1. Charles Ward, “Protestant Work Ethic That Took Root in Faith Is Now Ingrained in Our Culture,” Houston Chronicle, September 1, 2007, https://www.chron.com/life/houston-belief/article/Protestant-work-ethic-that-took-root-in-faith-is-1834963.php.

2. All names of participants are pseudonyms, usually chosen by them.

3. Susan Adams, “America’s Worst Cities for Finding a Job,” Forbes, November 23, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2011/11/23/americas-worst-cities-for-finding-a-job/.

4. […] means a deletion from an interview excerpt. See the Transcription Key in the front matter.

5. On the utopian/dystopian divide in writing about the future, see Samuel Gerald Collins, “Working for the Robocracy: Critical Ethnography of Robot Futures,” Anthropology of Work Review 39, no. 1 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1111/awr.12131.

6. Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 335. See also Weeks, The Problem with Work.

7. Peter Frase, “Against Jobs, for Full Employment,” Jacobin, July 27, 2011, https://jacobinmag.com/2011/07/against-jobs-for-full-employment/.

8. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2016), 234, 235.

9. Marie Jahoda, “Work, Employment, and Unemployment: Values, Theories, and Approaches in Social Research,” American Psychologist 36, no. 2 (1981): 189, https://doi.org/10.1037//0003-066X.36.2.184.

10. John A. Garraty, Unemployment in History: Economic Thought and Public Policy (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 5.

11. In a famous essay, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins draws on some time studies of hunters and gatherers to emphasize their considerable leisure time, contrary to popular perceptions. There have been criticisms of what kinds of labor were omitted from his calculations, but the general point stands. Marshall Sahlins, “The Original Affluent Society,” in his Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972), 1–39. See also James Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots (New York: Penguin, 2021).

12. Garraty, Unemployment in History, 5.

13. Garraty cites Pierre Bourdieu’s finding that in the 1960s seasonal agricultural laborers in northern Algeria considered themselves to be unemployed during the months they were not working, but those in southern Algeria did not. The northern area (Kabylia) had a long history of emigration to France, which is dominated by a wage economy. Bourdieu writes that the absence of a predominant wage economy in the south meant they “ ‘had not discovered the idea [of] unemployment.’ ” Pierre Bourdieu, Travail et travailleurs en Algérie: Étude sociologique (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’Homme, 1963), 52, 303–4, quoted in Garraty, Unemployment in History, 6.

14. William Monteith, Dora-Olivia Vicol, and Philippa Williams, “Work beyond the Wage,” in their edited book, Beyond the Wage: Ordinary Work in Diverse Economies (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2021), 3–4.

15. Tocqueville excluded slave owners in the South from these generalizations. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Why Americans Consider All Occupations Honorable,” in Democracy in America, vol. 2, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 550.

16. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 550.

17. Caitrin Lynch and Daniel Mains, “Epilogue: Rethinking the Value of Work and Unemployment,” in Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and Its Absence, ed. Jong Bum Kwon and Carrie M. Lane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), 223–27; “International Labor Laws and Minimum Age Requirements,” Blue Marble Payroll, June 25, 2018, https://bluemarblepayroll.com/international-labor-laws-minimum-age-requirements/; Eversheds Sutherland, “Compulsory Retirement: An International Comparison,” Lexology, April 11, 2014, https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=6a6150 B.C.-0825-4166-9e52-d6589c6ee237. See also Ida Susser, “The Construction of Poverty and Homelessness in US Cities,” Annual Review of Anthropology 25, no. 1 (1996): 413–14, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.25.1.411.

18. Derek Thompson, “A World without Work,” The Atlantic, July/August 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/.

19. See also Francis Grund, The Americans in Their Moral, Social, and Political Relations: Two Volumes in One (Boston: Marsh, Capen and Lyon, 1837; New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1971).

20. Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 1.

21. L. Robert Kohls, The Values Americans Live By (Washington, DC: Meridian Intercultural Orientation Program, 1984), 6.

22. Thompson, “A World without Work”; Derek Thompson, “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable,” The Atlantic, February 24, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-workism-making-americans-miserable/583441/.

23. Capitol Hill Dweller, comment about “Is It Great to Be a Worker in the U.S.? Not Compared with the Rest of the Developed World,” Washington Post, July 4, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/07/04/is-it-great-to-be-a-worker-in-the-u-s-not-compared-to-the-rest-of-the-developed-world/?utm_term=.bec1d6359510. (Comment no longer available.)

24. Akihito Shimazu et al., “Workaholism vs. Work Engagement: The Two Different Predictors of Future Well-Being and Performance,” International Journal of Behavioral Medicine 22, no. 1 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1007/s12529-014-9410-x.

25. For a related but different categorization of work ethics, see Paul Heelas, “Work Ethics, Soft Capitalism and the ‘Turn to Life,’ ” in Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life, ed. Paul Du Gay and Michael Pryke (London: Sage, 2002), 78–96.

26. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1904–5; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958).

27. On the discursive construction of class, see Sherry Ortner, “Identities: The Hidden Life of Class,” Journal of Anthropological Research 54, no. 1 (1998), https://doi.org/10.1086/jar.54.1.3631674. On multiple meanings of being “middle class” globally, see Rachel Heiman, Carla Freeman, and Mark Liechty, eds., The Global Middle Classes: Theorizing through Ethnography (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2012).

28. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Writing against Culture,” in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991), 137–62.

29. Council of Economic Advisors, Expanding Work Requirements in Non-Cash Welfare Programs (Washington, DC: Council of Economic Advisors, July 2018), https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/cea-report-expanding-work-requirements-non-cash-welfare-programs/.

30. The 2018 Council of Economic Advisors report also fails to mention the weak overtime protections that force many Americans to work long hours whether they want to or not. Jerry A. Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson, The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

31. That is why it is problematic to conduct cross-cultural research by comparing people in different countries with no further specification of their social locations.

32. Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

33. Robert A. LeVine, Culture, Behavior, and Personality: An Introduction to the Comparative Study of Psychosocial Adaptation, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: AldineTransaction, 1982), 293.

34. Strauss and Quinn, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning, chapter 2; Claudia Strauss, “The Complexity of Culture in Persons,” in Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology, ed. Naomi Quinn (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 109–38.

35. Claudia Strauss, “Cultural Standing in Expression of Opinion,” Language in Society 33, no. 2 (2004), https://doi.org/10.1017/S004740450433201X.

36. Naomi Quinn and Dorothy Holland, “Culture and Cognition,” in Cultural Models in Language and Thought, ed. Dorothy Holland and Naomi Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 3–40.

37. For methods of analyzing cultural models see Naomi Quinn, ed., Finding Culture in Talk: A Collection of Methods (New York: Palgrave, 2005).

38. Christine Jeske, The Laziness Myth: Narratives of Work and the Good Life in South Africa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020), 8–11.

39. Andrew E. Clark, “Unemployment as a Social Norm: Psychological Evidence from Panel Data,” Journal of Labor Economics 21, no. 2 (2003), https://doi.org/10.1086/345560; Jennie E. Brand, “The Far-Reaching Impact of Job Loss and Unemployment,” Annual Review of Sociology 41 (2015): 366, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-071913-043237.

40. See, for example, Katherine M. Dudley, The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Katherine Newman, Falling from Grace: Downward Mobility in the Age of Affluence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Gregory Pappas, The Magic City: Unemployment in a Working-Class Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). For studies of recent factory closings, see Victor Tan Chen, Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); Farah Stockman, American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears (New York: Random House, 2021).

41. “Unemployment—The Economic Lowdown Podcast Series, Episode 5,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, accessed May 25, 2021, https://www.stlouisfed.org/education/economic-lowdown-podcast-series/episode-5-unemployment.

42. Tejvan Pettinger, “Structural Unemployment,” Economics Help, August 7, 2019, https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/27657/unemployment/structural-unemployment/.

43. Christine J. Walley, Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 72–73.

44. Walley, Exit Zero, 68.

45. Aronowitz and DiFazio, The Jobless Future, 27. Those guarantees were not available to many women and workers of color in the informal economy. Sharryn Kasmir, “The Anthropology of Labor,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.97.

46. Sherry Lee Linkon argues that “post-Fordist” is a more accurate term than “postindustrial” to describe the current economy. Manufacturing continues but with fewer workers. Sherry Lee Linkon, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working-Class Writing about Economic Restructuring (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 5.

47. Dennis Arnold and Joseph R. Bongiovi, “Precarious, Informalizing, and Flexible Work: Transforming Concepts and Understandings,” American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 3 (2013): 294–95, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764212466239. See also the discussion of flexible capitalism in David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Conditions of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

48. Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), esp. chap. 3.

49. Ho, Liquidated, 75, 85, 217, 222.

50. Carrie M. Lane, “Man Enough to Let My Wife Support Me: How Changing Models of Career and Gender Are Reshaping the Experience of Unemployment,” American Ethnologist 36, no. 4 (2009): 685–86, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01203.x. See also Carrie M. Lane, A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). Gershon found that knowledge economy workers and those who managed them in the San Francisco Bay Area expected jobs to be short-lived. Ilana Gershon, Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

51. None of my participants used this term, but a member of the audience brought it up during a talk I gave. Appreciating a short time out of work is not new. When Bakke studied unemployed blue-collar working men in the United States during the Great Depression in the 1930s, he learned that they were used to periodic layoffs. Bakke commented, “Since he [the unemployed worker] has had the same experience before, he is likely to expect the layoff to be merely temporary and to regard it as a chance for a short holiday.” E. Wight Bakke, Citizens without Work: A Study of the Effects of Unemployment upon the Workers’ Social Relations and Practices (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940), 155.

