An eviction notice has arrived. A child has been diagnosed with a serious illness and the health insurance has run out. The car has broken down and there's no way to get to work. These are the routine emergencies that plague the chronically poor. But it struck me, starting in about 2002, that many such tales of hardship were coming from people who were once members in good standing of the middle class—college graduates and former occupants of midlevel white-collar positions. One such writer upbraided me for what she saw as my neglect of hardworking, tempting cost cut. They were the losers, in other words, in a classic virtuous people like herself. game of bait and switch. And while blue-collar poverty has become numbingly routine, white-collar unemployment—and the poverty that Try investigating people like me who didn't have babies in high school, often results—remains a rude finger in the face of the American who made good grades, who work hard and don't kiss a lot of ass and dream.
