May 30, 1998

Don’t Believe The Gen-X Hype

I.

It has gone on long enough. While Fortune magazine’s Nina Munk[1] fawns over the six-figure incomes that some Generation-Xers are able to earn right out of school, never pausing in her propagandistic portrayal of today’s “golden” youth as nothing short of the most exacting demographic ever to hit the labor market, the most demanding employees into whom corporate behemoths have ever had to cave, deserving of such perks and privileges as shoelessness, free bottles of “hip microbrew,” parrots, free sodas, and gourmet coffee; and while American Demographics’ Tibbet Speer[2] runs through some successful “College Come-Ons” for those earnest junior marketing execs seeking to extract the last few fixed-income dollars of college students nationwide by means of “Halloween promotions and temporary tattoos,” which proved more successful than “specific information on individual products,” which information given below may explain as a result of declining literacy, the Bureau of Labor Statistics[3] has graciously brought us back to our senses with a sobering reminder of my generation’s collective downward mobility (although it fails to do so with reference to the mutually reinforcing trends of contingent-workforce growth and declining union participation).

II.

After dividing Generation-X into four easily comprehensible and all-too-readily-applicable stereotypes—the Cynical Disdainer, whom we slackers know well from the inside-out; the Traditional Materialists, whom we love to bash; the Hippies Revisited, whom, it seems to me, faded with the sheen on their Birkenstocks; and the Fifties Machos, who seem to get the least attention, despite the flurry of cigar-puffin’ Gordon Gekko wanna-bes and martini-sippin’ Frank Sinatra record-spinners (did you hear the Rat Pack was back?)—all of which can be found in visual-media portrayals, these two economists do some very good legwork for those of us wrestling with the mystifying effects of contemporary consumer culture: for all the advertisements to and of Generation-Xers as the best consumers around, the most entrepreneurial generation yet, we’re all pretty much broke:

In real terms, [Gen-Xers] earn about 9 percent less than Boomers II [those entering the workforce in the 80s, whose income was measured in 1984-85], and 11 percent less than Boomers I [those entering the workforce in the 70s, whose income was measured in 1972-73].... [C]hange in real incomes from 1972-73 to 1984-85 ($485) account[s] for less than one-fifth of the total change from 1972-73 to 1994-95 ($2,522).[4]

So 80% of the decline in young adult wages occurred between 1984-85 and 1994-95. Good looking out, Ronnie.[5] To put real 1995 dollar amounts to these percentages, in 1972-73, real income averaged $22,413 for young adults. In 1984-85, young adults averaged $21,928, a slight decrease. By 1994-95, young adults averaged only $19,981.[6]

While strategic business-and-finance magazines portray what must be the Fifties Machos and the Traditional Materialists as a bright and beckoning bunch, sure to hoist the flaming baton of monopoly corporatism high into the twenty-first century (which may be correct if the outright sale of higher education continues[7]), we make our first ancillary finding: significant numbers of Gen-Xers run home after college because we can’t support ourselves:

The first notable change is in the age of young singles. Although the average age increases only slightly over time—less than a year from 1972-73 to 1994-95—the distribution of singles by age clearly has changed. In 1972-73, 52 percent were below age 25, while 48 percent were aged 25 to 29. By 1994-95, the dispersion had widened—42 percent were under 25, and 58 percent were aged 25 to 29. This may indicate that it was somehow easier in 1972-73 for a single young person to “make it on his or her own” than in the later period. A person could leave high school, for example, and get a job that would provide income necessary for self-sufficiency. But if those circumstances have changed such that jobs paying higher real wages are less available to members of this group, then perhaps a larger portion of the younger singles are moving home after college, or leaving home later if they do not attend college.[8]

We also go to college less, or later, or it takes us longer: “Well over half of young singles were college graduates in 1972-73, but only about one-third had attained that status in 1984-85 and in 1994-95.”[9]

Fifties Machos will be pleased to learn that objective social trends have pushed women back into dependency: “In 1972-73, a young single person drawn at random was more likely to be a male than a female, but not by a large margin (54 to 46 percent). By 1994-95, there were nearly two single males (62 percent) for every single female (38 percent) in the group.”[10]

This dramatic decline in young female workforce participation is startling in its implications for the revival of a particularly pernicious image: that of the innocent young girl, sheltered far-too-long by her stable nuclear family or paternal educational institution from the blustery storm of life in the “real world.”

