The recession didn't gut the prospects of American young people. The Baby Boomers took care of that.
By Stephen Marche
Twenty-five years ago young Americans had a chance.
In 1984, American breadwinners who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as those under thirty-five. The year Obama took office, older Americans made almost forty-seven times as much as the younger generation.
This bleeding up of the national wealth is no accounting glitch, no anomalous negative bounce from the recent unemployment and mortgage crises, but rather the predictable outcome of thirty years of economic and social policy that has been rigged to serve the comfort and largesse of the old at the expense of the young.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, human potential has been consistently growing, generating greater material wealth, more education, wider opportunities — a vast and glorious liberation of human potential. In all that time, everyone, even followers of the most corrupt or most evil of ideologies, believed they were working for a better tomorrow. Not now. The angel of progress has suddenly vanished from the scene. Or rather, the angel of progress has been sent away.
Nobody ever talks about generational conflict. Who wants to bring up that the old are eating the young at the dinner table? How are you going to mention that to your boss? If you're a politician, how are you going to tell your donors? Even the Occupy Wall Street crowd, while rejecting the modes and rhetoric and institutional support of Boomer progressives, shied away from articulating the fundamental distinction that fills their spaces with crowds: young against old.
The gerontocracy begins at the top. The 111th Congress was the oldest since the end of the Second World War, and the average age of its members has been rising steadily since 1981. The graying of Congress has obvious political ramifications, although generalizations can be deceiving. The Republican representatives tend to be younger than the Democrats, but that doesn't mean they represent the interests of the young. The youngest senators are Tea Party members, Mike Lee from Utah and Marco Rubio from Florida (both forty). Here's Rubio: "Americans chose a free-enterprise system designed to provide a quality of opportunity, not compel a quality of results. And that is why this is the only place in the world where you can open up a business in the spare bedroom of your home." He is speaking to people who own homes that have empty spare bedrooms. He will not or cannot understand that the spare bedrooms of America are filling up with returning adult children, like the estimated 85 percent of college graduates who returned to their childhood beds in 2010, toting along $25,250 of debt.
David Frum, former George W. Bush speechwriter, had the guts to acknowledge that the Tea Party's combination of expensive entitlement programs and tax cuts is something entirely different from a traditional political program: "This isn't conservatism: It's a going-out-of-business sale for the Baby Boom generation." The economic motive is growing ever more naked, and has nothing to do with any principle that could be articulated by Goldwater or Reagan, or indeed with any principle at all. The political imperative is to preserve the economic cloak of unreality that the Boomers have wrapped themselves in.
Democrats may not be actively hostile to the interests of young voters, but they are too scared and weak to speak up for them. So when the Boomers and swing voters scream for fiscal discipline and the hard decisions have to be made, youth is collateral damage. Medicare and Social Security were mostly untouched in Obama's 2012 budget. But to show he was really serious about belt tightening, relatively cheap programs that help young people like the Adolescent Family Life Program and the Career Pathways Innovation Fund were killed.
His intentions may be good — he may want to increase support for AmeriCorps — but the program shrunk last year. Three quarters of the applicants were turned away. He resisted Republican efforts to slash Pell grants by $845 per student, but then made other changes to the program that will save the government — or cost students, depending on your perspective — a projected $100 billion over ten years.
The youth vote still supports Obama, but in a chastened, conditional way. In hindsight, Obama's 2008 campaign looks like an indulgent fantasy in which the major conflicts in life simply don't exist. There may be no white America and no black America, no blue-state America and no red-state America, but one thing is clear: There is a young America and there is an old America, and they don't form a community of interest. One takes from the other. The federal government spends $480 billion on Medicare and $68 billion on education. Prescription drugs: $62 billion. Head Start: $8 billion. Across the board, the money flows not to helping the young grow up, but helping the old die comfortably. According to a 2009 Brookings Institution study, "The United States spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children, measured on a per capita basis, with the ratio rising to 7 to 1 if looking just at the federal budget."
The biggest boondoggle of all is Social Security. The management of entitlement programs, already weighted heavily in favor of the older population, has a very specific terminal point that coincides neatly with the Boomers' deaths. The 2011 report by the Social Security trustees estimates that, under its current administration, the fund will run out in 2036, so there's just enough to get the oldest Boomers to age ninety.
Only 58 percent of Boomers have more than $25,000 put aside for retirement, so the rest will either starve or the government will have to pay for them. But the government's future ability to pay is decreasing rapidly precisely because the Boomers splurged so heavily during the Bush and Clinton years. Public debt per person in the United States currently stands at $33,777. George W. Bush inherited a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of 32.5 percent and brought it up to 54.1 percent during a period of economic growth. (The money borrowed from the future paid for massive tax cuts, with no serious reductions in domestic spending, two expensive wars, and a prescription-drug benefit added to Medicare.) Under Obama, the debt-to-GDP ratio has risen to 67.7 percent and is projected to rise to 74.2 percent this year.
