The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-take-all America - Hardcover

Daniel Brook is a journalist whose writing has appeared in Harper’s, Dissent, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Boston Globe, among other
publications. Brook was a finalist in the 2003 Livingston Awards for Young
Journalists and won the 2000 Rolling Stone College Journalist Competition while a student at Yale. He lives in Philadelphia.

Daniel Brook is a journalist whose writing has appeared in Harper's, Dissent, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Boston Globe, among other
publications. Brook was a finalist in the 2003 Livingston Awards for Young
Journalists and won the 2000 Rolling Stone College Journalist Competition while a student at Yale. He lives in Philadelphia.

Introduction
 
THE PAM PERD GENERATION
 
Waiting on the drink line at a wedding reception, I explained the premise of this book to my ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend. From the social circumstances alone, I was not expecting a sympathetic hearing. Having been tipped off by the groom that the new boyfriend worked on Wall Street for Lehman Brothers, and seeing his advantage in height and weight, I hoped he wasn't a belligerent drunk. To my relief, he greeted my ideas with enthusiasm (and sobriety). " 'Sellout' is harsh," he said, "but it's not too strong a word." A leftist with a liberal arts degree, he had gone to Wall Street after years stuck in unpaid internship limbo convinced him to give up on his dream of a career as a muckraking journalist. "That's how hegemony works," he offered, referencing a key concept of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist theorist. "The system can contain all of the dissenters."
 
This seemingly surprising exchange no longer surprised me. During my months of interviewing young professionals, I often felt as if I was hearing the same joke over and over--the one about the anticorporate corporate lawyer; or the anticonsumerist adman; or the Lehman Brothers leftist. Each time, the joke got a little less funny. And in the end, I still enjoyed its first telling the most.
 
My first interview had been with Pam Perd, who served as national director of public relations for Billionaires for Bush, the tongue-in-cheek "pro-Bush" activist group, during the last presidential campaign. To lampoon administration policies that exacerbate economic inequality, the Billionaires, who go by clever noms de guerre, protest in tuxedos and evening gowns, smoking cigars and wielding wads of fake cash. Pam Perd came late to the group; her favorite name, Lucinda Regulations, was already taken.
 
While serving as national PR director often meant putting in upward of forty hours a week, the work was all pro bono. Pam already had a full-time salaried position: doing PR for mere millionaires for Bush. In her day job, Pam handled public relations for Fortune 500 companies at one of the largest public relations firms in the world.
 
"I was very, very happy to hear that my main client did not give money to the Bush campaign. That made me smile. But overall I know a lot of our clients at my firm absolutely did give to the Bush campaign and that makes me uncomfortable," the jean jacket-clad thirty-one-year-old confessed in her local coffee shop, on the edge of Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan's East Village. "It makes me question what I'm doing and why, but at the same time I also know I need to survive. I need to feed myself and house myself. So you have to do what you have to do. That's why you end up having two lives."
 
Despite her day job helping giant corporations push product, Pam eschews consumerism in her own life, living simply in a fifth-floor walk-up studio apartment. Her income gives her financial security, not a ritzy lifestyle. "I'm going to want to have a family and I have to prepare for that," Pam says, referring to rising college tuition costs. Her two lives, she admits, are a compromise: "I would much prefer to work in the nonprofit world where I'd be able to work on issues that I feel very passionately about, but at the same time, the nonprofit world is not going to pay me what I need to make to feel comfortable and have a sense of security."
 
I met Pam on one of the handful of perfect spring days allotted to New York City each year. I had last been to Tompkins Square Park the previous fall, having happened upon a reading of Allen Ginsberg's poetry, part of the annual Howl Festival of East Village Arts. I took my seat on a park bench as a young poet howled the eponymous poem, mourning the destruction of "the best minds of my generation," by a system Ginsberg dubbed "Moloch," after the fiery-eyed Babylonian idol lit from within by the smoldering flesh of sacrificed children. "Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!" the poet raged. "Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!" The reading was sponsored by the Discover Card.
 
From the introductory bios it became clear that none of the readers at the festival lived in the East Village. Instead, they hailed from places like Brooklyn, Philadelphia, even Poughkeepsie--the very places young poets fled to the East Village from in the beatnik era. In today's East Village, where a sign on a nearly completed condominium informed passersby that units were available "from $3.2 million to over $12 million," there are no poets, only millionaires and people like Pam.
 
 
Claire, a twenty-seven-year-old activist, can't afford to live in the East Village. In fact, she can barely afford to be an activist. "I'm pretty anxious about it and often have the sense that I can't hold out much longer, that I just have to find a position that may compromise some of my political views," she told me. With a public policy degree and a Fulbright under her belt, Claire now works at a nonprofit in Jackson Heights, Queens, that combats the trafficking of sex workers around the globe. "This job's been a dream come true in that it's within my value system to work alongside the people that you ultimately advocate for," she explained, her mild face radiating concern not just for her clients but for herself as well. On paper, her $35,000-a-year salary puts her squarely within the middle class. But a middle-class salary can't buy a middle-class life in a major American city these days. To make ends meet, Claire works fourteen hours each weekend taking reservations at Café des Artistes, a long-established French restaurant on the Upper West Side, where the only artistes to be found are on the waitstaff.
 
"It's a confusing time. I'm not sure how I got into this position," she told me over dosas at an inexpensive South Indian restaurant near her office. "I always thought in grad school and with a Fulbright that I would end up having a pretty different lifestyle now." Claire had gotten a full ride for graduate school and her Fulbright grant covered living expenses while she conducted research on trafficking in Chile, but years of just covering costs meant that her undergrad debt never got paid off. Today, Claire works seven days a week to share an apartment in Long Island City with an editorial assistant at Random House.
 
Claire knows she could earn more--considerably more--if she sold out, abandoning her human rights work for a corporate job. But that would mean abandoning work on a problem she has spent years preparing herself to combat. She could also leave New York for cheaper pastures, but that would mean abandoning the potential for global impact that comes with having the United Nations a few subway stops from the office. With her skills, talents, and passion, Claire has found her calling. Yet she doesn't know how much longer she can afford to follow it.
 
 
Despite their divergent careers and incomes, Pam and Claire have a lot in common. They were both born middle class--Pam to a pair of financial planners on Long Island; Claire to a high school teacher and a professor in New Mexico. They both attended selective private colleges. They are both politically progressive, well educated, and drawn to big-city life. And they both faced the same hard choice but made different decisions. Pam earns a comfortable living but pays the psychological price of doing a job she doesn't believe in; Claire finds her work fulfilling but pays the economic price of just getting by.
 
A generation ago, these two women would have earned similar incomes and would have likely lived in the same neighborhood--say, the Upper West Side. These days, in a more class-stratified city and nation, they can't. If they came together socially, it...