I'm a couple years out of college and can't overstate how real this is (in America, though I know the article is focused on the UK). Last summer I flew back to my Midwestern hometown for a concert, and I still remember being introduced to a friend of a friend. She was a college graduate one year removed, vastly 'underemployed' [1], and living in her parents basement.
When my friend mentioned that I was just in town from SF for the weekend, she asked what I did and after telling her, her reaction was something along the lines of 'oh you're like a real grown up!' Her tone was one of embarrassment and a begrudging acceptance of where she was, and it's one I've seen a fair bit despite going to a pretty solid school. Not Ivy League, mind you, but a reasonably high-ranked state school.
I really have no idea what the solution is, but I've thought a fair bit about the as of yet unrealized ripple effects: Many of these people are in debt up to their eyeballs. Given that, they're going to be much less likely to (or at least will significantly delay) purchases of cars and real estate. Dating is a lot harder when you're living at your parents', and I'm sure we'll see an impact in the ratio of singles/families among my generation as a result. Then there's the whole psychological impact of feeling they have nothing going for them that the article focuses on. Pretty dismal scene.
[1] Honestly, I hate this term. It shouldn't be any surprise to us that when we promote an 'everyone goes to college!' culture a la 'everyone's a home owner!', coupled with an insidious lowering of standards in our education system starting in the lower rungs of K-12, we'll have a mass of college-educated individuals who can't find gainful employment.
A lot of the answers here address the symptoms, rather than the root cause. I believe the source of these kinds of problems is that we focus too little on teaching kids to be builders.
I specifically avoid words like "science", "engineering", or "entrepreneurship" because I do not want to be dragged into a debate about why artists and writers are needed, too. They are needed, too. But I prefer the word "builders" — people, who are taught that value comes from building, and that is something you can always do yourself. You do not need a "job" with someone telling you what and how to build.
Note that there is an attitude problem in many young unemployed people: many seem to think that getting some kind of education entitles them to something. What's worse, if that "something" (job, money) doesn't appear, many are helpless and turn into a spiral of self-loathing and depression.
In the longer term this will become even more of a problem, as we automate more and more mundane tasks. The number of jobs that require no thinking will not grow. On the other hand, the possibilities for making a living using all kinds of building skills are growing fast.
I believe we should make more effort to teach kids to build, and use their own initiative. And I use the word "build" very loosely — you can build furniture, electronics gadgets, web sites, artsy jewelry, anything. Whatever you build will help your self-esteem, put thoughts on the right track (growing/extending/building rather than self-loathing, moving up rather than down), help you meet new people, give you new possibilities.
The thing is that the current young ones are still of the belief that no-one has had it hard before; that it was cruisy and easy for everyone before (repeating the pattern of this thought - this isn't unique to gen Y, but to young gens). One gen Y person in my office repeated the mantra to me that "jobs were handed out like candy for the boomers"... yeah, if you were male... and liked working in a factory or other menial jobs. If you were female there was a stigma to working, options were pretty limited, and usually it was legal to be explicitly paid a lower hourly rate.
The Western world we live in is safer in most regards than previously, whether it's food or medical or military. Ten years of war in the middle east killed only a tenth of the US soldiers killed in Vietnam, and there was no conscription. Before the downfall of the USSR, there was a very palpable fear of nuclear war in the West (justified or not) or a sizeable military invasion. Civil and social rights for minorities and women were far, far behind where they are now. In the consumer world, shit is cheaper and more disposable than ever before. Much less need to put effort into maintaining things, just get another one. Hell, even going to the dentist is far easier today with improvements in pain control. What about support services for victims of domestic abuse? Or rape? At least now there are some systems in place where people can get support sometimes (if not always) and it's a recognised problem, rather than in the boomer's youth, when it was a taboo subject and there were no services.
So sure, complain about the current situation of Gen Y folks, but when people complain about how 'easy' previous generations had it, these kinds of things are why it sounds like self-indulgent whining - because they only focus on the good things the boomers had and never recognise the bad things. Not to mention the things that the Boomers did build and give to us.
Gen Y does have hurdles to face, but those hurdles don't have to be defined in how much worse it is than previous generations had it.
I'm from Gen Y. I don't think that previous generations had it easier than we do, but I think it's an undeniable fact that you have it easier.
