Barbara Ehrenreich

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The salary used to be the proof.

Not just of competence. Of worth. The number on the offer letter, the billing rate, the comp package — these were the professional class's way of keeping score, and the score was supposed to reflect something real. You invested years. You endured the difficulty. You developed expertise that was genuinely hard to acquire. And the market rewarded you, and the reward confirmed that the investment was rational, and the confirmation became indistinguishable from identity.

I know this because I have lived inside it for decades. The flush of validation when the market says yes. The quiet terror when the ground shifts and the market recalculates.

Barbara Ehrenreich spent fifty years studying that flush and that terror — not in technologists, but