But...
Now that my sister has tenure--and thus that now that Ehrenreich's daughter is no longer a potential key vote in her tenure process--I can say what I really think.
Yes, Ehrenreich is an amazing talent. _Fear of Falling_ and _Blood Rites_ blew me away. But she does have a number of blind spots, and I think that they show up powerfully in _Nickel and Dimed_ and in the "do your own housework!" stuff:
First, a number of people are picking up on a certain snobbery--strong pains Barbara Ehrenreich takes to demonstrate that *she* is not one of *them*: $30 lunches at understated French country-style restaurants, where she ate salmon and field greens while wondering aloud how people can possibly make it on $6 or $7 an hour; the dismissal of Maine's beautiful (and boardwalk-charming) Old Orchard Beach as a "rinky-dink blue-collar resort" (not the kind of place *she* would go to in her *real* life); et cetera--these grated as I read them.
Second, there is the... call it antipolitics. The government does not appear (save in footnotes discussing the lack of enforcement of the Fair Labor Standards Act). Yet if you look what makes the lives of America's working poor better, the government plays a big role: it sets and enforces (imperfectly) the minimum wage; the Earned Income Tax Credit provides low-wage workers with kids with a wage boost of forty cents on the dollar for each of their first fifteen hundred hours of work (if they file an income tax return with the IRS and claim it--a big if); what inadequate health care the working poor receive is paid for by the government; and if we are ever going to change the supply-demand balance of the American economy and significantly close the income gaps between working rich and working poor, publicly-funded education must play the major role. But all these are invisible to Barbara Ehrenreich (see "When Government Gets Mean: Confessions of a Recovering Statist, _The Nation_ (November 17, 1997)), so she can write that it is time for America's left to ditch the government. To Ehrenreich, American government today is made up of "petty-minded bureaucracies like the I.R.S. and the D.M.V." when it is not made up of cops violating people's civil rights. The right thing to do is not to care about electing representatives who will vote for expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit and increases in the minimum wage, but to focus attention of "alternative services": "...squats, cooperatives of various kinds, community currency projects... [a cultural core] offering information, contacts, referrals and a place for people to gather." And from her point of view a Democratic victory in the 2000 election would have been something to fear, because of its "almost certainly debilitating effect on progressives and their organizations" (see "Vote for Nader," _The Nation_ (August 21/28, 2000)). She looks forward to seeing all the achievements of social democracy thrown into the garbage can of history--and never even thinks to wonder about what the end of social democracy would mean for the lives of people who don't routinely eat $30 French country lunches.
Third, Ehrenreich is not a neoclassical economist. And, from my perspective, this is a hanging offense. Normally, if you see something bad, you want to stop it: you want to stop polluters, you want to stop child abuse, you want to stop crime. But we neoclassical economists know (and few others know) that when what is wrong is that some people are being paid too little for their work, the last thing you want to do is to diminish demand for their labor. Ehrenreich sees immigrant women being paid peanuts to cook, clean, and watch the children of yuppies. So she wants to stop their being paid peanuts--and thinks that the way to do this is to stop paying them at all: to eliminate yuppie demand for domestic labor.
But those of us who are neoclassical economists know that immigrant women are taking these jobs because their other options are even worse. Each yuppie whom Ehrenreich convinces not to hire a nanny is one fewer employer of immigrant women, and puts downward pressure on their wages and working conditions. As Joan Robinson liked to say, the only thing worse than being an exploited wage-slave is not being an exploited wage-slave--having no job at all.
Thus in the end Ehrenreich's attack on the yuppie nanny culture smells to me like a certain kind of objectionable Christian charity: The point of doing one's own housework is not to improve the status and life chances of immigrant women (because it doesn't), the point of doing one's own housework is to obtain a certain moral purity by avoiding the caste pollution that a left-wing yuppie suffers when she takes on the role of a boss. The similarity with those acts of charity that are undertaken not to make the poor better off but to store up Treasure in Heaven for yourself seems clear...
Brad DeLong