I agree Cat Whisperer! Also, the 80’s had the whole impending doom feeling with the threat of nuclear war. So, I’m pretty darn comfortable lving through tough economic times and the thought of impending death (hear than Iran? Throw your best punch).
Only if you don’t mind your children hating you. Do you think you’re the first generation to inherit problems? Every generation lives with the cumulative successes and failures of all the previous generations.
As far as Social Security, I’m 48. I’ve been paying in for over 30 years, and I’ll be paying for 20 more. The compound interest on the money I’ve put in should count for something.
The economy can’t boom all the time. There are crests and there are troughs and you’ll see more than one of each in your lifetime. We all have. The air is cleaner now than 20 years ago, the water table is less polluted, there’s less of a threat of total nuclear annihilation (and you think it’s bad to feel like the adults around you have screwed up the world - when I grew up there was a very real expectation that nameless people would cause the death of everyone on the planet because of stupid posturing).
Get over it.
StG
I was reading a news article today that I thought was interesting and relavant. It is about how boomers (1946-1964) may end up becoming far more socially active after they retire.
I don’t know if I agree though. Most boomers seem broke (I think the average 401k is barely $80,000). Plus the economy is crap and many are also helping out their kids. So stressing out about paying the bills may sap whatever pro-social feelings they have.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnews/20091029/ts_usnews/canboomersleadanelderrevolution
Roszak, a college teacher and author of 15 books who is now in his late 70s, has issued another rallying cry to this generation with The Making of an Elder Culture, published earlier this year. In it, he argues that the baby boomers are hardly finished making their mark on the world. “Boomers, who will usher us into senior dominance, are the best educated, most socially conscientious, most politically savvy older generation the world has ever seen,” he says. “I believe that generation will want to do good things with the power that history has unexpectedly thrust upon it in its senior years. What boomers left undone in their youth, they will return to take up in their maturity.”
Roszak is still crusading. Conservative government leaders and consumption-driven corporations are still his bad guys. But while he makes a lot of valid points, the polemics of The Making of an Elder Culture can get in the way of the powerful forces at work here. Seniors have rising power, in numbers and especially in the voting booth. This is a global trend; the U.S. actually is younger than other industrial democracies. Advances in agriculture have enabled sustainable increases in world population. Advances in medicine have permitted this growing population to reach ages never seen before.
In the elder culture that Roszak envisions, longevity and health become driving social and economic forces. Aging boomers will return to their youthful idealism. They will work to improve the environment and climate problems. They will volunteer like crazy. In their longer lives, they will embrace newly rediscovered values. “The final stage of life is uniquely suited to the creation of new social forms and cultural possibilities,” he says. “Age offers us the opportunity to detach from the competitive, high-consumption priorities that dominated us on the job and in the marketplace.”
Totally wrong. Everything can be changed for the better. Except for climate change, which was not caused by people, and pretty soon it will be changed back, or we’ll go into an ice age, or drift into the sun. Nothing any generation did has any effect on a planet. Everything can be changed almost overnight by ‘your generation,’ but either you will be one of the movers and shakers to make a change, but it may be good or bad, or you will be powerless and relegated to the role of spectator of the change, be it good or bad. Regardless, you are not looking at the true cause of any problems.
Perhaps somewhat justified, but no more so than any other generation has the right to be.
First off, at 29, I’m hardly old. The major problems that we are experiencing are the result more of political decisions and an unrestrained media than a simple generation issue. There IS a problem with people living longer and staying much longer in the workforce though. In the 80’s, people in their late twenties and early thirties already had families, and had begun to acquire homes and decent midlevel positions that would help their advancement. Today it seems that there is a great deal of stagnation within the levels of the workplace and jobs are primarily secured by networking or ass-kissing rather than by merit. There is a great deal of well educated twenty somethings languishing in poorly paid positions due to a simple lack of space.
My generation grew up being told that we could do anything we wanted to do as long as we really, really tried. It turns out that was complete bullshit, and the reward of diligence, hard work, studiousness, and some sense of ethics in today’s American job market is nothing. Mostly this is due to corporate culture and an out of control insurance and legal industry. The bottom line reigns supreme. That blows.
So DO something about it! Game the system. Start a lobby. Start your own business. Take some risks. Or trade something away to secure the dreams you have. Nothing good is ever gained without some sacrifice. One thing the older generations knew was not to buy something you can’t afford. Want to really piss off The Man? Buy with cash and only finance Huge ticket items like cars or a home. Cut up your credit cards.
NinjaChick, you are educated, in the prime of your life, and live in a incredibly wealthy society which offers tremendous social mobility and economic opportunity.
What precisely have you been doing to improve things for future generations? If you have not been doing something significant to the benefit of future generations, you really should not complain about not being satisfied with what earlier generations have provided for you.
No, you couldn’t.
It’s not just the toys, cars, and “things”. It was a lot easier for people in the 1950s to afford a big city apartment, or a house in a nearby suburb. There were barely half the number of people in this country as there are now, and the nearby suburbs were still being built up. From the beginning of Anglo-American history, I think we have a puritanical streak in our culture that prompts us to say, “The reason we have it so hard now is because we buy a second TV, have cable, or spend $80 a month to carry a mobile phone!” Yes those are expenses that our parents and grandparents didn’t have, but they’re nothing compared to the cost of housing. Time was when teachers and lifeguards could live in Malibu. Staff engineers at Douglas Aircraft could buy houses in Santa Monica. But those days are long gone.
