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The World Socialist Web Site, publication of record of the ICFI (SEP), on May 24th released a report about the grim situation many millennials face:
The stock market is booming, and President Donald Trump is boasting at every turn that the unemployment rate is lower than it has been in five decades.
However, the working class, the vast majority of the population, is confronting an unprecedented social, economic, health and psychological crisis. The same processes that have produced vast sums of wealth for the ruling elite have left millions of workers on the brink of existence.
Perhaps no segment of the population reflects the devastating consequences of these processes so starkly as the generation of young people deemed the "millennials," those born roughly between the years 1981 and 1996. More than half the 72 million American millennials are now in their 30s, with the oldest turning 38 this year.
A recent exposé by the Wall Street Journal noted that millennials are "in worse financial shape than prior living generations and may not recover." The article, "Millennials Near Middle Age in Crisis," [paywalled] concludes by stating that people born in the 1980s are at risk of becoming "America's Lost generation."
Selected bullet points from the WSWS article:
- Millennials have taken on 300 percent more student debt than their parents' generation. [Source: The College Board, Trends in Student Aid 2013]
- By 2014, 48 percent of workers with bachelor's degrees are employed in jobs for which they're overqualified. [Source: Labor Economist Stephen Rose, published by Urban Institute.]
- The number of workers in the United States participating in the gig economy is expected to triple to 42 million workers by 2020, and 42 percent of those people are likely to be millennials. [Source: Freshbooks]
- Between 1978 and 2017, according to the EPI, CEO compensation rose in the US by 1,070 percent, while the typical worker's compensation over these 39 years rose by a mere 11.2 percent.
- In the 40 years leading up to the recession, rents increased at more than twice the rate of incomes. [Source: Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.]
- One in 5 millennials say they cannot afford routine healthcare expenses. Many of these millennials are uninsured because of the cost. An additional 26 percent say they can afford routine health-care costs, but only with difficulty. [Source: Harris Poll]
- Men and women in their thirties are marrying at rates below every other generation on record. [Source: The Atlantic, "The Death (and Life) of Marriage in America"]
- It is predicted that most millennials will not be able to retire until age 75. [Source: NerdWallet analysis of federal data]
The report concludes, "Far from becoming the 'Lost Generation' predicted by the Wall Street Journal, this generation of workers carries within it an enormous source of revolutionary potential."
[Ed. Note. I debated whether or not to run this story given the partisan source for the article, but the list of references suggested it was more than a simple opinion piece. So, are things really as grim as portrayed here? I'm too old to be a millennial, but have both personally experienced as well as witnessed many others facing the same trends listed here. Where do things go from here?]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Monday May 27 2019, @11:38PM (2 children)
If you're the millenial on this site, you're also the Facebook generation, and those following you are growing this pool. A lot of the oligarchies are significantly backdated in their technology use, meaning any communication they do, you and your cohort (and those coming of voting age every year) can do two orders of magnitude faster, and hopefully with a more peer-to-peer mentality. My take is that everyone in your cohort needs to internalize that:
You and your cohort have the tools to argue these perspectives faster than any Gen-Xers or older could have dreamed possible. Just don't conflate speed and quantity of argument with measurable progress towards a goal. Hopefully this provides a way to serve your cohort's interests without using guillotine use. It's messy, requires maintenance, and doesn't scale as well.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday May 28 2019, @12:45AM (1 child)
Facebook doesn't have anything that we didn't have decades ago on other platforms. Most of the functionality and format were already there with the BBSes, actually. As a popular, readily usable form Yahoo Groups had that in the 90's. The one thing that Facebook did better was its recruitment mechanism. That's it.
Also, when you're talking about oligarchs they don't really give a crap about the specifics. They have guys for that. What they have are real interests, you know, oil wells and shipping companies and telecoms, the stuff that you depend on unwittingly every day of your life. If they perceive a threat to those interests, they make a phone call to a fixer, who subcontracts to subject matter experts, and they do the necessary. All the oligarchs need to be to stay on top is utterly ruthless, and they are.
Here's the reality: you're not going to fix the system by using the system. The oligarchs own that system top to bottom. If you win a political office or two, they tie you down with the legal system. If you win in the legal system, they buy companies who bribe the politicians who change the rules of the game, and they win again.
Things do change when political upheaval breaks out, or when technological change happens faster than the oligarchs can, or want to, change. Napster caught the Recording Industry unawares, but we have all seen how they were able to use the courts and the politicians to try to throw enough sand in the gears of change to survive. More dramatically, digital cameras utterly killed Fuji Film and Kodak. But those opportunities don't come along every day, and are not easy to predict. Sadly, many of the chances to disrupt the status quo are short-circuited because their agents decide they want to be rich more than they want to change the world.
So that's my takeaway: change the world, or get rich. When the moment of decision arrives, will you choose to become just another rich asshole, or make the world a better place (even if it wins you no fame)?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @08:43AM
Come on, admit it. Geocities was so fabulous it was disruptive.