52. Lane, Company of One, 46.

53. “Unemployment—The Economic Lowdown Podcast.”

54. For more detail on how class, race, and gender privilege can create better unemployment experiences and better outcomes when working again, see Sarah Damaske, The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).

55. See also Chen, Cut Loose.

56. “Unemployment—The Economic Lowdown Podcast.”

57. Damaske, The Tolls of Uncertainty, 32–33; Steven. H. Lopez and Lora A. Phillips, “Unemployed: White-Collar Job Searching after the Great Recession,” Work and Occupations 46, no. 4 (2019): 504, https://doi.org/10.1177/0730888419852379.

58. “Civilian Unemployment Rate, Seasonally Adjusted,” US Bureau of Labor Statistics, accessed May 25, 2021, https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm; “County Unemployment Rates, 2011 Annual Average,” California Employment Development Department, https://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/file/Maps/County_UR_2011BM2014.pdf.

59. Rand Ghayad, “The Jobless Trap,” Northeastern University, Boston, 2013, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.692.6736&rep=rep1&type=pdf. But see Lee Dye, “Unemployment: UCLA Study Shows Stigma of Joblessness Is Immediate,” ABC News, April 5, 2011, https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/unemployment-stigma-begins-quickly-makes-job-search-harder/story?id=13302693.

60. Evan Cunningham, “Great Recession, Great Recovery? Trends from the Current Population Survey,” Monthly Labor Review 141, no. 4 (April 2018), https://doi.org/10.21916/mlr.2018.10.

61. “Average (Mean) Duration of Unemployment [UEMPMEAN],” US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, January 31, 2023, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UEMPMEAN.

62. Mason Ameri et al., “The Disability Employment Puzzle: A Field Experiment on Employer Hiring Behavior,” ILR Review 71, no. 2 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793917717474.

David Neumark, Ian Burn, and Patrick Button, “Is It Harder for Older Workers to Find Jobs? New and Improved Evidence from a Field Experiment,” Journal of Political Economy 127, no. 2 (April 2019), https://doi.org/10.1086/701029. Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,” American Economic Review 94, no. 4 (2004), https://doi.org/10.1257/0002828042002561; Sonia K. Kang, Katherine A. DeCelles, András Tilcsik, and Sora Jun, “Whitened Résumés: Race and Self-Presentation in the Labor Market,” Administrative Science Quarterly 61, no. 3 (September 2016), https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839216639577. For a finding of no discrimination based on apparent Latino and African American surnames, see Rajeev Darolia et al., “Race and Gender Effects on Employer Interest in Job Applicants: New Evidence from a Resume Field Experiment,” Applied Economics Letters 23, no. 12 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1080/13504851.2015.1114571. András Tilcsik, “Pride and Prejudice: Employment Discrimination against Openly Gay Men in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 117 (2011), https://doi.org/10.1086/661653; Emma Mishel, “Discrimination against Queer Women in the U.S. Workforce: A Résumé Audit Study,” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 2 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023115621316. Bradley R. E. Wright, Michael Wallace, John Bailey, and Allen Hyde, “Religious Affiliation and Hiring Discrimination in New England: A Field Experiment,” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 34 (2013), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2013.10.002. Those who indicated participating in college atheist and Evangelical Christian groups also received somewhat fewer calls. There is an extensive international overview of these studies in Stijn Baert, “Hiring Discrimination: An Overview of (Almost) All Correspondence Experiments since 2005” (IZA Discussion Papers, No. 10738, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn, 2017), https://docs.iza.org/dp10738.pdf. There is an updated registry on his website as well: https://users.ugent.be/~sbaert/research_register.htm.

63. Amanda Agan and Sonja Starr, “Ban the Box, Criminal Records, and Racial Discrimination: A Field Experiment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, no. 1 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjx028.

64. Amy Traub, Discredited: How Employment Credit Checks Keep Qualified Workers out of a Job (New York: Dēmos, 2014), https://www.demos.org/research/discredited-how-employment-credit-checks-keep-qualified-workers-out-job.

65. Jack R. Friedman, “Shame and the Experience of Ambivalence on the Margins of the Global: Pathologizing the Past and Present in Romania’s Industrial Wastelands,” Ethos 35, no. 2 (2007): 248, https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.2007.35.2.235. The “violence of everyday life” is an allusion to Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). See also Brand, “Far-Reaching Impact of Job Loss and Unemployment.”

66. Friedman, “Shame and the Experience of Ambivalence”; Jie Yang, Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).

67. Kelly McKowen, “Substantive Commitments: Reconciling Work Ethics and the Welfare State in Norway,” Economic Anthropology 7, no. 1 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12169. In 2014 I interviewed two unemployed Danish women who said that their country’s generous welfare state created social pressure to be a contributing taxpayer. One stated, “Now, in people I talk to, they feel that you—somehow you’re profiting on the system, that you get paid without doing anything.” This is better by far than starving, but they said it felt “shameful.”

68. Pieter Serneels, “The Nature of Unemployment among Young Men in Urban Ethiopia,” Review of Development Economics, 11, no. 1 (2007): 174, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9361.2007.00389.x.

69. Daniel Mains, Hope Is Cut: Youth, Unemployment, and the Future in Urban Ethiopia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 4. See also Clark, “Unemployment as a Social Norm.”

70. Jeske, The Laziness Myth. See also Craig Jeffrey, Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). For a different perspective on South Africa, see E. Fouksman, “The Moral Economy of Work: Demanding Jobs and Deserving Money in South Africa.” Economy and Society 49, no. 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2019.1690276.

71. Kay Lehman Schlozman and Sidney Verba, Injury to Insult: Unemployment, Class, and Political Response (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 104. See also David B. Grusky, Bruce Western, and Christopher Wimer, “The Consequences of the Great Recession,” in their edited book The Great Recession (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011), 10.

72. Newman, Falling from Grace, 77. Newman’s careful analysis shows that although unemployed managers had alternative explanations for their unemployment (for example, age discrimination), the dominant meritocratic individualist discourses in the business community still undermined their self-worth. On self-blame among the unemployed, see also Chen, Cut Loose; Ofer Sharone, Flawed System/Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

73. See also Lane, Company of One, 9. Interestingly, Damaske found that unemployed women in her study exhibited more self-blame than the unemployed men. Damaske, The Tolls of Uncertainty. Lopez and Phillips found both self-blame and system blame among white-collar job seekers in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Lopez and Phillips, “Unemployed.”

74. In chapter 2 I discuss wellness discourses and practices that counter a living-to-work ethic.

75. I give more details in chapters 2 and 4. See also Lopez and Phillips, “Unemployed,” 489ff.

76. Claudia Strauss, “Engaged by the Spectacle of Protest: How Bystanders Became Invested in Occupy Wall Street,” in Political Sentiments and Social Movements: The Person in Politics and Culture, ed. Claudia Strauss and Jack Friedman (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 33–60.

77. Bakke, Citizens without Work, 21–22.

78. Tanya Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Vintage, 2012).

79. Raymond Garrett-Peters, “’If I Don’t Have to Work Anymore, Who Am I?’ Job Loss and Collaborative Self-Concept Repair,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 38, no. 5 (2009), https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241609342104. The importance of religious beliefs for job seekers is also touched on by Lane, Company of One, 90; Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character (New York: Norton, 1998), 130; Wendy Patton and Ross Donohue, “Coping with Long-Term Unemployment,” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 8, no. 5 (1998): 338, https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-1298(1998090)8:53.0.CO;2–6.

80. Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009).

81. Claudia Strauss, “Positive Thinking about Being out of Work in Southern California after the Great Recession,” in Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and Its Absence, ed. Jong Bum Kwon and Carrie M. Lane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), 171–90. Positive thinking discourse was also noted among job seekers by Sharone, Flawed System/Flawed Self, 38–39; Lane, Company of One, 161–62; and Gershon, Down and Out, 24. Positive thinking discourse is not limited to the United States. Patton and Donahue heard some positive thinking among those coping well with long-term unemployment in Australia. Patton and Donohue, “Coping with Long-Term Unemployment,” 338.

82. “Definition of Work,” Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/work, accessed May 3, 2022.

83. John W. Budd, The Thought of Work (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 2; André Gorz, Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society, trans. Chris Turner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 3; Jeske, The Laziness Myth, 10–11.

84. Mechthild von Vacano, personal communication, June 1, 2018.

85. Budd, The Thought of Work, 2.

86. All labor force statistics also exclude active-duty military from those who are employed, as well as those in prison or otherwise institutionalized. “How the Government Measures Unemployment,” US Bureau of Labor Statistics, October 8, 2015, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#employed.

87. Carrie M. Lane, “The Limits of Liminality: Anthropological Approaches to Unemployment in the United States,” in Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and Its Absence, ed. Jong Bum Kwon and Carrie M. Lane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), 29–31; Lynch and Mains, “Epilogue,” 214–15.

88. “Unemployment—The Economic Lowdown Podcast.”

89. Zygmunt Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, 2nd ed. (Berkshire, UK: Open University Press, 2005), 1.

