Tag Archives: Atlantic Monthly

A Lost Generation on the horizon

Posted on August 17, 2010 | 1 Comment

Robert Borosage, president of the Institute for America’s Future and co-director of its sister organization, the Campaign for America’s Future, has the key to my heart. In his recent piece on reinventing our economy, he puts his money on manufacturing and goods-producing as a route to building a strong middle class.

Since 2000, we’ve lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs. Instead of making things here, we borrow $2 billion a day to cover our trade deficits.

I recently drove to Michigan City from Chicago, a route that takes me through Gary, Hammond, and other rusting cities and towns. It’s a depressing sight. The grocery stores, car dealerships, banks and churches are long closed, replaced by  Costco-sized “adult entertainment” warehouses, junkyards, and liquor stores. The $50 an hour job (with benefits) has been replaced by the $10 an hour job at the Majestic Star or Horseshoe casino. Sure, some of this transformation was inevitable. But some of it was hastened by government and Wall Street policies.

Borosage for one thinks this loss is not an inevitable product of globalization. He thinks our choice to let manufacturing go elsewhere is  a matter of ideology (free markets rule) and Panglossian policy (free markets will fix all). This market “fundamentalism” got us into a lot of hot water, and unfortunately, young adults are paying the price and feeling the brunt of it right now.

The recession is the last nail in a coffin of a long string of changes that have affected young adults just starting out in the workforce. For years these changes–declining wages as casinos replaced steel mills, declining opportunities as low-skilled jobs were outsourced overseas — were felt largely by those with the least education. But now, even college grads are out of work, and facing the prospect of lower wages over their life time.

We’re facing a lost generation if we don’t begin investing in our future in more than just platitudes. Young adult unemployment is at an all-time high, and without some policies to restore well-paid jobs here in the US, we’re going to see some of the so-called pathologies afflicting our poorest communities seeping up the line into more working-class and middle-class communities. In many respects, it’s already happening, and this latest deep recession is only speeding up the process.

As Ron Peck says in his March Atlantic Monthly article,

“If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.”

Take marriage, for example. Kathy Edin and Maria Kefalas in their book “Promises I Can Keep,” have documented what happens to marriage when men can no longer provide for a family, as many urban black men no longer can. In these cases, women have instituted a “pay to stay” rule, and many men cannot pay, so they don’t stay. This trend of growing single-mother families is creeping into higher-income and white society as well. As Edin told the Atlantic reporter:

“We already have low marriage rates in low-income communities, including white communities. And where it‘s really hitting now is in working-class urban and rural communities, where you‘re just seeing astonishing growth in the rates of nonmarital childbearing. And that would all be fine and good, except these parents don‘t stay together. This may be one of the most devastating impacts of the recession.”

W. Bradford Wilcox of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers agrees. “We could be headed in a direction where, …for substantial portions of society, life is more matriarchal… The marginalization of working-class men in family life has far-reaching consequences.”

In Japan, which experienced its own lost decade in the 1990s as its economy collapsed and refused to revive, workers who began their careers amid that slump are and are now in their 30s , make up 60% of the cases of depression, stress, and work-related mental disabilities reported by employers, according to the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development.

Borosage places his bets on green technology as the new way out of this decline. But, as he says, competition is already fierce, and we need some support for this fledgling savior, including “U.S. renewable energy standards that ensure a growing market for alternative energy, aggressive use of government procurement to help domestic producers, tax credits and other subsidies to help start-ups, expanded investment in science and technology and, finally, setting a price on carbon emissions.”

“This forward-looking manufacturing strategy is vital to rebuilding a broad middle class — as other nations have demonstrated. Germany, for example, maintains a large manufacturing trade surplus that is now fueling its recovery, even as its workers receive higher pay and better benefits and work far fewer hours than Americans.”

All I can say is, we’d better hurry up. We have an entire generation at stake.

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She’s the man

Posted on July 2, 2010 | Leave a comment

A new set of memoirs by young women quietly mark the moment when women truly have, as Virginia Woolf once  wrote, a room of their own.

