What’s
next?
Last
summer, two authors asked Fast Company readers a simple question:
“Are you ready to consider that capitalism is the real problem?”
For
millennials, the answer seems to be increasingly yes. “A lot of
young people don’t believe in it anymore,” Ana Garcia, a college
junior, told the Wall Street Journal in a recent article on the
topic. “We don’t trust capitalism because we don’t see
ourselves getting ahead.”
A 2016
poll by the Harvard Institute of Politics found that just 19% of
Americans aged 18 to 29 identified themselves as capitalists; only
42% claimed they supported the economic system. Another Harvard poll,
released on December 5, found that two-thirds of that same age group
is fearful for the future of the country. Just 14% think we’re
headed in the right direction.
It’s
not difficult to connect the dots between young Americans’
rejection of capitalism and their concern over the future of the
country. The millennial generation is the one, after all, that came
of age and entered the job market during or right after the financial
crash of 2008, which was precipitated by the failure of the large
financial institutions that both symbolize and drive the capitalist
system.
It’s
also, according to the World Economic Forum, the first generation in
modern memory to be on track to be worse off than their parents. The
median earnings of millennials in 2013 were 43% lower than someone
who was their age and working in 1995. Even though average wages have
inched slowly upward in recent years after a long period of
stagnation, they’re still 8% lower than they were before the 2008
recession. And average student debt, has, since 2008, climbed from
around $24,000 to over $37,000.
Richard
Wolff, an economist who’s been lecturing on anti-capitalism for the
past 50 years, has witnessed this shift away from trust in the
economic system firsthand, and has seen how instrumental young people
have been in this movement. The change in consciousness he’s
witnessed among his students, he told Fast Company in September, is
instrumental in precipitating a move toward a different economic
system–a shift he thinks is so far underway as to be too late to
stop. “The sheer beauty of this is that nothing fuels this movement
more than capitalism’s own troubles, and the displeasure,
disaffection, and anxiety it produces,” he says.
So what
might that alternative look like? Ask millennials, and they have a
strong preference for a more socialist model: According to a 2016
Gallup poll, the popularity of capitalism and socialism is
neck-and-neck among younger Americans, while older generations are
still distrusting of socialism. Younger people are also the ones
driving the surge of the Democratic Socialists of America, which
endorsed 15 winning candidates in the November election. And
Americans aged 18 to 29, according to a recent WSJ poll, are more
likely than any other age bracket to say that they believe the
government should be doing more, not less, to help people in need.
If
anything, the Trump administration is only serving to galvanize
millennials’ beliefs. The president himself is perhaps one of the
most extreme products of capitalism, and his success signifies what
many feel to be the irrationality of the system. And as the
Republican Party inches closer to passing the tax bill that will
increase inequality and strip students of their already-limited
financial resources, while leaving even less to help people at the
lower end of the economic spectrum, the call for a system that
prioritizes humanity and equity over inflating the profits of a tiny
fraction of the already well-off will only continue to grow.
Source,
links:
Comments
Post a Comment