Give Up the Bootstrapping Myth!: Alissa Quart
July 25th, 2024
”The self made myth is not only destructive politically, it's also false scientifically.”
Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author of Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. We discuss what it really means to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps in America, “the land of the self-made.”
Humans are biologically wired to be interdependent. In fact, achievement is often accompanied with isolation and loneliness. Alissa reminds us that “People who are fighting for democracy shouldn't be leaning into their own self made myth, but instead they should be trying to dispel the myth entirely.” The counter narrative to the self-made myth is that being in community and mutual solidarity feels better than being an individualist.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Alissa Quart
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Alissa Quart Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:04] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
It's 2024 and the future of America is in your hands. Democracy is not a spectator sport, So we are here to bring you an independent perspective about the election this year and empower you to change the status quo.
America is the land of the self-made, of the enterprising souls who are not the descendants of aristocrats, who have made a fortune as a result of their incessant toiling, their shedding of their own sweat and tears. And when we think of the land of the free, we think of pioneers in the romanticized Wild West and of endless opportunities ripe for the picking. But is that true?
Our guest today examines the reality of what it means to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and is the author of several books. Her most recent is Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream.
Welcome, Alissa. Thank you for joining us. Alissa Quart: [00:01:25] Great to be here.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:26] So I loved your book. It's a fantastic overview of how we got to where we are today. And I was struck by the subtitle "Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream." And my knee jerk reaction is, why would I do that? We're all busy doing exactly that. So just so we're all on the same page, what is the American dream? How would you define it?
Alissa Quart: [00:01:48] Yeah, so I think part of why I gave it that subtitle is, um, SEO a little bit like, you know, I thought, okay, this is a way that people are going to be struck by this book or think, why do I need to read this? But also it was heartfelt in the sense that the original American dream, not the one that we've come to believe in, which is like
making it, prosperity, two cars, a house, personal wealth. But American Dream was something that was more collective initially. It was coined in 1931. It was something imperfect. It was something that was going to be constantly improved upon, and it was seen as a community endeavor. So I guess I could have called it "liberating us from the false American dream to the authentic one," but so that's really what's embedded in that subtitle, right?
Mila Atmos: [00:02:33] Right. Well, so let's connect that to how bootstrapping fits in, because that's another thing that people bandy about in popular culture in the United States all the time. So tell us the story, the origin story, of how bootstrapping came about, or the idea of pulling yourself up by your very own bootstraps came about because it illuminates so much about how absurd it actually is.
Speaker3: [00:02:56] Absolutely. I mean, like many things like the American Dream, like the Horatio Alger story, or even meritocracy, which was coined in 1958 as something very critical, it was seen as a negative, actually, it was by an English scholar. But bootstraps was a joke. It was used in 19th century newspapers to talk about, like, the crazy inventor. In one case, it was in Wisconsin. Ill-advised government official, a farmer. So it was, it appeared in these early newspaper accounts as kind of mocking, like, oh, these fools, they think they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And then somehow over the decades, it became, you know, writ like we're supposed to want to be this, we're told by our political leaders that this is our aspiration. There's the lie of that, the impossibility of it, but also there's something in the fact that so many of our prominent storylines start out as jokes or start out as having a different meaning, and always get contorted back to this kind of punishing individualism.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:55] Yeah, well, let's talk about punishing individualism. In the pre- conversation, before we sat down, we talked about how this might be the original, the original disinformation campaign about poverty, individualism, and how we are the sole agent to our good fortune.
Speaker3: [00:04:12] Absolutely. So one of the things that occurs to me, I mean, I run this poverty media nonprofit now for ten years, which I created with the late, great Barbara Ehrenreich. Was that telling a different story about poverty or financial instability is actually a form of fighting disinformation, because the original
disinformation narrative is the story that we can do this all on our own, that all we have to do is hard work and being kind of impervious and incredibly individualistic and self- sufficient, and we will make it. And that if we don't, then we're lazy. This is a commonly held belief, actually, by Republican and Republican leaning voters, that people who are not successful or not wealthy are not employed. There's something wrong with them. They're just not trying. So that is a story that actually has helped elect people like Donald Trump and has helped, you know, secure the good fortune of people like Elon Musk. And I can I can get into why, but this is part of why I think it's really important to question that myth when we're questioning other anti-democracy stories.
