Month: April 2012

By now we are well aware of how much it sucks to be a young adult in 2012 America. Yeah, it sucks to be a lot of ages, but the older generations at least have a few consolation prizes – the tail end of pensions and health benefits from employers, and a high likelihood of getting something out of Social Security and Medicare – even if insufficient. There isn't much else to say about unemployed, college graduate twentysomethings working at Starbucks or living at home.

This editorial from a Harvard Business Review writer raises an excellent, albeit incomplete, point about people currently in the 25-40 range before coming to one of the least satisfying conclusions since my visit to the I-10 Massage Cabana next to the Stuckey's (Exit 297).

The rules keep changing while you are mid-way through the game. The bedrock principles of Boomers' financial plans were: (1) A good education will help you get a good job and (2) Putting money into a home is the best way to build the equity for long-term financial security. Both of these rules have failed Generation X.

This, I think, is an important point. When people in my age-peer group talk about our careers and financial status, one of the things that comes up most often is how Our Parents just do not seem to understand that things have changed. We have conversations with our older friends or relatives who say things like, "There's no health insurance? That can't be right. Let me see the forms next time you visit," or, "Why haven't you bought a house yet? Renting is just throwing money away." They mean no harm; if anything, they mean to help (through nagging). That does not make such advice any less frustrating or impractical. People who graduated from college in the 1960s have a hard time grasping the concept of graduating from college and not being able to find a job. You must not be looking hard enough!

Now the goalposts have moved, and the part of the older generation that does understand the new reality has done what it does best: vote Republican and blame us for being dumb enough to take their advice. Why did we sink so much money into houses we can't afford? Why did we borrow 0,000 to go to law school?

This requires complete amnesia of everything that our society encouraged people to do for, oh, 75 years prior to 2008, but that's not a problem. They do amnesia well. The author also neglects the important third pillar of the Boomer Advice: stocks. Stocks! Stocks! Stocks! Mutual Funds and whatnot too. Ameritrade! 401(k)! Jackpot! Yeah, that one didn't work terribly well either. Turns out that we're not all sitting at home, retired at 40 and e-trading all day.

Maybe the real problem is that, having realized that the House-College-Career advice is no longer good, relevant, or useful, they find themselves lacking an alternative.

The urge to lecture us remains, but they appear to be running out of plausible platitudes. For those who realize that it's in poor taste and logic to play the blame game, the most popular advice these days appears to be:

More than ever, X'ers are being challenged to invent their own path forward. As it has been before, that path will almost certainly be less guided by conventional rules and less dependent on traditional institutions, than by X'ers' own sense of self-reliance and quest for multiple options. I encourage X'ers to re-imagine the next 30-50 years of your life: most of you won't have the institutionally-funded retirement options that many Traditionalists have enjoyed or the housing-based nest egg that provides many Boomers with the flexibility to blend volunteer and paid work over the years ahead. But you have your own ingenuity and entrepreneurial skills with which to build a unique future…X'ers should avoid even trying to follow the Boomers' path and, instead, have confidence to bring your own pragmatic sensibility both to organizational leadership — and to the design of your own life plan.

This is almost indistinguishable from the advice we might give someone on their way to prison: Figure it out, and good luck.
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Mom and Dad had pensions and job security, we have our "own sense of self-reliance and quest for multiple options." Neat.

So my friend Bob and I are wooing the same woman. That this is fictional should already be apparent, as no one has used the word "wooing" seriously in about 40 years. Suspend your disbelief for a moment.

I've gone on a few dates with her and she seems nice. Bob has done the same. The time has come to take the relationship to the next level, so she has to choose.
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We are both decent guys, and not without our respective merits. Bob and I each get one final date to make our pitch. I go first and promise that, despite my gargoyle-like appearance and mouth like a longshoreman, I'm loyal, supportive, and funny. And I do a lot of housework to boot, should we ever move in together. She seems pleased. I like my chances.

After she meets with Bob, he and I convene to talk about our experiences.

I relay that my experience was positive and I think she has an interest in me. Bob agrees; "I felt like you were going to be the choice, so I had to sweeten the deal.

