Kids These Days

John writes:

David Brooks has an interesting piece in The New York Times about how our young people are not prepared to enter the world of adulthood due to a toxic mixture of overzealous parenting and hippie “find yourself” individualism. Oh, and the job market is bad too, but really the problem is that our graduates are too full of themselves and their parents encouraged this kind of thinking by being “helicopter” parents.

While I agree with some of what Brooks has to say (perhaps young people are too narcissistic these days), I think he misses the greater point, which is that much of the extreme emphasis on a structured childhood was probably a product of changes in the economy. Brooks and others in the bubble world of the punditocracy fail to realize how much status anxiety there is among the American middle class. Gone are the days when even a manual laborer could expect to have an income sufficient to support a family in relative comfort on one working adult’s income. Instead, the American people were told by all of the Very Serious People in politics, business, and the media that education was the only way to avoid sinking into the new low-wage, low-skilled underclass being created by America’s embrace of neoliberal economics.

Not surprisingly, the result was an almost neurotic reaction by frightened middle-class parents. Parents were told that little Jimmy and little Susie had to be loaded up with extracurricular activities to make their college applications more attractive, had to take expensive test prep courses to be able to succeed at ultracompetitive standardized tests, and that an unstructured childhood was a relic of the past, or worse, a symptom of a lower-class lifestyle, as exemplified by the media's portrayal of poor and working-class children as wild and uncontrollable.

Unfortunately, Brooks is yet another in a long list of media figures who refuse to look at how the American economy has changed structurally and instead seems satisfied with turgid lectures on how suffering builds character. Alternatively, Times writer Paul Krugman’s recent piece on the devastating impact of long-term unemployment in a stalled economy is much more appropriate given the reality of the economic world recent graduates are being forced to contend with and has the added benefit of pointing out that things don’t have to be as bad as they are.

While Brooks is correct to point out how corrosive extreme individualism has been for American culture, he seems to use an individualistic methodology when writing about the problems young people will face in the near future. Besides a ritualistic nod to the problem of debt (without really discussing how and why that debt came into existence), Brooks avoids discussing the wider social forces that may have led parents to become overindulgent and their children increasingly narcissistic. While we should avoid the trap of blaming social forces for all individual failures or misfortunes, we should also discard the old tricks of the classical liberals who used philosophical individualism mixed with puritanical moralism to shame the poor and unfortunate into accepting their miserable status in an often exploitative and unjust economic system, all while absolving those at the top of the economic ladder from any moral responsibility to society.

If David Brooks is really interested in turning young people into responsible adults with “sacred commitments” then he should support policies such as public employment, a national commitment to a family wage, and proper regulation of the economy to avoid the devastating economic bubbles that he apparently opposes. Unfortunately, such ideas are not taken seriously by the Very Serious, Moderate types like David Brooks, despite the fact that we already had such a system (or something close to it) under the Keynes-Beveridge consensus, and it actually worked pretty well.

The continued attack on young people is combined with a blatant refusal to do anything about the problems facing the young. In a few years from now, when David Brooks will no doubt be writing about the social decay unleashed by the creation of a permanently unemployed or underemployed underclass, I hope people remind him that all he had to offer the suffering masses were empty platitudes.