The paper of record for New York’s young and ambitious has a piece about the legions of twenty-somethings that are losing their jobs and maybe their shirts in the financial debacle. Here are a couple paragraphs and my quote in the piece:
The 90,000 laid-off office workers that the city anticipates by the end of 2009 will include many of these younger New Yorkers. A lot will hail from the city’s more lucrative fields, including finance, advertising and law.
The city could, then, soon experience a glut of the young, the talented—and the idle; and it may not be so easy to unclog before there are serious repercussions, particularly for real estate and the very real fabric of certain neighborhoods.
“People in their 20s, I feel for them, I really do,” said Lisa Chamberlain, 39, author of Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction.
“It’s not like this is cyclical job loss,” she said of the financial implosion, which reminds her of the dot-com bust and the accompanying loss of jobs. “It’s not like these jobs are going to come back when the economy recovers. A lot of these jobs are going to be permanently gone; and that was true with the dot-com thing. … I mean, I don’t know who’s going to be selling derivatives in five years.”
I’ve been digging Sandra’s commentaries on Marketplace for years (not to mention her writings and other work), so I’m like totally psyched that she she chose to include Slackonomics in her pick of three books to recommend on the Barnes & Noble website! Here’s what she had to say:
“It’s official. The Boomers suck! Self-styled ‘rebels,’ these silver-maned materialists toting surfboards while smugly growing their investments have bequeathed a fiduciary apocalypse Gen X now must – Mad Max-like – clean up, in our flaming trash cars! This is my take: yours may vary. A Suze Orman for the Deconstructionist set, Chamberlain is witty, brainy, fabulous. A necessary addition to any collapsing IKEA bookshelf.”
Click here to go to the Barnes & Noble guest reviewers section.
It’s unstoppable, people, this Slackonomics publicity train. Today I was on Seattle’s NPR station KUOW, tomorrow will be Wisconsin NPR (click here to listen to The Conversation on KUOW), and here are excerpts from a review and interview on Forbes.com:
Forbes.com: The 2004 article you wrote for the New York Observer painted a rather grim portrait of Gen X’s economic prospects. In Slackonomics, your tone was more cautiously optimistic. What changed?
Lisa Chamberlain: It’s a complex picture, and once I started looking at it more in depth–rather than just for a short article–the complexity of the picture just became more apparent. … You realize, “Wow, there’s a lot of creativity and adaptability going on,” and I really thought that that was as much a part of that story–that there is as much creativity as there is destruction, to use the subtitle from the book.
Read the whole interview here.
From the review:
Slackonomics is no hippy-dippy “everything’s going to be OK” self-help book. “Diminished expectations had become the defining force for this post-hippy, post-punk generation,” she writes. It’s not all gloom and doom, however. Chamberlain argues that these problems have made Generation X uniquely resilient and flexible.
My hometown daily paper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, reviewed Slackonomics last Sunday. As the editor-in-chief of a Village Voice-owned weekly in Cleveland (1999-2002), I spilled a good amount of ink beating up on the PD. Sometimes the paper deserved it and sometimes not, but it seems to be all water under the bridge — or maybe our criticism was irrelevant to begin with. Either way, I’m grateful for the positive, if somewhat disjointed review:
Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 3, 2008:
Cool word, slackonomics. Cool idea, too, to meld attitude and what Lisa Chamberlain admits is an intuitive grasp of economics in her prickly, entertaining book about the changing of the guard from baby boomer to Gen Xer. Studded with insight into pop culture and today’s turbulent society, “Slackonomics” aims to give Gen X, or people in their 30s and 40s, its props. … She has a testy, smart style, is well read and peppers her book with factoid strips and graphics. … The fluid marketplace Chamberlain explores is hard to pin down, let alone navigate. But she and her peers bespeak a flexibility and fearlessness suggesting they will not only survive, but also prevail — and, perhaps, guide the world to greater sense.
It’s the dog days of August but Slackonomics — despite its moniker — doesn’t rest! I was interviewed on Marketplace about my book this morning. It’s pure, unadulterated easy listening! Stacey Vanek-Smith did a great job. Click here to listen.
The good news is, this actually translates into book sales! My ranking on Amazon jumped considerably to #5,548 as of about 3:00 this afternoon. So I’m pretty happy about that! Click here to order from Amazon.