Frayed Bootstraps

Peter Gosselin, whose book High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families languishes on my to-read list, has an op ed in the LA Times today. He writes, "[t]he prosperity we enjoyed [between 1980 and 2007] was purchased at a price of diminished security for our families and ourselves. Even as our incomes went up, economic risks -- the costs of being laid off, of suffering a work-stopping illness or of a catastrophe like a house fire -- that were once largely borne on the broad shoulders of business and government were being shifted onto the backs of ordinary families, from the working poor to the reasonably rich."

Gosselin's thesis, both in the LA Times and (so far as I understand) in his book, is that from employer-sponsored health insurance to homeowners insurance to college funding, individuals continue to bear more and more responsibility for ensuring their own financial stability, and that the consequences of failure are more and more serious. Although my memory is not long enough to corroborate his theory through my own anecdata, I find the whole thing just depressing enough to be completely plausible. Many pf bloggers wax poetic about the bootstrap approach to financial stability: those who have the guts and the fortitude can lift themselves by their own bootstraps into a better financial position; those who lack those qualities get what they deserve. If Gosselin is correct, many of the bootstrappers are positioned more precariously than they would like to believe.

Let's be honest. If you had a medical emergency and your health insurance provider (assuming you even have one) rejects your claim for coverage, how much of a hit can you afford? A broken leg? A car accident? A chronic illness? Chemo? If I had to cover the costs for anything requiring any sort of lengthy hospital stay, I would be knocked flat on my ass, economically speaking. And I'm not in the least hurting to begin with.

A bootstrap mindset is attractive to people on the upswing because it affirms their own deservingness of their success, and provides mental insulation from having to think about whether that success might not be permanent. It might be comforting to someone in the depths, too, because it provides a road map out. But although the bootstrap concept might be useful for any of these reasons, it's true only in a limited way.