The Ballad of Downward Mobility :: The Atlantic

[erronis]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/downward-economic-mobility-boomer-generation-x-debt/671260/
Archived: https://archive.ph/qQXIL

I didn’t quit on the American dream; it quit on me—and my generation. Now we need a different idea of the good life.
By Rich Cohen

In the summers of my youth, the rooms were always air-conditioned. This machine-cooled air came not from window units, which were a relic of the cities, but from central systems that chilled every inch of living space to an Alaskan 67 degrees. The air seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It had no warm spots, no eddies, no pockets of humidity. It was a sea of comfort that ran from the threshold of the front door—passing from yard to house was like moving between seasons—to the peak of the finished attic. Now here I am, in the late summer of 2022, eons away from my 1970s and ’80s suburban childhood, in a world beset by heat waves, droughts, wars, and disasters, sitting before a Walgreens fan, bathed in sweat and meditating on the wealth of nations and the fate of the American dream. And the realization comes that I am just one of the millions of members of Generation X who, looking into the sun of the thing, must admit that we are in fact downwardly mobile, the first American generation that will perform worse economically than their parents.

When your median Baby Boomer was 50, around the turn of the millennium, he earned roughly $30,000 a year. I use the male pronoun because the gender-wage gap among Boomers was even wider then than it is today. Currently, a 50-year-old with the same education, family background, intelligence, good luck and bad, will earn slightly more in inflation-adjusted terms (the youngest Boomers are now nearing their 60s). Things have improved—not enough, gap-wise, for women and people of color—but overall the picture still looks like stagnation, or worse. According to the Pew Research Center, “the typical Gen Xer has just over $13,000 in wealth (defined as total assets minus total debts), compared with the $18,000 held by a typical Gen Xer’s parents when they were the same ages.” Or, as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson just described the change in life chances for a child born in the ’80s compared to one born in 1940, “In 40 years, the American dream went from being a widespread reality to essentially a coin toss.”

It’s bad even before you consider the dragon at the door: debt. Our grandparents had practically none, our parents had little, but it can seem, to those born between 1965 and 1985 (the precise parameters given for Gen X vary), that debt is the only thing we’ll ever really call our own. Negative numbers. Swampland on the wrong side of zero.

[Celerity]

1. Will read it later, but his delineations are a tad off. The median Boomer would have been

born as December 31, 1954 turned to January 1, 1955, thus they turned 50 as 2004 changed to 2005.

Also, the Gen X boundaries have been clear for ages. The birth years are 1965 to 1980. Sure, there is the micro gen Xennials/Carter Babies/Gen Catalano, which are cuspers born 1977 to (depending on what you accept) 1980 to 1983 or so, but the straight Gen X core boundaries have been set long ago. Same for Millennials, born 1981 to my birth year, 1996

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. No, no-one has set generation boundaries that precisely for a universally-agreed definition

Each polling company may be sticking to their own dates, but they don't match exactly.

[Celerity]

7. The broadly accepted (both academically and in wider culture) boundaries are what I stated.

I have some backgrounding in demography and cultural anthropology, so am quite familiar with this.

Of course there are some one-offs and outliers, but on balance, my positings above and below are valid.

Boomers 1946-1964

Gen Xers 1965-1980

Millennials 1981-1996

Gen Z 1997-2012 (2012 is not completely set yet, but getting there)

Gen Alpha 2013 (tentative)-?

It makes little to no sense to suggest a 21 year (so even longer than the Boomers gen length) Gen X cohort of 1965 to 1985. A person born in 1965 has lived a very different life for their first 15-20 years (the world wide web was not even publicly released until 5 to 11 years later, in 1991) was still than a person born in 1985, who at the same ages saw post 9-11, the mass spread of wireless telephony, and the rise of modern social media (Wikipedia in 2001, FB in 2004, YouTube and Reddit in 2005, and Twitter in 2006, when they were 20 and then turned 21). The 1985 born had their entire teen (and part of their pre-teen years) years in the WWW/Windows 95/98 and beyond years. There are many other socio-cultural, socio-political (especially the end of the Cold War and the post Thatcher/Reagan dystopian outcomes that haunt us all to this day) vast differences as well. A 1965 born grew up, for the first quarter century or so of their life, in a bipolar Cold War world. The 1985 born was 3 or 4 years old when the Berlin Wall fell.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. Well, if you want sense ...

