The Go-Nowhere Generation
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Because in addition to that $200 for the bus ticket, they'd also need money on hand for first month's rent, security deposit, probably some new furniture and houseware, etc. plus enough saved up to be able to commit to the lease without knowing how much income they'll have... if/once they do manage to line up a job.
it takes fewer weeks of work income to buy a car today than in the early 1980s, and inflation-adjusted gasoline prices didn’t get out of line until a few years ago.
"Fewer weeks of work income" only helps if you have work income.
Maybe the authors have gone too long without wondering where next month's rent is going to come from?
These concerns are not unique to the current generation. Pulling up stumps and moving in search of work and prosperity has ALWAYS been risky (hell, I've done it three times so far, once while massively in debt). It's just that now there's a very strong trend towards risk aversion, which makes it that much harder for the entrepreneurial spirit to flourish.
In fact, it's even worse than that; With the internet, it's easier than ever before to find a job before you even decide whether to move or not. And yet more and more people remain complacent in a 13% jobless rate area when 3.3% is available for the taking.
Of course, the good news is that for those who ARE adventurous, there's never been a better time to move and take advantage of the opportunities created by the fear of the majority.
Managing risk is a learned behaviour, and we've kinda got our recession on... may be they were paying attention. Heck, I couldn't be prouder of these cottonwool wrapped kids. Let's give em a low carb imitation lollypop.
It seems likely that people will move / have moved interstate to take advantage of the job availabilities in ND, but it's not clear from the article why we'd expect unskilled youth to take on this mild inconvenience, as opposed to any other demographic group.
Census data does indicate that interstate migration rates are falling generally (albeit gradually), but isn't that to be expected? I hear this new fangled "Internet" means that the telecommuting cybernautic generation can work from their oxygen-controlled humidicribs, thus saving the burden of investment in loathsome, expensive transport infrastructure.
If we're renaming generations, perhaps we can rename his the "You've Lead America Off a Cliff And Stiffed Your Children With The Bill." Generation.
Not catchy enough? Here are a few more to try on:
The "You Voted For SOPA" Generation
The "Civil Liberties? Overrated." Generation
The "Hey, I Don't Have To Go Fight That War" Generation
The "I Can't Email, But I Can Reform Washington" Generation
Though the author might have had an old-fogey tone he does bring some interesting points to light:
1. why do young people in auto-centric cities hold off on getting a car? 2. why are young people not migrating to places where the jobs are? 3. there seem to be a correlation between recession-era kids and entrepreneurism.
I think these are very real issues that merit discussion.
2. Maybe they don't see a need to migrate to places where physical presence is necessary to undertake these jobs when location independent work is a rising tide? (Thus further negating the entire point of having a car and / or submitting to the prior mentioned procedures from point 1?)
Speaking for myself those are the reasons I don't submit to the whole car culture thing and the reason I don't choose a location to live based on employment / economic factors, but then I'm 32, so I acknowledge I'm not generation Y. It stands to reason though that there are some people in that generation proceeding on the same basis as I am.
Boomers criticising any generation for not wanting to play the game strikes me as utterly hilarious. Especially from a guy with a book titled "Why you need and love the rat race". It's self parody at its finest.
Perhaps this is also why working at Foxconn - migrating to a different city just to work long hours and live in dorms, seem so alien and cruel to Americans.
Instead, we have been raised in a world decrying the systematic consumption of the environment which, when coupled with highly volatile gas prices, makes using car alternatives an attractive option.
Further, many of us have complex outlooks that assigns value to friends, family, and free time that we may have to surrender if we accepted a cushy North Dakota job (and let's face it, you are reaching when North Dakota is your poster child for opportunity). Not everything is about money.
Sadly, each year I get older, the more I internalize that somebody will always feel the need to write articles bashing the younger generation. All I hope is that I never reach the point where I am the one doing the writing.
