The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

by Sarah Kendzior

Gentrification spreads the myth of native incompetence: that people need to be imported to be important, that a sign of a neighborhood’s “success” is the removal of its poorest residents.

If you are thirty-five or younger—and quite often, older—the advice of the old economy does not apply to you. You live in the post-employment economy, where corporations have decided not to pay people. Profits are still high. The money is still there. But not for you. You will work without a pay raise, benefits, or job security. Survival is now a laudable aspiration.

Survival is not only a matter of money, it is a matter of mentality—of not mistaking bad luck for bad character, of not mistaking lost opportunities for opportunities that were never really there.

In one of the wealthiest countries in the world, privation should not come with the job description, and survival should not be an aspiration.

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. Talented and hardworking people are denied the ability to contribute, and society is denied the benefits of their gifts. Poverty is not a character flaw. Poverty is not emblematic of intelligence. Poverty is lost potential, unheard contributions, silenced voices.

Wages are not corresponding to demand or credentials. In a post-employment economy, wages are both arbitrary and fixed.

Free speech does not mean deferring to people’s right to abuse you.

With roughly 40 percent of academic positions eliminated since the 2008 crash, most adjuncts will not find a tenure-track job. Their path dependence and sunk costs will likely lead to greater path dependence and sunk costs—and the costs of the academic job market are prohibitive.

It is easy to make people work for less than they are worth when they are conditioned to feel worthless.

College is a promise the economy does not keep—but not going to college promises you will struggle to survive.