UCSD Communications War on Youth Article Analysis Paper

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The War Against Youth
The recession didn’t gut the prospects of American young people. The Baby Boomers
took care of that.
By Stephen Marche
Published in the April
2012 issue
Twenty-five years
ago young Americans
had a chance.
In 1984, American
breadwinners who were
sixty-five and over
made ten times as
much as those under
thirty-five. The year
Obama took office,
older Americans made
almost forty-seven
times as much as the
younger generation.
This bleeding up of the
national wealth is no
accounting glitch, no
anomalous negative
bounce from the recent
unemployment and
mortgage crises, but
rather the predictable
outcome of thirty years
of economic and social
policy that has been
rigged to serve the
comfort and largesse of
the old at the expense
of the young.
James Victoire
Since the beginning of
the Industrial
Revolution, human potential has been consistently growing, generating greater material wealth, more
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education, wider opportunities — a vast and glorious liberation of human potential. In all that time,
everyone, even followers of the most corrupt or most evil of ideologies, believed they were working
for a better tomorrow. Not now. The angel of progress has suddenly vanished from the scene. Or
rather, the angel of progress has been sent away.
Nobody ever talks
about generational
SINCE THE RECESSION:
YOUNG AMERICANS HAVE
ROVEDBACK
IN WITH THEIR PARENTS AFTER
LIVING SEPARATELY
YOUNG AMERICANS HAVE
mo
MARRYING
YOUNG AMERICANS HAVE
DELAYED
AVERAGE NET NORTH
OLDVS. s 12221002
1984
65 AND OVER:
$120,457
35 AND YOUNGER:
$11,521
2009
65 AND OVER:
$170,494
conflict. Who wants to
bring up that the old are
eating the young at the
dinner table? How are
you going to mention
that to your boss? If
you’re a politician, how
are you going to tell
your donors? Even the
Occupy Wall Street
crowd, while rejecting
the modes and rhetoric
and institutional support
of Boomer progressives,
shied away from
articulating the
fundamental distinction
that fills their spaces
with crowds: young
against old.
3S AND YOUNGER:
The gerontocracy begins
at the top. The 111th
Congress was the oldest
since the end of the
Second World War, and
the average age of its
members has been
rising steadily since
1981. The graying of Congress has obvious political ramifications, although generalizations can be
deceiving. The Republican representatives tend to be younger than the Democrats, but that doesn’t
mean they represent the interests of the young. The youngest senators are Tea Party members, Mike
Lee from Utah and Marco Rubio from Florida (both forty). Here’s Rubio: “Americans chose a freeenterprise system designed to provide a quality of opportunity, not compel a quality of results. And
that is why this is the only place in the world where you can open up a business in the spare bedroom
of your home.” He is speaking to people who own homes that have empty spare bedrooms. He will
not or cannot understand that the spare bedrooms of America are filling up with returning adult
children, like the estimated 85 percent of college graduates who returned to their childhood beds in
2010, toting along $25,250 of debt.
HAVING A BABY $3,662
David Frum, former George W. Bush speechwriter, had the guts to acknowledge that the Tea Party’s
combination of expensive entitlement programs and tax cuts is something entirely different from a
traditional political program: “This isn’t conservatism: It’s a going-out-of-business sale for the Baby
Boom generation.” The economic motive is growing ever more naked, and has nothing to do with any
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3
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principle that could be articulated by Goldwater or Reagan, or indeed with any principle at all. The
political imperative is to preserve the economic cloak of unreality that the Boomers have wrapped
themselves in.
Democrats may not be actively hostile to the interests of young voters, but they are too scared and
weak to speak up for them. So when the Boomers and swing voters scream for fiscal discipline and
the hard decisions have to be made, youth is collateral damage. Medicare and Social Security were
mostly untouched in Obama’s 2012 budget. But to show he was really serious about belt tightening,
relatively cheap programs that help young people like the Adolescent Family Life Program and the
Career Pathways Innovation Fund were killed.
