If there seems to be general complacency about the low-income housing crisis, this is partly because it is in no way reflected in the official poverty rate, which has remained for the past several years at a soothingly low 13 percent or so. And as I read the next paragraph, the same hope returned: The problem of rents is easy for a non-economist, even a sparsely educated low-wage worker, to grasp: it’s the market, stupid.įor a second, I was filled with hope that Ehrenreich was going to go full Yglesias and start denouncing our insanely strict housing regulation.

You don’t need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high. Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. Instead of simply complaining about low wages, Ehrenreich talks about the painful pairing of low pay with high housing costs: My favorite part, though, comes in the final chapter.

While there’s ideological commentary throughout, she’s less preachy than most of her competition. Ehrenreich mostly just walks us through her experiment: how she found work, where she lived, what the jobs were like, how she made ends meet. Her runaway best-seller is what researchers call “radical ethnography” to study low-skilled workers in America, Ehrenreich became a low-skilled worker in America. I finally read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, and was pleasantly surprised.

Nickel and dimed book buy