The most essential passage in Kids These Days, Malcolm Harris’s new book on the “making of millennials,” does not appear until its 113th page and is not really about millennials at all. “When history teachers talk about government policy decisions, they tend to use the progressive frame: The government improves things over time,” he writes.
While liberals think conservatives slow down or rewind progress, and conservatives are only willing to accept government policy forty or fifty years after its implementation (at which point they want an equal share of the credit), both agree that America is improving itself and improving the world as it goes. This simplistic historical perspective doesn’t jibe with reality: Somehow, things got worse.
Kids These Days is about what got worse. It is a book about late capitalism, or at least capitalism, lately, about how the economic and political forces that have dominated the past thirty years of American life have conspired to produce a generation more managed, exploited, and uncertain than those that came before. It is a book about millennials, but for Harris millennials are only the symptom: They are what happen when you bring up an entire generation under the demands of a precarious economy. Despite the relentless, if divergent, optimism of America’s sanctioned political actors and institutions, even today’s winners are less secure and stable than those of the twentieth century’s economy. Some have adapted better than others—securing good diplomas and stable jobs, even a mortgage or some savings—but, as Harris writes,
“Adapting to a messed-up world messes you up, whether you remain functional or not.”
Harris’s approach is simple. So simple, in fact, that it is difficult to believe nobody has written this book before, although it is fortunate that Harris—who manages to be quick and often funny without sacrificing rigor—is the author who ultimately took up the task. In fewer than three hundred pages, he surveys the myriad hot takes on millennials—they’re lazy, they’re entitled, they’re narcissists who buy avocado toast instead of homes, slacking on Snapchat at their unpaid internships—and asks, “Why?” That is, What actually happened to you materially, politically, and socially if you had the poor luck of being born between 1980 and 2000? What kind of education system and labor force and nation raised you?
In keeping with his materialist outlook, Harris argues that society molds each generation to fit its economy, to produce the kinds of debtors and workers required to service the needs of its most powerful members. What, then, were the economic factors that shaped millennials?
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“Over the past forty years we have witnessed an accelerated and historically unprecedented pace of change as capitalism emerged as the single dominant mode of organizing society,” Harris writes in his introduction. He continues:
It’s a system based on speed, and the speed is always increasing. Capitalism changes lives for the same reason people breathe: It has to in order to survive. Lately, this system 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. . . . In order to fully recognize the scope of these changes, we need to think about young people the way industry and the government already do: as investments, productive machinery, “human capital.”The story of Kids These Days is the story of this “human capital,” and of millennials as the products of an economy designed to cultivate that capital at every stage of life. It begins in childhood, when kids corralled by standardized tests, psychiatric intervention, and punitive zero-tolerance policies—backed up by armed police stationed in public schools—must work harder than ever to appeal to an increasingly selective and expensive set of universities thought to improve job prospects. (“Risk management used to be a business practice,” Harris writes, but “now it’s our dominant child-rearing strategy.”) For those who evade draconian disciplinary measures, imprisonment, or poverty, the process continues at the university level, where students take on massive debt obligations—essentially, capital investments in their future earnings—and then compete (often without success) for jobs that can pay off those loans. Finally, millennials enter the workforce, where unpaid internships and low job security shift the cost of training onto employees, and each individual learns to see her peers as competitors who will seize any opportunity she passes up. The losers of the new economy are relegated to poverty or prison. The winners never get to stop watching their backs.
In the second half of the book, Harris rounds out his story with examinations of the role of the federal government (largely serving to guard the interests of baby boomers through a safety net heavily slanted toward the protection of programs like social security) and of how the story of human capital plays out in particularly visible fields (sports and entertainment, mostly). Finally, he turns to the social-media networks and pharmaceutical remedies that keep all this churning: considering how they keep people competing at all hours and at maximum achievable efficiency, in full view of their peers. Where the first half of the book charts the precarious course of even the most successful millennials, the second half explores the particular methods and trends of policy and culture that ensure that course.
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by Filipenko Tue Aug 15, 2017 4:03 pmTo određuje i njenu poresku stopu u matičnoj zemlji - 3.5%.
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