September 1, 2014

Incumbency and over-production of elites in journalism

Like most other people my age, I haven't watched the news on TV in a very long time, not since high school in the mid-to-late 1990s. At college I suddenly had access to hard copies of newspapers from around the world, and about the same time every major paper began distributing their content for free over the internet. Bye-bye TV news coverage.

So imagine my shock the other day when I caught a bit of the local news on the same NBC station I used to watch 15 to 20 years ago — and saw the exact same crew of anchors! I even remembered some of their names before they introduced themselves.

I headed over to NBC4's website roster to see who all was still there, and the answer was — everyone! Jim Handly, Wendy Rieger, Barbara Harrison, Pat Collins, Tom Kierein, and of course Jim Vance, who was already stumbling over his words in old age back in the '90s. The incumbency problem was worse than I'd suspected, as most of them began working for the station in the '80s (Vance was the only one there since the early '70s).

Sure, there are lots of new young reporters who I didn't recognize, but by the looks of who's still sitting in the anchors' chairs, they won't ever be moving up. Only one incumbent, Joe Krebs, is retiring.

You'd probably see the same thing for the anchors in your own neck of the woods, although I'm not interested enough in the topic to actually check into other major markets.

But we sure do see that at the national level. Starting in the early 1980s, three incoming anchors ruled the roost for the better part of a quarter-century (Brokaw, Jennings, and Rather). If old age did not get in the way, they would have kept at it even longer. Only Cronkite had a similarly long tenure during the Midcentury.

Now it's common to anchor some national news program or another for 20 years or longer. Katie Couric, Barbara Walters, Al Roker — the list goes on and on. And they all began their star roles during the '80s and afterward.

As a result of the big figures never stepping down from their Establishment positions, the soaring numbers of journalism majors have tried to carve out newer and ever more niche, er, niches for themselves. They're gonna be a somebody, somewhere.

That's why most websites nowadays have jumping-off links to more and more "new media" sites where, unlike on NBC Nightly News, you can read all about The 17 Ways You're Annoying Your Roommates, or The 11 Most Dishonest Lies That Republicans Are Spreading About Healthcare, or The 11 Most Dishonest Lies That Democrats Are Spreading About Gun Control, etc. etc. etc.

These new media types are not vying for the anchor spot on a national broadcast news program, and they may not even have a journalism degree like those who write for major newspapers. The point is that incumbency at the top and increasing interest in being a journalist has a ripple effect all the way out to those Weird New Trick sites.

You see the same phenomenon in late night talk shows. There were a bunch of variety and talk shows in the '40s during the heyday of radio, but they didn't continue to dominate the industry into the '60s and '70s. Carson was the only one to begin in the Midcentury and last for several decades, like Cronkite. (Dick Cavett, who was a hit in the '70s, didn't last for two decades.) Everyone else has been on since the '80s or early '90s, and were loathe to leave — Letterman, Leno, Conan. You can bet that Jon Stewart and Howard Stern will be clinging for dear life to their spots, too.

Daytime talk shows are no different. Phil Donahue was the only one to begin before the '80s and last for several decades. Oprah was on forever, Geraldo's been on in one form or another since the same time, even Maury Povich is still going after 20 years. Sally Jesse Raphael began in the early '80s and hung on for 20 years. Ellen and Rosie O'Donnell came along later and haven't been on for as long, but they were already coasting off of their stand-up / acting brand.

As with the nightly news, the incumbency problem has led to a proliferation of niche late-night and daytime talk shows to accommodate the widening ranks of aspiring talk show hosts.

Siskel and Ebert had a lock on reviewing movies for a TV audience, and were only stopped by death and cancer.

The only constant across all of these cases is the timing of their beginnings — circa the 1980s — and the generations of the incumbents — Silents and Boomers (Greastest Gen were happy to move aside after a brief stint). It doesn't matter if the scale is national or local, if the tone is serious or comic or trashy, if they're men or women, white or black, Jewish or Christian. The me-first / dog-eat-dog norms that have prevailed since the Me Generation of the '70s have ushered in an age of first mover advantage. They shoved the Greatest Gen aside, dug themselves in, and are only leaving due to the complications of old age.

This places them within the broader trend in the economy and government toward incumbency, rising numbers of aspiring elites, and new niches being carved out to give the strivers somewhere to go.

