Getting ahead gets harder
Straitened circumstances are becoming more familiar to those in their 20s and 30s as they try to get a foothold on the American Dream. Student loans, depressed wages, rising healthcare costs and soaring housing prices are creating new economic realities. Sixty percent of young adults between 18 and 34 are struggling for financial independence, says [Tamara] Draut, now the director of the economic opportunity program at Demos, a think tank in New York. She is also the author of a new book, "Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead."We don't have any debt at the moment, but we sure can't seem to progress very far either...
"What made the transition to adulthood somewhat less bumpy 30 years ago was that we had an economy that lifted all boats," she says. "When productivity was increasing, so were wages. We don't have that today. Wages certainly aren't keeping up with the cost of things like healthcare and housing."
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Very often, social observers say, young adults living on the financial edge view their situation as simply their own fault.
"We're so individualistic," says Deborah Thorne, a sociologist at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. "We see this as an individual problem, and then we look to the individual for the solution. The fact is, these are national problems and they require a national solution. But this is just not on the radar of politicians. It's not an issue with which they concern themselves. But it's the issue the American family is concerned with."
Young people, Draut says, feel that many Americans are doing very well. "You see Hummers on the highway, McMansions being built. It's extremely frustrating and confusing for young adults who are living paycheck to paycheck and with five- figure student-loan debts to see young families living in million-dollar houses."
Parents are also confused. "A lot of parents don't understand why their kids haven't accomplished the traditional markers of adulthood that they did -- buying a home, starting a family, living without debt," Draut says. "I don't think there's an awareness of how much the economic context has changed."
I don't know if I would say that everything was great 30 years ago, though. It's not like my parents were driving new cars and living in a huge house.
2 comments:
You'd think that this would be a perfect "study" to link with that other one they did awhile back that said kids in their 20's these days are less driven than their parents were to get out there on their own, oftentimes leaving the nest later, picking up part time jobs or not working at all, and overall being more "lazy" than their parents.
Think of some people you know in their early 20's - there's quite a few out there that fit that bill. I could even be perceived to be one, in certain respects. My weekend rituals aren't something that a responsible adult would be doing as often as I do.
We're a different kind of twenty-somethings than the ones that came before us. There are a lot of factors: games, plastic surgery (it seems odd, doesn't it? But television and everything else has made it a pretty identifiable part of our culture), the internet in general - but if you look at it right, 30 might really be the "new 20". Like we're all just taking another ten years to find ourselves and commit ourselves to a job that'll pay the bills - security - all of that.
Blaming it all on the economy is rather silly. There's trade skills a fellow can get if he's ready to get into a career and stay in it. Our generation in general wants things to be exactly how we want them. Heather doesn't want to field customer service calls, for instance. I don't want to work anywhere near the food industry.
If we HAD to have money to pay for something, we'd take care of it. And there's plenty of work out there, should we finally decide that it's time to get off our asses and make some money.
I think both arguments here have valid points, but to say we're the lazy generation is wrong. I work as hard as any in my family ever has, yet I'm still far behind in the game of being where I want to be financially. I think it's just symptomatic of living in an increasingly digital age, where with the click of a button you can apply for a credit card(wether you're in high school or not), and we're in the time of any age's growth where the class division is starting to get painfully wide. It'll be interesting to see if this gap rips into a civil uprising, I think the determining factor will be if we're really the laziest generation of humans to ever exist, or, if we're just accepting being told we are...
And yes, maybe I'm just looking for an excuse to shoot at rich people while burning down their 'McMansions' (that's the best term I've heard in a while), but, any way about it I think our generation's collective financial situation is something someone is going to have to deal with soon, or our kids are going to be making us petty cash loans when we retire. :P
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