Author sees stark choice: Serve society, or sell out

Author Daniel Brook takes a seat inside Center City's glitzy El Vez restaurant to survey a population he's been studying for years: scores of young professionals who have turned out for happy hour. Fresh from the idealistic college years and wearing fancy clothes, they're enjoying $3 sangrias and free hors d'oeuvres, laughing like they've got it made.

Brook begs to differ. In his new book, The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All-America (Times Books), Brook argues that while small luxuries from sangria to Ikea may come cheap these days, the ballooning costs of education, housing and health care are likely to drive talented twentysomethings into a Faustian bargain with corporate America.

Forget the graduation speech about changing the world. Public-spirited jobs in teaching, social work and government now pay a thin fraction of salaries in the corporate world, where Ivy Leaguers can pull down six figures straight out of college. In an ever-more-unequal society, Brook says, the message to the best and brightest is unequivocal: Sell out.

Or as Brook puts it: "Forget about saving America. Save yourself."

It wasn't always this way, Brook explains: "In 1970, someone starting at a big-city corporate law firm made just $2,000 more than a starting teacher in a big-city school. Today that salary gap is $100,000."

So when the under-30 crowd at El Vez decides to buy a house or educate their kids, the big-salary sellouts among them will drive up prices for real estate and private schools, Brook says, asserting that it's precisely this dynamic that has made middle-class life impossible in cities such as San Francisco and New York.

Brook, 29, is a former Philadelphia City Paper staff writer and a contributor to Harper's. The son of a New York City prosecutor, he's less a "lifestyle liberal" than an old-fashioned populist, cocksure and combative, concerned with hard issues of wealth and power. The Trap is very much in the vein of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas?, a bestseller from 2004.

Brook began writing The Trap, his first book, after seeing classmates at Yale surrender their progressive ideals in order to make ends meet.

But in sympathizing with elite sellouts, Brook takes a risk. The usual stance of the social critic is to pillory the privileged - especially if the critic himself is a Yale man. Since the book's debut in June, some reviewers have sneered at well-paid sellouts like Erik, an NYU Law School grad in the book. Though he aspired to be a civil rights crusader, Erik says his tuition debt drove him to sign up instead with a Manhattan law firm famed for busting unions.

"Pity the poor sellouts," read a critical review in the San Francisco Chronicle. "Society made them do it."

Brook counters that pity isn't his point. He studies sellouts the same way coal miners watched their canaries. If these well-educated young professionals must pay heavy social penalties for choosing public service, he says, we've all got a problem.

Brook traces the trend to Republican policies designed to foster individual wealth.

Over the last 30 years, he argues, policies pursued by the GOP have flattened the once-progressive income-tax system so that, according to the New York Times, the nation's 400 richest families now pay the same percentage of their income as families making $50,000 to $75,000. This de facto flat tax is one reason incomes at the top have flown away, Brook says, while those in the middle stagnate.

Meanwhile, the notion of meritocracy takes a beating. Elite universities raise tuition north of $30,000, and according to one study, Brook says, fully 74 percent of their students come from the richest fourth of American families. The idea of publicly funded education based on merit, invented here by Thomas Jefferson, is routinely dismissed in the United States as a European welfare frill.

The trap leads progressives to work against their ideals. Just across from El Vez, Brook points out the headquarters of Philadelphia's hippest advertising agency. While the staff is likely packed with left-leaning art school graduates, he says, they spend their days churning out ads for a major tobacco company, which in turn makes campaign contributions to the Republican Party.

"I'm sure there are some people in there who are somewhat queasy about what they do all day," Brook says.

In sum, Brook sees a corporate takeover of America that is changing our nation in ways that even corporate types should regret.

His solution is to correct the mechanisms of inequality one by one. Start with guaranteed health care. Increase public funding of education. Cut the money out of politics. He's unabashed in his admiration for the post-New Deal 1950s.

Yet he realizes that, down the road, he may be forced into the same trap as others. Self-employment is difficult with a family, considering astronomical health care costs and huge college bills, he says.

"My lifestyle is sustainable for now, but wouldn't be if I were to start a family," he wrote in an e-mail. "Would I start writing ads for ExxonMobil if I had a few kids? Hard to say.

"I feel incredibly fortunate to have not hit the wall yet, as so many of my friends have. But it's scary to think how far up the socioeconomic spectrum you have to go to escape these pressures. . . . We're truly becoming a society in which only the inheritors of great wealth have control over their lives."

Brook's argument is a large one, at times larger than readers may accept from a non-economist. And it's one to which conservatives will no doubt object.

But simply accepting that the rich will always get richer, and that they will dominate our educational and political systems, Brook argues, "is basically giving up on the whole point of America."