the who, sure it's a choice. but it's a choice not everyone is free to make. sometimes your path in life is chosen for you, and you cant do jack shit about it.
even for the college educated, there are fewer and fewer choices. things are getting competetive. for starters, it's much harder for college kids to find jobs to pay tuition and survive. it used to be that many menial jobs like landscaping or deliveries were taken by college kids, who would get paid a decent wage for their work. now, employers hire mostly mexicans who get paid half as much. so kids need to find jobs doing other shit..they move into cities. they get internships and work as office bitches. and then they end up (even with a college degree) working at merril or chuck schwab, or some other lame firm, where they get paid 40g/year and never get promoted. by the time they buy houses and get kids, the college educated urbanites working on wall street are all deep in debt and essentially living an equal quality of life as farmer joe in alabama. College is not how you get ahead. you get ahead by being clever and creative at fucking the system. as you may well know, not everyone can be clever and creative. after all, thewho, you do make your living being "clever and creative and fucking the system".
also, as time goes on it gets harder and harder for people to make a decent living doing the same thing they've been doing for years. i dont remember where i read it, but i remember reading somehwere that a college degree now is worth as much as a highschool diploma 25 years ago, and that soon enough people are going to have to get master's and phd's to get to the same socioeconomic level as people with college degrees now. couple that with immigration/outsourcing, inflation, and economic recession, it's going to be tough for middle class americans to continue living the way they are.
case in point: Flint Michigan. thousands of SKILLED autoworkers put into poverty because some schmuck wanted to cut costs. sure, most people moved, but wheather they were ever able to attain that level of income again is questionable, and the people who stayed (because they simply had nowhere else to go - how do you move if you have no job, cant get a job, and are broke?) they ended up living in some of the worst conditions in america. need i say more?
or take something a little more modern - dell customer service. it used to be that americans were the people working the lines, and there were quite a few neighborhoods in america who's economy depended almost entirely on customer service and telemarketing operations. when dell and all the other companies outsourced their labor to india, all those neighborhoods fell apart. the sheniqua latifa jacksons that used to make an honest living working the telephone, are now all on wellfare or selling crack to feed their kids.
