Just finished LOSING OUR WAY: AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT OF A TROUBLED AMERICA.

[raccoon]

LOSING OUR WAY: AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT OF A TROUBLED AMERICA
By Bob Herbert. New York: Doubleday. 2014 ISBN: 978 0385 52823 8

Herbert tells how the USA has gone downhill over the last 40 years in the areas of jobs, public education, income inequality, and the condition of the infrastructure. Others have dealt with these areas, of course, but his style is quite readable and I recommend this book.

There has been a widespread tendency to retreat into denial about the severity of the jobs crisis, to close our eyes and pretend, year after year, that something approaching a normal employment environment is just around the corner, just past the next policy initiative. We keep telling ourselves that the landscape will change. We’ll see a burst of economic growth and jobs will be plentiful again—just as they were back in the 1960s, or maybe the late ‘90s. But that’s not so. In 2013 and 2014, I was still hearing the same sad stories from jobless men and women that I’d been hearing during the Great Recession and the years that immediately followed. The sorrowful truth was that the era of limitless job growth that built the American middle class was gone. The U.S. had been stuck for years in the worst employment environment since the 1930s, with millions of ordinary American being left far behind, their hopes and dreams dwindling. The stark, cold reality was that men and women of all ages, in all regions of the country, million upon millions of them, have for years been scrambling to meet their most basic daily needs in the face of mass layoffs, reduced hours, wage stagnation, and the collapse of any hope of economic security.

In late 2013, four and a half years after the formal, technical ending of the Great recession, employment conditions in the U.S. remained in horrendous shape….

I think most of us here on DU aren’t in denial about the job situation, but I think there are plenty of people out there in the own bubbles who are in denial and/or ignorant about it.