Exodus Starts: Millennials Ditch City Life

The urban revival of America’s core inner cities has been a decades-long failed experiment, as deindustrialization coupled with failed liberal policies have created a growing problem of inequality and violent crime. Middle-class advancement was once localized in the core of America’s cities, but that is not so much the case today, as those areas are labeled a “barbell economy,” divided between highly-paid professionals and low-skill service workers.

Brookings Institution notes as early as the 1970s, middle-class income in the inner cities started to shrink more than anywhere else. Today, in most US inner cities, the cores are more unequal than their surrounding suburbs, noted geographer Daniel Herz.

As the failed American inner city experiment nears the latter stages before a collapsing point, a new report from Time could be the final nail in the coffin for some American inner cities, as the article suggests “cities have already reached ‘Peak Millennial’ as young people begin to leave.” 

According to the latest Census data, after years of growth, the population of millennials in Boston and Los Angeles have declined since 2015, as a mass exodus from city life starts to take shape. Other cities such as Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., are experiencing similar issues but not as severe while growth rates of millennials plateau.

Dowell Myers, professor of demography at the University of Southern California, called the peak of the millennial population in major U.S. cities back in 2015, with the largest birth group of the cohort turning 27 this year. To note, Myers could be a far better forecaster than Dennis Gartman, but we’ll leave that for another conversation.

Myers said at the critical age of 27 and above, that is the time when the millennial generation will participate in, what we call, ‘millennial flight’ to the suburbs. Such a trend could be the final nail in the coffin for some American inner cities, who were expecting the millennial generation to lead the charge in the revival process, as what we’ve learned from Myers– that may not be the case.

The Times explains how Myers coined the term— ‘peak millennial’. Interesting, the plateauing of millennial populations are occurring in East Coast cities, while the West Coast is still drawing in young people.

To see which cities have reached “peak millennial” — a term Myers coined —we analyzed a decade of Census data through 2016. We found that while tech hubs like San Francisco and Seattle are still drawing young people, large East Coast cities, like New York and D.C., are fast approaching peak millennial, with plateauing populations of those born between 1980 and 1996.

 

And then there are cities like Boston, which already appear to have reached their peak. Boston lost roughly 7,000 millennials in 2016, after a record high of 259,000 the previous year.

In the explanation of millennial flight from America’s inner cities, Jim Rooney, president of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce said, “they’re doing what every generation does — they get married, start a family and think about having a backyard and looking at school systems” in the suburbs.

While that is definitely true, and what we’ve mentioned above, millennials tend to live in core inner cities, where inequality and violent crime are sometimes out of control. Also, many millennials are becoming priced out of real estate in these areas, as wage stagnation is drowning many millennials into more and more debt, on top of their already ballooning balance sheet of liabilities. Think student loans….

In Boston, the millennial peak was confirmed in 2014 through 2015, as it appears it’s all downside from here. Rooney’s findings conclude millennials in the region are being priced out of homes with the median home in Boston around $561,000, according to Zillow.

In Chicago, the millennial plateau occurred in 2014 through 2015, hitting a high of 814,000 millennials in 2015 and falling by a few hundred in 2016. Jack Lavin, president of the area’s Chamber of Commerce said millennials are moving to the suburbs to start a family— ditching urban areas. Nevertheless, the article does not mention— the out of control homicides adding to the fear of city life.

In Los Angeles, the millennial peak was confirmed in 2015, which saw a decline of about 2,500 millennials in 2016. “It’s hard for millennials to achieve a middle-class lifestyle that they think they deserve”, said Myers. With that being said, millennials are moving out.

Bottomline: The ruling elite and their inner-city playground planners who were expecting the millennial generation to revive their decades-long failed experiment are about to come to harsh terms with the reality of a millennial exodus.

Labor Market Conundrum: Number Of Millennials Living At Home With Mom Continues To Surge

Nary a day goes by that President Trump and/or the talking heads on CNBC fail to mention the following unemployment chart as evidence that "everything is awesome" with the U.S. economy...

...which might be true unless you"re among the 95 million-ish Americans who have been looking for a job for so long that you no longer even count as a human being to the Bureau of Labor Statistics...

...or if you"re a millennial.

Despite being the most educated generation ever to walk the face of the

planet, at least according to their tuition bills paid by mom and dad, a

staggering number of millennials still can"t seem to land a steady job.  Moreover, despite the steadily improving labor market, as the USA Today points out, the outlook for millennials continues to inexplicably deteriorate with 20% of 26-34 year olds currently living at home with mom versus only 17% back in 2012.

The share of older Millennials living with relatives is still rising, underscoring the lingering obstacles faced by Americans who entered the workforce during and after the Great Recession.

 

About 20% of adults age 26 to 34 are living with parents or other family members, a figure that has climbed steadily the past decade and is up from 17% in 2012, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Trulia, a real estate research firm. The increase defies record job openings and a 4.1% unemployment rate, the lowest in 17 years.

 

Not surprisingly, a much larger portion of younger Millennials age 18 to 25 (59.8%) live with relatives, but that figure generally has fallen the past few years after peaking at 61.1% in 2012.

So why does the professional development of millennials continue to diverge from other generations?  While one can never be sure, perhaps the answer to that question lies in the personal experience of young Heidi Toth who decided to quit her job, after gaining just two years of experience, to join a church mission for nearly two years.  Then, after returning to work from her travels, Toth quit again in 2013 after a "series of layoffs modified her duties"...which we assume roughly translates to..."a bunch of people got fired which meant I had to work harder so I quit."

After graduating from Texas Tech University with a journalism major in 2005, Heidi Toth, now 35, got a job quickly at a Provo, Utah, newspaper. But in early 2007, she went on an 18-month church mission, landing her back in the job market in the depths of the recession in 2008. Unable to find work, she moved in with her mother in Roswell, New Mexico, for nine months while she hunted for work and took part-time, low-paying jobs.

 

She was rehired at the Provo paper in spring 2009 but left again in 2013 after a series of layoffs modified her duties. After months of fruitless job searching and traveling, she returned to her mother’s house for three months until she was hired at a Lubbock, Texas, paper.

 

Toth was grateful she could live rent-free during her periods of unemployment. But, she adds, “It wasn’t ideal, professionally or personally.”

 

Prospective employers in larger, distant cities didn’t think she would be readily available for interviews. And at home, “I felt like I was back in high school,” she says. “I felt like I had to ask permission to go out.”

Meanwhile, as the Pew Research Center recently noted, even the Millenials that manage to hold a job and establish their own residence aren"t much better off as they now head more households living below the poverty line than any other generation and, in aggregate, represent nearly one-third of all impoverished households in the United States. 

