Category Archives: politics

Do young people have too much time to think about only themselves?

Posted on January 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

I spent the weekend in a skilled nursing center with my 95-year-old father, and I met a young person, James, who at age 26 has done more inspiring work than many of us will do in a lifetime. His story makes me wonder about a couple of things, the first of which is whether this slower path to adulthood might just be giving kids a little too much time to focus on themselves–and how we might transform this slower path into something more. Read the full post over at Psychology Today.

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Posted in delayed adulthood, millennials, politics, work and earnings

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Voices beyond Occupy Wall Street: very little sympathy

Posted on October 28, 2011 | 4 Comments

I had two conversations yesterday with 20-somethings, one still in college and one a recent grad who is now working. Both were unsympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street protests. Both thought the protests were too fringe, led by people who did not represent them or reflect their values.

In the first chat, a student in his final year of undergraduate work in New York City, was interviewing me about student debt. As we talked, however, I got the impression he wasn’t enthralled with the protesters, or sometimes even his own generation.

Lurking behind the conversation was a sentiment I heard later in the day over a cocktail with a young woman in her first job out of college. She was hesitant to embrace the motley crew on Wall Street–especially on this issue of student debt–because she felt people go into things with their eyes wide open and shame on them if they don’t read the fine print on their loan papers and get themselves into deep hock as a result. We have free will, she pointed out.

A child of immigrants, she believes firmly in the “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality. Her parents, who came here with nothing and some serious roadblocks ahead of them, nevertheless managed to become quite successful in the embrace of America. If they can do it, so can most people, she thought. She acknowledged that the playing field is not always level, but she countered, the opportunities are there if you have the ambition and drive to make it happen.

Both she and the young man were put off by the privilege they saw at the protests. The protesters, they thought, had the luxury of being there because they could afford not to work. Some had even quit their jobs to go to the park and take part–such recklessness proved both their privilege and their disconnect from the mainstream.

They were both put off by the demands of some protesters to wipe out the debt, to forgive the debt 100%. Both said–and I paraphrase–don’t you think if you have to pay something back, you’ll appreciate it more? There was little sense that debt was burdensome (of course, both had the luxury of parents who paid for their school). Both I think felt that the issue was a back door for freeloaders to not have to pay for their mistakes.

Neither, I think, believes the country is in as dire straits as it is. Both are too young and optimistic to believe that anything dire will happen to them if they just work hard and play by the rules. I hope that’s the case. But I fear it won’t be. The country is at a point where many of our past derelictions of duty are coming home to roost. We’ve failed to keep up our roads and bridges, we don’t invest in R&D, we’ve allowed our schools to wither, we’ve allowed inequality to gallop ahead and with it blocked opportunities for too many, we’ve buried our head in the sand on immigration policy and force the next innovators to leave the country after we’ve educated them, and we’ve replaced a modest safety net with a you’re-on-your-own workforce and social life. All of these problems were once collective problems. We used to rally as a country and find solutions. Now we separate like oil in water to our factions of discontent. As Thomas Friedman said recently, we have to start looking hard at these issues as a collective challenge. If we do, we face a tough decade; if we don’t, we face a  lost century.

If one thing came through loud and clear yesterday in those two conversations, it was the notion of individualism. There wasn’t even a whiff of a sense of duty to the social contract among us all.  A collective responsibility has been so washed clean in their minds that it’s a non-issue, not because they disagree with it, but because it does not register, period.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. We are shaped by our surroundings and our moment in history. This generation came of age among the most free-wheeling, libertarian, no-holds-barred capitalism since the 1920s. They also came of age in an era of identity-driven politics: gay rights, women’s rights, black feminist gender rights, forgotten white men’s rights, animal rights, … you name it, the list goes on. So it’s no surprise that individualism and a distaste for “free rides” and slackers resonates so with these two young people. (This history also helps to explain the gentle anarchy that reigns in the Occupy Wall Street protest. How can you find common ground to form a platform when there are so many issues clamoring for attention and a generation who has been raised on free-wheeling individualism?)

We have splintered into increasingly narrow interest bases and as a result have sacrificed the more social view of a life bound together.  That “social contract” doesn’t mean that the slackers get a free ride. But shouldn’t it include a sense that when the weakest link suffers, we all suffer? Whether this generation will agree with that is a question waiting for an answer.

