A puzzle of contemporary society is the broad acceptance by young people – Millennials and Generation Z – of their lot. True, they haven’t been conscripted to fight an inglorious war as the early Baby Boomers were in Vietnam. But in many other respects, they have strong grounds for feeling shortchanged. Economies in the developed world haven’t boomed, as they did in the decades immediately after the Second World War. The expansion that started in the 1980s sputtered after the dotcom bust at the turn of the century. The economy glowed only thanks to a central bank-stoked housing boom that led to the economic equivalent of a cardiac arrest in the 2007-08 financial crisis.
“The one experience Millennial Americans all share is that our early adult years have been dominated by an economy that has failed us over and over again,” writes Joseph Sternberg in The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future. The jobs market has been hollowed out as routine jobs are automated. Research shows that it pays to be old – the earnings gap between older and younger male workers widened from 11% in 1970 to an astonishing 41% in 2011. Declining rates of homeownership put the primary vehicle of wealth accumulation increasingly beyond reach of Generation Rent, burdened with $1.4 trillion of student debt. Earlier generations experienced recessions, but none since the Great Depression matches the Great Recession, notes Sternberg. “The economic recoveries weren’t as slow. The underlying transformation in the labor market wasn’t as dramatic. And the previous generations weren’t so indebted, so house-poor, so haunted by the prospect of substantial tax bills to come.”
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