Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Kids These Days
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
Sources say he lives in both Philadelphia and Brooklyn.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2012083542 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2012083542 |
| HEADING: | Harris, Malcolm |
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| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca09228262 |
| 040 | __ |a TnLvILS |b eng |e rda |c TnLvILS |d DLC |
| 046 | __ |f 1988 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Harris, Malcolm |
| 375 | __ |a male |
| 377 | __ |a eng |
| 670 | __ |a Share or die, c2012: |b t.p. (Malcolm Harris) p. 4 of cover (Contributing editor to Shareable.net and The new inquiry) |
| 670 | __ |a Kids these days, 2018: |b eCIP t.p. (Malcolm Harris) data view screen (b. 1988; columnist for Pacific Standard and an Editor of The New Inquiry; his work has appeared in The New Republic, Bookforum, the Village Voice, and The New York Times Magazine. He lives in Philadelphia) |
PERSONAL
Born 1988.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and freelance writer.
WRITINGS
Contributing editor for New Inquiry and Shareable.net. Also contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times Magazine, Pacific Standard, Village Voice, Bookforum, and New Republic.
SIDELIGHTS
Malcolm Harris is most well known for his work as a writer. He has published numerous pieces in such periodicals as New York Times Magazine and New Republic, and also services as The New Inquiry‘s editor. He has also released two books.
Share or Die
Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis, the first of Harris’s books, is meant to shed light on how today’s members of “Generation Y” conduct their lives on a day to day basis. Several other writers contributed to the book, which was co-edited by Neal Gorenflo. In describing how they carry out their lives, many of the writers featured in the book also impart their views on the state of the world and how their generation has cultivated its own culture in response to it. The title of the book itself, Share or Die, reflects the worldview shared by several of its featured writers. Namely, the act of sharing what one has increases the odds of survival and generally makes the world a much better place to inhabit. Harris devotes his portion of the book to discussing the harm that exorbitant student loans place on young people, especially once they leave school and begin their adult lives.
Frank Kaminski, a reviewer on the Resilience website, remarked: “Share or Die represents a compelling account of the hardships faced by young people today.” He also said that “the book excels as a practical reference.”
Kids These Days
Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials deals with a similar topic: the socio political and economic situations of today’s Millennial generation, and how their circumstances came to influence the polls for the Democratic candidates. One of the major points Harris addresses during his investigation of the Millennial generation is how they have been shortchanged by the educational system, which should qualify them for much higher economic success than they have actually achieved. According to Harris, everything that was promised to Millennials when they were young has become uncertain or, at best, much more difficult to obtain than it was for older generations. Many Millennials are forced to accept jobs far outside of their chosen field and with salaries that leave them unable to adequately support themselves. Much of the work Millennials can find asks them to perform excessive amounts of work for very little reward. On top of this, they must also contend with high amounts of debt from student loans, which they must pay back while also trying to fend for themselves in terms of basic survival.
To strengthen his point, Harris tells the stories of several members of his generation, all of which span across different age groups and have been affected by the current state of society in various ways. Some have managed to find success, while others are still struggling under the weight of their responsibilities. Reason contributor Robby Soave commented that the book is “a worthy snapshot of life as a not-so-fragile snowflake, and it provides plenty of fodder for outraged anti-statists of both leftist and libertarian varieties.” One Kirkus Reviews writer said that Harris “provides an informative study of why the millennial generation faces more struggles than expected, despite the hard work they’ve invested in moving ahead.” In an issue of Booklist, Raymond Pun recommended the book to “readers interested in sociology of class, economic history.” New Statesman reviewer Houman Barekat felt that “the book is coherently argued and persuasive.” On the Los Angeles Review of Books website, Jacqui Shine remarked: “Some of the analysis in Kids These Days is pretty impressive.” She added: “The highlight of the book is its admirably lucid précis of higher education, the student debt crisis, and the institutional wealth accumulation it fuels.” Financial Times reviewer Yohann Koshy wrote: “Malcolm Harris restores a good deal of precision to the business of defining the millennial and generational discourse in general.” Bradley Babendir, a writer on the WBUR The Artery website, called the book “smart and provocative.”
On the Humanist website, Mark Dunbar remarked: “Kids These Days should be read by anyone who agrees with Harris that there’s no escaping responsibility: things either stay the same or we change them.” Forward contributor Daniel Witkin commented: “The central achievement of “Kids These Days” is its detailing of how the many institutions that shape American lives have been transformed by the neoliberal pivot of both major American political parties towards the free market.” Natasha Lennard, writing on the Dissent Magazine website, stated: “Readers might disagree with Harris’s views, but it is his analysis, not his conclusions, that make the book significant.” Billboard website reviewer Nicole Dieker expressed that “Kids These Days is full of those kinds of sentences — the mind-blowing ones that flip your understanding of the world just slightly.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 15, 2017, Raymond Pun, review of Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, p. 4.
California Bookwatch, August, 2012, review of Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2017, review of Kids These Days.
New Statesman, November 10, 2017, Houman Barekat, “Generation vexed,” review of Kids These Days, p. 44.
Publishers Weekly, July 31, 2017, review of Kids These Days, p. 71.
Reason, February, 2018, Robby Soave, “Goodbye, Millenniais: Get off our lawn,” review of Kids These Days, p. 66.
Washington Post, January 5, 2018, Stephanie Mehta, “Book World: Busting the myths about millennials,” review of Kids These Days.
ONLINE
Billfold, https://www.thebillfold.com/ (January 11, 2018), Nicole Dieker, “Kids These Days: A Billfold Book Review,” review of Kids These Days.
Claire Griffin Talent, http://clairegriffintalent.com/ (May 21, 2013), Claire Griffin, “Interview with Malcolm Harris, coeditor of ‘Share or Die, Voices of the Lost Generation in The Age of Crisis,'” author interview.
Dissent Magazine, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/ (April 25, 2018), Natasha Lennard, “The Kids Aren’t Alright,” review of Kids These Days.
Fast Company, https://www.fastcompany.com/ (December 21, 2011), Jody Turner, “For Millennials, Work And Life Are About Cooperation, Not Competition,” author interview.
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (November 3, 2017), Yohann Koshy, “Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris — no free brunch,” review of Kids These Days.
Forward, https://forward.com/ (December 17, 2017), Daniel Witkin, “Are Millennials Tomorrow’s Revolutionaries — Or Its Fascists?,” review of Kids These Days.
Humanist, https://thehumanist.com/ (January 3, 2018), Mark Dunbar, review of Kids These Days.
Los Angeles Review of Books , https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (November 26, 2017), Jacqui Shine, “Won’t Get Fooled Again: Malcolm Harris’s ‘Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials,'” review of Kids These Days.
Inside Higher Ed, https://www.insidehighered.com/ (July 27, 2011), Scott McLemee, “Youth in Recession,” author interview.
Little, Brown and Company Website, https://www.littlebrown.com/ (April 25, 2018), author profile.
n+1, https://nplusonemag.com/ (April 25, 2018), Gabriel Winant, “Not Every Kid-Bond Matures,” review of Kids These Days.
Resilience, http://www.resilience.org/ (January 10, 2013), Frank Kaminski, review of Share or Die.
Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (January 5, 2018), Stephanie Mehta, “Knocking down generalizations about the millennial generation,” review of Kids These Days.
WBUR The Artery, http://www.wbur.org/ (November 7, 2017), Bradley Babendir, “‘Kids These Days‘ Convinces You That Millennials Aren’t Ruining Everything,” review of Kids These Days.
Wealth of the Commons, http://wealthofthecommons.org/ (April 25, 2018), Neal Gorenflo, “Share or Die – A Challenge for Our Times.”
Malcolm Harris
Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and an editor at The New Inquiry. His work has appeared in the New Republic, Bookforum, the Village Voice, n+1, and the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Philadelphia.
Goodbye, Millenniais: Get off our
lawn
Robby Soave
Reason.
49.9 (Feb. 2018): p66+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Reason Foundation http://reason.com/about
Full Text:
"IN SHORT: MILLENNIALS are over," Taylor Lorenz wrote in BuzzFeed in October. "It was fun while it lasted. But like a slice of avocado toast left too long in the sun, our cultural relevance has begun to rot."
The year 2018, Lorenz argues, will be the year the media obsession with the selfie generation (birth dates: roughly 1982 through 1999) finally fades.
Arriving during this transition period between millen-nialism and whatever comes next is Kids These Days, Malcolm Harris' thoughtful and deeply researched portrait of the cultural, political, and economic factors that shaped the millennial generation. In his telling, it's not a pretty picture: Millennials are anxious, depressed, and above all financially screwed by an American system that increasingly produces rampant economic inequality. There's plenty right with this thesis, even if the message is marred by the author's need to blame everything on capitalism.
To understand the book, it's helpful to know some things about Harris. First, he is a millennial. The cover of the book proudly notes its author was born in 1988, the veritable eye of the millennial storm. (Note: The author of this review was born in 1988, too.) Harris is also an ardent leftist, of the anarchist variety, who first came to national attention as a leader of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. Harris became known for stunts; he tricked several news outlets into thinking the band Radiohead was going to perform at Zuccotti Park, for example, later admitting his involvement in the hoax to Gawker. He was also among the Occupiers arrested for marching across the Brooklyn Bridge in defiance of police orders.
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But there's little of Harris' characteristic mischief making in Kids These Days, which suggests the author, like the generation he represents, may have finally grown up. Instead, the book is filled with charts and data to support his claims about the average millennial's less-than-ideal quality of life. Depression rates have increased "1,000 percent over the past century," writes Harris, "with around half of that growth occurring since the late 1980s." It's no wonder they're depressed, he continues: They were sold a raw deal. They worked hard at school, drilled relentlessly to pass their college entrance exams, borrowed massive sums of money to afford university tuition, and then discovered that the promised reward--a well-paying job--was by no means guaranteed.
"Higher education is, in addition to many other things, an economic regime that extracts increasingly absurd amounts of money from millions of young people's as-yet-unperformed labor," writes Harris. "For anyone who takes out a student loan--and that's two-thirds of students--succeeding at contemporary American childhood now means contracting out hours, days, years of their future work to the government, with no way to escape the consequences of what is barely a decision in the first place."
Harris is as disparaging of primary education as he is of higher ed. He castigates helicopter parenting, zero-tolerance school discipline, and other trends that discourage kids from enjoying childhood. "The result is a generation of children with an unprecedented lack of unsupervised time who have been systematically denied the chance to build selves without adult oversight," he writes in a passage that could have come straight from the pen of Reason's resident free-range mom, Lenore Skenazy. Childhood is "no longer a time to make mistakes; now it's when bad choices have the biggest impact."
Harris is refreshingly frank about the role government itself has played in making life miserable for his generation. He dedicates an entire chapter to misguided federal policies, backed by both Republicans and Democrats, that have contributed to the rat race of millennial life.
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These include the Common Core standards, a federally supported effort to uniformly focus K-12 classrooms on herding all kids into college; mass incarceration, which disproportionately affects young people of color; and even Social Security, a welfare scheme that currently benefits older Americans but is being funded by millennials. Harris notes that although most millennials support the existence of Social Security, a majority expect never to see a dime when the time comes for them to retire. "Whether it's generosity of spirit, utilitarian analysis, or plain old resignation, the so-called entitled generation doesn't even feel entitled to our own entitlements," he writes.
These are all worthy observations. But Harris' thesis starts to come apart when he tries to lay these sins at the altar of capitalism. It is the relentless pursuit of profits, he says, that has created a world in which millennials are barely scraping by. Competition is killing us all, from the high schooler managing 18 different extracurricular activities in the hopes of getting in to Harvard and Yale to the Adderall-addicted 20-something pulling an all-nighter while studying for the LSAT, from the would-be teenage YouTube sensation maintaining eight social media accounts to the underemployed Starbucks barista drowning in student loan debt.
"The rate of change is visibly unsustainable," writes Harris. "The profiteers call this process 'disruption,' while commentators on the left generally call it 'neoliberalism' or 'late capitalism.' Millennials know it better as 'the world,' or 'America,' or 'Everything.' And Everything sucks."
But neoliberalism didn't cause the student loan crisis; the federal government's policy of subsidizing student loans did that. It isn't free market competition driving up tuition rates: Multiple studies, including a 2015 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, have found that federal loan programs are mostly responsible. It was the government, not business, that started jailing parents for letting their kids walk to school or play in the park by themselves. And schools aren't suspending more low-income minority kids because of capitalism; they're
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doing it because legislators codified mandatory suspensions into law and threw money at schools to hire more cops.
Plus, while generational fatalism is alluring and occasionally justified, not everything sucks. Millennials have lower drunk driving rates, for instance, and we engage in less risky sex. Harris is cognizant of some of the more positive trends affecting millennials--he notes several of them in the book--but his outlook nonetheless remains incredibly negative throughout.
These anti-capitalist currents keep Kids These Days from becoming truly essential reading for chroniclers of the millennial generation. But it's still a worthy snapshot of life as a not-so-fragile snowflake, and it provides plenty of fodder for outraged anti-statists of both leftist and libertarian varieties.
Associate Editor ROBBY SOAVE, a 2017-2018 Novak Fellow at the Fund for American Studies, is the author of a forthcoming book about campus activism in the age of Trump.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Soave, Robby. "Goodbye, Millenniais: Get off our lawn." Reason, Feb. 2018, p. 66+. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522210615/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=e63d7c8d. Accessed 16 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A522210615
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Harris, Malcolm: KIDS THESE DAYS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Harris, Malcolm KIDS THESE DAYS Little, Brown (Adult Nonfiction) $25.00 11, 7 ISBN: 978-0-316-51086-8
A millennial writer talks about the coming crises his generation will face.Millennials--defined by the author as those born between 1980 and 2000--have been sold on the idea that if they work hard in school, forfeiting play and creative time for work and sports, and go on to a four-year college, where they continue to work hard, then a solid, well-paying job awaits them once they graduate. But as Harris (b. 1988), an editor at New Inquiry, points out, many in that age group have discovered there is no pot of gold at the end of that particular rainbow. In today's competitive economy, he writes, "young households trail further behind in wealth than ever before, and while a small number of hotshot finance pros and app developers rake in big bucks...wages have stagnated and unemployment increased for the rest." Those who manage to attend college are often burdened by high student-loan debts, forcing them to work any job they can to pay the bills. Athletes who attend college on a sports scholarship pay with the physical wear and tear on their bodies and the stress of high-stakes games alongside a full academic schedule. Harris also evaluates how millennials interact with social media (a topic that could warrant an entire book on its own), which creates a never-ending link to nearly everything every day, never giving anyone a chance to unwind. Professional musicians, actors, and other performing artists face strong competition in a world where anyone can upload a video to YouTube, so those with genuine talent have to work that much harder for recognition. After his intense analysis of this consumer-based downward spiral, the author provides several possible remedies that might ease the situation--but only if millennials step forward now and begin the process of change. Harris still has plenty to learn, but he provides an informative study of why the millennial generation faces more struggles than expected, despite the hard work they've invested in moving ahead.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Harris, Malcolm: KIDS THESE DAYS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217509/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=1dc3220f. Accessed 16 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504217509
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Kids These Days: Human Capital and
the Making of Millennials
Raymond Pun
Booklist.
114.4 (Oct. 15, 2017): p4. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials. By Malcolm Harris. Nov. 2017.272p. Little, Brown, $25 (9780316510868); e-book, $13.99 (9780316510875). 331.
Harris, writer and editor for the New Inquiry, contributor to numerous other publications, and a millennial himself, attempts to deconstruct the stereotypes about millennials--that they are entitled, immature, and worse--in his first book. Harris draws on a variety of sources to capture the voices and experiences of millennials. Addressing millennial realities from unpaid internships to social-media algorithms, Harris writes clearly and thoughtfully on key issues facing this generation today. This is not a self-help book for those who are trying to adapt into the millennial culture but, rather, a book that reveals the political, cultural, and economic climates that millennials need to navigate, along with the new issues, never seen in previous generations, millennials must address. Readers interested in sociology of class, economic history, and the millennial generation will find plenty of fascinating food for thought here, as Harris uses social theories, economic analyses, and data research to prove his argument that millennials are "the hardest working and most educated generation in American history."--Raymond Pun
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pun, Raymond. "Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials." Booklist, 15
Oct. 2017, p. 4. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512776010 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=8c665fbf. Accessed 16 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A512776010
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Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials
Publishers Weekly.
264.31 (July 31, 2017): p71. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials Malcolm Harris. Little, Brown, $25 (272p)
ISBN 978-0-316-51086-8
American millennial--roughly speaking, those born between 1980 and 2000--are arguably the nation's best educated generation ever, but also one with the unfortunate distinction of having come of age just as the American dream was beginning to fade. Harris, a New Inquiry editor and millennial, contends that the rich human capital (as demonstrated by high GPAs, AP classes, enrichment courses, advanced degrees) his generation represents has been exploited by educational institutions and employers. What awaits millennials is precarious employment, student debt, and global warming, rather than the suburban McMansions and ever-increasing salaries their labor was supposed to secure. Harris makes powerful points: health insurance, pension plans, job security--the American laborer's one-time birthrights--are no longer guaranteed. And yet throughout the book, Harris seems to assume that millennials are somehow entitled to a risk-free return on every human-capital investment they make. He focuses on how interns, student-athletes, and even grade-school students doing homework perform demanding but unpaid labor. Harris gives the off putting impression that he expects nearly everything in life to be remunerative. Readers will come away agreeing that millennials have gotten a raw deal but unconvinced that they represent the new proletariat. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, Gernert Agency. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
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"Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials." Publishers Weekly, 31 July 2017, p. 71. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499863446 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=dce03639. Accessed 16 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499863446
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Share or Die
California Bookwatch.
(Aug. 2012): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2012 Midwest Book Review http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
Share or Die
Malcolm Harris with Neal Gorenflo
New Society Publishers
PO Box 189
Gabriola Island, BC, Canada, V0R 1X0 9780865717107, $14.95, www.newsociety.com
SHARE OR DIE: VOICES OF THE GET LOST GENERATION IN THE AGE OF CRISIS belongs in any social science collection where activism is a key topic, and provides a call to action revolving not just around resource depletion or vanishing jobs, but to finding common practices needed to build a meaningful life. Nearly 40 essays, personal narratives, cartoons and how-to provide a fine guide to navigating the new economy based on collaboration and cooperation instead of competition, and is a fine pick for any collection strong in social activism and community planning.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Share or Die." California Bookwatch, Aug. 2012. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A300885889/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=3664352a. Accessed 16 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A300885889
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Generation vexed
Houman Barekat
New Statesman.
