unpaid internship

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The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

The end result hurts individuals struggling in the labor market but also restructures the market itself. 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. Worst of all, unpaid internships in policy and human rights send the message that fighting poverty, inequality, and other issues of injustice is something that only rich people should do.

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., and worked as a waitress—one could once afford to live in D.C. on a waitress’s salary—and then got a clerical job at the Washington Daily News, which led to a job with the United Press Service. Helen Thomas worked her way up from the bottom. She did not buy her opportunities, because exorbitant journalism schools and unpaid internships did not exist. Her time in the service industry was not perceived as indicative of her abilities or her future path. Today, a reporter of Thomas’s modest background is out of luck. Journalist David Dennis argues that requiring unpaid internships shuts out voices from poor communities by denying those who hail from them the ability to work: “Opinions or perspectives reflecting my own come few and far between. How many journalists can say they have firsthand knowledge of the mentality of someone from the inner-city?

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The adjunct problem is emblematic of broader trends in American employment: the end of higher education as a means to prosperity, and the severing of opportunity to all but the most privileged. In a searing commentary, political analyst Joshua Foust notes that the unpaid internships, which were once limited to show business, have now spread to nearly every industry. “It’s almost impossible to get a job working on policy in this town without an unpaid internship,” he writes from Washington, D.C., one of the most expensive cities in the country. Even law, once a safety net for American strivers, is now a profession which pays as little as $10,000 a year—unfeasible for all but the wealthy, and devastating for those who have invested more than $100,000 into their degrees.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

The number of university-backed internship programs rose from two hundred in 1970 to one thousand in 1983. 18 But it was in the 1990s that the modern internship really took off, and it was also in the 1990s that the pushback against the spread of unpaid internships began. Architecture students, organizing with the American Institute of Architecture Students, began to protest the prevalence of unpaid internships in their field—one already known for its grueling educational programs. The organization lobbied other groups to condemn the practice too and managed to change the culture in the field in favor of paying interns. Unpaid interns also sued a prominent public relations firm after the company had gone so far as to explicitly bill its clients for the hours worked by employees it wasn’t paying.

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If internships these days offer “a chance to look at an environment rather than as a chance to learn the job,” what are they worth when one can no longer be in the workplace? 29 The real ground zero for unpaid internships—and for the publicity around them, as well as the highest-profile battles for justice—is in the arts and media industries, where competition is fierce and the sheen of glamour hangs around the top jobs, where hope labor has always been the name of the game. The art world is filled with unpaid internships, though in 2019 the Board of Trustees of the Association of Art Museum Directors issued a resolution calling for museums to pay their interns.

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A 2016 survey found that less than half of the unpaid interns got job offers, and nearly one-third of the paid interns didn’t, either. 33 Not all interns have it as bad as the North Carolina zoo intern killed by an escaped lion, whose family told reporters she died “following her passion” on her fourth unpaid internship. Nevertheless, the interns have begun to rebel. Amalia Illgner, for example, announced, in the pages of The Guardian , that she was suing over her “dream internship” at UK magazine Monocle . She wrote of her 5:30 a.m. morning shifts, and interns dispatched “as human FedEx boxes,” including one sent to Milan to hand-deliver magazines to Monocle ’s editor. “So Monocle, since you’re listening, I have taken the first step in legal proceedings to claim my unpaid wages,” Illgner wrote. In another example, Diana Wang sued over what was her seventh unpaid internship, also in journalism, at Harper’s Bazaar , alleging that Hearst (Bazaar ’s parent company) had violated federal and state labor laws by having her work for free for up to fifty-five hours a week, including nights until 10 p.m., and shuttle pricey fashions around New York for free. 34 The internship lawsuit heard around the world, though, or at least around the media, was the Black Swan case.

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard V. Reeves

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, knowledge economy, land value tax, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, positional goods, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working-age population, zero-sum game

Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit declared that private companies (in this particular case, Fox Searchlight) were permitted to continue with unpaid internships so long as the intern derived more value from the arrangement than the employer.57 This decision is a setback for attempts to rein in internships, effectively inaugurating a new and weaker legal framework, not least by diluting the previous legal standard that employers should gain no “immediate benefit” from the intern. Some observers wish we could be rid of unpaid internships altogether. The thoughtful Atlantic writer Derek Thompson wrestled at length with this question and came to a stark conclusion: “Unpaid internships aren’t morally defensible.”58 Thompson makes a good argument.

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The thoughtful Atlantic writer Derek Thompson wrestled at length with this question and came to a stark conclusion: “Unpaid internships aren’t morally defensible.”58 Thompson makes a good argument. I suspect that society would be fairer without unpaid internships. But abolition would be too draconian, illiberal, in fact. At least for the foreseeable future, then, unpaid internships will be with us. The challenge is to bring them within reach of less-affluent young adults. Government has a role to play here. One promising idea is to extend student financial aid to cover internship opportunities, as proposed by Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici in 2013 in the shape of the Opportunities for Success Act. There was not much political appetite, however; the act failed to make it out of the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training.

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National Association of Colleges and Employers, The Class of 2014 Student Survey Report (Bethlehem, Pa.: NACE, September 2014) (http://career.sa.ucsb.edu/files/docs/handouts/2014-student-survey.pdf). 36. Ibid. 37. Quoted in Amy Scott, “Why the Unpaid Internship May Be on its Way Out,” Marketplace, May 5, 2014 (www.marketplace.org/2014/05/05/education/why-unpaid-internship-may-be-its-way-out). 38. “The Role of Higher Education in Career Development: Employer Perceptions,” Report presentation prepared for The Chronicle of Higher Education and Marketplace, December 2012 (www.chronicle.com/items/biz/pdf/Employers%20Survey.pdf). 39.

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

But that didn’t mean the overarching idea that you should do what you love, no matter the cost, faded away. Sofia, a white woman who grew up “privileged as fuck,” had a string of unpaid internships at small museums and Sotheby’s before graduating from a small liberal arts college with a degree in art history. But it was 2009, and a promised job at Sotheby’s suddenly evaporated. She applied for hundreds of paid and unpaid internships in New York and Chicago; she finally got a single interview with a theater company and took it, knowing that her parents could help support her, since the internship was unpaid.

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In a 2019 blog post, Erin Panichkul, the first in her family to go to college, wrote about how she’d taken out loans throughout her undergrad career, not just for tuition, but to cover rent, groceries, utilities, and books: first at Santa Monica Community College, then at UCLA, and finally at law school. When the prospect of the unpaid internship came up at the United Nations, she knew she had to take it—even if it meant taking out student loans (i.e., paying) to do work for free. “Exposure does not pay bills,” Panichkul wrote, in a post entitled “Unpaid Internships Keep Women Like Me Out of the Legal Field.” “Experience doesn’t cover rent. It doesn’t pay for my transportation to get to my internship. It doesn’t feed me. But I believed the experience was so important that taking out a loan was worth it.”

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She tried to get a waitressing job on the side, going door to door in Astoria, Queens, distributing her resume to every restaurant. She never heard a thing, landing a job only when a position opened up at the restaurant where a friend worked. “If I learned anything in that search, it was that networking, nepotism, and insider connections are largely the only way to get a job,” she said. “And even then, that job was an unpaid internship.” And yet, that internship led to a paid internship, which eventually led her to a PhD program. But before she got that far, Sofia helped assist the intern coordinator at one of the museums where she worked—and gained “firsthand knowledge of how nonchalantly they exploited interns (in terms of low/no pay) because they knew how competitive the internships were.”

The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs (Provocations Series) by James Bloodworth

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, cognitive dissonance, Downton Abbey, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, income inequality, light touch regulation, meritocracy, precariat, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

However, this is an over-representation of a very particular class of white male. White men from the working class are not – by a long stretch – ubiquitous in the elite. In fact, they encounter economic hurdles at least as difficult to surmount as the barriers of gender and racial equality faced by their contemporaries. A six-month unpaid internship at a prestigious newspaper – or an unpaid internship in any job, for that matter – is as off limits to a white working-class boy as it is to anyone else who lacks the sufficient funds. Professor Savage’s analysis of the British Class Survey found evidence of a social class pay gap comparable to the gender pay gap that rightly induces so much opprobrium in liberals.

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More and more, the newspapers rely on free labour for their content, including unpaid interns and impressionable young people willing to write copy for nothing on the promise of supposedly career-benefiting ‘exposure’. This gives an in-built advantage to those from middle-class and wealthy backgrounds who can afford to take unpaid internships and spend time churning out articles for nothing. London is now the unpaid intern capital of Europe, and in journalism it shows. According to a recent survey by the National Council for the Training of Journalists, 83 per cent of journalists who started work in the three years prior to the survey did some sort of work experience or an internship before getting their first job, 92 per cent of which were unpaid.

Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America by Linda Tirado

emotional labour, it's over 9,000, payday loans, plutocrats, quantitative easing, retail therapy, telemarketer, unpaid internship

Here’s another thing the poor can’t afford: unpaid internships. I’ve had to turn down offers that might have improved my circumstances in the long run because I just couldn’t afford to work for nothing. Again, the people who can afford unpaid internships are getting help from home—in my world, everyone else has to work for a living. And this means that we’re being cut out of all that potential networking too. That’s at least one reason why I’ve never had much of a professional network—I never had the chance to build one. Accepting an unpaid internship, or one of those internships that basically pays you lunch money, is for people who don’t have to pay the rent.

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

Honneth, A. (1995) The Struggle for Recognition, Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell. Honoré, C. (2004) In Praise of Slowness, New York: Harper Collins. Horkheimer, M. (1974) Critique of Instrumental Reason, New York: Continuum. HR Review (2014) ‘Most Graduates Happy to Take on Unpaid Internships, Even With No Job Guarantee’, HR Review website, 30 July (available at: www.hrreview.co.uk/hr-news/l-d-news/graduates-happy-to-take-on-unpaid-internships/52291). HSE (2014) ‘Health and Safety Statistics: Annual Report for Great Britain’ (available at: www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/overall/hssh1314.pdf). Huffington Post (2013) ‘Benefit Reforms Are Putting Fairness Back at the Heart of Britain’, 6 April (available at: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/04/06/benefit-reforms-cameron-welfare-_n_3029737.html).

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In exchange for knowledge and credentials, students agree to a debt that will end up regulating their actions and shackling them to a future obligation to work (Berardi, 2009). Like the competitive graduate, the indebted graduate is more easily cajoled into doing more for less, making him ideal fodder for the thousands of unpaid internships available in today’s labour market, many of which offer no guarantee of skills development or future employment (Perlin, 2012).5 Ultimately, the pressures of employability are bringing to fruition Max Horkheimer’s lamentation on the ‘loss of interiority’ in advanced capitalist societies: societies in which ‘the wings of the imagination have been clipped too soon’, as individuals are increasingly forced to adopt a more practical and instrumental orientation to the world and others (Horkheimer, 1974: 25).

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These figures are based on projections from the student debt survey by Push. The survey was conducted with 2,808 students at 115 UK universities, and accounts for the money owed to parents, banks, and student loan providers. See www.push.co.uk Return to text. 5. A 2014 survey by savoo.co.uk asked 1,505 graduates whether they would be willing to work in an unpaid internship to gain experience. Some 85% said they would, with 65% saying that they would do so even if there was no job guarantee at the end (HR Review, 2014). Return to text. 6. Figures from the Economic History Association, ‘Hours of work in US history’ (available at http://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/).

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, behavioural economics, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, deskilling, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, future of work, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, hive mind, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, profit maximization, publication bias, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, school choice, selection bias, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

Aren’t unpaid internships a massive loophole? Not taking the law literally. In the for-profit sector, the U.S. Department of Labor allows unpaid internships only if “the employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern.”32 A bizarre rule. Why would a for-profit firm bother hiring workers from whom it derives zero immediate advantage? If you sought to convince a CEO to start an internship program, your pitch wouldn’t be, “Let’s hire a bunch of inexperienced workers to provide our firm with no immediate benefits whatsoever.” Unpaid internships survive because authorities hypocritically fail to enforce the letter of the law.

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Is full-time compensation times probability of employment a fair measure of everything a student fails to earn? Almost. Main doubt: many full-time students have part-time jobs. We should subtract their pay from foregone full-time earnings. Still, part-time workers’ low pay—not to mention the prevalence of unpaid internships—calls for only a modest adjustment—say 10% of full-time compensation. Accounting for experience. When you have a job, you don’t just earn income. Job experience improves your job skills—and the labor market rewards these extra skills with higher pay—also known as the “experience premium.” The longer you stay in school, the longer you wait to learn skills on the job—and the longer you postpone the attendant raises.

