Millennials, also known as Generation Y (after Gen X) and Generation
C (for Connected), should perhaps be called Generation Leaky, at least
according to some experts.
Various surveys have found that workers
born between the early 1980s and early 2000s are much more concerned
with productivity and convenience than security, to the point where they
will ignore IT directives or work around what Adweek blogger Kimberlee
Morrison called called, “clunky security mandates.”
That is also the view of security executive Chris Rouland, who declared in a recent Dark Reading post that Milliennials, “have no interest in protecting their data.
“They
will pay double for organic bread,” he wrote, “… but they place
seemingly no value on the integrity and security of their personal
identifiable information, let alone the consequences a hack could have
on their friends, families, colleagues and employers.”
He noted that the recent breaches of Yik Yak and Snapchat
didn’t reduce the use of those apps. “Leaked personal photos and
private information seem to not just be tolerable in this demographic,
but almost expected,” he wrote.
Indeed, CSO recently reported that
studies have found that some workers put more importance on sharing
information about themselves than in making more money.
The
security implications of such attitudes could be large. Ages 22-24 are
the top three in population in the U.S. And with Boomers and Gen Xers
moving toward retirement, Millennials are about to become the largest
generation in the workforce.
If they really don’t care about
security, it would seem they will be creating an expanded threat
landscape that will be a hacker’s dream and an organization’s nightmare.
And some experts argue that it is indeed that bad, for a number of reasons: Need for speed
Andrew
Avanessian, executive vice president of consultancy and technology
solutions at Avecto notes that, “Millennials are the most connected
generation in history, and with that comes this new mentality where
everything should be instant – information and communication at the
click of a button.” Andrew Avanessian, vice president of professional services, Avecto If security protocols interfere with that,
they’ll go with speed and convenience. “The likely result is that
they’ll bypass those settings completely, or turn to another, unsecure,
platform that doesn’t have those perceived barriers,” he said. The personal/professional merge
“Millennials
link everything from financial accounts to very personal information
from social media apps everywhere, on every device,” said Tom Bain, vice
president of Security Strategy at CounterTack. “Sixty percent of all
mobile attacks are capable of stealing money from Millennials,” he said,
noting that mobile attacks globally are growing by a factor of 10 every
quarter.
“So the more data that is available, mostly on mobile
apps and devices, the better the opportunity for hackers to hack
individuals and ride those coattails into corporate networks freely.”
Avanessian
added that today’s digital workers like applications that are, “sleek,
intuitive, and have the same look and feel as products they're already
familiar with. This is why we see many employees using platforms such as
Dropbox or Skype for business purposes. But these kinds of applications
were largely designed with the consumer in mind – not for the business
professional who might be handling sensitive content.”
[ Building the security bridge to the Millennials ]
That
extends to devices, according to Raj Dodhiawala, senior vice president
and general manager at Mantech Cyber Solutions International. “I know
Millennials who want to use their personal devices at work because they
are more powerful and capable than standard issue desktops,” he said. Ignorance isn’t bliss
Dominique
Singer, principal of Security Solutions Architecture at Hexis Cyber
Solutions, contends that Millennials are poor at security not because
they don’t care, but because they don’t know enough to care.
“They
have grown up in a world of ‘data everywhere’ and ‘information
everywhere,’” he said, “and have been conditioned to expect easy access
to any kind of data, especially social media. They haven’t been
conditioned, or even slightly educated, on the importance of protecting
their data.”
[ How security smart is Generation Y? ]
Dodhiawala
added that while Millennials do care about protecting their data, “they
just don’t have a good sense for what constitutes private, personal or
sensitive data.
“Putting their date of birth on Facebook is
considered routine, for example,” he said. “Intuitively, they share
first, and protect minimally.” A matter of trust
Millennials
tend to trust technology more than they should, according to Bain.
“They just have implicit trust in apps, carriers and the devices they
use, that anything they do or say is protected. They are 99% blind to
the growing threatscape,” he said. Pushing for privileges
Along
with the expectation of instant communication comes the expectation of
easy access. Avanessian said Millennials have grown up in an online
world where access was always easy and immediate, and bring those
expectations to the workplace, in the form of demands for elevated
privileges.
Raj Dodhiawala, senior vice president and general manager, Mantech Cyber Solutions International.
“We conducted a survey a couple years ago that
found that male employees between the ages of 25 to 35 years old were
most likely to demand elevated rights,” he said.
And while that
may improve productivity, “the problem is that it gives users the
ability to make system tweaks or unauthorized application downloads.
This significantly increases the potential for malware to invade the
system and open the entire corporate network up to vulnerability,” he
said.
***
While there is little disagreement that
Millennials exhibit those vulnerabilities, other experts say they are
not alone – that older workers can be just as bad.
Armond Caglar,
senior threat specialist at TSC Advantage, agrees that the majority of
social media users, who willingly surrender their personally
identifiable information (PII), are Millennials. But, he noted, millions
in other age groups do so as well.