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“Unjust” is what lit the fire for Occupy Wall Street protesters

Posted on October 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

“The system is deeply unjust and careening out of control,” Naomi Klein, contributor at The Nation, told the protesters holding their ground at Occupy Wall Street in New York. That statement, it seems to me, holds the catalyst for this crowd-sourced protest. Besides having all the elements to rally a crowd, it turns on the word “unjust.” For this youngest generation, “unjust” is the equivalent of “Vietnam” for the Boomers. It’s loaded. It sparks the passion.

In many interviews with young people, their political apathy has always stood out. They don’t read newspapers. They don’t vote. They hate the horse-race politics. They don’t like confrontational debates. But where they are passionate is around causes, and in particular causes that rectify a wrong, that fight injustice. Usually that injustice has been elsewhere–Africa seems to be a favorite. AIDS, poverty, rape, dispossession: these are all topics young people have rallied around (mostly online). Our own two wars or poverty on our shores: not so much. The more abstract, far-away problems with clearly horrible consequences grabbed their attention. It was easy to “like” a cause online or buy a t-shirt or a pair of shoes that “gave back” to a cause.  Local political wrangling? Not interested. “I’m so bad at following politics and the news,” is a common response.

We recently sat down with about 100 young adults  for a wide-ranging interview on how the recession has affected them. (In a word: ouch.) As part of the interviews, we asked them about what they were thinking when they saw Lehman Brothers and the other big banks come crashing down in 2008, or the prospect that capitalism was being sorely tested. Most said something like, “Thank God it doesn’t affect me.” At the time, most were still in college, working on the assumption that it would be all said and done by the time they graduated. Now, two years later and largely unemployed or underemployed, they are perhaps thinking twice about where to cast the blame.

The big fuzzy social justice issues are suddenly becoming much more defined and personal. After all, this youngest generation is hardest hit by the recession. But in this case, social justice is their justice, not a cause in Africa or Tibet. It is the stark inequalities in wealth and assets and the power imbalance that such inequality brings. As Joseph Stiglitz put it, turning Lincoln’s famous phrase on its head: a government for the 1%, by the 1%, and of the 1%. (1% of the country’s population owns one-fourth of the nation’s income and 40% of its wealth today). Young adults are feeling this shift personally. The power imbalance is sucking the life out of their futures.

Sure, their demands are unformed, and the occupation on Wall Street is largely a 21st century love-in still. But they’re out there. For this generation, that’s huge. I cannot say that strongly enough: HUGE. This is a generation that talks the talk a lot about social issues, but doesn’t often walk the walk (either to the voting booth or the picket line). But here they are. Something has changed.

For once perhaps their ignorance of history will benefit them. They don’t feel the pressure to protest in familiar forms of the past. “Anarchy” doesn’t even fit them: not enough anger. They’re coming together on their own terms, in a new form of political protest. The skeptics don’t think this movement has a chance because they cannot articulate their demands. What do they want? But as my husband, who was at the rallies in the 1960s and 1970s said, it wasn’t that organized back then, either. A lot of people joined in for the hash and to pick up girls.

It is up to the legislators and others in power to respond to the protest. The protesters should not have to figure out how to fix the problem; that’s what we have elected officials for. The protesters’ role is to voice the discontent–no matter what that voice looks like. In that, they are doing their job as citizens.

For more on the protests, here’s an “official” site: Occupy Wall Street.
Here’s their newspaper (newspaper!): Occupied Wall Street Journal

Here’s the Facebook page.  Twitter is #occupywallstreet

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A new generation, a new movement underfoot

Posted on September 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

Yesterday morning, after many mornings of disheartening news, I awoke  to the headline, “Protests Around the Globe as Faith in the Vote Wanes.” The story reported on young people in Israel, Spain, Greece, India, and elsewhere who have taken to the street to voice their anger at their leaders, at corruption, and at blocked opportunity. Yes, I thought. Start something. Start something now.

What was truly inspiring was the new form of government they are agitating for. With little faith in the ballot box, whose politicians are seen as corrupt and corrupted, pandering to the established interest groups, they are seeking a new answer. As the Times reports:

They are rejecting conventional structures like [political] parties or trade unions in favor of a less hierarchical, more participatory system modeled in many ways on the culture of the Web.

When we interviewed young people for Not Quite Adults, I distinctly remember Zach, a young 20-something with a bright future ahead. He and many others were electrified by Obama’s run at the time, and yet he said, politics as a whole turned him off. Asked about protests, he said,  ”My generation doesn’t go in for that old form of protest.”  The banner-waving, the bull horns, the fired-up masses: Too confrontational. Too radical.

