"Takes dead aim at the conservative economic consensus that has dominated U.S. politics . . . Biting and necessary."—The American Prospect
In this provocative, witty, and revealing polemic, Daniel Brook's The Trap argues that the exploding income gap—a product of the conservative ascendance—is systematically dismantling the American dream, as debt-laden, well-educated young people are torn between their passions and the pressure to earn six-figure incomes.
Rising education, housing, and health-care costs have made it virtually impossible for all but the corporate elite to enjoy what were once considered middle-class comforts. Thousands are afflicted with a wrenching choice: take up residence on America's financial and social margins or sell out. And it's not just impoverished teachers and social workers, struggling to pay their rent, who are hurt. From the activist who works to give others a living wage but isn't paid one himself, to the universal health-care advocate who becomes a management consultant for Big Pharma, Brook presents a damning indictment of the economic and political landscape that traps young Americans.
When the best and the brightest cannot afford to serve the public good, Brook asks, what are we selling out: an individual's career, or the very promise of American democracy?
"Takes dead aim at the conservative economic consensus that has dominated U.S. politics . . . Biting and necessary."—The American Prospect
In this provocative, witty, and revealing polemic, Daniel Brook's The Trap argues that the exploding income gap—a product of the conservative ascendance—is systematically dismantling the American dream, as debt-laden, well-educated young people are torn between their passions and the pressure to earn six-figure incomes.
Rising education, housing, and health-care costs have made it virtually impossible for all but the corporate elite to enjoy what were once considered middle-class comforts. Thousands are afflicted with a wrenching choice: take up residence on America's financial and social margins or sell out. And it's not just impoverished teachers and social workers, struggling to pay their rent, who are hurt. From the activist who works to give others a living wage but isn't paid one himself, to the universal health-care advocate who becomes a management consultant for Big Pharma, Brook presents a damning indictment of the economic and political landscape that traps young Americans.
When the best and the brightest cannot afford to serve the public good, Brook asks, what are we selling out: an individual's career, or the very promise of American democracy?
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Overview
"Takes dead aim at the conservative economic consensus that has dominated U.S. politics . . . Biting and necessary."—The American Prospect
In this provocative, witty, and revealing polemic, Daniel Brook's The Trap argues that the exploding income gap—a product of the conservative ascendance—is systematically dismantling the American dream, as debt-laden, well-educated young people are torn between their passions and the pressure to earn six-figure incomes.
Rising education, housing, and health-care costs have made it virtually impossible for all but the corporate elite to enjoy what were once considered middle-class comforts. Thousands are afflicted with a wrenching choice: take up residence on America's financial and social margins or sell out. And it's not just impoverished teachers and social workers, struggling to pay their rent, who are hurt. From the activist who works to give others a living wage but isn't paid one himself, to the universal health-care advocate who becomes a management consultant for Big Pharma, Brook presents a damning indictment of the economic and political landscape that traps young Americans.
When the best and the brightest cannot afford to serve the public good, Brook asks, what are we selling out: an individual's career, or the very promise of American democracy?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429912761 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/29/2007 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Daniel Brook is a journalist whose writing has appeared in Harper's, Dissent, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Boston Globe, among other publications. Brook was a finalist in the 2003 Livingston Awards for Young
Journalists and won the 2000 Rolling Stone College Journalist Competition while a student at Yale. He lives in Philadelphia.
Daniel Brook is a journalist whose writing has appeared in Harper’s, Dissent, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Boston Globe, among other publications. Brook was a finalist in the 2003 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists and won the 2000 Rolling Stone College Journalist Competition while a student at Yale. He is the author of The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America. He lives in Philadelphia.
Read an Excerpt
The Trap
Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America
By Daniel Brook
Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2007 Daniel BrookAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-1276-1
CHAPTER 1
THE RISING STICKER PRICE ON THE AMERICAN DREAM
Connecting the Dots
Just about everything you need to know about the rising sticker price of the American Dream gets plunked down on your doorstep each Sunday. In a recent Sunday paper, there might have been a human interest story on the so-called boomerang kids — young college grads so saddled with tuition debt they move back in with their parents. The business section might have run an article describing how rising health insurance premiums are making health care less and less attainable for the middle class. The arts pages might have had a melancholy piece on a downtown dance troupe squeezed out of its rehearsal space by gentrification.
To some extent, the tale you're told will vary based on where you live. Rising higher education and health-care costs affect all Americans equally; housing costs vary by region, though most metropolitan areas have seen similar declines in the number of middle-class neighborhoods in recent decades. If you were reading the Sunday Oregonian, you might learn that teachers have been priced out of two-thirds of Portland-area homes; if you were reading The Boston Globe, you'd find the starker figure of 90 percent. In bellwether metropolises like New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. — centers of business, culture, and government — you'd find the problem at its most extreme.
