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I'm a couple years out of college and can't overstate how real this is (in America, though I know the article is focused on the UK). Last summer I flew back to

• ericd 12y ago
  I think implementing basic income would probably help at least somewhat, but everyone still needs some way to feel like they're contributing. Also, short of bringing back protectionist measures like high tariffs and reversing globalization somewhat (maybe not a terrible idea), it seems like we need to create a much more highly skilled workforce than the one we have so that we can move up the value chain.
  • cgag 12y ago
    I feel like somewhat is really underselling it.
    • ericd 12y ago
      Well, it doesn't answer the question of "what is my purpose?" for people who have no work, so it's not a perfect/complete solution by itself.
• danieldk 12y ago
  I really have no idea what the solution is, Redistribution of wealth?
  • VMG 12y ago
    Funny how "materialism" is brought up as a solution in what seems to be a spiritual crisis. By the way, the answer is no.
    • danieldk 12y ago
      Did you read the grandparent's comment? Some redistribution of wealth is a solution if many people are so much in debt as a result of study loans and unemployment. Being able to survive on your own, rather than living in your parent's basement, gives dignity. It has worked great for Western European and Scandinavian countries.
      • VMG 12y ago
        I hasn't worked at all in most other cases, particularly in eastern European and ex-soviet countries. Debt is a big problem, but government handouts are not a good solution to give young people the feeling that they have something to live for.
        • danieldk 12y ago
          I hasn't worked at all in most other cases, particularly in eastern European and ex-soviet countries. But the world is not black and white. There is a vast space between 'free for all'-capitalism and state socialism. You can empower people by giving everyone access to good education and giving decent social security. Where 'decent' means: being able to afford housing, eat, and travel for interviews. But not so much that it makes working unattractive. Another method for empowering people is to make it possible to make a living with an 8 hour work day by introducing a minimum wage.
          • VMG 12y ago
• vacri 12y ago
  The thing is that the current young ones are still of the belief that no-one has had it hard before; that it was cruisy and easy for everyone before (repeating the pattern of this thought - this isn't unique to gen Y, but to young gens). One gen Y person in my office repeated the mantra to me that "jobs were handed out like candy for the boomers"... yeah, if you were male... and liked working in a factory or other menial jobs. If you were female there was a stigma to working, options were pretty limited, and usually it was legal to be explicitly paid a lower hourly rate. The Western world we live in is safer in most regards than previously, whether it's food or medical or military. Ten years of war in the middle east killed only a tenth of the US soldiers killed in Vietnam, and there was no conscription. Before the downfall of the USSR, there was a very palpable fear of nuclear war in the West (justified or not) or a sizeable military invasion. Civil and social rights for minorities and women were far, far behind where they are now. In the consumer world, shit is cheaper and more disposable than ever before. Much less need to put effort into maintaining things, just get another one. Hell, even going to the dentist is far easier today with improvements in pain control. What about support services for victims of domestic abuse? Or rape? At least now there are some systems in place where people can get support sometimes (if not always) and it's a recognised problem, rather than in the boomer's youth, when it was a taboo subject and there were no services. So sure, complain about the current situation of Gen Y folks, but when people complain about how 'easy' previous generations had it, these kinds of things are why it sounds like self-indulgent whining - because they only focus on the good things the boomers had and never recognise the bad things. Not to mention the things that the Boomers did build and give to us. Gen Y does have hurdles to face, but those hurdles don't have to be defined in how much worse it is than previous generations had it.
  • danieltillett 12y ago
    Exactly. I don't know how much is gained by playing the generation blame game. If we are going to solve problems we have to work together not spend all the time blaming each other.
    • vacri 12y ago
      Well said. We're all in this shit together, and there aren't teams.
• zacinbusiness 12y ago
  I have similar experiences. I almost hate running in to people that I went to high school with, or getting friend requests via Facebook and then having these getting reacquainted discussions. I see my friends and they are struggling to find a place in the world, many are living at home and society at large is telling them that they are failures. It makes me very sad for them because feeling like a failure is one of the worst things in life, in my experience anyway.
  • throwwit 12y ago
    Take heart... http://www.technologyreview.com/view/523566/how-the-friendship-paradox-makes-your-friends-better-than-you-are/ http://www.technologyreview.com/view/523566/how-the-friendsh...
    • zacinbusiness 12y ago
      That's fascinating. I'd not heard of this before.
• x0x0 12y ago
  Underemployment doesn't just come from inappropriate people going to college. I don't have the graphs in front of me, but if you look at jobs as a whole we have a mediocre recovery from the great recession but if you look at the types of jobs it's horrid. That is, white collar jobs where lost and service jobs where gained. So it's more than just people's perceptions. This is compounded by the republican ideology of transferring risks from the state to the individual. My alma mater cost $3.2k/year in tuition in the late 90s, and now costs $9.4k/year (numbers not inflation adjusted). According to the cpi inflation calculator, tuition has roughly doubled [1]. But that's not all -- course loads are now heavy enough that it can be very difficult to get required classes when needed, and because of sequencing requirements for your major classes it's very easy to accidentally get stuck for an extra 1-2 semesters because you couldn't get the course you needed because of reduced course offerings. Assuming you spend $10/year for books + living expenses, leaving college with ~$40k in debt is significant. [1] http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
  • zacinbusiness 12y ago
    There were programs in my uni that got dissolved before people had matriculated. Students who had several semesters of courses under their belts were left out in the cold and had to try to rig their courses into other programs as electives or transfer. It was awful.
    • sentenza 12y ago
      Would you mind to name and shame that university? I've often heared of programs being dissolved, but always with a "we won't stop operation until the last matriculated person has been given enough time to graduate at average speed" grace period.
