Professional poverty
The Sunday Times, on Britain’s downwardly-mobile upper-middle class professional graduates. His article seems to imply (but never really states outright) that for a new graduate to enter a creative profession is almost a guarantee of life of renting and genteel poverty.
And, this week, several specialists bemoan the newspaper industry’s wholesale sacking or casualising of creatives such as: cartoonists, photographers, and book critics. Art critics are also feeling the axe.
2004 research (PDF, 20kb summary) by the Elizabeth Finn Trust showed that… “Currently 14% of the professional class in the UK … are living below the poverty line.” That’s a significant chunk of the nation’s brainpower going to waste, and perhaps does not bode well for a new wave of French graduates fleeing their moribund nation on the Eurostar.
