I'm a couple years out of college and can't overstate how real this is (in America, though I know the article is focused on the UK). Last summer I flew back to my Midwestern hometown for a concert, and I still remember being introduced to a friend of a friend. She was a college graduate one year removed, vastly 'underemployed' [1], and living in her parents basement.
When my friend mentioned that I was just in town from SF for the weekend, she asked what I did and after telling her, her reaction was something along the lines of 'oh you're like a real grown up!' Her tone was one of embarrassment and a begrudging acceptance of where she was, and it's one I've seen a fair bit despite going to a pretty solid school. Not Ivy League, mind you, but a reasonably high-ranked state school.
I really have no idea what the solution is, but I've thought a fair bit about the as of yet unrealized ripple effects: Many of these people are in debt up to their eyeballs. Given that, they're going to be much less likely to (or at least will significantly delay) purchases of cars and real estate. Dating is a lot harder when you're living at your parents', and I'm sure we'll see an impact in the ratio of singles/families among my generation as a result. Then there's the whole psychological impact of feeling they have nothing going for them that the article focuses on. Pretty dismal scene.
[1] Honestly, I hate this term. It shouldn't be any surprise to us that when we promote an 'everyone goes to college!' culture a la 'everyone's a home owner!', coupled with an insidious lowering of standards in our education system starting in the lower rungs of K-12, we'll have a mass of college-educated individuals who can't find gainful employment.
A lot of the answers here address the symptoms, rather than the root cause. I believe the source of these kinds of problems is that we focus too little on teaching kids to be builders.
I specifically avoid words like "science", "engineering", or "entrepreneurship" because I do not want to be dragged into a debate about why artists and writers are needed, too. They are needed, too. But I prefer the word "builders" — people, who are taught that value comes from building, and that is something you can always do yourself. You do not need a "job" with someone telling you what and how to build.
Note that there is an attitude problem in many young unemployed people: many seem to think that getting some kind of education entitles them to something. What's worse, if that "something" (job, money) doesn't appear, many are helpless and turn into a spiral of self-loathing and depression.
In the longer term this will become even more of a problem, as we automate more and more mundane tasks. The number of jobs that require no thinking will not grow. On the other hand, the possibilities for making a living using all kinds of building skills are growing fast.
I believe we should make more effort to teach kids to build, and use their own initiative. And I use the word "build" very loosely — you can build furniture, electronics gadgets, web sites, artsy jewelry, anything. Whatever you build will help your self-esteem, put thoughts on the right track (growing/extending/building rather than self-loathing, moving up rather than down), help you meet new people, give you new possibilities.
The thing is that the current young ones are still of the belief that no-one has had it hard before; that it was cruisy and easy for everyone before (repeating the pattern of this thought - this isn't unique to gen Y, but to young gens). One gen Y person in my office repeated the mantra to me that "jobs were handed out like candy for the boomers"... yeah, if you were male... and liked working in a factory or other menial jobs. If you were female there was a stigma to working, options were pretty limited, and usually it was legal to be explicitly paid a lower hourly rate.
The Western world we live in is safer in most regards than previously, whether it's food or medical or military. Ten years of war in the middle east killed only a tenth of the US soldiers killed in Vietnam, and there was no conscription. Before the downfall of the USSR, there was a very palpable fear of nuclear war in the West (justified or not) or a sizeable military invasion. Civil and social rights for minorities and women were far, far behind where they are now. In the consumer world, shit is cheaper and more disposable than ever before. Much less need to put effort into maintaining things, just get another one. Hell, even going to the dentist is far easier today with improvements in pain control. What about support services for victims of domestic abuse? Or rape? At least now there are some systems in place where people can get support sometimes (if not always) and it's a recognised problem, rather than in the boomer's youth, when it was a taboo subject and there were no services.
So sure, complain about the current situation of Gen Y folks, but when people complain about how 'easy' previous generations had it, these kinds of things are why it sounds like self-indulgent whining - because they only focus on the good things the boomers had and never recognise the bad things. Not to mention the things that the Boomers did build and give to us.
Gen Y does have hurdles to face, but those hurdles don't have to be defined in how much worse it is than previous generations had it.
I'm from Gen Y. I don't think that previous generations had it easier than we do, but I think it's an undeniable fact that you have it easier.
Except for the past few years, the world has been constantly improving all your life; USSR, Berlin Wall, computers, internet, technology, ... In contrast, most of my adult life has been nothing but shit (objectively; things have been quite good for me, but I'm a programmer, so...): financial crisis, terrorism, low employment, home foreclosures, high tuition. It doesn't seem to be improving for the average person. Furthermore, things have turned to shit almost exactly when we became adults; when we were children, we were brought up in a time of abundance, when life was easy, and hopes for the future were high. Now, life is hard, especially for people with no homes and no jobs and no work experience, and there is nothing to look forward to, except global warming.
Exactly. I don't know how much is gained by playing the generation blame game. If we are going to solve problems we have to work together not spend all the time blaming each other.
It's not all "blame game". The boomers are also the generation that holds all power and makes the decisions. Younger generations feel like their problems are not heard.
Personally, for the generation Y living in the US, I feel it's worse than other Gen Y. Because of the dollar previous generations have had the benefit of exporting inflation and forcing everyone else to trade in dollars (most importantly the energy-markets). I feel the world is slowly learning to trade in it's own currency whenever they're not dealing with the US Euro/Yen/Roebel/Yuan).
There most certainly are differences in interests and priorities between the demographic groups, and many of them are conflicting. Teams isn't a bad analogy.
I agree with you; especially your last statement. I believe that the arguing between generations spawns from the differences in the challenges each has faced. Those challenges may be nearly equal in difficulty, but the difference is great enough that each generation has a difficult time empathizing with the others. We should restore hope in those (of any generation) who are struggling against terrible adversity rather than assure them that everyone else had it just as hard.
Maybe we argue cross generations because of cultures that have clear divides between generations - what they do, what they are interested in, etc. We are so adamant about it that we shame each other for being "age inappropriate" when we step out of those molds. In turn, maybe there is relatively little bonding and friendship between the generations. Everyone who is 20 years or older than you is either your parent, your teacher, your boss, your counselor, your mailman, or he's a noone to you. You meet some of them and, unless you see them every day for some reason (parent, relative, boss, coworker), they have nothing more to say to you than "are you still in school, what are you studying?", and the like, and you have nothing interesting to say to them, either. (I'm talking about myself here, not anyone else in particular.)
A lot of younger people today are incapable of making strong or hard life choices. Even something as simple as deciding to go to a trade school instead of risk a liberal arts degree. Yet these folks know going into it what sorts of options they have in terms of majors, and they have to know they're staring down the barrel of questionable employment if they pursue a less lucrative education. Yet somehow they feel they don't need to make sacrifices. The same thing goes when it comes to budgeting. Netflix? Smart phones? Starbucks? These are part of the economic floor for a lot of people of recent generations. But in many ways they are luxuries. If you are having trouble making ends meet then you need to cut some of those things. You can get buy without a smartphone, although even just going with the cheapest option (low cost smartphone w/ a prepaid plan) saves a crapton of money compared to the average. I think a lot of people have no clue how much people of previous generations went without common conveniences on a routine basis just to keep the bills paid. Boomers weren't buying starbucks every morning and dining out every day, they were packing sack lunches and drinking coffee made from a can.