But niches can only grow so narrow and draw such tiny crowds. There are simply too many people aspiring to be a somebody in the world of journalism. When the trend toward status-striving and inequality turns around, we'll see people who don't mind reading the teleprompter or gabbing with the celebs du jour for five years before moving on to something else. And who won't think of their spot as a way to "build their brand" i.e. glorify themselves.

32 comments:

  1. I've lived my whole life in the Twin Cites metro area of Minnesota and yeah, there's definitely some local news figures who hang on way past their sell by date. At leat one particularly pompous anchor who regularly gave stern liberal sermons, Don Shelby (a '47 birth), threw in the towel about 4 years ago. Relevant to Agnostic's post about the correlation of sports mania, status and trendy liberalism is that Shelby's wiki page says he's known as big woman's basketball fan!

    It's a depressing that the unpretentious, self effacing Gen X'ers have patiently bided their time while the silent gen and early to mid Boomers have kept a tight grip on the cultural and social throne. On the rare occasion when Gen Xer's or the Millenials dare speak up about the never ending reign of the '30-'60 cohort it always meets resistance. Don't complain, just wait your turn we promise we will give you these lovely things once you prove your worthy and after we've acknowledged that our time is up.

    With the advances in tech/medicine I'm not counting on the '30-'60 group (should we stick to the 'Me Generation' as a label for this group?) writing the last words of their chapter any time soon. As in early '85 birth its' pretty demoralizing to think that the 'mid 60's and beyond people have been warming the end of the bench for decades now. Maybe that's too emo of a thing to say but us Xer's/early Millenials have basically waited our turn for many years with the utmost courtesy and what do we have to show for it?

    I don't expect everyone to agree with, or even read my whole rant but I'm glad that this blog exists so that we can discuss these issues that are regrettably overlooked in most other places.

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  2. Tom Brokaw has been doing a radio PSA sort of thing the last few months in which he offers his opinion on god knows what. The dude's in his mid 70's and he still wants millions of people to hear his spiel. I don't always think he's wrong and I'm glad he gives credit to the Greatest Gen (Boomers seldom give credit anyone to but themselves) but it is yet more proof that the '30-'60 crowd just refuses to declare 'the end' on anything related to themselves.

    Sorry about the apostrophe errors in my first post hope they didn't make it unreadable.

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  3. I think there is this first mover advantage, but you do have to sift out audience composition.

    Like, Gen X apparently doesn't watch the news, so why would X be prominent as the anchorman? Audiences respond best to their own generation (due to personality differences, etc. not just due to the stage of life history).

    Same with politics, Gen X are relatively politically unengaged and have a low vote share, so why would would they get much position? (Plus, they don't have as much money, and who becomes a prominent politician is fairly ruled by money).

    Gen X listen to movie critics less and people read movie critics of their generation disproportionately, so more people listened to Ebert than Harry Knowles, so Ebert has more of a prominent position.

    This could be circular in a way, in that their being frozen out of the system leads to their apathy, so it is hard to tell.

    Also, there's a financial incentive to try and stay at the top in our high inequality times - fair enough you could argue a striving mindset created high income / salary / status inequalities, but it also exists independently of them as an environmental variable and motivates elites to hold on to their position.

    Why bother not to retire (or semi-retire) once you've past your A game? Well, in another era (say the '40s), you might have damned a relative pittance of a premium you got for being the "big dog", life's too short, so go fishing, but today there's a strong financial incentive not to.

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  4. John Stewart is a '62 birth, Conan's a '63 birth. Prior to reading this blog I didn't think much of generational differences but looking up the birth dates of these elites really reinforces how divergent values and outcomes can be from one generation to the next. There really is strikingly little power or prominence among those born in the mid 60's and beyond. I think it can be attributed to Gen X just not having the ruthless tooth and nail tendencies that the Me Generation had and to our detriment still have.

    While were on the subject of TV hosts they're not doing a whole lot to stop the corrosion of our culture. I'm really tired of snarky liberal misanthropes like John Stewart and Conan O'Brien pleasuring themselves while we descend into oblivion. Even Jay Leno joked about the Mexican invasion of California. I can't remember Stewart or O'Brien ever tipping a liberal sacred cow.
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  5. "Audiences respond best to their own generation"

    There's something to that, but not much. Gen X was watching Letterman and Leno in the '80s and '90s, Conan in the '90s, and now Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in the 21st century. Millennials have been tuning into The Daily Show despite the host having had gray hair for as long as they can remember.