This is no conspiracy; no nefarious backroom deal by political and corporate overlords. The impasse of the moment is, tragically, the result of the best aspects of the Boomers' spirit. The native optimism that emerged out of the explosively creative postwar world led them to believe that growth would go on forever; that peace and prosperity were the natural state of things. Their good intentions seem like willful naivete today, but the intentions were genuine. Clinton actually believed that globalization would export the First World rather than bring the Third World home; it did both. The prescription-drug benefit was the "compassion" in compassionate conservatism. All those tax cuts were intended to liberate opportunities, not destroy them.
Cynicism rises to fill the emptied space of exaggerated and failed hope. It's all simple math. If you follow the money rather than the blather, it's clear that the American system is a bipartisan fusion of economic models broken down along generational lines: unaffordable Greek-style socialism for the old, virulently purified capitalism for the young. Both political parties have agreed to this arrangement: The Boomers and older will be taken care of. Everybody younger will be on their own. The German philosopher Hermann Lotze wrote in the 1870s: "One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future." It is exactly that envy toward the future that is new in our own time.
And we will not talk about any of it. We will keep mum. We will hold our tongues lest we seem ageist, lest we seem bitter, lest we seem out of touch, lest we seem pessimistic, lest we seem divisive.
HOW TO DISENFRANCHISE A GENERATION:
Across the country, state branches of the Republican party are making a thinly veiled attempt to disenfranchise the young through "voting reform." The trick is simple: Require government-issue photo ID before allowing somebody to vote. Eighteen percent of young voters don't have current photo IDs. Scott Walker in Wisconsin has signed this "reform" into law. So has Rick Perry in Texas. Similar new rules are going forward in roughly thirty other states. Restricting out-of-state IDs is a natural next step, already under way: That way, thousands of college students won't be able to vote. The Advancement Project, a civil-rights advocacy group, calls the move "the largest legislative effort to scale back voting rights in a century."
Let's say you just graduated from high school.
College, right? You have to go to college. That's not just what your career counselor told you. That's in the numbers. If you go to college, you're significantly less likely to lose your job. The pay of college graduates has risen over the past twenty-five years and everybody else's pay has declined. Which curve do you want to be on?
And yet, at the exact moment when an education has never been more necessary, education is increasingly out of reach. From 1980 on, the price of attending a four-year college has risen by 128 percent. While the price has spiked, the quality has tanked. Students at college in 2003 did two-thirds the homework that students in 1961 did. In a survey published in 2011, 45 percent of students showed no improvement in "critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing" after two years of college. You did not read that incorrectly: That's no improvement. None. And how could the results be any different? Three decades ago, 43 percent of professors were adjuncts. Now, with colleges bloated by older, tenured professors who take up huge slices of academic budgets while teaching crumbs of courses, the vast majority of classes are taught by adjuncts. On college campuses, the supposed hotbeds of liberalism, the young are instructed primarily in the mechanics of crony capitalism.
Once you're out of college, you'll have to intern. Again, no choice. The practice of not paying young people for their labor has become so ingrained in the everyday practice of American business that we've forgotten how bizarre and recent the development is. In the early 1980s, 3 percent of college grads had had an internship. By 2006, 84 percent had done at least one. Multiple internships are common. According to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, more than 75 percent of employers prefer students who have interned or had a similar working experience.
Employers have feasted on despair — and these aren't internships for struggling small presses or rarefied design companies. Subsidiaries of General Electric, a company worth $200 billion, employ them regularly as an "important recruiting tool." Disney uses eight thousand of them in dismal working conditions. Jennifer Lopez Enterprises uses them. So does The Daily Show. So does the pope. And because internship programs are sheltered from the violation of labor laws by the complicity of universities that give students "credit" for them — as long as the students pay thousands of dollars for those credits — American companies can operate these programs for the most part hidden from scrutiny. The best study of intern life in America found that companies save annually around $2 billion from pseudo-employment.
But maybe you're an overachiever — instead of interning, you want to get a master's or a professional degree. With entry to the professions comes another opportunity to be taken advantage of, and it's not just the inherently ridiculous price of a creative-writing M.F.A. or journalism school, where on some level, everybody understands the students are being played for suckers. The cost of medical school has spiked over the past three decades. In 1981, average medical-school debt was less than $20,000. Today it is $158,000. Law-school tuition rose 317 percent between 1989 and 2009 while American laws schools wildly increased the number of lawyers they graduate. Naturally, a glut of lawyers decreases their value. So kids pay more for a worse education that leads to lesser prospects in order for the schools to prosper temporarily. Even for doctors and lawyers, an accrual of property or any rise in net worth happens much later in life than it did twenty years ago. The standard debt-repayment plan for physicians is ten years, but twenty-five is a commonly accepted option. For the new professional class today, life begins at forty. That's not just an expression.
