Debate: Will Millennials Be Left Behind?

[Music] all right welcome to open to debate I'm Nick Gillespie editor large for reason magazine and I'm guest moderating this debate here at the Comedy Cellar in New York City we're here to debate the question will Millennials be left behind every day we read headlines about how people born between 1981 and 1996 are likely to be the first generation in America to have less money and sway than their parents does that ring true or is there more to the story first we're going to ask your opinion in the audience on this question before we get into the debate itself and later we're going to ask you your views again to see if you might have shifted your position to do that I'm going to have you applaud to show your opinion as it stands right now yes no undecided so class up right now if you think yes Millennials will be left behind and now clap if you think no Millennials will not be left behind [Applause] and finally clap if you're undecided okay and I suppose there's a fourth option which is should Millennials be left behind but we're not talking about that okay so to my ear and I'm kind of judging this it sounded pretty much it pretty evenly split between yes and no okay now let's meet our Debaters arguing that yes Millennials will be left behind journalist lawyer and author of ok Boomer let's talk how my generation got left behind Jill philipovic thank you and arguing no Millennials will not be left behind senior fellow and director of the center of opportunity and social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute Scott Winship all right before we start I want to get a sense of why you care about this Jill why did you take this topic on what are the stakes for you in this argument well in case you couldn't tell by my Millennial side part I am a millennial uh an elder Millennial born in 1983 and I wrote the okay Boomer book with now it's kind of dated meme title um because I looked at how different my life looked felt and materially was compared to the lives of my parents in some ways my life has been much more Dynamic and adventurous but in most ways it's also been much less stable and I was interested in exploring the question why and so I'm invested in this topic because I do feel like my generation is getting left behind and has frankly gotten cut out of a fair future okay thanks Scott same question to you why did you want to take this topic on what are the stakes for you well for me this may surprise some of you I'm mostly concerned about low-income Americans especially kids who start in the bottom I feel like the middle class and the upper middle class A lot of their problems get overstated and that is important because it directs attention away from a group that needs our help more and so I spent more time than I would like sort of pushing back against arguments about uh how the middle class is doing and that will probably be my evening tonight as well okay thank you uh let's get to it we want each of you Jill and Scott to take a few minutes to explain your position Jill you're up first your answer yes Millennials will be left behind you've got four minutes tell us why so Millennials are already being left behind the foundation of the American dream is that each generation will do better than the one before it and Millennials are shaping up to be the first American generation for which this is not true and that's despite the fact that Millennials have more or less done everything right we've gone to college in record numbers despite stereotypes about avocado toasts and lattes were actually pretty good Savers we've waited to have children until we're more financially and personally stable and still we're far behind where our parents were at our age we're less wealthy we have less upward Mobility we're less happy and we enjoy less political representation and I'm glad that Scott brought up inequality because Millennials like me who are white and college educated are generally doing pretty okay and Black and Hispanic Millennials in particular are really not doing okay I was born in 1983 and I took what a lot of Millennials in this room might recognize as the path I went to college on the promise that a college degree would pay off after college I continued on to law school which I paid for by taking on significant student loan debt my father a boomer and the child of immigrants he took a similar path except that he was able to pay for college and law school by working at the steel mills in Chicago I worked summer jobs too and I worked during the school year but somehow I wasn't able to find a job that would cover the nearly quarter of a million dollars in student loan debt that I eventually took out two weeks into my freshman year of college I watched out of my dorm room window as a second airplane hit the World Trade Center seven years later and my first day as a junior associate at a Manhattan Law Firm Lehman Brothers collapsed and the global economy swiftly followed the Great Recession which came just as the older half of the millennial generation were starting our professional lives set us back from the start we were often the last hired and so the first fired we accepted jobs with sub-optimal wages and sub-optimal benefits a decade later by January 2020 and largely thanks to Millennial women women outpaced men in the workforce for the first time in American history just as Millennials were hitting our Prime reproductive years the coveted pandemic again upended the global economy and Millennials again were the worst impacted generation when the pandemic hit and school shuttered 5.1 million American Mothers left the workforce most of those women were millennials by mid-2021 1.3 million still hadn't returned and the percentage of women in the workforce was the lowest it had been since the 1980s this is the story of millennials major