146.5392 (Nov. 10, 2017): p44+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd. http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Kids These Days Malcolm Harris
Little, Brown, 261pp. $25 iGen
Jean M Twenge
Atria, 352pp, 18.99 [pound sterling]
It is the lot of each generation to be frowned upon by its elders, but the opprobrium routinely heaped upon millennials is something else. Barely a week goes by without some solemn think piece disparaging their chai-latte-guzzling, social-media-gorging ways, their fecklessness and narcissism. In a timely new book, the Philadelphia-based journalist Malcolm Harris issues a robust rebuttal of these stereotypes. Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials contends that, far from being being lazy and coddled, millennials--broadly defined as the generation that came of age in the first decade of the 2000s--are being systematically ripped
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off and overworked.
Harris, who was born in 1988, is an editor with the left-wing online journal The New Inquiry and was heavily involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Here he spotlights a historic rupture in the meritocratic social contract that has governed American economic life for decades--the idea that if you work hard you will be rewarded.
"By every metric," he writes, "this generation is the most educated in American history, yet Millennials are worse off economically than their parents, grandparents, and even great- grandparents." The higher education loans system saddles graduates with so much debt that many end up poorer, in terms of net income, than their noncollege educated counterparts. (Harris notes that the lion's share of revenues from tuition fee hikes goes towards a burgeoning stratum of managerial workers, rather than teaching staff.) They are then served up to the mercies of an employment market that has changed beyond all recognition since the baby boomers' heyday. The term "precarity" was, until recently, largely confined to academia. It is aesthetically unlovely and spellcheck still rejects it, but as a signifier for the casualisation of labour in the 21st century it is probably here to stay:
Precarity means that jobs are less secure,
based on at-will rather than fixed-duration
contracts; it means unreliable
hours and the breakdown between the
workday and the rest of an employee's
time; it means taking on the intense
responsibility of "good" jobs alongside
the shoddy compensation and lack of
respect that come with "bad" jobs; it
means workers doing more with less,
and employers getting more for less.
The pressures of economic competition are producing a mental health epidemic, exacerbated by the overprescription of drugs for hyperactivity or depression. It is this blend of material insecurity and chronic fretfulness--rather than a penchant for avocado toast or hook-up apps--that truly defines the Zeitgeist. Indeed, millennials are statistically better behaved than baby boomers when it comes to partaking of drink, drugs, sex and crime. "Far from being the carefree space cadets the media likes to depict us as, Millennials are cagey and anxious," Harris insists. The alleged narcissism of young people's social media habits needs to be seen in this light to be properly understood--it's not escapist lassitude but hyper-conscious, high-stakes engagement with the world.
At times, Harris interprets the data a little myopically to fit his thesis. For example, he cites a substantial diminution in theft and violent attacks in schools as evidence that existing school disciplinary regimes are unnecessarily heavy-handed, though one might just as easily claim the statistic demonstrates their efficacy. For the most part, however, the book is coherently argued and persuasive. Though it is exclusively focused on the US, many of its insights can be applied to the UK. The rise of Corbynism has been, at least in part, a response to the conditions Harris laments; conversely, the Tory party's ongoing failure to deliver on its ideological mission of
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creating a "property-owning democracy" threatens to erode its electoral credibility. People are increasingly coming to the conclusion that the game is rigged against them, and mainstream politics must address this or face the consequences.
Harris, still in his twenties, is standing up for his peers. By contrast, Jean Twenge, a fortysomething psychology professor at San Diego State University, approaches contemporary culture with precisely the kind of needling solicitude you might expect from someone whose previous books have titles such as Generation Me and The Narcissism Epidemic. The demographic purview of her latest book, iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood and What That Means for the Rest of Us, is narrower than Harris's: she focuses on those born between 1995 and 2012, the first generation not to have known life before the internet. Twenge draws on data comparing shifts in social attitudes from one generation to the next, alongside interviews she has conducted with young Americans, to paint a picture of the cohort she calls "iGen".
They are sleeping with their phones under their pillows, checking social media last thing at night and first thing in the morning. They spend an average of six hours a day on digital devices--in their leisure time alone --and are less likely than their predecessors to go to parties, probably because they're in non-stop virtual contact: "The party is constant, and it's on Snapchat." Twenge is justifiably concerned about the impact this may be having on their wellbeing and development. The rise of smartphone use has coincided with increases in anxiety, depression and suicide; a severe drop in the number of teens getting the medically approved minimum of seven hours' sleep per night (down 22 per cent from 2012 to 2015) might also be linked to smartphone use.
We learn that iGeners favour a "slow life strategy": they are less likely to date, have sex, drive, work, or drink alcohol. Twenge believes this has rendered them markedly more risk-averse than preceding generations, with a heightened sensitivity to emotional upset. She rightly derides some of the more egregious excesses of the campus activism around "safe spaces" and the no- platforming of controversial speakers, but for every pertinent point there is a dubious generalisation. For example, the author feels it's regrettably dweeby that students are now more likely to report a complaint to a member of staff than directly confronting the person who has aggrieved them: in labouring her point about the importance of fortitude, Twenge lapses into the macho dogma that equates civility with mental weakness. She is on still shakier ground when extrapolating her argument into the macropolitical realm, tenuously linking her observations about iGen lifestyles with the decline in support for traditional party politics. To attribute this development to a nebulous notion of coddled individualism is a speculative leap too far.
"Maybe if I name their generation," Twenge quips, "my kids will listen to me when I tell them to put on their shoes." It's a truth said in jest: ultimately, books like this tell us more about their authors (and their target readership) than their purported subjects. iGen's existence speaks to contemporary anxieties about maintaining a sense of control in rapidly changing times.
The most heartening aspect of the book is the intelligence, pragmatism and compassion demonstrated by Twenge's young interviewees, who seem to understand their world with greater clarity and sanguinity than many among the commentariat. As Miles, 22, puts it with devastating
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simplicity: "I don't want to have a child when I'm not sure if I'm going to have a job tomorrow." That's not selfish, it's just plain sensible.
Houman Barekat is co-editor of "The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online" (OR Books)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Barekat, Houman. "Generation vexed." New Statesman, 10 Nov. 2017, p. 44+. Book Review
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Book World: Busting the myths about
millennials
Stephanie Mehta
The Washington Post.
(Jan. 5, 2018): News: From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Stephanie Mehta
Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials By Malcolm Harris
Little Brown. 261 pp. $25
---
Malcom Harris is the thinking person's Berniecrat. His book, "Kids These Days," offers a comprehensive, data- and research-driven look at the trends and anxieties that led so many young people to zealously support Sen. Bernie Sanders' quixotic bid for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. Millennials are better educated and more skilled than previous generations, yet they are saddled with more debt and fewer stable job prospects than their predecessors. To hear Harris, a millennial himself, tell it, they're overworked, undersexed and stressed out. No wonder so many of them embraced an anti-establishment candidate who campaigned for free college education and railed against corporate greed. "Were someone to push the American oligarchy off its ledge, the shove seems likely to come from this side of the generation gap," Harris writes.
Harris sets out to dispel much of the conventional wisdom about his peers - that they're entitled, tech-addicted and in need of constant validation - using a novel approach. He analyzes millennials through the lens of "human capital," an economic concept that refers to the investments that go into making a resource (in this case, people) more productive. By this measure, young adults born between 1980 and 2000, with their competitive schools, unpaid internships, organized sports and music lessons, indeed should be very valuable. But they find themselves thrown into a job market that, thanks to globalization, increased productivity and the "gig economy," doesn't reward them for their inputs. If you don't count people in finance careers, college-educated young adults have seen their real wages drop 8.5 percent between 2000 and 2012, and unemployment rates for recent graduates have nearly doubled since 2007. Far from being entitled, millennials are disadvantaged. And the always-on devices they supposedly love so
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much? Technological advances are part of what's killing their professional prospects.
It's a stark and compelling picture, but in Harris' book, it's fairly bloodless. The few real-life examples of struggling millennials offered by the author are gleaned from the research papers, books and articles he cites to support his arguments. To disprove the myth that most undergrads are rich kids coasting through school while their parents write tuition checks - only about 19 percent of full-time students finish four-year programs on time, Harris reports - he writes about a student who was falling asleep in class. When queried by her professor, who assumed the young woman had been at a party the night before, the student revealed that she worked the graveyard shift at a local grocery store to make extra money. I yearned to know more about this student. Where did she grow up? Was anyone helping her pay for school? How does she feel about the job market she's going to face after graduation? To find out, I might have to read "Paying the Price," a book Harris draws from, which was written by the professor who confronted the student.
Anecdotes about entry-level Wall Street analysts, an aspiring professional athlete, singer Taylor Swift - all come from other sources, not original interviews. That's a pity, for what better way to explode preconceived notions about millennials than to offer some three-dimensional portraits of individuals living through the challenges Harris describes?
And in his keenness to knock down every unfair generalization about his generation, Harris peppers his book with straw-man arguments, some so absurd that they distract from the potency of his message. In an otherwise astute assessment of profiteering and greed at colleges and universities, the author wants us to be shocked, shocked that there are opportunists in these establishments. He writes, "Since almost all colleges are nonprofits, we assume people work in higher education for reasons other than financial gain, whether it be commitment to teaching the next generation, a passion for contribution to the sum of human knowledge and understanding, fear of social life outside the academy, or some combination of all three." It's as if he's never heard of Division I college football or interacted with the support staff at a university bursar's office. I stopped short when he mused, "If it is every parent's task to raise at least one successful American by America's own standards, then the system is rigged so that most of them will fail." It's a throwaway line, but Harris seems to be positing that parenting is transactional, a notion that may advance the book's narrative that millennials are investments but one that surely will rub any well-meaning parent the wrong way.
All these quibbles - and I realize the critiques make me sound like a grumpy old Gen Xer - might be excused if Harris offered ideas for how millennials and future generations could band together to restore upward mobility. Instead, he practically shrugs in the concluding chapter, "Books like this are supposed to end with a solution, right?" He then proceeds to offer the pros and cons of various traditional levers citizens use to affect change, such as participating in elections, making smart buying decisions, volunteering and protesting.
I get it: Harris doesn't want to devalue his analysis by concluding with a tidy, too-pat blueprint. But his reluctance to offer anything resembling a millennial call to arms feels like a cop-out. The author may not have all the answers, but here again, some outside voices might help. Surely there are smart activists and organizers who can lend insight and proactive suggestions for reversing millennials' fates. Indeed, Harris suggests, somewhat naively, that mounting pressures may push
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his cohort to "become the first generation of successful revolutionaries." In fact, there have been other triumphant rebellions in U.S. history, starting with the colonists who ousted the British. The volunteers and protesters of the civil rights movement - including Sanders - were revolutionaries. Millennials may be different from previous generations, but it doesn't mean they can't learn a thing or two from the past.
---
Mehta is a deputy editor at Vanity Fair. She has worked as a staff writer and editor for the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Bloomberg News.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mehta, Stephanie. "Book World: Busting the myths about millennials." Washington Post, 5 Jan.
2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A521529810 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=9df31797. Accessed 16 Apr. 2018.
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Won’t Get Fooled Again: Malcolm Harris’s “Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials”
By Jacqui Shine
NOVEMBER 26, 2017
THE WORD “millennial” was first pressed into service as a noun in 1991 by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069. (Strauss had, by the time of the book’s publication already left an indelible mark on American culture: in 1981, he helped to found The Capitol Steps, the live performance troupe that delivers light political satire through mildly bawdy musical parodies drawn from the American songbook — e.g., “Papa’s Got a Brand-New Baghdad,” “Springtime for Liberals,” “Unzipping My Dooh Dah.”)
Strauss and Howe introduced the term in the context of a grand theory of generational archetypes and sociohistorical progress. (You have to go back to 1584, apparently, in order to truly appreciate how inexorably fated America was to become the greatest country in the world.) The millennial generation, they prophesied — those born between 1980 and 2000 — would come of age in a period of urgent social crisis that would require them to “unite into a heroic and achieving cadre of rising adults.” In 2000, they announced with a further flourish that millennials are “special, sheltered, confident, team-oriented, conventional, pressured, and achieving.” Today the nearly oppressive dominance of the term and the persistent reiteration of this profile they simply made up suggests that Strauss and Howe, to put it in language a millennial would understand, made “fetch” happen.
Nearly 20 years later, as the youngest millennials reach adulthood, we’re stuck with the stereotypes Strauss and Howe proffered, and not much else. Millennials are said to be a generation of tech-obsessed narcissists whose failure to match, much less exceed, our parents’ economic success is evidence of poor moral fiber. We think we’re special; we’re too sheltered; we’re too conventional; and we certainly aren’t achieving enough to warrant our wild overconfidence. (Full disclosure: I’m a millennial.) If that’s so, says Malcolm Harris, it certainly didn’t happen by accident. In his new book Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, he warns that we ought to take the historical formation of this cohort seriously, because it represents a single point of failure for a society veering toward oligarchy and/or dystopia. We will either become “the first generation of true American fascists” or “the first generation of successful American revolutionaries.”
No pressure, though.
¤
In November 2011, just as the Occupy Wall Street protests were winding down, two progressive think tanks jointly published a study called “The Economic State of Young America,” which reported that millennials were likely to be the first generation of Americans who were less economically successful than their parents had been. This news unleashed something between a moral panic and a national identity crisis, one that’s only sort of about the material conditions of millennials’ daily lives or the documented effects of growing wealth inequality on the health of our democracy. Someone or something, it seems, had killed the American dream: the idea not only that hard work will be rewarded with social mobility and economic prosperity, but also that justly earned wealth will grow exponentially across generations.
But who was to blame? Was the problem that millennials have failed to live up to the economic challenges that previous generations of Americans had always met, or was it that their parents and grandparents had failed to deliver them a world in which success was possible? Harris, for his part, thinks the answer is clear: “Every authority from moms to presidents told Millennials to accumulate as much human capital as we could and we did, but the market hasn’t held up its side of the bargain. What gives? And why did we make this bargain in the first place?” (Human capital, in Harris’s usage, refers to “the present value of a person’s future earnings”; “the ‘capital’ part of ‘human capital’ means that, when we use this term, we’re thinking of people as tools in a larger production process.”)
Harris’s thesis is simple: young people are doing more and getting less in a society that that has incentivized their labor with the promise of a fair shake, and that older generations are profiting handsomely from the breach of contract. He doesn’t express it this clearly, though, in part because he is hamstrung by the book’s framing, which is detrimental to his argument (for reasons I’ll explain later). But it also makes Kids These Days an interesting artifact in its own right. It reveals something about how badly we want to believe that we all belong to a bigger American story, and about how essential that belief is to the maintenance of a capitalist regime that maximizes our labor and diminishes our lives.
¤
Some of the analysis in Kids These Days is pretty impressive. In the book’s first two chapters, Harris maps the effects of a hyper-capitalized youth control complex that formed, he argues, in the last two decades of the 20th century. At every level, Harris thinks, the American education system is either a workplace or a profit machine. The highlight of the book is its admirably lucid précis of higher education, the student debt crisis, and the institutional wealth accumulation it fuels. Harris makes clear that higher ed has become a debt machine that profits everyone except students. While outsourcing and labor casualization have cut expenses, price tags at four-year schools have jumped 200 percent or more, and administrators seem to have multiplied like gerbils: an increase wildly out of proportion to the rollback of public funding over the last 30 years. That’s where student loans come in. They represent over $100 billion a year in government funding to schools and, over time, huge returns for the feds. The $140 billion in federal student loans issued in 2014, Harris says, will eventually net a $25 billion profit.
The strength of this argument is that Harris doesn’t try to frame the analysis in the context of the millennial generation. While he briefly discusses the federal government’s failure to offer meaningful relief for loans in repayment — including the observation that the Obama administration’s vaunted reforms amounted to very little — he doesn’t say all that much about the experiences of millennial student debtors, or how they’re distinct from those of Generation X or other cohorts. One can certainly imagine how that piece comes into play without his indulging in the generational grandstanding that otherwise appears throughout the book.
Another chapter argues persuasively that primary and secondary education actually involves processes of labor capitalization we’ve simply cloaked in a “pedagogical mask.” In school, he says, “When students are working, what they’re working on is their own ability to work.” Childhood is “the time to accumulate the skills and abilities necessary to compete in a tough adult job market,” an “arms race that pits kids and their families against each other in an ever-escalating battle for a competitive edge” (e.g., a kid takes music lessons primarily because it will look good on a college application). We’ve obscured the labor arrangement and its deferred profits with the language of child and adolescent development, as when, for example, a school tells parents that they’re canceling the annual kindergarten show because, as Harris puts it, “These kids could not spare two days off from their regularly scheduled work […] The implication is that the very children themselves aren’t good enough without some serious improvements.” He backs these claims up with a lot of research on time use; between 1981 and 2003, for example, kids between the ages of six and eight spent 20 percent more time in school and recorded a 178 percent increase in time spent studying. The growing numbers of students taking Advanced Placement courses or applying to college are reflections of a surge in labor productivity. Harris also tacks on a qualitative examination of “helicopter parents and vigilante moms” in lieu of a less hysterical exploration of his observation that parenting has become risk management: family life has been hijacked by the demands of maximizing the system’s investments.
The rest of the book, unfortunately, is more hit-or-miss. A chapter on how the state profits from making young people into human capital exemplifies the problem. Harris’s brief discussions of high-stakes testing, juvenile policing, and the school-to-prison pipeline are squeezed in with a fairly anemic analysis of the likely collapse of the entitlement system. The latter is a complicated topic that requires a far greater mastery of its historical context than Harris can muster. (I’ll spare you my pedantic digression into the history of the AARP and the difference between Social Security employment benefits and Supplemental Security Income; you’re welcome.) Similarly, a chapter on the workplace would be stronger if it focused more on how young people are trained to do the now-compulsory affective labor demanded in virtually every sector of the workforce — or, as Harris puts it, in “[a]ny job it’s impossible to do while sobbing” — and less on how we feel about it. More seriously, Harris fails to consider the fact that women and girls are also forced to do the work of managing how and whether and to what degree we project and perform sexual availability. This is compulsory labor, particularly in the workplace. Refusing to do it leaves women economically vulnerable and raises the risk of sexual harassment, violence, and assault. So, sure, a lot of affective labor once thought as “female labor” is now assigned to people of all genders. But not all of it.
