Here's the thing. You are entitled. You are entitled to have a government free of corruption. You entitled to make a decent, living wage. You are entitled to further your education. You are entitled to healthcare that is decent. But you have few of those things, if any, and they are getting further away because the aristocracy is insatiable and will never give you any of those things until you and others like you demand them. Until you are ready to stream into the streets and demand what you expect from the richest country on earth you will get nothing.

Is Generation Y the first to have scheduled play dates rather than just roaming Lord-of-the-Flies-like through the neighborhood?

If that's the case, sorry, but you guys are fucked.

Graduated in the recession of 91. Have been a full-time working journalist ever since. My first job, I had to move to Klamath Falls, Ore. Had to give up friends and live among racists and homophobes (your older colleagues can tell you about ballot measure 9). Life sucks sometimes. Deal.

One of the worst things about the dot-com crash was that it left a bunch of liberal studies majors as waitstaff in San Francisco that were too busy whining about where their $100K+ a year "project management" jobs went to bother to serve anyone. I was back in the Bay by then. It ruined the city for me.

So look on the bright side, you're not an overpaid douche or on the path to becoming one.

Matt Bors made a nice webcomic that was published on CNN's website that covers it pretty well too

http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/09/opinion/bo…

Older generations have been telling younger people to shut up and quit whining since time began. This could have just as easily been written in 1988 by the proverbial Barista-with-an-Masters-in-English-Lit .
We're all in this shit together (well, unless you're not).

@3- OK, not to totally contradict my "we're all in this together everyone stop worrying about other people's shit" message, but something you said struck a nerve and I'm changing my position—
If the revolution comes, the street will run red with the blood of Project Managers.

Has any generation every been more spoiled, arrogant and infinitely entitled than the baby boomers? It's galling to hear them preach like this.

@6 You and your ilk are why we have such a corrupt government. You, the stupidocracy.

The next time one of us baby boomers gives bs like""If you're not making enough money, why don't you work harder/quit your job/ask for more money?" to one of you Gen Y'ers, tell them to pay for most of their state college education through taxes the way the boomers parents and grandparents did.

@8, the baby boomers are the best example of spoiled brats who have ever roamed the face of the planet. And they are the ones who will destroy the planet.

Now, their parents were a very impressive lot though. Too bad they failed to teach their kids better values like community, taking only what you need, education is a good thing when you can get it....

I'm not denying that good-quality jobs are down- but is it just me, or are there, like... a LOT of people who want to write for a living? We don't need that many, and it's 1) holding down wages and 2) cultivating clickbait farms like Slate and the Daily Dot. Maybe it's my imagination- maybe all these people used to write for local newpapers that have since gone under.

It's been trending since published on Huffington on Monday.

@6 Not sure what your deal is, but man, are you out of touch. Not just with where the kids are today, but where you yourself were way back when.

By Slog standards, I'm probably pretty old. Old enough to do those reminiscences that young folk hate. Well, except that I have nothing but sympathy for young folk today.

I grew up during the Cold War/Space Race. The government was pumping tons of support into the schools and economy. (People, and especially well-off ones, had to pay taxes back then and the government was flush.) Consequently, college tuition, especially for the state schools, was very low. A significant percentage of kids in my state were awarded academic scholarships, too.

Government spending on domestic defense and aerospace was a significantly higher percentage of the economy than it is now. Manufacturing jobs hadn't been offshored or automated out of existence. As a result, employment was damned near full and almost anybody who wanted a job could get one, and a high school education virtually guaranteed you could raise a family without crushing debt. The minimum wage was pretty close to a living wage at the time, too. Basically, it was a booming economy, even at the entry level.

We all had health insurance. I think it was $300 for a Blue Cross/Blue Shield "major medical" policy. A year. Parabolic health cost inflation hadn't started yet. Doctors visits were like $10 or $15. Total.

I lucked/fell into several different jobs, as I lost interest in the previous ones. Mobility was a cinch, as was changing careers. When I moved into the city, ratty apartments were a dime a dozen. My rent was $150/month in a building with a great bunch of young tenants. Even with a nothing-special job, and dining out a couple times a week, I managed to save enough money to quit jobs I didn't like, take some time, travel and find something else when I got back. There was always something.

You can't fucking do that today, and I am so, so sorry that, starting with Reagan, we fucked it all up.

Ugh, class warfare or no care.

@12,

I don't know if there are more wannabe writers, but I do know that creatives are getting fucked over in this economy in general. I have a friend whose husband is a professional photographer; he mostly does commercial work. When the recession started, his clients started asking for price breaks. In some cases because they genuinely couldn't afford to pay the going rate, in some cases because they were taking advantage of the shitty economy. And my friend's husband lost quite a few clients to other photographers who were willing to work for *free*. This isn't amateur stuff, and he wasn't losing out to amateurs. These were experienced professionals offering to work for nothing.