More Millennial households are in poverty than households headed by any other generation. In 2016, an estimated 5.3 million of the nearly 17 million U.S. households living in poverty were headed by a Millennial, compared with 4.2 million headed by a Gen Xer and 5.0 million headed by a Baby Boomer. The relatively high number of Millennial households in poverty partly reflects the fact that the poverty rate among households headed by a young adult has been rising over the past half century while dramatically declining among households headed by those 65 and older.

 

Of course, that"s all despite the fact that they only head just over 20% of all households...

Millennials are the largest living generation by population size (79.8 million in 2016), but they trail Baby Boomers and Generation Xers when it comes to the number of households they head. Many Millennials still live under their parents’ roof or are in a college dorm or some other shared living situation. As of 2016, Millennials (ages 18 to 35 in 2016) headed only 28 million households, many fewer than were headed by Generation X (ages 36 to 51 in 2016) or Baby Boomers (ages 52 to 70).

 

Of course, those aren"t the only stats that prove just how much those anthropology degrees are paying off...Millennials are also winning at the "cohabiting-couple" game...presumably because it takes a village of millennials to cover one monthly rent bill.

Conclusion:

Why Credit Suisse Thinks Millennials Are The "Unluckiest" Generation

As part of the annual Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, which as discussed earlier found that for the first time ever, the "Top 1%" owns a majority, or 50.1%, of the world"s wealth...

... the millionaire bankers behind the firm"s (Ultra) High Net Worth client division decided to also shed some tears for the world"s Millennials, whom they dubbed with one word: "unlucky"... a term which members of said generation will likely wear as a badge of honor (if only to justify their plight in life), while other generations will be eager to promptly mock.

While both sides have valid justifications for their perspective, here is why the Swiss bank has almost given up on an entire generation as a potential client:

"The “Millennials” – people who came of age after the turn of the century – have had a run of bad luck, most clearly in developed markets. Capital losses in the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 and high subsequent  unemployment have dealt serious blows to young workers and savers. Add rising student debt in several developed countries, tighter mortgage rules after 2008, higher house prices, increased income inequality, less access to pensions and lower income mobility and you have a “perfect storm” holding back wealth accumulation by the Millennials in many countries."

In a contrast that is sure to generate controversy, Credit Suisse compares the plight of the "unlucky" Millennials to the "good fortune experienced by the baby boomers, born in large numbers between 1945 and 1964, whose wealth was boosted by a range of factors including large windfalls due to property and share price increases." Additionally, CS notes that the millennial cohort is smaller as a percentage of the total adult population than the baby boomers were at the same age, and notes that while "normally it is good to belong to a smaller cohort" this time that appears not to be the case, and nowhere more so than in the United States.

So why aren"t Millennials a lucky cohort? Did the financial crisis and its fallout just swamp the advantage of being in a small cohort? Or is there more to it? Here are several key reasons cited by Credit Suisse to make its high net worth clients feel some compassion for America"s young adults.

Assets and debts of the Millennials

Table 1 provides a breakdown by age for various wealth characteristics in key developed markets.  The table shows that income and wealth both generally increase with age – certainly for the average individual, but also usually in cross-section data.

The share of financial assets also rises once young millennial adults have left the parental nest. Non-financial assets – of which owner-occupied homes are the most important – decline in importance with age. For many people, the first priority is to buy a house, with financial assets being built up later. This pattern helps to explain why the high and rising house prices seen in many countries since the year 2000 have been a special problem for the Millennials. According to the IMF, state pensions in advanced economies are expected to replace just 20% of per capita income by 2060, compared with 35% today. Also, fewer workers are now covered by employer-based pensions than in the past, and defined benefit pensions are declining fast. For example, only 10% of UK workers in the private sector born in the 1980s have a defined benefit pension plan, compared to 40% of those born in the 1960s at the same age. So it is increasingly important for people to save for retirement on their own account. The share of financial assets in total assets will need to rise in most countries in the future compared to what is seen in Table 1. This is especially true for the Millennials, who will likely face the added challenge of higher contributions and taxes required to fund state pensions and other benefits for the baby boom cohort in their retirement.

Student loans have been an increasingly important component of debt in a number of countries. The trend is particularly striking in the United States and is also evident in Germany (see Figures 2a and 2b, which use the same data sources and age groups as Table 1). In the United States, 37% of those aged 20–29 in 2013 had some student debt, which accounted for 18% of the total debt of that age group. In Germany, 12% of those in the same age group had student debt and it accounted for about 6% of total debt.

The rise in student debt is partly due to higher fees. But it also reflects the fact that the Millennials are more educated than preceding cohorts. For instance, the percentage of 25–34 year olds with tertiary education in OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries rose from about 15% in 1970 to 26% in 2000 and 43% in 2016. This greater educational attainment may help to ease the Millennials labor market diffuclties. However, although average rates of return to college and university have held up fairly well, this is largely because lower wages for less-educated workers have reduced the opportunity cost of tertiary education. But for the most university-educated Millennials the outcome may be job opportunities and wages no better than those of their parents, achieved by a dint of more costly education.

Entrepreneurship

It is sometimes claimed that Millennials are starting more businesses than earlier generations, and doing it at younger ages. But the official statistics suggest otherwise: only 2% of Millennials in the United States are self- employed, versus 8% of Generation Xers (those born between 1965 and 1980) and baby boomers. And entrepreneurship, as measured by the fraction of self-employed workers, has been declining in most OECD countries since the turn of the century. The OECD self-employment rate fell from 17.6% in 2001 to 15.8% in 2011; in the United States it dropped from 7.4% in 2001 to 6.5% in 2015. Sagging entrepreneurship in most countries is consistent with relatively few Millennials starting a business in this period.

The apparent decline in entrepreneurship among Millennials relative to their predecessors seen in the official statistics may reflect the fact that the cohorts being compared are observed at the same point in time, not at the same age. More Millennials will start businesses as they age. Another explanation is that those Millennials who have become entrepreneurs have each created more businesses than their counterparts in earlier cohorts. This may reflect their ”tech savvy” and the greater ease of starting multiple businesses these days with the help of the internet. A third factor is that although many Millennials would like to start a business, for a time they were restrained by  tough economic conditions. This suggests a surge in millennial entrepreneurship may occur soon or may already be taking place, as has been seen in some emerging markets, such as China and India.

