Reminder #1,271,689 that the economy is still broken: the permintern.
For those twenty-somethings who do manage to find a decent job, buying a decent home is usually still well out of reach due to home prices that skyrocketed far beyond stagnant wages. Older Americans who bought their homes decades ago are still doing fine due to policies that have prioritized asset growth over wage growth. But for those who were children or yet unborn when housing started to shoot upwards, things are far more difficult. Of course, as bad as Millennials have it, it's even worse for the middle-aged who have been forced out of jobs and whose homes are underwater.
The economy is still broken. It will stay broken until wages rise to meet productivity growth, and until the middle class reclaims much of the wealth that has been stolen by the very wealthy.
In so many ways, Kate, who was born in 1987, is a perfect reflection of the opportunities and hardships of being young today. She’s smart and motivated and has a degree from an Ivy League school, yet at 25 she worries she’ll never attain the status or lifestyle of her boomer parents. She majored in political science and has a burnished social conscience, something she honed teaching creative writing in a women’s prison. But Kate’s most salient—and at this point, defining—generational trait might be that she doesn’t have a full-time job. Instead, she has been an intern for a year and a half.
Kate moved to DC after dropping out of her first year of law school. She has cycled through one internship at a political organization and another at a media company and is now biding her time as an unpaid intern at a lobbying firm. To make ends meet, she works as a hostess in Adams Morgan three or four nights a week, which means she often clocks 15-hour days.
“I don’t mean to sound like I have an ego, but I am an intelligent, hard-working person,” Kate says. “Someone would be happy they hired me.”
It’s a refrain heard many times from the millions of twentysomething Kates who are scrambling to find jobs with a steady paycheck and benefits. Mostly, though, they want to find a way out of the low-paying—or nonpaying—apprenticeship track. For Kate, it feels more like an internship vortex.
After all, who wants to still be an intern at an age when you should have a 401(k) and a modicum of job security, or at least be earning more than you did at your summer job during high school? “People my age expect to start at the bottom,” Kate says, “but in this economy the bottom keeps getting lower and lower.”Welcome to the slow, sputtering economic recovery, Generation Y. Keep in mind that this is the situation for Ivy League grads in D.C. Nor is this an aberration: it's also a major problem in the entertainment industry on the West Coast. And these are the well-to-do kids doing everything they can to climb the social ladder, do what they're supposed to, and get ahead. Many of them will give up and take a low-paying, insecure dead-end job, or get sucked into the vortex of debt and unemployment that is much of graduate school. Matters are worse for most more normal people.
For those twenty-somethings who do manage to find a decent job, buying a decent home is usually still well out of reach due to home prices that skyrocketed far beyond stagnant wages. Older Americans who bought their homes decades ago are still doing fine due to policies that have prioritized asset growth over wage growth. But for those who were children or yet unborn when housing started to shoot upwards, things are far more difficult. Of course, as bad as Millennials have it, it's even worse for the middle-aged who have been forced out of jobs and whose homes are underwater.
The economy is still broken. It will stay broken until wages rise to meet productivity growth, and until the middle class reclaims much of the wealth that has been stolen by the very wealthy.
by David Atkins, Hullabaloo
