R Lost Generation
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The Millennials entered the workforce during the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Saddled with debt, unable to accumulate wealth, and stuck in low-benefit, dead-end jobs, they never gained the financial security that their parents, grandparents, or even older siblings enjoyed. They are now entering their peak earning years in the midst of an economic cataclysm more severe than the Great Recession, near guaranteeing that they will be the first generation in modern American history to end up poorer than their parents.
It is too soon to know how the unfurling business-failure and unemployment crisis caused by this novel public-health crisis is hitting different age groups, or how much income and wealth each generation is losing; it is far too soon to know how different groups will rebound. But we do know that Millennials are vulnerable. They have smaller savings accounts than prior generations. They have less money invested. They own fewer houses to refinance or rent out or sell. They make less money, and are less likely to have benefits like paid sick leave. They have more than half a trillion dollars of student-loan debt to keep paying off, as well as hefty rent and child-care payments that keep coming due.
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Recommended Reading
The Colleges That Took the Pandemic Seriously
Aaron E. Carroll
Recommended Reading
- A Lost Generation? Long-Lasting Wealth Impacts of the Great Recession on Young Families By William R. Kent and Lowell R. Ricketts The Great Recession of 2008-09 inflicted deep and widespread losses of income and wealth on the typical American family, leaving both mea-sures lower in 2016 than they were in 2007.1 (See Figure 1.).
- The Lost Generation is a gripping and passionate story of one soldier simply trying to survive the greatest war the world had ever seen, and to attempt to collect up the pieces of himself in its wake. Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought.
The Colleges That Took the Pandemic Seriously
Aaron E. Carroll
Compounding their troubles, Millennials are, for now, disproportionate holders of the kind of positions disappearing the fastest: This is a jobs crisis of the young, the diverse, and the contingent, meaning disproportionately of the Millennials. They make up a majority of bartenders, half of restaurant workers, and a large share of retail workers. They are also heavily dependent on gig and contract work, which is evaporating as the consumer economy grinds to a halt. It’s a cruel economic version of that old Catskill resort joke: These are terrible jobs, and now all the young people holding them are getting fired.
What little data exist point to a financial tsunami for younger workers. In a new report, Data for Progress found that a staggering 52 percent of people under the age of 45 have lost a job, been put on leave, or had their hours reduced due to the pandemic, compared with 26 percent of people over the age of 45. Nearly half said that the cash payments the federal government is sending to lower- and middle-income individuals would cover just a week or two of expenses, compared with a third of older adults. This means skipped meals, scuppered start-ups, and lost homes. It means Great Depression–type precarity for prime-age workers in the richest country on earth.
Recessions are not good for anyone, from infants to the elderly. Nor are pandemics. Americans born during this calamity will be more likely to have low birth weights and to be in poor health generally, with lifelong effects. Children will not just endure this trauma—manifested in lost months of schooling, skipped meals, housing volatility, and increased abuse—but will carry it with them. Zoomers graduating into the recession will die sooner because of it, suffering increased incidence of heart disease, lung cancer, liver disease, and drug overdoses in the coming decades; they will also earn less over the course of their lives. The elderly are likely to be the most economically insulated group but are facing the most terrifying health consequences.
Among adults the news isn’t good, either. And particularly not for those youngish-but-no-longer-young adults who came into this crisis already vulnerable, already fragile, already over-indebted and underpaid. The Millennials were left with scars during the Great Recession that never quite healed, and inherited an economy structured to manufacture precarity for the young and the poor and black and brown, and to perpetuate wealth for the old and the rich and white.
For the most part, kids of the 1980s and 1990s did it right: They avoided drugs and alcohol as adolescents. They went to college in record numbers. They sought stable, meaningful jobs and stable, meaningful careers. A lot of good that did. Studies have shown that young workers entering the labor force in a recession—as millions of Millennials did—absorb large initial earnings losses that take years and years to fade. Every 1-percentage-point bump in the unemployment rate costs new graduates 7 percent of their earnings at the start of their careers, and 2 percent of their earnings nearly two decades later. The effects are particularly acute for workers with less educational attainment; those who are least advantaged to begin with are consigned to permanently lower wages.
Slogging their way through the aughts, avocado toast in hand, the Millennials proved those miserable studies true. During the recession, half of recent graduates were unable to find work; the Millennials’ formal unemployment rateranged as high as 20 or 30 percent. High rates of joblessness, low wages, and stagnant earnings trajectories dogged them for the following decade. A major Pew study found that Millennials with a college degree and a full-time job were earning by 2018 roughly what Gen Xers were earning in 2001. But Millennials who did not finish their post-secondary education or never went to college were poorer than their counterparts in Generation X or the Baby Boom generation. Economic growth, in other words, left the best-off Millennials treading water and the worst-off drowning.
Crummy wages collided with a cost-of-living crisis and heavy debt loads. The cost of higher education grew by 7 percent per year through the 1980s, 1990s, and much of the 2000s, far faster than the overall rate of inflation, leaving Millennial borrowers with an average of $33,000 in debt. Worse: The return on that investment has proved dubious, particularly for black Millennials. The college wage premium has eroded, and for black students the college wealth premium has disappeared entirely. While struggling to pay down their student loans, millions of younger Americans have also found themselves shut out of the real-estate market by housing shortages and attending sky-high prices. Rich Boomers bought the houses and made building new ones impossible. Millennials were forced to keep on renting, transferring wealth from the young to the old.
Put it all together, and the Millennials had no chance to build the kind of nest eggs that older generations did—the financial cushions that help people weather catastrophes, provide support to sick or down-on-their luck relatives, start businesses, invest in real estate, or go back to school. Going into the 2008 financial crisis, Gen Xers had twice the assets that Millennials have today; right now, Gen Xers have four times the assets and double the savings of younger adults.
