What is the typical life experience for an American on the verge of turning 30?
This is a hard question to answer, no matter who is asking. But it’s become especially difficult for an industry responsible with providing the answers: the national press. An irony of digital media is that the Internet distributes journalism, but it concentrates journalists. Jobs at media sites like The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, or Gawker are five-times more likely to be located in New York or Washington, D.C., than television-news jobs. The clustering force is only getting more centripetal: The share of reporting jobs in Los Angeles, NYC, and DC increased by 60 percent between 2004 and 2014.
It’s easy to imagine many downsides of this agglomeration, like the dissolution of local reporting, but a subtler risk is that well-educated journalists in these dense cities wind up with a skewed impression of the world, a “majority illusion” based on the extremely unrepresentative cross-section of the country that’s immediately around them. To be fair, being a reporter in Des Moines or rural Nebraska, while it provides a better view of Des Moines and rural Nebraska, doesn’t offer a universal window into the average experiences of all Americans, either. For that, one needs something else, like a national survey.
So, how useful that the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently published a report on the demographics of 29-year-olds in the U.S. As a 29-year-old reporting on the economy from New York, it was a particularly good orientation for me. The impression of young people in the U.S. today is warped: In trend pieces, the word Millennial has become shorthand for “a college-educated young person living in a city.” But this usage elides some critical details, for example that most people born between the early 1980s and late 1990s (a) didn’t graduate from college, (b) aren’t living in a city, and (c) generally hate being called “Millennials.”
Instead, the average 29-year-old did not graduate from a four-year university, but she did start college; held several jobs, including more than two in the last three years; is not as likely to be married as her parents at this age, but is still likely to be living with somebody; is less likely to own a home than 15 years ago, but despite the story of urban renewal, is more likely to live outside of a dense urban area like Brooklyn or Washington, D.C.
Here are several more details from the BLS report (and some similar surveys) about 29-year-olds:
This is a hard question to answer, no matter who is asking. But it’s become especially difficult for an industry responsible with providing the answers: the national press. An irony of digital media is that the Internet distributes journalism, but it concentrates journalists. Jobs at media sites like The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, or Gawker are five-times more likely to be located in New York or Washington, D.C., than television-news jobs. The clustering force is only getting more centripetal: The share of reporting jobs in Los Angeles, NYC, and DC increased by 60 percent between 2004 and 2014.
It’s easy to imagine many downsides of this agglomeration, like the dissolution of local reporting, but a subtler risk is that well-educated journalists in these dense cities wind up with a skewed impression of the world, a “majority illusion” based on the extremely unrepresentative cross-section of the country that’s immediately around them. To be fair, being a reporter in Des Moines or rural Nebraska, while it provides a better view of Des Moines and rural Nebraska, doesn’t offer a universal window into the average experiences of all Americans, either. For that, one needs something else, like a national survey.So, how useful that the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently published a report on the demographics of 29-year-olds in the U.S. As a 29-year-old reporting on the economy from New York, it was a particularly good orientation for me. The impression of young people in the U.S. today is warped: In trend pieces, the word Millennial has become shorthand for “a college-educated young person living in a city.” But this usage elides some critical details, for example that most people born between the early 1980s and late 1990s (a) didn’t graduate from college, (b) aren’t living in a city, and (c) generally hate being called “Millennials.”
Instead, the average 29-year-old did not graduate from a four-year university, but she did start college; held several jobs, including more than two in the last three years; is not as likely to be married as her parents at this age, but is still likely to be living with somebody; is less likely to own a home than 15 years ago, but despite the story of urban renewal, is more likely to live outside of a dense urban area like Brooklyn or Washington, D.C.
Here are several more details from the BLS report (and some similar surveys) about 29-year-olds:
by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Ricardo Moraes / Reuters
