It’s a good one, go read the whole thing. More from Jacob Hacker on “The Great Risk Shift”:

What’s distinctive about the dramatic increase in inequality in the United States is that it largely hasn’t happened because of a growth in America’s perennial poverty problem (though deep poverty — defined as living below 50 percent of the federal poverty line — has grown.) Rather, it is driven by the enormous gains at the top — gains that have dwarfed the rise experienced even by the educated upper middle class. Indeed, you have to go all the way up to the 90th income percentile, according to a recent analysis, to reach the income strata that has received earnings gains over the last thirty-five years commensurate with the general growth of productivity in the economy. And even these fortunate folks at the 90th percentile have seen their income rise only modestly compared with those at the very top.

The thesis of The Great Risk Shift flows directly from this striking pattern of inequality. It is that over the last generation, problems once confined to the working poor — lack of health insurance and access to guaranteed pensions, job insecurity and staggering personal debt, bankruptcy and home foreclosure — have crept up the income ladder to become an increasingly normal part of middle-class life. Personal bankruptcies are more than five times as common as they were a quarter-century ago. Mortgage foreclosures are up 400 percent since the early 1970s. Working-age adults with modest annual incomes ($20,000-$40,000) are nearly half again as likely to be medically uninsured than they were in 2000, with a staggering 41 percent going without coverage for all or part of last year. It is families in the middle who frequently fall between public and private protections in our jerry-rigged structure of economic benefits. And upper-middle-class families are increasingly facing the same sorts of insecurities, too — their skills more fragile and their knowledge jobs more insecure than many of them ever expected.

I see the problem this way not because it’s a politically prudent frame, but because it’s the truth. But I do think that insecurity is more likely than inequality to spur Americans and their leaders to action. Larry Bartels at Princeton and others have shown that Americans are aware of rising inequality and are concerned about it, but that they don’t connect it to their everyday life. (Paul and I have argued that Larry overstates public support for top-heavy tax cuts, but his broader argument strikes me as absolutely correct.) Americans, moreover, are highly aspirational — they believe in upward mobility and think they will experience it, even as they express broader economic views that are highly populist and increasingly pessimistic.

This faith in opportunity can undercut concerns about inequality, but it shouldn’t undermine concerns about economic security — not just because security and opportunity go hand in hand in practice, but also because they go hand in hand in most people’s minds. Ever since Loyd Free and Hadley Cantril argued in the late 1960s that Americans are “philosophical conservatives” and “operational liberals” (a point updated by the political scientists John Zaller and Stanley Feldman), it’s been clear that Americans believe simultaneously that people should make it on their own and that they deserve basic protections, so long as those protections are seen as available to people “like them.”