Elizabeth Nolan Brown Discusses Millennials on Fox Business

I had the opportunity to go
on Opening Bell with Maria Bartiromo this morning and
discuss millennials, hipsters, and entrepreneurs—three subjects I
covered in a piece for Reason’s October issue titled
“Rise
of the Hipster Capitalists“. It was fun and mildly infuriating.
Host Sandra Smith quoted me as saying that millennials are
“doomed”; when I protested that doomed was my characterization
of what other people say about millennials, not personal analysis,
Smith told me I “should look back at my piece.” Okay,
fine. Here’s the paragraph in question: 

Popular wisdom about millennials seems to come in two varieties:
They are either an entitled, narcissistic group of
basement-dwellers, gazing at their selfies while the world burns,
or they’re a perfectly upstanding young cohort who got a raw deal
from the recession economy. Millennials make awful employees
because their boomer parents gave them too many soccer trophies; or
maybe they can’t find jobs because those same boomer parents aren’t
exiting the workforce. The one thing everyone can agree on is that
millennials are probably screwed.

I think it’s pretty clear that everything following from that
first line is meant as an example of “popular wisdom” about
millennials, not my own opinion. And in case there’s any doubt, I
spend the rest of the piece (the above is the opening
paragraph) making a case for the exact opposite. But after telling
me to re-read my own work, Smith went on to “quote” me,
context-free, saying millennials make awful employees because their
parents gave them too many trophies. Then she cut to the other
guests before I could respond. 

The other guests, Newedge Director of Market Strategy Robbert
van Batenburg and Value Advisory Founder Howard
Rosencrans, mostly just wanted to yell about how millennials
are the worst. They and Smith all seemed to have outsourced their
opinions to the Generic Millennial Crit playbook—we listen to
iPods! and drink Starbucks! and are lazy, and entitled, and “less
educated” (demonstrably untrue), and… well, see for
yourself: