Kids These Days

ISBN: 0316510866

Highlights

future. If, as blockbuster audiences seem to both fear and relish, America is quickly headed for full-fledged dystopia, it will have gone through us Millennials first, and we will have become the first generation of true American fascists. On the other hand, were someone to push the American oligarchy off its ledge, the shove seems likely to come from this side of the generation gap, and we will have become the first generation of successful American revolutionaries. The stakes really are that high: In the coming decades, more Americans will be forced to adapt in larger, stranger ways to an increasingly hostile environment. ^ref-56449

Washington’s program for higher education accessibility isn’t based on the “No one turned away for lack of funds” logic of a punk show at a Unitarian church; it’s closer to “At no money down, anyone can get behind the wheel of a brand-new Mustang.” This is how the president can call an escalation in average student debt an achievement in accessibility. ^ref-48635

Higher education is, in addition to other things, an economic regime that extracts increasingly absurd amounts of money from millions of young people’s as-yet-unperformed labor. For anyone who takes out a student loan—and that’s two-thirds of students—succeeding at contemporary American childhood now means contracting out hours, days, years of their future work to the government, with no way to escape the consequences of what is barely a decision in the first place. ^ref-52958

Employers convince kids and their families to invest in training by holding out the promise of good jobs, while firms use this very same training to reduce labor costs. The better workers get, the more money and time we put into building up our human capital, the worse the jobs get. And that’s a big problem because, as we’ve seen over the last two chapters, America is producing some damn good workers. ^ref-49679

Employers didn’t just awake one day and decide to treat their workers worse. Capitalism encourages owners to reduce their labor costs until it becomes unprofitable. The minimum wage exists to put an extramarket basement on how low the purchasers of labor can drive the price. As Chris Rock famously put it: “Do you know what it means when someone pays you minimum wage? I would pay you less, but it’s against the law.” ^ref-19180

There’s also a cultural aspect: Kids trained from infancy to excel and compete to their fullest potential under all circumstances are ill-suited for traditional union tactics that sometimes require intentionally inefficient work, like the slowdown strike or work-to-rule. Instead, we’re perfect scabs, properly prepared to seize any opportunity we can. ^ref-6588

Many schools offer credit for internships, treating them as if they had the educational value of a course. What this three-party relationship means is that students are paying their colleges and working for companies (or the state or nonprofits), and in return both will confirm for anyone who asks that the student indeed paid for the credits and performed the labor. Interns are like Danny Dunn, getting paid in homework stickers. ^ref-53403

In the 1940 cohort, approximately 90 percent out-earned their parents. But for Millennials, the mobility number is down to 50 percent: It’s a coin-flip whether or not we’ll out-earn Mom and Dad.41 The analysts conclude that the drastic change comes from the shifting, increasingly unequal distribution of GDP, rather than a lack of growth itself. The American dream isn’t fading (as the title of the NBER paper says), it’s being hoarded. ^ref-37102

College-educated households without student debt had a median net worth just shy of $65,000, far higher than the three other categories combined, and over seven times greater than the $8,700 median wealth for college-educated households with debt. The average wealth for households without a bachelor’s and without student debt is actually higher than that for the indebted graduates, at just under $11,000. ^ref-25416

A March 2014 Pew study of Millennial attitudes toward entitlements revealed that a paltry 6 percent believe they will receive the full Social Security benefits that they’ve been promised, and 51 percent believe they will see no benefits at all.14 Think about that for a moment: The average dual-earner couple will pay over a million dollars in taxes into a system that more than half of Millennials think will leave them high and dry.15 Whether it’s generosity of spirit, utilitarian analysis, or plain old resignation, the so-called entitled generation doesn’t even feel entitled to our own entitlements. ^ref-17396

A lot is riding on a poor school’s ability to achieve the quantitative standards set up at the state and federal levels. The law is effective at incentivizing school administrations to meet their yearly progress goals, but that’s not the same as incentivizing them to improve instruction or learning. Instead, it’s about compelling schools to generate the right kind of data. The state accepts these assessment reports as valid representations of educational quality, so administrators and teachers—and most of all, students—have to generate the right reports. ^ref-2477

Classrooms and teachers that look alike on paper might very well be totally different in ways the test can’t see. Meanwhile, anything that’s enjoyable or nurturing about school falls away if it can’t be made to serve the tests. ^ref-53934

