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Millennials face a very real risk of being a lost generation financially. They have endured 2 major, years long recessions, and now the Covid pandemic coupled w

Millennials face a very real risk of being a lost generation financially. They have endured 2 major, years long recessions, and now the Covid pandemic coupled with social isolation and massive unemployment that does not appear to have an end date in sight. Housing is more expensive for them than prior generations, wages are stagnant, school is expensive and social conflict is also currently on deck. WW2 was of course a much more trying time but it was followed by massive economic growth for most sectors of the population, I don't see that happening after the pandemic, wealth is just being silo'd and prosperity limited.

sheeshkebab 6y ago
Sorry, party is over, time to find real work
bengale 6y ago
The optomisit in me hopes that when the truth about climate change really dawns then the effort to battle it could cause a similar transfer of wealth to a post war rebuilding. Lets hope we can actually solve the problem though or it wont matter much.
- mantas 6y ago
  A lot of post-WW2 wealth transfer was from old failing empires to US of A. While climate change wealth transfer would accelerate transfer from US of A to ex-2nd and, especially, 3rd world. Either way, US and rich West people are looking to grim future compared to their parents. The rest of the world... We'll be fine one way or another.
  - wonderwonder 6y ago
    ? Climate change will disproportionately affect Africa and Asia.
    - mantas 6y ago
      A lot of international agreements seem to be geared towards rich countries paying off poor countries.
- compscistd 6y ago
  In an era of rampant misinformation feeding reality-denial, I think our collective willingness to respond to global catastrophe is worse off today than a hundred years ago. The US response to the coronavirus epidemic is a great example of this. You hear it time and time again: people who have personally felt the loss of loved ones to pandemic or wildfire or flood still deny the cause. I fully expect 50% of the (surviving) public to point out that "some scientists disagree" on the cause of global climate change while we slowly perish in a Water World dystopia.
Aeolun 6y ago
Anecdotally at least, all of my friends around my age (32) have by now managed to buy homes at very reasonable rates (<2.5% ish). Meanwhile my parents are stuck with their much higher 10% boom years interest rate, even though the absolute amount was much lower initially. Of course this is in Europe, not the states.
- smeeth 6y ago
  Is refinancing not a thing in Europe?
  - guggle 6y ago
    It is definitely a thing (saved a lot myself). But amazingly, not everyone knows about it.
  - machiaweliczny 6y ago
    It's a thing. Not sure if whole EU but in Poland by law you don't pay fees when refinancing after 3 years.
  - joncrocks 6y ago
    Not sure about the rest of the EU, but in the UK it's unusual to have very long-term mortgages that seems to be described here. The norm is 2->3 year variable rate (tracking an underlying rate + a %) or a 2->5 year fixed, maybe a 10 year fixed. After that they tend to 'default' to a worse rate for the remainder, but with no penalties generally for switching. Remortgaging is a normal part of life, but you can imagine that there might be penalty clauses if you've signed up for a 10 year fixed and in year 2/3 you want to remortgage at different terms.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      The US doesn't have the penalty fees, only transaction fees.
  - Xylakant 6y ago
    At least in Germany, it's common to have a fixed interest rate for up to 30 years (more common are 10 and 20, 30 is rare). You can refinance, but you have to basically pay a fee that covers the expected loss for the bank, so that may not be worth it. Other countries differ, for example AFAIR it was common in Poland to have housing credits pegged to the swiss franc. However, I'm fairly certain that the GP is exaggerating. Even 15 years ago, no bank asked for 10%. 5% would have been a lot, something around 3.5 - 4% common. My parents paid between 7 and 10% when they built their house, but that's like at least 40 years now. Today, something around 2% is the going rate. At least in the booming markets, however, the rise in prices has completely eaten the gain in interest. I could for the same monthly installmend pretty much finance the same size as I could 10 years ago, the interest rate would be lower, but the principal substantially higher.
paul_f 6y ago
"Major, years-long recessions"? In the lives of anyone 25 and under, there have been three recessions, the current 7-month recession, the 2008 recession which lasted 18-months, and the 2001 recession which lasted 8-months. Recessions in the US almost never last more than a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
- save_ferris 6y ago
  That may be true academically, but it’s important to point out that everything doesn’t just go back to normal when the textbook definition has ended. The wealth transfer from working class to the rich in 2008 was staggering, and so many people feel that we never really recovered from that crisis.
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    It really felt like the 2008 crisis never ended, it just trailed off into an exponential decay.
    - wonderwonder 6y ago
      This really does do a good job of explaining it, I feel the same way, you just said it better than me.
