Matthew McKeever – författare

In 1980, single mother families were five times more likely than two-parent families to be poor. Forty years later, single-mother families are still five times more likely to be poor. How can this be given the vast increases in education and employment achieved by American women over this period? In Thanks for Nothing, Nicholas H. Wolfinger and Matthew McKeever explore the contradictions that lie at the heart of single motherhood. Drawing on forty years of data from two large national surveys, they find that the mystery of single mothers' economic stagnation can be explained by changes in the kind of women most likely to become single mothers. In 1980, most single mothers were divorced women; forty years later, the majority are mothers who gave birth out of wedlock. On paper, divorced women look a lot like their married contemporaries, but with one income instead of two. Never-married mothers are a completely different population--they have less education, work less, and receive lower economic returns on their educational credentials when they do work. They're also far more likely to have grown up in underprivileged families. Ultimately, Wolfinger and McKeever find that some single mothers are doing better even as others have fallen through the cracks. Providing an in-depth look into the economics of single motherhood, Thanks for Nothing offers the most detailed statistical portrait of single mothers to date and, importantly, provides concrete suggestions for how policymakers should respond to persisting inequalities among mothers.

What is it actually like to live today? It's an era where world politics play out on Twitter, and where the gig economy has made the nine-to-five job an object of aspiration rather than dread. Rates of mental illness are soaring, inequality predominates everything and much of life is contained in our phones.The core idea of this book is that we can only understand what life is like now by comparing it to previous times to see what has changed, what is genuinely new, and what is a continuation of existing trends. Providing original analyses of a range of seminal works of 90s pop culture, this book extracts a core set of concepts--such as irony, branding, and media--that defined the 90s. It demonstrates how these concepts are expressed in both those works and in the art of today. Presenting close history in a new light, this book helps us understand today by framing it in terms of yesterday.