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In modern times, is there any decent reason to discourage kids from getting jobs and learning job skills? The silliest objection is that businesses “exploit” our children, handing them a pittance for their toil. No one expects schools to pay their students; the training kids receive is payment enough. Why hold firms to a higher standard? College students ferociously compete for unpaid internships because training is valuable compensation—and total compensation, not cash alone, is what counts.22 In any case, if the young were really grossly underpaid, employing them would be extraordinarily profitable—and thanks to competition, few business models stay extraordinarily profitable for long.

Financing Basic Income: Addressing the Cost Objection by Richard Pereira

banks create money, basic income, behavioural economics, carbon credits, carbon tax, income inequality, job automation, Lyft, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, quantitative easing, sovereign wealth fund, Tobin tax, transfer pricing, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Wall-E

As David Suzuki (2008) and James Hansen (2009) have argued, exacting a proper levy on the use of the commons can mitigate such destructive activity and bring it down to a sustainable level while generating large revenues for a “green dividend” or green component to basic income.27 New forms of free labour being extracted from populations, especially younger demographics entering the workforce, in the form of unpaid overtime work, unpaid internships, excessive hours worked without premium pay previously associated with overtime, deliberate misclassification of employees as self-employed, etc. all represent social dumping (Perlin 2012; Pereira 2009; Standing 2009). Even more extreme versions of it involve the horrible vision of suicide nets placed outside the factory of mobile phone producer Foxconn (Trenholm 2012) as a twenty-first century solution to degrading labour.

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.), Financing Basic Income, Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-54268-3 113 114 INDEX F Fee and dividend, 4, 34, 104 Food banks, 28 Forget, Evelyn, 103 France, 50–52 Free-riding, 10, 15, 31–34, 35 G GDP, 12, 20, 21, 51, 52, 68, 91, 93 Germany, 50, 51, 52, 59, 60 GFC (Global Financial Crisis), 72, 78 H Healthcare, 2, 19, 23, 24, 41n25, 51, 57, 102, 103 Land rent, 79, 82, 84–85, 94 Liberal theory of rent, economic rent, 79, 82, 93 LICO (Low income cut-off), 12, 13, 38n6 Liquidity rent, 87 Locke, John, 79 M Maternity, paternity leave, benefits, 20, 21 Mill, John Stuart, 78 Mincome, 103 Monopoly (rent), 89 Multiple jobholding, multiple job workers, 21 Murray, Charles, 2, 5n1, 81 I Individual Savings Account program (UK), 19 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 111n8 International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 92, 93 N Negative Income Tax (NIT), 3, 5, 20, 24–28, 31, 34, 35, 41n23, 41n28, 67, 102–104, 106 Norway, 5, 83, 85, 104, 105n4 J Japan, 78, 94 O Oil fund, 83 K Keynes, Maynard John, 78 P Paine, Thomas, 79 Pension(s) AHV – Switzerland, 53, 55, 58, 67, 71 Canada Pension Plan (CPP)/ Quebec Pension Plan (QPP), 16, 36 Old Age Security (OAS) – Canada, 54–55, 73n11 Philanthropy, 83 L Labour (forms of free labour being extracted), 32 Labour income, 10, 25, 32 Labour-market, 2, 13, 20, 31, 33, 34, 65, 67, 71 Labour standards, 40 INDEX Precarious jobs, employment, precarity, 17, 22, 32, 102 Pregnancy, pregnant women and job dismissals, 21 Public trust resource, 88 R Registered Retirement Savings Plan, 16 See also Tax shelters Regressive taxation, 38–39n7 See also Taxes Royalties, 78, 82, 104 S Scarcity (rent), 89, 93 Social housing, 4, 20, 22, 23, 28, 40n21 Sovereign Wealth Funds, see Norway; Alaska; Oil fund Speculation, 15, 32, 33, 60, 82 speculative activity, 64 T Taxes carbon tax, 4, 95; carbon fee, 4; carbon levy, 4; fee and dividend, 4 corporate taxes, 4, 85; cuts, 4; multinational companies, 27, 105; reductions, 4 evasion, 4, 25, 26, 27 personal income tax, 4–5, 10, 14, 15, 25–28, 32, 34, 102, 105n1 regressive, 17, 38n7, 60, 104 tax cuts, 4, 34, 35, 105; to corporate rates, 4; by implementing basic income, 4; neo-liberalism, 27, 52, 78 115 tobin tax, 33(speculation tax[es]) unearned vs. earned income, 17, 39n10, 82, 103, 104 VAT, sales taxes, 38n4 Tax exemptions, 4, 60–61, 103 Tax-Free Savings Accounts (TFSA), 17, 19 See also Tax shelters Tax havens, offshore tax havens, 26, 27, 103 Tax shelters, 4, 17, 39n12, 102, 104, 105n2 Transfer pricing, 26, 27 U Underemployment, 17 Underground economy, 37n2 Unearned income (vs. earned income), 17, 18, 31, 39n10, 78, 82, 83, 103, 104 Unemployment, 53, 67, 81 United Kingdom (UK), 19, 27, 50, 88 United States (US), 4, 5n1, 22, 24, 34, 41n25, 78, 81, 87, 88, 93, 94, 95 Universal Basic Income (UBI), 3, 4, 9–28, 30–34, 38n4, 38n6, 39n10, 39n11, 40n19 See also Basic Income Universal dividend, 3, 5, 101, 103, 104, 105n4 Universal public health care (or universal health care), 2, 23 Unjust dismissal, dismissal (pregnant women and employers), 21 Unpaid internships, 32 Unpaid overtime, 21, 32 Unpaid work, unpaid labour, 21, 32, 38n4 116 INDEX V Van Parijs, Philippe, 11, 12, 25, 67, 82 Vermont (and public trust resources), 83, 88, 90, 95 W Whistleblower protection, 106n1 White, Stuart, 11, 25 Windfall profits, 103, 104, 105n4 See also Economic rent WITB (Working Income Tax Benefit) See also EITC [US] Workplace culture(s), 21 Workplace disability (and costs), 33 Workplace mental health, 33 Workplace standards violations, 40n17 See also Labour standards

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, deplatforming, en.wikipedia.org, false memory syndrome, Frances Oldham Kelsey, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Jeff Bezos, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, scientific mainstream, Skype, social contagion, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, TikTok, unpaid internship

I think that would be a huge mistake because I don’t think that you are a guy, and I don’t think you can ever become a guy.” For a while, that message seemed to sink in; Sally stopped bringing up transitioning, and Mary was relieved. Sally graduated and moved to New York to begin an unpaid internship in the non-profit sector. Mary and Dave covered her security deposit and her first year’s rent while Sally endeavored to turn an unpaid internship into a full-time job. Sally didn’t mention any plans for gender medical treatments to her parents, but the friends she made in New York all seemed to be transgender. Sally began seeing a gender therapist. “And she really went full bore into the trans thing.”

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Mary scrambled to explain herself to her daughter, worried that Sally was headed down a bad road, but Sally no longer wanted to hear it. “We paid for her tuition 100 percent the whole way through. We paid for her to get settled in New York City. We paid for her first six months when she had her unpaid internship so she could get her first job. The week before she cut off all contact with us, she borrowed two thousand dollars.” Mary and Dave continued paying for Sally’s cell phone and health insurance long after she wouldn’t return their calls or emails. “We’re toxic, but our money isn’t.” PUBERTY IS HELL Puberty is a trial for anyone, perhaps girls especially.

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

§ I ran some calculations in an Excel spreadsheet and expanded the net to include Millennials born 1983–1997. ¶ Born 1983–1994. * I have to confess to a certain amount of confusion on this myself. In 2010, a colleague at the Wall Street Journal and I wrote an op-ed about how we had benefited earlier in our careers from opportunities to take unpaid internships. Those “jobs” had given us a foot in the door in a competitive field, and had reduced the element of financial risk for employers in hiring us temporarily. I still believe that argument was correct as far as it went, but with the benefit of more experience and knowledge I’d wonder why it is that employers are now more reluctant to take risks on training paid entry-level employees than they used to be—a subject for Chapter 2

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Boomer politicians and policymakers aren’t unaware of the consequences of gig work and intern employment for younger workers, but those leaders are seriously blinkered when it comes to what has caused these phenomena and what to do about it. Too often, the response has been to extend to gig platforms such as Uber the same expensive employment regulations that apply to other companies—and that have helped push more and more investment into the gig economy in the first place. And in 2010, the Obama administration cracked down on unpaid internships by imposing a strict new legal standard that made it almost impossible for employers to avoid paying interns. That might have prevented some of the worst abuses in the internship job market, but none of these measures fundamentally improve the incentives for companies to invest in productivity enhancements and training for workers, instead of trying to replace as much labor as possible.

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., 165 Murphy, Patrick, 212 National Center for Education Statistics data analysis, 92–93 National Football League union refs lockout (2012), 49n National Home-ownership Strategy (1995), 123 navigator Millennials, 21–23 NEETs (youths “not in employment, education, or training”), 181 Netherlands minimum wage, 184 New Deal/regulations, 52–53, 148–149 Obama, Barack Boomers and, 64 education policy and, 93–94, 97–101 financial crisis/Great Recession and, 129, 131–132, 132n, 137, 162–164, 223–234 Millennials and, 64, 218–219, 224 policies and, 18, 19, 24, 64, 73, 93–94, 97–101 regulation and, 229 unpaid internships and, 73 See also Affordable Care Act/Obamacare Obamacare. See Affordable Care Act/Obamacare Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria election to Congress, 211 as Millennial, 211, 219 policy positions/views, 211, 222 taxes and, 195, 197 Occupy Wall Street movement, 130, 214 Ohio Public Employee Retirement Systems (OPERS), 175 Once and Future Worker, The (Cass), 58 Operation Twist, 134 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 61 O’Rourke, Beto, 214 Patel, Suraj, 219 Paul, Ron, 222 Paulson, Hank, 129, 131 peace dividend, 151 Pell Grant program, 97, 99, 100 pension/plans Boomers and, 121, 159, 221 Detroit city government example, 175 European countries, 183, 196, 198, 199, 200 Germany/Millennials and, 199, 200 Japan and, 203, 205, 208n mid-twentieth century, 49 Millennials (US) and, 79–80, 81, 81n, 82 Ohio example, 175 problems with state/local government plans, 150, 158–159, 175 trend in private work, 158 Perot, Ross, 217 politics and Millennials 2018 midterm elections, 213 first nationally-elected officials, 211–212 fixing problems and, 213–214 House Member age statistics, 212 interns and, 213 party support/political views and, 214–216, 217–219, 222–223 political influence and, 213 state offices, 212 stereotypes, 214 trade policy, 217–218 voting and, 213 wants, 220–223, 232–236 working economy, 220–221 Powell, Jerome, 231–232 productivity by the 1970s, 48 investment and, 16, 49 measuring, 48n “qualified mortgage” (QM) standard, 139–140 quantitative easing description, 133 Federal Reserve and, 18–19, 60 housing/global financial crisis, 133, 135, 136, 137 Reagan, Ronald economic policies, 24, 52–54 fixed investment, 53 supply-side economics and, 52, 54–55, 58 support for, 20 taxes and, 52 recession postwar period, 62 See also financial crisis/Great Recession regulation (financial) changes/consequences, 56–57 during Reagan administration, 52, 54 regulations and Trump, 229–230, 234 religion and Millennials, 216–217 Resolution Foundation think tank, 178 retirement finances 401 (k) plans, 80 Millennials as “retirement plans” for parents, 145 Millennials/savings and, 79, 80–81 See also pension/plans; Social Security Revolutionary War/state debts, 147, 147n Romney, Mitt as candidate, 215, 225 manufacturing background, 232n youth vote, 215 Rubin, Robert, 54–55 “Rubinomics” program, 54–55, 124 Ryan, Paul, 231 S&P 500, 10 Sanders, Bernie description/political party and, 219, 222 Millennial support, 195, 214, 219 taxes, 173, 195, 197 savings/Millennials college-educated Millennials and, 78–79 debt and, 81n, 82 defined-contribution plans, 80 description/overview, 77–83 emergency-lending facility use and, 78 job market and, 79 obsession and, 79 parents vs., 77 pension plans and, 79–80 retirement finances and, 79, 80–81 Social Security benefits and, 82–83 statistics on, 78–79, 80–83, 83n Wall Street payback and, 83 worries about, 81–82 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 50n Say’s Law, 50n Schock, Aaron, 211–212 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 41 self-employment trends (since 2000), 71 See also gig economy September 11 terror attacks/consequences, 57, 152 Shapiro, Ben, 215, 224–225 “sheepskin effect,” 90 Sixteenth Amendment, 148 Smith, Brad, 71–72 SNAP (Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program), 164 social capital, 22 social programs/benefits consequences/Mulligan and, 165–166 financial crisis and, 163–165 Social Security beginnings, 149 financial problems/Millennials and, 153–161 housing and, 114n insurance comparisons, 154, 157–158 Millennial expectations, 82–83 Millennial resources and, 142 taxes and, 150n, 196 See also entitlements for elderly solar panels installation, 28 Spain and financial crisis, 180 steel industry (1970s to 1990s), 50–51 stock market crash (1929), 10 financial crisis, 10 Strauss, William, 6–7 “structural deficits,” 150–151, 151n Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), 164 supply-side economics, 52, 54–55, 58 TANF, 164 TARP (Troubled-Asset Relief Program), 59, 130, 130n taxes on capital/consequences, 53 Clinton and, 55, 152 cuts with Great Recession, 163 inflation as, 207 myth on, 195 national consumption tax and, 173–174 politicians in Germany/US and, 197 Reagan and, 52 Republicans and, 174 Sixteenth Amendment, 148 tax wedge, 183 Trump and, 227–228 Tea Party movement, 130, 231 technology labor and (mid-twentieth century), 49 role in economic problems, 234–235 See also computer/information technology Thatcher, Margaret, 189 “total-factor productivity,” 48n total number of hours worked in 1970s, 47 as measure of labor market, 47 trade policy and Millennials, 217–218 training investing less, 17, 69, 88 investing more, 228 Millennials wanting, 29, 72 See also internships/Millennials Troubled-Asset Relief Program (TARP), 59, 130, 130n Trump, Donald Affordable Care Act and, 68 description, 19 entitlements and, 231 immigration and, 225–226 interest rates/Federal Reserve and, 19, 231–232 Japan/foreign competition and, 202, 217–218, 225 Millennials and, 214, 215, 217, 224, 225–232 real estate background and, 232n regulations and, 229–230, 234 taxes, 227–228, 234 traits/character, 224 unemployment rate and, 226 Uber, 70, 70n unemployment Britain/Millennials and, 189 NEETs, 181 unemployment-assistance programs (US) creation, 149 financial crisis and, 164 unemployment rate (US) in 1950s and 1960s, 47 in 1970s, 47 in 1980s, 54 changes post-2008 decade, 30, 33 description, 30 global financial crisis/recovery and, 11, 12, 13 Millennials and, 42 Trump and, 226 See also labor-force participation rate union power other countries and, 186 in US, 49, 49n United Kingdom minimum wage, 184 Urban Institute, 139 US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 28, 30, 37, 47 Vance, J.

