Kids These Days

Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

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Pub Date Nov 07 2017 | Archive Date May 08 2019

Description

Millennials have been stereotyped as lazy, entitled, narcissistic, and immature. We've gotten so used to sloppy generational analysis filled with dumb clichés about young people that we've lost sight of what really unites Millennials. Namely:

We are the most educated and hardworking generation in American history. We poured historic and insane amounts of time and money into preparing ourselves for the 21st-century labor market. We have been taught to consider working for free (homework, internships) a privilege for our own benefit. We are poorer, more medicated, and more precariously employed than our parents, grandparents, even our great grandparents, with less of a social safety net to boot.

Kids These Days is about why. In brilliant, crackling prose, early Wall Street occupier Malcolm Harris gets mercilessly real about our maligned birth cohort. Examining trends like runaway student debt, the rise of the intern, mass incarceration, social media, and more, Harris gives us a portrait of what it means to be young in America today that will wake you up and piss you off.

Millennials were the first generation raised explicitly as investments, Harris argues, and in Kids These Days he dares us to confront and take charge of the consequences now that we are grown up.

Millennials have been stereotyped as lazy, entitled, narcissistic, and immature. We've gotten so used to sloppy generational analysis filled with dumb clichés about young people that we've lost sight...


Advance Praise

"Malcolm Harris's thesis is the kind of brilliantly simple idea that instantly clarifies an entire area of culture: Millennials are the way they are-anxious, harried, and 'narcissistically' self-focused, though hardly lazy or entitled-because the neoliberal economy has made them so. When we raise children in a world that reduces people to 'human capital', then bids down the price of that resource, what else should we expect? Kids These Days is deft, witty, unillusioned, and brutally frank. Read it and weep, puke, scream." —William Deresiewicz, New York Times bestselling author of Excellent Sheep

 

"Kids These Days is the best, most comprehensive work of social and economic analysis about our benighted generation. Malcolm Harris matches Naomi Klein for depth of research and Jane Jacobs for systemic vision. If you're a millennial who feels economically jinxed and unfairly spat-upon, but can't say why, cram this book in your brain; if you think millennials are lazy and entitled, cram this book in your mouth. Fascinating, infuriating, and bulging with receipts, Kids These Days shows us why no space is safe." —Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens

"Malcolm Harris's thesis is the kind of brilliantly simple idea that instantly clarifies an entire area of culture: Millennials are the way they are-anxious, harried, and 'narcissistically'...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780316510868
PRICE $25.00 (USD)
PAGES 272

Average rating from 2 members