Activities and experiences that previous generations of children enjoyed without a second thought have been relabeled as troubling or dangerous, while the adults who still permit them are branded as irresponsible. At the extreme…society appears to have become unable to cope with any adverse outcomes whatsoever, no matter how trivial or improbable. While such episodes may be rare, they fit a pattern of growing adult intervention to minimize risk at the expense of childhood experience.21
Even casual observations of children playing outdoors confirm that these youngsters, like other young mammals, deliberately put themselves into moderately fear-inducing conditions in play. Their swinging, sliding, and twirling on playground equipment; their climbing on monkey bars or trees; their risky skateboarding down banisters—all such activities are fun to the degree that they are moderately frightening. If too little fear is induced, the activity is boring; if too much is induced, it becomes no longer play but terror. Nobody but the child himself or herself knows the right dose, which is why all such play must be self-directed and self-controlled.
A hypercompetitive environment sets parents up for dreams of champion children, and then for almost inevitable heartbreak. Millennials of all abilities have grown up in the shadow of these expectations, expectations that by definition only a very few of us can fulfill.
When it comes to children’s life chances, zero tolerance is a self-fulfilling prophecy: School authorities warn students that any deviant behavior on a child’s part is irresponsible because it could have severe and long-lasting consequences for their future, and then they enforce unreasonably harsh disciplinary standards that have severe and long-lasting consequences for the child’s future. That’s not a warning, it’s a promise.
If the changes in childhood over the past decades have really been made “with the interests of all children in mind,” as the Harley Avenue letter said, then they should, at the very least, not be actively making children unhappier. Evidence, however, suggests that even this small hope is in vain.
To put it simply: American kids and teens, across race, gender, and class lines, are spending less time doing things that make them happy (like self-directed play with their friends and eating—pretty much the only two activities they report enjoying) and more time doing things that make them especially unhappy (like homework and listening to lectures).
By every metric, this generation is the most educated in American history, yet Millennials are worse off economically than their parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. Every authority from moms to presidents told Millennials to accumulate as much human capital as we could, and we did, but the market hasn’t held up its side of the bargain. What gives? And why did we make this bargain in the first place?
College admissions offices are the rating agencies for kids, and once the kid-bond is rated, it has four or so years until it’s expected to produce a return. And those four years are expensive.
Wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished, with real wages for young graduates down 8.5 percent between 2000 and 2012.
In 1960, 25 percent of full-time college students between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four worked while enrolled. Five decades later, national statistics show that over 70 percent of undergraduates are working….Twenty percent of all undergraduate students are employed full time, year-round.
While economic recovery has been just around the corner for years—or so we’re told—Treasury rates (the interest rates the government pays to borrow money) are still low, which has produced some unforeseen consequences for the federal government’s takeover of the student loan industry. Because the government’s borrowing costs are so low, student lending is incredibly profitable.
Since almost all colleges are nonprofits, we assume people work in higher education for reasons other than financial gain,
Even at nonprofit schools, top-level administrators and financial managers pull down high-six-and even seven-figure salaries, closer to their industry counterparts than their fellow faculty members.
Corporate universities must be competitive in recruiting students who are already set up to become rich alumni, so they have to spend on attractive extras, which means they need more revenue, so they need more students paying higher tuition. For-profits aren’t the only ones consumed with selling product.
“business” has quickly become the nation’s most popular major by over 100 percent.
Over the past thirty years, costs of attendance (tuition, fees, room and board) in real terms have risen around 220 percent at both public and private four-year institutions (219 and 223 percent, respectively).18
In 2013, Moody’s issued a negative outlook rating for the US higher education sector, suggesting that schools were, in aggregate, not a good investment. The first reason these analysts give is that schools have more or less hit the ceiling when it comes to charging families for higher education.
What this all amounts to is a clear tendency for both public and private colleges to behave like businesses, passing off a lower-quality product at a higher price by tacking on highly leveraged shiny extras unrelated to the core educational mission. Stadium skyboxes, flat-screen monitors, marble floors, and hors d’oeuvres for the alumni association. Consultants of all flavors and salaried employees to make sure it’s all efficient. Competition hasn’t improved the quality of higher education, it has made colleges more like sleepaway camps or expensive resorts, cruise ships with lucrative fast-food concessions and bookstores full of branded tchotchkes for sale.
