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The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream by Courtney E. Martin
Published in September of 2016.
The New Better Off is a book-length guide for a generation that believes that they will be materially worse off than their parents.
The main argument in The New Better Off is that the old better off no longer works. This old better off, at least for non-poor, involved a life course characterized by predictable stages and transitions. An education, particularly a college degree, was the ticket to a relatively secure and stable job. Income would rise with experience and age. Having a stable job was the foundation in which people could pair up, have kids, and buy a home in a good school district. A middle class life meant the option to go to college, marry, procreate, get on the property ladder.
According to Martin, this description of the secure and predictable life course is as outdated as commuting by horseback was in the 1950s. The era of stable careers and affordable housing is over. The future belongs to the gig economy and the rented apartment. Kickstarter rather than mortgages. Driving for Uber replaces joining the union.
In Martin’s eyes, we need to find a new way to be happy that does not depend on having a secure job. She is not even sure that the sacrifices and tradeoffs necessary for a “traditional” career were even ever worth the costs that these careers imposed. A portfolio job - one where a creative worker strings together pay from any number of diverse projects - can be invigorating. Freelance Nation may be less secure, but is almost always more interesting.
Is Martin right? Do we need to shift our ideas about the good life away from what we do (our job title and career prospects), to one that prioritizes creativity, connections, and community? If owning a home and sending your kids to a good college is really out of reach - then perhaps we should not strive to own that home or save for that tuition.
The New Better Off tries to recast middle class downward economic mobility as a feature, rather than a bug.
Having less money, and the options available through the rise of the sharing economy, means owning less stuff. Who needs a car when we have ZipCar and Lyft? Why buy a bike when you rent one from Splinster? Buying new clothing is so twentieth century when quality used clothing is a click away on thredUP.
Discovering how to make peace with less - less job security and less good housing and maybe even less of those expensive kids - might be a wise move in our age of diminished expectations. Martin makes a compelling case for the joys of co-housing (her family lives in a co-housing community) and portfolio work (she is a writer for various magazines and websites).
Where I wish Martin had spent more time investigating in The New Better Off are the causes, and possible solutions, to the economic insecurities of the new professional class. To be clear, (and to her credit Martin is self-aware on this topic), The New Better Off is not aimed at the poor or the working class. Her audience is college educated professionals who are no longer able to count on their degree as ensuring a predictable path to a stable and well-paying career.
Martin’s failure to spend adequate time on either the structural causes, or possible policy solutions, to the economic challenges at the heart of The New Better Off ultimately result in a less than satisfying reading experience. A focus on college affordability, lowering health care costs, and increasing the supply of affordable housing seems more productive than extolling the benefits of the gig economy.
You would not know it by reading The New Better Off, but most future college graduates will end up taking full-time jobs, and most will want to start families and buy homes. They may not do these things in San Francisco or Boston or NYC (too expensive), but they will locate in fast growing cities and in suburbs with affordable housing and good schools.
Martin may have gotten a better grip on the reality of migration, family formation, and employment if she had spent more time talking to people in cities like Houston, San Antonio, Phoenix, Fort Worth, Dallas, Austin, Denver, and Charlotte - and less time with the creative class of Brooklyn and San Francisco.
Living in a co-housing community and working as a freelancer sounds exciting, but this path will not be the ultimate destination for the great majority of college graduates.
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