- In the US, UK, and Japan, the generation of citizens aged 19-35 are the first in modern memory on course to be worse off than their parents. To take perhaps the most striking example, roughly half of Japanese Millennials aged 20 to 29 in 2015 reported still living with their parents.
Most people I know have accepted it and decided to chose different paths from their parents which is something I think will be interesting to see down the road. I think society will start to look very different. Most of the people I work with have university degrees and none of them are using them. A co-worker and I were talking the other day about how people our age are starting to figure out careers in things our parents never taught us like gardening and crafting that skipped a generation. One example was a woman in Montreal who grows mushrooms and delivers them to restuarant on her bike.
A woman I know has done something similar, by opening a sewing school. She started doing it just in her house, but it absolutely blew up to the point that she quit her day job, got a separate space, and now does it full time. Talking to her husband about it more recently, he said that they were being told this very thing: women in the early- to mid-30s and younger never learned it from their moms, so there too it was skipping a generation. I think there was this prediction from our parents' generation (I'm 33) that we wouldn't need a lot of these more practical skills to the same degree due to increasing technology. For example, I learned only the most basic of basic carpentry, and that was more from my engineer grandfather who did woodworking as a hobby. But now that the economy isn't raising all boats, our generation is recognizing due to a combination of economics and environmental concerns that we don't necessarily need to hire someone or buy something to solve a given problem. So there's this whole resurgence of handicrafts and cottage industries. It'll be interesting to see what effects this has on, say, people who are kids now.A co-worker and I were talking the other day about how people our age are starting to figure out careers in things our parents never taught us like gardening and crafting that skipped a generation.
The part about automation is interesting to me. One of my long standing goals at work is to script some of the work we do. My group has six people in it. I think I could reduce that to five within ten years (or do more work with the same six). And this is just with an engineer cobbling together some halfway decent python code. Was that Japanese insurance company artificial intelligence article on Hubski? I suspect the work I do is too specialized to economically automate with artificial intelligence today. But the next generation will have to compete with cheaper and more powerful software. Will the next generation face decimation of cubical farms the way my generation faced the decimation of factory jobs?
A few hours ago I did a presentation on new interactive 3D city engines. My superior noted that software like that will eventually be linked to noise / environmental pollution models. Currently, calculating the change in pollution when new buildings or roads are laid down takes 5 work days and a bunch of people to build an accurate model and run the numbers. That city engine can probably do the same thing in less than an hour. It'll mean that an entire floor of our five story building will be out of a job as soon as they can get that city engine up to a good level of sophistication.
Here's the sum total of what they had to say about automation: Here's what McKinsey's ongoing study of automation had to say:This is the generation that has come of age in the long shadow of the global financial crisis — a historically significant loss of global wealth and opportunity — and their problems have been compounded by the automation of many tasks.
Especially if you count the math entirely wrong. From the article: From the article's citation: So their data really says "net worth has fallen 43% since 1995" which means "student loans have gone up a crapton" which is not good but fuckin' A the very same graph they're bitching about shows that wages have gone UP since 2010. I'm not gonna go through and fact-check the whole thing. Don't get me wrong - millennials are fucked. But if we can't even accurately describe their fuckitude the 'boomers aren't going to take things seriously.Pesky Whipper-Snapper incomes have also fallen dramatically compared with previous generations. Pesky Whipper-Snappers in 2013 had median earnings that were 43 percent lower than that of Generation Xers in 1995, when Gen X was at a similar point in its demographic development.
In fact, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the median earnings of 18-to-34-year-olds were 9.3 percent lower in the 2009–2013 time period than in 2000. The 2013 median net worth of this age group had declined by 43 percent from a high in 1995, when Gen Xers were under 35.