During the past generation, the American middle-class family that once could count on hard work and fair play to keep itself financially secure has been transformed by economic risk and new realities.

All other hard links to the same file will show a link count that is now reduced by 1.

The exception is the special directory entries in a directory for the directory itself and for its parent (. and ..), which are hard links that maintain the count of the number of subdirectories.