Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

Malcolm Harris argues that Millennials are the first generation raised as a standardized product for the labor market. He frames childhood and adolescence as a period of intense human capital accumulation where play is replaced by competition and performance metrics. The text examines how the rising costs of higher education, the disappearance of entry-level wages in favor of unpaid internships, and the constant surveillance of social media work together to increase productivity while driving down labor costs. This economic pressure results in skyrocketing rates of anxiety and a reliance on pharmaceutical management to maintain efficiency.

This book serves readers interested in labor economics, generational sociology, and leftist political theory. It provides a structural explanation for the precarious financial state of young adults that ignores personality traits or cultural clichés. Readers walk away with a vocabulary for how neoliberal policies and technological shifts restructured the American family and legal system. It offers a framework for understanding why increased educational attainment has yielded diminishing returns and how the contemporary workplace extracts more value from workers through constant connectivity.