Katherine Newman set out in the mid-’80s to explore a story that, since then, has only gotten bigger: the experience of downward mobility in America. Her book Falling From Grace, published in 1988, was based on more than 150 interviews of the sort anthropologists call “focused life histories.” She writes about the ways middle-class Americans come to understand, and cope with, a loss of economic security. “Whether downward mobility is defined in terms of income or occupational dislocation (or both),” she writes, “it is clear that it is a problem that has plagued between one-fifth and one-third of our population for at least the last 15 years.”
Though journalists and some political leaders have been taking a strong interest in recent years in such topics, Newman approaches the territory as a trained anthropologist – one who is more interested in the American suburb than in distant cultures. In 1993, she published Declining Fortunes: The Withering of the American Dream, in which she wrote about the effects of the changing economy on a middle-class town in New Jersey. “The middle class matters hugely in this country,” the New York Times wrote that year, “and Ms. Newman is well on her way to becoming its pre-eminent chronicler.”
In the last couple of years, while teaching anthropology at Columbia University, Newman has been interviewing people in Harlem who qualify as “the working poor.” She will complete work on this forthcoming book as a new resident of Massachusetts: She started teaching this fall at Harvard, where she is now a faculty member at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. CommonWealth editor Dave Denison met with Newman in her new office at the Kennedy School in early September. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation.
CommonWealth: I found your book Falling From Grace at the bookstore on the sociology shelf–not on the anthropology shelf.
Newman: Right. I could be confused for a sociologist.
CommonWealth: How does your approach as an anthropologist differ, for example, from that of a sociologist?
Newman: I think the best way to understand what I do is that the topics which interest me are sociological topics. They have to do with the impact of large economic trends. But the approach that I take is very anthropological. I spend a lot of time with the people that I study–I halfway live with them. I interview them over long periods of time. I really come to know them quite well. So I’m not a survey researcher, who gets on the telephone and surveys a thousand people. That’s much more of a sociological method. When sociologists do this kind of work they will ask questions and give people categories, on the scale of one to ten: Are you very happy? Are you sort of happy? Are you a bit miserable? And that’s the kind of data they work with.
I ask people questions and give them a lot of time to reflect on their answers. And that’s because my primary interest as an anthropologist is in questions of meaning and of subjective understanding: how people caught in this maelstrom of economic change understand their own futures, the predicaments they found themselves in, the challenges that they’re faced with and the difficulties of meeting them, and the failures to meet them, much of the time.
CommonWealth: Do you as an academic look at the way journalists sometimes approach these issues–and you know that journalists have been looking a lot more carefully at downward mobility and downsizing over the last few years… When you think of something like the New York Times series that was done earlier this year, do you look at their method and think it differs significantly from yours?
Newman: It does differ, in that their contact is more abbreviated. And it’s more scattershot. It’s not as systematic. I mean, when I draw my conclusions I’m drawing them based on interviews with 60 people, 100 people, 200 people. And the conclusions I draw are based on a fairly careful understanding of the patterns that emerge from that kind of comprehensive collection of information. Journalists look for one anecdotal person who represents a trend that they believe is in effect or that they can see in some database. They want to illustrate something. I want to illustrate something, too, but I want to be sure it’s really representative and a deep trend.
CommonWealth: How did it come to be that you as an anthropologist have concentrated so exclusively on America? Why are you not off studying body piercing in faraway places?
Newman: Most of my colleagues in anthropology are doing exactly that. I think any bright academic wants to find unexplored territory. In anthropology, the American middle class is unexplored territory. One of the reasons it’s unexplored is that it’s just all around us, to the point where it’s hard sometimes for anthropologists to see that as a subject. It’s too close, in a sense, for them to [get] the kind of distance on it to see it as a research problem. But I think it’s an important research problem. I think anyone who’s interested in the interplay between any form of social science and the political world has to take the condition of the middle class seriously. I also think I had a special take on the middle class. I wasn’t interested in its more settled, successful elements, and that’s what you read a great deal [about] in the journalistic world, for example, and in popular culture. I was interested in the dark side, the unsung side of middle-class experience.
CommonWealth: And you were on to that early. Another thing that struck me when I found your book was that it was right next to Megatrends… I wonder if this question of downward mobility has become something that the culture at large sees as a “megatrend” of the ’80s and ’90s.
Newman: I think that it does. When I started working on this topic, you couldn’t find anybody who was doing any research on this. Even the term “downward mobility” was not a term that was in use. I like to think I had something to do with making it a topic of concern, because in fact the numbers were quite big in the early ’80s. We had a big recession in the early ’80s. Unemployment was more than twice what it is right now. And so this was a problem that began quite some time ago, but it wasn’t something that was really in public consciousness. It was understood as a downturn in the business cycle, rather than a permanent slippage in the middle-class experience. So I do think that I was attempting to work on something that hadn’t really been studied. I mean, when I went to look for relevant literature, you had to go back to the Great Depression to find anything from the social science community about middle-class people falling out of the class structure.
CommonWealth: I wonder if you are aware of something that I sometimes am aware of as a journalist: When you spend time concentrating on middle-class issues, and devote years to it as you have, isn’t there always kind of a nagging or lurking notion in the culture that the problems of the middle class are not really urgent enough? I mean, you’ve got people, maybe they’re worrying about making $50,000 instead of $70,000. And generally that’s not the “crisis” that our politics and culture pays attention to.
Newman: It was very much a silent disaster, especially in the early ’80s. This is not so true now. I mean now this is gaining a lot of public attention because it’s so widespread and because you pick up the newspaper and discover that 40,000 people just got the chop at AT&T. Suddenly it looks like a significant social problem. But for many people, especially when I began studying this topic, and even now, it’s a silent crisis because they feel they have no claim to complain. And that no one is going to be interested in their problems.
But if you drop from a job that paid you $50,000 a year and end up having to accept a job that pays you $20,000 a year, which is the experience of an awful lot of people who go through downsizing now, it’s going to have a big, big, impact on your standard of living. And it’s not so silent inside your family. That has happened to an increasing number of Americans who never expected to have this kind of trouble. Nonetheless, I do think they feel a degree of reticence about claiming public attention for their problems, because they know they’re not starving, they’re not in ghettoes, they’re not destitute. So why should anybody care about them? But the fact is, they’re under extreme pressure and the whole trajectory of their lives has just gone inside out.
CommonWealth: Do you have a shorthand for who’s in the middle class?
Newman: Well, I tend to look at it in all of these different ways, in order to explore the various ways in which you could define it. But I was primarily interested in people who were home owners, who were stably employed, who had incomes in the middle ranges, but all the way up to as much as $70,000 or $80,000 a year, people who had to work for a living, who didn’t have inherited wealth. I was interested in everything from fairly stable blue-collar workers, who many people would not define as part of the middle class, because they’re really thinking of white-collar professionals. But I did because they were home owners, because they had a pretty high standard of living, because they were in industries that could support a middle-class lifestyle, and because from their point of view, they had the same expectations that their white-collar counterparts had. They wanted their kids to be able to go to college, they were very worried about mortgages, their interests were not that different from the secretaries who lived next door or the teachers who lived next door, because their earnings were pretty much the same.
CommonWealth: There’s such a divergence, though, from the upper part of the middle class to the lower part of the middle class, not just in their economic standing but in the very culture of their lives. Can you even talk about something called “middle-class culture”?
Newman: Not without breaking its components down. And I do try to do that. In my work I have looked at blue-collar communities and have tried to describe what is special about their view of their economic prospects. It is different from the more upper-level white-collar workers. Blue-collar workers were much more concerned with tradition, with the role of long-standing ties between industry and labor, much more intertwined into union issues. All of those things were of concern to them. Much less geographically mobile. Much less likely to pick up and move somewhere, because they were generations deep into the communities where they lived, and had a very deep attachment to the industries they were in. That is, it wasn’t just a way to make a living. It was also a culture–the company was a culture.
The white-collar workers were much less intertwined into the places they worked as cultures. They were much more concerned with mobility–they would pick up and move. They weren’t as deeply rooted in the communities they were in, in the sense of being fourth- or fifth-generation in those communities. So yes, there’s great divergence. I don’t think we can speak of “a middle-class culture.” We can speak of some central tendencies in the middle class. But the job of the anthropologist is to explore the variation.
CommonWealth: But you also noted that anthropologists are disturbed by, or bothered by, cultural contradictions.
