The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty

"This is a very different kind of book. I suppose you would put it alongside a number of more general books about what’s been happening to the working and middle classes in America of late. It’s a repeat of a study that was done—I think it was in South Africa and India some years ago—where they spent a lot of time with families to understand where their money comes from and how they use it and how they save; the sort of everyday mechanics of what people do. What they learned from doing this in America was that even people who had what looked like quite a high level of income on average experienced great uncertainty—because of the way their jobs worked or because they don’t have health insurance or some big bill to do with their car landed and they had to have their car for work. So it’s about that kind of vulnerability and how extensive that is in American life. I thought it was a much more interesting insight than saying, ‘There are some very poor people in poor communities,’ which is part of this genre, because of the detail and because of the fact that it does go so far up the income scale. It’s an incredibly sympathetically written book. The researchers actually went and spent a lot of time with the families. You get a very detailed and sympathetic perspective on how they cope. It looks a bit at whether there would be ways of developing financial products to suit people—savings vehicles and the way that the credit market operates, more than policy. Because I think the policy questions about that take you to some very big social contract kinds of decisions. To any European, it’s just astonishing that the US health insurance market operates the way it does. But that’s the kind of question that gets raised by it, I think. It also takes you to all of the concerns about gig work and zero-hour contracts, which are not really to do with the digital companies. They’re to do with the fact that that’s the way the American labour market has been going for a long time. There’s been a lot of contingent work. It’s nothing to do with digital. It’s an epidemic of uncertainty and it goes a long way to explaining the politics of the US. Or the European countries where there has been populism, for that matter. I suppose, in a way, it links back to Dani Rodrik’s arguments about the price we’ve paid for having ignored the transition costs of the free trade, globalised, financialized world."