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• W243482934 abstract "THE FRAGILE MIDDLE CLASS: AMERICANS IN DEBT. By Teresa A. Sullivant, Elizabeth Warrens & Jay Lawrence Westbrook^^. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xvii, 380. $35.00.$^^ Beginning in 1980, personal bankruptcies, which were then running at under 300,000 per year, began trending upward.' In 1998, when the numbers ultimately peaked at 1.4 million, there had been more than a three hundred percent increase in the numbers of Americans ending up in bankruptcy court. By then, a political controversy had begun: credit card issuing companies were reframing bankruptcy as a moral-hazard problem and stigmatizing bankrupts by claiming that nonpayment of credit card debts raised costs for paying customers. Others disputed this view, arguing an absolute need to maintain a system that provides a financial safety net.3 The companies have now spent large sums wooing legislators, and it is likely that the Republican victories of 2000 will yield legislation favoring financial institutions at the expense of creditors. The Fragile Middle Class is a major contribution to this controversy, a book every member of Congress would do well to read. Indeed, it is likely to become the gold standard against which future research on bankruptcy is compared. Based on painstaking and comprehensive analysis of bankruptcy records from courts in five states, original survey data from those cases, and a litany of previous studies, the authors provide a fascinating account of the people who end up in bankruptcy court. They convincingly debunk the portrait of bankrupts as wanton profligates, deliberately and repeatedly running up credit card debts they have no intention of paying. Instead, the message of this book is more ominous: this population is not only not a morally inferior sub-set, but it is absolutely ordinary. Unlike an earlier time when bankruptcy was concentrated among blue-collar workers, bankruptcy petitioners are now socioeconomically and demographically indistinguishable from the broad middle class.4 And this research shows that broad middle class to be at far higher risk of experiencing bankruptcy than has been previously understood. The formula for that experience: bad luck (in the form of an adverse labormarket event such as job-skidding or unemployment, or a bout of ill health) plus an unpaid credit card balance. The increased likelihood of the former (which is now well documented in the economic literature),5 plus the ubiquity of the latter (the causes of which are less well understood), is behind the skyrocketing bankruptcy numbers. Indeed, the authors found that in two-thirds of their cases there were job-related factors.6 I must confess that I began the book somewhat skeptical about its major argument. Not that I questioned the basic evidence: the authors provided abundant and compelling data to show that their sample was solidly middle class, using demographic and socio-economic measures such as education and occupational status.' But the argument that the typical middle class household is vulnerable to bankruptcy is hard to make with an ex post sample. Rather, one would want to start with a general population sample and show that bankruptcies are random-not predicted by any measurable characteristics. Alternatively, one would like panel data that follows households over time. Furthermore, the data at hand is not ideal for addressing the moral-- hazard argument. For that, the relevant question is not whether bankrupts come from the middle class but whether they are less prudential, more risk-- loving, more profligate, and less concerned about debt repayment than nonbankrupts. For evidence on these factors, psychological data or the posing of hypotheticals about risk-taking preferences would have been useful. The demographic variable that may be most relevant is the fact that bankruptcy petitioners are less likely than the overall population to complete college (35.1% versus 25% for the general population). …" @default.
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• W243482934 date "2001-04-01" @default.
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• W243482934 title "Who's Going Bankrupt and Why?" @default.
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