    Then go back to the turning point in the '70s. Why didn't the Greatest Gen audiences want to keep seeing themselves as TV hosts and anchors? How did the Silents break through fairly easily at relatively young ages, with all those middle-aged and old viewers?

    It's more like the viewers don't care too much who is reading the teleprompter, as their personality adds little to learning the news. Ditto for talk show hosts, who read cue cards written by professional writers, not a personal stand-up routine, and who mostly sit and babble with the celebrity guests who are the main excitement every night.

    The major change since circa 1980 has not been on the demand side but on the supply side, with Silents and later the Boomers entrenching themselves, while rationalizing their neverending reign as a mere reflection of their unique talent, rather than greed and vainglory.

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  6. Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon are early X-ers, but it took forever to break in -- basically, once the Boomers started getting senile enough for it to show during an unscripted talk show. And Kimmel is still way in third place behind Leno and Letterman. Who even knows how long Fallon will last on The Tonight Show? Conan already put in a stint there, and could be brought in to replace Fallon.

    When Letterman retires next year, Colbert will be taking over -- at age 51 (born at the end of the late Boomer cohort).

    "I think it can be attributed to Gen X just not having the ruthless tooth and nail tendencies that the Me Generation had and to our detriment still have."

    The early X-ers were pretty optimistic and can-do as teenagers and young adults. Not much of a sign of apathy and slackerdom in the '80s teen movies. Didn't help that when they should've been getting their foot in the door at a real job, the early '90s recession hit.

    The Nineties were sobering for the formally optimistic early X-ers, and the later X-ers picked up on that as teenagers. I think we thought that focusing single-mindedly on higher ed would get around the problem. Maybe the early X-ers just didn't give it their all in getting credentialed by the establishment... so if we put everything into getting into higher ed, problem solved!

    But like everyone else in the higher ed bubble, we were suckers and dumbasses. We've pretty much given up on the illusion of credentialing.

    Millennials seem to be clinging to that fantasy a lot more desperately, though. They were true believers in the promises of the higher ed hucksters, whereas we saw it more as a cynical calculation on our part.

    The difference is probably due to Millennials not having been in touch with the age group above them, having been isolated their whole lives. Whereas the late X-ers hung around, and even out with, the early X-ers and picked up a lot from them, directly or at-a-distance.

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  7. "This could be circular in a way, in that their being frozen out of the system leads to their apathy, so it is hard to tell."

    Right, it's not natural to be an apathetic slacker when you're an adolescent who thinks he's invincible and whose hormones are raging out of control. Only when you slam into the reality of incumbency do you start to shrug your shoulders and look somewhere else for a job and a way to connect at a higher level.

    Pop music acts are still young, and actors come in a wide enough range of ages that X-ers and Millennials can plug into a broader network in those domains. I can't imagine there are many Boomers in the oh-so-important world of video game development, so there's another option.

    But entertainment and distraction isn't part of productive and civic life, so they can't leverage their generational power into political or economic power. Only to throw their weight toward one video game rather than another, or one pop singer rather than another.

    It will be interesting to see how Gen X and Millennials express their disaffection once the shit hits the fan. They have little experience with or taste for wielding even a medium amount of power. It's not as threatening if the stakes are smaller, though. So perhaps they will focus mainly on breaking everything up into smaller, more manageable pieces -- and only after that's done, figure out how to serve as mayors, executives, and so on.

    X-ers are the most highly rated as managers, though -- they're not incompetent, just frozen out. So they may be more capable of taking over than they realize, especially when the norm is not conquering the world but practicing stewardship.

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  8. If late Xers are analogs to the Flaming Youth, than they are according to Strauss and Howe's definition, "Civics", meaning they will become involved in government and wield enormous political power.

    "
    The Nineties were sobering for the formally optimistic early X-ers, and the later X-ers picked up on that as teenagers. I think we thought that focusing single-mindedly on higher ed would get around the problem. Maybe the early X-ers just didn't give it their all in getting credentialed by the establishment... so if we put everything into getting into higher ed, problem solved!"

    The Xers were only parodied as slackers in the 90s - because, as you say, they had a tendency to get masters and doctorates.