Newman: I think there is a tendency in anthropology to try to make people’s understandings appear to be seamless, logical, organized, consistent. And they’re not, usually. They’re fractured, incomplete, contradictory. I find that quite interesting. I think there’s also a romantic appreciation of culture in anthropology. Culture is usually seen as helpful, as enduring, as enhancing life experience. I was looking at people for whom the very cultural beliefs they held were devastating to them. Skewered them. Beliefs in meritocracy. Beliefs in individual responsibility–the ability to control your fate. And then their lives would go inside out and they were damaged by their belief systems. So I, again, was trying to take a different approach to the whole study of culture by saying it also has its dark side. It isn’t always so helpful. The way your own culture defines what’s happened to you can make it much harder to recover.
CommonWealth: One of the things I thought was illuminating in Falling From Grace was the difference that you pointed out in attitude between middle-class managers and blue-collar workers when they got laid off, and their very attitude about their layoff.
Newman: Right. Well, they come from very different kinds of cultures and they have different forms of social organization in their lives. The white-collar workers on the whole tended to have friendship networks that came out of work, hence when they lost their work they also lost their whole social lives. They also tended to be much more privatized, mainly because they were more affluent. So they didn’t have support systems in place, where they could borrow from friends and neighbors and kin–because they had had the income to support an independent family lifestyle and that was their goal and their aspiration. When things unraveled they were really quite alone. In short order, they were quite alone. In addition they had a very self-conscious sense of individual control. They believed that they were masters of their own destiny. And that left them very shaken when they couldn’t exercise that control.
The blue-collar workers came from a much more group-oriented tradition. They were union people. They didn’t bargain on behalf of themselves, the union bargained for them. So they were part of collective organizations that dictated what would become of them. The strength of that is that they tended not to see themselves as so individually responsible for their plight. The weakness of it is that somebody else has to rescue them. And if they found they couldn’t find another job and the union couldn’t do much for them, they were really in trouble.
CommonWealth: There’s a passivity that comes with that. Even though blue-collar workers benefit by being able to see larger forces at work in causing their jobs to disappear, there’s also, it seems to me, a certain sort of passivity that comes with that.
Newman: I don’t know if I would characterize it as passivity in the sense that they felt they had no responsibility for themselves. Because that really isn’t true. They did feel very responsible to find work. And they were agonized by not being able to work. Their jobs were less important as sources of identity. But being a working person was extremely important to them. To be dependent, to be on the dole, was an unthinkable state of existence. But it is true that there had been larger organizations that had a big influence on their lives and that could clear the pathway for a hundred people to be rehired, or not clear the pathway. So they were more at the mercy of events, decisions, contracts they couldn’t influence, than the white-collar workers thought of themselves as being. The white-collar workers had a view of themselves as independently responsible, even though very often they were just as subject to the winds of political decisions, or contracts, or downsizing in an industry. They didn’t really have that much more control than the blue-collar workers did, but their culture said they should.
CommonWealth: And so there’s a different kind of self-blame you found.
Newman: Very different dynamic there. … The white-collar workers had a much stronger sense that they could go out and find a new job. The trouble was, if they didn’t, they were really left to blame themselves. And it was devastating to them. So the advantage of that more individual orientation is that you don’t give up all hope if no one else is interested in your problems. You still think you may be able solve them. The disadvantage is, when you can’t, you really turn that blame full-force inward.
CommonWealth: Harper’s ran a piece last year called “Dancing with Headhunters–Scenes from a Downsized Life….”
Newman: Right. That could have come straight out of my book.
CommonWealth: A similar tale, of a person who had been upwardly mobile and then was coping with the loss of status and station. One of the things that I thought was interesting was that a few issues later, when Harper’s ran letters in reaction, one of the ones that struck me was a letter that came from a former headhunter who had been trying to work with these downsized managers, and he called the writer of the article a “whiny hypocrite.” And there’s a lot of that; there is this sense…
Newman: He had nothing to complain about.
CommonWealth: …that to complain is merely “whining.”
Newman: Well, there is certainly a widespread view that that’s the case–that, you know, why should we worry about these people? They have plenty of resources, and if they didn’t save up enough money to tide them through a rainy day, well, who’s to blame for that? And that is a problem. It means that there’s not a whole lot of understanding. Until it reaches a crisis level and you start to see those headlines, and it’s thousands of people. Thousands of well educated, experienced workers who’ve now lost their jobs and are not getting re-employed. Then it starts to take on a slightly different tenor.
I think something else has changed, as well, which is different from when I started doing this work. In the early ’80s, American businesses were in trouble. And there was a widespread understanding that they, in a sense, needed to do these cuts because they were really in trouble. We had gone through record inflation in the ’70s, then the government cutbacks came in the early ’80s. Business was in trouble, so when business is in trouble these sorts of things happen.
