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The challenge

“My generation has it harder than any before”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

Harder than any before, no. Squeezed in a way your parents weren't, yes, and I'm not going to talk you out of that. Economist Raj Chetty found about ninety percent of Americans born in nineteen forty grew up to out-earn their parents. For kids born in the eighties, it's about half. That's a broken promise, and a generation that can't own anything stops defending the system. But keep your history straight. In nineteen hundred, about one in ten American babies died before a first birthday. About sixteen million Americans served in World War Two. You'll say they could at least buy a house on one income. Right, so make owning the goal. Learn a skill, skip the debt, get married, buy something small. Let me ask you this. Which year would you actually trade places with? You're not a victim. You're the generation that has to build.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. Plain survival used to be far harder. Burying a baby was common for earlier generations.

    The CDC reports that in nineteen hundred, roughly one hundred of every thousand American infants died before age one, and infant mortality fell by about ninety percent over the twentieth century.

  2. Earlier generations got world wars, a draft and the Great Depression.

    Roughly sixteen million Americans served in the armed forces during World War Two.

  3. The economic squeeze on young Americans is real and measurable. The answer is to own and build, not to adopt a story that you're doomed.

    Raj Chetty and colleagues found that about ninety percent of Americans born in nineteen forty out-earned their parents, compared with about half of those born in the nineteen eighties.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Old people had cheap houses, cheap college and pensions. Comparing infant mortality from a hundred years ago is dodging today's real economic problems.

Nate: Housing and college are real burdens, and you should be angry about them. But harder than any generation has to be measured against war, disease and depression, not just against your dad's mortgage. Name the problem precisely and you can fix it. Call yourself doomed and you won't try.

The lines

Sources

  1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, MMWR, Achievements in Public Health, 1900-1999: Healthier Mothers and Babies (1999)
  2. The National WWII Museum, Research Starters: US Military by the Numbers
  3. Chetty et al., Science, The fading American dream: Trends in absolute income mobility since 1940 (2017)

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