As Salon says, in reviewing the memoirs:

This crop of books is laying out what it feels like to be a young, professional, economically and sexually independent woman, unencumbered by children or excessive domestic responsibility, who earns, plays and worries her own way through her 20s and 30s, a stage of life that until very recently would have been unimaginable or scandalously radical, but which we now – miraculously – find somewhat ho-hum.

Probably because it’s happening right under our feet, I don’t think we realize the enormity of this change. Women are on a tear.  Thanks to their own mothers and grandmothers who cut a rough trail through the wild, young women today are cruising on paved highways. Sure, there are still a few detours and bumps in the road, but women are making great time.

Here’s a few of their accomplishments (and put this in perspective of just 30 years ago):

  • They outnumber men in college and grad school
  • The economic gains to education are higher for women than men
  • They outnumber men in the workforce (by a hair)
  • In some major cities, they outearn men
  • In 162 countries, the greater the economic and political power of women, the greater the country’s economic success
  • In China, women own more than 40% of private business
  • They’re no longer dependent on men for their financial security. To wit: the age at first marriage in the US is rising quickly, and one in five women in their 40s are childless.

Salon notes the literary milestone these books represent. They have surpassed the cage-rattling manifestos of The Second Sex or the Feminine Mystique. They are not critiquing society and culture ala Joan Didion. Rather they are books that simply capture the daily lives of young women carving out their lives and figuring out who they are in this brave new (free) world. They face loneliness, happiness, discontent, thrills, freedoms, challenges, and constraints all in one swoop. The hurdles they face are normal, quotidian hurdles of a life beyond the equality battles. They are, in a word …. like men!

Like men, but better, according the latest issue of The Atlantic, whose July/August issue blares: The End of Men: How Women Are Taking Control–Of Everything.

I’m not sure how to take that article. There’s a thread of misogyny running through it (and it’s written by a woman!). Its relentless tally of women’s accomplishments is always juxtaposed with men’s decline. It’s a zero-sum game, apparently.  “We’re the new ball and chain,” one man says morosely, at the end of a section on how women are often the main breadwinner in families.

For every accomplishment by women, the article implies, there’s a loss by men.

  • More men have only high school degrees than women.
  • Men drop out of high school at much higher rates than women.
  • Men lost 8 million jobs in the recession, far more than women.
  • The bastions of blue-collar men–manufacturing and construction–have been decimated.
  • Wages have stagnated since the 1970s for men with less than a BA.
  • One in five men of prime working age is not working, the highest rate ever recorded.
  • Men dominate only 15 of the job categories projected to grow in the future.
  • Men only earn 40% of the bachelor’s degrees; several colleges add “male” to the list of affirmative action preferences in admissions.
  • Fatherhood and “head of household” is taking a hit; 40% of children are born to unmarried parents, and many lower-income women institute a “pay to stay” rule in the house.

Susan Faludi’s Stiffed comes to mind.

I’m not sure we have to pose this as an us-against-them fight, which the Atlantic article does, at least implicitly. It’s certainly unsettling for men, who after all have been used to inheriting the keys to the kingdom. But is it as alarming, earth-shattering, morally dangerous as implied? I don’t think women are “taking over.” They just happen to be coming of age at a time when the world wants more skills that they’re good at–skills like communication, negotiation, nurturing, “social intelligence,” and smarts. More brain, less brawn. More “flat” organizations that rely on collaboration and less boss-man.  Women–and their biological and socialized selves–are at the right place at the right time.They have the skill set that is in demand.

Unfortunately, that skill set doesn’t demand the higher wages. And therein lies the real story.

In fact, the article fails to mention is a few realities that paint a slightly different picture. As most media seem to do, this article focuses on the elite. So while women with college degrees are faring pretty well, the picture looks quite different if you widen the scope to include everyone. For example, take wages.

The median (typical) annual earnings of employed, white male high school graduates (aged 25-34) in 1979 were $44,172. In 2007, it had dropped to $31,000 after adjusting for inflation.