Except for the past few years, the world has been constantly improving all your life; USSR, Berlin Wall, computers, internet, technology, ... In contrast, most of my adult life has been nothing but shit (objectively; things have been quite good for me, but I'm a programmer, so...): financial crisis, terrorism, low employment, home foreclosures, high tuition. It doesn't seem to be improving for the average person. Furthermore, things have turned to shit almost exactly when we became adults; when we were children, we were brought up in a time of abundance, when life was easy, and hopes for the future were high. Now, life is hard, especially for people with no homes and no jobs and no work experience, and there is nothing to look forward to, except global warming.
Exactly. I don't know how much is gained by playing the generation blame game. If we are going to solve problems we have to work together not spend all the time blaming each other.
It's not all "blame game". The boomers are also the generation that holds all power and makes the decisions. Younger generations feel like their problems are not heard.
Personally, for the generation Y living in the US, I feel it's worse than other Gen Y. Because of the dollar previous generations have had the benefit of exporting inflation and forcing everyone else to trade in dollars (most importantly the energy-markets). I feel the world is slowly learning to trade in it's own currency whenever they're not dealing with the US Euro/Yen/Roebel/Yuan).
There most certainly are differences in interests and priorities between the demographic groups, and many of them are conflicting. Teams isn't a bad analogy.
I agree with you; especially your last statement. I believe that the arguing between generations spawns from the differences in the challenges each has faced. Those challenges may be nearly equal in difficulty, but the difference is great enough that each generation has a difficult time empathizing with the others. We should restore hope in those (of any generation) who are struggling against terrible adversity rather than assure them that everyone else had it just as hard.
Maybe we argue cross generations because of cultures that have clear divides between generations - what they do, what they are interested in, etc. We are so adamant about it that we shame each other for being "age inappropriate" when we step out of those molds. In turn, maybe there is relatively little bonding and friendship between the generations. Everyone who is 20 years or older than you is either your parent, your teacher, your boss, your counselor, your mailman, or he's a noone to you. You meet some of them and, unless you see them every day for some reason (parent, relative, boss, coworker), they have nothing more to say to you than "are you still in school, what are you studying?", and the like, and you have nothing interesting to say to them, either. (I'm talking about myself here, not anyone else in particular.)
A lot of younger people today are incapable of making strong or hard life choices. Even something as simple as deciding to go to a trade school instead of risk a liberal arts degree. Yet these folks know going into it what sorts of options they have in terms of majors, and they have to know they're staring down the barrel of questionable employment if they pursue a less lucrative education. Yet somehow they feel they don't need to make sacrifices. The same thing goes when it comes to budgeting. Netflix? Smart phones? Starbucks? These are part of the economic floor for a lot of people of recent generations. But in many ways they are luxuries. If you are having trouble making ends meet then you need to cut some of those things. You can get buy without a smartphone, although even just going with the cheapest option (low cost smartphone w/ a prepaid plan) saves a crapton of money compared to the average. I think a lot of people have no clue how much people of previous generations went without common conveniences on a routine basis just to keep the bills paid. Boomers weren't buying starbucks every morning and dining out every day, they were packing sack lunches and drinking coffee made from a can.
That said, there are still some really shitty things that Gen Y and the millenials have to deal with that boomers didn't.
Jobs are harder to get, they don't pay as well, and the cost of living is higher. These days even entry level jobs require a ton of leg work and paper work to fill, and they usually have restrictive hours and almost invariably crappy pay. Median home prices vs. median household income has been increasing considerably since the 1970s. Considering that owning a home has typically been a multi-decadal achievement for a lot of folks that increasing ratio ends up translating directly into a great many folks denied home ownership, and the many financial benefits that come with it.
And then you look at the college situation and wonder how anyone today manages. Increasingly college education is a prerequisite for many jobs, even jobs that do not require anything other than basic literacy skills. Compared to an era when high school dropouts could easily find work and where mere high school graduates could commonly find white collar jobs as long as they had the skills, today is a much different playing field. Add to that the fact that acquiring a useful college credential usually ends up costing tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt.
All of that makes for a very tight squeeze for many folks entering the work force today.
Yeah, a lot of people today make poor choices and they whine, but make no mistake, it's a legitimately tough situation they are in.
