美國兩代的交接

《皮尤研究中心》（Pew Research Center）最近按美國人口調查局的數據推測美國舉足輕重的嬰兒潮一代已經讓位給新的一代，中文叫“Y世代”（Gen Y，即“Generation Y”，百度百科，18-34歲）。但在美國大家更常將“Generation Y”成為“Millennials”。

中文裏“千年”不是個常用的單位（不如“百年”），有叫“千紀”，“千禧”，“千禧年”的，百度說“千禧年又名千福年，其概念源於基督教教義”，咱入鄉隨俗，與其叫“Y世代”，不如叫“千禧代”。

《皮尤研究中心》的分類：


這是另一個圖示美國百年代構：


參見維基：Generation Z refers to the cohort of people born after the Millennial Generation

《皮尤研究中心》的定義：


較為詳盡的解釋，參見：
William SchroerGenerations X,Y, Z and the Others

這是《皮尤研究中心》的判斷：


德勤（會計谘詢公司Deloitte ，全稱Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited）用美國人口調查局的數據給美國青年人（20-34歲）人口結構過去20幾年的圖，如下：


“千禧代”並不是蘋果穀狗臉書那新時代新精神充滿朝氣希望無比的一代，你要是冷靜想想，蘋果穀狗臉書實際上是精英階層，人數很少，不足以解決整代人的生計，德勤給出的兩個特征充分說明了這一點：
（一）教育

是的，教育程度高了不少

（二）收入

2007-2008解決大危機卻是最受打擊的一代之一，而且負債累累：

（由此可見為什麽閑得死一呼“大學免費”而百應。）

然而“千禧代”卻是充滿樂觀精神，大家也許最關心的兩個方麵：

宗教：
《皮尤研究中心》Q&A: Why Millennials are less religious than older Americans
《大眾電視台PBS）Poll Finds Americans, Especially Millennials, Moving Away From Religion

“千禧代”不如老一輩那麽信教、虔誠，基督教的狂熱程度自然降低，在全球推廣西方至高無上的的精神。

經濟：
《大西洋月刊》Millennials' Political Views Don't Make Any Sense
《全國電台NPR》Generation Disappointed: Millennials Want More From Politics
《天天見獸性Daily Beast》Hey, GOP, Here’s Why Millennials Hate Us

政治解決被邊緣化，生活越來越窘迫，沒錢還得買個蘋果機露露臉，過得挺艱難，故此整一代都有歐洲化的趨勢，講政府、福利、保障、公平，對美國曆來“贏者通吃”（俗稱“美國夢”【注1】）“一日升天”（俗稱“instant gratification”）的美國精神是個反叛，會讓美國變得日益“社會主義化”。那“放眼世界”的宏大目標，解決不了實實在在的衣食住行，解放“阿富汗伊拉克敘利亞難民”的災難，保衛亞洲自由人民的利益，跟中國在南海幹一仗嘛，就免了【注2】。

《華郵網文》
A majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows
Millennials are increasingly rejecting voodoo economics

曾幾何時？

也許“千禧代”標誌著美國社會徹底的轉變。


【注1】我把“美國夢”（American dream）說成“贏者通吃”，大逆不道。我想說的是，“美國夢”是真的，這是為什麽全世界窮人，能來的，都湧到美國的原因。即使有錢人也把美國作為寄托之鄉，問問中國的上層和高層領導就行了。隻是世界太小，美國還是不夠大，“得道升天”在美國“成功”的，微乎其微，一看統計，殘酷極了。

其實是個“贏者通吃”。

【注2】美國精英不是這麽想的。對精英來說，“胸懷全球，放眼世界”，其實是“征服全球，統治世界”，是美國人的職責，奧巴馬所言“咱美國還是世界第一”是也。隻是統治了世界，美國百姓還是分不到一羹肉，大家也難免沒覺悟了。

【注3】“千禧代”對投資的態度：



【附錄】《紐約時報》收複製造業就業的海市蜃樓（參見：美國那日落黃昏的製造業崗位）被標榜為奧巴馬最大經濟成就的“泛太協議”（昵稱踢屁屁，就是踢中國的屁屁）肯定不會給美國增加就業機會，製造業就跟沒戲了，這，連最左的經濟學家也堅信不疑，唯一說有的隻有奧巴馬一人。
The Mirage of a Return to Manufacturing Greatness
Eduardo Porter， ECONOMIC SCENE APRIL 26, 2016


Assembling televisions at Element Electronics in Winnsboro, S.C. Despite efforts to revive manufacturing in the United States, economists say the chances of a recovery are slim. Credit Chris Keane/Reuters

Half a century ago, harvesting California’s 2.2 million tons of tomatoes for ketchup required as many as 45,000 workers. In the 1960s, though, scientists and engineers at the University of California, Davis, developed an oblong tomato that lent itself to being machine-picked and an efficient mechanical harvester to do the job in one pass through a field.

The battle to save jobs was on.

How could a publicly funded university invest in research that cut farmworker jobs only to help large-scale growers? That was the question raised in a lawsuit filed by a farmworker advocacy group against U.C. Davis in 1979.

César Chavez’s United Farm Workers union made stopping mechanization its No. 1 legislative priority. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter’s agriculture secretary, Robert Bergland, declared that the federal government would no longer finance research that could lead to the “replacing of an adequate and willing work force with machines.”

