Boomer, wake up. Generations, Part One of Three

I saw this headline on a financial website:

Why The 'Me, Me, Me' Generation Needs Help From You, You, You

In fairness, this categorization was not made by the author of the article, who reluctantly admitted that he's technically part of the Millennials, the generation this article is about.  Indeed, he stated:

Of course, for all of the criticisms and accusations lobbed at millennials, by any standards, they've been dealt a pretty rough hand as they attempt to begin their adult lives. The earliest millennials have already been forced to endure two stock market crashes and multiple armed conflicts (sparked by one of our nation's most traumatic experiences in a century), and they've inherited a world with some of the least-trusted leaders in history, a trend that doesn't seem likely to change any time soon.

Time magazine came up with the " 'Me, Me, Me' Generation" categorization.

It did that in 2013 in an article in which it noted:

I am about to do what old people have done throughout history: call those younger than me lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow. But I have studies! I have statistics! I have quotes from respected academics! Unlike my parents, my grandparents and my great-grandparents, I have proof.

Here’s the cold, hard data: The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that’s now 65 or older, according to the National Institutes of Health; 58% more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982. Millennials got so many participation trophies growing up that a recent study showed that 40% believe they should be promoted every two years, regardless of performance. They are fame-obsessed: three times as many middle school girls want to grow up to be a personal assistant to a famous person as want to be a Senator, according to a 2007 survey; four times as many would pick the assistant job over CEO of a major corporation. They’re so convinced of their own greatness that the National Study of Youth and Religion found the guiding morality of 60% of millennials in any situation is that they’ll just be able to feel what’s right. Their development is stunted: more people ages 18 to 29 live with their parents than with a spouse, according to the 2012 Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults. And they are lazy. In 1992, the nonprofit Families and Work Institute reported that 80% of people under 23 wanted to one day have a job with greater responsibility; 10 years later, only 60% did.

Well, baloney.

How on earth has the Boomer generation, which authored this opinion, remained so completely delusional about their privileged generational status, let alone their own history?

To hear them tell it, you would think that every member of the Boomer generation walked uphill both ways to school in a blizzard everyday. And now they lament the rootlessness and aimlessness of the following generations, which have failed to follow their examples of hard work and enterprise.

Eh?

Bull.

Now, let me now state that I'm not into categorizing an entire generation; well too much anyhow.  The same Boomer generation that's identified with anti war protests, etc., actually fought in the Vietnam War and it had a higher volunteer rate than the World War Two generation.  So a person can only take this sort of thing so far.

Boomers protesting the Vietnam War.

 Boomers fighting the Vietnam War.

Moreover, the "Boomers" aren't really one single generation, in spite of what demographers might claim.  The generation is supposed to be the one that was born between 1946 and 1964.  Well, baloney.  That may be true in a statistical sense, but when people look at the boomers they're really looking at the generation that came of age in the 1960s and early 1970s.  Indeed, demographers have variously defined people who were born from 1960 to 1965 in various ways, including as members of the following generation, Generation X, or members of their own demographic, the Gap Generation.   What that tells us, and accurately, is that people born between 1960 and 1965 don't fit in well to the Boomers and identify more strongly with later generations, and that''s how we will sue that information here.  Indeed, a kid born in 1960 would graduate high school in 1978, and have very little in common with one who graduated in 1968.  Even at that, graduates from 1980 would have even less in common, and more in common with those graduating in 1988, and maybe even more in common with 88 grads than 78 grads.

Anyhow, having said this, I hear and read shots taken at Millennials all the time, and I think they're very far off the mark, quite frankly.

I just don't see it.

Indeed, what I do see, is quite the reverse.  The Millennials, and the "Gap Generation" and Generation X just ahead of them are sort of uniquely burdened by the Boomers in ways the Boomer just can't seem to grasp.

The Boomers are the most fortunate generation in American history, and they've enjoyed a world, and its resources, like none before it and like none after it. But they don't grasp that all.

Prior to the Boomers, access to college was based on money.  A  high percentage of Americans didn't even graduate from high school prior to their generation, but their parents made sure they did, and having been exposed to university in mass as a result of the GI Bill after World War Two, they made sure that their kids had access to it as well. The entire concept of public assistance going to university came out of the GI Bill and it was the World War Two generation that gave rise to the Boomers that massively expanded the concept. 