Rather, policymakers have treated higher education costs like a public relations problem. There’s no way to address the underlying issue of too many young Americans owing too much in student debt without the lender (the United States government, in most cases) taking a hit.
Today, student debt is an exceptionally punishing kind of debt to have. Not only is it very hard to escape through bankruptcy, but student loans have no expiration date and collectors can garnish wages, Social Security payments, and even unemployment benefits.
debt is a kind of time travel for value: Borrowers take out loans based on the idea that the returns on a college education will always exceed the costs, and they’re made to pay regardless.
Across the economy, bad jobs are getting worse, good jobs are getting better, and the middle is disappearing.
As social and educational barriers to women’s participation in the workforce have eroded, firms have looked to women as a lower-wage alternative. Women still aren’t paid as well as men for the same productivity, but the wage gap has closed significantly since the late 1970s.
Wages have stagnated for most of the labor force since the 1970s, especially for men. Rates of real wage growth in the United States have averaged less than 1 percent per year since 1973….Median
Just because the quality of jobs has tanked, that doesn’t mean the quality of workers and their work has gone down as well. Productivity hasn’t followed the stagnant wage trend.
At both good and bad poles of job quality, employers need more affective labor from employees. Affective labor (or feeling work) engages what the Italian theorist Paolo Virno calls our “bioanthropological constants”—the innate capacities and practices that distinguish our species, like language and games and mutual understanding.
The major change has come from working women themselves, who reduce their time in unpaid labor at home as they move into the workforce. However, they do not remotely reduce their housework hour-for-hour for time spent in paid labor. And while their male partners increase their own time in housework, this is not nearly as much as working wives reduce theirs. The upshot is that rather less unpaid household labor gets done overall in the dual-earner household—but women’s total combined time in paid and unpaid household labor is substantially greater than is the typical nonemployed women’s in domestic labor alone….The working woman is much busier than either her male colleague or her housewife counterpart.15
Just because some men’s work tended to be better at a time when single-worker families were more common doesn’t mean we can return to the former by returning to the latter. But that’s the narrative misogynists use to interpret what’s going on and how it could be fixed, and they’ve attracted a lot of angry and confused men who aren’t sure about their place in the world.
Precarity means that jobs are less secure, based on at-will rather than fixed-duration contracts; it means unreliable hours and the breakdown between the workday and the rest of an employee’s time; it means taking on the intense responsibility of “good” jobs alongside the shoddy compensation and lack of respect that come with “bad” jobs; it means workers doing more with less, and employers getting more for less.
On the professional side of polarization, the proportion of men and women working more than fifty hours a week has grown significantly.
The grand irony is that this system wouldn’t be possible without a generation of young Americans who are willing to take the costs of training upon themselves. If young people refused to pay in time, effort, and debt for our own job preparation, employers would be forced to shell out a portion of their profits to train workers in the particular skills the companies require.
Having pushed so many of the training costs onto young people and their families, employers have less invested in individual employees and their continued welfare. If they didn’t invest in the workers’ human capital, firms aren’t compelled to “protect” their investments.
As Chris Rock famously put it: “Do you know what it means when someone pays you minimum wage? I would pay you less, but it’s against the law.”
Industrial labor unions have always attempted to counter employer interests by representing large numbers of workers together. This collective bargaining meant wages, benefits, hours, working conditions, promotions, etc., were all subject to negotiation between two parties that needed each other. If unions care about their members, and firms are compelled to care about what their unions want, then as long as their mutual dependence lasts, unionized workers can maintain some balance of power. But in the last few decades, that bit of shared leverage has largely dissolved.
The unpaid intern is a relatively new kind of employee. This role combines features of low-and high-skill labor, along with the lack of compensation that befits work under the pedagogical mask.
A 2013 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE)—an organization that exists in part to promote internships—found that graduates who had completed an unpaid internship were less than 2 percent more likely to get a job offer than the control group (37 and 35.2 percent, respectively), and their median starting salary was actually lower ($35,721 versus $37,087).
