The Unluckiest Generation in History (Script & Sources)
Added 2021-10-08 23:02:30 +0000 UTCGood morning, bad news: Millennial are the unluckiest generation in US history. Compared to every single generation going back to 1792 - that’s the Transcendental, Gilded, Progressive, Missionary, Lost, G.I, Silent, Baby Boomer, and Gen X generations, spanning the Civil War, both World Wars, the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, and the Great Depression - Millennials, unequivocally, have had the worst economic growth per capita ever, according to a deep dive analysis by Washington Post.
Millennials have had the distinct honor of experiencing so many once-in-a-lifetime economic setbacks, which specifically impacted their generational group more than any other, that even accounting for future economic upturn, and higher earnings over time, millennials as a whole will never recover from a lifetime of back to back recessions and black swan events like 9/11 during their childhood, the 2008 economic collapse when entered the workforce, and COVID-19 at the exact moment that millennials became the largest portion of the workforce as older generations retired.
And every single time there’s a collapse, and recovery, it leaves older generations better off, at the sole expense of Millennials, and each recovery is accompanied by it’s own unprecedented transfer of wealth from the working class to the billionaire class, of which millennials are not a part - in fact Millennials own only 5% of the total US wealth, and Mark Zuckerberg alone has 2% of all Millennial wealth.
This cycle of uninterrupted economic spiraling, has also meant that Millennials earn significantly less than they should. By entering the workforce during the Great Recession, a period of record breaking high unemployment, the well paid jobs that were promised to them by virtue of a college education, which is what happened to Boomers and Gen X during extremely strong economic growth in the 90s, never materialized for Millennials. Instead, they started their careers in lower paying jobs, often ones that didn’t have anything to do with what they went to college for. And by starting at lower salary in a different field, their future economic earnings were permanently stunted. That’s why, on average, Millennials are reaching life milestones like home ownership, marriage, and starting a family as much as a decade later than previous generations, if they even do at all.
Today, 70% of millennials live paycheck to paycheck, generationally they hold within a statistical margin of error, 0% of the total real estate wealth in the US. And ironically, Millennials are the most educated and most productive workforce in history, statistically they work harder and get more done than their Gen X or Baby Boomer counterparts, while generating more revenue for the companies that employ them.
Despite all the whining other generations do about “lazy Millennials”, it’s those other generations who collect billions in passive rental income from Millennial workers, while refusing to retire and leave easy, well paid, managerial jobs for which they are no longer qualified. If you’re a millennial, how many times have you had to export a PDF for someone making six times your salary, who’s had that job since the early 2000s?
In fact, maybe The Washington Post is wrong - Millennials aren’t the unluckiest generation, it wasn’t luck that repeatedly crashed the economy, decimated wages, raised the rent, skyrocketed the national debt, poisoned the environment, and fumbled the pandemic response. We’re not unlucky. We’re screwed.
