In the world of corporate propaganda, there tends to be a lot of puffery about how important it is for corporations to cater to the changing tastes of the millennial generation — meaning people born between the 1980s and the 2000s.
This is essentially bad information which leads corporations and investors to make bad decisions. Western governments need to massage the bad data about the economic performance of this burgeoning demographic section — particularly of a middle class which is badly burdened by nonproductive debts and uneconomic skillsets. The problems are especially acute in Europe, where high double digit percentages of this generation remain unemployed, despite extremely expensive education certificates certifying how much they ought to be worth.
Part of what makes this generation different is that it’s the first major demographic chunk impacted by mass immigration, both in Europe and the US. Just as school performance data tends to be blamed on bad policy rather than a weakening genetic stock, so does performance in the workplace.
From the perspective of Western states and their institutional friends, it’s important to puff up the future prospects of the future cash streams which will be funding all of those outstanding bonds — quantitative easing nonwithstanding. It’s important to look at labor force participation data rather than unemployment — because students don’t count as ‘unemployed.’ By those measures, young people are working less, while their elders are spending more time in the workforce.
Pundits will tend to portray marriage rates as more of an outmoded measure of morals, but it’s the institution that actually allows societies to replenish themselves. To the extent that Europeans have, by and large, become enervated, and are unwilling to follow these patterns, is the extent to which these countries are burning themselves out. There’s a big complex of pseudo-cameralist thought at the think tanks and in the big publishers dedicated to promoting a narrative that this will all work out, given that we all ‘muddle through’ and that ‘unorthodox monetary policy’ winds up delivering results which it never has.
The other notion is that European countries can somehow magically replace the core demographics who aren’t reproducing with immigrants from the third world.
There is a sort of millennarian hope that a new magical education policy will be developed which will ‘close the gap,’ despite no evidence that this will happen, and indeed decades of evidence to the contrary — that, owing to genetic differences, there is no replacement for over a thousand years of divergent evolution, that there is no teaching method which can correct for genetic differences between populations.
This isn’t a generation that’s all that likely to take off in the way that these states need them to take off. It has some people who can be salvaged. It’s important to counter the false story that these people will somehow start producing enough cash to cover the public debt loads which have been foisted upon them, because avoiding the happy-talk sooner will help us solve these problems sooner.