Welcome to Prof. Kevin Leicht

I'm delighted to welcome Professor Kevin Leicht to a guest-blog stint at Credit Slips. Kevin is a colleague of mine at the University of Iowa, where he is the Director of the Institute for Inequality Studies and the Director of the Social Science Research Center. He is a Professor of Sociology, whose research interests include the sociology of work and social stratification. Debb Thorne and I have enjoyed Kevin's recent book, Postindustrial Peasants:  The Illusion of Middle-Class Prosperity, which discusses changes in household wealth and wages in the last several decades.

Kevin has a delightful sense of humor, which I got to enjoy during his participation in the recent week-long seminar that I organized at Iowa called Borrowing to the Brink: Consumer Debt in America. Kevin's project for the seminar questioned whether Americans' increased access to credit reflects economic growth or masks declining financial security for American families. It's an important question, and I look forward to Kevin's posts on this and related topics concerning the social effects of household financial well-being or distress.