DopeZine vol. 1: The Long Bust

Great Debates
2

The Millennial Generation Revisited

by Max_S, doper since 2019

By 2020, the world is about to go through a changeover in power. This happens not through force, but through natural succession, a generational transition. The aging baby boomers, born in the wake of World War II, at the beginning of the 20th century’s 40-year global economic boom, are fading from their prominent positions of economic and moral leadership. The tough-minded, techno-savvy generation that trails them, the digital generation, has the new world wired. But these two generations have simply laid the groundwork, prepared the foundations for the society, the civilization that comes next.

Any American in 1997 would have been acutely aware of the power shift from the Silent Generation to Baby Boomers. The first Baby Boomer president, President Clinton, had just won re-election; 9 Boomers were sworn in to the Senate in January, bringing the total to 251; Boomers would have a majority in the House by 19992 and in the Senate by 20083. It would only seem natural that the next twenty years would be dominated by Baby Boomers, after which they pass the torch to the next generation - that “tough-minded, techno-savvy generation that trails them, the digital generation”, then called the MTV Generation4 but now called Generation X.

It is now the year 2022, and the aging Baby Boomers aren’t fading from their prominent positions of economic and moral leadership. The torch of leadership is still in the process of being passed from the Silent Generation to the Baby Boomers. At the top level, we had 28 years of Baby Boomer presidents. Two terms of Clinton, two terms of Bush the Younger, two terms of Obama, and one term of Trump. Only three of those elections involved Boomer versus Boomer (2000, 2012, 2016). Only one frontrunner was born in the second half of the 20th century (Obama). Most Baby Boomers were born after 1950 but we often forget about them when speaking about that generation5. Nobody from Generation X ever made the ballot, not even as vice president (Palin and Harris were born in 1964). Now we have President Biden, of the Silent Generation. Lest you think this is a fluke, consider also that our Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is even older than Biden. Our Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, is a Boomer - but he retains a majority of zero6 over Leader McConnell of the Silent Generation. Baby boomers still retain a majority in both houses of Congress7 and are represented in the governorship of 35 states (one governor belongs to the Silent Generation, Kay Ives). The Silent Generation may be a minority in Congress but they wield a lot of power - aside from Biden, Pelosi, and McConnell, you have Bernie Sanders, Diane Feinstein, Chuck Grassley, Patrick Leahy, Dick Durbin, Maxine Waters. The Supreme Court is set to lose its last member from the Silent Generation later this year8, and will have 5 Boomers and 4 from Gen X.

The thing about Generation X is that they will never have the sheer numbers like the Baby Boomers or the Millennials. There was no period of time in which Generation X was doing the bulk of society’s work9. Generation X, far from already laying the groundwork for Millennials, is only now approaching political dominance. Yet the entire Millennial generation has already reached voting age, and they outnumber Generation X.

The millennial generation is coming of age. These are the children born in the 1980s and 1990s, at the front end of this boom of all booms. These are the kids who have spent their entire lives steeped in the new technologies, living in a networked world. They have been educated in wired schools, they have taken their first jobs implicitly understanding computer technologies. Now they’re doing the bulk of society’s work. They are reaching their 40s and turning their attention to the next generation of problems that remain to be cracked.

These are higher-level concerns, the intractable problems—such as eradicating poverty on the planet—that people throughout history have believed impossible to solve. Yet this generation has witnessed an extraordinary spread of prosperity across the planet. They see no inherent barrier to keep them from extending that prosperity to—why not?—everyone.

It is certainly true that millennials are the largest cohort in today’s labor force10, although we may not ever be a majority like the Baby Boomers were in the '80s. We did grow up in a “wired” world. 96% of Millennials - virtually all of us - play video games, for an average of 13 hours a week each11. Almost all of us can type - a data point so obvious I can’t find a reference. Most of us had cell phones when we first entered the workforce - Pew says 80% of young adults in 2005 were cell phone users12, and that 63% of teenagers had cell phones in 200613. And all of us spent at least part of our early life in the booming years, that is, the mid-nineties up to the Great Recession of '08. Of course most millennials want to improve the world, be it world hunger, or poverty, the environment, or injustice. But they are not unique in this regard - every generation from the dawn of time has wanted to make the world a better place. I submit for your consideration the antitrust/labor, conservation, suffrage, temperance, social welfare, civil rights, peace, gay liberation, feminism, and environmental movements of the 20th century. And in each case technology has been viewed by optimists as a tool for achieving that end. Can you imagine the civil rights movement without the wirephoto, the (second) feminist movement without the pill, the peace movement without television? The generation behind each movement grew up with the relevant technology, so it is natural to expect millennials to do the same.

