Jim Tankersley - The Riches of This Land

Copyright 2020 by Jim Tankersley

Cover design by Pete Garceau

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First Edition: August 2020

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020939475

ISBNs: 978-1-5417-6783-6 (hardcover); 978-1-5417-6784-3 (e-book)

E3-20200626-JV-NF-ORI

For Max and Lily, the riches of my land

Look with pity, O heavenly Father, upon the people in this

land who live with injustice, terror, disease, and death as

their constant companions. Have mercy upon us. Help us to

eliminate our cruelty to these our neighbors. Strengthen those

who spend their lives establishing equal protection of the law

and equal opportunities for all. And grant that every one of

us may enjoy a fair portion of the riches of this land.

The Book of Common Prayer

T his is a story about the greatest middle class in human history, how it was built more than a half century ago, and how America could rebuild it today from the ruins of a historic economic collapse. Its heroes are black men, immigrants, and women of all races. They are the key to restoring prosperity that is broadly shared among all workers, and not confined largely to the rich and elite.

It is also a story about white men who suffered when the middle class fell into decline, some of whom put Donald Trump in the White House. It is about Trumps promises to those workers, which he did not keep. But it is not a story about Trump, not really. It is bigger than he is. It predates his election by decades. It runs up and down family trees. It sprawls across cotton fields and factory floors and tin cans that fly to the moon.

For much of my life, starting in childhood in what was once a timber town, Ive chased that story. Ive tried to solve the mystery of how America lost so many good jobs, why so many workers lost the comfortable lives their parents once enjoyed. The pursuit of that story grew to become my career as a journalist traversing the country, most recently in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, chronicling the nations economic and political dysfunction and, as I write this, its spiral into a virus-induced recession.

My reporting uncovered lies that have poisoned our national economic debate for decades, long before this latest recession, but which left us weak and vulnerable when that recession hit. Politicians and business leaders and other powerful men have peddled an incomplete origin story for the middle class, one that put white men at the center and shoved the real heroes to the side. Those omissions have changed economic policymaking for the worse. As we struggle to rebuild the economy again, those lies, left unchallenged, could once again thwart our efforts to deliver shared and sustainable prosperity to all Americans. No matter who they are or where they live or what unique skills they bring to their communities.

The real story of the middle class reveals itself through statistics and deep economic research. But it is foremost a human story.

In the pages ahead there are no charts. Instead, there are people I have been lucky enough to encounter in more than a decade of reporting and writing about the economy, who taught me what cutting-edge economic analyses look like in the flesh. No one taught me more than several generations of black Americans in a single, industrious family, led by one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met, a multiple-job-juggling highway worker named Ed Green. Youll meet him soon. Youll like him.

The book skips back and forth across time and geography, but it roughly follows my journey as a reporter. I didnt always cover economics. Early in my career I wrote about politics, chasing candidates across Oregon and Colorado and Ohio, drinking in a stream of empty answers to real problems. The platitudes changed and the winning messages changed, but the problems didnt go away. I watched voters grow numb to those promises, lose faith in those politicians, and throw their hands up in helplessness with the political system. I threw my hands up, too, and went searching for real answers to the real human problems that seemed to be getting only worse.