Millennials have been blocked from a prosperous future（470 words）

By Rana Foroohar

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One of the key ideas behind the success (at least thus far) of liberal, free market, democratic societies was that children would do better than their parents. A raft of new data show this assumption is no longer true on either side of the Atlantic.

According to new data by the US Census bureau, millennials are moving back in with mum and dad at record rates. A third of young people aged 18-34 now live at home, and of those, a quarter are neither working nor going to school. They hold nearly triple the amount of student debt as the previous generation and as a result are less likely to own a home, be married, or have children. Economics has put adulthood — and upward mobility — on hold for these young people.

The same is true in the UK; a new piece of research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that the millennial generation has only about half of the typical net household wealth that the cohort that is 10 years older had at the same age. As the report puts it, “not only have they suffered from lower wages, but the two main types of assets which people accumulate during their lives, housing and pensions, have both become much less affordable over the last couple of decades”.

Globally, millennials were hit by the post-2008 trifecta of higher youth unemployment, rising student fees and higher housing prices. All of which means that they are debt-rich and asset-poor. The ramifications of this are worrisome for growth in both the short and long term. In the US, Bill Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has cited the high debt levels among young people as a reason for slower interest rates, which have reflected in part a lack of demand in the economy, particularly for things like housing.

The cycle is compounded by the fact that real estate prices and rents are higher than average in college towns (where an increasing number of rich parents buy investment properties for their children to live in while they study, driving up prices) and in places where the job market is hotter. Unable to buy in such cities, millennials opt to rent. But rental rates are rising, and the upshot is that they are unable to asset build in their youth.

All this makes them less prepared for retirement (pension savings rates are far lower than in past generations) and less likely to own the assets crucial for upward economic mobility; returns on assets always outweigh income, which has been flat in real terms for decades. If you think about the fact that most rich-country economies are based 60-70 per cent on consumer spending, the downward mobility of the millennials — which will undoubtedly continue to grow — doesn’t bode well for anyone’s future.