And if you didn't take your high school advisor's advice to go to college? Well, you should have listened. What goes for the white-collar young person applies even more ferociously to the blue-collar world, or what's left of it. The nature of the generational setback for unionized labor can be summed up in a single devastating phrase: New workers will earn a "globally competitive wage." Manufacturing jobs, having been exported to the Third World, are now returning to America at Third World rates. Newer workers at unions across the country earn ten to fifteen dollars an hour less than established workers, and the unspoken but widely reported understanding with the AFL-CIO is that the wage of these workers will not increase. In other words, Boomer workers make almost double what their young counterparts do, and will continue to do so regardless of how long a young worker stays in the same job. As one older worker in one of these bifurcated factories told The New York Times, by the time the young reach their maximum earning, their elders "won't be here any longer to remind them of what they are missing."
Government, academia, the professions, corporations, unions, and both political parties — all continue to mine the vulnerability of youth in service of the needs of their aging power base. Separately, each of these cases would amount to a minor scandal, but taken together they point to a broader and more significant alteration to the way of the world. From every corner of the institutional spectrum, the whole of American society has been rearranged so that the limits of vision coincide exactly with the death of the Boomers.
Nobody wants this. The Boomers did not set out to screw over their kids. The wind just seemed to blow them that way. But no matter what their motivations, a painful truth grows truer with every passing year: Through its refusal to act, the generation in power is willing to do what other generations before them would not — sell their children's birthright for a mess of their own pottage.
WHAT'S HAPPENING IN AMERICA IS HAPPENING EVERYWHERE ELSE:
A generation now means an economic cohort — a moment in the cycle of rising and (mostly) falling economic data. The UK has 21.8 percent youth unemployment, France 22.8 percent, Hungary 26.1 percent, Italy 28.2 percent, Spain 47.8 percent. Around the world, young people are beginning to be defined by their unemployment: the mileuristas of Spain, "those who earn less than a thousand euros"; the NEETs of England, "not in employment, education, or training"; the hittistes of Tunisia, "those who lean against the wall." Revolutions or unmanageable riots have inevitably followed the rise of masses of bored, underemployed young people.
Many claim that the young deserve their fate: They're entitled, they have too many choices. They don't know what they want. They're getting themselves into debt. They don't know how good they have it.
These criticisms are convenient, but also demonstrably incorrect. Defining generations by cultural attributes or values, almost always done with unrepentant shallowness, is the stupidest thing that commentators do. However, a recent study from the National Center for Education Statistics comparing high school seniors in 2004 (who are in their mid-twenties today) with high school seniors in 1972 (now in their late fifties) is useful and practical.
The breakdown is rather stark: Two thirds of the Boomers thought "being able to give their children better opportunities" was important; 8 percent wanted to live close to their parents; 18 percent believed that making money mattered; 27 percent cared about social problems. The students in 2004: 83 percent claimed that the opportunities of their children were very important; 25 percent wanted to live close to their parents; 35 percent were serious about making money; and 20 percent cared about social problems.
Compared with their parents, high school kids who graduated from college into the teeth of the recession are a Republican fantasy. They want a good job in order to raise a family, and it's exactly that arrangement that is going to be denied them. The deal they were promised, that if you work hard and make smart choices you will have a good life, is not working out. A Great Disappointment will no doubt follow.
Everyone currently emerging into the workplace will be economically scarred for life by the misfortune of their timing. The initial wage loss for a worker emerging in a bad economy is 6 to 7 percent for every 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, which means a twenty-one-year-old starting a job today makes about 24 percent less than he or she would have five years ago. After fifteen years, even during the good times, the wage loss still hovers at around 2.5 percent.
A more profound shift is under way, though. Currently the average American parent spends 10 percent of his or her annual income on their adult children, regardless of income. Meanwhile, one in four young Americans recently moved back home with their parents after living apart. Calling them the Boomerang generation implies that it's the irresponsible, feckless children who don't have it together enough to leave the nest. But many children who live at home have jobs. So we have children living with their parents after they have income, just like they did in the early parts of the twentieth century and before. The idea of youth as a time of freedom and self-discovery will last exactly one generation, it seems.
People who want to join society will do so through an increasingly lengthy period of humiliation and struggle, and only through the help of their parents. Even before the recession, that was more or less true. It's the dirty little secret of every middle-class person in their mid-thirties: Everybody's parents helped them out. Who do you think is paying for all those summer internships? How many new parents do you think actually have enough money for a Bugaboo stroller, let alone a down payment on a first home? And if you don't have a mom or dad who can help with ballet lessons for the kids or family vacations, God help you. America is becoming what it was founded to reject, what it has resisted throughout its history, a patronage society.
The situation is obviously unsustainable: At the exact moment when the United States and all other Western countries are trying to deal with aging populations, they are failing to capture the energy and potential of the people who will have to work to support those aging populations. We have arrived at a moment, just before the 2012 election, in which the hedges, the corner-cuts, the isolated decisions about young people from a host of institutions have accrued to the point of a continuous catastrophe. The question rises from the wreckage: How long can you eat the young?
Get ready for the summer. It's going to be hot.
Youth should be the only issue of the 2012 election, because all the subsidiary issues — inequality, the rising class system in America, the specter of decline, mass unemployment, the growing debt — are all fundamentally about the war against young Americans. But the choice young Americans face is between a party that claims to represent their interests but fails to and a party that explicitly opposes their interests and actively works to disenfranchise them.