Standardization, as we’ve seen in the labor market, is an important part of a rationalization process that’s ultimately about lowering costs. Once we’ve turned educational achievement into a set of comparable returns, the policymakers and bureaucrats can focus on getting the same returns for less money. ^ref-1231

it’s clear the American public education system is a rapidly rationalizing factory for producing human capital. They think once every school is on the same page, they can turn up output like they’re producing bottle caps or bars of steel. If employers need a lot of skilled workers, then the state will provide. The workers might not be happy, but they’ll know how to work. For kids who don’t (or can’t) fit the mold, however, getting along has become more difficult. We can draw a straight line between the standardization of children in educational reform and the expulsion, arrest, and even murder of the kids who won’t adapt. ^ref-57339

Bringing the police into schools to patrol the hallways and intervene in noncriminal matters, along with the increased use of suspensions, is an intensification of school discipline, analogous to the intensification of the production of human capital. The system is geared to churn out more skilled workers, but it’s also meant to produce prisoners. This harsh reality lurks behind every “joke” all the teachers, counselors, and administrators tell their students about ending up in prison if they don’t work hard. ^ref-40828

America’s criminal justice system needs lives to process, and our schools are obliging by marking more kids as bad, sometimes even turning them over directly to the authorities. ^ref-2998

Instead of imagining that the current state of school discipline is a malfunction in a fundamentally benevolent system, it seems more likely that one of the education system’s functions is to exclude some kids. When I look at school discipline in the context of declining violence and a lack of evidence that suspensions are effective at improving students’ learning conditions, I can only conclude that the actual purpose of such discipline, at a structural level, is to label and remove black kids (disproportionately) from the clearly defined road to college and career. Just as they have increased human capital production, schools have increased the production of future prisoners, channeling kids from attendance to lockdown. The school system isn’t an ineffective solution to racial and economic inequality, it’s an effective cause. ^ref-5230

The problem with the relationship between poor black and brown children and the state, liberals contend, is that it’s not tight enough. Analysts speak of “underserved” communities as if the state were an absentee parent. If kids are falling behind, they need an after-school program or longer days or no more summer vacation. ^ref-3721

“The poor,” Rios writes, “at least in this community, have not been abandoned by the state. Instead, the state has become deeply embedded in their everyday lives, through the auspices of punitive social control.” ^ref-7245

Far from being the carefree space cadets the media likes to depict us as, Millennials are cagey and anxious, as befits the most policed modern generation. Nuisance policing comes down hard on young people, given as they are to cavorting in front of others. Kids don’t own space anywhere, so much of their socializing takes place in public. The police are increasingly unwilling to cede any space at all to kids, providing state reinforcement for zero-risk childhood. What a few decades ago might have been looked upon as normal adolescent hijinks—running around a mall, horsing around on trains, or drinking beer in a park at night—is now fuel for the cat-and-mouse police games that Victor Rios describes. It’s a lethal setup. ^ref-4510

The systematic exclusion of young black and brown Americans reaches its most visible and horrific level when the state’s armed guards execute them in public, only to face the most minimal consequences, if any at all. Extrajudicial and pseudojudicial violence against racial minorities has always been a flashpoint in American society, but the qualitative change in policing over the past few decades (combined with new communications technologies) has caused this particular form of injustice to take on new resonance. ^ref-653

The way we talk about how children become athletes downplays the work they do. There’s no question that a coach is doing labor when she tells a kid to run another lap, but once again the pedagogical mask prevents us from seeing the kids running around as working too. At a certain point they must decide to compete. ^ref-11705

The labor that goes into star athletes doesn’t just come from them or their coaches, trainers, consultants, or parents. The competition from the other 99.9 percent of players allows them to be great, but in a winner-take-all system devoted to cutting labor costs, there’s more money for profiteers and the institutions that employ them if that work goes uncounted and unpaid. The pedagogical mask is an all-purpose tool for discounting young people’s labor, and it’s all the NCAA has left to hide behind. ^ref-40341

It is now much cheaper in terms of manpower, equipment, space, and difficulty to make an electronic track than to record a rock song, which means it’s likely to be a more vibrant genre. That doesn’t necessarily make it better, but there are more people doing it, and the form evolves more quickly as a result. ^ref-24135

The ways we interact with each other and think about the people around us are highly mutable, and they shift with a society’s material conditions. We aren’t dumb, we’re adaptable—but adapting to a messed-up world messes you up, whether you remain functional or not. ^ref-45103

Given the psychological burden that Millennials bear compared to earlier generations, we can also expect an increase in depression. The competitive system is designed to turn everyone into potential losers; it generates low self-esteem like a refinery emits smoke. It’s very difficult to imagine that the changes in the American sociocultural environment have not led to more of the population suffering from depression. ^ref-56383

Young people’s creativity is a mine for finance capital, and social media companies (usually built and maintained by young people) are the excavation tools. Precisely targeted advertisements refine the raw attention into money. From this perspective, technology firms are motivated to maximize user engagement, regardless of its impact on their lifestyle. ^ref-704

