Volatility. Instability. Insecurity. Precarity. There’s a burgeoning lexicon seeking to capture the grim economic state of more and more Americans. Join us as Jonathan Morduch describes what he and Rachel Schneider discovered when they got 253 households to track their every bit of income and their every expense over the course of a year. The results—showcased in The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty (Princeton University Press, 2017)—are sobering, and should cause us to reevaluate what we think we know about poverty and inequality in postindustrial America.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017).
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