Generation Screwed

Young people are doomed. And have been for generations.

“We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own. Our people are losing that faith.”

By the pessimistic standards of America in late 2025, that’s a modest statement. Many would express the same sentiment in much grimmer language.

But those words weren’t spoken in 2025. They come from a nationally televised address President Jimmy Carter gave from the Oval Office on July 15, 1979.

Carter’s words are worth reconsidering today, for a surprisingly optimistic reason. Seriously. Want a smidgen of hope? You should read this.

Carter’s address is known to history as “the malaise speech.” Carter never used that word in the speech. But “malaise” summed up the president’s message perfectly.

Ten days ago, I had planned to speak to you again about a very important subject -- energy. For the fifth time I would have described the urgency of the problem and laid out a series of legislative recommendations to the Congress. But as I was preparing to speak, I began to ask myself the same question that I now know has been troubling many of you: Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?

It’s clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper — deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession. And I realize more than ever that as President I need your help. So, I decided to reach out and to listen to the voices of America.

I invited to Camp David people from almost every segment of our society -- business and labor, teachers and preachers, governors, mayors, and private citizens. And then I left Camp David to listen to other Americans, men and women like you. It has been an extraordinary ten days, and I want to share with you what I’ve heard.

What follows is the president’s summary of what he heard. It amounts to a litany of complaints and pessimism. Things aren’t just bad. People fear the United States is falling apart, economically, politically, even spiritually.

Carter sums up in his own words.

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways.

It is a crisis of confidence.

It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

It was one of the bleakest speeches ever given by an American president, bleaker even then Roosevelt’s famous first inaugural address in the depths of the Great Depression.

And people loved it, at least at first. As historian Kevin Mattson showed in What The Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?, the initial response to the speech was overwhelming support. Americans felt Carter expressed what they felt with perfect fidelity, and they respected him for being so honest and blunt.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.

And the grim mood ran so much deeper than five years. It was generational.

We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own. Our people are losing that faith.

As it turned out, the five years following Carter’s speech were indeed dismal. Energy crisis gave way to worsening stagnation and soaring inflation, followed by the Fed’s desperate effort to finally stamp out stagflation by raising interest rates through the roof. Ordinary home owners soon struggled to carry mortgages at interest rates of 15%, 17%, even 20%.

A severe double-dip recession followed. General unemployment peaked in November, 1982, at a brutal 10.8%. Unemployment among young people almost reached 20%, double what it is now, and a record that wouldn’t be matched until the Great Recession of 2008-2009.

When the apparent recovery from the first dip reversed and the economy again plunged into the mire, there were widespread warnings that the United States was entering into a second Great Depression.

The grim mood of the era cost Carter re-election in 1980. By the beginning of 1983, Ronald Reagan, Carter’s successor, had an approval rating so low it was conventional wisdom in Washington that he would not stand for re-election in 1984. Even Nancy Reagan thought he would bow out.

It was a bleak time. And that was only the economic situation. Watergate had severely damaged trust in government. Defeat in Vietnam and the failed attempt to rescue American hostages held in Iran suggested the US military was impotent. The Cold War worsened. Fears of nuclear annihilation grew.

Everything was awful. And getting worse fast.

But now you are probably wondering why I am recapping all this old and grim news. There’s plenty of awful to go around today, thanks very much. And didn’t I promise something “surprisingly optimistic”?

Indeed. So let’s get to it.

Time, 1990: Gen X are such losers.

In the Washington Post on Tuesday, a feature story explained “How baby boomers got so rich and why their kids are unlikely to catch up.” What follows is not terribly surprising to anyone living in 2025.

Baby boomers hold more than $85 trillion in assets, making them the richest generation by far. New research explores the extraordinary rise in their good fortunes — one that experts say successive generations will be hard-pressed to replicate.

The reasons come down to timing and time: Americans 75 and older bought homes and invested in stocks well before such assets exploded in value, according to Edward Wolff, an economics professor at New York University. In a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, he examined the four decades between 1983 and 2022 when those older boomers saw their wealth climb and their younger peers recorded relative declines.

This is all familiar stuff: We constantly hear that American baby boomers lucked out simply by being born when they were, between 1946 and 1964. But Millennials and younger generations? They are truly screwed. A recent Politico poll found, in defiance of traditional American optimism, that half of Americans think the best days of the United States lie in the past while only 41% said the same of the future. (Let’s stick with tradition and ignore Gen Xers, says the guy born in 1968.)

So where is the optimism?

