«I THINK THE YOUTH OF TODAY ARE TERRIFIC»

Millennials have a high degree of trust in their society’s institutions. A Pew Research Center study found that Millennials are “more supportive of business than their elders. A higher percentage of Millennials than other cohorts agrees that ‘business corporations generally strike a fair balance between making profits and serving the public interest.’” This feeling is shared by 44 percent of Millennials, compared with 35 percent of Gen Xers and Boomers and 32 percent of the Greatest Generation. We don’t blindly trust these institutions; we understand their limitations and know that greed and corruption are inevitable, and thus we are not shocked by scandals and crises.

The same spirit of pragmatic idealism is responsible for the Millennials’ optimistic attitude about their economic prospects, even in the depths of a lingering recession that has hit our generation hard and diminished our prospects of finding our first jobs. A Pew study found that although Millennials’ “entry into careers and first jobs has been badly set back by the Great Recession … they are more upbeat than their elders about their own economic futures as well as about the overall state of the nation.”

www.salon.com
Feb 16 2013