His intentions may be good — he may want to increase support for AmeriCorps — but the program
shrunk last year. Three quarters of the applicants were turned away. He resisted Republican efforts to
slash Pell grants by $845 per student, but then made other changes to the program that will save the
government — or cost students, depending on your perspective — a projected $100 billion over ten
years.
The youth vote still supports Obama, but in a chastened, conditional way. In hindsight, Obama’s 2008
campaign looks like an indulgent fantasy in which the major conflicts in life simply don’t exist. There
may be no white America and no black America, no blue-state America and no red-state America, but
one thing is clear: There is a young America and there is an old America, and they don’t form a
community of interest. One takes from the other. The federal government spends $480 billion on
Medicare and $68 billion on education. Prescription drugs: $62 billion. Head Start: $8 billion. Across
the board, the money flows not to helping the young grow up, but helping the old die comfortably.
According to a 2009 Brookings Institution study, “The United States spends 2.4 times as much on the
elderly as on children, measured on a per capita basis, with the ratio rising to 7 to 1 if looking just at
the federal budget.”
The biggest boondoggle of all is Social Security. The management of entitlement programs, already
weighted heavily in favor of the older population, has a very specific terminal point that coincides
neatly with the Boomers’ deaths. The 2011 report by the Social Security trustees estimates that,
under its current administration, the fund will run out in 2036, so there’s just enough to get the
oldest Boomers to age ninety.
Only 58 percent of Boomers have more than $25,000 put aside for retirement, so the rest will either
starve or the government will have to pay for them. But the government’s future ability to pay is
decreasing rapidly precisely because the Boomers splurged so heavily during the Bush and Clinton
years. Public debt per person in the United States currently stands at $33,777. George W. Bush
inherited a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of 32.5 percent and brought it up to 54.1 percent during a period
of economic growth. (The money borrowed from the future paid for massive tax cuts, with no serious
reductions in domestic spending, two expensive wars, and a prescription-drug benefit added to
Medicare.) Under Obama, the debt-to-GDP ratio has risen to 67.7 percent and is projected to rise to
74.2 percent this year.
This is no conspiracy; no nefarious backroom deal by political and corporate overlords. The impasse
of the moment is, tragically, the result of the best aspects of the Boomers’ spirit. The native optimism
that emerged out of the explosively creative postwar world led them to believe that growth would go
on forever; that peace and prosperity were the natural state of things. Their good intentions seem
like willful naivete today, but the intentions were genuine. Clinton actually believed that globalization
would export the First World rather than bring the Third World home; it did both. The prescriptiondrug benefit was the “compassion” in compassionate conservatism. All those tax cuts were intended
to liberate opportunities, not destroy them.
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OTHE
RISE
IN WEALTH FOR
OLDER AMERICANS OVER THE PAST
25 YEARS
OTHE
DROP
IN WEALTH FOR
YOUNGER AMERICANS OVER THE PAST
25 YEARS
Cynicism rises to fill the emptied space of exaggerated and
failed hope. It’s all simple math. If you follow the money
rather than the blather, it’s clear that the American system
is a bipartisan fusion of economic models broken down along
generational lines: unaffordable Greek-style socialism for the
old, virulently purified capitalism for the young. Both
political parties have agreed to this arrangement: The
Boomers and older will be taken care of. Everybody younger
will be on their own. The German philosopher Hermann
Lotze wrote in the 1870s: “One of the most remarkable
characteristics of human nature is, alongside so much
selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy
which the present displays toward the future.” It is exactly
that envy toward the future that is new in our own time.
And we will not talk about any of it. We will keep mum. We
will hold our tongues lest we seem ageist, lest we seem
bitter, lest we seem out of touch, lest we seem pessimistic,
lest we seem divisive.
HOW TO DISENFRANCHISE A
GENERATION:
Across the country, state branches of the Republican party are making a thinly veiled attempt to
disenfranchise the young through “voting reform.” The trick is simple: Require government-issue
photo ID before allowing somebody to vote. Eighteen percent of young voters don’t have current
photo IDs. Scott Walker in Wisconsin has signed this “reform” into law. So has Rick Perry in Texas.