- lucideer 6y ago
  > In the lives of anyone 25 and under I think you're mixing up your generational labels. Millennial are pushing 40. Under-25s are typically referred to as "GenZ" or, more colloquially, "zoomers". > ... 7-month recession [...] lasted 18-months [...] lasted 8-months ... Those are some... VERY specific timings. For many, the 2008 recession lasted >10 years. Putting a very narrow specific figure on it needs a little bit of perspective. 10 years is obviously ridiculous as it represents the extreme, but the impact of any academically-defined "18-month" recession is always going to be multi-year.
- Humdeee 6y ago
rjkennedy98 6y ago
> Millennials face a very real risk of being a lost generation financially I think it's already a done deal. Millennials aren't as young as they seem (over 30) and as the own a minuscule percentage of US household wealth. The numbers are incredible. "Indeed, at a median age of 35, Gen Xers owned just 9% of the nation’s wealth in 2008 — less than half what boomers had at that age. And millennials will have to triple their net worth in the next four years to catch up to Generation X at 35, and increase their wealth sevenfold to catch up to boomers at that age." https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-depressing-chart-shows-the-jaw-dropping-wealth-gap-between-millennials-and-boomers-2019-12-04 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-depressing-chart-show... The funny thing is that across that millennials seem to love politicians that HATE them. Obama's big thing was Obamacare which was basically a tax on the young (force them to buy insurance to subsidize capped insurance rates on older people). Bernie's big thing is expanding Medicare and Social Security. So, I don't see things changing any time soon.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Millennials all dream of becoming older one day.
  - rjkennedy98 6y ago
    My point wasn't to pooh-pooh on the Democrats (Republicans are worse obviously with their awful tax policies). My point was that they should care about millennial issues. Whether you like or not WE are the ones paying for increased social security, medicare, NOT the boomers. They are getting way more out of the system than they ever put in. The Boomers basically took all the wealth in this country and regulated everyone out of it. There are so many issues that are good for the country and good for millenials that never seem to gain traction. Student loans reform for instance or Housing (especially zoning and property tax laws e.g. Prop 13). Here is a good link to what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh6hesHk6yE&t=1250s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh6hesHk6yE&t=1250s
- triceratops 6y ago
  Obamacare banned declining coverage for pre-existing conditions and allowed < 26-ers to stay on their parents' health plans. It also created exchanges with subsidies for those who don't have employer health plans - of whom a large proportion are under-employed youngsters. Since they don't see things getting better for them as they get older, maybe it's not so irrational to support expansion of Medicare and Social Security. It's not as illogical or against their self-interest as you think.
deleted 6y ago
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umanwizard 6y ago
Sorry to nitpick but the social isolation and massive unemployment are being caused by our response to the pandemic, not by the pandemic itself. Lockdowns are a choice, with tradeoffs.
- wonderwonder 6y ago
  Exactly and by not locking down properly we have managed to extend the pandemic in the US and its associated quasi lock down leading to our current situation. I agree with your response.
  - umanwizard 6y ago
    Have we? It doesn't seem possible to permanently stop outbreaks without having either reached 20-25% of the population infected, or locking down until a cure or vaccine is discovered. Plenty of places that locked down much more stringently than the US are having new outbreaks now - Europe, New Zealand, Australia and even parts of China. Anyway, I seem to remember that extending the pandemic was the whole point of the lockdowns. The messaging at the beginning was that we would spread out cases over time, in order to keep under emergency healthcare capacity. Not prevent cases entirely. By that metric, hasn't the US been wildly successful? Or has the goal changed - and if so, why?
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Other places have managed to become entirely COVID-free due to properly following lockdown policies. The US is still gaining thousands of cases a day–the only reason this isn’t more is that most people are staying inside. The places you mentioned with “new outbreaks” have a handful of new cases, and yet are taking it significantly more seriously than the United States.
      - umanwizard 6y ago
        Europe is having a handful of new cases? No, that isn’t true. Spain is reporting more than 10,000 new cases a day.
sandworm101 6y ago
>> WW2 was of course a much more trying time Really? Lives were lost, but WWII came and went rather quickly, a handful of years. Millenials are dealing with multi-decade problems, potential solutions to which are discussed in terms of generations, decades rather than years. For perspective: US WWII deaths: 407k over ~6 years. US COVID Deaths: 196k and counting over ONE year. So, even adjusted for population growth, the US is losing people to covid faster than it did during WWII. (The math is radically different for other countries, but in the US it is an interesting comparison.)
