Low-paid, liberal, nonprofit yuppies unite: you have nothing to lose but your chains.

• Author: Taussig, Doron
• Position: The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America - Book review

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The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America by Daniel Brook Times Brooks, 274 pp.

When Daniel Brook and I first spoke about his book, the conversation morphed quickly into what I imagine a therapy session to be. He even compared me to my parents. We were sitting in a bar in Philadelphia, and Brook was delivering what by then must have been a very practiced spiel. His book, he said, was about young, educated people who want to go into either public service, advocacy, or creative work, but increasingly find that they can't stay in those fields and maintain a basic, middle-class lifestyle.

It just so happened that I had asked to see Brook, and bought him a beer, precisely because I was a young, educated person beginning to find that I couldn't stay in my field and maintain a basic, middle-class lifestyle. Brook used to write for the same alt-weekly paper I write for now, and though our tenures didn't overlap and I hardly knew him, I knew he was making a go of it as a journalist in Philadelphia, without selling stories on, say, perfect abs to Cosmo. This was no small accomplishment, and I'd been hoping to learn his secret. Instead, I began talking about myself.

"That sounds like me," I said.

Brook nodded knowingly, and asked about my background. I told him that my parents both work for the government--my father's an attorney for the City of New York, my mother's a public school teacher. They raised me in Queens Village, Queens.

"And could you buy their house from them?" he asked.

Of course, he already knew the answer. He was asking to make a point: I had been looking at things through the narrow lens of my ambition. Brook has been trying to get people like me to see a bigger picture.

If talking to Brook was like visiting a therapist, reading his book was like finding an entry in the DSM that sounds suspiciously familiar. The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America opens with two case studies. One is the irony-soaked story of Pam Perd, a member of the tongue-in-cheek protest group Billionaires for Bush. "Pam" puts in long, unpaid hours coordinating public relations for her organization; to support the work, she holds a job handling PR for Fortune 500 companies--as Brook puts it, "mere millionaires for Bush." She'd prefer to work for a nonprofit, of course. But that kind of gig wouldn't pay for her current, relatively modest lifestyle of a fifth-floor walkup in the East Village and the hope of someday raising a family.

The other case is a twenty-seven-year-old activist named Claire, a former Fulbright scholar who makes $35,000 a year for her work at a nonprofit combating the global traffic of sex workers. Technically, this is a middleclass salary, but in New York (where Claire needs to be in order to lobby the United Nations), it's hardly enough. Factor in school debt, and Claire has to wait tables on weekends just to afford a shared apartment in Queens. Should she wish to have a family, the math would no longer work.

Pam and Claire may seem like people on widely divergent paths, but Brook sees them as two victims of the same pernicious circumstance. In today's hyper-capitalist America, he argues, the basic touchstones of a middle-class life--health insurance, a quality education for one's children, and home ownership, particularly within reasonable commuting distance of a metropolitan center--have become exorbitantly expensive. At the same time, the compensation gap between people dedicating their lives to the public good and those dedicating their lives to corporate enrichment has grown immensely. And so a generation of young, educated people who want to do good in the world is forced to choose between material sacrifice (Claire) and spiritual sacrifice, or "selling out" (Pam).

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