Princeton University Press
The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty
Key Metrics
- Jonathan Morduch
- Princeton University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780691172989
- 9.3 X 6.4 X 1 inches
- 1.1 pounds
- Social Science > Social Classes & Economic Disparity
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
What the financial diaries of working-class families reveal about economic stresses, why they happen, and what policies might reduce them
Deep within the American Dream lies the belief that hard work and steady saving will ensure a comfortable retirement and a better life for one's children. But in a nation experiencing unprecedented prosperity, even for many families who seem to be doing everything right, this ideal is still out of reach.
In The Financial Diaries, Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider draw on the groundbreaking U.S. Financial Diaries, which follow the lives of 235 low- and middle-income families as they navigate through a year. Through the Diaries, Morduch and Schneider challenge popular assumptions about how Americans earn, spend, borrow, and save--and they identify the true causes of distress and inequality for many working Americans.
We meet real people, ranging from a casino dealer to a street vendor to a tax preparer, who open up their lives and illustrate a world of financial uncertainty in which even limited financial success requires imaginative--and often costly--coping strategies. Morduch and Schneider detail what families are doing to help themselves and describe new policies and technologies that will improve stability for those who need it most.
Combining hard facts with personal stories, The Financial Diaries presents an unparalleled inside look at the economic stresses of today's families and offers powerful, fresh ideas for solving them.
Author Bio
Jonathan Morduch is Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University.
Morduch's research focuses on finance, poverty, and inequality. He is a founder and Executive Director of the NYU Financial Access Initiative.
Morduch is the author with Rachel Schneider of The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty (Princeton 2017; project site) and co-author of Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day (Princeton 2009) and The Economics of Microfinance (MIT Press 2010). He is co-editor of Banking the World: Empirical Foundations of Financial Inclusion (MIT Press). Together with Dean Karlan, Morduch is the author of Economics (McGraw-Hill 2020, 3rd ed.), an empirically-oriented principles of economics text now in its 3rd edition.
Morduch has taught on the Economics faculty at Harvard, and has held visiting positions at Stanford, Princeton, Hitotsubashi University and the University of Tokyo. He received a BA from Brown, Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard, and an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Brussels for his work on microfinance.
Education
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Ph. D., M.A., Economics, November 1991. Fields in public finance and labor
economics. Dissertation: Risk and Welfare in Developing Countries.
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
A. B. Economics (Honors), May 1985. Lamport Prize for International
Understanding in Economics. Junior year at the London School of Economics.
Source: New York University
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