« The Far-Right Court | Main | Time To Attack »
September 19, 2007
The Trap
I had a bit of an allergic reaction to Daniel Brook's much-hyped book, The Trap. Far too often, it seemed to be begging public policy to orient itself more towards helping Ezra Klein -- and other white, educated, ambitious do-gooder-types -- who don't need the help. Indeed, there's a whole chapter on how you can no longer be an underemployed intellectual living in a single bedroom in New York, and how that's bad. And maybe it is. But in the list of problems public policy should ameliorate, this didn't seem like one of them:
The catch-22 for today's aspiring intellectuals [in New York] is that you can have the time to do creative work or the money that affords a place to do it, but not both. The only way to make $1,000 monthly rent payments is to have a day job (translating Rimbaud won't cut it); the only way to spend less than $1,000 is to have roommates. The prerequisite for the writing life, what Virginia Woolf famously named "a room of one's own," is now hopelessly out of reach for young writers.
I've got a lot of sympathy in me, but I definitely run out long before I get to unemployed, wannabe writers who need a solo studio in New York from which to pen their first novel. And hell: Does anyone think there's really a paucity of people doing that in New York even as we speak!
That said, the book has some decent policy ideas, and does hook into a serious problem: That do-goodery really doesn't pay enough to support an adult lifestyle, and so we lose talented people from professions we want to keep well-stocked with impressive types. At the very least, college debt and healthcare shouldn't be holding anyone back (on the other hand, the answer to law school debt is for fewer people to go to law school, not for the rest of us to subsidize the indecision of social science majors). For a more generous read of the book's better arguments, see Doron Taussig's review in the latest Washington Monthly.
September 19, 2007 | Permalink
Comments
What the hell is an "aspiring intellectual" anyway?
Posted by: Hamilton Lovecraft | Sep 19, 2007 4:18:32 PM
"Surfeit" means "excess." I think you mean "shortage."
Posted by: Tim | Sep 19, 2007 4:21:54 PM
Meant paucity -- thanks for the catch.
Posted by: Ezra | Sep 19, 2007 4:23:37 PM
What the hell is an "aspiring intellectual" anyway?
I know plenty.
Posted by: Jason G. | Sep 19, 2007 4:31:27 PM
The real problem is: if anti-sprawl types are right about the need for most people to live in densely populated areas, people in general cannot afford to live in the areas/manner which would be best for society.
Perhaps Ezra's right that it really doesn't matter if some artist-wannabe is priced out of NYC. But if it's better for society that more of us live in NYC and take the subway to work and fewer of us live in auto-dependent suburbia, then it does matter that most people cannot afford $1000/month rents to live in NYC or a similar place.
But since proles are generally too busy actually working to complain and since the squeeky wheel gets the oil, it's good that the artist-wannabes are complaining so at least something is done about the problem (if it actually exists -- people like Michael Lind would argue against urbanization and in favor of population dispersion).
Posted by: DAS | Sep 19, 2007 4:42:25 PM
To push for more mandated vacation time rather than for an economic regime that doesn’t foster a lifestyle overwhelmingly oriented toward work seems a bit bizarre. Isolated pockets of leisure are not substantive boosts in the quality of life. If one believes there’s more to life than making a living, the policies one favors should somehow reflect this belief in a substantial way.
Posted by: jason | Sep 19, 2007 4:49:48 PM
I'll still have to give this a good thumbing through, even if Ezra Klein didn't really like it.
Posted by: david | Sep 19, 2007 4:52:11 PM
I've got a lot of sympathy in me, but I definitely run out long before I get to unemployed, wannabe writers who need a solo studio in New York from which to pen their first novel. And hell: Does anyone think there's really a paucity of people doing that in New York even as we speak!
I think there's a lot fewer artists/writers/entrepreneurs/etc. in America than there should be, in part because current policy makes housing and health care too expensive for these classes of people. For that matter I think there's a lot fewer liberal/leftist pundits and policy wonks than there should be, for mostly related reasons. But hey, as long as Ezra Klein's made it, who cares about anyone else?
Other than that, what DAS said. Even if you genuinely don't give a fuck about artists and writers, you should care that the suburban/exurban lifestyle is ultimately unsustainable. We need to be making it cheaper and easier to live in cities.
Posted by: Christmas | Sep 19, 2007 4:54:03 PM
I would like to know where these $1,000 apartment in NYC are. I rent out a room in my NYC apartment in an OK part of Manhattan for that.
