most people would generally agree that if we can get the right things done for the country, then that is a better place than just talking about the right things to get done. >> watch sunday night at nine eastern on c-span2's booktv. .. microphone

during the question and answer portion. we only have one tonight and lastly please hold up your chair at the end of the event and place it against something solid. our staff would appreciate that. i'm pleased to introduce alissa quart of politics and prose, author of four acclaimed books, branded, republic outsider, hothouses and monetized, a volume of poetry. she writes a bimonthly poem for the guardian after work appears frequently in many publications. including the atlantic, the new york times and the nation. alissa quart examines the life of middle-class americans who can barely afford to lose children and "squeezed: why our families can't afford america". reporting on families just getting by and clean her own experience alissa quart reveals parenthood is overwhelming to everyone except the wealthiest. she provides real solutions to necessary policy shifts to a

blueprint for helping us see parenting and caregiving as professionally and politically valuable. david corn, co-author of russian roulette, rights alissa quart chronicles the plight of americans confronting the dangerous rise of middle-class financial instability. "squeezed: why our families can't afford america" is journalism at its best, exploratory, visceral and searching for answers. an important work for which attention should and must be paid. alissa quart will be joined by barbara ehrenrich, author of the classic nickel and diamond with whom she cofounded the economic hardship reporting project, and reporting on any quality. please join me in welcoming alissa quart and barbara ehrenrich. [applause] >> hi, i am barbara ehrenrich. i thought i would start by introducing alissa quart a little bit more but i came to know her, i started something

called the economic hardship project, which is this. there is more for people up here. at this point six. before alyssa came along, we were floundering. and and essays and things like that. >> the idea was we raised money so that we could pay low income people, journalists generally, there is no shortage of low income journalists because

nobody else is paying anymore. don't know if i should mention the atlantic.com. >> 50% according to -- there has been a 50% traction of newsrooms in 2005,. jobs lost. people need help. >> and a 3000 peace, and online side, you can pay $75 for that. that is impossible. if you work weeks or months, we thought we could come in, and photojournalists, we will pay you the old standards. >> which was the standard in

1995. >> we didn't have trouble attracting people who do this, and the editor was alissa quart. not only an editor but a writer. i don't want to make this sound machiavelli and but she took over the organization in no time at all. she was the executive editor. she took it over because she had the vision, the imagination, the energy, the incredible energy to work with so many people, get those pieces placed and write her own. i have to say about this book, a lot of it or most of it comes

out of discussions with dhr p. who takes care of the immigrant nanny's children, working for white people. that would turn into a series. >> much elongated into one of the main chapters in the book. separated from her son for ten years and she was here and taking care, a common story, middle-class people. and what that experience was like. and the handle. and you are a caregiver for

other people's children. >> care is being drained from the poorer countries to the richer countries of the world. there were so many that turned into finally chapters in this wonderful book which is a pleasure to read as well as very instructive. i have a lot of questions. >> you can talk as well as you can read. >> let's start with one that is coming up before we started.

why is the work of caring for others so undervalued in our culture? caring in general, what parents do or mothers do, home health work aids would do and nurse's aids do, what is wrong with this kind of work that yet so little respect or pay? >> what i see going out, embedded in a 24-hour day care facility, don't know how many people knew about that but growth industry, 9% of caregiving is off hours and on weekends and there is a lot of centers that cropped up to fulfill the needs so wound up spending a lot of time in one

of them and all these people who are working, i talked to many nannies who left their kids overseas, they are paid not a lot. the part, and gender and race, but part of the trap of the middle class. a lot of families paying these people are not always so wealthy. what i try to get at in this book, think of them as russian dolls stacked, the caregiving prices or how little they are paid within these strange middle-class moms and dads, people in this room will talk to that. we are victimizing the carriers, demonize care.

why don't we care about care? it is partially because we want to separate love and money and contaminate one another. people who do care work, are not interested in money, parents for themselves too, it is complicated. >> >> nursing was thought to be instinctual. you pay them a little tiny bit. >> social science on it, prisoner of love theory, so filled with love they work for little money and part of our emotional economy depends on that love.