- scandox 6y ago
  Give me a multi-decade problem over dying in a ditch any day
- wonderwonder 6y ago
  ? 80+ million people died... That is not something that is just shrugged off. Entire ethnic groups were culled. To suggest that WW2 had no long term affects and indeed affects that did not last generations is to demonstrate a fragile grasp of history.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Did you forget that non-white people existed in the USA 1945-1965? Or did their experience not matter?
  - dontbestpuid 6y ago
    You're stupid
- pjc50 6y ago
  For perspective, the Soviet Union lost something in the region of TWENTY MILLION people. Exact numbers are disputed in the range of millions; the Soviet state lacked the capacity to track accurately, having convulsively emerged from feudalism only twenty years previously. It also, frankly, displayed a spectacular disregard for human life even of its own troops and civilians. > The US is losing people to covid faster than it did during WWII. This is a huge tragedy; the US responded to the war by trying to win it, deploying huge scientific and technical resources to that purpose. The US (and the UK) has responded to COVID largely by wishing it would go away, leaving the public to their own devices, locking down too late and too incoherently, and waiting for the private sector to develop a cure.
_qulr 6y ago
Can we please stop with the term "Millennials"? The article talks about 18-29 year olds. The most widely accepted definition of Millennials is people born 1981 to 1996, which would be 24-39 year olds. Not the same. Regardless, the financial differences between people the exact same age are always vastly larger than the financial difference between so-called "generations".
- gedy 6y ago
  Yeah "millennials" and "boomers" are turning into loose terms for "young" & "old". I'm Gen X and did not see many of these "boomer" benefits..
  - _qulr 6y ago
    It's funny, when we talk abstractly, we can look at the statistics and see that wealth in concentrated in the hands of a small % of people. But then when we break it down by age, or by gender, then suddenly, magically, this wealth becomes distributed to the entire age group, or the entire gender, so that "Boomers" are all well-off, or men are all well-off, when the reality is that it's not even remotely true, and a lot of people of all different groups are struggling.
    - rtx 6y ago
      Do you feel its natural or the conversation is being guided.
- jayd16 6y ago
  Hmm the article is not about Millennials but perhaps the comment was. I don't think GenZ has "experienced" two years long recessions like Millennials have.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    Hell, depends on what you mean by "experienced" as well. I'm a mid-range Millennial, and was in college during the Great Recession - not even aware of it until after it was over. This year is the first recession I'm actually experiencing.
prionassembly 6y ago
My grandfathers were an accountant and an engineer. The latter was really sought after too, he oversaw the construction of roads and spent months away and refused jobs to spend time home too. My parents were both musicians/painters/other artistic stuff on the side. We were always tight money-wise but somehow had a two kids middle class upbringing on the absolute best part of town. Every time I think of this my admiration for my father grows. Me and my sister became STEMpunks. My sister dropped it to be a full-time mom after a year of not liking the idea of daycare; but by then she had married well. Once every other day I wish I had become a musician like my dad. But I don't think I could pull it off. Besides, they didn't save much so I (very gladly) chip in with about half of what they need to survive -- it's not as easy anymore. (None of this is in America.)
- insidepgsmind 6y ago
  What country out of curiosity, although I’m sure it’s a universal takeaway.
rvn1045 6y ago
There's always this kind of narrative floating around that's simply not true. Sure things are getting bad right now but times have been good for a decade. Also people always say this kind of thing and extrapolate current trends into the future. After the 2008 crisis which many thought would take a long time to recover from we've had unbelievable growth for a decade.
- JeremyBanks 6y ago
  We privileged few may have experienced unbelievable growth, but most of my generation has not.
- JanisL 6y ago
  The recovery from 2008 was very uneven, because I'm in tech I did quite well but many of the people I knew from my community that were not in tech did badly. I think this unevenness in recovery is why that narrative persists so strongly.
mywittyname 6y ago
> They have endured 2 major, years long recessions, What are these recessions? I'm an "elder millennial" and the .com bust came while I was in high school. Even entering the job force with a two year degree, I graduated well after it was over. Leaving, the GFC and our current one, but our current one isn't years long...yet. The GFC was definitely a fucking mess for all of us. I have literally never had a real promotion and it wasn't until like five jobs in that I learned about annual cost of living adjustments. I still don't have a "senior" title despite having worked in industry for 15 years... I feel like GenX got the biggest shaft. They graduated in the 80s-90s into an economy where unions were in decline and Asia had come into manufacturing dominance. Saw a brief boom in the 90s, only to have numerous accounting scandals destroy any investments they managed to save during that era. Went through the housing boom/bust, then were in their mid careers by the time the GFC hit. Now they are in their 50s/60s with a pandemic and another recession landing, and this recession looks to be inflationary, which means any savings they had is going to get eaten away.
