It wasn't initially a hard decision: I had been tapping my parents and extended family for cash over twenty-three years of being alive on this planet, and this had included a generous amount of travel and an expensive undergraduate education. It wasn't hard, because as formative as all this had been, these people clearly did not deserve to be footing my bills any longer - perhaps they never deserved to be doing so in the first place, with their middle-class teacher incomes - so I resolved to finally make my own living. Not a radical or unusual choice, by any means. But by doing this, I signed myself up for a sort of crash course in economics that I am still trying to get my head around.

Because all of a sudden, I'm a stipended intern at a non-profit, and I'm poor. My estimation of my personal needs has always tended toward modesty, but now even my modest needs sometimes seem like more than my budget can handle. Worst of all, I'm stuck with principles from those bygone days that predispose me toward financial strain: I require myself to be decent, generous and far-sighted. Terrible, isn't it? I love the work at Net Impact, where I get to learn about business and possibilities for social progress all at once, and I see it as a step in the right direction. But with principles such as these, for the time being I wince at every expenditure large and small, and fret over the impending necessity of dental work. Dental work! If I lived in Europe (and I'm certainly not the first American to express wanting to do so), my teeth would be a matter of public concern.

Never before has being an American seemed like such a hardship. I suppose I've always known there was a disparity between America and other developed countries, but now this knowledge rings a little more personal. I read a pair of articles in this month's Common Ground Magazine (a San Francisco publication which, fortunately for me, can be picked up for free), both of which emphasized what I already knew: that of developed countries, America has the largest and most insurmountable income gap, and job growth, where it occurs, occurs almost exclusively in the highest and lowest income brackets. Jobs paying $25k/year or less are growing, as are those paying $100k/year or more. What we're seeing fewer of are jobs in between.

Increasingly, it seems most Americans are left with no comfortable choices. When you have to choose between being very rich and being very poor, undoubtedly more and more people will be tempted to recklessly pursue the former regardless of what it might cost them in integrity. When you raise the stakes this way for an entire national population, it should be no surprise when the corporate sector finds itself in a state of moral bankruptcy. The happy medium is conspicuously missing, so the choices we make will be motivated more by a fear of poverty than by a desire to behave consciously and appropriately.

Corporate social responsibility has been high on my radar lately, but I'm conflicted about whether this trend is doing everything it ought to. It seems everybody is for it, but what we understand from it seems to vary by individual. If the environment scores a few initial points because companies find new ways to make being green profitable, great, but we still haven't addressed how the employees of these corporations are going to avoid a nasty fall to poverty if they become sanguine enough to suggest a change that isn't profitable. An Economist article forwarded by one of my colleagues a few days ago brings up Robert Reich, a new critic of CSR, and while I'm not entirely sure what to think about his conclusions, much of what Reich says rings true, pessimistic as it is.

I will continue to explore these issues as I learn more about them, and hope to become a better blogger as I learn more about blogging. Stay tuned.