A long time since my last post - I created Top Secret Class War Spy Report to take my political content off of social media and into something that felt more productive, and instead I’ve just been doing a shitload of posting on social media. Easing back into newsletterdom with a quick hit post on generational wealth transfer.
As a general rule, though it is easy (and fun!) to take potshots at the Boomer generation in retribution for like 15 years and counting of hot-takes in major publications about various things millennials have been accused of ruining, it’s not super productive. It’s become a meme at this point - Boomer writer accuses millennial generation of something absurd, millennials hit back that Boomers ruined the whole world, and everyone fights and no one is happy. I’m not here to weigh in on that specific debate - I’m sympathetic to the “boomers ruined everything” argument, but also applying a blanket description to everyone born between 1944 and 1964 isn’t exactly useful. However, it does provide important context for this bullshit right here tweeted out by the City of New York official twitter account yesterday:
If you can’t read the weirdly rustic graph here, basically, they are implying that millenials are being reckless and irresponsible and causing the continued spread of covid in NYC. The gleeful cries of “get off my lawn you goddam kids” echoed throughout the land as a generation spiked the ball on the “whose fault is covid” debate. Of course, this is ridiculous on a number of levels - that we’re fighting among each other about covid and who is responsible ignores the fact that while all of us should be wearing masks and taking steps to protect ourselves, the current chaos we face is the product of a deliberate misinformation campaign and a dedicated effort to cause internal strife between people rather than allow that ire to be focused on our flailing and failing federal response.
Beyond that however, is infuriating “do better” stinger at the end of this message. Millenials are currently between 26 and 40 years old - the age where college debts come home to roost, first and maybe second kids are born, and living expenses rise as financial dependence on your family is either ending or has ended. But surely everyone is in the same boat - why is it that millenials can’t seem to stay socially distant?
For the exact same reason that “millenials don’t like to want to own cars or houses” discourse was absolutely insane - the fundamental attribution error here is interpreting the effects we’re measuring as "preferences” or “choices” rather than a rational response to economic conditions on the ground. To put it more succinctly, by and large, millenials own almost no wealth as a generation and absolutely must keep working in order to sustain themselves and their families at a time when this is true of our economy:
Full-time minimum wage workers cannot afford a two-bedroom rental anywhere in the U.S. and cannot afford a one-bedroom rental in 95% of U.S. counties, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s annual “Out of Reach” report.
In fact, the average minimum wage worker in the U.S. would need to work almost 97 hours per week to afford a fair market rate two-bedroom and 79 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom, NLIHC calculates.
At the same time, the jobs millenials are doing are increasingly low-level, low-wage, and public facing. Why is this true of the most educated generation in American history? Because Boomers, themselves having had their retirement savings crushed by multiple financial crises, aren’t retiring:
In 2018, 29% of Boomers ages 65 to 72 were working or looking for work, outpacing the labor market engagement of the Silent Generation (21%) and the Greatest Generation (19%) when they were the same age, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of official labor force data.
Perhaps a more instructive graph that NYC’s charmingly crayon-drawn-for-some-reason do-better graph would be this one:
In 1990, when the average baby boomer was 36 years old, their generation held about 22% of American wealth. This has since increased to nearly 60%, but that’s no surprise as it’s what you would expect as a generation goes through it’s prime earning years. What you would hope, however, is to see the same among the generations that follow. While Gen X has seen some growth in wealth, Millenials have seen almost none. In 2016, when the oldest millenials were turning 36, their generation owned less than 5% of all US wealth. You could make the argument that at that time, the youngest millenials were still 22 years old and not really earning yet, consider that in 1990, the youngest baby boomer was only 26, and still owned 22% of American wealth as a generation bloc.
Bottom line - an affordability and inequality crisis, coupled with rising education and medical debts and a consumer culture artificially inflated by consumer credit, our standard of living is decreasing as there is less and less wealth to go around and our cost of living continues to increase. We don’t have a bad behavior crisis. We have an economic crisis, and millenials are just the ones still going to work to keep from drowning. Do better.