That said, there are still some really shitty things that Gen Y and the millenials have to deal with that boomers didn't.
Jobs are harder to get, they don't pay as well, and the cost of living is higher. These days even entry level jobs require a ton of leg work and paper work to fill, and they usually have restrictive hours and almost invariably crappy pay. Median home prices vs. median household income has been increasing considerably since the 1970s. Considering that owning a home has typically been a multi-decadal achievement for a lot of folks that increasing ratio ends up translating directly into a great many folks denied home ownership, and the many financial benefits that come with it.
And then you look at the college situation and wonder how anyone today manages. Increasingly college education is a prerequisite for many jobs, even jobs that do not require anything other than basic literacy skills. Compared to an era when high school dropouts could easily find work and where mere high school graduates could commonly find white collar jobs as long as they had the skills, today is a much different playing field. Add to that the fact that acquiring a useful college credential usually ends up costing tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt.
All of that makes for a very tight squeeze for many folks entering the work force today.
Yeah, a lot of people today make poor choices and they whine, but make no mistake, it's a legitimately tough situation they are in.
> The thing is that the current young ones are still of the belief that no-one has had it hard before; that it was cruisy and easy for everyone before
Really? It seems to me that a much more common belief is that the living standards in the modern, developed world is on a constant, never-ending upwards trajectory; that wealthy economies will grow wealthier or at least stay at an equilibrium, and that science and technology will keep improving people's life and make them easier. And also that we will grow more tolerant and accepting of each other (see; women's rights 100 years from now compared to today, black and gays rights in the last 50 years...). The recession probably dented the belief in strong western economies, but that is relatively recent.
In that light, it would be consistent to also believe that previous generation had it harder than the younger ones do today.
It seems to me that the attitude that the younger generation is entitled and spoilt is a pretty common one, irrespective of the era - how would X survive if he grew up like me? We didn't even have Y! There has been a lot of rage against the boomers lately, at least on the Internet, but that also feels kind of recent. At least when it comes to the Internet trend, I wouldn't be surprised if that whole debacle at least partly started because of a rant against baby boomers by George Carlin, who was himself not-quite in the boomer demographic (but on the other hand, who didn't he rant against?). Prior to the complaints towards the boomer generation, I think there was a certain amount of "apologies for my generation" sentiment going on. But again, that is also just an Internet-thing; I don't know about other avenues of information.
"It shouldn't be any surprise to us that when we promote an 'everyone goes to college!' culture a la 'everyone's a home owner!', [snip] we'll have a mass of college-educated individuals who can't find gainful employment."
The quoted portion should be a surprise. Several generations ago, we decided to promote an "everyone goes to grade school" culture, and it led to a vast expansion of our economy and middle class in the western world. Our current situation sounds predictable, but it was not. It was reasonable to predict that an educated workforce would provide more capable brains to fulfill new and existing needs with goods and services.
I think the core cause is the belief that college was the cause of success, when it was really more of a gatekeeper of success. Now that the gate is wide open to a large fraction of society, you need either connections or hard skills. I can forgive past policymakers for that oversight. I can't forgive current policymakers for perpetuating it.
The most popular major at my state's most popular university this year was psychology. Many—if not most—of those degrees will never be put to use.
Underemployment doesn't just come from inappropriate people going to college. I don't have the graphs in front of me, but if you look at jobs as a whole we have a mediocre recovery from the great recession but if you look at the types of jobs it's horrid. That is, white collar jobs where lost and service jobs where gained. So it's more than just people's perceptions.
This is compounded by the republican ideology of transferring risks from the state to the individual. My alma mater cost $3.2k/year in tuition in the late 90s, and now costs $9.4k/year (numbers not inflation adjusted). According to the cpi inflation calculator, tuition has roughly doubled [1]. But that's not all -- course loads are now heavy enough that it can be very difficult to get required classes when needed, and because of sequencing requirements for your major classes it's very easy to accidentally get stuck for an extra 1-2 semesters because you couldn't get the course you needed because of reduced course offerings. Assuming you spend $10/year for books + living expenses, leaving college with ~$40k in debt is significant.
I graduated from my undergrad quite a while ago with around fifty thousand in borrowed debt. I made sure to only take what I absolutely needed and maintained various part time jobs throughout.
When I had my exit interview, the financial aid counselor asked if I knew how much I had borrowed. I told her what I knew it to be. She laughed and said that I was probably wrong as most students have no idea how much debt they have accrued.
I asked her to recheck the paperwork because I had been keeping record of how much I borrowed and only borrowed the minimum that I was eligible for throughout my college career. When she looked at my file, she made an embarrassed apology and said that she must have confused me with someone else and that her experience was that most students didn't know their full debt burden.
My wife and I paid it off in five years. We were lucky, though. We were married in our last year of school and were used to living with few luxuries. We decided to keep living as simply even though we were lucky enough to both get jobs not long after graduating. We read all the requirements and prepayment guidelines and followed them to the letter which helped knock the time down tremendously. When we got within a couple thousand, my in-laws paid off the rest with a no-interest loan that they made to us.
Not everyone has those circumstances, I know, but the biggest realization was if we would be okay with living well below our means for a few years, we would be better off in the end. I have friends that I think are still paying off loans due to deferments, unemployment, and amount they received.
There were programs in my uni that got dissolved before people had matriculated. Students who had several semesters of courses under their belts were left out in the cold and had to try to rig their courses into other programs as electives or transfer. It was awful.
My wife was a college advisor and had students keep copies of the college handbook that was published the year a student started in a major. She would hammer home that it was their "contract" with the university and had students use it to good effect when they argued against changes to the graduation requirements mid-program.
I don't know if it would work for everyone, but it is worth a shot and can't hurt to just have that stored away when you appeal to your university.
Would you mind to name and shame that university? I've often heared of programs being dissolved, but always with a "we won't stop operation until the last matriculated person has been given enough time to graduate at average speed" grace period.
I'm very loyal to my department because they were awesome and extremely supportive (luckily we survived the axe), so I don't want to shame the whole university. But it's a medium-sized school in the South East of the US and it's run by an alarmingly incompetent chancellor.
Yeah, my alma mater looks to be be right between 10 and 11k a year for tuition (28 credit hours a year assumed), and books and living expense puts that even higher.
I ended up with around 80k in loans, but I was dumb about my living expenses (I went to college in my late 20s, and had a certain living standard I wanted to maintain, which was a mistake).
I have similar experiences. I almost hate running in to people that I went to high school with, or getting friend requests via Facebook and then having these getting reacquainted discussions. I see my friends and they are struggling to find a place in the world, many are living at home and society at large is telling them that they are failures. It makes me very sad for them because feeling like a failure is one of the worst things in life, in my experience anyway.
