Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE nominated for New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism for 2009

New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism for 2009: High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families
New York Public Library, February 5, 2009

Alongside Jane Mayer and Robin Wright, Peter Gosselin's High Wire was selected by the New York Public Library as a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism for 2009. Winners will be announced on May 6, 2009 at a reception at the library.

To see latest updates, including other nominees, click here.

Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE in the New York Review

Trapped in the New 'You're On Your Own' World
Robert M. Solow
The New York Review of Books, November 20, 2008

When the Bush-Cheney administration proposed to replace Social Security with a system of individually accumulated, individually owned, and individually invested accounts, my first thought was that its goal was to take the Social out of Social Security. It took a few minutes longer to realize that it also intended to take the Security out of Social Security.

That attempt failed. In recent years, however, a mixture of public and private policy decisions and impersonal market developments has had the broad effect of shifting many financial risks from established institutions, including even society at large, to individuals who are unable to cope with them in an adequate way. Information may be impossibly difficult for citizens to process; or else the basic information may not be available to individuals or private groups. Sometimes the scale of the possible bad outcomes may be overwhelming. Sometimes the appropriate insurance market cannot function or just does not exist. The result is that individuals and families can be the casualties of situations that once would have been handled by a more centralized and more bearable allocation of risks.

The current turmoil in credit markets and the recession that is sure to follow are likely to drive this trend further. Banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions have seen too many risks go sour. They will be more determined than ever to push further risks onto those needy borrowers who are too weak and too ignorant to bargain hard. Families, small businesses, and other borrowers of last resort will be under great pressure.

Peter Gosselin's excellent and thoughtful book, High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families, is not the first to explore this territory. Two others that come to mind are Louis Uchitelle's The Disposable American and Jacob Hacker's The Great Risk Shift. Gosselin is like Uchitelle in combining social criticism with substantial stories of recognizable people who have been trapped by bad luck or bad judgment in this new you're-on-your-own world; he differs in covering a much broader variety of risks and risk-bearers than Uchitelle's focus on workers and job-related risks. Hacker's book also ranges over many issues, but does not have Gosselin's expert journalistic use of recognizable cases. (Professor Hacker is currently engaged in a Rockefeller Foundation–sponsored effort to construct a general "Index of Economic Security"—to show empirically how economic security varies over time and across social groups.)

Gosselin, who works in the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times, does a fine job of connecting the stories he tells to general ideas and to economy- wide statistical markers, some developed for his particular purpose. He has produced a readable and valuable book...

To read the full review, click here.

Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE on NPR's Talk of the Nation

U.S. Finances Precariously Perched On A "High Wire"
NPR, Talk of the Nation, September 18

American families are nervous about the stability of their finances — and Peter Gosselin says that they should be. In his new book, High Wire, he writes that an increasing number of families are only one mortgage-, doctor-, or emergency- payment away from financial ruin.

To listen to the NPR clip and read an excerpt of High Wire, click here.

Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE in the Washington Post

Risky Business -
Two books map the economic perils facing American families.

Reviewed by Martha M. Hamilton
Sunday, August 17, 2008.

HIGH WIRE: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families
By Peter Gosselin

THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND: Reports from a Divided Nation
By Barbara Ehrenreich

The recent economic downturn, with the collapse of the housing bubble and the tightening of credit, has revealed a world of financial risk that had been there all along, unnoticed by most of us. Two new books examine other financial perils and inequities that put us further at risk.

You might not expect a book on economic policy to be a page-turner, but Peter Gosselin's High Wire is just that. Gosselin, a national economics reporter for the Los Angeles Times, has written a systematic investigation of the many ways financial risk has been transferred from employers, the federal government and insurance companies to individuals and families. Gosselin shows, in frightening detail, how our lives as Americans have become riskier over the last few decades. Instead of believing that we are mutually responsible for each other, we now rely on markets that have repeatedly demonstrated that they are distorted by greed, corruption and irrationality.

Gosselin makes his case using statistics and stories of real people, such as Debra Potter. Potter was a stay-at-home mother until the late 1980s, when she became an insurance agent to supplement the modest income of her husband, a Presbyterian pastor. In 2001, she earned more than $250,000. But by the end of May 2002, she had become so disabled by symptoms of what was later diagnosed as multiple sclerosis that she had to give up her job. Her insurer, whose policies she had previously sold, tried to reclassify her disability to reduce her benefits substantially.

Despite continued appeals, the insurance company stood by its decision, and Potter's condition worsened. As a result, the Potters spent almost all of their savings on Debra's treatment and living expenses and were forced to pull their son out of college. In August 2003, her diagnosis was definitive, and Social Security began disability payments. Nearly two years after the definite diagnosis, Potter's insurer finally began paying benefits. A check for the benefits previously denied arrived three years later, but the damage was done.

For the full article, click here.

Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE in the Oklahoman

Oklahoman
June 22, 2008 Sunday
City Edition

Author details financial 'High Wire'