90. Jeske, The Laziness Myth, 24.

1. Weeks, Problem with Work, 1, 11, 2, 11, 38ff.

2. Sometimes this is called “misery poker,” one definition of which is “a game played between people that have ridiculous amounts of work. It is played by calling, raising and betting assignments. It is often played by college students.” Example: “It’s unbelievable, but I just lost misery poker to Christina. I had a term paper, a test in art history, and a lab but she raised me a history paper” (“Misery Poker,” definition by Leah Beah, Urban Dictionary, March 29, 2009, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=misery+poker). See also Elizabeth Bernstein, “Misery Poker: It’s One Game Worth Losing,” Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2009, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124511445043317379. A professor at a state university thought that attitude was not as common there. Alma Gottlieb, comment to author, November 20, 2020.

3. Fâtima @r0sewater, posted on Twitter and reposted on other platforms.

4. Musk and Mayer were quoted in Erin Griffith, “Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?” New York Times, January 26, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/26/business/against-hustle-culture-rise-and-grind-tgim.html.

5. Dan Lyons, “In Silicon Valley, Working 9 to 5 Is for Losers,” New York Times, August 31, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/opinion/sunday/silicon-valley-work-life-balance-.html?_r=0.

6. Quoted in Lyons, “In Silicon Valley, Working 9 to 5 Is for Losers.”

7. Jim Edwards, “Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian Says ‘Hustle Porn’ is ‘One of the Most Toxic, Dangerous Things in Tech Right Now,’ ” Business Insider, November 6, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-alexis-ohanian-hustle-porn-toxic-dangerous-thing-in-tech-2018-11; Jennifer Earl, “Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Blasts ‘Hustle Porn’ on Social Media: It’s ‘Really Toxic,’ ” Fox Business, May 27, 2019, https://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/reddit-co-founder-alexis-ohanian-hustle-porn-toxic.

8. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; repr. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1994), 25.

9. Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia, and Anat Keinan, “Conspicuous Consumption of Time: When Busyness and Lack of Leisure Time Become a Status Symbol,” Journal of Consumer Research 44 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucw076.

10. Charlie Giattino, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Max Roser, “Working Hours,” OurWorldInData.org, December 2020, https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours.

11. Lydia Saad, “The ‘40-Hour’ Workweek Is Actually Longer—by Seven Hours,” Gallup, August 29, 2014, https://news.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-longer-seven-hours.aspx; Claire Cain Miller, “Women Did Everything Right: Then Work Got ‘Greedy,’ ” New York Times, April 26, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/upshot/women-long-hours-greedy-professions.html?searchResultPosition=4.

12. Saad, “The ‘40-Hour’ Workweek Is Actually Longer.” Those figures are just for full-time workers, not including those who work two or more part-time jobs.

13. In that respect, I agree with Weeks, Problem with Work, 54.

14. “Following Weber, productivism can be seen as an ethos in which ‘work,’ as paid employment, has been separated out in a clear-cut way from other domains of life. Work becomes a standard-bearer of moral meaning—it defines whether or not individuals feel worthwhile or socially valued.” Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 175.

15. I pondered whether to use “ethos” (a “characteristic spirit”) instead of “ethic” (“a set of moral principles”), https://en.oxforddictionaries.com. I decided to keep “ethic” because it expresses the moral element of this outlook, but I could also see an argument for “ethos” as a way of thinking that goes beyond morality.

16. Alison Doyle, “Difference between an Exempt and a Non-Exempt Employee,” The Balance Careers, November 22, 2020, https://www.thebalancecareers.com/exempt-and-a-non-exempt-employee-2061988; Lisa Nagele-Piazza, “Are Your Pay Rates Compliant for 2020?” SHRM, February 3, 2020, https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/state-and-local-updates/pages/are-your-pay-rates-compliant-for-2020.aspx.

17. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 24.

18. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 66–67.

19. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 68.

20. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 69.

21. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 60.

22. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 157.

23. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 157.

24. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 157–58.

25. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 7–9.

26. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 48, 49.

27. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 182.

28. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 170.

29. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 181.

30. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 70; also, 283n115.

31. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 71.

32. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 53. To be precise, Weber saw the Protestant work ethic as highly rational in its methods but irrational in its ultimate aims.

33. Weber indicates that, for German observers, American businessmen had long served as exemplars of those devoted to making money above all else. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 51.

34. See the literature review in Adrian Furnham, “The Protestant Work Ethic: A Review of the Psychological Literature,” European Journal of Social Psychology 14, no. 1 (January/March 1984), https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2420140108.

35. Robert Bellah, “Reflections on the Protestant Ethic Analogy in Asia,” in his Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditionalist World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 53–63.

36. Weeks, Problem with Work, 39.

37. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 81. Those are Weber’s words, not Luther’s.

38. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 62. See also Weeks, Problem with Work, 39, 44.

39. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 62.

40. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 177, 281n101; see also 179. See also Weeks, Problem with Work, 8.

41. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 80.

42. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 127.

43. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 127. In a fascinating footnote, Weber departed from the distinction between Protestants and Catholics that he drew in the rest of the book and instead contrasted mystically inclined Germans of all faiths with activity-oriented Americans. In this footnote, he discussed a nineteenth-century caustic portrait of Americans published in Germany (Der Amerikamude, 1855), calling it valuable “as a document of the (now long since blurred-over) differences between the German and the American outlook, one may even say of the type of spiritual life which, in spite of everything, has remained common to all Germans, Catholic and Protestant alike, since the German mysticism of the Middle Ages, as against the Puritan capitalistic valuation of action.” Weber, Protestant Ethic, 192n3.

44. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 53.

45. I realize that “long hours” is a vague term; what seems long to one worker or researcher may not seem long to another. I relied on my participants’ self-descriptions of having devoted more time on their jobs than, in retrospect, they felt was necessary or desirable, given all the ways they could have spent their time. Later in this section, I explain why standardized measures of work centrality would have been of questionable value for those out of work.

46. Robert R. Hirschfeld and Hubert S. Field, “Work Centrality and Work Alienation: Distinct Aspects of a General Commitment to Work,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 21, no. 7 (2000), https://doi.org/10.1002/1099-1379(200011)21:73.0.CO;2-W.

47. We did not obtain each participant’s previous work hours, so I cannot say with certainty which ones had typically worked longer than fifty hours a week when they were employed.

48. Strauss, “Positive Thinking about Being out of Work in Southern California after the Great Recession.”

49. These are Ehrenreich’s glosses. Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), 89, 94, 96.

50. Emory L. Cowen, “In Pursuit of Wellness,” American Psychologist 46, no. 4 (1991): 404, https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.46.4.404.

51. Elizabeth Montgomery’s attempt to live in the present may be a current secular version of Buddhist ideas. Alma Gottlieb, comment to author, August 2019.

52. David McGillivray, “Fitter, Happier, More Productive: Governing Working Bodies through Wellness,” Culture and Organization 11, no. 2 (2005), https://doi.org/10.1080/14759550500091036. See also J. A. English-Lueck and Miriam Lueck Avery, “Intensifying Work and Chasing Innovation: Incorporating Care in Silicon Valley,” Anthropology of Work Review 38, no. 1 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1111/awr.12111; J. A. English-Lueck, Being and Well-Being: Health and the Working Bodies of Silicon Valley (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

53. Bryan Robinson, quoted in Kathleen Doheny, “Working Yourself to Death: Long Hours Bring Risks,” WebMD, July 16, 2018, https://www.webmd.com/balance/stress-management/news/20180716/working-yourself-to-death-long-hours-bring-risks.

54. W. Oates, Confessions of a Workaholic: The Facts about Work Addiction (New York: World, 1971), 11, quoted in Wilmar B. Schaufeli, Toon W. Taris, and Arnold B. Bakker, “Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde? On the Differences between Work Engagement and Workaholism,” in Research Companion to Working Time and Work Addiction, ed. Ronald J. Burke (Cheltenham, UK: Elgar, 2006), 193. Other researchers emphasize not long hours but rather that “workaholics struggle to psychologically detach from work.” Nancy P. Rothbard and Lieke ten Brummelhuis, “How Being a Workaholic Differs from Working Long Hours,” Pocket, accessed July 19, 2021, https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-being-a-workaholic-differs-from-working-long-hours?utm_source=pocket_mylist. Originally published in Harvard Business Review, March 4, 2018.

55. “Welcome to Workaholics Anonymous,” Workaholics Anonymous, 2021, http://www.workaholics-anonymous.org/.

56. Suzan Lewis, Richenda Gambles, and Rhona Rapoport, “The Constraints of a ‘Work–Life Balance’ Approach: An International Perspective, International Journal of Human Resource Management 18, no. 3 (2007): 360, https://doi.org/10.1080/09585190601165577. I use this term for convenience, despite agreeing with the excellent analysis in David E. Guest, “Perspectives on the Study of Work-Life Balance,” Social Science Information 41, no. 2 (2002): 261–63, https://doi.org/10.1177/053901840204100200. Guest points out it is not clear what we mean by “work,” “life,” or “balance”—or why work is opposed to life, instead of being part of it.

57. Lewis et al., “Constraints of a ‘Work–Life Balance’ Approach,” 361.

58. Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family (New York: Random House, 2015).

59. Jacques Freyssinet and François Michon, “Overtime in Europe” (Eurofound, Luxembourg, June 30, 2003), https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/publications/report/2003/overtime-in-europe.

