Talking to ... Jacob Savage

There’s a certain irony in how the American Dream—that grand
promise of merit-based advancement—has begun devouring its own
children. In 2011, Jacob Savage arrived in Hollywood with modest
expectations: a Princeton degree, solid writing skills, and a
reasonable hope of landing a mid-level television writer’s job.
But what he found was a system that had quietly rewritten its own
rules. When he submitted a pilot episode that a TV studio
executive liked enough to invite him into the writers’ room, that
same executive ultimately decided that having another white
person on the team wasn’t appropriate. »I was told very
specifically on several occasions that the reason was because of
things I couldn’t change about myself.« Paradoxically, it was
primarily older white men who enforced such corporate policies.
What led Savage to view this fate not as a personal failure but
as the lot of an entire lost generation was a weekend trip with
old friends who, like him, had completed Ivy League educations
but, with one exception, had all found themselves in precarious
jobs. This made him write essay, The Lost Generation in Compact
magazine, which was widerly read and brought him to our
attention. In it, Savage goes a step further, backing up the
logic of the closed door with hard statistical data that reveals
how DEI policy ultimately amounts to systematic discrimination
against young white men:


»But nothing explains the New Media story quite like Vox, whose
explainers dominated 2010s discourse and whose internal
demographics capture the decade’s professional shift. Back in
2013, when Ezra Klein came under fire for his startup’s lack of
diversity, Vox Media was 82 percent male and 88 percent white. By
2022, the company was just 37 percent male and 59 percent white,
and by 2025, leadership was 73 percent female.«


Jacob Savage, who laconically describes himself as a suburban dad
from Los Angeles, spends his time selling concert tickets when
he’s not taking care of his two sons. His article on The Lost
Generation has earned him significant media coverage across
various podcasts and newspapers. He also runs the Substack Jacob
Savage.


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