Well, business is not in trouble right now. The companies that are doing these massive downsizings are posting record profits. That’s when it becomes extremely difficult for most people to understand. It makes sense to the ordinary person that if firms are in trouble they’re going to have to cut back. It doesn’t make sense to them that if the firms are doing really, really well they’re going to have to cut back. Because then there’s no solution. Then growth isn’t the answer, then better management isn’t the answer, then there’s no answer. I think when it happens to people who are experienced and well educated, that old recipe that’s supposed to protect you from this kind of economic instability–get a good education, seek a practical job–none of those recipes seem to work any more. Then people really get rattled, because they don’t know which way to turn. What can they do for themselves if those older tried and true recipes don’t function?
CommonWealth: There has been a response to these tales of downsizing, that I’m sure you’re aware of, as well, that is kind of along the lines of “Get used to it.” America has changed and so now we lead our careers without feelings of economic security. So what?
Newman: Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to sell very well. For several reasons. One is that the generation that is the largest generation in our country right now, the baby-boom generation, came through a prosperous period in its youth [and has] a level of expectations for the future, which are really hard to unravel. It may well be that these more modest expectations will characterize younger generations heading into a very unstable labor market, which has been unstable for a long, long time, and that they will not expect to have secure jobs. But the biggest generation, which tends to set the trend, doesn’t buy that. That wasn’t their experience in their youth, it isn’t what they were expecting for the future, and it certainly doesn’t characterize the experience their parents had, the generation that came of age during World War II and thereafter, which hit such a big upward turn that job security was reasonably easy to come by.
So I think these are expectations that change very slowly, and with great difficulty, and with tremendous political upheaval. Politicians have been playing this economic insecurity card–I mean it’s almost gotten to amusing heights when it takes Patrick Buchanan and the Republicans to raise the issue of job insecurity. It’s not their usual song, so to speak. But it is clearly a matter of great agony for millions of Americans who either are going through it or know someone who’s going through it or have a family member who’s going through it. It’s hard to find people who have been totally untouched.
CommonWealth: I sense also that there is a strong assumption that this could be temporary. That if we can get the last recession behind us, maybe five years from now, we’ll be, as President Clinton said, “back on track,” and your books will be relegated to out-of-date analysis.
Newman: I don’t think so. I mean, I wish that were the case, because obviously job security is very important and it would be better for the country if more people were secure in their jobs. But I don’t think these are temporary trends. They’ve been going on for quite a long time now and [it’s] hard to see what it is on the horizon of the future that could change all of this. We have had a reasonably good run of economic growth in recent years. It hasn’t changed that pattern; in fact, we’re seeing record layoffs in a period of reasonable prosperity. So we have no reason to believe more prosperity is going to change this, when this run of prosperity didn’t.
CommonWealth: But, might this not be a one-generation phenomenon? In that the post-World War II parents did well and had that powerful combination of growing family incomes and an activist government helping to build the middle class, and now the baby-boom generation doesn’t have either of those, and so gets used to diminished expectations. But might it be a one-generation thing, where now the children of the baby-boomers, 15 years from now won’t have such high expectations–and may do better than their parents?
Newman: Possible. Possible. I mean, I don’t have a crystal ball. Hard to say. One thing that I think is most definitely a one-generation phenomenon were those high-growth rates and high-mobility rates of the post-World War II period. There’s no question in my mind that that was a unique set of circumstances in which western European industries were flattened by the war, and so the United States really was the only industrial power left. So we had these phenomenally high growth rates, we had a huge stay-at-home middle-class motherhood population, which was fueled by rising men’s wages. All of those conditions were unique to that postwar boom period. It took about 20-25 years before the economies of western Europe were rebuilt after the war and they started to compete with us, and our growth rates started to slow. So there’s no question in my mind that the one-generation thing we can be sure of is that one-generation boom period after the war.
But I think it had some very powerful ripple effects that are going to be hard to get rid of for a long time. It produced the baby boom and the baby boom, because of its sheer size, whatever it expects, whatever it wants, in a sense, determines the political mood for an awfully long time to come. So I can’t predict the future. I can say we’re in for another 20 years, at least, of complicated expectations. Because that generation, as it works its way through the life span, has continued to expect more than what’s being delivered.
CommonWealth: Do you think there’s something to this idea that an anxious middle class is less willing to be generous in spirit?
