Christine J. Walley joins a growing chorus of scholars whose subject is “the increasingly extreme nature of expanding inequality, the stagnation of middle-class incomes, and the staggering percentage of wealth owned by a small elite in the United States (and beyond)” (235). While Trump promised to bring back good, middle-income jobs to the Rust Belt and other struggling regions, factors such as automation and the rise of “contract” jobs, along with the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, pose additional challenges to U.S. economic policy. “Given the increasing precarity of even the well-educated middle classes,” Walley writes, “the Rust Belt might not be a disappearing vestige of a past economy, as many presumed, but a distressing harbinger of the future” (235). Walley further suggests that increasing economic precarity  could have dire political consequences going forward. What do you think of her bleak assessment?