It was a litany of middle-class lives shattered by the recession.
Some had been petty traders in Iraq, others were the splinters of a shattered middle class.
Where Iraq is an urban, oil-rich country with an educated middle class, Afghanistan is a shattered state whose social fabric and physical infrastructure has been ruined by three decades of war.
Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, gently scoffed at the idea that this report means that we can forget about the deep issues of rising inequality, a shattered middle class, and profound inequity in opportunity.
America appears to be a society splitting down the centre, shattering the middle class that long formed the cultural bedrock of the country and dividing it into a country of haves and have-nots.
One year ago, Fareed Zakaria threw down the gauntlet in his TIME cover story, How to Restore the American Dream, when he said, "the grim reality is that technology and globalization are shattering the middle class... the good news is that a bipartisan policy agenda can return the country to prosperity".
My illusion of comfort, living in a middle to upper middle class, predominantly white neighborhood has been shattered. .
Playing at populism is laughable when the existential threat to Labour is how to represented a shattered working class and a middle class that is fast dissolving.
When in London, "fearfully randy", they expect "comforts", ie. sex, from the girls, whose respectable upper-middle-class expectations are shattered by rackety wartime conditions, bombs, and precipitate adulthood.
Nanni Moretti's small, touching film "The Son's Room" is a portrait of a closely knit Italian family whose contented middle-class existence is shattered with the death of the teenage son, Andrea Giuseppe Sanfelicee), in a scuba-diving accident.
