Boomers vs millennials. The new Generation Gap. We've heard the debate before. Millennials are supposed to be spoiled. We're supposed have everything given to us. We're supposed have a sense of entitlement. We're supposed to be whiners and crybabies. It's like, "You kids today have it
easy. If you want to get ahead, you have
to go to school so you can get a good job.
You don't get a free lunch. You
can't expect life to be given to you on a silver platter. Stop whining."
And to
perpetuate the whiner stereotype, boomers do this "be-an-adult" thing,
which makes it easier for them to flat-out refuse to acknowledge the honestly
difficult economic conditions we have today, or how much different times are
now than they were in their era.
First off, college
diplomas today have become no more than participation trophies for adults. Of course no college diploma guarantees
earnings. Duh. But today there's far less likelihood of
getting a decent-paying job by having one, even if a job doesn't require a college
degree. Both the Economic Policy
Institute and Goldman Sachs confirm that, adjusted for inflation, the earning
power of college graduates has gone down.
How does that not leave us
with less money than previous generations?
To make matters
worse, student loans set us back financially before we even get a chance to enter
the workforce. In 1978, a student with a
minimum-wage summer job could afford to pay a full year's tuition without
taking out any loans at all! Today? A year's tuition has skyrocketed by 1120%, while
state funding towards college has fallen by 40%. That's just adding insult to injury—on top of
a massive increase, we're left to
pick up the state's tab.
The oldest of us
millennials would have been 27 years old when the recession began in December
2007. Our early adulthood's been focused
on establishing careers when economic opportunities were relatively
scarce. And guess what? News flash—they still are.
About half of us
are financially independent, but Bernie Sanders wasn't lying. The middle class is disappearing. Despite
that 15% more of us are attending college than boomers, the middle class is still
a smaller target to hit. No matter how
hard we work—if we find work—too many
of us are going to inadvertently veer into the low-income tier.
Why? Because of the growing disparity between
productivity and wages. From 1948 to
1973, the Greatest Generation was rewarded handsomely for their work. Back then, the rates of productivity and
wages soared together at levels above 90%. When the Seventies rolled around, hourly
compensation teetered off a little while productivity started to rise—meaning
more work for less pay. But boomers
still prospered. The trend
continues. Since then, productivity has
increased 75% compared to a 9% increase in wages. It doesn't matter that we now comprise a
third of the workforce. Our economic
contributions are simply not valued as much.
Which means you’re
not going to walk into a business, give the manager a firm handshake, tell him
all about your high school diploma and walk out with a job that'll support a
middle class life. It's just not going
to happen. The barriers to entry are just
too high.
But no matter
how much higher education we get, or how good a job we land, housing is another
bombshell. Boomers used to be able to
able to buy a house with a single person's blue-collar salary. Not anymore.
Housing prices are up 294%. We
need three times the cash our parents and grandparents did—and still wind up
paying more. Because the longer you make
mortgage payments, the more the compound interest piles up.
Sheer statistics
back all this up. And we're "whiners"?
For real? We're just trying to
cope with an economic crisis and shaky job market over which we have no control
at all.
There's
something else to consider, though. No
matter how much boomers deny reality—no matter that they still live in the cheesy
good 'ol days—they weren't the ones that started this. It wasn't like the boomers had a meeting and suddenly
decided to screw everybody over. It's people in power—the politicians and
the elite—who gain advantage by pitting one group against another. We see this kind of exploitation every day,
across all kinds of media. Conservative
against liberal. Democrat against
Republican. Citizens against immigrants
and refugees. Capitalists against
socialists. Christians against Jews and Muslims. Straights against gays and transgenders.
In a lot of
these conflicts, neither side is entirely wrong. Boomers and millennials in particular both
live under a system that works hard to put workers against each other on a
daily basis. And it's working. The more people in one group focus attention
on another group to target for blame, the less attention they focus on what
causes these problems in the first place, and how to solve them. And it isn't as if intergenerational
conflicts are a new thing, either.
So getting all
caught up on this trap, this false conflict, this pissing match over which
generation is in touch or out of touch, accomplishes only one thing. It distracts us from joining together to
protect job rights and establish better working conditions for everybody. It's an easy trap to get caught up in because
it's so alluring.
So what can we
do about it? Well, we could not go to
college and just muddle through life as well as we can. Or we could go to college and risk lifelong
debt, continue to struggle paying student loans with ridiculously mounting
interest for the rest of our lives, and at least try to make up for the epic fail of believing all the outdated
promises of prosperity.
Either way we still
live with the real fear of current conditions—just like the boomers who weren't
so lucky (and yeah, there are some).
Or maybe we can
do something unconventional. Something
that could really stick it to the politicians and elite who started all this in
the first place. If we want to affect
change for ourselves and others in our generation, it'd make sense to take
advantage of the things they do.
If you look at
wealth distribution in any country closely enough, wealth can be defined in
terms of marketable assets. Leaving out
consumer durables like cars and household items (because you can't easily
convert them to cash), they include stocks, bonds, trusts, business equity, and
other securities. You can't have
business equity with no business. You
can't have trusts either without property or assets. Stocks and bonds get
pretty risky, too much of a gamble, because it's really hard to predict market
trends, even for investment experts.
But the thing that
comprises 80% of all tangible assets in this country is real estate. Real estate investment is more than just
buying up apartment buildings and renting them out. There are a lot of other strategies to do it,
too.
In fact, there's
this nationwide group of investors that help each other...
No comments:
Post a Comment