Not All Millennials: ​Generational Wealth and the New Inequality

Peddlers of self-help and pop-psychology are quick to assure us that we’re each our own toughest critic. In fact, it’s often our peers who will exact the harshest judgments, being best positioned to sniff out the social cues and latent hierarchies that are most legible within a shared milieu. Last year, Pete Buttigieg, the only millennial candidate in the Democratic Presidential field, failed to win the support of other members of his generation (which is also mine) — a February 2020 poll of 18-34 year olds placed him at a pitiful 6%. The résumé stacked with institutional achievement felt a little too polished, and he was widely regarded with the kind of disdain reserved for teachers’ pets. Columbia students called him “the old man’s millennial,” the kind of ideal young person that our parents measure us against: Harvard, Rhodes scholarship, military service, McKinsey, not quite so politically radical.

Pitted against AOC for the title of Anointed Millennial Politician, he simply didn’t stand a chance. Setting aside the charisma differential, Ocasio-Cortez is an avatar of the leftist politics that has become de rigueur for a large chunk of our economically disenfranchised generation. Her commitment to progressive issues is the product of a lived experience that can’t be replicated by the shrewdest political strategists: famously, she was working as a bartender when she was elected to Congress; when she moved to DC, she struggled to afford rent. Critics have investigated the value of her childhood home and other such clues in an effort to challenge this narrative of precarity, but the specifics hardly matter. Where Buttigieg represents an outdated fantasy of meritocratic accomplishment, Ocasio-Cortez’s story is millennial realism. (...)

Widening income and wealth inequalities, and millennials’ dim economic prospects, have led the media to reevaluate its initial verdict on the generation. First, we were entitled, distracted avocado toast addicts who couldn’t budget. But the past few years have seen an increasingly sympathetic shift, as even the bootstrap scolds have been forced to admit that structural factors might be impacting our generation’s failure to meet expected benchmarks of middle-class adulthood. Publications that were once obsessed with admonishing us became obsessed with declaring our economic prospects hopeless. “The Coronavirus Means Millennials Are More Screwed Than Ever,” wrote The Daily Beast in May, a month after The Atlantic declared, “Millennials Don’t Stand A Chance.” Definitively, from The Washington Post: “Millennials are the unluckiest generation in U.S. history.”

Generational insiders have worked hard at narrativizing this predicament: Anne Helen Petersen most recently posited “burnout” as the dominant affective response to skyrocketing precarity and worsening prospects amid constantly multiplying demands on our time, attention, and labor in her viral article-turned-book Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. If our toothbrushes (Quip), mattresses (Casper), suitcases (Away), and novels (Sally Rooney) match, so too, we are given to believe, do our emotional states. “The weight of living amidst that sort of emotional, physical, and financial precarity is staggering,” she writes, describing a condition of exhaustion battling the steady impetus to do more. In 2017, Malcolm Harris’s Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials offered the most thorough accounting yet of the structures underpinning millennial psyches. He explains the way that the forces of neoliberalism, with its imperative to optimize profitability in every facet of life, have set millennials on an impossible and unending racecourse. His book is now frequently cited alongside Petersen’s; in The Nation in November, Jeremy Gordon wrote that the two “draw on a similar body of evidence to demonstrate how and why we got here, because the facts aren’t really up for debate.” Many bleak statistics, which hardly need repeating at this point, bear that sentiment out. Millennials control 4 percent of aggregate wealth, compared to the Baby Boomers’ 21 percent at the same age, and in the era of precarious employment (47 percent of millennials freelance either some or all of the time), we can’t and won’t earn our way out of that hole.

These books, and the slew of accompanying articles, have illuminated the millennial experience and identified the structural barriers we face, drawing a direct line from our debts, wages, and shattered expectations to policy choices made in the last few decades. They have also been used in service of a flattening narrative that creates a frame around our generation and a shorthand for a shared experience that is frequently gestured at, even when it’s not necessarily earned. Last summer, Rachel Connolly put her finger on the way that a distinct “we’re all in this together” ethos papers over intra-generational class distinctions. “Those who stand to inherit substantial wealth will complain they are crippled by the high cost of rent,” she writes, “and those with rich and famous parents will speak, darkly, of “hustling” their way into the industries in which their relatives work.” I immediately recognized in her description the discreet millennial landlords and “broke” trust-funders I’ve met, and I’d venture to guess that I’m not alone.

The millennial social condition is analogous to the one that has arisen during the pandemic: despite a wildly unequal material reality, essential workers, the unemployed, and those with cushy remote jobs have all experienced a brutal lifestyle disruption, a severe narrowing of options, and a blow to mental health and happiness. Almost across the board, millennials will do worse than their parents, inheriting a harsher and more difficult world, but not all of us will experience this in the same way. For a generation that has developed a complex language and conceptual rubric for privilege, it’s curious that this phenomenon has yet to receive as much attention, that the authenticity tests we’ve administered to Buttigieg and Ocasio-Cortez have not yet translated to a broader reckoning with what’s coming.

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Some millennials are already receiving financial help from their parents (in fact, many: the Times reported one estimate that “more than half (53 percent) of Americans ages 21 to 37 have received some form of financial assistance from a parent, guardian or family member since turning 21.”) Others can soon expect a life-altering infusion of cash, either in the form of posthumous bequests or transfers — like help with a down payment — made while parents are still alive. These gifts have become more significant than ever now that the wage labor market can no longer serve as a corrective to unevenly distributed parental wealth. Yet another group may see its economic position shift later in life: after struggling to pay the bills until age 50 or later, outcomes will suddenly diverge even among those who hold the same job.

The financial industry is calling the coming shift a “great wealth transfer.” Morgan Stanley has referred to it as the “$30 Trillion Challenge” after one study specified that amount as the sum of wealth that will pass into millennials’ hands between 2031 and 2045. Their advisors are standing at the ready: “Morgan Stanley is committed to helping this generation prepare for its inheritance and achieve the amazing,” reads their website. CapitalOne/United Income predicts $36 trillion; Cerulli Associates places their estimate at $68 trillion; PNC Bank predicts $59 trillion; Wealth-X says $15 trillion by 2030. Regardless, The Economist wrote in October, “Wall Street will soon have to take millennial investors seriously.” Forbes wrote in 2019 that “Millennials Will Become Richest Generation In American History As Baby Boomers Transfer Their Over Wealth,” the same year that the Times asked, “A ‘Great Wealth Transfer’ Is Coming. What Will It Mean for Art?” 

 

by Kiara Barrows, Drift |  Read more:

Image: Emma Kumer