See also Edward Fischer, The Good Life: Aspiration, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Wellbeing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 107–8, on successful labor organizing in Germany to shorten workweek hours while holding wages steady, along with the cultural value of Feierabend (quitting time).

60. Erin Reid, “Why Some Men Pretend to Work 80-Hour Weeks,” Harvard Business Review, April 28, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/04/why-some-men-pretend-to-work-80-hour-weeks. See also Miller, “Women Did Everything Right: Then Work Got ‘Greedy.’ ”

61. McKinsey & Company, Women in the Workplace: 2020 (New York: McKinsey & Company, 2020), 24, https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/women-in-the-workplace.

62. Wilmar B. Schaufeli, Toon W. Taris, and Arnold B. Bakker, “It Takes Two to Tango: Workaholism Is Working Excessively and Working Compulsively,” in The Long Work Hours Culture: Causes, Consequences and Choices, ed. Ronald J. Burke and Cary L. Cooper (Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2008), 204.

63. Schaufeli et al., “Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde?” 193–94.

64. Shimazu et al., “Workaholism vs. Work Engagement.” These mental and physical health correlations were weak but statistically significant. See also the twenty questions at “Welcome Newcomers!,” Workaholics Anonymous, 2021, http://www.workaholics-anonymous.org/newcomers.

65. See Guest, “Perspectives on the Study of Work-Life Balance,” 260, for critiques of disease models of workaholism.

66. Weber hinted at possible enjoyment from work when he wrote, “In the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions which often actually give it the character of sport.” Weber, Protestant Ethic, 182.

67. See the discussion of a “career” approach to choosing a job or occupation in chapter 6.

68. “All Employees, Total Nonfarm [PAYEMS],” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, April 8, 2023, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS.

69. Elizabeth Dwoskin, “The Fight over Retraining the Unemployed,” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 12, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-04-09/the-fight-over-retraining-the-unemployed.

70. For descriptions of contemporary US job search rituals, see Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (New York: Henry Holt, 2005); Lane, Company of One, 74–77.

71. Gina Belli, “How Many Jobs Are Found through Networking, Really?” Payscale, April 6, 2017, https://www.payscale.com/career-news/2017/04/many-jobs-found-networking.

72. Sharone found class differences: US blue-collar workers more often ignored career counselors’ advice and relied on methods that had worked for them in the past, such as personal contacts. Sharone, Flawed System/Flawed Self, chap. 6.

73. Sharone, Flawed System/Flawed Self, 109.

74. On conspicuous busyness as a US salaried worker’s status symbol, see Bellezza et al., “Conspicuous Consumption of Time.”

75. On the variety of ways contemporary Americans stay busy, see Charles N. Darrah, James M. Freeman, and J. A. English-Lueck, Busier than Ever! Why American Families Can’t Slow Down (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).

76. See chapter 1 for an explanation of cultural standing; also Strauss, “Cultural Standing in Expression of Opinion.”

77. Strauss, “Cultural Standing in Expression of Opinion,” 181.

78. Hochschild reports hearing a corporate employee use that very phrase: “I work to live; I don’t live to work.” Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), 35. Rejection of workaholism may be what I have termed a “conventional discourse.” Strauss, Making Sense of Public Opinion.

79. These are not the same as what other researchers call “9-to-5” employees, who are not engaged with their jobs. Marisa Salanova, Mario Del Líbano, Susana Llorens, and Wilmar B Schaufeli, “Engaged, Workaholic, Burned-Out or Just 9-to-5? Toward a Typology of Employee Well-Being,” Stress and Health 30, no. 1 (2014): 77, https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.2499.

80. See also Sharone, Flawed System/Flawed Self, 157.

81. Jahoda, “Work, Employment, and Unemployment,” 188.

82. Strauss, Making Sense of Public Opinion, 205–7, 247–53.

83. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 170–71.

84. Jahoda, “Work, Employment, and Unemployment,”189.

85. Lucien Febvre, cited in E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (1967): 60n13.

86. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline,” 60.

87. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline,” 95.

88. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline,” 96.

89. Heejung Chung and Tanja Van der Lippe, “Flexible Working, Work–Life Balance, and Gender Equality: Introduction,” Social Indicators Research 151, no. 2 (2020): 369–70, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-2025-x.

90. David L. Blustein, “The Role of Work in Psychological Health and Well-Being: A Conceptual, Historical, and Public Policy Perspective,” American Psychologist 63, no. 4 (2008), https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.63.4.228.

91. See also Jahoda on “status and identity” as intangible work benefits. Jahoda, “Work, Employment, and Unemployment,” 189.

92. An anthropologist who interviewed unemployed Norwegians has similar findings: “To live in accordance with the employment ethic is not to work hard per se but rather to achieve that sense of ordinariness, fulfillment, and moral satisfaction that comes with having a job.” McKowen, “Substantive Commitments,” 124. Interestingly, however, it seems that “the moral satisfaction” that McKowen describes comes from contributing taxes to the welfare state, not from productivist values.

93. Nicholas Bloom, “How Working from Home Works Out” (Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, June 2020), 2, https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/how-working-home-works-out.

94. Kim Parker, Juliana Horowitz and Rachel Minkin, “How the Coronavirus Outbreak Has—and Hasn’t—Changed the Way Americans Work” (Pew Research Center, December 2020), https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/12/09/how-the-coronavirus-outbreak-has-and-hasnt-changed-the-way-americans-work; Hilary Osborne, “Home Workers Putting in More Hours since Covid, Research Shows,” The Guardian, February 4, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/04/home-workers-putting-in-more-hours-since-covid-research; Jenesse Miller, “COVID-19 Has Hit Women Hard, Especially Working Mothers,” USCNews, June 18, 2020, https://news.usc.edu/171617/covid-19-women-job-losses-childcare-mental-health-usc-study.

95. Bloom, “How Working from Home Works Out,” 7. For alternative ways of combining working from home with socializing with other people, see Seo Young Park, “Stitching the Fabric of Family: Time, Work, and Intimacy in Seoul’s Tongdaemun Market,” Journal of Korean Studies 17, no. 2 (2012), https://doi.org/10.1353/jks.2012.0023. I return to this topic in chapters 6 and 7.

96. Lane heard the same in her research with unemployed high-tech workers. Lane, “Limits of Liminality,” 27. See also this discussion on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/42g9i2/unemployed_people_of_reddit_what_do_you_do_all_day/.

97. Michael G. Flaherty, “Time Work: Customizing Temporal Experience,” Social Psychology Quarterly 66, no. 1 (2003): 20, https://doi.org/10.2307/3090138; Garrett-Peters, “If I Don’t Have to Work Anymore, Who Am I?” 562.

98. See Sharone, Flawed System/Flawed Self; and Lane, “Limits of Liminality” for similar observations.

99. For a different finding, see Sharone, Flawed System/Flawed Self, 116.

100. Kohls, “The Values Americans Live By,” 6.

101. Strauss, “What Makes Tony Run?”; Reid, “Why Some Men Pretend to Work 80-Hour Weeks”; Saad, “The “40-Hour” Workweek Is Actually Longer.”

102. Brigid Schulte, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2014), 44ff.

103. Shayla Love, “The Cult of Busyness,” Vice, June 7, 2021, https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78wpz/covid-changed-our-relationship-to-busyness-can-we-keep-it-that-way-v28n2?utm_source=pocket-newtab.

1. Anna Jefferson, “ ‘Not What It Used to Be’: Schemas of Class and Contradiction in the Great Recession,” Economic Anthropology 2, no. 2 (2015): 312, https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12033.

2. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 71.

3. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 181. The “iron cage” metaphor was chosen by Talcott Parsons, who translated The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism into English. A better translation, according to Peter Baehr, would have been “shell as hard as steel,” which has subtly different connotations. Peter Baehr, “The ‘Iron Cage’ and the ‘Shell as Hard as Steel’: Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes Gehäuse Metaphor in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” History and Theory 40 (May 2001), https://doi.org/10.1111/0018-2656.00160.

4. Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 4–9.

5. Daniel Miller, “Consumption Studies as the Transformation of Anthropology,” in Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies, ed. Daniel Miller (London: Routledge, 1995), 263–92, especially 278.

6. “City of Los Angeles Security Officer Yearly Salaries in California,” Indeed, accessed June 14, 2021, https://www.indeed.com/cmp/City-of-Los-Angeles/salaries/Security-Officer/California.

7. Carl Mathews’s desire for the pleasures of lavish consumption is different from seeing consumption as a signal of a middle-class class identity, although that mattered to him as well. For more on the way some middle-class Blacks like him signal their class identity in different contexts, see Karyn R. Lacy, Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

8. That was common. Michael Calhoun, “Lessons from the Financial Crisis: The Central Importance of a Sustainable, Affordable and Inclusive Housing Market” (Brookings Center on Regulation and Markets, September 5, 2018), https://www.brookings.edu/research/lessons-from-the-financial-crisis-the-central-importance-of-a-sustainable-affordable-and-inclusive-housing-market/.

9. Carl still had friends. Our interviews were frequently interrupted by their calls.

10. “The American dream,” Merriam-Webster, accessed June 14, 2021, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/the%20American%20dream.

