Back when Mark Schmitt used to blog more, I would joke about "The Definitive Schmitt," Mark's eventual intervention into a conversation, which would come in around the size of a small novella, somehow integrate the arguments of both sides, and be so analytically clear as to seem to mainly be made of crystallized common sense and distilled good intentions. There are, sadly, fewer Definitive Schmitts these days, but Mark does have one on Daniel Brook's The Trap:
the trap in action [is] often a very lightly reasoned justification for staying on the high-dollar track. And that's my reaction to one of Brook's characters, the 30-ish health-policy consultant who wants to do good but has to work for Big Pharma, because he “wasn't willing to be one of the public servants in the new plutocratic DC...who either forgoes owning a home and raising a family or commutes to work from West Virginia.” That's nonsense. No, he probably couldn't have four kids in private school and a non-working spouse and a five-bedroom house with a brand-new kitchen, so if he can't imagine life without all those things, he may be trapped. If you need to make four to five times the U.S. median income, your choices are indeed limited. But just as Dana points out that it's not impossible in the early years of a career to live on a mainstream non-profit or journalism income, it's also not that difficult later on – even if that path is not always as clear.
There are plenty of people in today's economy, perhaps a majority, who have no choices or very limited choices and are teetering on the edge. Those are the people we should worry about and that public policy should address. The recent graduates of America's elite private universities are not among them. They may have more limited, or different, choices than their elders, but they still have greater range of opportunity to fulfill their own dreams than just about anyone who has ever lived on this planet. That so many of them choose not to exercise that range of options is depressing, but to accept their claim that they are trapped is to perpetuate the very situation that Daniel Brook eloquently decries.