The same group of women, meanwhile, saw an increase in their wages, from $14,599 to $20,000. Good news, right? Sure. But those wages are still $11,000 lower than men’s. So much for parity.  The same is true about blacks and Hispanics. Women, even after their wage gains, are still earning considerably less than their male counterparts.

Among college grads, wages are a little more equal, but women still earn less. The wages of white men with a college degree held steady at $50k in 1979 and 2007. White women’s wages rose, but only from $29k in 1979 to $39k in 2007.

The place where women outshine men is at the low end of the wage scale– those earning less than $9 an hour. Whoopie, right? About 15% of white women earned less than $9 an hour in 2007, compared to only 8% of white men. The shares are much higher for black and Hispanics. 31% of Hispanic women earn less than $9 an hour, while 23% of Hispanic men do.

Women are concentrated in low-wage work–those professions like home health aides, teachers, day care workers, and other “helping” professions. Men are reluctant to join them, and no wonder. The Atlantic article says that jobs in health care and the helping professions are the wave of the future, and women are poised to take those jobs, leaving men further behind. “Men have been remarkably unable to adapt,” the authors claim. But I’m not so sure it’s a case of inability to adapt. Many more women live in poverty today than men. I think men are just unwilling to work for those wages.

A key reason we see this surge in women into the workforce is because they are forced by declining male wages to make up the slack. But the jobs the majority of women are taking are low-paid.  These aren’t the elite women with master’s degrees. These are the working class women whose husbands have lost jobs, or they are the middle-class women who feel the need to move to better school districts in more expensive neighborhoods (and more expensive mortgages). They are taking the jobs that the new economy offers– low-paid work with crazy hours, no steady shifts, and few benefits.

That to me is not progress.

Because most journalists are part of the elite, they write about themselves–those people they see in the office everyday or on the train home. They write about their struggles with balancing the act of work and family, or the rise in young women heading into law firms, or the growing freedom of their own daughters. (to wit: the author of the Atlantic piece has an online debate with her own daughter, son, and husband about women’s rights here…seriously. Now that’s stretching to find your interview.)They also write about it because that’s who reads the books and papers. (As our editor said, “make this book about the elite kids because it’s elite parents who buy books.)

But the majority in this country does not have that lifestyle. The majority are working their fingers to the bone. They get up 4am to get far across town so they can be at the day care center when it opens for the elite to drop off their kids. They probably work til noon and then hightail it (often on unreliable public transportation) to a second job in a hospital, mopping up after someone who has just thrown up. They head home around 7, hoping that their 12-year-old has remembered to put a load of laundry on and popped the hot dogs in the microwave for dinner for the 8-year-old and 4-year-old. They walk in the door and manage the crisis that no doubt has occurred, pull together a quick dinner for dad, who is walking in the door from the second shift,  before checking on homework (if they don’t fall asleep in the chair first). They clean up the house, toss the bills in the pile, probably fend off a few calls from creditors, and then flop into bed somewhere after 11, and set the alarm for 4:00.

So hurrah for the women making progress in this world. But perhaps they should take a moment and remember their sisters on the other end of the privilege train. There’s a lot of work still to be done before we can claim victory of any sort. And we certainly don’t need to be diverting our attention to the false fear that women are taking over. It’s not women who are the threat. The bigger issue is the workforce and society they are supposedly taking over. It is not a sustainable option in a country that prides itself on a high standard of living.

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Is college still worth it?

Posted on May 14, 2010 | 3 Comments

Are we reaching a point where people are questioning the value of college just as we need graduates the most?

I was in Washington a couple days ago for work and stopped by the National Press Club to hear a press conference on the Millennials. Ron Brownstein, Tom Wilson, chairman of Allstate, and others have done a fantastic survey (read: very reliable) called the Heartland Monitor Poll, on how young adults are faring in the recession. The survey is a joint project with the Atlantic and the The National Journal.

Being the data wonk I am, I ate it up. There’s tons of content to absorb, but this one caught my eye. When asked whether a four-year degree is a ticket to the middle class, only 46% said yes. (The survey was of young people aged 18-29. This question was asked of those with degrees, either still in school or working.)

