Traditionally, the expectation has been that each generation gets progressively better, as in more financially sound and economically secure. But as the June 2022 Economics Explained video,
"Young Generations Are Now Poorer Than Their Parents and It's Changing Our Economics," points out, this is no longer the case. It asserts that even though the world has grown richer than it was in the previous millennia, millennials are holding less of that wealth, while their grandparents are hoarding more of it. They pose the question, "How is it that a world that is richer overall is producing generations that are poorer than the ones that preceded them?" It largely blames home ownership and what it calls "the housing divide." It's certainly a factor effecting wealth potential. It cites a 2020 Pew Research Center study that says 52% of young adults, ages 18-28, still live at home with their parents, causing them to be less socially and geographically mobile.
Scott Galloway, an NYU Professor, has become a leading proponent of changing this generational wealth gap. His
TED Talk went viral two months ago on YouTube, inspiring more than 22k comments. Galloway framed his talk in this way, "America's War on the Young." He claims we're "taking away opportunity and prosperity from our youngest" generation. Further, a 30-year old today is not doing as well as his/her parent's at that age, for the first time in our history, he asserts. This causes young people to be less patriotic and he showed a 2023 graph comparing those 55+ to those 18-34, and only 18% of the latter were "extremely proud" to be American while 50% of the former were. He says this leads to anger and unrest and gave rise to movements like #MeToo and #BLM among the younger citizens of this country. I touch on this in the section, Gun Violence, below.
Galloway blames the generational wealth gap on the stagnant, federal minimum wage which sits at $9.50 when it should be about $22 if it had kept pace with productivity and inflation since the 1950's (it hasn't even doubled in those 70 years, that's nearly two generations). Meanwhile, median home prices have skyrocketed for the last two generations of Americans, resulting in an average monthly mortgage payment of $2,310 (as of Feb 2024). It's led him to ask, "Do we even love our children?"
He says, "This has resulted in an enormous transfer of wealth." A graph showing that between 1989 and 2023, the share of household wealth of those under 40 has been cut nearly in half, from 12% to 7%. Galloway also blames wages v. wealth. Like in his statistic on the minimum wage, above, he says that corporate wealth has so far outpaced income that the median income line on his graph looks flatlined, while the S&P 500's numbers are nearly off the chart (numbers from 1974-2021). This is why millennials can't get ahead. Poverty among the younger generation is way up while senior poverty is way down, which he claims has been purposeful.
The cohort known as the Silent Generation sits at the top and holds all the power--politically, socially and economically. Think about it. Rich, old white dudes have always run this country. The color of justice is green, just ask the disproportionate number of poor, black males in lockdown. How many young people are represented in town hall, the statehouse or the Capitol? This wealth gap equals a gap in power. This leads millennials to be further disenfranchised.
GUN VIOLENCE
The Washington Post reports there have been 413 school shootings since Columbine in 1999. It got even worse in the last half of the 2010's, as Security.org reports. "Since 2015, school shooting incidents in the U.S. have skyrocketed compared to previous decades." That same report says that cries of "never again" rang out in the wake of the Sandy Hook (2012) and Parkland (2018) shootings. "And yet, since the Parkland shooting in 2018 — a period of just six years — more than 200 people have died and over 550 have been injured in shootings at K-12 schools." And still, nothing was done to curb the tide of gun violence on our nation's campuses.
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| SOURCE: Security.org |
My girls and I marched in a demonstration against gun violence in the immediate wake of the Parkland shooting. They were in high school in Tallahassee then and Parkland is just a six-hour drive down the Florida Turnpike. They became political activists that day at the state capital, but they'd always held strong opinions.
As I
reported in my assassination-related blog, millennials by-and-large are sick of the status quo, namely the patriarchy. My daughters, both staunch feminists and on the LGBTQ spectrum, are vehemently against the patriarchy and the Establishment.
OUR POLITICAL FUTURE
Red states are economically struggling (legalize weed), they’re bottom in education (quit pushing Jesus and indoctrinating children), high in crime (quit marginalizing people), etc. It’s no wonder the parties have dumbed down their message to lowest common denominator, especially the GOP. A change is coming.
As the graph at the top of this post points out, millennials are by-and-large more left leaning than the generations before them. They are very socially liberal in that they support the causes mentioned above, also gender equality, transgender rights, reproductive rights and slowing climate change. Financially, they are tired of the generational wealth gap holding them down. They support socialist policies like higher taxes on the wealthy, more government spending on individuals and less on corporations. They feel slighted when banks and Wall Street CEOs get bailed out, a form of "corporate socialism," but they can't get free health care or college tuition because politicians tell them socialism is a 'failed experiment,' minus a small handful of progressives in office, like Bernie Sanders and AOC. They see the overspending on the military industrial complex and the fight to save Social Security (for the Silent Generation, who already hold most of the country's wealth). As mentioned above, they are not represented in the government, so they feel they don't matter.
The silver lining is that those in power are elderly. Baby Boomers and their parents are dying off in great numbers, comparatively, which is going to shift both the wealth and the power in this country. Gen Z and younger millennials are going to become the main voting block in this country. And the backlash against the Establishment, the patriarchy, the ultra-conservative Supreme Court and the repeal of basic human rights is going to be swift and aggressive. Wait and see.
In many ways, America is already leaning more to the left, when it comes to women's rights, reproductive rights, cannabis use, etc. In many polls, these important issues tend to have 60% and higher approval by a more liberal America. Kids that can move out of rural areas and red states are doing so. They aren't big fans of corporate greed, raping our planet/killing our very habitat or of the Electoral College. As they become the power brokers and policy makers, we are going to see a vastly different American government in the coming years. The "land of the free" will once again start to feel that way, with the restoration of liberties to all citizens, the welcoming of foreigners and immigrants and a shift in our representative republic away from wealthy lobbyists (like the gun lobby) and the corporations who pay them. Hopefully, we'll see it return to what the framers of the Constitution intended--by the people and for the people (not special interests or Wall Street).
My daughters have been groomed to make it so. Hopefully, their contemporaries will wake up and realize that they hold the keys to our future.
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