BYLINE: Dennie Hall
SECTION: LIVING; DENNIE HALL; Pg. 9D

Things are going smoothly. Both spouses have jobs. They live in a comfortable house in the suburbs.
Then their world comes crashing down. Bam!
Maybe it's a job loss. Perhaps it's a spike in interest rates. It could be a death in the family. Likely it's a big medical bill, or maybe it is runaway inflation at a time when pay increases are nil.
Whatever the cause, author Peter Gosselin provides a scary look at the plight of average folks in "High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families" (Basic Books, $26).
Gosselin writes that Americans have had a year in which "we've had to hold our breath as one disaster after another has swept over us - the mortgage mess, the financial freeze-up and now, recession." He writes that economic risks once carried on the shoulders of business and government have shifted "to the backs of working families."
Many employers no longer provide health insurance. Families able to provide it for themselves do so at tremendous expense and often find that a co-pay - or even an insurer's refusal to pay a claim - can be financially ruinous. Some employees work and save for years toward retirement only to learn a company, such as Enron, has failed them.
With so many employers moving their operations to foreign countries, a sudden pink slip is not unusual.
"Our near-exclusive reliance on free-market principles to solve every financial and social problem has led the nation down a political and ethical dead-end," the book's publisher writes. "Now is the time for a new direction."
Gosselin helps readers understand what that direction would be. His writing is made more meaningful by use of real personalities to illustrate problems, putting a human face to the new reality of financial upheaval.
His book should be imperative reading for anyone concerned about financial woes and their causes.
Gosselin is the national economics correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and a member of the paper's Washington bureau. He is now a visiting fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.
Words on the book's cover by Mark Shields of NewsHour put it succinctly: "If you have time to read only two books this year about the condition of the country and the challenges we all face, do yourself a favor and read 'High Wire' twice."

Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE in the Star-Ledger

The Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey)
June 22, 2008 Sunday
FINAL EDITION

BRIEFLY
SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. 5

High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families
Peter Gosselin; Basic Books, $26.95

Los Angeles Times national economics correspondent Gosselin's book examines the broader lessons in our current economic crisis. The author traverses readers' material lives to show how changes in work, benefits, homeownership, college and retirement, even insurance, have shifted economic risks, once borne on the shoulders of business and government, to the backs of working families. With new data and real-life examples, Gosselin explains why Americans' mounting anxiety is warranted and how everyone is on a high wire, only one misstep away from disaster.

Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE reviewed in the LA Times

'High Wire' by Peter Gosselin
American families struggle to make ends meet in a world of globalization, mortgage meltdowns and ever-soaring fuel prices.

By Chris Hedges
June 29, 2008

High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families
Peter Gosselin, Basic Books: 374 pp., $26.95

In his book "High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families," Peter Gosselin writes movingly of the personal wreckage endured by many Americans in today's volatile economy. Gosselin, the Los Angeles Times' national economics correspondent, chronicles in detail the emotional, physical and economic devastation caused by outsourced jobs and insurance companies that rescind coverage to the seriously ill, as well as the roller-coaster fortunes of U.S. workers competing in the global marketplace.

Gosselin paints a portrait of an America where citizens suffer profound dislocations because of vanishing safety nets and can expect to be discarded by corporations without comparable job prospects or benefits. The human cost, which he adroitly conveys, is heartbreaking. It is also, as he notes, widespread. He illustrates wild income swings that have left the poor, the middle class and even formerly well-do-do families suddenly struggling to survive. These dramatic plunges from lost jobs have now "reached into the majority of working American households."

The relentless efforts of corporations to maximize profit has a human cost. For example, when Rebecca J. Rowlands was diagnosed with cancer, her insurance company, Blue Shield of California, promptly cut off her benefits in a process known as "post-claims underwriting," or "rescissions." Rowlands, her health deteriorating, fought back and won a settlement. But during that legal fight, as Gosselin notes, her chemotherapy was delayed for a prolonged period, saddling her with "increasingly severe medical problems" that are likely to leave her with "a six-figure medical debt."

"High Wire" is filled with such tales: of people crushed by credit card debt, mortgages they should never have been granted, predatory lenders, as well as sudden and catastrophic unemployment caused by "outsourcing."

Chris Hedges is the author of "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" and, most recently, "I Don't Believe in Atheists."

For the full article, click here.

Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE Mentioned in Time

The New President's Economy Problem
Thursday, May. 15, 2008, TIME
By JUSTIN FOX

FINANCIAL SECURITY
47 million uninsured
HEALTH CARE AND RETIREMENT SCARE YOU? YOU'RE NOT ALONE

Ronald Reagan uttered another line in that 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter that has entered the history books: "There you go again," he chastised his opponent. What's less well remembered is what that was in response to. Carter had been making the case for national health insurance and said Reagan had once opposed Medicare. Reagan objected that Carter was misrepresenting his position — he had simply opposed a particular Medicare bill. But Carter was absolutely right that Reagan wasn't for universal health care — or for any other government effort to socialize risk.

In the seminal PBS series Free to Choose, which aired in 1980 and may have helped set the mood for Reagan's victory, economist Milton Friedman argued that economic freedom was just as important as all those freedoms written into the Bill of Rights. This went on to become perhaps the most consistent theme of the Reagan economic era: giving Americans the freedom to succeed or fail on their own economically was a good thing. And it is probably a good thing. But not an unmitigated good. Economic security matters to Americans too. And finding ways to offer more of it may be the basis of the next big economic-policy revolution.

Economic changes over the past three decades — many the result of government decisions — have "left working families up and down much of the income spectrum living with fewer economic protections, bearing more economic risk, chancing steeper financial falls," writes Los Angeles Times reporter Peter Gosselin in his new book High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families. This Great Risk Shift from governments and corporations to individuals, as Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker labeled it in the title of another book on the subject, has become one of the defining economic realities of our age. Some aspects of it are still in dispute: economists can't seem to agree on whether jobs really have become less secure than they were. But others are undeniable. "No one argues that Americans aren't shouldering more of the risk on health care and retirement than they used to be," says Hacker.

That you're-on-your-own ethos is already beginning to change — a little. In 2006 Congress passed a law that has brought positive changes to the 401(k) savings plans that for many Americans have replaced pensions. But the majority of private-sector workers in the country aren't offered a 401(k) or a pension, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. All three candidates have talked of creating a new system of portable retirement accounts for those who don't get one through employers, with Obama's plan the most ambitious.

For the rest of the article, click here.