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

Economic segregation has become the order of the day, so much so that even those well-off and well-intentioned selective colleges that instituted programs of economic affirmative action—explicitly trying to increase the fraction of their student body from lower socioeconomic groups—have struggled to do so. The children of the poor can afford neither the advanced degrees that are increasingly required for employment nor the unpaid internships that provide the alternative route to “good” jobs. Similar stories could be told about each of the dimensions of America’s outsized inequality. Take health care. America is unique among the advanced countries in not recognizing access to health care as a basic human right. And that means if you are a poor American, your prospects of getting adequate, let alone good, medical care are worse than in other advanced countries.

…

Young people from families of modest means face a Catch-22: without a college education, they are condemned to a life of poor prospects; with a college education, they may be condemned to a lifetime of living at the brink. And increasingly even a college degree isn’t enough; one needs either a graduate degree or a series of (often unpaid) internships. Those at the top have the connections and social capital to get those opportunities. Those in the middle and bottom don’t. The point is that no one makes it on his or her own. And those at the top get more help from their families than do those lower down on the ladder. Government should help to level the playing field.

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We could have made sure that every young person was either in school, in a training program, or on a job. Instead, we let youth unemployment rise to twice the national average. The children of the rich can stay in college or attend graduate school, without accumulating enormous debt, or take unpaid internships to beef up their résumés. Not so for those in the middle and bottom. We are sowing the seeds of ever more inequality in the coming years. The Obama administration does not, of course, bear the sole blame. President George W. Bush’s steep tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 and his multitrillion-dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan emptied the piggy bank while exacerbating the great divide.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, disinformation, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Dyson, Jon Ronson, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, night-watchman state, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, Overton Window, plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-war consensus, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

‘At one time I got into massive debt which, thank God, is now all gone.’ But there are other reasons, too. Trade unions and local government used to be avenues for aspiring working-class candidates, helping to give them political training and a support base – but now, trade unions have been drastically weakened. Unpaid internships that only the well-off can afford to do have become ever more widespread in Parliament, think tanks, and other significant points of entry into the political world. It is not just that politicians are so unrepresentative of those they serve. MPs themselves are often treated as little more than voting fodder by governments that have huge amounts of power.

…

She was hired, broadly, because Murdoch knew she would be effective at ensuring the News of the World projected his own views. It’s not just who owns the media that ensures newspapers toe the Establishment line. Media outlets have increasingly become a closed shop for those from privileged backgrounds. The less well-off are filtered out for a number of reasons. First, there’s the proliferation of unpaid internships, which force aspiring journalists to work for free for long periods, often with little prospect of a paid job. Generally, only those able to live off the Bank of Mum and Dad can afford such exploitation, particularly in London, one of the world’s most expensive cities. Another barrier is the rise of costly postgraduate qualifications, which are often now prerequisites for getting a foot in the door of the industry.

…

Any reform of the media has to be undertaken with care to avoid imperilling press freedom and infringing on journalists’ independence from the state. To begin with, there should be limits on how many national media outlets one individual can own, restricting the power and influence that oligarchs can wield in a democracy. Barriers in the path of non-privileged aspiring journalists should be torn away, for example by scrapping unpaid internships. After all, such internships help to ensure that only those with prosperous parents can afford to be exploited and enter the media – or, for that matter, a whole range of other professions from politics to law. Mandating all media organizations to include a ‘conscience clause’ in their contracts would allow journalists to turn down work that was either unethical or illegal.

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day by Craig Lambert

airline deregulation, Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, big-box store, business cycle, carbon footprint, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Galaxy Zoo, ghettoisation, gig economy, global village, helicopter parent, IKEA effect, industrial robot, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, recommendation engine, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, you are the product, zero-sum game, Zipcar

If these bankers had gone out on hundreds of mortgage appraisals like my dad did, seeing the actual houses for which they were lending money and meeting real, live borrowers, would the 2008 banking crisis have happened? Starter positions, including summer and part-time gigs, are where young people learn how to hold down a real job. (That means a job with wages—not a volunteer job, not an unpaid internship, not an NGO project in a developing country.) This is where they learn to show up on time, appropriately dressed and groomed, with a professional attitude, and learn habits like cooperation, punching a clock, and service with a smile. But how does an aspiring banker work his way up from the teller’s window if ATMs and shadow-working customers have displaced tellers?

…

They recruit a throng of healthy, energetic, young shadow workers who collect very little in either salaries or benefits. The world economic recession that began in 2008 strengthened the intern trend. Managers economized by replacing full-time jobs with internships, solidifying unemployment in some areas. They also cut expenses by substituting unpaid internships for paid ones. Internships can become little more than a way for employers to sidestep labor laws. For their part, the interns supposedly learn something meaningful about the field they are trying out, and in the best case they jump-start a career. Sadly, it rarely turns out quite that way.

All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work by Joanna Biggs

Anton Chekhov, bank run, banking crisis, Bullingdon Club, call centre, Chelsea Manning, credit crunch, David Graeber, Desert Island Discs, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial independence, future of work, G4S, glass ceiling, industrial robot, job automation, land reform, low skilled workers, mittelstand, Northern Rock, payday loans, Right to Buy, scientific management, Second Machine Age, Sheryl Sandberg, six sigma, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, wages for housework, Wall-E

A rectangle of sea-blue fabric was pinned to the wall and a PowerPoint slide with the slogan ‘LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA – YOUR POLICIES ARE OUT OF TUNE – PAY YOUR INTERNS’ was projected on to it, so that the letters could be traced with black paint. I sat with C at the silver MacBook, whose job it was to keep pressing the space bar so that the projection wouldn’t disappear. C had found the Future Interns online. She had spent the two years since graduating from a prestigious South Asian university going from unpaid internship to unpaid internship at international NGOs across the world. She was now 23. After South-East Asia and Scotland, the UK appealed: ‘I wanted to experience something new, I wanted to go out of my comfort zone.’ She was ‘impressed’ by what the Future Interns did at the Serpentine after reading about it online.

Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage

Bullingdon Club, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, deskilling, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, moral panic, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, old-boy network, precariat, psychological pricing, Sloane Ranger, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, very high income, winner-take-all economy, young professional

But it also sometimes manifested itself as a more overt and concrete disadvantage, such as when George reflected on the powerful social connections wielded by his public school-educated colleagues in law, or when Samantha explained her difficulties in ‘getting ahead’ in political lobbying because she couldn’t afford to take the unpaid internships that helped propel her colleagues forward in their careers. To recap, stable members of the elite tend to have higher levels of all three types of capital than those who have recently gained entry into this group. This provides them with advantages in the competitive race to the top of the highest peaks.

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There is no evidence that native Londoners are advantaged over those who migrate to the city. Some of our interviewees saw this process very clearly. George explained how his ability to enter his profession had hinged largely on a pivotal period after graduation, when he was able to work in a number of unpaid internships whilst living at home with his parents (just outside London). While George obviously worked hard to establish himself during this period, his ability to get a foothold up in his career was dependent on both the financial support and geographical positioning of his parents. In the case of John, a retired IT director, the pull of London was also intimately connected to how he narrated his career success.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

With the economy tanking, media outlets transformed full-time jobs into contract work and entry-level positions into unpaid internships, and changed worker expectations along the way. Told that advanced degrees would help them keep their jobs, my former coworkers shelled out tens of thousands of dollars for journalism school, where they were taught skills they already knew or that technology would soon render obsolete. In the end, it did not matter—the layoffs came anyway. By 2010, my old Daily News job had been converted into an unpaid internship. My old Astoria apartment rented for over $2,000 per month. The cost of living in New York had skyrocketed, while wages remained stagnant or even decreased as desperate writers took pay cuts to stay in the profession.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Artists’ reactions to Google’s request for free art is found in Andrew Adam Newman, “Use Their Work Free? Some Artists Say No to Google,” New York Times, June 15, 2009. The story about free lawyers is in Elie Mystal, “It’s Come to This: Unpaid Internships for Lawyers with One-Three Years Experience,” Above the Law, September 30, 2009 (abovethelaw.com/2009/09/its-come-to-this-unpaid-internships-for-lawyers-with-one-three-years-experience/, accessed 07/18/2010). Hal Varian’s suggestion on how newspapers can make money is in Hal R. Varian, “Versioning Information Goods,” University of California Berkeley Working Paper, March 13, 1997.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Etonian, facts on the ground, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, pension reform, place-making, plutocrats, post-war consensus, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, rising living standards, social distancing, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

Overwhelmingly from middle-class, professional backgrounds, the combined salary and expenses of the average backbencher comfortably puts them in the top 4 per cent of the population. Scurrying around after them, or gossiping over lattes in Portcullis House, is an army of fresh-faced, ambitious parliamentary researchers. With unpaid internships (often, quite unlike their bosses, without even expenses provided) almost always a prerequisite for making it on to an MP's staff rolls, Parliament is a middle-class closed shop. Only those able to live off the financial generosity of their parents can get their foot in the door. At the service of MPs and hacks alike are the cleaners and catering staff.