Posted by: Kate | Sep 19, 2007 4:54:30 PM
The problem of affordable housing in cities is a bigger problem than some starving artist in a hovel writing the next great book; it's a basic thing about keeping the working class generally on the edges in first, second and third ring suburbs. It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the starving artist problem, indeed, that hits pretty close to my (non) home these days... but we don't need to solve the housing problem for potential Hemingways, and frankly, casting them as the victims strikes me as a way to harden people's hearts, not open them ("get a job, you lazy gadabout" comes to mind).
Second, I'd dispute even more forcefully this romanticized view of what New York was or what it's become - that "starving artist" culture in Manhattan or Brooklyn died to a large extent in the 1980s, with a few pockets that stretched into the 90s. You just don't see the kind of artsy buzz you used to and examples of the change abound - the closing of CBGB, the condo-ization of the Lower East Side, the election of a series of Mayors meant to "clean up" areas of drug use and crime that existed in large measure due to poor housing stock (one of Giuliani's less heralded changes was redevelopment of Harlem and the East Village). I moved to New York in part because I was drawn to just such romantic notions; by the time I left, 42nd Street was a Disney theme park, Starbucks had outposts in Hell's Kitchen, and Whole Foods had a store in the Bowery. The real energy in the arts has moved, arguably, south and west, along with much of the population. What's left in the northeast is a bunch of rich hippies who want the image of an experience, not the real thing. It's worth keeping in mind when we talk about solutions for artists that we not marry ourselves to the romance of the way it was. Art and creative energy don't need a place, they need room, and the solutions (which are needed) should think about what's next, not what's been.
Posted by: weboy | Sep 19, 2007 4:55:30 PM
My heart bleeds for wannabe "intellectuals" who want to live in NYC but don't want to have day jobs or roommates.
Wait - no it doesn't. I can't believe anyone could write that paragraph - it reads like a parody of what a mid-westerner would think an overprivileged, elitist New Yorker intellectual would write.
Posted by: NonyNony | Sep 19, 2007 4:55:56 PM
I'm sympathetic to your arguments, but here are a couple of counterarguments to consider:
First, if you follow the gentrification trends of New York you see a repeated series of events:
1. The artists get priced out of their current neighborhood and find a rundown neighborhood with cheap rent and move in.
2. The artists establish a hip scene with cool bars and clubs and coffee shops and museums and stuff, and it becomes a desirable neighborhood.
3. Everybody wants to live there, and they move in, driving rents up.
4. The artists get priced out of their current neighborhood and find a cheap, rundown neighborhood with cheap rent and move in.
5. In the meantime, a formerly undesireable neighborhood has been revived, and wealth is created in the sense that property values go up (and landlords make a killing.)
This happened in downtown Manhattan, and as the area between Houston and 14th street gentrified, the artists moved to SoHo. Then they moved to DUMBO. Then they moved to Williamsburg. These days, the artists are getting priced out of Williamsburg.
My point is that the artists are performing a valuable service which is unremunerated. One might argue that there's a missing market which somebody ought to step in and take care of.
Another consideration is simply whether we as a nation want to provide governmental subsidies for the arts. If we do, then finding ways to make it easier for unestablished artists to live on small incomes is arguably a better investment than pouring money into big established organizations with existing financial support.
Posted by: Galen | Sep 19, 2007 4:58:34 PM
The prerequisite for the writing life, what Virginia Woolf famously named "a room of one's own," is now hopelessly out of reach for young writers.
Of course, Woolf wasn't one for libraries.
Art and creative energy don't need a place, they need room, and the solutions (which are needed) should think about what's next, not what's been.
Ding fucking ding.
And again, this is about more than rents: it's about barriers to entry. I'm looking at you, small magazines who love their unpaid interns and Rolodexes. 'Aspiring intellectual' is such an unfortunate phrase: if you want to think and write, then you think and write: you'll write in coffeeshops and diners and libraries. And of course, Ezra's living proof that a blog will get you noticed. But then comes the stumbling block: if there's no money to support you during that internship, or no friends in the city to offer a couch or floor, you're likely to be stuck.
Posted by: pseudonymous in nc | Sep 19, 2007 5:05:52 PM
Wait - no it doesn't. I can't believe anyone could write that paragraph - it reads like a parody of what a mid-westerner would think an overprivileged, elitist New Yorker intellectual would write.
