NPR: My Constant Companion

I just can’t get enough of the agitprop the flows forth from the reports of National Public Radio. Yesterday, that bastion of anti-capitalist business news, Marketplace, ran a piece on Strapped, a book that claims to unpack, explain and remedy (or at least offer a remedy) for the economic bind that many 20- and 30-somethings claim to find themselves in. According to the interview, today’s yuppies are caught in a bind between their student loans and a flat job market and finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. At one point the interviewer asks author Tamara Draut, without any irony, “Why is it so much more difficult for your generation to make it economically than it has been for earlier generations?” (Stop and think about that. Earlier generations? You mean like the one that lived through the Great Depression?) She proceeds to explain the hardships of living the simple life in Manhattan where she and her husband periodically shed some of their CDs at the end of the month to buy groceries. “We don’t live extravagantly. You won’t find any designer clothes in my closet,” she says, as if the absence of Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan constituted the last word on penny-pinching miserliness.

Then, of course, having defined the “crisis” Draut comes forward with the solutions, which, you guessed it, are government subsidies and payments. Chief among these is “earn and learn” which amounts to working 30 hours a week while the government pays for graduate courses in high-demand fields—or not. One imagines that the proletariat drawn to Draut’s analysis would probably lean heavily toward topics like women’s studies, conflict resolution and comparative gay lit. Listen for yourself. You will be astounded.