Although his peers across the globe are still embracing the old-school protest, their ideas about how to govern, how to organize certainly reflect Josh’s ideas. Participatory, fresh, self-organizing, more decentralized and less dependent on a bullhorn or a figurehead leader. They are all leaders. “A beautiful anarchy” one Israeli called it.

The European and Israeli and Indians’ actions may have been sparked by traditional complaints: unemployment, lack of opportunity, corruption, an electorate who does not hear their pleas. But they are acting in new, and hopeful, ways. This younger generation is turning to each other, seeking a new way of governing. The old forms, in this generation’s eyes, are no longer legitimate–any of them. The Left is corrupt, the Right is corrupt–they all pander and work to hold on to power, nothing more.

Their decentralized self-organizing ethos springs from this generation’s life on the Web.  I have the good fortune to manage the online site for the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning program so I have the privilege of learning about digital media from people like Mark Surman from Mozilla Foundation and danah boyd at Microsoft, or Katie Salen of the Quest to Learn schools. I’ve seen first-hand how kids operate with digital media, and it is open, free, and most important to this conversation, the “sage on the stage” is dead.

The era of an “expert” deigned as such by a gatekeeper doling out credentials or admittance to the club is fading. And with this  fading comes come a diminishment of the powerful elite. Authority is turned on its head. If you’re good at what you do, and you’re only 15, so what? If you can pass muster among your peers and prove yourself in an open forum, who cares if you’re a 15, or 20, or 60?

Consider publishing. Since at least Boswell and Johnson’s era, authors were designated as such by the intellectual and power elite, whose judgments deigned one talented enough to join the club. Only a select few made the cut.  Unless one was accepted into that clatch, we were forever the reader, rarely the storyteller. That has now changed. Today we have at our fingertips the power to be the storyteller or reporter or columnist.  In 1999, there were 23 blogs on the internet. Today, there are more than 100 million, according to Technorati‘s “State of the Blogosphere” report. The voices of millions are broadcast out through the blogosphere, sometimes garnering only a handful or readers and at other times launching an unknown into the ranks of the blogging elite, with their ideas and opinions and stories reaching across the globe.

Our stories can find new audiences and be “published” in new forms. Consider Electric Literature, for example, where people from all over the world submit their short stories– written, video, or audio. Those stories are then geo-coded (tagged to the location where the story unfolds) and sorted by topic, such that walking to meet a date for brunch in Brooklyn on a Sunday morning, a person can download a love story whose plot unfolds right near the brownstone they are passing.

But the power doesn’t stop at authoring. In fact, as Surman told me one day, the real power lies in the ability to program and write code, which of course the open-source movement is all about making happen.  An art festival in Berlin held a “Facebook resistance” workshop where someone used a simple Firefox add-on (i.e., programming code) to change the ubiquitous “like” button on Facebook to “dislike.” He now has a different power relationship to a big monolith called Facebook. “It gives you choice,” Surman said.

The web lowers the barriers to participation and gives you the tools to direct your course.  Anyone can join an online discussion board and ask a question. More important, and more revolutionary, anyone can provide an answer.

“One thing is certain,” writes Will Richardson in 21st Century Skills: Rethinking How Students Learn,  …”Instead of learning from others who have the credentials to ‘teach’ in this new networked world, we learn with others whom we seek (and who seek us) on our own and with whom we often share nothing more than a passion for knowing.”

The web makes this connection, this seeking possible, and our connections make “participatory” possible.  As Don Delillo imagined our world, “In the lonely pockets of towns and cities, a thousand minds tick.” Now those thousand minds are networked, and they tick even louder.

For the youngest generation, this participatory ethos is central. After all, the social web was largely built by young people, for young people.  Shawn Fanning and Napster; Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook; Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim and YouTube—they designed these sites and tools –in their early 20s

I’m a skeptic on most things (read the quote at the top), but I have to say, this movement inspires me. I hope it can take wing, not just in Europe or Syria or India, but here, too.

postscript: While I was writing this blog, a group called Splashlife sent me a link on twitter to the  ”take back Wall St.” movement going on right now. Check it out and join up. On twitter, you can follow it at #takewallstreet or #occupywallstreet.

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Young parents are losing ground

Posted on September 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

In a week of bad news for young adults, there’s more of it today. The share of young parents living in poverty shot up, and is at its highest peak in decades. That means that the children of those parents are also in poverty.  Today, more than one in three young parents (under age 30) lives in poverty. Thirty-seven percent! Not only is that a disgrace, but it is a threat to our futures.

