HomeOver at The Atlantic, Don Peck has a phenomenal article on how the current recession will redefine twenty-first century American society. His points are far too numerous and detailed for me to rehash here, so I encourage you to read the whole thing. I did want to point out one particular section of it though. Regular readers of kids-these-days type news pieces will recognize it right away–it’s the obligatory “kids these days are idiots / delusional / just don’t get it” part:
“In her 2006 book, Generation Me, Twenge notes that self-esteem in children began rising sharply around 1980, and hasn’t stopped since. By 1999, according to one survey, 91 percent of teens described themselves as responsible, 74 percent as physically attractive, and 79 percent as very intelligent. (More than 40 percent of teens also expected that they would be earning $75,000 a year or more by age 30; the median salary made by a 30-year-old was $27,000 that year.) Twenge attributes the shift to broad changes in parenting styles and teaching methods, in response to the growing belief that children should always feel good about themselves, no matter what. As the years have passed, efforts to boost self-esteem–and to decouple it from performance–have become widespread.”
Naturally there’s no mention of what survey this was, who was conducting it, or who or how large the sampling group was. For 40 percent of those teens surveyed, a $75,000 annual income may very well have been the median income for 30-year-olds from their socio-economic background, even if for the country overall it was only $30,000. But if you word it this way 40 percent of us kids seem completely unhinged from reality. There’s also no follow-up evidence of how self-esteem has been “decoupled” from performance, or how widespread is “widespread,” or who these nefarious people making these efforts to bastardize self-esteem are. It’s all left hanging there.
Nevermind the fact that it’s antithetical for Peck to cite a study about what kids were like in 1999 in an article ostensibly about how the Great Recession is going to change our society. Even if Generation Y was starry-eyed about its prospects in 1999, why would Peck assume that we’d remain so delusional after all the fiscal fallout of 2008?
Having not read the book, I hope Twenge offers more context for these facts than Peck has excerpted for the purposes of his article, but I’m willing to bet readers of this select passage who don’t consider themselves members of its subject matter didn’t think anything was amiss with any of these facts. It jives with the perception most older people have of Generation Y. It feels true, so we don’t question it. And yes, I do include myself when I say “we” because I didn’t question it either on the first read-through.
I come across articles like this one from time to time, and every time I do I always wonder who it is that they’re getting for these studies. Generally speaking, the people my own age that I’ve talked to about future plans (and these days, it’s a favorite topic of discussion) are marked by a sense of grim of pessimism, of borderline hopelessness that comes with not knowing what comes next. Feelings which I believe, by the way, are perfectly warranted given the nation’s current economic state and are not because kids these days “don’t excel at leadership or independent problem solving,” as former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Aslop claims. You think 10 percent unemployment is bad? Once you narrow it down to the under-30 crowd it more than doubles.
The kids-these-days type knocks aside, Peck has put together a superb article on the more nuanced effects an economic recession could have on the country for a generation to come. He notes that Generation Y is going to bare the brunt of its effects–including an income gap that young people coming of age in the midst of recession usually suffer from, which can persist even a decade or more later on.
Bottom line: whatever year economists predict we’ll finally come out of this hole we’ve dug ourselves into, its aftermath is going to be with us for many years to come–if not for the rest of our lives.