ericmcer 6y ago
Not to mention low fertility rates meaning millennials will retire into a society with few young people to support them.
nostrademons 6y ago
> WW2 was of course a much more trying time but it was followed by massive economic growth for most sectors of the population, I don't see that happening after the pandemic, wealth is just being silo'd and prosperity limited. I could see it happening, but not in a good way. One (not all that unlikely) scenario is that the economic winners manage to place themselves out of harms way in the pandemic & social unrest that follows, and then everybody else just...dies off. That'd leave all the survivors extremely well off, and everybody else drops out of the population and ends up forgotten. Globally, WW2 worked this way as well. There was a huge loss of life in Europe, in Russia, in China, in Japan, basically everywhere that the war was actively fought. 2/3 of Europe's Jewish population just died off, up to 20% of Poland and Russia, 8-10% in Southeast Asia, 4% in China. "Most sectors of the population" in the U.S. did well because the war wasn't fought here and we were the last developed nation left standing.
- Retric 6y ago
  That analysis completely fails after WWI. The actual cause of the post war boom was a massive increase in agricultural efficiency. This freed up a large chunk of household budgets to be spent of consumer goods which kicked off a long cycle of economic growth.
  - nostrademons 6y ago
    Timeline and geography doesn't work out for your hypothesis. The Green Revolution began in earnest in the late 50s; at that point, the post-war expansion in the U.S. was alread 10-15 years old and slowing down. It also started in developing nations like Mexico, India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines - there's perhaps some influence through international trade, but if that's the cause you'd expect Mexico and India to be the geopolitical superstars rather than the U.S. The timeline does match up with the Marshall Plan and redevelopment of Japan. A much simpler explanation is that the U.S. was the only nation whose capital stock remained intact after WW2. This allowed us to produce high-value goods more efficiently than everywhere else, which allowed us to export more, which led to a strong currency and ample buying power on world markets. Post-war unionization also spread the fruits of this productivity to society as a whole, rather than concentrating it among capital owners.
Barrin92 6y ago
I think this is only really true if Millennials continue to attempt to live like their parents. First thing people need to do is stop fetishizing home ownership. It's not a magical object, instead of buying a home put your money in an index fund, you'll be better off financially anyway in 20 years. Owning a home is just a status symbol people are obsessed with for your quality of life it doesn't matter if you own or rent. Even better would be to share a space with peers. Not only does it make housing cheaper, it makes everything cheaper. Nobody in their 20s or 30s needs to be isolated in some giant house. Education is predominantly getting much more expensive at elite institutions, but good public universities in-state are still affordable, or go and move abroad and get a degree in Europe if you're American. If you don't like to go to university, pick up a vocation, a lot of them pay well. In general be ready to move to improve your circumstances. Physical mobility in the US has fallen to extreme lows, it's one of the easiest way to improve your situation. Being a millenial myself I'm actually not pessimistic about the generation at all, or at least not fatalistic. This isn't an economy any more where you get a job at 23 and then you're set for life and then live in a suburb with your labradoodle. To me that's a positive.
peter_l_downs 6y ago
18-29 year olds are sort of between generations but largely fall into Gen Z; certainly they're the youngest end of Millenial, and can not really be said to have endured the 2008-2011 recession as they were not working at that time.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > certainly they're the youngest end of Millenial, and can not really be said to have endured the 2008-2011 recession as they were not working at that time. My 2 & 4 year old aren't working right now, and they've certainly endured the coronavirus pandemic. I don't know why not yet being in the labor force would prevent one from being accurately described as having endured an economic downturn any more than any other adverse conditions. It's hardly as if not being the breadwinner of the household insulates you from the effects if their income is reduced or eliminated.
- fetus8 6y ago
  As a 29 year old, I reject this sentiment. I may not have been working but my decisions regarding college and overall early adult life were heavily affected by the 2008-2011 recession because of how it affected my family. We endured it, just in a different way than those who were working.
deleted 6y ago
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sheeshkebab 6y ago