>> okay. one thing i am sure your book which is upsetting to me is the penalties placed on women for motherhood, the instant you are perceived to be pregnant, your boss may start ignoring you, you may be shoveled off to a less important department, forget about it. it used to be at one point, maybe i am thinking of the 19th century, giving birth and raising a child was seen as important work and a contribution to society. it is something that has been

penalized. >> people may be familiar, people wanted to pay, a hypothetical, $11 less then men. a sociological worldview, a lot of women experienced that. not an abstraction rate, but in my book i argue that there is the opposite event, motherhood advantage which i could get into also, a focus that people told me about. and social science around that as well. every time you get penalized,

what i hope people read my book, there's actually may be an advantage my employer doesn't know, i am sharper and more organized, organize my time better, know how to deal with other minds, children have radically different minds. maybe i more flexible with people i encounter in my daily life. for the most part i don't think this awareness is in the workplace. i did a journalistic experiment and went looking for a white-collar corporate job. see what happened. >> bait and switched. >> undercover into white-collar jobs using your maiden name. >> i used my maiden name, changed to my maiden name. >> it is amazing you did that. started that with a resume telling of the suit -- something of the truth, not

that i was a writer or anything like that. my activities in the pta and etc. organizing this organizing that, they laughed at me. any experience you have as a parent is not relevant, i would like to convince them, i haven't done that yet. >> do women feel they have been to apparent advantage as a worker or thinker, keep that in your mind. >> what you think about this, never occurred to me to ask you this before. given all the penalties for parenting, why should we do it

anymore? why are we doing it? many women in their 30s are desperate to have a child. after reading your book, why? why? a happy mother and grandmother. i understand that side but is having children getting to be a luxury like angelina jolies of the world? >> if you look at some of the people with many children, they have a lot more money than people with one child. it depends. all these wealthy people with many children. >> you are more representative of your age group with one. >> what is it now? one.something.

>> let's not wait until we are old. >> it is very bleak but that is what your book talks about. you have got to. let's not go there or even talk about it. another kind of question. is this really new, the struggles of the educated middle-class. >> >> the documents.

do you see a huge difference now from these accounts of the people that you looked at back then in the mid-80s? >> it is a huge difference, the educated middle-class once had some stability. you knew that if you could get your children through college and they could get a profession everything would be okay, right? that was the goal. now those professions are crumbling. certainly, you focus in one chapter on the law which everybody thought was a stable -- >> there are three states that don't have surplus lawyers, access lawyers, that was the phrase. in all the other states there are too many lawyers to go around, much too many and i talk to people with a lot of law school debt.

these were not people who didn't make it, people who had been lawyers and sustain it. this is interesting, the seachange is a way of thinking about what a middle-class person is, images from the 50s or 60s, revolutionary road rd. richard yates, everyone's been the 60s in 70s trying to escape from that trap as you mentioned and then, can we ever get into the convention? can we ever be boring? can we ever have a humdrum life? every day the commute is half an hour in the train, an hour and a half. changing what my reporting showed me, changing the category of the middle class. >> look at college teaching. another admired profession.

people immediately respected you. most of the teaching, 70%. >> i am going with 40%. i was willing to tolerate 50%. there was a large number of adjuncts. temporary teachers who don't have 10 years, permanent positions that are renewable, on course and makes $3000 a class and 62% of adjuncts surveyed make $20,000 so we are talking after graduate school they paid a lot for, the poverty line kind of work and i documented one of the men talked to many others in her life was really hard, food stamps, since i have written

this, someone's was telling me the adjuncts asked to go to the food bank at college, it was meant for the students, we need to go to the food bank too. and that, these are the kind of stories and then the broader questions, should any of us be doing what we love? i try to address that. what does it mean to be interested in the humanities now? can we afford that? that is another luxury it seems. >> two points or questions. one is the old boring jobs aren't as stable anymore. bait and switch was about the crisis among white-collar corporate workers and that was a realm, they sold out, they got it all, no. they have no job stability. they could be gone at any time

and have to start all over at the age of 50 so that is not -- it leads to a harder question for you. are you ready? i always tell young people do what you want to do, follow your passion. find out the color of your balloon. >> parachute. >> not much you can do with it. >> i knew it was something that floats. after reading this may be that is the wrong thing to say but i can't in good conscience tell them if you go get a job as an assistant department manager you will be safe. i can't say that either. what do we say?

>> i do have solutions in the book and i can get into those but part of what we do is try to make people aware of what they are getting into because i tend to think awareness at least makes people less vulnerable to self blame and self-hatred and all the things, why is this not working out, why, people are writing to me and saying why did i get the second job, you told me no stigma and i'm listening, great. that is what i want i want people and then from there start to look at more systematic problems. what is underlying this, how many administrators are in the university system? there is an adjunct movement, one of the names is tenure for the social good. if anyone is in academia i can tell you more about it. it is academic. they are organizing around this but i have this idea you go to

