Take heart, millennials
When it comes to existential angst, you’d have to go some to beat the near-despair found recently by Star reporter Rosa Saba among young Canadians walloped by the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Young people are going to be footing the bill for this pandemic for the rest of their lives,” said one young Toronto businessman.
“It just kind of seems bleak at this point,” said a graduating college student. “Life as we know it is over,” added another millennial. Little of this dismal outlook is new for a demographic cohort — born between 1980 and 1996 — that was delivered into economic and social revolution and has been hit by one crisis after another.
They were the first digital natives, the product of helicopter parenting and often children of divorce who came of age as the middle class was shrinking and inequality rising.
They are the best-educated generation in history, but more deeply indebted, slower to launch and facing greater barriers to building wealth.
Enter the pandemic and they faced lost jobs, disrupted education plans, rising debt and increasing anxiety.
By and large, life was put on hold in what should be the prime of life.
Worse still, the coronavirus setback came on top of an economic hammering described last year by Joseph C. Sternberg in a book whose title speaks for itself: “The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future.”
When the Great Recession of 2007-08 hit, aging politicians and policy-makers made decisions that favoured their interests over their heirs, he wrote.
They abandoned investing for the future, he said, to pay for the economic sins of the present.
That was added to globalization’s ongoing hollowing-out of the middle of the job markets, of workers’ rights, essentially a shredding of the social contract and shattering of the expectation that every generation could expect to do at least as well as the one before it.
The one experience millennials share “is that our early adult years have been dominated by an economy that has failed us over and over again.”
It can safely be said that the Boomer-Millennial divide is not without rising recrimination and much misunderstanding.
This month, American lawyer and journalist Jill Filipovic will publish “OK, Boomer, Let’s Talk,” in which she seeks to cross that most notorious of chasms — a generation gap.
For starters, boomers should consider that the circumstances facing millennials are “not the result of individual bad choices, but of the political and economic environment boomers created.”
Likewise, the young should acknowledge what the previous generation provided, she said. By and large, millennials were raised in a world of unparalleled security and comfort, freedom and choice.
Filipovic notes one of the unlikely outcomes of the moment. That “the precarity of Millennial life is increasingly being felt by people who aren’t Millennials.” And that there is nothing like shared pain to enhance mutual understanding. Her book should give millennials cause to take heart. Down the road, they will be the beneficiaries of the greatest intergenerational wealth transfer in history.
Meanwhile, demographic power is shifting. Millennials — at about 27 per cent of the total population in Canada — have overtaken baby boomers as the largest generation.
In Canada, Abacus Data says millennials are the new driving force of Canadian politics.
And what they will need to address above all, in ways their elders have not succeeded, is growing inequality of income and wealth. Even among millennials there is a divide. The Broadbent Institute has noted that millennials whose families made it possible to achieve post-secondary credentials without student debt, who lived at home longer or who had financial assistance from their families in order to pursue low- or non- paying internships or training programs in high-paying fields had enough of an advantage to save enough money to invest in the housing market by the time they were 30 and are on a different trajectory.
The takeaway, it said, is that “without policies to ensure social mobility, such as increasing government funding to ensure anyone admitted to post-secondary programs can graduate without student debt, wealth generates wealth from generation to generation.”
In her book, Filipovic suggests there’s one thing boomer parents bequeathed to millennials that will be key in this regard. Values.
The Baby Boom generation was almost equally split along partisan lines, she said, and liberal boomers generally lost the battles of their times to conservatives.
But “it was the liberal Boomers who won the hearts and minds of the kids,” she said. “All the hippies, commies and feminists who conservative boomers thought they left behind in the ’70s are back.”
Moreover, those millennial progressives are not as racially homogenous as boomers and, as recent events have shown, they are more inclined to take on injustices based on race, sex and social circumstances. So all may not be lost.
Young Canadians should not be over hasty in declaring the end of days and booking one-way tickets to the slough of despond.
As Beckett said, “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”