Kids These Days is also a very white book, in ways that it might not have been if not for Harris’s insistence on capturing the experience of a monolithic millennial cohort. To his credit, his discussion of education and the justice system does foreground the system’s racial disparities. “Despite the media’s efforts to get us to picture generic Millennials as white, black victims of [zero-tolerance school discipline policies and the like] are no less ‘Millennial’ than their white peers,” Harris writes; “in fact, insofar as they are closer to the changes in policing, they are more Millennial.” Reading this, I was reminded that Michael Brown, killed by police, and Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride, killed by vigilantes, were all millennials. So is CeCe McDonald, who plead to second-degree manslaughter for acting in self-defense.
Harris also discusses sociologist Victor Rios’s concept of “dignity work,” or the work that low-income young people of color must do in order to stay clear of the ever-present law enforcement apparatus. However, this and a section on college sports are the only places he addresses race, or any of the other identities that differentiate the supposedly monolithic bloc of Americans born between 1980 and 2000. We know that structural inequality produces disparate outcomes between millennials of color and their white counterparts across the board, not just in terms of the former cohort’s explicit criminalization. For example, it’s true that millennials are accumulating wealth at a rate that lags far behind our parents. But the 2008 recession also increased the already present racial disparity in wealth accumulation in our parents’ generation and therefore in inherited wealth. And that isn’t really a “Occupy Generation” problem, but a multigenerational one (and not in the Strauss and Howe way).
Likewise Harris’s chapter on higher education might have delved into how the student debt crisis has played out for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and their students, or referenced Tressie McMillan Cottom’s recent work on the growth of for-profit colleges, which she describes as institutions that “exclusively, by definition, rely on persistent inequalities as a business model.” Such intersectional analysis is especially imperative for a book that aspires to chronicle “the making of Millennials”; without it, the generational conceit strikes me as fairly useless.
¤
Ultimately, though, the most frustrating thing about Kids These Days is how Harris keeps coming back to that broken promise framing, encapsulated in those blunt rhetorical questions quoted above: “[T]he market hasn’t held up its side of the bargain. What gives? And why did we make this bargain in the first place?” As a millennial might say, great questions. But the answer to the first has very little to do with millennials per se and everything to do with a set of historical and economic forces that lurched into operation long before 1980. The game was rigged from the start, and the prize was never real. The answer to the second taps into a much, much bigger and more important problem about how the deceptive rhetoric of the American dream fuels our exploitation, and prompts a third question: why are we so surprised we got scammed?
Let me take a shot at that one. I read with incredulity Harris’s suggestion that “[a] look at the evidence shows that the curve we’re on is not the one we’ve been told about, the one that bends toward justice.” He’s referring, of course, to Martin Luther King Jr.’s much-quoted maxim about the arc of the moral universe, which apparently conflicts with some unspecified “evidence” demonstrating that millennials have been denied their rightful economic and cultural inheritance. But conflating matters of moral justice with rising material success implies a frankly impoverished vision of, and for, American life. Nor does this strike me as a book that’s especially concerned with economic justice in more than a facile way, unless you’re of the “rising tide lifts all boats” school.
To be fair, it’s not like Harris is alone here. “We were promised something and we didn’t get it” is not just a millennial refrain: it’s a shared American delusion. But a dream is not an entitlement. The idea that entry into a stable middle class is some sort of American national birthright is ahistorical; that it ever seemed possible may prove to be epiphenomenal. The American middle class to which we were supposed to aspire was vanishingly short-lived, and it was certainly never uniformly accessible.
More importantly (hold my pamplemousse LaCroix while I blow your mind), it was never real in the first place. The seductions of the postwar prosperity narrative have obscured the fact its spoils were never firmly secured. Those stable manufacturing jobs had an expiration date from the outset: the restructuralization of the industrial work force began in the 1950s. Unionization was never a bulwark for the American worker. Yes, public-sector unions flourished, but that’s a different story; in the private sector, corporations embraced a model of employer beneficence and welfare provision because it limited the range of benefits negotiated under collective bargaining agreements and eroded the commitment of the rank-and-file. The regressive taxation schemes favored by Nixon’s so-called silent majority all but ensured that millennials would come of age to find a badly battered system of public education. Investing in the middle-class prosperity narrative as a normative expectation in American life — for American life — doesn’t make a ton of sense. I’m not sure it ever really did. The past 18 months have certainly shown that it animates electoral politics in ways that are fundamentally toxic and corrosive to our democracy. Why, then, have we bought it? Because this is a consumer society, and it was sold to us like a product. Millennials are just another market segment.
¤
Which brings us back to William Strauss and Neil Howe. It’s not incidental to Harris’s story that Generations was published in 1991. Millennialism was quite useful in selling us on the idea that what was happening to young people was simply a necessary stage in America’s manifest destiny, and Harris, for all his supposed disillusionment, apparently still buys it. In his conclusion, Harris paints millennials as a renegade version of the generation of heroes that Strauss and Howe prophesied, the ones bearing a responsibility to bring us through some clarifying fire. “If we find ourselves without luck or bravery,” he writes, “I fear it will seem in retrospect like we never had a choice. But, to paraphrase Emerson, we’ll have all there is. And it is up to the Millennial cohort to make something else of what’s been made of us.” But maybe what we need — and this isn’t something we can do alone — is to let the American dream die so something new can be born.
No pressure, though.
¤
Jacqui Shine is a writer and historian. She lives in Chicago.
Kids These Days
Human Capital and the Making of Millennials
By Malcolm Harris
Published 11.07.2017
Little, Brown and Company
272 Pages
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Knocking down generalizations about the millennial generation
Students cheer during a 2015 speech by Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders at George Mason University in Virginia. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
By Stephanie Mehta January 5
Stephanie Mehta is a deputy editor at Vanity Fair. She has worked as a staff writer and editor for the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Bloomberg.
Malcolm Harris is the thinking person’s Berniecrat. His book, “Kids These Days,” offers a comprehensive, data- and research-driven look at the trends and anxieties that led so many young people to zealously support Sen. Bernie Sanders’s quixotic bid for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. Millennials are better educated and more skilled than previous generations, yet they are saddled with more debt and fewer stable job prospects than their predecessors. To hear Harris, a millennial himself, tell it, they’re overworked, undersexed and stressed out. No wonder so many of them embraced an anti-establishment candidate who campaigned for free college education and railed against corporate greed. “Were someone to push the American oligarchy off its ledge, the shove seems likely to come from this side of the generation gap,” Harris writes.
[No, millennials aren’t killing stable employment]
Harris sets out to dispel much of the conventional wisdom about his peers — that they’re entitled, tech-addicted and in need of constant validation — using a novel approach. He analyzes millennials through the lens of “human capital,” an economic concept that refers to the investments that go into making a resource (in this case, people) more productive. By this measure, young adults born between 1980 and 2000, with their competitive schools, unpaid internships, organized sports and music lessons, indeed should be very valuable. But they find themselves thrown into a job market that, thanks to globalization, increased productivity and the “gig economy,” doesn’t reward them for their inputs. If you don’t count people in finance careers, college-educated young adults have seen their real wages drop 8.5 percent between 2000 and 2012, and unemployment rates for recent graduates have nearly doubled since 2007. Far from being entitled, millennials are disadvantaged. And the always-on devices they supposedly love so much? Technological advances are part of what’s killing their professional prospects.
It’s a stark and compelling picture, but in Harris’s book, it’s fairly bloodless. The few real-life examples of struggling millennials offered by the author are gleaned from the research papers, books and articles he cites to support his arguments. To disprove the myth that most undergrads are rich kids coasting through school while their parents write tuition checks — only about 19 percent of full-time students finish four-year programs on time, Harris reports — he writes about a student who was falling asleep in class. When queried by her professor, who assumed the young woman had been at a party the night before, the student revealed that she worked the graveyard shift at a local grocery store to make extra money. I yearned to know more about this student. Where did she grow up? Was anyone helping her pay for school? How does she feel about the job market she’s going to face after graduation? To find out, I might have to read “Paying the Price,” a book Harris draws from, which was written by the professor who confronted the student.
“Kids These Days,” by Malcolm Harris (Little, Brown and Company)
Anecdotes about entry-level Wall Street analysts, an aspiring professional athlete, singer Taylor Swift — all come from other sources, not original interviews. That’s a pity, for what better way to explode preconceived notions about millennials than to offer some three-dimensional portraits of individuals living through the challenges Harris describes?
And in his keenness to knock down every unfair generalization about his generation, Harris peppers his book with straw-man arguments, some so absurd that they distract from the potency of his message. In an otherwise astute assessment of profiteering and greed at colleges and universities, the author wants us to be shocked, shocked that there are opportunists in these establishments. He writes, “Since almost all colleges are nonprofits, we assume people work in higher education for reasons other than financial gain, whether it be commitment to teaching the next generation, a passion for contribution to the sum of human knowledge and understanding, fear of social life outside the academy, or some combination of all three.” It’s as if he’s never heard of Division I college football or interacted with the support staff at a university bursar’s office. I stopped short when he mused, “If it is every parent’s task to raise at least one successful American by America’s own standards, then the system is rigged so that most of them will fail.” It’s a throwaway line, but Harris seems to be positing that parenting is transactional, a notion that may advance the book’s narrative that millennials are investments but one that surely will rub any well-meaning parent the wrong way.
[A new survey shows white millennials think a lot more like whites than millennials]
All these quibbles — and I realize the critiques make me sound like a grumpy old Gen Xer — might be excused if Harris offered ideas for how millennials and future generations could band together to restore upward mobility. Instead, he practically shrugs in the concluding chapter, “Books like this are supposed to end with a solution, right?” He then proceeds to offer the pros and cons of various traditional levers citizens use to affect change, such as participating in elections, making smart buying decisions, volunteering and protesting.
I get it: Harris doesn’t want to devalue his analysis by concluding with a tidy, too-pat blueprint. But his reluctance to offer anything resembling a millennial call to arms feels like a cop-out. The author may not have all the answers, but here again, some outside voices might help. Surely there are smart activists and organizers who can lend insight and proactive suggestions for reversing millennials’ fates. Indeed, Harris suggests, somewhat naively, that mounting pressures may push his cohort to “become the first generation of successful revolutionaries.” In fact, there have been other triumphant rebellions in U.S. history, starting with the colonists who ousted the British. The volunteers and protesters of the civil rights movement — including Sanders — were revolutionaries. Millennials may be different from previous generations, but it doesn’t mean they can’t learn a thing or two from the past.
Kids These Days
Human Capital and the Making of Millennials
By Malcolm Harris
Little Brown. 261 pp. $25
6
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Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris — no free brunch
Far from being work-shy, millennials may in fact be too diligent and productive for their own good
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Yohann Koshy November 3, 2017
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Self-obsessed, radical, atomised, social, hard-working, lazy, disobedient, risk-averse — the media have given us more than enough adjectives to describe millennials but few intellectual frameworks to understand them. This is partly why generational analysis is viewed sceptically: unlike class, race or gender, which latch on to something concrete, generations can seem arbitrary and abstract. Any quality can be ascribed to members of a diverse group of people who happened to be born within the same stretch of time, so what can be gained from such thinking?
In Kids These Days, the journalist and critic Malcolm Harris restores a good deal of precision to the business of defining the millennial and generational discourse in general. Adhering to a Marxian and behaviourist account of society, Harris argues that you cannot understand millennials — those born between 1980 and 2000, which include him, and me for that matter — without examining the political, economic and social institutions that nurtured them. He focuses on the US but much of what he describes applies to Britain too.
His first contention is whether generations and, by extension, millennials, exist. After all, people are always being born, so how can we divide them into discrete sets? Echoing the sociologist Karl Mannheim, who argued in the 1920s that distinctive cohorts emerge from periods of social destabilisation, Harris claims “generations are characterised by crises”. It was the development of neoliberal capitalism over the past 40 years, a system that has “started to hyperventilate” since the 2008 crash, that provided the specific crisis through which millennials came into being. As such, they can be understood as historical products “whose abilities, skills, emotions and even sleep schedule are in sync with their role in the economy”.
This folds into the central analytic claim: what makes the millennial situation distinctive is that it has produced workers who are too well-trained for their own good. Contrary to the stereotype of American millennials as a generation more interested in eating brunch than honest graft, the evidence shows that they are “damn good workers”, with unprecedented levels of education. The problem is that millennials are producing lots of value at work that is not reflected in job quality or wages. Productivity and real wages grew together during the Baby Boomers’ heyday; their divergence in our age, for Harris, is “perhaps the single phenomenon that defines Millennials thus far”.
Through this lens we get a sweeping sketch of the bleak, anxiety-ridden lives of young Americans. Childhood, which is supposed to be the province of spontaneous play, has become highly administered, with parents and schools priming their human capital investments — children — for a merciless jobs market: “Between 1981 and 1997, elementary schoolers . . . recorded a whopping 146 per cent gain in time spent studying.” For those who make it through the debt and stress of university to graduation, short-term contracts and underemployment are leading to increased mental health problems, as millennials internalise the economy’s instability.
Harris is at his most forceful when arguing that society conspires to make life worse for young people. The children’s book Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine (1958), about a boy who invents a machine to do his homework for him only to be tricked into doing more with his spare time, is smartly used to illustrate the way automation doesn’t always increase freedom. The implication is also that we live in a world that exhausts youthful ingenuity. These sections put the reader in mind of anarchist theorists such as Paul Goodman, whose book Growing Up Absurd (1960) championed the virtues of juvenilia against “the organised system” for a previous disaffected generation.
But unlike the soixante-huitards, Harris gives the impression, correctly, that he doesn’t see young people as essentially good or as the new agents of historical change. Millennials do not occupy a structurally vital position in society that will give them leverage over the future, as the proletariat does in Marxist theory. And although they might be drawn to the politics of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, in part for having no lived experience of cold war anti-communism, they have also buoyed the candidature of Marine Le Pen and swelled the ranks of the alt-right. The stable jobs that Goodman condemned as spiritually bankrupt in the 1960s are now a luxury; progressive politics do not necessarily emerge from such relative desperation.
To this end, Kids These Days disavows a prescriptive conclusion. Harris is sceptical about traditional forms of political strategy, even questioning the usefulness of protest. The rejection of a platitudinous rallying call is welcome, and the reticence is warranted. But it also shows up the limits of generational analysis, which can give detail and texture to the impasse that young people find themselves in — but offers less on the question of what is to be done.
Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, by Malcolm Harris, Little, Brown, RRP$27, 272 pages
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'Kids These Days' Convinces You That Millennials Aren't Ruining Everything
November 07, 2017
Bradley Babendir
Malcolm Harris' "Kids These Days." (Amy Gorel/WBUR)
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Malcolm Harris' "Kids These Days." (Amy Gorel/WBUR)
The conventional wisdom about millennials is not flattering. They’re narcissists. They can’t talk to one another. They’re destroying hoards of industries, from beer to casual dining to bar soap. Nothing is safe from the young cultural revolutionaries, remaking the world as they see fit. It’s an attractive story, the belief that the young are using the leavening power of the free market to chart their own course. If only it were true.
Instead, as Malcolm Harris, an editor for The New Inquiry and an early Occupy Wall Street protester, writes in his smart and provocative debut book, "Kids These Days," the millennials are experiencing something like the opposite. “If Millennials are different in one way or another, it’s not because we’re more or less evolved than our parents or grandparents,” Harris writes in the book’s introduction, “it’s because they’ve changed the world in ways that have produced people like us.” From here, he steers through many of the defining elements of American life, from how people are schooled to how they work to how they’re jailed.
The foundation of his argument is that the children of the present and recent past are treated by “industry and the government” not as people but “as investments, productive machinery, ‘human capital.’ ” This pervades all facets of their upbringing, leading to major problem every step of the way.
In this context, childhood is not a time for learning or growing, but training. In elementary and high school, for example, despite having access to technology that should reduce the amount of time required to complete work, Harris cites one study showing a threefold increase in time spent studying for 6- and 8-year-olds. Another study shows that kids spend very little time doing things they enjoy, like “self-directed play with their friends and eating” and more time doing things that make them “especially unhappy” like schoolwork. Or, he notes that between 1974 and 2014, inflation-adjusted college pricing has increased 197 percent at private schools and 280 percent at public ones, which means that more students will need to take out loans to attend, which means that the loan agencies (mostly the federal government) will make more money off of repayment. It’s no doubt controversial to reframe higher education as a money-making scheme for the government, but when diagnosing an issue, Harris first asks, “Who profits?” and his answers are convincing.
The book’s structure reflects an awareness that some segment of the population will need convincing. Each chapter centers around one subject, like school, work or entertainment, and is from there broken up into many subsections where Harris gets into the specifics that create broader illnesses. His research is rigorous and the text can get dense at times as a result, but he’s also a clear deliberate explainer, which makes it easy to understand.
Author Malcolm Harris. (Courtesy Little, Brown and Company)
Author Malcolm Harris. (Courtesy Little, Brown and Company)
Harris is a committed leftist and a gifted polemicist with a smart-aleck bent. His views of the cultural problems that define the millennial generation grow out of his vision for a better society, one where labor earns a much higher share of national production, inequality is lower and kids are treated like kids instead of pre-workers. Those who don’t share that vision will find a lot to grapple with in this book but not a lot to like.
The toughest part of the book to swallow is its bleak conclusion. Summing up the lessons of the evidence he’s presented throughout the book, he writes:
Profits are up, labor costs are down; unions are on their back feet and workers are more productive; there’s more inequality, and more jails to house people from the wrong side in case they get any bright ideas. The institutions that sort American children don’t necessarily care who wins and who loses — anyone can technically climb from the bottom to the top of the national caste system, and it’s possible to fall from the top to bottom, but the number of podium spots is determined by larger forces than individual effort or merit.
The sum total of "Kids These Days" is not a hopeful sentiment, and Harris is aware. Yet at the end, when most writers of largely-depressing books offer solutions to the problems they’ve described, Harris does the opposite.
In a section called “Bop-It Solutions,” named after a plastic toy that instructed its user to perform a series of mechanical actions with it, he lists what he sees as the available means of mending society and why he believes they’re doomed to fail. Unfortunately, this section is convincing too.
It’s admirable that he peddles no false hope but the shot stings worse with no chaser. His most reassuring idea is this: Millennials will “become fascists or revolutionaries, one or the other.” Perhaps if millennials truly remake the world in their best image, as some of the more sensational reporting suggests, the crisis will be averted.