Then it makes no sense to make the Boomer generation longer than X or Millennial. And what's so special about 20 turning 21? And if the things you find significant range from 2001 to 2006, and you talk of "first 15-20 years" and "part of their pre-teen", then you yourself are not working to precise dates.

2 ages that actually mean something in western society: 0, when you're born, and 18, when (by the end of this period) you are a legal adult. So:
1946-1963 Boomers - all born after WW2 had ended
1964-1981 Gen X
1982-1999 Millennials All alive, but children, at the turn of the millennium.
Gen Z 2000-2017 - because that's another 18 years, like these other generations.

But the main takeaway is that there are very few precise lines that can be drawn - end of WW2, really. The millennium didn't really mean much, but if you're going to call a generation after it, then have some way of relating it to the name. But mainly, you can't fault anyone else for disagreeing with the fairly arbitrary boundaries you, I or anyone else feels fits their scheme.

[Celerity]

10. The 2nd Millennium CE ended when December 31, 2000 turned to Jan 1, 2001

2000 years CE ended then

December 31 1999 CE was just the end of the first 1999 years CE , not 2000

there was no year zero

it went from December 31, 1 BCE to January 1, CE

same for decades

the first decade CE ended on December 31, 10 CE

2nd decade started January 1, 11 CE

The last year of the 1950's was 1960 CE

last year of of the 1990's was 2000 CE

the 2020's started Jan 1, 2021 CE

it's basic maths, regardless of what pop culture thinks

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. Touché. But that would push a "millennial" definition even later

And it was more than 'pop culture' defining it as Dec 31st, 1999. For that matter, it would make more sense for a generation to actually be as long as a human generation. This is about 27 or 28, in the UK anyway: https://www.statista.com/statistics/294590/average-age-of-mothers-uk/ .

We could have a 27.5 year generation:

born January 1946 - June 1973; call it the Cold War generation, since they all spent their whole childhood in the Cold War;
born July 1973 - Dec 2000; in the UK, call it the European generation, since they all spent their whole childhood in the EEC/EU.

[Johnny2X2X]

2. The Dream was stolen, it didn't just wither away

The fact is there is more wealth in our country than ever before. It’s just concentrated in the hands of they very few now who live like sultans while the rest of us fight each other over table scraps.

The top 1% controls everything. And they do an artful job of getting the bottom 99% to fight amongst themselves constantly. You saw a perfect example of that last week when Biden canceled just $10K of student debt, you saw people even here on DU attacking other working class people because they may have saw some relief even with incomes approaching squeezing into the top 10%.

People making $125K a year are not rich. They live like blue collar people loved in the 70s and 80s. What people should be mad about is that that lifestyle is barely available now to less than 10% of the country when it used to be available to the majority.

[Farmer-Rick]

4. When feudalism was on the brink of collapse,

Economic Stagnation was one of the major reasons it fell apart.

We are seeing the same thing today. Capitalism is collapsing. It no longer benefits society as a whole. It is actually a burden to the world. The filthy rich are a threat to a peaceful society as were Kings and Lords. Expect wars and diseases.....

There are a lot of similarities between the collapse of feudalism and what we are seeing today in our economy.

We actually don't have capitalism anymore. Capitalism does not gather wealth from a nation and then redistribute it to the already filthy rich and powerful through the government. Capitalism usually gives wealth to the wealthy thru markets Not through a central government.This is more like a regression to feudalism where Lords get all the wealth while everyone else suffers. It looks like fascism but kind of in reverse where the power is not in the government but in the filthy rich Lords.

Hang on, it will be a bumpy ride as the remains of capitalism fall apart.

[erronis]

5. Not quoted in the OP, but the cost of education has risen sharply and its benefits are less clear.

That debt is in the houses we live in but do not own, in the cars we drive but have not paid for, and mostly in the colleges we have finished but that have not finished with us. More than a quarter of Gen Xers carry student debt, their own or that of their kids: $40,000, $60,000, $100,000. You try swimming with that shackled to your ankle. And the problem is not just that college is so much more expensive than it was even a couple of decades ago—according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, the average cost of undergraduate education grew 169 percent from 1980 to 2019—but that it’s so much more necessary. A college degree is the new high-school diploma: the ante you need just to sit at the table.