Comparing cohorts

Figure 4 shows wealth components for US adults aged 20–29 and 30–39 in 1992, 1998, 2007 and 2013. Total assets increased markedly for the 20– 29 year-old group between 1998 and 2007, due mostly to an increase in real assets caused by rising house prices. Real assets for 30–39 year olds also increased rapidly at that time, but mean financial assets fell in this age range, perhaps reflecting re-allocation of portfolios in response to the changing returns from real and financial assets. Things went into reverse between 2007 and 2013: real assets declined substantially for both groups and financial assets increased a little. Debt rose strongly for both groups between 1998 and 2007, but has since returned to its 1992 level. These comparisons tell us about the experience of Generation X and the Millennials in their early adulthood. Generation X was still in its late 20s and 30s when house prices rocketed in the United States prior to the global financial crisis, and during the crisis itself. So it, as well as the first wave of Millennials, had a wild roller coaster ride. They experienced not only the effects of the general rise and fall of economic activity, but also the impacts of wild swings in asset prices. Both aspects are reflects in the wealth changes seen in Figure 4, which simply shows that young Americans aren"t getting wealthier any more.

General Indebtedness

Figure 6 shows US age-debt ratio profiles. For each cohort aged 40 or more in 2017, the debt to income ratio was higher than that of previous cohorts at all ages. The “crossing over”observed for wealth in Figure 5 is not seen reflecting the fact that debts do not fall in value when houses and shares crash, as they did during the financial crisis. But, perhaps most interestingly, the pattern is interrupted for the Millennials. The debt to income ratio started out higher than earlier cohorts for those aged 35-39 in 2017 and also rose (briefly, in 2010) above earlier cohorts for those aged 30–34 in 2017. But then there was a crossing-over in 2013 for both of these cohorts, with their debt to income ratios declining below previous cohorts. This hints that the Millennials became more cautious about debt than their predecessors due to the shock of the housing bust in the United States and the global crisis.

Student Debt

Student debt has leapt up for the most recent cohorts in the United States (Figure 7). The biggest increase came for the cohort aged 35–39 in 2017 – i.e. the “leading edge” of the Millennials – but those aged 30–34 in 2017 saw a further increase. As noted earlier, as a consequence, student debt now forms a substantial portion of total debt for young people in the United States.

Living in their parents" basement

The percentage of adults living in owner-occupied housing shows much more stability over cohorts (Figure 8). The oldest cohorts follow almost exactly the same path, but for those aged 40–49 or 35–39 in 2017, there was a higher initial fraction of home owners in successive cohorts. The financial crisis resulted in crossing-over once again, and by 2013 these cohorts slipped below previous cohorts with regard to the fraction of homeowners. 

Inequality and mobility

Millennials have been affected by the general rise in income inequality in advanced economies over recent decades. In a world with constant mean income, constant inequality and no mobility, parents and children would be equally well off. If – more likely – mean income is rising, and there is some mobility, but inequality is constant, then most children will be better off than their parents. But income inequality has been rising in the United States since the mid-1970s, and while mean income has also risen considerably, median income has not increased much. Mobility has also gone down. Similar trends have been seen in other “anglo” countries (with some notable differences, of course). The net result is that past expectations no longer apply. For example, 90% of children in the United States born in 1940 had earnings greater than their parents’, but this ratio had fallen to 50% for children born in the 1980s. About 70% of this decline was due to the rise in inequality.

Interest Rates and Rates of Return

The financial prospects of a cohort are affected by the rates of return they receive on investments and by the interest rates they face. Throughout the world, equity returns were high in both nominal and real terms during the 1980s and 1990s, providing favorable investment opportunities to baby boomers in the first half of their working lives, and also to young members of Generation X. In the first dedcade of the new century, however, both real and nominal returns collapsed, creating quite a different investment environment for the Millennials. After 2010, returns rebounded, but not to the level seen in the 1980s and 1990s. The interest rate story is similar to that for  equity returns, but the decline in real rates began earlier, in the 1990s. Although they rebounded slightly in Europe after 2000, the decline was steady in the United States. This is significant because workers trying to acquire assets increasingly have to switch to riskier investments to get a reasonable rate of return. Real lending rates, which are also important for young people, via mortgages for example, have declined over time as well, but more slowly than deposit rates. In the United States, lending rates reached quite a low level after 2010, but in Europe they remained at 3.8%, far above the real deposit rate of 0.4%. Hence safe saving opportunities have deteriorated for young people, while borrowing has not become correspondingly cheaper.

* * *

Finally, Credit Suisse"s conclusion:

The Millennials have not been a lucky cohort so far. They faced the rigors of the financial crisis and the high unemployment that followed in many countries, and have also been widely hammered by high and rising house prices, rising student debt and increasing inequality. Their pension outlook is also worse than that of preceding cohorts. Some of the Millennials have prospered in spite of these difficulties, as reflected in the more positive picture we see in China and a range of other emerging markets, and the recent upsurge in the number of Forbes billionaires below the age of 40. Some have had substantial family help in paying for education and buying homes, and some stand to inherit from wealthy boomer parents in the future. But there are many Millennials who have not been so fortunate. As a result, the Millennials are not only likely to experience greater challenges in  building their wealth over time, but also greater wealth inequality than previous generations.

And some parting words of comfort: Millennials" may or may not be unlucky, but all they have to do is lat a few years, and slowly but surely their wealth should start to grow....

... Unless, of course, the entire social-economic matrix has been corrupted by a decade of central planning and there truly is no hope for America"s young adults. In which case, if you need directions to the Marriner Eccles building to protest your fate to the appropriate authorities, we are glad to provide.

Oh, and for those Millennials who hoped to become the next ultra wealthy clients of Credit Suisse" high net worth group... our condolences, but we hear HSBC will take anyone these days.

Fourth Turning"s Neil Howe: Why Millennials Aren"t So Unique

Authored by Marianne Brunet via AdvisorPerspectives.com,

The conventional wisdom is that Millennials are a generation with unique needs and buying habits, but Neil Howe says that they are very similar to the Greatest Generation.

Howe, who coined the term “Millennial,” says that both generations are highly risk-averse, a characteristic brought on by their shared parenting environment.

In a talk last week, Howe explained how we can use generational patterns and historical economic trends to better understand the future of the global economy.

He also cautioned investors about the impact global aging trends will have on future economic development and financial market conditions.

Howe spoke on November 2 at a National Association for Business Economics luncheon in Boston.

He is an authority on social change in America, and an acclaimed bestselling author. He is also a leading researcher at Hedgeye Risk Management and a senior associate to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.

How aging populations will impact the fiscal future

Howe has spent his career researching demography within the context of economic history. But in his talk last week, he revealed that he recently shifted his focus to a new area of study.

“Political demography is a whole new budding field,” Howe said. “And it will never go away, not for the rest of our lifetimes.”

