Confidence that children will surpass parents’ living standards collapsed to 33 percent

Evidence

Yet while Zuckerberg ascended, most millennials felt deeply underwater. Coming of age in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, many faced chronic economic insecurity for the next decade. “Very few of us,” wrote millennial journalist Anne Helen Petersen, “felt anything close to secure.” Even college graduates feared sliding into the “precariat,” fated to eke out unstable livelihoods in the gig economy. In the wake of 9/11, journalist Hunter S. Thompson warned that children of the era were “doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed.” That prediction became a generational identity. Only 33 percent of Americans believed their children would surpass their parents’ quality of life. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 303

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘precariat’ and gig-economy insecurity thread connects to the reader’s Frankfurt School material on surplus repression and economic determinism shaping social character.