Overwhelming majorities once believed that working hard and playing by the rules would grant the next generation a better life than their parents’. What happened?
In 1991, Boomers took over America. In that fateful year — the year the Soviet Union dissolved — the Boomer generation (those between the ages of 27 and 45 at the time) were just coming into real power across the cultural, financial, and political realm. America was supreme on the world stage. It was No. 1 in value-added manufacturing, globally unchallengeable, and about to take much of the Soviet bloc into de facto receivership the way it did much of the British Empire in the years after World War II.
At home, there was a minor recession, but the American dream was alive and well. The average age of a first-time homebuyer was just 28 years old, meaning the youngest Boomers were jumping onto the property ladder with relative ease. Americans had an above-replacement-level fertility rate then, if just barely. Overwhelming majorities believed that in America, working hard and playing by the rules would grant the next generation a better life than their parents’. Indeed, 64 percent predicted their children would achieve that dream.
Thirty-four years later, Boomers have dramatically shaped our world. They are now between the ages of 61 to 79. We still have a Boomer as president. What has been the result? Seventy percent of Americans believe the American dream “no longer holds true.” Only about 25 percent of Americans see a good chance of improving their standard of living in 2025 — the lowest since such surveys began in 1987.
Almost unbelievably, Boomers are the largest generational cohort of homebuyers today. Boomers account for 42 percent of all U.S. home purchases. Millennials (ages 29-44) are just 29 percent of the market. The average age of first-time homebuyers is now 40 years old. A first-time homebuyer is now roughly as close to collecting Social Security as they are to their high school prom, according to Realtor.com. U.S. fertility rates have nose-dived to 1.62 per woman.
This collapse below replacement level has several baleful cultural effects. First it means, quite obviously, that people are less invested in posterity. They have less “skin in the game.” It means we will grow older and more risk averse as a society, not a winning combination for a country that has thrived by being precociously young and inventive. It also means that immigration is bound to be a far more contentious issue. Immigrants to a high fertility society are perceived as reinforcements. Those to a low fertility society are perceived as replacements. It also means we are much lonelier and bound to be more still. In 1991, only 12 percent of U.S. households consisted of a single person living alone. Today, it’s almost 28 percent of all households. This number will rise dramatically, unless we pioneer new modes of living together.
Geopolitically, America has deteriorated. In 1991, we represented roughly 25 percent of global value-added manufacturing, in a global market of $5 trillion. By 2025, we had fallen to 11 percent, and China accounted for 30 percent of a global market that has grown to $16.8 trillion. China drops ships into the sea “like dumplings into soup broth” while the U.S. Navy is mired in yearslong backlogs that will now spill over onto our Pacific allies. The Pentagon is forced to hoard munitions, which our defense industry cannot produce as quickly or as cheaply as the Russians. While we dither in replacing decades-old systems, China is going to the cutting edge of war. Russia signs a major drone deal with China, even as China also produces the crucial electronics that go into Ukrainian drones.
American men are less fit, less likely to be married, less likely to have children, less likely to own a home, and consequently more likely to be addicted to a drug, more likely to be politically alienated, more likely to be mired in medical debt or on disability, and more likely to be politically alienated.
To the extent that political conservatism has in any way sanctified these results — telling Boomers that they did it all by their own virtue, or assuring them that posterity failed them, rather than that they failed to pass on their country in a better condition than they inherited it — it must repent. To the extent that conservatism pats itself on the back for victories so long ago in the past they are not a living memory for the majority of our citizens, it is losing the fight for the future. Fifty-year mortgages will only compound the idiocy of indenturing the young for the profit of elderly asset holders. The idea that young Americans, blocked out of ownership of real assets — most especially the ornaments of middle class and familial life — will seek to conserve the very institutions that dispossessed them is a joke only an overfed ideologue could believe.