| No Images? Click here   Generation ScrewedHello Highliners,It feels like every time I open a browser window or have dinner with my parents, all I hear is how millennials like me refuse to grow up. We're entitled, we're hipsters, we're living in basements, we MFA'd when we should have STEM'd. If we could just tear ourselves off of Tumblr for 10 minutes, maybe we'd find a job and quit complaining already.I always knew this was a caricature, and probably my parents do too, but it was only once I started working on this article that I learned the vast, incredible, profound wrongness of the stereotype we've been sold about millennials. Young people are not failing in the U.S. economy. The U.S. economy is failing them.The hardest part of writing a story like this is knowing where to start. One of the first people I interviewed was Emma, who I met at a homeless shelter in Seattle last spring. She's 22 years old, trying to get onto the ladder in tech and sleeping in a church annex while she does an unpaid internship. She's been bouncing in and out of homelessness for two years now—getting a job, starting to climb the ladder and then falling off.It turns out this is a whole Thing, a sub-field of economics called "poverty dynamics." More than 60 percent of the U.S. population will spend at least one year in the bottom quintile of the income distribution—a percentage that's been growing since the 1980s.It was like this for months: Every time I met someone new, they led me to a novel way that young people have it harder than their parents. Katie, a midwife who only gets paid when one of her clients goes into labor and is still paying off her occupational license, put me on the trail of domestic outsourcing. Steve who moved to Detroit to buy a cheap house but now can't get a job that pays more than $10 an hour, opened up the wonderful world of zoning regulations.Last April, when I started on this story, I had no idea I would be looking up 1970s building codes or federal regulations on pension funds or the arcane details of Bill Clinton's 1996 welfare reform. But here we are! What I found was, first, that the challenges faced by millennials are larger than I (or my parents) ever expected. Second, these challenges are the result of three huge and deliberate and terrifying paradigm shifts in the way our economy works and how we think about it. They all happened slowly and imperceptibly. But, like the melting of an ice cap (cough cough), they are now undeniable.So this is it, my attempt at understanding and describing and freaking out about all the ways millennials are getting screwed and what we can do about it. It's long, it's dark and it's full of statistics—luckily, the gorgeous design (and a pixelated avocado) are here to help guide you through it.—Michael Hobbes Highline combines the rigor, depth and obsessiveness of the best magazine journalism with the experimentation that becomes possible when no paper or staples are involved. And our goal is simple: We want to publish stories that stay with you.Did you like reading this email? Forward it to a friend. Or sign up! Can't get enough? Check out our Morning Email or Must Reads.©2017 HuffPost | 770 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 |
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