u.s. news & world report and say put in how many adjuncts or how little they are getting paid and they are assessed with prestige and appearances and i wonder if there are ways to put pressure on institutions and corporate overlords of these industries as it were? they are technically nonprofits but i know that is not entirely true. they are also businesses, can we put pressure on them? once we overcome the sense that it is us, only us, our fault can we look out and start doing things? >> that is an important point you make again and again to the reader, it is not your fault. this is not because you are stupid or not creative enough. >> not that you didn't work

hard enough, not that you did the wrong thing. there's so much language in both liberal circles and conservative ones, bootstrapping on one side, weaning on the other. what if we have done as much as we can? >> don't know how many more minutes we have. five minutes. we can consider some of the political aspects and outcomes. is there a chance for building an alliance between the squeezed professional couple and their nanny? your book puts them in the same -- >> i did that on purpose because i want to show that it is a continuum of class

instability and the shaken category of the middle class, resembles the working class in many ways in terms of contingency, hours, regular hours, lack of security in old age. why don't we start thinking about reframing it, more organizing around groups and the election of alexandria cortez is part of what inspired me. and latinos in the area that were voting in and out -- it is not. and it is helpful and still

helpful to think occupy did not function entirely but having a middle precarious organizing around their own instability and recognizing it and name it as a class problem rather than your problem you will see and recognize similarity for others. >> it will take some effort to bridge class differences, the wealthy employers. >> mothers and fathers. >> to the people they employed. >> we wrote a piece together, made that point around me too. an interesting issue, you should read that. and talked about an

organization called hand in hand. a small organization inspiring in this way. parents and nannies together in this group, higher wages and better household, cooking your food, and their caregivers cook food that is aromatic in their kitchen. we have a recognition of the humanity of this relationship, what a decent wage is. >> a lot of problems connecting. >> we hope many of you, time is up, will have that.

>> we were writing about the me too movement which we were emphasizing really should be a movement of working-class women. the most abused and assaulted women workers, hotel housekeepers, agricultural workers. there was very little outreach in the attempt to bring them in to the me too movement, not enough anyway. >> we hope there will be more. >> having your career derailed, the me too members, the majority of people who are assaulted on the job are worrying about, not thinking of a career but thinking i need to get paid.

and more severe stuff. we still make connections between these two conditions. >> the last question i ask before i let you loose. there was an article in the new york times just a couple days ago suggesting that some of the kinds of frustrations and discontent that went into the trump phenomenon and his election might also account for the election of alexandria cortez. that is true, very interesting and an interesting way to look at something. do you see some chances for an alliance across that.

>> it is a small pebble in the site, that is what i'm hoping my book will be useful for and one of the things i'm hoping policy people or organizers could take it and do things that a journalist or other can't. >> anybody want to come up to the microphone, it could be an answer. >> thank you for coming. the federal reserve, so much quantitative easing which is

called printing money. has that helped us or help the local people, just spinning our wheels and the federal reserve is taking money. >> you should know. i don't know. that is a question that is going to make us think now. >> we don't have answers at the moment. we will answer you. >> according to the pew charitable trust, our fertility rate in america is 1.8, we are in a situation of population decline, are people aware of this, is anybody besides me concerned we are an endangered

species? >> the overall issue, not about the us but worldwide, we have achieved populations our distant ancestors could never have imagined. and too many people on the road, competing for housing. this is something to take into account if they decide to have children or not. >> at least some of my subjects said thank god i only have one. they often make asides like that. my book wasn't about fertility but i realized it factors into my own decision to have one child. >> i do think the reasons for that decline in american fertility are in this book.

>> the problem is so big and the progress we are making is so slow that we are really in trouble. we don't have a format of economics and statistics to even indicate what is going on. we are at a loss to understand it so we are not getting solutions. we are not dealing with distribution of wealth, we are dealing with cash flow to the economy and how it works and jobs in the future. so do you see any place where this kind of thing is starting to take place? where the planning and economic overview of what is happening to our culture is starting to be retooled so that we understand what is happening to us? >> we are seeing a lot of

smaller things like platform cooperative which is a movement to rethink, these are worker owned apps that are kind of collective so people who are part of the co-op possess part of the share of it. a huge problem is the gig economy created a new ownership class. that would be one small thing that would be useful. it is a broader stroke of things but what i really saw up close, i spent time at a co-op or talk to a lot of people, universal basic income, ubi enthusiasts. that was interesting too. a potential solution which was impossible.

