I had a bit of an allergic reaction to Daniel Brook's much-hyped book, The Trap. Far too often, it seemed to be begging public policy to orient itself more towards helping Ezra Klein -- and other white, educated, ambitious do-gooder-types -- who don't need the help. Indeed, there's a whole chapter on how you can no longer be an underemployed intellectual living in a single bedroom in New York, and how that's bad. And maybe it is. But in the list of problems public policy should ameliorate, this didn't seem like one of them:
The catch-22 for today's aspiring intellectuals [in New York] is that you can have the time to do creative work or the money that affords a place to do it, but not both. The only way to make $1,000 monthly rent payments is to have a day job (translating Rimbaud won't cut it); the only way to spend less than $1,000 is to have roommates. The prerequisite for the writing life, what Virginia Woolf famously named "a room of one's own," is now hopelessly out of reach for young writers.
I've got a lot of sympathy in me, but I definitely run out long before I get to unemployed, wannabe writers who need a solo studio in New York from which to pen their first novel. And hell: Does anyone think there's really a paucity of people doing that in New York even as we speak!
That said, the book has some decent policy ideas, and does hook into a serious problem: That do-goodery really doesn't pay enough to support an adult lifestyle, and so we lose talented people from professions we want to keep well-stocked with impressive types. At the very least, college debt and healthcare shouldn't be holding anyone back (on the other hand, the answer to law school debt is for fewer people to go to law school, not for the rest of us to subsidize the indecision of social science majors). For a more generous read of the book's better arguments, see Doron Taussig's review in the latest Washington Monthly.