Sorry, party is over, time to find real work

bengale 6y ago

The optomisit in me hopes that when the truth about climate change really dawns then the effort to battle it could cause a similar transfer of wealth to a post war rebuilding. Lets hope we can actually solve the problem though or it wont matter much.

mantas 6y ago
A lot of post-WW2 wealth transfer was from old failing empires to US of A. While climate change wealth transfer would accelerate transfer from US of A to ex-2nd and, especially, 3rd world. Either way, US and rich West people are looking to grim future compared to their parents. The rest of the world... We'll be fine one way or another.
- wonderwonder 6y ago
  ? Climate change will disproportionately affect Africa and Asia.
  - mantas 6y ago
    A lot of international agreements seem to be geared towards rich countries paying off poor countries.
compscistd 6y ago
In an era of rampant misinformation feeding reality-denial, I think our collective willingness to respond to global catastrophe is worse off today than a hundred years ago. The US response to the coronavirus epidemic is a great example of this. You hear it time and time again: people who have personally felt the loss of loved ones to pandemic or wildfire or flood still deny the cause. I fully expect 50% of the (surviving) public to point out that "some scientists disagree" on the cause of global climate change while we slowly perish in a Water World dystopia.

Aeolun 6y ago

Anecdotally at least, all of my friends around my age (32) have by now managed to buy homes at very reasonable rates (<2.5% ish). Meanwhile my parents are stuck with their much higher 10% boom years interest rate, even though the absolute amount was much lower initially. Of course this is in Europe, not the states.

smeeth 6y ago
Is refinancing not a thing in Europe?
- guggle 6y ago
  It is definitely a thing (saved a lot myself). But amazingly, not everyone knows about it.
- machiaweliczny 6y ago
  It's a thing. Not sure if whole EU but in Poland by law you don't pay fees when refinancing after 3 years.
- joncrocks 6y ago
  Not sure about the rest of the EU, but in the UK it's unusual to have very long-term mortgages that seems to be described here. The norm is 2->3 year variable rate (tracking an underlying rate + a %) or a 2->5 year fixed, maybe a 10 year fixed. After that they tend to 'default' to a worse rate for the remainder, but with no penalties generally for switching. Remortgaging is a normal part of life, but you can imagine that there might be penalty clauses if you've signed up for a 10 year fixed and in year 2/3 you want to remortgage at different terms.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    The US doesn't have the penalty fees, only transaction fees.
- Xylakant 6y ago
  At least in Germany, it's common to have a fixed interest rate for up to 30 years (more common are 10 and 20, 30 is rare). You can refinance, but you have to basically pay a fee that covers the expected loss for the bank, so that may not be worth it. Other countries differ, for example AFAIR it was common in Poland to have housing credits pegged to the swiss franc. However, I'm fairly certain that the GP is exaggerating. Even 15 years ago, no bank asked for 10%. 5% would have been a lot, something around 3.5 - 4% common. My parents paid between 7 and 10% when they built their house, but that's like at least 40 years now. Today, something around 2% is the going rate. At least in the booming markets, however, the rise in prices has completely eaten the gain in interest. I could for the same monthly installmend pretty much finance the same size as I could 10 years ago, the interest rate would be lower, but the principal substantially higher.

paul_f 6y ago

"Major, years-long recessions"? In the lives of anyone 25 and under, there have been three recessions, the current 7-month recession, the 2008 recession which lasted 18-months, and the 2001 recession which lasted 8-months. Recessions in the US almost never last more than a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...