6, the reason you're an idiot isn't because of your ideas, it's because you refuse to think. You didn't read the posts and consider what was being said, tried to understand their situation, followed their logic. You had a pat answer prepared before you even read it, and then spewed it back to us. Your eyes may have gone over the words, but did they get into your brain? Nothing you've written indicates that you have any original thought on this.

The problem is, you're not alone. There are plenty of people just like you out there, people who have the illusion of intelligence because they did their thinking decades ago and are just regurgitating those surface conclusions for the rest of their lives. It's been postulated that fantasy & science fiction are just projections of what the culture is denying in themselves. W/ that understanding, is it any surprise why stories about zombies are so popular? Because so many people have become zombies, they've stopped thinking, and they are feeding off the rest of us.

My favorite part is the non Gen-Y'ers in the comments on that article chiming in to support the premise of economic change rather than generation blaming. A lot of the boring "generation blah is like this" talk boils down to the same coming of age shit every generation had to deal with.

The article telling a generation to stop feeling special is IMPLYING they're special by claiming that they're any different than previous generations.

Meanwhile, guess whose lives aren't getting any better across ALL generations?

Stop
Having
Them
Babies

@19: For one thing, @1 wasn't just referring to government corruption - he mentioned minor details like a living wage, and health care.

For another, corruption as measured by Transparency International tends to focus on overt things, like bribery. And it is true that you don't have to slip a fifty to the clerk at the DMV if you want your license renewed. But there are other forms of corruption.
I expect @1 was referring to the way that monied interests have co-opted the American political system to their benefit. See, for example, Citizens United. (You may want to have a look at gerrymandering while you are there. Oh, and there is some interesting stuff here as well.)

Now, buying a Congressman or three may not be in the same league as a bit of baksheesh down at the zoning office, but it does look like corruption to these eyes.

@20: Stop
Posting
On
Slog
You
Misogynist
Git

@14 Brooklyn Reader, that was my experience too. Beautifully put.

#14

I grew up during the Cold War/Space Race. The government was pumping tons of support into the schools and economy. (People, and especially well-off ones, had to pay taxes back then and the government was flush.)

Man, how quickly they forget. I wasn't even there (as an adult) back then, but I remember how it was.

At that time society was incredibly narrow (square). Even the slightest deviation would invite hostility at least. People who were creative or artistic or even bright in all the senses of "disruption" that we praise today would have been frustrated (or incarcerated in a mental asylum).

Almost all jobs were slavery. There was no flex time. There was little or no creative work -- there were jobs where you came in and did what you were told, or basically stood or sta around and pretended to do stuff. You didn't talk to the boss. You didn't talk to parents unless you said Mr. and Sir!

The system talked to you...down. You got information one way...from them to you. You read books, you didn't write blogs. You listened to radio, you didn't make your own mp3s. You watched TV, you didn't make YouTube videos. (Unless you were one of the tiniest sliver of people who got to be a personality,star, writer or artist. Although here I claim that with my creative and technology interests I was close to the forefront of "social media" by making social media, publishing small magazine-lets, doing things with audio tapes...another time though).

There was no way to communicated with others beyond the caliphs limits of your neighborhood on a regular basis except for email and telephone. Both required that you already know the person (except for pen pals) and the later was prohibitively expensive for long or distant conversation.

Things were expensive. Toys were expensive. I would make a list in January and pin it to my wall and reshape it to get the "one good toy" and few lesser toys that I would get for Christmas that would have to last me for a year. School was routine and severe (but changed to something like its present form by the end of the 1970s).

Relations between people in daily life for an average middle class person were friendly but strained. There were no "bros". People were formal. Dress was formal. You did not do your own thing. You did their thing.

There was pollution and no mediation. There were no clean systems. There were no catalytic converters. In all but the most rarified and avante garde societies, women were second class -- or at least distinct. There were no clubs or activities where boys and girls mixed. We played separate. We worked separate.

The brunt of social change that benefitted almost everyone in the modern world over the last 100 years was probably born by the Baby Boomers (and here, I was at the end of it and got most if not all of the benefits with not much of the pain).

At best, the things that were done between 1979 and 2007 are on the Shoulders of Giants when it comes to leaps in technology, business, arts.

I think we are now finally entering into some kind of new era...but nothing significant has happened. Yet.

@19 - The revolving door between government and corporations, non-transparent financing of elections, "money is speech", and corporate lobbyists routinely writing bills (ALEC) don't amount to corruption according to Transparency International. Ergo garbage in, garbage out.

#22

How to Improve Your Reading Comprehension

http://www.wikihow.com/Improve-Your-Read…

It's a small remedy. But it might help you play with the adults.

@25 - I now see that #21 already correctly answered #19.

@26: And here is a link you might find helpful.