    Anyway, I'm not so sure all those college degrees are as useless as many believe. The big thing is competition with the older generations, and that HR departments have rigged the application system to keep out newcomers. In fact, all those liberal arts majors could have, in a fairer system, easily found employment as teachers or get government jobs. That is what most of them probably planned on.


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  9. 'It will be interesting to see how Gen X and Millennials express their disaffection once the shit hits the fan. They have little experience with or taste for wielding even a medium amount of power.'

    I've been looking at this site's directory of serial killers: http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Psyc%20405/serial_killer_timelines.htm
    The majority of white serial killers were born before '65. The relatively genial, fair culture of the 30's through 60's didn't give the Silents and Boomers enough modesty and conscience to prevent them from throwing all kinds of shit at the fan as they got older and bolder in the 60's and 70's. Vapid 'radical' politics, terrorism, senseless rioting, biker gangs, hard drug use, promiscuity, pretentious and tasteless art, and yes serial killing. They haven't seen fit to apologize for most of this. This nasty undertow of the decade of change isn't fully appreciated by most.

    The Millenials, particularly the post 1990 ones may be a ticking time bomb. The Silents blew up during the more permissive post 1960 culture and the later Boomers got to play with fire during their entire youth. When will the Millenials finally blow up?

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  10. A bit of a correction. I probably should have said the more outgoing culture of the post 1960 era. After all permissive parenting was encouraged in the mid century. A lot of good those naive parents did back then, but were emulating them now. Imagine what will unfold in the years to come

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  11. "he 60's and 70's. Vapid 'radical' politics, terrorism, senseless rioting, biker gangs, hard drug use, promiscuity, pretentious and tasteless art, and yes serial killing."

    Most of this was present in the 80s. It was the novelty of it all in the 60s that shocked people and caused the media to dramatize it. Also, a lot of it caught people off-guard, so many innocents got victimized. That's why, in the same time period, you get exploitation flicks where some innocent takes a wrong turn in the woods.

    I do agree on one thing, which is that the 60s and early 70s had more pretentious art and academic theories.

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  12. but was it really all so bad? oddly, despite being more violent and more promiscuous, the media from the 1960-1990 period is more wholesome. People who were alive in that time also, ironically, consider it to be safer. The older people I've talked to all seem unanimous that the world has gotten more dangerous; certainly, movies from the past 20 years have become more violent(though the violence is portrayed unrealistically).

    despite all those things you mention, Americans felt safer and more optimistic than they do now.

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  13. unrelated, but something I've been wondering is why the crime rate really does go in cycles of 30-some years, or if its more variable. why for, for instance, did it fall for so long in the 19th century? is it just bad crime reporting, in other words lack of professional police meant that a lot of crimes went unreported?

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  14. Possibly related phenomenon: People coming out of law school in 1975-1980 (i.e., Boomers, born 1950-1955) faced a 5-6 year partnership track. By the time Gen Xers came along (born in the early 70s, finish law school in the late 90s to early 00s), the duration had crept up to seven or eight years. Now that we're starting to get Millennial lawyers, an eight year track is viewed as quick and it's often more like ten or eleven.

    Part of that is overproduction of lawyers -- my firm has increased sixfold in size since 1975 -- part of it is the Boomers (now in their late 50s or 60s) hanging on and making sure their slice of the pie doesn't get too small too soon.

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  15. Peter Turchin on the over-production of lawyers over time, and their now bimodal income distribution -- one group that peaks around $50K and another that peaks around $160K.

    http://socialevolutionforum.com/2013/11/10/bimodal-lawyers-how-extreme-competition-breeds-extreme-inequality/

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  16. Every job that requires credentials has gone that way. Aspiring researchers used to get a PhD and get a tenure-track position not too long afterwards.

    Now that there are so many more PhD's, the employers can drive down conditions for those who will ultimately get the job -- mainly making them wait around for 5, 10, 20 years before they get the tenure-track spot. Lower pay, lower status, and lower job security.

    And now it's routine to have to dick around in "postdoc" positions for five years after getting your PhD. Supposedly you're gaining knowledge and skills that you didn't already pick up in four years of undergrad and 5-10 years of graduate training.

