When I was young, we had a lot of depression babies still around. And when they spoke of their childhood, it usually took the form of, "We had no food in the house when I was growing up. Soon as I graduated High School, I was drafted and sent off to World War II."
These were people who had lived through a lot of deprivation and hard times. There was really no appropriate response to these stories. Compared to them, even the poorest kids in the 70s were spoiled-ass rotten. Most of us responded to the stories with sarcasm: "Yeah, yeah, you walked to school in the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways."
The decades after World War II were a period of mind-boggling prosperity in America. Prior to World War II, we were still largely an agrarian nation, and our industrial revolution had a whole lot of ugly social aspects to it.
After World War II, it was truly a golden era where things got better and better every year. The rich got richer. The poor got richer. The middle class prospered. An average wage-earner could have a house, a car, and a stay at home wife. He could have kids and could afford to send them off to a state school and pay for it without really having to save for it. That was the norm. It wasn't even considered hard to do.
During the 70s, though, we had some big adjustments. Unemployment was high because a massive influx of baby boomers all hit the labor force essentially at once. The Arab Oil Embargo caused huge disruptions in the nations energy supply.
So, things started to unravel a little bit in my childhood. The unraveling reached it's worst pretty much the year I graduated High School: 1982. We had a massive recession. Inflation was double-digit. Unemployment was at record highs.
If I live to be 100, I will never forget the memory of being unable to find a job in my native Ohio. Not fast food, not retail, nothing. There just weren't any jobs.
I goofed around, tried college, joined the Army and by the time I got out in 1987, America was in full-blown boomtown mode again. Computers were king and I was getting a degree in Information Systems.
I remember driving home from school one day and picking up a hitchiker. His name was Henry and he was out of work, thumbing his way from West Texas to Louisiana where a relative had a job lined up for him. He had worked the oil fields until the early 80s. By the late 80s, oil was too cheap to be worth drilling.
He seemed like a kind older fellow. Asked me what I was "taking up" at school. I told him computers and he said that seemed like a good field to get into. When I dropped him off, I left him my lunch bag and apologized that it was already partially eaten. He was grateful for it, anyway.
Even during that boom-time, Henry was a bit of a metaphor for how older workers whose skills were perfectly suited to a previous era, were easily discarded when things changed.
There was another recession when I graduated college in 1993 (this would turn out to be a recurring theme in my life: whenever I needed a job, there would always be a massive recession.)
Still, after sending out 150 resumes, getting 4 callbacks and 2 interviews, I had two job offers. One was for, I believe, $27,000 and the other was for $24,000.
Now, to give these context, that would be like chosing between a job at $37,500 and $42,254 today.
I picked the lower paying job because I liked the technology better, it was a bigger company, and it had a better training program.
I worked for that company for 11 years, leaving them in 2004. At the time, I made roughly $105,000 if you included all my bonuses. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $126,000 today.
So, I'm sorta the evil mirror-image of a depression baby. I grew up during a time of incredible opportunity and good paychecks. Even though my timing seemed cursed, there were opportunities for me whenever I needed them.
Even when I joined the Army in desperation, I got an enlistment bonus of $8,000. (That's $18,000 today, folks.) My college fund was worth $20,100 ($40 grand today). I attended school on a full-tuition scholarship and pocketed every dime. Without a scholarship, though, full tuition for a texas resident was around $300 a semester back then.
I was even lucky on my military service: I got to serve entirely in peacetime. The sum total of my combat experience was a handful of bullets shot over my head when I was on a guardpost on the DMZ. Even the options you took in desperation in my day were pretty damned good.
So, now, when I see what young folks are up against, I feel sorta bad. Generations are supposed to get better from one to the next. It's not supposed to be a situation where you tell young folks that you had it a hell of a lot better than they do. Unfortunately, I just don't see any rational way I can try to insist that kids today have it easier than I did. I just don't think that's true.
Now, lest you resent me because I am wealthy while young people struggle, unfortunately for me, my personal fortunes pretty closely resemble those of my younger co-workers.
In 2004, I started a business. It went well for a while. At its peak, we employed 16 people and had seven figure annual revenues. I was within spitting distance of hitting the top marginal federal income tax rate. Then, the economy tanked, the industry changed, and 8 years after I started the business, I was folding it up.
I'm pretty much in the same boat as my younger coworkers, now. Just a heck of a lot older, fatter and balder, and looking at a much smaller retirement check.
We're lucky, though. We work for the federal government. We have paid vacation. We have health benefits. We have a pension for our retirement. Our paychecks aren't that great, but I would hardly call them bad.
Trouble is, these jobs are hard to get. Like 120 applicants for 4 openings type stuff. (And you only get to be an applicant if you have a law degree or an MBA and we recruit at your school.) Even though the federal government doesn't pay top dollar (again, they don't pay badly, but they don't pay all that well), they just don't have that many job openings. There are a LOT of unemployed kids and even the federal government can, at best, only hire a small number of them.
So, yeah, things used to be better. I hit the worst job market since the great depression when I graduated in 1982. And when I graduated from college in the early 90s, it was another horrible recession that cost George Herbert Walker Bush the White House. We still had options, though. Options that today's kids just don't have.
Things will change if we ever get back to boom-times. Back in 2001, I remember it being so hard to hire good workers that I talked a kid into coming on full-time while he was still a community college student. He made $40,000 a year to start and by the time I left, I think he was closer to $50,000. The company gave him full benefits and paid him 100% tuition reimbursement so he could finish his degree. (And yeah, increase those numbers by 20% or so to account for inflation. When times were good, a kid with one year of college and incredible computer chops could command the equivalent of a $50,000 starting salary.)
Will we ever get back to that? I don't know. That company, an employer I loved, was an old school industrial company that believed it had an obligation to its employees. Companies like that are rare, and most of them that may have been that way in the past aren't that way, now. They provide good benefits and big paychecks only if they have to, and right now, they absolutely don't have to.
If things ever do get good again, it doesn't appear it'll happen anytime soon. We're five years into this terrible economy and we probably have at least another 5 years to go before things get back to anything approximating normal. There's also no guarantee that the return to normal has to happen anywhere near that fast. This could be the new normal: a depressing new normal of diminished opportunities for workers of all ages.
So, In the mean time, pull up a chair and let me tell you what it was like to graduate school and have multiple job offers back in the good old days.
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