Everyone should be a home owner because people tend to take care better of the place they both own and live in. But it order to achieve that you need to incentivise people who rent property to sell it. Progressive property tax that makes owning more that two or three homes very risky endavor could do that.
I recently bought a flat with intention to rent. It stands empty for many months so far because I can't find time to finish renovating it. It can stand empty because it's dirt cheap to leave it like that. I'm earning enough too keep it empty for another month in less than a day. As it stands empty somebody has no place to live in and has to pay rent elevated by the fact people like me are perfectly safe to hoard property.
What solution do you propose? I've been thinking about it, but I can't think of a way to (1) tax landlords (i.e. disincentivize property hoarding) without (2) passing the tax on to those who rent. In the UK, for example, tenants pay council tax, and I expect any increases of said tax to affect tenants, not landlords.
Add to that that 11% of house owners in the UK now own more than one house.
One of the "problems" in the UK rental market is that the Duke of Westminster is one of Britain's most propertied landlord.
And then you read things like this :
> A Freedom of Information request by the New Statesman to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) reveals that the largest landowners received millions of pounds in taxpayer subsidy last year. The Duke of Westminster, a multibillionaire, was paid £748,716 for his ownership of Grosvenor Farms, the Earl of Plymouth £675,085, the Duke of Buccleuch £260,273, the Duke of Devonshire £251,729 and the Duke of Atholl £231,188 for his Blair Castle estate. It was also a lucrative year for the Windsors. The Queen received £415,817 for the Royal Farms and £314,811 for the Duchy of Lancaster, while Prince Charles was paid £127,868 for the Duchy of Cornwall. Similarly well-remunerated was Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who received £273,905 for his 2,000-acre Glympton Estate in Oxfordshire, allegedly purchased with proceeds of the 1985 al-Yamamah arms deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia. The largest individual UK beneficiary is Sir Richard Sutton, who was paid £1.7m for his Settled Estates, the 6,500-acre property near Newbury that he inherited with his baronetcy in 1981, despite net assets of £136.5m.
I'd just progressively tax estate, rooms, inhabitable area, whatever so that owning a house or a flat or two or three costs as much as today, but owning fifth one for a year will cost you for example 10%-20% of its value and owning twe tieth for a month would cost you more than it's worth. Some of those costs would be passed to tenants but this would lower demand and make the whole enterprise of owning property much riskier and incentivise selling also buying but only if you don't have one or two already.
Personally I'm fine with redistribution of work. People should work less hours to make room for more people to be employed. When you see that 25% of the workforce is unemployed or employed only from time to time and the economy is stagnating, I take it as a good sign that the legal work hours should be reduced with 25% to make room for the rest of the workforce which is idling on welfare which in the end is taken from the ones who work.
Did you read the grandparent's comment? Some redistribution of wealth is a solution if many people are so much in debt as a result of study loans and unemployment. Being able to survive on your own, rather than living in your parent's basement, gives dignity.
It has worked great for Western European and Scandinavian countries.
>Being able to survive on your own, rather than living in your parent's basement, gives dignity
>It has worked great for Western European and Scandinavian countries.
Has it? According to a report by the UN, it would appear the median age by which half of young people have left their parental home is 26 for males and 24 for females [1].
In some areas of Western Europe, unemployment is as high as 25% [2] and is particularly affecting young people.
So could you please quantify your statement that it has worked great for Western European and Scandinavian countries?
I hasn't worked at all in most other cases, particularly in eastern European and ex-soviet countries.
But the world is not black and white. There is a vast space between 'free for all'-capitalism and state socialism.
You can empower people by giving everyone access to good education and giving decent social security. Where 'decent' means: being able to afford housing, eat, and travel for interviews. But not so much that it makes working unattractive.
Another method for empowering people is to make it possible to make a living with an 8 hour work day by introducing a minimum wage.
The introduction of minimum wage raises unemployment.
By the way, TFA is about Great Britain, which by all accounts has a great social security net. And as you can read in the article, the people specifically suffer from unemployment and the resulting feeling of worthlessness.
They don't suffer from hunger, lack of housing, debt or lack of material goods.
People do suffer from hunger. We have increased use of food banks.
People do also suffer from lack of housing. It is ridiculous to suggest that homelessness is mot a problem in England. Homelessness does not just include rough sleeping, but even rough sleeping is a problem in England.
People living on the street are not automatically entitled to a home.
Personal debt is also a massive problem in the UK.
Since the article is about young people there are some things you need to know: Housing Benefit is restricted for young people. The type of accommodation they can get is limited. (Young people here is "under 35" http://m.england.shelter.org.uk/get_advice/housing_benefit_a... )
Most government help is in the form of tax rebates.
The combination of "lower taxes" and "government handouts" cUses cognitive dissonance for some people - they want lower taxation because fuck government, but they don't want lower taxation for poor people they only want it for very rich people people because SOCIALISM.
What you describe is a pretty good argument about why supply side economics alone can't describe our economy adequately. If nobody has the money to create the demand, the economy will shrink.
Can you imagine what it is like to live in a country where that friend of a friend of yours is the _average_ young person?
To answer that rethorical question, let me just point out that we won't have heared the last of the crisis in Southern Europe.
My brother has several friends in Ireland and he's described their outlook similarly. They have a sort of government stipend and some of them can find odd jobs (odd as in strange, one of them is a part time fire eater) but for the most part they simply can't find steady work. The demand for low-cost work vs. the demand for a living wage is definitely at work all around the world.
Although not geographically, Ireland definitely is part of the "Southern Europe" of the parent's comment; it was one of the countries hit by the recession the quickest and hardest.
I think implementing basic income would probably help at least somewhat, but everyone still needs some way to feel like they're contributing. Also, short of bringing back protectionist measures like high tariffs and reversing globalization somewhat (maybe not a terrible idea), it seems like we need to create a much more highly skilled workforce than the one we have so that we can move up the value chain.
I think part of the problem is that we don't have real problems. Throughout the last centuries every single generation had very fundamental challenges, mostly related to survival. Wars, hunger, whatever. Now first you have to find out what you want (career, gadget, car, traveling), then work for it, but the problems are not as simple and existential as they used to be. Most challenges are related to competition, pride and ego building, not to basic things like finding a small shelter to stay in, acquiring food and raising as many children as possible.
Yeah this is a problem. I think a lot of it comes down to cultural value shifts. My wife asks her students why they choose major X or Y and they almost always answer that they think it will help them to get a job. She then asks why they want that job and they say that it's important to be stable and have steady income. These are 18-19 year old kids, mind you. They should not be worried about being stable, they should be plotting adventures and taking risks. But the US has become so crippled by fear (of terrorism, joblessness, the NSA whatever) that a whole generation of kids is growing up and simply being as safe as they can be. And because they don't seek out trouble, they don't get to feel the excitement of overcoming problems, and that's very dangerous in my mind.