The protesters, the occupiers, the kids who screamed themselves hoarse in the parks of New York and Oakland last year have spent the winter nestled underground nurturing their strategies. Has there ever been a movement so full of people who don't want to be there, who would rather be working?
Around the world, the response to chronic youth unemployment has been consistently traditional. The Arab world takes to the streets the way it did in the 1950s. Italy returns to its antique paterfamilias. England goes into its standard mode of underclass rioting. And what's happening in the United States would be instantly recognizable to any progressive of the 1930s.
By bus and train and car pool, they will follow the gerontocracy to Tampa and Charlotte, the cities with the utter misfortune of hosting the presidential nominating conventions. Then we'll see if the people inside the convention centers can find the youth anything better to do.
We'll see then how the flowers of rage, planted and nurtured so carelessly for three decades, have sprung up and who will harvest them.
--
Sources: Pew Research Center; Urban Institute; Project on Student Debt; Eurostat; Bureau of the Public Debt; Brookings Institution; Department of Education; National Center for Education Statistics.
Source
By Stephen Marche
Twenty-five years ago young Americans had a chance.
In 1984, American breadwinners who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as those under thirty-five. The year Obama took office, older Americans made almost forty-seven times as much as the younger generation.
This bleeding up of the national wealth is no accounting glitch, no anomalous negative bounce from the recent unemployment and mortgage crises, but rather the predictable outcome of thirty years of economic and social policy that has been rigged to serve the comfort and largesse of the old at the expense of the young.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, human potential has been consistently growing, generating greater material wealth, more education, wider opportunities — a vast and glorious liberation of human potential. In all that time, everyone, even followers of the most corrupt or most evil of ideologies, believed they were working for a better tomorrow. Not now. The angel of progress has suddenly vanished from the scene. Or rather, the angel of progress has been sent away.
Nobody ever talks about generational conflict. Who wants to bring up that the old are eating the young at the dinner table? How are you going to mention that to your boss? If you're a politician, how are you going to tell your donors? Even the Occupy Wall Street crowd, while rejecting the modes and rhetoric and institutional support of Boomer progressives, shied away from articulating the fundamental distinction that fills their spaces with crowds: young against old.
The gerontocracy begins at the top. The 111th Congress was the oldest since the end of the Second World War, and the average age of its members has been rising steadily since 1981. The graying of Congress has obvious political ramifications, although generalizations can be deceiving. The Republican representatives tend to be younger than the Democrats, but that doesn't mean they represent the interests of the young. The youngest senators are Tea Party members, Mike Lee from Utah and Marco Rubio from Florida (both forty). Here's Rubio: "Americans chose a free-enterprise system designed to provide a quality of opportunity, not compel a quality of results. And that is why this is the only place in the world where you can open up a business in the spare bedroom of your home." He is speaking to people who own homes that have empty spare bedrooms. He will not or cannot understand that the spare bedrooms of America are filling up with returning adult children, like the estimated 85 percent of college graduates who returned to their childhood beds in 2010, toting along $25,250 of debt.
David Frum, former George W. Bush speechwriter, had the guts to acknowledge that the Tea Party's combination of expensive entitlement programs and tax cuts is something entirely different from a traditional political program: "This isn't conservatism: It's a going-out-of-business sale for the Baby Boom generation." The economic motive is growing ever more naked, and has nothing to do with any principle that could be articulated by Goldwater or Reagan, or indeed with any principle at all. The political imperative is to preserve the economic cloak of unreality that the Boomers have wrapped themselves in.
Democrats may not be actively hostile to the interests of young voters, but they are too scared and weak to speak up for them. So when the Boomers and swing voters scream for fiscal discipline and the hard decisions have to be made, youth is collateral damage. Medicare and Social Security were mostly untouched in Obama's 2012 budget. But to show he was really serious about belt tightening, relatively cheap programs that help young people like the Adolescent Family Life Program and the Career Pathways Innovation Fund were killed.
His intentions may be good — he may want to increase support for AmeriCorps — but the program shrunk last year. Three quarters of the applicants were turned away. He resisted Republican efforts to slash Pell grants by $845 per student, but then made other changes to the program that will save the government — or cost students, depending on your perspective — a projected $100 billion over ten years.
The youth vote still supports Obama, but in a chastened, conditional way. In hindsight, Obama's 2008 campaign looks like an indulgent fantasy in which the major conflicts in life simply don't exist. There may be no white America and no black America, no blue-state America and no red-state America, but one thing is clear: There is a young America and there is an old America, and they don't form a community of interest. One takes from the other. The federal government spends $480 billion on Medicare and $68 billion on education. Prescription drugs: $62 billion. Head Start: $8 billion. Across the board, the money flows not to helping the young grow up, but helping the old die comfortably. According to a 2009 Brookings Institution study, "The United States spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children, measured on a per capita basis, with the ratio rising to 7 to 1 if looking just at the federal budget."