According to Howe, “Political demography is premised on the fact that in the next century, we are going to see a greater divergence of demographic trajectories, more than we’ve ever seen before in human history.”

This divergence is based on two global aging trends.

On the one hand, “there are places in the world today whose demographics are essentially the same as in pre-modern times,” Howe said. “These are high-mortality, high-fertility societies – I’m talking about a lot of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.”

“And then you have other areas of the world with extreme low-fertility and low morality societies,” Howe explained.

“Look at South Korea,” Howe said. “According to the United Nations constant-fertility scenario, by the year 2035 there will be more people turning age 90 every year than being born every year.”

“We’ve never in human history seen this situation amongst different societies around the world,” according to Howe.

This divergence will undoubtedly drive significant changes in the future global economic landscape. “What are the implications for the direction of capital flows? What are the implications for labor productivity and competitiveness?” Howe asked.

He urged economists to consider societies whose working-age population is shrinking. “Every year their normal growth is declining faster than their normal productivity is growing,” he said. “Which means that even in a ‘normal’ non-recession year, they have negative GDP growth.”

“What’s the impact on investment, savings and competitiveness?” Howe asked rhetorically.

Howe theorized that one possible response to a decline in economic growth driven by shrinking population is for nations to become much more anti-competitive.

He predicted that nations “will actually move towards cartelizing market and carving them up, rather than competing.”

As a historical example of this sociological response to a loss in competitiveness, Howe pointed to the 1930s, “a decade of cartels and measures to keep productive institutions going.”

Howe highlighted one concern in particular – the future global standing of developed nations with demographic concerns.

“There’s a lot there, not just in terms of its impact on the economy, but demography’s impact on geopolitics,” Howe said.

 

“What happens to societies whose populations are declining every year versus those that are rising? Does this impact geopolitics and does it have to do with the rise and fall of empires?”

Circling back to the example of the 1930s, Howe highlighted that declines in the competitiveness of certain nations has marked historic global shifts. He explained that Britain, which had been a super-power on the international stage, experienced a dramatic shift in its economic and geopolitical standing culminating in World War II.

Part of Howe’s research has focused on measuring risk and publishing aging vulnerability indices. This tool can be used to consider “the affordability and sustainability of pension funds around the world,” according to Howe.

“In the late 1990s, one of our big stories was on Australia,” he said. “Australia always got ‘first place’ because it has the mandatory superannuation fund,” he explained, “a required defined-contribution plan, which is fueling tremendous savings in Australia.”

“Perhaps not coincidentally, Australia is the only country that has had no recession over the last 25 years,” Howe said with a smirk.

How generations impact economic development

Howe focused his presentation on how population growth rates will drive change in the global economy. However, he also spoke about another demographic factor that will significantly impact the future of international markets – generational shifts.

According to Howe, to consider the future of the global economy, we also need to understand “differences in how generations think and the strengths they bring to political power.”

Howe’s research has focused on the archetypal differences between generations, and what they bring to the table.

“What we found was that each generation looks at the world differently even though they experience many of the same events, because of course they had a different location in history.”

Howe used Boomers and their parents to explain this in a real-world context. “We had Woodstock, they had D-day,” Howe said.

Boomers prided themselves on how different they were from than parents. “They were building battleships, while we were discovering ourselves,” he added comically.

They prided themselves on having differing perspectives, but Boomers eventually went on to occupy the same societal roles as their parents, just at different points in history and with different views.

“Looking generationally at social change allows you to see into the future in a way that a lot of people don’t appreciate,” according to Howe.

“No one applies this perspective,” according to Howe.

“For instance, if I go into a consumer retail company that sells cosmetics to people in their forties and ask them about their future market,” Howe said, “They will tell me: ‘I know everything about 40-year olds, we know everything about them, we studied 40-year olds throughout history and we just extrapolate that forward’.”

But Howe argues this is the wrong approach. “I would look at today’s 20- and 30-year olds instead,” Howe said.

With this approach as a basis for his analysis, Howe went on to discuss the future of the American economy.

Howe explained that we can use the traits of generations to understand how they will lead when they occupy influential societal roles. According to Howe, we can understand the traits of Millennials as a generation by examining the impact their parents had on them during their formative years.

For instance, according to Howe, because Millennials were sheltered by their parents they are now very risk-averse.

Are Millennials like the G.I. Generation?

In his research, Howe found that there are predictable cycles when generational personalities oppose their immediate predecessors, but share significant traits with groups they may never meet.

That is, although both Millennials and Boomers don’t share traits with their parents, they do resemble other previous generations.

“When people ask me to draw parallels like ‘what decade does this last decade most resemble?’” Howe said, “I tell them the 30s.”

According to Howe, we can predict trends about the future of the Millennial generation by examining the G.I. generation (also known as The Greatest Generation), which is made up of people born between 1900 and the mid-1920s.

Both the Millennial and G.I. generations grew up with similar parenting and similar historical conditions, according to Howe.

In terms of social and cultural similarities, “One of the trends we saw in the 1930s was declining fertility, a rise in multi-generational households, a decline in home ownership and a decline in youth violence,” according to Howe.

He urged economists to compare that to today’s environment and Millennial behavior.

“I would argue that in the last 10 years we have seen a personal turning away in risk-taking,” Howe said. “If you look at 200 youth-risk indicators the CDC keeps, almost all of them are hugely down.”

According to Howe, this is because “their parents assured them from the time they were born they were special, that they’re precious to the world, and that they should take care of themselves.”

“This is why this generation does not take risks,” Howe argued, “Why they’re not starting business, why they think stocks are really dangerous things.”

He went on to explain how this risk-averse mentality emerged for both the G.I. and Millennial generations from an economic perspective.

“Both the current generation and the G.I. generation grew in the shadow of a massive financial crisis,” Howe explained.

 

“Both have been characterized by a disappointing employment of labor and capital, low standard of living gains, low productivity growth, negative real interest rates, the failure of monetary policy and competitive devaluation.”

Looking forward, Howe inferred, much like the G.I.’s, Millennials will have to deal with a great conflict, but theirs will be a culture war.

Millennials Prefer Socialism To Capitalism

Donald Trump Jr. was right: It’s never too early to start teaching your kids about socialism. At least that’s what a survey published Thursday by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation appears to suggest.

 

I’m going to take half of Chloe’s candy tonight & give it to some kid who sat at home. It’s never to early to teach her about socialism. pic.twitter.com/3ie9C0jv2G

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 31, 2017

 

Because for the first time in the study’s history, the VCMF said a majority of millennials prefer socialism to capitalism.

