I’m just going to repost the Slackonomics jacket copy — including a brief excerpt and short bio — which was written in May and published in July, 2008:
Generation X grew up in the 1980s, when Alex P. Keaton was going to be a millionaire by the time he was thirty, greed was good, and social activism was deader than disco. That was before the Great Middle Class Squeeze and a roller coaster of economic insecurity and technological innovations changed everything. Two back-to-back bubbles later, many Xers find that living in a time of “creative destruction”—when an old economic order is upended by a new one—has deeply affected their everyday lives; from how they work, where they live, how they play, when they marry and have children, to their attitudes on love, humor, friendship, happiness, and personal fulfillment.
But what’s more, after spending years in the shadow of baby-boomers only to find themselves facing the prospects of economic ruin and environmental meltdown, Xers are realizing the time may finally have arrived for them to be in charge.
One part Freakonomics, one part Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Chamberlain’s debut deftly weaves together the disparate forces that have shaped a generation and defined an era. Exploring the connections between Douglas Coupland and Melrose Place, dot-com insanity and the riot grrrl scene, Donnie Darko and the current housing crisis, present-day graffiti artists and an early twentieth-century Austrian economist, Slackonomics is a wry and compelling must-read for anyone interested in our post-Boomer future.
Excerpt:
Ironically, before this generation was known as Generation X, the prevailing wisdom (circa 1985) was that this group would have it pretty cushy in almost every way: as babyboomers aged their way through society, vast opportunities would open up for the smaller demographic coming up behind them; colleges would be competing with each other to attract the best students; as boomers moved out of the workforce there would be more jobs available than could be filled, increasing pay and benefits; and—get this—there would be a flood of affordable housing as boomers traded up! As the saying goes, prediction is very hard, especially about the future…
Lisa Chamberlain is a regular contributor to the New York Times and the executive director of the Forum for Urban Design. Her writing has also appeared in Salon, New York magazine, and the New York Observer. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of a Village Voice-owned weekly paper. She lives in the East Village in New York City.
The 10th Anniversary edition of the surprise bestseller, The Not So Big House, will be published in the coming weeks. The book struck a nerve with Generation X, which embraced its emphasis of quality over quantity, Dwell-magazine practicality over McMansion bling. But I doubt Sarah Susanka (the architect and author) could have guessed just how far Gen X would take this trend.
In yesterday’s Home section of The New York Times is a story about the tiny house trend, featuring Michael Janzen. He is the epitome of an Xer who has learned how to deal with being whiplashed by the economy. In his twenties he lived in a space about the size of a two-car garage. At the age of 40, after getting married and making money as a Web designer for a bank, he has an in-ground pool, maid service, a yard landscaped with Japanese black pine bonsai trees, notes the Times. But Janzen has spent the summer building an 80-square-foot house out of free stuff he found on Craigslist. Why?
According to Mr. Janzen, he came to the realization that “I don’t want this life — the life of someone who’s working too hard to pay a large mortgage to live in this house.” The catalyst, he said, was watching the value of his home plummet with the rest of the real estate market, while the time and money required to maintain the property only increased. “The energy cost is enormous,” he said, “and the bigger your property gets, the more there is to do.”
That is Slackonomics, folks, pure and simple. Check out the article and audio slideshow below.
I have a piece on the website New Geography about the role of Boomers on Election 2008. Read it and weep, Boomers!
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.
In researching my post about cubicles (see below), I came across a piece published by BusinessWeek titled Ten Reasons Gen Xers Are Unhappy at Work. It’s written by Tammy Erickson who is writing a book about the Gen X corporate experience and our “career options.” You see, she is “worried” about Generation X and corporations — more so about corporations than Xers because now they need us (!) to fill the leadership vacuum that is about to open up. But guess what? We’re not so keen on leading Corporate America. This is of course no surprise (especially to anyone who has read my book Slackonomics), given the current state of Corporate America, which has not exactly been the best place to work since Gen X began entering the workforce, as Erickson’s Top Ten Reasons indicate:
1. X’ers’ corporate careers got off to a slow start;
2. When you were teens, X’ers witnessed adults in your lives being laid off from large corporations;
3. Most corporate career paths “narrow” at the top;
4. Just your luck—the economy was slow when you entered the workforce …
I could go on, but let’s just say I cover 8 of her 10 reasons in my book Slackonomics. And since she is a “McKinsey-award winning” writer and author of “four Harvard Business Review articles,” Slackonomics is probably more fun to read. Just a guess.