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The Very Serious People All Agree: Millennials Suck

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In the last few years, there have been a slew of articles all managing, in one way or another, to disparage and malign millennials. From the NPR articles engaging in controlled hand-wringing about how the economy needs millenials to buy the cars and houses that they aren't buying, to articles about how millennials are having kids without marriage as a matter of course (gasp!), or worse, don't want kids at all (scandal!) and are leaving the church in droves, all the Very Serious People agree that millennials are all-around terrible human beings who would rather go back to living in their parents' basement after college instead of becoming Highly-Responsible Adults with grown-up jobs. Even other millennials have jumped on the millennial-hate bandwagon, feeling it their place to tell us all to just grow up already! Millennials are deeply entitled, and may not even be "cut out" for today's job market, the Very Serious People decree, after having been coddled by their parents with trophies in youth sports "just for showing up."

A rare bit of good press for millennials

The Very Serious People all seem to agree that whatever the problem is, millennials are the issue, being waifs who are a drag on our economy. They nod solemnly, safe in their own jobs, content that the root of all the country's problems has been clearly identified. But the Very Serious People exhibit the most curious myopia. 

They neglect entirely an economy that has been particularly hard on the young. Millennials are encountering a rate of unemployment far higher than the national average, around 15%. The Very Serious People often fail to mention this, and the fact that it wasn't millennials whose risky bets on Wall Street helped wreck the economy in the first place. Those with college degrees are graduating into a poor employment situation with unprecedented debt on top of this. Thanks in no small part because the Very Serious People were quite sure that we had to cut funding for higher education, over 48 states in the last few years alone reduced levels of state funding, on top of decades of declining state support for public education, and student loan debt has topped a trillion dollars. This debt, of course, cannot be discharged in bankruptcy and will follow the debtor even after death. And while it is easy to say that college kids should just get a job if they want less debt, the unemployment numbers point to a reality that the Very Serious People work very hard to ignore, namely that with high unemployment, even minimum wage jobs aren't an option for many millennials, as the average age of someone working minimum wage is now 35. 

So while I'm sure many of us millennials would like to buy a house, a new car, and get married with a pricey ceremony, declining wages, high unemployment, and rising cost of basics like rent mean that we have less money to even meet basic needs, much less save for retirement or for a down payment on a house. The Very Serious People might realize that, if they gave it more than a moment's thought. But, after all, it is easy to blame millennials for everything that's wrong. The alternative to blaming millennials is harder and less satisfying. It requires that the Very Serious People who write editorials and blogs blaming millennials look in a mirror to see who is really to blame for everything they think is wrong about millennials, and who would want to do that?
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