What's driving generations apart—and ideas to bring them together

0:00This message comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast, Choiceology. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Download the latest episode of choice. TheWab.com slash podcast. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?

0:40And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. The United States has long pitched itself as the land of opportunity. A place where if you work hard, sacrifice, you can build a better life for yourself and for your children and your children's children. I think that's right. I don't even think he thought about it. It was just a given. This is Scott Galloway. When my parents came to the U.S. on a steamship, 150 quid each, and it was just a natural assumption that, given the opportunity that America offered, that you would just inevitably end up doing better than your parents.

1:30That was just part of the American compact. It was definitely the case for Scott. He's now a professor at New York University, a popular podcaster and bestselling author. And he's written a lot about the success of America's brand of capitalism, the rise of the middle class through the last century, the spread of wealth and financial stability to more people. But now, Scott says, that American compact, that each generation will prosper more than the previous one, it is broken. At the end of World War II, about 92 % of children did better than their parents by the time they were 30 economically.

2:10For the first time, it dipped to 50%. So now it's a coin flip. So for the first time in our nation's history, it's no longer a given that someone, that your kids will be better off than you at the same age or at the age of 30. The latest generation of young adults, Gen Z, have come of age with crushing student debt, unattainable housing, and stagnant wages. And my thesis is that these have been purposeful decisions. That the economy has actually been incredibly robust the last 30 or 40 years. Our growth has been consistent, if not remarkable. And every year we figure out a way for the markets to go up in value.

2:51But we have purposely transferred wealth and opportunity from young people to old people. So who owns stocks and houses? People my age. Who makes their money from current income or working at a job? And rents? Young people. That's nothing but a naked transfer of wealth and prosperity from young to old. You're constantly working and for what? You can hear the anguish playing out all over social media. I cannot envision ever owning a home. Increasingly, between random cute dog videos, there are clips of young people who are deeply distressed. Angry. That so much of the economy seems stacked against them.

3:33Every day for the past eight years has been nothing but an absolute living nightmare. Of course, the young and old have always had misunderstandings and tension. But many of us are left wondering, has that disconnect gotten worse? Today on the show, generation gaps. Ideas about sharing wisdom and prosperity and the unexpected benefits of building compassion between Gen Z, boomers and everyone in between. So back to Scott Galloway. OK, I start us with a question. Do we love our children? Here he is on the TED stage. Sounds like an illegitimate question, right? Well, I'm going to try and convince you otherwise.

4:18Essentially, as we go down generations, we're seeing that for the last two generations, people are making less money on an inflation-adjusted basis. In addition, the cost of buying a home, the cost of pursuing education continues to skyrocket. So the purchasing power, the prosperity, is inversely correlated to age. Simply put, as we get younger, we're taking away opportunity and prosperity from our youngest. As a result, people over the age of 55 feel pretty good about America, but less than one in five people under the age of 34 feel very good about America. This creates an incendiary. Righteous movements, cuts to our society, end up becoming opportunistic infections because, generally speaking, young people have a warranted envy.

4:59They're pissed off and they're angry that they don't enjoy the same spoils and prosperity that were provided to our generation. A decent proxy for how much we value youth's labor is minimum wage, and we've kept it purposely pretty low. If it had just kept pace with productivity, it'd be about$23 a share. But we've decided to purposefully keep it low. Out of reach, median home price has skyrocketed relative to median household income. As a result, pre-pandemic, the average mortgage payment was$1 ,100. It's now$2 ,300 because of an acceleration in interest rates and the fact that the average home has gone from$290 ,000 to$420 ,000.

5:37Why? Because guess what? The incumbents that own assets have weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrants to ever get their own assets, thereby elevating their own net worth. This has resulted in an enormous transfer of wealth, where people over the age of 70 used to control 19 % of household income versus people under the age of 40 used to control 12. Their wealth has been cut in half. This isn't by accident. It's purposeful. Consciously purposeful? Or how did this happen? Well, the demo in democracy is working really well. And that is old people vote for even older people who vote themselves more money.

6:21So the child tax credit, which would positively benefit not only children, but working age mothers, say in their 20s or 30s, gets stripped out of the infrastructure bill. It would have cost somewhere between, you know, probably about$30 billion. dollars, but the$145 billion per year fixed increase cost of living adjustment in Social Security flies right through. So we now spend about 40 % of our total government spending on programs for seniors. That's the greatest it's been in history. But wait, it gets worse. In 10 years at the current rate, it's going to be over 50%, meaning the majority of our government spending and tax revenues will go to programs supporting seniors.