" What does that mean, I ask? "Well", Bob replies, "I offered to pay her rent.

And to buy her a car. And I guaranteed that I'd come over once weekly to clean her house."

"Jesus", say I.

"And do her laundry."

"Oh, Bob. That's…that's pitiful. Have a little dignity."

"Save the sour grapes for another time," Bob says. "I think you're just jealous. And upset that she picked the better man."

This actually worked? "Yes," Bob tells me. "It's official. She and I are now a couple." While I find this surprising and sad, I realize that a woman who would choose a partner based on such criteria must be fickle, shallow, and altogether incapable of long term commitment. I am better off without her, and to Bob I wish nothing but the best in what is likely to be a bad relationship. Unfortunately Bob and I aren't very close anymore, as he seems to derive great pleasure from gloating about his superiority over me and his desirability as a mate as evidenced by his ability to snag this questionable excuse for a woman. "Bob," I say gently, "she picked you because you're basically paying her to be your girlfriend. She might think you're a total loser for all you know." The words fall on deaf ears. He is proud of his "accomplishment." I pity him.

Then self doubt sets in. Should I have done more? Am I undesirable? Will I be alone forever? Is this what it takes to find a partner these days, and I need to get with the program? Rejection is never easy to deal with and all of these negative thoughts are natural responses to it. Ultimately, though, I tell myself that I did the right thing. She was cool but I'm not about to start paying people to date me. That makes absolutely no sense. Then again, I suppose the rationality depends entirely on how desperate one is to be in a relationship.

Neat story, right? And on a totally unrelated note that I will leave here for no particular reason, two counties in Georgia just outbid several other sad sack states (both Carolinas, Mississippi, etc.) for a new Caterpillar factory and 1000 to 1400 jobs. All it cost them was $60-80 million in incentives and the promise of a docile workforce that would be thrilled to get $11/hr.

Greg Giraldo, another brilliant dead guy, from his final CC special (and album) "Midlife Vices":

The economy's been terrible, of course. But you know what? There's some good things about the economy being so bad. People are keeping things in perspective for the first time ever. It's unbelievable, people saying things like, "you know what? I hate my job, but in this economy, I'm happy just to have my job. A lot of people don't have their jobs, you know? I didn't get a raise this year, but in this economy, I'm happy just to have what I have.
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A lot of people don't have that. I have a shit car, But in this economy, I'm happy I still have my car. A lot of people don't even have cars in this economy.

This is the setup for, of all things, a buttsex joke. Giraldo was well above average at the "Let's get serious for a moment…" setup with a completely juvenile punchline. But the reason that the audience bites on this intro is that it is quite true.

The Great Recession has prompted a noticeable downshift in the kind of out-of-control materialism that we all love to decry. For the first time in my lifetime, people seem to be unashamed of, you know, buying used things, or making things, or driving small cars, or specifically avoiding all of the usual American "Hey look at how much money I have!" behaviors (that usually signified little more than a high tolerance for borrowing money – but that's another story). Lazy journalists have told the story of "Downshifting" repeatedly since 2008, those endlessly derivative Sunday magazine features about Bonnie and Dale who used to make $250,000 per year, got laid off, and now understand the simple pleasures of used Volvos*, NPR, recycling, knitting sweaters, camping vacations, and planting an organic kale garden.

It's understandable why people think this is a good thing. Certainly the attitudes in our society toward wealth, consumption, and quality of life were (and remain) seriously out of whack in recent years. The kind of values these stock characters exemplify – thrift, simplicity, and so on – also happen to be in line with my own. I should be happy about people "keeping things in perspective for the first time ever." But every time I hear these stories I want to find the responsible six-figure-earning segment producers responsible for it and go on a choking spree. "Keeping things in perspective" is a good idea, except, as is the case in this great experiment in economic insecurity without social upheaval, when it is a more polite way of saying "Lower your expectations" and "Know your place.

"

It would be great if Americans decided to drive small cars because they realize "Hey, a three person household doesn't need a damn SUV!", but that suggests behaviors changing due to lessons learned. What these tales always imply, though, is that people are merely learning to (insert trite phrase like "make do with less" here). They traded the SUV for a small car because they can't afford the SUV anymore. People aren't "downshifting" because it struck them that working 60 hours per week is a waste of one's life; they're doing it because some guy in Indonesia is now doing their job.

