor’s Note: One of our goals with Dispatches is to seed a national conversation in Patch towns across America, spark home-grown, grass roots solutions and spotlight doers across the land -- men, women and kids who are trying in unique ways to turn things around – get people back to work, give them confidence to make the transition to new jobs and skill building, a new way to live life and still thrive. If you have a personal story to share or you know someone whose life has been impacted by the economic distress of our times, or an organization that is tackling these issues, or a group doing something about it, drop us a note at marc.shapiro@patch.com. If you have a point of view to share and want to blog for us in your Patch town, get in touch.