Blame the Entitlement Mentality on...Dot-Coms???

A reference to the dot-com bubble/bust usually accompanies some article about how today’s economic woes share characteristics of blah, blah, blah. I’m going to blame the dot-com bubble/bust on something much more nefarious: the exponential growth of entitlement.
How many times did we read stories in the late ‘90s about some college drop-out or recent college grad who started a company to sell sawdust on Jupiter, went public for a bazillion dollars and then sold it for a mere 25 million? When you read it, didn’t you think: I could do that? How hard could it be? We started to think that a little chutzpah and an internet-based idea – no matter how crazy – would make us all rich in a few months.
Now imagine that you were 10 at the time – an impressionable age. You stop thinking about being a fireman or an astronaut and begin thinking to yourself, “I could be rich at 25 and not have to work ever again.” That image can burn itself in your brain indelibly. The entirety of your teen years would be consumed with just getting to school (made easy by lowered requirements, easy-to-attain student loans, and guidance counselors squawking the benefits of college) and waiting for your turn.
Now it’s 15 years later. You’ve gone to school. You’ve made some smart friends via World of Warcraft and Facebook. You’ve got a great idea to sell plywood on Mercury via the internet, but no one’s buying. What the heck?!? It happened 15 years ago, and all sorts of folks in their 20s got rich. Why am I not having any fun? So then the discouraged 20-something does what feels best: they wait. To quote a John Mayer song that eloquently captures the millennial generation’s motivation: “Waiting on the world to change.”
So the dissed youth sits back, plays World of Warcraft, and whines about how there are just no jobs out there for an art history major with a minor in Sanskrit and a great idea to sell plywood on Mercury. They default on the student loan. Eh, who cares? It wasn’t really his money. Then the credit score drops and getting a job (a car, a house, etc.) becomes that much more difficult. The youth whines louder about how no one educated him on the effects of defaulting on a loan. So he waits for the world to educate him (the fact that 16 years of government-provided education provided him ample opportunity doesn’t seem to register). And while he waits for a real-world education, he finally buckles down and gets one of only two jobs for which he is qualified: flipping burgers or local government bureaucrat.
As a burger-flipper, he will continue to whine about the lack of a “living wage,” and working conditions, and the rich franchisee who owns the burger joint. He does not realize that $7.25/hour is 10 times more than what he’s worth as an employee, the working conditions are palatial compared to the working conditions in the factories in the 19th century which gave rise to the labor laws of today, and his franchisee boss makes about $75k a year while working 100 hours a week and dealing with 300% annual turnover. If the youth did the math, he’d see that his boss makes only twice what the burger-flipper makes per hour. Twice the pay; one hundred times the headache. The burger-flipper is making out like a thief in the night.
If the youth became a government bureaucrat, he would continue to whine about the lack of a living wage, the onset of carpal tunnel syndrome, restless leg syndrome, and his deplorable healthcare plan. He does not realize that his government sector union takes most of what would be “take-home pay,” and that he wouldn’t need a union if he’d just stop whining and do some actual work.
So as you can see, the whiny, entitled generation is a direct spin-off of the dot-com boom/bubble/bust. It’s no one’s fault, but we should realize that these youths didn’t get that way on their own or because their parents were inattentive or because of “Jersey Shore,” although some of this may be true. They got this way, because they had early examples of young men and women getting rich quick without understanding the surreal, unsustainable backdrop against which the dot-com business was painted.