Reading the Sunday paper, you would learn everything you need to know about the problem except the thing that's most important: why it's happening. None of the articles would link the issues they are describing to rising economic inequality. The "boomerang kids" would treat the college tuition spike that nailed them as an immutable, if regrettable, fact of life. In the health-care story, the middle-aged professional laid off by a local company and rehired as a benefits-free temp would blame his company for his predicament, not the national health-care system. The evicted performers would attribute the real estate boom that squeezed them out to a drop in crime and the proliferation of fancy restaurants downtown, not the creation of a new economic overclass. It's hard to imagine the dancers dropping econ stats to explain their plight.
This is not to say that America's recent and dramatic rise in economic inequality will be ignored by the paper. Any regional newspaper of record will surely include a story on the new census numbers, showing how both the nation and the local metro area are seeing a larger and larger gap between rich and poor with fewer and fewer people in the middle. On the opinion page, two columnists may slug it out, the liberal fretting about the unfairness of the new inequality, the conservative celebrating the triumph of a perfect meritocracy. The paper itself may weigh in with an editorial taking one side or the other. But rising economic inequality will never be linked to the "boomerang kids" or the health-care mess or the real estate squeeze. It's time to connect the dots.
The Geography of the New Inequality
In a clever turn of phrase, social critic David Callahan dubs America's post-Reagan political-economic order the "Banana Republic economy." America's level of inequality, he argues, already greater than in any other developed country, is headed in the direction of the Third World's so-called banana republics. Actually, some parts of America have already hit those levels. Data from the 2000 census show that Manhattan, where the top fifth of earners rake in an average of $365,826 a year while the bottom fifth scrape by on $7,047, had income disparities on a par with the African nation of Namibia, the most unequal country in the world according to a recent UN Human Development Report. Berkeley, California, and Washington, D.C., were not far behind.
But Callahan intends a double entendre. In each of the four hundred outlets of the chain clothing store Banana Republic, a subsidiary of Gap, Inc., there is only one employee, the store manager, who makes a middleclass income, enough to support a family. The retail workers toil away at or near a minimum wage that has lost 20 percent of its value since Reagan's 1980 victory. It would take these workers an entire day's wages just to buy a single Banana Republic polo shirt, priced at $42. It doesn't take a Wharton MBA to figure out that high prices and low wages make for big profits. And where do those profits go? To the shareholders, to Gap, Inc., founder Donald Fischer, a billionaire several times over and a major Republican Party donor, and to the salaries of the high-end professionals at Gap, Inc., headquarters — the marketing gurus, sales number-crunchers, and financial deal-makers who manage the company.
What is missing in Callahan's analysis of the redistribution of wealth is a geographic component. While most Americans now own token amounts of stock, more than 40 percent of all shares are owned by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. The top 5 percent own about two-thirds; the top 10 percent, more than three-quarters. Needless to say, the wealthiest Americans are not equally distributed across the nation, but are clustered in fancy urban neighborhoods like the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in tony suburbs like Palo Alto, California, and in exclusive rural enclaves like Aspen, Colorado. Similarly, while Banana Republic has stores all across America, the vast majority of its managerial positions are located in its headquarters, which, like so many other "hip" corporate headquarters, is in San Francisco.
With so many well-heeled young professionals working in San Francisco, the local cost of living there goes up for everyone else. It's not just Gap and Banana Republic. Bay Area corporate behemoths founded in the past forty years include Oracle, Cisco Systems, Restoration Hardware, and Williams-Sonoma, to name a few. In 1984, the cost of housing in San Francisco was 63 percent higher than in the average American locale, proverbial Peoria. Today San Francisco's housing costs are three times higher than Peoria's. The median home price in the Bay Area is well over half a million dollars. As the wealth of the country has been redistributed since the 1980s, the percentage of income a household has to spend on housing has dropped in almost every part of the country, save the cosmopolitan metro areas on the coasts where it has skyrocketed — the very places that draw ambitious, creative young people.
It is comforting to hope that the decline of the metropolitan middle class in places like San Francisco is the temporary result of a speculative — and soon to be deflated — housing bubble, but examining rents should temper that optimism. Although home sales prices can become susceptible to "irrational exuberance," rents don't lie. They present an accurate picture of the month-to-month housing market in a city. In San Francisco, for example, rents rose 76 percent from 1995 to 2002. The San Francisco Chronicle calls its column on the local property market "Surreal Estate."
When housing costs go up, people get squeezed. Some get squeezed out, literally evicted and forced to move elsewhere. Others get squeezed metaphorically: squeezed into a narrower set of options on what they can do with their time. And this imperils the American Dream in both its classic forms — the talented individual from a modest background who blossoms in her chosen field, and the family that, through honest, hard work, reaps the benefits of a middle-class life, with homeownership and good schools for the kids.
