The losing generation

A new book says that minimum-wage jobs and mounting debt are burying America's youth.

By Sarah Karnasiewicz

Read more: Money, College, Life

Feb. 21, 2006 | When Anya Kamenetz, 25, graduated from college in the spring of 2002, the United States was still reeling from Sept. 11, the tech industry was going bust and the employment market was stagnant. Though Kamenetz -- having been raised in a middle-class family that helped her pay for school without acquiring debt -- knew she was better off than most, she found the transient lifestyle of freelance work and infrequent paychecks frightening. And all around her peers were facing the same woes: few promising job prospects, hemorrhaging credit card bills and five-figure student loans. She began to wonder if the American dream -- of upward mobility, family security and employer-subsidized healthcare -- was for the first time ever falling out of reach.

It is the same question she asks in a new book, "Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time to Be Young." An investigative look at the financial pressures facing America's youth, the stories in "Generation Debt" sound a refrain that may be familiar to many of today's twenty-somethings. "[It is] layoffs. Underemployment. Flat incomes," Kamenetz writes. "No health insurance, no retirement plan, no paid vacation. Unaffordable housing. Moving back in with Mom. Turning 30 with negative savings and no assets. Putting off marriage or kids because they can't afford them."

In the book, we meet Sean, a 23-year-old from New York with a B.A. in psychology who temped and delivered pizzas for a year in Vermont before moving back to his parents' home and taking a position at a marketing firm that paid $10 an hour with no benefits. And Nita, who at 24 has been in and out of college for six years, unable to balance out her tuition payments and $10,000 credit card debt with a stream of low-paying, uninsured jobs at Pier One, Borders and Home Depot. Then there's Dan, a 33-year-old Ph.D. dropout who after a few years of dead-end, entry-level jobs moved back into his parents' Michigan home to care for his blind father and ailing mother; he fears he may never have the private pensions, home equity or Social Security payments they do.

Kamenetz also takes on cultural pundits who would pigeonhole her peers as "twixters" -- apathetic, materialistic video-game addicts who are unwilling to commit to careers. She expresses hope that her book might be a call to action that helps her generation become involved in the education, healthcare and Social Security reform decisions that are being made right now and that will certainly shape their future.

I spoke with Kamenetz at Salon's New York office about some of the psychological motivations behind consumer spending, the changing American workplace, the future of student loans and whether now is really such a terrible time to be young.

What made you decide to write this book?

When I started working after college, my editor at the Village Voice was working on some of these ideas -- about the politics of being young and the economics of being young. "Generation Debt" was actually her coinage. And you know, [the work] really connected the dots for me. I saw that it was the real youth politics. Young people do feel left out of the consensus and left out of the political conversation, and feel like their needs are not being addressed. I started talking to people who were saying there are bread-and-butter concerns that affect young people as a class -- putting food on the table, paying the rent, paying the bills, being able to get somewhere, being safe, being able to raise a family. It's all of those things.

I know that to a degree, there is a certain amount of hyperbole involved in selling a book, but --

Oh, do you mean the book's subtitle?

Yes. Your subtitle is: "Why Today Is a Terrible Time to Be Young." I mean, is it really that bad?

You know, I actually fought with people over the subtitle. [The publisher] originally wanted to call it the "worst" time, but it is just not the worst. Of course, it is trying to get people to pay attention. What it is all really about for me is realizing that we are part of the first generation in America that does not expect to and probably won't do better than our parents. It's about taking a step down, and that is a feeling that is terrifying. The American dream has always been about progress and about going up and up -- but we are not making as much money as our parents, and maybe we are a little bit less educated than our parents. We are not achieving the milestones of adulthood at the same time that they did.

So we have to compare it to our own standards, we can't compare it to a global standard? Because, of course, we are not being forced to be child soldiers or work in factories --

Right. In America, there are no people living on a dollar a day. Even homeless people on the streets in New York are better off than people in Mali. American life has always represented the dream of freedom to the world. So it seems like a horrible breaking down of expectations for us to make that comparison because that's not how it is supposed to be. America is supposed to be the leader.

At one point in the book, you seem to criticize baby boomers for being irresponsible about the future. But as the children of boomers, aren't many "twixters" caught in the same cycle of entitlement?

It is really a tension. But that conversation takes place in the corridor of affluence, and there are a lot of people who don't have the expectation of affluence. I tried very hard to make sure other kinds of stories were told.

I just read the book "Money: A Memoir," and in it the author, Liz Perle, says we spend to feel safe but instead we chip away at the ground beneath our feet. And nowadays that is a pathology that characterizes all of American culture, all of consumerism. The kids are just as bad as the parents and the parents are just as bad as the kids, and I think we are all caught up in it. It's about someone like me realizing that I never learned what it actually means to be able to afford something.

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