7:01And this crowds out investments in technology and in education and things that are a little bit more forward-leaning show a greater return on investment and, quite frankly, benefit younger people. So our democracy, if you will, is working well, but it's a series of older people voting themselves more money. Old people vote. I guess what I find confusing about this is I recently read in The New Yorker that since 2020, U.S. growth per person has been more than 2 % and that actually people in their 20s are richer than prior U.S. generations were at their age. So why doesn't it feel that way for younger people?

7:37So I think the study you're referring to is the following. There's some nuance here. And that is we have basically kind of the zeitgeist, and this goes to cultural mores, we have decided to embrace a winners and losers economy or a Hunger Games-like economy. And that is the good news is, if you think it's good news, is that there are now millionaires in their 30s. When I was growing up, and I imagine when you were growing up, you didn't really hear about that. So the actual number of people in the top 10%, that number's gotten much higher. But if you look at the quote unquote bottom 90, the vast majority of these individuals, two things have happened.

8:15Their purchasing power has gone down. Inflation and housing, inflation and education, two things that young people save for and need to get ahead, have skyrocketed and their wages on an inflation adjusted basis have consistently gone down. I used to make on an inflation adjusted basis, people in my generation made 85 ,000 and 20 years ago, 65 ,000. This is at the age of 25. Now it's about$55 ,000. And so you have a lot of young people who've essentially given up on buying a home. The travel industry is booming. And my thesis is that people have just given up on saving for a house. And so they pick up and head to Thailand for a month.

8:52They go to Coachella. So live events and travel have never been stronger. But people are struggling to kind of cover, I think, the basics or the essentials, whether it's getting a college degree, paying off their student debt, saving for a home, or deciding to have a child. The great intergenerational theft took place under the auspices of a virus. I know. Let's use the greatest health crisis in the century to really speedball the transfer. This is the NASDAQ from 2008 to 2012. We let the markets crash. And by the way, you need churn, you need disruption, because it seeds and recalibrates advantage and wealth from the incumbents to the entrance.

9:31It's a natural part of the cycle. But wait, lately, no, a million people dying would be bad, but what would be tragic is if we let the NASDAQ go down and guys like me lost wealth. So we pumped the economy, which again, increased the massive transfer of wealth. The best two years of my life, COVID. More time with my kids, more time with Netflix, and my value of my stocks absolutely exploded. And who has to pay for my prosperity? Not me. Future generations who will have to deal with an unprecedented level of debt. Key to getting wealthy or establishing some wealth as a younger person is that in 2008, as an example, We allowed the markets to fall.

10:16We bailed out banks, but we didn't bail out the economy. And guys like me who were coming into the prime income earning years got to buy Netflix at$12. It's at$600 now. Got to buy Amazon at$8. It's at$180 now. So when you bail out the boomer owner of a restaurant, all you're doing is robbing opportunity from the 26-year-old recent graduate of a culinary academy who wants her shot to buy a restaurant on the cheap. Disruption is a cycle and a churn that cedes advantage from incumbents to entrants. And what we've decided is to borrow young people's credit cards to ensure that the incumbents stay rich.

10:56And so it seems like my generation of the people in power have lost a general view that it's their responsibility to invest in the future and invest in the middle class. I think politics have become very much, I need to get mine. This happens across the entire ecosystem. In my industry, every year we take pride in rejecting more and more applicants, meaning that the incumbents who already have degrees see the value of their degrees go up. When I applied to UCLA, it was a 76 % admissions rate. This year it'll be nine. When you own a home, you get very concerned with traffic and you show up to the local review board and make sure no new housing permits are approved.

11:35We have one and a half million fewer homes than we need for household formation, which again, has taken the value of homes way up. So we have embraced this rejectionist, exclusionary culture that crowds out the opportunity for entrance. But at some point, all the old rich people are going to die. Is there going to be a redistribution of wealth happening then? So a lot of people will say, but Scott, you're about to see the most massive transfer back to young people in the form of inheritance. I would argue that's a really unhealthy way to live life and build a society. What you're talking about is Downton Abbey, that, oh, you don't need to work or worry because you're going to inherit this estate.

