Meet the Middle Precariat naked capitalism

By Alissa Quart, author of "The Republic of Outsiders" and "Branded", is the editor for the nonprofit Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Precariousness is not just a working-class thing. In recent interviews, dozens of academics and schoolteachers, administrators, librarians, journalists and even coders have told me they too are falling prey to an unstable new America. I've started to think of this just-scraping-by group as the Middle Precariat. The word Precariat was popularized five or so years ago to describe a rapidly expanding working class with unstable, low-paid jobs.