
American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals - spking
http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-21/american-dream-fades-for-generation-y-professionals.html
======
bmmayer1
As a member of Generation Y, it is hard to have much sympathy for the "plight"
of GenY compared to pretty much any other generation in world history. We
haven't been drafted into foreign wars or had to suffer through a real
depression. A third of us didn't die in an influenza epidemic. Our women and
minorities haven't had to face entrenched and legally immovable workplace
discrimination. We have had to face no real looming foreign threat, let alone
a nuclear one. Most of us (who are called "GenY") didn't have to escape
persecution or immigrate with $1 in our pockets with a chance of being turned
back at the border, or get spat on by natives when we arrived.

With the help of technology, the Pax Americana and a stable world order,
improved healthcare, reduced social barriers and relative economic stability,
the generation born in the 80's to 90's is probably the most privileged.
Generation. Ever. In history. For 15,000 years of human civilization. I mean,
it's now considered normal (and even a human right by some) to take 2-3 weeks
vacation every year. So when I read that "I got a $150,000 education and now I
have to work for only $40,000," or (as I've heard before), "I have a college
education, I shouldn't be working at Pier One," I just want to vomit. My
immigrant grandparents would have killed for the chance to work at Pier One.
The world doesn't owe you a living because you graduated from a top tier
school with a degree in Environmental Studies, or even took out a loan to go
to law school.

Look, it's not like Generation Y--or, specifically, individuals in Generation
Y like in every generation--don't have any problems, but you have to have a
sense of perspective. Success for any generation has always been about hard
(productive) work, to better one's self and one's family. The American Dream
has always been about being born into rags and working into to riches, not
from being born into riches and being owed something by the virtue of your
privilege, which is what this "death of the American Dream" nonsense is about.
By this article's own admission, we've been so warped by our parents' relative
privilege that it's hard to see the big picture. Look at the big picture.

~~~
koralatov
Not that I'm defending grumblers, but I think a lot of the upset and anger
comes from the fact that the opportunities aren't as readily available as they
once were. The developed world is a much more regimented place than it once
was, with fewer employers will to take chances on the people they employ. The
classic trap a lot of Gen Y find themselves in is that they're not considered
for jobs because they don't have experience, and can't get experience because
they can't get the jobs. It's a pretty good catch-22.

~~~
bmmayer1
I don't know. There have been a lot of stories how young people are just a lot
less willing to take risks than they used to be. I can tell you for a fact
there are wide open $120k jobs in North Dakota and they are desperate for
young up-and-comers, but no one wants to move to North Dakota. Older
generations just didn't have that privilege.

A generation ago, Gen Xers would leave home and move across the country just
to have opportunity. Now, people are living with their parents til the age of
30. It's partially a change in culture and partially a consequence of not
needing to really take risk to get ahead. The prevailing attitude is "I
deserve this, so I'll just wait and it will come to me." At least that's the
attitude among many of my peers.

~~~
HarryHirsch
One wouldn't doubt that there are well-paying jobs in North Dakota, but with a
total of 700K people living in the whole state one immediately ask just how
many $120K jobs there are, and how many applicants there are for each such
job.

~~~
bmmayer1
Lots. The fracking boom makes it the fastest growing economy in the country.

~~~
HarryHirsch
Lots? The whole state has about as many people living in it as the Columbus
metro area, and the price of housing has been bid through the roof. ND isn't
going to make a dent in the national unemployment statistics, and with a
2-bedroom apartment going at USD 2500/month no one moving there is going to
get rich either.

------
ap22213
One of the puzzling parts of the current working situation is that the people
who are working seem to be putting in way more hours and effort than they used
to.

What I can't put a finger on is the underlying reason why me and about all of
my working friends have almost zero time anymore to do recreational
activities, or to spend time with our families and friends. We workers seem
all over-burdened with our work. But, it hasn't always been this way. Our
workloads have been slowly but steadily creeping up since the 90s.

And, the companies that we're working for are overflowing with cash. Yet,
these same companies aren't hiring new people to alleviate the situation.
Often, the excuse I hear is that there are no qualified people to hire.

