Mike and Morley

Members of the millennial generation – born between 1982 and 2003 – carry a student debt burden of close to one trillion dollars. This is the group that includes many just entering the stage in life when people tend to settle down and start families. Even though Millennials are marrying later than previous generations, they would still be the prime market for sales of single family starter homes, if only they could afford them. As interest rates rise along with home  prices, the only way this key consumer segment will be able to afford to buy a house is if the nation, out of its own self-interest, finds a way to relieve Millennials of their crushing student loan obligations.

The launch of "Pivot" and plans to launch other millennial-oriented cable networks, such as "Revolt and Fusion," is the strongest signal yet that the traditional TV networks have lost their way in trying to appeal to America’s largest and most diverse generation (born 1982-2003). The new channels are trying to connect to millennials by capturing the generation’s “change the world for the better” attitude or simply their music or ethnic identity, all of which are better ideas than the type of programming broadcast networks have deployed in a failed attempt to win eyeballs from a generation with a notoriously fickle attention span. Broadcast networks better find the answer soon or they are likely to end up becoming what CBS President Leslie Moonves called “bastard television,” the progeny no one wishes to acknowledge.

The fundamental disconnect between network TV and its potential millennial viewers is not the usual suspect, technology. Yes, millennials are devoted to social media and have none of the love of broadcast television that Boomers acquired in their youth, or even the type of affinity Xers have for cable TV that started when they were teenagers demanding, “I want my MTV.” According to leading communications research and consulting firm Frank N. Magid Associates, Xers and Boomers will engage in 8.4 and 7.2 non-TV activities  during prime-time hours, while millennials will engage in 10.4 activities. Millennials are much more likely to go online, visit a social network, listen to or play music, play games or just socialize out of the house and away from the TV box when networks most want them to pay attention to their programming. But those behaviors are an indication of how poor the programming is, not the root cause of the problem.

Slugging Milwaukee Brewer outfielder Ryan Braun’s accomplishments earned him the National League’s Most Valuable Player award in 2011. But his suspension for using performance-enhancing drugs — one that will force him to sit out the rest of the 2013 season — forever called into question all of his achievements. Of course, Braun wasn’t the first player to be caught using steroids, and he won’t be the last. Their number includes Barry Bonds, baseball’s all-time home run leader, and Roger Clemens, a pitcher with 354 wins in his career. Within the next couple of weeks more players, most notably Alex Rodriguez, are likely to be punished for the same offense, some probably more severely than Braun.

One thing is different this time, however. Unlike previous attempts by players' union representatives to create a civil-rights issue over steroid testing, most present-day players have vigorously condemned Braun’s PED usage. The adverse reaction to Braun by other players was noticed and applauded by Travis Tygart, CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, the organization that banned Lance Armstrong for life from competitive cycling for his use of steroids. According to Tygart, “It’s a new generation of athletes that are standing up. The culture’s been flipped on its head.”

Millennials (born between 1982-2003), need to share their experiences constantly. This behavior – responsible for the explosive growth in social media since the first Millennials became teenagers – presents a unique challenge to the television industry and the one-to-many broadcast technology on which it is based. Since this generation will dominate the key 18-49 TV ratings demographic for the rest of this decade and beyond, finding a solution to this technological puzzle will determine whether television is able to retain its popularity as the preeminent source for entertainment or whether it fades, as radio has, into a medium relegated to niche applications and limited markets.

In order to be successful with Millennials, television will need to become more like the concerts and theme parks that provide Millennials with the type of social experience the generation craves. By creating a space that Millennials can enjoy immediately and personally with those who join them at the event, as well as while tweeting about it on their smart phones to hundreds more of their friends and followers, concert promoters such as Live Nation and theme park owners like Disney have found a way to maximize the revenue generated from the content that they fully control in such venues.

In an age of terrorism, the Millennial generation may well find that elusive balance between security and privacy. They reflect the safety concerns of their GI grandparents, the respect for civil liberties of their baby boomer parents, and mix in their own ethic of fairness and tolerance.

The first four amendments to America’s Constitution were the nation’s initial attempt to find a consensus on where to draw the line between personal freedom and privacy on the one hand and societal safety and security on the other. This debate has been with us ever since and now events, such as the Boston Marathon bombings, or new technologies, such as drones and ever present surveillance cameras, create new concerns over how to find the right balance between these two competing values.

