In this episode, A. Mechele Dickerson, a law professor at the University of Texas and expert in bankruptcy and economic disparities, discusses her book on revitalizing the middle class. She reveals how policies since the 1980s have eroded worker stability and increased debt. Dickerson critiques current education and housing policies that hinder lower-income families, and highlights the detrimental effects of unpaid internships. She advocates for innovative ideas, like repurposing schools for community needs and transforming vacant buildings into affordable housing.
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question_answer ANECDOTE
Personal Family Motivation
Dickerson dedicated the book to her parents, who remained comfortably middle class and shaped her perspective.
She worries her sons may face fewer opportunities than previous generations despite their education.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Son's Amazon Contractor Job
Mechele Dickerson recounts her son's experience driving an Amazon truck as an independent contractor between college and grad school.
He appeared to be full-time Amazon staff but had no steady hours or health benefits.
insights INSIGHT
Middle Class Was Built By Policy
The U.S. middle class was intentionally created by bold federal policies after the Depression and WWII.
Reversing recent decline requires similarly large, politically driven reforms, not just market fixes.
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An expansive policy blueprint for meaningfully expanding the middle class for the first time in a century The US middle class was a product of state and federal policies enacted in the wake of the Great Depression. But since the 1980s, lawmakers have undermined what they once built, shredding the social safety net and instituting laws that virtually guarantee downward mobility for all but the most privileged. How can we restore what has been lost? Rigorous and highly readable, The Middle-Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream (U California Press, 2026) breaks down the policies that have decimated working families and proposes reforms to reverse this trend. As Mechele Dickerson shows, part of the problem is that politicians disingenuously conflate the middle class with the "White lower rich." Such propaganda hides how state and federal lawmakers consistently favor education, labor, housing, and consumer-credit laws that erode the bank accounts of lower- and middle-income people--especially those who are not White and don't have college degrees. Weaving together the latest research with the personal stories of Americans struggling to make ends meet, Dickerson provides a clarion call for political leaders to enact a bold agenda like the one that created the middle class almost a century ago.
A. Mechele Dickerson is the Arthur L. Moller Chair in Bankruptcy and Practice and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at University of Texas School of Law. Professor Dickerson is a nationally recognized scholar on financial vulnerability, consumer debt, housing affordability, and racial and economic disparities. She regularly teaches Remedies and Federal Civil Procedure at the School of Law, has taught a class on civil procedural disputes that arose between the two Trump presidencies, and has taught numerous cross-listed interdisciplinary graduate-level courses on the American middle-class and the COVID pandemic. She is also the author of Homeownership and America's Financial Underclass: Flawed Premises, Broken Promises, New Prescriptions.
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