He said LinkedIn, the career
networking site, tends to be used by older workers and is arguably more
dangerous than Facebook or Snapchat since, “the biographic, educational
and personal data that is volunteered here is way more valuable to a
potential adversary than an Instagram shot of a Millennial’s brunch on a
Sunday morning.”
Cagler is also among numerous experts who have
pointed out that many corporate executives, “ignore the perils
associated with using free Wi-Fi or willfully abandon certain security
best practices when traveling internationally.”
Andrew Deacon,
channel sales engineer EMEA at Hexis Cyber Solutions, also said he
thinks the issue is larger than a single demographic group. “It is how
technology and social media has changed the rules of society,” he said,
arguing that online and face-to-face interactions are, “totally
different.”
Most people would never give a stranger on the street
their banking information, even if he promised to put money in their
account. But online, “a lot of people would send their bank details.”
That,
he said, is because, “online, we lack non-verbal communication cues
that subconsciously give away a person’s true intentions. We have also
been told from an early age to be wary of strangers offering you candy.”
Online, “most people share all sorts of data and nothing bad happens right? So they think it must be safe.”
And
Perry Dickau, director of product management at DataGravity, said it is
human nature to ignore risks that haven’t caused any damage yet.
“Many
organizations still choose to be reactive to situations rather than to
proactively try to prevent them, and why should they? From their
perspective it’s a tedious, costly proposition with questionable yield,”
he said.
Dickau and others say that blaming Millennials is not going to fix the problem – it will take an organization-wide effort.
“For
data security solutions to actually work, it’s extremely important that
they don’t disrupt user productivity – in fact they should promote
their freedom. There are technologies out there that can achieve this,”
Avanessian said.
Dickau said it will take a combination of
technology and awareness training. “Fundamentally, data is exposed and
vulnerable at the moment it is created, by default creating a
requirement to protect and secure it whenever it is stored,” he said,
adding that while training is also crucial, “it is just another piece in
the overall security puzzle.
“Technology will only supplement the
human element in any security, privacy, and compliance equation,” he
said. “The two elements need each other to work successfully – one
cannot replace the other.”
Bain does not see that happening on a
broad scale anytime soon, however. “It will get worse before it gets
better because organizations can’t change behavior with security policy
enforcement,” he said. “Saying ‘don’t’ will just make them want to do it
more, and productivity will decrease if employees aren’t able to use
their social media accounts at work, or talent will go where the
environment is more open.”
For the second year in a row, the number of
non-Hispanic white deaths in 2013 outweighed the number of white births,
signaling an increasingly older and diversified American public. It is a
trend that’s likely to continue for a while, as traditionally minority
groups become the majority of the U.S. population.
As a result of its slower growth rate, compared with other groups, the
number of non-Hispanic white individuals declined to 62.6 percent of the
total overall population in 2013 from 63 percent in 2012, according to
recent
figures from the Census Bureau.
“As we move forward we’re probably going to continue to have a natural
decrease of whites because it’s an older population and eventually,
maybe in 10 years or so, we’ll have a decline in the white population,”
says William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Metropolitan
Policy Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “That’s a
scenario I think we’ll see for a while.”
[READ: U.S. Probably Not Headed Toward Another Recession]
A previous report from the Census Bureau showed that the U.S. will become a majority-minority country for the first time in
2043,
meaning the total number of black, Asian, Hispanic and other minority
populations will outweigh the non-Hispanic white population, though that
demographic will still make up the largest single group.
The country as a whole grew a little bit older last year, led by a
surge of the retiring-age American population and a much slower growth
of younger generations. The median age for the U.S. as a whole edged up
to 37.6 last year from 37.5 in 2012, Census figures showed. The age
group 65 and older grew to 44.7 million in 2013, up 3.6 percent from
2012, while the population younger than 65 grew by just 0.3 percent.
Growth of the senior population will continue as baby boomers turn 65.
In fact, says Richard Fry, an economist at the Pew Research Center, the
biggest group of baby boomers was born in 1962, a sign it will still be
some time before that largest group enters the 65-and-over category.
“We’re going to have a lot of growth in terms of absolute size [of the
population of Americans 65 and older] for easily another dozen years,”
he says.
[ALSO: GDP Shrinks Sharply, but Don't Panic]
A separate
report
from the Census Bureau released Monday showed that the oldest
population of Americans – which in 2010 was 12 times the size it was in
1990 – is more racially and ethnically diverse, with those identifying
their race as white was 84.8 percent in 2010, down from 86.9 a decade
earlier.
Brooking’s Frey points out that the growing diversification is mostly
taking shape in younger generations, though, which comprise bigger
numbers of minorities. The Census report showed that at a growth rate of
2.9 percent, Asians were the fastest growing group from 2012 to 2013,
and the growth was driven by international migration. The Hispanic
population, which is the second-largest group overall in size behind
non-Hispanic single-race whites, grew 2.1 percent and was led instead by
a natural increase, or more births than deaths.
