There are no shortage of columns bashing millennials and twenty somethings, but this piece from today’s Boston Globe is exceptionally harsh, not to mention mean-spirited (especially if you are among the demographic who eats from the “enabling 99-cent value menu”). Here are some lines from “A generation of idle trophy kids”:
Word that 6 million young people are not working or studying comes as no surprise to anyone with a millennial in the basement … Generation X gave way to Generation Vex, an amiable, tech-savvy, yet minimally employable crop of Americans who will ultimately need more subsidies than a dairy farmer … millennials, alas, are trophy kids, a generation spawned not for their usefulness at harvest but because they look so precious in those matching pajamas from Hanna Andersson …. we might as well have hung a sign over our kids’ doors, saying, “Abandon all ambition, ye who enter here.” … Millennials incubated in beauty and comfort and spaciousness unknown to their parents at that age … Today’s kids simply can’t imagine downsizing …
The piece is essentially just 700 words of calling “today’s kids” lazy, entitled, spoiled brats who like being unemployed. We at RELEVANT have taken these assumptions to task recently, but as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson points out in a brilliant (and scathing) takedown of the column, the Globe ignored and misrepresented facts about the 18-to-34-year-old generation. As he points out, even though the recession directly affected recent college grads (and despite the challenges of a slowly recovering economy) the millennial rate of unemployment is consistent with youth employment numbers dating back to the ‘70s. In other words, the reality is, the demographic is faring pretty well considering the state of the economy—no matter what a columnist thinks about “today’s kids” …