Even so,

[i]ncomes dropped faster for the 25- to 29-year-olds [from 1972-73 to 1994-95] than for those aged 18 to 24, but female income decreased less sharply than male income from 1972-73 to 1994-95...while male income continued to drop;...average incomes are virtually equal for males and females in 1994-95.[11]

The above is cold comfort considering their lingering dependence, but women’s declining incomes do not account for the largest share of our collective downward mobility. What does? How about the self-iterating dialectic of the-effects-of-slavery’s metamorphosis into justification-for-perpetual-racial-discrimination?

For [young black singles, male and female],...the experience is virtually the opposite [of that of all young single women in general]. Starting with incomes that were slightly smaller than those of white singles in 1972-73 (by about 5 percent), the percent loss in income from 1972-73 to 1994-95 is more than three times as steep for blacks as it is for whites, and more than 4 times as steep from 1984-85 to 1994-95 as it is for whites.[12]

To put real 1995 dollar amounts to these proportions, all young white singles averaged $22,481 in 1972-73 and $20,370 in 1994-95, for a “white” decline of about 9.3 percent. All young black singles averaged $21,728 in 1972-73 and $15,239 in 1994-95 for a “black” decline of about 29.9 percent. Anyone care for a cup of vibrant diversity? No? How about a tall glass of youthful multiculturalism? No? You want some affirmative action? We’re all out. Sorry.

III.

After income, outgo. Spending, that is: the focus of much of the hype—at least that hype which does not attempt to puff up the eager-but-yet-to-be-employed heads of those slated soon to graduate. One such might ask, “What does it matter if we Gen-Xers earn less than our parents? After all, this ain’t the go-go 80s, but the frugal-er 90s: we don’t want flash, we want quality, and we’re willing to shell out the bucks one time for some top-quality merch if it’ll last.” This question is especially relevant when The Economist[13] tells us that “people of all income levels have steadily increased the amount of time and money they devote to having fun” and that “the distribution of dollar incomes may have become more skewed in recent years, and leisure is more evenly spread than ever,” in order to conclude that “inequality of living standards has fallen.” One such might believe concepts such as relative disparity to be consigned to the historical dustbin.

Besides, don’t we Gen-Xers like to enjoy ourselves in refreshingly authentic ways, by means of innovative new lifestyles? Don’t we like to seek fulfillment and stuff? Perhaps only cheap fulfillment, in the midst of what The Economist, rightly skeptical of statistics, notes as the possibility that “the less skilled (and lower paid) have worked ever-fewer hours, giving them more time to enjoy leisure pursuits.”

Well, it turns out that our fulfillment and stuff is mostly stuff. Here, in the realm of necessity, where all income and expenditures have been put in terms of real 1995 dollars for the former and real 1995 consumption dollars for the latter, the “potential consumption level” is such that Gen-Xers cannot “afford to consume as much in real terms as their older counterparts did....”[14] The 70s boomers could spend $19,984 and we 90s busters[15] can spend $18,591. The 80s boomers could spend a lot more than both of us: $20,536.

So do we spend less on everything? No: “Members of Generation X have cut back on some items more severely than others, while at the same time increasing consumption of some goods and services.” Which ones? We spend 11.3% less than the 70s boomers on basic goods and services. But within this category, eating at home jumped up 53%, while shelter and utilities decreased 23.3%. We spend 10.8% less than the 70s boomers on recreation. But, again, within this category, lodging away from home dropped 62.6% and reading declined 39.9%(!),[16] while entertainment[17] shot up 15.6%.

For debunking’s sake, however, recreation expenditures[18] reached their peak with the 80s boomers, who leisured away $3,011 a year. In 1994-95, Gen-Xers spent only $2,430 on recreation: 19.3% less. It is not like we are enjoying ourselves so very much more that unemployment and low wages do not bother us.

