The Pandemic Paradox by Scott Fulford;

Author:Scott Fulford;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

Millennials, the Unluckiest Generation

Even before the pandemic, the millennials were already “the unluckiest generation,” a term used by Derek Thompson, writing in the Atlantic in 2013.41 At the time, the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent recession were over, but employment and wages were inching up very slowly. Millennials, who were just entering the job market or were early in their careers, were having the most difficult time. During the pandemic, they would experience the second economic crisis of their working lives.

Generations are broad groupings of people born about the same time. In research, a group of people born in the same year is called a cohort. A “generational cohort” is the combination of cohorts born over approximately 20 years. Generations and these broad cohort groups are often referred to interchangeably.

Generations are used to broadly describe the common experiences of a group of people of about the same age. Often there is some formative event that most people in a generation experienced. For example, as Tom Brokaw called them, the “greatest generation” served in World War II and rebuilt the world afterward.42 Pew Research defines more recent generations as the baby boomers, who were born from 1946 to 1964; Generation X, who were born between 1965 and 1980; and the millennial generation, who were born between 1981 and 1996.43 Of course, there is not much of a difference between the experiences of the cohort born in 1981 and part of the millennial generation and the cohort born in 1980 and part of Gen X. These two cohorts likely have more in common with each other than with the cohort born in 1996. Still, these broad groupings are useful for summarizing the experiences of people of about the same age.

Entering the workforce during a recession can permanently reduce wages and job prospects. There are several reasons why being a member of a “recession cohort”—a group that starts working life during a recession—can cause long-term problems. First, taking longer to find a job leaves recession cohorts with less experience. Second, they may accept a lower wage when they do find a job, which leaves them with lower bargaining power for the next job, and so may hurt earnings for a long time. Third, people in recession cohorts may have fewer job choices and so may not be able to take the job best suited to their talents. They thus have less room for growth. These factors also influence anybody affected by a recession, but the impact tends to be the largest for the people with the least experience who are just entering the workforce, the recession cohort.

The combined impact of these factors is stark; compared with people who started working just before a recession, recession cohorts earn less initially and may never catch up, so their lifetime earnings are lower.44 They are less likely to marry. They have higher death rates and more deaths of despair from drug overdoses and alcohol (see Chapter 7). These effects seem even more pronounced for high school graduates who start working during a recession than for college graduates.

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