It's The Economy Stupid... Next Things to Think About

11/13/2024

In the fall of 2020, I dreamed of being on a massive ship with a large group of Gen-Xers. We would be deep inside the boat in what would be the economy class of a cruise ship. We were sailing along, stuffed into the ship together, when suddenly, the ship was turned upside down, and water started rushing into it. We were going to be the first to die. This is the first of what I’ve referred to as my “ship of state” dreams. I've been thinking a lot about the symbolism of people in my age group being the most affected.

Clearly, the ship overturning is a metaphor for our democracy flipping. The most vulnerable population will be Generation X. People who are not yet to retirement age, don’t have social security, and likely never will. Generation X is the first generation to do worse than the generations before them. We came of the hunting age during another big banking crisis, the S & L meltdown, and the subsequent recession of the late 1980s into the 1990s. During this period, manufacturing jobs, which many in my generation had planned to enter, went the way of the doo-doo.

By the mid-1990s, the midwestern states looked like Bosnia after the war. I’m not exaggerating at all here. Buildings were left abandoned and crumbling, and garbage rolled down the street. Cities of the midwest became ghost towns. Those who stayed behind were in extreme financial distress. All of this occurred under the Clinton administration. While the Reagan/Bush era people wrote the policies he signed into law, Clinton signed them, and the crushing weight of it ripped a hole through the middle of our country that was never rectified or even addressed. This is how the Democrats lost the Rust Belt.

Those who went to college found the rules changing under Reagan. We couldn’t be declared independent from our parents (even if we were) until 24. Worse than that, the law passed, making it impossible to absolve yourself of student debt. Previous generations went to college, worked a summer job, and paid their way through school. By the 1980s, college was becoming unaffordable, and the gap between the rich and everyone grew faster than ever in history. It was the beginning of the worst incoming inequality America has ever seen. It started under Reagan.

Middle-class Gen-X kids contended with all the rules changing. When they left college, the job market collapsed. The loans they agreed to (before the rules changed) were now unnegotiable and would be worn as an albatross for life. This has been true for every generation since then. For Generation X, however, they were in school as the change happened. They were the first generation to have to pivot and scramble. If they went to school and got a BFA in liberal arts because their hippie parents thought it was a great way to learn to think, well they were stuck paying for an education that had no value in the job market. They exited institutions of higher learning with no job skills and a new set of rules in a recession. Many people with advanced degrees scraped by working as baristas, waiters, and construction workers.

The show “Freinds” was a fun representation of the reality that Generation Xers didn’t have strong families to stay home with as millennials did; they were expected to be independent in their late teens-early 20s. They couldn’t live at home. Instead, they lived in apartments with multiple roommates as they scrapped by in their service jobs while they tried to pay off their enormous loans. The culture writ large didn’t acknowledge this reality except for the novel by Douglas Copeland, “Generation X,” which detailed this reality, and the subsequent shows like “Friends” that tried to capitalize on a new generation’s story by turning it into a fun romp.

Generation X, the invisible generation, didn’t start building traditional American capital until much later. Throughout their careers, the job market was unstable for them. They were the first to float from one job to the next as newspapers, the record industry, stores, factories, etc., were remade into this current neoliberal economy. Unlike other generations, they were in the middle of all the changes; hence, they experienced more periods of joblessness and career drift. I’m not saying generations after had it great, no.

Every generation afterward has had to contend with this. The big difference is the dust had settled. The new order had taken shape. The digital age had been birthed, and manufacturing jobs were no longer an option. Subsequent generations at least knew and could plan around the pitfalls. Generation X could not.

Most of my peers had periods of joblessness that ate away at whatever 401k or savings they may have had. They had to live on that. They don’t have much money to rely on for a rainy day. Many live paycheck to paycheck as they approach retirement. For some, their only retirement plan is the money they paid into social security. Their other source of capital (for those who made it into the middle class) is their home.

What happens when you have a population, starting with those about to retire, where the rules change completely? When a country goes from a democracy to a theocratic plutocracy? We can look at what happened to the Soviet Union in the 1990s as an example of when a political system suddenly changed, and people had to adapt to it desperately—economic collapse. Political instability is not good