Overall fertility rates have declined in the U.S. as a whole and especially for white Americans, according to
figures
from the National Center for Health Statistics. This helps temper the
growth rate of the white non-Hispanic and Hispanic populations, Frey
says.
Extrapolating from the census data, a separate
report
from San Francisco-based real estate research firm Trulia Inc. showed
where different age groups lived in 2013. Contrary to popular thought,
millennials – Americans 20 to 34 years old – actually moved more into
big-city suburbs and lower-density cities rather than dense urban areas.
The three fastest growing millennial metropolitan areas were Peabody,
Massachusetts, a town north of Boston, Colorado Springs, Colorado and
San Antonio.
Americans 50 to 69 years old also flocked most to the “second quartile
of counties,” wrote Trulia Chief Economist Jed Kolko, or big city
suburbs and lower density cities. The fastest growing areas for baby
boomers were Austin, Texas, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Dallas – all
places that already have high concentrations of young people. In fact,
Austin has the highest share of millennials than any other large
metropolitan area, the Trulia report showed.
[MORE: Immigrants Are No Longer the Biggest Share of the Latino Labor Force]
“The trend in the past year was that boomer growth [took place] in millennials’ favorite places,” Kolko says.
The population of the youngest Americans, or those ages 5 and younger,
grew fastest in big cities like Washington, D.C. and New York. Frey has
studied demographic changes in New York and says since 2010, there’s
been a growth in the under 5 population in all of the boroughs except
for Staten Island.
“What you’re seeing here is whites back then were only growing
in Manhattan and Brooklyn as yuppies were moving in and having kids,” he
says. “But now we see white gains [in under 5 age group] … in Queens
and the Bronx, so there’s probably some gentrifying of whites moving
into those boroughs, which were not necessarily the hot spots for kids.”
Yahoo
editors have selected this article as a favorite of 2013. It first ran
on Yahoo Finance on May 7 and was one of the most popular stories of the
year. The video and article discuss William Bennett's argument that
only a fraction of the country's thousands of universities are worth the
investment they require to attend.
The U.S. is home to some
of the greatest colleges and universities in the world. But with the
student debt load at more than $1 trillion and youth unemployment
elevated, when assessing the value of a college education, that’s only
one part of the story.
Former Secretary of Education William Bennett, author of Is College Worth It,
sat down with The Daily Ticker on the sidelines of the Milken
Institute's 2013 Global Conference to talk about whether college is
worth it.
“We have about 21 million people in higher education,
and about half the people who start four year colleges don’t finish,”
Bennett tells The Daily Ticker. “Those who do finish, who graduated in
2011 - half were either unemployed or radically underemployed and in
debt.” Related:The One Skill Every American Needs to Learn
That
average student loan balance for a 25-year-old is $20,326, according to
the Federal Reserve of New York. Student debt is second largest source
of U.S. household debt, after only mortgages.
Bennett assessed the
“return on investment” for the 3500 colleges and universities in the
country. He found that returns were positive for only 150 institutions.
The top 10 schools ranked by Bennett as having the best "ROI" are below
(for the full list he used, click here, and for the latest figures, click here):
Harvey Mudd College
California Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Stanford University
Princeton University
Harvard University
Dartmouth College
Duke University
University of Pennsylvania
University of Notre Dame
He
found college is “worth it” if you get into a top tier university like
Stanford, or study an in-demand field like nuclear engineering at even a
lower tier school. Related: Are Millennials a “Lost Generation”?
The
problem, Bennett says, is people going to second-tier schools, majoring
in less-marketable liberal arts fields, and taking on debt to do so.
Alternatives
to a traditional four-year college include entering the workforce prior
to college, joining the military, or going to a 2-year community
college.
Bennet discovered, for example, graduates of Jefferson
College of Health Science and Nursing in Virginia make more after two
years than those from the prestigious University of Virginia in
Charlottesville.
Also the rise in massive online offerings has lowered costs for taking a course to as little as $150.
As
for what could turn around what some have called a student debt
“bubble” in this country, Bennett has some ideas. They don’t involve
changes to government policy or a massive overhaul of how colleges do
business. They may involve tears and parents’ basements. You can watch
the interview to find out.
Here we are in the baby boom cosmos. What have we wrought?
By
P.J. O'Rourke
Updated Dec. 1, 2013 12:42 a.m. ET
The Baby Boom generation spans eighteen years. Already,
the earliest boomers have reached retirement age. Many are getting more
conservative as they get older. WSJ's Jason Bellini reports.
We are the generation that changed
everything. Of all the eras and epochs of Americans, ours is the one
that made the biggest impression—on ourselves. That's an important
accomplishment, because we're the generation that created the self, made
the firmament of the self, divided the light of the self from the
darkness of the self, and said, "Let there be self." If you were born
between 1946 and 1964, you may have noticed this yourself.
