Something that I see bubble up time and again is the notion of substantial generational change in access to a variety of touchstones of adult life that connect young people to mainstream society. This manifests in a number of different ways: concerns about the substantial lack of wealth that Millenials have compared to similarly aged Baby Boomer and Gen X’ers, the lack of home ownership in younger generations due to astronomical housing costs in affluent cities (I remember a comedian saying that young people live in their phones because it’s the only home they can afford), the decline and delay of marriage and parenthood, the problems of unpaid internships replacing entry level jobs, the extension of time spent living with parents into one’s 20s, etc. .
I think that access to these perhaps more traditional transitions to adulthood are consequential for a few reasons. Psychologically, they provide signals to oneself and others that a young person has “made it,” or successfully transitioning fully into adulthood. I imagine that this affects one’s view of oneself and one’s self esteem. They may also reflect a young person’s economic and social stability: housing, employment, marriage, entry internships, etc. have large costs associated with them these days, suggesting that they signify the proportion of young people in an economically stable situation. Further, I imagine that many of the touchstones of transition to adulthood mentioned above put constraints onto one’s life that prioritize predictability and security, and extend the conceptualization of one’s life and behavior as having consequences across a longer period of time. If young people are locked out of attaining these adulthood touchstones, then they may be less invested in social stability. Or if you’re locked out of these things, you may feel that society is not working for your benefit, and you’re probably correct.
I’m curious about how these adulthood transitions have changed across generations. My hunch reading popular news and social media is that there is a substantial general decline across generations in access to touchstones of adulthood transition. I’m going to start out thinking through this idea by considering trends in home ownership.
I used Census and American Community Survey data, which includes information on whether an individual owns or rents their home. I’m conceptualizing “young people” as noninstitutionalized individuals aged 25-35. It’s not a perfect proxy for “young people,” but it should provide a sufficient window at the end of youth to capture the extent to which the year-specific younger generation has attained each of the mainstream anchors of adulthood.
Let’s start out by comparing trends in home ownership among younger people and older people. The lines below represent the percent of folks aged 25-35 who own a home (blue line), and the percent of noninstitutionalized folks aged 45+ who own a home (pink line).
OK. This is definitely looking like younger people are not able to get connected to one of the big anchors of mainstream society. Beginning in 1980, younger folks have had declining home ownership rates, from about 62% in 1980 to 55% in 2006. Unsurprisingly, home ownership rates plummeted during the Great Recession, to under 50%. Young folks’ home ownership only started bouncing back in 2017. Yet it bounced back from a historically low rate.
By comparison, home ownership rates increased for middle- and older-aged folks between 1960 and 2007, from about 71% to a touch over 80%. Home ownership for this group declined during the Great Recession too, but at about half the magnitude of younger folks, from 80% to about 77%.
To show the age gap, let’s look at the difference in these percentages over time.
Yeesh. Home ownership among those aged 45+ was about 13 percentage points higher than those 25-35 in 1960. A difference certainly, but nothing suggesting a massive generational gap. This gap has steadily grown over time, so that home ownership was almost 30 percentage points higher among older folks by 2013. The gap’s declined a bit since then, but its magnitude is still pretty massive by historical standards. Over the last 60 years, it looks like we’ve gone from a reasonable generational difference in home ownership that could be explained by the typical upward economic attainment that typically flows along the life course to a massive chasm between generations.
There’s way more to unpack. But this definitely looks like younger folks are on the outs of one of the big pillars of entering mainstream American society. This could be a push - younger folks may want to own homes but cannot - or a pull - perhaps younger people are more flexible and mobile. The youth-specific crash in the mid 2000s suggests to me that young people didn’t suddenly learn of the perks of renting right at the beginning of a home valuation expansion.
I’m wondering, though, how universal these trends are. Specifically, I suspect that there are two big group dynamics that could affect trends (these will be future posts):
1] Higher education: My hunch is that there is a large difference in adulthood transitions for young people based on educational attainment, but that the gap has shrunk over time, with fewer college educated young people attaining adulthood touchstones. My other hunch is that less educated people have either stagnated or declined in access to these over time. I’m biased in assuming that national narratives, cultural memes, and “newsworthy” stories are biased in favor of higher class and highly educated people. So I’d expect a larger relative decline among higher educated folks (hence the bubbling stories), but that they’d still be doing much better than less educated folks.
2] Race: Younger cohorts are more racially and ethnically diverse. Racial and ethnic minorities face a substantial set of economic, political, and social barriers to typical anchors of mainstream society. We might well be observing generational decline in attainment to mainstream activities, but this could simply be due to the fact that younger cohorts are more diverse than older ones. Young white cohorts may look a heck of a lot like older white cohorts.
But this post is getting too long. These will be for another day.