>> want to explain what that is? >> an allowance for every family, it would be $12,000-$20,000 a year and it would be provided and offset job losses for automation, daycare costs. as i write in the book, they spent at least 30% of take-home pay, daycare. it is 38%. ubi would be this problem. and the disabled son, she had to care for him. and the allowance for that movement. on the right as well, which is interesting.

a lot of libertarians too. not just progressives. >> thank you. >> i am the mother of one child who is 43 and has twins. part of the reason i only had one child was so that it would not be an impediment to my career and had a very good career. one of the phenomena you haven't addressed at all was the role of grandmothers and grandparents. that is critical among middle-class families. i said to my daughter i will help you in a pinch but i'm not going to spend my time babysitting during my retirement years. i have a lot of friends who are committed to monday, tuesday,

thursday, they split with the in-laws four days a week and their retirement is geared to taking care of the grandchildren. and what are the implications of that? part of it is certainly that when i babysit or my friends babysit there is no cost involved. there is cost to me and my life but no economic cost to my daughter and son-in-law, and they are both a professional family in this town. >> thank you for bringing that up. a grandma is always available. we go unnoticed. the perpetuation of this class is not noticed. >> i take that as an assignment.

>> it came out mother's day last year. the joy of grandmothering. barbara's book would be quite different. >> thank you. >> my name is joe williams, thank you. >> alissa quart, i know you have a lot to say about the subject. two things come to minds, child care costs roughly for middle-class family as much as college tuition, 20, $60,000 a year, depending on quality of care.

workers don't make that much. they are around minimum wage, who gets the money, why is there such a differentiation between what the child care provider gets and how much the family gets to pay and what of the providers? you talked about this before but who is taking care of their kids? >> the people who ran the daycare i invented for instance, their kids were involved in daycare. they were scooped into it. that is part of what happened but i talked to six or twee 7 other caregivers. whoever the grandma is, global version of the grandparent story but they are separated from their kids.

usually local day cares are cheaper. i often thought that would be a good story too about the global care chain within neighborhoods. someone did a version of it, informal daycare. and informal networks. who takes care of the nannies kids here? >> the other question, if the united states has a differentiation between taking care of children as an afterthought except when it comes to cut the check. and we had good family leave, and the support other countries

give their working families. is there a model in the us going quell that we can examine? is there a movement to integrate the best practices in the us? >> you must be a journalist. that was really good. okay, now -- before you go, what was the first one? i don't want to just say denmark and sweden. and and they tax their citizens more and are committed to daycare services. that is not like scandinavian eden, that is across the border. and the second question?

>> best practices in the us. >> we tend not to pay attention to those other countries, and how do we adopt anything from canada? canadians are totally different from americans. they are exotic, they -- anyway. there is tremendous american arrogance, the we don't need to learn anything. the short answer, countries had a social safety net deal with these problems better than we do. and all the northern european countries. >> one short answer, 1971, nixon was going to find an act, passed something that was going to give substantial childcare

to people and he vetoed it. i love these moments in history, they are working for us, people say it is impossible, never happen here but it almost happened in 1971. >> thank you for your book and making these dynamics more visible. people working on the structural issues will hopefully take it. >> and look at policy and other changes. as you were talking, i was thinking of this increase in depth of despair, suicide rates, opioids and your comment about the internalization of people thinking it is about them individually and their inability to transcend class or economic challenges and structures that are locking them in and creating freefall.

i'm curious what you see in this conversation. i people actually locating the problem, people who are living it, structural policy, or are they internalizing it as about them and their inability to transcend and for me this is tied to the rags to riches story. a big force for propelling people forward and they are locked in and don't recognize ossification, that is a setup, poisonous to believe that with certain degree so i'm curious what you find in that. >> a lot of people i spoke to were blaming themselves. that was a refrain and there was this internalized self-doubt. i have said this before. we have a lot of blaming the

other too. blaming islam a phobia. they are two sides of the same coin, what is wrong with me, i want to cancel myself out, what have i done wrong, i would start talking to my subjects. if we did this and that, explaining how then. but yeah. it wound up okay in the end. character is centered journalism, and some of the people wind up by the end, they made it. they are not living the american dream, that is a lot outside most people's reach but they are on dry land, not near the poverty line for now.

i don't know what that was attributed to, resilience, rethinking their lives, getting out of the decision fatigue. do you know what decision fatigue is? the exhaustion when you are economically precarious and can't make choices. that affect middle-class in a way it didn't used to in the past. you can't think clearly, make clear choices, you can't plan, you don't know what the future will hold. some of the people i spoke to when they got in a better position were able to make broader choices. >> two more questions. >> in spain, fertility rate is 1.3. we have our own economic problems. there was an agency linked to spanish government. they conduct a research

foundation, one of the main outcomes is society -- in a way that people cannot fulfill expectations. >> have you done this to me? >> it is an institute. in your research, have you found any sense of excitement in the middle-class? the research in spain tried to explain, enough time to read, working out for many hours a day, spending as much time as they should with kids and voting for extreme right or extreme left political parties, very detailed research. >> a mania. >> one of the things that is going on. >> that is what you see.

