Stemming Middle-Class Decline: The Challenges to Economic Development

Nancey Green Leigh

ISBN 10: 0882851497 / ISBN 13: 9780882851495

Published by Rutgers University Press, 1994

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Bibliographic Details

Title: Stemming Middle-Class Decline: The ...

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Publication Date: 1994

Binding: Paperback / softback

Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis:

Are Americans as well-off as they used to be? The answer affects everything from product markets and housing sales to social tranquility and presidential (and local) elections. This volume examines what is happening to the American middle class. In a detailed and comprehensive analysis, Nancey Green Leigh tracks changes in the pattern of income distribution over a twenty-year period. While earnings have increased, there is a widening gap between what middle-level earnings can purchase and the cost of a middle standard of living.

Due to the fact that this decline has not been experienced equally in all regions, separate analyses are reported for urban and rural locations, major census regions, and the largest states. To identify which workers have been most affected, Leigh compares earning trends by race, gender, educational level, industry of employment, part- or full-time status, and fringe benefit recipiency. Rejecting short-term and demographic explanations, Leigh links the decline of the middle class to economic change and industrial restructuring.

Leigh concludes her work by examining planning and policy prescriptions to improve the prospects of members—and aspiring members—of the middle economic class. She documents the decreasing ability of middle-level earners to purchase a middle standard of living and attributes the decline in part to failures in planning. Failures of planning, she observes, have contributed to the growing divergence between middle-level earnings and the middle standard of living. Stemming Middle-Class Decline provides comprehensive data and trends on workers, communities, regions, and the nation that all policymakers and government officials should read and examine with care.

About the Author:

Nancey Green Leigh is professor of city and regional planning at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is a former Woodrow Wilson Fellow and Regents Fellow of the University of California and past vice president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. Her writings have appeared in the Journal of Planning Literature, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, and Economic Development Quarterly.