Sometimes you have to spend money to save money. Rather callously, if just for the purposes of this discussion, regarding a stay-at-home spouse as a human resource who shops for bargains and takes care of things at home while you are out at work–now he or she needs the second car in order to be able to go to Walmart or Cosco and buy those mass quantities. You need to run an extra freezer to store all that bargain meat in. The underlying point is that the world in which it was so cheap to live doesn’t exist anymore.
On the other hand, I think the “American Dream” of home ownership is part of the problem too. The cultural imperative to have your own house and yard, especially when you start having kids, is closely tied to the mistrust and disapproval of cities and the desire to get away from them which also goes back to the beginnings of our history. There’s nothing wrong with owning a house and yard, nothing at all. But as our population doubled this cultural ethos became even more entrenched, even as we ran out of close-by places to build houses. I think one key aspects of the imagined future was that whole new cities would spring up, like the “Mojave City” mentioned in a Star Trek episode. They would be well planned places in which to live, work, and play, but that never happened. Instead we have a world in which people do live in the Mojave–and commute to jobs in Los Angeles. Some of these people spend their working lives in offices by the beach, but live fifty miles away in the middle of nowhere. It would be a lot more pleasant to work in the middle of nowhere and live near the beach, but that isn’t the way things turned out. Where the home-ownership instinct becomes destructive, in my opinion, is that those willing to compromise in that area usually find a great deal more geographical flexibility as to where they can live.
I think young people today have it much harder than their predecessors, but I think it would be more fair to blame American cultural conservatism and recalcitrance than any one generation.
Well the previous generation did not have competition from Hu and Prashant, who are willing to work longer, harder the they are.
One thing that you see in Europe, N America and Australia, which you don’t see elsewhere are…weekends. Abolish them or return to a six day workweek and oh extend working hours too.
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Population, again. What do you think happens to the price of labor when you triple the ranks of the desperate?
Isn’t that already happening? On my last job I hardly ever had a weekend when I didn’t have to provide on call support, or spend hours finishing the week’s reports. Those took forever because the status of the things being reported needed to be changed continuously.
If the stories are to be believed, slaves in the antebellum South at least had Sundays off. But I imagine that many of the wage slaves of South and East Asia, and elsewhere, have to work seven days.
Elizabeth Warren studied the issue and found that the growth in middle class insecurity isn’t that people are spending more on luxury items. If anything most personal consumption items like food or electronics have gone down in price and even though people buy more of them, they are a small part of spending. The real reason people are struggling is because housing, tertiary education and health care costs have been growing at 6-10% a year while wages grew at 3-4% a year for the last few decades. So wages doubled every 20-25 years and the costs of health care, college and housing doubled every 9 years. Obviously, that is unsustainable.
Then when 2 parents are forced to start working people have to factor in the cost of day care too.
We are in a recession, and employers are cutting hours. If anything during an unemployment crisis the last thing you want is to extend hours, that’ll just unemploy more people.
As of 2009, Hu works in a factory that only saves 6% compared to a US factory.
http://www.asiaone.com/Business/News/Story/A1Story20090520-142755.html
“The United States has also significantly closed the gap to the degree that China’s total manufacturing costs are now only six percent below those of American factories, the study by AlixPartners business consultants indicated.”
Outsourcing to India and China cuts labor costs. But it increases costs in other areas like transportation, infrastructure, management, etc. The cost savings of hiring Hu and Prashant are greatly exaggerated, and may disappear altogether over the next 5-10 years as wages continue to grow by 10%+ a year in India & China.
Throw in the quality control issues in Asian countries on top of the minor cost savings (<10% and dropping) and the US is not nearly as uncompetitive as we may seem.
Why should we weaken our labor laws? Why shouldn’t China and India strengthen their labor laws rather than the US and Europe weaken theirs?
I forgot to add taxes. Thirty years ago we still had a progressive tax code. But with the ascent of Reagan and the movement conservatives, tax burdens have been shifted downwards.
Progresive taxes (federal income tax, capital gains tax, dividend tax, estate tax, luxury tax) have been cut, sometimes in half, whereas regressive taxes (payroll taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, sin taxes) have grown to make up for the shortfall in revenue.
So you have little/no real wage growth for most workers in the US after adjusting for inflation over the last 30 years, a higher tax rate on them and higher expenses for health care, day care, housing and education. That is why people are going broke and sending 2 parents into the workforce. It has nothing to do with buy 3 LCD televisions.
Personally I am angry at the previous generations that hadn’t yet discovered how to extend healthy human lifespans into several decades past 100 years of age. And I’m pissed at the generations younger than me because they get to live a lot longer!
After all, it is really all about me.
Forget about the fact that my grandparents lived without the benefits of medicine (They were deceased by the 50’s) Forget that I can afford to travel almost anywhere and have so much more cool stuff than the wealthiest person of my childhood…forget about the struggle to extend social equality to not-white people and women…Forget that most people in the last century earned a very modest living by doing physical labor…words really fail me.
I expect that I may actually be pitted for the first time ever…
(The above is not serious, but it does have the serious intent of illustrating how we can easily fall into the trap of focusing on ourselves and not seeing the larger picture of the human condition and its progress.)