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It's not uncommon for a person to enter NYU Law school with the hopes of one day working at the ACLU. By the time they graduate, though, it's also not uncommon for this same person to work at a major corporate firm instead, where they'll enjoy a starting salary of upwards of $150,000 a year. Perks include a hefty life insurance policy, subsidized health insurance, a 401K package, flexible vacation time, door-to-door transportation service and free meals after 8 p.m. I usually interpret this as the de rigueur assimilation practice of a self-perpetuating elite with a highly developed super-ego, or something like that. A harsher critic might call it selling out, something I wouldn't necessarily have disagreed with until I read Daniel Brook's smart and sophisticated rebuttal in The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America.
Such dismissals are beside the point, as Brook convincingly argues. Despite the liberal politics of most students at elite law schools, the majority end up working in service to the powerful, not the poor. This is due in part to the average debt load of law school graduates -- staggering at $84,000 -- and in part to the exorbitant housing costs in major cities. There was once a time, in 1968, when fewer than half of Harvard Law graduates went into private practice. It was also around this time that starting salaries "began to reflect the emergence of the seller's market," Brook writes. "The salary gap has increased because only enormous salaries can win over bright young lawyers who went to law school to take on the powers that be, not serve them."
I know, I know. In an age of compassion fatigue, to sympathize with a handful of well-to-do but morally ambivalent lawyers as opposed to, say, the plight of the Wal-Mart cashier, seems dubious. Such young persons can do whatever they want, we think. And yet, as Brook makes clear, that's simply not true. Just to live a modest life -- with health insurance, homeownership, the ability to send your kids to college -- is outrageously expensive. And this problem is not specific to would-be public interest lawyers. Many would-be academics, teachers and journalists more and more eschew a life of scraping by not to live in the lap of luxury but merely to lead an average middle-class life.
How did this happen exactly? Well, as Brook shows, our ever-flagging economic situation is the result of a series of conservative policies that "have begun rolling back freedom for everyone but the independently wealthy -- even for the talented and fortunate few who have attained a top-notch education. The America conceived by Goldwater and Buckley and built by Reagan and Bush has constrained a generation of talented individuals, enforcing conformity, not unleashing creativity." We would be better off in a more egalitarian society, Brook goes on to say, where we could do the work that mattered to us without the specter of poverty, and speak our minds without the fear of losing our jobs.
To get more to the crux of his argument, I spoke to Daniel Brook at The Half King Pub in New York before his reading on Monday night.
Jeanine Plant: How did you come up with the idea for this book?
Daniel Brook: There are several answers to this question. One is from looking at friends growing up: friends from growing up and friends from college. Out of most of my friends, I am one of the few people actually pursuing what they're interested in, and that struck me as surprising. So that is one way I got into this. Another way is through a program called the Century Institute, which was run by the Century Foundation, which is a think tank here in New York. They had a summer program for progressive college students, kind of like wonk camp. And I took a course on economic inequality, which gave me a lot of material, and got me thinking about the topic. But the attitude of the program was very much: "You guys are fine. You all went to fancy colleges; you don't have to worry about this. But this is a problem for the country. This is a problem for everyone at the bottom, and because you are progressives, you're going to do something about it." And now, today, almost everyone from that program is a corporate lawyer. But then, I was like, this is our problem. We just don't see it, and again, it's sort of how people fall into that trap.
Another reason I wrote the book is family observations. I joke that my parents are part of a class that doesn't exist anymore, sort of like public-interest professionals. My mom was a nursing-home doctor and my dad was a prosecutor. Looking at the generations of my family, since we've been in this country for a hundred years, you see what it was like. My mom's parents were both schoolteachers. They bought a house in Brooklyn. They sent my mom to the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia for medical school. Medical school, they took a loan out against their house, they did. Penn, they paid for with no debt. And the house they grew up in, in not a fancy part of Brooklyn, is now worth over a million dollars. So it's not a house two teachers could afford.
See more stories tagged with: selling out, consumerism, generation x, corporate america, middle class
Jeanine Plant is a New York-based freelance writer.
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