American Dream Dying ─ The Changing Economic Lot of the Least Advantaged

This book is based upon two premises. The first is that the pervasiveness of the withering of the American Dream is a story with which few Americans are familiar. They are familiar with recent difficulties of the middle class, but know little about how the "Dream" has been disappearing over the past three decades for those lower down the income scale.
The second premise is that this story can only be told using aggregate data, not anecdotes. The text is short, free of jargon, and can easily be covered in a few hours. For many readers, however, the careful scrutiny of a succession of graphs will be an unfamiliar and demanding task. The key word in the previous sentence is "careful." Only with such scrutiny can the magnitude of the transformation under way be fully grasped. With that grasp will come, at minimum, a sense of profound unease if not outright alarm.

Peter Tobin is a Ph.D. candidate in engineering and applied science at Yale University.