Oh goody, another article telling me why everything I do as a Millennial is wrong.
Here's what we were told as children:
"My gosh, you always want more toys, more comics, more videogames. Don't you ever get enough? What's wrong with you!"
As teenagers/young adults:
"Look at all this crap you've collected over the years, taking up all this room, and you're barely an adult! You'll never have space for all this when you move out into a tiny apartment. What's wrong with you!"
As adults:
"Why aren't you buying physical things and hoarding crap anymore? What's wrong with you!"
While I don't know that I agree with Tyler Cowen's original article, I don't think this is a particularly fair reading of it. Should we never question whether a societal trend is good or bad, because doing so can never come from any place other than "let's wave our canes at the younger generation?"
The point is certainly worth considering. I would personally consider myself more interested in truly owning the things I buy more than the average person, insofar as I regularly purchase and rip my own CD's so that I control the format, strip all of my Kindle books of DRM using Calibre, and contribute to the development of free software and free/libre operating systems so that I can be in complete control of my PC's hardware.
With that said, this article does a number of things that I find obnoxious. Namely:
1) The article gives Amazon a pass for implementing DRM into their books, and instead blames the people who buy Amazon ebooks. I consider that victim blaming. Amazon more or less has a monopoly on the ebook market, meaning if you buy an ebook, you're likely buying from Amazon. If you own a Kindle (which is, bar none, the best ebook reader on the market), you're buying from Amazon. And if you buy from Amazon, your books don't truly belong to you.
2) The article seems very much targeted at the younger generation. Buying digital books, digital music, and smartphones is a thing everyone does, but again, the older generation seems to get a pass on it. They own houses, after all, so from the author's perspective they surely won't "los[e] their connection to private ownership". But those poor naive youths simply can't buy an album off iTunes without giving up their stake in the system.
3) Many of the author's (valid) concerns have actionable ways to resist, which the article fails to mention. You can strip the DRM off ebooks. You can rip your own music and movies. You can load an after-market OS onto your Android phone when the carrier decides to stop supporting it. Some of these can be difficult and time-consuming, but that's the tradeoff for getting both the digital convenience and the freedom of true ownership.
To be clear, I very much dislike this trend of "licensing" everything for the sake of having it streamed to you. But I would argue that this is a business trend rather than a societal trend, as it has been implemented top-down by the nation's most powerful tech companies. The vast majority of people simply picked what was most easily available to them.
Put another way, I think it would be shameful to yell at a poor college student about contributing to the elimination of individual property for choosing to rent his college textbooks for the semester at 1/3rd of the price it would've cost to buy them. And that's largely what this article does.
As someone whose cohort is either X or Boomer depending on the meaning of 1965, the "millenials are dumb" argument will pass once your successor generation is old enough to make adult mistakes.
Having said all that, I dropped $5 a couple of days ago on a little pink pig keychain for my girlfriend. It probably cost $0.10 to make. But it was a vacay trinket and kinda cute.
Note that the majority of these offending articles come from one source - and that source is Bloomberg. Once I learned to ignore Bloomberg I started to realize relatively few outlets are disparaging of millennials anymore.
Here's what we were told as children: "My gosh, you always want more toys, more comics, more videogames. Don't you ever get enough? What's wrong with you!"
As teenagers/young adults: "Look at all this crap you've collected over the years, taking up all this room, and you're barely an adult! You'll never have space for all this when you move out into a tiny apartment. What's wrong with you!"
As adults: "Why aren't you buying physical things and hoarding crap anymore? What's wrong with you!"