Generation Z

Generation Z, as in the folks who made World War Z popular, this entry is about them.

The current generation of young adults (and damn the media apelings who made up the stupid names for them) are depicted by The Atlantic as wearing T-shirts and sporting tattoos like rednecks (Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissman, The Cheapest Generation, The Atlantic, September 2012). They also are depicted as renting or living with parents instead of buying houses, and using community transport such as Zipcar instead of buying cars.

There is a reason for this: Many of those young adults are saddled with student loan debt that will take at least a decade to pay off and that cannot be defaulted. These young adults are not stupid; and it would be very stupid indeed to take out another loan (assuming the banks will lend to them) when they do not have to. So what if their intransigence hurts the housing and automobile markets? So what if their forced parsimony keeps the country in a recession — and yes, the country is still in a recession, no matter what the government and media apelings claim. And it is going to stay that way, no matter what the big corporations and their propaganda minions do.

You wonder what planet the writers come from when they cooked up this:

[B]oth construction and automaking are solidly blue-collar sectors. They employ millions of middle-class workers, who could be hurt by a transition away from home construction and auto manufacturing. The tech companies that sell personal electronics and provide high-speed Internet connections don't need as many workers. And the jobs they do create — domestically at least — skew heavily toward the top of the socioeconomic ladder.
— The Cheapest Generation

Since when are blue-collar workers middle-class? Doctors are middle-class; lawyers are middle-class; business owners are middle-class. Factory workers are not. Stroking blue-collar workers by making them equal to doctors and lawyers, no matter how much money they earn, is lying flattery that those workers do not need. And the last sentence partakes of the Bill Gates myth: In fact, tech companies hire cheap, fire cheap, and fail most of the time — burger flippers and Walmart peons are usually better off. Read The Trenches, especially the text, and know that this is the rule, not the exception.

Frankly, the authors seem to belong to the same subset of humanity that believes that putting money into savings is destroying the economy, by which they mean keeping money out of the hands of those multinational corporations that are now trying to get those young adults to spend. They are so clueless that the rest of the article was not a surprise: A tooth-rotting last paragraph that offers hope in the ancient Greek sense — what we call blind faith today. That's right, you keep believing that if it makes you feel better.