The Week: The Cost of Being Young in America

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1:52I'm George Hahn, and it's Friday, July 17th. Today, the housing market is doing exactly what it was built to do, just not for anyone under 40. Then, Washington's refusal to pass the baton. And finally, what happens when a generation decides the system isn't working for them? Let's get into it.

2:22For most of the last century, buying a house was the on-ramp to the middle class. This year, the median American home hit a record, just over$408 ,000, and three-quarters of the homes on the market are unaffordable to a typical household. On Monday's Prof. G. Markets, Ed Elson and finance professor Patrick Boyle argued that this isn't simply the market malfunctioning. Expensive housing may be the result of a political choice. You know, in the very long run, if you look at a very long history of housing prices, there's no reason to think they should go up. But it's become sort of an investment class.

3:08You know, years ago, if you speak to your grandparents, they'll never talk about the concept of real estate investing. They bought a home that they needed to live in. once it became an investment and we'll say in places like the uk where it is by far the biggest investment like it's what people do with their savings is sort of either buy their own home or buy a buy to let a property you end up with this situation where the government have uh you know incentivized people to buy homes they want prices to go up or at least stay steady and so you know in an election year or whatever, you know, are you going to sort of permit a load of new building that'll hit house prices?

3:54Are you going to allow, you know, changes that would make it affordable to young people? And for the last 20, 25 years, the answer has been no. You said in your video, I think this quote really sums it up. You said, quote, once a country decides its houses are supposed to make everyone rich, it has to keep prices rising forever, which means restricting supply, blocking development, and quietly pricing out each new generation, which works until it doesn't. And I think what I appreciate about that view, I think is right, is the fact that it is a choice. I mean, it is an intentional policy decision to decide that if you're starting from a place of people expect the value of their homes to go up, then we have to do whatever we can to make that happen.

4:46And I think this was really crystallized for me earlier this year when the president who had sort of said that he wanted housing to become affordable, I thought we had all agreed that that was something we all wanted to figure out. He said the following, and we'll just play this clip and get your reaction. So much talk about, oh, we're going to drive housing prices down. I don't want to drive housing prices down. for people that own their homes, and they can be assured that's what's going to happen. This is the problem, right? Because that's who votes, right? Like, that's who votes. You know, homeowners, the elderly vote.

5:21Young people don't vote, so they don't get a say. The ladder gets pulled up, and the people underneath it start to notice. Boyle has a name for what happens next. When a generation decides the normal path is closed, and the only way up is a bet. There's a lot of young disillusioned people and they sort of feel they can't afford a house. They are not getting the kind of jobs they wanted. A list of difficulties, you know, and they basically want to reach escape velocity. You know, they're on Instagram and whatever, and they see these people who've made masses of money through basically an all-in gamble on something, be it meme stocks, be it crypto, be it, you know, NVIDIA.

6:05Doesn't matter what it is. But it's just this yellow idea where they've decided that nothing matters. All the numbers are made up. It's all a con. And you just have to look after yourself. You have to make a big bet on something. You know, hopefully make, you know, a massive, massive amount of money. And then you're out. If young people don't get a say, it's worth asking who does. This week gave a stark answer. Senator Lindsey Graham died suddenly at 71. Mitch McConnell remained in a rehab facility, unable to cast votes. His office released a photo many suspected was AI-generated. Two seats, effectively frozen, in a chamber where the median member is pushing 65, while the median American is 38.

6:59Here's Scott's take on Monday's Raging Moderates. And leadership in both parties increasingly resemble the board of a company that forgot succession planning is part of the job. The people making the most important decisions around technology and needing to command a sense of the complexities of the world are looking increasingly like a mashup between the Golden Girls and the land of the dead. Enough already. Every CEO is told that their ultimate responsibility is to leave the company stronger than they found it. We fire CEOs on succession committees if they don't have in place a succession plan.

7:35And he used to be at 65. There was mandatory retirement in the U.K. And Martin Sorrell got that way. We've somehow decided the goal is to die with your hand on the steering wheel and take other people with you. Enough already. Age limits. I'm with you and make people miss you. That's like the best thing, right? You leave a party a little bit early. You leave the Senate a little bit early. 100 percent. Mitt Romney, who is turning 80 but looks like 60, was being interviewed by McKay Coppins. And they were talking about, you know, what would you do? Would you run? Because it should be, you know, a big primary field on the Republican side, too.

8:17And he was like, absolutely not. Your brain shrinks by 20 percent by the time you're 80. Yeah. Like who wants a president operating at 80 percent in a best case scenario? And that's not even factoring in how hard you've lived. Right. Like how many martinis you've had, what kind of childhood illnesses? I mean, I don't want to blame him. Obviously, it's a terrible thing that Mitch McConnell had polio. But like, you know, people go through all sorts of stuff that make it hard for you to do the most important jobs in the world. And if Mitt Romney, who seems sharp as a tack and looks the part right, like out of central casting that Mitt Romney would be our, you know, center right savior or whatever for the Republican Party, if he's even like, you're losing your mind.

