Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

Under this framework, it’s a kid’s job to stay eligible for the labor market (not in jail, not insane, and not dead—which is more work for some than others), and any work product beyond that adds to their résumé. If more human capital automatically led to a higher standard of living, this model could be the foundation for an American meritocracy. But Millennials’ extra work hasn’t earned them the promised higher standard of living. By every metric, this generation is the most educated in American history, yet Millennials are worse off economically than their parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. Every authority from moms to presidents told Millennials to accumulate as much human capital as we could, and we did, but the market hasn’t held up its side of the bargain.

We aren’t dumb, we’re adaptable—but adapting to a messed-up world messes you up, whether you remain functional or not.

Parents are treated like consumers, and “Think of the children” usually means “Think of your kid” and “Be afraid” and “Buy this or else.” Maybe that’s good advice for maximizing an individual kid’s chance at success in a winner-take-all market, but we can see what kind of society—and person—results.

It’s a contradiction: Kids have to be taught how to use tools that will help them reduce their work-time, without it actually reducing their work-time.

School authorities warn students that any deviant behavior on a child’s part is irresponsible because it could have severe and long-lasting consequences for their future, and then they enforce unreasonably harsh disciplinary standards that have severe and long-lasting consequences for the child’s future. That’s not a warning, it’s a promise.

Capitalism has always rewarded those who have found ways to monetize new life processes, but technology combined with the growth of the finance sector has accelerated this process.

As Chris Rock famously put it: “Do you know what it means when someone pays you minimum wage? I would pay you less, but it’s against the law.

The working activities during childhood moratorium are disguised by pedagogical ideologies…. Learning is not understood as a type of work, whereby children contribute productively to the future social and economic development of the society. Only the adult work of teachers is emphasized as productive contribution to the development of human capital. The corresponding learning activities of pupils are thus defined, not as work but as a form of intellectual consumption. 5

No one puts their whole self into their job like a Millennial who never learned to separate work and life enough to balance them, especially if they’re wired on uppers and get anxious when they’re too far away from their phone.

In a reversal of the traditional ideas about childhood, it’s no longer a time to make mistakes; now it’s when bad choices have the biggest impact.

Wars, revolutions, market crashes, shifts in the mode of production, transformations in social relations: These are the things generations are made of, even if we can only see their true shape in the rearview mirror.

A hypercompetitive environment sets parents up for dreams of champion children, and then for almost inevitable heartbreak. Millennials of all abilities have grown up in the shadow of these expectations, expectations that by definition, only a very few of us can fulfill.

What distinguishes the way a caring family or state institution treats a child from the way an investor would, if they’re both primarily concerned with the child’s future success? An investor may want an asset to achieve its full potential, but the investor doesn’t particularly care whether that kid is happy while they do it. A caring parent, on the other hand, balances an interest in a child’s future achievement with the child’s present wellbeing.

If you dangle in front of parents the kind of 1 percent life outcome that goes with being a star, some of them will grab for it, even if objectively it’s not a very good plan for their child’s long-term wellbeing. Once a parent hears that their kid might have potential - as a painter, a dancer, a tennis player, a musician, whatever - all the stories of struggling artists and washed up athletes fade to the background.

As in other industries, the recruitment process has become a lot easier (cheaper) for employers and a lot more expensive for would be employees. A demo with a new sound or a solid audition isn’t good enough. Artists are now expected to arrive with a market-ready brand and audience, saving their corporate overlords the makeover expense. Building a brand is no longer the purview of slick besuited experts; it’s the individual responsibility of every voice that wants to “make it.

Technological development leads to increased worker productivity, declining labor costs, more competition, a shift in the costs of human capital development onto individual competitors, and increased productivity all over again.

In 1960, a full 35 percent of Americans age sixty-five and over were living under the poverty line. Now it’s under 10 percent. Researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research credit the entirety of this decrease to a doubling of Social Security expenditure per capita over the time in question.10 The elderly have gone from the poorest American age demographic to the richest, in no small part due to sizable increases in state support.

Affective labor (or feeling work) engages what the Italian theorist Paolo Virno calls our “bioanthropological constants”—the innate capacities and practices that distinguish our species, like language and games and mutual understanding. A psychologist is doing affective labor, but so is a Starbucks barista.

Higher education is just one industry, and it follows—sometimes leads—the same trends as the rest of the labor market.

Senator Warren’s hope has been that the government could set borrower interest rates in advance to precisely and consistently balance federal revenues and costs. This was a hope the GAO quickly dashed in their report, helpfully titled “Borrower Interest Rates Cannot Be Set in Advance to Precisely and Consistently Balance Federal Revenues and Costs.”28 It’s the oldest play in the book when it comes to pretending to address an intractable policy issue: Commission a report that says it’s not feasible to do anything at all.

By every metric, this generation is the most educated in American history, yet Millennials are worse off economically than their parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. Every authority from moms to presidents told Millennials to accumulate as much human capital as we could, and we did, but the market hasn’t held up its side of the bargain. What gives? And why did we make this bargain in the first place?

In a world where every choice is an investment, growing up becomes a very complex exercise in risk management.

The few book-length considerations of Millennials—for our purposes I will mostly use this term to refer to Americans born between 1980 and 2000 (Reagan up to Bush II)—that exist are generally concerned with two things: young people’s intellectual degradation, and how to manage them in the workplace.

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. 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. The rate of change is visibly unsustainable. The profiteers call this process “disruption,” while commentators on the left generally call it “neoliberalism” or “late capitalism.” Millennials know it better as “the world,” or “America,” or “Everything.” And Everything sucks.

From our bathroom breaks to our sleep schedules to our emotional availability, Millennials are growing up highly attuned to the needs of capital markets. We are encouraged to strategize and scheme to find places, times, and roles where we can be effectively put to work. Efficiency is our existential purpose, and we are a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean production machines.

While women did bad jobs at a much higher rate than men during the twentieth century, in 2013 younger male workers were more likely to work at or below the poverty level than older women wage earners. Most of that difference was due not to the improvement of women’s wages, but to the increase in the number of young men working for low wages. Being under thirty-five is now correlated with poverty wages. Disconnect Between Productivity and a Typical Worker’s Compensation, 1948–2015 Note: Data are for average hourly compensation of production/nonsupervisory workers in the private sector and net productivity of the total economy.

It would be one hell of a coincidence if private and public universities responded to entirely different sets of cost pressures in the same way over the course of three decades. The most obvious explanation is that nonprofit higher education has become a single industry with premium and generic brands. If you don’t believe me, then at least believe the financial services agency Moody’s, whose 2013 report describes the distinction in the clear and unashamed language of unaccountable finance professionals: “Public universities are now as market driven as private universities, but remain a lower cost option with stronger pricing power.” 19

Before the Obama administration’s reform, most student lending was done through the ill-advised Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) Program, under which the federal government backed an intricate private system of dispersed lending agencies at a totally unnecessary cost to taxpayers. There was no sense in the government using its credit rating to support private lenders while the fat cats profited off students.

For all the jokes about students living off ramen, undergraduates are significantly more likely to experience high levels of food insecurity (in technical terms: “hunger”) than to live in a dorm. 7 Millennials have changed what it means to be a college student in practice, but the American “Town vs. Gown” imaginary hasn’t been updated.

Times have changed. In 1960, 25 percent of full-time college students between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four worked while enrolled. Five decades later, national statistics show that over 70 percent of undergraduates are working…. Twenty percent of all undergraduate students are employed full time, year-round.