40% of people work nontraditional hours now in america. that is not always meaning they are working at night. they work in strange clumps or part-time or whatever. it does feed anxiety, it is not regularity. >> at the lower reaches where you are on call, you don't know what your hours will be, come in here now. what was the plan? >> i wrote about how they are in that situation and help their kids with homework because they are coming home at strange hours, doing poorly in school, that was another finding. >> you are nickeled and times, the first book of nonfiction i ever read.

[applause] >> your book "squeezed: why our families can't afford america" was covered in the new york times, if you go online it is side-by-side with another book about -- >> david grebe are. >> his thesis in that book was there are so many people doing who knows what. that is a really interesting idea to explore compared to your overeducated but still poor. i just graduated from columbia and everyone was saying are you going to go into investment banking which is not what i did? how do you reconcile these people and this situation we are facing, people are

overeducated and still poor and a reason to write about people who are in jobs and jobs. >> they are part of the same thing. people who pursued what they loved, something that wasn't bs or authentic, they are often penalized for it. people who did what they had to do. they were penalized many different way. if they alienated labor. if there was an attempt not to be alienated and find meaning and you are alienated in another way because you have a steady job and they have jobs they don't care about at all. >> i would say i haven't read his book but i have read excerpts. almost any job you are in, you pretend to busily -- be busy at all times. manual labor, or whatever. that is a trick. that is what colleges should teach, how to look busy.

>> i will be here for signing. you have an incredible audience, we are glad, if you have more information about the organization, you want to find out more, thank you a lot. [applause] >> we have copies of barbara's book natural causes behind our register. thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> you are watching booktv on hart senate office building 0, television for serious readers. , television for serious readers.

>> that all happens tonight on hart senate office building 0's booktv, 48 hours of nonfiction artisan books on booktv. >> book to be really visible capitol hill to ask members of congress what they are reading this summer.

>> courage and consequence. it is written by karl rove. and political strategies that were used to propel george bush into a position where he could run for governor and when in a race that was determined to be not winnable because he proved that wrong and after that the political strategy, moving him from the governor's office in texas to a candidate for president of the united states. it starts out with a description of karl rove's personal life and how he became involved in politics and his ups and downs at the beginning

of his career. i find that fascinating. i like to read books that are factual. i'm not a fiction reader. i like to read about history and real people in real events. >> you read a couple books on your favorite presidents. >> i am in abe lincoln fan. i like the idea, those that are not the most friendly around you. mister lincoln's famous for bringing enemies into his cabinet. a fascinating story of how -- the courage it took to move through the civil war and another favorite of mine is teddy roosevelt. this is just one example of teddy roosevelt books, there have been many.

this one is special because i visit with teddy roosevelt before. before he was in my office. his ancestor -- he, like his ancestor, president roosevelt is interested and involved in the environment. i met him and knew about teddy roosevelt and the passion he had for the environment, interesting to see how that passed down from generation to generation and it was a pleasure to meet with teddy roosevelt before. >> you are third a book about charity. >> i think this book came out in 2004. i was a homicide detective in the early 80s and became a lead

detective and the korean river serial motor case and over a 19 year span, i am going to call him the devil of a human being, a monster of a human being took the lives of 60 to 70 people. he pled guilty when they finally caught him, through dna, he pled guilty to 49 murders. we closed 59 cases and they were a couple cases and we didn't have all the evidence, we knew he committed those two. this book describes in the beginning a little bit of my childhood, a little bit of my own life, and so some of those are described in the book but

mostly focused on the investigation of murders and the day-to-day activity, the team that was involved in this over the years. tremendously talented can be detectives to volunteers. all the proceeds go to the pediatric care center in kent. they are known for their ability to take in drug babies and put them through treatment, withdrawal from those drugs and get them into foster homes and

adopted homes or biological parents. and the care center, they were adopted by my daughter, tabitha and breyer, adopted a year apart at 3 months. they are 16, and 15 and doing are some. all the proceeds from the book. and the families of the victims who lost their daughters and also special thanks and recognition to all those detectives and the team that stayed with the case for so long to catch the monster that did this. >> send us your summer reading list at booktv on twitter, instagram or facebook.

booktv on hart senate office building 0 -- c-span 2, television for serious readers. >> here's a look at the current best-selling nonfiction audiobooks. topping the list, fox news host judge janine. defend donald trump against his detractors and lies, leakers and liberals.

.. describing himself as an evolutionary ornithologist with broad interest on diverse topics is richard prum. he's the head curator of vertebrate zoology at yale's