The huge difference between then and now is that the Boomers entered life, delayed compared to their parents, in an era of unparalleled opportunity, but they don't realize it. Moreover, they are acclimated to it.  

The 1945 through 1970 period was one in which merely having a college degree was nearly a guaranty of white collar success.  And even though college degrees became exponentially more common in the period, even having simply a high school degree (the dropout rate remained higher than it is today) meant a person could usually find a decent paying job of another type.  Entire classes of jobs that require college now did not require a college degree then.  Europe's economy remained destroyed form World War Two well into this period, and the United States made everything.  All of this meant that it was much easier to be successful than it is now, and much more difficult to fail.  A person with a trade skill or a college education was going to do well, for the most part.

And do well even with the delayed entry into adult life, which the Boomers (as we will see in a later installment of this series) largely experienced.  Prior to their generation, the entire concept of a delayed adulthood, stretching form the late teens up into the mid twenties, didn't exist.  If you look at old photographs and kids graduating from high school look more adult, that's because, as we will really see, they truly were.  Perhaps they were in the Boomer generation as well, as they sense, but not in the same way.

That's because they were really the first American generation to experience a period of delayed adulthood on a generational basis.  It had always been the case that the wealthy and privileged who were able to go to university experienced that, and tales of youthful college life date back to the Middle Ages.  But most people didn't experience that.  Most Americans, as we have explored in prior threads, by 18 were looking for work. They may have lived at home, and probably did (we'll also be looking at that), but they weren't kids.

Indeed, if a person wants a contemporary movie portrayal of what this period was like, sort of, for younger Americans, a good cinematic portrayal of it is provided in the film Marty.  Another good one, sort of, is provided in the film The Apartment.  "Oh no, those films are about adults. . . ".  Yep, but they're about younger adults than you might imagine.  The stay at home blue collar protagonist in Marty does pretty accurately reflect a common generational experience for the time.  And the fact that slightly wayward Miss Kubelik has immediate resort to her sister and brother in law in The Apartment isn't far off either.

Boomers came of age, for various reasons, at a time in which there was much more slack for everything.  The government expanded benefits to the boomers that they still enjoy today and that they're completely acclimated to without understanding that prior generations lacked them.  The wide latitude given to the generation in social terms meant that the generational reaction to the Vietnam War, which didn't occur with the earlier Korean War, fought by men who were only a bit too young for World War Two but who were kids during the Great Depression, was tolerated and even absorbed by the nation.  The same generation that reacted negatively to the war in Vietnam would send later generations to fight in the Middle East without even noting the sense of irony that created.

And coming into power in the wake of the  Vietnam War, it doesn't seem to recall any sense of irony in a generation that was part of a "youth movement" holding on to power with nearly cold dead  hands even though it is no longer the largest generational cohort.  Indeed, that last fact is amongst the most ironic.  The Boomers started entering government in the late 1970s. And there they remain.  This year we see two out of the three candidates fitting into that generation (Sanders is actually from the prior generation, which probably explains why his views seem different, in part).  No post Boomer candidate survived the primaries.  The Boomers will rule on.

But in ruling on, they've forgotten that when they were younger they were defined by rejection of everything they now grump about, even as they fail to realize that they've failed to come fully back around to the values of earlier generations that they've somewhat adopted but not in the softened form that existed for their parents.  They massively, as a generation, rejected the values of their parents.  They wouldn't serve. They rejected the corporate work life.  They laughed at the value of money.  They rejected much of the tradition of male/female relationships.  They felt no standards should be accepted that existed simply because they did.  Drugs, personal license, etc., were all vices they brought into their generation in spades.

And now they complain that the Millennials don't save and don't work.

In 1973 they made a hit out of Taking Care of Business.

You get up every morning from your alarm clock's warning
Take the 8:15 into the city
There's a whistle up above and people pushin', people shovin'
And the girls, who try to look pretty

And if your train's on time, you can get to work by nine
And start your slaving job to get your pay
If you ever get annoyed, look at me, I'm self-employed
I love to work at nothing all day

And I'll be takin' care of business every day
Takin' care of business every way
I've been takin' care of business, it's all mine
Takin' care of business and working overtime, work out

If it were easy as fishin', you could be a musician
If you could make sounds loud or mellow
Get a second-hand guitar, chances are you'll go far
If you get in with the right bunch of fellows.