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Book Review: Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials
by Mark Dunbar • 3 January 2018
BOOK BY MALCOLM HARRIS
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY, 2017
272 PP.; $16.50 (HARDCOVER) $13.99 (KINDLE)
Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials by Malcolm Harris is an unusual work of social criticism. Most books in the genre, after their tours of human misery and exploitation, end on a bright note by offering potential solutions. But Kids These Day doesn’t.
In fact, Harris ends the book by casting aspersions on this industry practice. Tail-ended solutions, Harris writes, “usually function as a cop out” for both author and reader. Hope is offered instead of despair, even though the situation clearly calls for the latter. What’s more, for all the talk of wanting more constructive solutions and less “mere complaining,” when constructive solutions are put forward they’re almost always greeted with sectarian denunciations—or, as Harris calls them, “a string of all-purpose objections that leads nowhere.” Harris’s book is thus both a symptom and diagnosis of the millennial character. Dissatisfied with nowhere, it chooses nothing.
Younger generations have always had the anxieties of older generations projected onto them, and for millennials it’s been no different. [Full disclosure: your reviewer is a member of the Millennial Generation.] For example, we’re accused of being coddled from an early age—a favorite media trope is to find troubling the proliferation of participation trophies over the last thirty years. But as Harris (a millennial himself) correctly stresses, we weren’t “giving trophies to ourselves.” It was adults passing them out, and it was largely adults who needed the emotional stimulus of what those trophies represented.
In the United States, competition and the start of “getting on the right track” begins earlier and earlier in children’s lives. Seven-year-old-boys excited about baseball are forced by their parents to practice five or six days a week. Girls who can’t sit still in class are given medication for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) out of fear that the long-term academic consequences of their behavior will soon be irreparable. Harris gives extraordinary examples of children regimented almost from birth to be brilliant violinists or pro-caliber quarterbacks. He also quotes from a 2014 letter sent from a New York elementary school informing parents that the school’s kindergarten play was canceled due to time constraints: “We are responsible for preparing children for college and career…and know that we can best do that by having them become strong readers, writers, coworkers, and problem solvers.” So no costumes or make-believe for them.
It’s news to no one that economic inequality in this country is bad and only getting worse. Although worker productivity has tripled since the 1970s, real wages have stagnated and in some instances even declined. This “disjuncture,” Harris believes, “is perhaps the single phenomenon that defines [m]illennials.” According to Federal Reserve numbers, rental income (stocks, real estate, etc.) is taking more and more of the surplus from the regular production-consumption economy; and those numbers don’t include unconventional rental incomes from the digital sector like service and platform providers. Making money rather than just earning it is becoming essential to economic security. “The American dream isn’t fading,” Harris writes, “it’s being horded.”
These cultural and material circumstances have had predictable psychological effects on millennials. With less free time than prior generations—time spent on homework and “extracurriculars” tripled in the 1990s and early 2000s—many of us have fallen for the unending tyranny of self-advancement. We’re taught to treat ourselves “as investments.”
In school, you’re warned that any misdeed will go on your “permanent record.” And with the advent of digital record keeping, there are now hundreds of different types of permanent records about you. A great plethora of state and corporate entities now monitor and (attempt to) control your behavior. Harris doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that mass incarceration and citizen-surveillance took off at roughly the same time. Nor does he think liberal fashions about welfare and education are at odds with these malevolent forces: “Unfounded assumptions about government benevolence have allowed the state youth complex to mutate in this highly aggressive form.” In other words, therapeutic liberalism and law-and-order conservatism scarcely differ in worldview—only in tone and conventionality.
Our cultural obsession with “employability,” in which people “are taught that the main objective while they’re young is to become the best job applicants they can be,” has pacified an entire generation on both a personal and organizational level. As Harris bluntly puts it, millennials “have been structurally, legally, emotionally, culturally, and intellectually dissuaded from organizing in their own collective interest as workers.”
Millennials are less likely to join a union or pay union dues than their older counterparts. Most either haven’t been convinced that there’s a benefit in doing so or are too afraid of the potential repercussions. Also, with more jobs being temporary (or at least feeling temporary), there’s an impulse among employees that, since they’ll be gone soon anyway, organized actions aren’t worth the hassle.
Free labor is also a pervasive economic phenomenon among millennials. What Harris calls “the pedagogical mask”— whereby work is unpaid because the benefits for the worker are supposed to derive from professional experience and promotion rather than monetary compensation—is “central to understanding the American economy.”
It’s how the NCAA justifies not paying college players: “They’re student athletes after all.” Despite the fact the NCAA is a multibillionaire-dollar organization. It’s also how companies, especially for white-collar jobs, can convince the young unemployed to take unpaid gigs: “You’ll be gaining valuable experience and it’ll look great on your resume.” Even advocates for the intern system admit it doesn’t noticeably increase chances for a better job.
Most of Harris’s social analysis is commendable. He is excellent at finding metaphors that clear up sentimental ambivalences. He compares student loan lending to essentially a bond market where “college admissions offices are the rating agencies for kids, and once the kid-bond is rated, it has four or so years until it’s expected to produce a return.” The federal government makes a decent profit from student loans, so Harris isn’t surprised to find lawmakers of both parties preaching the merits of higher education. “More college access…means more debt,” which means more debt payments going to the government.
There are, however, some underwhelming portions of the book. For example, in the final chapter Harris makes a series of dystopian predictions based on the societal path we’re already on.
Some of these predictions are genuine forecasts of where we aren’t yet but could easily end up. A future where “reality is itself a privilege” is not only disturbing but already openly discussed among wealthy technologists. It’s been proposed that society might be better off if prisoners were hooked up to virtual reality rather than simply encaged in large, expensive facilities. (Although one suspects the industries that depend on prison labor—textile, construction, food-processing—might disagree.)
Other of Harris’s predictions, however, are less a continuation of the path we’re on and more a matter of things that have either already happened or are currently underway. Harris worries about a “misogynistic backlash” brought on by female liberation and male economic uncertainty. “Hatred for women will acquire a countercultural sheen,” he writes, and “replace hatred for Jews” in right-wing populism. But this to a large extent has already occurred. For decades, anti-feminism has tried to culturally coordinate itself as “edgy” and “transgressive.” If in the last five years it’s been more successful at doing so, it would’ve been worthwhile for Harris to raise questions as to why.
It’s in this field of sex and sexual politics where Harris’s analysis is least relevant. By all reports, teenagers today are having less sex than generations before them. Harris translates this as “teens are waiting longer to have sex” and suggests this is perhaps because of depression—with either the affliction itself or the medication taken to treat it stunting sexual libido—or because children nowadays are more supervised and don’t have the opportunities for sex like they used to.
The idea of a sexual hierarchy—where, since the 1960s sexual revolution, men at the top are having sex with more partners while men at the bottom are having less sex all around—is much more interpretive and experiential than either of Harris’s explanations. Specifically, it makes intelligible why anti-feminist sentiment has become more widespread as of late.
It won’t do to merely say, as Harris does, that the ruling class seeks to divide us by propagating this anti-feminist sentiment—although they certainly do. The Mercers funding Milo Yiannopoulos’s reactionary pomposities across colleges and the media is an obvious example of them doing so. To make sense of the contemporary ideological landscape requires not only a recognition of this though, but a correct understanding of why particular forms of divide and rule work and others don’t—which Harris seems to lack.
Nonetheless, the shortcomings of Kids These Days are minor compared to its virtues. Simple prose and political common sense go a long way, and if Harris doesn’t feel obligated to offer radical solutions, he still at least feels obligated to fight on: “Either we continue the trend we’ve been given and enact the bad future, or we refuse it and cut the knot of trend lines that define our generation. We become fascist or revolutionaries, one or the other.”
Harris’s reputation as a bourgeoisie in anarchist robes shouldn’t stop anyone from reading his book. Nor should the fact that he’s likely our generation’s Dotson Rader (a prominent figure in the ’60s youth movement whose inclinations for personal celebrity eventually led him to mediocrity and quietism). Still, if Harris isn’t long for this radical world, we should enjoy his astute political writings while we have them. Kids These Days should be read by anyone who agrees with Harris that there’s no escaping responsibility: things either stay the same or we change them.
Mark Dunbar is a freelance writer based in Indianapolis. He can be reached by email at mark.dunbar1988@gmail.com or on Twitter @Mark1Dunbar.
Are Millennials Tomorrow’s Revolutionaries — Or Its Fascists?
Daniel WitkinDecember 17, 2017Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials
By Malcolm Harris
Little Brown and Company, 272 pages $16.50
Are millennials more worthy of pity or contempt?
Based on popular discourse, you might come to see this as the central controversy about that benighted generation. Their consumption habits and psychological hang-ups have been examined so repetitively that it’s no longer necessary to shuffle through the various stereotypes associated with them.
Yet millennials are also acknowledged to be in an unenviable and quite possibly pitiful position. Tamara Draut’s 2008 study of the “Economic State of Young America,” released by the public policy organization Demos contained bad news following that year’s financial crisis: “Today’s 20-somethings are likely to be the first generation not to be better off than their parents.” Economic instability included, the country’s political culture has rarely seemed so unstable or so toxic. The children are our future, as the saying goes, and the future is bleak.
The mix of alarmism and superficiality that defines the typical thinkpiece about millennials has made the genre into a punch line of sorts. As such, it’s a peculiar topic for a serious young writer to stake his debut upon, something that Malcolm Harris wryly acknowledges in his new book “Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials.” An editor at The New Inquiry, a journal of social critique, Harris bypasses the popular image of his cohort as jolly layabouts or oblivious narcissists. Instead, he believes that his generation is likely to make up the first batch of either “true American fascists” or “successful American revolutionaries.”
“The stakes really are that high: In the coming decades, more Americans will be forced to adapt in larger, stranger ways to an increasingly hostile environment,” he argues in the book’s introduction. “But millennials are going to be here regardless, and we have a lot of responsibility for what comes next.”
Harris first came to prominence by reporting on the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests, themselves the first major political statement to emerge from the millennial generation. “Instead of one policy, we had an enemy: the 1 percent, the people who were profiting off of popular immiseration,” he writes of the protests. “Based on the data, it’s a good set of enemies for millennials to pick, and it was mostly millennials participating.” Wholesale opposition to capitalism had been a niche phenomenon in the United States, particularly since the country’s giddy triumph in the Cold War. For a few weeks, the Occupy movement made it a round-the-clock fixture on cable news.
Recent polls conducted by Harvard University and YouGov found that millennials favor socialism to capitalism by a narrow margin, a result that would have been shocking a generation back. Youth support unambiguously fueled the 2016 presidential campaign of self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, who won more primary voters under age 30 than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton combined. His jeremiads against millionaires and billionaires would have been familiar to anyone who had followed the Occupy movement. And the sizeable millennial opposition to capitalism is beginning to have a mainstream impact: Following the Senate’s passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which gifts tremendous cuts to the very richest Americans while leaving future generations to foot the bill, The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg published an article titled “No Wonder Millennials Hate Capitalism.” “You don’t have to want to abolish capitalism to understand why the prospect is tempting to a generation that’s being robbed,” she concluded.
Harris, who identifies as a communist, does indeed want to abolish capitalism. “Kids These Days” works painstakingly to pin the ugly situation of his generation squarely on that economic system. Harris examines the institutions that shape the development of the young, moving through schools and universities into broader arenas such as the workplace and showing how each has been reshaped by an ascendant economic doctrine that prizes perpetually increasing efficiency. Harris bases his arguments on sociological and economic studies that show how the institutions on which he focuses operate. Though his approach in rooted in Marxist theory, Harris borrows his guiding idea from the broad establishment he seeks to critique, prominently citing University of Chicago economist Gary Becker’s concept of “human capital.” Harris defines human capital as “the present value of the person’s future earnings, or a person’s imagined price at sale, if you could buy and sell free laborers — minus upkeep.”
“In order to fully recognize the scope of these changes, we need to think about young people the way industry and government already do,” he writes, “As investments, productive machinery, and ‘human capital.’”
In Harris’s analysis, the young are forced into an ever-intensifying competition to develop and exhibit human capital. That process begins as early as elementary school. He argues that the work done by children is obscured behind what sociologist Jürgen Zinnecker calls “pedagogical masking,” which recasts labor as purely educational; instead of compensation, children receive symbolic honors that accustom them to working without asking for material returns.
Harris details the process by which colleges both public and private, as they continually raise tuition rates, profit handsomely from their role as arbiters of human capital. By the time millennials enter the workforce, he argues, they are often saddled with student debt and numb to the ceaselessly accelerating pace of competition. “Like cell phones that are meant to be turned off only for upgrades,” he adds, “Millennials are on 24/7.”
The backdrop for these arguments is the disconnect between workers’ productivity and their compensation. The two rose together steadily until the 1970s, whereupon compensation became stagnant as productivity continued to increase. According to Harris, the dissonance between productivity and compensation “is perhaps the single phenomenon that defines millennials thus far.” (He has referred to that gap as the “rate of exploitation.”)
While Harris effectively surveys these economic trends, his work is most effective when he describes how these broader economic circumstances shape millennials’ daily lives. In his view, for instance, the alarming rates at which millennials take SSRIs for depression and stimulants to combat ADHD — the New York Times has separately dubbed them “The Antidepressant Generation” and “Generation ADHD” — is a natural response to economic pressure.
The central achievement of “Kids These Days” is its detailing of how the many institutions that shape American lives have been transformed by the neoliberal pivot of both major American political parties towards the free market. Harris offers a potent rebuke to the idea that neoliberalism is an ideology of freedom and movement, showing instead how lives have become increasingly surveilled, managed and even endangered as corporations attempt to push drive for profit to the absolute limits. Harris notes the case of Moritz Erhardt, a 21-year-old intern at the London branch of Merrill Lynch, who died in 2013 after working until 6 am on three consecutive nights, literally having worked himself to death. In contrast to the autonomy we’re said to enjoy, Harris argues that people are pressured into accepting lowered expectations and working more in exchange for less.
Yet “Kids These Days” sets out to be a comprehensive overview of a generation rather than an indictment of contemporary capitalism. It’s in that effort that the limitations of Harris’s project are most apparent and most interesting. First among those is the issue that the phenomena Harris describes may not be wholly unique to millennials. Harris writes specifically about the young, but several major changes he identifies took place not only prior to the first millennials entering the workforce, but also before they were born. (After all, the exploitation of workers is a story as old as capitalism itself.) Members of previous generations remain quite hazy throughout “Kids These Days,” and as a result, the book’s historical arguments remain incomplete. The question of how millennials differ meaningfully from previous generations is never fully taken up, nor does Harris offer an explicit argument that they do.
Harris’ portrait of millennials itself remains frustratingly one-dimensional. “As much as policymakers wish they could erase all the differences between students except for how high their scores are, there’s (thankfully) far too much variation for this to be feasible,” he writes. But within Harris’s data-driven, institutionally focused method, much of this variation ¬— and its subversive potential — fails to register. Generations are formed by the world they inherit, but they end up bringing something of their own to the situation as well. Without acknowledging millennials’ agency and their ability to improvise, the book paints its subjects as little more than the victims of circumstance.
Part of this failure can be attributed to Harris’s attempts to square the circle between the empirical approach favored by mainstream reformists and the polemical, insurrectionary stylings of leftist theorists. It’s gratifying to imagine Harris smuggling his holistic anti-capitalism into the mainstream; his best arguments are strong enough to carry weight there. Still, this gambit prevents Harris from offering a full-throated argument for his own revolutionary politics. This elision removes something critical from the book’s depiction of its subjects. If millennials are indeed fated to become, as Harris writes, the potential “first generation of successful American revolutionaries,” there’s little indication of what sort of revolutionaries they might actually make. Ultimately, the millennials of “Kids These Days” come off less as the fascists or revolutionaries of tomorrow than as yet another iteration of today’s neoliberal drones.
Although Harris’s methodology doesn’t illuminate how millennials could transform their society, there may still be reason to believe they will. If the current economic trends Harris outlines progress along the lines he details, it seems likely that something, eventually, will have to give. Conventional wisdom says that the baby boomer generation went through a period of fiery radicalism before settling into a reactionary complacency. “Kids These Days” shows how the material circumstance they’ve passed along may compel their children to follow the opposite trajectory. In any case, the history of the millennial generation is still yet to be written.
Read more: https://forward.com/culture/books/390199/millennials-malcolm-harris-kids-these-days-revolutionaries-fascists-exploit/
Not Every Kid-Bond Matures
Millennial habits so often mocked and belittled in the press are the survival strategies of a demographic “born into captivity.”
Published in Issue 30: Motherland
Publication date Winter 2018
Tags
American Politics Reading, Writing, and Publishing Reviews
Stock image of millennials taking a selfie, via CommScope, a network infrastructure provider “at the forefront of shaping infrastructure, products and solutions that enhance people’s lives.”
Malcolm Harris. Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials. Little, Brown, 2017.
On a recent visit to my parents, my mother asked me whether I want to have kids. Being 30 and single, an uncle to a niece and a nephew through both my siblings, I’ve started to get questions from older generations about my plans to reproduce. This began later for me than it does for women and is a fraction as oppressive, but to be honest I’d thought male privilege would shield me from it entirely. When this defense failed, I forestalled a line of inquiry from my mother by talking about climate change. Even as I said it, I knew it was an already hackneyed form of stonewalling. You can defend any uncertainty these days by evoking melting ice sheets and disappearing permafrost.
But she’d never heard anyone take this tack before—at least not since her own generation’s “population bomb” version of the same story. “That,” my mom said slowly, “is so heavy.” Over the course of the rest of my visit, she mentioned it to others my age for confirmation, to others her age in incredulity. “Gabe says nobody in his generation wants to have kids because of climate change. Did you know about this?”
How could the gap between us be so great? What seemed to me such a commonplace as to be evasive and impersonal appeared to my mother as a serious human quandary—which, in fact, it is. I’m more politically optimistic than my mother, yet I was taken aback to realize how much darker the future seems to me than to her. Then I remembered: she’s a boomer, I’m a millennial, and this is the song of the season.
There hasn’t been a generational divide this pronounced since the 1960s. The flare-ups that have occurred have been aftershocks of the 1960s—as in the 1992 confrontation between World War II veteran George H. W. Bush and draft dodger Bill Clinton with the wife who didn’t want to bake cookies. Generational analysis rarely got beyond generic psychobabble: the “greatest generation” were stoic, laconic survivors, boomers the spoiled offspring of Dr. Spock, et cetera. The actual “life chances” of the generations were not meaningfully different, and politics did not line up with the generations. Clinton’s best generational slice of the electorate in 1992 was the senior vote, but he performed pretty evenly overall, winning between 41 and 50 percent in every age category. Neither party enjoyed any significant preference from the young or the old in particular.
