Design schools increasingly urge students to address social, political and environmental issues in their work. But who can afford to work in this way after graduation? In a dynamic style that draws from multiple contributors, Who Can Afford to Be Critical? discusses the limits that affordability, class and labor impose upon the educational promise of holding a "critical" practice. Why do we tend to ignore the material and socioeconomic constraints that bind us as designers, claiming instead that we can be powerful agents of change?