That's
not to say we're a selfish generation. Selfish means "too concerned
with the self," and we're not. Self isn't something we're just, you
know, concerned with. We are self.
Before
us, self was without form and void, like our parents in their dumpy
clothes and vague ideas. Then we came along. Now the personal is the
political. The personal is the socioeconomic. The personal is the
religious and the secular, science and the arts. The personal is
everything that creepeth upon the earth after his (and, let us hasten to
add, her) kind. If the baby boom has done one thing, it's to beget a
personal universe. (Our apologies for anyone who personally happens to
be a jerk.)
Self is like fish,
proverbially speaking. Give a man a fish and you've fed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and, if he turns into a dry-fly catch-and-release
angling fanatic up to his liver in icy water wearing ridiculous waders
and an absurd hat, pestering trout with 3-pound test line on a $1,000
graphite rod, and going on endlessly about Royal Coachman lures that he
tied himself using muskrat fur and partridge feathers…well, at least his
life partner is glad to have him out of the house.
So
here we are in the baby-boom cosmos, formed in our image, personally
tailored to our individual needs, and predetermined to be eternally
fresh and novel. And we saw that it was good. Or pretty good.
Justin Paget/Corbis; photo illustration by Stephen Webster
We should have had a cooler name, the
way the Lost Generation did. Except good luck to anybody who tries to
tell us to get lost. Anyway, it's too late now. We're stuck with being
forever described as exploding infants. And maybe it's time, now that
we've splattered ourselves all over the place, for the baby boom to look
back and think. "What made us who we are?" "And what caused us to act
the way we do?" "And WTF?" Because the truth is, if we hadn't decided to
be young forever, we'd be old.
The
youngest baby boomers, born in the last year when anybody thought it was
hip to like
Lyndon Johnson,
are turning 50. We'd be sad about getting old if we weren't too
busy remarrying younger wives, reviving careers that hit glass ceilings
when children arrived and renewing prescriptions for drugs that keep us
from being sad. And we'll never retire. We can't. The mortgage is
underwater. We're in debt up to the Rogaine for the kids' college
education. And it serves us right—we're the generation who insisted that
a passion for living should replace working for one.
Still,
it's an appropriate moment for us to weigh what we've wrought and tally
what we've added to and subtracted from existence. We've reached the
age of accountability. The world is our fault. We are the generation
that has an excuse for everything—one of our greatest contributions to
modern life—but the world is still our fault.
This
is every generation's fate. It's a matter of power and privilege and
demography. Whenever anything happens anywhere, somebody over 50 signs
the bill for it. And the baby boom, seated as we are at the head of
life's table, is hearing Generation X, Generation Y and the Millennials
all saying, "Check, please!"
To address
America's baby boom is to face big, broad problems. We number more than
75 million, and we're not only diverse but take a thorny pride in our
every deviation from the norm (even though we're in therapy for it). We
are all alike in that each of us thinks we're unusual.
Fortunately, we are all alike in our
approach to big, broad problems too. We won't face them. There's a
website for that, a support group to join, a class to take, alternative
medicine, regular exercise, a book that explains it all, a celebrity on
TV who's been through the same thing, or we can eliminate gluten from
our diet. History is full of generations that had too many problems. We
are the first generation to have too many answers.
Not
a problem. Consider the people who have faced up squarely to the
deepest and most perplexing conundrums of existence.
Leo Tolstoy,
for example. He tackled every one of them. Why are we here? What
kind of life should we lead? The nature of evil. The character of love.
The essence of identity. Salvation. Suffering. Death.
What
did it make him? Dead, for one thing. And off his rocker for the last
30 years of his life. Plus he was saddled with a thousand-page novel
about war, peace and everything else you can think of, which he couldn't
even look up on Wikipedia to get the skinny on because he hadn't
written it yet. What a life. If Leo Tolstoy had been one of us he could
have entered a triathlon, a baby-boom innovation of the middle 1970s. By
then we knew we couldn't run away from our problems. But if we added
cycling and swimming…
So, to the
problems of talking about the baby boom, let us turn our big, broad (yet
soon to be firmed up, thanks to the triathlon for seniors that we're
planning to enter) generational backsides.
But
a difficulty remains. Most groups of people who get tagged by history
as a "generation" can be described in an easy, offhand way: as folks
sort of the same age experiencing sort of the same things in sort of the
same place, like the cast of "Cheers" or "Seinfeld" or "Friends." I'm
pretty sure—as a result of taking Modern Literature in college—that
Ernest Hemingway,
F. Scott and
Zelda Fitzgerald,
James Joyce,
Gertrude Stein,
Ford Madox Ford,
Henry Miller
and
Ezra Pound
were roommates in a big apartment on the Left Bank in Paris in
the 1920s. (If not, I give this idea for a sitcom away for free to the
reader.)