The biggest boondoggle of all is Social Security. The management of entitlement programs, already weighted heavily in favor of the older population, has a very specific terminal point that coincides neatly with the Boomers' deaths. The 2011 report by the Social Security trustees estimates that, under its current administration, the fund will run out in 2036, so there's just enough to get the oldest Boomers to age ninety.
Only 58 percent of Boomers have more than $25,000 put aside for retirement, so the rest will either starve or the government will have to pay for them. But the government's future ability to pay is decreasing rapidly precisely because the Boomers splurged so heavily during the Bush and Clinton years. Public debt per person in the United States currently stands at $33,777. George W. Bush inherited a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of 32.5 percent and brought it up to 54.1 percent during a period of economic growth. (The money borrowed from the future paid for massive tax cuts, with no serious reductions in domestic spending, two expensive wars, and a prescription-drug benefit added to Medicare.) Under Obama, the debt-to-GDP ratio has risen to 67.7 percent and is projected to rise to 74.2 percent this year.
This is no conspiracy; no nefarious backroom deal by political and corporate overlords. The impasse of the moment is, tragically, the result of the best aspects of the Boomers' spirit. The native optimism that emerged out of the explosively creative postwar world led them to believe that growth would go on forever; that peace and prosperity were the natural state of things. Their good intentions seem like willful naivete today, but the intentions were genuine. Clinton actually believed that globalization would export the First World rather than bring the Third World home; it did both. The prescription-drug benefit was the "compassion" in compassionate conservatism. All those tax cuts were intended to liberate opportunities, not destroy them.
Cynicism rises to fill the emptied space of exaggerated and failed hope. It's all simple math. If you follow the money rather than the blather, it's clear that the American system is a bipartisan fusion of economic models broken down along generational lines: unaffordable Greek-style socialism for the old, virulently purified capitalism for the young. Both political parties have agreed to this arrangement: The Boomers and older will be taken care of. Everybody younger will be on their own. The German philosopher Hermann Lotze wrote in the 1870s: "One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future." It is exactly that envy toward the future that is new in our own time.
And we will not talk about any of it. We will keep mum. We will hold our tongues lest we seem ageist, lest we seem bitter, lest we seem out of touch, lest we seem pessimistic, lest we seem divisive.
HOW TO DISENFRANCHISE A GENERATION:
Across the country, state branches of the Republican party are making a thinly veiled attempt to disenfranchise the young through "voting reform." The trick is simple: Require government-issue photo ID before allowing somebody to vote. Eighteen percent of young voters don't have current photo IDs. Scott Walker in Wisconsin has signed this "reform" into law. So has Rick Perry in Texas. Similar new rules are going forward in roughly thirty other states. Restricting out-of-state IDs is a natural next step, already under way: That way, thousands of college students won't be able to vote. The Advancement Project, a civil-rights advocacy group, calls the move "the largest legislative effort to scale back voting rights in a century."
Let's say you just graduated from high school.
College, right? You have to go to college. That's not just what your career counselor told you. That's in the numbers. If you go to college, you're significantly less likely to lose your job. The pay of college graduates has risen over the past twenty-five years and everybody else's pay has declined. Which curve do you want to be on?
And yet, at the exact moment when an education has never been more necessary, education is increasingly out of reach. From 1980 on, the price of attending a four-year college has risen by 128 percent. While the price has spiked, the quality has tanked. Students at college in 2003 did two-thirds the homework that students in 1961 did. In a survey published in 2011, 45 percent of students showed no improvement in "critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing" after two years of college. You did not read that incorrectly: That's no improvement. None. And how could the results be any different? Three decades ago, 43 percent of professors were adjuncts. Now, with colleges bloated by older, tenured professors who take up huge slices of academic budgets while teaching crumbs of courses, the vast majority of classes are taught by adjuncts. On college campuses, the supposed hotbeds of liberalism, the young are instructed primarily in the mechanics of crony capitalism.
Once you're out of college, you'll have to intern. Again, no choice. The practice of not paying young people for their labor has become so ingrained in the everyday practice of American business that we've forgotten how bizarre and recent the development is. In the early 1980s, 3 percent of college grads had had an internship. By 2006, 84 percent had done at least one. Multiple internships are common. According to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, more than 75 percent of employers prefer students who have interned or had a similar working experience.
Employers have feasted on despair — and these aren't internships for struggling small presses or rarefied design companies. Subsidiaries of General Electric, a company worth $200 billion, employ them regularly as an "important recruiting tool." Disney uses eight thousand of them in dismal working conditions. Jennifer Lopez Enterprises uses them. So does The Daily Show. So does the pope. And because internship programs are sheltered from the violation of labor laws by the complicity of universities that give students "credit" for them — as long as the students pay thousands of dollars for those credits — American companies can operate these programs for the most part hidden from scrutiny. The best study of intern life in America found that companies save annually around $2 billion from pseudo-employment.
