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 middle of the Great Depression, we are really not sure.
Levy offers only pieces of an explanation:
The large OPEC oil price increases of 1973-1974 and 1979- 1980 each cut purchasing power by 5%; worker productivity suddenly stopped growing after 1973; large increases in energy prices, a fast-growing labor force, a 10-year inflation that produced its own momentum, and a corporate structure that couldn't adapt to slow- 3 growing markets are only pieces ...