But there’s one catch…

Only 34% of millennials could accurately differentiate between communism and socialism.

...and seven in ten couldn’t accurately define communism.

Considering the extent to which radical leftist idealism permeates contemporary college culture, the fact that millennials feelings toward socialism. It also should come as no surprise that 70% of millennials underestimated the number of victims of communism. Nearly half were off by 50 million or more.

Oddly, a small percentage of Americans view communist leaders like Joseph Stalin favorably, despite his massive body count.

But while millennials still harbor generally more favorable views about communist icons like Stalin and Che Guevara, their numbers have dropped since last year.

Despite President Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, only 60% of Americans are aware of the economic calamity taking place in Venezuela.

In summary, millennials, who now comprise the largest plurality of American voters and the largest generational cohort in the workplace, are decidedly more liberal than their older peers. Perhaps the fact that many millennials are too young to remember the Cold War has something to do with it. But one thing’s for certain, with polling showing Bernie Sanders to be the most popular politician in America, Nancy Pelosi and her corporatist cronies might see their grip on the party continue to weaken amid a resurgence of the American left.
 

Home Depot Panics Over Millennials; Forced To Host Tutorials On Using Tape Measures, Hammering Nails

As wall street analysts celebrate the coming of age of the millennial generation, a group of young people who were supposed to lead another revolutionary wave of consumerism if only they could work long enough to escape their parents" basement, retailers like Home Depot are panicked about selling into what will soon be America"s largest demographic...but not for the reasons you might think. 

While avocado resellers like Whole Foods only have to worry about creating a catchy advertising campaign to attract millennials, Home Depot is in full-on panic mode after realizing that an entire generation of Americans have absolutely no clue how to use their products.  As the Wall Street Journal points out, the company has been forced to spend millions to create video tutorials and host in-store classes on how to do everything from using a tape measure to mopping a floor and hammering a nail.

Home Depot"s VP of marketing admits she was originally hesitant because she thought some of their videos might be a bit too "condescending" but she quickly learned they were very necessary for our pampered millennials.

In June the company introduced a series of online workshops, including videos on how to use a tape measure and how to hide cords, that were so basic some executives worried they were condescending. “You have to start somewhere,” Mr. Decker says.

Lisa DeStefano, Home Depot vice president of marketing, initially hesitated looking over the list of proposed video lessons, chosen based on high-frequency online search queries. “Were we selling people short? Were these just too obvious?” she says she asked her team. On the tape-measure tutorial, “I said ‘come on, how many things can you say about it?’ ” Ms. DeStefano says.

And just in case you think we"re joking and/or exaggerating, here is Home Depot"s tape measure tutorial in all its glory:

Meanwhile, Scotts Miracle-Gro has been forced to start training classes to remind frustrated millennials, who can"t seem to keep their flowers alive, that plants need sunlight to grow (apparently not a single millennial ever took biology in grade school).  Commenting on the tutorials, a defeated VP of Corporate Affairs, Jim King, admitted "these are simple things we wouldn’t have really thought to do or needed to do 15 to 20 years ago"...sorry, Mr. King this is your life now.

The Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. has started offering gardening lessons for young homeowners that cover basic tips—really, really basic—like making sure sunlight can reach plants.

“These are simple things we wouldn’t have really thought to do or needed to do 15 to 20 years ago,” says Jim King, senior vice president of corporate affairs for Scotts. “But this is a group who may not have grown up putting their hands in the dirt growing their vegetable garden in mom and dad’s backyard.”

“They grew up playing soccer, having dance recitals and playing an Xbox,” says Scott’s Mr. King. “They probably didn’t spend as much time helping mom and dad out in the yard as their predecessors or their predecessors’ predecessors.”

Companies such as Scotts, Home Depot Inc., Procter & Gamble Co. , Williams-Sonoma Inc.’s West Elm and the Sherwin-Williams Co. are hosting classes and online tutorials to teach such basic skills as how to mow the lawn, use a tape measure, mop a floor, hammer a nail and pick a paint color.

Unfortunately, at least for the Home Depots of the world, millennials now represent the largest demographic in America with 4.75 million 26 year olds roaming the streets of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles without a clue as to how to use a tape measure.

The biggest single age cohort today in the U.S. is 26-year-olds, who number 4.8 million, according to Torsten Slok, chief international economist for Deutsche Bank . People 25, 27 and 24 follow close behind, in that order. Many are on the verge of life-defining moments such as choosing a career, buying a house and having children.

Millennials as a whole are America’s latest demographic bubble, overtaking the baby boom generation and, like them, transforming popular culture, retailing, media and lifestyles. They make up about 42% of all home buyers today, and 71% of all first-time home buyers, according to Zillow Group . Some 86% of millennial home buyers reported making at least one improvement to their home in the past year, more than any other generation, Zillow says.

While we have our doubts that it will save their business, retailers like J.C. Penney and West Elm are trying to adapt to the millennial generation by offering basic in-home services like installing televisions or hanging wall art.

J.C. Penney Co. says the group is willing to hire others for projects. The retailer has pushed into home services, including furnace and air-conditioning repair, water-treatment systems and bathroom renovations, and expanded its window-covering installation.

“They’re much more of a ‘Do-It-for-Me’ type of customer than a ‘Do-It-Yourself’ customer,” says Joe McFarland, executive vice president of J.C. Penney stores. “You don’t need a ladder or a power drill, you don’t even have to wonder if you measured your window right.”

Home-furnishings retailer West Elm offers service packages, which start at $129, to provide plumbing and electrical work, painting, installing a television and hanging wall art and mirrors.

All that said, at least some millennials are trying to be more self-sufficient...as an example, the WSJ notes the case of 26-year-old Breanne Loes who recently borrowed her dad"s power tools to craft a wooden headboard...which went really well AFTER she realized the saw blade was on backwards.

Ms. Loes enjoys do-it-yourself projects, and two summers ago built with her now-husband a wooden headboard in her parents’ garage, with help from an online tutorial, her dad, two older brothers and their tools.

The saw wasn’t working at first because the blade was backward. “That was embarrassing,” says Ms. Loes.

Congrats, Breanne, really great job...really.

Millennials Head One-Third Of All Poverty-Stricken U.S. Households (The Rest Live With Mom)

Millennials just can"t catch a break.  Despite being the most educated generation ever to walk the face of the planet, at least according to their tuition bills paid by mom and dad, a staggering number of them now head households living below the poverty line...and that excludes the ones forced to live at home with mom and dad.

According to a recent note published by the Pew Research Center, Millenials now head more households living below the poverty line than any other generation and, in aggregate, represent nearly one-third of all impoverished households in the United States. 

