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Highlights first synced by [[readwise]] [[September 2nd, 2020]]

• This is the New York artist today: A literal servant to corporate elites, hired to impart "creativity" to children whose bank accounts outstrip their own. (Location 167)
• Today, creative industries are structured to minimize the diversity of their participants - economically, racially and ideologically. Credentialism, not creativity, is the passport to entry. (Location 183)
• Perhaps it is time to reject the "gated citadels" - the cities powered by the exploitation of ambition, the cities where so much rides on so little opportunity. Reject their prescribed and purchased paths, as Smith implored, for cheaper and more fertile terrain. Reject the places where you cannot speak out, and create, and think, and fail. (Location 214)
• Urban decay becomes a set piece to be remodeled or romanticized. This is hipster economics. (Location 238)
• My generation watches the malls fall like our parents watched the downtowns die. To our children, the mall will be a nostalgic abstraction, a 404 in concrete. (Location 329)
• you are 35 or younger - and quite often, older - the advice of the old economy does not apply to you. You live in the post-employment economy, (Location 395)
• One would suspect that a college student who can pay $22,000 to work 25 hours a week for free in one of the most expensive cities in the world needs little help making connections. But that misconstrues the goal of unpaid internships: transforming personal wealth into professional credentials. (Location 436)
• The United Nations does not pay its interns, making it very difficult for someone who is not independently wealthy to take an internship. (Location 450)
• Most human rights, policy and development organizations pay interns nothing, but will not hire someone for a job if they lack the kind of experience an internship provides. (Location 464)
• work is not labor to be compensated with a living wage, but an act of charity to the powerful, (Location 467)
• Qualities that should be encouraged in society– like empathy and the willingness to stand up for others – are devalued when ordinary people are told that they literally cannot afford to care. (Location 471)
• “All they can do if they want to do something bigger than themselves and still get paid is join the army.” (Location 475)
• Mistaking wealth for virtue is a cruelty of our time. (Location 554)
• Poverty is not emblematic of intelligence. Poverty is lost potential, unheard contributions, silenced voices. (Location 557)
• During the recession, American companies found an effective new way to boost profits. It was called "not paying people". (Location 595)
• Poverty becomes both a crime and its own punishment, (Location 773)
• The same week that the nation cheered a charitable effort to make one child’s wish come true, the largest employer in the US held a charity drive for some of its own workers. Wal-Mart, whose six heirs to the company fortune have as much wealth as the bottom 42 percent of Americans, pays its workers salaries so low that many qualify for food stamps. The costs are then transferred to taxpayers. A report by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce estimated that one Wal-Mart Supercenter employing 300 workers could cost taxpayers at least $904,000 annually. (Location 789)
• On November 23, East Saint Louis, an impoverished city with a high rate of gun violence, offered a trade to city residents: bring in your gun and receive a $100 gift certificate at a local grocery store. At 9 am, a long line had formed of residents with guns in hands. Within ten minutes, $10,000 of grocery store gift cards had been given away. (Location 823)
• "Don’t trust the boomers!" warned Paul Campos in a 2012 article on the misguided advice the elder generation peddles to their underemployed, debt-ridden progeny - including gems like "higher education is always worth the price" and "internships lead to jobs" (Location 845)
• In 1968, when Faust graduated from Bryn Mawr, tuition and board at a four-year private university cost an average of $2,545. As the scion of a wealthy political family, it is doubtful Faust had to worry about affording tuition, but neither did most members of her generation, since the cost of attending college was relatively low. Today, Bryn Mawr costs $53,040 per year - more than the American median household income. (Location 851)
• In 1968, $2,545 was about the most you could expect to pay for college (Location 855)
• She graduated in 1975, a year when over half of history PhDs could expect to find a job in their chosen field, (Location 875)
• Blame Stalin, because we can pronounce that name. (Location 1058)
• Her claim is equivalent to saying a child named Nicholas must be named in honor of ruthless Russian tsar Nicholas I (Location 1076)
• When a Polish-American commits a crime, his ethnicity does not go on trial with him. (Location 1105)
• Free speech does not mean deferring to people’s right to abuse you. (Location 1335)
• "Public Intellectuals, Online Media and Public Spheres: Current Realignments (Location 1471)
• College shows you are serious enough about your life to risk ruining it early on. (Location 1697)
• Americans are taught to believe the economy is in a permanent crisis - a position seemingly validated by their own experience. (Location 1790)