FT’s Luce wins award for covering middle class struggle

Financial Times writer Edward Luce has won the July Sidney Award from the Hillman Foundation for his story, “The Crisis of Middle Class America.”

Luce is the Financial Times’ Washington bureau chief.

At the center of Luce’s story is a portrait of a typical Minneapolis family, Mark and Connie Freeman, and their son Andy, who, despite a gross annual income of $70,000 a year, are still fighting off foreclosure of their house. Interspersed with the travails of the Freeman’s life, which have turned their American Dream into a ‘fitful American reverie,’ are devastating quotes and statistics about the state of the American economy.

“Luce does a brilliant job of encapsulating many of America’s most pressing problems in one 3,900 word piece,” said Sidney Award judge Charles Kaiser.

Said Luce: “The struggles of America’s middle classes has struck me for a while as the central fact of America’s political economy. Prior to the Great Recession, the stagnation of median incomes was something that I wrote about for the FT. But the abrupt removal of that cushion of rising asset prices, and inflated house values, has added an urgent new dimension to the problem. The difficulties of middle America can no longer be disguised through easy credit.”

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