      • zacinbusiness 12y ago
        I'm very loyal to my department because they were awesome and extremely supportive (luckily we survived the axe), so I don't want to shame the whole university. But it's a medium-sized school in the South East of the US and it's run by an alarmingly incompetent chancellor.
• natrius 12y ago
  "It shouldn't be any surprise to us that when we promote an 'everyone goes to college!' culture a la 'everyone's a home owner!', [snip] we'll have a mass of college-educated individuals who can't find gainful employment." The quoted portion should be a surprise. Several generations ago, we decided to promote an "everyone goes to grade school" culture, and it led to a vast expansion of our economy and middle class in the western world. Our current situation sounds predictable, but it was not. It was reasonable to predict that an educated workforce would provide more capable brains to fulfill new and existing needs with goods and services. I think the core cause is the belief that college was the cause of success, when it was really more of a gatekeeper of success. Now that the gate is wide open to a large fraction of society, you need either connections or hard skills. I can forgive past policymakers for that oversight. I can't forgive current policymakers for perpetuating it. The most popular major at my state's most popular university this year was psychology. Many—if not most—of those degrees will never be put to use.
  • x86_64Ubuntu 12y ago
    Hopefully "most popular" mean plurality and not majority. To do anything with psych, you need a PhD, and with just a BS you do lab rat work.
• sentenza 12y ago
  What you describe is a pretty good argument about why supply side economics alone can't describe our economy adequately. If nobody has the money to create the demand, the economy will shrink. Can you imagine what it is like to live in a country where that friend of a friend of yours is the _average_ young person? To answer that rethorical question, let me just point out that we won't have heared the last of the crisis in Southern Europe.
  • zacinbusiness 12y ago
    My brother has several friends in Ireland and he's described their outlook similarly. They have a sort of government stipend and some of them can find odd jobs (odd as in strange, one of them is a part time fire eater) but for the most part they simply can't find steady work. The demand for low-cost work vs. the demand for a living wage is definitely at work all around the world.
    • tomp 12y ago
      Although not geographically, Ireland definitely is part of the "Southern Europe" of the parent's comment; it was one of the countries hit by the recession the quickest and hardest.
• scotty79 12y ago
  Everyone should be a home owner because people tend to take care better of the place they both own and live in. But it order to achieve that you need to incentivise people who rent property to sell it. Progressive property tax that makes owning more that two or three homes very risky endavor could do that. I recently bought a flat with intention to rent. It stands empty for many months so far because I can't find time to finish renovating it. It can stand empty because it's dirt cheap to leave it like that. I'm earning enough too keep it empty for another month in less than a day. As it stands empty somebody has no place to live in and has to pay rent elevated by the fact people like me are perfectly safe to hoard property.
  • tomp 12y ago
    What solution do you propose? I've been thinking about it, but I can't think of a way to (1) tax landlords (i.e. disincentivize property hoarding) without (2) passing the tax on to those who rent. In the UK, for example, tenants pay council tax, and I expect any increases of said tax to affect tenants, not landlords.
    • SixSigma 12y ago
      Add to that that 11% of house owners in the UK now own more than one house. One of the "problems" in the UK rental market is that the Duke of Westminster is one of Britain's most propertied landlord. And then you read things like this : > A Freedom of Information request by the New Statesman to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) reveals that the largest landowners received millions of pounds in taxpayer subsidy last year. The Duke of Westminster, a multibillionaire, was paid £748,716 for his ownership of Grosvenor Farms, the Earl of Plymouth £675,085, the Duke of Buccleuch £260,273, the Duke of Devonshire £251,729 and the Duke of Atholl £231,188 for his Blair Castle estate. It was also a lucrative year for the Windsors. The Queen received £415,817 for the Royal Farms and £314,811 for the Duchy of Lancaster, while Prince Charles was paid £127,868 for the Duchy of Cornwall. Similarly well-remunerated was Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who received £273,905 for his 2,000-acre Glympton Estate in Oxfordshire, allegedly purchased with proceeds of the 1985 al-Yamamah arms deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia. The largest individual UK beneficiary is Sir Richard Sutton, who was paid £1.7m for his Settled Estates, the 6,500-acre property near Newbury that he inherited with his baron­etcy in 1981, despite net assets of £136.5m. http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/09/how-we-pay-our-richest-landowners http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/09/how-we...
• jwr 12y ago
  A lot of the answers here address the symptoms, rather than the root cause. I believe the source of these kinds of problems is that we focus too little on teaching kids to be builders. I specifically avoid words like "science", "engineering", or "entrepreneurship" because I do not want to be dragged into a debate about why artists and writers are needed, too. They are needed, too. But I prefer the word "builders" — people, who are taught that value comes from building, and that is something you can always do yourself. You do not need a "job" with someone telling you what and how to build. Note that there is an attitude problem in many young unemployed people: many seem to think that getting some kind of education entitles them to something. What's worse, if that "something" (job, money) doesn't appear, many are helpless and turn into a spiral of self-loathing and depression. In the longer term this will become even more of a problem, as we automate more and more mundane tasks. The number of jobs that require no thinking will not grow. On the other hand, the possibilities for making a living using all kinds of building skills are growing fast. I believe we should make more effort to teach kids to build, and use their own initiative. And I use the word "build" very loosely — you can build furniture, electronics gadgets, web sites, artsy jewelry, anything. Whatever you build will help your self-esteem, put thoughts on the right track (growing/extending/building rather than self-loathing, moving up rather than down), help you meet new people, give you new possibilities.