Someone with a sunnier disposition might consider this a net positive regardless. Anything that makes Americans behave less like teen girls let loose in the mall with an unlimited credit card has to be good, right? The problem is that we have all seen the data repeatedly and we know that some Americans – not many, but some – are doing extraordinarily well these days. Far from downshifting their lifestyles, they're doing the exact opposite. If I was a cynic, I might think that all of this Luddite glorification of gardening and handcrafts and home cooked meals and bicycling and thrift was just a way for the people in control to streamline costs. And that's without even getting into the further shift in the employee-employer balance of power implied by lines of reasoning like, "My job sure does suck a lot of ass, but I should be happy just to have it!"

I want to buy used clothes and repair them with a sewing kit because I want to buy used clothes and repair them with a sewing kit – not because I work full time and can't afford a $15 pair of new jeans. There's a big difference between those two scenarios, a difference that journalists and social commentators – lovers of subtlety, one and all – have neglected to appreciate. Shocking, I know.

* This autocorrects to "vulvas." Be careful.

OK, so we know that lotteries are machines designed to extract money from the poor and redistribute it to the middle and upper classes in the form of property tax relief, school funds, and merit-based scholarships. This is the point at which one of our friends on the right reliably steps in to remind us that no one points a gun at the poor and forces them to buy lottery tickets. This is indisputable. It also leaves us with the question of why people willingly participate in something that siphons off income they can scarcely afford to spare in exchange for catastrophically lousy odds of striking it rich. Anyone who is poor, has been poor, has close friends or family who are poor, or works in close contact with the poor understands that long term financial planning and rational money management are not traits the poor possess in great quantity. Accordingly many people simply conclude that the poor are not smart enough to behave in their own rational self interest. This is a common way of reaching our preferred conclusion that the poor have only themselves to blame for their predicament. In reality, of course, the poor know very well that state lotteries are screwing them. That doesn't stop them because the experience of being poor in the United States is little more than getting screwed repeatedly ad infinitum until all parties are completely desensitized to the act.

Lotteries are the descendents of older, informal, private-sector prize systems like "policy wheels" (often run by neighborhood merchants as a way of distributing money people would then use to shop) or numbers games (usually run by organized crime). It wasn't until the 1960s – New Hampshire in 1964, to be specific – that states legalized, and then dove headlong into, the lotto business. The key difference for consumers when control shifted from the black market to the public sector was that the odds got a lot worse and the payoffs got much larger. Oh, and the winners got the honor of paying taxes on their prizes. Yes, lotteries actually got more exploitative when the mob stopped running them. The theory behind state control was and is simple: find a way to boost flagging revenues without taxing people who vote, and since gambling and playing the numbers are going to happen anyway (as Pennsylvania Governor Rendell so animatedly pointed out on TV recently) the state might as well get some tribute out of it. That the same logic could be applied to drugs and other illegal vices escapes most of our elected officials.

But I digress. On the original point, poor people play the lottery because they have one all-consuming goal: to be not-poor. It does not matter if the odds are ten to one or a billion to one; if the possibility exists that a given poor person can wake up the next day and instantly not be poor, he or she is going to take that chance. I have known poor and borderline poor people who play $100+ on the lottery every week. I have tried (and failed, of course) to explain that saving the $100 every week would give them over $5000 at the end of just one year. But he and I think differently about these things. The inability to save money or plan for the future are classic stupid habits we develop when we're poor, and it has the added bonus of guaranteeing that you will stay poor as well.