save_ferris 6y ago
That may be true academically, but it’s important to point out that everything doesn’t just go back to normal when the textbook definition has ended. The wealth transfer from working class to the rich in 2008 was staggering, and so many people feel that we never really recovered from that crisis.
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  It really felt like the 2008 crisis never ended, it just trailed off into an exponential decay.
  - wonderwonder 6y ago
    This really does do a good job of explaining it, I feel the same way, you just said it better than me.
lucideer 6y ago
> In the lives of anyone 25 and under I think you're mixing up your generational labels. Millennial are pushing 40. Under-25s are typically referred to as "GenZ" or, more colloquially, "zoomers". > ... 7-month recession [...] lasted 18-months [...] lasted 8-months ... Those are some... VERY specific timings. For many, the 2008 recession lasted >10 years. Putting a very narrow specific figure on it needs a little bit of perspective. 10 years is obviously ridiculous as it represents the extreme, but the impact of any academically-defined "18-month" recession is always going to be multi-year.
Humdeee 6y ago

rjkennedy98 6y ago

> Millennials face a very real risk of being a lost generation financially I think it's already a done deal. Millennials aren't as young as they seem (over 30) and as the own a minuscule percentage of US household wealth. The numbers are incredible. "Indeed, at a median age of 35, Gen Xers owned just 9% of the nation’s wealth in 2008 — less than half what boomers had at that age. And millennials will have to triple their net worth in the next four years to catch up to Generation X at 35, and increase their wealth sevenfold to catch up to boomers at that age." https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-depressing-chart-shows-the-jaw-dropping-wealth-gap-between-millennials-and-boomers-2019-12-04 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-depressing-chart-show... The funny thing is that across that millennials seem to love politicians that HATE them. Obama's big thing was Obamacare which was basically a tax on the young (force them to buy insurance to subsidize capped insurance rates on older people). Bernie's big thing is expanding Medicare and Social Security. So, I don't see things changing any time soon.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
Millennials all dream of becoming older one day.
- rjkennedy98 6y ago
  My point wasn't to pooh-pooh on the Democrats (Republicans are worse obviously with their awful tax policies). My point was that they should care about millennial issues. Whether you like or not WE are the ones paying for increased social security, medicare, NOT the boomers. They are getting way more out of the system than they ever put in. The Boomers basically took all the wealth in this country and regulated everyone out of it. There are so many issues that are good for the country and good for millenials that never seem to gain traction. Student loans reform for instance or Housing (especially zoning and property tax laws e.g. Prop 13). Here is a good link to what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh6hesHk6yE&t=1250s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh6hesHk6yE&t=1250s
triceratops 6y ago
Obamacare banned declining coverage for pre-existing conditions and allowed < 26-ers to stay on their parents' health plans. It also created exchanges with subsidies for those who don't have employer health plans - of whom a large proportion are under-employed youngsters. Since they don't see things getting better for them as they get older, maybe it's not so irrational to support expansion of Medicare and Social Security. It's not as illogical or against their self-interest as you think.

deleted 6y ago

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umanwizard 6y ago

Sorry to nitpick but the social isolation and massive unemployment are being caused by our response to the pandemic, not by the pandemic itself. Lockdowns are a choice, with tradeoffs.

wonderwonder 6y ago
Exactly and by not locking down properly we have managed to extend the pandemic in the US and its associated quasi lock down leading to our current situation. I agree with your response.
- umanwizard 6y ago
  Have we? It doesn't seem possible to permanently stop outbreaks without having either reached 20-25% of the population infected, or locking down until a cure or vaccine is discovered. Plenty of places that locked down much more stringently than the US are having new outbreaks now - Europe, New Zealand, Australia and even parts of China. Anyway, I seem to remember that extending the pandemic was the whole point of the lockdowns. The messaging at the beginning was that we would spread out cases over time, in order to keep under emergency healthcare capacity. Not prevent cases entirely. By that metric, hasn't the US been wildly successful? Or has the goal changed - and if so, why?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Other places have managed to become entirely COVID-free due to properly following lockdown policies. The US is still gaining thousands of cases a day–the only reason this isn’t more is that most people are staying inside. The places you mentioned with “new outbreaks” have a handful of new cases, and yet are taking it significantly more seriously than the United States.
    - umanwizard 6y ago
      Europe is having a handful of new cases? No, that isn’t true. Spain is reporting more than 10,000 new cases a day.

sandworm101 6y ago

>> WW2 was of course a much more trying time Really? Lives were lost, but WWII came and went rather quickly, a handful of years. Millenials are dealing with multi-decade problems, potential solutions to which are discussed in terms of generations, decades rather than years. For perspective: US WWII deaths: 407k over ~6 years. US COVID Deaths: 196k and counting over ONE year. So, even adjusted for population growth, the US is losing people to covid faster than it did during WWII. (The math is radically different for other countries, but in the US it is an interesting comparison.)