I'm catching a whiff of "Dirty Fucking Hippies" syndrome.
Posted by: Christmas | Sep 19, 2007 5:07:21 PM
Well, Jesus Christ. I live in NYC, and I've had roommates the entire time.
And guess what. I've always had a room to myself.
It's not like me and some random guy from craigslist are thrown into a dorm room together. From the three places I've lived, I've had a bedroom to myself and had to share a bathroom, kitchen, and living room. Isn't that pretty normal?
Like many failed writers in NYC, my inability to produce anything of worth is because I'm a drunk, not because I don't have a one bedroom apartment.
Posted by: Stu | Sep 19, 2007 5:15:54 PM
i lived in new york city in the sixties and seventies, and it certainly was not inexpensive to live there then, either.
...my best friend lived in soho in the sixties and though the rents were inexpensive, she took her life in her hands entering and leaving at night.
...i remember my last flu in new york city, waiting for the bus that never came in a snowstorm, with my umbrella turned inside out, my fever rising by the minute, watching the taxis go by that i couldnt afford, and they were all filled anyway, thinking...manhattan is great if you are rich.
time to move on.
...i bet even montmartre was expensive in the time of toulouse-lautrec. (i have no actual evidence of that)..just thinking of the consumptive waifs in the garret in la boheme.)
....i also believe that creative artists and writers could paint and write inside a cardboard box and be just fine.
look at thoreau in a cabin in the woods.
...being an artist has never been easy.
economics being the least of it.
Posted by: jacqueline | Sep 19, 2007 5:18:03 PM
jacqueline - Exactly. And Manhattan is great if you are rich - and even more fun if you're rich and call yourself an "artist", even if, like Stu, your art is mostly how you liven up a party. :)
Posted by: weboy | Sep 19, 2007 5:24:22 PM
Like many failed writers in NYC, my inability to produce anything of worth is because I'm a drunk, not because I don't have a one bedroom apartment.
I likes: best thing I've read on the internets all week. Way to go, Stu! You should definitely use that line in your next failed novel.
Posted by: Jasper | Sep 19, 2007 5:33:19 PM
Artists and intellectuals could always migrate to a city with cheaper rents, like Chicago, and live like kings! Damn hell ass kings!
Posted by: Royko | Sep 19, 2007 5:33:19 PM
Stu certainly livened up this party. Thanks!
Posted by: mutakhalef | Sep 19, 2007 5:34:07 PM
I'm catching a whiff of "Dirty Fucking Hippies" syndrome.
I don't get it. All of the "Dirty Fucking Hippies" I know have roommates. Some of them practically live in communes they have so many roommates. And many of them have day jobs. And some of them are actually writers.
None of them, however, whine about the fact that they need to have day jobs or roommates to pay their rent.
Posted by: NonyNony | Sep 19, 2007 5:51:20 PM
Law school is what I've been going for since I was 20 years old Ezra. If I didn't have that I'd have no marketable intellectual skills (except my admittedly raw but slightly above average talent as a fiction writer, and ability to opine on everything) despite my intelligence.
Jesus. Thanks.
Posted by: MNPundit | Sep 19, 2007 6:15:54 PM
But if it's better for society that more of us live in NYC and take the subway to work and fewer of us live in auto-dependent suburbia, then it does matter that most people cannot afford $1000/month rents to live in NYC or a similar place.Except that one-bedroom apartments are terrible for society (all those fully furnished kitchens and bathrooms going unused 90% of the time, for starters), and artist wannabes with no job aren't so hot either. And with this thing called "The Internet" there's no requirement that you must to live in NYC to create art.
Living alone in NYC is not the only way to live in NYC; living alone without a job in NYC is *definitely* not the only way to live in NYC. And living alone without a job in NYC is definitely, definitely not the only (or probably even best) way to create art of lasting merit, so why should we give a damn whether it's an economically viable lifestyle or not?
Posted by: Chris | Sep 19, 2007 6:37:42 PM
I am not understanding your point about law school. How would fewer people going reduce the debt of the ones who did? Unless you think only the people whose parents can pay their tuition ought to go?
Posted by: Emma Anne | Sep 19, 2007 7:08:12 PM
It should be noted that many places have loan-forgiveness programs in place for law students who go on to work in public interest.
Posted by: Jason G. | Sep 19, 2007 7:12:17 PM
