Meredith Bagby's Rational Exuberance: The Influence of Generation X on the American Economy
Perlstein, Rick
RATIONAL EXUBERANCE: THE INFLUENCE OF GENERATION X ON THE NEW AMERICAN ECONOMY by Meredith Bagby E.P. Dutton, 1998 274 pp $24.95 IHAVE BEFORE me a book on the political economy of Generation X...
...beyond what level does metaidentity simply become identity...
...And: "the average household net worth in 1998 for those under 35 was $29,450 and for those over 65 was $133,760...
...It's just, as her jug-eared mentor would put it, that simple: "Today we are told by economists that the government is transferring huge quantities of wealth from future generations to current generations by fostering unsustainable retirement plans like Social Security and by running up debt that future 112 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 generations will have to pay...
...There was also a coda that the earlier, nonOppenheimer-funded Third Millennium poll did not include...
...She is going to be talking about her generation and her generation's children and why we can't let these things continue the way they are," Ross BOOKS Perot tells U.S...
...She did not reach such heights of spokespersondom through metaphysical handwringing...
...At the January press conference in which the TM/Oppenheimer Funds poll was released, there were more catchy sound bites on the popular distrust of Social Security50 percent of Americans think that the Super Bowl is a better investment than their FICA dollars...
...Her selfpublished booklet, "The First Annual Report of the United States of America," attracts media attention, then a book contract, and before long, HarperCollins has a tidy little annual franchise selling the same kind of compendium of charts and graphs that any decent newspaper publishes during the budget markup period every year...
...Or that America's economic downturn began "during the Carter administration...
...This year, Third Millennium released the results of a new Social Security poll, co-sponBOOKS sored by the investment company the Oppenheimer Group...
...Indeed...
...But they also found that all age groups are more disaffected than they were twenty years ago...
...When you hear about the Wall Street firms who have been quietly pushing the Social Security debate in the direction of privatization these last few years, think Oppenheimer Funds...
...For a paper called "Is There a Generation X?" Stanford's David B. Grusky and Eric Rice studied surveys on American subjective well being from the seventies to the nineties and found that people in their twenties are indeed more dejected than their counterparts in years past...
...and there was Bagby, this time wheeling out the findings that a majority of young Americans think the soap opera General Hospital will outlast the Medicare system...
...We go our own way...
...In this book there are so many loose threads the ugly political undercushion peeks through on nearly every page...
...The median incomes of households headed by those fifteen to twenty-four fell something like 10 percent between 1980 and 1995, and for families headed by those twenty-five to thirtyfour it fell 3 percent...
...And so Bagby...
...A philosopher might begin the debate with questions: When does life begin...
...She will present federal budget data as if it were a financial statement to the stockholders of a large corporation...
...Our entitlement programs, DISSENT / Spring 1999 n 113 BOOKS she writes, are "financed by a huge pyramid scheme . . . . Through programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government has become a kind of intergenerational Robin Hood—taking money from the young and giving it to the old...
...GENXERS ARE hard workers, good capitalists...
...Amid her glowing profiles of successful entrepreneurs, there is not a word on failed businesses...
...Richard Lamm, the former Colorado governor who was the Reform Party's number two...
...Coca-Cola, it turns out, spent something like $60 million on its new highcaffeine Surge brand, mostly for ads—about twice the AFL-CIO's annual political budget...
...Entrepreneurship, she writes, is "a promising path for minorities who have not traditionally been afforded opportunities in corporate America...
...This is old news, of course...
...One would hope that forty years from now there are more corporations run by people in their sixties than in their nineties...
...Hell, if someone like Meredith Bagby can make it as an entrepreneur, who's to say you can't, either...
...For us, it is autonomy at all costs...
...In 1997 Swing magazine named her one of the most powerful Americans in their twenties...
...Perhaps so many young people cherish fantasies of tycoondom for the same reason they greet space aliens with more credulity than social programs: glorifying the most insecure career path, they play a game of chicken with the insecurity they instinctually fear, but cannot admit to fearing...
...Scratch that statistic and you realize at once it is mere rhetoric: it says nothing about the reality of Social Security, gives no indication if these would-be beneficiaries are right or wrong in their incredulity...
...Toward unions GenXers are indifferent, because GenXers "tend to be pro-free enterprise and free trade...
...She writes: "Thau says Third Millennium takes money from a wide variety of interests—businesses and private individuals, liberal and conservative— but is careful not to accept too much money from any one source, to avoid becoming the pawn of any one interest...
...and Tim Penny, a former Democratic congressional representative from Minnesota, now closely associated with the libertarian Cato Institute...
