For neoliberals, in other words, it’s prejudice not poverty that counts as the problem, and if, at the heart of the liberal imagination, as Trilling understood it, was the desire not to have to think about class difference, then at the heart of the neoliberal imagination is the desire not to have to get rid of class difference. Sometimes that desire takes the form of pretending class doesn’t exist (no maid service in the dorms); more often it takes the form of pretending it does exist (there are rich students and poor students at Harvard). Almost always it takes the form of insisting that class doesn’t matter; that, like Lee’s mom says, being rich doesn’t make you a better person. Of course it might be objected that, when it comes to being healthier, safer, freer, and happier, being rich does indeed make you better and a more just society would imagine a more just distribution of money, health, safety, and freedom. But the politics of the neoliberal imagination involve respecting the poor, not getting rid of poverty—eliminating inequality without redistributing wealth. And until that changes, our best hope for economic egalitarianism would seem to be the recently announced spike in theft on the subways, due, the transit police say, to kids stealing iPods from (we can hope) the graduates of universities like Duke, which has started giving them away free to Charlotte Simmons and her classmates.