Similar new rules are going forward in roughly thirty other states. Restricting out-of-state IDs is a
natural next step, already under way: That way, thousands of college students won’t be able to vote.
The Advancement Project, a civil-rights advocacy group, calls the move “the largest legislative effort
to scale back voting rights in a century,”
Let’s say you just
graduated from high
school.
James Victoire
College, right? You have
to go to college. That’s
not just what your
career counselor told
you. That’s in the
numbers. If you go to
college, you’re
significantly less likely
to lose your job. The
pay of college
graduates has risen
over the past twenty-
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five years and everybody else’s pay has declined. Which curve do you want to be on?
And yet, at the exact moment when an education has never been more necessary, education is
increasingly out of reach. From 1980 on, the price of attending a four-year college has risen by 128
percent. While the price has spiked, the quality has tanked. Students at college in 2003 did two-thirds
the homework that students in 1961 did. In a survey published in 2011, 45 percent of students
showed no improvement in “critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing” after two years of
college. You did not read that incorrectly: That’s no improvement. None. And how could the results be
any different? Three decades ago, 43 percent of professors were adjuncts. Now, with colleges bloated
by older, tenured professors who take up huge slices of academic budgets while teaching crumbs of
courses, the vast majority of classes are taught by adjuncts. On college campuses, the supposed
hotbeds of liberalism, the young are instructed primarily in the mechanics of crony capitalism.
Once you’re out of
college, you’ll have to
intern. Again, no choice.
The practice of not
paying young people for
their labor has become
so ingrained in the
everyday practice of
American business that
we’ve forgotten how
bizarre and recent the
development is. In the
early 1980s, 3 percent
of college grads had had
an internship. By 2006,
84 percent had done at
least one. Multiple
internships are
common. According to a
survey by the National
Association of Colleges
and Employers, more
than 75 percent of
employers prefer
LIFETIME TAXES PAID (BENEFITS RECEIVED
AMOUNTARETIRINGCOUPLEWITH LOW TOAVERAGE WAGES
$510,000
WILL PAYIN TAXES
AMOUNT OF ENTITLEMENT BENEFITS THEY WILL
GAIN OVER THEIR LIFETIMES
AMOUNT A COUPEE WITH AVERAGE TO HIGH WAGES
WILL PAY IN TAXES
B GAIN OVER THEIR LIFETIMES
students who have interned or had a similar working experience.
Employers have feasted on despair — and these aren’t internships for struggling small presses or
rarefied design companies. Subsidiaries of General Electric, a company worth $200 billion, employ
them regularly as an “important recruiting tool.” Disney uses eight thousand of them in dismal
working conditions. Jennifer Lopez Enterprises uses them. So does The Daily Show. So does the pope.
And because internship programs are sheltered from the violation of labor laws by the complicity of
universities that give students “credit” for them — as long as the students pay thousands of dollars
for those credits — American companies can operate these programs for the most part hidden from
scrutiny. The best study of intern life in America found that companies save annually around $2 billion
from pseudo-employment.
But maybe you’re an overachiever — instead of interning, you want to get a master’s or a
professional degree. With entry to the professions comes another opportunity to be taken advantage
of, and it’s not just the inherently ridiculous price of a creative-writing M.F.A. or journalism school,
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where on some level, everybody understands the students are being played for suckers. The cost of
medical school has spiked over the past three decades. In 1981, average medical-school debt was
less than $20,000. Today it is $158,000. Law-school tuition rose 317 percent between 1989 and 2009
while American laws schools wildly increased the number of lawyers they graduate. Naturally, a glut
of lawyers decreases their value. So kids pay more for a worse education that leads to lesser
prospects in order for the schools to prosper temporarily. Even for doctors and lawyers, an accrual of
property or any rise in net worth happens much later in life than it did twenty years ago. The
standard debt-repayment plan for physicians is ten years, but twenty-five is a commonly accepted
option. For the new professional class today, life begins at forty. That’s not just an expression.
And if you didn’t take
your high school
advisor’s advice to go to
college? Well, you
BELIEVED THEIR CHILDREN SHOULD BE
should have listened.
