I don’t have kids; I’m just not a “kid” kind of guy. So I’m a bit out of touch when it comes to the problems that young people are facing. Rather than have my kids explain their problems to me, I read about them in the papers or hear about them from friends who have kids. What I’ve heard and read over the last year has made me realize one thing: my generation — and those older than me — really screwed things up for the younger generations.
Let’s start with education: I was really fortunate because my education was paid for by my family. My Dad started to save when I was born and, by the time I went to college, he had saved enough money for my tuition. I went to a private liberal arts college which was pricey. But back then (the late 1980s), state schools offered a great value for the money that was comparable. That’s no longer the case. Why? Because over the last 25-30 years, we’ve slowly shifted the funding of state schools from state budgets to students.
What has this led to? An entire generation (or maybe two at this point) who are graduating college with a fairly large amount of debt. Think about what this does from an economic perspective: instead of having no debt — which would allow the newly graduated to begin building wealth — the newly graduated have to pay off enough debt to make wealth accumulation difficult at best.
And that’s before we get into the whole economy thing — especially the “productivity-pay gap:”
If we think about the entire US economy wholistically, most people have salaries, or, in economic terms, “income.” As this chart shows, it used to be that gains in productivity (read: economic efficiency) went hand-in-hand to workers. That changed in the late 1970s when an increasingly large share of the productivity gains went somewhere else, leaving less for hourly-waged employees. That means that most college graduates are now trying to divide up a smaller portion of the national economic pie.
And that’s before we get to the issue of climate change, which is more-than-understandably screwing with kids. Badly:
As climate change continues unabated, parents, teachers and medical professionals across the country find themselves face-to-face with a quandary: How do you raise a generation to look toward the future with hope when all around them swirls a message of apparent hopelessness? How do you prepare today’s children for a world defined by environmental trauma without inflicting more trauma yourself? And where do you find the line between responsible education and undue alarmism?
I have no answers to this one.
Here’s the absolute worst part: let’s suppose you want to try and solve the problems through the political process. Good luck with that. A large enough minority of idiots (read: Republicans) believe that up is down, left is right, and the sun rises in the West. Think I’m exaggerating? These are the same people who believed that a pizza parlor in Washington DC was ground zero for a pedophilia ring led my 2018 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. I’ll rest my case right there.
I could go on, but I’m pretty sure you get the point by now. From this older guy's perspective, my generation and those older have royally screwed things up. And I’m really sorry about.