Edward Luce Wins July Sidney for FT Story “The Crisis of Middle Class America” | Hillman Foundation

Edward Luce Wins July Sidney for FT Story “The Crisis of Middle Class America”

Contact: Elissa Strauss

August 16, 2010

NEW YORK: The Sidney Hillman Foundation announced today that Edward Luce has won the July Sidney Award for the Financial Times story “The Crisis of Middle Class America,” a stunning portrait of the “slow economic strangulation” of millions of middle class Americans. Luce writes that this decline started long before the great recession, “which merely exacerbated the ‘personal recession’ that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years.”

At the center of Luce’s story is a portrait of a typical Minneapolis family, Mark and Connie Freeman, and their son Andy, who, despite a gross annual income of $70,000 a year, are still fighting off foreclosure of their house. Interspersed with the travails of the Freeman’s life, which have turned their American Dream into a “fitful American reverie,” are devastating quotes and statistics about the state of the American economy.

Luce does a brilliant job of encapsulating many of America’s most pressing problems in one 3,900 word piece,” said Sidney Award judge Charles Kaiser.

Among Luce’s sobering statistics:

• The annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years.
• Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the multiple is above 300.
• In the last expansion, which started in January 2002 and ended in December 2007, the median US household income dropped by $2,000 – the first ever instance when most Americans were worse off at the end of a growth cycle than at the start.
• Worse still: the long era of stagnating incomes has been accompanied by something profoundly un-American: declining income mobility.

Harvard economist Larry Katz, put it this way to Luce: “Think of the American economy as a large apartment block. A century ago – even 30 years ago – it was the object of envy. But in the last generation its character has changed. The penthouses at the top keep getting larger and larger. The apartments in the middle are feeling more and more squeezed and the basement has flooded. To round it off, the elevator is no longer working. That broken elevator is what gets people down the most.”

Edward Luce is the Washington Bureau Chief of the Financial Times, where he has been a reporter and editor since 1995, except for a year starting at the end of 1999, when he took a short sabbatical to be a speech writer for Larry Summers, then Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration. He is the author of “In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India” (Doubleday). He has a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from New College, Oxford, and a graduate degree in journalism from City University, London. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Priya Basu, a Senior Financial Economist at the World Bank.

The Sidney Award is given once a month to an outstanding piece of socially-conscious journalism by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, which also awards the annual Hillman Prizes every spring. For more information please click here.

Since 1950, the Sidney Hillman Foundation has honored journalists whose work fosters social and economic justice. Our prizes and awards celebrate the legacy and vision of Sidney Hillman, founder of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, a predecessor union to Workers United, SEIU.

To read an interview with Luce about his winning piece click here.