Not everybody does, but many do. I have read hundreds of articles and comments here which explicitly state that wealth can only be meaningfully measured in money, and that anything else is, ironically, abstract. It is a consensus I am confronted with on a daily basis, regardless of whether you or I agree with its validity.
They measure participation in some specific economies, while carefully omitting others.
Where did I do that? I was pointing out the complete subjectivity of notions of success, coupled with people’s chronic failure to recognize this subjectivity by persisting in applying their pet metrics to all people, rather than only those who subscribe to their models.
I’m not a big fan of hearing about how people feel about uncertainties– they’re rarely accurate… People are almost always worried about the wrong things. But ‘millennials’ do have real cause to worry (and I guess I’m one of them, just barely).
For me, the most frightening concern is retirement. With no private sector pensions available and interest rates near zero, personal-contribution schemes for retirement are a fucking joke. Add to that the notion that my job will probably be made entirely irrelevant many times over before I retire, requiring me to figure out how to make a living every 10 years or so.
I feel like I have a decent shot at making it work, but none of this bodes well for those less fortunate. Boomers are going to sell their million-dollar nest eggs to pay for their care in declining years, but what will happen for of us who wont have a house to leverage?
My experience has been that fast food places are easier for kids under 16 to find work at. When i worked retail they avoided hiring anyone below that age because there’s restrictions on the hours they can work (at least in Texas there is).
near zero interest rates. While not great for your savings, they are great if you have a mortgage.
When I was buying about 15 years ago, and wondered whether I should go with fixed or variable rates, my father said, whenever he had a loan or mortgage it was always over 14%. I recall their mortgage in 1980 was 19%.
granted at the time employment was still a lot easier.
According to Vaclav Smil (Manufacturing in the US)
Manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979 at 19 million, then gradually declined to about 16 million by the year 2000 and then through the Bush years it went to 12 million.
on the plus side, manufacturing will come back to the US when robotics get cheaper than Chinese labour.
(check out the sewing robot on Planet money). Except those will be engineering and technical jobs for a handful.
I did. My job was about a block from home, so I could get to and from work very easily. If I lived out in the country like five miles from the nearest town, I never would have been able to do that.
I bought an old cruiser at a police auction when I was 16. I worked crap jobs to put myself through college, but this was in the 90s and I had scholarships. The money was more so that I had something to live off of, rather than for tuition itself.
I didn’t have things super easy, but they could have been a lot worse.
That’s because sometime around 2000, High School became a full-time job. Extracurriculars, heavy courseload, volunteering, etc. It’s like the only kids who work these days are from less affluent families who can’t afford to pay for everything, or plan on going to community college if that.
The one thing I really learned from working shit jobs was how to take an insult. Someone’s having a shitty day at work and needs to pick up dry cleaning on their way back? They yell at the kid working the counter. Got stuck in traffic? They yell at the cashier at the grocery store. They take their frustration out on the kids doing the crap jobs, because that’s about the only level of person they can safely take their frustration out on. So, some schlubby middle manager’s bad day was my Shut Up And Take It day. I took satisfaction in knowing that there are plenty of things worse than being a kid working in retail, including being the guy who needs to show off what a big man he is by yelling at a kid working in retail.
According to some charts, I’m the tag end of the Boomers; according to others, I’m the very beginning of Gen X. I got a bunch of breaks which don’t appear to be available to later generations, and I still feel nervous about a lot of financial issues. For someone who doesn’t have a stable job that pays enough to live on, I can’t imagine the black hole of suck.
I think your sample size is too small. Most millennials I know had jobs in their teens. I am in the generation, to the extent that it exists, and I desperately wanted a job growing up in high school, but could only work for the company my dad ran, and off the books because at the time, I lived in another country and my residency visa had a big red stamp that said I was denied employment. But all my friends back in the States had jobs in various parts of the service industry. I’m from the early to middle part of the generation. Most of the people I go to college with right now, (the last of the Millenials since I’m going back at 30) have jobs in college that aren’t their first. Those that don’t either come from families that have money or overseas.
ETA: By the way, having lived overseas, I can tell you that the idea of teenagers having to work as a moral imperative is not universal, and a lack of working teenagers is probably not a sign of civilizational collapse.
If it’s any consolation, I’m sure the millennials will have plenty of opportunity to screw things up for their kids to, so there’s always that.
Also: it’s one thing to say “the millennials are screwed,” because that’s a statement of economic situation. But to paint an entire generation – billions of people – as “they screwed things up” – well, that’s the kind of cognitive error that leads to things like racism and sexism. Just sayin’.
I think the punishment fits the crime in this case. Make decisions that destroy the economy? Be prepared to live with the consequences. In this case, literally. People would take more interest in what’s going on in the world if they realized that their kids would have to live with the aftermath.
True, but the point of the image is that the minimum wage level in real dollars has remained stagnant since Old Economy Steve’s salad days, while the price of a gallon of gas has ticked along steadily to the march of inflation, along with the price of rent, food, and a bunch of other things a worker spends his wages on.
Stagnant? At the height of the oil embargo it was 8.50 in today’s dollars. In '68, it was 10. It’s not stagnant because it’s declined along with jobs that pay more than minimum wage. This of course comes with the often ignored and never mentioned caveat that price indexing doesn’t always accurately reflect the value of currency through time due to a variety of factors and can only be treated as a rough estimation.