We talked with many of these young people in Not Quite Adults, people like Sheila, a mother of three in her late 20s who babysits three kids in addition to caring for her own so she can balance work and family more easily. The pay is paltry–at the time less than $360 a month. She and her husband Tony had only a high school degree and were trying to patch together a living in the service sector. She’s worked in fast food, waitressing, data entry, she was a clerk at a dental clinic, and a nursing home aide. She cleaned houses for awhile, and tried to start her own business. The family lives hand to mouth, and her barely constrained desperation was evident in her interview.

Or there was Franco, a 27-year-old married father of two, who worked long days as a deliveryman for small grocery stores. Working 57 hours a week for about $12.50 an hour at the time, he was never home. Working those hours was the only way to raise his family’s income above the poverty line, but it was taking its toll.

There are countless other stories like these. We tend to imagine the latest generation as the kids we see on television or in the movies–elite brainiacs inventing the next social media tool or a slouching gamer hunkered down on the couch. But the vast majority are more like Sheila and Franco: working hard with little to show for it.

And these interviews were before the recession. It’s only worse now. I suspect that Franco and Sheila are struggling to hang on to their standard of living, and I would bet that they’ve been pushed out of their jobs as the competition for workers tightens. When estimates are that 17 million college grads are doing jobs that don’t require a BA, Franco and Sheila don’t stand a chance.

On top of the desperate job market, since 1996, the program that had supported single mothers and children (AFDC, now called TANF) has been radically altered. To receive cash assistance today, mothers must be working, and to prevent long-term dependency according to reformers, women can only receive TANF for a total of five years over their lifetime–cumulative. Every month receiving TANF counts against the clock, in other words.

After the reforms were passed, caseloads plummeted–which reformers pointed to as a sign that too many had been abusing the system. In 2010, there were 1.9 million families receiving TANF cash assistance, down from 4.8 million in 1995. However, as ample research shows, the caseloads plummeted mainly because the economy was hot. The late 1990s saw one of the most robust economies in recent memory. Jobs were plentiful, and young mothers were easily getting a foothold on the job escalator. States focused on job preparation on the belief that once in the door, they’d pick up the necessary skills to advance. But while many entered the workforce, many also embarked on a string of low-paying jobs, rarely moving up, like Sheila. As Ron Haskins, one of the main voices of welfare reform on the then-moderate Right, put it recently:

“There are a lot of moms who can’t make it under this kind of demanding regime. Most of them can get a job, but they cannot hold it. So they get a job; they lose their job; then they try to find another one; they lose that one. So they are in and out. Some of them just try it once and they are out. Research shows that these are usually moms who have two or more problems – problems such as depression (which is a big issue among welfare mothers); three or more kids (which raises issues about child care); problems with transportation; problems with housing. Most mothers can deal with one of those things and can keep going, but once they hit two or three (especially) there really is a drop-off.

Those strains were extended to other young mothers when the first serious economic downturn hit and many young mothers were let go. After a tough decade of the 2000s, according to LaDonna Pavetti, a leading researcher of welfare reform, the employment rate  among poorly educated single mothers on TANF is the same it was as reform took hold: 54%.  In the meantime, many young mothers have exhausted their benefits. You can see why unemployment insurance becomes so important today–keeping 3.2 million families out of poverty, according to the Urban Institute.

When we talk about the poverty rate of young families, we’re not only talking about single mothers of course. In fact, “working poverty” is a way of life for far too many.

There was a time when we were more committed to keeping people out of poverty.  During the 1960s and President Johnson’s “Great Society” programs (extending Bobby Kennedy’s War on Poverty),  the country agreed that the families should not have to go hungry in a land of plenty. Medicare and expanded Social Security are a direct result of that effort, and lifted millions of elderly out of poverty. Today, young families are now six times more likely to be poor than elderly families. The poverty rate for those over age 65 is 5.7%.

The programs of the Great Society also included the Peace Corps, VISTA, Head Start, the Higher Education Act, Jobs Corps, and other supports for young adults. They helped millions of young adults connect to work or find purpose in volunteering and giving back. Yes, some of those programs still exist today, and there are others that have been modeled on them, but gone is the commitment to taking care of each other as a society, for the betterment of the whole.

We are a fractured and poisonous politics today, a miserly and vindictive group (“I made it, why should I help anyone else?”). We are also short-sighted. No one can build a secure future without a strong foundation, and when so many young families are poor and struggling, we risk short-changing our future and the future of the next generation. Poverty has a long arm.

