Down the Up Escalator: How the 99 Percent Live in the Great Recession
By Barbara Garson
Doubleday
288 pages, $26.95
April, 2013
About a chapter into reading Barbara Garson's Down the Up Escalator, I was wondering why I bothered. I've read so many of these books and articles and written so many of these blog posts. They lay out the policies that benefited the rich over everyone else and allowed the financial manipulations that crashed the economy. They tell us stories of people caught in this terrible economy. Maybe they remind us of the policies we already know could start to fix the problem. But we've seen that all before. We know what happened. We know the policies that would fix it. What we don't know is how to get there, how to overcome a broken Senate and a gerrymandered House and both political parties being more responsive to big money than to working people. What could this book offer that was new? What could any book offer that's new, beyond the faint hope that this will be the book that gives us a new way of talking or thinking about our economy and politics and somehow turns the tide?
Well, Garson's book won't do that. But it still turned out to be more interesting and engaging than I expected in those early dispirited evenings of reading, maybe because it wears Garson's alert human gaze so close to the surface. In fact, she's straightforward about the same sense of frustration I felt in those early chapters. When a woman whose home is being foreclosed on says to her, "I prayed about [going to be interviewed by Garson], and then I said 'I'll go meet her. I'll go because she is tiny. She can't do me no harm,'" Garson writes:
Oh, God, I can't hurt her, because I'm small. "No, I'm not going to do you any harm," I said, "but I'm not going to do you any good. That's the problem." Then I moved to Alice's side of the booth and cried because my books never do anyone any good.
That sense of human connection and care is woven through Garson's compelling rendition of the economic story we've come to know so well, the squeeze not just on people at the bottom but people who were—or at least thought they were—in the middle, as well. As a result,
Down the Up Escalator does add to all those other books, to Jacob Hacker's
The Great Risk Shift and Donald Barlett and James Steele's
The Betrayal of the American Dream, to name a couple I've reviewed in the past.
Down the Up Escalator is rich with information (as of August 2010, "nearly 8 percent of African-American families had lost a home in the Great Recession compared with 4.5 percent of white families," for instance). It reports on just what happens in foreclosure courts and makes blindingly clear how badly the deck is stacked against families struggling to keep their homes not by focusing on the worst of those courts but by focusing on one of the best.
But more unusually, it offers a vision through Garson's eyes of how destabilized our understanding of the economic world we live in has become. She shows how people who thought, not unreasonably, that their comfortable lives were stable lives had the rug pulled out from under them when they were laid off and, despite solid work histories, couldn't find new jobs; how people could think they were getting ahead until suddenly they were underwater. She's clearsighted about mistakes some of her subjects made along the way, but also about the enormous structural challenges that all of them faced—that most of us face. Our sense of class, of what kind of lives and stability people should have according to their education and employment histories, has become unmoored; Garson writes:
I was still mildly shocked to hear well-dressed professionals coolly consider default. But I was beginning to realize that white Californians who drive new cars and speak TV announcer English may be poorer than they look. I don't know exactly what these women earn; it's enough to make air commuting worthwhile. But apparently, it hadn't been enough to own middle-class homes in pre-crash California. At least not as I understand home ownership.
She turns this gaze on a home health aide and on a woman with old, old New England money who has only recently learned "that I did not have an 'income' as in a Jane Austen novel. I had a finite amount of money"; on a blind woman losing her home because of a mortgage the mentally disabled cousin she cares for had been tricked into signing and on a banker who, at a relatively low level, did the kind of work that contributed to the financial crisis, a man about whom Garson writes, "There was no sense asking him about social value. You can't undo a master's in business administration in one afternoon."
I went into the reading of Up the Down Escalator feeling dispirited because it was sure to be full of sad, illuminating stories reinforcing how screwed working people are, without any means of changing things. And it is full of them, and the forces keeping the economy organized this way are as overwhelming as they ever were. But Garson's curious eye and warm presence throughout the book create a sense of connection rather than the hopelessness I'd feared feeling. As for her policy prescription, the one that inevitably comes at the end of such books, leaving you thinking, "I know, I know, but how?" Garson skips over restoring Glass-Steagall or passing a public option or ending subsidies for big oil companies—the things that on most days are the policies we fantasize about. Instead, she has a simple answer: "It's time for a Jubilee."
