Writing this book famously turned Elizabeth Warren into a Democrat when she was previously a Republican. That's the main interest for me.

The basic thesis is well-known: women with children are increasingly exposed to financial ruin because the middle class was tricked into locking the income from two jobs into long-term commitments like cars and mortgages in expensive neighbourhoods. The entire book tries to convince us that such expenses are not cases of "over-consumption", an expression which in my book is linked to excessive carbon emissions, but that in this case must be understood as a word from the Republican moralist dictionary. Eventually Congress accepted Warren's argument that these people are victim of fraud and created the CFPB.

Apart from the data, which is very convincing, it's fun to see the contortionism required to carry Warren's argument in a Republican-friendly way. Spending a million dollars on a house in a fancy neighbourhood is deemed a "necessity" because otherwise your kids have no chance to get into the Ivy League. Owning two cars is "necessary" because commute distances have increased from 14 to 17 km or something over 30 years. And so on. The specific policy proposals are also ridiculously bad "market-friendly" non-solutions which have catastrophically failed already: private insurance for losing your job has never worked; freedom to apply for school anywhere in your county has only made things worse in NYC ("The Paradox of Choice: How School Choice Divides New York City Elementary Schools", Center for New York City Affairs at The New School).

It's also clear Warren didn't believe in those things herself back then, because when she tells the story of how she got out of financial ruin she casually explains she did without her car, despite having a commute that few pages before was described as one that makes two cares "necessary". Tracking all those contradictions while reading was fun for a Warren-watcher like me, but I it's probably not what most people are looking for.