Customer Reviews

The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America

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1 star:		(6)

 

 

It is evident that a number of these reviewers have not read the book. The Trap is not about the selfish rants of idealistic recent college grads seeking a life of starving activism. It is about a pervasive crisis facing America, where it is becoming ever harder to live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle and pursue a meaningful career, even after graduating from a top-class college and holding a steady professional job.

The book begins discussing a national PR director who took a job she doesn't enjoy in order to make enough money just to raise a family, "feel comfortable and have a sense of security." Chapter one profiles a computer programmer with a six-figure income who qualified for affordable housing in the town where he works. We also meet a teacher who, like many, can no longer afford to live in his own school district.

Chapter two features a "master's degree-toting professional married to a Harvard-educated lawyer" in Washington D.C. who is worried about how she will afford to have a house and raise a family in the nation's hyper-gentrified capital. Born in Denmark she "grew up thinking that part of social justice is you can...afford some pretty basic things like decent schooling."

In Chapter five we meet an aspiring tech industry entrepreneur in California, a government-hands-off libertarian, who is finding the path of starting his own business (the bread an butter of a free-market economy) almost impossible because of the high costs of entry including prohibitively expensive health insurance.

The Trap also discusses lawyers and investment bankers, many of whom hoped to do more productive things with their lives, finding no other way to raise a family and pay off their colossal college loans than to join a corporate firm. There they work as essentially glorified secretaries doing menial tasks, working every waking hour in a job they hate, unable to enjoy their lives.

The Trap explains, with substantive data, that today's struggles of all but the wealthy is a pervasive problem. Today's America makes entrepreneurship ever more difficult, and forces the nation's best and brightest into a select few professions where their skills, intellect and creativity are barely put to use.

But it was not always this way, The Trap explains. Our current crisis is the result of generations of new tax policy, reducing the burden of the wealthy, and putting greater and greater burden upon the middle class. College tuition, healthcare, home prices and other basic expenses have risen exponentially, while middle-class incomes have been simultaneously falling.

The Trap also discusses how this crisis does not just affect the middle class. Understanding the nature of the crisis raises critical concerns about how we can even begin to think that America can provide opportunity for those born into poverty if those privileged enough to attain a good education and professional career have trouble making ends meet. After reading The Trap, it becomes clear that the solutions of reversing the failed tax policies of recent generations will be necessary to bring the American dream back within reach of all hard-working Americans.

This book struck a strong chord for me personally. I have plenty of friends in this position, trapped in the "golden handcuffs." I also find myself in "the trap," having graduated from a US News and World Report top-ten college, holding a professional job with a decent salary and benefits, and yet living in an efficiency apartment, finding it difficult just to pay my bills each month, including exorbitant college loans. I come from a middle-class family, I do not have a trust fund, and in my mid-twenties I see no economic feasibility in the near future of buying a house or raising a family.

The Trap is for all the members of my generation who cannot figure out why the American dream is eluding us. It is also for the boomer generation, like my friends' parents, who cannot figure out why their children are making decent incomes and cannot afford a home--why it is so much harder today than it was for them.

The Trap is surely one of the most important pieces of social criticism to be written in the past decade. I hope it is only the beginning of a true discussion about the crisis imposed on America by now several generations of failed social and economic policies. I also hope it starts us on the road to rethinking those policies and ushering in a new and more hopeful era.

This book is a great counter-intuitive look at how growing income disparity in the United States is hurting all of us, not just those trying to make ends meet with minimum wage. And it's not just 20-something independent filmmakers who are now struggling to pay the rent (although Brook does profile plenty of them) it's the district attorney who stops putting criminals behind bars to work in a corporate law firm to make ends meet. Teachers who can't even afford to buy a home in the city they teach in.

Investment bankers, corporate attorneys and software engineers are all vital to the economy, but that doesn't mean they should be the only people who can afford to pay off their college loans, buy a house and (gasp!) maybe let one of the parents stay home and raise the kids. With the world we live in today, I for one want the people who commit their lives to community service or who work for the government--analyzing terrorist threats, tracking down tax cheats and making sure the medicine and food (and toothpaste) we consume aren't tainted--are the best qualified, best educated people available, not just those born rich or altruistic enough to take a cut in pay for work they think is important.

With a mix of economics, sociology and anecdotal reporting, Brook does a great job showing how the skyrocketing costs of health care, education and housing, combined with (and caused by) the shift in the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle-class, is hurting us all. President Bush says that community service should replace big government intervention; that's fine, but as Brook shows, America's economy is making it increasingy hard for people to even do that.

So said Oscar Wilde and such is the moral of this book.

In many ways, its touching - there are still people who'd like to teach kids, care for the sick or probe the secrets of the universe. But the burgeoning corporate elite with their astronomical salaries are driving the price of quality education, housing and healthcare sky high. So indulge yourself helping humanity and your kids will be lucky to afford community college. Welcome to a system where the best minds of our generation are trawling the tax code for loopholes, while we import math teachers from India.

But - I hear you cry - surely day-traders benefit society too, filling the supermarket shelves with inexpensive paper doilies and fat-free lard, 'lobbying' politicians and betting on Pork Belly futures? Brook wouldn't deny it - his point is that the pay disparity is hurting everybody else.

Brook's book is punchy and witty and uncomfortable and validating. His ideas for restoring the balance don't require a Marxist revolution. Read it and send it anonymously to a friend. Everybody will recognize a part of their own history in this book.

What some reviewers have missed is the main point of The Trap; It should be possible for a salary to cover a comfortable lifestyle, medical coverage, education and security in old age. Now, thanks to the corporate takeover of our society (unlike other first world societies) we are loosing ground faster than we can recover it. Our middle class has been under persistent siege and has been flattened. Our children face a bleak future while too many Americans have been blinded by rightwing rhetoric about American individualism. Americans were community based barn-builders.

