Monday, April 1, 2019

The Most Fortunate Generation in History

David Harsanyi at The Federalist declares that, notwithstanding the asseverations of millennials like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the contrary, today's millennials are the most well-off generation in human history.

Specifically, he claims, "...if the world continues on its present trajectory, American millennials will have collectively lived the most peaceful, wealthiest, safest, most educated, and most globally connected lives in the history of the world."

The facts he amasses to support this affirmation are impressive:
For starters, millennials had the world opened to them like no one else, benefiting from the perhaps greatest technological revolution in information and commerce–even more consequential than the printing revolution.

For most millennials... any book, any piece of music, any great work of art—virtually any nugget of human knowledge—has been at their fingertips throughout their entire adult lives. And today, more Americans have access to high-speed internet than ever. This is a manifestation of prosperity.

During the adulthood of most of today's millennials there's been only a single quarter of negative GDP growth, and 13 quarters of more than 3 percent growth.
Harsanyi quotes from National Review’s Jim Geraghty:
But the U.S. economy has added jobs for 100 consecutive months, and there are seven million unfilled jobs in the country. The housing market either quickly or gradually recovered depending upon your region, and auto production recovered, both at companies that received government bailouts and those that did not.

There’s not too much inflation or deflation. Energy prices declined as U.S. domestic production boomed. Wage growth has been slow, but some research indicates this reflects companies hiring more young workers, who generally earn less than older, more experienced workers.

Scott Lincicome lays out how more Americans households can afford more products. The stock market hit new world highs last year. In late 2018, the World Economic Forum ranked the United States the world’s most competitive economy for the first time in a decade. Even the more pessimistic economists concede that the U.S. economy’s problems are smaller and less severe than anyone else’s.
There's more:
More broadly, no group of Americans has ever had more of an opportunity to achieve personal prosperity. In 1965, there were only 5.9 million Americans enrolled in college—mostly rich kids. By 2012 there were 21 million Americans enrolled in college. According to the Federal Reserve study, millennials are the most educated generation, with 65 percent of them possessing at least an associate’s degree.

It’s often claimed that millennials have “lower earnings, fewer assets, and less wealth.” This is because many of them are still young. Getting a college education defers financial success to later years. The average earning potential of a college graduate is higher than for trades that don’t need it.

Moreover, more millennials choose to live in expensive urban areas—where they pay high rent and rarely own houses—and get married later than previous generations. The longer you defer getting married, the longer it takes to realize your potential earnings, generally speaking.

Because of...technological advances, almost everything is cheaper today. In the last 50 years, spending on food and clothing as share of family income has fallen from 42 to 17 percent. At the same time we have countless choices—many of which would seem exotic to an average person in 1989.
Millennials have been economically fortunate but they've been even more fortunate, perhaps, in terms of their health never having had to worry "about measles, rubella, mumps, diphtheria, or polio. The cancer death rate has fallen over 27 percent [over the last decade] — which equals more than two million deaths averted during that time period."

Harsanyi goes on to cite statistics which show that violent crime, deaths from vehicular accidents and deaths from war are all down significantly over the last couple of decades, and adds that even the anxieties millennials harbor over what they believe to be the looming disaster of climate change has been blown out of proportion by the scare-mongers:
“Climate change” has affected millennials in about the same way nuclear winter, global cooling, overpopulation, and other Malthusian scares have affected previous generations—which is to say, not at all. Every generation has its End of Days myth. In the real world, the imperceptible change in climate during [our millennials'] lifetime has done nothing to diminish prosperity here or abroad.
All of which makes it very difficult to understand why millennials seem eager, according to some polls, to jettison capitalism in favor of socialism. Perhaps they should reread Aesop's story about killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.