Scott Winship crunches some numbers:
Brook notes that the proportion of middle-income neighborhoods in twelve central cities was halved between 1970 and 2000, leaving just 23% of neighborhoods middle-income. This finding is his primary evidence that the problem of housing affordability he notes isn't just about competition for a few hipster neighborhoods.
But "middle-income" in the Brookings Institution report he cites refers to neighborhoods that are nicer than those he has in mind. A Washington D.C. neighborhood was "middle-income" in 2000 if its typical household made between $58,000 and $87,000. The sorts of neighborhoods Brook's young idealists and artists are likely to search out are "low income" by the report's definition, with typical incomes between $36,000 and $58,000 in D.C. The proportion of neighborhoods that were "low income" actually grew from 34 percent to 38 percent in the twelve cities included in the Brookings study, even as the share of "low income" households was constant. In other words, Brook's heroes had more affordable options in 2000, not fewer.
Indeed, I sort of agree with Winship that, at the end of the day, The Trap is really a normative, cultural argument posing as an economic analysis. "Brook," Winship writes, "gets bogged down in his disapproval of Americans' consumerism and aspirations for upward mobility." The book seems to really disapprove of people going to law school and medical school and McKinsey. As such, it's searching for an explanation of why they make these bad, semi-immoral, choices, and settles on the idea that they can't afford to live any other way. But what if they just like making a lot of money, and having high economic status? And that's relatively more important to them than saving the world?
They may be making the wrong choice. It may be that global warming, or Darfur, or the health care crisis, are such acute problems that wandering off to do management consulting is akin to dodging the draft. I'd be interested in reading a book taking issue with the materialist striving that's gripped much of my generation. But chalking it up to economic determinism both robs folks of agency that Im pretty sure they have, and, if you believe their choices are wrong, let's them off the hook too easily.