The contrast with today could hardly be starker. Republicans have consolidated the elder vote and Democrats enjoy the default support of the young, who largely don’t vote anyway: as we know from the maps on our social-media feeds, Hillary Clinton would have won something like forty-five states if 18–25-year-olds had cast the only ballots. And she was the distant second choice of these so-called young millennials in the Democratic primaries, far behind the left-wing challenger. The reawakening global left of the past decade, of which Bernie Sanders was the American electoral incarnation, is, in terms of its age distribution, uniform: the Indignados and Podemos, Syriza (alas), the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Gezi Park protests, South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters, Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, the Kurdish revolution, Black Lives Matter, Nuit Debout and La France Insoumise, Momentum and Jeremy Corbyn, the Democratic Socialists of America—all are or were movements of the young.
While striking, this massive political generation gap is a symptom of something deeper. Whatever it is, we register it in complaints about the supposedly “bad” work ethic of young employees or scolding about keeping good habits: our smartphone-induced fidgetiness; our infamous predilection for avocado toast over mortgages; the decline of Applebee’s and Buffalo Wild Wings, laid low by millennial distaste. (Cf. the swelling genre of listicles about what consumer brands millennials are killing. Cf. also all the articles about millennials and their love of listicles.) You hear it in stories of adult children who move back in with their parents. It’s in the 52 percent of teenagers who have told surveyors that they don’t identify as straight, and the perplexing—if encouraging—news of resurgent youthful interest in public libraries. For good or ill, something has gone profoundly awry in the intergenerational transmission process.
Under ordinary circumstances, the institutions built by the old are repopulated by the young, who adjust them for new circumstances but leave them basically the same, in turn handing them over to the next generation. The possibility of successful passage through the institutions of society is what makes a person follow a normative rather than deviant life course: being a woman or a man roughly the way she or he is supposed to, partnering and reproducing in the socially standard fashion, trying to get ahead or at least get by according to prevailing ethics of education and work. In our society, this has meant (in ideal-typical middle-class terms) homeownership, an occasional vacation, sending your kids to college, and retirement. Historical continuity—the integrity of social institutions over time—works itself out on the individual level: people may feel they are making distinct, agonizing life choices, but for the most part they are living out those institutions predictably. An institution is, at the end of the day, just a pattern of social behavior repeated long enough. On the other hand, if the institutions aren’t processing enough people into the proper form—if too many can’t or won’t do family, school, work, and sex approximately the way they’ve been done before—then large-scale historical continuity can’t happen. The society can’t look tomorrow like it does today.
While it feels as though we are heading toward some such break, there have not yet been many serious efforts to understand our national crisis in terms of generations. This is why Malcolm Harris’s new book, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, is a landmark. Remarkably for an author of a trade book on such an on-trend topic, Harris makes a politically radical argument, undergirded by a coherent and powerful Marxist analysis. You can very well imagine buying this book in an airport, and because Harris is a compelling and funny writer, you’d get through it before you landed. But you might land a different person: the book is devastating. “American Millennials come from somewhere—we didn’t emerge fully formed from the crack in an iPhone screen,” Harris writes. In his view, we are, down to our innermost being, the children of neoliberalism. The habits so often mocked and belittled in the press are in fact adaptations to tightening repressive and exploitative pressures, the survival strategies of a demographic “born in captivity.”
Capitalism’s generation-long crisis, in Harris’s diagnosis, has imposed enormous competitive pressure on the young to produce “human capital.” This concept, a core one in neoliberal economic thought, is meant to quantify the bundle of economically valuable human qualities—education, skills, discipline—accumulated over the course of a life. It’s in the book’s subtitle because it’s the key to Harris’s argument. The hidden hand that shapes millennials, producing our seemingly various and even contradictory stereotyped attributes, is the intensifying imperative—both from the outside and also deeply internalized—to maximize our own potential economic value. “What we’ve seen over the past few decades is not quite a sinister sci-fi plot to shape a cohort of supereffective workers who are too competitive, isolated, and scared to organize for something better,” writes Harris. “But it has turned out a lot like that.” Capitalism is eating its young. It’s only feeding us avocados to fatten us up first.
Harris works through this argument by following the millennial through the stages of life—as far as we’ve yet gotten. A remarkable feature of the book is how Harris is able to apply this single explanation to dozens of disparate if familiar symptoms. Again and again, he yanks the disguise from some behavior seeming to belong to a discrete field—parenting, education, pop culture, or the labor market—and finds that it was actually neoliberalism all along. Harris points out that, beginning in childhood, so-called helicopter parenting and the measurable decline of unstructured play are actually forms of risk management. Given how social inequality in the world at large has worsened competition to get ahead, “parents are told—and then communicate to their children—that their choices, actions, and accomplishments have lasting consequences, and the consequences grow by the year.”
From the preoccupation with bullying to the design of playgrounds and the school policy of zero tolerance, Harris finds the world of childhood increasingly redefined by actuarial caution. Most of all, though, he finds it in the classroom. School is just a form of unwaged work, masked by the ideology of pedagogy. The surplus that kid-labor creates, rather than going to any immediately present boss, pools up in the students themselves, to be tapped by future bosses. When children do schoolwork, they labor on themselves. “By looking at children as investments, we can see where the product of children’s labor is stored: in the machine-self, in their human capital.” The steady increase in homework, the growing apparatus of testing and school accountability, and the pressure for longer school days and school years are just what you would expect once children have been turned into financial assets. Many of the observed social-psychological attributes of the young generation result from undergoing such processing into a human commodity form. Childhood is a “high-stakes merit-badge contest,” teaching kids to be “servile, anxious, and afraid.”
At the end of childhood, some millennials go to college to continue accumulating human capital. Harris is a peerless observer of the harrowing economic costs of “meritocracy,” and his chapter on college abounds in withering aperçus. “College admissions offices are the rating agencies for kids,” he writes. “And once the kid-bond is rated, it has four or so years until it’s expected to produce a return.” Because the pressure to accumulate human capital is so intense, students will bear enormous costs to do it. Far from the coddled children of stereotype, Harris points out, most college students are “regular people—mostly regular workers—who spend part of their work-time on their own human capital, like they’ve been told to.” Exhaustion, overwork, and even food insecurity are common. Colleges themselves, meanwhile, reap obscene rewards from their gatekeeping position by offering a worse product for a higher price: hollowed-out pedagogy from exploited adjuncts and graduate students, masked with “shiny extras unrelated to the core educational mission.” Aggrandizing administrations bloat on student debt, the key to the whole scheme. Student debt, Harris argues, is a bloodsucking Keynesian stimulus, turning the value of the future labor of young borrowers into the capital to build stadiums and luxury dorms today, jacking up tuition even higher and allowing another round of borrowing and building.
But not every kid-bond matures. Students who can’t keep up are diagnosed, drugged, and punished. The extraordinary proliferation of mood and attention disorders among the young, and their development into a lucrative pharmaceutical market, is only the logical complement of the human-capital-accumulation regime of testing, supervising, and debt collecting. Depression, Harris notes, is up 1,000 percent over the past century, “with around half of that growth occurring since the late 1980s.” While there’s always a question about changing diagnoses with this sort of figure, Harris is convincing that there’s more to this phenomenon than an artifact of measurement. So too the growing punitive apparatus waiting to catch kids who fail: “We can draw a straight line between the standardization of children in educational reform and the expulsion, arrest, and even murder of the kids who won’t adapt.” On this account, mass incarceration, too, is a generational phenomenon, and it makes its first appearances inside schools, which are now heavily policed zones, as are the public spaces in which working-class kids congregate. “Millennials are cagey and anxious, as befits the most policed modern generation,” Harris writes. In this way, the book effectively argues that widely different experiences of neoliberalism—from the grasping student’s anxiety for good grades to the young person of color dodging the cops—are nonetheless part of the same social process.
The immediate impulse driving human-capital accumulation is the need to compete in a labor market more unforgiving than anything in memory. This is one of the most familiar elements of the millennial critique of the world we’ve inherited, perhaps best embodied in the meme of “Old Economy Steven”—a yearbook image of a smug and blotchy young white man with an echt mid-’70s look: pageboy haircut, wide-lapeled shirt, some kind of necklace. “Why don’t you call and ask if they’re hiring?” says the supertext on one version; the subtext reads, “Hasn’t been on a job hunt since 1982.” “Pays into social security,” offers another. The kicker: “Receives benefits.” The story Harris tells here isn’t new, but it lies at the core of millennial experience: “It’s harder to compete for a good job, the bad jobs you can hope to fall back on are worse than they used to be, and both good and bad jobs are less secure. The intense anxiety that has overcome American childhood flows from a reasonable fear of un-, under-, and just plain lousy employment.” The meme itself conveys something distinctively millennial: not just precarious employment but awareness of our own precariousness, which our elders refuse to accommodate or even acknowledge.
Though media stereotypes often portray millennials as brittle, wheedling, and demanding, for the most part young workers are docile enough to have bent themselves into whatever shape capital has required. Millennials aren’t fragile—they’re overstretched. This is the most human-capital-intensive generation in history, productive far beyond the wages it garners. “From our bathroom breaks to our sleep schedules to our emotional availability, millennials are growing up highly attuned to the needs of capital markets,” Harris writes. “We are encouraged to strategize and scheme to find places, times, and roles where we can be effectively put to work. Efficiency is our existential purpose, and we are a generation of finely honed tools.” Racing to stay ahead, young workers accept low wages, sweatshop working conditions, and insecure arrangements. They do not expect that their employment will grant access to the social benefits enjoyed by their parents and grandparents—written off by Harris as history’s most entitled generations, anomalies not likely to occur again. Rather, the emblematic figure of the millennial workforce, the clearest expression of its tendencies, is the intern: the worker whose labor is disavowed entirely, made out to be for her benefit, like the labor of schoolchildren.
For Harris, even millennial forms of creativity and self-expression are captive to this logic. The young are transforming the entire culture, he argues, through the way that their human-capital-accumulation strategies are working themselves out in the culture industries. Pointing to professional and college athletes, musicians, tween entertainers, online pornographers, and YouTube stars, he repeats his point: depressed entertainment profits have produced an arms race, causing aspiring performers, actors, and writers to laboriously produce their own stardom rather than wait to be discovered. He tells the story of Chicago rapper Chief Keef, who released more than forty songs for free online and created his own label at age 16 without any corporate involvement: “By the time Interscope signed Keef, he was already a bona fide star, with the kind of brand they would have otherwise had to spend money developing.”
While the restructuring of these industries allows for some Cinderella stories, its overall effect is to intensify exploitation, by others or by oneself. For Harris, this is both a way of interpreting mass culture today and a metonym for a classic millennial habit. “Older Americans like to complain about the way many young people obsessively track our own social media metrics, but it’s a complaint that’s totally detached from the behavior’s historical, material causes,” he writes. “Personal branding shifts work onto job-seekers.”
On social media—the heart of the matter, naturally, for a book on millennials—personal branding becomes indistinguishable from social life in general. The destruction of childhood as we once knew it by parents, teachers, and police has driven kids into social media for their “flirting, fighting, and friending.” Once online, these formerly free activities can be commodified, the living activities of childhood vacuumed up as data and monetized. Despite cyclical moral panics over new drugs or hookup culture, teens—busy engaging in their social lives online when they’re not doing homework—actually use fewer recreational drugs, drink less, and have less sex than their equivalents in prior generations. It’s risk aversion again, says Harris—fuel for Silicon Valley profits now and more disciplined workers later.
The summation Kids These Days gives us is harrowing: here is a generation hurrying to give in to the unremitting, unforgiving commodification of the self. Harris predicts a future of debt servitude, confinement for the “malfunctioning,” worsening misogyny (though his gender analysis is less coherent than the rest of his argument), and total surveillance. Millennials, that is, are the first generation to live in the dystopia to come. Harris’s politics are revolutionary, and he dismisses any lesser mode of collective response to the thoroughgoing crisis as—to use his simile—akin to playing with a toy. Ethical consumption, electoral politics, philanthropy and nonprofits, and social protest are all just switches and buttons, yielding fun noises and flashing lights but having no effect: “The series of historical disasters that I’ve outlined, the one that characterizes my generation, is a big knot. There’s not a single thread we can pull to undo it, no one problem we can fix to make sure the next generation grows up happier and more secure.” What you do with a knot that you can’t untie is cut it.
Harris emerged as a writer with anarchist politics over the past decade, particularly in the New York milieus of Occupy Wall Street and the New Inquiry, though one can find his writing in this magazine and early issues of Jacobin as well. The window of possibility, the feeling of historical openness, that was generated by the Occupy moment did not stay open. The halves of the anticapitalist left, embodied on the one hand by Harris’s anarchism and on the other by the emergent democratic socialism of Jacobin, became incompatible—a rupture to which Harris’s work feels like a partial response. You can actually watch this happen in real time in a video of a 2011 panel at Bluestockings bookstore on the Lower East Side. The same day that thousands had rallied to defend the occupation against a police raid, anarchists Harris and Natasha Lennard squared off against socialists Jodi Dean, Doug Henwood, and Chris Maisano in a contentious exchange off which one can read much of the substance of intra-left developments and conflicts of the past six years. Periodically, the camera pans around the packed bookstore, and a sharp eye can pick out a large number of prominent figures from New York’s left-wing world of letters.
The whole thing quickly takes on a generational tone. “The sit-down strike was invented decades ago by unionists,” says Maisano. “It wasn’t a bunch of kids running around the University of California writing stuff on the wall.” (Off to the left, Harris and Lennard roll their eyes and laugh.) The socialists propose workplace and student organization and campaigning for free higher education. Harris answers the socialists with a slogan from the 2009 University of California occupation: “A free university in a capitalist economy is like a reading room in a prison.” Henwood—a man nearing 60—mimes masturbation in response to Harris, at the time 22 years old. One moment, though, stands out as particularly prescient. It’s a question from an older man in the audience. This isn’t going to last forever, he points out. “What happens when the occupation ends? What happens when the tumult and the shouting of the ecstatic moment dies? Who remains? Who maintains the continuity? Who draws the lesson? Who draws the lesson—what a question for a school abolitionist.
About a year later, Harris sniped at the Chicago Teachers Union during its 2012 strike against school closures, widely seen as a rare instance of heroism and victory on the left. He wrote on Twitter that teachers don’t “like or care very much about the kids,” comparing them to prison guards whose word we wouldn’t accept about the best interests of prisoners. His line, that he supported the strike but opposed the school system itself, was hard for many comrades to swallow. Earlier the same year, he mounted a defense of his generational analysis, in which he mocked his critics, especially Henwood, for missing the point because they were ‘old.’ Henwood shot back that readers should check in with Harris in ten years, by which time he’ll have transitioned from revolutionary anarchism to marketing.
In many ways, Henwood could scarcely have been more wrong about Harris. Five years later, the younger writer has published a book calling for youth revolution and recently seemed to risk his book contract by publicly rooting on Twitter for the death of the Republican congressman Steve Scalise. Harris doesn’t seem to have mellowed. But there’s something more interesting at stake in this debate than male-writer egos, old and young. In a less ad hominem register, Henwood might have raised a valid question: can the political impulses that Harris represents, the ones that come out of our generation’s distinctive experience, mature into potent collectivity? Or are they individualist from the root, bound to decay into posture and then a racket—absent the guidance of more seasoned activists, or without connection to struggles more deeply historically or socially grounded?
While there are of course old and young anarchists and socialists alike, the political division that has reemerged over the past decade on the left still pivots on this question: What is the proper relationship to the past for those of us who want to make a new future?
The more traditional socialist left argues for continuity. We’ve been doing occupations since forever, Maisano said; let’s rebuild social-democratic institutions like CUNY, Henwood said. Socialism may be embraced by the young now, but in this version it still looks and sounds like Bernie Sanders—still a project of recuperation as much as invention, resuming an effort interrupted by the neoliberal caesura. In some guises, such historical continuity is humbling and useful. In others, it’s boomer narcissism run amok, reducing every left-wing proposition from a young person to an opportunity to force the past into the present. “Don’t repeat my mistakes,” cries the old socialist to the new one. The result can be formally radical but quite often conservative in affect and mood, dabbling soberly in the far-fetched notion that you can change the structure of society while everyone stays the same kind of people. This is one way of understanding why whiteness and masculinity continue to bedevil the socialist left, even in its committed antiracist and feminist quarters. A left that maintains a tether to a usable past is bound more tightly to the historical American nightmare. It can’t rush toward utopia, because it’s committed to engaging with people as they are and nudging them along.
The insurrectionary left, on the other hand, wants year zero. The power of the occupation, Lennard pointed out, is that when you step into it, you become someone else. The problem with becoming someone else, though, is that you’re disinherited from your history, so you can’t wield it effectively to understand the present or get ready for the future. It’s life in a permanent now, a condition reflected in anarchism’s traditional weakness when it comes to strategic calculation and engagement with state institutions—those durable, blunt objects. What was predictable about Occupy’s destruction—in fact, what was predicted at Bluestockings that night—was for this reason hard to prepare for until it was already under way.
It is, in its way, a generational question. If you kill your parents, you won’t hear their warnings, and then you’ll eventually just become them without realizing it. If you listen to them, you’ll become them on purpose. The question is how to become new and stay that way, how to be a stable point moving steadily from past into future without a neurotic relation to either—neither clinging nor leaping. This is the existential core of the strategic question on the left. It’s a question about growing up.
Harris is a leaper. There are no preparations to make, for him, no slow and steady work to chip away at power structures and create strategic opportunity. He imagines no source of transcendence in the millennial experience itself. If things break our way, it will be simply the intrusion of events. He anticipates some great departure, seemingly coming all of a sudden as Occupy did. In the book’s rushed coda, Harris points vaguely to some approaching test of unknown shape for the millennial soul. “We don’t know for sure when or where our crucial moments are coming, but we do know that they are.” We will, he predicts enigmatically, become “fascists or revolutionaries, one or the other.” What determines the timing of this reckoning or its outcome is unspecified, except that it would help if we can be “lucky and brave.” This much I agree with.