...Its focus is national, 'to build consensus around solutions to America's national debt, Social Security, health-care, environmental, racial, and educational crises.'" Do a little digging and you learn that its board of advisers includes Sylvester Schieber, the most gung-ho privatizer on the thirteenmember federal bipartisan Social Security Advisory Council...
...RICK PERLSTEIN'S book on the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign and the rise of the conservative movement will be published next year by Hill & Wang...
...Our ethic puts personal freedom, happiness, and lifestyle choices above the house in the suburbs, the new car, and the many other status symbols that characterize the 'work ethic' of past generations...
...The fact is that Generation X is poorly positioned to defend its interests in the political realm, whatever they may actually be...
...The peace of our present gives us the time to secure our future...
...Bagby is more than a disinterested chronicler of that particular argument...
...She asks us to consider the question of abortion...
...In contrast, in this period the incomes of people over the age of 65 skyrocketed 25 percent...
...But measured by the challenges of the day a generation can change the course of human history...
...One of the few truly eye-opening revelations in this book is that in the quest for the demographic grail, consultants began going around with video cameras to record twentysomethings in their very own lairs, selling the tapes in packages of three for $3,800 to the likes of Liz Claiborne and Mattel...
...This from someone who graduated magna cum laude in economics from Harvard...
...X could only be solved—be rendered visible—by comparison to what it was not: pushy, preening, present Baby Boomers, possessed of job security, plain old good cheer, and the knowledge of where India can be found on a map...
...Most young adults realize the importance of 'defining a generation,' " she declares...
...Bagby cites one study that suggests people eighteen to thirty-four start 70 percent of all new businesses in America...
...Bagby is blithely unaware that this has all been said before, that when you tug the loose thread of any argument for disinterested technocratic expertise, politics will always show up under the ragged upholstery...
...All of this raises the legitimate question of why you should be detained by a review of a book this bad...
...Senator Jay Rockefeller called them "selfish...
...Why...
...She does not note that the nation's fastest growing occupational category is cashier, or that the fastest growing employer is the temporary-help agency Manpower International—meaning GenXers by dint of the age effect are more likely to find themselves mired in a segment of the economy where flexibility, autonomy, and control are but a dream...
...So it is that Generation X's penchant for identifying with the Great American Crapshoot of entrepreneurship may not be all to the good...
...Buried within the menagerie of political youth groups she profiles with apparent disinterestedness in the chapter entitled (of course) "Neither Elephant nor Donkey" we find this: "Third Millennium [TM] is on the front lines as a growing national advocacy and educational organization for young people...
...Another statistic, however, gives things a spin...
...For those aged thirty-five to sixty-four, the number is 36 percent...
...The economist...
...Sixty-six percent believe Washington should "act now" on Social Security...
...I will limit my criticism here to her technical competence...
...Bagby, who is about as ironic as a bar of soap, only detains herself for a page or so fretting about how there is no there there, about how much is lost in the broad strokes of generational discourse: "our ethnic diversity, complex political views (combining aspects of liberal and conservative), and the many facets of our multiple cultures and backgrounds...
...But security is a scarce quantity these days, scarcer, more and more young people seem to believe, than a UFO...
...No other choices—more social democratic solutions like assessing FICA on income above the current cap of $68,500, dedicating the federal budget surplus to Social Security reform, or investing part of the trust fund in the market— were provided, and presto: backed by the moral authority of a "leading advocacy group for young Americans," Oppenheimer Funds could wave the American people's "consensus" on government-sponsored private retirement accounts in reporters' and politicians' faces...
...By way of predictions she offers that Generation X "will gradually climb the corporate ladder, largely replacing the Boomers...
...It would be hard to find interest-group hustle of a purer ore in all of Washington...
...The Social Security issue has received more proposals than Elizabeth Taylor...
...Here is Bagby testifying in 1997 in front of the Senate Finance Committee in favor of adjusting the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to take in the Boskin Commission's recommendation that the current index overstates inflation, causing the government to hand out too much Social Security cash...
...We combine a belief in sixties idealism with social and economic pragmatism," says a recent college grad and Web entrepreneur...
...It is for the reader to decide whether Bagby is selfish...
...It begins, innocently if incompetently enough, with the signal gesture of its genre, arguing that Generation X does not exist, long live Generation X. Douglas Coupland's 1992 coinage of the term was brilliant, of course, in exactly this surly way: Xis a variable, an absence, a locational placeholder...
...the same year she was keynote speaker at the twenty-ninth annual Youth Leadership Conference, sponsored by Senator William V. Roth...
...A free-market system creates social progress precisely because of those new businesses that fall by the wayside—providing, or so the theory goes, market signals about what is valuable and what is not...
...This time TM recommended both partial privatization and an immediate raising of the eligibility age for Medicare...