11. Tocqueville, “The Taste for Physical Comfort in America,” vol. 2 in Democracy in America, 531.

12. In 2011, when I conducted my research, a bare majority (51%) of adults lived in middle-income households, down from 61 percent of adults in 1971. The Pew Research Center defines middle-income households as “two-thirds to double the national median, after incomes have been adjusted for household size.” Rakesh Kochhar, “The American Middle Class Is Stable in Size, but Losing Ground Financially to Upper-Income Families” (Pew Research Center, September 6, 2018), https://pewrsr.ch/2FxKvLs.

13. Tocqueville, “The Taste for Physical Comfort in America,” vol. 2 in Democracy in America, 531.

14. My research assistant Rylie Fong pointed out that Veblen’s theory is compatible with Tocqueville’s. Tocqueville focuses on the importance of material acquisitions for a mobile middle-class, whereas Veblen explains what kinds of material acquisitions are desired. Rylie Fong, comment to author, June 16, 2021.

15. Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 52.

16. Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 54–55.

17. Chad Stone et al., “A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality” (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington, DC, updated January 13, 2020), 9–10, https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality. The second set of figures considers income after taxes and government transfer payments.

18. Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (New York: Harper, 1998), 12.

19. Schor, Overspent American, 9–10, 11–12. The large range of estimates in spending increases is due to different ways of controlling for inflation.

20. Bauman, Work, Consumerism, 23–24, 25–26.

21. Bauman, Work, Consumerism, 1.

22. Chen, Cut Loose, 216–18.

23. Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 2–3. See also Daniel Miller’s suggestion that anthropologists have been influenced by “a generalised puritanism which assumes that the desire for goods is based on an irrational materialism.” Miller, “Consumption Studies as the Transformation of Anthropology,” 269.

24. Eric Etheridge, “Rich Santelli: Tea Party Time,” New York Times, February 20, 2009, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/rick-santelli-tea-party-time/.

25. Anne Meneley, “Consumerism,” Annual Review of Anthropology 47 (2018): 118, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041518.

26. Owen Kelly, “Understanding Compulsive Shopping Disorder,” Verywell Mind, September 17, 2020, https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-compulsive-shopping-disorder-2510592.

27. Meneley, “Consumerism,” 119–21.

28. BER Staff, “Rise of Thrifting: Solution to Fast Fashion or Stealing from the Poor?” post at website of Berkeley Economic Review, November 19, 2019, https://econreview.berkeley.edu/rise-of-thrifting-solution-to-fast-fashion-or-stealing-from-the-poor/.

29. According to a reference librarian at the Claremont Colleges, “The quote is attributed to the reference Ben Franklin, Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748). However, I found the text of Advice to a Young Tradesman, 1748 in several places and this particular quote is not contained in that text.” Mary Martin, email message to author, September 11, 2020.

30. “Our Mission” and homepage of the New Dream website, accessed June 14, 2021, https://newdream.org/ and https://newdream.org/about-us.

31. Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 39–40, 78. Bowler explains why she uses this term, although contemporary prosperity preachers do not. Bowler, Blessed, 249–51.

32. Marla F. Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 142, 146–53.

33. Quoted (no source given) in Bowler, Blessed, 200.

34. Rhonda Byrne, The Secret (New York: Atria, 2006), 99.

35. Byrne, The Secret, 103, 107ff.

36. For fascinating and contrasting international studies of good life aspirations, see Fischer, The Good Life; Jeske, The Laziness Myth; McKowen, “Substantive Commitments,” 129.

37. According to one cultural historian the ideal before World War II was an urban penthouse, but the suburban single-family home became established as a cultural ideal after the war. David Marc, cited in Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 25. On the importance of homeownership in the United States, see Jefferson, “ ‘Not What It Used to Be,’ ” 312; Constance Perin, Everything in Its Place: Social Order and Land Use in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), especially 44–49; Nicholas W. Townsend, The Package Deal: Marriage, Work and Fatherhood in Men’s Lives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 138. As Alma Gottlieb and Beverly Haviland pointed out to me, a single-family home and a car are valued, in part, for the privacy and independence they provide. Comments to author, October 17, 2019.

38. That consumption is opposed to caring about sociality is one of the “myths” of consumption discussed by Daniel Miller, “Consumption as the Vanguard of History,” in Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies, ed. Daniel Miller (London: Routledge, 1995), 20–21.

39. Andrew Hernandez, “American Dream,” Urban Dictionary, November 28, 2004, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=American%20Dream.

40. Hernandez, “American Dream.” His definition ended “or don’t agree with capitolism.” I suspect that was an unintentional misspelling, rather than the slang term “capitolism” meaning “an ironic reference to an economy in which market forces are subsumed to political interests in Washington.” Marcellus_vrw, Urban Dictionary, March 11, 2009, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Capitolism.

41. William A. Gamson and Andre Modigliani, “Media Discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear Power: A Constructionist Approach,” American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 1 (1989): 3, https://doi.org/10.1086/229213. It could also be a “key symbol.” The anthropologist Sherry Ortner gives as example of a key symbol “ ‘work’ in the Protestant ethic.” Sherry B. Ortner, “On Key Symbols,” American Anthropologist 75, no. 5 (1973): 1339, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1973.75.5.02a00100.

42. Avi Friedman and David Krawitz, Peeking through the Keyhole: The Evolution of North American Homes (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 76; “Highlights of Annual 2020 Characteristics of New Housing,” U.S. Census Bureau, accessed July 30, 2021, https://www.census.gov/construction/chars/highlights.html.

43. “White picket fences” can be a metaphor for a happy life. One my participants, Emily Quinn, commented that she could not tell her sister how difficult it was to be out of work: “My sister is, ‘If it’s not white picket fences and roses I really don’t wanna talk about it.’ ”

44. Les Christie, “America’s Homes Are Bigger than Ever,” CNN Money, June 5, 2014, https://money.cnn.com/2014/06/04/real_estate/american-home-size/.

45. Schor, The Overspent American, 113.

46. Meneley, “Consumerism,” 118.

47. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

48. Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

49. Austin Nichols, Josh Mitchell, and Stephan Lindner, “Consequences of Long-Term Unemployment” (Urban Institute, Washington, DC, 2013), 3, https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/23921/412887-Consequences-of-Long-Term-Unemployment.PDF.

50. “Estimate of Median Household Income for Los Angeles County, CA,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, updated December 10, 2020, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MHICA06037A052NCEN; “Estimate of Median Household Income for San Bernardino County, CA,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, updated December 10, 2020, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MHICA06071A052NCEN.

51. Their past and current incomes were obtained on a form with the income ranges shown in figures 3.4 and 3.5. To estimate the decline, I took the midpoint of each range, using $8,500 for those who checked the bottom category of less than $12,000/year and $600,000 for those who checked the top category of more than $500,000/year. If they volunteered the exact amount of their income, I used that figure instead.

52. Jessica Godofsky, Carl Van Horn, and Cliff Zukin, American Workers Assess an Economic Disaster (New Brunswick, NJ: John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, Rutgers University, 2010), 7. The problem was particularly acute in southern California. During the Great Recession, the US Bankruptcy Court district for Southern California had the highest increase in bankruptcy filings of any court in the country. Jonathan Lansner, “The Recession That Cut California Deeply Isn’t Fully Forgotten,” Orange County Register, September 17, 2018, https://www.ocregister.com/2018/09/17/the-recession-that-cut-california-deeply-isnt-fully-forgotten/.

53. That is why it is important to get to know participants over multiple interviews and use a variety of prompts. Although Auguste Salander’s good life image spoke of material desires that he seemed uninterested in during the interviews, in other cases, it was the reverse. For example, Carl Mathews’s response to the good life question was “having God in your life” and “live within your means,” along with other prudent financial advice—but nothing about making his home a palace.

54. The most recent research backs up Jim Wade’s assessment, “Money does buy happiness.” People with higher incomes are more likely to say they are happier or, at least, that they are more satisfied with their life, whether comparing across countries or within them. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox” (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, no. 14282, 2008), https://users.nber.org/~jwolfers/papers/EasterlinParadox.pdf; Erik Linqvist, Robert Östling, and David Cesarini, “Long-Run Effects of Lottery Wealth on Psychological Well-Being” (NBER Working Paper No. 24667, May 2018), https://doi.org/10.3386/w24667. See also Justin Wolfers, “Money Really Does Lead to a More Satisfying Life,” New York Times, August 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/business/money-satisfaction-lottery-study.html. Linqvist et al. found a robust correlation between higher incomes from lottery winnings and life satisfaction (responses to “Taking all things together in your life, how satisfied would you say that you are with your life these days?”) but not as strong a correlation to current happiness (responses to “All things considered, how happy would you say that you are?”). Stevenson and Wolfers, in contrast, found that both increased happiness and life satisfaction correlated with higher income in cross-national samples.

55. “Daily Practice,” Soka Gakkai International—USA, accessed June 14, 2021, http://www.sgi-usa.org/member-resources/member-activities/daily-practice/.

56. “Golden Words by Daisaku Ikeda, Golden Words No. 711,” https://m.facebook.com/goldenzones/photos/a.157302158013887/1039735003103927/?type=3&source=48.

57. Casey Leins, “Cities with the Most Homelessness,” U.S. News & World Report, December 18, 2019, https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/slideshows/cities-with-the-most-homelessness-in-the-us?slide=4.