That’s a serious crack in the dike on the education front. I looked back to the Network’s book, On the Frontier of Adulthood, to see if we had any similar data on past generations to compare against. There’s nothing exactly comparable, but one of the chapters looks at changing attitudes using data from the General Social Survey, conducted by National Opinion Research Center.  This question gets at the public’s confidence in education. That’s probably getting close to this notion of “is it worth it?”

Back in 1973, about 40% of young adults aged 25-34 had  “great deal” of confidence in education (this could be higher or lower education). By 1997,  that had dropped to 23%. The biggest drop occurred between 1973 and 1985 and leveled off after that.

Part of this is an overall decline in our confidence in big institutions in general, and certainly the public schools’ demise plays into this falling confidence. But it does seem to offer a hint at a trend toward a growing suspicion of whether our educational systems are doing their job.The Heartland Monitor Poll question just adds another level to it.

For the longest time, our colleges and universities were the beacon to all, and we offered arguably the best higher education in the world. But now a crack might be appearing. A crack that started with a declining trust in educational institutions generally might indeed be spreading to the seemingly invincible Harvards, Smiths, Northwesterns, and University of Californias.

Certainly cost is playing into this question, especially at those high-end schools. But I do think there’s more to it than that. I suspect that universities are grappling with a very real question–a question that is even more pertinent in a recession. That question is whether what they’re teaching is what leads to jobs (to pay off those bills). That question is an about-face for most colleges. Traditionally, colleges have been mind-expanding four-year interludes where you broadened your horizon and read the great books, grappled with philosophical questions, learn to think critically about life, and, well, mature. But when the price-tag creeps up into the $40-$50,000 range, that’s a pretty expensive hiatus. I hate to come down on the side of practicality this hard, but I think people are beginning to wonder–is it worth it if I don’t come out with “real” work skills? (My friend Mc-Arty has a great blog about her experience with an MFA in creative writing!)

The second part of the Heartland survey question was this: Do the responsibilities of my job frequently require me to use the skills and knowledge I gained through my education? 55% said no.

Food for thought.

Granted, the kids were in the beginning of their careers and no one at the bottom end of the totem poll sees the connection yet between their jobs and the education.  And believe me, not having a degree will show up pretty fast in the paycheck. But public perception is a powerful thing, and there’s often a grain of truth to it. So I think we should start really asking our colleges and universities what it is they’re preparing this generation for while they take their money. I doubt any other business could get away with failure rates as high as 40% (the share of freshmen who will drop out of college before finishing) while still raising rates.

The economy of the future requires higher education. But it also requires a dose of pragmatism. We need engineers, biochemists, and computer scientists if we are to shove this aging economy into the “green” future. It seems we’re at the same point the country was 60 years ago coming out of the war, and facing a retrenched economy that had shifted from agriculture to factories. Then we needed scientists and engineers, and we trained them masterfully. (Tom Wolfe has a fantastic essay, “Two Young Men Head West,” in Hooking Up about an engineer from Grinnell College in Iowa who in the early 1960s went west  to California to what would become Silicon Valley.)  Today, Obama is calling for a retrenchment of science, technology, engineering, math (STEM in education lingo), and none too soon.

The doubt about the value of education is on the street. But we can’t retreat from education. We just have to retool it.

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On leaving home & writing

Posted on May 3, 2010 | 5 Comments

There’s been much ado lately about the state of publishing on this eve of the e-book. The Kindle and iPad are supposedly revolutionizing publishing. We’ll see. As my friend Jenny says, was the paperback really such an unwieldy form? Let’s see– it’s light, portable, effective for conveying the written word. Doesn’t blink off when the battery is dead.

But, cry the devotees,  you can’t download the entire New York City public library with a mere paperback! What if you don’t like the book you’re reading when you’re on vacation at the beach? With the iPad (and stale gum for that matter), you can toss one and unwrap another. (But…can you actually see the screen on the beach? And what about the sand? My god, the Kindle might be the end of beach reading!!)

