An interview with author Daniel Brook offers us answers on why so many progressives get roped into the corporate world.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.
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