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Many get into desirable jobs as much through recommenda- tions and friends of friends as through their qualifications. Could a working-class kid from Liverpool or Glasgow even dream of this kind of leg-up? But nothing has done more to tum major professions into a closed shop for the middle classes as the rise of the intern. Unpaid internships are thriving, particularly in professions like politics, law, the media and fashion. According to a recent survey of 1,500 students and graduates, two-thirds of young people feel obliged to work for free because of the recession. For many, internship can follow internship, with paid jobs dangled like carrots but never offered.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

Always take that into consideration. What is the purpose of the anonymity? Is it to protect someone’s job or freedom? Or to insulate the person against political consequence if the story goes sideways? 11. THE CLASS TABOO “Journalism has evolved into a career with significant entry barriers, one of which is the unpaid internship. This makes the profession whiter, wealthier… and less concerned with public policy issues that affect the poor and even the middle class.” —Dana Goldstein, The American Prospect In the late 2000s, the British Cabinet Office issued a report called “Unleashing Aspirations.” It found journalism to be one of the most socially exclusive professions in the country, noting: •98 percent of journalists born since 1970 were college-educated •Less than 10 percent came from working-class backgrounds •A journalist on average grew up in a family in the upper 25th percentile by wealth In America the change came in stages.

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If I did it, I knew, police would find a hundred bodies buried under the candidate’s lawn the next day. There was something to the whole courtier thing, however. By that time in history, to even get on the plane as a reporter, you had to jump over a slew of cultural and financial obstacles. The aforementioned unpaid internship was just one. Another was travel cost: the price tag for a news organization to send a reporter on the campaign trail was thousands of dollars a day, which limited traveling press to the richest corporate outlets. There are no alt-weeklies on the trail. The Internet accelerated the class divide.

Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent by Joel Spolsky

AOL-Time Warner, Build a better mousetrap, David Heinemeier Hansson, functional programming, knowledge worker, linear programming, no silver bullet, nuclear winter, off-by-one error, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, Superbowl ad, the scientific method, type inference, unpaid internship

By the way, before I move on, I need to clarify something about internships in computer science and software development. In this day and age, in this country, it is totally expected that these are paid internships, and the salaries Finding Great Developers are usually pretty competitive. Although unpaid internships are common in other fields from publishing to music, we pay $750 a week, plus free housing, plus free lunch, plus free subway passes, not to mention relocation expenses and all the benefits. The dollar amount is a little bit lower than average, but it includes the free housing so it works out being a little bit better than average.

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

Just as self-financed politicians can block the upward movement of lifelong public servants, so, too, can trustfund activists use their superior resources and connections to snag plum positions within nonprofits. We are used to this phenomenon in other sectors—the way that rich kids can afford to take prestigious unpaid internships in publishing or Hollywood or finance that burnish their résumés or can use Daddy’s Rolodex to get their foot in the door of elite institutions. But it is different when these same advantages come into play in a sector that is explicitly aimed at democratizing U.S. society and reducing inequalities.

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It is a good thing, for instance, that more wealthy heirs are doing community service in prep schools and choosing careers in the nonprofit sector, but it’s a bad thing when these young people use their superior both.indd 279 5/11/10 6:27:57 AM 280 fortunes of change resources to gain an edge by taking unpaid internships or low-paid entry-level jobs. Rich kids, as it happens, can more easily afford to save the world than can middle-class kids, and guess who ends up with the better résumés? In the Republic, Plato imagined a leadership group called the Guardians who could govern society in a totally selfless fashion.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

No one can teach that, but an apprenticeship lets you stare, and fiddle, with the market on someone else’s dime. 3. Better Value AKA Play with House Money Instead of paying six figures to go to law school or get a MBA, you can get paid to learn skills and build relationships valued by the marketplace. Apprenticeships are also an astoundingly good value right now. Many people think free work or unpaid internships are exploitative, but find the idea of someone taking out a quarter million in debt to get a college degree and a MBA a smart investment. That may be a legacy of the knowledge economy that we haven’t adapted to yet. Advantages of Apprenticeships to Entrepreneurial Companies It’s certainly important to have tight hiring practices, as many applicants fall into the camp of people who like the idea of being an entrepreneur, but may not be willing to make the sacrifices.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

About a third of legacy applicants – those whose parent attended – are accepted into Harvard. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution calls them ‘dream hoarders’.33 Judged by aptitude, almost half those in America’s top two-fifths income bracket are there because of the luck of family background. Think of the value of those unpaid internships and family connections. Think of what those pricy weekend tutors did for your prospects. A big share of those in the bottom fifth would be in the top if they had the same life chances. According to one Harvard study, more students attended America’s elite universities from the top 1 per cent of income backgrounds than from the bottom 60 per cent.34 About one in four of the richest Americans attended an elite university, compared with less than half of 1 per cent of the bottom fifth.

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed by Alexis Ohanian

Airbnb, barriers to entry, carbon-based life, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, Hans Rosling, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Occupy movement, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, software is eating the world, Startup school, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, unpaid internship, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

The previous year, I’d spent a formative summer in Singapore, competing on behalf of UVA at an international technopreneurship conference (oh, bless the Singaporeans and their technopreneurship conferences). One of my favorite teachers, Professor Mark White, had invited me to go on this all-expenses-paid trip. I’d even turned down an internship at Ogilvy because I like free travel even more than I like unpaid internships in the most expensive city in America. It was there in Singapore on our first night that I pitched Mark the idea Steve and I had cooked up. Mark’s was the first unbiased feedback I’d gotten on the idea (my parents had always been ludicrously supportive of whatever I told them I was up to), and he thought we’d be able to pull it off.

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

., 70, 131–32 Buttigieg, Pete, 159 BuzzFeed, 9, 21–22, 60, 149 Cain, Caleb, 159, 161, 162 cancel culture, 85 Capehart, Jonathan, 154 capitalism, 141–42 Carlson, Tucker, 122–24 Carnevale, Anthony, 104 “Cashing in on the Rise of the Alt-Right” (Harkinson), 77 catastrophizing, 196–97 CBD (cannabidiol), 33 CBS, 149–50 Chabloz, Alison, 52 character assassination, 16–17 Charlesworth, Tessa, 98 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack, 20–21 China, 139–40 Churchill, Winston, 203 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 38, 112 Clarkson, Kelly, 198 classical liberalism, 7–8, 28, 29–71 abortion and, 45–49 definition, 30 drugs and, 32–36 economics and, 62–67 foreign policy and, 67–71 free speech and, 50–54 gay marriage and, 37–39 gun control and, 54–58 historical proponents of, 30–31 immigration and, 39–45 individual rights, protection of, 30–31 political language of, 96 stereotypes, neutralization of, 31 tolerance of opposing viewpoints and, 37–39 trans issues and, 59–62 class warfare, 65 Clinton, Hillary, 42, 113 CNN, 10, 21–22, 148–49, 150 Covington story and, 153, 155 Jussie Smollett news story and, 157 Russian Hoax and, 158 college professors, left-wing political brainwashing by, 151 comedy, 187–90 coming out, 3–5 Confederate flag, 112 conservatives political language of, 96 pro-life position of, 49 Cook, Tim, 146 Covington story scandal, 152–55 crack, 34–35 Cruz, Nikolas, 58 culture war, 197–201 Cuomo, Andrew, 156 Daily Beast, The, 149 Daily Show, The (TV show), 62–63, 134–35 Daily Signal, The, 92 Damore, James, 25–26 Daniels, Jessie, 92 Darcy, Oliver, 161 David and Goliath story, 183 debt, government, 66 Declaration of Independence, 31, 144 Deconstructing Harry (film), 4 defensive gun use, lives saved from, 106 DeFranco, Philip, 159, 160–61 DeGeneres, Ellen, 146 Democratic Party, historical background of Civil Rights Act, opposition to, 112 Confederate flag, creation of, 112 Dred Scott ruling and, 111 Ku Klux Klan, formation of, 111–12 Lincoln assassination and, 112 opposition to Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, 112 school choice, opposition to, 113 War on Poverty and, 112 Democrats = good, Republicans = bad myth, 111–13 Demos, 101 denial, 12 digital journalism, 151 discrimination, 83 Dred Scott ruling, 111 dressing as the person you want to be, 175–79 drugs, 32–36 alcohol, 33–34 government role, 34–36 marijuana, 33 nicotine, 33 Schedule I controlled substances, 34–35 state versus federal issue, 36 taxation and, 35 Dunham, Lena, 127 economic issues, 62–67 government debt, 66 government size and spending, 64 minimum wage, 62, 65–66 tax rates, 64–65 unpaid internships, 62–63 welfare, 66 Economist, The, 80 Ehrlich, Paul, 108 Elder, Larry, 87–95 “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” (Fryer), 98 environmental issues, 108–10 extreme weather, 109 food shortage, 108–9 polar bears, 110 Equality Act of 1974, 38 Evans, Chris, 127 Evergreen State College, 22, 23 extreme weather, 109 Facebook, speech guidelines of, 53 fact checking, 8, 87–113 Democrats = good, Republicans = bad myth, 111–13 Elder interview and, 87–95 environmental issues, 108–10 gun control, 105–6 hate crimes, 107–8 learning and growing when faced with new facts, 94–95 nuclear family, importance of, 91–93 political languages, recognizing, 95–97 slow thinking, practicing, 96–97 systemic racism, 89–92, 97–100 wage gap, 103–5 war on women, 100–103 fake news, 9–10, 148–65 algorithmic manipulation of news intake, 163 blatant falsehoods, 163 categories of, 162–63 college professors, left-wing political brainwashing by, 151 Covington story scandal, 152–55 curating list of trusted journalists who operate in good faith, 163–64 distrust of media, 162 gut instinct, following your, 164 historical background, 149–51 institutional, 163 Jussie Smollett news story, 155–57 narrative-driven, 162 political activism and propagandism by journalists, 151–52 proprietors of, examples of, 148–49 Roose’s hit piece blaming Rubin and others for radicalizing youth, 159–62 Russian Hoax and, 157–58 family, 91–93, 112–13 Family Guy (TV show), 189 fatherless children, 91–92 Feinstein, Dianne, 44 Ferguson, Niall, 134 Field of Dreams (film), 177 Fifteenth Amendment, 112 First Amendment free speech rights, 14, 50–54 Fonda, Jane, 103 food shortage, 108–9 foreign policy, 67–71 peace through strength strategy, 67–68 red line in Syria, failure to enforce, 68 troop withdrawals, 70 Ukraine, NATO’s failure to help, 69 Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 111–12 Fourteenth Amendment, 112 Fox News, 150 France, 69, 141 free speech, 50–54, 207 combating conspiracy theories and bad ideas with, 50–51 comedy and, 189 as essential to civilized society, 52 exceptions specified by Supreme Court, 50 hate speech laws and, 52 Kaepernick’s kneeling for national anthem and, 53–54 progressive policing of, 52–53 free thinking, 7–8, 28, 29–71.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

As one journalist reflected at the time, “It’s a small but symbolic labor dispute in one of the country’s most often praised economic sectors that could have ramifications for workers at other studios.”15 The strike, which Habert described as “a very spontaneous movement,” ended in the second week of April, even though the strikers’ demands were not met. Some then chose to take legal action against the studio.16 The STJV has continued to build from this strike, representing not only workers in the industry, but also students and unemployed workers. The union has since focused on campaigns against unpaid internships, low wages for starting workers, and precarious contracts.17 These initial struggles of voice actors in the US and videogame workers in France foreshadowed the emergence of a new organization. This is not to say that videogame workers in studios across the world have been passive—rather, that these were some of the few open moments of class struggle.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

Today the in-state tuition is $13,500. The effect of the average student debt of $30,000 upon graduation is to increase the pressure to get a good job. As economist Joseph Stiglitz has written, “On average, many college graduates will search for months before they find a job—often only after having taken one or two unpaid internships. And they count themselves lucky, because they know that their poorer counterparts, some of whom did better in school, cannot afford to spend a year or two without income, and do not have the connections to get an internship in the first place.” And at least from the vantage point of a California college, getting a job seems to mean work in the technology sector.

Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, David Attenborough, David Graeber, delayed gratification, Dominic Cummings, double helix, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, family office, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, land value tax, Leo Hollis, Londongrad, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, mega-rich, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor

As inequality rises, growing numbers of people turn a blind eye to the suffering of others, while they become increasingly concerned about themselves and how they are seen. That is why charity fundraising events involving the superrich are public spectacles, with the press often invited along. In the same year that the Eton exam paper came to light, Westminster School was ridiculed for holding an auction for unpaid internships. These included a chance to work in the investment office of the private bank Coutts, or a week with the master jeweller Fabergé, or with retail communications agency Portas, or with a premier investment services advisory firm established by a man who has ‘more than 14 years experience in private banking and wealth management’.29 Parents bid huge sums of money so that their children could work unpaid; the connections they would gain were clearly seen as worthwhile.