But the baby boom has an exact
definition, a precise demography. We are the children who were born
during a period after World War II when the long-term trend in fertility
among American women was exceeded.
Still,
distinctions among varieties of baby boomers need to be made.
Geographical distinctions are peripatetically moot for us. Distinctions
according to race, class, gender or sexual orientation would be
offensive to baby-boom sensitivities. Furthermore, they'd be beside the
point, because the author—much as he endeavors to be as different from
everyone else as a member of the baby boom should be—finds himself to be
hopelessly ordinary in matters of race, class, gender identification
and which section of Playboy he turned to first when he was 16. But time
is a distinction we all have to endure. And there are temporal
variations in the baby boom.
The seniors
of this generation were born in the late 1940s. The author is of that
ilk. The seniors were on the bow wave of the baby boom's voyage of
exploration. But they were also closely tethered in the wake of
preceding generations. In effect the seniors were keelhauled by the
baby-boom experience and left a bit soggy and shaken. If we wound up as
financial advisers trying to wear tongue studs or Trotskyites trying to
organize Tea Party protests, or both, we are to be forgiven.
Hillary Clinton
and
Cheech Marin
are seniors.
The juniors were
born in the early 1950s. They were often younger siblings of the seniors
and came of age when parents were throwing in the towel during the
"What's the Matter with Kids These Days" feature match. The juniors
pursued the notions, whims and fancies of the baby boom with a greater
intensity. For them, drugs were no longer experimental; drugs were
proven. From the juniors we got the teeny-boppers, the groupies and the
more ragamuffin barefoot urchins of Haight-Ashbury. They hunted up some
shoes when they eventually made their way to Silicon Valley. (
Bill Gates
and
Steve Jobs
were both born in 1955.) But they never did find their neckties.
The
sophomores were born in the late 1950s. By the time they reached
adolescence, the baby-boom ethos had permeated society. Sophomores
gladly accepted sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and the deep philosophical
underpinning thereof. But they'd seen enough of the baby boom in action
to realize that what works in general terms doesn't always work when the
bong sets fire to the beanbag chair. Circumstances had changed. In
college, many of the sophomores attended classes. Some even sneaked off
and got M.B.A.s.
The freshmen were born
in the early 1960s. They felt no visceral effects from the events that
formed the baby boom. To freshmen, the Vietnam War was just something
that was inexplicably on TV all the time, like
Ed McMahon.
Feminism had gone from a pressing social issue to a
Bea Arthur
comedy show that their parents liked, and, by the time the
freshmen were in college, feminism was an essay topic for the "Reading
Shakespeare in Cultural Context" course. Hint: Lady Macbeth hit that
glass ceiling hard.
Now the American
baby boom is the world's future. Everyone on the planet will turn into
us eventually, as soon as families get excessively happy and start
feeling too much affection for their kids. Unless, of course,
extravagant freedom, scant responsibility, plenty of money and a modicum
of peace lead to such a high rate of carbon emissions that we all fry
or drown. But you can't have everything. And you can have a profusion of
opportunity and, at the same time, a collapse of traditional social
standards.
Just look at Western Europe
and the wealthiest parts of Asia and Latin America. They're almost as
useless as we are—with abundant disposable income and ample leisure time
to devote to pointless activities that don't harm anybody much except
ourselves.
Baby-boom-like places all
seem to be engaged in bellicose national political deadlock the way we
are in America. There's much tut-tutting about bellicose national
political deadlock. But it's an improvement on bellicose national
political purpose.
It will take a while
to turn the whole world into baby boomers. For one thing, due to
declining birthrates, the rising generation won't be a boom like we were
with the same weight of numbers on their side. On the other hand, aging
populations in places such as Russia and China will let these babies
speak in booming voices.
Noxious
politics will disappear as all the world's political science classes
happily degenerate into hourlong shouting matches the way our old
Constitutional Law classes did. It's hard to remain truly noxious when
you like being obnoxious better.
Stupid
notions of central planning, nationalization and protectionist trade
barriers will fall by the wayside when everyone is paying as little
attention in Economics as I was.
And
sooner or later, the 1.29 billion people making $1.25 a day, the way we
were, selling "underground" newspapers on the street in Baltimore, are
going to figure out there's a better way. I just received an email from
Nigeria about a rather large amount of money needing to be transferred
to an American bank and requiring only modest assistance on my part.
There
will be no religious fanaticism. We're not a generation who listens to
anybody, God included. In our defense, I doubt God minds us not
bothering about Him. Very few of the people we've bothered—parents,
college deans, the police, LBJ, the psychiatrist at my draft physical,
supervisors, bosses, attractive types in bars—have minded when we quit
bothering them.
World peace is probably
too much to ask. But it will be hard to assemble those huge conscripted
armies that used to fight wars. We'll all have a letter from our doctor
about our deep-seated psychiatric problems and drug use.
