My Amazon Review of Steven Brill's "Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Decline - and Those Fighting to Reverse It"

The Unprotected

I wanted to like “Tailspin”. Author Steven Brill had very nice things to say about my alma mater Baruch College in its efforts to create successful paths for its student body that is largely made up of immigrants and children of immigrants. To mention Baruch in the same sentence as Amherst warmed my heart. He had nice things to say about the Financial Leadership program of which I am a co-founder. As an example of the program’s success is that the son of a night cleaning lady became an analyst at the major investment bank where she worked.

He starts off with a very simple thesis that the meritocracy created by opening up the Ivies to all comers in the 1960s created a new self- perpetuating elite. That is all to the good, but then he conflates this with campaign finance, the decline of unions, the smug civil service of the Veterans Administration, the “rubber rooms” of the New York City teachers’ unions and the financialization of the economy. All of that has been said before. In fact he is a bit out of date because the big driver of income inequality has shifted from Wall Street to Silicon Valley over the past ten years. His representations of the economy would have been far more accurate in 2006 than 2018.

More importantly Brill leaves out perhaps the most important factor in perpetuating his meritocratic elite, assortative mating. It is this mating process where investment bankers marry lawyers and doctors marry doctors and so on that is at the heart of creating a new establishment. In my opinion leaving out assortative mating is a major failure of his book. Brill also spends too little time on the role elitist zoning plays in perpetuating income inequality.

Brill also fails to cite Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan for coming up with the terms “protected” and “unprotected.” It came from her 2016 award winning column. To me the first two chapters are great and then the book goes downhill from there.

The full Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2JNZF3OA414UZ/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv