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July 23, 2007
The Trap!
Lots of people are telling me that I need to read Daniel Brook's book The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, and I probably do. But if Adam Doster's review is correct, it's main point seems a bit banal. So far as I can tell, Brooks argues that conservative economic policies have shredded the safety net, forcing more and more talented graduates to enter law school (or investment banking, or whatever) rather than follow their bliss by working for low pay at virtuous non-profits.
Well, yeah. Working for low pay at a job that confers lots of Good Person points has always been something of a luxury for the young, well-off, and independent. And you don't go into law or hedge fund management because you're seeking subsistence: You do it because you're seeking riches, and status. I am, to be sure, a big believer in the economic autonomy offered by such programs as universal health care. But I don't think the end result will be a vast reordering of the occupational landscape. It will just be more people with health care, and a bit less job lock. And creating economic security for the young and upwardly mobile (i.e, by creating free college) will cost other people more money -- money that I'm not sure should be spent subsidizing the educations of the upper middle class.
All that said, I haven't read the book, and should. It's fully possible Brooks deals with exactly these objections.
July 23, 2007 in Books | Permalink
Comments
Totally OT, but Ezra, you got your hottie nom...
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlDC/hottest_media_types/2007_hottest_media_types_finalists_male_off_air_63532.asp#more
Posted by: Glenn | Jul 23, 2007 1:51:50 PM
I am in the middle of reading the book. The point Brooks is making is how much harder it is for the young to do what they want to do than it used to be, due primarily to GOP policies that promote inequality. He includes the eye-popping statistic that in 1970, a starting Wall Street banker made $2000 more a year than a starting NY teacher, but now the discrepancy is $100,000/yr. That's a huge change, which calls your comments about how following one's bliss has always been primarily for the independently wealthy into some question. He also points out the costs for society in having potentially gifted teachers and social service professionals become investment bankers instead. Yes, you should read it before questioning it.
Posted by: beckya57 | Jul 23, 2007 1:54:19 PM
since ezra started it, i'll wade in w/o reading it either...
one thing that strikes me about this argument (i agree with it) is that it isn't a completely accidental side-product of conservative policies - that is, it's a feature, not a bug.
granted, it's not the main reason why conservatives want to make economic life riskier, but, it's definitely noted and on the plus side of the ledger for doing so.
putting huge economic pressure to bear in convincing talented people with a social conscience to eschew public service-oriented careers is clearly a good thing for the right.
besides "shredding the social safety net", i would add "failing to make college affordable w/o crushing debt for most" as policies that achieve this end.
Posted by: josh bivens | Jul 23, 2007 2:04:23 PM
There's probably a market for the political idea of a pay cap for CEOs, whether in the form of confiscatory margin income tax rates or deductibility as an expense for corporate tax purposes or a change in corporate governance regulation.
The escalation of CEO pay encourages corruption and drains resources, and, probably, attracts the wrong kinds of people for the wrong reasons into the upper reaches of the elite.
We should worry about whether good people are attracted into the elite that runs society, or whether they are crowded out by greedy sociopaths.
Posted by: Bruce Wilder | Jul 23, 2007 2:20:30 PM
I think this sounds limited. It's not just social services that are hurt with a lack of a safety net. It's also entrepreneurs, small businesses, etc.
Posted by: akaison | Jul 23, 2007 2:45:16 PM
I haven't read it either. On the face of it, it's silly. The college premium has gone up, so college graduates can now expect to earn relatively more in real terms than they use to. There is a huge spread in prices for college, and more expensive colleges buy very little extra income, controlling for test scores. So, for savvy consumers like Ezra Klein who took advantage of the low price of subsidized state schools, the cost of education as a proportion of its expected returns has never been lower. I agree that law school can be a trap for people who think they need more education but don't really know what they want to do. But that has nothing to do with an imagined fraying of the safety net and everything to do with, as you point out, misguided, completely optional status-seeking. The current cohort of recent college grads have more opportunity to do unusual stuff than any previous. Sounds like a Kamenetz-style evidence-unburdened bitchfest. God, it really must be terrible graduating from Yale.