~~~
greenyoda
To your employer, there's no situation that needs alleviation. They're very
happy that they can get you to work more hours for the same pay, and even
happier that they don't have to pay increasingly costly health benefits for an
additional employee when one employee can be made to do the work of two. They
obviously don't care that you're suffering.

And "no qualified people to hire" is a euphemism for "no qualified people
willing to work for the low salaries that we're willing to pay them for the
long hours we expect them to work." Double that salary and they'd probably
have qualified candidates flying in from across the country and pounding down
their doors.

~~~
philwelch
At least in software, salaries are high enough and there's even enough
competition on culture that this can't really be the case. Furthermore, it's
not actually possible for one employee to do the work of two. There _actually
is_ a shortage of qualified people in the world.

The fact is, business has become increasingly more sophisticated and,
consequently, difficult over the past several decades. Operations have become
increasingly driven by increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques and
modeling and much of the drone work has been replaced by computers. In the
early days of digital electronics, actual engineers were paid to minimize
logical expressions using Boolean algebra or Karnaugh maps. These days we use
algorithms and engineers have to solve more difficult problems. If you had the
chops to be a white-collar worker at Sears Roebuck corporate in 1960, you
don't have nearly the chops required to be a white-collar worker at Amazon
corporate in 2012, because there's been half a century of innovation in
operations by dozens of firms trying to beat Sears Roebuck.

The end result is that more jobs require numeracy and specialized skills, but
if anything there are fewer people with these skills because mathematics
requirements were dumbed down to get more people into universities and out
with degrees. The stereotypical unemployed Gen-Yner is a liberal arts
graduate, and for good reason. The engineers are fine.

~~~
HarryHirsch
> The engineers are fine.

Says who? Consider the state of the physical sciences. Employment in physics
has been problematic since a long time back, chemistry has suffered from
outsourcing to East Asia for ten years, and in biology the pharmco bubble is
bursting as we speak.

That leaves computing. It's not that hard to become qualified to B.S., in this
very place we see encouragements to drop out of college and "just start a
startup". That's not a sustainable model.

~~~
philwelch
You're right that science is problematic, but I said engineering. Engineering
tends to be paid for by the market, science tends to be paid for by academia
and government, which means employment trends in science are slightly more
arbitrary.

~~~
HarryHirsch
You are forgetting the chemical and pharmaceutical companies, which always had
R&D departments that employed chemists and biologists.

Employment in discovery has shrunk, both because it has become too expensive
to bring a new drug to market, and the process end was offshored to China,
starting about ten years back. No need to invoke the government here.

~~~
philwelch
As you're pointing out, the private sector has relatively little interest in
employing scientists. That's fine--I was mainly talking about business and
engineering.

~~~
HarryHirsch
> As you're pointing out, the private sector has relatively little interest in
> employing scientists.

Boston, San Diego and New Jersey might disagree with you. That's where the
pharmcos are.

~~~
philwelch
First you're telling me that pharmaceuticals aren't employing a lot of
scientists, and now you're telling me that they are. I'm not sure where you're
going with this.

I think "relatively little" (as opposed to "very little" or "none") is a fair
characterization of what you said.

~~~
HarryHirsch
It appears that your point is that science graduates have mainly found
employment in academia. This is just not so - chemists and biologists have
traditionally found employment in the chemical and pharmaceutical industry.

My points is this: for a few years now chemistry has moved offshore, there
have been heavy layoffs in the pharmaceutical industry, and the synthetic
chemistry has been off-shored to contract shops, mainly in East Asia. But the
pipeline is long, and any chemist who began their studies in the early 2000s,
when the trend started, is (justifiably) pissed off that then cannot find work
in their field even with a solid degree.

There is talk about alternative career path, but the observation is that those
pay less then the original career promised.