What goes for the white
-collar young person
applies even more
ferociously to the bluecollar world, or what’s
left of it. The nature of
the generational setback
for unionized labor can
be summed up in a
single
devastating
PERCENT OF PARENTS
phrase: New workers
will earn a “globally
competitive wage.”
Manufacturing jobs,
having been exported to
the Third World, are
now returning to
America at Third World rates. Newer workers at unions across the country earn ten to fifteen dollars
an hour less than established workers, and the unspoken but widely reported understanding with the
AFL-CIO is that the wage of these workers will not increase. In other words, Boomer workers make
almost double what their young counterparts do, and will continue to do so regardless of how long a
young worker stays in the same job. As one older worker in one of these bifurcated factories told The
New York Times, by the time the young reach their maximum earning, their elders “won’t be here any
longer to remind them of what they are missing.”
80 PERCENT OF PARENTS IN 1993
FINANCIALLY
inn
67 SHARE THAT VIEW TODAY
Amy
Government, academia, the professions, corporations, unions, and both political parties — all
continue to mine the vulnerability of youth in service of the needs of their aging power base.
Separately, each of these cases would amount to a minor scandal, but taken together they point to a
broader and more significant alteration to the way of the world. From every corner of the institutional
spectrum, the whole of American society has been rearranged so that the limits of vision coincide
exactly with the death of the Boomers.
Nobody wants this. The Boomers did not set out to screw over their kids. The wind just seemed to
blow them that way. But no matter what their motivations, a painful truth grows truer with every
passing year: Through its refusal to act, the generation in power is willing to do what other
generations before them would not — sell their children’s birthright for a mess of their own pottage.
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WHA rs HAPPENING IN AMERICA IS HAPPENING
EVERYWHERE ELSE:
A generation now means an economic cohort — a moment in the cycle of rising and (mostly) falling
economic data. The UK has 21.8 percent youth unemployment, France 22.8 percent, Hungary 26.1
percent, Italy 28.2 percent, Spain 47.8 percent. Around the world, young people are beginning to be
defined by their unemployment: the mileuristas of Spain, “those who earn less than a thousand
euros”; the NEETs of England, “not in employment, education, or training”; the hittistes of Tunisia,
“those who lean against the wall.” Revolutions or unmanageable riots have inevitably followed the
rise of masses of bored, underemployed young people.
Many claim that the
young deserve their
OTKE PERCENTAGE
RISE
OFLAW-SCHOOLTUITION
BETWEEN 1 9 8 9 AND 2 00 9
S100
BILLION
THE AMOUNT IN THE
AVERAGE PROPOSED
DEBT
OFACOLLEGEGRADUATE
These criticisms are
convenient, but also
demonstrably incorrect.
Defining generations by
cultural attributes or
values, almost always
done with unrepentant
shallowness, is the
stupidest thing that
commentators do.
However, a recent study
from the National
Center for Education
Statistics comparing
high school seniors in
2004 (who are in their
mid-twenties today)
with high school seniors
in 1972 (now in their
late fifties) is useful and
practical.
2012
BUDGET
THAT
$25,250
fate: They’re entitled,
they have too many
choices. They don’t
know what they want.
They’re getting
themselves into debt.
They don’t know how
good they have it.
OBAMA
CUTTING
FROM STUDENT-LOAN
PROGRAMS
OVERTEN YEARS
The breakdown is rather stark: Two thirds of the Boomers thought “being able to give their children
better opportunities” was important; 8 percent wanted to live close to their parents; 18 percent
believed that making money mattered; 27 percent cared about social problems. The students in
2004: 83 percent claimed that the opportunities of their children were very important; 25 percent
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wanted to live close to their parents; 35 percent were serious about making money; and 20 percent
cared about social problems.
Compared with their parents, high school kids who graduated from college into the teeth of the
recession are a Republican fantasy. They want a good job in order to raise a family, and it’s exactly
that arrangement that is going to be denied them. The deal they were promised, that if you work
hard and make smart choices you will have a good life, is not working out. A Great Disappointment
will no doubt follow.