political and economic crises punctuating pivotal moments of our young adult lives the good news is that Millennials are slowly recovering what is hard for Millennials to make up for these many many setbacks so a few numbers according to 2023 estimates from the St Louis fed Millennials and genziers have 75 cents of wealth for every one dollar that gen xers had at the same age gen xers and older Millennials have 85 cents for every dollar that baby boomers had we're the most racially diverse and best educated adult generation in American history but the typical white Millennial family has about 88 thousand dollars in wealth while the typical black Millennial family has about five thousand dollars that means white Millennial families are about five percent behind white families of previous generations while black Millennials are 52 behind black families of previous generations we're doing better than we were a few years ago but that's an awfully low bar to clear okay thank you very much [Applause] Scott Winship Millennials won't be left behind what's your opening statement let me try to unify the generations by Shifting the focus from Boomers to doomers um doomerism is the belief that life under quote late capitalism is worse than it really is Millennial dumerism specifically has its roots in the financial crisis that inaugurated the Great Recession it's no surprise Millennials began adulthood with a sense of pessimism and resignation but Millennial doomerism also draws strength from problematic accounts of the facts many of these accounts rely on statistics from the Great Recession that were to be sure quite worrisome but those stats reflected temporary conditions it was never reasonable to assume that the worst economy seen in well a generation would persist forever and indeed for the last 10 years or so American workers and families have seen economic gains that rival any experience since the 1960s starting out at an unusually bad time means that things will likely get better they have for Millennials just as they did for Gen xers after 1994 but popular perception has remained stuck in the past things have been improving so much the last few years the most recent data we have for the millennial cohort indicates that it's doing better today than gen xers and Boomers did at the same ages this is true of men's and women's hourly wages men's and women's annual earnings and family income Millennials have higher net worth than Boomers did at the same ages after excluding student loans which I'll argue is the right thing to do for these questions they have higher net worth than gen xers too Millennial dumerism also sometimes Compares younger adults to older adults when we should be comparing younger adults today to younger adults in the past wealth levels are much higher among older adults because they've had decades to save and invest and to pay down their their debt that will also be true for Millennials when they are older young adults tend to forego health coverage because it's expensive in the risk of a costly episode is relatively rare for at lower ages so finding that the young are more likely to be uninsured than the old is not that relevant for assessing whether Millennials will be left behind compared to their predecessors today's Millennials are as likely to have health insurance coverage as Boomers at the same age and they're more likely to have it than gen xers were dumerism also tends to focus on Rising costs and key areas such as Healthcare housing and higher education but tumors tend to overstate them for instance to the extent that homeowners pay fixed mortgage rates and have home equity they experience Rising housing prices as greater wealth rather than as a higher cost of living and the average cost of attendance at a four-year public college is 30 percent lower after institutional and government Aid government grants than the publish cost numerous accounts also ignore costs that have risen more slowly than incomes or have even fallen for goods and services such as clothing household Furnishings household utilities and fuels communication financial services and Recreation finally Millennial dimerism sometimes neglects the role of trade-offs in producing some economic trends the decline of marriage for instance has put downward pressure on the income and wealth of young adults one is struck reading Jill's book at the extent to which the Millennials she interviews assert the centrality of values they hold that reduce their economic standing working at a job that has meaning living in a fun dynamic city even as they lament the circumstances that their choices have produced none of this is to say that life is better in every way for Millennials than for previous generations indeed self-reported unhappiness seems to be rising for young adults but that deterioration likely has more to do with deterioration and the social aspects of American Life of which the decline in marriage is just one then the economic aspects here perhaps there's room for agreement about the trajectory of the nation I look forward to stimulating conversation thank you all right thank you both Jill and Scott we know where you stand and why we're going to dive into our discussion now on the question will Millennials be left behind we just heard opening statements from Jill philippovic and Scott Winship now let's move into our discussion and before we do that I just want to do a quick summary Jill was talking about how the millennial generation just got hit by a series of historic shocks from 9 11 to the Great Recession to the to covid that have left them kind of on their heels they're doing better but they're still far behind and unlikely to catch up to Boomers in particular but also just getting ahead Scott has said that Jill is mostly using outdated data and that the real distinction we should be talking about