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One of the ways we’ve convinced millions of members of Generation Z that they live in a dystopian world with no prospects is by romanticizing the past. You’ve probably seen posts claiming that in the 1950s, an average working-class man could afford a big home on a single factory job salary while supporting six children and an obedient stay-at-home wife who was waiting at home with a fresh martini in hand. They often feature the tagline, “This is what they took from us.”
A lot of these posts are probably AI slop or clickbait, but many on the New Right have been feeding the victimization complex of young people by similarly engaging in doomer revisionism. Whether it’s “unfettered” free markets or “globalism” or immigrants or Wall Street “robber barons,” some shadowy group is always denying Zoomers their rightful homes, marriages, and happiness. Politics thrives on aggrievement. Class aggrievement. Partisan aggrievement. Now, generational aggrievement.
But no one took anything from them. The notion that a contemporary 20-something toils in uniquely grueling economic circumstances is utterly delusional. Of course, the young face obstacles. The world always has problems, though it has significantly fewer serious ones these days.
Besides, Zoomers are in luck. They can live just like people did in the 1950s. All they need to do is buy a 980-square-foot home, which was the average size of new construction in 1955. They need to set down roots away from major metro areas. Around half the country lived in rural America in the 1950s. The home-ownership rate in the 1950s was significantly lower than today, as it was through most of the 1970s and 1990s, despite romantic perceptions.
Forget air conditioning and attached garages. Don’t worry, your family will only own one car. No streaming, computers, fancy gizmos, or virtually any appliances. Dryers and dishwashers were still luxury items. No regular eating out. No $10 coffee runs. Don’t plan any vacations that aren’t within a day’s driving distance. Your pipes, roof, and electrical system will constantly need repair. Make sure to wear a mask when you’re working on the house because of the lead paint and asbestos. RETVRN!
In the 1950s, a person spent around 20% of disposable income on food. People were buying a lot less. Due to a lack of modern refrigeration and other technological advances in trade, they also had considerably fewer choices. That includes healthy choices. There is considerably more and more varied produce available today than there was in the 1950s to ’70s. And you’re in luck, MAHA mom: no DDT. For the first time in human history, one of the central concerns of a society is obesity, not malnutrition.
Then again, you’ll save a lot by dispensing with tuition for the children: Under 10% of people went to college in the mid-1950s (under 2% were women), and, even with the G.I. Bill, most of them were wealthy and privileged. Having to pay back a ridiculous student loan for a useless degree isn’t one of the great tragedies to have befallen mankind, anyway.
If all this sounds enticing to you, you can have it. There are people who choose to live sans modern conveniences. The vast majority don’t. Because every generation faces trade-offs, a fact that young socialists and traditional conservatives don’t seem to accept.
No one denies that healthcare, for instance, is more expensive. There is plenty of reforming to do. Then again, an average person in the 1950s was afforded what we would consider shockingly subpar care compared to what a person receives today. One of the drivers of high costs is rapid technological advancement. You could write books on the number of ways modern medicine has improved in the past few decades. Heart attack, stroke, and cancer survival rates have skyrocketed since the 1950s.
Tradcons such as Vice President JD Vance often pin America’s imagined decline to “40 years ago” to coincide neatly with President Ronald Reagan and the rise of “neoliberalism” and “corporatism.” By 1981, before the unprecedented 40 years of prosperity in the United States, the unemployment rate was over 10% and average interest rates for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage peaked at 18.6%. I’m sure that wasn’t much fun.
In any event, a significantly larger percentage of people worked for a few big corporations in the 1950s, with little chance of meaningful mobility. Many “New Right” technocrats with Ivy League degrees imagine a working-class utopia where people work according to their needs in antiquated and tedious jobs. Today, though, a record number of people are self-employed.
More young people can pursue careers that interest them rather than being generationally or geographically tied to work that doesn’t. That includes many jobs that don’t need college degrees. It is true that more people work in cerebral and white-collar fields because of rising levels of educational attainment. We have more free time. We have more creative time. When we do work for corporations, the benefits, such as parental leave, help families.
Tradcons also like to blame allegedly runaway capitalism for undercutting religious institutions and driving childlessness, even though virtually the entire world, including socialist and theocratic nations, has experienced declines in birthrates.
Married people are more successful. Get out, meet people, and get married and have children as soon as you can. No one is stopping you. Though many people believe they need to be financially secure, whatever that entails, before having children, the affordability excuse doesn’t really hold up. The average age of first-time parents in the ‘50s was around 24 years old. Today it’s around 30.
No one with even a rudimentary grasp of history believes those approaching 30 today are worse off economically than someone in their early 20s in the 1970s or 1950s or the Great Depression, all of which had higher birth rates. The replacement rate was over four times higher in the 1800s, when around 80% of people had to wake up before dawn to engage in the backbreaking work with no other prospects available. Then again, if abandoning modernity and embracing subsistence farming is your thing, that lifestyle is available, too.
IF YOUR CITY IS TOO EXPENSIVE, MOVE. IT’S THE AMERICAN WAY
But the truth is that everyone knows why replacement rates keep declining. Women entered the workforce. They began going to college. So people started getting married later, having children later, and having fewer of them. That’s biology and economics. It’s also never going back to how it was. Nor do most people think it should.
Nevertheless, dropping marriage and replacement rates are real and problematic. There are real housing affordability struggles in many areas of the country. Young people don’t have it easy — they never have. We need more policies incentivizing homebuilding and deregulating economic barriers. But blaming boomers for stealing your future is about as useful as believing these revisionist fantasies about the 1950s.
