| 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. |
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.