is not between Boomers and Millennials but doomers people who always look at the worst elements of things and that in fact a lot of catch-up has happened so we're going to uh start talking about this but first I want to ask question and to you Jill first because um you you mentioned this in passing the millennial generation as adults is the most diverse generation around who is the typical Millennial or how do we grasp when we talk about Millennials who are we talking about yeah I mean because Millennials are so diverse um and because we weren't raised in the kind of monoculture that Boomers were I think it's a lot harder to identify a typical Millennial um we are much more likely Than People of any generation to have gone to college we're much more racially diverse than any previous generation we've many more immigrant members of Our Generation but it's hard to say this is you know this is the average Millennial given the fact that we are yeah such a heterogeneous generation I think all generations are pretty diverse um and I and I think we do need to be careful uh those those of us who are quite online very online um sometimes I think tend to equate uh the generations with sort of the the folks who are there online who are sort of upper middle class professionals living in big cities um paying too much for rent uh and and that's just about everybody in the room probably uh but we do have to remember that uh in every generation you know there are a lot of people whose worlds we just have no idea what those are like I grew up in rural Maine quite different than New York um so so I think it's important to to keep the diversity in mind for all the generations um let's uh talk about economics Jill uh because that that really does seem to be kind of the central Focus you ticked off a series of kind of average wealth or median wealth of Millennials and things like that Scott has said and uh Gene twangy uh who's a social psychologist who's also a kind of historian or demographer of of generations uh recently wrote in the Atlantic that Millennials looked worse off a decade ago but as they've caught up as things have changed even with but Millennials are actually making more money they own more houses in ways that are comparable to previous generations are you buying that or is there something that's missing there I think there's something missing so I read that Atlantic article very interesting Gene is great A lot of the numbers in the article came from her own calculations and so they're a little bit hard it was a little tough for me then to to recheck them in 2023 the St Louis fed did revise uh the numbers that it had given for Millennial wealth that a few years back had been incredibly dire and now those numbers are only kind of dire and you know in in Jean's article that was presented as well look everything's fine and yes things are looking better for Millennials as you would expect given a generation of Highly Educated young people in a boom time economy I do think it's still concerning that the oldest Millennials are hitting our mid-40s and we still aren't seeing the kind of wealth that we would be expected to have at this age and frankly even comparing Millennials to Boomers when you look at educational rates for example you would expect us to be surpassing Boomers in wealth and income and that isn't what's happening instead and what's happening is boomers are gifting Millennials significant portions of their wealth that's also another driving factor of millennial inequality um can I ask given that more Millennials have gone to college does it make sense that they would and actually grad school as well does it make sense that they're starting their careers later is part of this that there's a delay effect but we also know that real wages have been we sing right since the late 1970s so yes of course when you're starting your work a few years later you would expect to amass less wealth but at the same time more Millennials are going into a Workforce that is a white collar labor force so you would expect higher higher pay and instead what Millennials have seen until relatively recently has been lower pay and connected to that a real stripping out of benefits right so less access to health insurance um certainly less access to things like a pension which is like a pipe dream for Millennials Scott what is the centrality of Economics to a generational experience particularly with Millennials and have they caught up you know I'm I'm I was heartened that Gene twingy did sort of reinforce some of the findings that I had the numbers that I've got are based on government databases for the most part are widely respected nationally representative surveys and uh you know they they do just show better outcomes that I think we're hearing from Jill so you know on on net worth the Millennials were 23 to 38 and years old in 2019 their median was three percent higher in 2019 than was the case for 23 to 38 year olds in 1989 so looking at people that are basically the same age group uh 1989 and 2019 are both peaks of the business cycle so these are the sort of things you have to be very careful about when you're comparing numbers now in that you uh said earlier in your opening remarks that you strip out student loan debt from that so from that number no that's that's the number uh that includes student loan debt uh if you strip out student loan debt uh the median increased 70 7-0 uh over uh from 1989 to 2019 for people that were same ages in both years so um and why would you uh what's the argument about stripping out student loan debt um the reason is that uh so our measures of wealth net worth are essentially assets Linus debt so for most things like a car you value the car as an asset and you value if you took out a car loan to buy it as debt and you do that for all your assets and all your debts and you