58. That 40 percent figure includes Stephen Smith’s wife. If she were excluded because I learned about her fears secondhand, it would still be a striking 30 percent of those with former annual household incomes of $200,000 or more expressed such worries in the interviews. I cannot see why those with household incomes below $200,000 would be more likely to keep any such fears to themselves.

59. Similarly, Marianne Cooper was surprised to find considerable financial anxiety among affluent northern Californians in the research she conducted shortly before the Great Recession. Cooper, Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), chap. 4.

60. Tocqueville, “The Taste for Physical Comfort in America,” vol. 2 in Democracy in America, 531.

61. Cooper found that her affluent participants were particularly knowledgeable about economic trends such as the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States. She speculates that may account for their surprising financial anxieties. Cooper, Cut Adrift, 96, 107. In my research, conducted six years after hers, I heard the idea that the middle class is disappearing voiced by participants of all classes.

62. Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 2.

63. Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, “More Mexicans Leaving than Coming to the U.S.” (Pew Research Center, Washington, DC, November 19, 2015), https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2015/11/2015-11-19_mexican-immigration__FINAL.pdf. For an ethnographic description, see Frances Abrahamer Rothstein, “Labor on the Move: Kinship, Social Networks, and Precarious Work among Mexican Migrants,” in Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and Its Absence, ed. Jong Bum Kwon and Carrie M. Lane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), 155–70.

64. Martijn Hendriks, “The Happiness of International Migrants: A Review of Research Findings,” Migration Studies 3, no. 3 (2015): 361, https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnu053.

65. Kristyn Frank and Feng Hou, “Over-Education and Well-Being: How Does Education-Occupation Mismatch Affect the Life Satisfaction of University-Educated Immigrant and Non-Immigrant Workers?” Ethnicity & Health 23, no. 8 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1080/13557858.2017.1316832. The anthropologist Susanna Rosenbaum found another frame of reference for immigrants who had lived in the United States for many years, some of whom compared their present situation not only with their life in their home country but also with their lives when they first arrived in the United States. Rosenbaum, Domestic Economies: Women, Work, and the American Dream in Los Angeles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

66. Hendriks, “Happiness of International Migrants,” 347.

67. Hendriks, “Happiness of International Migrants,” 361–62.

68. Regarding the importance of a subjective sense of belonging, see Rosenbaum, Domestic Economies, 12.

69. From 2010 to 2014, Latinos (immigration generation unspecified) in large urban counties in California had a median household income of $48,373. California Senate Office of Research, “A Statistical Picture of Latinos in California: 2017 Update” (California Senate Office of Research, Sacramento, CA, July 2017), 7–8, https://latinocaucus.legislature.ca.gov/sites/latinocaucus.legislature.ca.gov/files/forms/Statistical%20Picture%20of%20Latinos%20in%20California%20-%202017%20Update.pdf.

70. Typical home prices from https://www.zillow.com/irvine-ca/home-values/ and https://www.zillow.com/pomona-ca/home-values/, accessed March 12, 2023.

71. Anastasia requested that I not identify the country she came from to protect her confidentiality.

72. Anastasia’s narrative suggests that the “dual frame of reference” theory should be expanded to add return migrants, because she compared herself not only to those who stayed in the home country and to the native-born in her new host country but also to return migrants. A fourth possible reference group consists of other immigrants (first-generation or later generation) in the host country; a fifth could be themselves at an earlier time. Rosenbaum, Domestic Economies. For research on the mental health effects of unemployment and underemployment on highly educated immigrants, see Jennifer Asanin Dean and Kathi Wilson, “ ‘Education? It Is Irrelevant to My Job Now. It Makes Me Very Depressed …’: Exploring the Health Impacts of Under/Unemployment among Highly Skilled Recent Immigrants in Canada,” Ethnicity & Health 14, no. 2 (2009), https://doi.org/10.1080/13557850802227049.

73. The interview was conducted in 2012, before the violence that later forced many Salvadorans to flee. For median incomes in El Salvador at the time, see “Household Income up 10% in El Salvador,” CentralAmericaData, September 1, 2014, https://www.centralamericadata.com/en/article/home/Household_Income_Up_10_in_El_Salvador.

74. Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America, 54, 57.

75. Both are Catholic, although neither attended Mass.

76. Octavio Blanco, “Immigrant Workers Are Most Likely to Have These Jobs,” CNN, March 16, 2017, https://money.cnn.com/2017/03/16/news/economy/immigrant-workers-jobs/index.html; Rosenbaum, Domestic Economies, 8.

77. The average cost of homes in Irvine would have been a little lower at the time we spoke.

1. For an exploration of current ways of making a living beyond standard waged employment, see William Monteith, Dora-Olivia Vicol, and Philippa Williams, eds., Beyond the Wage: Ordinary Work in Diverse Economies (Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, 2021).

2. Susser, “Construction of Poverty and Homelessness,” 413–14.

3. David Davenport and Gordon Lloyd, “Rugged Individualism: Dead or Alive?” (Defining Ideas, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, January 10, 2017), https://www.hoover.org/research/rugged-individualism-dead-or-alive-0. The term “rugged individualism” was popularized by Herbert Hoover. Hoover, “’Rugged Individualism’ Campaign Speech,” Digital History (1928; 2021), https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=1334.

4. Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the US Welfare State,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19, no. 2 (1994): 320, https://doi.org/10.1086/494886. On American kin systems, see Francis L. K. Hsu, “Rugged Individualism Reconsidered,” in his Rugged Individualism Reconsidered: Essays in Psychological Anthropology (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 3–17.

5. “A Shocking 52% of Unemployed Americans Have Exhausted Their Benefits,” Business Insider, November 6, 2011, https://www.businessinsider.com/a-shocking-52-of-unemployed-americans-have-exhausted-their-unemployment-benefits-2011-11.

6. In 2013, only half of Americans had $400 in cash to cover an emergency expense. By 2018 nearly 40 percent still lacked that much cash for emergencies. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2018 (Washington, DC: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, May 2019), https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2019-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2018-dealing-with-unexpected-expenses.htm. For recommendations about savings, see, for example, Matthew Goldberg, “How to Start (and Build) an Emergency Fund,” Bankrate, January 25, 2021, https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/starting-an-emergency-fund/.

7. Perhaps surprisingly for those who consider Japan a more sociocentric, group-oriented society than the United States, it has been more difficult for the unemployed and precariously employed there to obtain assistance from the state or their families; without work, some have starved to death. See Anne Allison, Precarious Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).

8. Kaiser Family Foundation/NPR, “Long-Term Unemployed Survey” (Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Menlo Park, CA, 2011), 19, https://www.kff.org/other/poll-finding/long-term-unemployed-survey/.

9. From 2000 to 2010, rents in the city of Los Angeles rose by 31 percent after correcting for inflation while incomes rose only a little more than 1 percent. The median home cost $400,000 by the end of 2012, but a Los Angeles household with a median income could afford a home that cost no more than $190,000 (using standard measures of home affordability). Los Angeles Department of City Planning, Housing Element 2013–2021 (Los Angeles: Department of City Planning, 2013), xiv, https://planning.lacity.org/odocument/05b5d571-9bde-43c7-99e4-1aa6b656a7e9/HousingElement_20140321.pdf.

10. Christine Flanagan and Mary Schwartz, “Rental Housing Market Condition Measures: A Comparison of U.S. Metropolitan Areas from 2009 to 2011” (US Census Bureau, Washington, DC, April 2013), https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2013/acs/acsbr11-07.pdf. For current housing costs in Los Angeles County, see “Los Angeles County, CA,” City-Data.com, http://www.city-data.com/county/Los_Angeles_County-CA.html#ixzz3uWqQCohl.

11. Richard Florida, “The U.S. Spends Far More on Homeowner Subsidies than It Does on Affordable Housing,” Bloomberg Citylab, April 17, 2015, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2015/04/the-us-spends-far-more-on-homeowner-subsidies-than-it-does-on-affordable-housing/390666/.

12. Florida, “The U.S. Spends Far More on Homeowner Subsidies”; “Housing Choice Vouchers Fact Sheet,” US Department of Housing and Urban Development, accessed April 15, 2023, https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/public_indian_housing/programs/hcv/about/fact_sheet#3.

13. Julia Wick, “The Waiting List for Section 8 Vouchers in L.A. Is 11 Years Long,” LAist, April 4, 2017, https://laist.com/2017/04/04/section_8_waiting_list.php.

14. Mian and Sufi, House of Debt.

15. Calhoun, “Lessons from the Financial Crisis.”

16. Kaiser Family Foundation/NPR, “Long-Term Unemployed Survey,” 18.

17. “5 Charts about Public Opinion on Medicaid,” Kaiser Family Foundation, March 30, 2023, https://www.kff.org/medicaid/poll-finding/data-note-5-charts-about-public-opinion-on-medicaid/.

18. “Average Cost of Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance,” eHealth, updated January 11, 2021, https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/resources/small-business/average-cost-of-employer-sponsored-health-insurance.

19. “How Does the Tax Exclusion for Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance Work?” Tax Policy Center, Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, 2022, https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-does-tax-exclusion-employer-sponsored-health-insurance-work.