Blowing that $20 every day on scratch-off tickets is just one of the dozens of ways that the poor get reamed on the regular, and it's actually one of the few that offers any upside (even at long odds). They're treated unsympathetically (at best) by the police and courts. They can't afford the food that won't make them fat and sick, and they can't get to the grocery stores that sell it anyway (Not to worry! The neighborhood has a liquor/convenience store on every corner). Their own neighbors rob them and push the most addictive drugs on them. Predatory lenders offer usurious short term loans and, increasingly, credit cards and mortgages. They live among the waste products of the dirtiest, most polluting industries in their area. Politicians and planners use them as experimental subjects, shuffling them through one hare-brained Urban Renewal Plan after another. What few jobs are available are usually backbreaking and low paid – although that never stops The System from regularly reminding them that they work too little and make too much. Most of all, though, they are regularly ripped off by scam artists selling hope – the for-profit education industry, evangelists, politicians, banks, casinos, and, yes, lotteries.

Taking money from people who have little and are powerless against even the slightest chance of escaping poverty is the kind of activity usually associated with the Mafia and street gangs. State governments are more than happy to play the part though, and they've gone far beyond anything organized crime ever did in terms of exploiting the desperation of the poor and selling them false hope with terrible odds. Lotteries that take their money for the explicit purpose of giving it to people who are financially better off is evidence of how completely our governments – particularly here in the South – have abandoned even the pretense of holding the moral high ground. They've identified the victims of an exploitative system and chosen to use that to their advantage. The poor, for their part, are all too willing to play along. Spending $20 on the lotto every day may not appear to make sense until we realize that to the poor, there's no point in saving that $20 – someone or something else is just going to come along and swindle them anyway. Might as well blow that money on what might be, but never is, their literal ticket out of a life of grinding poverty.

Here in Georgia, many college students (especially, but not exclusively, at public schools) receive something called the HOPE scholarship. It was created in 1993 by then-Governor and eventual Senator Zell Miller, the Joe Lieberman of the South. The program is uncomplicated, being both entirely merit-based and entirely funded from the Georgia Lottery. High school students qualify by getting a GPA over 3.0 or scoring above the 85th percentile on the SAT or ACT. The program was sold to an enthusiastic voter base as a way to help those unfortunate kids who happen to be academically successful but poor. Predictably, it hasn't quite worked out that way.

We know two things. One is that higher income areas and families are the ones that can afford expensive ACT/SAT prep courses. This coincides with the de facto segregation of the public school system and the tax base. The other is that the Lottery is disproportionately played by the dirt poor, and especially poor blacks (see extensive analysis of the economics and demographics of lotteries here or here). In politics and public relations, the state never fails to trot out some examples of the kind of student the program ostensibly aims to help: poor, and usually black or Hispanic, with appropriately hardscrabble biographies.
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Hiding behind these anecdotes are the hard data, which reveal that the vast majority of HOPE recipients are students who would be in college anyway.

There are a few red flags here. First, if suburbanites with above-median incomes are big fans of a program aimed at helping minorities and the poor, it's a safe bet that it's not actually helping minorities and the poor. Second, when such programs are limited in geographic scope to Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, and South Carolina, it is a safe bet that a) it's a terrible idea and b) its primary beneficiaries are going to be upper-middle class homeowners and/or businesses.

The reward structure of the HOPE program is misguided enough on its own; funding it with lottery money is downright malicious. Look at where lottery programs advertise, and more importantly how. Georgia uses slogans like "Today Could Be the Day!" to sell hope at liquor stores and gas stations in run-down neighborhoods, and they're not unique in that regard.
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Michigan has used the slogan "The Rich: Join Them!" just in case its residents don't grasp subtlety. New Yorkers are told, "All You Need is a Dollar and a Dream!" while Chicago advertisements play on the geography of wealth and poverty ("How to get from Washington Blvd. to Easy Street!") and outright deception ("This could be your ticket out.") Several years ago our nation's capital scraped the bottom of the barrel by using a photo of Martin Luther King with the tagline: "His vision lives on. Honor the dream – play DC Lottery.
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Even a casual familiarity with the statistics and the marketing of lotteries reveal that they are and always have been a lower class phenomenon. Not content to use the money extracted from the urban poor for "property tax relief", red states are leading the way in simply giving the money to the children of the wealthy and near-wealthy. Income redistribution is a hallmark of creeping socialism – that is, when the poor benefit from it.
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It turns out that using the government to move money from one person to another is A-OK when the money flows up the socioeconomic ladder.