Since the days of Occupy, Harris has gotten older, and like most of us as we’ve gotten older, he’s hardened some. Kids These Days wants to be a political economy of millennials the way Capital wanted to be a political economy of the working class, a story of how structural processes produce abjection, then crisis, then transformation. But—like Marx, though not for the same reason—he doesn’t quite close this circuit. Harris experienced defeat, and he can’t help but telegraph the hopelessness it created. Kids These Days is the story of the objectification of millennials, not the subjectivity that they make from that objectification. At the end, we’re still playthings of history, not its agents. Addressing the deunionization of the American workplace, he describes his cohort as “the perfect scabs.” Of acquiescence to the internship, he writes, “Only a generation raised on a diet of gold stars could think that way.” Millennials are captive to fantasies of upward mobility, a “fool’s errand.” We’re “so well trained to excel and follow directions that many of us don’t know how to separate our own interests from a boss’s or a company’s.” We are, in his telling, incapable of trust, crippled by anxiety, unwilling to stand up for ourselves or one another, and sexually stunted: “Like Calvinists who thought the heaven-bound were preordained but unknown, everyone has to act as if they are saved, even though most are damned.”
While the diagnosis is persuasive in its way, Harris seems unusually willing to set aside our generation’s quite impressive record of resistance in the streets and at the ballot box. (On Twitter and in his published record he is visibly a regular, passionate observer of international social movements.) The catalog of movements of millennials, if not yet thick with victories, is nothing to sneeze at either. Moreover, it’s clearly a work in progress. His own experience at Zuccotti, mine in the labor movement, and those of millions of our comrades around the world in social and political struggles of all kinds sit uneasily with the existential skepticism that the book avows.
The problem may be that Harris seems to see our generation as the whole of the question. He’s right that one can see the crystallization of our world in what’s happening to our generation. But this clarity is possible exactly because it’s only a part of the picture. Without engaging with the larger social landscape, Harris can’t get a view of what exactly might dislodge the current pattern. This, one supposes, is why such a sharp analysis concludes with a hand wave about future “crucial moments.” Millennials are not alone, and we are not the only ones facing life changes of momentous social consequence. Generation is not actually just an identity. It’s a relationship: no children without parents, no millennials without boomers. And all of us should have noticed by now that our parents are starting to get old. This will impose new obligations on us and open up new opportunities.
The aging of our parents’ generation will produce a new peak in the country’s age structure. When the boomers were young, less than 10 percent of the population was over 65. Today, we’re around 15 percent, and we’ll get to 20 percent as quick as 2030—then stay there for some time. Our society has never gone through anything like this before. It’s likely to slow economic growth significantly all on its own—in addition to whatever other drags will be operating at that point. It certainly will put enormous pressure on social support and caregiving systems, likely beyond what they can sustain in anything like their current form. Harris writes that millennials have been written out of the social contract of midcentury American liberalism, whose crown jewels are Social Security and Medicare, social-insurance programs for the elderly. But the beneficiaries whose entitlements he resents, the boomers, may end up being written out, too.
The sharp pressure on elder-care and health-care systems engendered by the boomer demographic decline will be more than a statistical outlier. Health-care prices, already rising, will skyrocket as demand spikes. Medicare and Medicaid, if they’re still intact in anything like their present form, will face attempts by the right to impose steep cuts. Nursing homes will become overcrowded, leading to the torture of old people—something that the Trump Administration recently moved to weaken elders’ legal power to sue over, not coincidentally. (The old folks left behind in California and Texas and Florida nursing homes after recent disasters—lethally in the latter case—are a precursor of this coming nightmare.) The demand of older Americans on fixed incomes for affordable places to live will collide with housing markets that, if current conditions still obtain, will probably be even more out of control than now. What you should imagine is not debates in Congress over Medicare reimbursement policies, though these will happen. What you should imagine is homeless shelters packed with octogenarians.
Many of these processes are already under way. Today, health care accounts for nearly one-fifth of the economy and one-seventh of the labor market. It expanded right through the Great Recession. Home health aide is the fastest-growing job in the country. It’s a 21st-century job—unregulated by labor law, afflicted with falling real wages, taking advantage of the heightened desperation for work of women, immigrants, and people of color. Usually it involves caring for Medicaid patients—in other words, people still shielded (if barely) by parsimonious 20th-century social protections.
The young and the old don’t become who they are, and live the lives they live, independently of each other. In Harris’s bad future, we’re all the home health aide. But as the old grow in number, we’ll have to make a choice. The right will probably attempt simultaneous attacks on programs for the old and on the working and living conditions of the young, arguing that screwing over the young (though they will call it increasing opportunity) is the only way to sustain the threadbare safety net for the old. Grandma can only have a decent twilight if her home health aide’s wages get pushed down to $7 an hour. Further unraveling of the welfare state, falling wages, worsening inequality—this is the route to Harris’s apocalypse. Maybe it ends well, but if the old are reducing the young to peonage and the young are abandoning or torturing the old in their nursing homes, it’s a bit hard to imagine coming out the other side happy with who we are and what we’ve done.
The need to replace parents and care for the old always marks a watershed in the life course, but it isn’t usually a mass event capable of rewriting the social contract. A crisis of such breadth and intensity as we are likely to face seems the only possibility for breaking the political deadlock currently pitting young against old. If there’s a path to political resolution short of apocalypse, it runs through the young growing up and assuming the caretaking role, and compelling the old to accept care on our terms—and with it, our political hegemony. Either we rebuild democracy around care provision, as the political theorist Joan Tronto argues we must, or we lose it as Harris predicts.
This is not an idle fancy. One sees it nowhere more clearly than in British politics, upended by action from both ends of the age structure at once. On the left, the Labour Party was transformed by a movement of the young, a movement emerging from the 2010 student protests, which installed Jeremy Corbyn as the party’s most left-wing leader in a century. Corbyn then escaped his universally predicted demise in the general election, holding the Conservatives to a hung parliament and setting himself up for victory down the road. By all accounts, the turning point in the campaign happened when the Tories unveiled their party manifesto, which included a proposal widely derided as a “dementia tax.” This idea would have required long-term-care patients to forfeit all assets above £100,000, including their homes. (We do a version of this in the US to the Medicaid recipients who make up two-thirds of the population of our nursing homes.) The response was so withering that Prime Minister Theresa May stumbled to reverse herself almost immediately, but the damage was done. The “about-face awoke a largely dreary election campaign,” as the New York Times put it.
In the end, the old still voted for May in huge numbers—69 percent of those over 70. It was the young, perhaps imagining the way that care burdens would be dumped onto them, who brought the socialist Corbyn within reach of power. The age structure of the vote was almost perfectly symmetrical: for every ten additional years of age, a voter was 9 percent likelier to support the Tories. The old will certainly never enact social transformation themselves. They are even likely to obstruct it. But it is nonetheless our relationships with them that may lead us to a sustainable program for its pursuit—a way to move forward in our lives and in history at once. If we see our millennial identity as a relationship to our elders, rather than an abject identity, then an avenue of transcendence short of apocalypse opens up: in this collective relationship, new solidarities may form, new varieties of care, love, and responsibility may take shape—and, from them, power. Millennials may yet figure out what we need to do politically from the labor we’ll need to perform in our lives.
We have our examples in this country, too. In that famous picture from Charlottesville, we see a young black man—Corey Long is his name—shooting fire from a spray can at a wormy white fascist brandishing a Confederate flag like a club. So far, we’re in Harris’s world here—in fact, I believe I first learned the term antifa from his Twitter page some years ago. But if you look at the photo, you see over Long’s right shoulder a frail-looking older white man, whom Long, it emerges, stepped forward to defend against the physical menace facing them, including the actual discharge of a gun in their direction.
This is an image, then, not only of the escalating racial and ideological confrontation gripping the country but also of intergenerational solidarity and protectiveness. In this sense, it is quite far from the fantasy of antifascist defense as irresponsible youthful adventurism. The scene is made all the more tender by the fact that the 23-year-old Long is actually an elder-care worker. This, care for the old, is his job. He probably doesn’t usually do it with fire, but it’s good to know that’s part of the skill set that this particular millennial has accumulated. One can be quite sure that his job is a shit job, but he appears committed to the principle, and in that, there’s something more.
The Kids Aren’t Alright
A crucial new work of generational analysis explores how society turned millennials into human capital.
Natasha Lennard ▪ Winter 2018
Submissions to the We Are the 99 Percent Tumblr, 2011–2013
Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials
by Malcolm Harris
Little, Brown and Company, 2017, 272 pp.
When we talk about generations, we tend to talk as if history has always been divided up into them. But the idea of distinct eras of cohorts each defined by some unique spirit is not timeless. The notion of a generation was borne of a conception of history as a machine of progress—a claim central to Enlightenment ideology. When philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder coined the term “Zeitgeist” in 1769, he assumed time was a progressive force driving history forward. Developing this idea, Hegel imagined historical progress as a series of dialectical steps, each bringing the Geist, or World Spirit, closer to its realization of reason and freedom.
To this day, the notion of generations remains haunted by the Geist—the tacit presumption that each birth cohort signifies progress. Little wonder that millennials have proven such a conundrum for media narratives. Because for millennials, as author Malcolm Harris points out, the progress ideology “doesn’t jibe with reality: Somehow things got worse.”
Harris’s new book, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, is a crucial work of generational analysis in part because it severs the connection between the idea of generations and the presupposition of progress. The book is not an explicit critique of this essentialist notion of generations, however, but something more practical: a corrective. Against a glut of reductive clickbait stories dedicated to asserting “Millennials be like [insert broad observation]” Harris (with whom I worked a number of years ago at the New Inquiry) takes up the task of asking why millennials are the way they are, and then providing an answer. As he states in his introduction: “if Millennials are different in one way or another, it’s not because we’re more (or less) evolved than our parents or grandparents; it’s because they’ve changed the world in ways that have produced people like us. And we didn’t happen by accident.” The pages that follow are a careful and convincing study of how specific material conditions account for the way millennials be like—and, crucially, “in whose interests it is that we exist this way.”
Kids These Days offers a historical materialist analysis, but Harris is too committed to accessibility to use that term or to mention Marx even once. In prose that is precise, readable, and witty, he explores the economic, social, and political conditions that shaped those of us—myself and Harris included—born between 1980 and 2000. Harris’s central contention is that millennials are what happens when contemporary capitalism converts young people into “human capital.” After reading his book, it seems ill-advised to understand millennials any other way.
It’s nothing groundbreaking to state that capitalism shapes the subjects who live under it. But Harris looks in detail at what distinguishes millennials as the product of our specific period during which capitalism, as he puts it, “has started to hyperventilate: It’s desperate to find anything that hasn’t yet been reengineered to maximize profit, and then it makes those changes as quickly as possible.” This has turned young people into “human capital.” It’s not just industry and government that frame us this way. Harris’s book shows how almost every institution influencing the development of young people—including parents, school, college, entertainment, psychiatry, social media, and work—reinforces the idea that young people are simply investments in labor.
So what is human capital? As Harris explains, its “rough paper analog is the résumé: a summary of past training for future labor.” Being viewed as human capital reduces people to no more than potential earners, with their value determined by their imagined future capacity to make money based on their current skillset and social position. It’s a way of reconfiguring young life into market terms. And it has informed every stage of the millennial generation’s development: schools organized by competitive standardized testing; résumé-building extracurriculars for the wealthy; zero-tolerance policies and the constant threat of prison for poor kids; monitoring and control of childhood behavior; prescription drugs, and little free time to play, all justified by the myth that turning yourself into better human capital guarantees a better future.
Childhood done right, according to the vagaries of this system, means getting into college and taking on huge debt—to double down on the self-qua-investment. As tuition costs have soared, median incomes have stagnated, producing a generation with little hope of paying off its unprecedented levels of debt. “As it turns out,” Harris writes, “just because you can produce an unprecedented amount of value doesn’t necessarily mean you can feed yourself under twenty-first-century American capitalism.”
As Harris admits almost as a refrain, this is a bleak story about an unsustainable situation. But this game does have winners. The question is who wins, and the answer is clear. Turning a generation into human capital provides capitalists with a steady supply of workers.
Harris’s analysis will come as a shock only to readers who previously understood millennials in terms of contradictory media tropes (they are both lazy and working all hours, sexless and oversexed, ever-connected and narcissistic, money-driven and financially irresponsible). But Harris isn’t offering up novelty—he’s giving us a comprehensive analysis of what has up until now been dealt with in fragments.
A book with this kind of scope risks the pitfalls of the very sorts of media narratives it attempts to overturn—namely, broad generalizations that assume all millennials share the same experiences. Harris sidesteps those traps by confining his analysis to American millennials and emphasizing the salience of class, race, and gender. This is not auxiliary to his analysis, but central. We are converted into human capital in different ways; the “growth of growth” requires different kinds of person-machines.
Harris details, for example, how “the gendered wage gap has narrowed in the past decades,” but that women’s gains have been far from evenly distributed. He explores late capitalism’s increasing reliance and production of so-called “feminized labor”, and how this “reflects employers’ successful attempts to reduce labor costs.” Throughout the book Harris also stresses how black, Latino, and indigenous millennials—as in prior generations—face greater barriers to financial stability, systematic exclusion from public life, and overpolicing compared to their white counterparts.
The author does not claim to offer a complete account of the millennial experience. The label “millennial” is used with messy abandon by the mainstream media and marketing agencies and in turn has been dismissed by some critics as little more than nonsense advertising fodder. Harris is keen to point out that “millennial” is anything but a useless term, but not because all so-called millennials have any one quality in common. A historical materialist analysis doesn’t foreclose attention to intersecting struggles; a good one, like Harris’s, does the opposite. He’s not bartering the idea of some vital principle shared by all American millennials; he’s looking at the conditions that have fashioned millennials into a group.
There’s a risk of begging the question here, to posit millennials as products of material conditions and then to show how material conditions produce millennials. But Harris offers a clarifying and information-rich narrative that avoids mechanistic determinism. His story might not be the only explanation for how millennials were created, but it’s certainly convincing.
By demanding that we take seriously the making of millennials, Harris sends up a warning flare about the kind of world millennials themselves might go on to make. Readers who reach Harris’s final chapter hoping for a solution weren’t reading with enough care. If we grasped just how capitalism has produced millennials, we would understand that undoing this system requires no less than undoing ourselves. Harris could have made this point more explicit, but he is clear that the necessary drastic change of course will be difficult even to imagine.
Harris is well versed in the putative solutions that people tend to mobilize around. He notes that books like his often end with optimistic calls to action, which recall the ’90’s kids game, Bop It!: “Buy It! Vote It! Or Give It! Protest It!” But Harris cuts through each of these potential moves with a scalpel.
Harris is not about to hang his hopes on Bernie Sanders, or the Democratic Socialists, or representative democracy in general: “The young people who could provide the type of leadership we need—kind, principled, thoughtful, generous, radical, visionary, inspiring—won’t touch electoral politics with a ten-foot pole,” he writes. Nor does activism outside electoral politics offer a way out. “[I]f the people in power are willing to use guns before they will capitulate [and they are],” he writes, “then protest is not a plausible road to wide-ranging social change.”
In the end, he rejects “progressive Bop It!” tout court, writing that, “anyone who invites you to start playing is clueless, disingenuous, or both. The only way to win is not to start.” But Harris doesn’t leave us with total fatalism. As he sees it, to continue on our current path is to opt for a fascistic future, and he believes there’s but “a short window” of time in which to change course. “We become fascists or revolutionaries, one or the other,” he writes.
It’s a conclusion that may sit ill with readers watching with optimism as socialist candidates gain small but notable electoral ground across the country and make serious advances in Europe. More than at any other moment in our lifetime, the aperture for leftist political intervention is widening, not because of aging statesmen like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, but because of the young people organizing around them—the millennials of Harris’s analysis, and the generation that will come after us. Harris’s cynicism here betrays his politics, which lean more anarchist than socialist. For him, a “political revolution” led by a septuagenarian senator working within the existing political system is not enough. But if Sanders and his followers can’t tell us how to become revolutionaries, neither, by his own admission, can Harris. Is it fair to ask him to?
Both Harris and I made small names for ourselves in Occupy’s heyday for taking up anarchist stances that ran against certain socialist currents of that moment. We eschewed calls to unify around demands or build a movement and were, accordingly, accused of insurrectionary bluster. But Harris’s suspicion of solutions is not a mark of immaturity: it is the kind of skepticism that his own materialist analysis demands. Readers might disagree with Harris’s views, but it is his analysis, not his conclusions, that make the book significant. The core virtues of the book should not, unlike some of the headier proclamations Harris and I made circa 2011, divide the left.
Harris tells the story of a generation coming into being as human capital. We don’t know how to think outside of ourselves, and Harris knows he’s as stuck in this predicament as any of his readers. If one millennial author could figure out how to undo all this, he wouldn’t have needed to write the book on millennials in the first place. And even if a generation cannot become a revolutionary subject, we can thank Harris for clearing away some false consciousness.
Natasha Lennard writes about radical politics and philosophies of violence for publications including the Intercept, the Nation, and the New York Times. Her forthcoming book Violence (with Brad Evans) will be published by City Lights in 2018.
Kids These Days: A Billfold Book Review
By Nicole Dieker January 11, 2018
Where do I even start with Malcolm Harris’s Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials — which I finally got to read and VERY MUCH RECOMMEND? It might be best to say that even though I already knew a lot of the information presented in the book (I was born in 1981, after all) I still loved it.
Harris begins his examination of the Millennial generation at the beginning: all of us newborn children, ready to be molded into productive middle-class adults by our parents and teachers. Except there are fewer middle-class jobs than ever before, and more of us are performing at higher levels than ever before, and college costs more than ever before.
A jump in the number of students with Harvard-caliber skills doesn’t have a corresponding effect on the size of the school’s freshman class. Instead, it allows universities to become even more selective and raise prices, to populate their schools with rich kids and geniuses on scholarships. This is the central problem with an education system designed to create the most human capital possible: An en masse increase in ability within a competitive system doesn’t advantage all individuals. Instead, more competition weakens each individual’s bargaining position within the entire structure.
Those last two sentences are essentially his thesis, and if you want to read about all of the ways in which this increase in competition, ability, and human capital — aka the amount of monetizable work a human can produce — have made it harder for the Millennial generation to find financial and social stability, you are probably going to love this book too.
Harris breaks down the way the educational system strips as much cash out of Millennials as possible, the way the workplace strips as much work out of Millennials as possible, and the way that the government — and the prison system – keep Millennials in line. On the one hand, you have universities writing letters to the Department of Labor asking them to avoid taking action against illegal internships (since students are paying those universities for the privilege of being unpaid employees), and on the other hand, you have school administrators and police reducing the labor pool by disproportionately targeting young people of color:
Before a young person can compete to accrue human capital, they have to be part of a free society. The police exist in part to keep some people at the margins of that free society, always threatening to exclude them.
