Free Republic

Generations Y and Z are rewriting the rules of the luxury market, according to a report released on Wednesday by the consulting firm Bain & Co. The global luxury market, encompassing goods and luxury experiences, is forecast to grow by 5 percent this year to an estimated 1.2 trillion euros, or $1.4 trillion, according to the study, compiled using market data and interviews with people in the industry. But while older shoppers traditionally have driven the growth of sales in the luxury sector, this time it was shoppers born after 1980 who made the difference. Generation Y provided 30 percent...

Say hi to Lucy. Lucy is part of Generation Y, the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. She's also part of a yuppie culture that makes up a large portion of Gen Y. I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group—I call them Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs. A GYPSY is a unique brand of yuppie, one who thinks they are the main character of a very special story. So Lucy's enjoying her GYPSY life, and she's very pleased to be Lucy. Only issue is this one thing: Lucy's...

The media claimed that conservatives must become more moderate or face permanent irrelevancy after the supposedly solid liberal millennial generation of 18-29 year olds that overwhelmingly supported reelection of Barack Obama. These dire warnings reminded me of the media geniuses who proclaimed after Jimmy Carter's presidential victory in 1976 that the 18-29 year olds of the Baby Boomer generation would always vote as a liberal bloc. Four years later, Baby Boomers abandoned liberalism and began reliably voting as Ronald Reagan conservatives for the next three decades. As Millennial support of President Obama has plummeted this year, it is liberalism that...

FULL TITLE: Workers believe Gen Y bosses aren’t team players, act like they are entitled and are full of themselves, survey finds The workers of Generation Y are getting a name for themselves. Managers from Gen Y are widely perceived as self-entitled and don’t score particularly highly when it comes to being a team player. Generation Y is defined as people aged between 18 and 32. It finds that they’re moving into management at a rapid pace. New newly released research from EY, the global firm that includes Ernst & Young LLP suggests 87 percent of Gen Y managers have...

The nearly 3.7 million American babies born in 1982 weren’t special, except to their families. But in the eyes of demographers, they were categorically different from the 3.6 million Americans born in 1981. They were the first members of a new club: Generation Y.This so-called millennial cohort, the largest generation in American history, landed in the cradle during an awful recession, learned to walk during the Reagan recovery, came of age in the booming 1990s, and entered the labor market after the Sept. 11 attacks and before the Great Recession, the two tragedies of the early 21st century. They’ve...

“What’s the matter with Kansas?” syndrome of young people voting against their economic interests. Thus follows the constant courting of the hip and cool Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Lena Dunham, Occupy Wall Streeters, and others who blend pop culture, sex, youth, energy, and fad — almost anything to avoid the truth that today’s teenagers are starting out each owing a lifetime share of the national debt amounting to more than three-quarters of a million dollars. Those who ran up the debt enjoyed the borrowing, but won’t be around to pay back their proverbial fair share.

As the battle over gay marriage heats up in this election year, one evangelical Christian writer is calling for a truce, fearing that the outspoken opposition to gay marriage among some church leaders could alienate an entire generation of religious youth. . . . A 2011 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute shows the generation gap between young Christians and their elders is large, with 44 percent of white evangelicals aged 18-29 in support of marriage equality compared to only 12 percent of those 65 and older. According to the same survey, nearly 70 percent of young Christians also...

John T. Rogers, age 26, grew up in rural West Texas, raised by a single mother who often worked three jobs to make ends meet. He says his 59-year-old mother remains fiscally conservative, refusing to spend a dime on herself, though she now earns a respectable income. But when it comes to spending, Rogers is not following in her footsteps. "Not to knock J.C. Penney's, but I definitely wanted to step up my style," he said. Earning $46,000 a year as a communications manager for a private, non-profit university in Denver hasn't held him back. He bought a hybrid Lexus...

Why work in America?

Talkin’ about my generation”: the Who song once expressed the hope and self confidence of the Baby Boomers as they reached biological if not emotional maturity. It was an attack on the older generation, a defense of the young, but it includes an ominous refrain: “Hope I die before I get old.” Already, perhaps, the shadow of generational failure hung over the twenty something Boomers. Those shadows have darkened considerably as the Boomer sun moves past the meridian and an unmistakable air of twilight infiltrates into the declining hours of the long Boomer day. Talking about our generation is not...