Mila Atmos: [00:05:15] Yeah, let's. Let's dig a little bit deeper because I think so many people, you know, I would say all of us here in the United States are swimming in the soup of this. Right? And it's not really separable in our minds of how we conceive of ourselves. We're so deeply steeped in this idea. So why is it bad to perpetuate this myth? Like how is it hurting us? And you mentioned Donald Trump. How is it hurting us in the context of the presidential election this year?
Alissa Quart: [00:05:45] In 2016, some scholars at University of Wisconsin, or the time leading up to that election, talked to voters about why they were Republican leaning voters, independent voters, why they were interested in voting for Donald Trump. And they said it was because they believed he was self-made. It's pretty clear he's not self- made. This is somebody who inherited millions and millions of dollars, who lost millions of dollars. So if anything, he's an heir who has kind of unmade himself. And yet this is what people believe. It's because he kept telling that story over and over again. And what the scholars did was they told these voters, these would-be voters, they explained how he wasn't self-made. They went through all the different ways in which he was and how he had been had bankrupted himself at points, how his father made all this money and had given it to him, and how he didn't pay his taxes. And 10% of those voters said afterwards that they were less likely to vote for him. So I felt like, oh, well, this mythbusting could actually have an effect that's broader than we think. That's... Potentially people who are fighting for democracy shouldn't be leaning into their own self-made myth, but instead they should be trying to dispel the myth entirely.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:55] Mhm. Well, I want to talk about debunking the myth further, but who is actually the self-made man? Does this person exist?
Alissa Quart: [00:07:04] Well, I always say if you think you're self-made, call your mother. And I obviously I have a vested interest as a mother, but call, call a mother. Call your mother. Everyone on earth has been born of someone from something. Lives in a city where they walk on pavement, or in rural areas where they drive on roads. They drink water that has been freed of contaminants by their municipal government. They follow laws that were written hundreds of years ago. You know, I just think that there's no self-made element of that. We're all creatures of a constructed society and of a biological order of things in which we don't invent ourselves. We're not unicellular organisms, so I think that's really important. That's just a basic story. And it's part of why we are biologically wired to be interdependent. And the self-made myth is not only destructive politically, it's also false scientifically.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:02] Mhm. Yeah. Of course, I think one of the things that really stood out to me in your book, you said that babies are radically dependent and I thought, yes, of course. And I was thinking about how little child care there is in this country, unlike in a place like France, for example, where child care is widely accessible to everybody and where women work as a matter of course, because they know that they can have child care for their children and it's perfectly reliable. And there isn't sort of the same kind of stigma, I think, that exists in this country about depositing your child in childcare. And I wanted to connect this conversation into public policy, because not only do we believe this popularly in our culture, that individualism is sort of the core of our existence, but it seeps through in the way that we run government or the way that the US government is run, I should say. So when it comes to public policy, there's a long history of the US government shaming its very own citizens for accessing assistance, whether that's through vetoing daycare under the Nixon administration or the tremendous administrative burdens that Americans face to access aid dollars. And even Ron DeSantis, of all people, candidly described administrative burdens as pointless roadblocks. But actually, not only is that the case, it's difficult to get, but also it's not enough. And the story that really stood out to me in your book was the story of James Fauntleroy. Tell us a little bit more about starvation subsistence, and the hurdles he has to jump through, and what kind of bind he is.
