A piece by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic proclaims that Millenials don't make any sense. "Millennials are more liberal than the rest of the country, particularly on social issues," Thompson writes, "but they get more economically conservative when they make more money." This is posted alongside a "No way, Jose and Wang Fang!" graph outlining Reason survey findings that Millennials become less welcoming of the idea of income redistribution as their incomes climb.
"[S]omething interesting happens when Millennials start making serious dough," Thompson writes. "They start getting much more squeamish about giving it away."
Clueless rich kids on the rise: How millennial aristocrats will destroy our future, Tim Donovan's article in Salon, makes good on his crash-scene title by fronting his piece with flashy, pouty images of Ivanka Trump and Paris Hilton before launching into a dire tale of how rich Millennials will be the end of us all. What with their lessened support for a living wage as their incomes increase,
their greater unwillingess to support the social safety net as their coffers fill,
and their repeated "no thanks" to income redistribution at wealthier levels, Donovan's rich, me-centric, constantly tech-wired Millenials are poised and ready to end welfare, social services, and basic human rights for all in the U.S. The nerve of Paris Hilton and her rich, entitled Millennial hoarde. The nerve!
Now, pay no mind to those economists reporting that Millennials are just slightly creeping out of the worst job market faced by young people in 50 years, and that employment rates are just incrementally higher for young adults than in 2010 when their levels hit its lowest point for this group since employment data began being collected in 1948.
Pay no mind to statistics such as those presented by the Pew Center that found less than five years ago that "the gap in employment between the young and all working-age adults— roughly 15 percentage point— is the widest in recorded history" (1).
Pay no mind to employment reports like the one named Failure to Launch out of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce that concludes economic security is far harder for young adults in the U.S. to achieve today than in the past. Reflecting on report findings, Anthony Carnevale, director of the center, states: "The millennial generation was the generation to confront this structural change first. . . . It has sorted them out in ways that have made them more unequal than any generation before."
But pay no mind to that, or to population statistics that find that all Americans become more conservative when they earn higher incomes, such as this report by Pew:
or this one from 2012 that points out that richer Americans directly experience less need for social safety nets or minimum wage protections (duh).
It's not just Millennials. Richer Americans are less likely to support social programs.
Millennials (particularly non-white Millennials) continue to reel from poverty levels and joblessness rates not previously experienced by any generation. “This is truly a lost decade,” Harvard Professor Lawrence Katz told the New York Times in 2010. “We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.” Timothy Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison concluded: “We’re risking a new underclass.”
In their staggering poverty levels, these poor young Americans receive few social services within a system that has succeeded in equating basic human supports with "entitlements." They are not being served by the safety net that existed for their parents in this country, and, for some, for their grandparents and great grandparents.
We say that Millenials will erode the social safety net to look past the fact that they are falling through it now.
The statistics above on Millenial poverty and joblessness come from the most trusted sources on employment. But, please, pay no mind to them. You wouldn't be alone; they are widely not considered when we think of young people today.
Instead, like our theoretical Millenials dropping everything to inhale the latest tabloid in the grocery store check-outline, we as a culture continue to center in upon those familiar discourses that feed what we want to believe about Millennials being the source of our troubles.
Social perspective shapes social policy. This shapes social realities. It did when G. Stanley Hall "discovered" the "unfinished," "savage" adolescent in 1904, providing psychological backing -- and, thus mass ideological justification -- to remove young citizens from jobs older workers wanted during Industrialization, and to roll out mandatory schooling and more surveilled existences for these newly-defined "children."
It did when the trope of the Young Black Male Superpredators was used to push fear into the U.S. collective consciousness in ways that fueled public acceptance of massive reallocation of tax dollars into prison funding in the 1980s.
And it is now, social perspectives are shaping our social policies as we erode our public resources and social safety net and place blame for this, again, on young people.
All those many clueless, unprepared, naive, entitled, rich, me-centric, wired, made-up Millennials who will just ruin the social safety net for all the rest of us in this country when they grow up.
Someone clearly needs to do something to stop them, like keep not giving them jobs, or healthcare, or options for security, or meaningful involvement in society, or a living wage, or assistance in their poverty.
That will sure teach them, eh?