scandox 6y ago
Give me a multi-decade problem over dying in a ditch any day
wonderwonder 6y ago
? 80+ million people died... That is not something that is just shrugged off. Entire ethnic groups were culled. To suggest that WW2 had no long term affects and indeed affects that did not last generations is to demonstrate a fragile grasp of history.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
Did you forget that non-white people existed in the USA 1945-1965? Or did their experience not matter?
- dontbestpuid 6y ago
  You're stupid
pjc50 6y ago
For perspective, the Soviet Union lost something in the region of TWENTY MILLION people. Exact numbers are disputed in the range of millions; the Soviet state lacked the capacity to track accurately, having convulsively emerged from feudalism only twenty years previously. It also, frankly, displayed a spectacular disregard for human life even of its own troops and civilians. > The US is losing people to covid faster than it did during WWII. This is a huge tragedy; the US responded to the war by trying to win it, deploying huge scientific and technical resources to that purpose. The US (and the UK) has responded to COVID largely by wishing it would go away, leaving the public to their own devices, locking down too late and too incoherently, and waiting for the private sector to develop a cure.

_qulr 6y ago

Can we please stop with the term "Millennials"? The article talks about 18-29 year olds. The most widely accepted definition of Millennials is people born 1981 to 1996, which would be 24-39 year olds. Not the same. Regardless, the financial differences between people the exact same age are always vastly larger than the financial difference between so-called "generations".

gedy 6y ago
Yeah "millennials" and "boomers" are turning into loose terms for "young" & "old". I'm Gen X and did not see many of these "boomer" benefits..
- _qulr 6y ago
  It's funny, when we talk abstractly, we can look at the statistics and see that wealth in concentrated in the hands of a small % of people. But then when we break it down by age, or by gender, then suddenly, magically, this wealth becomes distributed to the entire age group, or the entire gender, so that "Boomers" are all well-off, or men are all well-off, when the reality is that it's not even remotely true, and a lot of people of all different groups are struggling.
  - rtx 6y ago
    Do you feel its natural or the conversation is being guided.
jayd16 6y ago
Hmm the article is not about Millennials but perhaps the comment was. I don't think GenZ has "experienced" two years long recessions like Millennials have.
- Izkata 6y ago
  Hell, depends on what you mean by "experienced" as well. I'm a mid-range Millennial, and was in college during the Great Recession - not even aware of it until after it was over. This year is the first recession I'm actually experiencing.

prionassembly 6y ago

My grandfathers were an accountant and an engineer. The latter was really sought after too, he oversaw the construction of roads and spent months away and refused jobs to spend time home too. My parents were both musicians/painters/other artistic stuff on the side. We were always tight money-wise but somehow had a two kids middle class upbringing on the absolute best part of town. Every time I think of this my admiration for my father grows. Me and my sister became STEMpunks. My sister dropped it to be a full-time mom after a year of not liking the idea of daycare; but by then she had married well. Once every other day I wish I had become a musician like my dad. But I don't think I could pull it off. Besides, they didn't save much so I (very gladly) chip in with about half of what they need to survive -- it's not as easy anymore. (None of this is in America.)

insidepgsmind 6y ago
What country out of curiosity, although I’m sure it’s a universal takeaway.

rvn1045 6y ago

There's always this kind of narrative floating around that's simply not true. Sure things are getting bad right now but times have been good for a decade. Also people always say this kind of thing and extrapolate current trends into the future. After the 2008 crisis which many thought would take a long time to recover from we've had unbelievable growth for a decade.

JeremyBanks 6y ago
We privileged few may have experienced unbelievable growth, but most of my generation has not.
JanisL 6y ago
The recovery from 2008 was very uneven, because I'm in tech I did quite well but many of the people I knew from my community that were not in tech did badly. I think this unevenness in recovery is why that narrative persists so strongly.

