Last week, I asked for your thoughts on the millennial generation. And you didn’t disappoint. It’s time for a rummage through the mailbag.
While the age parameters vary depending on who you ask, the generation born during the 80s and 90s are now gaining direct political and economic influence, and I wanted to know how optimistic you are about their rise.
Thank you to all who wrote in. I’ve received many detailed and well thought-out responses, and while I don’t have room for them all, I’d like to share some of them with you today.
I’m a millennial and am pretty pessimistic about a future run by my peers, due to their growing support for authoritarianism and increased government intervention in the economy, be it overtly socialist or otherwise.
Their disregard for private property rights does not bode well, though it can be understood due to the fact that my cohort of the population owns so little assets in general, and very often are instead saddled with a boatload of student debt. This has been exacerbated (possibly even caused) by the monetary policy of central banks, but that’s for another letter. I wanted to know what you think.
Several responses were short, such as the rather curt “Thank Christ it ain’t 1939.”
Some readers were more optimistic:
I am generally impressed with the young generation. Notwithstanding all the difficulties that they face, they remain optimistic and robust. I also think that more of them should be involved in the national debate and in influencing government. I just hope that the growing disparity in wealth between the richest 10% and the rest of the population will be narrowed. If not, I fear for the outlook…
With central banks once again looking to the printing presses, wealth disparity will likely only get worse… and the political appetite to redistribute that wealth should only get stronger.
The majority of responses I received took a gloomy perspective:
How do I feel about millenials being in positions of power? Ha ha ha! Safe spaces? Trigger warnings? Offense culture? Feelings over facts? Oh that’ll go well.
We are already seeing people arrested for comments posted on social media, while at the same time the establishment try and control the narrative by decrying anything they don’t like as “fake news” and therefore to be censored (even as they generate reams of propaganda themselves to justify regime change wars). CNN and MSNBC are still pushing Russiagate, in spite of the Mueller report – they are so detached from reality they might just throw the 2020 election to Trump. Again.
Honestly? I think we’re f***ed, skipping blindly down a road to hell paved with good intentions (and the usual raft of no-so-good ones).
China and Russia seem to be getting their act together just as the West takes a shotgun to both its own feet. That said, maybe that’s the one glimmer of hope – that geopolitics is finally regaining some balance; the Americans have been on a 20 year rampage unopposed, and it has been the single most destructive force of my lifetime.
But maybe I’m wrong, and millennials will persuade us all to be nicer to each other, no-one will ever be offended again, and everyone will wear flowers in their hair and ride a unicorn to a well-paid, fulfilling job each day, and everything will be OK.
And…
Sorry, Boaz,
Not confident at all.
The examples are too many to list but one comes to mind, that of a young man very close to me who inveighs against the evils of climate change yet:
Uses the bags for life and then throws them away
&
Refuses to re-use the useful little boxes that Chinese meals come in, insisting that only “Tupperware” (i.e. a plastic item that costs money) is re-usable.
While I fear the hyphen will mark me more as a pedantic old foggy than one preferring traditional usage, the example above suggests the young can also act rather on personal preference than a practical application of their own core beliefs – let alone any questioning of the latter.
As for the causes of such problems, several readers looked in the same direction – the previous generation.
I feel sorry for the millennial generation. They have been brought up by parents who have lived in a time of plenty.
Plenty of work, plenty of wealth, plenty of affordable housing, even if the parents were not very highly educated they had the opportunity to work a full week, and earn a proper almost liveable wage, but with Mum and dad both working the family could enjoy a reasonable lifestyle.
These parents were able to indulge their offspring, with a lot of the goodies, toys computers, university, travel, driving lessons, and a car, which gave these children a right to think they will have a better standard of living than their parents.
Education focused their minds to think employment was a right, they were owed a living, they bought the dream sold to them by the education business that the more paper qualifications you had the better job you would get. When they left education a lot after completing university and gaining a degree, but a degree of little use in the real world of work, and worse still with a load of debts…
… regarding the millennial generation’s future, look at the House of Commons, some of them are part of the debate or their parents are. Therefore god help us all.
And…
Let us not forget that we (the baby boomers) created the millennial generation. We inherited a world of far greater austerity, inequality and widespread poverty than this generation will ever know. We laboured and aspired, and laboured even more to escape the financial fetters of the 20th century’s great wars, and then we forget to pass on any of our collective memory of hardship. We have assiduously protected our offspring (the middle class ones at least, who will in the absence of utter revolution produce most of the next group of leaders in society) from all knocks and setbacks. We have given them endless attention and support. We cannot now complain that they are self-centred ‘snowflakes’ with zero tolerance of adversity.
Yes, they complain about debt and housing and job prospects but how many of us have ever really educated them on how much worse it was starting out in the 70’s when the entire nation was bankrupt. Maybe that’s arguable, but what can’t be denied is that we’ve bequeathed them a likely 20 year greater lifespan. Instead of encouraging them to worry about long-distant pension prospects, let us instead challenge them to make use of all that extra time which we will never see. Maybe in rising to that they will create a more inclusive but still dynamic economic model (socialism is not it!). Of course, if they aren’t up to that then their inability to handle conflict and adversity will give us a political class even less capable than the current shower, and the path to anarchy will be short….
One reader is optimistic not about the millennials, but the generation after, known as Generation Z:
I’m a baby boomer & freely admit that my generation drew 1st prize in terms of when to be born – no wars to fight, any number of jobs you wanted for life, free university (at a time when the dustman didn’t need a degree so getting one was actually worth something), final salary pensions, a huge – undeserved – hike in the value of our homes and a 12% tax discount on retirement (the National Insurance nonsense) … but do Millennials encourage me? Not really, I find many of them to be expert on coffee & smartphones yet completely unengaged & uninformed about some fundamental issues facing the world such as the more concerning aspects of technology (E.g. algorithms leading you to unsavoury material in 4 clicks from an initial innocent enquiry), the steady destruction of proper capitalism (the uncontrolled power of Tech giants, fewer quoted companies, less competition, more cronyism); this sort of stuff makes their eyes glaze over.
Finishing on a more upbeat note, I do a lot of voluntary stuff with teenagers & they most definitely do encourage me.
I’d like to round off today’s letter with this closing pair of responses which seemed to perfectly match each other:
“I am very optimistic about them in charge as long as they can keep their faces out of their smart phones.”
“The millennial generation will never be in charge … too busy peering into their phones. Artificial intelligence will be in charge, thank God.”
Whatever great shifts do occur when the next generation inherits the Earth, they’ll no doubt be featured in Capital & Conflict. Thanks again for all your responses!
All the best,
Boaz Shoshan
Editor, Capital & Conflict
Category: Market updates