We see the offshoring trend continue, the biological research is moving
offshore as well, the pharmacology bubble is bursting, and soon only
management will remain stateside.

This _heavily_ afflicts people with advanced degrees. Considering that the
common wisdom on this website is "skip college, get to work with the
equivalent of a bachelors from Coursera/Khan &c", I cannot see that
demographic unaffected. In India and China you can get an excellent education,
and you will work for much less than an American or European. I cannot see
computer engineering unaffected by the offshoring trend.

Exactly what is your point?

~~~
philwelch
You know, I didn't say anything directly about people with advanced degrees in
the sciences in my first comment, and I think I should have left it at that
because you're picking a fight with me over a topic you brought up.

~~~
HarryHirsch
You were the one who defined the "stereotypical unemployed Gen-Yner", as "a
liberal arts graduate, and for good reason. The engineers are fine". This just
isn't the case, it isn't by a long shot. Anyone who makes statements risks
having them checked against reality.

~~~
philwelch
It's hard to see how your statements about biologists and chemists is at all
relevant to my statement about engineers. If I meant "STEM", I would have said
"STEM", not "engineers".

------
angersock
I'm so sick of hearing about how bad we--us poor, lost kids from Generation Y
--have it. I'm so sick of hearing about the odds, about the unemployment rate,
about how everything's our fault because we're too entitled, or about how
nothing's our fault because the economy you see.

I live in a rented house with several other young folks trying to get by in
our industry. I'm working today instead of taking a bus home to see my family.
I'd work tomorrow if I needed to. My computer equipment is worth more than I
have in the bank, because that's my capital investment in myself and my work.

My roommates are all fleeing rolling boulders of student debt--a situation I'm
not in only because I devoted a sizeable chunk of my old salary to paying it
off. Once that debt was paid off, I quit my job, because the company was never
going to go anywhere with its attitude and codebase.

We don't have or want picket fences, we don't have two cars in the 'burbs, we
don't want to sit in front of the TV and veg out. That's something we
inherited from the boomers and Madison Avenue.

The people I know, whether they're architects, or lawyers, or coders, or
dealers, or hustlers, all are in pursuit of the same dream that our
forefathers pursued. We're all good people, with strong work ethics and a
desire to see our kids grow up better than we did into a world kinder than
ours.

We want to live in a country where you can build a business, help your
community, and do so without worrying about getting blackbagged or destroyed
by bureaucracy, where you can smoke a joint or drop acid and go into work that
afternoon and change the fucking world with a commit or a hammer.

(And we're doing this in the Midwest, in Texas no less--no Bay Area bubble for
these views!)

We aren't afraid of evil brown people somewhere else in the world, and we
don't want to cast a "supporting vote" in a system as obviously corrupt and
rigged as the current US government. We don't want to take away people's
rights because we're afraid for our own little lives and our stuff from Ikea.
We don't care about your abortion, or your sexuality, or whatever you do in
your free time.

Don't tell me, don't show me, don't bloody try to sell me this notion that the
American Dream is dead--we're just returning to its roots.

~~~
Permit
An exercise in trading anecdotes isn't going to get anyone anywhere. The fact
that the people you've surrounded yourself are relatively well off does not
offset problems surrounding unemployment and falling wages.

~~~
praptak
I got the impression that GPs point was that the American Dream is about
improving ones own fate (especially when the environment is hard) rather than
complaining about unemployment and wages.

~~~
_delirium
I think of the American Dream as more structural: the idea that, unlike in
countries with strong, hereditary class systems, anyone could succeed in the
U.S. with effort, because your success was less tied to your pedigree. Imo,
statistics, rather than anecdotes, are a good way of determining the extent to
which that's still true.

------
saosebastiao
Gen Y's and Baby Boomers are the two largest examples of irrationality that
this nation has ever seen.

Gen Y for thinking that you can just do whatever you want and expect a high
salary for it. I look at my peers from high school and can't believe some of
the entitlement issues they have.