 

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Posted in marriage and relationships, parents, politics, poverty

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Young adults remain optimistic, but should they?

Posted on September 19, 2011 | Leave a comment

I’m being lazy today and directing you to my post at Psychology Today.
After interviewing nearly 100 young actuals ages 22-23, I’m still struck by how optimistic they are, despite the bleak outlook for jobs, the numbers living at home, and the general feeling of being stalled in life. A recent Atlantic article adds to this sense, with hundreds writing in, bewailing their current position. And yet… amid all this, many, if not most, think that in the end, they’ll do fine. While their generation overall may suffer, they’ll somehow be the exception. Is this a case of American individualism, always looking inward instead of outward for blame and solutions? Read on at Psychology Today…

 

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Posted in moving home, politics, work and earnings

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The power of youth

Posted on March 22, 2011 | Leave a comment

Amid all the dire news today, from Japan to North Africa and the Middle East, it’s easy to sink into a funk. It’s the old(er) person in me I suspect. The more years you’ve spent on this earth, the more life seems to be an unrelenting punch to the kidneys.

I remember my boxing days–yes, I was a boxer of the Golden Gloves sort– when I’d train with this much younger boxer. We’d climb into the ring to spar for two minutes of action between the bells, both of us fit, both of us well-trained . The bell would ring and  I’d dodge and weave, use my experience to outgame him. That would work for round #1. And maybe into round #2. But by round #3, as in life, it was the dogged persistence of youth that would defeat me every time. I would simply get worn down by his stamina, his unfettered belief in his abilities. He had no doubts, no sense of decline. He just put his head down and kept punching.

I think of that unending barrage of punches as I watch the news. Pummeled by the enormity of the disaster in Japan, weighed down by the task ahead in the Middle East, I think, “where is the bell?!” And on more pessimistic days I think, “All this pain will come to naught. The powers that be will win out. The ways of the world are too much to overcome.”

But what I fail to see is the flipside of that coin: the power of idealism. The power of youth.

Watch this video to see the future. Theirs are not the naive voices of untested youth. They are the certain, hopeful voices of dogged idealism. It gives me hope.

Our own youth here in the U.S. are less tested than those in the Middle East or even in Europe. Ours is a comfortable–some would say “fat”– existence, one rarely tested, and certainly not on the streets, with bullets fired by our government. We can thank our lucky stars for that. Yet I fear that this generation will be tested in more subtle ways.

See this op-ed in today’s Times by Matthew Klein (a topic I raised here). While the Arab world burns, he says, we might also take care to look closer at home for the tinder that makes for a fire.

High unemployment? Check. Out-of-touch elites? Check. Frustrated young people? As a 24-year-old American, I can testify that this rich democracy has plenty of those too.

About one-fourth of Egyptian workers under 25 are unemployed, a statistic that is often cited as a reason for the revolution there. In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in January an official unemployment rate of 21 percent for workers ages 16 to 24.

And then he says this: “My generation was taught that all we needed to succeed was an education and hard work.” That, dear reader, is the crux, the beginnings of a disillusionment that can lead a turning point. This young man, after all, is one of the elite. He works for the Council on Foreign Relations. He no doubt went to a “good” school. Yet even he feels the tentacles of unemployment and economic malaise.

I’m starting to sort through the 50+ interviews of young adults in the Philadelphia area, whose upbringings span the economic spectrum. I have heard those very words, often. “I played by the rules.” “We were told we could be anything if we worked hard and went to college.” “What gives?” There is a strain of disillusionment, coupled with a grain of optimism–the optimism of untrammeled youth.

This generation stands at a turning point, after which nothing will likely ever be the same. The world is rising up, led by young people. Whether dictators crush the uprisings or not, the fire has been lit. Our own young people are suddenly facing a hardship they could never imagine. And that hardship is not going away any time soon. The global, interconnected world they inhabit is tied together in inextricable ways. The earthquake in Japan will only lengthen our own economic recovery. The crisis in the Middle East will only add to our daily expenses in higher gas prices (just to start with). They, their older siblings, their uncles and aunts, grew up amid growing affluence. Certain things were taken for granted. A middle-class life was assumed. And now? It’s not. In the blink of an eye, those assumptions crumbled. The rules of the game changed, and for many, they are awakening to the fact that the rules of the game have been rigged.

