The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

by Sarah Kendzior

transforming personal wealth into professional credentials.

In the post-employment economy, jobs are privileges, and the privileged have jobs.

Unpaid internships lock out millions of talented young people based on class alone. They send the message that work is not labor to be compensated with a living wage, but an act of charity to the powerful, who reward the unpaid worker with “exposure” and “experience.” The promotion of unpaid labor has already eroded opportunity—and quality—in fields like journalism and politics. A false meritocracy breeds mediocrity.

as wealth morphs into merit before our eyes.

The job you work increasingly reflects the money you already had.

Mistaking wealth for virtue is a cruelty of our time. By treating poverty as inevitable for parts of the population, and giving impoverished workers no means to rise out of it, America deprives not only them but society as a whole.

Forty percent of Americans now make less than minimum wage workers did in 1968, the year King died.

Claims you were pushed, or you were born so far down you could not climb up, were dismissed as excuses of the lazy. This is the way many saw their world before it collapsed.

To be eligible for WIC, one’s income must be below 185 percent of the U.S. poverty income. A near majority of American households now meet this criterion, despite the unemployment rate hovering at 7.3 percent.

When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatize those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.

Walmart, whose six heirs to the company fortune have as much wealth as the bottom 42 percent of Americans, pays its workers salaries so low that many qualify for food stamps.

It is a path that encourages citizens to depend on arbitrary generosity while decrying stable programs that help people through tough times. It trades in racial stereotypes, portraying the poor as lazy, violent, and “undeserving” of either assistance or the benefit of the doubt.

the baby boomers who can buy their children opportunities as the system they created screws the rest.

Dependence may be the primary trait of the millennial generation, but it is a structural dependence, caused not by “laziness” or “narcissism” but by a lack of options or social mobility.

According to a report from the New America Foundation, colleges give “merit aid” to wealthy students who can afford to pay nearly full tuition at the expense of aid to low-income students. The goal is to increase the university’s prestige by building an affluent student body.

Here is how raising a child in America has changed over the past decade. Between 2004 and 2010, the average out-of-pocket costs for childbirth rose fourfold, making American deliveries the costliest in the world.

Over the past few decades, the U.S. has turned into a country where the circumstances into which you are born increasingly determine who you can become. Social mobility has stalled as wages stagnate and the cost of living soars.

so revealing of the values of his generation, and so alien to the experience of mine.

Only 3.8 percent of American families make more than $200,000 per year. But at Harvard University, 45.6 percent of incoming freshmen come from families making $200,000 or more.

At George Washington University, students who cannot pay full tuition are put on a wait list while wealthier students are let in. In 2012, less than 1 percent of wait-listed students were admitted.

What they are defending is a system in which wealth is passed off as merit, in which credentials are not earned but bought. Aptitude is a quality measured by how much money you can spend on its continual reassessment.

The $800,000 figure came from a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco showing that the average U.S. college graduate will earn at least $800,000 more than the average high school graduate, and that “college is still worth it.” The report relied mainly on twentieth-century data, drawing conclusions from a short-lived period in U.S. history when college was cheaper and wages were higher.