Boomers for thinking that they could continuously f __* over an entire
generation with their robbing of social welfare systems and expecting people
with no right to vote to pick up the tab 30 years into the future. When
payroll taxes reach 20%, Social Security Recipients will become the next
Westboro Baptists.

~~~
jiggy2011
To be fair some of the feelings of entitlement and the sense of "do whatever
you want" of Gen Y come from the boomers.

When growing up I remember being told from an early age by adults that my
generation would have it great, their generation was putting everything in
place for peace and prosperity such as access to education, better medicine
and technology etc.

The overriding message was really just to work hard and everything would come
good. It didn't matter whether you studied the liberal arts, technology or
just got a job straight out of school and worked your way up.

Now Gen Y have grown up and complain "getting a job with liveable pay and
reasonable stability is hard, and I have a masters!" they get told "the world
doesn't owe you a living!" which is technically true but non helpful.

~~~
vacri
_The overriding message was really just to work hard and everything would come
good._

On the other hand, every gen before Y was told "just work hard", no light at
the end of the tunnel, no 'it gets better'.

------
tarr11
This looks like an example of "Software Eating the World".
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.html)

Many law firms are doing automated textual analysis of legal work that used to
be done by associates. The fact that they are still making more profit implies
that they've just gotten more efficient. I suppose that there are a set of
legal software companies that are probably profiting pretty well on this.

"Similarly, the number of hours logged by first-year and mid-level legal
associates -- a _productivity measure_ of young lawyers -- fell 12 percent
from 2007 at some of New York’s largest law firms, says Jeff Grossman,
national managing director of Wells Fargo Private Bank’s Legal Specialty Group
in Charlotte, North Carolina. Yet profits per partner climbed $50,697 to $1.5
million on revenue of $66 billion last year, according to a separate survey of
86 of the world’s top law firms by The American Lawyer magazine."

~~~
helmut_hed
"Textual analysis" also sounds like the sort of thing that could be profitably
outsourced. I understand that in the medical world, reviewing medical images
may now be done by qualified technicians in lower-wage countries.

------
donretag
The employment problem is precisely why I do not think the housing market will
ever "recover". Housing prices did not crash, they simply aligned themselves
with current and forecasted salaries. Attempts at raising housing prices to
"normal" levels is a fools game. Create the jobs and the salaries first and
the rest will follow.

~~~
cglace
I don't understand why everyone wants housing prices to go up. As a person
looking to buy a home in the near future I certainly do not hope the housing
prices head towards their prerecession levels.

~~~
phillmv
Why, they're investments. Of course you want prices to go up!

You're sinking a huge quantity of money - presumably, above that of an
equivalent rental unit in your region - and by golly, you need returns on that
or else you're just fritting it all away.

It's all compounded by the fact that housing is the only major asset
investment that the vast majority of people ever engage in.

~~~
Joeri
They're only an investment if you buy more housing than you need. After all,
you need housing, so when you sell that home at increased value, you will need
to use that revenue to buy new housing which has also risen in cost.

In short, only if you can sell your home and buy a cheaper home can it be
considered an investment. Otherwise it's just non-liquid capital.

~~~
plorkyeran
In theory, if you buy enough housing to fit a few kids then you'll have more
housing than you need by the time you're looking at retirement, so you can
cash out your 'investment'.

Of course, in reality this never seems to actually happen.

~~~
theorique
Lots of people are doing this / have done exactly this.

My parents and many of their generational peers (boomers +/- 10 years) did the
large house thing in the 1960s-1980s in order to raise the kids, then sold
their large house and moved to a smaller house or condo as the kids moved out
in the 1990s-2000s.

------
lispertoascheme
The article focuses on a couple of lawyers. Lawyers are classic parasites.
They need to find money-making entities to act as "hosts". When the economy is
sinking, there are less healthy hosts for the parasites to target. The few
parasites who are lucky enough to find hosts that can act as hosts will be in
good stead (the article admits profits have risen at law firms, even if hiring
has plummeted). It's strange to think the American Dream (How do you define
it? Is it home ownership and progeny?) must be funded through parasitic
behavior.

