Notable here is the authors' insightful history of 20th-century social dynamics and the working-class plight.
But the arguments she made for greater consumer protections suggest a grasp of the middle class's plight that's much more than academic.
Previous biographers have claimed, for example, that Marx despised, individually as well as collectively, the very working classes whose plight he drew attention to and whose cause he affected to champion.
When I started my undergraduate education I was planning to study commerce, but after a moving class on the plight of the world's poor, I shifted course to international development with all the idealism of a 19-year-old.
He confronted race head-on, then reached beyond it to talk sympathetically about the experiences of the white working class and the plight of workers stripped of jobs and pensions.
"So he would talk in class about the plight of the Gypsy minority, and then I would say, 'Yeah, except no one's going to actually commission that piece, so, to the extent that you actually want to make a career out of journalism, which I assume you do, you'd do well to find topics of more interest to your audience.' " The course involved a weeklong field trip to Hungary.
To achieve a tiny percentage of what many of Amber's drama-school counterparts will take for granted, she will work several times harder, sacrificing and risking much more – even the Virgin train ticket to London to see the college would wipe out the average Harpurhey household budget – only to endure Benedict Cumberbatch and his ilk whining that no-one understands the upper-class actor's plight.
Liberals, pointing to a bankrupt Detroit and new reports of diminished class mobility, believe the plight of lower-income and young Americans is so severe that the party must shift away from the center-left consensus that has shaped its fiscal politics since Bill Clinton's 1992 election and push more aggressively to reduce income disparity.
The ensuing story is one of class struggle and the plight of the artist (yes, seriously).
But what is striking about Romney's remarks is that they have replaced that commitment with a willingness to blame a vast swath of striving, middle-class Americans for their plight.
However, journalist Cristina Odone, blogging on the Telegraph site, said Willetts was right to suggest feminists were responsible for the plight of working class men.