More Millennial households are in poverty than households headed by any other generation. In 2016, an estimated 5.3 million of the nearly 17 million U.S. households living in poverty were headed by a Millennial, compared with 4.2 million headed by a Gen Xer and 5.0 million headed by a Baby Boomer. The relatively high number of Millennial households in poverty partly reflects the fact that the poverty rate among households headed by a young adult has been rising over the past half century while dramatically declining among households headed by those 65 and older.

Of course, that"s all despite the fact that they only head just over 20% of all households...

Millennials are the largest living generation by population size (79.8 million in 2016), but they trail Baby Boomers and Generation Xers when it comes to the number of households they head. Many Millennials still live under their parents’ roof or are in a college dorm or some other shared living situation. As of 2016, Millennials (ages 18 to 35 in 2016) headed only 28 million households, many fewer than were headed by Generation X (ages 36 to 51 in 2016) or Baby Boomers (ages 52 to 70).

Of course, those aren"t the only stats that prove just how much those anthropology degrees are paying off...Millennials are also winning at the "cohabiting-couple" game...presumably because it takes a village of millennials to cover one monthly rent bill.

Meanwhile, for the first time in history, more young adults today are living at home with mom and dad than with a spouse.

Conclusion:

These Are The States Where $1 Million Lasts The Longest

If you had a million dollars, would you retire?

For most Americans, the answer to that question would be no. Which is especially problematic for millennials, who, having been permanently scarred by the financial crisis, are investing at lower rates than members of Generation X or the Baby Boomers, making it more difficult for them to build wealth. Furthermore, the generation that now comprises the largest share of working Americans is having trouble saving money, thanks in no small part to their $1.3 trillion in student debt.

Their present financial predicaments suggest that millennials probably won’t retire in the large numbers that members of their parents’ generation will, primarily out of necessity. Even for some baby boomers, perennially low interest rates since the crisis – and possibly from here on out – have made things more difficult for conservative savers who may now need to redo their longstanding retirement plans to make do with less.

For workers in this situation, choosing a location where they can stretch their money the furthest in retirement is paramount. Enter a new study by GoBankingRates that measures how long $1 million will last in different locations around the country.

“A new report from GOBankingRates measures how long a million dollars would last for retirees 65 and older, state by state. It did that by multiplying the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ mean annual expenditures for that age group by a cost-of-living measure for each state, provided by the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center. The tally separated out annual spending on health care, housing, groceries, transportation, and utilities.”

The upshot is unsurprising: Retirees hoping to squeeze the maximum value from their dollars should head down south:

In Mississippi, retirees can stretch a million dollars for more than 26 years – the longest of any US state, according to the study. Arkansas, Michigan, Tennessee, Georgia, Missouri, Texas, Indiana and Alaska are also states where a million dollars can last for longer than 24 years.

The state where $1 million will be consumed most quickly is, unsurprisingly, California.  

According to Bloomberg, the study’s figures are conservative.

“These are conservative figures. They don’t factor in any entertainment or travel, which would make for a pretty grim retirement. Nor do they take into account how inflation might cut into purchasing power as we age. Inflation can take a bigger bite for seniors, because medical costs, which may account for a bigger chunk of expenses, have an inflation rate significantly higher than that for the broad economy.”

And while health-care costs are projected to rise, the study also doesn’t factor in any investment returns on the $1 million.

“Health-care costs for retirees will rise at an average annual rate of 5.5 percent over the next decade, according to HealthView Services, which makes retirement health-care cost projection software. To put that in perspective, from 2012 to 2016, the average annual broad inflation rate in the U.S. was 1.9 percent."

Of course, to many young people, one day having $1 million in assets seems like an impossible dream. One recent study suggested that 70% of millennials have less than $1000 in savings. But this is just one more reason why they should start thinking about retirement now.
 

Fourth Turning's Neil Howe Fears "Strong Parallels" Between 1930s And Today: "It's Going To Be A Rollercoaster Ride"

This week on the MacroVoices podcast, host Erik Townsend interviewed Neil Howe, co-author of The Fourth Turning, an investing tract that’s found renewed relevance thanks to White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, who’s cited it as an inspiration for his (and by extension, President Donald Trump’s) worldview.

According to the New York Times, which published a story earlier this year explaining the theories encapsulated in the book, the Fourth Turning was “written by two amateur historians, making the case that world events unfold in predictable cycles of roughly 80 years each, and that they can be divided into four chapters, or turnings: growth, maturation, entropy and destruction. Western societies have experienced the same patterns for centuries, the book argues, and they are as natural and necessary as spring, summer, fall and winter."

Few books have been as central to the worldview of Mr. Bannon, a voracious reader who tends to see politics and policy in terms of their place in the broader arc of history.”

Townsend shares Bannon’s enthusiasm, saying in his preamble that he believes the Fourth Turning is “the most important investing book of our time…I am such a big fan of this book personally that I literally named my own investment management company Fourth Turning Capital Management after Neil’s work.”

During the interview, Townsend and Howe discussed Howe’s conclusion that America is presently in the middle of a 20-year-long period of social, economic and political upheaval.  

Howe begins by explaining how the first book written by himself and William Strauss, with whom he also collaborated on the Fourth Turning, introduced him to the idea that America’s economy and culture follow distinct patterns. While studying cultural differences between generations of the American population, Howe says he began to notice a pattern, with one generation tearing down and reinventing some of the institutions, both physical and cultural, of the generation that preceded it.

“So, on the one hand, you have these turning points which are civic and institutional and involve politics and empire and the economy. These are the fourth turnings. And then you have these value-focused episodes which involve culture and religion and the interior of life, not the exterior of life. And of course our most recent awakening was in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, something a lot of us boomers today remember because they came of age during that period.

So this was an interesting pattern to us, and it was in The Fourth Turning where we sort of formalized that into looking at history moving through a series of social moods in a certain order. And we think there’s some very fundamental reasons for why we move through history.

And not just American, I should mention, but I think most of the modern world moves through history and cycles like this. They can be interrupted, they can be cut short, but there is a tendency for this. It’s manifested itself very strongly in American history. And we call these—each of these eras is about a generation long, they’re about 20, 21, 22, 23 years long, and we call them first, second, third, and fourth turnings.

The fourth turning is the final season of history, if you will, the final generation. And that is the period of crisis. That is the period when we tear down institutions that we’ve built, everything that’s dysfunctional. And we sort of rebuild things from scratch again. And it usually follows a period where—it’s bound up in a period where there’s complete disgust, complete distrust with what we have. And, usually under pressure by the younger generation, we kind of rebuild. These are the civic rebirth moments we’ve talked about earlier. That’s by way of introduction. That book was in 1997. You’re right, it’s about 20 years ago.”

