Illustration: Glenn Harvey/The Guardian

Almost every couple that I know in their 20s, 30s or even 40s has had the same argument with their parents before getting married.

The parents say to open a wedding registry. The couple responds that they do not want one. They don’t expect gifts from wedding guests (their “presence is enough”), and they have been cohabiting for years and already have plates, bedsheets and a blender. In fact, since they live in a small rented apartment, they barely have room for the plates that they do have – let alone a set of china.

Perhaps, they will timidly suggest, guests who really want to give a gift can donate to a honeymoon fund? Or better yet, make** **a small contribution toward a downpayment on a house?

The parents get upset. Asking for cash, they say, is “tacky”, and also puts people in the difficult position of having to choose an amount to give. The young couple will point out that they are not *asking *for cash, just giving an option for those who want to mark the occasion.

There will be a long argument, maybe even some shouting or tears, and the parents will win. As a compromise, there may be a house-fund bucket on the registry, down at the bottom after the really niche cookware. (If the couple is especially sneaky, they will pretend to go along with their parents, but rig the registry with unattractive gifts to make the fund look more appealing by comparison.)

In the end, the wedding will be lovely. And afterward the married couple may have a china set, but – like nearly half of US millennials – no house in which to put it.

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Despite some signs that the wildly expensive housing market is cooling down, buying a home is still a fantasy for millions of younger Americans. In the 1980s, the median age of someone buying their first home was about 29. Today the median first-time buyer is 40 – and can expect their first home to cost twice as much money, adjusted for inflation, as their parents’ home did in the mid-1980s.

The situation is so bad that last month the Trump administration floated the idea of introducing a 50-year mortgage to make houses more affordable, then frantically walked back the idea when critics pointed out that a millennial buying their first home at 40 might die before paying it off.

This is a crisis, given how closely home ownership is tied to wealth creation in the US. The wealth gap between renters and owners has never been wider, and soaring prices keep enriching those who already own, while locking everyone else out. In fact, the newlyweds with the china set may be creeping into early middle age with few assets at all: no home, no significant investments, perhaps not even a car.

I am a millennial who came of age during a financial crisis, global recession and pandemic. No, most millennials and gen Zers are not starving to death. But our adult lives have been marked by stagnant wages, inflation, broken political institutions and a sense of national decline. Small wonder, then, that we feel cynical about our country and pessimistic about our future; that some of us are attracted to increasingly radical politics of both left and right; that we marry later and have children at far lower rates.

A recent study by economists at Northwestern and the University of Chicago predicted that Americans born in the 1990s “will reach retirement with a home ownership rate roughly 9.6 percentage points lower than that of their parents’ generation”, and that when owning a home feels impossible, people spend more, work less, and take on riskier investments – a recipe for economic disaster.

Some observers have dubbed this attitude “financial nihilism”. If you have been working for years yet feel no closer to paying off your student debt or buying a house, why not “quiet quit” your job, put a lavish vacation on your credit card, or liquidate your last savings bond from Grandma and bet it all on online poker or a dubious cryptocurrency?

American baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, are the richest cohort in the history of the entire world. Yet they are also the first generation of Americans to leave to their children a world that is, by most common economic metrics, worse. So why are we still being told we would own a house if we drank less Starbucks, or shamed for failing to meet the milestones of a vanishing age?

And why, when economic alarms have been ringing for years, does it often feel like only younger Americans hear them?

‘For most of history, including when boomers came of age, living was cheap and things were expensive; today it’s the opposite.’ Photograph: H Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock

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Earlier this year, as part of my reporting on American politics, I was watching a video of Tucker Carlson, the rightwing commentator, giving a speech at a conservative political conference. I was somewhat distracted, until I heard something that made me rewind the video.

Between asides about how New York smells like “weed and Halal food”, Carlson made a prescient point. “At some point the basic economics really matter,” he said. Rather than GDP, he argued that the health of the economy should be measured by something simpler.

“I’ve got a bunch of kids,” he said. “Can they afford houses with full-time jobs at, like, 27, 28? And the answer is no way. And the answer is that 35-year-olds with really good jobs can’t afford a house unless they stretch and go deep into debt.”

