The Millennial Industrial Complex pt. 1

There's a great BIG piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week that talks about how SO many people have made money off of BSing companies on how to "deal" with young people. All these OLD aging Baby Boomers that can't seem to get to know their own children enough to know how to manage them. So corporations call these people in to help them understand their new hires because we're so foreign.

I've written about this before after a WaPo piece annoyed me by giving these people any kind of cred when I believe they're the most skillful con artists of all time.

This is a pretty long piece because the Chronicle is written by them academics that like to say the same thing over and over again... I'll shorten it... because in politics it has to fit into 30 seconds. But we'll still have a few 30 second clips...

It begins with the idea that "Millennials talk is contagious." This is true because there are so many of us and we tend to set trends for two reasons. One, sheer number of us creates a solid purchase power, second is that we tend to have strong relationships with our parents. And because of those relationships with our parents they tend to ask us what they should buy when it comes to things they don't understand ... like technology, electronics, the latest in hip apparel.. So we're deciding marketing for our generation (the largest generation in history) and to some extent our parents generation (Baby Boomers are the 2nd largest generation in history). That's a lot of people, so companies talk about Millennials because its the biggest target demographic to communicate to.

They continue that all of these "consultants" are different.

"But just for fun, let's stereotype them as smart, successful, and full of unshakeable opinions. Although they have described one another's work as "wrong," "unempirical," and "wildly mistaken," these experts have something in common: They are products of their time. In an era when the wants of young consumers have become a fixation for colleges and businesses alike, these unlikely entrepreneurs have fed a world with a bottomless craving for labels."

See... I told ya... I would modify this by saying that for fun we should just all admit that they're a waste of money, particularly in an unstable market.

The piece goes on to outline the history of youth bashing which apparently goes back to Socrates. "Criticizing the young is inevitable," they say, "but so, too, is change." This is why we should just agree on criticizing everyone all the time. Lets be inclusive. Or lets make fun of academics, cause its something we can all get behind.

Blah blah blah... something about how people say we are a generation of heroes like the GI Generation. I love us, but we're not heroes. We're just us. Blah blah blah. Another academic

"Generational images are stereotypes," says Arthur E. Levine [some academic from some college place], now president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. "There are some differences that stand out, but there are more similarities between students of the past and the present. But if you wrote a book saying that, how interesting would that book be?"

There's other stuff but I got lost in the text and I've tweeted a search party. Part 2 tomorrow.

h/t to Ian who came up with the headline