It is their moment. Like their parents and grandparents before them, it is their time to take a stand. And I don’t mean a stand by “buycotting” or buying only Tom’s Shoes because they give 10% of their profits to a good cause. I mean a loud, demanding raid on the powers that be.

Perhaps the dogged persistence of youth will win out. Perhaps our own young adults will be inspired by those risking their lives for an ideal, for the future. As Muhammad al-Zawam, 25, of Libya said, wiping tears from his eyes, “This revolution is not for me. I am 25 years old. We started this revolution for the sake of the coming generation.”

I do hold out hope that the sheer idealism of youth will carry us to some place better. We need that energy. I’m tired of Tea Party anger and thinly veiled class warfare in the name of politicking. We need that dogged persistence of youth if we are to break out of that tired, self-interested, pandering that counts for political “discourse” today. We need that unflagging belief.

But I do think we’re in for a long round before that bell rings.

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Young adults–the new “do-gooders”? As job offers dwindle, young adults flock to the public sector

Posted on March 7, 2011 | Leave a comment

In 2009, 16% more college grads worked for the federal government than the  year before, and 11% more worked for nonprofits, according to a recent article in the New York Times. Welcome to the recession. As the competition gets fierce, nonprofit groups rub their hands together in welcoming anticipation. Americorps has seen applications triple between 2008 and 2010. Teach For America had more than 46,000 applications in 2010, a 32% increase, according to the Times.

For some, this decision is a temporary side-step, a place to cool one’s heels and gain some work experience while riding out the recession. This generation is frequently tagged as apathetic–they don’t vote, they don’t keep up with politics, they’re not politically minded, despite the Obama “youth vote.” Only about one in five youth under 30 eligible to vote did so in the midterm elections.  They may be  quick to sign on to “lifestyle” causes–buying Tom’s shoes because the company gives a percentage of profits to charities, or joining online causes. However, as many have noted, these acts require little real action. It’s easy to click “like” to a Facebook cause. It’s harder to rally for change on the Capitol steps.

On the other hand, this generation grew up with volunteering. According to a recent analysis of high school seniors nationally, by 2005, about one-third of high school seniors had volunteered in their community, up from 21% in 1990.  Most faced service requirements in high school, and many have continued that volunteering habit in college. They have been hooked into the volunteering, community-organizing system at an impressionable age, and it might make life-long volunteers out of them. Indeed, the number of educated Millennials in public-service jobs has been rising since 2000.

Yet the kids coming in the doors of the nonprofit world are largely college-educated. It is that group that is also more likely to vote and be more involved in traditional forms of political participation, such as writing their congressperson, finds Amy Syversten and colleagues in their recent study, “Thirty-Year Trends in U.S. Adolescents’ Civic Engagement: A Story of Changing Participation and Educational Differences. They are also more hopeful about the future and are more trusting of government than their peers with plans to attend a two-year school or none at all. Disaffection among those with lower educational aspirations set in around 1994 and has only begun to bounce back lately (the data only go to 2006), leaving a large voting and civic participation gap between college-goers and those planning to attend a two-year school.

In some respects, then, the surge of college grads into the public sector is a double-edged sword. If the interview pool is increasingly made up of “the best and the brightest” who were, as the Times put it, increasingly forced by the absence of private-sector jobs “into lower-paying, if psychically rewarding, jobs,” then what chance do those with fewer educational credentials have in landing a job in the public sector? Yet that outcome is likely to only widen the already wide divide between the college elite and the more than two-thirds of young adults with only a two-year degree or less.

Whatever the outcome of this recession and the surge in public-sector work, it seems an opportune time for nonprofits to reach out to Millennials of all backgrounds, many of whom are living at home with their parents, trying to save money, and hoping someone will hire them. After all, they have the two ingredients nonprofits most need: youthful passion and time on their hands.

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Generation stuck

Posted on February 23, 2011 | 3 Comments

I’ve been reading transcripts of our interviews with young people fresh out of college (graduated last spring), and I have to say, it’s both depressing and heartening. Probably the most prevalent feeling among this generation is that they’re stuck, their life is on hold until they can find a job. They truly want to embrace adulthood–be financially independent, live on their own, get on with life. But they can’t. How can they make any kind of move–whether that be out of their parents’ house or across the country–when they have no money coming in, no solid job prospects, but about $20,000 or more in student debt?

Or as one young person said, “It’s like a prolonged Indian summer of adolescence and I’m not thrilled about it.”

