Millennials

The Millennial generation, born between roughly 1980 and 2000, is much maligned for their sense of entitlement, their lack of work ethic, and their profligacy with credit. These are not just stereotypes either, but attributes correlated with the cohort. The correlation satisfies the statistician in me, but the scientist in me is looking for causality. Why did Americans suddenly get so irresponsible? Reading the newspaper this morning I stumbled upon another piece of the puzzle. Whereas I spent my summers working - babysitting, mowing & stocking groceries - those opportunities have dried up for kids today. For some reason teenage employment never recovered after the dotcom bust at the turn of the century, and it's still sitting at roughly half of what it was going back to WWII. That is perhaps the greatest disservice a society has ever done to their children. Not only are we handing this generation a country in which they have less earning potential than their parents, but we're also leaving them ill equipped to maximize that potential!

A number of years ago I read Jimmy Carter's autobiographical An Hour Before Daylight and I was struck by the sheer number of jobs and responsibilities he was able to take on as a child. Child labor may have been abused historically, but learning that work leads to income leads to spending power is vital to any person's later success. Just look at Jimmy Carter. He held one of the most powerful offices that has ever existed in human history, lost it, and continued to work to change the world for the better without the power of the state behind him. He grew up working hard and it's a value that never left him. That lesson was one I wanted my own children to learn, which is why I have helped them sell crafts and cookies and eggs over the years.

Being a Gen Xer on the cusp of the Millennials I was somewhat plagued by a sense of entitlement even though my parents instilled a strong work ethic in me by finding or forcing me to find work to do. It was not until reading Atlas Shrugged that I was able to make the intellectual connection between work and earnings. Before that I fell into the trap of believing that my income should flow from my worth as a person rather than the service I provide to others. Without the experience of work it's unfortunately an even easier trap to fall into.

Last night at a Kentucky Derby party I was fortunate enough to talk to a retired Ford executive and we swapped stories of roadtrips west to Wall Drug, Nevada, etc. As a teenager he and some buddies traveled around and worked odd jobs in towns they came across to pay their way as they went. How this country has changed! With worries about illegal immigrants, background checks, lawsuits by fired employees, etc. the hiring process has become a bureaucratic nightmare. This has pushed marginal and inexperienced workers out of the workforce. And if you make it harder for inexperienced workers to enter the workforce, how will they ever get experienced? In a xenophobic attempt to keep a few Mexicans out by destroying the open labor market they snuck in to join we've inadvertently killed a part of American culture critical to our future. How many generations until the flow of migrants goes the other way across the Rio Grande in search of jobs?

Want to save the world? Give a kid a job.