Debt to America: twenty-somethings complain they've been shafted. And they're right.

• Author: Madland, David
• Position: Generation Debt: Why Now is a Terrible Time to be Young - Book review

Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time to be Young By Anya Kamenetz Riverhead, $23.95

Each generation seems to be genetically programmed to pooh-pooh the problems of those who come after them, often invoking historical tales of woe in an unending game of one-upmanship. When I was your age, we had to walk everywhere--uphill, both ways. We lived through rations and war. We had phones with cords and our computers ran on dial-up. The young adults of 2006 may enjoy technological innovations their grandparents never imagined, but by most other standards--paying for school, securing a good job, affording a home, and supporting a family-their ascent to self-sufficient adulthood is steeper than at any other time in the past 30 years.

Anya Kamenetz, a 25-year-old writer for the Village Voice and author of Generation Debt: Why Now is a Terrible Time to be Young, is at the age when, not so long ago, many young adults were already married, buying their first homes, and settling into family life. But Kamenetz knows that those milestones are more difficult for her and her peers to achieve, and that it will take them longer to reach the next level of official adulthood. Unlike many older observers, however, she does not blame this on a slacker generation of adults kids who prefer to leech off their parents and avoid long-term commitments to relationships or real estate. Instead, writing in short vignettes that relate the frustrations of young adults struggling to become financially stable, Kamenetz identifies economic and political structural changes as the source of the problem.

Ultimately, however, Kamenetz's generational cynicism prevents her from imagining ways to turn this situation around, and she restricts most of her solutions to embracing her peers and teaching them how to cope with their lot in life.

The members of what Kamenetz calls "generation debt" aren't putting off settling down just to annoy their grandchild-craving mothers. Once they leave their parents' houses, these young adults start falling into a hole that will take them the next decade or more to crawl out of. Start with college: Previous generations enjoyed a government support structure that gave many working and middleclass students the means to attend college, through such programs as the GI Bill and the Higher Education Act, which created the Pell Grant. Today, as tuition costs have risen exponentially, government support has withered away. Federal grants, which once...