Will Baby Boomers be the last generation to enjoy the modern concept of a leisure-filled retirement? It's a worthy question to ponder in light of a new Pew Research Center report showing a growing wealth gap between young and old in the United States. Using government data over the last 25 years, Pew found that households headed by those over 65 have made "dramatic gains" in economic well-being, while those headed by younger adults have fallen steadily behind. In 2009, elderly households possessed 42 percent more median net worth than their same-age counterparts had in 1984. Young adults veered in...

Frank Sinatra once crooned about having the world on a string. Generation Y has grown up believing that parents, teachers, and bosses would tie that string around our collective fingers. Now that adult realities are hitting home, the frenzy isn't pretty. My generation -- those in their late teens, twenties, and early thirties -- is the most over-promised youthful cohort in American history. Our Boomer parents told us we could do and be anything, if we believed in ourselves. The government and higher-education establishment bolstered that misconception through excessive student loans, promising jobs, jobs, jobs if only we'd make passing...

FED up with the Me-Me-Me MySpace generation? Inclined to believe today’s young ’uns are blindingly self-aggrandizing and entitled? According to a major new study of college students, you may well be right. Vindication for crotchety Gen-Xers — already depressed to find themselves the elders in this social relationship — arrived in a paper presented in May at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science in Boston. “Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students Over Time: A Meta-Analysis,” by Sara Konrath, a researcher at the University of Michigan, found that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic...

Those who were born into "Generation Y" have an over-inflated sense of entitlement lack the work ethic to achieve their goals. They also hate being criticised, it is claimed. Researchers believe that the problem stems from being constantly told from birth they are special and as a result now believe it - and will ignore anybody who says otherwise. But far from making them happy their approach to life leads to higher levels of depression and "chronic diasppointment" as unjustified levels of self-esteem masks the ugly reality. Academics have concluded the values drummed into their grandparents, such as a strong...

Young adults in the United States are being squeezed out of the labor force as older workers either delay retirement or seek jobs to rebuild nest eggs destroyed by the recession, a study showed on Wednesday. The size of the labor force fell 6.3 percent for young workers, but increased 8.5 percent for workers 55 years and older between December 2007 and January 2010, according to the study by the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

Los Angeles, CA (March 10, 2010) Managing the young generation of workers – sometimes called GenY, GenMe, or Millennials – is a hot topic, covered in the popular press and discussed in numerous books and seminars. However, most of these discussions are based on perceptions and anecdote rather than hard data, partially because no one had established that GenY differed in work values from previous generations. Until now. Using a large nationally representative sample of young people surveyed since 1976, an article in the Journal of Management (published by SAGE) compared the work values of GenY (born in the late...

Kids today are a credulous bunch. The 2007 Pew Political Values survey revealed "a generation gap in cynicism." Where 62 percent of Americans overall view the federal government as wasteful and inefficient, just 42 percent of young people agree. No wonder, then, that GenNext responds to President Obama's call for "public service," roughly translated as "a federal paycheck."

During the past couple of weeks, the Washington media and political establishment have focused on such matters of crucial and lasting importance as President Barack Obama’s possible “overexposure,” whether he showed suitable affect by chuckling during a TV interview in a time of severe economic difficulty, and just when he became angry about the bonuses received by American International Group executives. To be fair, the focus on trivialities is bipartisan. We have also been treated to several days of discussion about whether conservatives Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter or moderate Meghan McCain have the appropriate body shapes for Republican women....

GENERATION OBAMA FIRST-TIME VOTERS ARE GLOBAL, DIVERSE, COLORBLIND - AND LOVE BARACK By JOHN ZOGBY Are the kids all right? Not if you listen to some of our leading social commentators. To hear people like Juliet Schor and William Bennett tell it, today's youth have been virtually brainwashed by marketers, advertisers, and a mushy-headed professoriate. But if your measure of "all right" is a group that is not just tolerant of but welcomes diversity, if it is young adults who march in lockstep with no political ideology, who in the majority are willing to think through the subtleties of some...

Newsmax.com Zogby: First Globals Are Redefining America Wednesday, August 13, 2008 8:44 PM By: David A. Patten A demographic earthquake is taking place in America that is transforming our traditional society, argues pollster John Zogby in his newly released book, “The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream.” And these changes could have seismic implications for the coming 2008 election showdown. This new ascending group of Americans Zogby calls the “First Globals,” and unlike other demographic groups such as “Generation X” or “baby boomers,” this group is making some radical departures from traditional American...