Speaking of which, while many Millennials in the '90s and early 2000s may have dreamed about ending world poverty, the Great Recession of '08 dashed those hopes just as Millennials were coming of age. At the time, some thought the generation would “flounder” because they weren’t well established professionally when the recession hit, some thought they would do all right, some thought they were more entitled than any previous generation, some thought they were less entitled than previous generations, and some argued that sweeping generalizations of an entire generation serve little purpose14. Rising costs of education (i.e. significant student loan debt), housing, and healthcare coupled with lower purchasing power, largely stagnant wages, and a tight recession job market during peak working years… “Millennials currently earn 20 percent less than Boomers did at the same stage of life, despite being better educated […] Millennials were more likely to be living in poverty than Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers at similar ages, with one in five Millennials officially classified as poor”15. It wouldn’t be until the latter half of the 2010s that Millennials finally gained some financial stability in their lives. With stability at home we could again dream of addressing world poverty. Yet those dreams were crushed by a worldwide pandemic in 2020.

Then there’s the environment. The millennial generation has inherited a planet that’s not getting much worse. Now comes the more difficult problem of restoration, starting with the rain forests.

The Wired article identifies environmentalism as a cause the Millennial generation takes up. This prediction is not exactly correct. Millennials are less likely than any other generation to describe themselves as environmentalists16. The environmental movement that grew out of the anti-nuclear movement in the '60s and '70s peaked in the early '90s. It was Boomers and Gen X who wrote op-eds and protested against corporations like Burger King and McDonalds over clearing forests in South America. The beautiful and mystifying “rainforest” replaced the dangerous “jungle” in the popular lexicon. By the late 1990s the political movement largely died down, but environmentalism left its legacy in children’s education and entertainment. Captain Planet, The Magic School Bus, The Crocodile Hunter, even Sesame Street all openly advocated environmentalism. Whereas the later half of the Baby Boomer generation might have looked up to astronauts, the later half of the millennial generation may have held conservationists and marine biologists in high regard. But along the way, the environmental movement and forest conservation in particular picked up a bad reputation17, 18. “Environmentalist” is today something of a derogatory term, like tree-hugger or hippie.

Millennials are by and large concerned about the planet. Rather than environmentalism per se, many identify with the movement to address climate change. Pew surveys from 2011 to 2018 shows us Millennials more than any other generation believe there is solid evidence that human activity causes global warming, and moreso than any other cohort they favor alternative energy sources, public transportation, and hybrid/electric vehicles19, 20.

Then there’s governance. Americans can vote electronically from home starting with the presidential election of 2008. But e-voting is just an extension of the 250-year-old system of liberal democracy.

On the topic of governance and e-voting specifically, it is actually true that some Americans can vote electronically from home. But this is hardly attributable to the influence of Millennials. Sections 577 et seq. of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 requires states to allow overseas and military voters to receive their absentee ballots electronically21. That law was passed in 2009, before Millennials had any significant political influence. It is up to the individual state to provide for electronic submission of the ballot, as opposed to printing it out and mailing it back. All in all, 31 states and D.C. allow electronic voting in at least some circumstances which vary by state22. Most of these states only provide the option for overseas and military voters. The method or methods (email, fax, web portal, or for West Virginia mobile app) used to vote electronically varies by state23. Utah has allowed voters with disabilities to register and vote electronically since 201424, 25. Louisiana allows any absentee voter to return his voted ballot by fax, however absentee voting is reserved for the elderly, people temporarily outside their parish such as students/teachers/clergy, etc26. The method of voting, fax, tells us this wasn’t a Millennial solution to the problem of governance.

More generally, in the 1990s most Americans voted on either paper or punchcard ballots. Many paper ballots in the '90s were fed into an optical scanning computer which would actually count the vote. The “mark sense” technology dates back to the 1930s and was first used in elections in the '60s. Punchcards would also be fed into a computer. In either case you would call it electronic voting. The significant change between then and now is a) after the 2000 election recount debacle in Florida and the resulting Help America Vote Act of 2002, punchcard ballots and lever operated machines have been abandoned, and b) we now have voting machines with touch screen technology, especially for voters with disabilities. The adoption of touch screens took place in the early 2000s - before Millennials had any significant political presence. As these touch screen voting systems were rolled out en masse in the 2000s and 2010s, the media reported a number of glitches and security lapses. Some machines created a printout for recount purposes, some didn’t. It would later be revealed that electronic voting machines in 21 states were targeted by Russian hackers during the 2016 presidential election. By 2020 there had been a significant roll back of touch screen voting systems, although most states still offer them for individuals with disabilities. VerifiedVoting has a great interactive map where you can compare the prevalence of paper ballots versus direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines, from the 2008 election to 202227.

