The Recession Generation: Future Squares?

IN 1951, Time magazine set out to paint a portrait of the nation’s youth, those born into the Great Depression. It doomed them as the Silent Generation, and a generally drab lot: cautious and resigned, uninterested in striking out in new directions or shaping the great issues of the day — the outwardly efficient types whose inner agonies the novel “Revolutionary Road” would dissect a decade later. “Youth’s ambitions have shrunk,” the magazine declared. “Few youngsters today want to mine diamonds in South Africa, ranch in Paraguay, climb Mount Everest, find a cure for cancer, sail around the world or build an industrial empire. Some would like to own a small, independent business, but most want a good job with a big firm, and with it, a kind of suburban idyll.” The young soldier “lacks flame,” students were “docile notetakers.” And the young writer’s flair “sometimes turns out to be nothing more than a byproduct of his neuroses.” (This even before Philip Roth, born 1933, had published a novel.)

“The best thing that can be said for American youth, in or out of uniform, is that it has learned that it must try to make the best of a bad and difficult job, whether that job is life, war, or both,” Time concluded. “The generation which has been called the oldest young generation in the world has achieved a certain maturity.” Today we are in a recession the depth and duration of which are unknown; Friday’s job loss figures were just the latest suggestion that it could well be prolonged and profound rather than shorter and shallower. So what of the youth shaped by what some are already calling the Great Recession? Will a publication looking back from 2030 damn them with such faint praise? Will they marry younger, be satisfied with stable but less exciting jobs? Will their children mock them for reusing tea bags and counting pennies as if this paycheck were the last? At the very least, they will reckon with tremendous instability, just as their Depression forebears did.

“The ’30s challenged the whole idea of the American dream, the idea of open economic possibilities,” said Morris Dickstein, an English professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, whose cultural history of the Depression will be published in September. “The version you get of that today is the loss of confidence on the part of both parent and children that life in the next generation will inevitably be better.” How today’s young will be affected 10, 20 or 40 years on will depend on many things — the children of the Depression were shaped as much by the war that followed. The recession generation will include those born into it, at the youngest end, and those emerging out of college and high school into a jobless marketplace, at the oldest. If history is any guide, what will matter most is where they are on the continuum.

-NYTimes

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A good interesting read, obviously very speculative, but seems to suggest that those that are young now will be most affected. Some of the analysis is scary though; some suggest that those graduating college in the (smaller) recessionary period of the early 1980s were held back by a decade...