Last week there was a NYT feature story about a 24-year-old Millennial (born 1982-200?), a recent grad of Colgate University with a stellar academic record, who has been living with his parents (and grandfather) over the last six months sending resumes and looking for a job.  He wants an executive track corporate position.  A couple of months ago, he was turned down by an insurance company for the job he applied for—but was offered a lesser job as an insurance adjustor for $40K.  The Millennial turned it down, saying that the company made clear it was at least ten levels below the job he wanted.  The author interlaced the story with statistics on the severity of the current “Great Recession” for young adults.

The story lit up a firestorm of reader responses: no less than 1,487 comments thus far, and much larger echoes on the blogosphere.  Many of the commenters lambasted the NYT for suggesting that this privileged young man’s experience (he lives in a nice suburban home and his dad is president of a small manufacturing company) is in any way representative of the employment hardships most youth are facing today.  Even more excoriated the young man for turning down the $40K offer—and the family for letting him live at home while turning down such offers.  The most vicious remarks seemed to come from older (Generation X (born 1961-1981) and Boomer (born 1943-1960)) readers, who often cited their own tough, low-salary beginnings.  Apparently, they disapprove of this generation’s tendency to hold fast to long-term plans and dreams.  Be realistic, they insist.  Eat humble pie.  It will be good for you (to repeat what older Chinese now tell the rising “Little Emperor” generation) to “taste bitterness.”

Wow.  Stern stuff.  What’s surprising about all this indignation is just how vague these critics are about just what is *wrong* about what is going on in this story:

• The Millennial himself is not complaining.  There is no whininess.  He disavows any legitimate comparison between his own situation and what the unemployed faced, say, during the Great Depression.  He’s looking forward to a happy ending–as are most unemployed Millennials (something we know from data from Pew and others).
• The parents are not complaining.  The son gets along very well with his  (Boomer) parents and (G.I.) grandpa and runs errands for them.  The marginal dollar cost of the son living at home seems trivial and doesn’t really bother anyone—though admittedly the older folks worry sometimes about the young man’s career.  This is also typical.  The survey data indicate that today’s Millennials and Boomers get along much better in the same home than young Boomers and their own parents did 35 or 40 years ago—when many young Boomers report that they left home in anger… or that their parents simply kicked them out.  Take this trend (closer inter-generational households) and extrapolate it out over the next couple decades and you could be looking at a win-win solution to our unaffordable Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid liabilities, a solution predicated on greater mutual dependence within families.  Our number one fiscal nightmare solved.  And this is a *bad* thing?
• There is no evidence that this Millennial is selfish or anti-community.  In fact, he expected to enter officer training with the Marine Corps but was barred at the last moment due to childhood asthma.
• The guy is clearly keeping busy, volunteering for the fire department, working for neighbors.  By the end of the article, the reader learns that he is no longer actually living at home at all, but living with brother (a guy who did get the $75 opening corporate job) to sub for a roommate who just moved out.  He is planning to temp for local eateries while there.  Totally “temp” work—as opposed to quasi-permanent “careers” that the young person does not really want—is also a typical Millennial strategy.
• There is, finally, widespread agreement among labor market economists that taking a lower initial salary, while certainly a doable and often successful strategy for long-term success, is not the only strategy.  On average, it is likely to result in a lower salary trajectory for many years to come.  Millennials plan ahead and have long time horizons.  If an executive track is important to them tomorrow, they will plan accordingly today.

So let’s move to the bottom line here.

Should we feel sorry for this young man?  No, but then again he’s not asking for that.

Did he make an irrevocable career mistake by not accepting the $40K position?  Not as far as I can see.

Is it unfair that, over the course of the business cycle, youth who graduate into a severe recession are disadvantaged in their career paths relative to those who graduate into a boom?  Yes, it’s unfair, but no more so than a lot of the other vicissitudes of fortune that hit some people and not others.  Besides, the effects of these “cohort timing” differences, while long lasting, gradually fade over time.  As Glen Elder showed, the Great Depression’s impact on the young adults of the 1930s was largely forgotten by the time this cohort reached its peak lifetime earnings years in the late 1960s.  (By then, their salaries didn’t concern most of them nearly so much as their kids’ music!).

Would America be a better place if today’s young Millennials were eager to leave their parents at all cost, even if it meant taking a job they hate?  You’ll have to explain to me why.

To be sure, one might reasonably argue that not everyone, not even everyone with excellent college credentials, can hold out for a $75K salary.  True enough.  But not everyone wants to hold out for a high salary.  And many of those who do will ultimately change their mind.  Maybe even this young man.  So?

