Kids These Days
"A Millennial's groundbreaking investigation into why his generation is economically worse off than their parents, creating a radical and devastating portrait of what it means to be young in America. Millennials have been called lazy, entitled, narcissistic, and immature, but when you push aside the stereotypes, what actually unites this generation? The short answer: They've been had. Millennials are the hardest working and most educated generation in American history. They have poured unprecedented amounts of time and money into preparing themselves for the twenty-first-century workforce. Yet they are poorer, more medicated, more precariously employed, and have less of a social safety net than their parents or grandparents. Kids These Days asks why, and answers with a radical, brilliant, data-driven analysis of the economic and cultural forces that have shaped Millennial lives. Examining broad trends like runaway student debt, the rise of the intern, mass incarceration, social media, and more, Harris shows us a generation conditioned from birth to treat their lives and their efforts-their very selves and futures-as human capital to be invested. But what happens when children raised as investments grow up? Why are young people paying such a high price to train themselves for a system that exploits them? How can Millennials change or transcend what's been made of them?
Stats for nerds
2recommend
2mentions
2people
2018years
100% recommend
What Hacker News says
- Excellent counterpoint. Malcom's Harris' "Kids These Days" goes into a lot of that. Not only the debt but psychology of how their perspectives are groomed in US society.
https://www.amazon.com/Kids-These-Days-Capital-Millennials/d...
- I recently read The Dispossessed and The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin, and will continue reading her stuff over the summer for sure. It's really great. (HN discussion about her obituary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16218439)
The other day I started Pictures of a Gone City, a book about the Bay Area by critical geographer Richard Walker. It was recently discussed here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17473141). I'm only about fifty pages in, but I can tell this is going to be worthwhile.
I'm also still finishing Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials by Malcolm Harris. It's a very compelling account of the crises and pressures confronting today's young adults (among which I can still, just barely, count myself).
Other books I've got lined up for the summer:
• The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network, by Kate Losse. This memoir by an early Facebook employee came out a few years ago, and I finally want to read it.
• Social Creature, by Tara Isabella Burton. Recently published novel that's been getting rave reviews. It's been described as "a literary novel about social media."
• Surveys, by Natasha Stagg. A novel about microcelebrity/instafame that came out in 2016.
PS: LitHub runs a "Rotten Tomatoes for Book Reviews" site at https://bookmarks.reviews/ that I'm finding to be a useful resource to discover new books coming out. That's how I found out about the Burton and Stagg books.