Posted by: Will Wilkinson | Jul 23, 2007 2:54:39 PM
Echoing what akaison said, there's people in many industries who would eschew full-time employment for freelancing / consulting if they could.
Posted by: fiat lux | Jul 23, 2007 3:00:33 PM
The fact that the stat that beckya57 cites is not adjusted for inflation makes me very skeptical of the evidence in the book.
Posted by: Isaac | Jul 23, 2007 3:16:01 PM
"Well, yeah. Working for low pay at a job that confers lots of Good Person points has always been something of a luxury for the young, well-off, and independent."
You jest, but this point is debatable. A teacher's salary went much farther 30 years ago than it does today. Period.
And I think you, and Will, are overplaying the influence of status-seeking on the decision of many students. Sure, it's there. But I have a good friend who graduated near the top of her high school class in Kalamazoo, went to the a flagship public university in her state -- you know, those land grant institutions that were conceived as a public good and not a life-time investment -- and is now racked with $30,000 grand in debt. Her freedom to choose the path of her life is restricted, what free markets are supposed to avoid, and that's not a problem worth passing over.
Posted by: Adam Doster | Jul 23, 2007 3:17:21 PM
I think you're being slightly flippant here. It's not just about the trustafarian lock on non-profits.
for savvy consumers like Ezra Klein who took advantage of the low price of subsidized state schools, the cost of education as a proportion of its expected returns has never been lower.
Ah, Will's being even more flippant. The undergraduate degree is a loss-leader. If your goal in life is to be a pundit, then it's all you need. Elsewhere, things are a bit different.
There are certain jobs that require postgraduate degrees, but will never pay back the cost of tuition in a timely fashion. I'm not just talking about the academic ivory tower. Many of those jobs are in the public sector, but budgetary constraints will drive people towards more lucrative private practice, or into ancillary applications of their skills.
A PhD psychologist, having racked up $100k or so in loans, is in a very different position from a graduate from med-school or law school. If that psychologist chooses to be part of the social safety net of public health, chances are that loan repayments will swallow up a large proportion of his or her paycheck for the next decade.
Posted by: pseudonymous in nc | Jul 23, 2007 3:28:11 PM
to add to the point- how many times have you heard this "I took the job b/c it has great benefits" or "I took the job because of my student loans." This isn't about self actualization to me. It's about whether we are getting the best productivity out of a system where such efforts are forced because of need rather than a product of ingenuity?
Posted by: akaison | Jul 23, 2007 3:29:17 PM
But there are two different problems being conflated. One is the reduction in personal autonomy from student loans. This is a particular obsession of mine, though I approach it from the opposite direction (short version: The number of kids going to professional schools right out of college is a HUGE problem).
The second is whether many folks are being forced into heavily renumerative professions by conservative public policy -- and given who's going to elite law schools and MBA programs, that doesn't seem credible to me. Maybe Brooks has evidence I haven't seen, but too much of this looks like a way to rationalize decisions we don't necessarily like.
But, again, I need to read the book.
Posted by: Ezra | Jul 23, 2007 3:43:17 PM
It strikes me this whole subject is a bit more complicated than anyone's making it out to be here; I think Ezra's onto something about the belief that health insurance reform or student loan forgiveness would free up a lot of people's decision making is kind of a red herring, but clearly the economics of things work far differently for young people entering the workforce now than even when I did 20 years ago (eeek). Still, I'm among those who think some of this complaining is a bit misplaced: the starving nature of "starving artist" is what it is for a reason, and has been for a long, long time. People choose professions that pay well because, well, they want to be paid well. That's not why we choose to follow our dreams. To some degree, this is about certain levels of expectations, and a good bit of this is not for public policy to solve (going back, really, to our extended debates here on vacations: some of this is cultural, and some of this is about personal tastes). What I, and a good number of older people I talk with, comment on these days is a certain sense of entitlement and "something for nothing" attitudes among the young: a refusal to pay dues, work one's way up, accept that you start low and move higher, not at the top (this is, of course, rather generalized; I don't mean to suggest something particular about folks here). You may have to live in fantastic debt, struggle and scrape to achieve the things that really matter to you. Or, you can go into i-banking. Blaming loans and economics only gets one but so far in figuring out why people are making the choices they make.