He continued: “And I just think that’s a total disaster … why? Two reasons. One, if people don’t own things, they don’t feel ownership of the country they’re in, and the country gets super volatile because people feel like they’ve got nothing to lose; when you have a lawn, trust me, you’re thinking longterm. Second, it’s really hard to have a family without a house, it is. It’s, like, super fun to live in an apartment if … there’s, like, a bar downstairs, you’re in a cool neighborhood, [but] you’re not going to have three kids there. You can’t.”

The “only young people in general that you will ever meet who have houses are young people whose parents help them”, he added. “And God bless their parents, that’s a perfectly great thing to do for your kids, but most people’s parents can’t afford to do that” – in part, he noted, because some are already in debt for their children’s education.

He called the situation a “national emergency”.

Carlson is not the first person to make these points, and leftwingers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani have made similar arguments in different forms. You know something is structurally broken when Carlson and AOC are, at least on this subject, reading from the same page. Either way, what he said struck a chord. It also made me think about my own family.

My parents bought their first home in 1985, when my mother was 29 and my father was 31, for about $50,000 (or $150,000 in current dollars). My father was an accountant and my mother was a sales representative at a commercial wallpaper company. The home was an apartment that they were able to buy, below market rate, when the building where my father rented converted some rentals to owner units. It was tiny – a glorified studio – but it was in Lenox Hill, in Manhattan, and they sold it at a profit just two years later.

They moved to the New Jersey suburbs, where they bought a three-bedroom fixer-upper with a yard. In 1992, they sold it for a profit and bought another house with a larger lot down the street. They somehow also found the money, time and energy to buy and renovate a fishing cottage in Pennsylvania as a summer house.

No, my parents were not representative of everyone. They were white, college-educated professionals, who for part of that period had dual full-time incomes, and they were unusually adventurous about real estate. They also spent nights and weekends doing DIY home renovations and scrimped to save money. (“We got takeout maybe once every two or three months,” my mother said pointedly, when I asked her to recollect. “And we brought bag lunches to work.” My father partly disputed that characterization, saying, “Maybe your mother did … I used to buy my sandwich in the city.”) Mortgage rates were also higher than now.

When my parents later separated, the suburban house with the big lot and the summer cottage were the first financial casualties. Still, even after their separation they both managed to land on their feet, home-wise.

I am 35 and owning a home seems unfathomable. Like many millennials (usually defined as people currently between the ages of 29 and 44), I did everything my elders advised. I got good grades in high school, worked part-time jobs to “build character”, graduated from a good university, and have now been working full-time for years. I am a journalist – which means I work in an industry that has been in decline for decades – but I am one of the lucky few who has a good job with a decent income and benefits. My girlfriend, who works at a research and strategy firm, also has a good job. We both hold master’s degrees.

We could move to a cheaper area, but both our jobs require us to be in or near New York City. (ConsumerAffairs recently calculated that it would take a typical New York state household 23 years to save enough for a downpayment on a median-priced home.) So, like many millennials, we rent – spending, in our case, $27,000 a year.

You could say that that is a fair trade for a roof above your head. But that is all it gets. Our diligent rent payments build no equity – they are not even reflected in our credit scores. The more than $150,000 I have spent on rent in my life is money I will never see again.

None of this is a sob story, exactly. No one would call us poor. We get takeout, more than our parents would probably say we should, and we travel several times a year – though mainly to see family or attend weddings. We have nice things: good clothes, the obligatory (though secondhand) Le Creuset pot, a large and delightfully high-definition television. When you cannot have big things, you console yourself with small ones. Yet even scuttling these indulgences would not make much difference in our finances.

That’s partly because of an odd paradox of modern life. For most of history, including when boomers came of age, living was cheap and things were expensive; today it’s the opposite. As Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein note in their recent book, Abundance, the result is a weird dissonance for many Americans: luxuries and little treats are obtainable, yet the staples of life – housing, healthcare, groceries, transportation – are frustratingly costly.

Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, recently pointed out that if you get a hole in your wall, it is now cheaper to buy a flatscreen TV to cover the hole than it is to fix the drywall.

I called a handyman to see if that was true. It is.