get wealth well we do this this thing with student loans mostly because it's hard to measure otherwise where we include the student loan debt on the debt side but we don't include anything on the asset side but people don't take out big student loans for no reason right they're doing it because they're actually increasing the value of their skills and their knowledge they're going to increase their lifetime earnings there's an estimate from Preston Cooper of the foundation for research on equal opportunity who finds that uh the the the value in today's dollars after you take into account uh the Lost earnings that you when you were in school that a four-year college degree is worth a hundred and thirty thousand dollars that's after discounting all of the earnings from from from later on um so 130 000 versus you know what's the typical student debt load you know the average for Millennials who are 23 to 38 in 2019 was 39 600 but that's affected by a small number of people who have huge student loan debt the median the one that's right in the middle is seventy eight hundred dollars so much less so you know if we're going to count uh the debt we need to count the asset that's financing apps and being able to do that then we should just drop the debt from the calculation but unfortunately a lot of people who take on student loan debt don't get degrees I think there is this baked in assumption that student loan debt means a bachelor's degree or it means an advanced degree and the truth is that a lot of Millennials who take on debt and disproportionately these are millennials of color and first generation college students don't actually end up completing a degree and so they're essentially in the worst financial position because they have the debt and they don't have the degree that's then going to benefit them in the workplace could I just clarify that the Preston Cooper numbers uh took into account the risk of of not finishing in in his estimates um and he found that 70 two percent of students that are going to four-year colleges will have a positive net return on investment that is it'll be worth it in the end taking into account the risk that folks might not finish college Jill in in OK Boomer let's talk one of the things that was interesting and I think Scott talked about this a little bit is that Millennials seem to be exercising choice in the types of jobs they take and and the work situations is it possible that Millennials are choosing lower paying jobs because they are more interested in expressing their commitments same question a lot of meals do say that their personal ideologies and you know their their goals in their dreams shape the kind of jobs that they take for sure but I think a lot of Millennials also looked at the job market that we were coming into in the midst of the Great Recession and didn't really have a lot of room to be choosy quite frankly and so I do think part of the calculus for a lot of us in our generation was well I'm kind of gonna get screwed no matter what sort of job I take unless I'm going to be an investment banker so I may as well do something that I care about and that feels meaningful and then that you know does sort of set you on a career trajectory so yes Millennials generally are pretty values driven generation but we do also want to pay our rent I don't think that we're being completely ridiculous I think it's a great thing uh that Millennials or anybody else um feels like they can take jobs that reflect their values rather than taking the first job that they get offered or the job that they got their expensive degree for you know I think that's a reflection of affluence right these are things we get to do once we're rich enough as a nation and that's that's sort of the story uh of the last 50 years I would argue uh is that we've gotten richer uh that uh has allowed uh more wives to go into the workforce for longer I think a lot of times people think wives have been compelled uh to go to work uh to prop up family income I don't think that's true at all I think it's costly to send two workers in the workforce you need two cars you need child care uh and and we've uh that that's been part of the way we've spent our affluence over 50 years is on things that are not uh just material uh or uh sort of taking the first opportunity that we get whether we enjoy it or not so I think it just reflects to me uh a positive sign that that Millennials aren't getting left behind that they have the ability to choose these things but Jill uh let's talk about children uh you know the fertility rate or the the number of children that women have has been going down is that a sign of economic desperation or is that a sign that actually women are choosing differently and have the ability to control their biology I think it's both you know when you look at what women say that they want women generally say at various age stages that they want roughly two children we're not seeing that play out particularly among Millennial women where it can record low fertility rates we're seeing that all over the world though including in places that have really really robust social welfare programs so I do think part of it in the U.S is this lack of support that women get I mean we I think we all probably know these stats right lack of paid parental leave we have no Universal child care we work these incredibly long hours and don't get paid sick days I have to imagine that those material conditions are driving women and families to make certain choices or not make certain choices but I do think another big component part of it is that women now have more areas than ever before in all of human history to find meaning and purpose in their lives and I think historically a lot of women have found that through childbearing right that was something you could invest in and gives you a sense of