As for the presto-change-o availability of books on the e-reader, I have to side with Paul Theroux in the most recent issue of The Atlantic. When asked whether the migration to e-readers increases access to good stories or diminishes it, he agrees that it greatly increases access. “I could not be more approving,” he says, “But free libraries are full of books that no one reads.”

Sigh– and so true.

In the same article, he also has this to say about advice for young writers.

Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their succes? “She drove me to my practice at 4:00 in the morning” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write: leave home.

(Notice how I brought this back to young adults.)

Anyway, he’s right. Leave home and/or have a crazy mother. That’s the ticket. I think I had both.

Leaving home injects you right into the unknown–that stressful, exhilarating world of newness that fires the creative spark (as well as brooding depression–always a plus for a writer). My first sniff of independence came during the many trips to Minneapolis (the Cities, as we call them in StA) with my parents.

It was there, sitting alongside the adults in the Little Wagon, Russells, and a steak joint whose name escapes me that I caught wind of a different life. The glamour (mink coats!) and the fun they all had, cocktails in hand, telling jokes that went right over my head.  And what characters those Grain Exchange men were. Bob White– a 6′ 5″ Mr. Magoo with a serious cocktail habit–was my favorite.  He’d tower over everyone with his loud jackets and white leather shoes (it was the 70s– we can forgive him). He wheeled and dealed at the Exchange,  dodged taxes, never put an asset in his name, and drove a Cadillac always with a “traveler”  in his makeshift cupholder. His second wife, Elly, was a gravely voiced former hostess who lit up a room. They lived the high life– a life absolutely anathema to the prim streets and neat corn rows of rural Iowa. And I sat with my Shirley Temple and took it all in.

From then on, I fancied myself a city girl. But it was a summer or two later, when I was about 12, that the freedom and anonymity a city offers really sunk in.  We were visiting my Aunt Bette and  Uncle Dick in Philadelphia. It had been a long day of sightseeing and as we emerged from a museum with a stoic set of stairs not unlike those Rocky Balboa scaled, my Aunt Bette unceremoniously plopped down (as only Bette can plop) on the steps. I was so trained in the small-town obsessions of what other people think and what someone might say, that the thought of just sitting down on the steps was shocking. No one else was sitting!

I looked around–mainly at my horrified mother–and sat down beside her. No one cared! No one even looked at us. What freedom. Truly, if you’ve never lived in a small town, where your every move is dissected, you don’t know what I”m talking about here. Life in a small town is like living in a bell jar. Even today, after more years living in cities than in small towns, I feel the eyes on me as I walk (walk!) to the grocery store or head to the tennis courts when I’m home visiting my parents. No wonder no one goes out, except to the safety of their back yards. Small towns are seemingly empty of people, because when you do go out, everyone watches you from behind the curtains. Believe me. Even when you simply walk around, you feel judged.

So it was to a city I fled when I turned all of 18. Whether it made me a writer, I can’t say. But the trials and newness, the new friends and new ideas, and yes the loneliness and confusion–they all contributed to an adult life that has challenged me at every turn. There’s nothing like realizing you’re just a little fish in a big pond to drive you on. And there’s nothing like realizing you can metaphorically sit down on any old set of steps and just be.

So, living at home might be safe (and cheap), but life only really begins when you leave.

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Posted in personal meanderings, writer's life, writing nonfiction

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Generation R, for Recession

Posted on February 19, 2010 | 5 Comments

My friend Maria, who has a wonderful book out now, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means for America, sent me a link to the latest Atlantic Monthly article, How a New Jobless Era will Transform America. (fyi, read that one with a stiff drink in hand because it’s a brutal read).

The article hits on a topic I’ve talked about before, young men, and recounts the dire statistics about their prospects as jobs in construction and manufacturing disappear and are replaced by service-sector jobs (for those not interested, or capable of pursuing “knowledge economy” jobs like computer engineers).The Atlantic article covers much of the same ground we touch on in Slouching with our “diverging destinies” thread.

It also talks about a generational mindset shift that recessions bring, and that got me to wondering about how this recession will play out in young people’s lives over the long term.

