… Or so writes Steven Malanga in the latest issue of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute. A good portion of the piece is devoted to debunking Barbara Ehrenreich?s silly Nickled and Dimed, which created a memorable stir last year at UNC-CH:
The New York Times recently reported that “lawmakers of both parties describe the 1996 law as a success that moved millions of people from welfare to work and cut the welfare rolls by 60 percent, to 4.9 million people.” Those results belie the hysterical warnings of welfare advocates, Ehrenreich among them, that reform would drastically worsen poverty.
Given that such data subvert Ehrenreich’s case against the U.S. economic system, she unsurprisingly puts statistics aside in Nickel and Dimed and instead seeks to paint the low-wage workplace as oppressive and humiliating to workers forced by reformers to enter it. But given the author’s self-absorption, what the reader really gets is a self-portrait of Ehrenreich as a longtime rebel with an anti-authoritarian streak a mile wide, who can’t stomach the basic boundaries that most people easily accept in the workplace.
There?s also a mention of one of my favorite academic historians, Larry Schweikart at the University of Dayton.