Alissa Quart: [00:09:41] Yeah. So James is someone that I met partially because he was quite a political person. I mean, he was tweeting, he was Pro Bernie Sanders. He's
African American. He lives in Orlando, Florida. And he has a very serious case of kidney disease. So he's a young man. He's probably by now he's in his late 30s, but he's been on dialysis for quite a while. And while Medicaid, I think, paid for most of his medical bills, there was also all these ancillary stuff that it didn't pay for, like how to get to his multiple dialysis appointments a week, how to repair his car. He lived with his mother, who was also lower income, and he's this very sharp, witty, urbane kind of guy. He used to sell furniture, and you could completely see how he would be someone you'd want to buy a couch from, but now he's too ill to do that. So he started raising, you know, the cost of the ambulette or the cabs to and from the dialysis and other kinds of discretionary money that he needed on GoFundMe. They're very civilized GoFundMe. "Please." You know, they're kind of like, "please," in a genteel way. And people did actually give him quite a bit of money. But it struck me, and I think it strikes him as outrageous that this is what he has to depend on. I mean, he is at this point disabled. And this is really wrong that somebody who is on disability and does get assistance for his medical care can't pay to get himself to the appointments that would be sustaining his life. I mean, forget about the fact that he's not eligible for organ transplant, even though he's young and, you know, whatever the order of things around organ transplants and how costly that is, how people often go to the private sector for organ transplants.
Alissa Quart: [00:11:20] One of the things that economic hardship reporting project is that I'm always trying to find writers and assign about the pleasures of life. If you're working class or working poor. So it's not just this devastating portrait. I mean, in his case, it is. The forces arrayed against him are devastating. But as I said, he's like really politically engaged. Actually, the people who helped him most were the people that campaigned for Bernie with him, which I found fascinating. Strangers would drive him places and take him to Starbucks because he had organized with them all virtually because he's mostly in his home. So he did take pleasures. He made, he was a really good cook. He had been at some point a sous chef or something. So he cooked for his mom. He'd send me pictures of the meals he cooked, and I just kept thinking like, what would it be like if he wasn't forced to be on GoFundMe, which is one of the main sources of additional medical funding for citizens? When we don't have enough money in this country for our medical care.
Alissa Quart: [00:12:17] It's actually a close friend had to do this and raised quite a bit of money for when he had myeloma, and he and his family had to create videos. You know, you have to tell a story. Again, we're talking about narrative that gets people, your friends and acquaintances, to give you money. And while that in itself is not horrible, like this is like mutual aid and like a lot of volunteerism, this is what we have. But it's really a shame that this is what we have to resort to, because many of the people in our community also don't have the resources. They're giving modestly what they can. I call it the dystopian social safety net. And what I mean by that is it's this sort of shadow safety net that's created by ordinary people like you and I, funding school lunches on GoFundMe and funding medical care for people or NGOs and nonprofits like the organization I run, or ad hoc stuff like people creating warming centers and ATMs when it's really cold in Chicago. Or volunteers, you know, knocking off after work as a doctors. One of the subjects of my book did, and doing work with homeless population around Covid. But again, really too bad that this is what people have to do.
Mila Atmos: [00:13:24] Yeah, I mean, I think you call it the right term dystopian social safety net. You know, I'm interested in poverty in general. We've had a lot of poverty oriented conversations here on the podcast, but it's always shocking to me just how threadbare the social safety net is in this country, and how that coexists at the same time as people going to fancy restaurants. And it's it's one of those things where if we think of ourselves as living in society together, how can those two things happen simultaneously? And I'm always wondering this as, just as a human, right, not as a policy person or whatever, just sort of like, how is it that I can be here and that person can be there, and the circumstances are so dire over there, and I live in such great comfort.
Alissa Quart: [00:14:11] And it's... I mean, I personally have a lot of cognitive dissonance going through my life,
Mila Atmos: [00:14:15] mhm Alissa Quart: [00:14:16] As a...
Mila Atmos: [00:14:16] Yeah, tell us more about that, because you do this work. You've been doing it for ten years. What have you discovered there that I think people just don't understand?
