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http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/201...art-2-of-2
Quote:Let’s pick up where we left off. How are Millennials’ stagnant real earnings affecting their family lives?
Many are delaying parenthood. According to the latest full-year CDC data, the mean age of a mother at first birth was 26.3 in 2014, an all-time high. Preliminary 2015 data show that although birthrates declined to a record low for women in their 20s last year, rates rose slightly for women in their 30s—suggesting that some first-wave Millennials who have been waiting to have children are finally getting started.
By dint of the large number of Millennials now in their mid-20s, we will undoubtedly see some increase in the total number of births over the next 10 years—even if fertility rates for women in this age group don’t rise all that much...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/201...art-2-of-2
Posts: 10,465
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I predict that Millennials will be extremely radicalized if the economy seems to work only for extant elites, and life proves little more than the duty to enrich and pamper exploiters. They are even less prone to accept "pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die" as a reason for suffering for rapacious elites than Generation X. They can see through an economic order that ensures huge profits to slumlords and legalized loan-sharks. They heard their X older siblings and parents how bad American capitalism can get. They may not yet see any improvement. Prosperity is only for the few, lest it be impossible.
It is easy to see Millennials as rationalists who can work through a well-intended, if technically-flawed order by working the flaws out, like GIs. I can also see them as unsentimental revolutionaries set to extirpate the selfish irrationality of what they see as an old and malign order that serves only the elites to enrich them, pamper them, and enforce their desires. Millennials may decide that they do not need their exploiters, yet those exploiters will not leave even in a time of great economic hardship even if all rational thought deems those exploiters the cause of pointless mass suffering.
Think of Robespierre. He began as the incorruptible reformer, the pure rationalist. So getting people in the way of the Just and Rational new order requires the active participation of Madame Guillotine? Then Madame Guillotine, or her early 21st-century equivalent, shall not be delayed in the exaction of her Justice. Such is rationality as the Jacobins saw it.
Millennials are not a stupid generation. Some will even use the tools of financial analysis to establish the harm that rentiers, executives, crony capitalists, and outright criminals do -- and as jurors in capital trials of such types will deem their exploiters damnable. So imagine a reactionary President and a Congress basically run by lobbyists in the way. What will be the equivalent of the Bastille?
The end of the bureaucratic-capitalist order will begin when the corporate nomenklatura ensures that its spoiled-brat kids are the ones born to enjoy the bloated salaries that people of not-so-noble birth must be kept away from the class privilege of a bureaucratic elite which has been paid handsomely for treating the rest of Humanity badly on behalf of rapacious, domineering, selfish elites.
So who is Madame Guillotine this time? Nitrogen asphyxiation, most likely. Swift and allegedly painless, even better than a fast-falling blade.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