For fairness’ sake, however, The Economist was also in a major sense correct. It suggested that “maybe the greater variety and quality of entertainment options makes Americans value their free time more than they used to, thereby making the feeling of overwork onerous” which hypothesis the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirmed:

Although entertainment [as opposed to recreation in general] expenditures decreased from 1984-85 to 1994-95, they are actually higher in both these years than they were in 1972-73. This may reflect the introduction of new products and services in the 1980s, such as compact disc players and video cassette recorders, that were simply not available for purchase in the 1970s.[19]

IV.

What are we to make of the tremendous gap between image and reality here? When rightsizing and the growing contingent labor force is making steady work (let alone benefits[20]) “an object which [we] can get hold of only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions,”[21] how can corporations and their press organs be so obtuse? I do not claim to be the first to have addressed this, but one has to wonder why certain media outlets have not educated themselves out of such misrepresentation. To its credit, in 1996, the New York Times, probably the very definition of mainstream media, ran a series[22] which addressed this discrepancy, if in a piecemeal fashion.

One author, Kirk Johnson, writing on March 7, 1996, took “[a]...survey of the 1970 graduating class at Bucknell University, a college known as an educator of successful engineers and middle managers, found that nearly two-thirds doubted that today’s children would live better.” So certain representative boomers seem aware of the failure of Generation-X to earn yuppie bucks. How now the hype?

The most prosaic answers are probably the most likely: (1) our image is profitable. But into what does our pauperization set over against our affluent image translate? Johnson’s article indicates hardly hardy class-consciousness, but probably its opposite, which has already befallen some of our boomer parents:

White-collar, middle-class Americans in mass numbers are coming to understand first hand the chronic insecurity on which the working class and the poor are experts [and]...this is causing a pronounced withdrawal from community and civic life.... People find themselves sifting for convenient scapegoats on which to turn their anger, and are adopting harsher views toward those more needy than themselves.

In case there is any doubt, even “urban, multi-racial and multi-ethnic” Gen-Xers are capable of succumbing to the powers of Limbaugh, as anyone familiar with college campus life in the 1990s has been forced to realize. Which brings us to answer (2): the apathetic or reactionary, and in any case, cynical, epidemic with which we find ourselves afflicted could yet mutate into something a little less benign for corporate control if not perpetually framed and re-framed from outside and above.

The reactionary aspect falls right into line with the remarkably consistent self(ish)-image of Traditional Materialists and certain Fifties Machos, who, when bereft of literary pretensions to Beat, are sure to show up at college corporate recruiting sessions. I am reminded of the remarks of one hyper-aggressive friend of mine who eventually quit a two-year stint at Goldman Sachs because he found it to be a “slave job.”[23] Too many hours. One day, before he began the job, he, another friend, and I, were talking about the average annual income of graduates from our college—my other friend reported it at close to a million dollars, after having done some research in the Alumni office—and my investment-banking friend chirped “As long as I’m in that income bracket, its all good!” The other laughed in joyous consent.

That remark, given in 1994, was identical to that of one student in the Bucknell college graduating class of 1996:

[A] 22-year-old management major from Pittsburgh with a giant American flag on his wall and a firm belief that capitalism is a struggle in which he will prevail. “I don’t know where the country is going as a whole,” he said. “But if there are only so many places, I’ll have one of them.”

Perhaps he is also bound to experience the slavishness of capitalism’s highly-paid menial chores.

Philosopher Herbert Marcuse suggested that perhaps the very aggression and drive for individual expression which commodity fetishism engenders could erupt into a biological basis—an actual physical need, expressed as involuntary revulsion against existing relations of production—for real lived freedom.[24] Marcuse’s critique of capitalism is already built in: embedded in the consciousnesses of these two Macho Materialists is the knowledge that capitalism does not under any circumstances allow of equal opportunity. In fact, the overwhelming fear of either was that he might be too late to the party, and that “They might lock it down,” as my friend used to say, before he had a chance to appropriate his multibillion-dollar share.

V.