Alissa Quart: [00:14:25] I mean it's made me pretty cynical about some extremes of the kind of upper middle class, upper class community that I may be touching on in my own life, right? The excesses, the vacations, the you know, when you see all this on, um, Instagram or Facebook, I call them "Wealthies" because they're like these pictures of, and there's actually a study done that many people take these pictures in front of, kind of 1% locales when they don't live there. Some of this is not even the way that the people themselves live. It's the way they want to present themselves. But that's odd, too, because, you know, we live in this great state of income inequality where I think the last time I checked, CEOs make something like 290 times more than their lowest paid employee. That was a mean, I think. And why would you then, if you're, say, lower middle class or middle class, want to look like you're stinking rich online, well, it's because that's how people survive. Now, those appearances back -- to our main thing about the deserving rich and the undeserving poor -- these are major storylines that kind of keep you in the game. To be seen that way by your your peers. It is odd. It's changed my life, I have to say, doing this kind of work. I can never go back. I mean, I'd always been a political person, but it really made in sort of physical or embodied a lot of the disparities. I work with people who have been homeless. I work with people who are being evicted, you know, writing the stories of their life. And honestly, it's... It is dissonance because I'm identified with them. And yet I'm taking my kid to her dance recital or, you know, and then because the media is in such bad shape, my personal life started to resemble more of the kind of conflicts that I write about. By the way, a lot of the people that we work with at AP, people like Ray Suarez, who was a famous radio personality and a TV personality who aged out of the media at some point and had got sick. I think he had cancer and he had a bike accident and he didn't have dental care, and suddenly he was writing about that for us. And he's the kind of person that we support, partially because we want to de-shame around financial instability, that it could happen to anyone.
Mila Atmos: [00:16:39] Yeah.
Mila Atmos: [00:16:43] We're taking a short break, and we'll be back with Alissa Quart in just a moment. But first, I want to share about a podcast I know you'll love called "What Could Go Right."
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Mila Atmos: [00:17:46] And now let's return to my conversation with Alissa Quart.
You write a lot about the Covid pandemic, and I think that's the big event in recent years that really has shown us the precarity of everybody's lives. Right. Like whether you are a gig worker, even if you're not, even if you had a steady job, but because of the pandemic, your place of work shut down. That had nothing to do with you, and you lost your job, or you were at home with your children basically being an at home teacher, even though you had your own job and it was incredibly difficult for, I would say, most people. You know, it really laid bare just how interconnected we actually are and who we actually rely on in our communities. And that we cannot do it alone. In your mind, how did the pandemic move the Overton Window on debunking the myth on bootstrapping, and what has it made possible in terms of public policy?
Alissa Quart: [00:18:42] So yeah, there was a moment where the window did move and it was almost like delirious. I talk about cognitive dissonance. I was like, when you've been sort of talking about the fight for 15, for $15 an hour for low wage workers, or as I've written around this, like there is no such thing as an unskilled worker, you know, kind of fighting that the stigma. And suddenly people are easily accessing SNAP,
you know, food stamps; easily re-enrolling in Medicaid; getting child tax credit. Our family got child tax. It feels good to get some support for that, right? You open your mailbox and you your government's supporting you. Eviction moratoria. So it's stopping the roofless, what I think of as housing injustice because everybody should have a home. And what kind of democracy is it where people don't have homes? Yeah. So all that was happening during the pandemic, and then also ordinary people were doing mutual aids. They were connecting in different ways. They were doing kind of online counseling. There were, you know, all these kind of concerts that people were starting. You know, there are all these groups. I was part of different kind of online discussion groups. And then it seemed to sort of be forgotten. I sort of call it post pandemic amnesia, but it's like post-traumatic growth, which is something that people can have after trauma if they remember it and integrate it. I think we're missing an opportunity now.
Mila Atmos: [00:20:07] Mhm.
Alissa Quart: [00:20:08] And a policy opportunity but also emotional and democratic opportunity to integrate what we learned about caring for one another and how in a sense, you know, minimal resources, things like this child tax credit, how good it was for the citizens and how good it was politically. For the people who were offering the money, I just think let's not forget it. Let's try to keep some of these. Matthew Desmond said, "This child poverty" when it fell by half during the pandemic, "If that's the case, we should just keep doing this."
Mila Atmos: [00:20:43] Yes, we should keep doing it. And yet the child tax credit expired. And despite the best efforts of many, many electeds, it has not been reinstated. I think there is some child tax credit, but not the same as it was. And it and it's again, the administrative burden is so immense for people. You know, I was reading somewhere that there is on average, $60 billion of aid for the indigent in the United States that does not get accessed. It just sits around because it's so hard to get to. And like the fact that it doesn't get taken up is just shocking. You know, the money is there. That's the other part, you know, because sometimes you think, oh, there's no money. But it turns out that the money that we do have is not being distributed. That sounds totally insane.
