To hear Jacob Hacker talk, U.S. workers are increasingly being asked to become actuaries for their own economic doom.

Pension plans are evaporating. Health-insurance costs are climbing. More than ever, incomes rise and fall from year to year.

The American middle class feels more on the edge of financial ruin than any time since World War II.

Why? That's the subject of Hacker's new book, "The Great Risk Shift" (Oxford University Press, $26).

The Yale University political science professor and native Oregonian's theory is simple: Government, corporations and insurers once shouldered the costs of workers' retirement, health care and job security. No more, Hacker says. Increasingly, families carry those risks, and they're growing ever-more weary and financially incapable of doing so.

An example: The proportion of families earning between $20,000 and $40,000, without health insurance, has risen from 25 percent in 2000 to nearly 40 percent, he says. "We're seeing problems that were once really confined to the very bottom of our economic pyramid moving up to affect the middle class," he says...

Q: So, there's unrest among the public, but that's not being transferred into political debate?

A: It may be soon. The economy is actually featuring more prominently in this election than the many pundits would have expected. There's a lot of reasons why politicians have not talked about this.

The way we think about what's happened in the economy is always in terms of inequality, the growing gap between the rich and the poor. But what I show in the book is that insecurity or instability of income has risen faster than inequality in the United States.

Family incomes of college-educated people are now as unstable as the family incomes of high school dropouts were in the 1970s...

For the complete interview, please visit The Oregonian website.