Newman: Yes, I do. I think that’s true. And I think it’s very worrisome because if the middle class isn’t willing to cooperate with the various schemes of redistribution that we have–taxation, school bonds, Social Security payments and so on–the whole social compact really unravels. And I think we’re entering a period in which that’s really a question. We don’t know how it’s going to come out. In a sense, the Republican revolution in 1994 was the quintessential expression of the notion that “every man for himself” is the way we ought to run our country. I think there was a view that that was going to prevail. It looked like it was prevailing right up to the point where it started to hit Social Security, Medicare, and the various forms of middle-class entitlement. And the notion that those benefits were going to be tampered with terrified the middle class and I think that is what has been responsible for a certain cooling off of ardor for the Republican revolution. But I don’t know where that leaves us. It’s not clear: Does that mean we hammer the poor and get rid of their benefits but preserve the middle-class entitlements that are built into the postwar social policy? Or does it mean that we start hammering away at those, as well? I think it’s unclear right now. But there’s no question that economic instability and downward mobility reduces the level of enthusiasm that middle-class families have for redistribution and for support of the poor.
CommonWealth: Well, why is that, really? Don’t those ungenerous, if it is that, ungenerous attitudes–don’t those exist in the hearts of middle-class people anyway, whether they feel provoked to utter sentiments against the poor? Aren’t those feelings there anyway?
Newman: I don’t think so, necessarily. Or at least they’re willing to ignore them in periods of greater prosperity. Certainly in the period of the Great Society programs you saw an enormous amount of largesse, really. And it was politically supportable. It didn’t provoke a huge backlash. I think that there is a monumental lack of trust, or confidence, in government right now–that the middle class has been convinced to some degree by conservative voices that have argued that government can’t do anything well so it shouldn’t do anything at all. And that it’s sort of botched every area that it’s attempted to reform or improve. I think it’s important to ask more questions about what middle-class people want out of government now. I don’t think we understand very well where these crises of confidence have left us, exactly. As I said, we seem to have walked away from that Republican revolution a bit–which was the expression of the notion that really government shouldn’t do much at all. It’s not clear to me that that’s really how the middle class sees these issues, but it’s not clear what they do believe government is responsible for.
I think there have been periods in which middle-class people were far more willing to part with dollars out of their pockets to support general social goals–improving the school system, providing support for poor families, even erecting a Social Security system. In periods of economic distress when people can see their paychecks declining–after all, we’ve had stagnating wages for almost 20 years now–it becomes harder for them to part with those tax dollars, especially if they’re being told it’s all a waste–it’s all useless spending that has no benefits for the society.
CommonWealth: One of the things you got at in one of your books is that the decline of the middle class, if there is a decline, is both an economic and a cultural phenomenon. That it isn’t all economics; a lot of it has to do with family structure. And nothing can be as sudden a setback as a divorce.
Newman: Divorce is probably one of the leading causes of downward mobility for families, largely because women’s earnings are not on par with men’s. Any time you split up households and have to support them on the income that used to support one household, it’s going to cause a lot of grief inside both remaining households. Divorce is a very serious problem, and it’s growing. I don’t see much of a solution to that one on the horizon. It’s growing in all classes, it’s growing in all ethnic groups. Ironically, when times are tough economically we tend to see lower divorce rates because people are more aware that they can’t make it without two incomes in the house. And they attempt to reconcile a little bit more than in periods of prosperity.
CommonWealth: You’ve been spending a lot of time now studying the working poor. We talk about the economic factors and the cultural factors. Economically, we know that the working poor have, I think, more stacked against them. When you think about the people now that you’ve been spending time with, do you sense that the culture of the working poor is worse, more detrimental, than that of the middle class?
Newman: No. In the book that I’m working on right now, I make the argument that the working poor are actually quite “middle class” in their culture. They’ve been portrayed, or the inner-city has been portrayed as a zone of deviance and distant subculture. What I found in my studies in central Harlem was quite the opposite. The values of both the working poor and people who were looking for work were really very hard to distinguish from their middle-class counterparts. They believe in the work ethic, they don’t believe in being dependent, they think they’re responsible for themselves, they think family is important. They’re really quite indistinguishable. The public doesn’t know this.