I hear the frequent complaints from older generations saying, yeah, but I lived on my own at age 19. It wasn’t easy, but I cut corners and didn’t expect a flat screen tv and a posh condo. True, but they (and I) didn’t have a monthly bill of $400-500 to pay back to State U. either. (And I have yet to hear the flat screen or posh condo request.)

So far I’ve read about a dozen or so interviews, and half of the young people are unemployed, and those that are employed are often not in the field they hoped to be in. Nationally, the unemployment rate for those 18-24 is about 15%.

They’re frustrated, and getting more so. As this young woman said,

A lot of times it just feels like I’m never gonna be able to find a job. It just feels like, you know, I have been like completely shut out. I mean, you know [pause] why didn’t I major in business? Why didn’t I go major in chemistry? It is scary ‘cause it’s like the longer that I am sitting at home, applying for jobs and not hearing back, or hearing back and then them saying, “No, we went with somebody else,” —it just  kind of wears you down. And it’s kind of like, well, is there any point in trying”

That’s the scary part of that sentence: “Is there any point in trying.” She did everything right. She got 5′s on her high school AP tests. She was in all the extracurriculars. She excelled in college. She was a planner–had her life mapped out: major in Russian, do a stint in the Peace Corps, apply at the State Department.

But then, life intervened. She realized, while on a semester abroad that she didn’t want to live that far away from home. So here she is now. Her plan is derailed, and she is left with a general liberal arts degree (albeit with honors), and no job offers. Yes, she should not have put all her eggs in one basket. But at any other time than right now, she would have landed on her feet. And if she’s struggling–3.7 GPA, honors courses, good work ethic–then you can imagine what havoc is being wreaked on those who are less on the ball.

And yet… they remain optimistic. They believe that if they just work hard enough, they’ll make it, eventually. They also believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that America is still the land of opportunity. Given the huge, and growing, gulf between rich and poor in this country, and the overall hollowing out of the middle class, it’s hard to square this belief. I chalk it up to youth.

But optimism for how long? Bob Herbert takes note of this in his column today. Drawing from the hundreds of heart-breaking letters that constituents in Vermont have sent their Congressman, Herbert chronicles the silent suffering of “the many of millions of Americans who, economically, are going down for the count.” Like the woman who wrote, “this is the first generation to leave our kids worse off than we were. How did this happen? What happened to the middle class? We did not buy boats or fancy cars. Why was it possible to change the economy…to a paper economy that disappeared?”

Or as another said, “All we want to do is work hard and pay our bills. We’re just not sure even that part of the American Dream is still possible anymore.”

There is in these letters a pervasive “sense of loss…in the possibilities of America,” Herbert writes. I’m reading these and the young adults’ stories with the backdrop of Wisconsin and the “race to the bottom” in wages and job security that is on display.  In a Machiavellian move, the governor of Wisconsin has pitted the middle class against itself such that now we hear  waitresses and day care workers and home health aides say: “I don’t have job security, I don’t get a living wage, why should they?”  In a sadly telling moment, this anger and accusation is the reverse of the peculiarly American credo that “I’m voting Republican because some day, I might be rich too.”

I’ve never understood that motivation until recently. My husband was telling me how the parking lot at his school was always full when he arrived so he had to park on the street, as did several fellow teachers. Each morning, after battling for a space, they walk into the school, past the principal and assistant principal’s assigned, primo parking spot.

“You’d think,” I said, “that to bolster moral, the principal might give up her spot and show some solidarity with her workers.” But then I realized, no one begrudges her that perk. They aren’t bitter because it’s a perk that everyone buys into–that if you work hard and rise to the top, you get your own parking space. It’s a sign that you played the game better, and won. The playing field was fair, and you outworked, outmaneuvered, and outchased that spot. Bully for you. You earned it. It’s those carrots that keep us all working and in line. That parking spot is the American Dream.

But in their desperation, the low-paid Wisconsin workers in precarious jobs have turned this quest on its head. They are shouting at their brethren who have managed, through unions, to secure some semblance of a middle class life. Wisconsin public workers are not paid outrageous sums. They are paid a middle-class wage. They have benefits. They have, gasp, a secure retirement (so far). That is what we all should have. Period. And yet, in a cruel reversal of the “I can someday get my own parking space” mindset, these angry words turn that sentiment around. The rallying cry is instead:  join me at the bottom. That’s truly scary. Is that the new American dream? Fighting for the scraps? What have we come to?

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Posted in debt, delayed adulthood, Generation-R, moving home, politics, work and earnings

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Make room for young workers, or else.

