‘Ten Lives’ profiles Americans from across the economic spectrum : NPR

How much money would it take for you to feel financially secure? Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mona Chalabi spent five years following 10 Americans, from those living paycheck to paycheck to those earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, in an effort to answer that question. Her new book, Ten Lives: How What We Have Shapes Who We Are, explores why financial security can feel so elusive.

“It’s called 10 Lives because I specifically didn’t just want to focus on the 1%,” Chalabi says. “Instead I wanted to talk about how the 99% of us aren’t all in it together, and the kind of power differentials between us.”

Chalabi says almost everyone she profiled in the book was deeply worried about their financial future, even those who earn plenty of money.

“Across the board, everyone just seemed to be expressing this feeling of panic that I think is really, really particular to U.S. capitalism, which is an incredibly precarious and cruel system where you are one crisis away from experiencing a real economic shock,” she says.

Chalabi also noticed that many of the people she profiled considered themselves middle class, regardless of what their actual income was. She says that disconnect between actual wealth and a sense of class has consequences — not just for how we see ourselves, but also in how we judge everybody else.

“To be poor in this country is to encounter an enormous, enormous array of obstacles, including assumptions about your intelligence [and] your educational level,” she says. “And so it’s actually quite rational sometimes for people to try to present themselves as middle class, maybe even to try and signal wealth with the clothes that they buy or the cars that they drive. I don’t think it’s simply aspirational. I also think it is them trying to avoid the discrimination that they might face if their real income level were disclosed.”