People see you having fun, just a-lying in the sun
Tell them that you like it this way
It's the work that we avoid and we're all self-employed
We love to work at nothing all day.

Hmmm. . . .

Well, by 1987 they were watching Wall Street, with its punchline.  "Greed is good".  Indeed, both of the current front runners in the current Presidential election, who are Boomers, have lauded Wall Street in the past, and it's only because of pre-Boomer Sanders, who appeals to Millennials, that this is suddenly in question.

Somehow that generation of the 1960s that went to college but which was for peace, love and dope (keeping in mind that this wasn't a universal view, and others were "pround to be an Okie from Muskogee"), and never trusting "anyone over 30" became corporate in the extreme, and in a way their parents never were, in the 1970s.  1956 gave us The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit about the generation that came home from World War Two, but the focus on money that's present in that representational film falls far below that which came to define the Boomer generation in later years.

As we'll deal with shortly, a lot of this criticism of the Millennials, and the Gaps, by the Boomers, is really unwarranted.  Indeed . . . in the great scheme of things, they probably stand closer to the Boomers parents, and maybe even their grandparents, than the Boomers do.  If Boomers feel that the Millennials don't share their values, well they're partially right.  They might share an older set however, with prior generations. And they have to live in the world that the Boomers have dominated since the 1960s, and that's not easy for generations that are faced with having less of absolutely everything.

Of course, that's true of some Boomers, indeed quite a few of them, as well.  All along there were those who worried about the direction everything was going and have had to live with it.  That's cold comfort indeed.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Postscript

It's been pointed out to me that I'm not on the only one to make some of the observations here.  Stephen Cobert has done the same:

Lex Anteinternet: Funding Failure, part three

Something to ponder while you are watching those Thanksgiving university football games, which I wholly hope to avoid if at all possible.

I ran this item in 2011, last time we were having a major election; Lex Anteinternet: Funding Failure:

One of the topics that's been kicking around the GOP Presidential race is that of student loans.  At least one candidate, Ron Paul, says he wants to phase them out altogether.

I wouldn't be in favor of that, but I really do think that the entire topic needs to be revisited, as it's helping to fund failure, and has a weird impact on our economy.  This is the reason why.

Generally, student loans are a government backed system in which private young individuals receive funding for university or college irrespective of the needs of the economy, or the wisdom of their choice.  I'm not suggesting, of course, that we should override the choices of individuals who make study choices that are not likely to advance our collective economic well-being, but I do feel that it's a bad economic choice to fund them.

Students of the history of student loans often point out that they've been a boost to the American economy, which is somewhat true, but which really confuses the loans with the GI Bill, which was an outright grant.  At any rate, what they fail to note is that the early post World War Two American economy was such that that the student population

(largely male) was unlikely to be study something that wasn't directly usable in the work sphere, and that having a college degree in the 1945 to 1975 time frame was rare enough that nearly any college degree could translate into business utility.  Neither of those factors is true today.  Indeed, at this point in time college degrees have become so

common that a lot of them have no economic value to their holders at all.

This is not to say that pursing a college degree is worthless. That would hardly be true.  But if the government is to back the study of something, it ought to be something useful to the nation as a whole.  Not something that's likely to have no use to the nation, and which moreover is likely to have no real value to the holder in later economic terms.

As an example of this, which I've already noted here, one of the protesters at the Wall Street occupation was reported to have a $90,000 student loan for the study of art.  Why would the nation help fund this.  If she wants to study art, the more power to her, I just don't want to help.  In economic terms, this isn't going to help the nation at all, and frankly she'll be really lucky if she ever fines a job.  By funding her, we've made ourselves poorer and, chances are, her too.

What I'd propose to do is to restrict funding to areas where we really feel we need to boost the nation's educated populace.  If we're weak in the sciences or engineering, that's what I'd fund.  Other areas where we need new workers, who need an education to obtain it, would likewise be eligible for loans.  I wouldn't bother funding art students, or literature students. That doesn't mean their studies are unimportant culturally, or personally, but rather if they are important, it's in a manner that cannot be economically judged, and therefore people shouldn't be taxed to help fund it.  Law is the same way.  The nation has a vast oversupply of lawyers and I can't see any good reason to give a person a loan to study that.