I don't believe for one second though that the reason Gen Y suffers from a high jobless rate is because they share the same values you do. I believe they're lazy, spoiled and entitled. I have several cousins who are between 16 and 18 and have no jobs, nor have they ever. And it's not because there's no jobs to be had, it's because they don't want to work as a grocery story stock person or a cashier. Those jobs are below their upper middle class upbringing.
And because of Facebook, they don't need jobs. They can hang out with their friends all day online for free. Their parents provide them with food, shelter and clothing - so what more could they ask for? I don't believe this is sustainable though. Our society works because people produce things. We've seen what happens when we trend towards a service based economy rather than a manufacturing based economy. What happens when we transition to a sit on our ass and surf the internet economy?
But in all seriousness, this article is ridiculously pretentious and completely out of touch with reality. I know lots of people, including myself, who want to go travelling. Most of them can't afford it. As many others have pointed out, most of them can't afford it because YOUR generation threw the economic in the toilet.
Is it car culture that drives Americans to move around so much? I tend to think so.
So... the economy is being held back by the lack of teens cruising the main drag?
And young people move quite a lot - in fact, more than the previous generations did. Just not from Nevada to North Dakota - heck, the city of Las Vegas has more people than the whole of North Dakota :-D
"Get off my lawn!"
We predict problems before they ever arrive using telemetry monitoring and we could fix 95% of the problems with keystrokes.
This sentence caught my eye. Could the economic climate be reflected in a person's locus of control?
http://wilderdom.com/psychology/loc/LocusOfControlWhatIs.htm...
I agree with many views expressed here by the way and thought the article a tad patronising.
It seems ridiculous to assume that with all the major changes that have happened over the last 20 years that people wouldn't have different behaviors.
"The Rape and Pillage the Planet For Every Last Drop of Oil" generation
"The Gained the World, Lost their Soul" generation
"The Numbers and Dollars, not Humans and Values" generation
we are "Wish for the best, prepare for the worst" generation
As a country, we deeply suck at moving humans around. Europe has actually fast trains and they're actually reasonably priced, unlike Amtrak. If you want great service in Europe, you take Virgin; if you want cheap flights, you take RyanAir. We lose by getting RyanAir service for Virgin/BA prices. We're great at shipping bits, U.S. freight rail is world-class, and we can get almost any fruit in any season, but when it comes to passenger transportation, we essentially stagnated in 1949. Air travel is still expensive and far more unpleasant than it ever was, passenger rail is at the same speed it had in the 1920s, and most of us still rely on the car for commuting. If you want to live in a place where you can actually walk or bike to a city, you'll pay absurdly high prices to live there. This mediocrity in transportation is a deep national morale problem that is exacerbated by the current economic climate (i.e. many people having no fucking money). A result of this is that the world is becoming larger. Much larger.
Moreover, what's left of the job market fills through social connections. "Front door" approaches are officially dead. It's possible to make "weak ties" and acquaintanceships online, and that kind of "networking" is often enough (strength of weak ties) but if you fall into a bad spell (or, say, are female and take a few years off from work to raise children) and need someone to take a chance on you, you're going to want strong ties. With wealth disparities widening and talent geography becoming more unfavorable, people are less inclined to believe they'll easily make strong ties after college; it rarely happens. So people are averse to moving without a strong reason to do so.
Then there is the difference in job markets between continuous (efficient, low-latency) and discrete (illiquid, high-latency) ones. For high-talent jobs and candidates, there are 3 places where the markets are continuous: New York, Silicon Valley, and Boston. That's not to say there aren't great jobs (and great people to hire) in places like Portland or Minneapolis. There are, but there isn't the massive number that makes a market continuous. A lot of talent is coalescing in these 3 areas because living in one of them means that changing jobs doesn't mean that one is likely to be changing cities. What that means is that people who are willing to move for economic reasons, by and large, have ended up in one of those three places (and will stay there).
> I say this as a recently-young person who has
> moved across the country.
This is so stupid. Read any story about the ND oil field boom and all they can talk about is these little towns that have quintupled in size, where ND license plates are outnumbered on the streets 25:1.
Can we suggest that NYTIMES seek better article submissions? Maybe some HN'er?