The second job has become normalized among young people to increase their income.
Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, has been labeled as the "glass generation." The awareness of this population group regarding mental and physical health has led many to accuse them of being lazy or overly sensitive.
It’s because many of the metrics we’ve always used are looking good. Unemployment is down, inflation is under control, stock market’s bumpin’, all that, economy looks good from those heights.
Problem is, those metrics aren’t showing the stunning transfer of wealth I’ve seen. And I remember dad in the late 70’s talking to mom on the drive home from church, “The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.” (Same trip, mom had some words about the Shiites, because of course the Middle East was the asshole of the world and terrorists were causing a ruckus. And no, I can’t describe the ruckus, forgot.)
LOL, this is gonna either freak people out, piss 'em off or both:
Forgot the class, but I think it was around 8th-grade or so, mid-80’s? Our teacher was talking about how corrupt Mexico was because 80% of the wealth was owned by 20% of the population. We kids were stunned that such a thing was real!
Y’all can take the comments from here. I’m tired.
One thing you learn in software testing is to optimize for the right metrics. It doesn’t matter if your system can respond to a request in under 10ms if it can’t handle a million requests. It doesn’t matter if your click-through conversion is high if your bounce rate is 90%.
Our entire economy seems designed to maximize the wrong metrics. Yes, per-capita GDP is astounding, but twelve million kids don’t have enough to eat. Yes, the stock market is doing well but people are having to work two jobs to get by.
And the really frustrating part is none of the folks in charge seem to get it.
Yup, I heard similar things back then. Middle class has been under attack for ages. I guess Reagan did a number on us. I was too young to understand tax cuts for the rich.