Besides,
war is about power. Baby boomers aren't power hungry. Power comes with
that kicker, responsibility. We're greedy for love, happiness,
experience, sensation, thrills, praise, fame, adulation, inner peace,
and, as it turns out, money. Health and fitness too. But we're not
greedy for power. Observe the baby boomers who have climbed to its
ascendancy in Washington. The best and the brightest? They're over at
And all of you tyrannical,
despotic, overbearing squares and wet smacks with your two-bit
autocracies in the butt ends of the world? You shall gather in finished
basements while your revered elders stand at the top of the basement
stairs yelling, "I think something's on fire down there!" Your offices
shall be liberated by raving peaceniks. You shall spend your treasure on
cocaine and rehab. Your junk bonds shall default. You shall form
overage garage bands and try to play "Margaritaville." Your third spouse
shall acquire an
Black Card with a credit limit higher than the U.S. national
debt. Your daughters shall wear nose rings. Your sons shall have pagan
symbols indelibly marked upon their necks. (Unless you belong to one of
those cultures where daughters wear nose rings and sons have pagan
symbols indelibly marked upon their necks, in which case they shall
not.) You shall be perplexed by the Internet. You shall grow old and
addled enough to vote for
Ron Paul
in a presidential primary.
There
is no escape from happiness, attention, affection, freedom,
irresponsibility, money, peace, opportunity and finding out that
everything you were ever told is wrong.
It's really sad that in 2012, one of the few places in
the country that is supposed to be a bastion of open thinking and the
exchange of ideas has become the exact opposite. This past week, the
Fordham University College Republicans extended an invite to
conservative columnist Ann Coulter to come speak at their university.
Coulter, while always controversial, is a multiple-time bestselling
author and a regular on the college speaking circuit.
It took only a matter of hours for the Fordham University administration and other student organizations to convince the college Republicans to back down and cancel their invite. University President Joseph M. McShane released a statement saying
that while he could not force the student body to cancel their
invitation, saying that he was severely disappointed would be a
"tremendous understatement."
That statement also says how student groups are allowed and even
encouraged to invite speakers who will showcase diverse and even
unpopular points of view. Yeah, right.
The fact that the College Republicans folded like a cheap lawn chair
so quickly is utterly pathetic. Now, many conservatives going to college
know what it's like to be outnumbered 30 to 1. It's not fun. Liberals
constantly roll their eyes whenever young Republicans complain about the
bias on college campuses, because of course they do not see it. Hard to
see forest when you're one of the trees.
The mafia should take note. Apparently there is no need to strong-arm
anyone anymore. All it takes is a Facebook page and a petition at
change.org.
What's the whole point of this free speech thing if we're not going
to use it? Newsflash, people: Freedom of speech was guaranteed not just
to protect speech that is popular or fun. There is no point in
protecting speech that no one will ever have a problem with. If no one
ever said anything that never caused a stir, there wouldn't be much
point.
A few decades ago, a generation of free-spirited liberals descended
upon college campuses, raising ideas, starting protests and giving
speeches against things that were considered the norm. A few things have
happened over the past few decades. Those liberals have grown up. Many
of them stayed on the campus. Now that they are the super majority, they
seem to have forgotten the importance of saying something that may not
be popular, but nevertheless is important.
However, as fun as it is, I'm not here to beat up a bunch of
politically correct college liberals. I'm here to beat up on the
cowardly College Republicans, who caved in faster than Michael Moore on a
diet.
The College Republicans at Fordham, instead of backpedaling to
pressure from other groups, should have maybe taken a moment to remind
their fellow students and administrators that colleges are supposed to
be welcoming to all schools of thought.
Perhaps they could have reminded them that while people like Ann
Coulter sometimes say things that other people find offensive, it is
protected speech. When said on radio or television, it is protected
speech not only by the First Amendment to the Constitution, but by the
FCC as well.
According to the TheFreeDictionary.com, the definition of "liberal" is someone who is "Not
limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian
attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry." Well, thank god that's
still true at college campuses like Fordham. You can say whatever you
want to say and invite anyone to speak that you wish .... as long as it
doesn't conflict with anyone else's views.
These sniveling little poltroons may want to remind people that while
Coulter has said things that are critical of other religions,
ideologies and cultures, she has never once gone up to a microphone and
bellowed out a call to arms. She has never said "Let's start a race
war!" That would be hateful, and incendiary. However, she's never done
that.
The Fordham University College Republicans should have reminded those
who had a problem with Coulter's appearance about some of the other
speakers that have been allowed on college campuses to speak before. Dr. Norman Finkelstein, Michael Moore, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Cindy Sheehan, and Kamau Kambon
have all spoken at colleges before, often saying some very harsh
things. (Kambon in particular had a little gem about the reasons to kill
all white people.) They could also have discussed the fact that several
universities have employed people far more inflammatory than Coulter.