A survey by Intern Bridge—the other main research organization besides NACE that focuses on the internship market—found that lower-income students were more likely to take unpaid internships, whereas their higher-income peers were more likely to be found in the paid positions.
My fear is that the prominence of the unpaid internship isn’t the result of a regulatory oversight. Rather, this new labor regime is a natural and unavoidable outcome of a culture in which children are taught that the main objective while they’re young is to become the best job applicant they can be.
It’s no wonder we’re used to feeling like things are going to get better: In the 1940 cohort, approximately 90 percent out-earned their parents. But for Millennials, the mobility number is down to 50 percent: It’s a coin-flip whether or not we’ll out-earn Mom and Dad.
The analysts conclude that the drastic change comes from the shifting, increasingly unequal distribution of GDP, rather than a lack of growth itself. The American dream isn’t fading (as the title of the NBER paper says), it’s being hoarded.
Meanwhile, employee compensation has grown 9.5 percent between 2008 and 2013,47 only a fraction of the 50 percent swell in corporate profits between 2009 and the second quarter of 2014.48 Postcrisis America has been a great place to own things and a really bad place not to.
After taking into account his obscene workweek, one J.P. Morgan analyst Roose interviewed calculated his post-tax pay at $16 an hour 52—more than $5 less than the 1968 minimum wage adjusted for productivity growth.
In their 2014 reports, the Social Security trustees themselves estimate that by 2020 outgo will exceed total fund income; by 2033 the reserves will be totally depleted and new tax revenue will only cover 77 percent of scheduled benefits.
Americans who retired in the 1980s received twice as much in benefits as they paid taxes into the system, but the ratio has been declining ever since.
March 2014 Pew study of Millennial attitudes toward entitlements revealed that a paltry 6 percent believe they will receive the full Social Security benefits that they’ve been promised, and 51 percent believe they will see no benefits at all.14 Think about that for a moment: The average dual-earner couple will pay over a million dollars in taxes into a system that more than half of Millennials think will leave them high and dry.15 Whether it’s generosity of spirit, utilitarian analysis, or plain old resignation, the so-called entitled generation doesn’t even feel entitled to our own entitlements.
By 2012, more than one in five American kids lived below the poverty line, and at 21.8 percent, the portion of children in poverty was more than twice as high as for those over sixty-five (who were at 9.1 percent).19 Social scientists call this switch in fortunes between the old and young the “juvenilization of poverty.”
Schools have found a lot of ways to improve their scores, demonstrating the kind of innovation that happens when the state puts a gun to your head. They’ve reduced arts and music time in favor of tested subjects like math and reading. Teachers spend instructional time telling kids how to fill out bubbles correctly and how to narrow choices to make a better guess. Critics call this “teaching to the test,” and it’s predictable and worrisome.
The entire way we talk about education turns students into lab rats, objects of experimentation and feedback, and Millennials were born in captivity. Stakeholders work out compromises and decide on procedures in order to create kids who will fill out the right bubbles on their standardized tests.
it’s clear the American public education system is a rapidly rationalizing factory for producing human capital. They think once every school is on the same page, they can turn up output like they’re producing bottle caps or bars of steel.
K-12 suspensions for white students increased from 3.1 to 4.8 percent between 1973 and 2006, while the rate for all nonwhite students more than doubled.
When I look at school discipline in the context of declining violence and a lack of evidence that suspensions are effective at improving students’ learning conditions, I can only conclude that the actual purpose of such discipline, at a structural level, is to label and remove black kids (disproportionately) from the clearly defined road to college and career.
But whatever the reasons, the US incarceration rate has quintupled since the 1970s, and it’s affecting young black men most of all and more disproportionately than ever. The white rate of imprisonment has risen in relative terms, but not as fast as the black rate, which has spiked.
The police are increasingly unwilling to cede any space at all to kids, providing state reinforcement for zero-risk childhood.