I don't think that this would mean these other fields would dry up by any means.  But it probably would mean that a lot of people who don't qualify for private scholarships and who don't otherwise have the means of obtaining such a degree would do something else. Frankly, however, that would be a good thing, as by funding the non economic, we're fueling the hopes of a lot of people who aren't going to be able to find employment later.

And, no, I didn't have any student loans, thanks to the National Guard and my parents.

 And I followed that post up with this one;  Lex Anteinternet: Funding Failure II: 

 A very interesting NPR Talk of the Nation episode on Student Loans.

What is so interesting about this, I think, is that there's at least one caller who emails in with complaints about how the burden of loans caused her to take a career she didn't want, Wildlife Management, over one she did, Veterinary school, as she couldn't afford the loans.  She then goes on to blame the burden of servicing her loans for living far from her family, and for not having any children.

The other thing that is is interesting is that a few callers have no sympathy at all with those complaining about their loans.

I'm afraid I'm in that camp, the one without sympathy. Choosing a career you don't want, just because the loans are cheaper, is stupid.  Beyond that, avoiding real life, to service loans, is as well.

This probably says something, however, about the current nature of our societal view towards education. Why must we go this route?  We don't have to, we're choosing too.  And now, a large section of the population views paying for the loans they obtained for their education as unfair, when nobody asked them to get the loans in the first place.

Not that society cannot be blamed to some degree.  We've created a culture where we now view manual labor as demeaning, and teach our middle class children that.  The grandsons of machinist and tool and die makers feel they must go to college, and indeed they must as we sent the tool and die work to China, more or less intentionally.  So we're now all over-educated, and can't pay for it with the jobs we retained. And we encourage this to continue on by giving loans for educational pursuits we know will never pay off.

Since I posted these items, this has been more in the news than ever.  And a lot of that has to do with the combined impact of student protests as well as Democratic Senator Bernie Saunders suggesting that he cause their to be free college for all.

Before we go back to the main point of this, let's take up that free college for all topic. Truth be known more Americans are college educated than ever before, so it isn't as if we're failing to get people to college.  Granted, student debt is a big problem, but by and large we are getting a lot of students there.

We're also quite frankly generating a lot of junk degrees that are worthless.  This is a popular conservative point about higher education, and it's frankly true. While we are graduating more degreed people than ever, a college degree of 2015 doesn't mean the same thing as a college degree from 1965 meant, or 1945, or 1915.  A student graduating in 1915, while their were far fewer of them, was quite frankly far better educated than many are today, depending upon their major.

College level educators, unfortunately, have a vested interest in this, which explains more than a little about the current level of dissent and rank idiocy on college campuses today. The recent series of demonstrations at the University of Missouri should be pointing this out.  Take, for example, University of Missouri professor Melissa Click, who infamously asked for "some muscle" to eject those recording the demonstration.

Click is the Department of Communications, an ironic post for somebody seeking "muscle" to prevent the recordation of an event, but I'll note that communications are a legitimate field of study.  But consider her master dissertation, which is "It’s ‘a good thing’: The Commodification of Femininity, Affluence, and Whiteness in the Martha Stewart Phenomenon.".  This is a thesis that did not need to be written and perhaps one that an institution of higher learning should have rejected.  Click, as George F. Will points out in a recent article, also "has a graduate certificate in “advanced feminist studies.”". That's baloney packaged up between two thick slices of baloney, and is the type of certificate only useful in a fake, highly left wing, purely academic, world.

Indeed Will's article points out a whole host of similar absurd academic behaviors, and even the University of Wyoming has become a little guilty of some institutionalized nonsense.  The net impact is to reduce the seriousness of the situation the students are about to be ejected into combined with a probably temporary political radicalization of them.  In other words, they're separated from their cash, or probably their parents cash, or the public's cash, not really educated, save for a career in university level academia, and then booted out into the real world with diminished job prospects.

That is, in part, because there are a lot of worthless majors now crated by this system and the social and economic atmosphere that created it.  Somehow the number of degrees has vastly exploded, and not in a good way, if for some the application of those degrees is marginal.  People who would have had fairly rigorous Liberal Arts degrees 40 years and back now sometimes have specialized degrees with no practical application at all.