My question is: Why do the sober-minded, future-oriented career choices of today’s Millennials make so many Boomers and Xers jump up and down in agitated condemnation?

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Is this Millennial’s views really representative of his generation? Here’s why I ask.  The mandatory (or “entitlement”) spending he talks about has been growing as a share of GDP more or less continuously over the last 45 years.  And it is projected to continue to grow over the next thirty.  I know many Millennial (born 1982-200?) who are very concerned about this trend—and when you talk to them, they do find it troublesome.  But to the extent of really motivating them to elect or defeat a political candidate?  If the Democrats’ new health-care legislation remains in place, that path has just been tilted further upward, i.e., accelerated.  Yet I can’t say I’ve heard many Millennials speak out about this law’s obvious fiscal impact.  This year, Social Security is going into a primary-balance deficit some eight years earlier than projected a few years ago.  Not much comment here either.

So again I ask: Do most Millennials share this writers view?  Maybe after the next great economic scare, but not quite yet, I think.  One can imagine a larger version of what happened after the 2008 meltdown, when everyone “woke up” to say omg we knew about those subprime mortgage and CDS’s all along… why didn’t we *do* anything about them?  Only this time they’ll be talking about the entire government sector balance sheet.

Pay as you go accounting has allowed a gap the size of the Grand Canyon to open up between what most Americans expect to pay to government over their lifetimes and what they expect to receive.  Absent blistering productivity growth or surging demographic growth (we’re not going to see either anytime soon), nearly all of that gap must be filled.  Get out your shovels.  There will be a day of reckoning.

Jim Quinn has written a number of essays about America’s entry into the coming Fourth Turning (Crisis).  Here is another good one, probably the best one he’s done:

http://theburningplatform.com/economy/21st-century-breakdown

He refers in this essay to the film “Generation Zero.”  Please don’t ask me more about this film than I know.  Yes, I’m interviewed in this film, and turnings and generations are used as the central organizing theme.  Yes, I’ve known the director (Steve Bannon, based in LA) for a while.  The film will be released in theaters later this spring.  Yes, it features over a dozen conservative talking heads (from Charles Krauthammer to Lou Dobbs), and has been a big hit at tea parties, the CPAC convention, and (earlier this evening) on Fox News.  No, it’s not really partisan in any party (Democrat v. Republican) sense, but it is very populist.  But yes, it is visually very striking.  Here is a trailer:

There are already many reviews of this movie.  Here is Jim Quinn’s: http://www.lewrockwell.com/quinn/quinn23.1.html.

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In 2007, PBS released a special documentary on Millennials that centered around interviews with me and Bill.  LifeCourse Associates has just been able to release the DVD  for sale on our website, and I thought you might be interested.  You can access it here.

Here’s the announcement from our site:

Announcing “Millennials,” a PBS Special Featuring Neil Howe and William Strauss

LifeCourse is pleased to announce the release of a 2007 PBS special documentary, Millennials: A Profile of the Next Great Generation, now available for sale in our bookstore.  Using the research of generational experts and bestselling authors Neil Howe and William Strauss, the documentary examines today’s rising Millennial Generation of youth.  Who are the Millennials?  What forces have shaped them as a generation?  And do they have what it takes to deal with the many political, environmental, and cultural issues that may now be reaching a crisis point?  This documentary looks for answers.  It brings the insights of Howe and Strauss to life through in-depth interviews with the authors as well as personal stories of Millennials coming of age.

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I found this NYT report (text and video) on the pop culture of Pakistan’s present-day youth generation to be very sobering. It is really worth watching and relates to the Fourth Turning (Crisis)

We see (in the headlines) the pro-western policies of the Iraq’s leadership and (lately) the pro-western military campaigns of its army. Yet one wonders, after watching this video, whether the reality may be very different under the surface. The U.S. and President Obama’s “war of necessity” against the radicalized Taliban has become, more than ever before, the object of vituperation in Pakistan—and of Pakistan’s youth in particular. Our new stepped-up predator/drone campaign is especially hated.

Keep in mind not just that Pakistan has nukes, but that it has an enormous and unstable youth population (the lower fertility that has hit Iran and much of the Arab world has not yet much affected Pakistan), that it remains very poor, with very low human development index scores, that it is riven by tribal, ethnic, and religious factionalism, and that it has a history of violent coups. Not a single former leader of Pakistan has yet died a natural death. And most of them are dead. The “anglo” culture of Pakistan’s elite does not seem to help—indeed, may even further fuel a sense of alienation. Nor, as this video demonstrates, does it matter how many die in Taliban attacks. It’s not a pretty picture.

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Published:Dec.1997 | Price:$15.95

The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy

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