I have been going back over a piece in The Atlantic by Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissman entitled “The Cheapest Generation.” The article posits that Generation Y has different consumer values because they are “less interested” in buying homes and automobiles than prior generations. As it so happened, I put up the first comment which earned over 1000 “likes”: You …
Are the super-wealthy the new secessionists?
I have spent a lot of time covering secession movements – from my native Vermont and Quebec to Texas and…lesbians? (Yes, lesbians, I will explain in a future article.) Mike Lofgren, author of The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted suggests in The American Conservative that the real secessionists are …
The millennial generation is uninterested in purchasing houses and cars
Some great pieces are up at The Atlantic about how the young generation appears uninterested in “owning” (ha ha ha, entering into multi-year debt agreements) the main drivers of the economy: cars and houses. Compounding this shift in desires is the new spate of technologies that will enable options other than “ownership.” The emergence of the “sharing economy”—services that use …
Education as the way into poverty, not out of it
An astonishing statistic about higher education in the United States: up to 66% of all faculty teaching course at the university level are now adjunct professors receiving a minimal wage and no benefits. A recent PhD graduate from Washington University in St Louis (up the road from me) lays out the case for the university failing as an institution that …
Zero hour contracts, an innovation of sorts for young people
I recently happened by a blog from the United Kingdom that describes a “novel” work arrangement for low-wage jobs – the “zero hour contracts” through which employers may employ temporary laborers with the minimum protections on both sides. Here is the editorialized version: RAW DEAL FOR GRADUATES DOING SHOP WORK AND WAITING TABLES Thousands of graduates are complaining they are …