Finally, I think teaching, in particular, is a fraught example here, tied up in a larger, complicated debate about our educational systems, our priorities and some issues around teacher training that rarely get discussed. I don't know that for a lot of people choosing a career boils down to banking or teaching. I think for the people who look at teaching, the alternatives don't necessarily look more attractive, but perhaps the more useful test would be comparing teaching to other traditional "woman's professions" like nursing and the other health sciences; I suspect that discrepancy, and the sense that health care pays better with more benefits, is the one worth exploring. And the challenge there, I think, is that if we're serious about healthcare reform, what we're really planning to do is make healthcare jobs pay more closely to teaching. Just something to consider.
Posted by: weboy | Jul 23, 2007 3:55:54 PM
The fact that the stat that beckya57 cites is not adjusted for inflation makes me very skeptical of the evidence in the book
Dude, $2,000 in 1970 money is only a little over $10,000 in 2006 money. That isn't even close to $100,000.
Posted by: joeo | Jul 23, 2007 4:08:42 PM
I just got through reading this, and I thought that it was reasonably compelling, although I'm most likely one of the people that he's talking about. But the argument, that I see it, is not entirely that this particular class of privileged people can't do what they want anymore, it's that rising income equality is getting so bad that even they've been affected. Everyone else, most likely, is entirely underwater. A lot of the book is analysis about the negative effects of reagan/goldwater era regressive tax policy on income distributions. I think that he threw in the other stuff for a more humanistic appeal. Also, to appeal to these people's parents, who have a disproportionate influence on policy. It's light, but I thought that take all together, it's a nice little summation of several nasty trends that make America a less pleasant place to live if you're not a member of the upper-upper class, dressed in enough fluff that people would, you know, actually read it.
The one thing that I think is interesting is that almost every reaction to it from the right has been along the lines of, 'Get a job, you whiny Yalie bastard.', rather than addressing any of the real points that the book makes. The guy is trying to start a conversation about economic inequality and its root causes, and people are lining up ad homininem attacks from both sides, although the left's comments are less vicious.
Posted by: Evan | Jul 23, 2007 4:13:57 PM
money that I'm not sure should be spent subsidizing the educations of the upper middle class.
Ummm, what? The upper middle class are the only people who need help paying for college?
Posted by: Freddie | Jul 23, 2007 4:26:55 PM
What I, and a good number of older people I talk with, comment on these days is a certain sense of entitlement and "something for nothing" attitudes among the young: a refusal to pay dues, work one's way up, accept that you start low and move higher, not at the top
That's understandable, but it's also predicated on an older -- and in some areas, obsolete -- model of what constitutes a career.
The one thing that I think is interesting is that almost every reaction to it from the right has been along the lines of, 'Get a job, you whiny Yalie bastard.', rather than addressing any of the real points that the book makes.
This was a stock-in-trade of a not particularly lamented former commenter here. Pretending it's about 'entitlement' cheapens the debate. There's a certain amount of anti-elitist schadenfreude towards those who were served up the Hobson's choice of graduate debt at a relatively tender age in order to advance themselves in their field. That is, certain faux-blue-collar wingnut types relish the idea of PhDs living in trailers because they're paying off a mortgage's worth of loans.
Posted by: pseudonymous in nc | Jul 23, 2007 4:38:01 PM
The same people who always purposefuly stick their heads in the sand when it comes to class issues will, of course, continue to do so. Most of them benefit from a system where only the upper classes can go to college, and even then only the uber-rich can afford to study the subjects they want or those that produce the most public good. They simply prefer it that way, because if the public is too busy trying to scrape by they can exploit as many people as they want to. The people who don't want to believe this stuff don't want to believe this stuff. No matter how many facts are provided, they always find them weak and unconvincing (or rather, they claim to). No matter how many years wages stagnate, they always find a way to justify it as americans being lazy. Despite never end quarters of record productivity. No matter how low the Average americans income is, they look to averages skewed by massive inequality to justify their claims that college is still affordable for everyone.
to put it bluntly, the scumbags are always going to be scumbags until their made to feel real fear.