9:01And also, he has a big family. They all have these big families, and they post the pictures of your huge tribe. Just, like, spend 20 minutes with them. That would be cool. So, I'm with you.

9:16We'll be right back after the break.

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12:59Welcome back. Two years ago, Scott wrote an essay called War on the Young. It's narrated by yours truly. We re-aired it this week, Unchanged. It hasn't aged a day, which is precisely the problem. We've broken the social contract that binds America. Work hard, play by the rules, and you'll be better off than your parents were. For the first time in our nation's history, this is no longer true. Today's 25-year-olds make less than their parents and grandparents did at the same age, yet they carry student debt loads unimaginable to earlier generations. Neither the minimum nor median wage has kept pace with inflation or productivity gains, while housing costs have outpaced them.

13:50The statistics on children's and young adults' well-being are staggering. None of this is lost on young people, and the shattering of the social contract has left them feeling rage and shame. Half of Americans older than 55 say they are extremely proud to be American. That number drops to 18 % among 18 to 34-year-olds. And that frustration isn't uniquely American. On this week's China Decode, James King and Alice Hahn described a version of the same generational opt-out. Young people walking away from the biggest cities and the grind that comes with them. This is China in the passing lane. And what we're seeing is the collateral damage of all the effort that individual people are putting in to spur China's emergence as an economic superpower being so considerable.

14:52And Gen Z or Gen Z just deciding that, you know what, I'm going to escape from this. I'm jumping off the treadmill. I'm going to swap my big city existence for life in a tier three or tier four city. And while we have similar trends in the US and in the UK, I think in the US they call it, you know, opting for a soft life or something like that to minimize stress and avoid burnout. and in the UK we have downshifting, you know, leaving a high-pressure job for a less demanding and more balanced life. It would be easy to end there, on a generation quietly checking out. But that's not the whole picture.

15:38On Thursday's Prof G Conversations, Scott spoke with Pulitzer-winning journalist Julia Angwin and former White House advisor Ami Fields Meyer about their book on resisting authoritarianism. Most people on the left or right are going to go authoritarianism bad. What would be that one thing based on your research that you would ask people to do? Ami, I'll let you go first. And Julia, you'll have the last word. To find a political home. I think that this is a long, this is going to be a long haul. And Trump will, whatever will happen to Trump is going to happen to Trump. But they're going to keep trying to do this for a very long time.

16:16We know this from every other part of the world. We understand in our lives that in moments of spiritual crisis, it's important to have maybe a faith community. We understand that in moments of health crisis, it's important to have, you know, a social safety net. For whatever reason in this country, we don't have a sort of consistent political home, somewhere to engage with, somewhere to be regularly, somewhere to be with other people. Scott, this is deeply—all of this is deeply connected to the first thing you said about people taking risks online and not taking risks offline. We have to start gathering and building power together at the most local level.

16:50And I'm not—and the reason I say this is because there's not one thing that's going to end this. But if we are all deeply engaged in a regular political community where that is—where we can decide our futures together and people are deciding together what are the issues that matter to them, that is actually genuinely, according to the research, the first step in getting us off this path. Julia? I mean, I think I would maybe end with what I ended up doing because writing this book sort of radicalized me to think about my own life and how I really, as a journalist, I had a kind of view, I don't need to participate in this stuff.

17:29In fact, it's like more pure to sit here and witness everything. And so I put flyers up on every house on my street And I said, let's all meet I didn't know my neighbors I've lived on the street for 15 years And I had a little wine and cheese party And I gave everybody ice whistles And I said, let's get on a group chat Now we're on a WhatsApp group all together We've had a second meeting I'm planning a barbecue this summer As soon as we're off book tour and it's actually transformed my life in a way that is so positive and it means we're ready, right? I learned this from the activists in Washington, D.C., which is basically an occupied city.

18:13There are 5 ,000 troops right now in D.C. patrolling and intimidating people, arresting people for being past curfew. People don't realize, like, we're already in a situation that we would write about in another country as like, oh, the Capitol has been militarily occupied. And the way that they prepared in D.C. for that was every block started group chats because that is how you need to know where are the military, who's going where. And we have to prepare now by getting to know everyone in our lives and building solidarity with them. A functioning society requires more than asking young people to work harder or patiently wait for their turn.

18:59It requires giving them a genuine stake in the future. What happens when an entire generation decides the system is no longer worth buying into? That's The Week. I'm George Hahn. We'll see you next Friday.

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