In Howe’s more recent writing, he has cited the 2008 financial crisis as the catalyst that signaled the beginning of the most recent turning. But Townsend questions why Howe didn’t pick 9/11. For one, Townsend believes it had a more dramatic impact on how Americans view and feel about the US’s relationship with the modern world.

Howe says he didn’t choose 9/11 because it didn’t have the same transformational influence on markets that the financial crisis had. It also arrived too early: In 2001, most members of the millennial generation hadn’t graduated from high school yet, and most baby boomers hadn’t reached retirement age.

“A couple of reasons. One is that, although 9/11 changed America’s attitude towards the rest of the world, I think that the stock market boom and celebrity circus that’s here in the United States really hadn’t changed very much. And I don’t think you really had a shift, a fundamental shift, in America’s perception of themselves as a people, as their own country, to a fundamental degree until 2008. Also, 2001, as we explained to many people at the time, was simply too early. Every turning starts when each generation is beginning to move into a new phase of life. Back in 2001 boomers were not yet retiring, millennials were still—maybe the first one of them was barely graduating from high school.

So, this was not what we expected. 2008 really did coincide with the generational maturity of the turning, so to speak. And I think that, in terms of the basic shift in our efficacy of the social system, I think 2008 was a bigger change.” The crisis also ushered in an era where central banks exhibit total control of markets, which has created an “artificial quality,” Howe said.

“The economic emergency that occurred in 2008-2009 really catapulted us into by far the biggest economic emergency we’ve been in since the early 1930s. And, arguably, we are still living out the consequences of that with complete change in central bank policy, monetary policy, with sustaining these record low interest rates and arguable very high valuations in financial markets—almost anything pushed by that—and people still wondering how we’re going to get out from under that.

The constant discussion is when are central banks going to pull back on their balance sheets and actually go back to the old normal? So, I think there is the sense, even in this the booming markets that we see today, that there is this artificial quality: people think that there’s something wrong about this. We have not re-righted where we were. We are not letting price discovery and actual markets function the way they did before then.

So, I do believe that 2008 was the beginning of a whole new regime. And I also believe that the political dysfunction, the sense of political dysfunction—created during the two turns of the Obama presidency and, obviously, also into the Trump presidency—of government completely grinding to a halt is going to have some very powerful repercussions in the years shortly to come.”

Of course, there’s a certain futility in trying to determine the exact beginning and ending of a turning cycle while it’s still in progress. Townsend asks, since we can’t predict the future, how do we know that there isn’t an even worse crisis just around the corner? It’s a great question, Howe responds.

“It’s certainly a danger out there. Now we all just saw this morning how markets reacted to this war of words between President Trump and North Korea. I think that there is a rising tide of nationalism around the world. I think it’s driven by younger generations. And I should say not just nationalism but authoritarianism. And I would say these are strong parallels that we see between the decade we’ve been living through and the 1930s. Because it isn’t just what happens to/in the economy. I mean, you consider so many ways in which this last decade has recapitulated the 1930s, starting off with a financial crisis, worries about deflation, worries about declining fertility rates, and currency wars, and beggar thy neighbor policies, and radical attempts by monetary and ultimately fiscal policy to remedy the situation.

But also consider the geopolitical atmosphere of the 1930s. Which was a new world in which there was no concert of great powers, no great power who was taking responsibility for guiding or leading the world. Britain had largely retreated from its global influence after World War I.

The League of Nations had fallen apart. And the 1930s was the time when authoritarian leaders, and with growing popularity—growing numbers of people thought that that was actually a pretty good answer to the world’s problems. These regimes were doing whatever they wanted in their corner of the world with no one really to stop them.”

Evidence of the millennial generation’s contribution to the current turning can be found in the shift in political attitudes from those of their parents. Howe claims millennials are less interested in democracy, and that there’s a “growing appeal of authoritarian leaders that get things done.”

“And I think today we live in a similar era. Just look around the world today. You see a vacuum of any great power or concert of great powers who are orchestrating what goes on in the world. And basically people doing what they want and creating an increasingly dangerous world. I even think in the culture you find strong parallels. The decline in home ownership, for example. The decline in the birth rate and the fertility rate. The blanding of the popular culture that occurred during the 1930s is very similar to what’s going on with the millennials today. And the growing appeal among younger people, activists among younger people—younger people have a more collectivist or authoritarian notion of what kind of government works.

We actually wrote a piece recently called Are Millennials Souring on Democracy? And look at some of these recent opinion polls around the world showing that millennials are less interested. Not just in America but in Europe and East Asia. Not necessarily favoring liberal democratic solutions. It’s a growing appeal of authoritarian leaders that get things done. Well, you can see here in the United States we have a government that no longer thinks about the future at all and can’t get anything done. So you can imagine how turned off you would be if you’re a young person trying to think of the rest of your life.”

If Howe is correct, the US has another decade or so before the present cycle ends, and the next first turning, supposedly a period of economic and cultural renewal, begins. So, Townsend asks, with 10 years of turmoil left on the clock, what can Americans expect? Howe said Americans should be watching for "all these little problems to coalesce in one huge problem.""

“I think this is going to be the real rollercoaster ride. And I do think, not only—as you mentioned there are four stages to a fourth turning. One is the catalyst. The next is the regeneracy when we see some center of public trust beginning to grow around the new public agenda. We really haven’t seen that yet. Although you can look at various parts and begin to see certain—I would say particularly look at what young people are doing. Every fourth turning you kind of see where are young people going, who are they beginning to trust both on the right and the left. I think that’s an interesting marker. But then ultimately you move to the crisis.

And that’s when this new sense of public trust, which I think won’t really begin to appear once we begin to hit public problems that we have to solve. And I mentioned about two or three that we’re probably going to have to hit by the end of this year. And then, of course, comes the mid-term election next year. But that’s when that begins to grow.

And then the crisis, when all of these problems begin to coalesce into one huge problem. It’s when the Great Recession met all of these—the rise of fascism both in Asia and in Europe, and everything came together, currency wars, everything became part of a huge problem. Which, by the resolution, you see—and this is what happens at every fourth turning. All the little problems come together into a giant problem. And the giant problem gets completely solved.”

Americans – and investors, in particular – shouldn’t find comfort in the notion that the worst of the crisis has passed. Central bankers managed to engineer a quick recovery (in asset valuations, at least) with an unprecedented injection of freshly printed capital, but the magnitude of this intervention is preventing markets from working properly - what Howe calls “the valuation issue.”

