At its core, this relentless drive to spend any money available comes not from a desire to consume more lattes and own nicer cars, but, largely, from the pressure people feel to provide their kids with access to the best schools they can afford (purchased, in most cases, not via tuition but via real estate in a specific public-school district). Breaking the bank for your kids’ education is, to an extent, perfectly reasonable: In a deeply unequal society, the gains to be made by being among the elite are enormous, and the consequences of not being among them are dire. When understood mainly as a consequence of this rush to provide for one’s children, the drive to maximize spending is not some bizarre mystery, nor a sign of massive irresponsibility, but a predictable consequence of severe inequality.

There’s not a great term for this phenomenon and its consequences. Often, scholars and writers will use some variant of the phrase “financial insecurity” or “fragility” to describe it, but this does a disservice, implying that living paycheck-to-paycheck carries risks, that something bad could happen. But where would that show up in this measure? For millions of people without savings, those bad things have already come—they’ve had to make an emergency car repair or pay an unforeseen medical bill. They’d still answer a survey question about whether they had $400 on hand in the negative, and the survey would miss entirely that they had already experienced such a need. Risk is certainly part of the problem, but lots of families are facing issues that aren’t hypothetical and in the future—they are real and immediate.

Other existing terms fall short too. More colloquially, many refer to the speed of American life as a rat race, but that’s more of a reference to the hard and fast pace of work than it is to the broken finances many face at home (though surely the two are related, as the need for more money at least partially motivates that pace). Another, separate, phenomenon that people discuss is the “hollowing out” of the middle class, but that refers to the distribution of incomes becoming more polarized, leaving fewer in the middle, not the struggles faced by those still there.

Neal Gabler, the author of The Atlantic’s story on this problem, decides to go with the phrase “financial impotence,” which succeeds in capturing the powerlessness that many feel when confronting a financial abyss. There are ways in which this is apropos—men, in particular, have seen their earning power diminish in recent decades, and Gabler isn’t the first to draw a connection between financial power and sexual power. But this is an unfortunately narrow framing of a financial crisis whose casualties are so often women.

The failure to put a proper name on this dynamic is a part of a broader failure to understand it—and to see it as a problem at all. (Cognitive scientists have a great term for this—“hypocognition”—which refers to when, as linguist George Lakoff puts it, “the words or language that need to exist to frame an idea in a way which can lead to persuasive communication is either non-existent or ineffective.”) The most common and straightforward measures of households’ financial health look at income: Are incomes rising? How many people are earning less than $40,000? How many are earning more? But a measure of income alone completely misses the fact that few are getting off this earn-and-consume hamster wheel, even as they earn more. Wealth statistics do a better job capturing just how much trouble Americans have building up real assets and savings (and the answer is: a lot of trouble), but don’t capture at a week-to-week, month-to-month level how hard it can be to cover one’s bills.