No abstract

(2003)

Increasing access to diverse types of credit and spreading indebtedness across many social groups were significant economic developments of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, with implications for social inequality and insecurity. This review evaluates the role of credit and debt in social inequality in the United States. Credit and debt shape inequalities along multiple pathways, in defining social inclusion and exclusion, directing life chances, and facilitating oppression. On the basis of this review, I conclude that building on the progress made in prior research calls for a relational approach to understanding credit, debt, and inequality that includes a focus on the powerful actors that benefit from a political economy increasingly dependent on credit and debt to distribute, regulate, and control social resources. I close by identifying outstanding questions that need to be answered in order to move forward our understanding of economic inequality and insecurity, as well as for social policy and the prospects for collective action.

The U.S. job structure became increasingly polarized at the turn of the twenty-first century as high- and low-wage jobs grew strongly and many middle-wage jobs declined. Prior research on the sources of uneven job growth that focuses on technological change and weakening labor market institutions struggles to explain crucial features of job polarization, especially the growth of low-wage jobs and gender and racial differences in job growth. I argue that theories of the rise of care work in the U.S. economy explain key dynamics of job polarization—including robust growth at the bottom of the labor market and gender and racial differences in job growth—better than the alternative theories. By seeing care work as a distinctive form of labor, care work theories highlight different dimensions of economic restructuring than are emphasized in prior research on job polarization. I show that care work jobs contributed significantly and increasingly to job polarization from 1983 to 2007, growing at the top and bottom of the job structure but not at all in the middle. I close by considering whether the care economy will continue to reinforce job polarization, or whether it will provide new opportunities for revived growth in middle-wage jobs.

No abstract