@24 Holy shit. We must have lived in entirely different dimensions. Everyone in my dimension was happily stoned, exploring Eastern religions, into long hair, music, sandals, and flowery clothes, shacking up, toying with communes and free love, protesting against war and The Man. Taking art and dance classes. Starting their own businesses. Even when we put on suits to work, you could still tell. We were creative, rebellious, exploring. If there were hassles, we handled them. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were from people like us, just smarter and more driven. Everything was different.

Not sure what repressed, sterile hell hole you grew up in, or if you weren't an adult, just what sort of view you had of it, but it wasn't a microcosm of our world.

#28

And here's a video to help you be more helpful...and...help people...yeah, take that!

One of the things the "you're not poor, you have a cell phone" brigade forget is that sometimes there's a little money for some things because other, more durable, things are permanently out of reach.

Young people today are priced out of the housing market (in or near desirable places), full stop. That's a huge distortion of how real estate has traditionally worked, and the effects have barely started showing up yet.

Young people today are priced out of the new car market as well, and it's driving the car companies crazy -- they can't survive on grandpa's Buick, but they have no way to design cars for the young -- who have always been the driving force behind innovation -- because the biggest feature young people want in a car is "priced under $5k". This is killing US competitiveness.

Another thing: student debt. Even people who graduated from college ten years ago have little understanding of how grisly the increases have been. This change is incredibly recent, and is almost entirely due to the abandonment of the university system by state governments. When you graduate with $100,000 in debt, your ability to acquire the other things that have been an accepted part of life for a couple of generations, like a house, is destroyed from within.

The next thing is the putrid job market. If you can get a job paying $50,000 or $75,000, a lot of these pressures are eased. But that's impossible. Even in a strong job market, those jobs are rare -- and if you fall short of that, you're just plain screwed.

The last thing I'll mention is health care. Not only is it ludicrously expensive these days, and increasing by ridiculous amounts -- Mrs. Fnarf's Regence plan is going up by 25% this year, but it is THE primary brake on the job market, because it adds so much to the cost of adding an employee. I pay a bunch for my own health insurance, but my company pays a lot more -- which isn't the case in Canada or other countries where civilization accepts reality. My company can't move jobs to Canada or Brazil -- but yours probably can.

Meanwhile, old people, for the most part, have never had it so good. Recession? That's long over. Taxes? All-time low. Services for older people? The only boom area of the economy. If you are rich, you're even better off -- you have never been better off today than at any time in history.

But you're stepping over the prone bodies of your neighbor's kids every day. Yeah, they have iPhones. They don't have the same opportunities we did, though.

@20
M
Y
O
B

@29 Brooklyn, I think its called Kent. You would not have ever heard of it. Didn't recognize you form my age group (HS class of 79), but I always liked your comments.

"Since 1979, the alleged Dawn of the Millennial, the average US worker has endured as much as a 75 percent increase in productivity…while real wages stayed flat."

I wish people stopped saying that real wages have stayed flat, because they haven't. As Fnarf correctly points out much of housing, education, health care, transportation (he forgot child care) are now out of reach for younger workers and many others. This is surely an indication that wages haven't kept up with inflation of non-elective expenditures. This has been pointed out by E Warren in her research written up in Two-Income Trap.

@34 You can't say real wages have declined, because they haven't. They have stayed flat. But expenses have gone up, so disposable income has declined.

But when you say "disposable income" people think "beer and cigarette money" and you aren't allowed to complain about having less of it.

In reality of course, it is "saving for a rainy day" money, and "buying shit to stimulate the economy and keep my neighbors employed" money. But that's just crazy talk, as everyone knows that money only adds value to the economy when it is rotting in some one-percenter's bank account.

Kids these days...are screwed. Easily paying $700-1000/month or more in student loans. Between shitty health care and those goddamn loans, we've really put an entire generation behind the eight ball.

@35 - "real wage' is wage adjusted for inflation. If people can't anymore afford non-elective expenditure like health care, education, housing, etc it points to government having underestimated inflation, i.e real wages haven't kept up with the cost of living. No?

#31

Starting salaries for college graduates ranked by PayScale.com

1 Harvey Mudd College
$73,300

2
United States Naval Academy (USNA) at Annapolis *
$77,100

3 - tie
California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
$68,400

3 - tie
Stevens Institute of Technology
$64,900

5
Babson College
$59,700

6
Princeton University
$56,100

http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-r…

These are entry level salaries for just a bachelors degree!

And check out what mid-career salary is!

39 cont'd

"Oh but those are engineering graduates from Ivy Leagues...whine..WHINE!!!"