Alissa Quart: [00:21:26] Well, this is what we mentioned before, the administrative burden. It's a term used by Don Moynihan and Pamela Herd, who are political scientists, social policy folks, and they use it to talk about the hurdles that are either occurring naturally, although not often, or have been sort of installed into various social programs to make it hard for people to access them. And at EHRP, we worked with a writer named Lisa Ventura, and actually she's on the radio show I produced. It's called "Going for Broke." And Ray was the host, and Lisa is a guest and had also written a piece about how she was trying to get unemployment for her father, who English is not his first language, he doesn't really speak English, and he was a difficult guy and this was during the pandemic. It just took her forever and she was a trained social worker. And that seems pretty clear that that some of these hurdles were installed in the system. I mean, now I know because my husband was part of these mass layoffs that people over 50, you do get severance. If you wait, you can file for unemployment on top of it. But a lot of people don't know that. So people don't even know their the rights that they have for the money that they can access.
Mila Atmos: [00:22:38] Right. Yeah. Let's talk about solidarity and mutualism. You share a lot of stories in the book about pandemic-based mutual aid, and also a whole history of cooperatives. That was a great, a great example. We actually had a whole conversation about corporatism with Bernard Harcourt on the show. What is your favorite example that illustrates how mutualism works and how it solves for bootstrapping or cooperatives? You know, whichever you like.
Alissa Quart: [00:23:03] I guess recently, because I run this media nonprofit, I've been thinking about recent examples, which are media co-ops. There's a new media co-op called Flaming Hydra that has 60 members, including some of my friends and colleagues who write for it. There's also another one called Defector, which is a sports one, and there's 4 or 5 extra ones. The media cooperatives, worker cooperatives, are really taking off because it's so bleak out there for media companies. And how it works is that subscribers pay a fee, kind of like a Substack fee. And then the writers split the fee. So in the case of Flaming Hydra, the splitting is 60 ways. So right now it's quite small. I don't think they're making a ton, but places like Defector, they're making salary from that subscription service, like a real salary. And I was like, okay, this is something that is giving the journalists a stake. There's also now media mutual aids, which I was like, whoa, this is getting really dark when it's people from the LA Times are part of a
mutual aid. People from Gannett are part of a mutual aid supporting their colleagues when they're laid off, because layoffs are so extreme right now. There's two closures a week, I think, in 2023 of media outfits, and there's a 50% downturn in media sites in 2023. So these are addressing that problem. Other instances, I mean, this is a fascinating one. The Black Panthers were a mutual aid. We think of them as, you know, stylish radicals from the 60s but they did really common sense things. Like they gave out school lunches to children who were not getting them, oranges and milk ,and things like that in the mid 60s. There were also the ones I wrote about historically, that Du Bois wrote about the co-ops at the end of the 19th and early 20th century that were open to people of color who otherwise would not have had access to banking or different kinds of institutions where there was a color bar for them, and they instead joined together. And this really struck me when I read about it, that it was like mutual respect and knowledge of each other. Those were the grounds for entry, so that you could have that that was something that people in communities can establish for themselves, even when there's bias against them or racism, etc. and with the worker co-ops. There's also things like rideshare co-ops that I found fascinating because Uber takes a huge chunk and I do this and I feel guilty. This is the cognitive dissonance. Again, I'm like, oh no, I'm taking an Uber, but it's um.
Mila Atmos: [00:25:34] Take a yellow cab.
Alissa Quart: [00:25:36] Yeah, yeah, not in Brooklyn, not in Brooklyn, but it's like 25 to 40% off for each ride. Yeah. So, you know, tip well. But then also this rideshare which is owned by the drivers. So it's a drivers collective. It's in New York I think is there's not that many drivers.
Mila Atmos: [00:25:55] Yeah. It's not the same as Uber. Yeah. It's not the same the same density and availability. So let's talk about participatory budgeting I'm sure you've covered this a lot. To me it's at the intersection of mutualism and democracy. You know, it turns away the attention of individualism towards the community and what we're doing together. And actually, people show up. Tell me about what the beauty and the promise is of participatory budgeting.
