Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Poorly researched, rambling book largely about the travails of Ivy educated, upper middle class background liberal arts majors who discovered, too late, that acquiring a lot of debt for a prestigious advanced degree doesn't necessarily lead to financial stability as an adult with children. There are some sympathetic stories here - an immigrant nanny attempting to make ends meet, poorly payed workers struggling with the hardship of working at a 24 hour day care center - but these pluses are outweighed by the minuses of stories like that of a fully tenured professor with family income of $160k year living in New York who is anxious about losing her subsidy for affordable housing after a pay raise. I suppose it's not terribly surprising, but the author is also an upper middle class, Ivy educated liberal arts major who, even though she had children relatively late in life, seems rather surprised that raising children is expensive, and who makes the mistake of constantly injecting her self pity into the story of those who are genuinely suffering. For instance, in one cringe inducing, Onion-esque passage discussing her difficulty in living in her expensive home town of New York City she says: "There were the small degradations of my middle-class daily existence in an overpriced metropolis. Individually, these pinpricks were bearable, but together they combined so that the city seemed to whisper to my kin and myself: "This is not the place for your kind anymore." There are also plenty of factual errors, and a strange poorly researched closing chapter about the coming AI job apocalypse. If you really want to learn about the plight of truly middle class folks, read Robert Gordon's: "The Rise and Fall of American Growth." Update: I was curious about the favorable reviews for the book, and it turns out that one 5 star review was written by a former magazine colleague of Ms. Quart (Adam Piore), and another was a clear quid-pro-quo with Randi Epstein (both wrote 5 star reviews for each other on the same day; high probability that they disappear after this addendum). But there's more! In a remarkable coincidence, another reviewer (jplptl) wrote favorably of both Epstein's and Quart's books on the very same day. I guess the term "creative class" applies to reviews as well as content.