Posted on January 28, 2011 | 2 Comments

A few months back I wrote a couple of posts wondering whether we were witnessing a youth revolution, in Europe. I should have included the Middle East. Tunisia, Egypt, and now Yemen are all in open revolt against staid, corrupt governments that cling to the status quo, blocking opportunities for young people to get started in life. In Tunisia, young men, even those with college degrees, spend their days in cafes instead of at jobs, because the jobs are nowhere to be found. Their forced idleness becomes a tinderbox–the results of which are clear.

Young people are taking their pent-up frustrations to the streets, in the optimistic, naive, heartfelt belief that they–the 20-somethings of this world–can change their future. More power to them. It is just this optimism coupled with youthful naiveté that we need. It is why the world changes only at the hands of the young. They still believe it can. Without that belief, we’re done. Witness Japan.

Japan’s economy continues to struggle through a lost decade (or two), largely the result of a failure to respond nimbly to changing times. They became mired in the past, unable to pivot as the world shifted. Their economy ossified. According to today’s New York Times article by Martin Fackler, the failure lies with the old folks. Japan has clung to policies that protect older workers while creating a new system of “irregular” jobs that make it harder, if not impossible, for younger workers to get a foot in the door. In this case, irregular jobs are akin to contract jobs, where young people are paid less, they work for a set short-term time period, with no benefits, or as they call themselves in Japan: “freeters”–a job-hopping part-timer.  Last year, according to the Times, 45% of young people 15-24 were working in irregular jobs, up from 17% in 1988. The Economist finds that about 28% of young people aged 25-34 were freeters.

“Japan has lost its vitality because older workers refuse to step aside,” said one person interviewed.

Young people are feeling shoved aside in favor of older workers, and are facing the prospects of never fully getting that foot on the escalator of a career. Sound familiar? Baby Boomers are forced to cling to their jobs here in the US as their retirements disappeared. According to the Labor Department,  28.2 million people over 55 years of age had jobs, an increase of 7.6 percent from three years earlier, when the recession was beginning. Thirty years ago, one in seven jobs was held by a person who was 55 or older. Today the proportion is one in five.

We also tilt our safety net to older Americans, from Social Security to Medicare, to pensions.  Unlike in the Middle East or in Europe, however, young people in Japan (or in the US) do not flood the streets in protest. Instead, according to the article, they turn inward, blame themselves, or “try to find contentment with horizons that are far more limited than their parents.’”

We certainly join them in the blame-game. How many times have you heard the word “moocher” attached to 20-somethings living at home with mom and dad?

It seems the time is now to have a serious conversation about how we help this younger generation get started on the path to adulthood. Older people I talk with often pooh-pooh this generation’s struggles: “Boo-hoo. So “the world has changed.” Big deal. It’s always changing. Grow up.” Perhaps. But to that I say, this one is different because we’re different.

We’re no longer the Big Dog in the world. We’re playing the game on a globalized field. We suddenly have billions more people to compete with, most of them young. We are also not poised to rebound as quickly as we once were. Our education ranking has declined. Our economy is preoccupied with old-school industries. We have not invested in R&D. The list goes on. Like Japan, we’ll be feeling this sting for a long time because we have failed to adapt. Tunisia is feeling the heat because it sat on its laurels and refused to see the powder keg they were creating by ignoring the frustration of its youth.  In Portugal, young people are tossing in the towel and emigrating. The list goes on.

Here in the US, we have the makings for a lost generation for another reason as well. Andrew Leonard, writing at Salon, warns that countries with the weakest safety nets risk losing the most in this globalized economy. Reading Dani Rodrik’s “The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy” it struck Leonard that the U.S. is overlooking one important fact of competing in a globalized world: “People demand compensation against risk when their economies are more exposed to international economies.” Those economies most exposed to globalization also are those with the biggest governments, providing strong safety nets to its workers–with the exception of the US.

I was struck by the fact that the United States (which, despite all the hoo-ha we hear about Obama’s “socialism” today, boasts a smaller government as measured against the size of the economy than most other rich nations) has opened itself up very widely to globalization and international trade without expanding its safety net to compensate for the risks involved. We’ve thrown ourselves into cutthroat waters without a life preserver in sight, exposing our workers to the harsh mercy of global competition without showing them any mercy of our own.

It’s time we take this issue seriously, and start having a conversation about how we can make this path into jobs, careers, and adulthood easier and more hopeful for young people–the world over.

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