The Ballad of Downward Mobility :: The Atlantic [View all]

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/downward-economic-mobility-boomer-generation-x-debt/671260/
Archived: https://archive.ph/qQXIL

I didn’t quit on the American dream; it quit on me—and my generation. Now we need a different idea of the good life.
By Rich Cohen

In the summers of my youth, the rooms were always air-conditioned. This machine-cooled air came not from window units, which were a relic of the cities, but from central systems that chilled every inch of living space to an Alaskan 67 degrees. The air seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It had no warm spots, no eddies, no pockets of humidity. It was a sea of comfort that ran from the threshold of the front door—passing from yard to house was like moving between seasons—to the peak of the finished attic. Now here I am, in the late summer of 2022, eons away from my 1970s and ’80s suburban childhood, in a world beset by heat waves, droughts, wars, and disasters, sitting before a Walgreens fan, bathed in sweat and meditating on the wealth of nations and the fate of the American dream. And the realization comes that I am just one of the millions of members of Generation X who, looking into the sun of the thing, must admit that we are in fact downwardly mobile, the first American generation that will perform worse economically than their parents.

When your median Baby Boomer was 50, around the turn of the millennium, he earned roughly $30,000 a year. I use the male pronoun because the gender-wage gap among Boomers was even wider then than it is today. Currently, a 50-year-old with the same education, family background, intelligence, good luck and bad, will earn slightly more in inflation-adjusted terms (the youngest Boomers are now nearing their 60s). Things have improved—not enough, gap-wise, for women and people of color—but overall the picture still looks like stagnation, or worse. According to the Pew Research Center, “the typical Gen Xer has just over $13,000 in wealth (defined as total assets minus total debts), compared with the $18,000 held by a typical Gen Xer’s parents when they were the same ages.” Or, as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson just described the change in life chances for a child born in the ’80s compared to one born in 1940, “In 40 years, the American dream went from being a widespread reality to essentially a coin toss.”

It’s bad even before you consider the dragon at the door: debt. Our grandparents had practically none, our parents had little, but it can seem, to those born between 1965 and 1985 (the precise parameters given for Gen X vary), that debt is the only thing we’ll ever really call our own. Negative numbers. Swampland on the wrong side of zero.