That's why the "free college for all" (which of course would not be free) is a bit of a farce in real terms.  A "free education" isn't free if you spend four years of your life on it, and the net results is that you are not educated in real or practical terms.

This is why comparing our educational system at the college level to that of other nations, by which we really mean European nations, is quite questionable.  While European degrees are presently in a state of evolution, European university degrees have generally been fairly hard to obtain.  I don't know the current situation, but when comparing the public funding for them, that can make quite a difference.

For instance, over 40% of Americans have a college degree, while only 30% of the Swiss do.  Are the Swiss international slackers?  Probably not.  Indeed, we have more people with college degrees than the United Kingdom, Denmark Belgium, Australia, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, South Korean and Finland do.  We are on par with New Zealand and Japan and really only Russia and Canada have a true statistically greater percentage of their populations that are college educated.   So it sure isn't the case that we aren't sending people to college.

Therefore, if measured in terms of the sheer number of people in the population who have degrees, we beat out every country except for Canada and Russia, which is pretty impressive on some level.

But that's only impressive it it really means something, which gets back to the main point.

What college students are really complaining about now is that a college education doesn't pay off the way it once did. If you had to invest $100,000 in something but were almost sure to get it back, you wouldn't worry much about the loans to obtain it.  Now, that's quite uncertain. And as it's quite uncertain, those doing it are hoping for somebody else to pick up the risk, that being the taxpayer.

That's not a good idea for a lot of reasons, the foremost being that if the public is going to pick up the risk, it ought to reap some sort of a reward. And that is where our system is really messed up.

In a country where about 30% of the population is obtaining a degree it stands to reason that its likely the degree is worth more, and its probably in an area with application.  But the American system has sort of evolved to where many college degrees are nothing much more than High School Degrees +.

When I was younger, it was emphasized quite correctly that if a person had any hope of economic success at all, they needed to have a high school degree. That's still true, but our economy has evolved to the point where you need a college degree for that now.  And that is, quite frankly, completely absurd.

There's no earthly reason whatsoever that many former areas of employment that only required a high school degree should not require a college degree, and the concept that they do is deeply flawed.  It's commonly stated that he world is more complicated, but it frankly isn't.  The global level of complication has changed very little, and computerization of things has served to simplify, not complicate, many things.  The ability to operate a computer is something that every kid coming out of high school is well versed with, so the sometimes heard excuse that people need to learn the technology is baloney, they know it.

And the fact that degrees have become available for everything means that they have become debased in value.  There are entire fields that are not really of the type that should require post high school education, if high school was done well.

What this means, in part, is that colleges and universities ought to dump a lot of the academic degrees they have that are of little value, and that would mean dumping the vested interests that maintain them.  It also means that university needs to toughen back up, academically.

Indeed one of the real shocks for people who obtained "hard" degrees from decades ago is the level of frivolity that is now so deeply associated with universities.  University as a four year party seems to be both commonly experienced and accepted. That's nonsense, particularly if its on the public dime.  This was not always the nature of university, in spite of the popular image to the contrary.

The biggest reform that could be done for the system, and to the advantage of the students, would be to change the funding system we presently have to one, as noted above, that funded a real demonstrable public need.  That doesn't force anyone to do anything, but it does mean that if the public is funding an education, even through a loan, it ought to be in an area where the public derives a benefit.  What fields, that is, does the US benefit from in terms of producing college graduates?

I fully acknowledge that this means I'm completely discounting the cultural benefit argument.  Some would argue, and probably validly, that the nation enjoys a richer cultural life if it produces artists, etc., in addition to engineers. Well, tough.

Or more accurately, to the extent the nation benefits from people in those categories, it benefits and should encourage them in the way that has been done with all former cultures, in the stuff we publicly procure. Btu we've done a poor job of that recently as well.  By that, I'd note, churches and public buildings fueled the arts, but on their terms.  Not through loans.  That's a better process as its market based, the way the real world ultimately works.  If a person desires to be an artist, be one.  But being one probably means suffering for your art at some point, which doesn't require the public to fund the suffering at he university level.

