Pinched by Don Peck Page A

during the Depression carried scars for the rest of their lives; even forty years later, unlike peers who had been largely spared in the 1930s, they generally displayed a lack of ambition, direction, and confidence in themselves—a belief that they were powerless before the fates.Today in Japan, according to the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development, workers who began their careers during the “lost decade” of the 1990s and are now in their thirties make up six out of every ten cases of depression, stress, and work-related mental disabilities reported by employers.
    A large and long-standing body of research shows that physical health tends to deteriorate during unemployment, most likelythrough a combination of fewer financial resources and a higher stress level. The most-recent research suggests thatpoor health is prevalent among the young, and endures for a lifetime. Till Von Wachter, an economist at Columbia University, and Daniel Sullivan, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, recently looked at the mortality rates of men who had lost their jobs in Pennsylvania in the 1970s and ’80s. They found that particularly among men in their forties or fifties, mortality rates rose markedly soon after a layoff. But regardless of age, all men were left with an elevated risk of dying in each year following their episode of unemployment, for the rest of their lives. And so, the younger the worker, the more pronounced the effect on his lifespan: the lives of workers who had lost their job at thirty, Von Wachter and Sullivan found, were shorter than those of workers who had lost their job at fifty or fifty-five—and more than a year and a half shorter than the lives of workers who’d never lost their job at all.
    J OURNALISTS AND ACADEMICS have thrownvarious labels attoday’s young adults, hoping one might stick—Generation Y, Generation Next, the Net Generation, the Millennials, the Echo Boomers. Recently, the
New York Times
reporter Steven Greenhouse has aptly suggested Generation Recession, or simply Generation R. All of these efforts contain an unavoidable element of folly; the diversity of character within a generation is always infinitely larger than the gap between generations. Still, the cultural and economic environment in which each generation is incubated clearly matters. It is no coincidence that the members of Generation X—painted as cynical, apathetic slackers—first emerged into the workforce in the weak job market of the early to mid-1980s. Nor is it a coincidence that the early members of Generation Y—labeled as optimistic, rule-following achievers—came of age during the Internet boom of the late 1990s.
    Many of today’s young adults seem temperamentally unpreparedfor the circumstances in which they now find themselves. Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has carefully compared the attitudes of today’s young adults with those of previous generations when they were the same age. Using national survey data, she’s found that to an unprecedented degree, people who graduated from high school in the aughts dislike the idea of work for work’s sake, and expect jobs and career to be tailored to their interests and lifestyle. Yet they also have much higher material expectations than previous generations, and believe financial success is extremely important. “There’s this idea that, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to work, but I’m still going to get all the stuff I want,’ ” Twenge told me. “It’s a generation in which every kid has been told, ‘You can be anything you want. You’re special.’ ”
    In her 2006 book,
Generation Me
, Twenge notes that self-esteem in children began rising sharply around 1980, and hasn’t stopped since. By 1999, according to one survey, 91 percent of teens described themselves as responsible, 74 percent as physically attractive, and 79 percent as very intelligent. (More than 40 percent of teens also