Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammad cite the racial gap in middle class security as measured by the Middle Class Index in their New York Times OpEd, The Recession's Racial Divide.
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The PBS show NOW with David Brancaccio features the Middle Class Security Index report By A Thread.
View PBS piece
Senior Lookout columnist for the Gloucester Daily Times uses data from IASP's Senior Financial Stability Index to underscore the need to ask Do you have enough to live on after retirement?
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A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Social Security: Options to Protect Benefits for Vulnerable Groups When Addressing Program Solvency, features IASP's policy paper on Strengthening Social Security for Low-Wage Workers.
Read GAO report
CBS evening news interviews IASP director, Thomas Shapiro, who highlights how seniors are Living Longer on Less: The New (In)Security of Seniors.
New measures and indicators are strategically supporting and positioning an important new national conversation on family financial well-being. Three complementary areas of research and analysis are being used to identify and understand more fully the characteristics that contribute to family financial well-being: (1) creation of indicators of stability and vulnerability; (2) refining, validating and expanding measures of asset poverty; and (3) analyses of federal and state tax codes for individual asset accumulation provisions and distributional impact.
The Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP), in collaboration with our partner organizations Dēmos and CFED, embarked on a three-year project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, on family financial well-being and the role of the social contract in creating opportunities for economic security and stability in this nation.
This project creates strategic data tools and evidence-based analytic measures--a middle class security index and a refined asset poverty index--to establish an integrated framework for identifying factors that contribute to family financial well-being and that most impact their stability and vulnerability. Additionally, the project frames out an examination of key federal and state wealth-building tax policies that may affect these measures to understand better the relationship between policy and financial security.
With these tools and measures, data will be analyzed to understand the impact of public policies on family financial well-being, and to inform policy decisions that build toward a new social contract addressing the security and opportunity needs of all families. Shifting the perspective from income poverty to examine family assets expands our understanding of the relationship between temporary poverty and the conditions for middle class security and the role of tax policy investments in wealth building. This work will contribute to identifying policy mechanisms that block mobility, make asset accumulation difficult, maintain wealth inequality, and most importantly, contribute to stability.
Together these new measures, indices, and analyses of policy initiatives will improve public understanding of economic vulnerability and its links to public policy, and will inform policy making and legislative agendas by making visible the cost-benefit value of social investments and variations of impact for different populations. This project aligns perfectly with the Institute on Assets and Social Policy's core mission of building knowledge and resources to support economic and social mobility.
For more information about this project please contact Tatjana Meschede or phone 781-736-8678.
By a Thread: The New Experience of America's Middle Class, Nov. 2007
Economic (In)Security:
The Experience of the African American and Latino Middle Classes, Feb. 2008
From Middle to Shaky Ground: The Economic Decline of America's Middle Class, 2000-2006 , Nov. 2008
Living Longer on Less: The New Eeconomic (In)Security of Seniors, Jan. 2009
Living Longer on Less in Massachusetts: The New Economic (In)Security of Seniors, Mar. 2009
Statement on Better Understanding the Economic Security of Seniors, May 2009