I don't really agree with this. 50 years ago those 18-19 year olds were working and getting married, and at 21-22 being fathers and mothers. But now we accept that 18-19 year olds are still 'kids'. I don't know if this has anything to do with the problem we are discussing, but I'm pretty sure at 19 you should be worried about a stable life. It is the best time to do so, maybe just not 'go to college, get a job' stable since that doesn't seem to work anymore.
I think we understand how the human brain develops now a bit better than we did 50 years ago. And that at 19 you're basically not fully cooked yet. So yeah, at one point you were thought to be fully developed by 19 and that meant you should go get a job and put an oven in the kitchen for the little lady. But now we know that your attitudes and opinions will (or at least are likely to) change a great deal between 19 and 25. This also means your motivations and what makes you happy will change. But if you're concerned with locking down the 9-5 as soon as possible, then you're much less likely to find something that actually makes you happy.
The thing about taking risk is that you may not overcome problems. If you are sure that you will overcome all problems, then it was not a risk to begin with. Those who plotted adventures always either graduated into booming economy or had rich parents to help them.
Thinking about your ability to find job in bad economy after you take all that debt on you does not strikes me as excessively risk averse. The opposite strikes me as irresponsible.
And punishment for not finding job and being unemployed for months is hard. There is a big difference between "I send application and a job with benefits is found in a month" and "it will take a lot of time and may end up as long term unemployed". America is not exactly nice to those who failed and even yours kids will have it hard to impossible to get better life if you fail.
We have the idea that 18-19 old should be worry free because we graduated into exceptionally good market and economy. We were privileged so to speak. If you look at history, non-priviledged non-rich adults did not used to have worry-free-do-not-care about income periods in their lives.
I'm not advocating just throwing caution to the wind and hoping everything works out. But this culture of fear that drives people to nearly always take the safest path is not one that will lead people to happiness. My best friend took the opposite route as me. He drugged out for several years and recently joined the navy. Now he has learned some cool skills that can transfer to other jobs and, more importantly, he's gotten a huge build in self confidence. But with his personality he would have been miserable just taking some safe job somewhere and settling down. He needed to find something that inspired him and only then did he really turn his life around.
I do not think drugging out several years of your life is kind of adventure and risk taking I will encourage in my kids. Anyway, your friend was lucky he was not caught. Military does not welcome people with criminal with open arm. It significantly lowers your chances to get in. In effect, it significantly lowers your chances to get any job anywhere.
There is middle ground between and afraid of everything. And I agree that some people tend to be on paranoid side, especially when it comes to physical risks or anything that resembles terrorism.
However, decisions that make or break your earning and quality of life for next dozens years are not the best place to start with risking.
Interestingly, he did get caught. Severs times. I asked him just before he shipped off to his first deployment and he said "You know, that's one thing I've learned. The military really doesn't have their shit together. I just lied on all the forms when it asked about criminal background and when they asked about drugs."
Keep in mind, he's not planning in making a career out of it or becoming an officer or anything like that. But he did get his life turned around for the better, even though he didn't take the safe route early on.
It's interesting that you say this and I guess many people believe it as well.
And yet there are so many problems in the world and people don't feel they can make a difference. The analogy that jumps to mind is that society is similar to a car. In the 70's cars could be fixed by someone with a manual and common sense. Now they are so complicated you need special equipment, knowledge and money to even start figuring out what's wrong.
Regardless of my bad analogy young people seem feel powerless to change anything at any level in their lives.
The problems are real, just more diffuse and less immediate (no war to get conscripted off to for example). The big problem right now is the huge shift in the value of human labor resulting from by a whole series of causes (immigration, technological change, movement of capital, globalisation, etc).
> "I were suicidal at times coz I felt worthless and it just went on and on and I weren't getting anywhere."
That was hard to read and it is very serious stuff. Some might take a derisive, cynical approach that "Well in so many countries people have to much worse and how do these people from a first world country think that way". But it is important to note that human experience is unique the pain one experiences is often relative to their environment and their expectations.
Someone I knew was very successful and made millions of dollars (tens or so). And then his accountant stole probably half of it and disappeared. Well this acquaintance had contemplated suicide. And when word got out, many friends and acquaintances were laughing at him. "He still had all this great wealth and there he was ready to take his own life." But, the pain he was experiencing, was real to him. And he was ready to take that step. The wisdom to understand (maybe not agree with it, but at least to understand) comes a bit later in life.
If you don't have a phone (or even if you do), feel free to message me if you'd like to talk to someone in the startup/tech community who's also worked as a crisis counselor. Contact info's in my HN profile.
I would say that in a very self-aware, half-ironic, half-serious way, anti-capitalism is one of the few things that gives my life that fuzzy feeling of "meaning" these days.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how I can reconcile my software skills with lofty goals of a more just society, but it's pretty tough. I think it was the piratebay founder that said it was impossible.
In any case, yesteryear dreams like "starting a prosperous household" seem not only unattainable, but hollow as well, in 2014. It's definitely weird being a young adult these days.
ps. lmao @ "we don't have real problems". I guess massive underemployment, environmental wreckage, domestic espionage, corporate wage fixing, increasingly sophisticated advertising, etc. are all just a blip on the radar compared to the fights of old boys. It's just not as romantic as it used to be, it's the inter-generational equivalent to "poor people have refrigerators".
I think that referred to concrete problems that concern the individual and can be solved by work. You need food to live. So people farm. People need houses. So people build houses. That sort of stuff.
Yes, we have lots of problems now. But you can't grab a hammer and nails and build a solution to massive underemployment while earning a living for it.
Food and houses on the other hand, at least in the western world, are more or less solved. You don't need to build a house and a farm. You just need fing money to get a house.
yep, that's quite sad we have so little anticapitalist software projects. Like helping workers to organize, run consumer cooperatives efficiently, construct parecon-style economic networks...
It must be miserable to be in your early 20s today. The prospect of high student debt, more competitive job environment, polarising of wealth, a housing bubble that perpetuates here in the UK. I'm only early 30s but I'm glad I was born when I was.
IMO You really can't underestimate the importance of that last one, the property bubble.
In the past young people could strive towards buying their own place, starting a family, climbing the ladder, but that's so far out of reach nowadays that many people can't even hope to play that game.
One of the big drivers in many people's lives has been pulled out of reach.
It can all feel like a treadmill even if you're in a good job so I can see how young people who aren't working in a hot industry such as tech in a major city to feel this way.
I don't agree that life now feels like "treadmill" — life is what you make of it, if you live just to score fancy abroad vacations, buy new phone every year and wear 10 pairs of Tommy Hillfiger jeans... well then your life is a treadmill ;-) It's a matter of perspective and focus in life
Did you notice the key point? Property prices. They are out of reach.
A friend from my last office wants to buy a home. He has essentially a guarantee of lifelong employment, with a salary that today equates to something around 3000€/month pre-tax. He wants to own a small house in the neighborhood where he's renting now. But he's searching for a few years now, as he doesn't want to pay a million for it. Yup, 27.7 years of pre-tax salary for a small house. And mind you, this is not even a capital city.