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Baby boomers may be one of the most resented groups in America. Every week, about 220,000 people visit a forum on Reddit that exists solely for the purpose of complaining about them – turning older people’s lectures about youth entitlement on their head in first-person reports of boomer “tantrums” or posts mocking the “Gravy SEAL” politics of conservative uncles.

On TikTok and Instagram, people debate why boomers have such a hard time empathizing with younger Americans. Some blame insufficient psychotherapy; others, more viciously, make insinuations about the long-term effects of 1960s lead-paint poisoning on the brain.

Some of this rage is just ageism, or the familiar rebellion of generation against generation, or the** **eternal standoff of parents wanting a “thank you” while their children wait for a “sorry”. But at its heart this ire has less to do with the actual realities of baby boomers’ lives – which are as variegated as those of any group, with some rich, some struggling and some lying in fields in Vietnam – than with what they symbolize: the disastrous mismanagement of our national inheritance.

‘A law that held true for most of US history – that each generation does better than the one before – has collapsed.’ Photograph: Bromberger Hoover Photography/Getty Images

Pundits working in more academic arenas than TikTok have described boomers as thieves of posterity (the Wall Street Journal’s Joseph Sternberg); as “strangely uncurious about how the world is not really working for their kids” (the rightwing financier Peter Thiel); as economic bullies (the former US labor secretary Robert Reich); and as a “generation of sociopaths” who rigged the system in their favor, then pulled up the ladder behind them (the writer and venture capitalist Bruce Gibney).

And it is undeniable that American boomers, who were conceived during an extraordinary postwar economic boom and born into the most powerful country in the history of the world, have not seemed like responsible custodians of what they inherited.

Sure, they were often good stewards of their own prosperity. The hippies who danced in puddles at Woodstock and held Marxist reading groups at their college campuses often turned out to be socialists, when it suited them, and canny capitalists, when it did not. Because wages were relatively strong, and education, healthcare, childcare, and housing were all more affordable in real terms than they are now, boomers had money for downpayments on “starter homes”, then more real estate, then for investing in a stock market that had decades of bull runs. Some also worked at the same company for years, at a time when loyalty was rewarded with promotions and pensions.

Pensions! Upward mobility! Starter homes! It all sounds quaint, but if you try to explain why, older Americans tend to get defensive and interrupt – “We worked our asses off!” multiple people have told me – before you get to the important point: not that boomers did not work very hard, but that they worked hard in a system that, at least for some, repaid that work.

Then there’s this: from around the early 1990s, when they began to come into political power, and for the decades since, boomers repeatedly voted for tax cuts for themselves, at the cost of a ballooning national debt, and slashed public works – while protecting Medicare and social security for their own retirements. Some taxpayer-subsidized private Medicare programs now pay for retirees’ pet supplies, hair-styling, golf-course fees, and ski passes.

Yet the taxpayer-funded public universities where many boomers were able to work their way through school with summer jobs are now four times more expensive, adjusted for inflation – which may be why millennials at 40 have three times the student debt that boomers did at the same age. And the social security and Medicare programs supporting boomers in retirement will be severely overextended by the time millennials try to use them.

At the same time, the prosaic middle-income jobs that once powered upward mobility – teacher, paralegal, professor, trucker, machinist – are now fighting rearguard battles against flat wages, job insecurity and automation, while the best-paid corporate and tech jobs are concentrated in regions where salaries are high but the cost of living is even higher.

In the process, a law that held true for most of US history – that each generation does better than the one before – has collapsed. “In 1940 there was a 90% chance that you were going to earn more than your parents. To somebody born today, it is just a coin flip,” Jeremy Ney, a professor at Columbia’s business school, recently told the Washington Post.

To put it another way, in 1989, when many boomers were hitting the stride of their careers, an American 35 to 44 years of age already had a median net worth almost 75% that of someone then 65 to 74. In 2022, someone 35 to 44 had just a third of the wealth of the older person.

In a 2016 essay about middle-class precarity, the writer Neal Gabler said: “In the 1950s and 60s, economic growth democratized prosperity. In the 2010s, we have democratized financial insecurity.” (It is worth noting that Gabler was writing before the shadow of AI job losses began to fall over many industries.)