> The thing is that the current young ones are still of the belief that no-one has had it hard before; that it was cruisy and easy for everyone before
Really? It seems to me that a much more common belief is that the living standards in the modern, developed world is on a constant, never-ending upwards trajectory; that wealthy economies will grow wealthier or at least stay at an equilibrium, and that science and technology will keep improving people's life and make them easier. And also that we will grow more tolerant and accepting of each other (see; women's rights 100 years from now compared to today, black and gays rights in the last 50 years...). The recession probably dented the belief in strong western economies, but that is relatively recent.
In that light, it would be consistent to also believe that previous generation had it harder than the younger ones do today.
It seems to me that the attitude that the younger generation is entitled and spoilt is a pretty common one, irrespective of the era - how would X survive if he grew up like me? We didn't even have Y! There has been a lot of rage against the boomers lately, at least on the Internet, but that also feels kind of recent. At least when it comes to the Internet trend, I wouldn't be surprised if that whole debacle at least partly started because of a rant against baby boomers by George Carlin, who was himself not-quite in the boomer demographic (but on the other hand, who didn't he rant against?). Prior to the complaints towards the boomer generation, I think there was a certain amount of "apologies for my generation" sentiment going on. But again, that is also just an Internet-thing; I don't know about other avenues of information.
"It shouldn't be any surprise to us that when we promote an 'everyone goes to college!' culture a la 'everyone's a home owner!', [snip] we'll have a mass of college-educated individuals who can't find gainful employment."
The quoted portion should be a surprise. Several generations ago, we decided to promote an "everyone goes to grade school" culture, and it led to a vast expansion of our economy and middle class in the western world. Our current situation sounds predictable, but it was not. It was reasonable to predict that an educated workforce would provide more capable brains to fulfill new and existing needs with goods and services.
I think the core cause is the belief that college was the cause of success, when it was really more of a gatekeeper of success. Now that the gate is wide open to a large fraction of society, you need either connections or hard skills. I can forgive past policymakers for that oversight. I can't forgive current policymakers for perpetuating it.
The most popular major at my state's most popular university this year was psychology. Many—if not most—of those degrees will never be put to use.
Underemployment doesn't just come from inappropriate people going to college. I don't have the graphs in front of me, but if you look at jobs as a whole we have a mediocre recovery from the great recession but if you look at the types of jobs it's horrid. That is, white collar jobs where lost and service jobs where gained. So it's more than just people's perceptions.
This is compounded by the republican ideology of transferring risks from the state to the individual. My alma mater cost $3.2k/year in tuition in the late 90s, and now costs $9.4k/year (numbers not inflation adjusted). According to the cpi inflation calculator, tuition has roughly doubled [1]. But that's not all -- course loads are now heavy enough that it can be very difficult to get required classes when needed, and because of sequencing requirements for your major classes it's very easy to accidentally get stuck for an extra 1-2 semesters because you couldn't get the course you needed because of reduced course offerings. Assuming you spend $10/year for books + living expenses, leaving college with ~$40k in debt is significant.
I graduated from my undergrad quite a while ago with around fifty thousand in borrowed debt. I made sure to only take what I absolutely needed and maintained various part time jobs throughout.
When I had my exit interview, the financial aid counselor asked if I knew how much I had borrowed. I told her what I knew it to be. She laughed and said that I was probably wrong as most students have no idea how much debt they have accrued.
I asked her to recheck the paperwork because I had been keeping record of how much I borrowed and only borrowed the minimum that I was eligible for throughout my college career. When she looked at my file, she made an embarrassed apology and said that she must have confused me with someone else and that her experience was that most students didn't know their full debt burden.
My wife and I paid it off in five years. We were lucky, though. We were married in our last year of school and were used to living with few luxuries. We decided to keep living as simply even though we were lucky enough to both get jobs not long after graduating. We read all the requirements and prepayment guidelines and followed them to the letter which helped knock the time down tremendously. When we got within a couple thousand, my in-laws paid off the rest with a no-interest loan that they made to us.
Not everyone has those circumstances, I know, but the biggest realization was if we would be okay with living well below our means for a few years, we would be better off in the end. I have friends that I think are still paying off loans due to deferments, unemployment, and amount they received.
