So What, Who Cares (vol 2, issue 100) Why reality does bite for Generation X

Hello! Welcome to a new month. To quote Henry Rollins, "August, the summer's last messenger of misery, is a hollow actor."

I am delighted to learn that Mr. Rollins has many strong opinions about the month of August.

On a possibly related note: I am a sucker for any autobiography penned by someone in the entertainment ecosystem, and they make delightful pool- or beachside reading. My recommendations are Allison Arngrim's Confessions of a Prairie Bitch, Slash's eponymous autobiography, and Pamela Des Barres' I'm With the Band. I have Duff McKagan's It's So Easy & Other Lies on tap for a pending weekend away this month.

What are your favorite celebrity autobiographies? Tell me what they are and why via Twitter or email.

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It is no fun to be either a Gen Xer or a Milennial. So conclude a ream of economic experts, who report on the many, many ways in which people born from 1965-1994 are hosed:

38% of Generation Xers have more debt than savings, the highest percentage of any recent generational cohort. This is due to a combination of high student loan debt load and low-to-no wage growth:

While the stock market has rebounded, real wages, after factoring in inflation, haven’t improved for most employees since before the recession, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Twenty-three percent of Gen Xers received no raise and 26 percent just a 1 or 2 percent bump in the past twelve months. Even millennials got more.

Generation X lost 45% of its net worth during the Great Recession when the stock market slumped, compared to the 25% hit on the chin Baby Boomers took. The long-term result:

"Gen-X is the first generation that's unlikely to exceed the wealth of the group that came before it and face downward mobility in retirement," said Erin Currier, director of Pew's Economic Mobility Project. "They have lower financial net worth than previous groups had at this same age and they lost nearly half of their wealth in the recession."

Nearly a third of Millennials live with their parents, thanks to the one-two punch of the Great Recession and an incoherent real estate picture. If that Millennial has a child already, the percentage jumps to 40%. (Not helping: a rising number of Baby Boomers are moving into urban rental housing and they can afford to pay more, thus decreasing Millennials' chances of getting into an affordable place on the same block.)

So what? It looks like the people born between 1965-1994 simply chose to be born at the wrong time. A recent analysis of the growing generational wealth gap found that most Americans tend to experience an economic arc: not terribly liquid in your young adulthood, then able to amass capital and hang on to it from your 40s on. However, today's young adults are starting off poorer and less likely to reach that capital-accumulation plateau. Why? Because a) there are a lot of them, and b) social safety nets are shrinking, rather than expanding. As a recent Washington Post story explains:

The Silent Generation appears to get an additional boost because they were born during the Great Depression, a time when people had fewer babies overall. Their lower population meant that they had less competition overall for jobs, housing, investments and other opportunities. Sociologist Elwood Carlson called the generation “the lucky few” because they were smaller than the generation that came before. African-Americans and women born in those years had far more opportunity, and the generation also benefited from the expansion of the American safety net, including Social Security and Medicare, during their lives.

“[P]eople born in the first half of the 20th century simply may have been in the right place at the right time as they were lifted by a rising tide,” [economists at the St. Louis Fed’s Center for Household Financial Stability] write.

Who cares? Anyone who's a Gen Xer or Millennial, one would think. It is also not too late for baby boomers in policy positions to start thinking about what kind of legacy they'd like to leave the U.S.

What's the deal with generational cohorts? As explained in vol 2, issue 48, when examining the generational gap in terms of mobile technology use:

Enter Joshua Glenn, who writes long, detailed definitions of different generations. You may be interested in finding out more about the Blank Generation (Baby Boomers born 1944-1953); the OGXers (Baby Boomers born 1954-1963); the Reconstructionists (Generation Xers born 1964-1973); the Revivalists (Generation X & Y, born 1974-1982); and the Social Darwikians (Millennials born 1983-1992).

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Your pop-culture note of the day: Buzzfeed's "Classical Music Is Not Background Music" is part manifesto, part encouragement to explore music beyond "This plays only in pretentious coffee shops and when a serial killer is about to strike in a movie."

And so, in keeping with the idea that music written several hundred years ago can be a modern, kinetic good time, I give you Salut Salon and "Wettstreit Zu Viert." Ignore the stuff on the home page about "seduced classically" -- this is not "four women in corsets play the Pastorale and everyone hopes the cellist has a wardrobe malfunction." The women in Salut Salon are remixing physical comedy with Vivaldi with "Mack the Knife," and it is delightful.

(Fun fact: "Mack the Knife" was composed by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht for Die Dreigroschenoper. It all comes back to the Fatherland.)

What classical music do you think more people should listen to? Send me your suggestions -- even the baroque period ones, because I love a good Bach cantata -- via Twitter or email.

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