Alissa Quart: [00:26:22] Yeah. I mean, I loved having these conversations with all these different participatory budgeting things. So just for listeners, actually a lot of people don't know about it. It's interesting.
Mila Atmos: [00:26:30] They're not everywhere. But in New York we have it.
Speaker3: [00:26:33] I think. Yeah, but isn't it like in like 148 or something like that?
Mila Atmos: [00:26:36] In a lot of places, but it's not ubiquitous.
Alissa Quart: [00:26:37] It's not ubiquitous. But it's in like places like Seattle and New York and, you know, major cities.
Mila Atmos: [00:26:42] Yeah.
Alissa Quart: [00:26:42] What really started to be particularly of interest during the George Floyd demonstration period, because a lot of the police budgets now we start to question, why are the police getting these huge budgets? And they were debating them. And so this is the public that's now engaging in the actual budget for cities, saying like, why are we giving this much to the police? Can we divert it to X or Y? And that happened in Seattle. So that was interesting. But usually it's, you know, these giant meetings where lots of people come. Sometimes there are people where English is not a first language, or people who've never engaged in politics before, and they're trying to decide how to spend a, you know, sometimes like $1 million honestly, on things like, you know, water fountains or additional bathrooms or curbs that are cutaways for people who are disabled on sidewalks or even fun things like a statue. I actually went to something that was sort of like that recently in my neighborhood, because we're debating a skate park in the little park across the street from my house and all this. People who came were were sort of drawing and listing what they wanted instead of this skate park. And it included really beautiful things like wetlands that would absorb water or a running track, rather than this tar circle in the little park. But what if it was a track that was made of earth? And that's the kind of thing in participatory budgeting where people, again, these were not political people necessarily, who were brainstorming what to do with their local park.
Mila Atmos: [00:28:13] Yeah. Well it's a fantastic way to get engaged and also meet your neighbors at the very least, and have face time with your elected. Right, because your elected representative shows up to these participatory budgeting meetings, and then you have actually a human touch, as opposed to this distant idea of this person being there that you may have voted for, but maybe not. But in any case, actually, it's not only that you're participating in the budget, but also that you're making community with a person who is ostensibly who is purported to represent you.
Alissa Quart: [00:28:43] Absolutely. And my friend and colleague Celina Su is actually writing a book about this, and she's been studying this. And the phrase they use is "budget justice," which I really like that because it's sort of wonky. And she and a lot of the work co-ops, the budget, justice and other sorts of incremental change are often located in these spaces that are neglected because people think they're dull. You know, it's like, but they're sort of I see radical and communal possibility in them.
Mila Atmos: [00:29:14] Yeah, yeah. So as an everyday person, what are two things I could be doing to participate in this kind of radical movement for being more within society, or even just to rid myself of the bootstrapping myth?
Alissa Quart: [00:29:32] Well, the second one is easier sometimes, although they're both, you know, there's lots that we can do. I mean, sometimes it's in terms of engagement. It could be things like being part of a mutual aid, which included one of the newspaper, Mutual Aid's moral support, which I actually loved. And that's something that I've been trying to do with my own organization. Think how I can give psychological or trauma care for journalists who are have reported on things that are really difficult or just are living this really contingent life where, again, they're not able to pay money in emergency and they don't have money for their rent. And I know this because I run this and they write to me about it, But like, what would it be like to get sort of a peer to peer kind of trauma care for them? That would be voluntourists and would involve community. And I try to sort of an ad hoc way provide that for people if they need to talk. And then things like the workers cooperatives, the mutual aids. I think also we need to fight for, you know, different kinds of politicians. And one of the things that really interested me was the politicians that are being elected, that are not privileged. So Maxwell Alejandro Frost was a local politician in Florida, and he came out as not being able to pay his rent before he moved to D.C. and I thought, wow, that's really brave
because it's like really expensive. He had been... He's working class and person of color and really young. I think he was elected, he was 25 or 26. And moving, he wouldn't have his salary. I mean, which was a middle class salary like $140,000. But until he moved there. So he had to wait and he was like couch surfing. Yeah. And the fact that he was that, and he came out as it I was like, this is something that we need. We need to have politicians, elected politicians, that understand the experience of financial precarity. I think that's one of the crucial things that a lot of people just don't. Or there they've decided that they have to tell the Horatio Alger story about how they're up from poverty rather than they're still amidst people who understand, been impressed by people like AOC who've questioned bootstrapping stories publicly. There's politicians who also admit to their psychological vulnerability, which, again, was used to be seen as just like the death knell for any politician. But I think it's important you have a mental health epidemic right now, especially with the young people. And I think it's important when people can come out and talk about it. But back to what is to be done.