Everyone currently emerging into the workplace will be economically scarred for life by the misfortune
of their timing. The initial wage loss for a worker emerging in a bad economy is 6 to 7 percent for
every 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, which means a twenty-one-year-old
starting a job today makes about 24 percent less than he or she would have five years ago. After
fifteen years, even during the good times, the wage loss still hovers at around 2.5 percent.
A more profound shift is under way, though. Currently the average American parent spends 10
percent of his or her annual income on their adult children, regardless of income. Meanwhile, one in
four young Americans recently moved back home with their parents after living apart. Calling them
the Boomerang generation implies that it’s the irresponsible, feckless children who don’t have it
together enough to leave the nest. But many children who live at home have jobs. So we have
children living with their parents after they have income, just like they did in the early parts of the
twentieth century and before. The idea of youth as a time of freedom and self-discovery will last
exactly one generation, it seems.
People who want to join
society will do so
through an increasingly
A•
• H / I MSW U- S. GOVERNMENT
Vh •6 IK ■ ■ ■ . • s P D o N r M
lengthy period of
humiliation and
struggle, and only
1
PUBLIC DEBT PER
through the help of their
parents. Even before the
recession, that was
more or less true. It’s
the dirty little secret of
every middle-class
person in their mid­
thirties: Everybody’s
parents helped them out. Who do you think is paying for all those summer internships? How many
new parents do you think actually have enough money for a Bugaboo stroller, let alone a down
payment on a first home? And if you don’t have a mom or dad who can help with ballet lessons for
the kids or family vacations, God help you. America is becoming what it was founded to reject, what
it has resisted throughout its history, a patronage society.
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The situation is obviously unsustainable: At the exact moment when the United States and all other
Western countries are trying to deal with aging populations, they are failing to capture the energy
and potential of the people who will have to work to support those aging populations. We have
arrived at a moment, just before the 2012 election, in which the hedges, the corner-cuts, the isolated
decisions about young people from a host of institutions have accrued to the point of a continuous
catastrophe. The question rises from the wreckage: How long can you eat the young?
Get ready for the summer. It’s going to be hot.
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THEPERCENTAGEOFMILLENNIALSWHOSAID
OBAMA
MADE THEM FEEL
HOPEFUL
69%
NOVEMBER 2008
54%
MARCH 2010
43%
OCTOBER20U
4 J THE PERCENTAGEOF YOUNG ADULTS
0/ BETWEEN 18 AND 24
/0
THE
LOWEST
IT HAS BEEN SINCE THE
/ WHO ARE CURRENTLY EMPLOYED-
GOVERNMENT BEGAN KEEPING SCORE
Youth should be the
only issue of the 2012
election, because all the
subsidiary issues —
inequality, the rising
class system in America,
the specter of decline,
mass unemployment,
the growing debt — are
all fundamentally about
the war against young
Americans. But the
choice young Americans
face is between a party
that claims to represent
their interests but fails
to and a party that
explicitly opposes their
interests and actively
works to disenfranchise
them.
The protesters, the
occupiers, the kids who
screamed themselves
hoarse in the parks of
New York and Oakland
last year have spent the
winter nestled
underground nurturing
their strategies. Has
there ever been a
movement so full of
people who don’t want to be there, who would rather be working?
Around the world, the response to chronic youth unemployment has been consistently traditional. The
Arab world takes to the streets the way it did in the 1950s. Italy returns to its antique paterfamilias.
England goes into its standard mode of underclass rioting. And what’s happening in the United States
would be instantly recognizable to any progressive of the 1930s.
By bus and train and car pool, they will follow the gerontocracy to Tampa and Charlotte, the cities
with the utter misfortune of hosting the presidential nominating conventions. Then we’ll see if the
people inside the convention centers can find the youth anything better to do.
We’ll see then how the flowers of rage, planted and nurtured so carelessly for three decades, have
sprung up and who will harvest them.
Sources: Pew Research Center; Urban Institute; Project on Student Debt; Eurostat; Bureau of the
Public Debt; Brookings Institution; Department of Education; National Center for Education Statistics.
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