Dream Harder or Die Poor: Welcome to the New "Hunger Games" Economy

By Matthew Hutchings on November 6, 2014

As slightly overgrown children living in the shadow of the most powerful nation that has ever existed on this planet, it is easy to lose sight of context. How could we not? The urge is omnipresent. The very fabric of our civilization is mutating at an incredible rate. We have complex, digitized social lives to manage. We have strange, morphing, never-quite-clear career tracks to pursue. We have finances to worry over, parents to assuage, social pressures to submit to or fiercely resist, and all around us is enrapturing entertainment, great drugs and plenty of casual sex.

Too often this obscures from us the causes of the change that is now happening so rapidly. Society has given us a wooden sword and shield, shackled our legs with a large weight of debt, blindfolded us, and placed out on the battlefield of the new economy to live or die as conditions permit. Behind the bustle of our daily lives, there grinds the realization that we will be the first generations of Americans in a long time to face a bleaker economic outlook than our parents. In purely material terms, this is an indisputable fact.

In the 1950′s and 1960′s it was unheard of for a college graduate to be working a dead-end service job or living with their parents. Today more than 21.6 million millennials between the ages of 18 to 31 are living with their parents. The number rose from 32% in 2007 to 34% in 2009 due to declining employment. This is the highest number in four decades.

While the government gets less than two percent interest rates for ten-year loans from the Treasury, students must pay 6.8 percent. The total amount of student loan debt now exceeds $1.1 trillion making it the largest category of privately-held debt behind mortgages. And just in case you were thinking about bankruptcy, forget about it, you can’t default on student loans. They will follow you into old age and dock your Social Security if they have to. You had better start paying fast, too, because if you don’t stay ahead the interest accrued and added to the principle can easily lock you out of ever buying a home or starting a family, or even living under a roof period.

Meanwhile, most European nations have abolished tuition as unethical, or reduced it to a token payment. Perhaps the huge rise in the cost of tuition would be acceptable, but I could not find any studies claiming that the quality of education received from public 4-year colleges in America has kept pace with it’s cost. In fact, most were belaboring the opposite point, that our academic standards are laughable compared with other industrialized nations.

Retirement is now farther off than it ever was, and for some it is a mirage. The average retirement age of this generation is estimated to be between 73 and 80. Already in America there exist droves of the elderly poor who have sold everything they have and bought an RV to migrate across the country in yearly flocks, working as seasonal labor, often in Amazon warehouses. This phenomenon was explored in detail in a haunting Harpers article entitled “The End of Retirement“. If it is that bad for people retiring right now, imagine our coming predicament.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO compensation increased by 937 percent between 1978 and 2013, a rate double the growth of the stock market, and yes, that figure is inflation-adjusted. Meanwhile the average worker’s compensation increased 10.2 percent over the same period. This number barely keeps pace with inflation, not to mention tuition, rent, food, gas, and a whole host of other skyrocketing costs.

Since the Great Recession began, youth unemployment has been more than twice as high as the national average. By even the most generous estimates, the US job market won’t be back to how it was in 2007 until 2017. The stock market, meanwhile, has rebounded and is pursuing new record highs, even as worker pay has remained low. A large part of our economic activity is now generated by obscure deals between massive finance firms and banks who act like massive finance firms instead of actual investing, and because America has staked out a global capitalist order of nations with itself as the center, this practice is now being emulated around the world. Only eight percent of the world’s currency still exists as physical cash.

The old economy was vertical, like a skyscraper. Layer on layer of authority, strictly regulated. The boundaries were clear: you had to have this pedigree, and that bloodline, or know these certain people and have X degree. Now increasingly our economy is horizontal, spread out across the desert like Burning Man, with no boundaries save for our own talent and determination. Despite current popular conceptions among young people, race, religion and gender are more irrelevant to the trajectory of a human life than they have ever been. Instead, new, systemic inequality is growing larger with every passing year, dragging all of us down equally. In this new economy, you must dream big or die. You must have the will and the conviction to carry that dream through to completion, or else face the ignominy of a life chosen for you by other dreamers who dreamed bigger and dreamed harder.

And then, perhaps the unkindest cut of all: if millennials attempt to point any of this out they are labeled as lazy, entitled narcissists whose growth was permanently stunted by a childhood of gold stars for effort and everybody-gets-a-trophy mentality. In reality this appeal to bad parenting or a defective generation is as old as Plato’s lament over the wine-drinking, degenerate youth of Athens, and serves no purpose other than to deflect any serious critical evaluation of the legacy left to us.

Put on your Baby Boomer Goggles. What do you see?

So what are we to take from all this? Are we to become a Lost Generation, as happened in Japan’s most recent financial crisis? Is our fate to be remembered as a transitional period that stubbed it’s toe on the next step of human evolution? Is it to ride out the storm of some unforeseen global war into an era of unprecedented prosperity like our grandparents did?

In my mind, neither of those options is acceptable.

We must choose our own path, as every generation has done before. It will involve lots of frugal living, lots of networking, and enough elbow grease to keep the machines of modern life oiled for another hundred years. None of it will be fair or easy, and often it won’t even have the decency to pretend it is. However, should we manage to stand up, to lift upright this huge burden set upon our unready back, we will have achieved a feat that would make the Greatest Generation proud and will forever silence the critics. It’s time to either close the curtains and cry about it or kick open the front door like a boss and hustle the world harder than it’s hustled you. You’d better get cracking. Your hole is digging itself deeper with every passing second.

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