You know that vague, shapeless worry that never quite goes away? That sense that the things you count on for your security and that of your family — your spouse, your children, your brothers, sisters and parents — aren’t quite solid?

It didn’t start yesterday with the latest slippage of the stock market. It didn’t start three weeks ago when the world’s credit markets started to freeze up and the investment banks collapsed, begging for help. It predates the submarining of subprime, the crooked corporations and the Enron accounting scams.

It’s not irrational, you’re not paranoid and you’re not alone.

You, me — all of us — are living closer and closer to the edge, even if we are earning more and living better than many of our fellow Americans. Our jobs are less secure, our investments are more precarious, our retirement prospects are iffier and the future we’ve been working toward, for ourselves and our families, has become murky and indistinct. The things we depend on for a sense of security in our personal and family lives don’t feel solid . . . because they’re not.

The so-called town-hall-forum format of tonight’s presidential debate in Nashville, Tenn., doesn’t lend itself to the discussion of such primal concerns. I’ll be surprised if either Barack Obama or John McCain goes beyond the more concrete issues of Wall Street voraciousness, bailouts, regulation and oversight and the infuriating but mostly diversionary matter of executive pay and parachutes.

In the campaign so far, Obama and running mate Joe Biden have come closer to the heart of things when they’ve talked about the American dream slipping beyond the reach of ordinary middle-class and working-class people. People who work in good faith with dedication, honesty, competence and even excellence may not be rewarded for their efforts. Obama’s line that the phrase “ownership society” really means you’re on your own is not just rhetoric and hyperbole.

For awhile, I thought it was me: the persistent aftereffects of having been laid off from my New York newspaper job three months after 9/11, my inability to forge a freelance writing career in the devastated New York media economy of 2002, my return home to St. Louis and the failure of my marriage in 2003.
Making big decisions and planning more than a few months ahead seemed beyond me. My mental list of what-ifs kept getting longer.

But it’s not just me. It turns out we have good reason to worry about the unpredictable what-ifs of day-to-day life: What if I lose my job? What if illness or injury strikes the family? What if there’s a tornado, a hurricane, a flood, a divorce? What if we can’t afford college? What if a depressed economy wipes out our savings?

The issue is not the odds of such things happening. It’s that if even one of them does, the impact is likely to be more potent and longer-lasting than ever before. And it’s that - in today’s America - there is less help available to get us through the hard times. That leaves all of us exposed to things beyond our control with little protection.

Nothing I’ve read better explains these fundamental contemporary American anxieties than “High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives or American Families,” by Peter Gosselin, the national economics correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Gosselin started researching, reporting and writing about the subject several years ago and produced a series of prize-winning newspaper stories.

The book builds on those stories - pursuing, amplifying and expanding the understanding of their themes and adding more details to the accounts of individual Americans from all economic levels who have experienced first-hand how the country has changed.

Gosselin acknowledges that Americans have been living better material lives, on average, over the last two or three decades. He notes, too, that by many standard measures - unemployment statistics, for example - problems have not been as bad as in previous economic slumps.

But Gosselin goes deeper than the standard measures, often devising new kinds of data developed with the assistance of respected veteran economists at such universities as Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. What he discovers is that while incomes may be up, they also have become subject to wide, unpredictable swings from year to year. Upper-middle-class families may see swings of 25-30 percent; for lower-income families, the differences can be 50 percent or more.

That volatility disrupts people’s lives and makes it all but impossible for families to plan for the future. Not knowing what next year might bring makes ordinary decisions - buying a home, getting married, having children, moving to a different city, going back to school - leaps of faith.

People have been stripped, one historian tells Gosselin, of the “security of expectations.”
Consider health insurance, which has become more and more expensive and less and less comprehensive. Sick people who lose it are unlikely to get it back, although they’re the ones who need its protection from crushing medical bills the most.

Likewise, homeowners who suffer devastating losses - from fire, for instance - often find that their policies don’t provide the protection they thought they were paying for. Highly computerized risk assessments threaten to undermine the very purpose of pooling risk through insurance, which Gosselin credits as one of humanity’s greatest inventions and a powerful engine for economic development.

Meanwhile, pensions that once assured long-time workers of specific payments when they retired now are subject to the whims of the stock market. The new systems make the ridiculous assumption that ordinary people possess or will learn the skills of sophisticated investment portfolio management.

Finally, Gosselin rejects the notion that America’s reverence for individualism prohibits society and government from protecting people from some of the unpredictable risks of life. In one of the very earliest documents of the American experience, the Mayflower Compact, settlers from England agreed to forgo some rights as individuals for “the general good of the colony.” And 167 years later, the Founding Fathers declared that the purpose of the U.S. Constitution was to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Americans today did not decide to accept greater risk for the possibility of a greater reward. Americans did not choose to unravel the fabric of protections woven from the devastating experiences of the Great Depression. There was no debate and discussion about these things. They were imposed on us by the champions of unchecked market power, and the scale has swung wildly out of balance.

As a result, we and our families are more vulnerable to serious setbacks that we can’t control. Those setbacks are harder and harder to recover from - if we can recover at all. Whatever else you call that, it is not the American dream.