Down the Up Escalator How the. This item is unavailable.Down the Up Escalator How the

One of our most incisive and committed journalists--author of the classic All the Livelong Day--shows us the real human cost of our economic follies.

The Great Recession has thrown huge economic challenges at almost all Americans save the super-affluent few, and we are only now beginning to reckon up the human toll it is taking. Down the Up Escalator is an urgent dispatch from the front lines of our vast collective struggle to keep our heads above water and maybe even--someday--get ahead. Garson has interviewed an economically and geographically wide variety of Americans to show the painful waste in all this loss and insecurity, and describe how individuals are coping. Her broader historical focus, though, is on the causes and consequences of the long stagnation of wages and how it has resulted in an increasingly desperate reliance on credit and a series of ever-larger bubbles--stocks, technology, real estate. This is no way to run an economy, or a democracy.

BARBARA GARSON is an award-winning play­wright, journalist, and the author of three books, All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work, The Electronic Sweatshop, and most recently Money Makes the World Go Around: One Investor Tracks Her Cash Through the Global Economy. Her play MacBird was the literary open­ing shot of the sixties, and The Dinosaur Door won an Obie. Her writing has appeared in Harper's, the New York Times, Newsweek, and the Nation.