Although uninvited, I can't resist jumping in to this discussion of The Trap. I read it a few months ago, and it's a very good book, deserving of a place next to Tamara Draut's rhymingly-titled, Strapped as an evocative discussion of the astonishing pressures on young people, which create burdens that extend well into the life cycle. The discussion here has focused mostly on the economic analysis, and it should be said that Brook has the extraordinary intellectual range, curiosity, ability to combine ideas from different fields, and prose of an extraordinary cultural critic.

But on the economics, and speaking from the land beyond group houses and Ramen-noodle dinners, from the far continent of mortgages and kids, I want to emphatically echo Dana Goldstein's reaction, which was essentially that Brook runs the the risk of letting his Ivy League subjects off the hook too easily. What they insist is “no choice” but to go to work at a law firm or become a lobbyist is almost always very much a choice.

It's not an awful choice – there's nothing wrong with working at a law firm and lobbying is no crime – but I long ago got tired of hearing people solemnly declare they had no option but to do some ultra-lucrative thing. (Making an exception, of course, for people who have particularly costly responsibilities, such as a chronically ill child.)

There's a thin line between between understanding the enormous financial pressures on young people and going too easy on people who not only make the more lucrative choice, but then also claim the moral credit that deep down they would really prefer to do some other thing, but oh what a terrible pity, they just can't do it.

And some of Brook's examples cross that line. They bring to mind a conversation I overheard in a Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side back in the late 1980s. Two young women in investment banking were discussing their career options: “There's investment banking, and then there's commercial banking, and then there's, like, socially useful stuff, but how do you even find out about that? And it doesn't pay.” And with that it was settled (it went unsaid that commercial banking was out, because that's for people who go to colleges with the word “state” in the name): there was no option but investment banking. That's the trap in action – often a very lightly reasoned justification for staying on the high-dollar track.

And that's my reaction to one of Brook's characters, the 30-ish health-policy consultant who wants to do good but has to work for Big Pharma, because he “wasn’t willing to be one of the public servants in the new plutocratic DC...who either forgoes owning a home and raising a family or commutes to work from West Virginia.” That's nonsense. No, he probably couldn't have four kids in private school and a non-working spouse and a five-bedroom house with a brand-new kitchen, so if he can't imagine life without all those things, he may be trapped. If you need to make four to five times the U.S. median income, your choices are indeed limited. But just as Dana points out that it's not impossible in the early years of a career to live on a mainstream non-profit or journalism income, it's also not that difficult later on – even if that path is not always as clear.

Note here that we're not talking about tremendous sacrifice, like Peace Corps or teaching in Newark or one of those “socially useful” things that the young investment bankers were talking about. Neither sellout nor saint, I've never done anything that I consider particularly selfless – I've basically done what interested me at each point in my so-called career – but I haven't worked for a for-profit since I was 23. I've worked in government, at a foundation (one that operated on the healthy principle that it should not pay more than the non-profits it was funding), and now at a non-profit think tank. My wife's a newspaper reporter, now a freelancer. At various times we've each been drastically underpaid (although at other times, I think it's miraculous that I get paid at all); it was a drag that we were priced out of the Brooklyn neighborhood we loved; and it's a drag that we bought our first house at the peak of the market. But in DC we live in a neighborhood with plenty of law-firm lawyers but also plenty of public-interest and government lawyers (too many lawyers, anyway!), people who work at nonprofits or unions or in journalism or on the Hill or as filmmakers, and they all own nice little 3-bedroom houses and send their kids to a perfectly good DC public school.

In certain ways, The Trap captures some things that have changed significantly for the worse over the last 20 years or so: Student debt levels are outrageous (my best tactic to keep the debt manageable was simply not going to law school – a path I've had little success in persuading younger people to follow), housing costs are much higher (recall the 1991 movie Slacker, which depicted an era when job prospects for young people were terrible but housing costs, especially in a place like Austin, were so low that it barely mattered), and of course your peers at law firms and hedge funds and management consulting, or in DC, the lobbyists, are making infinitely more money. If that matters.

But in other respects, the book seemed to be describing the past more than the present. Brook's chapter on how Washington is full of well-paid young right-wing policy operatives, while there are few opportunities for young liberals or for “public intellectuals,” certainly describes the Washington I found in 1989, but the situation has dramatically improved. And when I graduated from the same college as Daniel Brook, there were very few structures for doing anything “socially useful” or even just non-investment-banking related. I remember going to the career advisory office, and there were a dozen baskets lined up to put in your resume to be interviewed by Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, McKinsey, etc., and when I asked if there was anything else, I was directed to some faded red binders on a high shelf that listed some internships, and I was warned that they might be out of date, which they were. Now there's Teach for America, Idealist.org, and various other systematic ways to start out doing something other than making the big bucks.

There's also been a major upgrade in nonprofit pay – at least the nonprofits I'm aware of – as the Baby Boom-generation leaders who had been trained in the Ralph Nader model of asceticism give way to younger leaders who are much more realistic about what people need to make a real career and pay student loans. One of Brook's examples is an ACLU lawyer, but that case proves my point – under its Gen-X president Anthony Romero, the ACLU ramped up its starting pay for lawyers from $36,000 to $59,000, which is not competitive with firms but enough to make it possible to be an ACLU lawyer if you actually want to be an ACLU lawyer, rather than just pretending that you might want to do something socially useful but can't.

There are plenty of people in today's economy, perhaps a majority, who have no choices or very limited choices and are teetering on the edge. Those are the people we should worry about and that public policy should address. The recent graduates of America's elite private universities are not among them. They may have more limited, or different, choices than their elders, but they still have greater range of opportunity to fulfill their own dreams than just about anyone who has ever lived on this planet. That so many of them choose not to exercise that range of options is depressing, but to accept their claim that they are trapped is to perpetuate the very situation that Daniel Brook eloquently decries.