Be a host not a parasite and you will always be able to live the Dream, no
matter what direction the economy goes. That's because you create value
instead of merely searching out others who are creating it.

------
btilly
Back in 2008 I was reading articles based on previous financial crises saying
that after the kind of debt crisis that the USA was then going through, the
average was 10 years to really recover, followed by a return to normal growth.
So, 4 years in, things still suck.

If that is true, we should have about 6 years left until the American dream
starts to work again across much of the country. Unfortunately for everyone
who entered the work force in that 10 year period, initial poor wages tend to
turn into lifetime poor earnings. A whole generation does indeed look set to
lose out economically for their whole lives.

But if you can adjust to current reality, your future is likely to be better
than your present. You just have to set expectations realistically low.

~~~
genwin
As population increases and resources dwindle, we get closer to subsistence
living or even a population crash. The decade-long cycle might be close to
breaking, then.

Yes the trick is to lower one's expectations. Ultimately we can be content
with little more than a warm dry place to sleep and enough food.

------
nn2
Less jobs for lawyers generally seems like a good thing to me. Like investment
banks lawyers do not create much (any?) value. That's a good sign for society.
There may be some hope left.

Now it's not good for those who wasted a lot of money on a law school. They
made a bad decision and will adjust.

~~~
antiterra
And yet there are more and more law schools gleefully suckering new students
into the major and getting rich off of it, while not being able to provide a
return on the investment. That's a very bad thing.

Lawyers as a whole are not a symbol of malaise. It really depends on what kind
of lawyers are around. You increase regulation in an industry, then companies
in that industry are going to need to hire lawyers to advise the companies on
how to comply. You're also going to need people familiar enough with the law
to write good regulatory legislation.

You want startups to make deals with each other, and to receive investments?
You're going to want lawyers who can sort out the terms and put it in writing
that reflects the intent of all stakeholders. So much misery and broken
friendship between co-founders could have been easily relieved by using
contracts instead of handshakes.

If you're investing in a company, it's likely you'll want a lawyer to perform
due diligence on the company's current contractual obligations.

------
patja
Yes, by all means, let's sue the schools! I was promised a six figure job if I
finished this expensive law degree, but there was a recession and now I have
to shift gears.

------
beatpanda
I don't know, I never found the idea of "The American Dream" all that
appealing in the first place. The whole thing sounds like kind of a drag.

