Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation. She won the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize. Her seventeenth book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan Books), has just been published. Her bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, 10th Anniversary Edition, has just been released by Picador Books.
Articles by this author
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Views Sunday, November 06, 2016 Forget Fear and Loathing. The US Election Inspires Projectile Vomiting Back when America was “great” – say, in the 1970s – the most unpleasant emotions a presidential race might inspire were “fear and loathing”. We expected our political process to provoke antagonism and ennui. We did not expect it to trigger projectile vomiting. But this year is different, with... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, December 01, 2015 Dead, White, and Blue: The Great Die-Off of America's Blue Collar Whites The white working class, which usually inspires liberal concern only for its paradoxical, Republican-leaning voting habits, has recently become newsworthy for something else: according to economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the winner of the latest Nobel Prize in economics, its members in the 45... Read more |
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Views Thursday, May 17, 2012 Preying on Poverty: How Government and Corporations Use the Poor as Piggy Banks Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. Read more |
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Views Thursday, March 15, 2012 Rediscovering American Poverty It’s been exactly 50 years since Americans, or at least the non-poor among them, “discovered” poverty, thanks to Michael Harrington’s engaging book The Other America . If this discovery now seems a little overstated, like Columbus’s “discovery” of America, it was because the poor, according to Harrington, were so “hidden” and “invisible” that it took a crusading left-wing journalist to ferret them out. Read more |
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Views Thursday, December 15, 2011 The Making of the American 99% And the Collapse of the Middle Class “ Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. ” -- E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class Read more |
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Views Sunday, October 23, 2011 Throw Them Out With the Trash: Why Homelessness Is Becoming an Occupy Wall Street Issue As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed; medical care and rudimentary security provided -- to which ends a dozen or more committees may toil night and day. But for the individual occupier, one problem often overshadows everything else, including job loss, the destruction of the middle class, and the reign of the 1%. And that is the single question: Where am I going to pee? Read more |
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Views Thursday, October 13, 2011 The Guys in the 1% Brought This On At the risk of being pedantic, let me point out that “99% versus 1%” is not a class analysis, not in any respectable sociological sense. Shave off the top 1% and you’re still left with some awfully steep divides of wealth, income and opportunity. The 99% includes the ordinary rich, for example, who may lack private jets but do have swimming pools and second homes. It also includes the immigrant workers who mow their lawns and clean their houses for them. This is not a class. It’s just the default category left after you subtract the billionaires. Read more |
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Views Saturday, October 01, 2011 The Rich Are Under Attack! Poor Things. The latest group to claim victim status is the rich. Actually the super-rich, whose wealth ordinarily exempts them from pity. While they are not yet subjected to airport profiling (except for early boarding and club access), they sense that the public is turning subtly against them — otherwise how could President Obama propose raising their taxes ? Read more |
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Views Tuesday, August 09, 2011 Nickel and Dimed (2011 Version): On Turning Poverty into an American Crime I completed the manuscript for Nickel and Dimed in a time of seemingly boundless prosperity. Technology innovators and venture capitalists were acquiring sudden fortunes, buying up McMansions like the ones I had cleaned in Maine and much larger. Even secretaries in some hi-tech firms were striking it rich with their stock options. There was loose talk about a permanent conquest of the business cycle, and a sassy new spirit infecting American capitalism. Read more |
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Views Monday, July 11, 2011 The Fog of (Robot) War For a book about the all-too-human “passions of war,” my 1997 work Blood Rites ended on a strangely inhuman note: I suggested that, whatever distinctly human qualities war calls upon -- honor, courage, solidarity, cruelty, and so forth -- it might be useful to stop thinking of war in exclusively human terms. After all, certain species of ants wage war and computers can simulate “wars” that play themselves out on-screen without any human involvement. Read more |