Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

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Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise<br>Society burned through social capital and replaced it with ruinous private expenditure

Johann Kurtz<br>Jul 14, 2026

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A recent article from The Cut received a huge amount of attention: ‘It’s Hard to See My Parents Live So Lavishly While We’re Struggling’. The piece includes vignettes of Millenial hardship:<br>…his dad, Steve, sold his company to a private equity firm about five years ago, which enabled him to retire comfortably in his mid-60s…<br>Two years ago, Joe asked his dad for a loan. He wanted to start a lawn-care business and needed capital for commercial-grade equipment and a trailer, at least $15,000. He presented Steve with his business plan, which included a schedule to pay back the money. Still, Steve said “no.”…<br>Joe hasn’t started the business. He works for a property-management firm and does landscaping work on the side to bring in extra money. But he has two young kids of his own and finds it difficult to save. “Without some initial help, it’s pretty unrealistic that I’ll ever be able to go the entrepreneurial route,” he says.<br>Steve, on the other hand, thinks he’s teaching his son a valuable lesson on self-reliance. “It’s not that I can’t afford to help him,” Steve told me. “I just have a real problem with handouts. And I want him to have the satisfaction of knowing he’s built something himself, with his own hard work. That’s how I was raised, too.

The virality of this piece prompted a discussion between Louise Perry and Rob Henderson (thank you Louise for the mention!): ‘The politics of the downwardly mobile class’.<br>Rob disagreed with the Cut article’s perspective:<br>The way that this article is written, it’s intended, I think, to convey that millennials are really struggling… but, generally, Millennials are doing just fine. And even the link to the US GAO that they cite says that Millennial households were more likely than other generations to be college educated… incomes have remained flat across the three generations… There was an article a couple of years ago from Jean Twenge in The Atlantic showing that Millennials are doing just as well as previous generations were.

I disagree! I think that Millennials and Zoomers are not doing fine. In fact, I think there have been structural changes to our economy and society which clearly explain why these cohorts are failing to move through the five pillars of a stable middle-class existence: education, stable employment, marriage, homeownership, children.<br>Some of these negative changes stand out in the normal datasets, while some do not, for reasons I will explain. In short, what has happened is that previous generations were able to take advantage of highly valuable and productive social capital as well as their exploding financial capital to move through each of these life stages in a fiscally efficient manner. (Don’t worry: I will define what I mean by social capital and back my argument with data).<br>Our current young, lacking access to this social capital, must engage in enormous outlays of purely financial capital in order to achieve the same levels of stability and accomplishment — capital that they do not have. We see this clearly in the data on schooling, homeownership, and family formation.<br>All of this is hidden from the top-line metrics, usually in one of two ways:<br>Huge increases in the cost of essential aspects of family life (homeownership, education, etc.) being offset by huge decreases in the cost of non-essential goods (televisions, phones, etc.) making the young appear wealthy in the abstract but without them actually being able to afford anything meaningful;

By presenting false equivalencies which imply a level of choice that younger generations do not actually have. For example: an American family in 1975 could send their children to public school on the assumption that the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families, communities like their own, and would speak English as a first language. Now, realistically, many parents must turn to private schooling for the same reassurances.

On the surface it does seem as if the young are fine. Real median incomes are higher than they were for their parents at the same age, unemployment has spent most of the past decade at historic lows, and purchasing power has risen roughly 63 percent since 1973. Televisions, clothing, food, and air travel are cheaper than ever.<br>And yet this generation is also not marrying, not buying homes, not having children, and seem pretty miserable. I think we’re clearly in the midst of a tremendous measurement failure.<br>My argument is that previous generations received an enormous stock of social capital: trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam and adults...