The first cliche to do worse than its parents

Commiserating with a friend the other day, a young journalist just getting started in her career and worried about her prospects, she lamented that her generation, the millennials, was expected to be the first to do worse than their parents. Whatever we call them -- some are calling them "Generation Z" , while others are calling them Generation R, for Recession -- you don't have to look far for examples of this lament.

Here's a line from a 2011 issue of Unlimited Magazine: "There’s a lot of speculation that Generation Me, the Millenials, will be the first generation to do worse than their parents, because they’ve always been provided for. They don’t have anything driving them to do better."

A Joe Queenan column from a 2010 Wall Street Journal: "Economists theorize that this may be that very rarest of things: a generation that does not do as well financially as the generation that spawned it."

My friend Jason Kirby used it in 2009 for Maclean's. Here's Anya Kamenitz, discussing her 2007 book Generation Debt: "The whole premise of Generation Debt the book is, you know, what does it mean to be part of this generation, the first generation that's going to do worse than our parents did."

But maybe it isn't Millennials who are so cursed.  From a 1999 edition of the Atlantic: " In fact, Xers may well be the first generation whose lifetime earnings will be less than their parents'."

I knew I'd heard it somewhere before. "The first generation to do worse than their parents." It's a line from Douglas Coupland's Generation X, published in 1991. It was my bible; I used that line as an excuse for not getting a job the summer I graduated into the deepest recession in Canada in a decade. Unsurprisingly, Bill Clinton used the line when he announced his run for president in 1991: "I refuse to stand by and let our children become part of the first generation to do worse than their parents".

But hold the phone, Xers! Put down that copy of Trainspotting! You don't have a monopoly on intergenerational indignation. Here's a line from a 1980 Newsweek report on "An Economic Dream in Peril": 

"And no longer do Americans share the great expectations of generations past. For the first time, public-opinion polls show that the average U.S. citizen is not at all sure that his children's lot will be better than – or even as good as – his own."

But at least we can agree on one thing: Whoever is doing worse, the baby boomers made out like bandits. Since they drank everyone's milkshake in the sixties and seventies, every generation since has been doing crappier and crappier. Right? Surely we can get all Soylent Green on the people who gave us Freedom 55 and Zoomer magazine?

Maybe not. According to the March 2011 New York Times: "The baby boomers will be the first generation that will do worse in retirement than their parents."

 

Welcome to the Occupation

In many ways, the most remarkable thing about the global Occupy Wall Street (#OWS) protests is that they haven’t happened sooner. It has been a full decade since the anti-globalization movement imploded in a mess of its own internal contradictions, and I am honestly surprised that left has taken so long to self-organize into another mass protest movement. I would have expected that the knee-capping of the world economy three years ago and the subsequent decision to make everyone except those primarily responsible bear the brunt of the pain would have catalyzed some sort of march on the plutocracy. 

Perhaps the left was biding its time waiting to see what Obama might bring to the table.  Perhaps it was wrong-footed by the Tea Party, which stole a march on the whole idea by taking to the streets from from the other side. Maybe it was still too busy with the wrong-headed troops-out campaign against the war in Afghanistan. And maybe this is exactly the sort of unrest that lots of smart people have predicting would be the consequence of unchecked growth in inequality. At any rate, no one should be too surprised at what is going on: by the mere swing of the pendulum, we were due for a gathering of the left-wing tribes.

Overall,  my views on the usefulness of this sort of protest have not changed much since The Rebel Sell. But my general disdain is leavened in this case by three thoughts. The first is that inequality is a growing problem that all of us need to pay more attention to. And second: to the extent that inequality is magnified by a financial elite that has effectively discovered a way to game the American banking system, then Wall Street is the right and proper target of mass protest.

But finally, and maybe primarily, I'm increasingly inclined to think that regular mass public gatherings are useful for their own sake. Since Canadian prime ministers both Liberal (Jean Chretien: APEC Vancouver 1997) and Conservative (Stephen Harper: G20 Toronto, 2010) have no problem spitting on the constitution and unleashing the full and illegal power of the state against protesters when it suits them, it is probably valuable to assert the right to freedom of assembly pretty much whenever it pleases, for whatever reason at all. 

With that throat-clearing out of the way, here are some pieces  -- some by me, some by people a lot smarter than me – that I think help put the protests in a wider intellectual frame.