Working Hard, Hardly Working by Grace Beverley

Cal Newport, clockwatching, COVID-19, David Heinemeier Hansson, death from overwork, glass ceiling, global pandemic, hustle culture, Jeff Bezos, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, stop buying avocado toast, TED Talk, TikTok, unpaid internship, work culture

Now I’m not suggesting that we need to overhaul our entire working practice legislation yet, but it does go to show that working ourselves tirelessly into the ground is not the same as being productive. There seems to be another, seedier and more gruesome possibility taking place behind the scenes, whereby extra hours of unpaid work are allowed to be framed as ‘productivity’ for the benefit of everyone except the labourer themselves. Alongside late nights at the office with no overtime, unpaid internships and work experience are the norm in many industries. While the UK is by no means the worst when it comes to labour protection, it does become all the more shocking when we learn that other EU countries are proactively fighting this change in work culture by putting further laws in place to protect their citizens as the issue develops.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Shapiro write in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth, “the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history,” and it generated trillions of dollars in equity that would eventually be converted into choices: the choice to go to a better college, or to take an unpaid internship, or to hire a better lawyer to keep a promising-but-occasionally-foolish adolescent out of prison. Ninety-eight percent of those loans went to white families. By 1984 the median white family in the United States had a net worth of over ninety thousand dollars. The median black family had less than six thousand dollars.

Getting a Job in Hedge Funds: An Inside Look at How Funds Hire by Adam Zoia, Aaron Finkel

backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, discounted cash flows, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, merger arbitrage, offshore financial centre, proprietary trading, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, rolodex, short selling, side project, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, systematic trading, two and twenty, unpaid internship, value at risk, yield curve, yield management

I graduated from an Ivy League college in 2003 with a degree in business administration and was thinking of a career in the hospitality industry, perhaps in a restaurant or hotel. After graduation I spent two and a half months traveling in Europe. My life-altering moment came when I was staying with a cousin who runs a hedge fund in Europe. I ended up not only staying with him, but shadowing him to work for a month. It became a type of unpaid internship during which time I watched how he traded. I also went on, and listened to, client and investment calls with him. By sitting at the trading desk and observing the fund’s senior currency trader, I learned the basic principles of momentum trading as well as the overall principles of foreign exchange and futures trading.

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, end world poverty, facts on the ground, gentrification, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, openstreetmap, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, the built environment, trade route, unpaid internship, urban planning

A 2014 Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission report found that on the BBC’s influential Question Time programme, 43 per cent of guests had attended Oxford or Cambridge University. And there are other factors at play that help perpetuate the imbalance across society. Many major companies offer only unpaid internships, effectively barring a young person from applying unless their parents can subsidize their living costs. Consequently the better off, many of them privately educated, gain the experience and contacts that help them succeed in the world of work. With both politics and the media disproportionately packed with the privately educated, the latter tend to dominate public discourse, which can have a huge impact on influencing public opinion.

Animals by Emma Jane Unsworth

call centre, dark matter, fear of failure, Google Earth, Higgs boson, Large Hadron Collider, rolodex, unpaid internship

It’s enough to make you never get on a plane again. I looked to my side and saw a glass I’d somehow had the sense to fill and place there before I collapsed. I reached for it, gulped one twice three times. My gunky mouth made the liquid milky. Swallowing was an effort. I drank water like it was a job to do, an unpaid internship at my own inner (highly corrupt) Ministry of Health. Getting the whole pint down was hard work. As soon as the water was in me it wanted to come out. I ran along the thin hall to the bathroom, left tight-leg trailing. Slammed the door. The tiles were blissfully cool under my feet. Bathrooms were the best kind of room.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

I wanted to tell him that I thought I was still young: I was only twenty-five. Instead, I told him I would try. Everyone I knew in San Francisco had already left. Our college class had graduated straight into a recession, and while most of us trudged to New York or Boston to compete for unpaid internships and other scraps of a ravaged economy, those who moved west refused to bend to despair. They chose instead to hide out for a while, work on their art. They lived in sun-flooded apartments, took part-time service jobs, and had complicated, consuming social lives. They freely experimented with hallucinogens and polyamory; smoked weed and slept in and day-drank; went to BDSM parties and wolfed burritos afterward.

Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life by Sarah Edmondson

Albert Einstein, dark matter, financial independence, Keith Raniere, Mason jar, Skype, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, young professional

“I don’t think any one person can be credited with having all the answers.” But she was forgetting: Keith Raniere was known to be one of the smartest men in the world. “Who says that about themselves? Only a megalomaniac,” she said under her breath. I ignored her. I was on my way in NXIVM. Now that they’d made me a yellow sash, this would be like an unpaid internship, but now I could attend intensives for free. I’d also be shadowing the highly skilled trainers, which, I was told, would help me move up the Stripe Path quickly to reach proctor status as a full, legitimate coach. When the upper levels determined you were ready to become a proctor, then you could officially start on one of the career paths within the company and finally get paid for all the time you put in.

Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the Tactics Behind China's Production Game by Paul Midler

barriers to entry, corporate social responsibility, currency peg, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, full employment, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, language acquisition, new economy, out of africa, price discrimination, unpaid internship, urban planning

In this regard, Chinese manufacturers faced the same paradox as college graduates. Experience was needed to land a good job, but without a prior job there was no experience to be had. The factory agreed to produce merchandise at close to cost in order to prove its expertise. For the manufacturer, Johnson Carter’s account was the equivalent of an unpaid internship. Once the factory learned how to make a product line that was up to export standards, the factory owners could convince other importers to take a chance with them. King Chemical’s showroom was filled with examples of products that the factory had made for Johnson Carter. Along a single wall in the showroom, Johnson Carter’s modest product line appeared rather impressive, especially to those importers who came from the second market.

Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain by Lisa McKenzie

British Empire, call centre, credit crunch, delayed gratification, falling living standards, financial exclusion, full employment, income inequality, low skilled workers, meritocracy, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, unpaid internship, urban renewal, working poor

And yet, as working-class Britain was expected to pay for a crisis caused by powerful elites, the voices of those punished by austerity were all but airbrushed from existence. No wonder: according to a government report published in August 2014, over half of the top 100 media professionals are privately educated, while the number of working-class MPs shrinks with every general election. The rise of unpaid internships and the weakening of trade unions and local government have helped turn the media and political worlds into closed shops for the privileged, ensuring that working-class voices are ever harder to come by. That’s why a book like this is so important: because it allows intentionally ignored people to speak on their own terms about their experiences and their lives.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The seemingly endless “jobless recovery” makes no sense at all, particularly at a time when many of us are working longer hours as overextended freelancers or the nominally unemployed than we did when we had real jobs. It’s hard to imagine how this all looks to young people just graduating college, who now chase unpaid internships with more energy than those in previous generations sought paying work. But what if joblessness were less of a bug than a feature of the new digital economy? We may, in fact, be reaching a stage of technological efficiency once imagined only by science-fiction writers and early cyberneticists: an era when robots really can till the fields, build our houses, pave our roads, and drive our cars.

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

Two of the top talent agencies had just merged and there was an abundance of talented people with years of experience looking for work. He considered going back to school in order to postpone the job hunt for a few more years, but his parents wouldn’t pay for it. Not wanting to take out loans, Jacob accepted an unpaid internship and moved back home. After nine months of internships, during which time his parents generously supported him, Jacob finally got a break, even if it was not the one he had been waiting for: He took a job delivering mail at a talent agency for $7 an hour. The college degree, which had once seemed like the key to his success, was beginning to seem more like a joke.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Overall, US student loan balances are more than US$1.1 trillion, having almost quadrupled since 2003. This compares to increases of 65 percent in mortgage debt (to over US$8 trillion) and a decline in credit card debt of around 4 percent (to US$660 billion) over the same period. Even with qualifications, there may be no jobs. Paid apprenticeships and training have been replaced by unpaid internships to gain work experience. The employment-to-population ratios for 25–34-year-olds globally has declined more than for older workers. Youth unemployment is high throughout the world, with levels of up to 60 percent in some developed countries. Young workers face increased competition from older workers, who are deferring retirement or reentering the workforce because of inadequate retirement savings and low returns on investments.

More Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Build a better mousetrap, business process, call centre, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, Dennis Ritchie, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, functional programming, George Gilder, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, lolcat, low cost airline, Mars Rover, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, price discrimination, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Oldenburg, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, The Great Good Place, The Soul of a New Machine, Tragedy of the Commons, type inference, unpaid internship, wage slave, web application, Y Combinator

And, my hope is, they won’t even bother going to that interview. By the way, before I move on, I need to clarify something about internships in computer science and software development. In this day and age, in this country, it is totally expected that these are paid internships, and the salaries are usually pretty competitive. Although unpaid internships are common in other fields from publishing to music, we pay $750 a week, plus free housing, plus free lunch, plus free subway passes, not to mention relocation expenses and all the benefits. The dollar amount is a little bit lower than average, but it includes the free housing, so it works out being a little bit better than average.

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber

Bretton Woods, British Empire, company town, corporate personhood, David Graeber, deindustrialization, dumpster diving, East Village, feminist movement, financial innovation, George Gilder, John Markoff, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, Lao Tzu, late fees, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, planetary scale, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, working poor

Most obviously, if you wish to pursue a career that isn’t simply for the money—a career in the arts, in politics, social welfare, journalism, that is, a life dedicated to pursuing some value other than money, whether that be the pursuit of truth, beauty, charity—for the first year or two, your employers will simply refuse to pay you. As I myself discovered on graduating college, an impenetrable bastion of unpaid internships places any such careers permanently outside the reach of anyone who can’t fund several years’ free residence in a city like New York or San Francisco—which, most obviously, immediately eliminates any child of the working class. What this means in practice is that not only do the children of this (increasingly in-marrying, exclusive) class of sophisticates see most working-class Americans as so many knuckle-dragging cavemen, which is infuriating enough, but that they have developed a clever system to monopolize, for their own children, all lines of work where one can both earn a decent living and also pursue something selfless or noble.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

Nairn, G. (2009), ‘Telework Cuts Office Costs’, FT Report - Digital Business, 12 March, p. 4. National Equality Panel (2010), An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK: Report of the National Equality Panel, London: Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion and the Government Equalities Office. Needleman, S. (2009), ‘Starting Fresh with an Unpaid Internship’, Wall Street Journal, 16 July, p. D1. Nink, M. (2009), ‘It’s Always about the Boss’, Gallup Management Journal, 25 November. Obinger, J. (2009), ‘Working on the Margins: Japan’s Precariat and Working Poor’, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 25 February. OECD (2010a), International Migration Outlook 2010, Paris: OECD.

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

This question pops up everywhere, underlying familiar parental concerns about their children’s “failure to launch” and the increase in “boomerang kids”—kids who return home. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course. As more young people remain untethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, they go back to school for lack of better options. Others travel, avoid commitments, compete ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) gigs, and otherwise forestall the beginning of adult life. The median age for a first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were coming of age, was twenty-one for women and twenty-three for men. By 2009, it had risen to twenty-six for women and twenty-eight for men.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Morby had been married to a successful banker and had two children when she decided she wanted more out of life. At forty, Morby enrolled in the all-women’s Simmons College Management School, taking classes at night. A few months shy of graduation, she interviewed with an investment banker from Paine Webber in Boston for an unpaid internship. After a lengthy talk that seemed to be going well, the banker leaned in and told Morby, “We think you’d be great, but you have two small children.” Before Morby could reply, he went on, “Your husband works at the Bank of Boston. He needs you at home.” The banker added, “My wife couldn’t do this.”

How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong by Elizabeth Day

Airbnb, country house hotel, Desert Island Discs, disintermediation, Easter island, fail fast, fear of failure, financial independence, gender pay gap, Kintsugi, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, pre–internet, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, stem cell, Stephen Fry, TED Talk, unpaid internship

I could have stayed and waited for the next round of voluntary redundancies but I didn’t want to hang around and it seemed slightly dishonest. I’d rather they saved the money and spent it on hiring a junior feature writer who could bring enthusiasm and fresh ideas to the newspaper and who might not otherwise be able to afford the endless string of unpaid internships now required to bag a job in media. I had no plan in place. I simply knew I had to leave. Something would work out, I told myself. I’d built up enough of a reputation to get some freelance commissions and I was nearing completion of my fourth novel. But it was still a terrifying risk to take.