But maybe you're an overachiever — instead of interning, you want to get a master's or a professional degree. With entry to the professions comes another opportunity to be taken advantage of, and it's not just the inherently ridiculous price of a creative-writing M.F.A. or journalism school, where on some level, everybody understands the students are being played for suckers. The cost of medical school has spiked over the past three decades. In 1981, average medical-school debt was less than $20,000. Today it is $158,000. Law-school tuition rose 317 percent between 1989 and 2009 while American laws schools wildly increased the number of lawyers they graduate. Naturally, a glut of lawyers decreases their value. So kids pay more for a worse education that leads to lesser prospects in order for the schools to prosper temporarily. Even for doctors and lawyers, an accrual of property or any rise in net worth happens much later in life than it did twenty years ago. The standard debt-repayment plan for physicians is ten years, but twenty-five is a commonly accepted option. For the new professional class today, life begins at forty. That's not just an expression.
And if you didn't take your high school advisor's advice to go to college? Well, you should have listened. What goes for the white-collar young person applies even more ferociously to the blue-collar world, or what's left of it. The nature of the generational setback for unionized labor can be summed up in a single devastating phrase: New workers will earn a "globally competitive wage." Manufacturing jobs, having been exported to the Third World, are now returning to America at Third World rates. Newer workers at unions across the country earn ten to fifteen dollars an hour less than established workers, and the unspoken but widely reported understanding with the AFL-CIO is that the wage of these workers will not increase. In other words, Boomer workers make almost double what their young counterparts do, and will continue to do so regardless of how long a young worker stays in the same job. As one older worker in one of these bifurcated factories told The New York Times, by the time the young reach their maximum earning, their elders "won't be here any longer to remind them of what they are missing."
Government, academia, the professions, corporations, unions, and both political parties — all continue to mine the vulnerability of youth in service of the needs of their aging power base. Separately, each of these cases would amount to a minor scandal, but taken together they point to a broader and more significant alteration to the way of the world. From every corner of the institutional spectrum, the whole of American society has been rearranged so that the limits of vision coincide exactly with the death of the Boomers.
Nobody wants this. The Boomers did not set out to screw over their kids. The wind just seemed to blow them that way. But no matter what their motivations, a painful truth grows truer with every passing year: Through its refusal to act, the generation in power is willing to do what other generations before them would not — sell their children's birthright for a mess of their own pottage.
WHAT'S HAPPENING IN AMERICA IS HAPPENING EVERYWHERE ELSE:
A generation now means an economic cohort — a moment in the cycle of rising and (mostly) falling economic data. The UK has 21.8 percent youth unemployment, France 22.8 percent, Hungary 26.1 percent, Italy 28.2 percent, Spain 47.8 percent. Around the world, young people are beginning to be defined by their unemployment: the mileuristas of Spain, "those who earn less than a thousand euros"; the NEETs of England, "not in employment, education, or training"; the hittistes of Tunisia, "those who lean against the wall." Revolutions or unmanageable riots have inevitably followed the rise of masses of bored, underemployed young people.
Many claim that the young deserve their fate: They're entitled, they have too many choices. They don't know what they want. They're getting themselves into debt. They don't know how good they have it.
These criticisms are convenient, but also demonstrably incorrect. Defining generations by cultural attributes or values, almost always done with unrepentant shallowness, is the stupidest thing that commentators do. However, a recent study from the National Center for Education Statistics comparing high school seniors in 2004 (who are in their mid-twenties today) with high school seniors in 1972 (now in their late fifties) is useful and practical.
The breakdown is rather stark: Two thirds of the Boomers thought "being able to give their children better opportunities" was important; 8 percent wanted to live close to their parents; 18 percent believed that making money mattered; 27 percent cared about social problems. The students in 2004: 83 percent claimed that the opportunities of their children were very important; 25 percent wanted to live close to their parents; 35 percent were serious about making money; and 20 percent cared about social problems.
Compared with their parents, high school kids who graduated from college into the teeth of the recession are a Republican fantasy. They want a good job in order to raise a family, and it's exactly that arrangement that is going to be denied them. The deal they were promised, that if you work hard and make smart choices you will have a good life, is not working out. A Great Disappointment will no doubt follow.
Everyone currently emerging into the workplace will be economically scarred for life by the misfortune of their timing. The initial wage loss for a worker emerging in a bad economy is 6 to 7 percent for every 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, which means a twenty-one-year-old starting a job today makes about 24 percent less than he or she would have five years ago. After fifteen years, even during the good times, the wage loss still hovers at around 2.5 percent.
A more profound shift is under way, though. Currently the average American parent spends 10 percent of his or her annual income on their adult children, regardless of income. Meanwhile, one in four young Americans recently moved back home with their parents after living apart. Calling them the Boomerang generation implies that it's the irresponsible, feckless children who don't have it together enough to leave the nest. But many children who live at home have jobs. So we have children living with their parents after they have income, just like they did in the early parts of the twentieth century and before. The idea of youth as a time of freedom and self-discovery will last exactly one generation, it seems.