20. Diane Rowland and Rachel Garfield, “Health Insurance for Unemployed Workers,” Medscape, accessed March 3, 2021, https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/423660_5. During the Great Recession, there were federal subsidies to help the unemployed with their COBRA costs, but those subsidies had expired by the time I began my research. US Treasury Department, “COBRA Insurance Coverage since the Recovery Act: Results from New Survey Data” (US Treasury Department, Washington, DC, May 2010), 2, https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/226/COBRA_Insurance_Coverage_since_the_Recovery_Act_Results_from_New_Survey_Data_MAY2010.pdf.

21. “Overview of the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid,” MACPAC (Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission), 2023, https://www.macpac.gov/subtopic/overview-of-the-affordable-care-act-and-medicaid/.

22. Garrett Therolf, “County Faulted in Death at King,” Los Angeles Times, December 4, 2008, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-dec-04-me-king4-story.html.

23. See also Mike Dang, “Their Children Are Their Retirement Plans,” New York Times, updated Jan. 23, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/21/business/retirement-immigrant-families.html?searchResultPosition=1.

24. Their actions fit the oft-described value of familismo: “loyalty, solidarity, and reciprocity among family members.” Esther J. Calzada, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, and Hirokazu Yoshikawa, “Familismo in Mexican and Dominican Families from Low-Income, Urban Communities,” Journal of Family Issues 34, no. 12 (2013): 1697, https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513X12460218. Careful studies have shown problems with blanket assumptions of familismo among immigrants and later generations of Latinos in the United States. Carolyn Smith-Morris et al., “An Anthropology of Familismo: On Narratives and Description of Mexican/Immigrants,” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 35, no. 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.1177/0739986312459508, and Agius Vallejo’s research, described next.

25. Jody Agius Vallejo, Barrios to Burbs: The Making of the Mexican American Middle Class (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2012), 71.

26. Agius Vallejo, Barrios to Burbs, 76, 89.

27. Catherine Rampell, “It Takes a B.A. to Find a Job as a File Clerk,” New York Times, February 19, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/business/college-degree-required-by-increasing-number-of-companies.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0; Catherine Rampell, “Degree Inflation? Jobs That Newly Require B.A.’s,” New York Times, December 4, 2012, https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/degree-inflation-jobs-that-newly-require-b-a-s/. Those were the conditions when I conducted my research. A tighter labor market after 2020 may have led to a relaxation in the credentials employers required. Neil Irwin, “Workers Are Gaining Leverage over Employers Right before Our Eyes,” New York Times, updated June 6, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/05/upshot/jobs-rising-wages.html.

28. Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser, “Marriages and Divorces,” Our World in Data, 2020, https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces.

29. “Historical Marital Status Tables,” US Census Bureau, accessed April 15, 2023, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families/marital.html.

30. Katherine S. Newman, The Accordion Family: Boomerang Kids, Anxious Parents, and the Private Toll of Global Competition (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012). Newman also investigated Scandinavian countries where the situation is different because there is government support for independent living. See also Norma Mendoza-Denton and Aomar Boum, “Breached Initiations: Sociopolitical Re-Sources and Conflicts in Emergent Adulthood,” Annual Review of Anthropology 44, no. 1 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014012.

31. Jonathan Vespa, “A Third of Young Adults Live with Their Parents,” Census.gov, revised October 8, 2021, https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/young-adults.html.

32. Adam Davidson, “It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave,” New York Times Magazine, June 20, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/magazine/its-official-the-boomerang-kids-wont-leave.html. However, Townsend’s research with middle-class baby-boomer-generation men in California found that, although they portrayed themselves as independent from their parents right out of school, 70 percent received help from relatives when buying their first home. Townsend, The Package Deal, 149, 220n2.

33. Newman, The Accordion Family, xvii.

34. Asian and Latino immigration is also driving that trend, but multigenerational households have increased among whites since 1971. Interestingly, Pew defines “adult children” as twenty-five years old or older, perhaps in recognition of changing norms about when young people become “adults.” D’Vera Cohn et al., “Financial Issues Top the List of Reasons U.S. Adults Live in Multigenerational Homes” (Pew Research Center, Washington, DC, March 2022), https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/03/24/the-demographics-of-multigenerational-households/.

35. Newman, The Accordion Family, 5–21. The anthropologist Eileen Anderson-Fye told me that every year she asks the students in her course on adolescence if they are adults. All are traditional college-age students. In the past, only one or two students per class thought they were adults (e.g., if they had a child). When she would ask what it took to be an adult, they would say “earning a living.” In 2015, for the first time, a majority said they were adults. Their criterion has shifted to making their own decisions for their future, not earning their own living. That fits the trend Newman observed of moving away from fixed markers of adulthood to a subjective sense of responsibility for one’s own life. Conversation with the author, March 31, 2016.

36. Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, “Emerging Adulthood: A Theory of Development from the Late Teens through the Twenties,” American Psychologist 55, no. 5 (2000), https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.5.469.

37. Jennifer Finney Boylan, “What to Expect the 264th Month,” New York Times, May 30, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/opinion/what-to-expect-the-264th-month.html?partner=IFTTT. A 2005 Pew Research Center poll found that across the generations, one-third of respondents thought it was a parent’s responsibility to let an adult child live in the parent’s home. Pew Research Center, “From the Age of Aquarius to the Age of Responsibility: Baby Boomers Approach Age 60” (Pew Research Center, Washington, DC, December 8, 2005), 3.

38. Newman, The Accordion Family, xvi, xxii.

39. Walter Hamilton, “Great Recession Has New Wrinkles for Older Workers,” Los Angeles Times, November 10, 2013, https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-older-jobs-20131110-story.html.

40. Emily Brandon, “Why Older Workers Can’t Get Hired,” U.S. News and World Report, May 18, 2012, http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/planning-to-retire/2012/05/18/why-older-workers-cant-get-hired; US Government Accountability Office, “Unemployed Older Workers: Many Experience Challenges Regaining Employment and Face Reduced Retirement Security” (Report to the Chairman, Special Committee on Aging, US Senate, Washington, DC, May 15, 2012), https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-12-445. See also Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 94ff.

41. Leslie Patton, “Senior Citizens Are Replacing Teenagers as Fast-Food Workers,” Bloomberg, November 5, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-05/senior-citizens-are-replacing-teenagers-at-fast-food-joints.

42. “Older Workers,” US Bureau of Labor Statistics, July 2008, https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2008/older_workers/.

43. Pew Research Center, “From the Age of Aquarius,” 3.

44. Mains, Hope Is Cut, 142–43.

45. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (1925; repr. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 63.

46. Tocqueville, “On the Use Which the Americans Make of Associations in Civil Life,” vol. 2 in Democracy in America, 513–17.

47. Thomas Rotolo, “Trends in Voluntary Association Participation,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 28, no. 2 (June 1999), https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764099282005. Many mutual aid groups arose to provide food and other assistance during the COVID-19 recession of 2020, but I have not found reports of those during the Great Recession. Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, “How Neighborhood Groups Are Stepping in Where the Government Didn’t,” New York Times, updated March 6, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/nyregion/covid-19-mutual-aid-nyc.html.

48. The only social problem that could occur is running into a volunteer one knows, as happened to Della Jones one time. That encounter was upsetting for her because it reminded her that she used to be a volunteer along with that former friend. She said she went back to her car and started crying because “I just miss them and I miss that and everything that could have been.”

49. Thomas Humphrey Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” excerpted in Citizenship and Social Class, Vol. 2, ed. Thomas Burton Bottomore and Thomas Humphrey Marshall (1950; repr. London: Pluto Press, 1992), 30.

50. Summarized by John E. Hansan, “Poor Relief in Early America” (VCU Libraries Social Welfare History Project, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2011), https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/programs/poor-relief-early-amer/.

51. An influential example is Charles A. Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984). Murray particularly criticized programs targeted to the poor. Interestingly, in recent years Murray has been a proponent of a universal basic income in place of such targeted welfare programs. Charles Murray, In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 2016).

52. Agricultural workers and domestic workers—the primary occupations of Black men and women in the South—were excluded from the provisions of the 1935 Social Security Act. On racial and gender restrictions in US social welfare in the early to mid-twentieth century, see Fraser and Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency,” 321–22. For an argument that the exclusion was not racially motivated, see Larry DeWitt, “The Decision to Exclude Agricultural and Domestic Workers from the 1935 Social Security Act,” Social Security Bulletin 70, no. 4 (2010), https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n4/v70n4p49.html.

53. Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: America’s Enduring Confrontation with Poverty, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 8.

54. Damaske argues that the unemployed have long been viewed with suspicion in the United States. Damaske, Tolls of Uncertainty, 103, 226. I agree they can fall under suspicion, but they are treated better in the US social welfare system than some other groups facing economic insecurity.

55. Stephan Leibfried, “Towards a European Welfare State? On Integrating Poverty Regimes into the European Community,” in Social Policy in a Changing Europe, ed. Zsuzsa Ferge and Jon Eivind Kolberg (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1992), 252.

56. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Policy Basics: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families” (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington, DC, updated March 1, 2022), 3–4, https://www.cbpp.org/research/family-income-support/temporary-assistance-for-needy-families.

57. The key legislation was The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996. “A Short History of SNAP,” US Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, September 11, 2018, https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/short-history-snap.