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

behavioural economics, billion-dollar mistake, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Great Leap Forward, hindsight bias, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job satisfaction, Kevin Kelly, loss aversion, Max Levchin, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, young professional

He’s placing a huge bet on paltry information. This is a situation that cries out for an ooch, and an obvious one would be to work in a pharmacy for a few weeks. He’d be smart to work for free, if need be, to get the job. (Certainly if he can afford several years of school without an income, he can afford to take a monthlong unpaid internship.) Surely this concept—testing a profession before entering it—sounds obvious. Yet every year hordes of students enroll in graduate schools without ever having run an experiment like that: law students who’ve never spent a day in a law office and med students who’ve never spent time in a hospital or clinic.

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays by Phoebe Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, defund the police, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joan Didion, Lyft, mass incarceration, microaggression, off-the-grid, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Sheryl Sandberg, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, too big to fail, uber lyft, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois

Noncontroversial statement of the day: Maybe, just maybe, some white people have a bit too much free time on their hands. I mean, I thought the purpose of training to compete at the CrossFit Games and apple picking at an orchard for leh-zur (that’s leisure for the unpretentious) was to eat up any and all spare time they had. Guess I was wrong because some white folks are committed to working an unpaid internship while studying at the University of Now Would Be a Good Time for Me to Mind My Own Business, But I’m Not Ready for That Conversation because keeping tabs on someone else’s grass is . . . ignorant. What I’m getting at is that these sorts of low-grade nuisances are what Black people are conditioned to “look forward to” instead of wanting to see and experience the world, which is often coupled with the myth that Black people have zero desire to travel.

Work Less, Live More: The Way to Semi-Retirement by Robert Clyatt

asset allocation, backtesting, buy and hold, currency risk, death from overwork, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, eat what you kill, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial independence, fixed income, future of work, independent contractor, index arbitrage, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, rising living standards, risk/return, Silicon Valley, The 4% rule, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

With this preparation, it is quite possible that your own employer or another industry player will agree to hire you on a part-time basis. If you know you are going to switch gears to a new profession or avocation, you can lay groundwork for that, too. Whether through networking and attending conferences or taking on unpaid internships or projects, you’ll begin building momentum and confidence about your decision to change work domains. Kicking around in a new area for a few years allows you to build contacts, understand your personal fit and aptitude, and think through where and how to make some income in this area. Once you stop working full time in your old career, you’ll have the time to progress in the new one.

Unequal Britain: Equalities in Britain Since 1945 by Pat Thane

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, equal pay for equal work, full employment, gender pay gap, longitudinal study, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, old-boy network, pensions crisis, Russell Brand, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

The growth of commercially successful ethnic minority media in the 1980s and 1990s may have been a factor in the increasing ability of minority communities to influence the language used to describe them. Publications like The Voice and Asian Age have also provided ethnic minority journalists with a route into the mainstream media, although research suggests that ‘low-level racism’ still pervades the culture of the newsroom.33 A heavy reliance on unpaid internships and personal contacts as ways into the media tends to exclude those who are outside the ‘old boys’ network’ and those with fewer financial resources. Television has a better record than newspapers, with the success of pioneers such as Trevor MacDonald and Moira Stewart in the 1970s, replicated by Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Zeinab Badawi since the 1990s, although minority ethnic groups remain under-represented in the mainstream media.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

For people like Sanni, Brexit was a story of marginalization and of Britain’s unaddressed legacy of colonialism—an attempt to right the wrong of denying immigrants and people of color access to the very country that had plundered them for centuries. And it was by identifying this bubbling resentment that the pro-Brexit movement managed to create a counterintuitive alliance between some sections of immigrant communities and cohorts of jingoist Brexiteers who wanted them all to “go home.” * * * — PARKINSON GAVE SANNI AN unpaid internship. He started in the spring of 2016 as a volunteer. Because the outreach team was so small, his duties quickly multiplied. Much of his work was focused on minority and queer communities. He would visit impoverished neighborhoods to ask residents how they were planning to vote and why. On Sanni’s first day at the office, he noticed a dandy in a green blazer and pink pants: Mark Gettleson, in his full homosexual plumage.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Only 2.2 percent of the nation’s students graduate from nonsectarian private high schools, yet these graduates account for 26 percent of students at Harvard and 28 percent at Princeton.13 High-income parents can also give their children such advantages as museum trips, SAT coaching classes, and unpaid internships. Robert Reich, a lion of the left and a former Harvard professor, characterizes the modern elite universities as being designed mainly “to educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle class.”14 Today’s leading universities are filling the role envisioned by Charles Eliot, who became Harvard’s president in 1869: taking the lead in creating an enlightened national ruling class—the Alphas, if you will.15 A National Journal survey of 250 top American public sector decision makers found that 40 percent of them were Ivy League graduates.

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following by Gabrielle Bluestone

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, cashless society, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, financial thriller, forensic accounting, gig economy, global pandemic, growth hacking, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Kevin Roose, lock screen, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Mason jar, Menlo Park, Multics, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post-truth, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Russell Brand, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech bro, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork

McFarland’s friend, who estimates she had earned a few thousand dollars, ultimately got a check for around $1,200—and only after threatening Spling with a lawsuit. She remembers McFarland seeming unfazed at the idea of losing both an employee and a friend. “We just stopped talking. I got really mad at him. I was like, ‘Oh, we were friends, how could you do this to me?’ I had an unpaid internship that summer, so I was banking on having that money,” she said. “I mean he just didn’t really seem to have any remorse or care about the friendship. It was just all about himself.” The friend suggests that McFarland’s questionable form of user acquisition wasn’t the only thing he’d apparently been using investor money to pay for.

Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us by John Hills

Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, credit crunch, Donald Trump, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage debt, pension reform, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, working-age population, World Values Survey

It is easy to see how that might make a difference, and why the research evidence suggests that ‘money matters’ on top of all the other factors that later outcomes might be associated with.42 While there are, of course, many things that ‘money can’t buy’ (in the words of the title of Susan Mayer’s book43), there are lots of things that money can buy, such as: • high-quality pre-school care • houses in the catchment areas of the best-regarded state schools (which then command a significant premium) • after-school activities, private tutors, etc • private schooling • parental support in going on to tertiary education (and reduction in the worries associated with student loans) • support in taking a Master’s degree (for many better-paid careers this now represents the same basic required qualification that a first degree did a generation ago).44 Parents, if they can afford it and choose to do so, can also provide support with living costs at the start of careers, including during the unpaid internships that often act as an entry barrier into particular professions. The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission reports that, ‘Graduates who have completed internships are three times more likely to get a job than those with no work experience, but 90 per cent of placements are unpaid in professions such as journalism.’45 Beyond that, parents (and grandparents) may provide substantial help with housing costs – allowing their children to afford to live in the areas where there are jobs, including help with deposits for house purchase, without which few young adults now become owner-occupiers.

Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo by Rebecca Walker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, call centre, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, export processing zone, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, neurotypical, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator

They hadn’t been to the cabin in several years, and when they did come, the visits were short and devoid of the intimacy we had once shared. The lake water was too warm, they complained, no longer refreshing, and the neighbors had built bigger houses along the opposite shore, ruining our once idyllic view. Our childhood was over, they said; it’s time to move on. But I was living in a one-room apartment in LA, with an unpaid internship and thousands of dollars of student debt, and the lake house was part of my backup plan. If rents got too steep and I couldn’t find a real job, I could always go there to reset. Without it, the pressure to succeed increased exponentially. But beneath the worldly concerns was the unbearable pull of nostalgia, the ache I suddenly felt for the innocence and ease of childhood.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

Whatever it means to others, $36,000 was a living wage to me—more than enough for a childless dirtbag like me to live in comfort. Most people in my social circle—my tribe—were also comfortable, as were most people I’ve met in journalism. Coming from a middle-class background, I’m still kind of on the scholarship-kid end of my generation of journalists—it’s rough getting through the years of unpaid internships and might-as-well-be-unpaid freelancing without outside financial support, and the barriers have gotten even higher since I elbowed my way in a decade ago. And, god, politics is so much worse. Before party officials from the DCCC* will even consider you as a candidate for national office, you have to pass a “phone test”—take out your phone, scroll through your contacts, and add up how much you think you could get each contact to donate.

Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison by The Class Ceiling Why it Pays to be Privileged (2019, Policy Press)

affirmative action, Ascot racecourse, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, classic study, critical race theory, discrete time, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Hyperloop, if you build it, they will come, imposter syndrome, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Martin Parr, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, nudge theory, nudge unit, old-boy network, performance metric, psychological pricing, school choice, Skype, starchitect, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