People who want to join society will do so through an increasingly lengthy period of humiliation and struggle, and only through the help of their parents. Even before the recession, that was more or less true. It's the dirty little secret of every middle-class person in their mid-thirties: Everybody's parents helped them out. Who do you think is paying for all those summer internships? How many new parents do you think actually have enough money for a Bugaboo stroller, let alone a down payment on a first home? And if you don't have a mom or dad who can help with ballet lessons for the kids or family vacations, God help you. America is becoming what it was founded to reject, what it has resisted throughout its history, a patronage society.
The situation is obviously unsustainable: At the exact moment when the United States and all other Western countries are trying to deal with aging populations, they are failing to capture the energy and potential of the people who will have to work to support those aging populations. We have arrived at a moment, just before the 2012 election, in which the hedges, the corner-cuts, the isolated decisions about young people from a host of institutions have accrued to the point of a continuous catastrophe. The question rises from the wreckage: How long can you eat the young?
Get ready for the summer. It's going to be hot.
Youth should be the only issue of the 2012 election, because all the subsidiary issues — inequality, the rising class system in America, the specter of decline, mass unemployment, the growing debt — are all fundamentally about the war against young Americans. But the choice young Americans face is between a party that claims to represent their interests but fails to and a party that explicitly opposes their interests and actively works to disenfranchise them.
The protesters, the occupiers, the kids who screamed themselves hoarse in the parks of New York and Oakland last year have spent the winter nestled underground nurturing their strategies. Has there ever been a movement so full of people who don't want to be there, who would rather be working?
Around the world, the response to chronic youth unemployment has been consistently traditional. The Arab world takes to the streets the way it did in the 1950s. Italy returns to its antique paterfamilias. England goes into its standard mode of underclass rioting. And what's happening in the United States would be instantly recognizable to any progressive of the 1930s.
By bus and train and car pool, they will follow the gerontocracy to Tampa and Charlotte, the cities with the utter misfortune of hosting the presidential nominating conventions. Then we'll see if the people inside the convention centers can find the youth anything better to do.
We'll see then how the flowers of rage, planted and nurtured so carelessly for three decades, have sprung up and who will harvest them.
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Sources: Pew Research Center; Urban Institute; Project on Student Debt; Eurostat; Bureau of the Public Debt; Brookings Institution; Department of Education; National Center for Education Statistics.
Source
These days, I'm more aware of how fucking bleak everything is and think "what the fuck is the point of any of this". I don't see how things are going to improve.
Edited at 2012-03-30 01:58 pm (UTC)
Edited at 2012-03-30 03:22 pm (UTC)
UGHH That's one of the main reasons I've been single for so many years.
I also didn't like how much of an emphasis they put on Obama. You know, the whole "when Obama got into office, opportunity flew out the window" thing. It was probably just the way I read it but it seemed like they were completely downplaying the republicans, bringing them up only when absolutely necessary.
I think both parties have blame in this but republicans get the lions share of it, imho. But I just woke up so maybe I'm grouchy. :/
I still love the music and TV and movies of the 60s/70s but I am really beginning to utterly loathe and despise the young people who grew up then. (As a whole, in general terms.)
It frustrates me so much that not every unemployed person is counted. How many more are unemployed and exhausted their claim like me? (Shit, I haven't had unemployment benefits since 2006!) Or are underemployed and take retail when they have a masters degree like an old coworker of mine?
It's cheating. You can write off a whole percentage of people that are unemployed!
on the plus side, i have 3 part time jobs.
on the minus side, i have 3 part time jobs, and this was never what post law school was supposed to be like.
I hope things get better for you.
Yeah, we have no hope for our future. :(
It's soul-crushing, though. I'm 32, I have a Master's degree, and I can't find full-time work in my field. I'm renting a friend's spare bedroom. I have no health insurance. I could afford health insurance for my cat, but not for me. I'm trying to pay off my student loans. I have credit card debt which is actually fairly small, but which I can't get rid of because I have so little left after rent, groceries, and my minimum payments. It's so fucking frustrating. And yet I know I'm comparatively lucky.
While I applied to and got accepted into several good universities, I turned them all down so I could go to community college. My parents rather unhappy about this at first because it doesn't look that good (especially from a family of academic high-achievers). Now, my mom is dealing with student debt from her own BA while unable to find a job, and my father is looking at our education bills vs that of others and finding out about how even Ivy League post-grads are having trouble finding a job, and they've both come around to what I was thinking and telling them:
By going to community college for the first two years of my BA, I'll save at least $30,000. Between existing savings and FAFSA and a bit of financial tweaking, I may be able to get a BA with little to no debt and have an easier time moving on to my masters, even law school if all goes well. I am absolutely grateful for the fact I will be able to get my BA with little debt, and that I'll be able to pursue grad school and maybe even a post-grad. My dad, who was educated in India and paid next to nothing for his education, looked very sad and even a little pained when I talked about how happy and grateful I was to be able to pursue these things - and how it was all about money, and nothing to do with my grades or intelligence.