There were programs in my uni that got dissolved before people had matriculated. Students who had several semesters of courses under their belts were left out in the cold and had to try to rig their courses into other programs as electives or transfer. It was awful.
My wife was a college advisor and had students keep copies of the college handbook that was published the year a student started in a major. She would hammer home that it was their "contract" with the university and had students use it to good effect when they argued against changes to the graduation requirements mid-program.
I don't know if it would work for everyone, but it is worth a shot and can't hurt to just have that stored away when you appeal to your university.
Would you mind to name and shame that university? I've often heared of programs being dissolved, but always with a "we won't stop operation until the last matriculated person has been given enough time to graduate at average speed" grace period.
I'm very loyal to my department because they were awesome and extremely supportive (luckily we survived the axe), so I don't want to shame the whole university. But it's a medium-sized school in the South East of the US and it's run by an alarmingly incompetent chancellor.
Yeah, my alma mater looks to be be right between 10 and 11k a year for tuition (28 credit hours a year assumed), and books and living expense puts that even higher.
I ended up with around 80k in loans, but I was dumb about my living expenses (I went to college in my late 20s, and had a certain living standard I wanted to maintain, which was a mistake).
I have similar experiences. I almost hate running in to people that I went to high school with, or getting friend requests via Facebook and then having these getting reacquainted discussions. I see my friends and they are struggling to find a place in the world, many are living at home and society at large is telling them that they are failures. It makes me very sad for them because feeling like a failure is one of the worst things in life, in my experience anyway.
Everyone should be a home owner because people tend to take care better of the place they both own and live in. But it order to achieve that you need to incentivise people who rent property to sell it. Progressive property tax that makes owning more that two or three homes very risky endavor could do that.
I recently bought a flat with intention to rent. It stands empty for many months so far because I can't find time to finish renovating it. It can stand empty because it's dirt cheap to leave it like that. I'm earning enough too keep it empty for another month in less than a day. As it stands empty somebody has no place to live in and has to pay rent elevated by the fact people like me are perfectly safe to hoard property.
What solution do you propose? I've been thinking about it, but I can't think of a way to (1) tax landlords (i.e. disincentivize property hoarding) without (2) passing the tax on to those who rent. In the UK, for example, tenants pay council tax, and I expect any increases of said tax to affect tenants, not landlords.
Add to that that 11% of house owners in the UK now own more than one house.
One of the "problems" in the UK rental market is that the Duke of Westminster is one of Britain's most propertied landlord.
And then you read things like this :
> A Freedom of Information request by the New Statesman to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) reveals that the largest landowners received millions of pounds in taxpayer subsidy last year. The Duke of Westminster, a multibillionaire, was paid £748,716 for his ownership of Grosvenor Farms, the Earl of Plymouth £675,085, the Duke of Buccleuch £260,273, the Duke of Devonshire £251,729 and the Duke of Atholl £231,188 for his Blair Castle estate. It was also a lucrative year for the Windsors. The Queen received £415,817 for the Royal Farms and £314,811 for the Duchy of Lancaster, while Prince Charles was paid £127,868 for the Duchy of Cornwall. Similarly well-remunerated was Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who received £273,905 for his 2,000-acre Glympton Estate in Oxfordshire, allegedly purchased with proceeds of the 1985 al-Yamamah arms deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia. The largest individual UK beneficiary is Sir Richard Sutton, who was paid £1.7m for his Settled Estates, the 6,500-acre property near Newbury that he inherited with his baronetcy in 1981, despite net assets of £136.5m.
I'd just progressively tax estate, rooms, inhabitable area, whatever so that owning a house or a flat or two or three costs as much as today, but owning fifth one for a year will cost you for example 10%-20% of its value and owning twe tieth for a month would cost you more than it's worth. Some of those costs would be passed to tenants but this would lower demand and make the whole enterprise of owning property much riskier and incentivise selling also buying but only if you don't have one or two already.
Personally I'm fine with redistribution of work. People should work less hours to make room for more people to be employed. When you see that 25% of the workforce is unemployed or employed only from time to time and the economy is stagnating, I take it as a good sign that the legal work hours should be reduced with 25% to make room for the rest of the workforce which is idling on welfare which in the end is taken from the ones who work.
