Dear George,

I recommend Jonathan Kozol's books to Steven Stern, perhaps beginning with Rachel and her Children. Mr. Stern seems to have no concept of what most people's real lives are like (perhaps even that of his exemplary graduate student, whose budget I'd love to examine). He reminds me of the late CEO of Coca-Cola, Roberto Goizueta, who at Monticello once suggested that any immigrant could make it to the top in America, just as he had (coming from a formerly wealthy, educated Havana family, and with his own Yale diploma and shares of Coca-Cola already in hand).

Worst of all Mr. Stern's assumptions, though it's difficult to choose among the many he presents as facts, is that there's always someone to step into the most miserably paid jobs, with terrible working conditions to boot. Apparently there are people who deserve those jobs, and can learn useful moral lessons from that suffering? (Always a new supply of desperate new Latin American farmworkers to crawl over the border and be transported by coyotes to live in disgusting housing, suffer abuse from crew leaders and bosses, and toil for miserable recompense to furnish the vegetables and fruit for Mr. Stern's table?)

In the world of academic economists and insulated CEOs, it's always the bottom line, with people as commodities, as units of production (and Mr. Stern's easy use of "productive" raises other questions). Thank God there are still people who challenge those assumptions, and who are willing to struggle, with hearts and minds and bodies, to convert short-sighted, conventional wisdom and corporate smugness into justice and decency for all.

Virginia Germino (electronic mail, July 7, 2001).