Have humans always been so defined by their work? Honest question. I personally find a lot of fulfillment in my work. But I don't know how I could expect a janitor at a truck stop to feel the same way.
I feel like the answer to this conundrum -- and in general the long term trend of job obviation -- is to decouple an individual's worth from their economic value.
But what would a world without work look like? I can imagine it being heaven or hell.
Its something we better start getting ready for because technology gets rid of far more jobs than it creates and will only continue to do so for the forseeable future.
Eventually only super highly skilled and creative jobs (writing, art etc) that can't be handled by robot/android/humanoids will be left to do and we'll have to figure out how to allot a basic living wage to people with increments to that coming based on ... specious things like their popularity ... maybe? (I shudder to imagine this)
>increments to that coming based on ... specious things like their popularity ... maybe? (I shudder to imagine this)
What about being allocated money based on your positive (and negative) contributions to society? You currently can earn millions doing absolutely nothing useful ripping people off in wall st or earn pennies devoting your life to helping others
"Eventually only super highly skilled and creative jobs (writing, art etc) that can't be handled by robot/android/humanoids will be left to do and we'll have to figure out how to allot a basic living wage..."
That vision was sold to us in the 70's, but despite the technological advancement, we are all working a lot more.
that is not surprising. In a society where ones identity is tied to ones job as tightly as it is in the US, its not surprising that as the job market shrinks, the people with jobs will tend to work harder and harder to justify having said jobs.
And when i talk about this scenario, I'm not talking about 10 20 or even 30 years. I'm talking 100, maybe 150 years from now that this becomes a reality.
Historically, young men would be sent to war and then, after being horribly traumatized, return to seek solace in family, community or alcoholism. Women were stuck with all the hard and mind-numbing household work, not allowed to take up a profession.
So I'd answer your question with no, they have not been defined by their work because life was too horrible. Needless to say that it doesn't follow that we _should_ let ourselves be definded by our work.
Plenty of periods in history were relatively happy, especially when we are talking about middle class. It was not hell-only all the time. Plenty of man were happy in their day jobs back then or slacked them through or felt succesful.
In university I did a summer job at my local municipality twice. Those people had extremely boring job and joked openly about how they had to learn to work less hard. A lot of them had hobbies where they derived their life satisfaction from, like being a coach for the local football team.
You may imagine what it's like in Spain, where over 50% of young people are unemployed and for the most part doing nothing at all. Part of me hates them for not using that time to educate and prepare themselves, but hopelessness is extremely hard to overcome, especially in a society full of distracting elements like successful soccer teams, excellent weather or apparent friendliness.
There is also the psychological problem of having been out of work for a long time - returning to full time work is psychologically traumatic, and hard to get used to. Obviously it's doable, but it's not trivial. Those of us who already work full-time are used to it and have our lives built around it and accommodate it, but to make the shift from long-term unemployed to full-time worker is quite the lifestyle change.
A friend of mine works in occupational therapy, and part of what they do is deal with this issue in getting people back to work. It's called "work hardening".
Apart from people who are mentally ill (an immediate family member included) I have very little sympathy for young people who can't find their own way.
I'm pushing 40 and have older siblings in their 50s. Only one of them went to college right out of high school (more went later on when they could afford to pay for it) and the others joined the military to get a start in the world. All of my siblings -- minus the one under lifetime treatment for depression -- are successful today. They all have fulfilling careers and healthy families. None of them had it easy.
My parents (begrudgingly) paid for (most of) my college. There was quite of bit of resentment in my family as I had grown up assuming that I would go to college and someone would pay for it, a fairly common belief at the time, at least among my peers. After changing majors a couple of times my parents told me I was on my own. I was angry at first and then I started a small business with some friends, worked hard and finished.
After college I moved to another country and worked hard to get a career-path job. After that I worked hard starting my own company in that field. Apart from the degree my parents helped pay for I did it all on my own steam. Those decisions I made -- finishing school, moving to another country, quitting a job to start a company -- those were the ones that defined my life and paved the way for the things that I enjoy today. (I'm not suggesting I've arrived anywhere, just that I've acquired the tools to live a fulfilling life.)
Whenever I meet young people (and by young I mean just out of college) I'm sometimes very impressed though I'm often shocked at how much they expect from the world. The impressive ones seem to get it and are working hard either on their own businesses or taking the most aggressive route through graduate school somewhere interesting -- doing what it takes to carve out a niche. The ones that don't impress me think that getting a degree (or even not getting one) means they're going to have a comfortable life, free of hardship.
It's not just young people though. I see a lot of people my age who cynically pick up a paycheck every month in a field they're not passionate about, that they're not truly invested in. Then they completely fall apart because they "got downsized" and they go frantic on FB looking for a lifeline. These are the same people at different stages in life. If you're willing to dig in and make your own way then you might get what you want out of life. If not then don't be surprised when life goes sideways.
When you were young, things were different. Colleges cost less, capital was weaker compared to workers, computers haven't yet taken over as many jobs as today. Plus, we have the biggest financial crisis in the past 80 years. Still, I'm sure you can find many people in their 40s, 50s that are much less successful than you, doing rote, unexciting jobs, living paycheck to paycheck. Not everyone can be a manager, business owner, investment banker, lawyer or doctor - you need garbagemen, farmers, nurses, clerks, bartenders, in other words, people in dead-end jobs. It is in no way their fault for not achieving "greateness", that holds especially true for the stupid and for people from poorer backgrounds, who by definition have less opportunities in life.
Furthermore, my generation (20-somethings) grew up in boom years, when everything was improving and there was a very bright light at the end of the tunnel, but when we actually reached adulthood, everything turned to shit and many of my friends can't even get a bad job (I'm lucky, as I'm a programmer). No wonder half of the young population is suicidal, and the other half apathetic, we were raised with high expectations and then reality hit everyone without a warning, it fucked up many people's emotions.
My college cost $16k per year plus living expenses. It's a long story why I was going there as opposed to a cheaper state school. My parents did pay for part of it though I had to take out $20k+ in student loans and pay for the last year or so outright.
> from poorer backgrounds
I'm from a military family, lower middle class.
> It is in no way their fault for not achieving "greateness"
I haven't personally and that really wasn't what I was suggesting.
> Furthermore, my generation (20-somethings) grew up in boom years
I was in college in the 90s, boom years. Things went to shit a year after I was out.
> we have the biggest financial crisis in the past 80 years
While the current economy might be as bad as the Great Depression by some measure, you are not living through the Great Depression.
> I was in college in the 90s, boom years. Things went to shit a year after I was out.
Also, things started improving a few years after that, and the next 4 years were awesome. This crisis has been going on for 7 years.
Unemployed young people really have very little to hope for. When the economy improves, noone is going to hire a 32-year old who's hardly been employed in the past 6 years. They are going to hire the fresh 24-year-old who's just finished college. The first paycheck/job you get greatly influences the overall wealth you're going to earn over your life.
