[ross-life]

> I don't see how the conclusion would be anything else, with merely a moment's thought.

Well it depends what side you are on! :)

Anecdotally, in the UK many older people will claim (A) Young people spend frivolously (B) Young people don't work hard enough or "as hard as they did" and/or (C) Their success was "their success".

Everything about economies, markets, education, housing, expectations, opportunities and the rest is wishy-washed away with "Well if they worked harder (like I did), those would work out for them".

[icelancer]

>Anecdotally, in the UK many older people will claim (A) Young people spend frivolously (B) Young people don't work hard enough or "as hard as they did" and/or (C) Their success was "their success".

People who claim millenials don't work hard and that they spend frivolously are probably right. The issue, of course, is that it's not an exclusive truth: Millenials are worse off than the generation previous AND they work less hard.

The same problem exists in millenials, obviously. They think the world is out to get them, and they are right. But they also don't work hard enough.

In short, everyone contributes to this downwards spiral.

[dcole2929]

Except the data doesn't agree with you. According to most studies millenials work as hard or harder than previous generations, mostly because they don't have a choice

[brianleb]

Can you cite some of these studies? I am interested in how they quantify work (and just seeing the conclusions they come to and how they got there).

[logfromblammo]

This is a specialized industrial economy. Telling people to "work harder" is the conceptual equivalent to telling them to shut off the tractors and plow the field by hand.

Gen X and Millenials do not work as hard as Boomers. They work much, much smarter. Worker productivity is higher than it has ever been.

Boomers look at younger generations and see "Ah, look at this! All they do is press a button, and the machine does all the work, yet still they complain." The Boomers conveniently ignore the part where the button was programmed by Gen X and Millennial engineers, and the only reason there is even anyone around to push the button is because no one will ever get paid a living wage for not pushing a button, as long as "work hard" Boomers are in power.

But as political control lags behind workforce composition, the people who grew up believing that success is the result of hard work are now commanding the economy. And they are responsible for the creation of the "bullshit job", wherein unnecessary work is invented out of thin air, just so that workers will continue to have the opportunity to show how hard they can work.

Millennials do not slack off at these jobs because they are bad workers. They do it because they are smart enough to know that the work is meaningless, and it does not matter one whit whether it is done poorly, or not at all. The only reason they work at all is because they need money to survive.

We no longer need all hands on deck. It's time to stop feeling guilty or judgmental about enjoying leisure time before age 65. And it's time to distribute the productivity dividend to the people who have been doing the work all these years. It simply does not matter that Millennials do not work hard. We have so many machines now that none of them really need to. So if any of them do work harder, that just means less actual work is available to others of their generation, or worse for them, to Gen X workers (who have been somewhat less harshly shut out from economic prosperity, but shut out all the same).

Boomers will be in for a rude awakening when they are all sitting in their retirement party castles and no young employees are ever around to serve them their Mai-Tais promptly at 5 o'clock. The younger generations will be trading what little they have with each other until the old people die off and release their stranglehold on the economy.

[icelancer]

>Gen X and Millenials do not work as hard as Boomers. They work much, much smarter. Worker productivity is higher than it has ever been.

And yet, this is not enough. Our generation (I am in my early 30s / late 20s) will have lower access to resources than the previous one. And that's just something we have to accept rather than bitch about - sure, some hand-wringing is fine, but at the end of the day it does nothing for us.

We must use the higher productivity we have and STILL put in more work than the previous generation if we are to overcome the economic quandry facing us.

Or we can pass basic income and solve a lot of the problems in one fell swoop. But that requires old people to vote against their immediate self-interest and the government to coordinate enough to roll out the biggest wealth redistribution since WW2. This doesn't strike me as very likely. So time to get to work, as much as it sucks.

[logfromblammo]

When my evil bit gets randomly flipped by a cosmic ray every now and then, I think about questionably ethical ways for young folks to financially exploit older folks.

For all my malicious cogitation, I just can't come up with anything more promising than a cyber-cold war. Essentially, it's the same con Boomer pulled on Greatest. You drum up a lot of fear in the older folks, and get them to spend a lot of money defending against the bogeyman, which is invariably spent on jobs for younger folks. A lot of money changes hands, and no one has to go out and actually risk getting killed.

Except the trick this time is you don't have an identifiable state enemy. The bogeyman is "hackers" and "terrorists", who will crack your Facebook and somehow steal all the money in your IRA by turning it into Blitcoins, a digital form of heroin that uses encryption to kidnap your grandchildren. The only way to stop it is a "cyber-corps" staffed by patriotic defenders of digital freedom, who will pre-emptively crack your Facebook to ensure that the money in your IRA is rightly going to cyber-taxes, rather than getting stolen by hacker terrorists or terrorist hackers. Cyber-stolen by cyber-criminals. From the cyber-cloud. Cybercybercybercyber.

We explicitly partner with China and Russia, to show that the cyber-situation is so bad that we have to cooperate with the filthy Commies to fight it. And they could probably also stand to siphon some cash from their old guard to the newer digital barons. We run a few media-frenzied false flag operations to demonstrate that critical infrastructure is even more vulnerable to cyber-attack than to decades of chronic neglect and mis-maintenance. Eventually, young folks get at the voting machines to "secure them against tampering". Or should I say foreign tampering? It's really just too bad the USSR fell apart before Gen X could take over the con.

If we have to work in bullshit jobs to get by, there's no particular reason why Boomers should be the only ones inventing the bullshit.

A distant second place is jacking up the cost of geriatric health care, then swabbing retirement home toilet seats with resistant strains of chlamydia. Those "free love" bastards would finally learn what it was like growing up in the 80s, when kids were taught that their genitals were ticking time bombs that could kill not only you, but also everyone you ever loved (in the literal sense).