ABSTRACT
According to David Troutt, Americans have good reasons to worry about the way to a middle-class future.2 The Great Recession, which started in 2008, revealed fault lines in banking and on Wall Street. It diminished home ownership as afamily’s central asset, weakened college prospects, and altered for millions the likelihood of astable job or even retirement. The recession wiped out all the wealth gained by the middle class during the 1990s. According to Troutt, these changes have shaken our personal belief in mobility, deestablishing our local faith in environments that were designed to support the American middle-class dream. Troutt states that we are challenged by two indisputable forces:
• The growing instability of the middle class • The rising proportion of previously excluded groups
According to Troutt, of the many reasons that we should address the inequities, the foremost is that we need each other’s success.