Over the centuries, differences in generational attitudes have caused the nation’s consensus on how to balance this tension to shift. Group and civic-oriented generations, such as the GI generation or "greatest generation," emphasized safety and security. Individualistic generations, such as today’s baby boomers and Generation X, tilted the balance back toward protecting privacy.

As Millennials, America’s largest generation, enter their thirties in ever greater numbers, their beliefs about how and where to raise a family will have a major impact on the nation’s housing market. This follows as their media and political preferences have helped shape how we entertain ourselves and who is the president of the United States.   A 2012 survey indicated that seventy percent of Millennials would prefer to own a home in the suburbs if they can “afford it and maintain their lifestyle.” Now a new survey of 1000 18-35 year olds conducted for Better Homes and Garden Real Estate(BHGRE) by Wakefield Research provides a much more detailed picture of the type of home Millennials believe best fits their needs and desires.

Reflecting their overall attitudes about spending their hard-to-come-by money, Millennials look more for value than “pizzazz” in a new home. Seventy-seven percent told BHGRE they preferred an “essential” home over a “luxury” model. And more than half (56%) believe the technological capabilities of a house are more important than its “curb appeal.”

 Originally published
at NewGeography.com

A remarkable, but mostly unnoticed, 2012 study found a powerful correlation between a community’s civic health and its economic well being. The analysis by the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) and its partners found that the density of non-profits whose purpose was to encourage their members’ participation within the community  correlated strongly with the ability of a locality to withstand the effects of the Great Recession. The same analysis revealed that those municipalities having the greatest amount of “social cohesion,” defined as “interacting frequently with friends, family members, and neighbors,” also showed greater resilience in ameliorating job losses during economic downturns, independent of the density of their non-profit sector.

The numbers are startling. States with high social cohesion had unemployment rates two percentage points lower than their less connected counterparts, even controlling for demographics and economic factors. A county with just one additional nonprofit per 1,000 people in 2005 had half a percentage point less unemployment in 2009. And for individuals who held jobs in 2008, the odds of becoming unemployed were cut in half if they lived in a community with many nonprofit organizations rather than one with only a few, even if  the two communities were otherwise similar. Given these results, every community interested in improving its economic vitality should be devising strategies to increase the civic health of their locality.

Originally published
at NationalJournal

Baby boomers, growing up in what appeared to be the never-ending prosperity of the 1950s and '60s, were at various times amused, mystified, and infuriated by the economic caution of their GI or Greatest Generation mothers and fathers, often labeling the penny-pinching of their parents “Depression mentality.”

Now, a half-century later, many of those same boomers, perhaps with a greater degree of understanding this time, are watching their own "millennial-generation" offspring (born from 1982 to 2003) develop the same habits of frugality and restraint that the millennials’ great-grandparents did in the 1930s and '40s. This change in attitude and behavior will impact America’s consumer spending and the way businesses and advertisers will need to approach their customers for decades to come.

Originally published
at PolicyMic

The producers of this year’s Oscar show, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, deserve credit for attempting to overcome the challenges of putting on a show that has to appeal to multiple generations, even if the results were decidedly mixed. By choosing Seth MacFarlane to host the show, the Academy took some risk that his type of snarky humor wouldn’t offend viewers from older generations too much. In the end, MacFarlane managed to skewer every politically correct Boomer shibboleth, potentially costing the Oscars viewers next year should he return. But, in exchange, his reputation and the presence of major millennial stars brought the production major gains among viewers in the key 18-49 year old demographic.

Originally published
at Huffington Post

Millennials (born 1982-2003) are America's most civic-oriented generation, since their GI Generation great grandparents. They believe in collective, local, direct action to solve their community's and the nation's problems. However, a recent report on the state of Millennials' civic participation indicates that the generation's interest in taking part in political activities is constrained by the underlying skepticism of many Millennials about the transparency and fairness of the country's current political system. To address this problem, the Roosevelt Institute's Campus Network (RICN) has just issued a set of recommendations on how to create "Government By and For Millennial America," that should serve as a roadmap for anyone interested in increasing the civic health of America's largest and most diverse generation.