This is why Malcolm Harris’s new book, Kids These Days, is a landmark. Remarkably for an author of a trade book on such an on-trend topic, Harris makes a politically radical argument, undergirded by a coherent and powerful Marxist analysis ... In Harris’s view, we are, down to our innermost being, the children of neoliberalism ... Harris works through this argument by following the millennial through the stages of life — as far as we’ve yet gotten ...Harris is a peerless observer of the harrowing economic costs of 'meritocracy,' and his chapter on college abounds in withering apercus ...convincing that there’s more to this phenomenon than an artifact of measurement ... The summation Kids These Days gives us is harrowing: here is a generation hurrying to give in to the unremitting, unforgiving commodification of the self.
In Kids These Days, the journalist and critic Malcolm Harris restores a good deal of precision to the business of defining the millennial and generational discourse in general ...folds into the central analytic claim: what makes the millennial situation distinctive is that it has produced workers who are too well-trained for their own good ... Through this lens we get a sweeping sketch of the bleak, anxiety-ridden lives of young Americans ... Harris is at his most forceful when arguing that society conspires to make life worse for young people ...Harris gives the impression, correctly, that he doesn’t see young people as essentially good or as the new agents of historical change ... To this end, Kids These Days disavows a prescriptive conclusion. Harris is sceptical about traditional forms of political strategy, even questioning the usefulness of protest.
Harris’s book is a methodical deconstruction of one of the stupidest tropes to degrade recent discourse. The ‘millennial’ is created, not born, as Harris shows, and as is true of all creations, her qualities reveal more about her makers than they do about her. From preschool to college to their entrance into a precarious labor market, Harris tracks how young people in America operate within a system that reinforces the economic, educational, and political injustices that sort us all into upper and underclasses … At times, Kids These Days can feel ruthless. Its injustices build, one on top of another, and wall the reader into claustrophobia. But that’s not Harris’s fault; the feeling will be familiar to anyone of a certain age … In Kids These Days, Harris doesn’t parse out many of those solutions. His book is more diagnosis than prescription.
In his new book Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, he warns that we ought to take the historical formation of this cohort seriously, because it represents a single point of failure for a society veering toward oligarchy and/or dystopia ... Harris’s thesis is simple: young people are doing more and getting less in a society that that has incentivized their labor with the promise of a fair shake, and that older generations are profiting handsomely from the breach of contract ...highlight of the book is its admirably lucid précis of higher education, the student debt crisis, and the institutional wealth accumulation it fuels ...rest of the book, unfortunately, is more hit-or-miss ...a very white book, in ways that it might not have been if not for Harris’s insistence on capturing the experience of a monolithic millennial cohort ...Harris paints millennials as a renegade version of the generation of heroes.
The most essential passage in Kids These Days, Malcolm Harris’s new book on the 'making of millennials,' does not appear until its 113th page and is not really about millennials at all ...a book about late capitalism, or at least capitalism, lately, about how the economic and political forces that have dominated the past thirty years of American life have conspired to produce a generation more managed, exploited, and uncertain than those that came before. It is a book about millennials, but for Harris millennials are only the symptom... In fewer than three hundred pages, he surveys the myriad hot takes on millennials...the story of this 'human capital,' and of millennials as the products of an economy designed to cultivate that capital at every stage of life ... All that feels left for us after Kids These Days is the dying world we kids are heir to, the empty struggle over the widening pit, each of us tending to our precious human capital until the end.
In his well-researched and depressing book Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, Malcolm Harris does the important work of putting the generational experience of American millennials within a historical context and critiquing the capitalist structures that put them in this precarious position. It is important work, because, as he writes, ‘soon ‘millennial’ won’t refer to those rascally kids with their phones, it will be a dominant character of a new America’ … Harris’s book is a fine gift for the insufferable Baby Boomers in your life whose brains have been dulled by Fox News, or for the liberals who spout off about millennials with their narcissistic selfies and dangerous entitlement.
...a comprehensive, data- and research-driven look at the trends and anxieties that led so many young people to zealously support Sen. Bernie Sanders’s quixotic bid for the Democratic nomination … Harris sets out to dispel much of the conventional wisdom about his peers — that they’re entitled, tech-addicted and in need of constant validation — using a novel approach. He analyzes millennials through the lens of ‘human capital’ … In his keenness to knock down every unfair generalization about his generation, Harris peppers his book with straw-man arguments, some so absurd that they distract from the potency of his message … All these quibbles — and I realize the critiques make me sound like a grumpy old Gen Xer — might be excused if Harris offered ideas for how millennials and future generations could band together to restore upward mobility. Instead, he practically shrugs in the concluding chapter.
Millennials — defined by the author as those born between 1980 and 2000 — have been sold on the idea that if they work hard in school, forfeiting play and creative time for work and sports, and go on to a four-year college, where they continue to work hard, then a solid, well-paying job awaits them once they graduate. But as Harris, an editor at New Inquiry, points out, many in that age group have discovered there is no pot of gold at the end of that particular rainbow ... After his intense analysis of this consumer-based downward spiral, the author provides several possible remedies that might ease the situation — but only if millennials step forward now and begin the process of change ... Harris still has plenty to learn, but he provides an informative study of why the millennial generation faces more struggles than expected.
Harris, a New Inquiry editor and millennial, contends that the rich human capital (as demonstrated by high GPAs, AP classes, enrichment courses, advanced degrees) his generation represents has been exploited by educational institutions and employers ... Harris makes powerful points: health insurance, pension plans, job security — the American laborer’s one-time birthrights — are no longer guaranteed ... Harris gives the off-putting impression that he expects nearly everything in life to be remunerative. Readers will come away agreeing that millennials have gotten a raw deal but unconvinced that they represent the new proletariat.
