How Much Wealth Does It Take to be Safe in the United States?

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and illustrator Mona Chalabi’s new book is about wealth inequality in America. Ten Lives: How What We Have Shapes Who We Are (Amazon) follows ten people with ten different incomes, from the bottom 10% to the top 10% and everything in-between:

For five years, data journalist Mona Chalabi followed them all, documenting how wealth shaped their feelings, their choices, their identities, and their insecurities. She researched the data behind their taxes, groceries, inheritances, and so much more to understand the systems that keep people stuck. But then, she too found herself facing the same fears, when her mother’s sudden illness and subsequent medical bills threatened her own financial safety and made the questions she had been writing about all too real. How much money is enough? To live a “good” life? To protect the people you love in an emergency?

This looks great — Chalabi’s work is always worth a look. Shades of Studs Terkel and What Do People Do All Day crossed with Barbara Ehrenreich. Chalabi did a recent interview with It’s Nice That about the book.

Part of the message of the book is that class doesn’t show up enough in our intersectional identities, and that that’s fundamentally dishonest. I would hope that people read the book and then get much more fluent and comfortable with describing their current wealth and income, as well as the one that they grew up in. I think that’s kind of ambitious, but you never know.

Ten Lives is out today in the US.

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