forward trajectory and you know living beyond yourself and now women can find that in a lot of different places and that to me isn't is a quite positive thing and I also think is one big component part of driving low fertility rates um Scott I looked into this question of whether uh whether it was the case that declining fertility over time um uh reflects uh women not being able to have the number of kids that they said they wanted uh as teenagers so it's interesting we have surveys for everything so we have uh two surveys that interview people both uh when they're teenagers and and then follow them and so you can compare what people the number of kids people had in their mid-30s to the number of kids they said they wanted at 18. and you could do that in these two different surveys which roughly correspond to Millennials and the younger Boomers and what I found is essentially um it hasn't gotten it it seems like women aren't doing no worse and in fact maybe they're doing a little bit better hitting the targets they said they wanted as teenagers than than the young Boomers were so it doesn't look to me you know that doesn't prove that economics don't matter but but it does sort of say to me that uh that for whatever reason women aren't struggling more to have the number of kids uh that that in theory they wanted to have but they want to have fewer kids that's right yeah even as a teenagers they say I want fewer kids yeah that goes down in line with with the numbers that you'd see from the CDC or anything there was this huge drop in fertility in the 1970s it corresponds with the the big increase in married women into the workforce um so these things are all related they all reflect affluence they're all good things in my book to the extent that people are choosing choosing them one place where uh I think everybody would agree that um there's something going on Millennials when they talk about mental health issues um it seems to be much more foregrounded than older Generations Gen X or Boomers um Jill can we talk a little bit about that yeah I mean Millennials see a whole host of challenges to both mental and physical health and we have higher rates of things like type 2 diabetes and hypertension but we have much higher rates of things like anxiety and depression than say gen xers did and where we really see I think a lot of scary statistics is in in Jen's ears and in adolescence and teenagers what I don't think there's a single cause of what is fueling this I mean a lot of folks theorize that obviously being like attached to our cell phones and having a constant stream of other people having fun without you is maybe not ideal for your mental health and then part of it may be that Millennials are much better about talking about these issues than previous generations were and it's awfully hard to identify a condition if you can't put a word on it or if there's significant social taboos around identifying with that right so so my best guess is that it's a combination of both shifting kind of Social and material circumstances and also greater awareness of mental health and greater willingness to be open and discussing it which to me is is probably a net positive Scott is it possible to be materially better off but to be mentally less you know kind of present yeah absolutely and I think that's that's kind of what what's happened when I look at economic Trends over 50 years um you know most of them look pretty decent uh men in the 1980s uh their earnings uh was went down um uh but it's hard to find you know the story for women is almost uniformly positive um but when you look at indicators of Social Capital um the strength of our of our social relationships those are almost uniformly down whether you're looking at marriage rates um out of wedlock births doing things with your neighbors doing things with your co-workers after work we actually have data on this that's gone down over time trust in institutions has gone down over time participation in organizations and church church attendance have all gone down and I think that is really at the root of the mental health challenges that we're facing today Jill to kind of pursue this a little bit more Millennials a decade ago or roughly were generally described as an incredibly optimistic and forward-looking idealistic generation now they're always talked about as kind of sour and bitter the present company excluded of course um present company absolutely included that um you know is that a uniquely Millennial experience or is it General kind of souring of the country according to Gallup in 2001 70 of all Americans said they were satisfied with the direction of the country it's now 16 so again is it you know is there something particularly driving Millennial kind of malaise um or and how do you separate that out from what seems to be a general tanking of positivity I think it's awfully hard to kind of look around at the politics of the last few years and not feel pessimistic scared outraged whatever word you you know whatever kind of negative emotion you want to attach to it um and I I think Millennials though are in this really particular circumstance where we're hitting a period of life that should be sort of like Peak adulthood right I think the reality for a lot of Millennials is that aside from the kind of most privileged among us we are looking at our lives and realizing I don't have enough say for retirement you know I either don't own my home where I was only able to buy my home with help from my parents or I do own my home but I'm paying way too much in a mortgage or I'm still a renter and that feels very scary um I don't have kids or I don't know if I want to have kids and I should have made this decision by now or I do have kids but I can't afford child care and I feel like I'm just keeping my head above water and I don't think that is the