Adventures in Downward Mobility: Poor Rich Kids Is the Tragicomedy on the Other Side of Graduation
The markets are dropping, the sky is falling, Bobby Jindal is about to take over America. The King of Antigua just raided your trust fund and Lehman is still the best job on Wall Street and it already went under. Welcome to the Brave New World of Ivy League Poverty, in which the value of silver-spoons is falling fast. Anon, the dawn of a disgusting, moldy-mustard-hued morn in which we are no longer able to sell our diplomas to the highest Wall Street bidder, or fetch lattes for some Fortune-500 sack of cash who pays you with the gold coins he sweats at night. We're liberal and OMGbama enough to know things could be a lot worse, but somewhere along the way, "but for the grace of God goes I" turned into "at least I'm not that pathetic guy" and "At least I'll always have Harvard. I could've been somebody, once!" -- and therein lies the genius of new blog Poor Rich Kids (helmed by an enterprising pair of lazy-ass HYP grads) which offers marching orders to the overeducated and underemployed:
Even if you’ve been cut off, so to speak (and every poor rich kid will insist that he/she is entirely financially independent), your parents want to know that if someone holds you at gunpoint and the $6.32 in your wallet just isn’t enough, the thief / poor-poor-person will be able to take their credit card. This way the poor-poor-person will feel satisfied and won’t kill you. So your parents give you their credit/ATM card, just in case. There is, however, another acceptable use for your parents’ credit card: buying items from the pharmacy. Use their credit card to buy a carton of cigarettes.
But then I read entries about how the jobs of choice for the poor-rich are "blogger," "freelance writer," and "thinking about grad school," and, like, close to home.
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Read more: alumni, extended adolescence, graduation, joblessness, lehman brothers, poor rich kids, the tragedy of adulthood
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February 28th, 2009 at 11:31 am
Everybody loves a winner and everybody hates a loser
It’s ironic that Obama gets elected with big plans to soak the rich at the very moment that the rich are suddenly much less soakable, but it’s not really a random fluke. After all, if the markets hadn’t collapsed, the margin would have been much closer, and Obama might even have lost.
In theory, it makes sense to squeeze the rich when the rich are riding high, and coddle them when they are down, but that’s hard for human beings to do. We root for winners and despise losers, so we usually spoil businessmen and financiers when they are going great guns and smack them around after they stumble. (See “1920s-1930s, History of”).
The success of Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts stemmed from reversing the usual timing and giving the business class a boost when they were down and feeling unloved and unmotivated. But that’s rare.