    It's the same stuff you would've picked up at the outset of a tenure-track job, as everyone keeps adding to their knowledge and skill base. Only as a postdoc, you get paid way less, have lower status, and less security. And you won't be taking sole credit for your work, since the Principal Investigator or whatever supervisor you have will also be tacking their name onto the authors' list for the research you publish.

    Making newly credentialed people wait forever in limbo also helps the incumbents keep their high-status jobs, despite not having produced much original / important research for the past 10 to 20 years. Not that they haven't done anything -- but what they did was less than the research that would've resulted from allocating those funds, positions, etc. to "younger" researchers (under 40 or 50) who haven't yet set into diminishing marginal returns.

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  17. Some folks may be thinking, "Well, serves those loser PhD's and JD's right -- not everyone is going to be a superstar lawyer or professor."

    That's besides the point. It's like the broader pattern of the middle class getting squeezed by the idle rich and the parasitic poor on both sides.

    The flood of PhD's and JD's are like the flood of immigrants into unskilled or semi-skilled labor, who drive down conditions for those who are suited to construction work and would like to make a decent living from it. The incumbent professors are like the idle rich whose wealth keeps multiplying itself with little to no capital gains tax -- not necessarily resting on their laurels (although that to), but more like maintaining higher status, wealth, and security for a gung ho assault that they launched 30 to 40 years ago, and now their research acumen shows clear diminishing marginal returns.

    So then, who's going to jump through all the extra hoops and wait around forever in limbo? Certainly nobody who wants to start and raise a family, let alone participate in community and civic life (no time from being overworked, plus you're permanently transient without job security). No one who would like to be able to kick some money toward worthy causes and groups. No one who gets queasy at the thought of having to suck so much dick to get ahead. No one whose research integrity would keep them from doing whatever it takes to triumph in a huge-stakes winner-take-all competition. And no one whose sole goal is the status of academic itself.

    Therefore, we'll get professors, lawyers, and businessmen who, compared to their counterparts 50 or 60 years ago, are more self-absorbed, rootless, gold-hoarding, obsequious, duplicitous, and fame-whoring.

    That's not a world that anyone wants to live in, given how influential these professions are. Laughing at the universities as the bubble bursts should not be so broadbrush, but target the incumbents and university administrators at the top, and shoo-ing people away from joining the PhD hordes at the bottom, to restore a healthy balance to the middle.

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  18. "And now it's routine to have to dick around in "postdoc" positions for five years after getting your PhD. Supposedly you're gaining knowledge and skills that you didn't already pick up in four years of undergrad and 5-10 years of graduate training."

    Credentialism has really gotten out of control. The West seems to imitating China's medieval civil service examination system. If young researchers are more productive and if they're being stalled from starting their careers, then one consequence will be stifled innovation. How much can Thiel's and Cowen's stagnation thesis be attributed to rampant credentialism and incumbency?

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  19. "Self-absorbed, rootless, gold-hoarding, obsequious, duplicitous, and fame-whoring." My personal experience tends to support this description.

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  20. Gen-x media men aren't doing so hot but good looking gen-x women are doing fine. I did notice the age thing a few years ago. I mean a cable guy like O'Reilly(64) looks like he could be on the job until he is seventy plus. I also noticed during the day how many business channels give women their own shows. I am not complaining about this but if those channels had started 15 years ago they may have had more men and more gen-x men then they have today. I guess that is my point, gen-x men are competing with gen-x women before they ever get a chance to take on the boomers.

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  21. The attractive teleprompter reader is a new thing, a convergence of over-production of lady journalists on the supply side looking for somewhere to work, and sex-starved nerds and catty women on the demand side who want to look up to / masturbate to a woman who looks decent and isn't blatantly whoring her looks.

    Given that most TV viewers are female and not too young or too old, it's natural that women currently in the Gen X age range will be chosen to read the teleprompters while showing off their great hair. But it would've been late Boomers in the '90s, and it'll be Millennials in the next decade if the trend continues.

    Gen X men aren't competing with women for those spots, since they're set aside specifically for guilt-free cheesecake. If somehow the cheesecake were taken away, the Boomers would be taking up the spot instead.

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  22. That may be a major cause behind how obsessed women are with their looks these days, which was already partly under way during the '80s (although big hair was way hotter than flattened hair).