------
rdl
It is jarring just how different tech (and SFBA) are from the rest of the
country.

~~~
sneak
I think this sort of view-bubble perspective adjustment is very healthy and
helpful for understanding our businesses' places (and strategies!) in the
larger economy.

------
tokenadult
From the article: "Three and a half years after the worst recession since the
Great Depression, the earnings and employment gap between those in the
under-35 population and their parents and grandparents threatens to unravel
the American dream of each generation doing better than the last."

There have been many postings to Hacker News recently with similar themes. The
situation described increasingly looks like the situation in the worst-off
countries in western Europe, where an ossified social welfare system insulates
the older generation (approximately people from the oldest people now living
down to people with birth years before 1970) from the economic situation of
the younger generation. The United States used to be much less like that, but
the Silent Generation (roughly, the people born during the Great Depression)
throughout their lives acquiesced in government policies that resulted in an
enormous income transfer to people in their generation at the expense of
younger people, including Baby Boomers like me.

[AFTER FIRST EDIT: A friend who is a Ph.D. policy analyst for the federal
government sent me a link the other day raising the question "Has the US
median household income really stagnated over the past 30 years?"

[http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/12/the-7-most-illuminating-
eco...](http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/12/the-7-most-illuminating-economic-
charts-of-2012/)

(point 6 in the link). I think the statement is surely correct that actual
ability to spend on the part of Americans on goods and services they desire
has increased in all income quintiles over the last thirty years. Some
economic statistics don't take account of tax policy and transfer payment
(entitlement) policy well enough to reflect the actual economic well being of
American families. Official inflation statistics have also badly overstated
increases in "cost of living" throughout my adult life, failing to take into
account changed consumption patterns and changing (improving) quality of many
goods and services, thus making people think they are poorer than they
actually are. By observation of actual consumption patterns, young people
today are better off in general than young people a generation ago, which is
the consistent expectation of American culture.]

I support United States policies that move in the direction of east Asian
rather than western European patterns of government spending and social
welfare, putting more of the investment in future generations back in the
hands of families and less in the hands of bureaucrats. I'm in favor of a big
boost in the minimum age for all kinds retirement benefits (Social Security,
Medicare, etc.) as the only possible way to keep taxation for those programs
from crippling the opportunities of my children. (Yes, I support that even
though I am middle-aged and that will put off my retirement. I'm already
slated to retire well after age 65 by the last Social Security reform that was
passed in the early 1980s to favor the Silent Generation.)

I'm also in favor of greatly expanded parental choice in education so that
families with children have the power to shop to help children gain good
primary and secondary educations that launch the children into adulthood with
a reasonable chance of employment. I live in the first state (Minnesota) to
have charter schools, to have statewide public school open enrollment (the
school district in which I live has enrolled students whose residence
addresses are in FORTY-ONE other school districts around the state), and to
have statewide dual enrollment of senior high school students in college-level
classes. Even at that, I was a homeschooling parent here, and there is more
that Minnesota and every state in the country can do to expand parental choice
in education. But the parade of horribles that some people claim will happen
if parents gain more choice has NOT happened in Minnesota over the last
quarter century, and more states ought to at least emulate the example of my
state, where educational achievement compared to educational spending is
moderately high by the unambitious standards of the United States. I'm glad
that through homeschooling and other alternative approaches I used to educate
my children that now my oldest son, already grown into adulthood, gained
sufficient work skills that he has gainful full-time employment even in
today's bleak job market. His generation should be spared from the policy
mistakes of my parents' generation.

ANTICIPATORY EDIT NOTICE: I posted an outline of what I think the policy
problem is here first. I've been looking up some sources and may do some more
edits as this thread continues to interest other participants here on HN,
until I run out of time on my edit window.

~~~
w1ntermute
> I support United States policies that move in the direction of east Asian
> rather than western European patterns of government spending and social
> welfare

This is going to be very difficult to pull off without a massive cultural
change. The Confucian influence on East Asian culture has resulted in a much
higher degree of filial piety (孝) than in the West, which makes it possible
for people to live in old age without social welfare. I just can't see
Americans taking care of their retired parents, nor can I see the parents
being OK with depending on their children.

> I'm also in favor of greatly expanded parental choice in education so that
> families with children have the power to shop to help children gain good
> primary and secondary educations that launch the children into adulthood
> with a reasonable chance of employment.

This is also untenable in most of America due to the lack of good public
transportation and the low population density. In fact, such a system already
exists (to a degree) in NYC, the one place where population density and public
transportation infrastructure is quite similar to Asia. But in most American
cities, the good schools are in the suburbs, which are usually in separate
counties from the city.

And the minute that you try to make the schools children attend unrelated to
where they live, the wealthy parents will simply pull their children out of
public schools and send them to private schools instead (we saw this before
with forced busing). And without the well-off students as their peers in the
public schools, the poorer students won't improve, no matter how much money
you throw at the situation.

In fact, I saw this problem in the (good) public suburban school system I was
in. Despite it having a desegregation program that brought poor black students
from the city (by way of a 45-minutes-each-way bus ride) to my school, I
almost never interacted with them in the classroom because of separate tiers
of education for gifted students starting in the 7th grade.

And don't forget that once the wealthy have pulled their children out of the
public schools, they'll vote for ballot initiatives and candidates that reduce
funding for public schools. The poor, who care less about the quality of
education their children are receiving, won't bother to fight back.

