The Great Risk Shift
The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care and Retirement and How You Can Fight Back
By Jacob Hacker
Oxford University Press
New York, 2006

There are different kinds of book reviews, from the biting critique to the love letter to the essay taking a book as its starting point but moving far beyond the book for a meditation on something larger. What I'm doing here is barely even a review. Really I just want you to read this book, because it provides such an important view of the American economy as it affects the majority of the American people. In case you don't read it, though, I want you to have some understanding of that view; so call it a summary if you'd like.

Most people who read Daily Kos will be familiar with the extent of economic inequality in the US - that, for instance, "between 1979 and 2003 the average income of the richest Americans more than doubled after adjusting for inflation, while that of middle-class Americans increased by only around 15 percent." And most will be familiar with some or most of the following information on economic insecurity:

Personal bankruptcy has gone from a rare occurence to a routine one, with the number of households filing for bankruptcy rising from fewer than 290,000 in 1980 to more than two million in 2005....

Americans are also losing their homes at record rates. Since the early 1970s, the mortgage foreclosure rate has increased fivefold. From 2001 to 2005 an average of one in every sixty households with a mortgage fell into foreclosure a year....

Over a two-year period, more than 80 million adults and children - one out of three nonelderly Americans, 85 percent of them working or the kids of working parents - spend some time without the protection against ruinous health costs that insurance offers....

Twenty-five years ago, 83 percent of medium and large firms offered traditional "defined-benefit" pensions that provided a predetermined monthly benefit for the remainder of a worker's life. Today, the share is below a third....Between 1989 and 1998 - a decade in which 401(k) coverage exploded and the stock market boomed - the share of families whose pension savings allowed them to replace at least half of their prior income in retirement actually declined, as old-style guaranteed pensions rapidly became a thing of the past....

At its peak in the mid-1990s, income instability was almost five times as great as it was in the early 1970s. And while it dropped during the boom of the late 1990s, it never fell below twice its starting level, and it shot up again in recent years to three times what it was in the early 1970s.

In The Great Risk Shift, Hacker weaves together the erosion of health insurance and pensions, the rise of bankruptcy and foreclosure, and sharply rising income instability, revealing them as closely related phenomena which, rather than seeking to limit, the government and employers have actively increased despite the many costs to American families. He labels this effort to relocate risk onto individuals and families the "Personal Responsibility Crusade."

Again, we're familiar with the broad strokes of the Personal Responsibility Crusade: It's all on you, as an individual. Born into a poor family? Work hard and you'll make it! You worked hard and graduated from a good college, but with a lot of debt? Work hard and you'll make it! Why do you want health insurance? A Health Savings Account would be so much better, because you wouldn't be paying for healthcare you might never use. What, your daughter got sick and one month of her care wiped out your HSA? That's too bad, but I guess you should have been working harder and saving more. Keep working! It's still all on you!! (And your daughter, but we'll gloss over that part.)

But Hacker reveals the insidious long-term strategies beneath the apple pie, American values, and hard work surface of the Personal Responsibility Crusade:

Perhaps most important, advocates of private accounts believed that they would ultimately transform how Americans viewed government and each other. By encouraging Americans to rely on themselves, tax-favored accounts would also make people more deeply invested in the market, more distrustful of direct government programs, more reluctant to join broader risk pools - and more likely to vote for conservative politicians.

It is, in other words, the patient, steady, enactment of Grover Norquist's famous desire to "to get [government] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub," and Hacker methodically fills out the human implications of the drowning - not the hugely visible implications like post-Katrina New Orleans, but the day to day ones that rarely make the news, but ruin lives.