...Not to put too fine a point on it, but entrepreneurs, God love them, are souls seized by a measure of fantasy...
...an apparition conjured up by its contexts...
...Its author, a young woman named Meredith Bagby, regularly testifies before Congress as the authoritative voice of the views and aspirations of her generation...
...Less remarked upon, however, is the psychological quirk that sets the whole process in motion: most people assume they will succeed...
...In an astonishing example of misplaced blame, a twenty-four-year-old men's magazine editor frets, "The whole concept of 'lifestyle' is demonic— from hell or from the government...
...This issue is crucial to the future of Americans in my age group and the generations that follow...
...What course, then, but to make virtue of necessity...
...What remains, of course, is to interpret the numbers, and here, Bagby is typically short114 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 sighted...
...And now she has written her manifesto, complete with blurbs from Perot and Roth...
...The course of a human generation is but a breath in time," this author writes...
...They're just too busy starting businesses...
...Respondents were asked to rank their preferred fixes for the system...
...Sixty-five percent favored reducing benefits for retirees earning over $100,000...
...Only 58 percent cited autonomy...
...There's been enough discussion," said TM director Thau...
...To shoot, briefly, some fish in their barrels: "We have been determined by the negatives and positives of an America era that saw moms transformed into full-time workers, become masters of their own reproductive systems, and engineer elections through platforms they supported . . . . We explore...
...By the next year, when hearings were held by the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, TM had made itself so ubiquitous with its nonpartisan voice of young American schtick that it was invited to represent the youth perspective by both the Democratic and Republican members of the commission...
...A lawyer would turn to precedent, Roe vs...
...Imagine how foolish today's Americans will seem to future generations if we sit idle...
...Flexibility, autonomy, control are our buzzwords," Bagby writes...
...Bagby's Generation X understands that as the world becomes more complex and demanding we need more caffeine, less politics...
...They will look at us in dismay and wonder how we had the gall to pass on to them needlessly another trillion dollars in debt . . . . I think the other members of this panel would agree that we must not make this a political issue . . . . We hope the AARP [American Association of Retired Persons) will show similar restraint in the CPI discussion...
...By contrast, "Generation X is putting a `rush' on the soft drink market like no previous generation...
...The plusses of this behavior are legion as we lead our nation and our world into truly global, color-blind, nonideological, and borderless, thought, action, and production . . . . we are lining up now in Washington, in state capitals and local courthouses, on Wall Street, Main Street, and Madison Avenue to see that reforms grow out of methodical transcendency and applied practicality . . . ." Then comes the second page...
...So it is not surprising that the subject is granted fourteen paragraphs, one alone on the booming market for caffeinated spring water, while unions get three...
...We question...
...She says it was the cold war that brought us "the two-hemisphere world," that "no nation has ever survived without one central language," that "The threat of Soviet aggression . . . did little to improve the standing of public school teachers who saw federal spending on education stagnate...
...Generation X acquired a look, a feel, a heft—an identity...
...And if you believe that's because of entitlement programs: well, then, you'll probably also believe that the $4.5 trillion national debt was largely caused "by creating unsustainable social programs like Social Security and Medicare...
...Bagby delivers two sets of statistics that deserve attention...
...In our trial and error," Bagby writes, "we are constructing a new way of thinking, a new code of judgment...
...Dutton, 1998 274 pp $24.95 IHAVE BEFORE me a book on the political economy of Generation X that resembles nothing so much as a hundred mediocre freshman compositions strung together end to end...
...The code is based on the foundations of economic thought...
...Society needs to make demographic assumptions about people in order to sell them goods, collect taxes, dole out government benefits...
...Flexibility, autonomy, and control would be the buzzwords of toddlers, had they the vocabulary to properly express themselves...
...A certain eccentric billionaire, overfond of charts and graphs, comes calling, and Bagby is invited to join every viable presidential candidate as a speaker at the 1995 United We Stand convention...
...Statistics about generations are meaningless unless you control for the effects of the period in which they are collected and for experiences that are constant for those at a certain age in any time period...
...IT STARTED at Harvard...
...She was plucked from her job as financial analyst at Morgan Stanley to become "Generation X financial corespondent" for the CNN Financial Network...
...Bagby, a bright-faced and ambitious scholarship student from Florida, hits in 1994 on an idea for a senior project...
...End of argument...
...She says: 'If, whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, we can say that abortion is not the desired end of pregnancy, then the real question is, how do we reduce unwanted pregnancies?' We do it through sex education, teaching abstinence, or through the proliferation of contraception...
...The economist seeks what is common among differing factions and builds a solution...
...In 1996 the campaign got a little quieter when the Wall Street Journal reported that privatization could be "the biggest bonanza in the history of the mutual fund industry...
