Packer chronicles our nation's recent economic calamity through the lives of those who enabled it and those who have been crushed by it. He doesn't theorize or analyze, he just lets people tell their stories. Mostly ordinary people, too; people like Dean Price, the son of a tobacco farmer in the Carolina Piedmont, who tried to launch his own biofuel business and wound up in near-ruin. And Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in Ohio who lost her job when the factories began closing down; she was sent packing with a pittance and watched her bosses walk away with millions. And Usha Patel, an immigrant who used her life savings to invest in a motel, only to have it swallowed up in the great collapse.
The closest Packer gets to analyzing is when he speaks through Elizabeth Warren, whom he clearly admires. This is from a brief profile on Warren near the end of the book (I just photographed it with my mobile, rather than typing it out):
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| P. 348 |
Packer also documents those who, if they didn't exactly cause the collapse, certainly learned how to game the system. From an invisible lobbyist who made millions, to a party-hardy boy stockbroker, to Jay-Z and Oprah, we learn that the way to do well in America is to be avaricious, disinterested in anyone's welfare but your own, and blasé about the law. Some had a leg up, some scrabbled up out of nothing, but they were all mindlessly focused on money, bling, the trappings of success. They would get rich by any means necessary ... and there are a lot of means, once you leave your ethics behind. Buy yourself a good lawyer, and you can get away with everything from tax evasion to literally stabbing rivals.
Playing by the rules is for suckers: that's what Jay-Z would tell you, and after reading this book it's hard not to see his point. I am a sucker. But I am a lucky sucker, because I was born into a solidly middle-class family that valued education, got that education at good public schools and a state university, met a great guy and had the sense to marry him, and have remained comfortable through the Great Recession. My dad was a scientist working for a national lab during the Cold War: this fairly well insulated him from the vagaries of the stock market. My husband is similarly situated now. (My mom was an entrepreneur, but got in and out of her business before markets went nutty.) I did make some good choices, but I am also just plain lucky.
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| Occupy Wall Street protester. Remember those? |
So what's the deep cause of the Unwinding? Is it simply luck and human greed? No, says Packer. While he keeps his opinions out of the book, he did write an article for the Guardian, and in that he writes, "Americans were no less greedy, ignorant, selfish and violent then than they are today, and no more generous, fair-minded and idealistic. But the institutions of American democracy, stronger than the excesses of individuals, were usually able to contain and channel them to more useful ends. Human nature does not change, but social structures can, and they did." Starting in the 1970s, "The US became more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic, more individualistic and less communitarian, more free and less equal, more tolerant and less fair," he writes. "Banking and technology, concentrated on the coasts, turned into engines of wealth, replacing the world of stuff with the world of bits, but without creating broad prosperity, while the heartland hollowed out. The institutions that had been the foundation of middle-class democracy, from public schools and secure jobs to flourishing newspapers and functioning legislatures, were set on the course of a long decline."
I strongly recommend this book. It won the National Book Award for 2013, is eminently readable (even hard to put down), is lucidly written, and is crushingly insightful. Packer is not a hack or a demagogue trying to fan the flames of populist rage ... this is a book for everyone, and everyone is indicted.
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