Intergenerational Grievances (Part 1)

Let's settle this once and for all: Which is really the first generation to do worse than their parents?

Whenever I speak with young Canadians, I begin with an apology. I tell them I’m genuinely sorry that my generation may be the first in Canadian history to leave the country in worse shape for those who follow us. 

That is Goldy Hyder, writing in the Globe and Mail last week. 

As evidence supporting his concern, Hyder lists interest rates and inflation, along with the growing climate emergency and the current geopolitical instability. He even cites a recent Nanos survey from back in June, according to which 65% of Canadians “believe the next generation of Canadians will have a lower standard of living than they have today.”

As a result, the younger generations are “cynical and skeptical.” They believe the country’s current leaders are basically only in it for themselves; politicians are good at doing things that are in their own generation’s short-term interest, but they drop the ball when it comes to the short-term pain, long-term gain sort of strategic planning that will benefit future generations. 

On the one hand, I’m inclined to agree with Hyder’s basic diagnosis, which is that Canada has lousy leadership, and the country is suffering enormously because of it. His prescriptions also strike me as sound — we should improve our infrastructure to better exploit our resources and sell them to the Americans.

But at the same time, I can’t help but notice that of the four trends that he lists as contributing to the current malaise, none are specific to Canada. High inflation and interest rates are a problem everywhere, and are largely a consequence of the global pandemic. The other two are, by definition, global problems. And at any rate, all of these are at least to some extent outside the control of any single government. 

Then there’s also this line from the Nanos survey, which Hyder doesn’t mention: The 65% of respondents who believe the next generation is going to be worse off than the current one? That figure is “consistent with previous waves.”

Which is to say only this: the notion that the current crop of leaders are a bunch of self-dealing incompetents leaving things worse for the next generation, leading to a cynical and disengaged youth cohort, has been around for a long while. 

Typically though, it’s Millennials think they discovered it. Here's a line from a 2011 issue of the (sadly now defunct) Unlimited magazine: “There’s a lot of speculation that Generation Me, the Millennials, will be the first generation to do worse than their parents, because they’ve always been provided for. They don’t have anything driving them to do better.”

This came on the heels of a Joe Queenan column from the Wall Street Journal in 2010: “Economists theorize that this may be that very rarest of things: a generation that does not do as well financially as the generation that spawned it.”

Then there is Anya Kamenitz in a documentary, discussing her 2007 Millennial lament, Generation Debt: “The whole premise of Generation Debt the book is, you know, what does it mean to be part of this generation, the first generation that's going to do worse than our parents did.”

And so on.

But maybe it isn't Millennials who are so cursed.  From a 1999 edition of the Atlantic: “In fact, Xers may well be the first generation whose lifetime earnings will be less than their parents'.”  Interestingly, ultra-Boomer Bill Clinton used the line when he announced his run for president in 1991: “I refuse to stand by and let our children become part of the first generation to do worse than their parents.”

Indeed, the idea that Gen X is the “first generation to do worse than their parents” is the entire motivating assumption of Douglas Coupland’s book Generation X, which was published in 1991. While the line itself does not appear in the text, there’s an appendix to the book that is a list of numbers and facts, a sort of Harper’s Index of intergenerational one-downmanship that is one long case for the prosecution. It includes factoids such as the ratio of people in the U.S. workforce per social security beneficiary in 1949 (13), compared to 1990 (3.4); another is the percentage of income needed to put a downpayment on a home in 1967 (22%) and 1987 (32%). 

But the most relevant one for our purposes is this:

That is from a Time/CNN poll commissioned in 1990; careful readers will notice that the percentage who agree is — surprise! — identical to that given by the June 2023 Nanos poll quoted by Goldy Hyder last week. 

But hold onto your flannel shirts, Xers. Put down that copy of Trainspotting. You don't have a monopoly on intergenerational indignation. Here's a line from a 1980 Newsweek report on "An Economic Dream in Peril": 

“And no longer do Americans share the great expectations of generations past. For the first time, public-opinion polls show that the average U.S. citizen is not at all sure that his children's lot will be better than – or even as good as – his own.”

But at least we can agree on one thing: Whoever is doing worse, the Baby Boomers made out like bandits. Since they drank everyone's milkshake in the sixties and seventies, every generation since has been doing crappier and crappier. Right? Surely we can get all Soylent Green on the people who gave us Freedom 55 and Zoomer magazine?

Maybe not. According to the New York Times: “The baby boomers will be the first generation that will do worse in retirement than their parents.”

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This post deals primarily with the rhetoric of intergenerational grievance. In the next dispatch, I’ll look at some of the data to try to compare just how things actually stack up between Xers, Millennials, and Gen Z, to see if there’s anything to be made of the claim that one generation is the first to do worse than their parents. — ap

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