source: Justice DepartmentThis week's Featured Find, an excellent Atlantic article by Dan Peck examining the long-run social costs of persistent unemployment, contains an embedded series of glourified vlogs blasting the youth of the nation for being "Followers, Not Leaders" and entitled basterds. Au contraire, stuffy old people, WE, the youth, will lead the economic recovery, for several reasons:
(1) Twentysomethings haven't taken on unnecessary debt - the root of the economic troubles - mostly because we haven't been able to. Marriage and children being pushed off ten or fifteen years in favor of "funemployment" means that we young people won't be stuck paying off toxic mortgages (which we don't have) and credit card debt (which we have a lot less of) when the good times start rolling again, and instead can actually put our money to work for us like it's Babylon. Capitalism in the past has been all about young people's ideas and old people's money, but since the Jedi Council spent all its money on snuggies and McMansions back in like the nineties, we sheepish youth will have to find angels or institutional investors among our own flock.
(2) Youth is beyond irrational debate. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? A few years ago, I witnessed a C-SPAN Book TV interview with a characteristically highball-nursing, pretentious white suit-wearing Tom Wolfe about his book "I Am Charlotte Simmons." Wolfe criticized Generation Y for being nihilistic, hedonistic, and ignorant of social problems. I found this ever so slightly hypocritical coming from a member of a generation whose idea of engineering social change was taking drugs and going to concerts. Accordingly, Generation Y was chided by A.H.L.D. for supporting "an idealist" like Obama over the practical experience of Hillary Clinton. Obama was chosen by my generation precisely because he promised to transcend the partisan bickering of the Boomers; he was seen as a transformative pragmatist, who would employ whatever tools of problem solving proved necessary to move beyond the ridiculous culture war and solve problems like Sherlock.
(3) The youth are the most familiar with the tools of the new economy across the board. The sectors that will lead the new economy are rapidly changing, and it pays to have recently finished one's education. In healthcare, a rapidly expanding industry with a massive shortage of qualified workers, the younger the better. Fifteen years ago, only a few hundred nucleotides of the human genome were known. Now, all 3.2 billion have been sequenced and their applications are seemingly without end. I was in school for that. Whereas a Boomer might have learned that cancer was a virus in his biology 101 class, we learned about tyrosine kinase and risk factors. Also, the new economy requires the ability to multitask. Much has been made by iPad-wielding beats of the sheer amount of time the youth of America spend being bombarded by information as though this were a bad thing. The constant demand for feedback that Ron Alsop attributes to an inability to lead and a reluctance to make decisions for ourselves is more likely a function of constant linkages to other people and accordingly higher standards for informed leadership; expecting "constant feedback" at work is a function of the constant communication and opportunities for fact-checking offered by information technologies, the anti-ignorance, with which we are remarkably proficient.
(4) If it doesn't kill us, it makes us stronger. The recession will ultimately be good for my generation's character; we will learn the lessons of frugality and sacrifice now, when we can learn new tricks, rather than never, like the indebted, entitled, fat, lazy Boomers who literally got everything handed to them as children, still managed to screw it up, are still playing catch-up with science from 150 years ago and social movements from five decades ago, and expect to be supported by my generation throughout their vacated pension years. This recession provides unemployed twentysomethings with an opportunity for the unstructured self-discovery which they were largely denied as children of the 1980s's materialism. In the words of Mr. Peck:
For the generation that grew up during the Depression and was inclined to pinch pennies, policies that encouraged freer spending were sensible enough—they allowed the economy to grow faster. But as younger generations, weaned on credit, followed, and credit availability increased, the system got out of hand. Housing, meanwhile, became an ever-more-central part of the American Dream: for many people, as the recent housing bubble grew, owning a home came to represent not just an end in itself, but a means to financial independence.
On one level, the crisis has demonstrated what everyone has known for a long time: Americans have been living beyond their means, using illusory housing wealth and huge slugs of foreign capital to consume far more than we’ve produced. The crash surely signals the end to that; the adjustment, while painful, is necessary.
Boomers, prepare to see your sons and daughters become the heroes and sheroes of the new age.
Joseph Cox
If only lobbyists were so forthcomingThe House Democratic Leadership announced today that it would stop accepting earmarks for private companies. While public agencies and non-profit companies will still be eligible for earmarked funds, the rules change by the Democratic leadership of the House Appropriations Committee will prevent corporations from lobbying Congressman for no-bid contracts and directed pork. The change is so unequivocally positive that rather than spin the decision the Republicans attempted to one-up the Democrats by banning earmarks entirely in their caucus. My support for such a change- and I agree with the Republicans that it should be a blanket ban- stems from my belief that the politics of financial quid pro quo have a deleterious effect on the quality of our Congressmen. Anything that takes away the ability of Congressmen to graft under the the noise of Congressional business is a positive development. My deep concern over the federal deficit, however, does not figure into my consideration of this change, because banning earmarks will do almost nothing to shrink the deficit. According to the Appropriations Committee, if their proposal had been in effect in 2009 it would have saved the federal government $1.7 billion. In other words, this proposal would have fixed .12% of the deficit ($1.412 trillion last year). 