    Since the contests for positions of wealth, power, and influence are rigged in favor of Silents and Boomers -- and will be indefinitely into the future -- members of the post-Boomer generations can find a niche by competing on something that favors youth. Health, fitness, athleticism, good looks, physical energy (not blowhard verbal energy), singing voice, and so on.

    It's striking how many X-ers and Millennials want to work as personal fitness trainers. That's more of a hobby or volunteer kind of activity, not the most productive use of time. You're motivating people who were already motivated enough to sign up at a gym and pay extra for a personal trainer.

    But at least you can rest assured that when you go looking for a job, there won't be Boomers as far as the eye can see squatting on that territory and refusing to ever leave.

    Girls are also way more likely to be one shade of sex worker or another, compared to the '70s. Porno actresses, webcam girls, sugar baby prostitutes for wealthy Boomers who advertise online, strippers, escorts, bikini baristas, bartenders, down to Hooters girls (although they did have that in the Midcentury -- the car hop). Those girls won't be facing any competition from 50 and 60-something women, or men.

    You'd have to go back to the Gilded Age and early 20th century to find so many young women making a living from selling their sexuality. The red light districts that used to be everywhere were only shut down in the 1910s.

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  23. Needless to say, those aren't good long-term career goals. You can venture away from the beaten path and work as a personal trainer while you're young, but before too long, aging will force you back onto the mundane path you started on, which is clogged by the Silent/Boomer roadblock.

    If you saved everything you earned, you might be OK. But people who like moving their body around all day tend to enjoy living it up and draining their income.

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  24. "Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon are early X-ers, but it took forever to break in -- basically, once the Boomers started getting senile enough for it to show during an unscripted talk show. And Kimmel is still way in third place behind Leno and Letterman. Who even knows how long Fallon will last on The Tonight Show? Conan already put in a stint there, and could be brought in to replace Fallon."

    I dunno, I never liked conan, kimmel, or fallon as much as Leno or Letterman. Most of the former guys came to prominence in the 90s and recently, when popular media in general went to crap because of cocooning. That could be the real reason why they aren't as popular.

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  25. Backed hard on this post. I got my degree in civil engineering from a cheap commuter school for work prospects, nothing else. I even remember talks that the ASCE considered upping the PE requirement to a fucking MS in civil engineering. I mean Jesus, a shitload of CE graduates end up working for construction companies, like me. It's ridiculous. And then you get to be under 40, working for a middle manager between the ages of 55 and 60, who has 20 to 30 years of experience on you, but instead of moving up or retiring, they wanna stay in their cushy spot, overpaid as all fuck, lording their experience over you despite the fact that they haven't had a fresh thought since you were in high school.

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  26. "It's striking how many X-ers and Millennials want to work as personal fitness trainers."

    Gyms have a reputation for being meat factories, so that's probably one big reason a lot of people got into it. I'm not sure how many were serious about it being a longterm career; more like something fun to do when you're young, get to hang out in a fun place and meet women, like being a lifeguard.

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  27. "lording their experience over you"

    That brings up another possible change in how the older and younger age groups are supposed to interact. The older ones with more knowledge and experience are supposed to pass that on -- to share it, rather than keep it to themselves. That's stewardship within the field or profession.

    But what happens when the older folks don't feel like leaving, and want to squat on their territory forever? Sure wouldn't be a good idea to start sharing your knowledge and skills with the young 'uns then, would it? The more unique your knowledge and skills, the less replaceable you are.

    Now, we all understand a person not wanting to be replaced by a machine, or an American not wanting to get replaced by a Mexican, Indian, or Chinese (whether the foreigner works abroad or is brought here). That's just wanting one community to stay intact, rather than be invaded and diluted by another.

    But the old are eventually going to die, and stalling the passing-on of knowledge and skills creates a clog in the flow of the system. It erodes the cohesion of a community because now the traditions are not being passed on as faithfully as in a mentor / apprentice situation.

    I can't say I've run into that too much, although how can you know what your superiors aren't letting you in on, or whether they're passing on just enough for you to tread water, but not as much as they have to offer? I don't sense that that's going on in my case, though it could be in other more cutthroat and high-stakes fields.

    Does anyone else get the impression that the folks who ought to be sharing and passing down their ways are reluctant, or even locking them in a safe so their job security will last into their 70s and beyond?

