One of my perpetual beefs on this blog is the “kids these days” trope where people lament the condition of young people. It doesn’t matter if kids these days are, in fact, no worse than they’ve ever been — or even better than they used to be. Nostalgia is a helluva drug. But media outlets don’t help. They know people will read those stories.
Kevin Casey, writing for the Atlantic, has a good variant entitled “the Myth of the Unemployed College Grad” which plays into the current genre of “the economy is doing well, so why do people feel like it’s bad” stories that DougJBalloon of the New York Times Pitchbot has so much fun with.
For half a century, the Post, The New York Times, and others have been feeding the anxieties of their well-educated readership by publishing stories about a crisis among recent college graduates. The precise details may evolve, but the formula is remarkably durable: Find some recent grads working humble jobs, quote them on how their lives are failing to live up to their aspirations, and cite an expert warning that this could be the new normal. “After generations during which going to college was assumed to be a sure route to the better life, college-educated Americans are losing their economic advantage.” Sound familiar? Those words were published on the front page of the Times in 1975.
Casey then has a little fun doing some “Where Are They Now” with people who were, once upon a time, used as the main characters in the struggling college grad pieces. For example, one of them went on to become a surgeon and presumably no longer has to subsist on beans and rice.
I guess I’m attuned to these kinds of stories because one of my parents’ favorite memories is when I was probably 7 or 8; so, late 70s – and had heard a story about rising housing costs. I declared that I would have to live with them when I grew up because I’d heard on the news that homes were unaffordable now. It’s a fun little story, but if I’m honest, I’m still a little pissed off that news outlets have a tendency to stoke anxiety for fun and profit.
Cynicism masquerades as wisdom and optimism is often denigrated as naivety.
Not exactly the same theme, but it reminds me of a story in My Weekly Reader when I was in elementary school in Indianapolis that left me pondering it for a long time afterward. According to the dire warning in this story, the biggest problem my generation would face when we grew up was what we would find to do with all of our leisure time! I laughed about that forecast many times over the years.
I have a old “Sports” magazine from 1966 and on the cover it has a headline, “Will baseball survive!” The article talks about fights started by pitchers trying to hit batters. How the frequency of these fight would ruin the sacred game. I got a good chuckle out of the article while cleaning out my basement.
While mortgage interest rates were around 15 to 18 percent in the late 70’s.