Privilege Lost Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall

"... American sociology has much to learn from Streib. We best learn it before we become irrelevant." -- Kevin T. Leicht, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Contemporary Sociology "Privilege Lost is a rich portrait of white youth who were born into the upper-middle class in the late-1980s." -- Natasha Quadlin, American Journal of Sociology "This is a valuable and nuanced perspective in consideration of socioeconomic class in America." -- F.E. Knowles, Valdosta State University, CHOICE "Streib has written a methodologically innovative study of a hugely important topic: downward mobility. Too often we think of mobility as people moving 'up.' Privilege Lost gives us a rich sense of what it means, instead, to 'fall,' and why far more Americans do than we imagine. -Shamus Khan, Chair and Professor of Sociology, Columbia University "In this ground-breaking book, Jessi Streib presents an incisive analysis of an often-overlooked aspect of class inequality-downward mobility. Through a novel use of existing interview transcripts, Privilege Lost gives us a new way of understanding how young people's sense of themselves and the class position of their families shape life outcomes." --Daniel Laurison, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Swarthmore College "Privilege Lost offers an in-depth examination of cultural factors that contribute to downward mobility among the relatively advantaged. It is a fascinating and important phenomenon that has received minimal empirical attention. The book contributes to contemporary research on culture and inequality, which has disproportionately focused on the reproduction of privilege, by illuminating cultural mechanisms that result in a failure to pass on privilege from one generation to the next." --Lauren Rivera, Northwestern University