In terms of youth culture consumption and its attendant images—cool multicultural post-adolescents, residing in a world of fast food, soft drinks or Zima, and imported compact cars which they probably drive to their parents’ homes after hour upon hour of writing code or crunching numbers—a few things also need to be set aright with regard to economic fact. On March 3, 1996, Caryn James of the New York Times noted the diametrical opposition obtaining between political economy and its pop-culture representations:

Pop culture rarely offers a straight-on reflection of social change. Instead, you can rely on television and movies to provide a fun-house-mirror version. So the scariest of economic changes are now being thrown back at us in exaggerated shapes. Films, television and pop music have begun to play out our worst fears and our fondest hopes about job insecurity. At one extreme is “News Radio,” which wraps unemployment in comforting reassurances. At the other extreme is a film like “Falling Down,” in which the white-collar military-industry worker played by Michael Douglas is laid off, becomes enraged at his unemployment (and at the notion of immigrants taking jobs) and reacts by shooting everyone in sight. Such scenarios, with their veiled responses to the fear of layoffs, allow viewers to feel soothed or to vent their rage, vicariously. This polarization into best- and worst-case scenarios is just the beginning. Pop-culture leaves a huge hole where you’d expect the issue of white collar, middle-aged unemployment to be.

If this sounds surprisingly structuralistic, never mind. Please ignore the nice, firm relation between the base and the superstructure. Blame no postmodernist theorist for going too far in the direction of either their collapse or their more complicated intermediation. After all, theory in the guise of certain “cultural studies,” like the Owl of Minerva, comes only after the pop-culture inversion, and one cannot expect it to correct—even in theory—what came before. One theorist laboring under such lateness even went so far as to declare America “utopia achieved.”[25]

The inverse relationship between Generation-X’s income stream and the number of marketing strategies crafted in order to drain it off is an overly-facile and almost trivially true confirmation, not only of a type of structuralism in the age of post-, but of Marx’s even more ancient increasing im-misèration.

From time to time even critical left publications have been guilty of misrepresentation, or at least, implicit misunderstanding. Generation-X is not—in any unique way, at least—“an influential group of consumers,” as Thomas Frank and Keith White of The Baffler once suggested.[26] If it seems like that at times, it is only because a “Gen-X” image informs the style and substance of so many advertisements. It is easy to forget that the demographic attempt to tailor pop-culture production to popular taste does not necessarily succeed in measuring any real culture at all; moreover, culture can be born out of the demographically constructed commercial image! The manner in which MTV can set trends is the best case in point. But youth-culture hype has always been that way. Black youth culture in particular has been both constitutive of and constituted by advertising (recently more of the latter), to create a sort of self-reflexive and automatically updated (read: tautological) index of hip, for most of this century.

In any case it is all-too-clear that Hegel’s identical subject-object is realized only in prime-time TV commercial images, which behave like the unaffordable commodities they display: they “exist[] outside [us], independently, as something alien to [us],...they become[] a power of [their] own confronting [us];...the object[s] [and images] confront[] [us] as something hostile and alien.”[27] And the proliferation of commercial speech regarding Generation-X is independent, indeed, from reality. It appears to be based on nothing other than itself. There is no rational economic basis for it. The irrational economic basis, which also grants the corporate speechifiers the appearance of merely spouting banal non sequiturs or miseducated distortions at worst, is nothing other, and nothing more recent and accessible to pop-accultured postmodern minds than the very unfashionable and dead Georg Lukács’ ideological imputation of false consciousness.

It is therefore safe to diagnose this irrationality as yet another one of capitalism’s many small steps into psychosis: it seems sincerely to believe its own commercial images, the better to recruit us with the force of its convictions: really, we do make a lot of money, and we really can afford to spend it on $5 Starbucks coffees, $25,000 1998 Volkswagen Beetles(!), and the whole array of eminently breakable Sony products. No...better for us to avoid the idolatry by heeding the words of Public Enemy’s Flava Flav, in order to appropriate an older black (urban, even!) youth slogan for (anti)advertisement: Don’t believe the hype.

Early Summer 1998

It was already unfortunate for me to have to write this essay two years ago; it has only gotten worse. Not only the business-and-finance strategy magazines, but also popular newsmagazines have begun to throw the segregated-in-both-senses wealth of the boom-economy in our faces. “Everybody’s getting rich! Why aren’t you?” and the like. The media have also forgotten, in the meanwhile, about the Cynical Disdainers and the Hippies Revisited Gen-Xers, focusing exclusively upon the Traditional Materialists, those Internet-startup-company upstarts, and the Fifties Machos, who, in the meantime, have had at least two movies, Swingers and In The Company of Men, made about them. You know the story. Not that our stereotypes can in any way be our liberation, but we should never forget that they pick and choose them for specific reasons.

