Elizabeth Warren (1) (1949–)

With all of the craziness in American politics, it's reassuring to know that there are still a few competent and compassionate figures fighting hard to make things better, or at least prevent them from getting any worse.

Warren is a great educator and an expert in crafting policies that address specific concerns with concrete action (as opposed to politicians all-too-often grandstanding to make a statement but not actually accomplishing anything).
While presenting such detailed plans as a show more candidate potentially hurt her chances of being elected by providing ammunition for her opponents, it's refreshing to have a politician willing to move beyond the soundbites and propose substantive solutions.

This is therefore a good book to read, even (and perhaps especially) for those who disagree, as it will force the reader to confront their biases and formulate their opposition into a clearer expression of what they'd do differently, and why.

My biggest complaint is that if anything the scope of what she proposes falls far short of what's needed. She's proud that if enacted her policies would benefit "tens of millions" of Americans. While a good start and certainly critically needed, what about the other 300 million of us? Most of her economic proposals address the needs of the bottom 20% of the economy (largely at the expense of the top 1%), which largely leave out the 75% in the middle. Her vision is largely of correcting failures to fully implement the intent of laws that were passed 50 years ago. There is no broader view of what we should be striving for in the next 50 years. show less

You don't have to know me very long to know that I'm a huge fan of Elizabeth Warren. What I'm not a fan of, though, is political memoirs. They tend to be didactic in the worst way, shallow, and transparently self-serving. It's unusual that I'll even give one a look, and very rare for me to finish it. But I enjoyed this one quite a bit. Warren is, I suppose, doing the things such a memoir is supposed to do—laying out her case for the causes she's identified with, making herself seem fully show more human to people who will never meet her, etc. But she does them quite effectively. Obviously this book probably isn't going to change your mind if you're fully opposed to her political & economic views (though there's always hope, I guess). But it does lay out those views in a way that is both accessible and fully accurate. And it's hard not to empathize with her as a novice politician, describing the personal and public challenges she faced on this career path. When I started the book, I doubted I'd finish, and truly doubted it would make me any more enamored with her. I was wrong on both counts. show less

With all the talk about Elizabeth Warren running for president, I decided to revisit The Two-Income Trap, a book that has had a very mixed reception amongst my circle of friends. (Disclosure, in case you think I am personally biased: I am a stay at home mother of two.)

This was published in 2003, which presents a problem for a review: Was the assessment correct at the time, and how well has it held up since? The short answer is mixed, for both of them. Essentially, the premise is this: the show more two income trap is faced by dual income middle class families because both incomes are committed to basic, fixed expenses, but they face nearly double the level of risk of job loss or other crisis, meaning the loss of one income is financially devastating. This is neutral as far as it goes, and can be demonstrated statistically.

The first problem is that they frames it as a competition. In Warren and Tyagi's view, dual income families have driven up the price of middle class life, principally housing in good school districts. Two income families are able to outspend single income families, thereby driving up the need for two incomes. The sense is that they view families as being pitted against each other in a war for scarce resources.

For a pair of working women in the 2000s, their views of women's roles are surprisingly simplistic. They principally ascribe women's income as providing an "economic edge"--a surplus to the man's income.

It was refreshing to see an acknowledgement of the economic value of unpaid labor provided by stay at home mothers, but even here, the details were shallow. The value of a stay at home mother is principally in the labor she provides. Its absence creates a void that must be filled--as acknowledged in the discussion of caretaking, though not her other domestic labor--but also historically has enabled men to work more, knowing their wife will pick up the slack. While Warren and Tyagi are aware of the racial disparities in working women, it gets only a glancing mention, which would not be acceptable today.

Worse, the other economic arguments of women's decisions to work are breezed over in ways that were a problem 16 years ago. They extol the potential of a stay at home mother's ability to act as a safety net in times of crisis, because her economic potential is still untapped. But you can't do that without considering how likely it is that she'll be able to bring in income. Similarly, the value of building a career is waved off because being a working woman doesn't protect you after divorce.

The proposed solutions for dealing with housing simply don't meet the smell test after the past 15 years. While middle class parents still chase desirable schools, it's also become clear that a major issue is the basic supply of housing and the overall inequality of American schooling. The problems here cannot be solved, as they suggest, by vouchers or a public school choice system.

The basic analysis that the trap is driven by spending on essentials, not luxuries, is sound and has been borne out since--even more so, given wage stagnation and rapid increases in the prices of housing, healthcare, and education. If the book were written today, more attention would be paid to the role of healthcare expenses and medical debt in driving families into bankruptcy.

There are some errors that really puzzled me--for example, stating that America "cannot afford huge subsidies for middle class housing," which ignores that we do just that through the creation of the 30 year fixed mortgage and the mortgage interest deduction on taxes. There's also a dismissal of government funded daycare because it "only helps two income families", ignoring the impact of price on quality. To their credit they later do briefly mention quality and that childcare is inherently valuable, but it's a bizarre thing to say. They encourage tax breaks for saving, but don't pay enough attention to the fact that middle class families don't have enough to save.

The work on bankruptcy and credit is, unsurprisingly, the strongest, and holds up the best, despite changes in laws and trends. This was Warren's core work, and she knows it well. She's clear about what drives personal bankruptcy (not irresponsibility) and the danger done by predatory lenders. The origins of the CFPB are clear here, though her proposed regulations may lean a little to the paternalistic and her proposal to restrict mortgage lending requires a lot more analysis for impact. It would be very interesting to redo a lot of this research post subprime crisis, with the continuing spiral in house prices in competitive markets that appears to be a supply issue, not just a credit issue.

Overall, the book is a really odd mix of liberal policy with surprisingly conservative analysis that doesn't go deep enough. Warren and Tyagi were clearly trying to write a popular book, not a scholarly one, but the thesis deserved a deeper treatment. show less

Elizabeth Warren being down-home sensible before she burst onto the national scene; it’s nice to know some people don’t change. Basic argument: when most married women didn’t work, they served as reserve labor who could help tide a family over when a male breadwinner lost a job by going to work themselves. With more two-income families, that reserve is now deployed all the time and thus it can’t add income in times of stress. That wouldn’t be so bad if it were easy to cover the nut show more on one income and save/spend on extras with the other income, but in fact the increasing expense of housing in particular has meant that it takes two incomes to provide children with access to “good” schools and “safe” neighborhoods. (They point out that it doesn’t matter whether these schools/neighborhoods really are better as long as the parents believe it; they’ll take big risks for their children’s futures.) That means an unexpected job loss or medical crisis can start a devastating downwards spiral, and banks etc. will happily help that spiral accelerate. Unsurprisingly, this 2003 book told the truth about bad mortgage loans and predatory lenders, but no one was listening. I’m not particulary convinced that school vouchers are the way to fix the problem, but I think Warren has changed her thinking on that too as she’s seen more of the way inequality works now. show less