Gabler’s line could refer to any number of problems today – but none more glaring than housing. The home ownership crisis is a mismatch between stagnant incomes and ever-rising prices. Most experts also view it as a problem of supply and demand: there is not enough housing being built in the parts of the US where people most want to live.

(Conservatives tend to blame this problem on overzealous regulations that have made building homes more expensive and difficult, particularly in areas that are already expensive, while progressives tend to blame real estate speculators, such as the private equity firms that buy houses to turn them into rentals, and zoning laws that discourage multifamily homes and apartment buildings. Both are probably correct.)

Older people, seeing the value of their nest eggs rise ever higher, do not want to sell them yet, and are often the first to lobby local boards to prevent the construction of new housing that might reduce the value of their own.

‘There are so many boomers, and they don’t want to die or move out of their housing,’ said William Gale, an economist at the Brookings Institution. Photograph: Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

“There are so many boomers, and they don’t want to die or move out of their housing,” William Gale, an economist at the Brookings Institution, told me. It’s partly a “timing issue”, he said; many boomers are in good health, and not old enough to feel that they should be in a retirement community.

“I’m 66,” he added, almost apologetically. “I don’t want to move into retirement – so I’m taking up a house that some young family could otherwise occupy.”

Even when boomers are ready to vacate, it is not clear how many younger buyers can afford, or will want, their houses. After years lovingly perfecting their dream homes, some boomers no doubt hope their children will buy or inherit them. But millennials, according to some reports, tend to regard big, beautiful Martha Stewart-style houses with the puzzled admiration of middle-class Europeans of the 1950s looking at the half-empty mansions of the fading aristocracy: impressive, but who could afford the upkeep?

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My cousin Matt, who also lives in New York, bought an apartment with his wife a few years ago, when he was 35. They got a third-floor walkup in Brooklyn with two bedrooms and 690 sq ft. Their building was built in 1937 and they cannot control their own heat. They paid $900,000 – an eye-popping sum, he acknowledged – and consider themselves lucky.

I called Matt to find out his secret. Had he and his wife made their downpayment with the help of family money – as is the case, by one estimate, for nearly a quarter of millennials and gen Zers who have recently bought homes?

No, he said. He and his wife paid themselves. (Their parents did pay for part of their wedding, and for his wife’s education and part of Matt’s.) They both had savings, well-paid corporate jobs (albeit with salaries that never seem to quite keep up with inflation) and no remaining student debt. They rushed to sign their mortgage when interest rates were low.

Even then, he said, it felt as if “both of us, put together, barely got across the line”. Just a couple weeks later, rates started to rise, and they might not have been able to afford the apartment. He and his wife were relieved to be home owners when, a few years later, they had their first child.

“And that’s kind of the shock around all this is,” he said. “Like, if we [could barely do it], who the hell is supposed to be able to do this? We have a lot of single friends who’ve been talking about buying places for years, and it’s just impossible. They’re just going to rent forever, unless they get married to someone who’s making almost as much as they are.”

He chuckled. “My parents had three children, two houses, two plots of land, and two businesses by the time they were 35.”

The “funny thing”, he said, is that many millennials, who already lag behind previous generations when it comes to typical milestones such as marriage, home ownership and children, are now waiting for wealth inheritances “so that we can live the lives we’ve been told we’re supposed to be living by our parents. But by the time we get them, it’ll be too late to live those lives.”

I asked him if gets into arguments with older people about economics. “It’s kind of a waste of time,” he said drily. “I don’t think our parents’ generation has ever been wrong. And they walked uphill, both ways, in the snow, their whole lives.”

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Of course, you may have heard about the “great wealth transfer”, a day in the near-ish future when inheritances from their boomer parents will supposedly make younger people affluent overnight. Banks and asset management firms have estimated that trillions of dollars in wealth will be transferred over the next 25 years. That prediction has led to a flurry of sometimes breathless media coverage about the remaking of the global economy.

But Gale, the economist, believes that the transfer has been greatly overstated. The problem is that “intergenerational transfers are largely a phenomenon of the extremely rich giving to the very rich”, he said. “The median inheritance is not going to be life-transforming.”