general sense um that Millennials expected to feel at an age that you know we have understood 40 to be like the age of the midlife crisis right not the age of oh my God why do I feel like I'm still barely making it we are going to wrap our discussion here let's move into our audience q a hi uh my name is Sam I'm curious to know what think about how the well to put it morbidly how the death of the Boomers will affect Millennials oh okay yeah he went there morbidly now you're setting uh people free okay so uh Jill I mean well what we are already seeing underway is the largest wealth transfer in American history um so that's going to impact Millennials tremendously but what we're going to see is that it's going to impact Millennials who are already doing the best the most um so Boomers there was a book by this guy Philip bump who's a columnist The Washington Post and he described Boomers as like the Pig moving through the python right so it changes the entire system from tip to tail and that was his metaphor for Boomers effect on on American society it's it's nice um but you know Boomers have accrued a tremendous amount of wealth and Boomer is in the top 10 percent and then the top one percent beyond that have accrued just absolutely massive kind of previously Unthinkable amounts of wealth and that is much of that is already being passed on to their children even before they die right but that's being passed on largely to White Millennials and to Millennials who are already college educated and have a huge amount of Advantage so yes many Millennials are going to benefit from Boomers aging and from Boomers dying but I think there's a really outstanding question of whether that's going to kind of increase the average well-being of Millennials but I suspect that it may have the effect of actually widening inequality within the millennial generation and making the worst soft Millennials even worse off by comparison than they already are uh Scott what do you think and I'm I'm looking at figures that I dug out for this at my 2030 some estimates are that 68 trillion dollars of wealth will have flowed from Boomers to Millennials how is that going to change the conversation and the debate yeah I agree with a lot of what Jill said I think it'll probably exacerbate inequality to some extent it's not going to make anybody poorer I don't think but but it certainly will not be distributed uh evenly there's there's another way that perhaps the passing of the Baby Boomers might help more people which is that there's going to be an oversupply of Housing and to the extent that that relieves some of the pressure on housing costs which which really are increasing much faster than uh than most things in the economy maybe that's sort of a good surprise coming do you have a quick question sir I don't think it's quick hi I'm Ryan I'm curious if we could talk a little bit about political representation rather than Financial Health like that's it okay political representation uh let's uh talk about this uh something like 56 percent of Millennials in 2020 voted for the Democratic party Jill do you think that will hold up yeah it's an interesting question there was just this piece in the times that suggested that Millennials have actually moved a little bit to the right um unclear to me from that data if Millennials who were voting 10 years ago have gotten more conservative or if it's just that college-educated Millennials who tend to be more liberal in the first place we're more likely to be voting 10 years ago and now you have Millennials uh without college degrees who are again typically going to be more to the right who have now shown up to the polls and that's kind of driving this cohort shift um I'm not sure which which one of those it is previous generations you know have shifted not kind of I think as much as The Stereotype but have tended to shift a little bit more conservative as they've aged until recently Millennials really didn't seem to be undergoing that same kind of shift but now as we hit middle age I will see to me the bigger problem is what Ryan points to which is that Millennials are and have been radically underrepresented in the halls of power in Congress and in the Senate and when you compare what for example Boomer representation was when they were our age Congress was much younger Boomers got elected in pretty significant numbers and then they stayed and the result of that is you know for the past few terms we've had the oldest congresses in history that's now starting to shift a little bit but Boomers have stayed silent generation members have stayed and by virtue I think there's a couple members of the founding fathers work and no I mean we've had straight baby boomer presidents um for pretty much my entire life the last President we had who wasn't a boomer was George H.W bush up until Joe Biden who's not a baby boomer because he's too old yeah Scott what do you think what um how will the um kind of growing political clout of Millennials uh as Boomers die or stop voting or kids won't drive them to the polls anymore how is that going to change the conversation yeah it's a great question I think a lot depends on um the extent to which uh Millennials get more conservative as they age which I think is a thing that has been empirically found people get married they have kids they start thinking of schools they start thinking of safety uh and and it tends to be the case that that Generations get more conservative over time if that happens maybe the impact won't be that big I also think you know the major divisions in politics are not generation all um comparing a Democrat to a republican you get much bigger divides than if you're comparing Republican Boomer to a republican Millennial also Gen X just got our first representation in New York's own Hakeem Jeffries yeah okay 10x Gen X the Forgotten