12:19Waiting around for your mother and father to die so you can buy a home and have a family is just not a way to live a life. Two-thirds of billionaires are self-made. 78 % of new millionaires are self-made, And that's one of the wonderful things about America. So this notion that, oh, don't worry that I'm getting my undue spoils, that I've gotten wealthier on your credit card as at some point you will get it. I just think that's a terrible excuse, does not build a healthy society and quite frankly doesn't work and just results in dynastic dynamics that the American culture has tried to avoid. When we come back, Gen Z protests online and across college campuses.

13:02Scott Galloway claims they're ultimately fueled by deep economic uncertainty. And he has solutions. On the show today, Generation Gaps. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Be right back.

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15:57Just go to plus.npr.org slash TED or give it a try right in the Apple Podcasts app. And thanks. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, generation gaps. What older and younger generations can learn from each other and what seems to be tearing them apart. We were just talking to NYU professor Scott Galloway. Scott says younger generations can't afford to pay off their debt, buy a home, invest in retirement. And he blames older generations for withholding financial opportunities from them. The effects, he says, are more than just economic. Well, the repercussions are, at a very basic level, disappointment and rage.

16:50A lot of these folks are living at home. A lot of them have been told their whole life they can do anything. And then that 210 times a day, they get a reminder of their failure on their phones with a series of notifications where people vomit their personal possessions and amazing lives that they're supposedly leading. And they're reminded every day that they're not doing well. And also there's a false impression out there that everyone is vacationing at the Amund Hotel and owns a Ferrari. And if you don't have all of those things that you're somehow failing, it creates incendiary that is poured over every issue.

17:24So I would argue in large part what's happened on campuses in the United States isn't about the Middle East. It's about America. Whether it's the Me Too movement, whether it's Black Lives Matter, all of these movements have righteous justification for concern and engagement among our youth. But what turns every cut into an opportunistic infection and then gangrene is the fact that young people aren't doing as well. And I think it just creates a general level of rage. I'm curious, you know, what young people think when you link their dissatisfaction with life and what feels like really big gaps between the generations.

18:03How do they respond when they hear these things? I get a lot of support for young people. I'm not sure they appreciate me telling them that the reason you're protesting is you're angry about your economic situation. I think that sometimes that feels like I'm infantilizing or patronizing them. But what I've generally, the feedback is, you know, thank you. You said the quiet part out loud. And who I really hear from is parents. If you're a boomer or if you're, say, not even boomer, but you're Gen X and you've done well and you see your kid, your kid's a good kid. She's worked hard. She's graduated from the right schools.

18:38And her and her fiance have been saving for a house for 10 years, and they just have given up. They can't buy a house. They're thinking about not having kids. It's just not viable for them. I mean, this is what you want. The whole point of an economy is to create a middle class. The whole point of a middle class is to create a thriving society, a democratic society that's prosperous. But the reason we all want prosperity at the end of the day when we get a little bit older is we want our kids to do well What can we do nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed with what's right with it? We got the hard stuff figured out.

19:12We have the money Things are doable. We increase minimum wage at 25 bucks an hour. It goes into the economy The wonderful things about low and middle-income households is they spend all their money We have to have a restore or a progressive tax structure with alternative minimum tax on corporations and wealthy individuals We need to refund the IRS. We need to reform Social Security. It should be based on whether you need the money, not on how old you are. We need a negative income tax. My friend Andrew Yang screwed up a great idea, but he branded it incorrectly. Instead of calling it UBI, he should have got Republicans on board by calling it a negative income tax.

19:47We need to eliminate the capital gains tax deduction. When did we decide that the money that capital earns is more noble than the money that sweat earns? Shouldn't it be flicked? We need universal pre-K. We need to reinstate the expanded child tax credit. We need income-based affirmative action. Expand college enrollment and vocational programs, mental health, band phones in schools, invest in third places, big brothers and sisters programs. We need national service. We need to tell people in the United States and Canada that they live in the greatest countries in the world, and we need to remind them of that every day by exposing them to other great Americans where they feel connected tissue.

20:29We can do all of this. We can do all of it. We have the resources. The question is, do we have the will? This is my last slide. It is an emotionally manipulative slide to try and get you to like me more. There's a moment in your TED Talk when you put up a slide of yourself and one of your boys at a sporting event. But it does have a message. This is the whole shooting match. Anybody here without kids, ask someone with kids. Your whole world springs to this. And you got pretty emotional up on stage. And you laid a lot of guilt on the people in the theater. You asked them, you know, do we love our children?