Right here:

It’s astonishing how their [baby boomers’] relative wealth has taken off in the last 30-plus years,” Wolff said. “They started out as among the poorest groups in terms of wealth back in 1983.”

The wealth of baby boomers — especially those in retirement — is a reflection of the uniquely favorable economic conditions that occurred during their working lives, Wolff and other economists said. So much so that it would be difficult for younger generations to emulate, especially as they are more likely to be weighed down by debt or child care costs.

See the grounds for optimism?

No?

Neither did the journalists who wrote the article. Journalists never do, for the simple reason that they look at the subject of their story only from the perspective of the present. But if you look at the same set of facts from the perspective of the past — in this case, the perspective of the early 1980s — you see something wonderful for both those who were young in the early 1980s and for those who are young now.

It’s simple: Those lucky baby boomers in 2025? The people who won the generational lottery? The envy of younger Americans? That is the same generation that was doomed in 1979.

Someone born in the first year of the baby boom, 1946, was 33 in when Jimmy Carter delivered the “malaise speech,” while someone born in the last year, 1964, was 15. They were the young people watching the president tell Americans that the whole country was losing hope. They were the young people told they would be the first generation of Americans to do worse than their parents.

Baby boomers were Generation Screwed. Until they weren’t.

And that is your reason for optimism in the present.

For the record, I’m not at all saying everything is wine and roses for young people. The cost of education and housing has exploded. Add polarization and rising authoritarianism, plutocracy, and generational inequity in public policy. Toss in climate change. A crumbling international order. The looming shadow of AI. There are lots of good reasons to be angry and worried.

But when young people jump from “lots of good reasons to be angry and worried” to “we’re screwed” they make the same mistake generation after generation has made in the past: They look around at the state of the world in their teens, 20s, and 30s and extrapolate forward 30, 40, or 50 years to their old age. Which is to say, they forecast the future of their country and the world by extending current trend lines as much as half a century into the future.

There are two things to know about such forecasts.

First, simple linear extrapolation is a poor way to forecast generally and it gets worse the further ahead you try to forecast. It’s as if I — a Canadian — looked around at the end of January and saw that the snow had steadily piled up over the previous month. It’s now three feet deep. So I forecast that at the end of July there will be 21 feet of snow on the ground. Yes, linear extrapolation over the long term is that dumb. Change happens. Reality is seldom a straight line for long.

But that’s not the most important thing to know about this sort of generational forecasting. The most important thing to know is that it’s flat-out impossible.

No one can accurately forecast economic, social, and political conditions half a century into the future. No one. Lots of theory says so. But more importantly, people have been trying to do that for a couple of centuries and we have heaps of experience telling us it can’t be done and the only real value of such forecasts is the amusement they provide when they are read in the future they get so badly wrong.

But linear extrapolation, even across decades, is deeply intuitive. It feels right. So we keep making the same dumb mistake, year after year, generation after generation — which is why young people’s expectations for their future are so often confounded.

Sometimes the expected golden future turns to dust, as Stefan Zweig and the truly doomed generation that came of age at the beginning of the 20th century experienced.

But sometimes a generation that seemed hopeless hits the jackpot. Think of the young people who came of age in the misery of the Great Depression, fought history’s most terrible war, and were told by most experts to expect the hard times to continue after the war. Has any generation seemed more doomed when it was young? I can’t think of one, at least not within the last couple of centuries. And yet, that same hapless generation spent most of their adult lives in an era of unprecedented peace and rising prosperity. So they had lots of kids — who became, first, the hopeless young people watching Jimmy Carter on television in 1979, then the lucky oldsters everyone envies.

So maybe the future will play out exactly as pessimistic young people expect today. Maybe they really are screwed. Or maybe they’ll luck out in ways similar to the boomers. Or maybe the future will find some new way to surprise us, for good or ill.

I don’t know. You don’t know. And that is the only thing we do know.

We can figure out what we would like the future to be, and we can resolve to steer the future in that direction as best we’re able. That much is within human imagination and capability. But that’s it. We cannot know the future decades out. Period.

I’ve made this point too many times to count so I know from long experience that very few people find it satisfying. To see the possibility of better times ahead, people want to hear a clear, compelling story that explains how and why we those times will come.

But an optimistic story of a deterministic future is just as wrong as a grim tale of woe, and for the same reasons. It may be psychologically satisfying. It is certainly a good way to garner attention, applause, book sales, and subscriptions. But it’s still a delusion.

You don’t know. I don’t know. Nobody knows.

Accept that fact.

And be grateful for your time on this mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam — thank you, Carl Sagan — whatever may come.