> The first paycheck/job you get greatly influences the overall wealth you're going to earn over your life.
Bullshit. My first post-college job paid $550 per month. Deciding that this wasn't the best way to live my life I networked until I found a lead and then chased a CEO for two months by calling him 2-3 times a week until I got a job. And that was just the beginning, not some magical doorway into success.
Why do people blame the economy? No doubt it has an effect, but as individuals we cannot change it. Better to spend time looking for opportunity.
Things weren't easier 20 years ago (when I started work) - different yes but not easier.
I see people applying for 100s of jobs without even an interview. Posts with 500 applicants. Yet I have SME clients who have numerous hidden jobs which remain unfilled because nobody at the company is prepared to go through the recruitment process. These jobs are there but it takes a little more to open the door.
If you're pushing 40, that means that you came of age in the boom years of the mid 90s. Do you see how that could be very different from those coming of age now?
Some very troubling trends for young people today:
1) Education has become much more expensive than just 10 years ago - you typically leave college with anywhere upto ~50K in debt
2) The Economy has changed - companies are making do with fewer people despite huge demand - (basically a jobless recovery)
3) Asinine trend of "you need to have a job to get a job" - basically some one already employed has 2-3 job offers but some one starting out has no one willing to take a risk on them
4) Some narrow sectors are indeed booming but most are locked out of them
>Asinine trend of "you need to have a job to get a job" - basically some one already employed has 2-3 job offers but some one starting out has no one willing to take a risk on them
This one is particularly relevant. It's literally impossible to get your foot in the door these days. I've had three separate tech companies string me along through multiple rounds of interviews, simply to say that the position was axed due to them requiring someone with more "experience", or funding was cut for the position due to the abysmal state of the economy. To be clear I wasn't even properly rejected (that's much easier to deal with), the positions were literally withdrawn.
Among my group of friends I'm the lucky one to even land interviews. Most of them are severely underemployed, or unemployed.
In three years I have gone from unemployment with zero experience and pay in engineering to £21k per annum. I did this by doing part-time courses in Autocad and then the same in Manufacturing Engineering, doing a year of minimum wage to pay for the first year of courses.
But I share the fears and doubts of the poorly skilled individuals. With no experience of the workplace or what it takes to be a decent employee that gets somewhere.
Being unemployed is depressing and you have to be mentally strong to survive it. Making chances for yourself is much easier said than done.
"By offering employers wage incentives worth up to £2,275 we are helping businesses to take them on. "
I've seen this in action. The jobs these kids got were from people who got fired in order to make room for them. As a company getting paid to have someone perform work for you is real nice. But it does not CREATE jobs.
In order to pay for all these things our sales-tax rate was pumped up to an all new high 21%...
Step two: Discover you actually hate all professions associated with your qualifications, or that your qualifications are useless in the job market and your career goals were utterly unrealistic
Step three: Mooch at home unwilling to retrain or do something menial, or with no relevance to your skill set to tide you over whilst you find something better
Step four, establish your new NEET identity and blame society, everyone and everything but yourself for your circumstance and the lack of a suitable high paying job served on a platter
I say this as someone that hasn't completed any education beyond GCSE level (I guess that's college in the US), and has never had any trouble finding paid work several within 10 days and something that I want to do within 60 days of that. I've worked throughout Europe, the UK and Southern Africa.
Apologies for the lack of empathy here, but it really isn't that hard.
Just be prepared to go anywhere and do anything
Ok without getting defensive about the salient subtext, I see your point; but I think that argument is a non-starter unless you mean specifically in the context of physical care, which can't possibly apply to the cited number of young people.
After all without the financial means and independence how can you care and provide for anyone let alone yourself?
In my own context, sure - at least initially I had only myself to care about, so I won't argue that :)
Not everyone can easily handle the cultural change from moving, or have strong social ties to friends and family. If a person has kids, it's an order of magnitude more difficult to move. Some people are quite socially adaptable, some are well-prepared by their upbringing to have the skills to be comfortable in changing social situations. Not to say that it's easy for them, but easier - it's still quite a challenge.
And again, doing something like this on an individual level is easy, because the status quo doesn't change overall. But on a demographic level, where are all the unemployed people going to move to? Another country? That other country also has unemployed people.
Similarly, if you don't have skills in demand by employers, you're hard to hire, and hence hard to get more skills valued by employers - moving to a new location simply moves you to a new pool of unskilled labour.
I hadn't considered that - my own experience (obviously) colours my view, at least when younger I was eager to see new places, meet new challenges and new people.
That did lead to losing touch with almost all my school-era friends at least initially - though in some ways it also taught me who were the best friends amongst them :) They're the ones you meet after a decade apart and can pretty much pick up where you left off.
I would imagine because not many people have tried both. I did. A few years back I moved myself to a different country. It took me one suitcase, hand luggage and buying a few things on the other side. I'm moving again now, but this time with a pregnant wife. And I see that in a few years even Google will not be able to make worthwhile once again.
Apologies for the lack of empathy here, but it really isn't that hard. Just be prepared to go anywhere and do anything
It's not hard at the individual level, but it is hard at the demographic level, if the jobs en masse aren't there. More people can start businesses, sure, but it's a complex picture that's not so easy to explain away.
I've worked in two factories, striping down old machines, unloading trucks, overnight shifts at gas stations where you're just as likely to get shot as you are to make it through the night. I've cleaned up blood, shit, vomit. I nearly had my hand torn off in an industrial machine. I worked hard because I thought that was the right thing to do. And all I ever got for it was a barely livable wage (I'm talking eating flour mixed with chicken broth and being damned excited about it because we could pay the power bill). I also learned that working that kind of job offers no security, no mobility, and is only barely worth doing. I'm not and have never been above physical labor. But in today's society, in the US, it's really hard to live a healthy life that way.
Certainly, I didn't mean to imply a permanence, only that doing something is usually better than nothing. I've always found employers infinitely more receptive to a person with a demonstrable work ethic, and far less sympathetic to the NEET or apathetic job seeker.
It's an interesting cycle. Lots of people from my home town have never had any sort of technical work and thus the people in my age group were sort of compelled toward the non technical also. So when you're 16 and you try to get your first job at the pharmaceutical factory they will ask you what kind of skills you have. If you have technical skills then the manager assumes that you will leave when something else comes along and so won't hire you. So you lie about it and say you're a hard worker etc. Later, you go to your first IT interview and they ask about previous jobs. Depending in the interviewer they will be glad that you've had a physical job or they will assume that you're not really all that skilled and be cautious in hiring you. Either way, it's difficult in many small towns to get better and better jobs. And stagnation isn't much better than being unemployed in the first place. And as you said, it's helpful if you can move to somewhere else. But lots of young people feel responsible for their families and want to try to contribute financially and emotionally. And it's difficult to do that from too far away. In my case, my wife and I have almost no attachment to any particular place, and as such we've both been fortunate in the job market. But others find it very difficult to let go of home.
