At the Times Literary Supplement Samuel Earle, quoting Malcolm Harris, summarizes the predicament of Millennials:
“The profiteers call this process ‘disruption’â€, he says, referring to the economic shifts that began in the 70s, “while commentators on the left generally call it ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘late capitalism.’ Millennials know it better as ‘the world’ . . . or ‘Everything.’ And Everything sucksâ€. More than 90 per cent of American children born in 1940 out-earned their parents – fewer than half of millennials are expected to out-earn theirs. In the UK millennials are reported to be the first generation in 130 years to be worse off than their parents, enduring a bigger reversal in fortune than in any other developed country other than Greece. Across the West, however, there is a growing sense among young people that, against everything they were told, they will likely not enjoy the same financial freedoms as their parents.
Millennials grew up in a very different world than I did. My peers and I were working from the time we were in our mid-teens, either in part-time jobs or summer jobs. The jobs available to us were the entry level jobs that adults, many of them immigrants, are attempting to raise families on now. By the time we had taken our first full-time permanent job we had worked for years. Many Millennials these days find themselves working at their first gainful employment after 17 or 19 or 21 years of education. They haven’t cultivated the habits of mind for employment, different from the world of school. Their expectations are out of line with the world they’re entering.
The only Millennials of whom I have much meaningful knowledge are my nephews and nieces. They are without exception intelligent, attractive, diligent, and conscientious young people, hardworking to a fault. The situation in which they find themselves more closely resembles the United States of the 1930s than it does the U. S. of the 1950s or 1960s. Unless you’re in one of the “caring professions”, jobs are hard to come by. It’s not unheard of for them to find themselves out of a job.
Like their parents, they don’t aspire to wealth or power. They just want nice, modest lives. A home. Family. Children.
In their world they’re in competition for jobs with everyone anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. Today’s employers no longer want to build great enterprises which meant lots of employees but high stock values which may well mean as few employees as possible.
It’s a very lonely isolated and isolating world in which humor is receding. I don’t envy them.
And now I’m set to retire from full time work and will soon join the competition for those low wage, part time jobs.
That oughta help.
Still schocks me how often they change jobs. I don’t think my daughter has stayed any one place more than 4 years, at most. Always moves up to something else. I think they know that companies are not investing in them and companies have no loyalty, so they don’t have any either.
Steve
Doesn’t help when the recruiting pitch includes “…stepping stone to …” as a surprizing number of civil service jobs.
While, doubtful I’ll live to see it, the upcoming battles over old age pensions vs free tuition vs solar subsidies vs estate confiscation vs advancing world peace via 250lb smart bombs will prove interesting.
“Today’s employers no longer want to build great enterprises which meant lots of employees but high stock values which may well mean as few employees as possible.â€
I was skimming along finding myself nodding my head in almost complete agreement and then I saw the statement cut and pasted. Of course they want to grow. And the fastest way to higher stock valuations is growth or perceived prospects for growth. Just look at NASDAQ stocks or PE companies. Doing the cost trick is a one timer. As is buybacks, and those come with their own set of issues.
As for the cynical employers don’t invest in employees etc. That’s garbage. They invest plenty. Training and capital. It’s a tug of war. Employees are just as likely to take the experience gained in a position (and the company investment in them) and hop to the next job and never think a thing about their current employer. It’s a two way street.
Ray Kroc built the longer largest hamburger-selling business in the world not to build a big business but because he like selling hamburgers. I heard those words from his own mouth and I have no reason to doubt them. Why are so many big businesses abandoning their core businesses these days? I think it’s because their managers don’t know or care about their core businesses.
Why did John Scully nearly drive Apple into the ground? He didn’t understand or care about their core business. He just saw it as commodity sales which is what he knew. Why don’t the big American automakers actually make autos any more? They assemble them from parts made overseas because they don’t care about making automobiles.
Dave, I realize you – any of us – can come up with examples to support a thesis. But we need to keep to the general thrust of themes and actions.