From the perspective of decreasing labor costs, it’s a no-brainer: A page view earned by user-created content costs less to produce than a click on employee-created content. With a large enough user base willing to upload or publish their work for free, it’s cheaper to host than to employ—even as these conditions drive down worker compensation and drive up productivity. ^ref-22432

Tech profiteers believe the same social instability that enables their rise will settle just in time for them to get comfortable on top. It’s possible they’re right, but a stable “disrupted” America means further developing the tendencies we’ve seen in the past chapters: more polarization and inequality, declining worker compensation, increased competition, deunionization, heavier anxiety, less sleep, wider surveillance, and lots of pills and cops to keep everything manageable. ^ref-39032

When she asked teens why they use social media, boyd heard that “they would far rather meet up in person, but the hectic and heavily scheduled nature of their day-to-day lives, their lack of physical mobility, and the fears of their parents have made such face-to-face interactions increasingly impossible.”30 Asking why teens use Facebook is a lot like asking why teens like talking to each other. “The success of social media must be understood partly in relation to this shrinking social landscape,” boyd writes.31 Driven from public spaces like parks and malls, teens have found refuge online, where their flirting, fighting, and friending can be monitored and sold to investors and advertisers. ^ref-62877

At first glance, the numbers suggest this is the case: Lifetime illicit drug use among high schoolers is up, after a long and precipitous decline between 1980 and the early 1990s. But not all illegal drugs are created equal: When you factor out marijuana (the most popular and least harmful of controlled substances), there’s a different picture: Teen drug use excepting weed has continued to decline since the 1990s, pushing historical lows. ^ref-54961

Growing up in expanding postwar America, Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) crafted the mold for how following generations have imagined “youth,” and many of our media stereotypes about teens and young adults flow from the Boomer experience. This is no surprise given the age cohort that owns and manages media companies. But Boomers are their own special group of Americans, with their own predilections. The Wall Street Journal broke down the numbers on accidental drug overdoses over time by age and didn’t find a consistent pattern: In the early 1970s, fifteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds overdosed most, then it was young and middle-aged adults, and now the forty-five-to-sixty-four-year-olds have taken over.49 It didn’t make much sense, until they looked at how the Boomer cohort traveled through those numbers. ^ref-876

Perhaps increased anxiety and depression means decreased teen libidos, or maybe it’s a side effect of the medication. A decline in unsupervised free time probably contributes a lot. At a basic level, sex at its best is unstructured play with friends, a category of experience that the time diaries in Chapter 1 tell us has been decreasing for American adolescents. It takes idle hands to get past first base, and today’s kids have a lot to do. ^ref-41330

We’ve seen how central workers’ ability to work has become to the economy, and to the lives of young Americans. Human capital is the government’s largest financial asset and the population’s largest source of debt that isn’t backed by land. But right now, with the student lending system nationalized, private capital is more or less locked out of the market. Capitalists could invest in workers as employees, but that’s risky, as employees are free to go work elsewhere. What they want is to invest in workers as capital, to get a return no matter where the worker works, the way the government gets returns on student loans now. And if they invest in the next Zuckerberg, they want a piece of that multibillion-dollar upside, not just a 4 percent return. ^ref-52505

Making school blatantly preprofessional dispenses with nice fuzzy liberal notions of what education is for, but it’s easy to see how a childhood spent preparing for a secure career in, say, home electronics repair might be more enjoyable than being set up to fail in a giant contest for a tiny number of really good lives. ^ref-12103

The algorithms see us less as individuals than as confluences of probabilities. We don’t have races per se, we have “ethnic affiliations” based on how our observed behavior compares to large data sets of other people’s observed behavior. Americans will understand less and less the exact ways in which we’re being profiled and discriminated against (or in favor of), and even when we do know, we’ll have a hard time proving it. ^ref-50437

My real fear is that authorities will find a way to break down the perceptual distinction between being alive and doing work. Maybe it will be Black Mirror’s rows of treadmills, but I’m thinking more like very advanced video game design. Tech enthusiast Shane Snow controversially suggested that we’d be better off if prison inmates were just sucking on Soylent dispensers and living through Oculus headsets.3 Giving asylum inmates games to play all day will seem generous, and if we can somehow extract value from their playing (the way Google uses CAPTCHA verification to gather street addresses for their Maps program), then it’s a win-win, at least compared to incarceration as it exists. This puts us on the Matrix path, where living in reality is itself a privilege. ^ref-61645

Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010, pp. 3– ^ref-31539

Metadata

Author: Malcolm Harris
ASIN: B06XFTVQFK
ISBN: 0316510866
Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XFTVQFK
Kindle link

Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

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