Best Schools for English Majors

1 - tie George Mason University $41,000
1 - tie Fordham University $40,500
3 University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) $44,400
4 University of New Hampshire (UNH) $40,000
5 University of Virginia (UVA) $45,000
6 University of Florida (UF) $39,100
7 Boston University $44,000
8 Rutgers University - New Brunswick $75,800
9 University of Texas (UT) - Austin $38,100
10 - tie University of Oregon $36,700

http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-r…

#32

The earth's total population is my business.

It's everyone's business.

So take an English major at University of Oregon getting $36,700 after graduation.

According to this the average total indebtedness is $24,528

http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/colle…

Using a calculator, and an artificially high Stafford loan rate of 6.8% that comes out to $282.27 a month (for 10 years).

http://www.finaid.org/calculators/script…

By the way, Oregon State Tax is about what you'd pay on this student loan:

"The tax on taxable income of $36700 for a person filing single, married filing separately, or registered domestic partner filing separately is $3086"

http://www.oregon.gov/dor/Pages/taxcalc.…

Still, you'd be pulling in $2,347.73 minus the loan or $2000 a month. Say you decided to stay in Portland and get an apartment. You can do that for under $1000 or less if you can find a roommate.

That leaves you, as a free spirited 20 something with $1000 a month left over to party, etc...which is like $1000 more than you'd ever thought you'd have in high school.

Complaints?

@42:

"You'd be pulling in $2,347.73 minus the loan... or $2000 a month. Say you decided to stay in Portland and get an apartment. You can do that for under $1000 or less if you can find a roommate.

That leaves you, as a free spirited 20 something with $1000 a month left over to party, etc...which is like $1000 more than you'd ever thought you'd have in high school"

Did you learn to budget from a brochure at McDonald's?

You've just taken a hypothetical average salary, deducted a hypothetical student loan payment, pulled a hypothetical number for rent out of your ass, and declared the remaining $1000 to be "left over to party".

Food.

Gas or transit.

Clothes.

Health insurance.

Utilities.

And myriad other expenses of living.

Look, we get it. You hate young people. But your stream-of-consciousness dump of statistics is pissing in the wind of the very real economic storm that is sweeping away folks like the unregistered @43 (who is well worth a read, much more so than Bailo's nonsense).

As to @38:

"Maybe younger folks should quit wanting things like houses and new cars and get on with their lives."

You arrogant little shit. When you and I were young, getting a new car and a house was what we called getting on with our lives. Thank you for the breathtaking example of the "Fuck you Jack, I've got mine" mentality of the modern conservative.

History of Federal Minimum Wage Rates Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938 - 2009

http://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/chart.htm

That is the wage at the bottom of the pyramid. Look at the rates of increase over different periods of time.

Do the math yourself, decide if the current rate of return is sufficient to hold up the pyramid or if it is turning to sand.

It's a technology issue - way back when there was far less media out there and it cost more. Now I just spent my media consumption time reading a couple pages of pretty interesting comments for free. Media's free and everybody makes it - we need journalists for the good of society but the market does what it does. I say get a different job not with a sneer but a gentle smile.

I'm sad to see the age wars here, but I suppose it's natural. The one lucky thing about being my age (which is old) is that although some of us are poor, we don't have college debt.

Someone way up above said "the creatives". I hope never to read that again.

Pure pure projection from smugfaced idiots who lucked into an undeserved writing career.

Kid, mow my lawn.

@45 It was under President Reagan that the minimum wage was decoupled from CPI-U, essentially leaving it in the dust as inflation accelerated.

@Supreme Ruler:

Your math is wrong, because the "average student debt" looks at EVERYONE who has gone to college, which includes a larger number of people who went prior to the 2000s.

50 million college grads went to college before 2000, when it was super cheap and have 0 debt, but the 25 million who have graduated SINCE 2000 with debt over 100,000, its going to lean lower.

Right here in Washington, look at tuition prices. 13k a year at the U, 12k at WSU, and between 10 and 11k at eastern,western,central. That comes out to 60-70k after 4 years. NOT including cost of living during that time. So its not a shock that graduates are leaving with 100k in debt.

Telling people "maybe you should all major in STEM/Engineering" is a joke. If they did, then those industries would simply be over inflated and you would be telling them "you should have majored in english/communications"

The corollary is, despite not being "special or entitled" and being "poor", this guy has a forum at least - unlike most non-special, unentitled poor americans.

I'd be interested to find out exactly how poor this fellow actually is. As a two-time Jeopardy winner, he's probably won more prize money than half of the world will live on over a decade. His education at US Naval Academy, Florida State, and graduate school at Columbia is worth probably over $500,000. Etc. Either his family paid for that, or it was simply given to him. What a fucking ingrate. He got to rub the magic lamp and all it gave him was a lifestyle that was slightly below the average in the richest nation that ever was.

I don't give a crap if Weinstein "feels" poor; it's obvious that he feels he's entitled to SOMETHING more than he has.

@54 >implying he doesn't deserve something more than he has.