The popular press is more inclined to portray the families that are breaking up, the drug-dealers, the deviant cases, the violence, and so on. All of which is certainly there in the inner-city. But that’s a minority. It’s a minority, however, that the working poor can’t run from as effectively as the middle class can. They would like to, but they can’t. They don’t have the resources to leave. But if anything, their values are even more conservative, on issues like crime for example, than their middle-class counterparts because they have to live with the crime. They want more police protection. They think drug dealers are a scourge on their lives–because they are. They take jobs that the rest of us wouldn’t touch with a barge pole and don’t want our children to have to stoop to. But the working poor in the inner city take those jobs because they’re the only jobs available where they live. They believe that being a working person is the only source of dignity that any American should seek. One of the things I hope to point out in this book is that there are millions of people trapped in poverty, but in working poverty whose values are not a problem and even whose practices are not a problem, but whose opportunity structure is a big problem. They have these low-wage jobs and it’s very difficult for them to move up from those low-wage jobs to anything else that looks remotely like a livable salary.
CommonWealth: But surely you must find a different set of attitudes among the working poor when it comes to the role of government. You talked about the frequency in which a person in the city who has a low-level job may also have relatives on AFDC or on food stamps; and so there must be a more direct acknowledgment among that group that we need government help.
Newman: Well, yes and no. I mean, I was really surprised at how conservative their views were on this subject, because very often those conservative views led them to powerful critiques of their own family members. They distinguish between people who are temporarily in trouble, who need some assistance for a short time. And they understand that many of the benefits available to the middle class are totally inaccessible to them. You don’t get unemployment insurance if you work part-time. You don’t get unemployment insurance if your job is not a full-time permanent job. If you’ve been employed in a job that is part-time or seasonal, the only kind of “unemployment insurance” available to you may well be AFDC. It’s a poor person’s unemployment insurance system. And they accept the notion that that’s something that people may have to fall back on for a short period of time. But they’re no more tolerant of the idea of long-term dependence on government benefits than your average middle-class person. They believe that the only thing one should seek in life is a steady job. They believe very much in individual responsibility. They actually distinguish themselves quite sharply from people who are recipients of public benefits. Even though very often those people are not only members of their families but sometimes members of their families who make it possible for them to stay in the low-wage labor market. Because it’s some mother on AFDC who’s doing the child care for someone else who’s in the low-wage labor force and can’t afford to pay for child care.
And in some sense the working poor almost–how can I put this?–their own sense of honor in a way depends on distinguishing themselves from people who are less fortunate. The less fortunate are those folks who are dependent on government benefits. [The working poor] occupy stigmatized low-wage jobs; there’s not a lot of honor locked up in those jobs. So how do you come to define yourself as an honorable person? Well, it’s partly by distinguishing yourself in a positive way from the people you see down below you. At least you’re not one of them. And in a way the impetus to separate yourself from those less fortunate is all the more powerful for people who sit at the bottom of this other pyramid, and are told in many ways, by the media, by their friends, by their family members, “you know that job you’ve got, that’s a McJob, that’s not a real job, that’s a crappy job. That’s a chump change job. And only a fool would take that kind of job.” Well if you are subject to that in a relentless fashion, which most of these low-wage workers are, you have to derive a sense of honor someplace. It ends up coming from this notion that you’re a part of that working mass of people, which is different from that other group down below you.
CommonWealth: Your books are down-to-earth, readable, and free of jargon…
Newman: Thank you.
CommonWealth: So I would think that your fellow academics wouldn’t think much of them.
Newman: Well I hope that’s not true! They get very positive reviews from my fellow academics…
CommonWealth: Isn’t there a stigma in academia attached to writing so-called “popular” books?
Newman: Maybe for some people. I don’t really care. If there is, that doesn’t bother me very much, because I get so much pleasure out of the idea that my ideas can be understood by people and are useful to them. I get letters from people all over the country who’ve read my books and who think it helps them capture some aspect of their own experience. My hero, and I think this is true for many social scientists who work on these topics, is C. Wright Mills. And C. Wright Mills was someone absolutely dedicated [to the idea] that social science could help people understand the conditions of their own lives–and that that’s what its real mission ought to be. If I was limited to an academic audience it would feel like a very small pond indeed, and because I occupy one of the most privileged jobs available in this society–I mean I still sometimes can’t believe I get paid to do what I do, because I love it, because it’s such an enriching and interesting job–I think I owe it to the population that supports academic institutions to make my work accessible. Otherwise it would feel parasitical for me. So I don’t care if other people prefer to write just for their own colleagues. That’s never been my interest.