Sixth in a series of essays
Ruben Navarrette recently criticized young Americans who need financial advice and are lobbying the government for help:
Young people usually don’t have mortgages to pay off, or spouses and children to support. That gives them an enormous amount of freedom whether they realize it or not. They also have an advantage in the job market because they can travel the country and go where the jobs are. Or they can simply follow their passions and build careers of their own designs. Instead of seeing obstacles, they should see opportunities.
And yet, when young people ask government to throw them a life preserver and save them from the choppy waters of a rough economy, they’ve all but given up. Even if they get the short-term economic aid they’re seeking, they’ll lose their self-sufficiency in the process and become dependent on an unresponsive bureaucracy. That’s not good. In fact, it’s dangerous.
So you have to wonder where young people picked up this distasteful and destructive behavior. It’s obvious. It was from watching their elders with outstretched palms, a sense of entitlement, and a tendency to see government as the solution to all sorts of problems. And to think there are people who actually believe that.
Navarrette misses the point. As he himself notes earlier in his column, young Americans are more disproportionately unemployed than other demographics. But the problem is much deeper than jobs.
Just like Generation X two decades ago, Generation Y is increasingly bitter and frustrated to the point of losing all hope that they will one day have a life at least as secure — and not even as prosperous — as the Baby Boomers did in their middle-aged lives. (For the record, my birth year — 1980 — is stuck between Generation X and Generation Y, so I can empathize with both.) It is hard to quantify the pessimism and anger that pervades the younger generation, but a writer named Squashed comes close:
The word “entitlement” has picked up a negative connotation it shouldn’t have. If you go to the bank and deposit $20, you are entitled to get your $20 from the bank. If you fulfill your half of a contract, you are entitled to the other party’s performance. Sure, its a problem when you feel you deserve something you don’t deserve—but there is nothing wrong with acknowledging a legitimate debt. So let’s ask why some people in their 20s might feel the older generation hasn’t kept its end of the bargain…
For those who just graduated, there was no job. That’s not technically true. There was a job—but somebody older has it and isn’t letting go. It turns out the whole system is rigged. Education and intelligence and everything we were told was important turn out to be worth nothing next to seniority and experience…
Take health insurance. Decades of pressure to lower wages for new hires and cut benefits means that the employer-provided system means that even if you can find a job, it probably won’t offer health insurance. Paying for insurance out of pocket is prohibitively expensive if you’re healthy and coverage is entirely unavailable if you’re not. And if you have a minimum-wage job serving coffee, you’re still getting a chunk taken out of your paycheck to finance a program that won’t be solvent by the time you’re old enough to use it. But any effort to change this system is met with seniors screaming about communists taking away their medicare. And if 20-somethings back a legislative initiative that would help them obtain coverage, they’re slackers living in their parents basements. And let’s not even get into the individual mandate in the health-reform bill that will require the healthy and young to subsidize the health-care of their older and generally wealthier parents.
Should twenty-somethings who have done everything asked of them their entire lives feel like somebody pulled one over on them? Probably—but bad things happen. And hopefully all those years of education taught us enough empathy not to be vindictive. Call us gullible—but don’t call us lazy or selfish. If some of us push for a few reforms that could help us succeed even when our parents have dropped the ball—back them, and be thankful that we’re not talking outright revolution.
In an earlier essay, I also described the reasons that people my age are — to put it bluntly — pissed off. Please take a minute to read the post and its comments. Now, for the specific data from the Pew Research Center:
Now, what facts can be determined from this data?
- The percentage of workers who are approaching or older than 65 is increasing while that of younger people is declining or remaining static.
- Most workers who remain on the job past the age of 65 do so out of desire rather than need.
- Still, some older workers have delayed retirement due to the recession.
In a nutshell, it is the Baby Boomers’ own fault that their children are working at McDonald’s or sleeping in their basements. For the most part, the older generation is refusing to retire simply because they want to work. Those who may need to delay retirement because their portfolios have declined either had idiots for financial advisers, or they made bad investments themselves. (By the age of 60, almost all of your investments should be in stable bonds rather than volatile stocks. And don’t get me started if you flipped houses or bought property during the height of the housing bubble.)