> the parade of horribles that some people claim will happen if parents gain
> more choice has NOT happened in Minnesota over the last quarter century

You're ignoring the fact that Minnesota has one of the whitest populations of
any state in the country. I can assure you that an undercurrent of
socioeconomically-associated racism still exists in large swathes of the US
where there are significant black and Hispanic populations. While most people
don't mind if their children associate with middle class black and Hispanic
children, they certainly don't want them associating with minority children
from the ghetto. And for the most part, the kids follow their parents' lead.
At my school, there were some children of African and Hispanic immigrants,
whose parents were highly educated and had jobs in engineering, medicine and
science and kept their children on the straight and narrow (usually much more
so than the white parents did). They were treated exactly like any of the
white children, and often used as examples of how racism had been "eradicated"
from the school system. But in reality, people wanted nothing to do with the
students from the ghetto.

This is the reason why charter schools have become so popular in Minnesota,
but remain politically untenable in so many other parts of the country. And I
don't know how it is for those students in your school district from the 41
other districts, but the poor students in the ghettos where I grew up don't
even have 1 car in the family, let alone gas money for the long daily trip to
a good school.

> I'm in favor of a big boost in the minimum age for all kinds retirement
> benefits (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) as the only possible way to keep
> taxation for those programs from crippling the opportunities of my children.

I'm pretty sure this is a foregone conclusion. There's simply no way around
the math other than increasing the retirement age. If you go back 50 or 100
years, people didn't sit around for 20 or 30 years after retiring doing
nothing - they simply died earlier. So if you're going to live until 80 or 90,
you'd better work until at least 75.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
_I'm pretty sure this is a foregone conclusion. There's simply no way around
the math other than increasing the retirement age. If you go back 50 or 100
years, people didn't sit around for 20 or 30 years after retiring doing
nothing - they simply died earlier. So if you're going to live until 80 or 90,
you'd better work until at least 75._

If you go back 50 or 100 years, productivity-per-hour was a tiny fraction of
what it is today. Why do we _decree by fiat_ that everyone has a _moral
obligation_ which we will _enforce via the economic system_ to spend at least
half their waking hours working for most of their lifespan?

~~~
greenyoda
If you're going to finance your own retirement, feel free to stop working
whenever you have enough money saved up. However, if you're going to demand
that future generations of workers finance your retirement through taxation
(which is how the U.S. Social Security system works), then what you're saying
is that future generations have a "moral obligation" to spend ever-increasing
fractions of their salaries to fund prior generations as life expectancy
increases. Keeping the retirement age the same while life expectancy goes up
results in an increasing transfer of wealth from younger generations to older
generations, with older people having an increased standard of living at the
expense of younger ones.

By the way, higher productivity per hour doesn't necessarily mean that people
can afford to pay higher taxes to fund your longer retirement. In many cases,
it means that employees are expected to work more hours (e.g., work 50 hours a
week and answer e-mails from home) for the same salary. Also, productivity per
hour is only likely to have increased in jobs that are based on technology.
It's not likely that the productivity per hour of a mail carrier or a teacher
or a waiter is much higher than it was decades ago.

------
frozenport
I think its dead for white people, for many foreigners I know its as real as
ever.

------
BrianPetro
The repercussions of dropping out of college constantly cross my mind.

Luckily, articles like this ease my self doubts. :)

~~~
breckenedge
Except that four out of five jobs lost during the recession were employees
with less than a college diploma [0]. Rather than dropping out, I strongly
recommend transferring to a lower-cost school or switching majors.

The article talks about law school students. A huge number of students entered
law school right at the start of the recession. There just wasn't market
demand for that many new lawyers when they graduated in 2011. [1]

[0]:
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2190273/Georgetown-U...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2190273/Georgetown-
University-report-College-graduates-better-recession-high-school-
diplomas.html)

[1]: [http://chronicle.com/article/Unemployment-Among-Recent-
Law/1...](http://chronicle.com/article/Unemployment-Among-Recent-Law/132189/)

------
jinushaun
The American Dream is a Boomer phenomenon. Gen Y are not Boomers.