generation uh we do have time for two more questions so let's go to it quick question I am Paul I would like to ask if you all could talk about the prospect of climate change and the ramifications of say State Farm deciding that they will no longer ensure new homeowner policies in California and how that will play out in a generational development thank you let's talk about climate change which seems to be as much as anything the defining event if that's the right thing or frame for Millennials how do you respond to the question yeah I mean a hugely definitional issue for Millennials it's it's terrifying right to think about for example having children on a planet that is currently on fire that we're seeing outside of our doors um you know whether that's actually shaping for example childbearing patterns I think is a different question but certainly for Millennials I think part of what contributes to this sense of political frustration alienation and certainly existential dread is the understanding that climate change is absolutely going to profoundly affect our futures and the futures of our children and in part because of the previous question because of our lack of representation uh in the highest levels of power not nearly enough is being done to combat it and you know when you look at for example who was championing the the green New Deal in Congress um and who were the the forces of shutting that down you know it's not purely a long generational lines of course but I do think UC generational differences in priorities around climate change and in the people that are really jumping up and down and screaming and saying do something but unfortunately those people don't have nearly as much access to power as the folks who don't seem to have that much of an investment in our planet's future Scott how do you think the centrality of climate change and climate change legislation how much is that driving the pessimism of millennials yeah it's a good question I don't have a good sense myself um I I was skeptical uh whenever there's polling and people say that they would have kids but for the environment that sounds to me like people don't really want to have kids um but maybe maybe such people exist um yeah I I think you know the environment is is a huge Central problem that we've got to figure out um I think probably uh more economic growth and affluence is probably going to end up being the way to do that um figuring out ways to deal with it rather than trying to slow down uh the extent to which Our Lives improve one last question so please sir uh Tim 1990. um my uh my my mom she's just Bloomer and she my whole adult life has always said you know when I was your age when I was your original you already have worked this job I had this house I moved out that kind of stuff and on the flip side of that I have a lot of friends there gen Z and they seem to be more aware uh professionally socially and politically so I just want to say how do you to make Boomers aware of millennial plight and then how do you as Millennial not have resentment towards gen Z and actually like lift them up that's the coming War right Millennials versus gen Z Jill do you want to go first on that yeah that that one thing I would love to just part of the reason I wrote my book was to create not hostility although I think some hostility is warranted um but to create conversations between Baby Boomers and Millennials so that Boomers have a better sense of how much the world changed when Millennials were entering into it and kind of our unique uh our unique challenges I think Boomers and Millennials we know each other well right we're often parents and children and individually get along pretty well um but generally generationally see a lot of tension I think because Millennials kind of rightly resents uh all the doors that seems like they opened for Baby Boomers and feel like to mix metaphors the latter was kind of pulled up behind us you know when it comes to Millennial and gen Z relationships oh it's it's less of the parent-child dynamic which is nice and I really do see gen Z as kind of inheritors of I guess Millennial culture you know sorry maybe that's bad but you know gen zeros are even further to the left than Millennials right they tend to be very Progressive um genzir's you know like Millennials uh have record numbers of members who identify as LGBT um they're incredibly racially diverse they are politically engaged I mean so much of what we were saying about Millennials 15 years ago we're now seeing among gen Z but kind of like on steroids which you know as a progressive Millennial to me is very exciting and and quite heartening and so I do think it's it's healthy for Millennials to not kind of sit in our own sense of Despair and frustration and instead say well how can we look at what I think are many of the mistakes that Boomers made in kind of shutting doors for us and think about how we leave those open how we kind of help do some you know downward generation you know pull up Mobility Scott how as a member of Gen X with a boomer how do we Ally ourselves to take on the Millennials engine see who seem to be teaming up against us it's a really important question um I think we need to find ways to work together to prevent these uh things from befalling us because we are the the greatest Generation uh right since the last one yes all right uh now is the time to bring it home to the audience with your closing remarks Scott since Jill went first for our opening statements you have the floor you've got two minutes to tell this audience why they should be convinced that Millennials will not be left behind thank you Nick over the course of our lifetimes we all experience good economic times and bad Economic Times Millennials were unfortunate to experience unusually bad times at the start of their adulthood but the bad times