An essay by Joe Heath on why the banks didn’t actually go crazy.

An article I wrote last year for Canadian Business on the hard problem of inequality, and a follow up blog post exploring why it’s even harder than I thought.

Trent history prof Robert Wright situates the #OWS movement within the longer traditions of left-wing popular protest.

A column by me for the Ottawa Citizen on what it will take for the protests to be successful.

An excellent analysis by the economics professor Mike Moffat on why the 99 percent don’t really want to fix inequality.

 A thinkier sort of column I wrote on why governments are suddenly so keen to talk about happiness instead of economic growth.

Finally, I'm quoted in this story for the Canadian Press about the intellectual origins of #OWS. And Joe Heath gets a look-in at the end of this story about how Mark Carney called the protests constructive.



Welcome to the desert of the young

From silver jumpsuits to feather-haired space-babes, seventies sci-fi got the future wrong in any number of ways. But perhaps the most laughable prediction is that western society would suffer from gross overpopulation, which would force us to either euthanise anyone except the young (e.g. Logan's Run), or turn the extra people into food (e.g. Soylent Green). What has come to pass is something far more sinister, viz., a nearly child-free gerontocracy where the entire productive capacity of society is directed towards the needs of the aged, while children are hounded from the streets and playgrounds by Baby Boomers in search of late-model forms of self-actualization.

You don't have to live in Japan to see where things are headed; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada will do just fine. Last week was back-to-school – which once was celebrated as the time when the fruit of our collective loins would go off to play and learn and generally become socialized into our cultural norms, so that they could grow up and get jobs and have kids and keep us in our own, inevitable dotage. But in Ottawa, a group of sour-faced old-timers decided that the mere sight of children on their way to school was an affront to their preferred lifestyle.

The residents of Farincourt Crescent, an “adult lifestyle” housing development in the city's east end, were outraged at the parade of school buses (NINE of them!) that used the crescent each day. No kids were being picked up mind you, they were just turning around. One of the residents, Pat Carriere, had this to say:

“We feel that as an adult lifestyle community we should be allowed that peace of mind,” Carriere said. “Our children are grown up, we’ve lived through this.”

But Carriere insists that her group does not want to be seen as anti-child. Not at all:

“We don’t want to be seen as crotchety old grey-haired people,” she said. “We bought into this lifestyle. We paid extra money for it and we feel we deserve our peace and quiet now.”

Except that's the precise definition of being anti-child, namely, that you will pay money to keep them out of sight, and are willing to even picket the buses to keep them off your street. Even if that street is actually a public roadway, as Farincourt Crescent is.

My colleague at the Ottawa Citizen, David Reevely, thinks that while the anti-kid sentiment is unpleasant, perhaps the city should try to find some way of meeting the demands of the adult-lifestyle crowd. I'm not so sure. The demographic crisis that we are heading into is probably the single most serious problem that we face. The view that kids are just another lifestyle choice, and one favoured by an unpleasant minority at that, is one that needs to be cut off at the knees.

As our population ages, we are becoming extraordinarily risk averse. To see this in action, go to any playground and watch the helicopter parents hovering around Schuyler and Banjo as they bump their kiddie bike helmets against the soft sand of the playground. Increasingly, this deep-seated aversion to risk is permeating the culture, with entrepreneurialism and adventurousness giving way to a fixation on comfort and security. People approaching retirement are less keen on long-term or volatile investments, and to the extent that the economy of the future will be built on creativity, flexibility and innovation, the absence of high-risk venture capital will make us more rigid and brittle. Eventually, our entire social infrastructure will tilt toward the needs of the elderly; spend an hour watching the ads on the CBC and you can see that soon enough the only growth industries will be life insurance, reverse mortagages, and cures for erectile dysfunction and incontinence.

By mid-century, this continent will be a de facto gerontocracy. For the few children who do manage to make an appearance, living here will be like one long visit to grandma and grandpa's house. Remember what that was like? All the attention was nice, and it was fun to get a handful of sweets or a ride in the old clunker.

But the place smelled a bit strange, and the environment was really not all that welcoming to kids. Fun as it was, it was always a relief to leave. Where the kids of 2050 will escape to, when the whole country is one big retirement village, is anyone's guess.