In the loftily titled Rational Exuberance: The Influence of Generation X on the New American Economy, commentator and economist Meredith Bagby has put together a worthy reference book not just for her own Xer generation, but for anyone puzzled by what the term or its demographic represents.
Bagby's exhaustive, sometimes repetitive fact-finding mission into the world of the approximately 45 million Americans born between 1965 and 1976 reveals that though they might be struggling with the daunting boomer legacy of a multitrillion-dollar debt and the dissolution of Medicare and Social Security, they're far from dwelling on their pernicious inheritance.
Switching on her evangelical enthusiasm, Bagby parades her peers as self-reliant, fiscally responsible go-getters who eschew bloated government, cherish activism, work longer hours than their boomer counterparts, and are "exuberantly" reforming the economy. She taps a gamut of successful Gen-X entrepreneurs, as well as her own economic insights, to deftly debunk the notion that the twentysomething crowd deserves the derogatory social labels bequeathed it.
She accomplishes this task most effectively by drawing testimonials from success stories of her generation. Among the worthies highlighted is former Sierra Club president Adam Werbach, who at 26 ran the largest grassroots environmental organization in the United States. Other luminaries include Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang, Kurt Von Emster - at 29, one of the Franklin Templeton Group's youngest portfolio managers - and Aliza Sherman, who launched Cybergrrl in 1995 to get more young women online.
Because Bagby has done her homework, she tends to overwhelm readers with a mountain of statistical data. Her central assertions, therefore, about how Gen X is tackling education, the national debt, political apathy, and increasing social and racial division are given less room for rationalization and analysis than the title implies. But she evokes enough collective dynamism to suggest that giving the economic reins to a bunch of doofus slackers isn't such a bad handoff after all.
Rational Exuberance: The Influence of Generation X on the New American Economy, by Meredith Bagby: US$24.95. Dutton: +1 (212) 366 2215.
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