-C. 306n23, 308n14 Bourdieusian approach 186–8, 195 Breen, R. and Goldthorpe, J.H. 294n2 Bridge Group 229, 231, 235, 236 Socio-economic diversity in the Civil Service Fast Stream 230 British Broadcasting Corporation see BBC British Social Attitudes survey 2016 286n31 Britton, J. et al 295n18 C capital (Bourdieu) Bourdieu on 186–7 class as total 196–7 cultural 14–17, 162, 164, 197, 199–203 dimensions of 194 economic 14, 24, 90, 93, 105–6, 197 embodied cultural 154, 187, 197, 199–208 ‘field-specific’ 199, 201–3 social 14, 110, 149, 162, 164 technical 141, 187, 203–8 Carter, C. and Spence, C. 159 Casciaro, T. and Lobo, M.S. 301n18 CCIs see cultural and creative industries CEOs (Chief Executive Officers) 33fig, 35fig, 40, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig Charlesworth, S.J. 314n71 Chetty, R. 192 Chinese ethnic group 42–3, 49fig, 51, 52fig Civil Service, Opportunity Network 237 ‘Clarendon Schools’ 148 class ‘death of ’ 5–6 origins and destinations 10–17 as multidimensional 196 class pay gap 7–9, 47–55, 57–70 within companies 85 company size and 67–9 demographic differences 59–60 drivers of 70fig, 86fig, 217fig education and 61–5 and elite occupations 52–5 and gender pay gap 50–1 and racial-ethnic pay gap 51–2 class-structural approach 189 client matching 147, 158–64 comportment 14, 132, 200 confidence cultural 154 fallacy of 23–7 and fitting in 124, 130, 151 misinterpretation of 102 and progression 19 and sponsorship 114 and typecasting 99 confidentiality 274 contest mobility 109 Coopers (architects) 81–3, 105–7 belonging 174–5 culture of 164–8 and embodied cultural capital 206 female representation 82, 120–1 fitting in 140–3 glass ceiling 143, 207 hierarchy 83 internal and external culture 164–8 merit 225–6 opting out 175 parental financial support 105–7 privilege 82, 83fig 361 The Class Ceiling racial-ethnic representation 82 researching 246–7 and sponsored mobility 118–21 working-class 82, 83fig Corbyn, J. 287n39 corporate senior management 33fig, 35fig, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig Crawford, C. et al 295n21 Crenshaw, K. 289n75 cultural affinity 111, 116, 122, 214 cultural and creative industries (CCIs), precarity of 91 ‘EGP’ (Erikson, Goldthorpe and Portocarero) approach 288n53 Elias, N. 302n3 elite signals 148, 156 Ellis, A.J. 306n20 embodied cultural capital 154, 187, 197, 199–208 emotional cost 173–4, 175, 178–83 engineering 33fig, 35fig, 40, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig, 54 Equality Act 2010 237, 296n1 The Equality Trust 238 Erickson, B.H. 307n38 ‘cultural competency’ 126 ‘cultural guides’ 120 F failure, anticipation of 173 ‘Fairer Scotland Duty’ 237 fairness 8, 9–10 feeding back 219–20, 273 Feinstein, L. 294n5 field (Bourdieu) 186–7, 198–9 ‘field-specific capital’ 199, 201–3 film and television industry access to 33fig class pay gap 53fig, 54–5 education 136 female representation 40, 42fig, 73 micro-class reproduction 34, 35fig racial-ethnic representation 40, 41fig, 73 social exclusivity 40, 74fig finance 33fig, 35fig, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig, 54 fire service chiefs 33fig, 35fig, 40, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig first class degree, earnings premium 38, 39fig, 64 fitting in 123–44 behavioural codes 134–40 ‘glass slipper’ 125–7 merit 144 polish 127–34 technical skill 140–3 cultural capital 14–17, 162, 164, 197, 199–203 D decomposition 58, 269 degree classification 63–4 deregulation 7, 246 disability 39–40, 41–2, 49, 51 discrimination 17, 40, 45, 57, 144, 224–5, 276 domestic migration 66–7 Dorling, D. 299n22 double disadvantage 50–2, 191, 218, 302n30 dress codes 126, 128–9, 134–5 Durkheimian approach 311n34 E Eagly, A.H. and Carli, L.L. 289n71 education and access to elite occupations 35–9 Bourdieu on 172–3 and embodied cultural capital 199–200 as ‘equaliser’ 61–5 grammar schools 6, 166 private 46, 78–81, 94, 104, 121, 123, 157, 159, 162, 172 public (elite private) 148–9 362 Index Fleming, P. 125–6 France, class pay gap 47 Friedman, S. 308n14 Future Leaders scheme 123–4, 244 G gatekeepers 114, 132, 144, 147–8, 166, 187 gender anxiety and 180–2 and dress 129 and merit 226 and technical capital 207 and tradition 39–40 under-representation of females 42fig see also double disadvantage; glass ceiling; intersectionality gender pay gap 45–6, 49, 61, 143, 221 ‘gig economy’ 91, 241, 270 glass ceiling 17–19, 45, 120, 143, 186, 190–1, 218 glass escalator 310n24 glass slipper 124–7, 128, 132, 133, 136, 142–3 globalisation 7, 286n17 Goldthorpe, J. 6, 8, 10, 189, 311n31 Goldthorpe, J. et al 309n7, 311n30 Goodall, L. 46 grammar schools 6, 166 Granovetter, M. 110 gravitas 159–60 H habitus (Bourdieu) 14–15, 186, 194, 198 Bourdieu on 288n69, 307n9, 308n1, 308n18, 314n80, 314n81 Hall, T. 45–6 Harman, H. 237 Heath, A.F. 310n20 hexis 200, 202 highbrow culture at 6TV 145–7, 150–6, 206, 219 as barrier 149–50, 164, 167 Bourdieu on 200 and privileged networks 168 Ho, K. 306n28 Hoggart, R. 307n35 homophily 214–15 and glass ceiling 17, 190 sponsorships and 113–14, 119, 120, 121 horizontal segregation 69, 272 Hout, M. 61 human capital 88, 90 I imposter syndrome 179 Indian ethnic group 42, 43, 49fig, 52fig individualisation 6, 26, 114, 144, 162 industry, decline in 6 Ingram, N. and Allen, K. 126 insecurity economic 91, 93 emotional 120, 139, 173, 179–83 institutionalised cultural capital 199, 315n92 intergenerational transfer 9, 15, 192, 193, 222 internships 149, 234 intersectionality 18–19, 40–4, 139, 190–1, 223, 233, 293n17 see also double disadvantage intra-generational mobility 193 IQ (intelligence quotient) 57, 61 isolation 181–2 IT 33fig, 35fig, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig J Jencks, C. et al 290n83, 311n29 Johnson, B. 57 Jones, D. 306n20 journalism class pay gap 53fig, 294n19 363 The Class Ceiling female representation 42fig Labour Force Survey (LFS) 264t micro-class reproduction 35fig privilege and 32, 33fig, 205 racial-ethnic representation 41fig and social mobility 30fig Just Fair 238 Lizardo, O. 149 ‘locus of control’ 23 London City of 19, 132, 212 parental financial support 24 privileged employment 22, 66, 69, 80, 106, 212 salary 66–7 senior positions 77 K Kitagawa, E 320n23 Koppman, S. 305n18, 313n58 KPMG 78, 230 Kuhn, A. 17 Kynaston, D. 132 M Macron, E. 29 management consultancy 33fig, 35fig, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig Matthew, M. 304n30 May, T. 7, 29 measurement of class background 230–2 medicine 33fig, 35fig, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig ‘merit’ measures 67fig, 68fig meritocracy 232–3 City of London 132, 133 and cultural similarity 111, 168–9 as driver 58, 62, 65 education 21–2, 61–3 and fitting in 144, 212–14, 215–19, 220–2 justification 88 ‘occupational effects’ and 198–9 and popular culture 179 and privilege 102, 103, 226–7 and progression 4–5 and sponsorship 118, 122 and technical capital 204 in UK 5, 7, 38–9 Weber on 4 meritocratic ideal 209, 210, 298n4 meritocratic legitimacy 8, 104 methodology 239–83 6TV 242–4 confidentiality 274 Coopers 246–7 elite occupation definition 265–6 L Labour Force Survey see LFS Lamont, M. and Lareau, A. 315n88 language 15, 128, 137–9, 151, 155–8, 306n23 see also speech Lareau, A. 15–16, 120 law class pay gap 53fig education 37 female representation 42fig micro-class reproduction 34, 35fig privilege 32, 33fig, 54, 85 progression in 19 racial-ethnic representation 41fig unpaid internships 234 Lawler, S. 18, 51, 308n15 Lawler, S. and Payne, G. 302n6 legal protection 237–8 Lexmond, J. and Reeves, R. 302n11 LFS (Labour Force Survey) 10, 30–1, 65, 72, 189–90, 240–3, 263–8, 271 life sciences 33fig, 35fig, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig linearity of career 196 Lineker, G. 45 ‘linguistic capital’ 306n23 364 Index feeding back 219–20, 273 interviews 247, 248t–60t measurement of social mobility 262–5 Turner Clarke (TC) 244–6 see also LFS (Labour Force Survey) microaggressions 17, 190, 224–5, 304n29 micro-class reproduction 34–5, 192 middle-class socialisation 126 Mijs, J.J.B. 298n4 Milburn, A. 9, 29–30 Miller, N. 229 Mills, C.W. 132, 148, 319n16 mixed race ethnic group 42, 43fig, 49fig, 51, 52fig Morrissey, D. 84 Mosca, G. 319n16 multiple race ethnic group 42 Murray, C. 57 N ‘neo-institutional theory’ 301n21, 303n26 networks and highbrow culture 149–50, 168 and inequality 121–2 old boys’ network 17, 109, 132, 211 and sponsorship 110, 115, 118 Norway, class pay gap 47 NS-SEC (National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification) 11, 222, 263–5 nudge theory 307n37 O objectified cultural capital 199 ‘objective merit’ 2, 168, 212, 214, 221 O’Brien, D. 241 ‘occupational effects’ 198–9 ‘old boys’ network’ 17, 109, 132, 211 ‘opportunity cost’ 182 ‘opportunity hoarding’ 148, 164 other Asian ethnic group 43fig, 49fig, 52fig otherness 146 Oxbridge 2, 3, 62, 63, 148, 155 P PACT (Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television) 243, 297n5 Paired Peers project 299n18 Pakistani ethnic group 40, 41fig, 42fig, 43–4, 49, 51, 52fig parental financial support 87–107 for actors 87–105 at Coopers 105–7 at Turner Clarke (TC) 105–7 parental occupation 31–2, 231–2, 240, 263 performing arts 33fig, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig Pfeffer, J. 290n83, 320n28 Piketty, T. 286n25 police service chiefs 33fig, 35fig, 40, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig Policy Exchange 286n31 polish 19, 127–34, 142, 159, 161, 180 popular culture 149, 202, 219, 307n38 primary socialisation 153–4, 194, 199, 202 private sector pay 68 Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television see PACT professional and managerial sector, increase in 6, 59 professionalism 159 progress in career 19–20, 45–55 class pay gap 47–55 cultural barriers 164 and education 62 female 143, 167 fitting in 124–5, 129 and merit 4, 102–3, 109, 111, 210 365 The Class Ceiling and parental financial support 90, 101, 106 and polish 127–34 self-elimination 173 sponsorship 113, 115, 118, 121 technical capital and 203 public assets, sale of 7 public sector access to 32, 33fig, 34 class pay gap 53fig, 68 female representation 42fig micro-class approach 35fig racial-ethnic representation 41fig public spending cuts 7 Puwar, N. 158 R racial-ethnic minorities at 6TV 139 access to elite occupations 20–1, 43fig at Coopers 82 and glass ceiling 190 and higher education 280fig, 281fig and IQ 57 pay gap 49–50, 283fig progression 21 at Turner Clarke (TC) 114 and upward social mobility 18 see also double disadvantage; intersectionality Received Pronunciation see RP Reeves, A. and de Vries, R. 315n91 Reeves, R. 149 regional differences 66–7, 80, 106 regression analysis 58, 268–9 Reith, Lord 306n21 RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) 175 Rivera, L. 19, 113, 129, 131, 223 Rollock, N. 289n80 Royal Institute of British Architects see RIBA RP (Received Pronunciation) 128, 156–8 Russell Group universities 38, 39fig, 62, 63fig, 100 S Saunders, P. 294n2 Savage, M. 205, 207 Sayer, A. 299n20 science, career in 33fig, 35fig, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig self-elimination 171–83 cultural mimicry 177–8 emotional self-protection 175 opting out 174–5 playing safe 175–7 self-worth 173 service-based economy 7 Sherman, R. 103 Skeggs, B. 18 SMC (Social Mobility Commission) 9, 57 social bridging 149 social capital 14–15, 110, 149, 162, 164 social closure 147–50, 189 social mobility, measurement of 30fig, 262–5 Social Mobility Business Compact 230 Social Mobility Commission see SMC Social Mobility Employer Index 230 Social Mobility Index 2017 305n3 Socioeconomic Duty 237–8 ‘sociology of elite recruitment’ 188–9 space, egalitarian organisation of 79 speech 126, 128, 156–8 see also language speed of career 176, 196 Spence, C. and Carter, C. 298n16 sponsorship 109–21 at 6TV 115–18 366 Index at Coopers 118–21 formalisation of 235–6 at Turner Clarke (TC) 111–15 standard mobility analysis 186, 198 standard mobility tables 188, 191–2 stereotyping 17, 218, 225, 303n28 studied informality 134–40, 142, 150 Sweden, class pay gap 47 ‘symbolic capital’ 201 ‘symbolic mastery’ 15, 16, 200 traditional/technical divide 32–4 Trump, D. 29 Turner, R.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

With government funding, and additional backing from philanthropic organizations and financial services, a statewide apprenticeship system was created, with the goal of giving students real-world experience and work-based learning to close the state’s skills and labor gap. In states that have large numbers of manufacturers, there will usually be more of these programs. It is important to distinguish between paid apprenticeships and the unpaid internships many college students pursue. Many students cannot afford to perform unpaid work. However, not all internships are unpaid. JBS Foods, the large meat company headquartered in Colorado, has paid summer internships where students learn management-level jobs in quality assurance. Often the intern is not only compensated but expected to meaningfully participate.

The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure by Yascha Mounk

23andMe, affirmative action, basic income, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, Donald Trump, failed state, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, language acquisition, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, unpaid internship, World Values Survey

Diverse democracies need robust laws to ensure that employers don’t discriminate on the basis of race or religion. They must ensure that the most prestigious institutions of higher learning are genuinely open to high-achieving applicants from all social groups. And they should stop companies and public institutions from offering unpaid internships that make it harder for those without deep-pocketed parents to break into promising careers. But if diverse democracies are to overcome their historical patterns of domination, they need to focus less on who attends the most famous universities or is hired for the most prestigious jobs, and more on how to ensure that children from disadvantaged backgrounds have a chance to develop their talents in the first place.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

In countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, according to a YouGov poll, the dominant opinion is that the next generation is less likely to be richer, safer, or healthier than the last.23 In Western families, bambinos all too often stay bambinos, and then become what Italians call bamboccioni (big babies), as they cannot afford to leave the nest. For millennials, the job market has become increasingly difficult to navigate with many having to jump from one low-paid job to the next whilst others can only find poorly paid or unpaid internships. Those who begin their careers out of work are more likely to face lower wages over the course of their working lives along with bouts of unemployment. The future looks bleak. But it is not just the young who feel trapped. Job creation and destruction have been on a slowing trend for decades, and those unhappy at work have greater problems in finding a new job.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

1960s counterculture, active measures, antiwork, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, data science, David Graeber, do what you love, Donald Trump, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, full employment, functional programming, global supply chain, High speed trading, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, informal economy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, moral panic, Post-Keynesian economics, post-work, precariat, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software as a service, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, unpaid internship, wage slave, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, éminence grise

There’s virtually no way that same daughter will ever become an international human rights lawyer, or drama critic for the New York Times. Even if she could get into the right schools, there would certainly be no possible way for her to then go on to live in New York or San Francisco for the requisite years of unpaid internships.5 Even if the son of glazier got a toehold in a well-positioned bullshit job, he would likely, like Eric, be unable or unwilling to transform it into a platform for the obligatory networking. There are a thousand invisible barriers. If we return to the opposition of “value” versus “values” laid out in the last chapter, we might put it this way: if you just want to make a lot of money, there might be a way to do it; on the other hand, if your aim is to pursue any other sort of value—whether that be truth (journalism, academia), beauty (the art world, publishing), justice (activism, human rights), charity, and so forth—and you actually want to be paid a living wage for it, then if you do not possess a certain degree of family wealth, social networks, and cultural capital, there’s simply no way in.

