Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

KIDS THESE DAYS

Malcolm Harris

Human Capital and the Making of Millenials

Being a 20-something in the world, today, is harder than ever. Malcolm Harris knows this from personal experience. Born into a generation that has been called “lazy, entitled, selfish, and shallow” (Joel Stein inTIME, 2013), Harris instead sees his fellow millenials as products of a winner-take-all system that has molded his peers intohyper-efficient, hyper-competitive, low-cost labor machines.

Far from being lazy, millennials, who grew up with an unprecedented lack of unsupervised time, have been giving away free labor since childhood, to institutions that have shifted the costs of human capital development onto students and workers. They worked on homework, sports, extracurriculars, went into crippling debt to keep working in college, then entered the job market to compete fiercely for the privilege of giving away more free work to employers (internships).

Harris merges economics and the pop signifiers of the past 40 years into a stream of social criticism - “the pedagogical mask” and the Spice Girls, the student debt industry and the birth of the “tween,” mass incarceration and Miley Cyrus.

This is a serious, data-driven look at what it means to be young. ALL THAT WORK FOR NOTHING challenges stereotypes and puts forth a new hypothesis: that Millenials are the most valuable human capital the world has ever seen, and they won’t be sharing in the surplus they have been molded to create.

Malcolm Harris is a columnist for Pacific Standard and an Editor of The New Inquiry. His work has appeared in The New Republic, Bookforum, the Village Voice, and The New York Times Magazine.

Available products
Book Published 2017-11-07 by Little Brown
Book Published 2017-11-07 by Little Brown

Comments

This fiercely smart book is not just another 'millennials killed chain restaurants' kind of thing. Instead, Harris dives deep into the ways that the millennial generation has been shaped by the capitalist economic forces at work now in America. . . It's a must read for anyone who cares about the future of our society.

Named one of Fall 2017's most anticipated books by New York Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Nylon, and LitHub

It is difficult to believe nobody has written this book before, although it is fortunate that Harris-who manages to be quick and often funny without sacrificing rigor-is the author who ultimately took up the task. In fewer than three hundred pages, he surveys the myriad hot takes on millennials-they're lazy, they're entitled, they're narcissists who buy avocado toast instead of homes, slacking on Snapchat at their unpaid internships-and asks, 'Why?

Harris writes clearly and thoughtfully on key issues facing this generation today. . . [he] reveals the political, cultural, and economic climates that millennials need to navigate, along with the new issues, never seen in previous generations, millennials must address. Readers interested in sociology of class, economic history, and the millennial generation will find plenty of fascinating food for thought here.

An informative study of why the millennial generation faces more struggles than expected, despite the hard work they've invested in moving ahead.

Kids These Days is the best, most comprehensive work of social and economic analysis about our benighted generation. Malcolm Harris matches Naomi Klein for depth of research and Jane Jacobs for systemic vision. If you're a millennial who feels economically jinxed and unfairly spat-upon, but can't say why, cram this book in your brain; if you think millennials are lazy and entitled, cram this book in your mouth. Fascinating, infuriating, and bulging with receipts, Kids These Days shows us why no space is safe.

Malcolm Harris's thesis is the kind of brilliantly simple idea that instantly clarifies an entire area of culture: Millennials are the way they are-anxious, harried, and 'narcissistically' self-focused, though hardly lazy or entitled-because the neoliberal economy has made them so. When we raise children in a world that reduces people to 'human capital', then bids down the price of that resource, what else should we expect? Kids These Days is deft, witty, unillusioned, and brutally frank. Read it and weep, puke, scream.