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Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard V. Reeves

Richard V. Reeves . Unknown Year . English

Dream Hoarders sparked a national conversation on the dangerous separation between the upper middle class and everyone else. Now in paperback and newly updated for the age of Trump, Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard Reeves is continuing to challenge the class system in America. In America, everyone knows that the top 1 percent are the villains. The rest of us, the 99 percent—we are the good guys. Not so, argues Reeves. The real class divide is not between the upper class and the upper middle class: it is between the upper middle class and everyone else. The separation of the upper middle class from everyone else is both economic and social, and the practice of “opportunity hoarding”—gaining exclusive access to scarce resources—is especially prevalent among parents who want to perpetuate privilege to the benefit of their children. While many families believe this is just good parenting, it is actually hurting others by reducing their chances of securing these opportunities. There is a glass floor created for each affluent child helped by his or her wealthy, stable family. That glass floor is a glass ceiling for another child. Throughout Dream Hoarders, Reeves explores the creation and perpetuation of opportunity hoarding, and what should be done to stop it, including controversial solutions such as ending legacy admissions to school. He offers specific steps toward reducing inequality and asks the upper middle class to pay for it. Convinced of their merit, members of the upper middle class believes they are entitled to those tax breaks and hoarded opportunities. After all, they aren’t the 1 percent. The national obsession with the super rich allows the upper middle class to convince themselves that they are just like the rest of America. In Dream Hoarders, Reeves argues that in many ways, they are worse, and that changes in policy and social conscience are the only way to fix the broken system.

Categories: Children’s Fiction

About the Author

Richard V. Reeves is the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM) and a non resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he was previously Director of the Center for Children and Families. Reeves is the author of several books, including the forthcoming "Yes, Boys Can!: Inspiring Stories of Men Who Changed the World - He Can H.E.A.L.", coauthored with Jonathan Juravich, which is intended to inspire boys to be confident and caring through the biographies of 50 fascinating men, past and present, in the fields of health, education, the arts, and literacy (HEAL). His previous book published in 2022 is Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to do About It”, a Book of the Year according to the New Yorker and The Economist, and included in Pres. Barack Obama's summer reading list for 2024. Inspired by his own experiences as a father and policy expert, Richard founded AIBM to bring awareness to the challenges facing boys and men today and to develop evidence-based solutions.Richard V. Reeves is the author most recently of Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It (Brookings 2022). He is also a regular a contributor to New York Times, The Atlantic, National Affairs, and other publications. His previous books include Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It (Brookings, 2016), All Minus One (with Jonathan Haidt), and John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (Atlantic, 2007). Between 2010 and 2012, Richard was director of strategy to the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister. He has also been director of Demos, the London-based political think-tank, principal policy advisor to the Minister for Welfare Reform, research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, among other roles. He is a former European Business Speaker of the Year. A former journalist on the Guardian and Observer newspapers, Richard earned a BA from Oxford University and a PhD from Warwick University.

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