Critics like Navarrette usually say that every generation has had tough times and that younger people should pick themselves up by their bootstraps. Well, here is a secret: My generation has no bootstraps! The most extreme members of my generation feel that there is nothing we can do until the Baby Boomers literally die off.
But even that might pose a problem. Read this insightful — and scary — article in the Atlantic Monthly on how the “longevity boom” will wreak havoc on American society:
In the scientists’ projections, the ongoing increase in average lifespan is about to be joined by something never before seen in human history: a rise in the maximum possible age at death. Stem-cell banks, telomerase amplifiers, somatic gene therapy—the list of potential longevity treatments incubating in laboratories is startling. Three years ago a multi-institutional scientific team led by Aubrey de Grey, a theoretical geneticist at Cambridge University, argued in a widely noted paper that the first steps toward “engineered negligible senescence”—a rough-and-ready version of immortality—would have “a good chance of success in mice within ten years.” The same techniques, De Grey says, should be ready for human beings a decade or so later. “In ten years we’ll have a pill that will give you twenty years,” says Leonard Guarente, a professor of biology at MIT. “And then there’ll be another pill after that. The first hundred-and-fifty-year-old may have already been born…” From religion to real estate, from pensions to parent-child dynamics, almost every aspect of society is based on the orderly succession of generations. Every quarter century or so children take over from their parents—a transition as fundamental to human existence as the rotation of the planet about its axis. In tomorrow’s world, if the optimists are correct, grandparents will have living grandparents; children born decades from now will ignore advice from people who watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Intergenerational warfare—the Anna Nicole Smith syndrome—will be but one consequence. Trying to envision such a world, sober social scientists find themselves discussing pregnant seventy-year-olds, offshore organ farms, protracted adolescence, and lifestyles policed by insurance companies. Indeed, if the biologists are right, the coming army of centenarians will be marching into a future so unutterably different that they may well feel nostalgia for the long-ago days of three score and ten.
“[A]lmost every aspect of society is based on the orderly succession of generations.” This is the most important line in the Atlantic article. When an older generation dies off, its wealth, jobs, and responsibilities are transferred, through inheritance and other means, to the younger generation. The next generation uses this capital to obtain jobs, get married, buy homes, raise families, and create more wealth. Then they will die off, and the circle continues. This is how society must function.
Now, however, the circle is broken. Instead of the Baby Boomers transferring their wealth to Generations X and Y, they are getting more money by staying at their jobs and spending their existing wealth on vacations as well as life-extending medicines and procedures (see here and here) rather than passing it onto their children and grandchildren. (I would have added the adverb “selfishly spending,” but I am not sure the natural, inherent desire to prolong one’s life can fairly be described as “selfish.”) Generations X and Y have yet to have the collective wealth, rights, and responsibilities transferred and assigned to them from the Baby Boomers. As a result, young people are stuck in their often-criticized state of perpetual adolescence because we cannot afford the trappings of so-called maturity: marriage, home, and family. (See here, here, and here.)
What else can we do but wait? Still, Navarrette is correct on one point: My generation has more mobility because most of us do not yet have good jobs, spouses, mortgages, and families even though many of are pushing the age of thirty or beyond. As a result, we may need to start looking elsewhere than the United States.
For example, I moved to Israel and found a wonderful job since international marketing experience and native English are in great demand. I am not paying part of my salary into Social Security, a program whose benefits I will likely never see. The government provides universal health-care. My job provides both an employer-matched pension and a retirement fund along with disability and life insurance. (My standard of living is much higher relative to other Israelis than it was in Boston relative to other Americans.) I write this not to brag but to ask: How many young people in the United States have this today? It is no wonder than Generations X and Y are so upset.
Related: Cancel Student Loan Debt (to Save the Economy). Hat tip: Anya Kamenetz. Next essay: The Jewish Fetish, Women in Jewish Society, Jews in America. Elsewhere: Columnist Dennis Prager apologizes on behalf of the Baby Boomers, though mainly for reasons other than economic ones.