Posted by: Soullite | Jul 23, 2007 4:40:28 PM
You'd be better off watching The Trap by Adam Curtis, it's on youtube and google video now:
links here:
http://adamcurtistrap.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Meh | Jul 23, 2007 4:43:08 PM
Its' not only the upper-middle class who go to college, but they disproportionately do, so if you make college free, you're doing a whole lot of subsidizing of their educations.
Posted by: Ezra | Jul 23, 2007 5:04:36 PM
I don't understand your logic Ezra. So your argument is that because the middle class, or as you call it, the upper middle class goes to college too, then that means everyone else, including myself who came from the poor, should be saddled with a huge amount of debt coming out of college. Let's be clear what we are talking about here. Everyone pays a lot in this system, and I would guess when compared to other countries in terms of education ours is as overpriced as your comparison to healthcare. Education is as vital to a thriving economy as healthcare. The social net has to be about the basics that will allow people to compete in a market where it's not about who could previously afford or almost afford education or saddling people with a lot of debt. I also think some of this well in my day crap from folks like weboy is just a bit annoying. Do you know how much educational costs have been going up per- at roughly as I remember almost 7 to 8 percent per year. My law school went up by more than 30 percent from the time I started until I graduated. I don't see how such a system is conductive for either those who want to do non profit or run small businesses.
Posted by: akaison | Jul 23, 2007 5:14:35 PM
Isaac: I don't know if that stat was adjusted for inflation or not, so you may have a point, but it's still a big change either way.
Pseudonymous: I AM a PhD psychologist, and was lucky enough to go to grad school back when government fellowships still existed. (Reagan killed the program a few years after I graduated.) As a result, I graduated without a heavy loan burden (about 10K), and have been free to pursue my preferred public sector jobs as a result. More recently, I went back to school to add an ARNP certification, and had to finance that totally myself. Since I'm well-established now, and had been lucky enough to inherit some money, that wasn't too difficult, but that 2 year degree cost me much more than the PhD did. Had I been younger and less well-off, that would probably have forced me to make choices I would rather not make (e.g. get in bed with the pharm companies).
Posted by: beckya57 | Jul 23, 2007 5:29:46 PM
soullite,
where do you get your liberal boilerplate marketing content? i have holday coming up with some conservative relatives and i'd love to spew that garbage.
Posted by: hmmmm | Jul 23, 2007 5:31:33 PM
Its' not only the upper-middle class who go to college, but they disproportionately do, so if you make college free, you're doing a whole lot of subsidizing of their educations.
A good point Ezra. Especially worth making to those who, like myself, believe that education should be free. OTOH, unless you equate free education with abolishing private colleges and universities, presumably those seeking the social advantages such institutions provide would continue to seek places at them.
Posted by: W.B. Reeves | Jul 23, 2007 5:32:55 PM
where do you get your liberal boilerplate marketing content? i have holday coming up with some conservative relatives and i'd love to spew that garbage.
If the best you can do is to characterize other's opinions as "garbage", your best isn't worth much.
Posted by: W.B. Reeves | Jul 23, 2007 5:43:00 PM
Its' not only the upper-middle class who go to college, but they disproportionately do, so if you make college free, you're doing a whole lot of subsidizing of their educations.
The logic here seems somewhat Moebian to me, Ez. Don't rising college costs account (at least, in part) for why upper-middle class kids make up a disproportionate share of college students?
Posted by: Brian Cook | Jul 23, 2007 5:55:41 PM
Its' not only the upper-middle class who go to college, but they disproportionately do, so if you make college free, you're doing a whole lot of subsidizing of their educations.
'College' is a nebulous term. And as I said upthread, undergraduate education is already something of a loss-leader.
The obvious approach is an expanded loan forgiveness scheme for those who take public sector jobs (or jobs with a high proportion of public-sector funding) that require postgraduate qualifications and board certification.
Posted by: pseudonymous in nc | Jul 23, 2007 6:03:23 PM
Fair enough and my bad. It's still boilerplate though.
Posted by: hmmmm | Jul 23, 2007 6:33:15 PM