Did you read the grandparent's comment? Some redistribution of wealth is a solution if many people are so much in debt as a result of study loans and unemployment. Being able to survive on your own, rather than living in your parent's basement, gives dignity.
It has worked great for Western European and Scandinavian countries.
>Being able to survive on your own, rather than living in your parent's basement, gives dignity
>It has worked great for Western European and Scandinavian countries.
Has it? According to a report by the UN, it would appear the median age by which half of young people have left their parental home is 26 for males and 24 for females [1].
In some areas of Western Europe, unemployment is as high as 25% [2] and is particularly affecting young people.
So could you please quantify your statement that it has worked great for Western European and Scandinavian countries?
I hasn't worked at all in most other cases, particularly in eastern European and ex-soviet countries.
But the world is not black and white. There is a vast space between 'free for all'-capitalism and state socialism.
You can empower people by giving everyone access to good education and giving decent social security. Where 'decent' means: being able to afford housing, eat, and travel for interviews. But not so much that it makes working unattractive.
Another method for empowering people is to make it possible to make a living with an 8 hour work day by introducing a minimum wage.
The introduction of minimum wage raises unemployment.
By the way, TFA is about Great Britain, which by all accounts has a great social security net. And as you can read in the article, the people specifically suffer from unemployment and the resulting feeling of worthlessness.
They don't suffer from hunger, lack of housing, debt or lack of material goods.
People do suffer from hunger. We have increased use of food banks.
People do also suffer from lack of housing. It is ridiculous to suggest that homelessness is mot a problem in England. Homelessness does not just include rough sleeping, but even rough sleeping is a problem in England.
People living on the street are not automatically entitled to a home.
Personal debt is also a massive problem in the UK.
Since the article is about young people there are some things you need to know: Housing Benefit is restricted for young people. The type of accommodation they can get is limited. (Young people here is "under 35" http://m.england.shelter.org.uk/get_advice/housing_benefit_a... )
Most government help is in the form of tax rebates.
The combination of "lower taxes" and "government handouts" cUses cognitive dissonance for some people - they want lower taxation because fuck government, but they don't want lower taxation for poor people they only want it for very rich people people because SOCIALISM.
What you describe is a pretty good argument about why supply side economics alone can't describe our economy adequately. If nobody has the money to create the demand, the economy will shrink.
Can you imagine what it is like to live in a country where that friend of a friend of yours is the _average_ young person?
To answer that rethorical question, let me just point out that we won't have heared the last of the crisis in Southern Europe.
My brother has several friends in Ireland and he's described their outlook similarly. They have a sort of government stipend and some of them can find odd jobs (odd as in strange, one of them is a part time fire eater) but for the most part they simply can't find steady work. The demand for low-cost work vs. the demand for a living wage is definitely at work all around the world.
Although not geographically, Ireland definitely is part of the "Southern Europe" of the parent's comment; it was one of the countries hit by the recession the quickest and hardest.
I think implementing basic income would probably help at least somewhat, but everyone still needs some way to feel like they're contributing. Also, short of bringing back protectionist measures like high tariffs and reversing globalization somewhat (maybe not a terrible idea), it seems like we need to create a much more highly skilled workforce than the one we have so that we can move up the value chain.
When my friend mentioned that I was just in town from SF for the weekend, she asked what I did and after telling her, her reaction was something along the lines of 'oh you're like a real grown up!' Her tone was one of embarrassment and a begrudging acceptance of where she was, and it's one I've seen a fair bit despite going to a pretty solid school. Not Ivy League, mind you, but a reasonably high-ranked state school.
I really have no idea what the solution is, but I've thought a fair bit about the as of yet unrealized ripple effects: Many of these people are in debt up to their eyeballs. Given that, they're going to be much less likely to (or at least will significantly delay) purchases of cars and real estate. Dating is a lot harder when you're living at your parents', and I'm sure we'll see an impact in the ratio of singles/families among my generation as a result. Then there's the whole psychological impact of feeling they have nothing going for them that the article focuses on. Pretty dismal scene.
[1] Honestly, I hate this term. It shouldn't be any surprise to us that when we promote an 'everyone goes to college!' culture a la 'everyone's a home owner!', coupled with an insidious lowering of standards in our education system starting in the lower rungs of K-12, we'll have a mass of college-educated individuals who can't find gainful employment.