June 18, 2000





















































Notes

1. Nina Munk, “The New Organization Man,” Fortune, 16 March 1998. The blurb accompanying the main text says it all: “Young, educated, and fiercely in demand, ‘gold collar’ workers are getting salaries and perks that would make a baby-boomer’s thinning hair stand on end. Brats? Perhaps. But hey—they’re not the ones who tore up the old employment contract.” So! What we thought was just a gargantuan cloud of corporate greed has a silver lining after all. Seeing as how Fortune’s market is middle-managing baby boomers, I suppose the message is that downsizing is, for lack of a better word, good, and perhaps even that these youngsters will volunteer to take care of their aging boomer parents when Social Security goes bankrupt, or, at least, when the Republican Congress fails to fix it.

2. Tibbett L. Speer, “College Come-Ons,” American Demographics (March 1998): 41. Speer suggests that success may come with “hand[ing] out thousands of packets of gum” and “bon[ing] up on the dialect.... particularly if the audience is urban, multi-racial and multi-ethnic.” Who said that Ebonics shouldn’t be taught in schools? Business school anyway...

3. Geoffrey Paulin and Brian Riordan, “Making It On Their Own: The Baby Boom Meets Generation X,” Monthly Labor Review 121, no. 2 (February 1998): 10.

4. Paulin and Riordan, 12.

5. Ebonics for “Thank you, Mr. President.”

6. See Paulin and Riordan, 12.

7. “[T]he University of Maryland recently concluded a multimillion-dollar deal with Pepsico that gives the company the exclusive right to sell soft drinks and snack foods on campus in exchange for a kickback to the university.” Susanne Woods, “Dean’s List,” The Nation, 27 April 1998, 32. Students could learn more quickly than they do at present that nothing is sacred, especially the life of the mind, which seems unable to support itself, and must therefore be worthless if unable to withstand the forces of the market.

8. Paulin and Riordan, 11. What the authors mean by “younger singles” is the 18-to-24-year-old segment of Generation X, which the authors take to be all 18-to-29-year-old singles.

9. Paulin and Riordan, 11.

10. Paulin and Riordan, 11-12.

11. Paulin and Riordan, 13 (italics mine).

12. Paulin and Riordan, 13-14.

13. Economics Focus, "Fun for the Masses," The Economist, 2 August 1997: 62.

14. See Paulin and Riordan, 15-16.

15. This word is not only a term for the “baby bust” of which Gen-X is comprised, but is also Ebonics for “loser."

16. Most of the drop in reading, 27.2%, occurred between 1984-85 and 1994-95.

17. This miscellaneous category does not include: alcohol, tobacco, education, personal care, cash contributions, miscellany, household operations, house furnishings, personal insurance, and health care.

18. Paulin and Riordan define “recreation” as eating out, entertainment, reading, and lodging away from home.

19. Paulin and Riordan, 16.

20. “At the typical U.S. corporation, benefits—Social Security and other mandatory employment taxes, health and life insurance, vacations and sick leave, pensions and bonuses—add about 30% to total labor costs.” Jaclyn Fierman, “The Contingency Work Force,” Fortune, 24 January 1994, 30. Corporation save this money by “hiring” nonemployees, contingent workers.

21. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” trans. Martin Milligan, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978): 72. See also U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, report no. 900, Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangements, (Washington, D.C., 1995), 3, which reports that the young, the female, and the black, and the young, black and female, are overrepresented in the contingent workforce.

22. “The Downsizing of America.”

23. “[I]n this double respect the worker becomes a slave of his object, first, in that he receives...work; and secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence.... The extremity of this bondage is that it is only as a worker that he continues to maintain himself as a physical subject....” Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 73.

24. See Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1969): 7-22.

25. See Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (New York, New York: Verso, 1990).

26. Thomas Frank and Keith White, “Twenty-Nothing,” in Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler, eds. Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997).

27. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 72.














































































































political.economy gen.x temps stereotypes American.Dream