The young and cash-strapped

TOWARD the end of her new book, “Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time to Be Young,” 25-year-old author Anya Kamenetz, a columnist for the Village Voice, proffers a bit of advice for her peers. Activist students shouldn’t focus their efforts on “free speech, the war in Iraq, AIDS, the drug war, and living wages.” They should fight to reform America’s credit card laws.

Young people often lead battles for social change -- think the civil rights movement here or the recent revolutions in the Ukraine or Serbia -- but to Kamenetz, that kind of idealism is admirable but distracting. Credit card debt, rising college tuitions and crummy service-sector jobs have so overwhelmed America’s youth that it’s time for them to unite into an interest group, an MTV-watching counterweight to the AARP.

It’s an odd message, but she’s got a point. As she shows persuasively throughout this jeremiad, young people are up to their knees in muck. The average student graduates college with about $20,000 in debt. Young adults head into an economy with a flat-lining minimum wage, a looming Social Security crisis and a plethora of jobs available at Starbucks.

Kamenetz drums home this point repeatedly, through statistics and voluminous interviews with her peers in what she calls “generation debt,” an age group (18- to 35-year-olds) that I am in the middle of. She then ends with sensible calls for reform -- reducing college tuition, reinvigorating usury laws, making the elderly wait longer to start cashing in on Social Security.

There are serious flaws with the book, though. For starters, it’s sloppy. The chapters are mishmashes of short, scattered vignettes. The prose is also often overheated and cliched.

“It’s past time for us to wake up and realize that we’re drifting toward a precipice; not only our own fates but the whole country’s future is at stake,” she writes to conclude the first chapter.

She also protests too much -- for example complaining that MP3 players are both essential and expensive -- and repeatedly overstates her case, making the book sometimes read like an extended advocacy-group talking-points memo. “What would you do if you grew up and realized that everything America has always promised its children no longer holds true for you?” she asks. Always?

Soon after that line, Kamenetz presents “Stella,” a young woman still paying off debt from a credit card she maxed out on a spring-break trip to San Diego a decade ago. Yes, Stella is now admirably trying to make things work. But I suspect her grandparents, growing up in the Great Depression, faced at least comparable obstacles.

The biggest flaw in “Generation Debt” is that Kamenetz directs almost all her ire toward issues that are mostly out of our generation’s control, such as college tuitions and jobs going overseas. But we can control most of what afflicts us. We don’t, for example, have to buy funky new shoes just because the TV tells us to.

Most of the problems facing the people profiled in the book are the result of choices, in particular their constant selection of freedom and experience over stability.

Readers should pair this book with “For Common Things,” the 1999 manifesto of then-25-year-old Jedediah Purdy. The two authors share a disillusion with the times. But the message espoused by Purdy, who is my friend and colleague, is that the problem is with us: People have become too ironic and cynical. Kamenetz’s message is that the problem is with them: those who rig the system.

Early in the book, Kamenetz quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” to extol the virtues of meaningful work and, thus, set up her call for all of us to ask: “Why aren’t there more good jobs?”

But the rest of that great essay has even better lessons, such as its repeated admonition to think for oneself and not, as a present-day example, to buy an iPod on credit just because everyone else has and because those ads with the silhouettes are so sexy. “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself,” Emerson writes at the end.

“Generation Debt” has some bold and thought-provoking ideas, but I’d recommend my generation (re)read Emerson first.

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Nicholas Thompson is an editor at Wired and a fellow at the New America Foundation.