Coulter may be brash and inflammatory, but she is also a brilliant attorney, a syndicated columnist and the author of multiple New York Times bestsellers. Coulter is a self-described polemicist,
and is quite good at it. She knows exactly how to get a reaction out of
people to highlight her point, much like the aforementioned Mr. Moore.
After that, the sniveling College Republicans might have mustered up
enough courage to realize that they were within the right. Even if
Coulter was not their first choice (The ever-safe and boring George Will
was), they should have realized that they were not breaking any rules.
Perhaps they didn't like the idea of facing several hundred protesting
students. Maybe they wanted to keep getting invited to all of the really
cool parties on campus.
Finally, the College Republicans should have taken a moment to tell
people that they do not have a right to not be offended. No one is so
blessed in this life that they will never have to worry about hearing
something they do not like. It does not matter if they are man or a
woman. It does not matter if they are an ethnic minority. You are going
to hear things in life you don't like. At the end of the day, if people
do not like what is being said on radio or television, they can turn the
dial. If they do not like something someone might say in a speech, they
can stay in their dorms.
These cowardly lions could have asked for those outraged at their
decision to take up a full page ad in the college newspaper admitting
once and for all that they want the liberal champions to be able to say
what the conservative ones cannot. Why not? Just ask them to admit they
want a double standard! Naw, that'd take some guts.
If these students are not willing to take a little heat and stick up
for what they supposedly believe in, then they should disband their
group. While they're at it, they might as well apply duct tape to their
mouths and join the opposition. If you're going to go with the path of
least resistance, why not go the whole nine yards?
The Founding Fathers knew that freedom of speech was perhaps the most
precious and valuable freedom that one can ever possess. If a group of
college kids aren't going to have the gonads to stand up for it, then
what is the point of it? Those at Fordham University, including the
college president, should be ashamed of themselves. However, it's not
something totally unexpected. The College Republicans at Fordham
however, should feel even worse.
There is no point in anyone joining their group or supporting them
ever again if they are not going to have the courage to stand up for the
basic rights that we are all supposed to enjoy. You can't cave in every
time some special interest group gets pissed off. You will never stop
capitulating. Ever.
Coulter would have given her speech to those who supported her as
well as those that had the courage to hear someone with a differing
viewpoint. There would have been some protests the day of, but by the
next week, no one would have cared. "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter
and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." -
Abraham Lincoln
Pity the baby boomers. No generation seems more widely despised, even among its own members. A quick Google
search shows just how common this is -- the search string "baby boomers
are" will be auto-completed with "selfish," "evil," and "the problem."
Shortening the string to just "boomers are" adds "the worst generation"
to your results. Ouch. How did a generation raised on peace and love in
the age of Woodstock come to symbolize everything that's wretched and
wrong with the world today?
Maybe it has something to do with these trends. Income inequality has exploded
Baby boomers were
part of a generational bulge born immediately after the end of World
War II. The leading edge of that bulge began coming of age during the
late 1960s, which means boomer power began to rise toward its peak
around the time Ronald Reagan became president. The growth of boomer
economic and political power that began during the 1980s also happens to
coincide with the beginning of a long-running trend toward greater
income inequality:
Source: 2012 Economic Report of the President, whitehouse.gov .
To really drive the point home, let's look at how the top 1% has fared during the era of peak boomer power:
Source: 2012 Economic Report of the President, whitehouse.gov .
As a result of this widening imbalance, fewer households are earning
something close to a median income. The shift in income brackets has
pushed more people to the upper and lower bounds of American earners:
Source: 2012 Economic Report of the President, whitehouse.gov.
Partly because of this "hollowing out" of the middle class, the
median income has been stagnating for more than a decade, which happens
to be the period when you might expect the post-boomer Generation X to
begin coming into its own peak earning period. When adjusting for
inflation, median incomes appear to have returned to levels last reached
during the dot-com era, when the boomer generation had its greatest
number of peak earners:
Source: 2012 Economic Report of the President, whitehouse.gov.
This isn't to say that the entire country is doing worse. In fact,
boomer-led households made it through the recession relatively
unscathed, and a big reason median incomes have stagnated has to do with
the incomes of the peak-earning age bracket. In 1999, that happened to
be the leading edge of the boomer generation, who were born between 1946
and 1955. Today, the same age bracket, now made up of the second half
of the baby boom, is earning 17% less at the median, in real terms, than
the first-wave boomers did in 1999. No wonder even the boomers can't
seem to stand their own generation:
When adjusted for inflation, the median net worth of households led
by people aged 45 to 54 was 10% lower in 2009 than it was in 1984,
according to the Pew Research Center. Those led by individuals aged 55
to 64 -- currently the leading edge of the boomer generation -- was 10% higher
in 2009. On the other hand, households led by people between ages of 35
and 44, which today is the primary age range of Generation X, had 44%
less median net worth in 2009 than the first-wave boomers did in 1984.
Those younger than 35 had two-thirds less net worth in 2009 than the
same age group did in 1984, which means that boomers generally had
almost three times as much real wealth (and potentially much more than
that, in the case of older boomers) during Reagan's first term in office
as their children did at the start of President Obama's first term. Taking more and leaving less
Those graphs help
explain why many people feel resentful toward the boomers, but they
don't really offer a compelling reason why the boomers should be so
widely reviled. It's not as if there's a wave of workers turning around
and knocking down the pay rate of its successors. However, boomers hold
plenty of influence in the area of public policy. If you want to
understand the national debt, a good place to start would be the 1980s,
when boomers started to come into their own:
Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve .
America's debt-to-GDP ratio was actually declining through the 1960s
and 1970s, before the Reagan Revolution brought a new attitude to power.
This isn't to say that a national debt is inherently evil. Much depends
on where that money goes. Debt-to-GDP was higher during World War II --
but all that spending did help win the war, and it also helped build a
massive manufacturing infrastructure. In the early postwar years, much
government spending went toward "investments," which the think tank
Third Way defines as spending on things like "building roads, teaching
kids, and curing disease." However, surging demands from entitlement
programs have flipped the script, and the United States now spends more
than $1 trillion more per year on entitlements than it does on public
investments. In 10 years, as more boomers retire and begin to draw on
Social Security and Medicare, that gap will grow 150% larger.
Generation X has another two decades to go before it can start
drawing on Social Security. Millennials won't start getting payments
until around 2050. Since the Social Security trust fund is only
projected to cover full benefits until the early 2030s, It shouldn't be
surprising that the younger generations wonder if Social Security will
even be around when they retire. "Dang kids, get a job!"
If you're not familiar with "Old Economy Steve,"
you might want to take a look. It's probably the one meme that best
captures everyone's frustration with the baby boomers, particularly how
oblivious they are to the economic realities of the day. One of Old
Economy Steve's common refrains is "You need to go to college so you can
get a good job," usually paired with the ease of paying back the costs
of a degree. However, college degrees haven't actually translated to
greater earnings since millennials started graduating.
Source: 2012 Economic Report of the President, whitehouse.gov .
College costs, however, have doubled since the turn of the century and have grown 600% since the boomer wave left college:
The steady growth in medical costs is also interesting, particularly
as boomers begin to retire and draw on Medicare. Everyone else remaining
in the workforce has had to deal with higher health costs even as their
employers (if they have one) steadily eliminate health insurance
benefits:
Source: 2012 Economic Report of the President, whitehouse.gov .
But wait! We have Obamacare now, right? Obamacare is great news for
uninsured boomers, but it's kind of a mixed bag for their children. Josh
Barro recently wrote that Obamacare "is designed to be a fiscal
transfer from the young to the old, the healthy to the sick, and the
rich to the poor." Young men will be hit hardest, as their premiums may
increase by more than 50%. In California, where Obamacare was
implemented earliest, the average premium for the currently uninsured
will be $200 to $300. That might not seem like much, except for the fact
that the real median income for younger workers has been in decline for
more than a decade.
Old Economy Steve also likes to point out how much higher the minimum
wage is for today's kids. Well, the minimum wage was at or near
inflation-adjusted all-time highs throughout our hypothetical boomer's
childhood:
Even though the minimum wage wasn't quite $2 an hour in 1970, Old
Economy Steve could have paid for his college tuition by working about
14 hours a week for minimum wage while at school, since the average
annual tuition back then was about $1,200. Today, it takes more than
twice as much work at minimum wage for the same result.
Let's not forget Old Economy Steve's old-economy investments, either.
A young boomer in 1990 (in the 25-35 age bracket) could buy a new house
with about four years of the median household wage for his age group.
It's roughly the same for today's young millennials, except that the
average young college grad (and you almost need to be a college grad now
to get a job that pays well enough to buy a house) leaves academia
saddled with more than $35,000 in debt -- about 70% of the 25-35 age
bracket's annual income, which has not changed in real terms since 1990
-- compared with average college debts of about a tenth the annual
household wage in 1990. Few boomers would have even racked up that much,
as the last year of boomer babies would have turned 21 in the mid-'80s.
And, of course, boomers also enjoyed the longest sustained stock market
rally in history:
In nominal terms, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJINDICES: ^DJI)
grew by 14% per year from the start of 1980, when the first boomers
hit their peak earning and investing years, to the start of 2000. Even
if you adjust for inflation, boomer investors who followed only the
simplest indexing strategy earned nearly 10% a year after inflation for
two straight decades. How have the next generations done?
Not quite so well -- the next 13 years produced nominal returns of
just 1.3% per year for index investors, and negative real returns when
adjusted for inflation. It hasn't been anywhere near as easy for
children of the baby boomers to build a nest egg as it was for the
boomers themselves.
What do you make of this? Are these charts just trying to blame
boomers for trends largely out of their control, or does there appear to
be something to the complaints that boomers have taken everything and
left nothing for the next generation?
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Fool contributor Alex Planes
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