![]() Children will not just endure this trauma-manifested in lost months of schooling, skipped meals, housing volatility, and increased abuse-but will carry it with them. Americans born during this calamity will be more likely to have low birth weights and to be in poor health generally, with lifelong effects. Recessions are not good for anyone, from infants to the elderly. It means Great Depression–type precarity for prime-age workers in the richest country on earth. This means skipped meals, scuppered start-ups, and lost homes. ![]() ![]() Nearly half said that the cash payments the federal government is sending to lower- and middle-income individuals would cover just a week or two of expenses, compared with a third of older adults. In a new report, Data for Progress found that a staggering 52 percent of people under the age of 45 have lost a job, been put on leave, or had their hours reduced due to the pandemic, compared with 26 percent of people over the age of 45. What little data exist point to a financial tsunami for younger workers. It’s a cruel economic version of that old Catskill resort joke: These are terrible jobs, and now all the young people holding them are getting fired.Īnnie Lowrey: The great affordability crisis breaking America They are also heavily dependent on gig and contract work, which is evaporating as the consumer economy grinds to a halt. They make up a majority of bartenders, half of restaurant workers, and a large share of retail workers. They have more than half a trillion dollars of student-loan debt to keep paying off, as well as hefty rent and child-care payments that keep coming due.Ĭompounding their troubles, Millennials are, for now, disproportionate holders of the kind of positions disappearing the fastest: This is a jobs crisis of the young, the diverse, and the contingent, meaning disproportionately of the Millennials. They make less money, and are less likely to have benefits like paid sick leave. They own fewer houses to refinance or rent out or sell. They have smaller savings accounts than prior generations. But we do know that Millennials are vulnerable. ![]() It is too soon to know how the unfurling business-failure and unemployment crisis caused by this novel public-health crisis is hitting different age groups, or how much income and wealth each generation is losing it is far too soon to know how different groups will rebound. They are now entering their peak earning years in the midst of an economic cataclysm more severe than the Great Recession, near guaranteeing that they will be the first generation in modern American history to end up poorer than their parents. Saddled with debt, unable to accumulate wealth, and stuck in low-benefit, dead-end jobs, they never gained the financial security that their parents, grandparents, or even older siblings enjoyed. The Millennials entered the workforce during the worst downturn since the Great Depression. ![]()
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