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The idea behind the concept of generations is that people born at a certain time share similar experiences, which in turn shape common attitudes.
The “Greatest” and “Silent” generations, born in the early decades of the 20th century, witnessed economic adversity and global conflict, going on to form relatively leftwing views. Baby boomers grew up accustomed to growth and prosperity, and went on to lean strongly conservative.
It was a similar story for millennials, who entered adulthood in the aftermath of the global financial crisis to be greeted by high unemployment, anaemic income growth, and ballooning house price to income ratios, going on to champion strongly progressive politics.
A lot of analysis and discourse treats millennials and Gen Z as close cousins, united in their struggle to achieve the prosperity of earlier generations. But the validity of that elision depends a lot on where you look.
Millennials right across the western world really were united in their economic malaise. From the US and Canada to Britain and western Europe, the cohort born in the mid to late 1980s lived its formative adult years against a backdrop of weak or stagnant wage growth and cratering rates of home-ownership.
Absolute upward mobility — the extent to which members of one generation earn more than their parents’ generation at the same age — fell steadily. In the US, by the time someone born in 1985 turned 30, their average income was only a few per cent above that of their parents at the same age, a far cry from the clear, palpable generation-over-generation gains of 50 to 60 per cent made by those born in the 1950s.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the narrative of millennial malaise is no myth. They may go down as the most economically unlucky generation of the past century.
But we then hit a fork in the road. For young adults in Britain and most of western Europe, conditions have only got worse since. If you thought the sub-1 per cent annual growth in living standards endured by millennials was bad, try sub-zero. Britons born in the mid 1990s have seen living standards not merely stagnate but decline. Right across Europe, there is precious little for the youngest adults to be happy about.
But in America, Gen Z are motoring ahead. US living standards have grown at an average 2.5 per cent per year since the cohort born in the late 1990s entered adulthood, blessing this generation not only with far more upward mobility than their millennial elders, but with more rapidly improving living standards than young boomers had at the same age. And it’s not just incomes: Gen Z Americans are also outpacing millennials in their climb up the housing ladder.
All the signs are that in the US, the decades-long slowdown in generation-on-generation economic progress has not only stopped but gone into reverse. Americans born in 1995 are enjoying even more upward mobility relative to their parents than those born in 1965. Zoomers by name, zoomers by socio-economic nature.
Both the change in young Americans’ economic trajectories and the divergence from their European counterparts pose interesting questions.
From a sociological perspective, in an age of borderless social media narratives and algorithms that reward negativity, can the meme of young adult adversity survive contact with America’s Gen Z reality? And with a stream of negative social comparisons only a smartphone away, how will the growing realisation that young Americans are on a higher trajectory affect young Europeans?
Turning to politics, will the youngest cohort of American voters tread its own path? The fact that it was not only the youngest men but also young women who swung behind Donald Trump in the US election suggests this may already be happening. A group that comes to see itself as among life’s winners may not develop the same instinct for social solidarity that its downtrodden predecessors came to hold.
In an era of “vibe shifts”, the pivot from a sense of downward mobility to one of rising prosperity may prove the biggest yet. A divergence in the mood music on either side of the Atlantic will also surely inject fresh urgency into Europe’s search for an uptick of its own.
Whichever way you look at it, the restarting of the economic conveyor belt in America could prove to be a hugely significant moment.
john.burn-murdoch@ft.com, @jburnmurdoch
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