These days, the battle to save American jobs has a different flavor. It echoes in Hillary Clinton’s promise “to win the global competition for manufacturing jobs and production.” It lives in Donald Trump’s call to break Nafta and impose a 45 percent tariff against Chinese imports, and in Bernie Sanders’s rallying cry against trade agreements.

Its outcome, however, will probably be similar. The freeze on research may have slowed the mechanization of California’s harvests, but by the year 2000, only 5,000 harvest workers were employed in California to pick and sort what was by then a 12-million-ton crop of tomatoes.

In America’s factories, jobs are inevitably disappearing, too. But despite the political rhetoric, the problem is not mainly globalization. Manufacturing jobs are on the decline in factories around the world.

“The observation is uncontroversial,” said Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist at Columbia University. “Global employment in manufacturing is going down because productivity increases are exceeding increases in demand for manufactured products by a significant amount.”

The consequences of this dynamic are often misunderstood, not least by politicians offering slogans to fix them.

No matter how high the tariffs Mr. Trump wants to raise to encircle the American economy, he will not be able to produce a manufacturing renaissance at home. Neither would changing tax rules to limit corporate flight from the United States, as Mrs. Clinton proposes.



“The likelihood that we will get a manufacturing recovery is close to nil,” Professor Stiglitz said. “We are more likely to have a smaller share of a shrinking pie.”

Look at it this way: Over the course of the 20th century, farm employment in the United States dropped to 2 percent of the work force from 41 percent, even as output soared. Since 1950, manufacturing’s share has shrunk to 8.5 percent of nonfarm jobs, from 24 percent. It still has a ways to go.

The shrinking of manufacturing employment is global. In other words, strategies to restore manufacturing jobs in one country will amount to destroying them in another, in a worldwide zero-sum game.

The loss of such jobs has created plenty of problems in the United States. For the countless workers living in less developed reaches of the world, though, it adds up to a potential disaster.

Japan’s long stagnation can be read as a consequence of a decades-long development strategy that left the nation overly dependent on manufacturing. “They are focused on a dead-end business,” said Bruce Greenwald, an expert on investment strategy at Columbia Business School. “They are not eliminating hours of work in manufacturing fast enough to keep pace with the reduction in work needed.”

The richest countries today started deindustrializing when they were already well off and benefited from fairly skilled and productive work forces that could make the transition into well-paid service jobs, as increasingly affluent consumers devoted less of their incomes to physical goods and more to leisure, advanced health care and other services.

Poorer countries have more limited options. If the demise of manufacturing jobs in the United States forced many workers into low-paid retail jobs and the like, imagine the challenge in a country like India, where factory employment has already topped out, yet income per person is only one twenty-fifth of what it was in the United States at its peak.

“Developing countries are suffering premature deindustrialization,” said Dani Rodrik, a leading expert on the international economy who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “Both employment and output deindustrialization is setting in at much lower levels of income.”

This is even happening in a manufacturing behemoth like China — which appears to have maxed out the industrial export strategy at a much lower income level than its successful Asian predecessors, like Japan and Taiwan.


For poorer countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the decline of manufacturing as a bountiful source of jobs puts an end to the prime path to riches that the modern world has followed.

A Chinese worker paints ceramic Smurfs in a factory in Fujian Province. China appears to have reached the limits of its industrial export strategy. Credit Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Manufacturing, Professor Rodrik points out, has unique advantages. For one thing, it can quickly employ lots of unskilled workers. “Setting up a factory to make toys puts you on a productivity escalator in a way that traditional agriculture and services didn’t do,” he said.

Moreover, production isn’t constrained by a small domestic market: Exports of goods can easily flow around the world, allowing industry room to grow and giving developing countries time to ride up the ladder of income, skills and sophistication.

The natural resources that dominate the exports of many poor countries don’t have these features. They employ few workers and offer little added value. They do not encourage acquiring skills, and they expose countries to violent swings in commodity prices.

High-end services such as finance and programming do pay well. But these aren’t the service sectors most poor countries build. A majority of service jobs in most poor countries are generally limited to housework, mom and pop retail and the like. Since these sectors offer little productivity growth and are generally isolated from foreign competition, they cannot pull a nation out of poverty.

The first large transition from agriculture to industry in the early 20th century — well lubricated by public spending on world wars — liberated workers from their chains far more effectively than Karl Marx’s revolution ever did.

The current transition, from manufacturing to services, is more problematic. In poor countries, Mr. Rodrik says, workers may have to pare back their aspirations of development. Who knows “how will political systems manage?” he asks.

In the United States, the political challenge is no less daunting. Low pay married to high profits in much of the service economy are contributing to a widening income chasm that is rending society in all sorts of ways. Used to the prosperity once delivered by manufacturing, American workers are rebelling against the changing tide.

Note to Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump: A grab at the world’s manufacturing jobs is the wrong answer. Walls will damage prosperity, not enhance it. Promises to recapture industrial-era greatness ring hollow.

The United States, though, does have options: health care, education and clean energy, just to name a few. They present big economic and political challenges, of course — not least the enormous inefficiency of private American medicine and Republicans’ blanket opposition to more public spending.

Yet just as the federal government once provided a critical push to move the economy from its agricultural past into its industrial future, so, too, could it help build a postindustrial tomorrow.