Downward Shift in Mobility
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The purpose of this paper is to critically explore and discuss the sociological problems facing the forty-six million Americans, aged eighteen to twenty-nine, who were born between 1964 and 1975. It will be the thesis of this paper that this generation is experiencing a downward shift in mobility which, for the first time, finds them unable to duplicate, let alone surpass, their own parents' standard of living. This paper will attempt to shed some light on the forces that brought this into existence and the likely course this phenomena will take. Frank Levy has noted that, by accident or design, articles reviewed in daily newspapers gave rise to a sense that American income inequality was growing (Levy, 1-2). This sense had been building for over a decade and had generated a list of fears as follows: (1) American families are splitting apart into the rich and the poor while the middle class vanishes, (2) The American job market is developing two tiers in which middle-income manufacturing jobs are lost and replaced by a few high-paying jobs and many low-paying jobs in the service sector, (3) Young workers, the baby boomers, are worried that they will not live as well as their parents, and (4) a growing proportion of children are being raised in poverty, and it is arguable that welfare programs themselves are responsible for this poverty through the creation of a growing, dependent underclass (Ibid., 4). What went wrong? Levy suggests that, like people caught in the midd
. . .
nlarging their benefits" (Lamm, A32).
Lamm's voice is not the first to be raised against generational privilege. Mark Featherman, a librarian at the Jewish Theological Seminary, complained about the massive national debt created in the 1980's by a nation unwilling to live within its means. He lamented that it would be his generation faced with payment of the bill:
America had a party in the 1980's and we, the
twentysomething generation weren't invited. While high flying S & L robber barons were making millions with
other people's money, while men of bad conscience were constructing investment houses of paper, we were making our way through college and graduate school, taking out loans to finance our educations. Odd, then, that now that the party's over, we should get stuck with the bill . . . But for those of us just entering the work force, austerity is not something we have chosen; it was chosen for us. The baby boomers have a long-term lock on the upper levels of the marketplace, and we face increased competition for entry level jobs. Who will be made to pay for the good times of the last decade? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that it will be us, the youngest and rawest members of the labor force
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2125
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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