Mila Atmos: [00:31:59] Yeah. I mean you gave us a lot of really good ideas. Already. Alissa Quart: [00:32:01] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:02] It's good, it's good. I just wanted to mention here that The New York Times recently just had this little video reporting of members of Congress who complained that their salary and according to these videos, is $174,000 a year. But how, if you are serving as a member of Congress, you have a home office and you have your, you know, your district office, then you have your office in D.C. and maintaining two homes, two cars on $174,000 is really impossible. And some of the members of Congress that were in this montage are Republicans. And they said, listen, if I were to come home to my home district where the average income is $53,000, and I say $174,000 is not enough, you know, that would be completely unacceptable. And yet I can't really make ends meet because Washington, D.C. is very expensive and I can't really have two things of both with this kind of salary. And there are about 100 members of Congress who sleep in their offices is what one of them said. And then there was another member of Congress, a woman, and she said, basically, we have to decide whether the only people who can run for Congress are people who are independently wealthy because they cannot afford this two part life on this kind of salary. And I thought
it was really interesting that it was being reported and that a lot of the people who participated were Republicans.
Alissa Quart: [00:33:25] Yeah. Well, but again, this is like, do they not understand. Do they not understand the conditions that most Americans live in, that they have to pay? Again, what you're saying daycare, when we're behind most Western democracies in terms of medical care, there's a huge percentage of people who spend more than 30% of their income on rent and 47% of people can't pay for three months of an emergency. Four out of ten people who make $100,000 or more can't pay for an emergency.
Mila Atmos: [00:33:55] Oh, wow.
Alissa Quart: [00:33:56] Because for the very reason you're saying there's a new survey by MIT that was about this, that something like median income people would be struggling in many American cities was $117,000. If you have two kids as a household income to me, you know, again, I'm like, oh, that's kind of what we're living on, you know? But I mean, I think that that needs to be said, that there is financial struggle up and down the gradient, and let's try to make it a source of solidarity. I think that's part of what the most successful thing about "Occupy," right, was the 99%. But I do think if we are thinking that people who make $117,000 are going to be having a hard time paying their bills in major American cities for their whole family, could we connect them to people who are more explicitly working poor?
Mila Atmos: [00:34:45] Mhm.
