(snip)"Caught between rising aspirations and stagnant wages, Reich says, middle-class Americans have gone through a series of coping mechanisms. First, women joined the workforce, giving families a second income. Then husbands and wives put in longer shifts, creating a species of family called DINS — “double income, no sex.” Finally, families went into debt. In this sense, inequality helped to stoke the credit bubble.
Now that the bubble has burst, these coping mechanisms are exhausted. Americans are not going to push their working hours up even more. Already, according to some estimates, they sleep an average of one or two fewer hours per night than did their parents in the 1960s; in 2007 they spent a whopping $23.9 billion on sleep aids, from white-noise machines to medications. Nor are Americans going to incur more debts; to the contrary, the credit bust has forced them to pay down their balances. And so, as Reich puts it, Americans will “face a necessity they have managed to avoid for decades: They have to make do with less.”
The belt-tightening is not likely to be popular, and Reich goes so far as to suggest that it could trigger a political convulsion. People are very likely to resent material losses bitterly if these are not broadly and fairly shared. And in the wake of the financial crisis, fairness has gone by the wayside: "(snip)
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