Immigration creating a surplus, or the economy itself hollowing out to eliminate jobs? As far as I can tell the UK is basically the City (as an export). Ultimately that doesn't require a lot of jobs, and they're either high skilled, or exist to support the City workers.
(obviously this isn't completely true, but the financial industry is even bigger as a percentage of exports in the UK than it is in the US, although nowhere near Liechtenstein levels)
Whether or not immigration causes the increased unemployment, when there's more unemployed than there are jobs it's pretty hard to argue that immigration, which increases the labour pool, improves the situation.
Establishment EU politicians seem to generally support immigration, which makes sense if one's objective is to lower the cost of labour for business (and weaken the power of unions).
Try to understand what something means before you mindlessly parrot it. The article I linked to shows that there is no correlation, or even negative correlation between immigration and unemployment. And that actually proves pretty conclusively that there is no causation.
OK, my comment was glib, but I do understand the meaning of "correlation is not causation". The link you provide attempts to refute the argument that "immigration causes unemployment". You correctly point out that no correlation was found in the case of the UK. My point (and hence my rather glib comment) is that this lack of correlation tells us nothing about causation.
Importantly, taking unemployment overall conceals that fact that certain portions of the workforce (i.e. the young and low paid) are disproportionately affected by a rapid influx of young tradesmen and low-skilled workers.
No, immigration filled the jobs that would otherwise stay unfilled and thus moved permanently to other countries because of no possibility to fill them domestically.
On the other side, lost jobs are lost because there's no more need for them. One robot caused one thousand of unemployed factory workers, and the need for this kind of jobs is not going to increase anymore.
Or are you trying to say that lowly skilled workers from closed factories would somehow successfully fill roles in finance or technology, but there are only immigrants staying in their way.
>No, immigration filled the jobs that would otherwise stay unfilled and thus moved permanently to other countries because of no possibility to fill them domestically.
Lots of immigrants work service/retail jobs that aren't possible to fill overseas.
>On the other side, lost jobs are lost because there's no more need for them. One robot caused one thousand of unemployed factory workers, and the need for this kind of jobs is not going to increase anymore.
Yup.
>Or are you trying to say that lowly skilled workers from closed factories would somehow successfully fill roles in finance or technology, but there are only immigrants staying in their way.
What I'm saying is that a bigger labour pool increases competition for existing jobs and high rates of immigration makes this worse. Supply and demand.
This is a non-problem. One person can now do the job of a hundred but we have more people than ever before. Increasing automation is only going to make this trend worse. It is unfortunate that most politicians continue to peddle an outdated idea of social worth and well-being.
I don't have a solution but then again most of these young people are far better off than the generation before them so maybe they should stop being so gloomy. Most of them have pretty much free access to all of life's necessities and they are going to live longer than any generation before them.
>these young people are far better off than the generation before
Which generation are you thinking of? That doesn't ring true. Things started going sideways for my generation (generation X) and then globalization happened and now automation is happening. Tech has made things better for a small subset of workers, but not everyone is suited to tech work. Globalization and automation are significant changes.
A life of comfortable idleness is not a very good one. They can develop hobbies, but it's hard in a work dominated culture to derive sufficient meaning and pride from that.
I don't think that's true. The key is to approach something, whatever it is, with focus and discipline. I've never met a person that satisfied that criteria that I didn't like. My thinking is very unexceptional in this regard.
On the other hand, feeling that global market forces and dynamics should just turn around and succumb to your desire for a job just so you won't be depressed seems quite silly to me.
Governments can change the dynamics of global market forces (tariffs are a good example of this). I don't think it's silly to lobby your government to change things to benefit you and other citizens.
The article's title is quite link-baity. That being said, it is obvious that technology will displace more and more traditional human labor. Of course, unlike in the past, human labor becomes increasingly unnecessary to sustain said humans on a biological level. It's a trade-off, and the cognitive dissonance is the "traditional" (20th century, Agent Smith) model of human worth being rendered invalid by the realities of technological progress.
Such feelings are ages old. Friedrich Nietzsche thought of these feelings as a long sickness that he was eventually cured of. He suggested laughter to be a reaction to the sense of existential loneliness and mortality that only humans feel. Having a job is a good thing. But that won't make the feelings go away. It just hides them for a time.
That's why I wonder why some European countries have voted more right-wing parties. [1] (Most of the voters being employees, too.) More capitalism and less welfare cannot be the solution, because aside from the moral obligations [2] there's a real danger of social and economical instability.
Sure, you can throw lots of police at demonstrators, but for one there will be more and more people who no longer can afford to buy your iPhones, and secondly, at some point it might get really ugly.
I am blessed to live in a safe place and earn a lot of money. But I do feel we need to put a part of it aside for direct help of the unemployed folks, especially the young, and for programs to tackle these problems.
And if we don't it will could turn out to be a bad century. For all of us.
[1] I speculate they are exploiting the egoism that's in all of us for their campaigns.
[2] If you don't think there are any, think about how much about your own life is the result of chance, and how it easily might be the other way round. For example you being a poor immigrant in a foreign country.
I'd like to share this. I've read it a long time ago and it's about the disappearing middle class in Argentina during the crisis of the 2000: Notes about the middle class falling, from a Student of Architecture
...This, this was important, a moment where the life we once knew stopped existing, and a group of students, in a class room that looked like and abandoned building, realized it, all 60 of us at the same time.
We understood it the same way a kid understands photosynthesis: Because a teacher coldly explained it to us, even used graphics… It happened 4 years ago, almost a year after the December 2001 crisis. It was a social studies class and this teacher, don’t remember if it was a he or a she, was explaining the different kinds of social pyramids. We even had a text book with those darn, cruel pyramids! The first pyramid explained the basic society. A pyramid with two horizontal lines, dividing those on top (high social class) those in the middle (middle class) and the bottom of the pyramid (the poor, proletarian). The teacher explained that the middle of the pyramid, the middle class, acted as a cushion between the rich and the poor, taking care of the social stress.
The second pyramid had a big middle section, this was the pyramid that represents 1st world countries. One where the bottom is very thin and arrows show that there is a possibility to go from low to middle class, and from middle to the top of the social pyramid. Our teacher explained that this was the classic, democratic capitalist society, and that on countries such as Europeans one, socialists, the pyramid was very similar but a little more flat, meaning that here is a big middle section, middle class, and small high and low class. There is little difference between the three of them.
The third pyramid showed the communist society. Where arrows from the low and middle class tried to reach the top but they bounced off the line. A small high society and one big low society, cushioned by a minimal middle class section of pyramid. Then we turned the page and saw the darned fourth pyramid. This one had arrows from the middle class dropping to the low, poor class.
“What is this?” Some of us asked.