58. Compare Table 13 and Table 19, Christopher Howard et al., “The Polls-Trends: Poverty,” Public Opinion Quarterly 81, no. 3 (2017): 781, 785, https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfx022. See also Strauss, Making Sense of Public Opinion, 209, summarizing General Social Survey polls from 1984 to 2010. There I propose that these confusing survey findings are the result of multiple vernacular discourses acquired by the American public and of cultural schemas that do not conform to elite ideologies. US social welfare spending also includes a variety of targeted tax breaks, including ones to help low-income wage earners (the earned income tax credit), parents (the child tax credit), and homeowners (the home mortgage interest deduction), as well as tax subsidies for employer-provided health insurance. Those tax deductions, credits, and exemptions operate invisibly. They rarely enter public discourse; when they do, they are framed as part of tax policy, not as social welfare programs. As a result, those benefiting from these breaks do not question their entitlement to them, nor are they questioned by others.

59. The near-poor in this study include those with incomes below 150% of the federal poverty level. Mark Robert Rank, Thomas A. Hirschil, and Kirk A. Foster, Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), Table B2, 190, drawing on the longitudinal Panel Study of Income Dynamics in the United States from 1968 to 2009.

60. US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, Poverty in the United States: 50-Year Trends and Safety Net Impacts, by Ajay Chaudry et al. (Washington, DC: March 2016), https://aspe.hhs.gov/system/files/pdf/154286/50YearTrends.pdf, 27; Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1999), 68. The survey research Katz cites emphasizes cultural models of the poor as Black. Others have noted that immigrants, especially from Latin America, have also been imagined as among the undeserving poor. Katz, Undeserving Poor, 9.

61. Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare, 103.

62. Gilens found the same pattern for three years of television news coverage of poverty. Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare, 114, 131.

63. Although Oscar Lewis formulated the construct of a “culture of poverty,” his version of it was not about inherent racial traits—unlike, for example, the later arguments of Lawrence Mead. Oscar Lewis, “The Culture of Poverty,” Scientific American 215, no. 4 (1966); Lawrence M. Mead, The New Politics of Poverty: The Nonworking Poor in America (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

64. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Policy Basics: Unemployment Insurance” (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington, DC, updated October 4, 2021), https://www.cbpp.org/research/economy/unemployment-insurance; “FY 2019 Characteristics and Financial Circumstances of TANF Recipients Data,” US Department of Health & Human Services, Office of Family Assistance, November 16, 2020, https://www.acf.hhs.gov/ofa/data/ofa-releases-fy-2019-characteristics-and-financial-circumstances-tanf-recipients-data.

65. Liz Schott, “State General Assistance Programs Very Limited in Half the States and Nonexistent in Others, Despite Need” (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington, DC, updated July 2, 2020), https://www.cbpp.org/research/family-income-support/state-general-assistance-programs-very-limited-in-half-the-states.

66. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Policy Basics: Unemployment Insurance.” After the Great Recession, some state legislatures reduced benefit periods to only twelve weeks. Michele Evermore, “Unemployment Insurance during COVID-19: The CARES Act and Role of UI during the Pandemic,” Testimony June 9, 2020. National Employment Law Project, https://www.nelp.org/publication/unemployment-insurance-covid-19-cares-act-role-ui-pandemic/.

67. Hannah Shaw and Chad Stone, “Key Things to Know about Unemployment Insurance” (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington, DC, updated December 20, 2011), https://www.cbpp.org/research/key-things-to-know-about-unemployment-insurance.

68. Chad Stone, “Congress Should Renew Emergency Unemployment Compensation before the End of the Year” (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington, DC, updated November 21, 2013), https://www.cbpp.org/research/congress-should-renew-emergency-unemployment-compensation-before-the-end-of-the-year.

69. Glassdoor, Which Countries in Europe Offer the Fairest Paid Leave and Unemployment Benefits? (Mill Valley, CA: Glassdoor, 2016), 11, 14, https://www.glassdoor.com/research/app/uploads/sites/2/2016/02/GD_FairestPaidLeave_Final-2.pdf.

70. Ed Bolen and Stacy Dean, “Waivers Add Key State Flexibility to SNAP’s Three-Month Time Limit” (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington, DC, updated February 6, 2018), https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/waivers-add-key-state-flexibility-to-snaps-three-month-time-limit.

71. Maureen Pirog, Edwin Gerrish, and Lindsey Bullinger, “TANF and SNAP Asset Limits and the Financial Behavior of Low-Income Households” (Report to the Pew Charitable Trusts, May 2017), http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/Assets/2017/09/TANF_and_SNAP_Asset_Limits_and_the_Financial_Behavior_of_Low_Income_Households.pdf.

72. Thomas S. Weisner et al., “ ‘I Want What Everybody Wants’: Goals, Values, and Work in the Lives of New Hope Families,” in Making It Work: Low-Wage Employment, Family Life, and Child Development, ed. Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Thomas S. Weisner, and Edward D. Lowe (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005), 151.

73. Damaske found that her male interviewees waited longer than her female interviewees before throwing themselves into their job search. Damaske, Tolls of Uncertainty, 162–65.

74. “SNAP: Frequently Asked Questions,” SNAP to Health! 2023, https://www.snaptohealth.org/snap/snap-frequently-asked-questions/#myths.

75. Aimee Picchi, “7 Things You May Not Know about Food Stamps,” CBS News, February 16, 2018, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/7-things-you-may-not-know-about-food-stamps/. Beverly Haviland stressed to me the importance of public visibility or invisibility of social welfare benefits. Comments to author, February 7, 2020.

76. Alma Gottlieb found that when she suggested to some graduate students that they go on food stamps, they always resisted the idea, even though they were eligible because of their low incomes. She helped me recognize the importance of class identities in her comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. Comments to author, February 13, 2020.

77. Mona Childs also had productivist and consumerist class identities, as I explained in chapters 2 and 3. See also Jefferson, “’Not What It Used to Be,’ ” 316.

78. It is interesting that three of the nine women in my study who eventually received food stamps initially expressed resistance to doing so, but none of the five men who received food stamps expressed the same concerns.

79. Mark R. Rank, “A View from the Inside Out: Recipients’ Perceptions of Welfare,” Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare 21, no. 2 (May 1994).

80. The unemployed Americans whom Carrie Lane interviewed also normalized unemployment benefits, with the one exception of a twenty-five-year-old engineer“who had moved back in with his parents following his layoff” and refused to take unemployment benefits, “which he saw as ‘too socialist.’ ” Lane, Company of One, 57.

81. Katz, Undeserving Poor, 8.

82. Grusky, Western, and Wimer, “The Consequences of the Great Recession,” 10. See also Schlozman and Verba, Injury to Insult, 145, 363.

83. Stanley Feldman and Marco R. Steenbergen, “The Humanitarian Foundation of Public Support for Social Welfare,” American Journal of Political Science 45, no. 3 (2001), https://doi.org/10.2307/2669244.

84. See also Lopez and Phillips, “Unemployed.”

85. I describe my participants’ diverse responses to the Occupy Movement in Strauss, “Engaged by the Spectacle of Protest.”

86. Elsewhere I call this the “Contributors Deserve Benefits” conventional discourse. Strauss, Making Sense of Public Opinion, 273–76.

87. The maximum in California at that time was actually $1,800 a month. California Employment Development Department, “A Guide to Benefits and Employment Services” (DE 1275A Rev. 49 (2–12), California Employment Development Department, Sacramento, CA), 9, https://www.edd.ca.gov/pdf_pub_ctr/de1275a.pdf.

88. Glassdoor, “Which Countries in Europe Offer the Fairest Paid Leave and Unemployment Benefits?” 14.

89. Strauss, “Not-So Rugged Individualists.”

90. They could still be embarrassed about it, however. Theresa Allen described the process of applying: “It’s depressing, it’s one step above jail, the people that you’re sitting with.” Some of my participants, especially immigrants whom I discuss next, never considered applying.

91. Interpretation offered by Beverly Haviland, comments to author, February 7, 2020.

92. I am not counting four other participants who were brought to the United States when they were young. Ong uses the term “ ‘cultural citizenship’ to refer to the cultural practices and beliefs produced from negotiating the often ambivalent and contested relations with the state and its hegemonic forms that establish the criteria of belonging.” Aihwa Ong, “Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States,” Current Anthropology 37, no. 5 (1996): 738, https://doi.org/10.1086/204560.

93. Tanya Broder and Gabrielle Lessard, “Overview of Immigrant Eligibility for Federal Programs” (National Immigration Law Center, Los Angeles, updated March 2023), https://www.nilc.org/issues/economic-support/overview-immeligfedprograms/. For current exceptions regarding Medicaid eligibility in California, see “Information for Immigrants,” Covered California, 2023, https://www.coveredca.com/learning-center/information-for-immigrants/.

94. Van Hook and Bean found that in the early 1990s Mexican immigrants had significantly shorter durations on welfare (cash assistance for low-income families) than US-born whites or African Americans. Mexican immigrants also had shorter welfare durations than other Latinos in their data. They attribute it to Mexican immigrants’ work-based reasons for emigrating. I suspect the explanation may include other factors, such as control of informal hiring networks in many low-wage industries. Jennifer Van Hook and Frank D. Bean, “Explaining Mexican-Immigrant Welfare Behaviors: The Importance of Employment-Related Cultural Repertoires,” American Sociological Review 74, no. 3 (2009), https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240907400305.

95. US Immigration and Naturalization Service, “Field Guidance on Deportability and Inadmissibility on Public Charge Grounds,” Federal Register 64, no. 101 (March 26, 1999), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1999-05-26/pdf/99-13202.pdf.