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Aftershocks via @freebeacon freebeacon.com/culture/afters…
Sternberg dutifully talks about debt financing of entitlement programs, or the Ponzi- structure of Social Security. But he also draws on other cases from mortgage structure to trade policy, to make the point that society has become tilted toward the old and away from the young.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Sternberg's discussion of the Great Recession, central to the book. In this account, the root of the crisis came in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the homeownership rate among young people—then meaning Boomers—dropped slightly.
In response, government began to build the subprime mortgage apparatus that would eventually bring down the economy, an apparatus that was only added to by Boomer policymakers like successive HUD secretaries Henry Cisneros and Andrew Cuomo.
The resultant collapse is the most obvious impact of Boomer decision-making on Millennials' economic well-being. Younger Millennials experienced foreclosure, while their older peers entered the job market mid-recession, a reality linked to lower lifetime wages.
These negative effects persist. Even in spite of our higher education levels, fewer Millennial men are employed than older generations were at our age—partially a reflection of greater time spent in school, but also of a weaker job market for young people.
The Millennial homeownership rate is similarly depressed, especially as Boomers continue to hoard the limited housing stock.
Aftershocks is an apt term inasmuch as the impacts of the recession have spanned at least the decade Sternberg discusses. For young people circa 2008, there were obvious immediate effects: foreclosure and unemployment.
Then there were the medium-term effects: lower wages and lifetime earnings, higher barrier to homeownership, and a jobless recovery that increasingly sees workers shunted into the benefit-free gig economy.
But there are long-term effects too. As I recently wrote, the U.S. fertility rate has declined steadily since 2007, stubbornly continuing to drop even as the economy has rebounded—a baby-less recovery.