Central banks’ willingness to keep us “not too far from the zero bound” has had myriad benefits for investors. But with US equity valuations still so close to all-time highs, Howe wonders: “Have we created a monster here.”

Listen to the rest of the interview below: 

More Lonely, Fewer 'Friends', Less Sex - Have Smartphones Destroyed A Generation?

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis...

The Atlantic"s Jean Twenge asks the most crucial question of our age... "have smartphones destroyed a generation?"

...Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, [teens today] talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so. Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.

Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data - some reaching back to the 1930s - I had never seen anything like it.

...

What happened in 2012 to cause such dramatic shifts in behavior? It was after the Great Recession, which officially lasted from 2007 to 2009 and had a starker effect on Millennials trying to find a place in a sputtering economy. But it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.

The more I pored over yearly surveys of teen attitudes and behaviors, and the more I talked with young people like Athena, the clearer it became that theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen. Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet.

...

More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.

Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.

...

There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives - and making them seriously unhappy.

...

You might expect that teens spend so much time in these new spaces because it makes them happy, but most data suggest that it does not. The Monitoring the Future survey, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and designed to be nationally representative, has asked 12th-graders more than 1,000 questions every year since 1975 and queried eighth- and 10th-graders since 1991. The survey asks teens how happy they are and also how much of their leisure time they spend on various activities, including nonscreen activities such as in-person social interaction and exercise, and, in recent years, screen activities such as using social media, texting, and browsing the web. The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.

There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness. Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they’re unhappy than those who devote less time to social media.

The allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.

Today’s teens are also less likely to date. The initial stage of courtship, which Gen Xers called “liking” (as in “Ooh, he likes you!”), kids now call “talking”—an ironic choice for a generation that prefers texting to actual conversation. After two teens have “talked” for a while, they might start dating. But only about 56 percent of high-school seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for Boomers and Gen Xers, the number was about 85 percent.

The decline in dating tracks with a decline in sexual activity. The drop is the sharpest for ninth-graders, among whom the number of sexually active teens has been cut by almost 40 percent since 1991.

Even driving, a symbol of adolescent freedom inscribed in American popular culture, has lost its appeal for today’s teens. Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school. For some, Mom and Dad are such good chauffeurs that there’s no urgent need to drive. “My parents drove me everywhere and never complained, so I always had rides,” a 21-year-old student in San Diego told me. “I didn’t get my license until my mom told me I had to because she could not keep driving me to school.”

The number of eighth-graders who work for pay has been cut in half. These declines accelerated during the Great Recession, but teen employment has not bounced back, even though job availability has.

At the generational level, when teens spend more time on smartphones and less time on in-person social interactions, loneliness is more common.

So is depression. Once again, the effect of screen activities is unmistakable: The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression.

Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan. Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. In 2011, for the first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate.

This trend has been especially steep among girls. Forty-eight percent more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys. Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them. Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well, as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes.

The correlations between depression and smartphone use are strong enough to suggest that more parents should be telling their kids to put down their phone. As the technology writer Nick Bilton has reported, it’s a policy some Silicon Valley executives follow. Even Steve Jobs limited his kids’ use of the devices he brought into the world.

...

If you were going to give advice for a happy adolescence based on this survey, it would be straightforward: Put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do something—anything—that does not involve a screen. Of course, these analyses don’t unequivocally prove that screen time causes unhappiness; it’s possible that unhappy teens spend more time online. But recent research suggests that screen time, in particular social-media use, does indeed cause unhappiness. One study asked college students with a Facebook page to complete short surveys on their phone over the course of two weeks. They’d get a text message with a link five times a day, and report on their mood and how much they’d used Facebook. The more they’d used Facebook, the unhappier they felt, but feeling unhappy did not subsequently lead to more Facebook use.

I realize that restricting technology might be an unrealistic demand to impose on a generation of kids so accustomed to being wired at all times. Prying the phone out of our kids’ hands will be difficult, even more so than the quixotic efforts of my parents’ generation to get their kids to turn off MTV and get some fresh air. But more seems to be at stake in urging teens to use their phone responsibly, and there are benefits to be gained even if all we instill in our children is the importance of moderation. Significant effects on both mental health and sleep time appear after two or more hours a day on electronic devices. The average teen spends about two and a half hours a day on electronic devices. Some mild boundary-setting could keep kids from falling into harmful habits.

Read the full report here...

'Generation Z' Are Nothing Like Millennials, Professor Warns Liberals

Authored by Dan Jackson via CampusReform.org,

A political science professor in Pennsylvania says Democrats need to worry, because the generation replacing their millennial allies on college campuses has a distinct libertarian streak.

Jeff Brauer, a professor at Keystone College, has been gathering data on “Generation Z,” and recently told The New York Post that he expects the rising generation of college students to differ markedly from those currently dominating campus culture.

“Politically, Generation Z is liberal-moderate with social issues, like support for marriage equality and civil rights, and moderate-conservative with fiscal and security issues,” Brauer said.

“While many are not connected to the two major parties and lean independent, Gen Z’s inclinations generally fit moderate Republicans.”

Notably, Brauer’s research has indicated that growing up in an age of constant terror threats, school shootings, and economic instability has led Gen Z to prize economic stability and security more highly than millennials.

“Pollsters need to pay attention to Gen Z. People and politicians need to recognize that they aren’t millennials and shouldn"t be lumped in,” Brauer told Campus Reform, noting that “there was virtually no attention paid to this demographic” in 2016, even though it was the first presidential election in which Gen Z had the ability to vote.

“Democratic candidates lost five percent of the youth vote nationally (down from 60 percent to 55 percent),” Brauer pointed out. “In Florida, Democrats’ margin of victory among the young dropped 16 percentage points. In both Ohio and Pennsylvania, the drop was 19 points. In Wisconsin, 20 points.”

Brauer believes that this is indicative of more than a one-time phenomenon, saying “it is much more likely the precipitous drops were due to the more conservative Generation Z being able, for the first time, to express their political inclinations, especially in the economically hard-hit swing states.”

These findings could give Republicans hope for capturing a larger share of the youth vote in future elections, but Brauer cautions that while Generation Z will likely be more conservative than Millennials, they will not actively seek out the GOP unless the Party takes steps to conform to their more-moderate social views, and could be driven away by a significant rightward lurch.

“This generation is different, and they are about to have a profound impact on commerce, politics, and trends,” Brauer said.

“If politicians and business leaders aren’t paying attention yet, they better, because they are about to change the world.”

Brauer cautioned that his work remains unfinished, saying he hopes to continue collecting data over the course of the next few election cycles in order to come up with even more definitive conclusions regarding Generation Z.