The teacher looked at us. “This is us” “It’s the collapsed country, a country that turns into 3rd world country like in pyramid five where there is almost no middle class to speak, one huge low, poor class , and a very small, very rich, top class.” “What are those arrows that go from the middle to the bottom of the pyramid?” Someone asked. You could hear a pin drop. “That is middle class turning into poor”.
I won’t lie, no one cried, though people rubbed their faces, held their heads and their breath. No one cried, but we all knew at that very moment that all we thought, all we took for granted, simply was not going to happen. “You see, the income from the middle class is not enough to function as middle class any more. Some from the top class fall to middle class, but the vast majority of the middle class turns into poor” Said the teacher.
I don’t know how many people in that room suddenly understood that he/she was poor. The teacher continued “You see, we have a middle class that suddenly turns to poor, creating a society of basically poor people, there is no more middle class to cushion tensions any more. Middle class suddenly discovers that they are overqualified for the jobs they can find and have to settle for anything they can obtain, therefore unemployment sky rockets: too much to offer, too little demand. You see they prepare, study for a job they are not going to get. You kids, you are studying Architecture because you simply wish to do so. Only 3 or 4 percent of you will actually find a job related to architecture.”
We all sat there, letting it all sink in. After a few months, it all proved to be true. Even the amount of students that dropped out of college increased to at least 50%. They either so no point in studying something that would not make much of a difference in their future salaries, had no money to keep themselves in college, or simply had to drop college to work and support their families.
And living in a certain way fills them. Not necessarily intentionally or to our benefit.
Some music is beautiful to me, some acts are pleasurable, some pictures and stories resonate. Maybe they're empty when taken objectively, but I don't see how that constitutes an answer to the poverty of subjective beings.
We mostly seem to have things that, based on our histories and to some extent our biology, we've learned to draw pleasure or pain from. And that learning does not seem like it can easily be altered in a well designed manner. If it could, psychology would be a vastly simpler undertaking:
"I'm depressed and I can't afford to do much more than eat."
"Don't worry, switch over to the Nihilism 2.0 release and then patch it with Existentialism 3.1"
The point is this: while people with good jobs feel they have something to live for, much of what happens is the simplistic perpetuation of consumerism. And, while the unemployed tie their value to their net worth, they miss out on some of the simple things that can make life wonderful -- none of which is a curved iPhone.
At one point in my life the IRS estimated my income to be a whopping -$500. I could barely feed myself and my wife, who was constantly sick because we couldn't afford insurance or medicine. There weren't any simple things in life back then, because literally every day was a struggle to survive. I would walk to work and she would drive to work. We pulled in a combined $1000 a month and rent alone was well over half that. And we were not living in a luxurious house. It was a roach infested hell hole.
Being poor is about a lot more than just not being able to afford an iPhone. And it's extremely offensive for someone to suggest otherwise.
This is the result of the government being so "open minded" that they end up not looking out for the best interests of their own populous. By "open minded" I mean rapidly (this being the operative word) removing all cross-border controls with countries with wildly differing economies, resulting in wage deflation and joblessness for a huge number of people.
Of course the people hardest hit are those at the bottom of the income chart - the young. At the same time, the cost of living has rocketed as a result of the mishandling of the banking sector, resulting in a housing boom (that from a political perspective cannot be permitted now to be undone and has been subsequently propped up by a heavily indebted the government). Again the worst off have been non-homeowners (i.e. the young).
It's impossible to blame the current administration for all of it, you have to blame the entire political establishment (all 3 main parties have been in power within the last 15 years). Their worldview has to be questioned. Significant errors of judgement have been made repeatedly over the last 15 years - Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria (no action taken by a hairs breadth even after everything that had come before), the banking crisis, handling of the educational system (including higher education), rapidly opening borders to former eastern-bloc countries, limitless spying on UK citizens, no reform of an undemocratic (not elected, but "appointed") European Commission, and migration of law making powers to the EU without consultation and assent by the public (through referendum).
You're being downvoted - probably - for blaming "former eastern-bloc countries" for the state of things in UK. Well, it's just not that simple. From purely economical point of view the recent arrival of labor from Eastern Europe was a positive, it added 0.25 percentage points to UK's growth (according to research done by Treasury). That's no surprise, since the immigrants are coming in for jobs (often for the low skilled jobs, since they don't know language enough to start a career in their field), so don't demand rents, education and healthcare right off.
Non-European immigrations affected jobs market negatively, yet only in two years of recent recession, in 2009 and 2010.
There are, of course, other, non-economical aspects, and here it's not so rosy.
This article touches the issue from many points of view:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/10822956...
Then, there's Germany. The only country in Europe where young people have relatively no problems with getting a job. Why? Germans keep their job market closed, so that's seems like an easy answer. Yet, France and some others did the same, and it didn't help.
And surely, Germany is significantly stronger economically that the rest. However, they too had a period of high youth unemployment rates. So that isn't it either. However, in exactly that period they introduced Nationaler Pakt für. Ausbildung und Fachkräftenachwuchs (Vocational and Educational Training Pact) - a solution that allows young people to simultaneously work and study. It's not a system with no flaws, but it worked.
Source: http://www.worldcrunch.com/opinion-analysis/how-germany-beat...
That's a mischaracterisation of my argument. I am blaming the political elites, not the eastern bloc countries (who are blameless). If I had no qualifications and I suddenly no longer needed a masters degree to come to a country with a minimum wage 7 times that in my homeland - I'd be on the first flight there.
Your discussion regarding the situation in France and Germany is pertinent but widens the discussion beyond my narrow point.
Supply and demand is econ 101. If the supply of low wage labour goes through the roof, then wages are compressed for a section of the population (the young and low paid) that can ill deal with the effects.
Now you you might say, "well, we have the minimum wage in the UK" - but there are all kinds of tricks employers will use to circumvent this, and with high supply, they can more easily get away with this type of behavior. Finally, the minimum wage, is not actually a liveable wage for an independent adult in the UK in 2014 (despite protestations, I'm sure), and so offers little in the way of protection anyway.
When my friend mentioned that I was just in town from SF for the weekend, she asked what I did and after telling her, her reaction was something along the lines of 'oh you're like a real grown up!' Her tone was one of embarrassment and a begrudging acceptance of where she was, and it's one I've seen a fair bit despite going to a pretty solid school. Not Ivy League, mind you, but a reasonably high-ranked state school.
I really have no idea what the solution is, but I've thought a fair bit about the as of yet unrealized ripple effects: Many of these people are in debt up to their eyeballs. Given that, they're going to be much less likely to (or at least will significantly delay) purchases of cars and real estate. Dating is a lot harder when you're living at your parents', and I'm sure we'll see an impact in the ratio of singles/families among my generation as a result. Then there's the whole psychological impact of feeling they have nothing going for them that the article focuses on. Pretty dismal scene.
[1] Honestly, I hate this term. It shouldn't be any surprise to us that when we promote an 'everyone goes to college!' culture a la 'everyone's a home owner!', coupled with an insidious lowering of standards in our education system starting in the lower rungs of K-12, we'll have a mass of college-educated individuals who can't find gainful employment.