In his column in today’s New York Times Bob Herbert mentions my book The Missing Class and highlights some of its key facts about the precarious status of today’s poor and near poor Americans. Herbert also quotes from the book’s foreword by former Senator John Edwards.

We have always gotten a distorted picture of how well Americans were doing from politicians and the media. The U.S. has a population of 300 million. Thirty-seven million, many of them children, live in poverty. Close to 60 million are just one notch above the official poverty line. These near-poor Americans live in households with annual incomes that range from $20,000 to $40,000 for a family of four.

It is disgraceful that in a nation as wealthy as the United States, nearly a third of the people are poor or near-poor.

Former Senator John Edwards touched on the quality of the lives of those perched precariously above the abyss of poverty in his foreword to the book, “The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near-Poor in America,” by Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen. Mr. Edwards wrote:

“When we set about fixing welfare in the 1990s, we said we were going to encourage work. Near-poor Americans do work, usually in jobs that the rest of us do not want — jobs with stagnant wages, no retirement funds, and inadequate health insurance, if they have it at all. While their wages stay the same, the cost of everything else — energy, housing, transportation, tuition — goes up.”

Herbert goes on to point out the effects that our current economic malaise will have on the future prospects of all Americans, as the desperation that the poor and near poor know well leaches into the ranks of a downsized and debt-ridden middle class. The growing amount of debt that families are taking on and the longer hours they work to make ends meet — topics discussed at length in The Missing Class — are ultimately unsustainable, Herbert notes, especially now that prices are rising and jobs are disappearing. The result is that for many hard-working families the American dream of upward mobility is fast becoming an illusion. (For some hard statistics on this last point, see this report by the Economic Mobility Project, which points out that the average male worker in his thirties today makes less than his father did at the same age.)

Herbert was kind enough to mention The Missing Class in a previous column as well.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen