Overview

One of our most incisive and committed journalists—author of the classic All the Livelong Day—shows us the real human cost of our economic follies. The Great Recession has thrown huge economic challenges at almost all Americans save the super-affluent few, and we are only now beginning to reckon up the human toll it is taking. Down the Up Escalator is an urgent dispatch from the front lines of our vast collective struggle to keep our heads above water and maybe even—someday—get ahead. Garson has interviewed an economically and geographically wide variety of Americans to show the painful waste in all this loss and insecurity, and describe how individuals are coping. Her broader historical focus, though, is on the causes and consequences of the long stagnation of wages and how it has resulted in an increasingly desperate reliance on credit and a series of ever-larger bubbles—stocks, technology, real estate. This is no way to run an economy, or a democracy.

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9780307475985

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Praise for Down the Up Escalator In the official estimation of government economists, the Great Recession ended in 2009. But in Barbara Garson's new book, it lives on. And for the people whose stories she tells, the Great Recession may never die.... Down the Up Escalator is best read as a kind of travelogue through a beaten-down but-not-broken United States.... [It is] an engaging, insightful account of the changes that have swept through an America where good, hard-working people are learning to make do with less money, less opportunity and less free time.... A willingness to portray the complexity of Americans' personal responses to macroeconomic disaster helps make Garson's book a lively read, despite its grim subject matter. So many books that treat the subject of economic restructuring portray working Americans as hapless victims. Garson is too sharp an observer, and too honest a writer, to do that...her lucid book makes it clear that with each new crisis the American people will survive by digging deeper into their supplies of creativity, courage and humor. --Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times Barbara Garson has written a small masterpiece of wise and alarming reportage about how ordinary Americans are surviving during extraordinarily rotten times. Down the Up Escalator is a necessary antidote to all the blather about 'freeing' banks and investment houses from 'crippling regulations'. --Michael Kazin, author of American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation Do you want to know both how and why we got into the economic mess we are in -- and what it really means in the everyday life of real people? What is driving the pain deep in the bowels of the system--and how people are trying to counter it in the real world? Read this book; no one does it better and makes it readable and human to boot, than Barbara Garson. --Gar Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism Most recessions come and go a

Praise for Down the Up Escalator In the official estimation of government economists, the Great Recession ended in 2009. But in Barbara Garson's new book, it lives on. And for the people whose stories she tells, the Great Recession may never die. . . . Down the Up Escalator is best read as a kind of travelogue through a beaten-down but-not-broken United States. . . . [It is] an engaging, insightful account of the changes that have swept through an America where good, hard-working people are learning to make do with less money, less opportunity and less free time. . . . A willingness to portray the complexity of Americans' personal responses to macroeconomic disaster helps make Garson's book a lively read, despite its grim subject matter. So many books that treat the subject of economic restructuring portray working Americans as hapless victims. Garson is too sharp an observer, and too honest a writer, to do that . . . her lucid book makes it clear that with each new crisis the American people will survive by digging deeper into their supplies of creativity, courage and humor. --Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times Barbara Garson has written a small masterpiece of wise and alarming reportage about how ordinary Americans are surviving during extraordinarily rotten times. Down the Up Escalator is a necessary antidote to all the blather about 'freeing' banks and investment houses from 'crippling regulations.' --Michael Kazin, author of American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation Do you want to know both how and why we got into the economic mess we are in -- and what it really means in the everyday life of real people? What is driving the pain deep in the bowels of the system--and how people are trying to counter it in the real world? Read this book; no one does it better and makes it readable and human to boot, than Barbara Garson. --Gar Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism Most recessions come and g

Praise for Down the Up Escalator <br> In the official estimation of government economists, the Great Recession ended in 2009. But in Barbara Garson's new book, it lives on. And for the people whose stories she tells, the Great Recession may never die.... Down the Up Escalator is best read as a kind of travelogue through a beaten-down but-not-broken United States.... [It is] an engaging, insightful account of the changes that have swept through an America where good, hard-working people are learning to make do with less money, less opportunity and less free time.... A willingness to portray the complexity of Americans' personal responses to macroeconomic disaster helps make Garson's book a lively read, despite its grim subject matter. So many books that treat the subject of economic restructuring portray working Americans as hapless victims. Garson is too sharp an observer, and too honest a writer, to do that...her lucid book makes it clear that with each new crisis the American people will survive by digging deeper into their supplies of creativity, courage and humor. <br>--Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times <p> Barbara Garson has written a small masterpiece of wise and alarming reportage about how ordinary Americans are surviving during extraordinarily rotten times. Down the Up Escalator is a necessary antidote to all the blather about 'freeing' banks and investment houses from 'crippling regulations'. <br>--Michael Kazin, author of American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation <p> Do you want to know both how and why we got into the economic mess we are in -- and what it really means in the everyday life of real people? What is driving the pain deep in the bowels of the system--and how people are trying to counter it in the real world? Read this book; no one does it better and makes it readable and human to boot, than Barbara Garson. <br>--Gar Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism <p> Most recessions come and go a

Author Information

BARBARA GARSON is an award-winning play­wright, journalist, and the author of three books, All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work, The Electronic Sweatshop, and most recently Money Makes the World Go Around: One Investor Tracks Her Cash Through the Global Economy. Her play MacBird was the literary open­ing shot of the sixties, and The Dinosaur Door won an Obie. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, Newsweek, and the Nation.

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