"The Betrayal of the American Dream" by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele There are two major flaws in "The Betrayal of the American Dream," a new book about the dismantling of the middle class. The first is its diagnosis of what's causing the country's economic troubles. The second is its prescriptions. By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele PublicAffairs. $26.99 At least it got the symptoms right. The authors, Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, investigative reporters for Vanity Fair, are angry about unemployment, offshoring, pension underfunding, tax loopholes, financial fraud and many other legitimately infuriating issues. In their rage, they see conspiracies everywhere, usually led by the Montgomery Burnses and Henry F. Potters of the world and their minions in Washington. The country's economic malaise is due to the malevolent machinations of the "ruling class," they suggest, which wants nothing more than to snuff out the proletariat with their "rapacious job-­killing strategies." To be sure, lots of financiers, executives and politicians have done lots of unethical and greedy things in recent years, from buying influence to committing outright fraud. Yet they did so not because they're mustache-twirling sadists, as the book implies, but to improve their bottom line. And the black-and-white moralism also fails to capture the whole story. The authors impugn evil capitalists for sending work abroad to chase lower prices, for example, but they mostly let American consumers off the hook for demanding those lower prices in the first place. Oddly, despite the complaints about the outsize influence of the wealthy, there is no mention of campaign finance reform. Instead, the book's main solution for just about every ailment is to erect new trade barriers and essentially freeze economic and employment arrangements as they are. But that's not a sustainable strategy for keeping (let alone creating) American jobs, as demonstrated by the wretched trade wars wrought by the Smoot-Hawley tariff in the 1930s. Barlett and Steele want to turn back the clock to a time when American workers were the most competitive in the world, rather than find new ways to make American workers more competitive - through, for example, a more functional education system. In fact, the authors write off the role of education, calling it a "shopworn" theory for addressing the needs of displaced workers. They complain about the recent fall in wages in entry-level jobs for college graduates, and argue that rising student debt proves higher education often isn't worthwhile. Yet throughout the book, some of their key anecdotes involve displaced workers who got back on their feet after retraining. And a closer look at the recent jobs numbers shows that unemployment rates for college graduates are still quite low: 4.1 percent, less than half the rate for workers with only a high school diploma. The wage premium conferred by postsecondary education has been rising, not falling, in the last few decades. A better education system would also address another major force behind the displacement of the working class, particularly those in manufacturing: auto­mation. That's a force protectionism unquestionably cannot address, which is perhaps why the authors ignore it. Barlett and Steele do have some intelligent things to say about the unfairness and impenetrability of the American tax code, which favors the wealthy and allows dangerous accounting for corporate pension liabilities. But the book is strongest, and most useful, when it recounts poignant stories of workers left out in the cold, chilling examples of exactly how far members of the middle class have fallen. The book will undoubtedly make you angry, even if it doesn't help you put that anger to good use. Catherine Rampell is an economics reporter for The Times.