Get a job? Where? All our jobs have been sold to the lowest bidder overseas.

This is an important book on an important issue: How are America's best and brightest choosing their careers? Brook argues persuasively that parts of America's system are leading America's best and brightest to not take the risks which reward us the full benefit of their talents. Two of these are:
1. Non-universal / unaffordable health care. No one should have to gamble with access to medical care. But if you want to start your own business, or become self-employed, this is exactly what you are doing. America is the only industrialzed country without universal health care.
2. The cost of higher education is exorbinant. People who pursue higher education graduate with a mountain of debt. And when they have children, they are faced with the cost of their children's tuition as well.
Again, this high cost of higher education is unique in the industrialized world to America.

The result is that young people who are entering the work force - indeed, our most educated ones - are encouraged to take the highest paying jobs possible. This is instead of striking out on their own to try to start their own companies or do public service. As Brook points out, this is in contrast to past generations of Americans.

The book is at its best when it focuses on these issues in the context of a socialogical phenomenon. Many people will read this book and view their own career chocies thru the lense that this book provides.

At points, though, the book strongly views the world politically: Left, Right, Liberal and Conservative. Those of us who are less passionate about politics than Brook (or, possibly, just less liberal) may feel alientated by some of these passages. This is unfortunate, since it detracts from the central message of the book.

There seems to be quite a negative marketing campaign against this book. If you read through the majority bad reviews, you see they're all on the same theme, that the author should grow up and face reality, and some are word-for-word duplicates under different reviewer names. I wonder why conservatives are afraid of ideas.

Many of the things mentioned in this book are enough to anger most conservative defenders of the status quo in America. And honestly, they have a right to oppose these claims. The thought that the values in america have changed from hard work and doing an important job like teaching equating to decent (or at the very least livable) pay, to the new neocon standard of 'The job is worth whatever the market will give it, regardless of its value to society' is a tough sell to a lot of people. Especially the well off people who could care less about their kids education, or the healthcare of the poor, or even how many police officers protect their homes. The message of this book is lost to them. But then, its not they who need to pay attention to this. Its the younger generation. The millions of college graduates who are entering a market were no educated person wants to teach, or be a police officer or health care provider (whos not a well paid doctor) because the pay isnt worth it. The young people above all should read this book and see how bad the extreme-right self-proclaimed-libertarians have made life in this country. This is now a place where the same people who complain about illegal immigrants taking their jobs applaud the outsourcing of their families careers, where the value of a person is determined on their income, regardless of whether they are putting the fires out on your house, treating your wounds in the hospital, or teaching your kids.

I recommend this book to anyone entering or preparing for entering the job market in america. IGNORE the critics on these pages. Much like many on the right nowadays in america, they blindly support their political mentality to the bain of their and their childrens futures. A metaphor for what this book is telling.

The US is losing to China, India, et al because our bright kids cannot make it to engineering, the sciences, mathematics, teaching, etc. If they are to have a decent family life, they must go into business and then will hasten the day when the world's only source of strength comes from overseas. We are the losers today and the only chance our children will have to stay out of penury is to hear and heed thinkers like Daniel Brook. This is the best analysis of our society and the damage conservatism has done to it that I have yet to read. Thank you Daniel.

For me, the main point of this book is to support a meritocracy of creative people in America at a crucial point in history when it should be a national imperative. Brook clearly outlines the systemic economic, and political barriers to creativity that impede America's single strategic and global advantage - good ole' Yankee ingenuity. While freedom vs. equality is an important debate- and essential to a real meritocracy - the larger debate now is about promoting American innovation and international relationships in a global context. American leadership needs a full strategic audit that requires a good look at our national social contract to promote creative merit. Rich kids getting richer on inheritence and conventional thinking (like our current commander-in-chief) is not the answer. I don't mind at all that Brook seems to have a chip on his shoulder. We all should. Look around! It's a new world. We need a new strategic America. Achieve that, and it just may become a more humane America too.

The Trap is just lucidly and engagingly written (my students like the way examples are woven through), and it really introduces and handles sophisticated political-economic concepts wonderfully. (I assigned this book in a general Sociology course full of nonmajors, and the undergraduates all loved this book.)

Brook deconstructs the politicized dichotomy of "equality v. freedom", showing how policies packaged as "freedom"-maximizing are anything but for most citizens. The work is based in modern history, but normally history-averse young people can easily relate to the problems it highlights--not only the misguided criticism of modern young adults as innately greedy solipsists, but especially the shackling price of sky-rocketing education debt (among other debt-engorging solutions to trying to grow the economy while increasing inequality and pulverizing working class power).

For example, one important concept that Brook introduces is the relationship between inequality and what Robert Frank ("Falling Behind" 2005) calls "cost cascades"--how rising inequality radically inflates the price of necessary conspicuous consumption goods and services (like houses and education). Related, vital discussions introduced and facilitated by Brook include how high inequality is incompatible with human rights such as health, as Richard G. Wilkinson's work (eg "The Impact of Inequality" 2005) illuminates. These books, along with Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson's (2007) "Social Murder", Naomi Klein's (2007) "The Shock Doctrine" and Steven Hiatt's (2007) "A Game as Old as Empire" would provide a firecracker set of discussions on the prevailing privatization of profit/socialization of risk system.

However, despite Brook's thoughtful discussion of the role of right-wing social movement organization in forming contemporary political economic conditions, and the need for countermovement to effect change, a professor of course needs to work hard to reinforce Brook and get the students to see that people can organize for progressive ends (and disrupt inequality-reinforcing institutions) as well.