200 students at the University of Maryland when media free for 24 hours. According to survey authors, people felt alone, depressed, disconnected. Students described being disconnected in similar terms that addicts use when withdrawing from drugs.
If there’s anyone or anything TED lectures were made for, its statistics guru Hans Rosling and his fabulous Gapminder charts. Rosling’s latest lecture at the U.S. State Department is up here. Rosling’s major thesis is that human beings in the developed world have made remarkable progress on several key measures. The more sophisticated point is that we too often conflate regions of the world as having similar characteristics, when in fact they are quite different (Yemen is an impoverished volatile country, yet it’s neighbor the United Arab Emirates is stable and prosperous).
Rosling’s clearly loves data. And he’s a very clear advocate for having governing bodies around the world open up and publicize the reams of data they collect on their citizens for independent analysis. This could be a very tangible realization the “Government 2.0″ movement — after all, the policy implications of Rosling’s datasets are enormous.
James Surowiecki is one of the smartest business writers around, and his latest debunking of commonly-held myths about the American consumer shows why. According to data he cites, the high debt-level of the American consumer is not because of their fondness of gadgets, SUVs, or flat screen TVs — no the main culprit is the high cost of housing and medical care.
Citing Elizabeth Warren, he notes:
Most interestingly, as Elizabeth Warren has argued, the idea that most Americans have been spending frivolously on consumer goods actually isn’t true. Instead, a hefty chunk of the increase in consumption in recent decades has been the result of higher housing prices, the rising cost of medical care, more spending on education, and childcare. A generation ago, Warren says, basics (housing costs, health insurance, transportation, education, and taxes) accounted for fifty-four per cent of the average family’s income. Today, they account for seventy-five per cent of it.
Surowiecki speculates that the average American consumer doesn’t actually have much room to save more. And while he’s not specifically talking about youth populations, stories like these are of particular resonance around DECODE offices, as we’ve spent much of our recent years trying to highlight the issues facing Young Independents (those living away from home and who have not started families of their own). Many wonder as to why young people have been putting off taking on many of the trappings of adulthood. Could it be that it’s just really expensive?
In Canada we’re insulated (to a certain degree) from the rapid explosion in health care costs in the U.S. But the explosion in housing costs is something that afflicts just about every major urban centre in the country. For almost 50 years, the notion that families live in homes they own has been almost sacrosanct. Could this expectation cause people to defer starting families?
That’s according to latest figures from Gallup.
More troubling news from the U.K: one out of every six British people aged 18-24 is both out of work and not in school.
The British have a handy acronym for this group: NEET (not in education, employment or training), and it’s been a long-standing public policy concern for both the left and the right. The prescriptions seem easy enough to grasp. Government needs increase access to post-secondary education. Business need to invest more in jobs and training. But as we noted in our article in the Mark News, these are long-term investments that don’t seem to be major public or industrial policy concerns. The irony is that anti-deficit, short-term-growth-at-any-cost logic that prevents countries from treating these issues seriously creates nagging public lags on our economies and societies.
Civic Participation, Generation X, Generation Y, United Kingdom, Youth Trends
More grim news on rising student loan applications in Ontario. Applications for provincial government student aid are up almost 6% this year.
Our thoughts on post-secondary spending in the world of a jobless recovery.
The New York Times has a snazzy interactive graphic showing the results of how Americans spend their days. You can track differences between various demographic categories, including age range. What this survey terms “computer use” accounts for a tiny fraction of how people aged 15-24 spend their leisure time.
This flies in the face of conventional wisdom about how youth populations are glued to their computer screens. Is this a case of a flawed survey methodology? Or are our assumptions about the dominant nature of online experiences completely wrong?
Media guru Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and a plethora of newspapers under his News Corporation mantle) yesterday re-launched a firestorm by announcing that his company will start charging for online access to its news content. It’s a tactic competitor Associated Press has openly considered as well. The New York Times has a helpful roundup of what media watchers are saying.
For young news and media consumers, this remains an interesting moment in time. The easy parallel is that of the music industry’s attempts to fight off online piracy through a variety of online music sales models. Despite the endless speculation, and some notable successes (Itunes), nothing seems to have worked the way the music industry wanted it.
It’s difficult to predict how well Murdoch’s attempts will work, especially with young people. If the music industry has so much trouble convincing people to pay $1 for a song they can listen to over and over again, how will they convince consumers to subscribe to something they’ll likely only read once?
Aside from the general problem about a lack of a viable advertising model for news content creators, our Youth Media DNA studies last year showed that young people didn’t seem to understand the unique function of newspaper-style reporting vs. that of other media. Without that understanding, it’s difficult for newspaper content providers to distinguish themselves, especially online, where the content created by a TV station looks the same as that provided by a newspaper. Compare how CTV covered recent jobless figures with the Canadian Press article on the Toronto Star.
That, coupled with the fact that the objective-style reporting is now easily co-opted and repackaged into snarky forms by aggregators is also problematic, and not only for the newspaper industry.
How then to convince young readers as to necessity of a news gathering organization and the economic model that supports it? News Corp appears to be giving up on this front. We’ll see how strong that arm is.
This article captures the rightful cynicism for those who pass themselves off as generational consultants without any strong understanding or commitment to the generations they are apparently expert on.
“All of which has led, as you’d expect, to a whole new industry — or epidemic — of consultants, experts they allege, in how to motivate, train and, yes, sometimes nanny the extraterrestrials who’ve taken over the workplace.”
Also check out the map further down the page that shows what the impact of 18-29 year olds was on the past US election