Student Loans, maybe we're looking at that the wrong way too.

Having just expounded on declining law school enrollment, and why maybe the legal community ought not to worry too much about it, and perhaps if it is going to worry it ought to reconsider its approach to the problem, if there is one, I'll separately note this topic.

Recently, there's been a lot of commentary about how students amassing debt to go to law school can't pay it off with the depressed wages they're now receiving as lawyers. 

The question this raises is this. Why give student loans to people who want to go to law school?

That may sound harsh, but in a flooded market, why fund failure?  Indeed, why do we give loans to go to art school, or just about any degree program we can think of?

Student loans, as a species, stem from the GI Bill, which allowed, very successfully, a lot of demographics to go to college for the first time in our nation's history.  This, it is often noted, resulted in a huge economic boon to the country, repaying the country in economic gain again and again.  The thought, correctly, was that student loads would do the same thing.

They did, but that also resulted in a vast expansion of fields of study, and over time, we graduated so many into the general population that it's really no longer true.  Or at least its not true for all fields.  Perhaps the time has arrived to give loans where our society needs them.

So, perhaps it's time to fund people to go into engineering or the sciences.  For certain targeted minorities, law still makes sense.  But it doesn't make sense to give loans out to everyone who, at age 18, decides they want to go to college in any field.  It can end up hurting them, and it doesn't seem to be benefiting society at large.

This may seem harsh, but perhaps its not as harsh as funding somebody all the way through a Masters in Art when there's no job to be had, and then asking them to pay it back on wages they won't be making.

Funding Failure

One of the topics that's been kicking around the GOP Presidential race is that of student loans.  At least one candidate, Ron Paul, says he wants to phase them out altogether.

I wouldn't be in favor of that, but I really do think that the entire topic needs to be revisited, as it's helping to fund failure, and has a weird impact on our economy.  This is the reason why.

Generally, student loans are a government backed system in which private young individuals receive funding for university or college irrespective of the needs of the economy, or the wisdom of their choice.  I'm not suggesting, of course, that we should override the choices of individuals who make study choices that are not likely to advance our collective economic well-being, but I do feel that it's a bad economic choice to fund them.

Students of the history of student loans often point out that they've been a boost to the American economy, which is somewhat true, but which really confuses the loans with the GI Bill, which was an outright grant.  At any rate, what they fail to note is that the early post World War Two American economy was such that that the student population (largely male) was unlikely to be study something that wasn't directly useable in the work sphere, and that having a college degree in the 1945 to 1975 time frame was rare enough that nearly any college degree could translate into business utility.  Neither of those factors is true today.  Indeed, at this point in time college degrees have become so common that a lot of them have no economic value to their holders at all.

This is not to say that pursing a college degree is worthless. That would hardly be true.  But if the government is to back the study of something, it ought to be something useful to the nation as a whole.  Not something that's likely to have no use to the nation, and which moreover is likely to have no real value to the holder in later economic terms.

As an example of this, which I've already noted here, one of the protestors at the Wall Street occupation was reported to have a $90,000 student loan for the study of art.  Why would the nation help fund this.  If she wants to study art, the more power to her, I just don't want to help.  In economic terms, this isn't going to help the nation at all, and frankly she'll be really lucky if she ever fines a job.  By funding her, we've made ourselves poorer and, chances are, her too.

What I'd propose to do is to restrict funding to areas where we really feel we need to boost the nation's educated populace.  If we're weak in the sciences or engineering, that's what I'd fund.  Other areas where we need new workers, who need an education to obtain it, would likewise be eligible for loans.  I wouldn't bother funding art students, or literature students. That doesn't mean their studies are unimportant culturally, or personally, but rather if they are important, it's in a manner that cannot be economically judged, and therefore people shouldn't be taxed to help fund it.  Law is the same way.  The nation has a vast oversupply of lawyers and I can't see any good reason to give a person a loan to study that.

I don't think that this would mean these other fields would dry up by any means.  But it probably would mean that a lot of people who don't qualify for private scholarships and who don't otherwise have the means of obtaining such a degree would do something else. Frankly, however, that would be a good thing, as by funding the non economic, we're fueling the hopes of a lot of people who aren't going to be able to find employment later.

And, no, I didn't have any student loans, thanks to the National Guard.