21:09Implying that if we do, they need to make changes. Will Minouche, you have children? I do. So without knowing you or your children, I'm fairly confident that you love your children. I bet you are fairly confident I love mine. The question I ask is, do we love our children? And that is, have we entered an economy where it's sort of a winner-take-most attitude and everyone's grabbing for their own? We ignore, because we all believe we're going to be in the top 10 % that's never done better than previous top deciles, that we'll be in that top 10%, and we're not willing to make the sacrifices and the hard decisions such that other people's children, who might be in the bottom 90, do better.

21:53I think that America has kind of lost the script and that is what is the point of any of this you know on your radio hour you're going to talk about AI you're going to talk about the environment you're going to talk about the climate anyone who has kids something comes off the tracks with one of your kids you're not thinking about the climate you're not thinking about AI you're thinking about that kid and economic anxiety is someone who went through economic anxiety as a kid I can tell you We aren't treating our children well. We aren't treating other kids well. The resting blood pressure of kids in low-income homes is tangibly higher than kids in middle and upper-income homes.

22:32There are more kids depressed, more admissions of self-harm, more anxiety. So the question is, what is the point of any of this if your kid is anxious or depressed? And people have this feeling, well, I'm going to be successful. I can take care of my kids. Okay, I know you love your kids, but do we love our kids? That was Scott Galloway. He's a professor of marketing at New York University and the host of Pivot and the Professor G Pod. His latest book is called The Algebra of Wealth, A Simple Formula for Financial Security. On the show today, generation gaps. We want to go now to another problem that younger generations are inheriting.

23:16Climate change. In many places, a warming planet means finding new ways to grow food that can survive extreme weather. So our next speaker assumed that today's farmer has little use for the agricultural wisdom of old. Until the science proved her wrong. Our story starts in a kitchen in the Philippines. My grandma, she is an incredible cook. And we treat the kitchen like it's a living room. That's where we talk. And that's how I fell in love with cooking. Louise Mabulo is 25 and an award-winning chef and entrepreneur. She grew up in a small farming town and started learning about cooking and food at a young age.

23:59My grandparents would serve me a nice steaming cup of hot chocolate that they'd grown from their farms. And my dad would be like, well, it came from this gorgeous bright red pod. And then your grandmother sucks on the seeds individually and dries them in the sun. and then we would roast it and turn that into chocolate. So my grandparents grew things intuitively and how they've learned from their own grandparents and all that ancestral knowledge has been passed down to them. Some of the things she learned struck her as kind of ridiculous. My grandfather would be in a rice field and be whistling because it's a hot day and he would say, you know, the whistle attracts a good breeze.

24:39or they'd go like, wow, you have so many harvests of cacao today. And they'd be like, yes, it's because, you know, we planted this tree during the full moon and that makes a lot more fruit. Another odd piece of advice was planting a rock under your root crops and sweet potatoes or even under your trees. Over the years, I was like, why do we do that? It makes no scientific sense. And they'd just be like, I don't know, every time I just do that, it's sweeter. And at the time when I heard these things, it was always, oh, this is just something that my grandma or grandpop would say. You know, it's, well, grandma's just crazy.

25:17Some other wives' tale. At the age of 12, Louise didn't care much about farming. But she started entering cooking competitions and winning. She went on TV cooking shows. By 17, she was a trained chef, hosting dinners in cities around Asia and building an online following. I became a farm-to-table type of chef where I would highlight where these ingredients came from and the stories of the people who brought them to your tables. And then after some time, I started growing ingredients myself. And that was when I started really getting into farming and caring about how food was grown. But in 2016, Louise learned how unpredictable the life of her fellow local farmers was when a typhoon struck the Philippines and her hometown.

26:03Typhoon Nocturne, locally known as Nina. Her family was safe, but the farmlands surrounding them were decimated. Camarillo Sur is now under a state of calamity. We lost 80 % of our agriculture lands and its productivity. The farmers that I've been working with, most of them were impacted. And I thought to myself, this is a huge, disastrous existential crisis for my community and for so many people across the Philippines. How can we address this? And I had a platform and the ability to do something. So first it was, you know, providing seeds and vegetables and plants that the farmers could use to start making an income again and rebuild their farms.

26:44But over time, I thought, you know, this kind of aid system is just very temporary. Louise wondered if she could turn this emergency into an opportunity for herself and those farmers. There's a root cause of this and it's climate change and weather disasters. How can we build resilience within these livelihoods so that they're not experiencing storms every year and recovering from them every year? They noticed some native plants, like cacao, had no trouble recovering. They were also very resilient to these storms. And so she wondered whether doubling down on cacao as a crop was a longer-term solution.