Millennials Don't Stand a Chance
They’re facing a second once-in-a-lifetime downturn at a crucial moment.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/millennials-are-new-lost-generation/609832/
Hello, lost generation.
The Millennials entered the workforce during the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Saddled with debt, unable to accumulate wealth, and stuck in low-benefit, dead-end jobs, they never gained the financial security that their parents, grandparents, or even older siblings enjoyed. They are now entering their peak earning years in the midst of an economic cataclysm more severe than the Great Recession, near guaranteeing that they will be the first generation in modern American history to end up poorer than their parents.
It is too soon to know how the unfurling business-failure and unemployment crisis caused by this novel public-health crisis is hitting different age groups, or how much income and wealth each generation is losing; it is far too soon to know how different groups will rebound. But we do know that Millennials are vulnerable. They have smaller savings accounts than prior generations. They have less money invested. They own fewer houses to refinance or rent out or sell. They make less money, and are less likely to have benefits like paid sick leave. They have more than half a trillion dollars of student-loan debt to keep paying off, as well as hefty rent and child-care payments that keep coming due.
Compounding their troubles, Millennials are, for now, disproportionate holders of the kind of positions disappearing the fastest: This is a jobs crisis of the young, the diverse, and the contingent, meaning disproportionately of the Millennials. They make up a majority of bartenders, half of restaurant workers, and a large share of retail workers. They are also heavily dependent on gig and contract work, which is evaporating as the consumer economy grinds to a halt. It’s a cruel economic version of that old Catskill resort joke: These are terrible jobs, and now all the young people holding them are getting fired. What little data exist point to a financial tsunami for younger workers. In a new report, Data for Progress found that a staggering 52 percent of people under the age of 45 have lost a job, been put on leave, or had their hours reduced due to the pandemic, compared with 26 percent of people over the age of 45. Nearly half said that the cash payments the federal government is sending to lower- and middle-income individuals would cover just a week or two of expenses, compared with a third of older adults. This means skipped meals, scuppered start-ups, and lost homes. It means Great Depression–type precarity for prime-age workers in the richest country on earth.
Recessions are not good for anyone, from infants to the elderly. Nor are pandemics. Americans born during this calamity will be more likely to have low birth weights and to be in poor health generally, with lifelong effects. Children will not just endure this trauma—manifested in lost months of schooling, skipped meals, housing volatility, and increased abuse—but will carry it with them. Zoomers graduating into the recession will die sooner because of it, suffering increased incidence of heart disease, lung cancer, liver disease, and drug overdoses in the coming decades; they will also earn less over the course of their lives. The elderly are likely to be the most economically insulated group but are facing the most terrifying health consequences. Among adults the news isn’t good, either. And particularly not for those youngish-but-no-longer-young adults who came into this crisis already vulnerable, already fragile, already over-indebted and underpaid. The Millennials were left with scars during the Great Recession that never quite healed, and inherited an economy structured to manufacture precarity for the young and the poor and black and brown, and to perpetuate wealth for the old and the rich and white.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
"If take care of your work your work will take care of you."
Response to Celerity (Original post)
Response to Celerity (Reply #14)
but there are a couple things going on with respect to those who attempt to designate "generations" - with one focusing on "cultural identification" and the other on actual birth rates and the curve.
The "1946 - 1964" designation was supposedly based not only on birth/fertility rates as defined by the Census Bureau but also on the reasons behind the drop in births based on the approval of "the pill" in 1960, with use doubling for the next couple years after, and where 1964 purportedly marked the finale of a dramatic drop-off of births (or at least signaled the end of the "post WW2 baby boom", reaching a point where the boom uptick began in earnest, and where in 1965, the SCOTUS invalidated any state laws prohibiting contraception).
There have been some who attempted to define the transitional groups - in this case - the transition between "boomers" and "GenX" because "culturally", those in that transition weren't as dramatically behaving as what the media eventually "defined" as characteristics that GenX espoused either (so much focus on "grunge" and "I don't care" and other stuff). Thus you had some call the transition group "Generation Jones" too.
As a 1962 baby - most of my friends had older brothers and sisters who were definitely in the boomer camp, many averaging 3 - 4 years older than me (including those who, for example, were seniors in high school my freshman year). But since they were siblings of my friends, we all played together despite the age range (and the play groups even included my own younger siblings). So I had quite a bit of exposure "culturally" to "boomer" stuff and consider myself in the "tail end boomer" group, and have little association with GenX other than a youngest sister who is definitely GenX-y.
My father WAS a WW2 vet (he was the "baby" of the group of vets having been born in 1924 and was 19 when drafted right out of college). My mother was a "depression baby" born in 1930, and her male peers were Korean War Vets. She was an "older mother" (got married "later" - in 1959 and had me at age 32). And her own friends had babies in the mid-50s, where their "younger" siblings were my age.
One of the other things that drenched my little age group in "boomerisms" was that during the mid-late '60s, much of the programming from the '50s and early '60s that was either still airing in "first run" (like "Bonanza" ) or was shown in re-run/syndication (like "The Patty Duke Show", "McHale's Navy", "Gilligan's Island", "Batman", "The Munsters", "Micky Mouse Club", etc.), was something that we got exposed to.
My dad got one of those RCA color TVs back in 1966 or 1967 and since I started 1st grade at age 5 in 1967, I knew my numbers and certainly could turn the dial on the TV to watch my faves - like "Batman" and "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea". 
It looked sortorf like this (would have to pull out my dad's slides to get some detail on what model it may have been) -
I never really accepted the "Generation Jones" term myself - but again, that was my circumstance! 
I just posted something mentioning that there was basically in no way to have a shared experience while in elementary school, with someone who is in high school or college at that same time. But the generation is not really defined by those earliest ones. The peak of births was in the mid-late 50s and those were the ones who I got most exposed to.
My mother read that book as well and her whole take on it was that there was no way you could have what in many instances, is one end of the range being "the parents" (at age 18) of those at the tail end (if you go by the 1964), and insisting they share the same beliefs. So she didn't really accept the idea of the "boomer" designation. Her own "baby" brother is a 1943 who I call a "WW2 baby". - and I tease him because his generation were the ones that the older boomers wanted to be like.
And my mom always bemoaned her own "forgotten" generation (she had been born in 1930), who never had a President from her generation. You had the "Greatest Generation" group (including my dad's age group) and then it skipped to the older boomers for the next set of Presidents.
The dynamic not really being factored in is that (at least according to my mom), there was a sortof expectation of having "3 or 4" kids during that period (only having "2" would mean "0 population" growth).
So interestingly enough, there were several families in my neighborhood, who had 4 or even 5 kids. And the younger siblings were either my age or my sisters' ages. But we interacted with and played with their older brothers and sisters. Not so much the ones at the early end of the boomer range who were in high school and college in the late '60s, but the ones who were born in the mid-late 50s and who were in middle school/junior high while we were in elementary school.
Established 1966
AFSCME, teachers' unions, police/fire unions, seem to have better retirement packages than many private companies.
Organize.
Solidarity Forever!
Bozo, former UAW, former IBoT.
We make less than previous generations thanks to inflation eating away at value while key early life costs have skyrocketed
In other words, all our adult lives so far, every major expense category has been rising fast than inflation... but our wages haven't
housing costs more, even after adjusting for inflation
as does education
and childcare
Screwed by their parents' voting of the most inept, embarassing conservatives to call themselves leaders. The beatings will continue until morale improves. 
