Reply #62: I'm not sure that's entirely fair. [View All]

[wickerwoman]

Maybe I'm jaded from dealing with a lot of professors who did copious amounts of dope in the 60s and stumbled into tenured academy jobs that they have to be pried out of with crowbars. Compare them to newly minted PhDs today who work twice as many hours with no hope of tenure, lousy pay and fifty people breathing down their necks for year-on-year contract positions.

If the kids seem disillusioned it may be that they're on to the fact that it doesn't matter how hard they work- they still have a 50/50 chance of being on the breadline and bunking in mom's basement after graduation.

The 50s and 60s were a hiccup, as other posters have mentioned. You worked hard and you could pull yourself up to something comfortable. Now you work twice as hard and you don't get shit. Except grief about how your lack off success must be because of something wrong with you. It's not the kids being complacent that has resulted in real wages not rising in 50 years or 18% unemployment.

In the 50s one man could support a family with a 40 hour a week job. Now two parents working 100 hours a week between them struggle to make ends meet. You think they don't know what sacrifice or hard work are?

I don't mean to be harsh... but it precisely this Calvinistic attitude that wealth comes from virtue and hard work and therefore the poor must be lazy, that makes it so hard to address the institutional causes of ingrained poverty in our society.