A new college football play-off earned the NCAA (and its member universities) $470 million from ESPN in its inaugural year alone,10 and the Association is in the middle of a fourteen-year $11-billion deal with CBS and TBS to broadcast the annual March Madness basketball tournament.11 And that’s just some of the TV money; it doesn’t include apparel sales, tickets and concessions, alumni donations, or the invaluable media coverage and prestige that universities get when they win. The vast majority of teams, however, still lose money for their schools.
March Madness has become the most gambled-on sports event in the country, according to the American Gaming Association.
But even though labor compensation is astronomical when it comes to coaches and athletic directors, the NCAA has found an innovative way to keep labor costs down: It banned paying players.
There’s no law that bans paying a kid to come to your school, but the NCAA has attached the purity of amateur athletics to the idea that the players are uncompensated. What’s closer to the truth is that the NCAA is fighting for survival. The minute universities start competing with each other for prospective players with cash on an open market is also the official time of death for college sports. That’s why Branch calls the NCAA a cartel: Universities collude not to compete, and they all profit by keeping the labor cost low. It’s a big scam, and it can’t last.
The same study estimated that if NCAA teams were forced to compete for players in cash, Division I football and basketball players would be worth $137,357 and $289,031 a year, respectively—not including endorsements and the gifts fans and boosters would no doubt shower upon student-athletes if they were allowed the chance to do so within the rules.17
Coaches and schools get paid while players get worked; the system is manifestly exploitative. The only defense the NCAA can muster is that the players are students and students don’t get paid.
Schools have engaged in anticompetitive practices in order to push the costs of competition on student-athletes and the kids who want to become them.
The pedagogical mask is an all-purpose tool for discounting young people’s labor, and it’s all the NCAA has left to hide behind.
In the early 1990s, The Mickey Mouse Club—a kids’ variety show that served as Disney’s minor league system—prepared and screened a string of future stars, including JC Chasez, Keri Russell, Christina Aguilera, Ryan Gosling, Britney Spears, and Justin Timberlake.
Platforms like YouTube and SoundCloud allow artists to upload and distribute their work for free, but they also automatically enter them in the world’s largest talent-search reality contest. After all, it’s where they found Justin Bieber. Why should a firm bother taking a chance on an unknown when there are relatively proven but unsigned acts littering the Internet?
If his debut album didn’t sell 250,000 copies, the multialbum deal was off. The label is able to offload nearly all the risk onto the artists—in this case, a teenager and his friends. Despite the debut Finally Rich having hit its numbers—Keef claimed he made $100,000 per song on the twelve-track album—Interscope dropped Keef in October of 2014.
Hosting platforms make millions off the ads they run next to the content, and media companies save money by letting artists compete to get noticed, but the average artist ends up giving away more in exchange for less.
Given what we know about the recent changes in the American sociocultural environment, it would be a surprise if there weren’t elevated levels of anxiety among young people. Their lives center around production, competition, surveillance, and achievement in ways that were totally exceptional only a few decades ago.
Given the psychological burden that Millennials bear compared to earlier generations, we can also expect an increase in depression.
It’s another case of firms passing production costs to workers themselves, and depression has the added benefit of hiding social costs behind the veneer of individual psychosis or incapacity.
Youth psychology became a Goldilocks question, with “just right” lying between depression and ADHD. For everything else, there are antidepressants and stimulants—and who can blame any individual for trying to stay happy, sane, or eligible for success by any means available?
Not only are many of young Americans’ interactions filtered through algorithms engineered to maximize profits, the younger “digital native” Millennials have never known anything different. They have always been online, and their social world has always been actively mediated by corporations.
And yet, despite all the surveillance and countermeasures, young Americans have less illicit behavior to hide in the first place. When it comes to sex, most illegal drugs, and crime, Millennials are significantly better-behaved than earlier birth cohorts. Moral panics about youth behavior are a historical constant, but now they are especially unmoored from reality.
When you factor out marijuana (the most popular and least harmful of controlled substances), there’s a different picture: Teen drug use excepting weed has continued to decline since the 1990s, pushing historical lows.
Aside from marijuana, American teens use controlled substances less than past generations. Among twelfth graders, binge drinking is down by nearly half over the past forty years, as is cigarette smoking. Use of harder illegal drugs like cocaine, meth, LSD, and heroin is down too.46 No one has a perfect causal analysis, but increased surveillance, heavier penalties, and a lack of public space most likely contribute to the decline, as has the flow of legal (and black-market) pharmaceuticals.
