Reading the stinkers, so you don’t have to! Or, that was an hour of my life I won’t get back (except that I read/paged through this while at the kids’ gymnastics class).
I’m not going to spend much time talking about this book. A 28 year-old wrote it, and, well, it shows. Her basic premise is that Generation Y has been screwed over by their elders: unable to find paying jobs worthy their top-notch education and sufficient to pay off their student loans (yes, apparently every single member of Generation Y has gotten a degree at a “top-notch” school). And not just in the U.S., but globally — Generation Y is just as troubled in Europe.
She’s actually correct that her peers in places such as Spain and Greece are significantly worse off than her peers in the U.S. — but she misses the mark, first, by labeling everyone in the same general age group as “Generation Y” as if their year of birth defines them, the world over, and secondly, and more importantly, by complaining that austerity measures are the source of all their hardship — blindly failing to recognize that, though in the U.S. there may be a reasonable debate about how much deficit spending is possible before making the situation worse instead of better, in countries such as Spain and Greece, there is no option to continue deficit spending, without the generosity of other countries who have grown weary of bailouts. She doesn’t particularly realize that griping about austerity in a country such as Greece is about the same as complaining that a household where the breadwinner got laid off should continue to go out to dinner every weekend because otherwise “it’s not fair.”
So what are her prescriptions?
More government spending for universities, systems establishing free tuition combined with percent-of-pay repayment (e.g., 5% of pay greater than 30,000, capped at 200,000, as one such proposal for the University of California — with no effort to determine whether this math works on a present value basis), and financial aid benefits of all kinds. She spends a lot of time on this.
Surprisingly, she then turns around and supports German-style apprenticeship programs, and observes that too many people are being pushed into college.
Then she starts to cast around for something to say. We should have more H-1B visas! And maternity leave benefits!
And that’s about it. . . . the end.
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