Setting the Trap

"'In 1970, when starting teachers in New York City made just $2,000 less than starting Wall Street lawyers, people who wanted to teach taught,' Brook explains. 'Today, when starting teachers make $100,000 less than starting corporate lawyers and have been priced out of the region's homeownership market, the considerations are very different.' Brook also cites Ellen Willis, the cultural critic and feminist, who savored reminding readers that she could once live for months in the East Village off the fee she made from one magazine feature. Salaries in many fields that attract creative, liberally educated people--teaching and journalism to name only two--have stagnated while the costs of education, housing and healthcare have gone through the roof. All of which raises a few questions: What would the social movements of the 1960s have looked like if baby boomer collegians had been stifled by the same educational debt as their children? What if they hadn't been buoyed by the broadly shared prosperity of the postwar era, or subsidized by a ratio of minimum wage to living expenses far more forgiving than what their offspring face in most metropolitan centers today?"

Astra Taylor in Salon reviews Daniel Brook's The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America.