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  28. To play devil's advocate, the young 'uns in a status-striving climate may think they know better than the old fogies with their obsolete skills and outdated knowledge. That's the product of everyone gets a trophy.

    That may be going on with Millennials, but definitely not with Gen X, who did not enter the workplace with that level of presumptuousness, who were always interested in picking up what the cooler older kids had to pass along, and who are eager to play that role now as those passing along their knowledge and experiences to the younger groups.

    Millennials have always struck me as not being interested in learning from the cooler older kids, and presuming that their collection of phony trophies and likes on Facebook posts proves how awesome they already are, and don't need to improve or learn anything.

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  29. I'm the lording guy. Construction's a tough business. Hard to start, hard to maintain, hard to improve, easy to fail. The importance of experience is thoroughly beaten into your head. At the same time, what used to be essentially a master-apprentice relationship has gradually broken down over the past 10 years or so, in my opinion. Primarily because the competition has gotten absolutely vicious, with federal and state projects turning into paint-by-numbers low bid affairs. Established local contractors with sterling reputations as builders get underbid out of business by scumbag GC "management" companies from out of town who'll sub everything out to shit-for-brains who hire 80 Juans and Joses whose last names change every week. Suddenly the wise old sage manager or super sees the 25-40 year old as the guy the company can pay 20k less a year.

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  30. Millennials have always struck me as not being interested in learning from the cooler older kids, and presuming that their collection of phony trophies and likes on Facebook posts proves how awesome they already are, and don't need to improve or learn anything.

    Millennials really are like that when it comes to tech interfaces and reasoning and fluid g (learned easiest when young, declines most with age), where they really are much, much better (like 3x-4x productivity better on tasks where this is important, relative to Boomers, less advantage compared to X).

    Not really like that very much about anything else in the workplace, I find. Not because of any great degree of humility, more because more common is the lifestyle competitor type who isn't too interested in trying to be Mr Big Bollocks or Top Johnny Banana in the office and who doesn't feel that if they behave in a deferent and obsequious way they'll eventually do well out of it. They tend to score high in those surveys comparing desire for a fulfilling career / personal life compared to work success, etc..

    Gen X's lack of success might discourage Millennials from seeing them as role models, and I get the impression X's combination of socially competent, outgoing and sensation loving yet also suspicious, disenchanted and cautious tendencies (they are the helicopter parent generation) might be alienating. Millenials tend to be more obsessed with education, so it's hard to see them as not really capable of learning from authorities (although admittedly they're like that in a bit of a grade-y way where they challenge teachers.) They're pretty used to being measured and graded on a curve in the classroom, if not on the sportsfield.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/robasghar/2014/01/14/gen-x-is-from-mars-gen-y-is-from-venus-a-primer-on-how-to-motivate-a-millennial/ - there's a few differences in generations from employers perspectives here. The split between being lifestyle competitors and individualistic career competitors is placed at X vs Boomers and Millenials rather than Boomers v X and Millenials - that might be a result of them looking at early X, who might be peak career striver and peak workplace deference (Gen X is noted for its subservience in that article), before disillusionment set in, while Boomers might look less striving because they had it relatively easy.

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  31. Those are good points M. However, I'm not sure if Millenials buy into formal education, unless its just for prestige. Millenials were the first generation encouraged to look stuff up on the Internet instead of asking for help or receiving formal education.

    Gen X/Gen Y(1969-1984) are the ones who really bought into formal education - partly because of temperament, partly because, as "Face to Face" explains, they thought credentialing would help get jobs. But don't overlook that they pursued formal education because they were genuinely passionate about the liberal arts. They are the "Civic" Generation, according to Strauss and Howe, meaning they put great trust in institutions. In my experience, late Gen X are also passionate about politics.

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  32. they pursued formal education because they were genuinely passionate about the liberal arts

    Gen-Xers (looking at the slacker archetype, looking the music and culture they made beginning during the late 1980s once the dominant late Boomer culture producers of the early 1980s began to make some way, their irony, etc.) seem fairly pretentious, ruminating and introspective, more likely to present themselves as (and be) cod philosophers. So I can see that leading to liberal arts education.

    Milennials seem apparently both more autistic and unselfconsciously shallow, and so maybe tend to have intellectual interests either due to being generally geeky, and to climb the ladder. That might lead to following intellectual pursuits which more technical or ingroup or advancement forcused than liberal arts.

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