Don’t believe what you hear about “hookup culture”; kids are having less sex than they have at any time since the sexual revolution.
A second study from a Temple-led Texas team looked at the longitudinal association between sexting and sexual behavior and found no connection between sexting and “high-risk” practices (unprotected sex, multiple partners, alcohol and drug use before sex), suggesting that sexting isn’t just for “bad” kids.
As part of a collaboration with BuzzFeed, the site Pornhub looked into its metrics and found that “teen” was both the most popular category and search term for male users.65
Major national trends like the increase in average worker output, rationalization, downward pressure on the cost of labor, mass incarceration, and elevated competition have shaped a generation of jittery kids teetering on the edge between outstanding achievement and spectacular collapse.
Here are seven slow-motion disasters I fear many of us can look forward to in our lifetimes:
- Human Capital Contracts
Algorithms will point lenders to the right kids, and the capitalists will make them better offers than the government can. When lenders start demanding a percentage of future earnings from borrowers in return for money up front it will seem sensible, a private version of Pay As You Earn tailored to individuals.
- Professionalization of Childhood
Instead of encouraging every child to be all they can be and imagine themselves rich and famous, the authorities will start to talk about everyone “finding a place” in society.
- Climate Privilege
The Environmental Protection Agency predicts the following between now and 2100, basically regardless of what we do from this point on: a national 3°‹F to 12‹°F increase in temperature, with extremely hot summers; an increased prevalence of exceptionally heavy rainstorms and hurricanes; a 15 percent decrease in American snow cover and a foot increase in sea level; and a decrease in coral production over 50 percent.1 Fuck, right?
The rich—and the people they need around—will live in relatively hospitable areas, while the poor will live on the edges of habitability.
- Discrimination by Algorithm
We don’t honestly know if they or any other online vendors are offering better prices to, say, white customers. But it’s a fact that discrimination that was explicitly disallowed has wandered through the tech back door—it was recently discovered that Facebook was letting users target ads for housing by race.
- The Malfunctioning
- Misogynist Backlash
I think the past correlation between a larger share of GDP going to labor and women’s low participation has turned and will turn to causation in some minds.
- Fully Tracked
With the right authorizations, an interested party could find out anything they want to know about me. Whom I’ve talked to, when, about what. Every single place I’ve been for years. Whatever I’ve bought or thought about buying. All of my work, ever. What the theorist Rob Horning calls the “data self” is continually approaching the real self, especially when it comes to Millennials like me who don’t leave the house without our phones.
We can apply this same consumer logic to any social problem. If movies with women protagonists are objectionably scarce, we can generate a virtuous cycle by backing up our values with our dollars. In this vision, our society is incredibly democratic: Each of us trades our time and effort for votes on how everything works, which we cast by spending.
With few exceptions, Americans either own companies or have to work for those who do. The main use of money isn’t expressing our values, it’s buying the things we need—like food and shelter—in order to stay alive and participate in society.
According to the Pew Research Center, the portion of Americans who trust the government to do the right thing most of the time is below 20 percent, a nearly unique low in the organization’s then fifty-seven-year history of asking the question.
Without a genuine labor party, working-class Americans don’t have a reliable path that leads inside, and the professional incumbents have huge advantages when it comes to maintaining their positions. For most people, disengagement with electoral politics is only logical.
People don’t need institutions to change their society, because people and their interactions are society.
Protests aren’t always legal. In fact, the police on-scene can basically declare any protest illegal whenever they want.
If protest is only protest until the authorities decide they don’t want to tolerate it anymore, then that’s a significant limit on its effectiveness.
We can’t just vote for politicians to do the things we want; we then have to protest to the people we elected to make sure they do the things they said they were going to do. But how can we have any credibility if we’re posting about the protest with corporate iPhones or walking in it with Nikes? First we have to put our money where our mouth is and stop supporting the 1 percent’s exploitation. But how can we justify spending $135 on ethical, organic hemp sneakers when there are kids with no good shoes at all, and in our own neighborhoods?