Reprise of Elizabeth Warren, Woman of Note

(We constructed this Women of Note item when Elizabeth Warren was first named as head of the TARP oversight panel. Now President Obama is considering her as head of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, a new government entity,created by the financial reform law.)

Named as the head of the Congressional Panel established to oversee the $700 billion fund (Troubled Asset Relief Program, now referred to as TARP), assigned to help distribute monies authorized to aid the economy, Elizabeth Warren is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard's Business School.

Perhaps what strikes the reader first are Ms. Warren's research interests, especially the last:

Empirical and Policy Work in Bankruptcy and Commercial Law
Financially Distressed Companies
Women, the Elderly, and the Working Poor in Bankruptcy

She is the co-author of The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke (written with Amelia Warren Tyagi), published in 2003. One paragraph in the introduction makes clear the understanding she possesses about the subject:

"As Ruth Ann and Jim learned, the dance of financial ruin starts slowly but picks up speed quickly, exhausting the dancers before it ends. Few families have substantial savings, so they usually run out of cash in a month or so. Soon the charges start mounting up for the basics of family life — food, gasoline and whatever else can go on the card.' When there still isn't enough to go around, the game of impossible choices begins."

The full text of the book is available online. What follows is part of a conversation Elizabeth Warren had at UC Berkeley in March, 2007 and conducted by Harry Kreisler :

Background

Professor Warren, welcome to Berkeley.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Where were you born and raised?

Born and raised in Oklahoma.

Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?

Ah. Well, my parents were from Depression-era, dust-bowl Oklahoma, and that shapes your life growing up. I was the last of four children, I have three much older brothers, and by the time I came along I was really kind of the second family for them. They hadn't recovered from the Depression and I guess in many ways they never did. They talked about it, those were the stories that permeated my childhood, what it was like to have seven years of drought, what it was like when nobody had any money, what it was like when all your neighbors left to go to California or someplace where they thought there might be jobs. My parents hung on, they stayed, my father worked a series of different jobs. He was a maintenance man in an apartment house — it was his last job — but they always saw themselves as middle-class people. They always saw themselves as people who — for them the distinction was, they used good English and they didn't say "ain't." Those were important indicia of middle-classness of my folks. They believed in education and were very proud of this little daughter they had.

Around the dinner table was there a discussion of politics, of law, or did that all come to you later?

Oh, no. Not around the dinner table. Mostly around the dinner table it was discussion of cars, or rodeos and dogs and cows and horses, and a little discussion of worry about others in the family. There was always a big sense in my family of — we all tried to look out for each other, but nobody in the family really had much of anything.

A theme that you pursue in these books that we're going to talk about is what's happening to the family. From what you're saying now I get the sense that the family was very important as a last resort for survival in the context of these very harsh times.

Yes, that's exactly right. People who didn't have family or people who broken from their family, they were the true poor, they were the ones with nothing. As long as you had family, you had people who would make sure that you got fed one way or another. Family was about canning peaches, and canning peaches was about making sure that there'd at least be something come next November, when it was cold outside and there were no more crops coming in. Family is the heart of what it's about.

Read the rest of the interview at the Berkeley site.

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Reprise of Elizabeth Warren, Woman of Note

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