Thursday, March 02, 2006

Generation Debt Author: Anya Kamenetz Publisher: Riverhead Books ASIN: 1594489076

About This Book

Twenty-four-year-old Anya Kamenetz started out as a journalist asking hard questions about her generation for which no one seemed to have good answers. Why were college students nationwide graduating with an average of more than $20,000 in student loans? Why were her friends thousands of dollars in credit-card debt? Why did so many jobs for people under 35 involve a plastic name badge, last only for the short-term, and not include benefits? With record deficits and threats to Social Security, what kind of future are young people facing?

Kamenetz was one of the youngest columnists ever hired by The Village Voice, the New York City alternative newspaper where she earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her reporting on the new economics of being young. In Generation Debt, she talks to experts in economics, labor markets, the health-care industry, and education.

Contrary to popular stereotypes, Kamenetz says, the reason young people are moving back in with their parents, aren't landing career-path jobs and are taking longer to graduate from college and settle down isn't a widespread generational laziness or some other pervasive psychological flaw. The reason, she argues, is "overwhelmingly economic." In Generation Debt, she presents evidence that building a secure life, let alone surviving, is harder for young people today than it was for the same age group 30 years ago.