[HN Gopher] Why millennials feel hopeless about the economy
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Why millennials feel hopeless about the economy
Author : SilverElfin
Score : 13 points
Date : 2025-11-26 20:41 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| SilverElfin wrote:
| The original title of this article as I saw it was "Millennials
| are richer than their boomer parents. Here's why they love to
| complain anyway." This line now appears as the subtitle.
|
| I was curious what HN readers think of the idea or evidence that
| millennials are actually richer than boomers, since everything I
| hear in casual conversations is about how boomers hoarded
| everything and millennials are worse off, due to boomers and the
| subprime crisis.
| us-merul wrote:
| I saw a comment recently that described the shift to a
| "consumer economy." Relative to boomers, millennials have
| increased access to goods and services like high-definition
| televisions, computers, international travel, and luxury foods
| (e.g., avocado toast). But in terms of wealth and assets,
| millennials have reduced or less feasible access to things like
| home ownership or college degrees (not to mention childcare or
| healthcare), compared to boomers. Though the causes of this
| shift are up for debate, it does seem that boomers had an
| easier path to ownership or growth, while millennials and
| beyond face more rent-seeking obstacles.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-u-s-inflation-
| by...
|
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/inflation-chart-tracks-
| pric...
|
| https://www.axios.com/2025/09/22/the-american-dream-will-
| cos...
|
| https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
|
| Related: (others?)
|
| _Why Millennials and Gen Z Are Going Gray Early, According
| to Experts_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45738730 -
| October 2025 (0 comments)
|
| _American Millennials Are Dying at an Alarming Rate_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963675 - August 2025
| (9 comments)
|
| _Millennials were priced out of capitalism_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43808835 - April 2025 (9
| comments)
|
| _Millennials -The Unluckiest Generation-Became the Most
| Economically Divided_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42020355 - November 2024
| (1 comment)
|
| _Millennials to feel biggest burden of fixing Social
| Security, report finds_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40505200 - May 2024 (0
| comments)
|
| _Deeply Unhappy Gen Z and Millennials Cause U.S. Drop in
| Global Happiness Ranking_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39767329 - March 2024
| (46 comments)
|
| _Millennials Have the Children, but Boomers Have the Houses_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39295239 - February
| 2024 (12 comments)
|
| _HN Search: Millennials_ -
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Millennials
| andrew_eu wrote:
| I think it's of course not so simple, and the abstract of the
| paper they refer to [0] seems to contradict the Business
| Insider article. Sure, inflation adjusted median income is up
| slightly. In addition to this educational costs have exploded,
| and to earn a median salary it has become necessary to buy in.
| People under 30 have greater inflation adjusted income, but
| this is because they rely more on their (boomer) parents. The
| overall wealth in society has increased dramatically, but the
| vast majority of gains are going to the outliers.
|
| That is to say, the real conflict isn't between boomers and
| millennials, it's between billionaires and everyone else. But
| generational friction is not new, a more common experience, and
| easy to exploit in media.
|
| 0:
| https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2024007pap...
| someone7x wrote:
| Thanks for the paper.
|
| It starts boldly by redefining the "american dream" into
| "line must go up" which ironically sounds like boomer logic
| being projected onto millennials.
|
| I don't know about the Fed but my dream as an American isn't
| to accumulate more wealth than my parents.
|
| Fwiw, the American dream in my neck of the woods is financial
| independence from landlords and bosses.
| swatcoder wrote:
| > Fwiw, the American dream in my neck of the woods is
| financial independence from landlords and bosses.
|
| That's fascinating. I believe you, but I don't think you'd
| find that voiced much in the private ephemera of American
| history.
|
| I think, until recently maybe, most people had a _much_
| more modest and communal vision of the American dream than
| that something, focused more on acheiving security for
| their family through honest work, held in the respect of
| their community, and perhaps with the further fortune to be
| able to comfortably give back to that community.
|
| Both versions that you mention ("just gimme more than my
| parents" and "You can't trust anybody and I just want
| everybody off my back so I can do what I think is right")
| feel like such radical foreclosures on any sense of
| community or society. Warranted or not: Yikes.
| swatcoder wrote:
| Single point comparison across generations is pretty much just
| nonsense as far as everyday experience. It makes for great
| clickbait and political sparring, though, especially to break
| class solidarity and sow generarional (or racial) discord.
|
| For an individual, it doesn't really matter at all how the
| median of one generation might compare to another.
|
| What they care about is how their life and their sense of its
| prospects compares to the one they _imagine_ for themselves.
|
| Sometimes that's pegged against what they see people they
| identify with demonstrating on social media or television.
| Sometimes it's pegged against nostalgic (for middle class) or
| pitying (for poor) memories of their own childhood. Sometimes
| its pegged against constructed narratives about a neglected or
| wasted golden age, or (as during the Cold War) about the rank
| superiority of their own lot vs some Evil Other.
|
| Usually, it's some combination.
|
| The reality is that some Millenials are doing pretty darn good,
| and many are not. That statement had also been true for GenX
| and the Boomers, and remains true for each of them as well. And
| it'll apply to Gen Z ans Gen Alpha just as well.
|
| The line will probanly shift a few percent this way and that
| way decade by decade, but mostly life is just hard to weigh
| expectations against.
|
| The best anybody can do is to be compassionate to people -- of
| whatever generation -- facing a hard time, including
| themselves, and temper those expectations as much as possible
| in the first place so as to deter anguish when or if those hard
| times come.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| I commonly see that discussions of "unemployment rate" don't
| account for the ways a person can be excluded from the labor
| market [1]. To achieve middle-class with a family detached home
| mortgage, annual vacation, etc., dual-earner is nearly mandatory.
| Those that "give up" and live in their parent's basement playing
| video games are not counted as unemployed.
|
| [1] https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#nilf
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