THE RICHES OF THIS LAND

After World War II, unsung Americans built the strongest middle-class in human history. Then powerful men tore it apart. Here is the story of what went wrong, and how to get it back.

For over a decade, Jim Tankersley has been on a journey to understand what happened to the world's greatest middle-class success storythe post-World-War-II boom that faded into decades of stagnation for American workers. Here, he fuses the story of forgotten Americans struggling people he met on his journey into the middle-classwith new economic and political research. He begins by unraveling the mystery of the American economy since the 1970s not where did the jobs go, but why haven't new ones been created to replace them. His analysis begins with revealing that women and minorities played a more crucial role in building the post-war middle class than politicians acknowledge, and policies that have done nothing to address the structural shifts of the American economy have enabled a privileged few to capture nearly all the benefits of America's prosperity. Meanwhile, the "angry white men of Ohio" have been sold by Trump and his ilk an economic theory that is dangerously backward, pitting them against immigrants, minorities, and women who should be their allies. At the culmination of his journey, Tankersley lays out specific policy prescriptions and social undertakings that can begin moving the needle in the effort to make new and better jobs ap- pear, fostering an economy that opens new pathways for all workers. Jim Tankersley, a tax and economics reporter for the New York Times, has written extensively about the stagnation of the American middle-class, and how policy changes in Washington have exacerbated those trends. Tankersley was the policy and politics editor at Vox, economic policy correspondent for the Washington Post, and economic and political reporter at the National Journal. He started his career with stints at The Oregonian, The Rocky Mountain News, and The Toledo Blade, where he was a member of the Coingate team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He won the 2007 Livingston Award for Young Journalists.