Growing Up Absurd
Though it is economically less hospitable, young college grads with artistic or intellectual ambitions still flock to San Francisco, the golden-gated community whose allure enchants even as its cost of living ensnares.
After graduating from Yale in 2003 with a double major in film studies and gender studies, Tara moved to San Francisco to pursue queer documentary filmmaking. She settled in the Castro district, the historic epicenter of American gay culture, and quickly discovered plenty of enticing projects. "There were lots of opportunities to do film and to help people with their films, but no one had any money to pay me so I did a lot of volunteering and part-time work," she told me in a Castro coffee shop. "Everyone's working on their own dream projects that they're funding through credit card debt." In an ironically circular effort to pay the rent, Tara got a gig as the personal assistant to a high-flying San Francisco real estate agent before biting the bullet and getting a full-time corporate job to support her outrageously expensive habit of being an interesting person in an interesting neighborhood.
A friend encouraged her to apply for a job at his company, Google, one of the few blue-chip Silicon Valley companies still hiring in the dot-com aftermath. The application process involved an exhaustive screening procedure. She divulged her SAT scores, took a writing test, and submitted to three separate half-hour interviews where she put on the feigned-enthusiasm routine demanded by corporate America — all for a temp job. "When they asked me about my resumé, they were like 'Wow, it looks like you're really interested in film.' And I was like, 'No, it's just a hobby. What I'm really interested in is customer service.' And they bought it."
But the joke was on Tara. By moving to San Francisco to get serious about film, to make it more than just a hobby, she had rendered it just that. Had she stayed in her native Portland, Oregon, the lower cost of living might have afforded her the time to work on film but would have kept her from making the contacts she needed to get noticed. Like her entire generation of creative young people, Tara was damned if she moved to a creative center, and damned if she didn't. Who's to say whether Tara would be the next great documentary filmmaker; not everyone who wants to make films for a living succeeds. But a fair and dynamic society would let the talented rise to the top rather than limit competition to those with trust funds.
Tara was hired at Google, the search engine giant with the informal corporate motto "Don't be evil." Firings were routine; there was no job security whatsoever. "Every Friday, they would tap some [temps] on the shoulder and they would be gone. It was really horrifying. Every Friday. Everyone was freaked out."
While Google, which generated $3.6 billion in profits on $8.5 billion in revenue in 2005, sells itself as a "family," Tara told me, "this large percentage of the family is getting shit upon." That was how she felt temping away for two of the richest men on the planet without basic benefits like health insurance or paid sick days, let alone Silicon Valley goodies like stock options. "Sometimes they would take us out to movies for free, but no one had health care!" she explained, as if describing some insane social experiment. Yet this is the American economy people like Tara have grown up in. Talk about "growing up absurd."
Tara worked for a Google department called AdSense that placed ads on other companies' Web sites. (Tech companies don't seem content just to repeal the social contract — they have to repeal grammar as well.) Tara reviewed Web sites for content that would disqualify them from working with Google, like obscene material — a peculiar job for an aspiring queer documentary filmmaker, to say the least. Minute by minute, a program would relentlessly feed a new site to her computer for screening in a kind of twenty-first-century manifestation of the Ford assembly line. In Tara's estimation, "Monkeys could do it." But what disturbed her most was that the longer she did the job, the more simian she became, losing her most human quality. "I had films that I was working on — my own stuff — but you were just so tired at the end of the day and so fried that you couldn't do anything creative." She started having nightmares in which she was at work, sitting in front of her computer screening Web sites for Google.
Despite the New Economy trappings, including what Tara conceded was "the most amazing snack room with incredible organic gourmet food," the job left her not unlike the factory workers of an earlier age. "I would go to a bar, usually directly from work, with my coworkers and complain about our managers. I would complain a lot about the hierarchical system. I feel like if there's anyone in need of a union, beyond service workers and people who are not getting paid very well, it's temps because the kinds of problems that temps have are the kinds of problems that all people at the lowest level have, because they're so expendable. A hundred people a day are applying to Google, so everyone is so expendable. It doesn't matter what your problems are, they can just get rid of you."
But unlike twentieth-century factory workers, none of her Google coworkers seriously spoke of organizing. Moving up or moving on were the easiest ways out. Those who get hired full-time, according to Tara, "forget how sucky it was to be a temp because now they're invited to all the secret beer-and-sushi meetings." Tara decided to move on, gaining acceptance to UC Berkeley's doctoral film studies program — a more intellectually rewarding way to scrape by in San Francisco, but no more likely to lead to a full-time job with benefits than working at a tech company.
Housing Projects for the Upper Middle Class
To the casual observer, Meadow Park, a new affordable housing development in Novato, California, about thirty miles north of San Francisco, looks like any other "new urbanist"-style subdivision. There are the neat little town houses, the communal open spaces, schools, and daycare centers within walking distance. Touring the development reminded me of the HOPE VI public housing developments, which replaced crime-plagued high-rises in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia with walkable, human-scaled neighborhoods. Except there was something besides the palm trees that distinguished the subsidized Novato development from those in the Chicago and Philadelphia ghettos — families with six-figure incomes could qualify to live there.
"From my office, there were a few people who applied, but they were at the clerical level — secretaries and people in accounts payable. So when they started talking about it, I said let me go on the Internet and see if I qualify. I was very surprised," explained Rajiv, who moved to the United States from India in the mid-1990s to work in the tech industry. "In Marin County, 'low income' is very high. It would be 'high income' in other places." With a five-person household of himself, his wife, two sons, and mother-in-law, Rajiv could make up to $123,000 a year and still qualify for one of the subsidized units. Because his company, a national upscale retailer where he works as a computer systems manager, is located in Novato, his application took precedence over all but those of city and school district employees.
The qualification formula is derived from the median income for a family of four in Marin County — nearly $100,000. Even with the high incomes, all but the very rich are priced out of homeownership in the county, where the average sale price for a home is $925,000. Marin County, with its easy access to San Francisco, natural beauty, and superb park system, has always been an expensive area, but a generation of economic policies that have made the rich both richer and more numerous has, for the first time, rendered entire counties, even entire regions, unaffordable to the middle and even upper middle class. Today, with a less egalitarian economy and a less progressive tax system, the lid has come off. In the market-rate subdivision just a few blocks from Meadow Park, I saw a For Sale sign on a starter home and grabbed a flyer. "Offered at $869,500," it read. The subsidized homes across the way cost about half as much — relative bargains at just over $400,000.
Before landing a home at Meadow Park, Rajiv tried to buy in nearby Petaluma, with its well-reputed school district. "We were outbid four or five times in the Petaluma school district. Let me give you an example: A ten-year-old condo came in at $449,000. We bid $477,000. And the condo went for $510,000," Rajiv recounted. "Wherever the school district is good, the housing prices are very high."
In his 1991 magnum opus, Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol exposed unequal school funding as a national scandal. The inequalities are particularly savage in California, where a conservative antiproperty tax referendum passed in 1978 has starved schools of money for decades. With state funding woefully inadequate, wealthy districts have created "local education foundations," nonprofit organizations that fund "extras" like art and music classes in well-to-do districts. In a particularly perverse twist, contributions to these foundations are tax-deductible, allowing wealthy parents and local businesses to further withdraw from any attempt to give other people's children a quality education. In Novato, the local foundation is called School Fuel. Its Web site crows, "Funding to Novato Public Schools from the state of California will never be what it should be for a stimulating, quality education. Support your local public school and students by donating today!"
The upward redistribution of wealth in recent years has made the gap between rich and poor districts even more pronounced — and has raised housing prices in strong school districts to levels that are unaffordable to anyone who doesn't work in the upper echelons of corporate America. Just as private school tuition has skyrocketed, the real estate boom in public school districts that teach music and art and offer AP classes has raised the de facto "tuitions" for good public schools as well. As home prices climb, teaching, by definition a profession for those who value education, becomes a less and less desirable career. After all, how could you possibly raise your own family in a good school district on a teacher's salary?
At Meadow Park, teachers make up the highest percentage of home buyers, no surprise considering a National Association of Home Builders study that showed that teachers were priced out of 99.7 percent of the census tracts in the San Francisco metropolitan area. Jason Eckl, a twenty-six-year-old music teacher at Novato's Sinaloa Middle School, recently moved into a town house there. He heard about the development from a flyer in the school staff lounge announcing "something like, 'low-income housing for teachers and public service employees,'" he recalled. At the time Eckl, who grew up in a small town in California's Central Valley, was renting an apartment near his school in downtown Novato. Many young Sinaloa teachers who had grown up in the area were living at home with their parents. If not for Meadow Park, "I would have kept going slowly broke from renting. Because I was a single guy living in a not-so-nice apartment I was surviving. I was paying twelve hundred dollars rent for a one-bedroom apartment," he said. "That was over half my salary."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Trap by Daniel Brook. Copyright © 2007 Daniel Brook. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Author's Note,Introduction: The Pam Perd Generation,
1. The Rising Sticker Price on the American Dream,
2. Home and Hearth,
3. The Road to Microserfdom,
4. Selling the Body Politic,
5. Start Up, Slip Down: Self-Employment Without a Net,
6. From Partisan Review to Partisans Revue: Intellectuals in the Post-Academic Age,
7. Save Yourself: Activism in the City of St. Francis,
8. What Your Company Can Do for You: Politics as a Vocation,
9. Hazard Pay for the Soul: The Legal Profession,
10. Releasing the Trap,
Conclusion: Beyond "What Should I Do with My Life?" to "What Should We Do with Our Country?",
Notes,
Acknowledgments,
Index,