These ambitious projects will not be solved in a decade, or two, or even three. But the life span of this generation will stretch across the entire 21st century. Given the state of medical science, most members of the millennial generation will live 100 years. Over the course of their lifetimes, they confidently foresee the solutions to many seemingly intractable problems. And they fully expect to see some big surprises. Almost certainly there will be unexpected breakthroughs in the realm of science and technology. What will be the 21st-century equivalent of the discovery of the electron or DNA? What strange new ideas will emerge from the collective mind of billions of brains wired together throughout the planet? What will happen when members of this millennial generation possibly confront a new species of their own making: Homo superior? And what happens if after all the efforts to methodically scan the skies, they finally latch onto signs of intelligent life?

So much optimism. I can’t comment on any predictions about a human engineered species, or discovery of extra-terrestrial life, so I’ll stick with just a couple points.

Of course there are bound to be breakthroughs in science and technology. Something that could have been predicted in 1997 is the Human Genome Project, which was already well underway. The project was declared complete in 2003, with some gaps that weren’t filled until 2021 and the Y chromosome only being sequenced this year. Mapping the human genome is, of course, one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time. We’re a fifth of the way through the 21st century, but so far the most immediate result of “billions of brains wired together” seems to be corporations capitalizing on the new ecosystem. Thus we see smart devices, social media, streaming services, etc.

With regard to environmentalism and saving the planet, unfortunately the planet can’t wait decades for Millennials to gain the necessary political clout to avoid catastrophe; many say we are already past the point of no return, or at least that reducing carbon emissions alone is no longer enough. And it could be argued that the political landscape today is a bit more polarized than it was in 1997. The New York Times cites a CBS News poll to report that “[m]ore than half of Republicans and more than 40 percent of Democrats tend to think of the other party as ‘enemies,’ rather than ‘political opponents’”28. Both sides think the other is acting less cordial towards them, although I won’t say both sides are equally correct on that matter. With rising sectarianism it’s difficult to say if a majority of legislators will be able to act even on shared interests. Obama had that fleeting supermajority in Congress for a couple months in 2009 - Bill Clinton could only dream of such an opportunity. From which we got the Affordable Care Act, barely. Who is to say there will be another such opportunity in the next ten, twenty, or thirty years? A filibuster-proof trifecta in the federal government hadn’t come around since Jimmy Carter’s day.

Medical science may be able to keep a man alive for one hundred years, but actually doing it is another thing. The best health outcomes require early detection and early, lasting treatment. But this requires access to healthcare. The byzantine U.S. healthcare system may not be fixed, if ever, until late in Millennials’ lifetimes. Even if people have access to healthcare it would take a major restructuring of the health research industry to shift the economic incentives away from chronic symptom management, and towards curing the underlying disease. And there are threats to the field of healthcare that could pose serious setbacks for the average lifespan of Millennials, perhaps unknown to your average journalist in 1997, such as bacterial resistance or opioid addiction. Or a deadly novel virus that spreads across the globe, killing some 15 million people.

Who knows what the future would hold? So far it’s been more of a mixed bag.

