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Roela Khalaf, editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The idea behind the concept of generations is that people born at the same time share similar experiences, which in turn shape common characteristics.
The “greatest” and “silent” generations, born in the early decades of the 20th century, witnessed economic hardship and global conflict. Baby boomers grew up accustomed to growth and prosperity, and continue to lean strongly conservative.
It’s a similar story for millennials, who entered adulthood in the wake of the global financial crisis greeted by high unemployment, anemic income growth, and Ballooning House Price to Income Ratioscontinues to champion strong Progressive Politics.
Much analysis and discourse treats millennials and Gen Z as close cousins, united in their struggle to achieve the prosperity of earlier generations. But the reality of that illusion depends a lot on your perspective.
Millennials all over the Western world are truly integrated into their economy. From the US and Canada to Britain and Western Europe, the Cohort was born in the late 1980s in the homes of the vulnerable or sheltered.
Absolute upward mobility — the extent to which a generation earns more than their parents’ generation at the same age — has always fallen. In the US, by the time a person born in 1985 turns 30, their average income is only a few percent above that of their parents at the same age, an obscene generation’s gains in 50 to 60 percent are made by those born in the 1950s.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the narrative of the Millennial Malaise is not a myth. They may go down as the most economically memorable generation of the last century.
But then we hit a bump in the road. For young adults in Britain and much of Western Europe, conditions have been worse since then. If you thought the sub-1 percent annual growth in living standards experienced by millennials was bad, try sub-zero. Britons born in the mid-1990s see living standards that are not only wasteful but stagnant. Right across Europe, there is precious little for the youngest adults to be happy about.
But in America, Gen Z is riding ahead. Living standards in the US are growing at an average of 2.5 percent per year from cohorts born in late millennials rather than younger millennials than younger boomers of the same age. And we’re not the only ones, GEN Z Americans are millennials as they climb the housing ladder.
All the signs are that in the US, the decades-long slowdown in economic growth-on-generations of economic growth has not only stopped but has not returned. Americans born in 1995 enjoy more upward mobility from their parents than those born in 1965. Zoomers of Socio-Economic Nature.
Both the changing economic patterns of young Americans and the divergence from their European counterparts raise interesting questions.
From a social perspective, in an age of borderless social media accounts and Negative Reward Algorithmscan the meme of the Young Adult World be beyond contact with reality in America And in a stream of negative social comparisons a smartphone, how growing Americans are on a higher Trajectory affecting the young Europeans?
Shifting Politics, the youngest cohort of American voters treading its own path? The fact that not only the youngest men but also young women rejected Donald Trump in the US Election suggests that this will happen. A group that sees itself as the conquerors of life may not develop the same instinct for social cohesion that the encumbered acquire.
In a time of “Transfer Transfers“, the pivot from a feeling of downward movement to one of increasing prosperity may prove the greatest. A musical diversity of mood on either side of the Atlantic will certainly inject fresh that urgency of Europe is looking for an uptick of its own.
Any way you look at it, the restart of the American economy will prove to be a very important moment.
