'Economic risk has shifted from the government and corporations to workers and their families.'

Why are so many Ameri so-and-sos mired in debt, passage bankrupt, and worried about the economy? To many observers, the answer is round-eyed: middle-class families have embarked on a reck slight expending spree, confident that they will be bailed out by the administration when the day of reckoning arrives.

Warren and Tyagi throw cold water on this condescending chorus. As they convincingly demonstrate, middle-class complaints have a solid basis: even as womens contributions to family income have risen, the basic principle of middle-class life have become much much expensive. Others have noted that womens entrance into the work force was needful for midle-class families to advance in the 1980s and 1990s. But Warren and Tyagi earn this observation a giant leap further. Families havent advanced. They have been rill to stay still.

Warren and Tyagi have set a high bank vault for the over- exercise argument, and for this they deserve great credit. Yet because they focus so hard on the consumption side of the picture, Warren and Tyagi say less about what is arguably the core economic experience of todays functional families: increased insecurity.

One reason for this oversight, ironically, is that Warren and Tyagi appear to buy into the primeval tenet of the over-consumption school--namely, its view of middle-class spending as consumption, a simple cash outflow that straitjackets family finances.



Today, they write, the basic expenses consume 75 percent of the familys combined income. Their nut--the amount that they must pay in good times and in bad--is fixed at 75 percent of their income.

Yet many of the big-ticket items that Warren and Tyagi discuss--housing, education, even electric razor care--are best thought of not merely as consumption but also as investments. And because they are partly investments, they can scarcely be viewed as money down the drain. To the contrary, families snitch such investments...

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