Kids These Days is full of those kinds of sentences — the mind-blowing ones that flip your understanding of the world just slightly. I knew that my generation was the first to do less well than its parents, but I didn’t know that “being under thirty-five is now correlated with poverty wages.” I knew that today’s children have to start training at impossibly young ages if they hope to be professional musicians/athletes/actors, but I didn’t know that “for parents doing the math, turning an athletically or a musically gifted toddler into a prodigy might be cheaper than four years at a competitive private school.”
If there’s one flaw to Kids These Days, it’s that word “Millennial.” Harris notes in his introduction that the Millennial generation encompasses people born between 1980 and 2000, but he also includes examples of the stresses and challenges facing today’s children (the ones born well after 2000). This creates an unnecessary correlation between Millennials and youth, and — as I love to remind people — a lot of us are in our thirties now. There’s nothing about how Millennials are parenting their own children, nothing about Millennials handling mid-career transitions, nothing to suggest that Millennials are anywhere near middle-aged. Even the book’s title implies we’re all still kids.
But hey — maybe Harris will write a sequel.
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Review: Share or Die by Malcolm Harris, Neal Gorenflo and Cory Doctorow
By Frank Kaminski, originally published by Mud City Press
January 10, 2013
Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis
Edited by Malcolm Harris with Neal Gorenflo; foreword by Cory Doctorow
207 pp. New Society Publishers – Jun. 2012. $14.95.
Today’s young adults seem to get under a lot of people’s skin. We’re accused of being pampered, entitled, egocentric and so different from our parents that we might as well have come from Mars.* But that summation completely misses the mark. Rather, it’s more accurate to say that our parents’ world has morphed into a strange new one in which the old rules don’t apply. We find ourselves adrift without the old social contracts and economic opportunities enjoyed by previous generations, and that’s the real reason for our underemployment, poverty and protracted parental dependence. Good credentials and a solid work ethic, once the key to success and prosperity, count for so little now.
Such is the plight of Generation Yers, the roughly 70 million Americans born between 1978 and 1995 who are now trying to make their way in an era of crisis and dwindling prospects. It’s a predicament poignantly captured in the new book Share or Die, a collection of short writings by those on the front lines of Generation Y. The book is a portrait of the lives of Gen Yers from around the world, representing a wide range of backgrounds and aspirations. Their common lament is perhaps best captured by this line from a community center volunteer who despairs of ever making a living: “I am still knee-deep in the slush of a muddy economy right beside my peers, feeling the cold shun of a job market that has shown itself to be quite stingy with the young and hopeful.”
Share or Die takes its title from an exchange that one of the editors, Neal Gorenflo, had with a poor man he met on the street. The man asked for money, Gorenflo handed him some, and the two struck up a conversation. When Gorenflo mentioned that he publishes an online magazine about sharing, his companion brightened and said, “Oh, I get that. When you’re homeless, it’s share or die.” Gorenflo asked him to elaborate and he did, explaining that when you give to others in need, even if you are yourself in need, it comes back to you. And it behooves you to avoid those who just take and don’t give. This conversation marked a turning point in Gorenflo’s thinking about sharing. He and co-editor Malcolm Harris began using the phrase “share or die” in talking about their book, and eventually it stuck.
It’s truly a phrase to live by for the young people featured in this book. The biggest lesson of their post-college lives seems to have been how necessary it is to share with others in your same lot if you are to survive yourself. Many have come to renounce the very notion of ownership altogether in favor of something called collaborative consumption. Dubbed “the sharing economy,” it’s an economic model in which everything is shared, swapped, bartered, traded or rented—but never owned. Car sharing services like Zipcar are a perfect example. Hundreds of dollars a month can be saved by not owning a car and renting one occasionally as needed.
Worker cooperatives are another form of sharing. They’re employee-owned businesses in which the worker-owners democratically manage the organization, elect their board from within the membership, own most of the shares and receive commensurate amounts of surplus revenue. Young entrepreneur Mira Luna tells us how it works and how those with enough business acumen and capital can flourish in this setting. Starting a worker co-op, she explains, is much like starting any business: there’s a lot of homework and planning to be done before you jump in. Luna lists some co-op development organizations that can provide valuable guidance and recommends talking with co-op-friendly attorneys and accountants when first getting started. She also gives detailed advice on how to find others willing to join your co-op.
For those who remain consigned to the world of corporate employment, Liz Kofman and Astri Von Arbin Ahlander describe an alternative to the traditional, rigid corporate ladder structure that they refer to as the corporate “lattice.” In an essay titled “Get on the Lattice,” they demonstrate how restrictive most nine-to-five jobs are for people who want to pursue parenting and homemaking along with a career. Most corporate employers, they observe, let their employees have only a couple of months of parental leave per year at most. And when considering candidates, they aren’t understanding of employment gaps resulting from having taken leave. As its name suggests, the corporate lattice can offer far more flexibility. A lattice lifestyle can take many forms, a common one being job-sharing, in which two or more people hold a single position so that they can fill in for one other during lengthy absences.
In addition to its insights into frugal living in hard times, Share or Die also explores efforts to reform the economic order so that things aren’t so tough for so many. The book offers an engaging look at the Occupy protest movement, which has had a significant representation of Gen Yers. In a narrative titled “Occupy Everything,” Brooklyn-based writer and editor Willie Osterweil provides a firsthand report on last fall’s demonstrations in New York. Noting that the media coverage was “either dismissive or outright malicious,” he sets out to tell the truth. His descriptions of police brutality during the occupation in lower Manhattan and the rollicking shouts of “Our Bridge!” during the Battle of Brooklyn Bridge are spirited and trenchant indeed.
Even more trenchant is the book’s exposé on the charade of higher education. In an excellent but disturbing article titled “Bad Education,” Malcolm Harris poses a very good question with regard to the crisis of student loan debt. “What kind of incentives,” he asks, “motivate lenders to continue awarding six-figure sums to teenagers facing both the worst youth unemployment rate in decades and an increasingly competitive global workforce?” His answer is that student loan lenders, like mortgage lenders during the subprime crisis, feel protected by their ability to bundle the loans into securities and re-sell them. His conclusions about higher education are damning ones: colleges and universities have become corporate enterprises run by high-salaried executives who are perpetrating an egregious scam.
The book has another fine piece related to education titled “Learning Outside the Academy.” It’s a how-to on mastering new subjects and skills without having to pay money for formal schooling. The author relates how he learned to speak Mandarin in five months without the benefit of an immersion program, becoming fluent enough to be admitted to a Chinese university. He then recounts how he did it. Out of all his pointers, my favorite is that you should “[f]ind something you can pour yourself into happily. Don’t bother trying to learn anything you aren’t truly interested in.”
Though Share or Die is quite good overall, it does have some off-notes, and these are sadly located near the beginning. We read several pieces by new graduates who enter the job market feeling full of potential, only to be crushed by reality. While some of the authors speak of silver linings, lessons learned, or a sense of resolution, the ones who don’t cast a pall of whininess over this section of the book. Don’t get me wrong; I feel their pain. But I also find myself uncomfortably aware that such passages are ideal fodder for those who like to attack Generation Y as entitled and coddled. I can also see readers from other age groups countering that the terrible economy has left many besides Gen-Yers feeling dejected and broken.
But aside from this lapse in tone, Share or Die represents a compelling account of the hardships faced by young people today. It doesn’t explore in detail the reasons for their plight, aside from brief mentions of the peaking of resources and affluence that is now happening across the industrial world (those looking for more depth in this regard would do well to read Richard Heinberg’s The End of Growth). However, the book excels as a practical reference.
* In the December 8, 2003 edition of the St. Petersburg Times online, business columnist Robert Trigaux wrote that Gen Yers "may as well have landed here from Mars" (URL: http://www.sptimes.com/2003/12/08/Columns/Bending_business_atti.shtml; accessed Jan. 1, 2013) .
The Wealth of the Commons
A world beyond market & state
Share or Die – A Challenge for Our Times
By
Neal Gorenflo
About a year ago, a weather-beaten, middle-aged man asked me for money on the platform of the Mountain View Caltrain station. I gave him three dollars. He thanked me, and asked what I did for work. I introduced myself, learned his name, Jeff, and we shook hands. I pulled out a card from my computer bag, and handed it to him as I told him that I publish an online magazine about sharing.
Jeff lit up, “Oh I get that – when you’re homeless, it’s share or die.”
That got my attention. I asked him to explain. Jeff said that a year earlier, his girlfriend drank herself to death alone in a motel room. He said she wouldn’t have died had someone been with her. For him, isolation equaled death.
Jeff explained his perspective further, that he had no problem giving his last dollar or cigarette to a friend, that it comes back when you need it. But there are those who just take. You stay away from them.
I asked him about the homeless in Mountain View, which is in the middle of prosperous Silicon Valley. Jeff said there are 800 homeless people in the city, and that each has a similar story.
That conversation got under my skin. I shared it with Malcolm Harris the next day on a call about this book. Half-joking, I suggested Jeff’s phrase, Share or Die, as a title. At the time, I thought it was over-the-top. I wasn’t serious. But, thankfully, Malcolm began using it in correspondence about the book. It stuck.
My conversation with Jeff marked a turning point in my thinking. I had thought of sharing as merely smart because it creates positive social, environmental and economic change through one strategy.
But Jeff ’s story and the directness of his phrase – share or die – broke through my intellectualization of sharing. Jeff helped me see something that I was blind to, even though I knew all the facts – that sharing is not just a smart strategy, it’s necessary for our survival as a species. This has always been so, but today our condition is especially acute.
We’re using 50 percent more natural resources per year than the earth can replace, and the global population and per capita consumption are growing. And despite the overconsumption, countries all over the world are being rocked by social unrest because of how unevenly resources are distributed. The social contract is in tatters, and threats to peace and security seem likely to escalate. It’s now glaringly obvious to me that we need to learn to share on a global scale fast, or die.
But the threat is not only one of biological death. Those like me – who are in no danger of starving anytime soon – face a spiritual death when we act as if well- being is a private affair, deny the influence we have on each other, and gate ourselves off from the rest of humanity with money and property. We can neither survive nor live well unless we share.
The path to this realization has been slow but steady. I started down it seven years ago when I deliberately shifted my life toward sharing. This shift led to co-founding Shareable magazine two years ago, where I’m publisher. I could never have gotten to the place where I realized how fundamental sharing is to the human experience without my work at Shareable. I’ve been able to see how my own personal narrative connects with an emerging collective narrative about how to thrive as a person within a commons-based society. I hope that our work helps many others see how they can be individual successes within a larger collective success through sharing.
While this consciousness is new to me, we understood the importance of storytelling to movement building when we started Shareable. From the beginning, Shareable’s editorial strategy was to affirm those who already share – the sharing community – while at the same time moving sharing into mainstream dialogue through emotionally engaging stories about ordinary people who build rich lives, successful enterprises, and vibrant communities through sharing.
In our minds, the sharing community encompasses all of humanity – though we wanted to speak to influencers in the “developed world” who sensed an impending societal resource crisis or had already experienced a personal crisis and were seeking new ideas about how to provision society or themselves. This bias reflects not only the background of Shareable’s founders, but also the belief that our cohort has an outsized influence on society, whether deserved or not, which it is using to do a lot of damage.
Over time our focus has sharpened. Since we launched, we’ve increased our focus on topics with one or more of the following characteristics: 1) Contexts where more sharing could have profound impacts; 2) Topics that already generate a lot of dialogue; and 3) Domains where there are a lot of interesting edge cases. This has led to more emphasis on three areas: the young people in their twenties who are called “Generation Y”; cities; and “collaborative consumption,” often spurred by technology startups. Together, these focal areas address questions about who, where, and how the developed world might share in the future.
1. Generation Y
If the commons are to triumph, it’s going to need commoners. This is where the next generation comes in. There’s a strong argument that Gen Y is the generation that can bring a shareable world to scale. Roughly 100 million strong in the United States alone, Gen Y grew up on the Internet and brings its values and practices, including sharing, into the real world. In 2009, the marketing firm TrendWatching called them Generation G (for “generous”) and said they are accelerating a cultural shift where “giving is already the new taking.” The people of Gen Y may not reach their full sharing potential until later in life, but there are promising indicators:
A recent UCLA poll found that over 75 percent of incoming freshman believe it’s “essential or very important” to help others in difficulty, the highest figure in 36 years.
The same poll found that “working for a cause” was a top career objective, ranking it higher than making money.
Eighty-three percent will trust a company more if it’s socially and environmentally responsible.
The Arab Spring, the UK movement against public service cuts, 15-M in Spain, and the Occupy Wall Street movement were arguably spear- headed by this generation.
Business strategist Gary Hamel believes that this massive generational force, which outnumbers baby boomers, promises to transform our world in the image of the Internet, a world where sharing and contributing to the common good are as normal as breathing. William Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of Millennials Rising, believes that Gen Y is a hero generation, coming of age in a time of crisis – a crisis they’re already helping to resolve, largely by applying the tools and mindset of sharing.
This possibility inspired Shareable to produce Share or Die, an anthology of personal narratives, analyses, cartoons, and how-tos by Gen Y to help Gen Y thrive as they attempt to remake the world. It’s fitting that the title was inspired by a homeless man, for we are moving toward a condition of collective homelessness through the destruction of our environment.
2. Shareable cities
A revolution is underway in our conception of cities. It couldn’t come any sooner, considering that 2007 was the first year in human history that the majority of human beings lived in cities. Perhaps as a result, cities are becoming the focal point for our collective hopes and dreams, as well as for all kinds of innovation needed to avert worsening environmental and economic crises.
In the past, we tended to see cities as dirty, unnatural, and isolating places; today, citizens and urban planners alike are starting to see their potential for generating widespread well-being at low financial and environmental cost. There’s increasing appreciation for the benefits of public transit and urban agriculture. People want the streets to make room for pedestrians and bicyclists, and for civic engagement. The very thing that defines a city – its population density – makes sharing easier, from cars to bikes to homes.
Perhaps in response, there seems to be a boomlet in technology that helps First World urbanites understand their environment, share, and use resources more efficiently. IBM has based a massive Smarter Cities campaign around this theme. But it may be that the most successful innovations will spring from the megacities of the developing world. In the absence of vast financial resources, these cities may do as Bogotá, Colombia, did and prioritize human well-being over economic growth through investing in commons such as schools, parks and public transportation. Can a city become a happiness commons? Former Bogotá mayor Enrique Penalosa, who pioneered a number of public-sector civic innovations, including “participatory budgeting,” knows from experience that it’s possible.
At Shareable, we’re convinced that we need to see cities as places to foster commons, and not just markets. To explore that idea further, we started a 20-part series, “Policies for a Shareable City,” to outline a policy framework to support urban resource sharing, co-production and mutual aid in the context of a developing-world. The regulatory environment should not just support markets, but also commons-based activity involving food, transportation, housing, governance and more.
3. Collaborative consumption and sharing as a lifestyle
The ways to share in everyday life seem to be multiplying like rabbits, but maybe the Great Recession is just forcing all of us to pay more attention these days. There’s car sharing, ride sharing, bike sharing, yard sharing, coworking, cohousing, tool libraries, and all kinds of cooperatives – the list goes on. There are also ways to share power, dialogue and knowledge, such as workplace democracy, citizens’ deliberative councils, “unconferences” (open, self-organized gatherings) and “world cafés” (focused deliberations).
There are also scores of new Internet startups that are helping people meet real needs. For instance, there’s Airbnb (peer accommodations), Thredup (kids clothes), Chegg (textbook rentals), Neighborgoods (general sharing), RelayRides (peer-to- peer car sharing), Hyperlocavore (garden dating), Zimride (ride sharing), and many others.
Taking all of these into account, it’s entirely possible to build much of one’s life around sharing. You could live in a cohousing community, work in a co-op, grow food in your neighbor’s yard, and get to the open space town council meeting via your car share. A shift in emphasis from ownership to access – taking possession of an asset only when we need to use it – can liberate us from the burdens of ownership such as the high costs of maintenance, insurance, taxes, legal liability, storage and disposal.
The positive dynamics of car sharing suggest what’s possible if the economy is restructured for access instead of ownership. Carsharing is the decades-old archetype of the sharing economy, but it has arguably only come of age recently with mature technology, a global footprint, and with the first publicly traded car sharing company, Zipcar. With maturity comes statistics: A 2010 UC Berkeley survey of 6,281 North American carsharing members showed that over 50 percent of households who didn’t already have access to a car joined to get access to one, and that the total vehicle count in the sample dropped by 50 percent after joining. The same study showed that one carsharing vehicle replaces 9–13 owned cars.
A 2011 eGo Carshare study showed that car travel by members dropped an average of 52 percent after joining. The American Public Transportation Association estimates that people save an average of $9,900 a year for each car eliminated from a household. The Intelligent Cities Project estimates that a city can keep $127 million in the local economy annually by reducing the number of cars owned in a city by 15,000.
These findings suggest that collaborative consumption can significantly broaden citizen access to resources, dramatically reduce resource consumption, save citizens big bucks, and strengthen the urban economy all through one strategy – sharing.
While sharing and commons are likely as old as we are as a species, I can’t help feeling that these few examples show that something radically new is afoot. Could it be that the confluence of a new generation, new technologies and a rapidly urbanizing global population are setting the stage for the emergence of a commons- based global civilization? There’s no way to know for sure, but by understanding our roles in the struggle for the commons and the tectonic shifts about us, we have a better shot at meeting the ultimate challenge – sharing the world’s resources. For it becomes clearer every day that our survival depends on increasing our capacity to share. The phrase “share or die” may shock, but it’s the shock of the truth.
Neal Gorenflo (USA) is the Co-Founder and publisher of Shareable magazine, a nonprofit online magazine about sharing. As a former market researcher, stock analyst, and Fortune 500 strategist, Neal left the corporate world in 2004 to help people share through Internet startups, grassroots organizing and a circle of friends committed to the common good.
Interview with Malcolm Harris, co-Editor of “Share or Die, Voices of the Lost Generation in The Age of Crisis”
May 21, 2013
Interview with Malcolm Harris
Interview with Malcolm Harris
A 2010 IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) report entitled ” The Future of Work” contains the following paragraphs:
“Generation Y (15-30 year-olds born between 1980 and 1995) are establishing themselves in the workforce with different assumptions about work. Generation X (Gen-X) is the cohort currently occupying the majority of management positions in the agency world, and Generation Y (Gen-Y) will inherit an industry going through unprecedented change. Increasing knowledge and social connectivity is already changing the economics of innovation, and, in a knowledge-based economy, we might expect to see more conflict and co-existence between hierarchies and networks. This will provide opportunities for Generations X and Y to challenge the rules and guidelines from the 1950s in a more de-centralised and distributed world.”
http://www.ipa.co.uk/Document/The-Future-of-Work-Research-Findings
In my last post I reviewed the new book “Share or Die” http://www.shareable.net/share-or-die in which Gen Y writers share their own views and experiences on many of the issues raised in those paragraphs above.
