Working Class Plight Calls for “Opportunity-Creating” Policies, Authors Tell Gousha
Nick Kristof grew up in Yamhill, Oregon, a small town about 30 miles southwest of Portland, where the economy was based on agriculture, timber, and light manufacturing. Among those who rode on the same school bus he did were kids from a family that was doing well.
But over time, the economy of the area declined, many jobs disappeared, and that family lost its stability.
Kristof, who is now 61, went on to become a Pulitzer Prize winning author and New York Times columnist. But all five of the children in that family and a quarter of the kids who rode that childhood school bus with Kristof died what Kristof calls “deaths of despair,” including from drug overdoses and alcohol abuse.
That’s part of the reason why Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, wrote a book, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope. The bigger reason, though is that they found, as they researched the book across the United States, that what had happened to people in Yamhill was similar to what had happened to millions of working class people in urban, suburban and rural communities and of all races and backgrounds.
Our Student Guest Blogger for October is 2L Liz Simonis. Originally from Milwaukee, Liz spent five years working in agriculture around the Midwest before moving back to the Cream City. Her legal interests are primarily in intellectual property and corporate law, but after spending six months in China, she has developed an interest in water law as well, including its ability to influence international relations. Liz has recently been