‘Ten Lives’ profiles Americans from across the economic spectrum: NPR

President George Washington is depicted on a US$1 bill.

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LM Otero/AP

How much money would you need to feel financially secure? Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mona Chalabi spent five years following 10 Americans, from those who live paycheck to paycheck to those making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, in an effort to answer that question. His new book, Ten Lives: How What We Have Shapes Who We Are, explores why financial security can seem so elusive.

“It’s called 10 lives because I didn’t specifically want to focus on the 1 percent,” Chalabi says. “Instead, I wanted to talk about how 99 percent of us aren’t all in this together and what kind of power differentials there are between us.”

Chalabi says almost everyone she talked about in the book was deeply worried about their financial future, even those who make a lot of money.

“Overall, everyone seemed to be expressing this sense of panic that I think is really very specific to American capitalism, which is an incredibly precarious and cruel system where you’re one crisis away from experiencing a real economic shock,” she says.

Chalabi also noticed that many of the people she profiled considered themselves middle class, regardless of their actual income. She says the disconnect between actual wealth and sense of class has consequences not only for how we view ourselves, but also for how we judge others.

“Being poor in this country means facing a huge number of obstacles, including assumptions about your intelligence (and) your level of education,” she says. “So it’s sometimes quite rational for people to try to present themselves as middle class, maybe even try to signal their wealth with the clothes they buy or the cars they drive. I don’t think it’s just an aspiration. I also think it’s them trying to avoid the discrimination they might face if their actual income level was disclosed.”