The growth of growth requires a different kind of person, one whose abilities, skills, emotions, and even sleep schedule are in sync with their role in the economy. We hear a sweetened version of this fact whenever politicians talk about preparing young people for the twenty-first-century labor market, and a slightly more sinister version from police officers and guidance counselors when they talk about working hard, flying right, and not making mistakes. It’s tough love, and young Americans are getting it from all sides. This advice is uncontroversial on its face, but its implications are profound. In order to fully recognize the scope of these changes, we need to think about young people the way industry and the government already do: as investments, productive machinery, “human capital.” If people have changed as much as other engines of productivity have over the past three or four decades, it’s no wonder the generation gap is so significant.

A hard look at these trends suggests that Millennials represent the demographic territory where a serious confrontation has already begun: a battle to see if America’s tiny elite will maintain the social control they require to balance on their perch. It’s not an arrangement they’ll let go of without a fight, and they have a lot of guns—figurative and literal. Political reforms seem beside the point if the next generation’s hearts and minds are already bought and sold. Millennials have been trained to hold sacred our individual right to compete, and any collective resilience strategy that doesn’t take that into account is ill-conceived, no matter how long and glorious its history. A regular old political party with a social media presence is insufficient on its face. No one seems to know what we—with all our historical baggage—can do to change our future.

This sort of intensive training isn’t just for the children of intellectuals; the theory behind the rhetoric advocating universal college attendance is that any and all kids should aspire to this level of work. College admissions have become the focus not only of secondary schooling but of contemporary American childhood writ large. The sad truth, however, is that college admission is designed to separate young adults from each other, not to validate hard work. A jump in the number of students with Harvard-caliber skills doesn’t have a corresponding effect on the size of the school’s freshman class. Instead, it allows universities to become even more selective and to raise prices, to populate their schools with rich kids and geniuses on scholarships. This is the central problem with an education system designed to create the most human capital possible: An en masse increase in ability within a competitive system doesn’t advantage all individuals. Instead, more competition weakens each individual’s bargaining position within the larger structure. The White House’s own 2014 report on increasing college opportunity for low-income students noted, “Colleges have grown more competitive, restricting access. While the number of applicants to four-year colleges and universities has doubled since the early 1970s, available slots have changed little.”15 Still, the Obama administration remained undaunted and continued to champion universal college enrollment, as if we even had the facilities to handle that.

[...] In a culture that increasingly rewards only exceptional accomplishment, any disadvantage or challenge can seem like a disqualification. One mom told Francis that because she had expected her son to star on the football team, his ADD diagnosis made her feel the way a parent who had expected a “normal” child must feel upon hearing a diagnosis of Down syndrome.30 It’s an insensitive comparison, but there’s something revealing in the equation: A hypercompetitive environment sets parents up for dreams of champion children, and then for almost inevitable heartbreak. Millennials of all abilities have grown up in the shadow of these expectations, expectations that by definition only a very few of us can fulfill.

Using the data carefully and anxiously prepared by millions of kids about the human capital they’ve accumulated over the previous eighteen years, higher education institutions make decisions: collectively evaluating, accepting, and cutting hopeful children in tranches like collateralized debt obligations that are then sorted among the institutions according to their own rankings (for which they compete aggressively, of course). It is not the first time children are weighed, but it is the most comprehensive and often the most directly consequential. College admissions offices are the rating agencies for kids, and once the kid-bond is rated, it has four or so years until it’s expected to produce a return. And those four years are expensive.

You can’t talk about contemporary higher education without talking about money, which is fine, because only fools are even tempted to try. Between 1979 and 2014, the price of tuition and fees at four-year nonprofit US colleges, adjusted for inflation, has jumped 197 percent at private schools and 280 percent at public ones, accelerating faster than housing prices or the cost of medical care or really anything you could compare it to except maybe oil.1

But as anyone who’s seen an infomercial knows, affordability isn’t just about cost, it’s about the repayment terms. Paying $1,800 for a Bowflex up front may cost about the same as eighteen payments of $99.95, but it’s a lot less affordable. When President Obama said in the State of the Union speech, “We worked with lenders to reform student loans, and today, more young people are earning college degrees than ever before,” it sounded like there was a certain causal connection, as if reform had led to a reduction in the higher education debt burden that had freed up more young people to go to college. The reality is closer to the opposite: The more debt there is available, the more “affordable” college is. Washington’s program for higher education accessibility isn’t based on the “No one turned away for lack of funds” logic of a punk show at a Unitarian church; it’s closer to “At no money down, anyone can get behind the wheel of a brand-new Mustang.” This is how the president can call an escalation in average student debt an achievement in accessibility.

The jobs that are set to last in the twenty-first century are the ones that are irreducibly human—the ones that robots can’t do better, or faster, or cheaper, or maybe that they can’t do at all. At both good and bad poles of job quality, employers need more affective labor from employees. Affective labor (or feeling work) engages what the Italian theorist Paolo Virno calls our “bioanthropological constants”—the innate capacities and practices that distinguish our species, like language and games and mutual understanding. A psychologist is doing affective labor, but so is a Starbucks barista. Any job it’s impossible to do while sobbing probably includes some affective labor. Under the midcentury labor regime we call Fordism, workers functioned as nonmechanical parts on a mechanical assembly line, moving, manipulating, and packaging physical objects. But as owners and market pressures pushed automation and digitization, the production process replaced American rote-task workers with robots and workers overseas whenever possible—that is, whenever the firms could get ahold of the capital to make the investments.

It’s important not to blame the wrong actor and to make sure we keep our eyes on the bottom line: Women are working more overall, men are doing more housework, and yet there’s less housework getting done and less financial stability. This is what happens when all work becomes more like women’s work: workers working more for less pay. We can see why corporations have adapted to the idea of women in the labor force. Plus, the ownership class can redirect popular blame for lousy work relations toward feminists. Millennial gender relations have been shaped by these changes in labor dynamics, and we can’t understand the phenomenon of young misogyny without understanding the workplace.

Just because some men’s work tended to be better at a time when single-worker families were more common doesn’t mean we can return to the former by returning to the latter. But that’s the narrative misogynists use to interpret what’s going on and how it could be fixed, and they’ve attracted a lot of angry and confused men who aren’t sure about their place in the world. One antidote to this kind of thinking is an alternative framework for why and how workers (of all genders) came to be in such a precarious position.

What we see in the wealth numbers is not a clean-cut case of intergenerational robbery, or at least not just that. A quadrant of young households in the Pew data are doing quite well for themselves. Over the past generation, the economy has bent heavily in the owners’ direction, like a pinball machine on tilt. The uneven impact of the 2008 crisis could have led to reevaluation of these trends. But it didn’t. Instead, the owners of land, real estate, stocks, and bonds have increased their rate of gain at the expense of everyone else. This also means that the path from worker to owner gets steeper and more treacherous, and since few Millennials are born with a stock portfolio, fewer of us will make it up the mountain than in past generations.