------
michaelochurch
Law (which OP focuses on) is a bizarre profession, because it used to be
driven by an arms race dynamic. Most of what lawyers do, at the top of the
profession, isn't intellectually difficult. The game is about being able to
generate work for the other team faster than they can adapt to it. When
litigation happens between large corporations, it's about playing the process,
not arguing or interpreting the law itself. It devolves into brute-force
process playing. It's not what you see in the movies, since cases so rarely go
to trial.

So, even though the work itself isn't challenging, large law firms have
traditionally sought very qualified people, not because of the work, but
because there's a complex, ever-evolving game in this war of attrition. The
winning team is the one that generates work faster than the other can keep up,
and you need to be smart, driven, and brutal enough to work the angles. This
also explains the 70-hour weeks that became the norm in biglaw. The game is
about beating the other side to death with excess work, so the best hires are
people who can do huge amounts of boring, procedural work and not get
completely exhausted.

What changed is that there's now less work to go around, due to cost-cutting
and "demand destruction" among these firms' Wall Street clientele. There's no
longer 70 hours of work per associate. Now the firms are overstaffed relative
to the actual workload. Well, the partners want to keep their lifestyles, so
associates get axed. What's most disgusting about it is the recent trend of
"stealthing", which is disguising a layoff as a performance-based firing.

There's also a bimodal income distribution. There's "biglaw" which has a hard
salary floor of $165k per year, and "everything else" where the average might
be $50k. Law is one profession where it's not at all uncommon to be making
_less_ at 35 (after not making partner, and being _lucky_ if you crack 120k)
than at 26.

White-shoe law is melting down. So is investment banking, on which it relies,
but banking's degradation is more graceful. Banking is just hiring fewer
people and reducing bonuses, while law has this problem of large numbers of
marginally qualified people who've spent large amounts of money on JD degrees.

What have we learned from the Law Crash? (Yes, there was a Law Bubble, and boy
has it crashed.) I think the lesson is about how of an influence
_respectability_ has over peoples' work lives. The attraction of the legal
profession wasn't just the money, but also the prestige. You're not some
plumber or computer programmer-- occupations whose average members now seem to
be doing better than average attorneys-- you're a _lawyer_. Even now, with law
imploded, I think that impulse is strong. What we're out of touch with is that
most upper-middle-class Americans would see it as weird and risky for a young
person to go off to Silicon Valley, and upper-class would only approve it if
you were a VC, not an entrepreneur.

People are desperate for the credibility and respectability of being a
"professional", but the professions are under attack. Doctors are being
pillaged by health-insurance barbarians, the law bubble is collapsing, and
academia's a non-concern by this point. Which means that the best (and, for
many, only) ways for most people to make a decent living are in formerly
"unrefined" lines of work. For a lot of people, it's a shock.

Millennials, for their part, often feel cheated out of this. They should. They
were put through a 16+ year game to lead them to believe they'd have a certain
kind of elite life, and then most were dumped into a featureless landfill of
confusion and mediocrity. They've been pumped and dumped.

~~~
Jimmy
>academia's a non-concern by this point.

Could you expand on what you mean by this? I'm just curious what your
viewpoint is.

~~~
michaelochurch
The academic career and the "life of the mind" are done-for in this society.
The US has already decided that it doesn't care about these things, and there
really isn't an option to turn back. There will be demand for teaching, for
sure, but basic research is gone and the academic career no longer has the
resources to create enough decent positions that would entice the top people
to stay.

What's happening now is that the best people are going into industry, and
spending time in academia _after_ they are rich enough to retire. I wouldn't
be surprised if that's the future of academia: a place where successful older
people teach the young, but not a lifelong career.

~~~
philwelch
We're employing more academics than ever. The problem is that we're producing
even more grad students than we have academic positions, because academia's
self-replication behaviors have metastasized.