Despite the stereotype of wealthy boomers careening around Florida in motorboats, not all have money to leave significant inheritances; people also live longer now, and have more medical and assisted-living costs. (Not for nothing, the healthcare industry is now the largest employer in 38 of 50 states.) And some boomers have indicated that they plan to live life to the fullest and leave nothing to their heirs (“die with zero”), or donate to charity to protect their children’s work ethic from the ravages of financial security.

But the biggest issue is that these inheritances, for those millennials or gen Zers who get them, will mostly arrive too late. “People need the money when they’re forming households and raising kids,” Gale said. “Getting it when they’re 60 or 65 isn’t as useful.”

Kurt Supe, a financial adviser with CFD Investments and Creative Financial Designs, helps clients plan retirement. His job often feels “more like [that of] a psychologist … than a financial planner”, he told me, because of the generational disconnect – and lack of communication – between clients and their children.

Many of his clients, Supe said, are boomers who worked decades at steady, middle-income jobs, lived conservatively, and now have a couple million dollars in retirement wealth. A typical client might be a midwestern couple who worked as teachers, enjoyed an excellent pension plan and low cost of living, and do not understand why their late-30s child in, say, California still does not own a home despite a low-six-figure salary as a software engineer.

‘The younger generation … [are] having to try to negotiate their way to get just a piece of the dream,’ said financial adviser Kurt Supe. Photograph: Bromberger Hoover Photography/Getty Images

He likes to make a board game analogy. Boomers and people of his generation (early gen X) were playing “with a Monopoly board where all the real estate pieces are still sitting in the box and we have the opportunity to buy them all”, he said. “The younger generation is playing with all of the real estate already bought, and they’re having to try to negotiate their way to get just a piece of the dream. I mean, it’s two very different games.”

If his clients are in good financial shape, he encourages them to give their children early inheritances or help them buy a house. Yet clients are often resistant – because they believe this will somehow make their progeny irresponsible; because previous financial advisers (who are often paid based on how much client money they manage) instilled in them a fear of touching their funds; or because they believe they may face an “emergency”.

“I’m like, what kind of $4m emergency could you possibly have?” he said. “But they’re terrified to give $10,000 away to their kids at Christmas, because what if they need that money someday?”

Many boomers, he thinks, unconsciously adopted the attitudes of parents who survived the Great Depression. He is fond of saying: “There is no prize for dying with the most money.”

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It seems ridiculous that anyone would envy millennials’ fortunes, but the generation after – Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012 – may already wish they had a fraction of their economic security.

Recent college graduates are discovering that traditionally safe white-collar industries, such as tech, finance, and corporate law, are glutted or anticipate AI-related job losses. Perhaps the US will soon taste the kind of youth unemployment that has long haunted some European countries; newly minted computer engineers, the New York Times reports, are applying to jobs at Chipotle.

When you don’t have income or wealth, you turn to credit.** **According to the New York Federal Reserve, 15.3% of Gen Zers with credit cards have maxed out their cards.

These recent graduates may never have china sets, or much use for them, though they can console themselves with Domino’s pizzas bought with installment plans. Earlier this year, Klarna, a financing company, announced a program that would allow people to pay for food deliveries with “buy now, pay later” loans. In August, Klarna sold up to $26bn of these loans to Nelnet – the same firm that services millions of Americans’ student loan debts.

“If you take a long view,” Gale, the economist, told me, “the US economy is incredibly resilient.” That is undoubtedly true, and important to remember. The slowing of population growth, among other factors, may also eventually make housing cheaper. Yet it can be difficult to feel optimistic right now.

Recently, as my mother, girlfriend and I returned from visiting family for Thanksgiving, my mother asked how my article about young people’s financial travails was going. We were in a rental car, and I was driving through a tunnel. (It was already dark out, so no, there was no light on the other end.) I said that I was still working on it.

“I thought of some more points,” she said, “as devil’s advocate. Houses may be more expensive now, but we paid for your college.” (My parents paid for the lion’s share of my undergraduate education, which I appreciate.) “I had to work my way through college. My parents didn’t pay for anything. Not college, certainly not a meal plan.”

I started to point out that it was easier to work your way through school then, when colleges, adjusted for inflation, were –

“Well,” she said, sitting upright. “It didn’t feel easy. Not to me. Not at the time.”