Millennials now are facing the second once-in-a-lifetime downturn of their short careers. The first one put them on a worse lifetime-earnings trajectory and blocked them out of the asset market. The second is sapping their paychecks just as they enter their peak-earnings years, with 20 million kids relying on them, too. There’s no good news in a recession, and no good news in a pandemic. For Millennials, it feels like there is never any good news at all.
All were included on The Sly, Slick and the Wicked, released in the fall of 1970. After their last chart hit, “Your Mission (If You Decide to Accept It) Part 1,” the group disbanded. Brownlee and Simon joined Curtom act Mystique featuring Ralph Johnson, the former lead singer of the Impressions. The group charted with three Bunny Sigler-produced singles: “Is It Really You?,” “What Would the World Be Without Music?,” and “It Took a Woman Like You.” Lowrell Simon co-wrote and co-produced the track “Keep on Playing the Music” on their self-titled debut LP. Lowrell Simon dropped his last name and signed to entertainer Liberace’s AVI Records; the single “Mellow Mellow Right On” b/w “You’re Playing Dirty” went to number 32 R&B in 1979. He also produced and co-wrote tracks for the Gemigo/Curtom act the Notations. One single, “Think Before You Stop,” charted in 1985. Sadly, Larry Brownlee died in 1978 in Chicago.
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In a similar vein is the late night soul groove “Love on a Two Way Street”. Really tight brass here, and that inimitable, classy, sophistcated orchestration that never gets too intrusive. The group’s spin on The Chairmen of the Board’s “Give Me Just a Little More Time”, on the other hand, is almost a carbon copy of the original.
The first uptempo tune here is “You’re So Young But You’re So True”, bumping along a frantic bass line, featuring more brilliant, busy arrangements by Tom Tom Washington.
The following two songs, “Sorry I Can’t Help You” and “Someday”, both are exquisite, dreamy, sweetly orchestrated ballads. The latter charted in 1971 and is embellished with some spot-on rainstorm effects.
More upbeat is a rousing rendition of Charles Wright & The Watts 103d Street Band’s “Love Land” – again staying fairly true to the original -, after which the group heads home one more for the sweet, smooth soul vibe of “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind”, a nice interpretation of the big Delfonics hit.
Probably the most surprising cut here is the stupidly rocking “Wasting Time”; a stuttering groove monster with Lowrell waiting on his date in a steamin’ club, with the rest of the group bantering behind him: “She should’a been here by now!”…
Closing this set is “Wait a Minute”, a track inspired by their first hit, “The Sly, Slick and the Wicked”. More heavy use of echo here, as well as shimmering, tastefully arranged strings, as the group glides through this lullaby-like ballad.
A fine Chi-Soul album by a very underrated group.
The release also generated enough money for Brunswick to buy itself out from its owner, Decca Records. On the flip side was “You’re So Young but You’re So True.” The next single, “Wait a Minute,” was written by the Chi-Lites’ Eugene Record. The Simon-Brownlee-Redmond trio wrote “Someday” and “Talking the Teenage Language.” All were included on The Sly, Slick and the Wicked, released in the fall of 1970. After their last chart hit, “Your Mission (If You Decide to Accept It) Part 1,” the group disbanded. Brownlee and Simon joined Curtom act Mystique featuring Ralph Johnson, the former lead singer of the Impressions.
The group charted with three Bunny Sigler-produced singles: “Is It Really You?,” “What Would the World Be Without Music?,” and “It Took a Woman Like You.” Lowrell Simon co-wrote and co-produced the track “Keep on Playing the Music” on their self-titled debut LP. Lowrell Simon dropped his last name and signed to entertainer Liberace’s AVI Records; the single “Mellow Mellow Right On” b/w “You’re Playing Dirty” went to number 32 R&B in 1979. He also produced and co-wrote tracks for the Gemigo/Curtom act the Notations. One single, “Think Before You Stop,” charted in 1985. Sadly, Larry Brownlee died in 1978 in Chicago.
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' Must Have Before Die '
Covers had always been a forte of the band, and on their second jam they went for true-to-the-original renditions of Al Green’s “Tired of Being Alone” and The Persuaders’ “Thin Line Between Love and Hate”. A little less orthodox material was culled from Detroit’s psy-soul outfit The 8th Day; their smash hit “You’ve Got to Crawl Before You Walk” gets the Lost Generation treatment here. Most appealing of all is their rendition of Ashford & Simpson’s bouncy “One More Bridge to Cross”.
The originals are were its at, though. Brunswick producer Richard Parker wrote the well-grooved, mid-tempo cruiser “All In the Course of a Day” – a great slice of Chicago Soul featuring those big arrangements that never get in the way of the Funk – as well as the uptempo, horn induced smoker “Paulette”.
Lowrell Simon, the group’s leader, wrote far less for this LP as he had for the Lost Generation’s first outing. But his “Sure Is Funky” does rank as one of his finest achievements. As the title implies, this is a hard socking slab of gutbucket funky soul: crashing drums, distorted wah wah guitars and a fat, fat bass line. Simon also had a hand in writing the title track, which, despite its ominous wording, actually is a very smooth, soft ballad.
Closing the disc is a fantastic instrumental version of “This Is the Lost Generation”; the same drilling groove, this time lavishly smothered with jazz guitar riffin’.
Maybe not as strong as its predecessor, but tracks such as “This Is the Lost Generation” (both the vocal and instrumental) and “Sure Is Funky” make ‘The Young, Tough and Terrible’ another must have for Chicago Soul buffs.