What Are Millennials Ruining Now? #1: The Entire Country’s Productivity

What Are Millennials Ruining Now? The productivity of the entirety of the UK, somehow;

Says Who? Your boy Douglas McWilliams, deputy chair of the Centre for Economics and Business Research and author of The Flat White Economy, who – and listen, we all have our foibles! – quit his post as a senior adviser to George Osborne after the Mirror filmed him allegedly smoking crack and he was questioned by police for allegedly assaulting a prostitute after smoking crack (McWilliams denied the allegations and no charges were ever brought). But yeah, no, please mate tell me why millennials are the problem—

What's He Saying? "People are increasingly taking on jobs that offer less in remuneration than those that their predecessors might have accepted but that offer a more attractive lifestyle," McWilliams told The Times. "This change in job preferences, the lifestyle economy, has reduced growth since 2008 by 4 percent of GDP and could explain slightly under a quarter of the measured productivity shortfall." The argument is basically: millennials are choosing – actively choosing – lower paid jobs with fewer hours because we like living lives outside of work, and this is leading to a national loss of productivity. Because younger workers are "placing more emphasis on job content other than remuneration", the government lost out on an estimated £36 billion in tax last year. That if millennials shifted their arses a bit more, Britain – mighty, mighty, mighty Great Britain – would only have a £10 billion budget deficit.

Hello, welcome to the new column, so anyway: what is "hard work", please? I think I have a wrong grip on the idea of hard work: hard work, in my eyes, is, like, a single mother working two or three jobs to feed her children, or a labourer sweating as a town's thriving factory slowly winds down forever, or you, working overtime to cover the work of two people because your colleague got made redundant and the company you worked for couldn't afford to replace them so you just got foisted with their work and asked to cover it without any additional pay, thanks. I have, clearly, got hard work wrong, though, because Baby Boomers keep telling us – us fey millennials, with our, I don't know, our bikes, and our 4G internet connections – Baby Boomers are very fond of telling us hard work is the way to get ahead. "Work 40 years at the same exact job which you clock into at 9AM on the dot and clock out of no later than 5PM," they tell us. "Do a cash-in-hand 'consultation' gig for a mate of a mate's business and drive home in an Audi about it." This is hard work, they tell us, and we millennials don't know about that, because we're too busy knowing what a .GIF is.

To Douglas McWilliams now, who says millennials are increasingly favouring their "lifestyle" – the insane idea of doing anything with your time beyond working yourself down to the ragged bone all the waking hours of your life for an employer who doesn't care whether you live or die, yuk, no thank you, no thanks, no leisure time for me, cheers – over their career. This rise in the so-called "lifestyle economy" since 2008 – the time when millennials emerged onto the job market, but also, let's not forget, every single economy collapsed because it was all built on a swamp of busted property – has cost the UK £80 billion in lost productivity.

Now, I know a lot of millennials, and I can honestly say I don't know anyone who has ever chosen a job with fewer hours – and, crucially, less pay – because it's more fun or allows more time in the evenings to drink. Millennials are often painted by Boomers as some sort of perennial gap year generation, just because we go to Europe on holiday (flights are cheap, get over it), or that we have jobs that didn't exist 20 years ago (yeah the internet is a thing, mate; just because you can't connect an iPad to the WiFi without phoning your son, doesn't mean it isn't real), or that we eat avocados (all your life, adults tell you to eat vegetables, and then when you do they shit on your for it, my god), but that ignores the causation: we're a generation that isn't as settled as 25-to-34-year-olds of time gone by because we literally cannot afford to be.

There's slim-to-no way of stepping onto the property ladder. Our salaries are disproportionately low compared to previous generations. Employment is harder to find despite zero-hours contract-padded figures painting a false picture of job market rosiness. Disposable income is barely higher than it was 30 years ago, with millennial income falling to as much as 20 percent below the national averages across Europe (only time this has happened outside of world wars or periods of natural disaster). We're leaving university with more debt, seeing less wage growth and having to pay more rent than any generation ever in history. And yet, despite all this, our supposed choice to take low paid work (nobody on earth chooses to take less money, thanks) is the thing impacting an economy that's already working against us at every possible turn. Honestly, it's like this "lifestyle generation" news was designed in a lab to piss me off.

"At one level this does not matter too much and in reality is probably a good thing, particularly if an increasing proportion are enjoying their jobs," McWilliams told The Times. It's good to enjoy your job, yeah. It's better to be able to afford a house for three years' worth of annual salary in the 1970s and then sell it on for a few million 30 years later, I imagine. It must be sick to be able to buy breakfast one time without being blamed for the downfall of the country's entire economy. Douglas McWilliams, mate: I wish I had more time to ALLEGEDLY smoke crack and ALLEGEDLY assault prostitutes, I really do. It's the lifestyle I desperately want to lead. But I'm too busy working all the time to try and make rent.

@joelgolby