How big the ante depends on the school. NYU tuition runs upwards of $55,000 a year. Yale is closer to $60,000. Even the state schools have become absurdly pricey. But if you don’t send your kids to college, you’re setting them up to fail. In their mid-20s to their early 30s, the median college grad out-earns a high-school grad by about $23,000. And the gap only grows from there. The result is a crushing overhang of debt; the harder you work, and the older you get, the further you feel you are from solvency. For many, the American dream has come to resemble a mirage that recedes as you cross the desert.

While the college degree is even more mandatory than it might have been 30 years ago, its benefits are less apparent. Especially when the debt burden for the degrees is carried for possible decades and those promised jobs become more elusive.

[CrispyQ]

6. He nailed it here:

But most of my predicament—it’s shared by Gen Xers, Millennials, and presumably Gen Z and all those who will follow—is the result of history, the inevitable life span (youth, maturity, senescence) of any great nation. The story of America is the story of a bull market. The wealth and its increase—an increase that made my parents’ economic life look like a ramp that went straight up—were at least partly built on plunder. First, of the land taken from the Native Americans, which became the free land for ranchers and farmers that ignited the boom. Then, of the free labor from enslaved people, the free silver from the mines, the free gold in the rivers, the free coal in the mountains, the free oil in the ground. You bend down and pick it up and, by God, you were rich! That’s the American dream.

After the Second World War, America alone was not in ruins, the richest nations of the Old World having set one another on fire. For decades after V-J Day, American affluence and influence seemed unstoppable forces. We owned nearly everything and wrote nearly every rule and patrolled nearly every sea. We were the market and the supplier, and even if we didn’t sell it, we still took a cut.

And now, we wake, as at the end of a long nap, to realize that we have not only used everything but used everything up. We have run out of new land to settle, new people to exploit, new markets to service. America is the dream of endless growth, and without that growth, there is seemingly no dream. That’s the real cause of all the debt carried by my generation: We used it in the way you use a hole punch to add inches to your belt. Extend the boom. Preserve the dream. Now we’re out of leather.

We (the country & indeed, the world) need a new economic system not based on continual growth. I have no idea what that looks like, but you can't have continual growth in a closed system.

[Wingus Dingus]

11. On one hand, I get what he's saying--the economic boom times

resulting from land grabs, plundering the resources (we are super-blessed with them in the US), being the last great power standing unscathed after two world wars: that led to the American dream of ever-upward mobility, but those factors were unique and can't be duplicated or sustained. Boomers are the last generation to reap the benefits of those times. Gen X is the first to see the accumulated wealth of centuries of growth begin to recede. I believe this is true.

However, I know many people decades younger than me (I'm in my early 50's) who have bigger, nicer, newer houses--houses that were $400-700,000 and up, even before the real estate bubble. Cars that cost 40,000 plus, luxury pickups that cost 20-30,000 more than my first house did in 2000. Covered in pointless ugly tattoos that I've heard aren't cheap. The millennials and Gen Z in our extended families, in their 20's-early 40's, have been to Europe, Jamaica, the Fiji Islands, the Caribbean, some to Japan and China. Travel is discretionary and expensive, and indicates you're doing pretty well, IMO--and they do seem to be living really well, far better than my husband and I at their ages. Compared to the way my Silent Generation elderly parents live, they're living in absolute unheard-of luxury.

So if Gen X and subsequent generations are downwardly mobile, it doesn't really look like it, yet.

[erronis]

12. I think it probably depends on your milieu - location, social environment

Where I live (rural north-east USA) most people are surviving but worried about the future. We do get more than our share of rich folks vacationing/living (second/third homes) that own mansions and drive fancy cars. Most of us try to pay our bills and keep a roof over our heads.

[Wingus Dingus]

13. I think my point is this--if we ARE downwardly mobile as GenX/Mill/GenZ,

then we're all somehow downwardly mobile from older generations with: increased amounts of leisure time compared to our parents, increased square footage, perfect-looking teeth, latest tech gadgets, marble and quartz countertops, eating out, extensive travel, big kitchen islands, professional landscaping, lane-and park-assist, etc. Someone is affording all this stuff. Maybe retirement is when the party finally stops for us.

[erronis]

15. That may be true when averaged but remember the high-end skews the averages.

And, I think you'll agree, that there is much more disparity in income and wealth than 20/40 years ago. This fuels the luxury lifestyle items you are listing. For us little folks (median income, not average), these luxuries aren't in my recent past or future.