We own an aluminum can maker, and not because we love cans, but because it’s lucrative. But we are not trying to figure out how to add a pancake house on the side, even pancakes cooked in aluminum skillets. We are no different than any other owner, seeking growth through new product, new channel or geography. And so does the vast majority of the world. If you love making cans, or plastic bottles, or hydraulic equipment etc that’s great. But I bet business guys really enjoy the strategic, organizational and operational challenges more. I do. And I bet Ray Kroc liked the notion of owning the land under those hamburger factories more than he liked making hamburgers.
When you truly run out of gas for growth you need to get out. We sell. Large corporations sell off divisions. Or return capital through buybacks.
Then go do something else with your skill set. Perhaps the buyer of your old business can do better.
But it’s very much what big American companies are doing. Google, Amazon, Facebook. Microsoft, Motorola, and Sears are the counter-examples. “Growing outside the core” is what the B-schools are teaching these days.
When they’re not straying from their core businesses, they’re sitting on cash. They’re out of gas. No more ideas.
In my admittedly limited experience as mostly a consumer, I think businesses run the gamut. It seems to me there is a lot of pressure to keep wages low in many sectors which runs counter to the notion of investing in employees.
As far as millennials go, I have a lot of experience with them. They are different in some ways but I think most of the complaints about them from my generation and the boomers are mostly unjustified “get off my lawnism.”
However, I do think they are getting screwed. A lot of them trusted us when we told them what path would lead to success and happiness and we gave them bad advice and still won’t, collectively, admit our mistake. Thanks to the wonderful globalization we’ve created and our terrible policy choices, millennials not only get to compete with their peers, they get to compete with the rest of the world. Meanwhile, we Gen-Xers and Boomers lecture them about their supposed laziness while we continue to undermine their employment prospects through a combination of bad advice and bad policy.
I, for one, hope they are forgiving because for every complaint about lazy millennials there are 10 Gen-Xers or Boomers who were too busy stuffing their mouths with the fruits of consumerism to bother to save for retirement, much less the kind of nursing home care that’s probably inevitable for most thanks to medical advances. The millennials will have the numbers, the political power and the justification to tell us to F-off when we demand that they fund the golden years that we didn’t bother funding. And do we care about their ability to fund their own retirements? Of course not, we’ll be dead by then.
If millennials do the smart thing and focus on their own future, I’m sure our generations will take this as more evidence that millennials are lazy and lack responsibility.
Most of those whom I encounter at work these days are Millennials. Despite my being old enough to be the grandfather of most of them, I think I get along with them pretty well, probably because I don’t look down on anyone and I’m aware of their sensibilities. If I’m communicating correctly on my blog I think you should see that. It also may help that I’m more enthusiastic and more energizing than most of those around me of any age. That may be something that doesn’t come across here as much as it does in person.
I don’t think that Millennials are lazy and don’t think I’ve ever said that here. I may have said that I don’t think that Millennials realize how hard some of their elders worked. I’ve also said that I think that Millennials are giving the Baby Boomers a bad rap because most of what they’re complaining about was foisted on all of us by the Silent Generation, members of which, coincidentally, form the core leadership of both political parties.
What does concern me about the Millennials I encounter is how helpless they are. They seem to need guidance in a way I don’t recall my own cohort or the one that followed doing.
“I don’t think that Millennials are lazy and don’t think I’ve ever said that here. ”
I didn’t intend to suggest that at all. For all my criticisms of the Boomers, you are a credit to your generation. My comment/rant was a more general observation about the general attitudes of our respective generations.
I do agree with you about millennials needing more guidance. I attribute this, again, to our own collective failings in parenting and education. And while I share many of your criticisms of the silent generation in terms of the policies they helped build and support, it is our generations who are most responsible for the current state of things. After all, we greatly outnumber the Silents and always have.
I don’t really resemble the members of my cohort very closely. My mom used to describe my dad as a combination of the 19th century and the 21st century. I’m sort of the same.
During the Vietnam War, for example, I had little more than disdain for the protesters—I thought that “Hell, no, we won’t go” was about as far as their moral high ground went. I thought the war was ill-considered and didn’t support it but that too much of the opposition to it was racist in nature.
My only real criticism of the Baby Boomers is that I don’t think they had enough kids and that was pure selfishness. You can’t be the “Me Generation” and be a decent parent at the same time.