Footnotes (Click to show/hide)
  1. Nine Baby Boomer Senators took the oath of office in January of 1997: Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Chuck Hagel (R-NE), Tim Hutchinson (R-AR), Robert Torricelli (D-NJ), Gordon Smith (R-OR), Jack Reed (D-RI), Tim Johnson (D-SD), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), and Susan Collins (R-ME). They joined sixteen other Senators from the Baby Boomer generation: Judd Gregg (R-NH), Kent Conrad (D-ND), Mike DeWine (R-OH), Dirk Kempthorne (R-ID), Don Nickles (R-OK), Ronald Wyden (D-OR), Carol Moseley Braun (D-IL), Rick Santorum (R-PA), Sam Brownback (R-KA), Tom Daschle (D-SD), Bill Frist (R-TN), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Spencer Abraham (R-MI), Patty Murray (D-WA), Rod Grams (R-MN), and Russ Feingold (D-WI).
  2. Concord Coalition. (1998, November 3). BABY BOOMERS NOW A MAJORITY IN U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. https://www.concordcoalition.org/press-releases/1998/1104/baby-boomers-now-majority-us-house-representatives
  3. Winograd, M. & Hais, M. (2015, January 5). Boomer Dominance Means More of the Same in the 114th Congress. The Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2015/01/05/boomer-dominance-means-more-of-the-same-in-the-114th-congress/
  4. Straight Dope Message Board. (2000, May 22). The forgotten generation of MTV... https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-forgotten-generation-of-mtv/20150
  5. CalMeacham. (2000, May 19). Baby Boomers. Straight Dope Message Board. https://boards.straightdope.com/t/baby-boomers/19945
  6. Collinson, S. (2022, February 2). Democratic senator's stroke exposes fragility of 50-50 Senate majority. https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/02/politics/senate-democrats-supreme-court-ben-ray-lujan/index.html
  7. Blazina, C. & Desilver, D. (2021, February 12). Boomers, Silents still have most seats in Congress, though number of Millennials, Gen Xers is up slightly. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/02/12/boomers-silents-still-have-most-seats-in-congress-though-number-of-millennials-gen-xers-is-up-slightly/
  8. Howe, A. (2022, April 7). In historic first, Ketanji Brown Jackson is confirmed to Supreme Court. Howe on the Court. https://amylhowe.com/2022/04/07/in-historic-first-ketanji-brown-jackson-is-confirmed-to-supreme-court/
  9. Generation X's share of the labor force peaked at 54 million in 2008, at which time Baby Boomers outnumbered them with about 60 million workers. From 2011 to 2016 Generation X - already in decline - was the largest cohort in the labor force, but it was only represented by about a third of workers in the U.S. See footnote 10 for citation.
  10. Fry, R. (2018, April 11). Millennials are the largest generation in the U.S. labor force. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/11/millennials-largest-generation-us-labor-force/
  11. Westcott, K. et al. (2022, March 22). 2022 Digital media trends, 16th edition: Toward the metaverse. Deloitte Center for Technology, Media & Telecommunications. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology/digital-media-trends-consumption-habits-survey/summary.html
  12. Horrigan, J. (2005, July 26). Internet and Cell Phone Facts. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2005/07/26/internet-and-cell-phone-facts/
  13. Lenhart, A. (2009, August 19). Teens and Mobile Phones Over the Past Five Years: Pew Internet Looks Back. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2009/08/19/teens-and-mobile-phones-over-the-past-five-years-pew-internet-looks-back/
  14. The Straight Dope Message Board. (2009, August 12.) Generational Questions :: A Survey. https://boards.straightdope.com/t/generational-questions-a-survey/506113
  15. Cramer, R. (2019, October 29). Framing the Millennial Wealth Gap: Demographic Realities and Divergent Trajectories. New America. https://www.newamerica.org/millennials/reports/emerging-millennial-wealth-gap/framing-the-millennial-wealth-gap-demographic-realities-and-divergent-trajectories/
  16. Pew Research Center. (2014, March 7). Millennials in Adulthood. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2014/03/07/millennials-in-adulthood/
  17. https://www.npr.org/2014/10/11/355163205/millennials-well-help-the-planet-but-dont-call-us-environmentalists
  18. https://grist.org/green-jobs/dont-call-me-an-environmentalist/
  19. Pew Research Center. (2011, November 3). The Generation Gap and the 2012 Election, Section 8: Domestic and Foreign Policy Views. <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2011/11/03/section-8-domestic-and-foreign-policy-views/#the-environment-energy-and-climate-change"https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2011/11/03/section-8-domestic-and-foreign-policy-views/
  20. Pew Research Center. (2018, March 1). The Generation Gap in American Politics, 4. Race, immigration, same-sex marriage, abortion, global warming, gun policy, marijuana legalization. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/01/4-race-immigration-same-sex-marriage-abortion-global-warming-gun-policy-marijuana-legalization/
  21. Pub. L. 111-84, Oct. 28, 2009. 123 Stat. 2319.
  22. National Conference of State Legislatures. (2019, September 5). Electronic Transmission of Ballots. https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/internet-voting.aspx
  23. Gal, S. & Panetta, G. (2016, September). 25 states allow some voters to submit their ballots electronically — here’s how that works. Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/22-states-that-allow-you-to-vote-online-2016-9
  24. Utah Code 20A-6-103
  25. Utah.gov. Information for Voters with Disabilities. Retrieved May 27, 2022 from https://voteinfo.utah.gov/information-for-voters-with-disabilities/
  26. Louisiana Secretary of State. Vote Absentee. Retrieved May 27, 2022 from https://www.sos.la.gov/ElectionsAndVoting/Vote/VoteByMail/Pages/default.aspx
  27. Verified Voting. The Verifier. Retrieved May 27, 2022 from https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier
  28. Cohn, N. (2021, April 19). Why Political Sectarianism Is a Growing Threat to American Democracy. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/us/democracy-gop-democrats-sectarianism.html

~Max