For example, wages of those laid off in a recession take a serious lifetime hit. If you’re laid off in a recession, your wages over your lifetime are on average 20% lower than a person not laid off. Part of that is because you likely have to take a job that pays less than the original job. For young people, starting out a career in a recession can lead to lower wages over a lifetime as well.

But there’s also other effects–and these are the more psychological, and potentially generation-shaping. Based on research from past recessions, young people hitting the workforce for the first time during a recession are more cautious in their career choices, less inclined to take risks by changing jobs later on. You can understand why– when you struggle to land a job, you’re not going to be cavalier about it once you have it. So job-hopping inches down  among the generation that comes of age in a recession.

On the surface, some might say, what’s so bad about that? The problem in today’s economy is that most wage advances are made by switching jobs. Instead of a “company man” who climbs the ladder within a company, we’re now more like free agents. We’ve switched to a more “nimble” DYI economy. The employer no longer guarantees the security of steady wage increases in exchange for a steady (read loyal). Loyalty (on both sides–employer and employee) is old school. Instead, we make our money job “shopping”–we look for the next job to pay just a little more (or a lot more) than the last one, and with that we begin to see progress in the bank balance.

So if people suddenly get spooked and stick to a job (if they can), they might miss out on some serious earnings advances, especially in their 20s. The first decade of our careers is when we cement some of the strongest wage gains. That decade, in other words, sets the tone for much of the rest of our career. (These are averages mind you. There are always exceptions. There are always those who gets As and those who get Fs in other words. But it’s the C students I’m most worried about in Slouching.)

And here’s another possible effect of starting out in a recession– if you’re forced to start out in an “unsexy” job, it’s easy, according to the Atlantic article, “it’s easy for other employers to dismiss you as having low potential. Moving up, or moving on to something different and better, becomes more difficult.”

So THAT’S why I never made it to the sexy jobs. You mean delivering pizzas and selling car stereos marked me as a loser? Ouch. There might be some truth to this, come to think of it. My husband, after many years working in hospitals, switched careers midlife and became a teacher. He took his first job in a “tough” school and was instantly marked as a bad teacher. Bad school = bad teacher in the elite schools’ minds. He never even gets an interview at an elite school, even though he has a master’s degree in his subject and another master’s in “gifted and talented” education.

The mindset is what’s interesting to me. What does the hardship do to a notoriously “high-aspirations” generation? I was sitting in a panel discussion here in San Diego at the Digital Media and Learning conference and we were talking about the high ideals and excitement that the so-called Millennial bring to the table when it comes to civic life– ala the environment, Darfur, causes galore. (much of that excitement plays out online, thus the connection). It struck me then, Are we on the cusp of another sea change, to a more cynical, cautious, “can’t do” generation like, well, like mine? (I graduated HS in 1980, and was on the job market just in time for the biggest recession since the Depression).

Remember the generation-defining movie, Slacker (circa 1991)? I’ll never forget the scene where the motley couple is deciding whether to go to the beach for a picnic. The consensus: “too much of a production.” You had to pack a picnic, find the towels, schlep everything to the beach…” They stayed home.  That movie–and its budding cynics– supposedly defined GenX. But in truth, it captured the generation that had just slogged through the dismal 1980s (Reagan didn’t trot out the “beacon on the hill” speech for nothing, after all. The country needed a serious pep talk).

Network researchers recently finished a study that tracks the ebbs and flows of civic energy among high school seniors. That glue that binds us all–social trust–plummeted during the 1980s, as did things like voting, volunteering, giving back to your community. (Cynicism doesn’t lend itself to many “I’d like to teach the world to sing” moments.)  And the gap between those with and without a college degree who were civically active  widened. The authors attribute this growing gap between the college-bound and noncollege-bound to a variety of factors, most of which are tied to family income. But I wonder if that dip wasn’t the hangover of the 1980s recession and a more cynical generation who was kicked in the booty by a bleak job market.

Note to Obama– “yes we can” might not ring true for much longer for your base.

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