The Disappearing Middle-Class

Warren was a child of the middle-class. However, the world she grew up in was vastly different from the world her children grew up in. As Warren began to teach bankruptcy at the law school at the University of Texas at Austin, she conducted research that revealed that most people who declare bankruptcy were not those who were too lazy or too irresponsible to pay their bills, but middle-class families who had faced setbacks like a lost job, bad health, or another catastrophic life changing event. These people were not unlike her own parents after her father suffered a heart attack when she was twelve.

The more Warren learned about the people declaring bankruptcy, the more she learned about the methods in which banks trapped these people, forcing them deeper and deeper into debt. Warren also came to understand that the banks wanted people to stop...