Modern Unemployment

Kather­ine Ryder looks at unem­ploy­ment among younger peo­ple:

With some won­der, I started seek­ing out sto­ries that, in a few short strokes, ful­filled every neg­a­tive stereo­type asso­ci­ated with Gen­er­a­tion Y, the so-called enti­tle­ment gen­er­a­tion. They’re easy to find. One unem­ployed Gen Yer is liv­ing out a life dream, trav­el­ing India and pay­ing for hos­tels with unem­ploy­ment checks. A par­tic­u­larly des­per­ate male had to actu­ally move back into his par­ents’ beau­ti­ful two-story house in Con­necti­cut and is on a weekly allowance from the state…

…per­haps the generation’s schiz­o­phrenic response to the econ­omy stems from res­ig­na­tion about the trillion-dollar deficit, a multitrillion-dollar debt to the Chi­nese, and a health care sys­tem that is going to become everyone’s worst nightmare.

Most of Ryder’s exam­ples show that Gen­er­a­tion Y is pur­port­edly full of self-important, cyn­i­cal peo­ple with enti­tle­ment com­plexes. Of course, I am sure that there are many peo­ple who are the exact oppo­site — but from the time that I spent in Amer­ica before mov­ing to Israel, I have the feel­ing that there is a gen­er­a­tional trend among peo­ple who are under­em­ployed or unemployed.

Young Amer­i­cans have become self­ish because they feel that there is no longer any­one else who is look­ing out for them. Com­pa­nies no longer look to hire employ­ees for their life­times and give them qual­ity ben­e­fits and pen­sions in exchange for years of hard work. Instead, cor­po­ra­tions began lay­ing off peo­ple and hir­ing cheaper labor as soon as it would save a few dol­lars. In addi­tion, com­pa­nies are increas­ingly cut­ting back on health-care ben­e­fits for young peo­ple or not offer­ing them at all. Gen­er­a­tion Y can­not move up the cor­po­rate lad­der to bet­ter them­selves because the Baby Boomers have self­ishly decided not to retire any­time soon. Young Amer­i­cans were told to pur­sue bachelor’s and grad­u­ate degrees at any cost, and now they are stuck with tens of thou­sands of dol­lars of student-loan debt that, in hind­sight, was either use­less or a bar­rier because the gen­er­a­tion is now “overqual­i­fied.” They see the dam­age wrought by the Baby Boomers on the econ­omy now, and they know that they are the ones who will suf­fer the most.

In such an envi­ron­ment, is it any won­der that more and more younger peo­ple have adopted a take-whatever-I-can-get mentality?

Related: Why My Gen­er­a­tion is Pissed Off