...Meanwhile, the Roper Group asked in 1993 what people found the "very important" benefits to having money...
...I ask your indulgence...
...Her case for entitlement reform rests on statistics she presents on how much more poorly young people are faring in today's economy compared to other age groups, and also to young people in previous decades...
...Her Generation X is like Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon: All the children are above average...
...News and World Report...
...She tends to repeat herself, but the point is put most succinctly in a chapter title, "A Whimper, Not a Bang: Shouldering the Great Society...
...But in its infinite repetition, the UFO statistic still moved mountains in instilling a popular defeatism about the possibility of a simple fix for the Social Security problem...
...We look beyond the ideologies of both parties to focus on pragmatic solutions,' says Richard Thau, the executive director...
...And good capitalists: "I'm doing this to make money," women's snowboard apparel magnate Kristin Roach, twenty-two, is quoted, "but I also have a cause here: to support women in sports...
...when is a bicycle messenger who moonlights as a performance artist just a bicycle messenger who moonlights as a performance artist?—it all became serious, and settled, soon enough: there was money to be made, after all...
...They mistrust Washington, naturally...
...65 percent of Americans ages eighteen to thirty-four think they're more likely to see a professional wrestler in the White House than a Social Security check...
...This generation of Americans must use the tools of logic, pragmatism, and economics with ethics to conquer this last frontier...
...Replace "minorities" with "young people," deliver it with an ironic sneer, and you have something like the classic psychic portrait of Generation X. BOOKS Or perhaps an achingly true psychic portrait of all of us...
...Those who think of a single human generation as lasting a few decades and the Renaissance as spanning a few centuries can be excused for conjuring up visions of Methusalahs running around with paint 110 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 brushes...
...Young people don't stay away from the polls because they're retreating from the world...
...They chafe at authority, and revel in flexibility, of course...
...Judge for yourself...
...Seventy-eight percent said security...
...Since everyone agrees on the desirability of sex education and handing out contraceptives, presto: problem solved...
...If this were not the case, why start a new business...
...Fifty-four percent of those eighteen to twentyfour report interest in starting a business...
...It defines itself as standing outside standard structures: 'Third Millennium isn't liberal, moderate, or conservative, but postpartisan...
...In the 1994 congressional elections, 17 percent of those aged eighteen to twenty voted...
...The falling median income for young people is a combination of an age effect and a period effect: young people always tend to be in lower income brackets than old people—the age effect...
...sic] Wade...
...She offers by way of evidence the generation that "brought us the high art of the Renaissance...
...Its chairman, Jon Fossel, also leads the Investment Company Institute (ICI), the lobbying arm of the mutual funds industry...
...Sixty-one percent of voters over the age of sixty-five cast ballots...
...all people in lower income brackets tended to do worse than people in higher income brackets in the past few decades—the period effect...
...And wouldn't you know that Generation X thinks a lot like Ross Perot...
...I'll bet you the biggest steak in Texas your reaction will be, 'I would not want to follow Meredith.'" You would not want to follow Meredith the way you would not want to follow Oliver North...
...The world has DISSENT / Spring 1999 n I I I BOOKS become more complex and demanding, so there is a greater need for drinks that provide stimulation...
...The most popular, with 76 percent of those surveyed, was "giving workers a choice where to invest their Social Security dollars...
...In the mid-nineties ICI led a loud charge for Social Security privatization...
...And so, soon enough her own definitions are forthcoming...
...Its Board of Directors includes .. . Meredith Bagby...
...Bagby quotes C.J...
...Soon Bagby was appearing on Good Morning America, Larry King Live, NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw...
...we so dearly want what we cannot have...
...Third Millennium is perhaps best known for a 1994 poll in which it revealed that more GenXers believe in UFOs than that they will ever receive a Social Security check...
...Amid her so many asinine sentences, the meaningless polls that pass by like soap bubbles, the craven plugs for her pals and comrades, the dippy generalizations, Bagby pens one thing that reveals more than she realizes...
...Rapp, president of Rochester-based Global Beverages: "Caffeinated drinks satisfy the needs of a demanding lifestyle," he says...
...Where does the duty of society lie, to the unborn or to the liberty of women to chose...
...Thirty-nine percent preferred raising the retirement age...
...In short"—to quote the wisdom of Meredith Bagby—"not to react, but to pro-act...
...But if all this became the occasion for endless bouts of the sort of rampant coffeehouse deconstructionism the buzz told us "we" favored— can coherence be defined by a refusal to cohere...
...We invent...
...cOMB THROUGH enough sludge, of course, and you're bound to find something valuable...
...She beams from the flap of this book with a face so winsome, so telegenic she seems almost to loose herself from the page and give you a hug...
Vol. 46 • April 1999 • No. 2