In this post I am very happy to have had the chance to interview the co-Editor of the book, Malcolm Harris.
CG: Hi Malcolm, thanks for taking the time to answer some questions about “Share or Die” and the philosophy behind the book and www.shareable.net You mention at the beginning of the book that you received “an avalanche of personal narratives” in response to your invitation to contribute to this book. What criteria did you use for making the final selection for inclusion in Share or Die?
MH: It was a tough call because there were so many worthy submissions. But ultimately when we were making final calls I was committed to get a diversity of experience and modes of expression in there. I was hoping we could reach everyone with at least one of the pieces, which meant getting comics, first-person essays, analytical essays. Even though it’s a collection, it was created as a whole, not piecemeal.
CG: In your preface you say “In order to survive and even have a chance to live, we will have to build communities of cooperation rather than competition.”
Given that we have been living in a society for many many years where a great deal of emphasis has been placed on the healthiness and desirability of competition, what positive signs do you see that the concept of sharing and collaboration is really taking root in the US? And is this just a Gen Y initiative in your experience or is it spreading across generations?
Interview with Malcolm Harris Share or Die
MH: A really positive sign I’m seeing is a counter-intuitive one: capitalism seems to have reached the stage where it’s in the profiteers’ best interests to set up ways for people to share, and then profit off their sharing. Obviously that’s not the ideal kind of sharing — Air BnB and Zip Car for example — but I think it sets up those networks for people to appropriate later.
CG: Who are you hoping to reach with this book and what effect would you ideally like it to have on its readership?
MH: The target audience is definitely Gen Y and anyone who wants to better understand the conditions that face its members, whether that’s school counsellors or parents. What I’m hoping people take from it is a sense that they’re not alone in their situation, that their problems are often social problems that don’t have individual solutions.
CG: In the Chapter “Generation Open” Chris Messina writes “So it’s no wonder that the Facebook newsfeed (now the “stream”) and Twitter make folks of previous generations so uneasy: the potential for abuse is so great and our generation — our open, open generation — is so beautifully naive.” Many people are in fact are made uneasy by the perceived lack of privacy which social media brings with it. What would you say to those people about their reservations?
MH: I think they’re right to a certain degree: the kind of privacy we were supposed to have is on the wane, but I’m okay with that. I hope our ability to be easily scandalized goes down with it. But there’s also the point that this privacy never really existed for everyone, it always had to be bought. And, for example, women being harassed on the sidewalk for walking in public never have the chance to buy.
CG: Is there one person or organisation which originally inspired or continues to inspire the founding of www.shareable.net and ultimately the publication of this book?
MH: Nope, it has always been a collection of folks.
CG: What’s the last thing you shared and when?
MH: I shared the bus to my roommate to the co-working office space where I’m writing this email, it might be easier to think of the last thing I didn’t share.
Malcolm Harris is a Senior Editor at http://thenewinquiry.com/
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For Millennials, Work And Life Are About Cooperation, Not Competition
What happens when schools and universities train future professionals and contributors for a marketplace that is in flux–or doesn’t exist at all? That’s the question Malcolm Harris and Neal Gorenflo, founder of Shareable.net, tackle in their new book, “Share or Die: Youth in Recession.”
By Jody Turner5 minute Read
What happens when schools and universities train future professionals and contributors for a marketplace that is in flux–or doesn’t exist at all?
That’s the question Malcolm Harris and Neal Gorenflo, founder of Shareable.net, tackle in their new ebook, Share or Die: Youth in Recession. Thirty essays tell of an emerging workforce leaning toward collaborative cultural building versus traditional competitive workforce engagement. Part post-college guide, part groundbreaking analysis, Share or Die illuminates what it means for millennials facing the cultural and economic realities of today while providing resources and support.
Harris describes the context of the book well in the introduction. “If the traditional job market fails to accommodate so many young people, then the modes of living devised by and for our parents will remain impossible for us. I mean this both in terms of living lives centered on consumption, but also the physical habitats they’ve built. We will live closer to one another as we realize distance is not the same as safety. In order to survive and even have a chance to live, we will have to build communities of cooperation rather than competition. Learning to live together instead of merely in proximity to each other will be crucial.”
We interviewed Harris about his new book; you can find it for download at shareable.net.
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Jody Turner: Malcolm, how did you come to be involved with this book and why is this of topic of interest to you?
Malcolm Harris: I started working at Shareable.org in San Francisco about a year ago after graduating from the University of Maryland. In college I had done a lot of activism and writing around issues of student debt and educational accessibility, so when Neal Gorenflo, the founder of Shareable, came to me with the idea for the book, I knew it was a good one. We are in a generational turning point that is being felt around the world. It’s a particularly fraught one, as we’re beginning to see. It’s a poignant moment of ecological and economic crisis, and young people are beginning to understand how much of the brunt we’ll bear. With that in mind, we assembled a group of incredibly strong writers and thinkers to address this poignant shift. Some were already friends, some acquaintances, and others strangers, but together they represent well the challenges for graduates today, while providing useful strategies and tactics for thriving in recession.
What are a few interesting teachings garnered from your involvement with the project?
Editing a collection like this is great because you get to see all the stories in context ahead of anyone else. There is a piece in the collection about being a nomadic journalist, and another from a young guy in Amsterdam who runs his apartment as a nomad-base. Together it’s a complete picture from both sides. Through reading this you will get to intimately know an inspiring group of people–almost all of them young, highly creative folk.
We’ve said from the jump that Share or Die is an experiment in both form and content. We brought together young designers and illustrators to give life to the interesting text, and it has taken off from there. It is amazing what a committed group today can produce with the tools available. The talent is out there, the passion is as well and with a little bit of organization and funding anything is possible.
Younger people are getting really good at conveying emotion through various new media, more easily developing professional relationships via virtual means. Will this only increase with the development and evolution of digital communication tools?
These days it’s so easy to meet, work with and learn from a wide range of people from all over. It is also easy to stay in touch–even with people you’ve never met in person who are not even in your proximity. The quality of the engagement has been great, as a result people I have met through this project are connections I’ve held on to and will continue to hold on to over time.
The feedback on the ebook has been very strong. The P2P Foundation named Share or Die its book of the week and did a three-post series. Judging from comments and tweets and emails I’ve received, reader response is positive. It is leaning to an older demo also, which has been a surprise. The feedback has been so strong that we’re working with a publisher now on an expanded print edition we are hoping to see in stores early next year. More is being added for this next iteration, we hope we keep seeing the same kind of enthusiasm among readers.
Since you know the content well, can you sum up the strategies from the book for our young readers here?
A recent piece in the Times discussed the difficult work-lives 20-something graduates are having today, which indicates that the mainstream media is starting to wake up to these realities. The question is, how young people are going to deal with these realities as they move into the work force and live in society? We need to realize what happened and act upon that knowledge.
But the current graduates are in an immediately bad spot, so in the book we show a new workforce attempting to become a part of the solution by solving their own problems. The essays we published provide frames for understanding what is happening and how to act on it. This includes how-tos on starting co-op housing and co-op businesses, a guide to collaborative consumption resources, cheap and easy seed-to-plate recipes, a peek inside the pack of a modern nomad, and instructions on how to find the best roommate.
In answering your question, I see the main strategy as increasing the density of communal living. This has a lot of different implications in practice, whether it’s the co-op businesses and homes I mentioned earlier, or the non-economic relations we establish with our friends, lovers, and family. It’s not just a question of physical density, but of producing and using more resources in common. There’s a big focus on do-it-yourself or DIY projects in the collection, but they should really be called do-it-ourselves projects; everything presumes we’re going to have to be working together in a non-exploitative fashion. One good example is a piece in the collection about how to put on “stranger dinners,” a potluck get together with people you don’t know. It’s not just about the food; it’s about links and relations.
And of course, you can always download the book itself where you get a real sense of how it all fits together.
[Image: Flickr user JessicaMarie]
Youth in Recession
A new anthology by Generation Y writers is part survival handbook, part manifesto. Scott McLemee interviews the editor.
By
Scott McLemee
July 27, 2011
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Freshmen who arrived on campus as the phrase “too big to fail" was taking hold will, over the coming year, be working out the details of their post-graduation plans. At this point, finding employment increasingly counts as an aspiration more than a goal -- while continuing with graduate study must feel like buying a lottery ticket. Condensing a million anxious conversations into a single humorous/appalling graphic, Jenna Brager’s “Post-College Flow Chart of Misery and Pain” finds its balance on the thin line between satire and cold-eyed realism. It deserves its spot on the opening page of Share or Die: Youth in Recession, an anthology of essays, memoirs, and cartoons recently e-published by the online magazine Shareable.
Released under a Creative Commons license, Share or Die is available to download for free. While Brager’s cartoon embodies a sense of foreclosed options, the spirit of the book as a whole is anything but resigned. “There’s a common anxiety in the pieces in this collection,” Malcolm Harris, its 22-year-old editor, writes in his introduction. “…The promises of the '90s and the early' 00s, that society could only be improved, that shopping was patriotic, that the earth knew no boundaries for the determined, have turned out to be worth about as much as a bunch of subprime mortgage-backed securities. There’s a sense of generational betrayal, a knowledge that those who came before weren’t planning for a future with consequences. In the face of the unknown, these writers have come to understand they’re responsible for making something new, even if they don’t know what it looks like yet.”
Shareable (where Harris works as a contributing editor) promotes an ethos of open-source cooperation and communitarian mutual aid. The volume includes advice on how to form work co-ops, pool goods and services with friends and neighbors, and otherwise strengthen social ties. The very notion of a commonwealth -- in which there are shared resources that escape the logic of possessive individualism – may need reinventing at this late date. But an ongoing economic crisis with no end in sight is the right time to begin trying to think and live in new ways. Intrigued by Share or Die, I posed a number of questions to Harris, who is also managing editor of the online cultural journal/open-door salon The New Inquiry. A transcript of our e-mail exchange follows.
Q: How did you come to do the book? Was there something in your own education, work history, or other interests that overlapped with this project?
A: I grew up in Palo Alto, California, which is sometimes mistakenly referred to as "Stanford University, California." After graduating in three years with good behavior from the University of Maryland with a degree in English and politics, I lucked into the job at Shareable (thanks Craigslist). That was about a year ago now. In a lot of ways it's a continuation of what I was doing in college, which included a lot of activism around student debt and a weekly column for the school paper on university politics. The struggles that erupted at the University of California campuses my last year of school over tuition hikes juxtaposed with the financial crisis and resulting recession had a deep effect on my thinking and what I wanted to do with my newly unemployed self. When Baby Boomers and Gen Xers write about my generation, they can almost never help themselves from projecting what I see as their own generational insecurities. We end up portrayed as lazy, disengaged, greedy whiners unable to endure a little hardship. That's not the case, and the stories in Share or Die prove it.
Q: How should people think of Share or Die -- as manifesto or survival handbook? There are elements of both. But did you have one or the other more in mind while editing it?
A: I definitely had both in mind while editing it, as well as about a half-dozen other forms -- the personal essay, ethnography, how-to's, and others. Young people face a rather total set of disorienting circumstances, and I think the variety of forms in which writers submitted to the collection indicates there's no solid consensus on how best to approach the situation. I think we could use some good manifestos right about now -- I'm a fan of the form -- but there's a real danger of abstracting too far away from concrete circumstances. The goal for the collection was to be of use in as many ways as possible, whether that's suggesting ways to think about the collective struggle for a livable environment and workers' dignity, or providing specific ways to start a housing co-op or quit your job.
Q: Some contributors express frustration at not being able to find interesting work. Three years into a collapsed job market, that complaint already sounds a bit dated. Apart from the much-discussed option of moving back in with one's parents, what's your sense of how people are getting by?
A: It is a dated frustration, and one that goes back further than the last three years. American capitalism has always offered workers a trade: your obedience in exchange for your freedom. As the writer John Berger put it: "selling your life piece by piece so as not to die." Job dissatisfaction isn't a new development, but this generation was promised otherwise. The historical narrative of steady progress and social mobility meant that each next generation's life could be more fulfilling -- your grandfather was a laborer so your father could be a professional so you could be an artist, etc. But it hasn't turned out that way at all -- the 21st-century college graduates who were supposed to be the teleological end of this chain are the most indebted and least employed in history. This has meant a vast majority moving back in with parents -- there's a touching essay about that in the collection -- and the much-discussed "extended adolescence." Besides that, it involves trolling Craigslist for short-term contract jobs, living in small spaces with lots of roommates, and learning to make instead of buy the things they need. We have a couple beautiful flow-chart cartoons by my dear friend Jenna Brager charting possible (and painfully realistic) post-graduation paths, and they're far more complex than any career ladder.
Q: Well before the recession kicked in, social critics were talking about the deep changes in ethos that have accompanied shifts in worklife in recent years. The notion of "having a career" makes sense if and only if someone has a reasonable prospect for stable, long-term employment in some field (professional or otherwise) covering the better part of adulthood. Now "careerism" seems to have given way to "flexibilism," for want of a better term -- the expectation that we will have constantly to be acquiring new sets of skills, moving frequently between occupations as well as between cities. Isn't it possible that the recession is just intensifying this? What's the difference between "share or die" and "be flexible or be discarded"?
A: But that's the false choice right there -- being flexible means being discarded all the time! The title doesn't just refer to material deprivation -- there are forms of social death, and the choice "be flexible or be discarded" is one of them. Share or Die is about a different choice, the choice to -- if you will -- discard the discarders. At the same time, flexibilism primes this pump. An Italian friend of mine, Gigi Roggero, has his first book in English coming out next month in which he makes a strong argument that with the decline of employer loyalty, employee loyalty has tanked as well. Job-searching takes up an incredible amount of Gen Y's time and energy -- for the employed, unemployed, and in-between alike. The challenge now is to take this time and energy and use it as a generation to build the infrastructure outside and beyond the market. Common resources -- both materially (spaces and goods) and immaterially (peer-to-peer networks and emotional support structures) -- have much more to offer us than a narrowing corporate career ladder and expensive therapists. That is, we have more to offer each other.
Q: The term "precariat" has emerged in Europe to name the sector of the labor force engaged in this sort of "flexible" work. The notion has not exactly caught fire here, even though we have precarity aplenty. I take it from your writing elsewhere that you have an ongoing concern with currents of social and political thought that helped spawn this term. How much of that interest informs the book, directly or indirectly?
A: Well, it certainly influenced my introduction and foreword, and the way I approached the collection as a whole. But it's not like I as an editor told writers they had to be experts on theories of the precariat to contribute to the collection. I think young people today have an intuitive understanding of a lot of the structures and practices of precarity, even if they don't necessarily have the vocabulary to describe it. Building that collective vocabulary is important to a sense of solidarity or shared experience.
I like to think of the relationship between something like Share or Die and so-called post-fordist theory (a strand of heterodox Marxism focused on terms like "multitude," "the common," and precarity) as neither causal nor coincidental. The understanding of precarity in the collection doesn't come (mostly) from reading about it; it comes from the writers' experience being the precariat. Theory coming out of the academy has played an important role in Europe in articulating both problems and solutions, but considering the degree to which the American university system adheres to market logic, I'm skeptical of the role it has to play. The best analyses don't come from cloistered dissertation research; in Italy, where a lot of this thought is coming from, the foundations were developed through workers' struggle in the late '70s. Speaking personally, I'd rather see an understanding develop outside the Ivory Tower -- practice-oriented groups do a much better job coming up with useful formulations and distributing them than any group of tenured professors.
Q: Okay, but what about the non-tenured sort? After all, there is a huge academic precariat -- not all of it youthful, by any means. Somebody entering graduate school now has a far greater chance of becoming an adjunct than ever reaching the starting gate for a tenure track.
A: Definitely. I believe the number is three out of four classes taught by TAs and adjuncts according to Marc Bousquet's great book on the topic, How The University Works. There are certainly plenty of aged adjuncts, but this was a very recent historical shift, mostly occurring within my lifetime, and it overwhelmingly targets young people. The academy is about as gerontocratic as it gets outside the U.S. Senate.
I'm glad to get the chance to set the record straight on this. After I wrote about student loans, I was accused of shilling for the professoriat, which I'm sure gave some former professors of mine a good laugh. You're completely right, by the numbers, grad school (especially, but not just in the humanities) is a con in which young people are suckered into doing labor and taking on debt to further a system that will ultimately have very little to offer most of them. From conversations with peers -- and Jenna has a very personal cartoon about this in the collection -- young people enroll in grad school for the same reason they join Teach for America: it's a predictable and explainable (if not comfortable) path where you might even feel a bit wanted or special once in a while. No one is more complicit in this arrangement than the faculty, who outsource their most laborious work to TAs, but aren't much interested in making sure they're acknowledged or treated as workers. Instead, junior professors are too busy trying to get tenure, and the tenured professors are too busy working on journal articles on the history of labor organizing that no one outside their small academic sub-clique (or, more likely, within it either) will read anyway. Of course they'd love to help, but.... The sheer mass of bad faith required to keep the gears turning astounds me.
Q: Suppose a baby boomer or Generation X-er reads the book and says, "Yeah, this reminds me of when we all tuned in, turned on, and dropped out to form that rural commune (vegetarian hiphop dumpster-diving collective, etc.) Too bad it didn't work out! But then I became a stockbroker (got a job with the Gates Foundation, etc.) and found that I preferred having my own pie, rather than sharing it. Just wait, the economy will pick up.... You'll see!" What reply comes to mind?
A: So you're the bastard who ate all the pie! The truth is, this is the worst prolonged employment crisis since the Great Depression, something no American Gen X-er or Boomer has experienced. And if, by the grace of global warming, we get one more generation of plenty (unlikely in not just my estimation), then we will find ourselves in the same position as our parents: leaving our children with even more debt and even fewer jobs. No society can endlessly finance prosperity with debt, no matter how many times you sell it back and forth. The student power slogan "We are the crisis" -- which has cropped up from Berkeley to Rome to Athens -- isn't a threat, it's a reality. A generational debt is due; we can pay it with our very lives, stretched across decades of precarious work, or find another way to be. The choice remains share or die.
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