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain by Robert Verkaik

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alistair Cooke, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, G4S, gender pay gap, God and Mammon, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, loadsamoney, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Piers Corbyn, place-making, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, school vouchers, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Suez crisis 1956, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trade route, traveling salesman, unpaid internship

But Osborne didn’t bother waiting for permission from either the Cabinet Office or the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA).6 For Owen Jones, Osborne’s seamless switch from Westminster to Fleet Street reflected the gulf between the unconnected working class and the wealthy elite. Talented working-class aspiring journalists are discriminated against because they can’t live off the Bank of Mum and Dad. With few exceptions, only the well-to-do can afford to do the unpaid internships and expensive journalism masters’ degrees that increasingly must adorn the CVs of those with hopes of making it into journalism. Having parents with connections has helped multiple journalists, too. And yet a man with precious little experience in journalism – other than being rejected by the Times’s graduate scheme – can get parachuted into the editor’s seat of a major newspaper because of who he is and who he knows.

Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs by Lauren A. Rivera

affirmative action, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, classic study, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, meritocracy, messenger bag, meta-analysis, new economy, performance metric, profit maximization, profit motive, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, young professional

Others had difficulty obtaining the extensive documentation required for financial aid applications.26 By contrast, students from affluent families in Radford’s study made their college choices based on noneconomic factors, such as academic or extracurricular offerings, or feelings of personal “fit” with a university or its student body.27 Once on campus, parental financial support can help offset the cost of children’s college tuition and living expenses. Freed from the need for paid employment, students from well-off families can concentrate on academic and social activities and accept unpaid internships, all of which can facilitate college success, valuable social connections, and future employment opportunities.28 Those who have to work part- or full-time to pay tuition bills or to send money to family members do not have this luxury. To summarize, parents with more economic capital can more easily help their children receive better-quality schooling, cultivate the types of academic and extracurricular profiles desired by selective college admissions offices, and participate fully in the life of the college they attend.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

For young African Americans, it was more than 30 percent. Millennials with college degrees did much better than those without them, but even graduates of good colleges had trouble finding work that paid them enough to manage their loans. Underemployment became a significant social problem, even among the highly educated. They scraped together unpaid internships, gig work, and freelance assignments, and many of them ended up moving back in with their parents to make ends meet. By 2012, when the economy was inching its way back toward stability, the class of 2009 had already been left behind. Many employers preferred the fresh college graduates over ones who graduated three years earlier and might expect higher wages for the same work.

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Melissa Korn, Jennifer Levitz

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, blockchain, call centre, Donald Trump, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, high net worth, impact investing, independent contractor, Jeffrey Epstein, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, performance metric, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Thorstein Veblen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, yield management, young professional, zero-sum game

Because if colleges post figures on who got in because of a rich dad or grandmother, or even stopped giving extra weight to candidates with the “recruited athlete” tag, privilege would still course through the admissions system. Wealthy students would still have more opportunities to burnish their résumés with volunteer trips and unpaid internships, and they’d still have influential family connections who can put in a good word at a particular university. They can continue to afford SAT or ACT tutoring, private coaches to brainstorm and polish essays. They can pay private school tuition to attend schools like Buckley and Brentwood. And as long as admissions offices leave open the gaping holes in their verification processes for regular applicants, little incentive will exist for high school seniors—or whoever’s filling out their applications—to think twice before signing an affirmation on the Common Application that submitted material “is my own work, factually true, and honestly presented

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

Whistleblowers are targeted by government agencies and treated as traitors. For those that like the James Bond movies and have always dreamed of being a secret spy, gathering important information to help save their country from the evil of foreign governments sounds pretty cool. Those people might be interested in an unpaid internship with one of the dirtiest organizations in the United States. The Department of Homeland Security needs help catching terrorists, and all a concerned citizen needs to do is spy on their neighbors for them. DHS has even started a marketing campaign that encourages citizens to rat out their friends, family members, and casual acquaintances.

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork

Girls is set in contemporary Brooklyn and tells the story of four friends struggling to define themselves in the confusing, exciting, bittersweet aftermath of college, at a time when anxiety is running high for liberal arts majors. At the outset, an aspiring twentysomething writer named Hannah Horvath (Dunham) is cut off financially by her parents—a cataclysmic moment in the life cycle of a Brooklyn hipster. She is devastated. How will she possibly survive? Later, she goes to the supervisor of her unpaid internship in book publishing and asks him to start paying her for her labor. But rather than give her a salary, her boss instead sends her packing, further ratcheting up the economic pressure. Afterward, feeling dispirited, Hannah has rough, awkward sex with Adam, a muscular, underemployed, aspiring actor (Adam Driver).

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

For capitalists, it’s what this fetches in money when it’s sold that matters. 87 Marx, K. (1996) [1867] Capital, vol I, ch 13, London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp 448–9. 88 Marx, K. (1998) [1894] Capital, vol III, ch 23, London: Lawrence and Wishart, p 545. 89 Though in several professional occupations, unpaid internships are becoming a precondition of subsequent employment. 90 As in the case of Apple, highly profitable companies may decide they do not need to pay dividends; their shareholders are nevertheless happy as long as the value of their shares is increasing. Arthur, C. (2012) ‘One year on, Apple after Jobs has a new, more ethical flavour’, Guardian, 5 October. 91 The secondary market in shares is generally defended as necessary for encouraging people to buy shares in the primary or initial public offering market; ‘investors’ will be more confident about buying new shares if they know they may be able to profit from a rise in their market price, or offload them if they are dissatisfied with their returns.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Pure artists are, in any case, today everywhere subordinated to the market and its pursuit of private profits. Today’s creativity crisis is unfolding in the shadow of the financial meltdown and an economic climate where public jobs are being cut from Athens and São Paulo to Chicago and Stockton, where persistent recession undercuts private job growth and rationalizes minimum wage jobs, and where unpaid internships and other inequities hostile to the development of a creative class proliferate. The persistence of economic segregation walls off too many from the advantages of urban generativity. Cities are not merely creative but capable of generating and nurturing hope, innovation, and a sense of possibility and hence of breaking the vicious circle in which segregation, poverty, and inequality feed off one another.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

When this might be, no one can quite say, but it’s similar to the philosophy that social media’s exercises in self-branding and self-promotion will eventually pay off for enterprising users. (Many white-collar workers, especially recent college graduates, know another form of this treatment: unpaid internships, which cater to those who can afford to work for free.) For years, AOL relied on its Community Leader Program, comprising thousands of remote volunteers charged with moderating message boards and chat rooms, enforcing the terms of service, serving as chat room hosts, or writing content. The staffers were unpaid but received modest discounts on their AOL memberships.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Few entrepreneurs get it right first time: for instance, Henry Ford’s first company, the Detroit Automobile Company, went bust; as did Henry John Heinz’s. But both had the assets to relaunch and succeed the second time.55 The big, expensive, one-off jumps that people have to make – especially early in their lives – in terms of acquiring education or building a portfolio of unpaid internships to secure their first job are more feasible if they are underwritten by assets. Assets therefore provide ways out of Lynsey Hanley’s concrete people-lockers. This was the inspiration for New Labour’s child trust fund – whose almost gleeful abolition was one of the coalition government’s most unthinking acts.

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth by Selina Todd

assortative mating, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, deskilling, DIY culture, emotional labour, Etonian, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, full employment, Gini coefficient, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, school choice, social distancing, statistical model, The Home Computer Revolution, The Spirit Level, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional

By 2010 40 per cent of London’s children lived in poor households – twice as many as the national average.30 The children of affluent families with connections certainly benefited from the concentration of wealth and opportunity in the capital. Oscar Greene, the son of a university professor, grew up in London. After moving away in the 2000s to study at a Russell Group university, he embarked on a career in publishing, ‘which I was able to do because I could live in the family home in London’.31 Studies found that unpaid internships and work experience, informally arranged through family friends, were important conduits into the financial, advertising and legal sectors centred in London.32 But Londoners from working-class backgrounds were no more likely to get the ‘top’ jobs than inhabitants of other areas of the country.

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

“I have several ideas which could be very easily and cheaply implemented,” Luckey wrote, and then described a prototype he had already built that did exactly that. It was a bit awkward, offering to try and help one of the very few VR experts in the world, but Luckey hoped that Bolas was the type of guy who would appreciate that kind of gumption. Especially because of the big ask that bookended his email: “I would love a low pay or unpaid internship at somewhere where I could get some experience,” Luckey wrote. “If there is anything you can do to help me out, or point me in the right direction, I would greatly appreciate it.” Luckey knew that this was a long shot. But by the time he reached out to Bolas, he was beginning to suspect that those were the only kind of shots that he would get.

The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific by David Bianculli

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, fake news, feminist movement, friendly fire, global village, Golden age of television, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, period drama, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship

So at the start, what Lena saw it as was that moment when you’ve been out of school for a few years, and things should be beginning to fall together properly, and they’re just not.” He points to the plot of the premiere episode, which begins with Hannah asking her parents for money to support her while she continues an unpaid internship in New York and ends with her reading samples of her writing to them in hopes of persuading them to invest in her future. Both times, they refuse. “And then the pilot’s over,” Apatow says, laughing. “That’s the whole pilot. ‘Can I have money?’ ‘No.’ Then, at the end, ‘Can I have money?’ ‘No.’

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

But university-based professional training skews dramatically toward wealth, as the disproportion of rich students at elite graduate and professional schools matches and even exceeds the socioeconomic imbalance among elite college students. (The one form of workplace training that survives and indeed thrives today—the unpaid internship—similarly favors young workers from wealthy backgrounds, who are disproportionately able to afford working for free.) This should not come as any surprise. Most immediately, graduate and professional schools are academically competitive, and the most elite schools are immensely competitive—indeed, more competitive than even the most elite colleges.

Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area by Nick Edwards, Mark Ellwood

1960s counterculture, airport security, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, Day of the Dead, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, period drama, pez dispenser, Port of Oakland, rent control, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, transcontinental railway, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Draining courtroom drama based on the true story of an The Pursuit of Happyness (Gabriele Muccino 2006). This drama tells the real-life story of Chris Gardner (Will Smith), a downon-his-luck salesman who ends up homeless with a young son. Gardner keeps his child fed by hitting the soup kitchen at Glide Memorial Church every night while he works an unpaid internship at a brokerage firm. Shoot the Moon (Alan Parker 1981). Albert Finney and Diane Keaton star in this strained tale of self-obsessed Marin County trauma and heartbreak that’s sadly about as affecting as an episode of Dallas. Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy 1986). In a surprising twist, this warm-hearted comic installment of the sci-fi series sends Kirk and company back in time to contemporary San Francisco in order to save some whales.

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The Institute for Educational Affairs, established the previous year by William Simon and Irving Kristol with gifts of $100,000 each from Bechtel, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, Mobil, and Nestlé, began distributing grants to promising conservative undergraduates and PhD candidates, and subsidized conservatives to take otherwise unpaid internships at activist organizations, periodicals—and even unsuspecting federal agencies. Organizations for grown-ups were thriving, too—like the American Legislative Exchange Council, which, along with what New Right Report called a “coalition of pro-life, pro-Right-to-Work, pro-Defense, pro-gun, pro-free-enterprise, pro-balanced-budget, pro-tax-limitation, pro-farmer, and anti-left activists,” helped crush a constitutional amendment granting statehood to the heavily Democratic District of Columbia.