It’s hard work making it in the middle class
Thirty years ago, CommonWealth magazine launched with a cover story that dove into the challenges facing middle-class families in Massachusetts. That piece, titled “On Heritage Road: In the heart of suburbia, anxieties about the new economy,” was something of a founding document for our newsroom – an example of the in-depth stories our magazine would be known for on a topic that is central to our organization’s core mission. Three decades later, the central premise of “On Heritage Road” — that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make it in the middle class — still resonates today as we, as a state and a nation, confront the same questions. Is getting ahead possible anymore? Is it luck or effort? Has the economy changed so much that the best we can do is not slide backward?
These are the questions our journalists have spent the last several months investigating. Today, we are publishing an update to that first cover story: “It’s hard work making it in the middle class.” In it, Chris Lisinski returns to Heritage Road and meets Kristina Boldebuck, a former Billerica star softball player who now works at a human services agency and returned about two decades ago to the town she grew up in to raise her family. Could her children afford to do the same? Her answer is a single, resounding word: “No.”
The fear that the next generation won’t do as well as their parents still reverberates across Massachusetts at a time when our national politics are mired in a backlash to policies that made it harder for Americans without college degrees to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, even if the definition of middle class remains up for debate.
As Chris writes, there’s a contradiction afoot in the Bay State, which has one of the highest median incomes in the country: “We have more than ever, and in many cases, that’s not enough to enjoy the stability prior generations enjoyed.”
Our guest on The Codcast this week, historian Andrew Seal, puts it another way. “Your parents being middle class doesn’t mean that you can coast and stay in the middle class. You have to re-achieve those markers on your own.” Seal’s research is focused on how members of the middle class think about their cultural and economic place in society. Class boundaries, he notes, often change along with the societal zeitgeist, shifting to both reflect and shape the particular political moment.
Laura Colarusso
Editor, CommonWealth Beacon
Published by MassINC