Alissa Quart: [00:34:46] They're all living a certain kinds of financial insecurity. Mila Atmos: [00:34:48] Yeah. Yeah. That's right.Alissa Quart: [00:34:50] And that's, that's a solidarity movement that politicians need to emphasize. I think the gradient of insecurity. And that's part of what we do at EHRP too. And in my previous book, I called it The Middle Precariat, which is the precarious proletariat cross with the middle class, which I believe, unfortunately, given that number that I just said to you, is growing.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:10] Yeah. Definitely is. Here's my last question. Alissa Quart: [00:35:13] Okay.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:14] Looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?Alissa Quart: [00:35:18] Oh, yeah. So what makes me hopeful? I think there's, like, a growing awareness, maybe sometimes a hyper awareness of injustices that were sort of naturalized people are checking their privilege. Like that's a phrase that when I was growing up, no one was checking their privilege. Unfortunately, I still think people aren't. But I think that to the extent, like I said before, with posting these images of themselves, but just even the idea that living in an unequal society where you're thriving should be something that you question, it's not because you've worked hard necessarily. It's probably because you've inherited land. Your ancestors benefited from the Homestead Act of 1862, the land giveaway. If you're, you know, a white person, you've benefited from privileges around that, around redlining. You know, if you are male, you've benefited from the fact that you make a dollar to $0.82 that women make and that there are all these things that people need to be recognizing and articulating. And what gives me hope is that people are starting to do that. And I do see an awakening around privilege and social class with that. I also think groups like I call them the class traitors, but like the Patriotic Millionaires or Solidaire and other philanthropies that are often run by wealthy people who, again, are checking their privileged posting their tax returns, showing how the tax code has been favorable to them, showing how they've actually been given all this credit, that by being wealthy and having inherited wealth that they shouldn't have had, and coming out in that way, I think that's very powerful. And then dispensing money with that in mind, I think of Mackenzie Scott. You know, Jeff Bezos ex-wife who has really or in some ways revolutionized philanthropy because she's giving to grassroots organizations rather than Johns Hopkins or Harvard, which was usually what donors did, and the majority still do, but instead giving to like historically Black universities, community colleges, those moments or those shifts in philanthropy and that insight, again, of course, I have a vested interest. I run a grassroots organization which people can donate to, but I can see people are realizing, oh, you don't want to just fund the huge behemoth, the giant organization, the giant college that's glitzy, but we need to, like, bring up everybody.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:38] Yeah, hopeful signs for solidarity going forward.
Alissa Quart: [00:37:42] Yeah, absolutely. And you know, before I forget, you had asked a second part of the question before, which was about what we can do personally. And I think that gives me hope, too. And I think of an idea called attribution, which Bob MacKinnon, who's a podcast host, had talked about, where we think of the people that helped us become who we are. And so we think about our dependence, what I call the art of dependence, and the ways in which we are interdependent, rather than being like, I wrote this book, which I did, but I wrote it because I had this wonderful babysitter, Kylie, who helped me take care of my child. I wrote it because when I was 13 years old, I was in a class with the writer of Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt. He was my English teacher, and he said, I was a born writer at Stuyvesant High School when I was 13 years old, and that changed my life. My grandparents, who were cobblers and shoe people who I would play with shoes in their house, you know, and shoe horns. And they gave me uncritical love, but also they showed me the complexity of being an immigrant and what those self-made stories did, but also that they were powerful individuals and they were working class.
Mila Atmos: [00:38:48] Mhm. Mhm. Thank you.
Alissa Quart: [00:38:50] Yeah. You're welcome. What are what's your attribution.Mila Atmos: [00:38:52] Oh what's my attribution. Oh my goodness there's so many I would say I need to thank my grandfather, who always believed in me and really helped me out of tight spots when I needed that help. There are so many people that I have to thank in my life.
Alissa Quart: [00:39:09] Yeah, and I feel like as a practice that's helpful to me now to do that, because the isolation and loneliness of achievement, like I think that's part of the counter-narrative. It's not just that we should not be individualists, but that it feels better to not be an individualist.
Mila Atmos: [00:39:26] Yeah. Hear, hear. Thank you very much, Alissa, for joining us on Future Hindsight. This was really a pleasure to have you on the show.
Alissa Quart: [00:39:33] Oh, thank you so much. This is great.
Mila Atmos: [00:39:36] Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author of Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Daria Dawson. She's the executive director of America Votes, which coordinates more than 400 partners to engage and mobilize voters for elections up and down the ballot across the country.
Daria Dawson: [00:40:03] I think we need to be honest about the fact that, yes, there's a lot of voter apathy out there. And the scary thing is that fear is a motivating factor, which is why it always seems like the other side is winning because they're able to tap into that and to get people riled up, as I will say.
Mila Atmos: [00:40:22] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
And before I go, first of all, thanks so much for listening. If you like this episode, you'll love what we have in store. Be sure to hit that follow button on Apple Podcasts or the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app, so you'll catch all of our upcoming episodes. Thank you! Oh, and please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. It seems like a small thing, but it can make a huge difference for an independent show like ours. It's the main way other people can find out about the show. We really appreciate your help. Thank you.
This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged. The Democracy Group: [00:41:17] This podcast is part of the democracy Group.