By Dave Andeson:
I'm one of the last members of Generation X to be born, so the following article technically does not apply to me, but the reality is that I consider myself closer to the economic and class circumstance of the 18 to 29 year old cohort than the 30 to 45 year cohort that is Gen. X.
No group in America has been hit harder during the current recession than young adults. Millions of Americans are graduating from college with virtually no money, lots of debt and with very dim employment prospects. Those who don't go to college are even worse off.
But the inability to get good jobs is only part of the story....
*The Pew Research Center study also found that only 61% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 are covered by some form of a health plan.
*According to a National Foundation for Credit Counseling survey, only 58% of those in "Generation Y" pay their monthly bills on time.
*Not only that, but according to a November MetLife poll, nearly 70% of those in "Generation Y" are not building up a cash cushion, and 43% are accumulating too much credit card debt.
The generational balance sheet is horrendous because the costs of entry into the middle class have been increasing without either the corresponding increase in wages due to higher productivity that originates from greater investment in personal educational capital or increased assistance. Instead, my generation has taken on massive loads of debt (some of it subsidized efficiently and some that acts as a conduit for the privatization of profit and the socialization of loss) to buy a decreasing chance of winning the lottery into the stability of the middle class. Healthcare is unaffordable unless one is in perfect health, housing is unobtainable without perfect credit, and education is increasingly expensive but less effective at delivering on its implied promise of increased income and satisfaction.
The social contract is broken, and my generation is broke.
The Times (of London) has a column today which estimates that one million 18-24 year olds in the UK are without jobs. I'm not sure people who are not in that age group really understand what an utter disaster in the making this is.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/libby_purves/article7107887.ece
Parents still reflexively shuttle their kids off to college. Returns on their and/or their kids expenses become lower and lower all the time.
ReplyDeleteI want to say something to make you feel better but nothing comes to mind. I'm concerned for my own children and their children as well as you. I can assure you that as long as immigrants continue to migrate to America, finding ways to navigate upward, the task may be tough but it is not impossible. Look where first-generation immigrants are working and know that if your mother tongue is English you have an advantage over the competition, all other things being equal.
ReplyDeleteFor what it's worth, the day is long past when a working lifetime is dedicated to one profession. Last statistic I heard, the average person can expect to work in at least three totally unrelated fields over the course of their productive years. Even in medicine, law, engineering, whatever, the trajectory will go from entry-level to mainline, but graduate to supervision, management, training, or executive functions that leave the original vision behind. All that presuming there is not a radical change of direction altogether.
Meantime, your generation will be the one expected to furnish your own employee-paid retirement income supplemental to Social Security (which furnishes only a bare safety net for those with no other resources). Company-paid plans and the old-fashioned defined benefits pensions which benefit my generation are rapidly vanishing. Employee-paid arrangements (401-k, IRA, SEP, etc) will be your old-age security, so disciplined savings for the future will replace in your generation the carelessness of mine.
You might want to study the Diamond-Orszag Plan for saving Social Security. Congress may screw it up, but until they do, that is a template for change as delicately balanced as a Swiss timepiece. Hang in there. Your intellect and writing gifts have already placed you in the top crust.
It's like nobody bothered to tell your generation that the American Dream is dead, murdered by the people who promote it through flecks of bloody spittle that come from eating its liver raw.
ReplyDeleteOn the plus side, maybe your generation will see things as they really are and collectively get off the American merry-go-round to do things differently.
Don't be fooled by the tempting voices from your parents' generation telling you that if you just tweek this or that towards "progress" that you too can aspire to the two SUV's parked in the McMansion driveway like they did.
You/We will have to find new ways to do things; our parents burned the bridges behind them. But it's possible for us to live decent lives once we turn away from the things we were taught to want - and the means to achieve them - and towards our own goals and our means to achieve them.
We must get off the hamster wheel that still goes by the name of "middle class". The American conception of that phrase is dead, because it really meant "working class with the benefit of a functioning society". For the Boomers to see good returns on their investments for retirement (and the banker class to make a killing), that had to be hollowed out...and it was.
I don't know what it will look like if we're successful, but i know it won't involve climbing any corporate ladders or saving for retirement with our surplus labor value. It will probably look more like small-scale agriculture for self-sufficiency, resilient communities and local manufacturing to meet local needs.
And remember, for us proletariat (i.e. asset-less class) inflation is not a bad word: it will pay down that student loan debt faster than a lifetime of chipping away at it with what little that's left after paying the bills.
Dave, what's your take on why society has decided to plow under the next generation?
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