mywittyname 6y ago

> They have endured 2 major, years long recessions, What are these recessions? I'm an "elder millennial" and the .com bust came while I was in high school. Even entering the job force with a two year degree, I graduated well after it was over. Leaving, the GFC and our current one, but our current one isn't years long...yet. The GFC was definitely a fucking mess for all of us. I have literally never had a real promotion and it wasn't until like five jobs in that I learned about annual cost of living adjustments. I still don't have a "senior" title despite having worked in industry for 15 years... I feel like GenX got the biggest shaft. They graduated in the 80s-90s into an economy where unions were in decline and Asia had come into manufacturing dominance. Saw a brief boom in the 90s, only to have numerous accounting scandals destroy any investments they managed to save during that era. Went through the housing boom/bust, then were in their mid careers by the time the GFC hit. Now they are in their 50s/60s with a pandemic and another recession landing, and this recession looks to be inflationary, which means any savings they had is going to get eaten away.

ericmcer 6y ago

Not to mention low fertility rates meaning millennials will retire into a society with few young people to support them.

nostrademons 6y ago

> WW2 was of course a much more trying time but it was followed by massive economic growth for most sectors of the population, I don't see that happening after the pandemic, wealth is just being silo'd and prosperity limited. I could see it happening, but not in a good way. One (not all that unlikely) scenario is that the economic winners manage to place themselves out of harms way in the pandemic & social unrest that follows, and then everybody else just...dies off. That'd leave all the survivors extremely well off, and everybody else drops out of the population and ends up forgotten. Globally, WW2 worked this way as well. There was a huge loss of life in Europe, in Russia, in China, in Japan, basically everywhere that the war was actively fought. 2/3 of Europe's Jewish population just died off, up to 20% of Poland and Russia, 8-10% in Southeast Asia, 4% in China. "Most sectors of the population" in the U.S. did well because the war wasn't fought here and we were the last developed nation left standing.

Retric 6y ago
That analysis completely fails after WWI. The actual cause of the post war boom was a massive increase in agricultural efficiency. This freed up a large chunk of household budgets to be spent of consumer goods which kicked off a long cycle of economic growth.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  Timeline and geography doesn't work out for your hypothesis. The Green Revolution began in earnest in the late 50s; at that point, the post-war expansion in the U.S. was alread 10-15 years old and slowing down. It also started in developing nations like Mexico, India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines - there's perhaps some influence through international trade, but if that's the cause you'd expect Mexico and India to be the geopolitical superstars rather than the U.S. The timeline does match up with the Marshall Plan and redevelopment of Japan. A much simpler explanation is that the U.S. was the only nation whose capital stock remained intact after WW2. This allowed us to produce high-value goods more efficiently than everywhere else, which allowed us to export more, which led to a strong currency and ample buying power on world markets. Post-war unionization also spread the fruits of this productivity to society as a whole, rather than concentrating it among capital owners.

Barrin92 6y ago

I think this is only really true if Millennials continue to attempt to live like their parents. First thing people need to do is stop fetishizing home ownership. It's not a magical object, instead of buying a home put your money in an index fund, you'll be better off financially anyway in 20 years. Owning a home is just a status symbol people are obsessed with for your quality of life it doesn't matter if you own or rent. Even better would be to share a space with peers. Not only does it make housing cheaper, it makes everything cheaper. Nobody in their 20s or 30s needs to be isolated in some giant house. Education is predominantly getting much more expensive at elite institutions, but good public universities in-state are still affordable, or go and move abroad and get a degree in Europe if you're American. If you don't like to go to university, pick up a vocation, a lot of them pay well. In general be ready to move to improve your circumstances. Physical mobility in the US has fallen to extreme lows, it's one of the easiest way to improve your situation. Being a millenial myself I'm actually not pessimistic about the generation at all, or at least not fatalistic. This isn't an economy any more where you get a job at 23 and then you're set for life and then live in a suburb with your labradoodle. To me that's a positive.

peter_l_downs 6y ago

18-29 year olds are sort of between generations but largely fall into Gen Z; certainly they're the youngest end of Millenial, and can not really be said to have endured the 2008-2011 recession as they were not working at that time.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> certainly they're the youngest end of Millenial, and can not really be said to have endured the 2008-2011 recession as they were not working at that time. My 2 & 4 year old aren't working right now, and they've certainly endured the coronavirus pandemic. I don't know why not yet being in the labor force would prevent one from being accurately described as having endured an economic downturn any more than any other adverse conditions. It's hardly as if not being the breadwinner of the household insulates you from the effects if their income is reduced or eliminated.
fetus8 6y ago
As a 29 year old, I reject this sentiment. I may not have been working but my decisions regarding college and overall early adult life were heavily affected by the 2008-2011 recession because of how it affected my family. We endured it, just in a different way than those who were working.

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