were also experienced by members of the other Generations just at different points in their lives Millennials will continue to experience good economic times and bad Economic Times as they age they are currently in the midst of a good one and it's left them better off on most economic measures than previous generations we can't predict the future but there's no reason to assume that it will leave Millennials uh worse off than their their forerunners uh and there are several reasons to think they'll Prosper uh we've already Somebody went dark before I did uh regarding the passing of the baby boom generation another Point has come up here as well Millennials are the most educated generation this enhanced human capital will continue to pay off down the road it'll become more clear once the student loans that Finance this investment are paid off furthermore we may be on the cusp of technological breakthroughs that will increase productivity which is the engine of wage growth it's safe to say that Rising costs in key sectors of the economy can't just continue forever they can't just keep going up low fertility will continue to present challenges for our system of federally subsidized retirement savings but lower expense for the smaller number of kids who are born will free up spending for other purposes including building a nest egg focusing on the overstated economic problems of Millennials to tracks from the Urgent task of helping lower income Americans increasing upward Mobility among them ensuring up the nation's Social Capital addressing our crises of loneliness trust and alienation problems that will not so much leave Millennials behind but sweep them up along with everybody else thank you Scott [Applause] okay and now Jill you get the final say tonight your rebuttal pleas as to why Millennials will be left behind so I hope Scott's right I mean really fingers crossed um but as Scott says yes bad times come and go so do good times Millennials have been hit by bad times at some really key life moments right when we are entering the workforce and then as most of us were in our prime childbearing years right we faced two Financial crises right at those kind of peak moments that has long-term effects right now we are in pretty good Economic Times and we're seeing that in the past couple years Millennial kind of financial well-being has gotten much better so when you look at numbers for example around Millennial wealth one of the reasons why you've seen those numbers go up is because Millennials are finally buying homes that seems to have been at least partly a result of this government invest from coved as well as our Boomer parents gifting us or loaning US money or giving us inheritances in 1989 Baby Boomers were 37 of the US population and they held about 21 of the wealth and Millennials were roughly the same age we were 30 of the population and just six percent of the wealth and at least according to the urban Institute nearly 40 percent of older Millennials are now predicted to lack adequate income to cover our basic needs when we're 70. the final thought that I'll leave you with is that Millennials have been radically underrepresented in our political system and this has really dire consequences compared to when boomers are young we are spending significantly less money now um on future Investments and less money in terms of proportion of spending not real dollars on future Investments on things like education and infrastructure than we are on things like entitlement programs that has real effects for Millennials for our future and for the future of our children all right thank you [Applause] okay Joe philipovic and Scott Winship thank you so much uh can we have a big round of applause for them okay all right and now we're going to ask you the audience your opinion again to see if you may have shifted your stance on the question will Millennials be left behind so after having heard this debate I'm going to have you applaud to show your stance yes no and undecided so right now clap if you think yes Millennials will be left behind [Applause] and clap if you think no Millennials will not be left behind and then finally clap if you are undecided okay wow that's I'm not quite sure it sounds to me like that the biggest portion of clapping was for Millennials will be left behind that concludes our debate I'd like to thank our debaters and everyone here at the Comedy Cellar for keeping such an open mind while listening to this the debate I'm Nick Gillespie and thank you for joining us at this open to debate live taping [Applause] for all of you listening I want to thank you for tuning in to this episode of open to debate as a non-profit our work to combat extreme polarization through civil and respectful debate is generously funded by listeners like you and by the Rosencrantz foundation and by supporters of open to debate open to debate is also made possible by a generous ground from the Laura and Gary Lotter Venture philanthropy fund Robert Rosencrantz is our chairman Claire Connor is CEO Leah Matthau is our chief content officer Julia melfi is our senior producer Marlette Sandoval is our editorial producer Gabriella Mayer is our editorial and research manager Gabrielle yanacelli is our social media and digital platforms coordinator Andrew Lipson is head of production Max Fulton is our production coordinator Damon Whittemore is our engineer Raven Baker is our events and operations manager Rachel Kemp is our chief of staff our theme music is by Alex Clement and I'm your host John donvan we'll see you next time [Music] foreign

Channel: Open to Debate

Views: 1,202

Keywords: Intelligence Squared, IQ2, IQ2US, Intelligence Squared U.S., debate, live debate, I2, nyc, politics, conservative, liberal

Id: cQ_uv6BpFMo

Length: 49min 46sec (2986 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023