The Baby Boomers and Their Children Have Ruined the Economy for Millennials: The Title is a Lie

As a Millennial I hear my peers often speak about how our parents and their parents can go to sleep at night dreaming of big houses that are paid off with only 1 breadwinner in their home. Oh, how they also speak of our plight, barely scraping by to make ends meet; surely it must be that our ancestors have left us in ruin.

Old people blame us for everything they actually do. The economy? Not being able to find jobs? Old people… Old people are literally the worst.”

The problem? Our economy is drastically richer than what it has ever been in the past.

Let me explain.

Many Millenials honestly believe that generations older than ours destroyed our economy and our opportunities. They rarely have precise reasons. The primary issue with that belief is it is plainly false to claim our economy is worse off than what is was a generation or two ago.

The beauty of proving them wrong? I do not necessarily need any statistics.

Consider this:

A family use to only have 1 breadwinner. He or she, most likely he, use to make enough to pay for an apartment or house; a car without A/C, sometimes without seatbelts or airbags, no backup camera, a radio horrible by today’s standards, and manual steering; a fridge many of us wouldn’t accept for free; a radio for the home; and a TV that only picked up 3 channels and hopefully was in color.

A family now has 2 breadwinners. Their incomes together can pay for an apartment or house; 2 cars with A/C, seatbelts and airbags, a backup camera, a radio that might have bluetooth capabilities, power steering, and good gas mileage; a fridge; 1 flat screen HD TV, if not more; a smart phone that has Internet access for every person in the house; a tablet or 2; a laptop; heat and air in the house; a microwave; and multiple gaming systems. We should not overlook the advantages the Internet brings us. We can access tens of thousands of movies on demand, talk with our friends and family 24/7 for free through many forms of communication, e.g. video calls and IM, write a book and publish it by ourselves and give access to it to anybody willing to download it in the world, look at cats, learn a skill on an expert level for nearly free, take courses for cheap or free, learn whole languages for practically free, listen to any music any time, start up a blog for free, and even make a business at a relatively low cost.

Our opportunities have skyrocketed in number since the Internet came into existence, and anybody saying that we have less opportunities than the previous generations needs to hop off Reddit and do something productive.

Our present economy might still not be fully recovered from the housing and financial market bust, but we are still absolutely better off than any of the previous generations in human history. Too many people do not see this, and blame their suboptimal lifestyles on external factors.

Ask a Millenial if they would rather live in today’s time or live 2 generations ago. The answer that they would give is obvious and shows that they implicitly acknowledge we are wealthier than in the past.