My father doesn't expect to ever have Social Security, and neither do I. Maybe I'm being a young, idealistic dreamer, but a large part of me honestly hopes that if I successfully become a lawyer, I can team up with other lawyers and get a bunch of economists on our side and sue for the right to not pay SS - we're not going to get anything out of it. I'd have more sympathy for the Baby Boomer generation that depended on it if it weren't for the fact they are going to be the reason I'll still spend a significant portion of my life shackled to debt, and that my mom is suffering due to lack of health coverage and no public option to help her out. I'm looking for a job right now not to pay my education debt, but hers. If I'm already looking out for my parents when they are the ones with the financial and social power in comparison to myself, then who's going to look out for me?
It's not the Baby Boomers, I can tell you that much.
/rant
Edited at 2012-03-30 06:55 pm (UTC)
I'm so scared that I'm seriously considering accepting a military commission. I don't want to be in debt. I don't live beyond me means. It's just that the system's set up in a way that someone as poor as me can't get a good education without practically selling myself to the banks.
Homelessness, yep. I spent 7 months living in a tent. I'd really really not like to go back to that, but at this point, it's pretty much inevitable. I'm basically unemployable and when my saving run out, there I'll be living under a tarp again in the woods.
Haven't seen a doctor in years, and I haven't been to a dentist since I was 20. Yeah.. land of opportunity.
My parents are young Boomers ('71 and '72), and my sisters and I are '01, '03, and '05 for HS grad respectively, with me having graduated last. My parents both went to college, although my Dad only has an associates, and my Mom has her masters. All three of their kids went to college. My sisters have bachelors, I quit uni after 3 years and went to culinary school and got an associates.
And yet only 1 of us three has a job that makes over 40,000 a year, and she only got that after being in the workplace for 5 years, moving back home from out east to live with the folks, and she went to freaking Princeton. My other sister with a degree has been through 12 jobs in the last 7 years, and has never made more then 8.50 an hour. I an an AM at a bagel chain and make 10 an hour.
Yet my parents salaries are almost 200,000 combined. While they've never told us we were shiftless and lazy kids, at my age my parents were married with a house and new cars, while none of us has been able to get out of renting, we're all living with partners cause we can't afford to get married, and even a used car is out of our budgets.
They always wanted to give us the world, and thought that they could, but now I can see it finally hitting them that we will never have the same chances as they did and that this is the norm for my generation, and for future ones.
This will be remembered as a time where the old ate their young, absolutely. The most infuriating part of it, for me, is that the boomers are so comfortably in denial about it all. They literally have no idea how good THEY had it, and they project that onto us.
Sorry, boomers, but not sorry; I plan to cannibalize your entire generation at the first available opportunity. At this point I (and when I say I, I mean my generation) literally have no choice. The difference is, you did.
When I was younger, I thought of all those rebellious hippies with a bit of admiration. But much like Obama's campaign of hope, in retrospect, I see what a ruse it all was (I support Obama, but even the most starry-eyed stans must admit...). They were, and will always be, merely looking out for their own interests, at the expense of everyone else. SS is a joke and needs to go. It is unsustainable anyway, and at this rate will take down as many as it can on the way down, cushioning only the boomers fall. I mean, it is horrible that the disabled and those children mentioned above are having to rely on this terrible system, and will be negatively affected by its absence, but, think of how many 'fringes' are being hurt directly BY SS. Out of the ashes, make a program ACTUALLY tailored to help them, those who need it. Unions? Twunions, more like it. Two leveled unions, the upper tier lasting exactly as long as the boomers needed it to. I don't even WANT what your unions have left to offer me. But I am stuck with them. We are stuck with the aftermath of a generational tornado, basically, whatever is left in the ruins financed on a credit card WE have to pay off, And chastised for being 'ungrateful'. I feel that this article exaggerates NOTHING. If anything, it's the least alarmist thing I've read on a drastically alarming situation. This, is pure fact. Numbers. The bleak, horrifying truth. I wish it would go viral.
Edited at 2012-03-31 07:23 am (UTC)
Anyone over 55 who doesn't have a job probably will never have another.
You think the geezers don't know it? Being blind is not the monopoly of any particular generation.
Did you notice that these figures are exclusively by age, and not broken down to make "the 1%" visible? Five of the ten largest personal fortunes in the U.S. are Wal-Mart heirs. The Koch brothers don't discriminate on the basis of age. They want everyone screwed.
Averages?
If Bill Gates visits a soup kitchen, the average net worth of every person there is a billion dollars. But it's still Bill Gates and 50 bums.
The average American has 0.98 testicles.
I expect that readers of this group mostly know who has been rigging things for the last few decades to put us here. One of the interesting things about the current depression is that each age cohort is screwed in its own particular way. I emphatically agree that the college and recently college age "generation" is well and truly fucked, but the people who spent decades paying into social Security who are not going to collect anything aren't in such good circumstances either.
Let's you and him fight is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It's not working quite as well with race recently, though there are places the Mexicans are useful, but distractions from class solidarity are always in demand.
Okay, so according to you, spending five years in college, self-educating tech and arts skills, and doing everything possible to turn a dollar is whining? Because most of us are doing something along the same lines, along with bitching at you to actually DO something about the problem instead of telling us to suck it up and deal with putting in a shitload of work for no end results.