“It’s not your fault.” This is the message Alissa Quart has spent over a decade trying to get people to believe when it comes to economic hardship. Right now, it feels harder than ever to embrace.
Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the nonprofit Barbara Ehrenreich built after writing her groundbreaking exposé Nickel and Dimed. A journalist herself, Alissa is the author of seven books, including Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America and Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. She's spent over a decade reporting on class, caregiving, and economic precarity.
In this episode, Jessi and Alissa discuss:
Why "insecurity" is a more honest and unifying framework than "affordability," and how it builds solidarity across class lines
The data behind it: 52% of US families are now financially insecure by one measure, and nearly half of workers lack confidence they could find a job they'd want
"Apocalyptic insecurity": the new framework Alissa and economist Lynn Parramore developed to describe how employers use AI dread to manipulate workers
The Frederick Taylor parallel: how AI is repeating the logic of scientific management, a century later
"AI brain fry": the exhaustion of performing enthusiasm for AI at work while feeling something very different about it personally
Why losing the narrative of generational progress is its own kind of psychological injury
The AI dividend, universal basic income, and what a modern New Deal could look like
Why naming the problem matters: how failing to recognize insecurity as systemic — rather than personal failure — can curdle into self-blame and even disordered coping
What Alissa tells her own daughter about finding agency in an uncertain future
Follow Alissa Quart and Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn.
