Today, OK Boomer, Let's Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind is out. I thought I knew the basic story of Millennial life - that it's precarious, that we're broke, that we're set to be the first downwardly mobile generation. I didn't know the half of it. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/OK-Boomer-Lets-Talk/Jill-Filipovic/9781982153762

Millennials aren't just the first generation set to do worse than our parents and our grandparents. If not for the (badly tattered) social safety net, we would be the most impoverished young adults since the Great Depression.

Nearly 5 million Millennials lost their jobs between February & May of this year -- we are the generation most impacted by pandemic unemployment. And that's after our incomes took a lifelong hit in the Great Recession of 2008 -- we still have not recovered, and likely never will.

More Millennial women are in the workplace than women of any other generation. But the gender pay gap has stagnated. Millennials are a more racially diverse generation -- but the racial pay gap has not significantly improved, and the racial wealth gap has actually grown wider.

The gig economy, with its badly-paid no-benefits jobs? It's dominated by Millennials. And Black Millennials are a whole lot likelier than white ones to work in it.

Millennials are the most educated generation in history, but those degrees have not translated into higher incomes. While college-educated Boomers saw an income boost, the bottom has fallen out of working-class wages -- meaning Millennials need college degrees just to hang on.

Depressed Millennial incomes and wealth also isn't a result of Millennial laziness. Americans work many more hours today than they did when Boomers were young adults in 1980 -- we work nearly an extra MONTH every year.

After the 2016 election, we heard a lot about the economic anxieties of the white working class. We've heard a whole lot less about the fact that young Black and brown workers are forced out of work & prevented from basic civic participation by our punitive incarceration system.

I wrote about this in the Atlantic today, drawing from a section of OK Boomer: Millennials kids had parents thrown in prison, then were often locked up when they were just kids themselves. Today, Millennials are the most incarcerated people in the US. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/millennial-futures-are-bleak-incarceration-blame/615133/

Millennials are also deeply in debt. We had to get college degrees to have any semblance of a middle-class life, but now Millennials owe an average of $33,000 on student loans. Even those of us in our early 30s owe $15,000 on average. The average 30-something Boomer owed $2,300.

More 25-year-old Millennials held college degrees than 25-year-olds of any previous generation. And yet more 25-year-old Millennials were unemployed than 25-year-old Gen Xers, Boomers, or Silents.

Millennials went to college in an age of expanding for-profit education, and a lot of Millennials got sucked in -- disproportionately Millennials of color and first-gen college students. Students at for-profit schools take out significant debt but are less likely to graduate.

88 percent of for-profit students take on student debt. Nearly half of them default within 12 years.

70% of white college grads leave school with debt. 85% of Black graduates do. Black workers are paid less than white ones even when they have the same credentials, and have less family wealth to rely on -- leaving them in debt longer, and less able to build wealth of their own.

One study found that 12 years from the day she started college, a Black woman's student loan balance is 13 percent higher than what she initially took out. White graduates, by contrast, largely managed to pay down their student debts.

One reason Millennials have so little wealth is that Millennial home ownership rates are actually dropping (and they were low to begin with). A Black Millennial is less likely to own their home today than a young Black adult was during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

This is not just random bad luck or "the economy." It's the result of systemic, intentional housing discrimination that has been magnified over the generations. Under Trump, attempts to fix it have been walked back - that's what his "suburban lifestyle dream" promised.

Plus, housing is expensive as hell. Even adjusted for inflation, the average cost of a home today is more than twice what it was in 1970. Back then, the average home was $154,184 in 2019 dollars. By 2019, the average home cost $321,500.

None of this is random, or even the free hand of the market. These are the results of political choices. For example: Greater enforcement of fair housing laws meant that by 2004, black home ownership hit an all-time high. By 2019, those gains were wiped out.

Housing and education aren't the only soaring costs for Millennials. A young Millennial-headed family pays twice as much in health care costs today as a young Boomer-headed one did in 1984. Millennials use less health care than older folks, but have more health care debt.

And Millennial health is surprisingly bad. Yes, we are the "wellness generation," spending big on boutique fitness and organic food. But that's probably because our formal health system is broken -- and a farmshare subscription is cheaper than a hospital visit.

Millennial mortality is up 20% compared to Gen X when they were our age. Thanks to drugs and suicide -- so-called "deaths of despair" -- white Millennial mortality is up 30%. Drug-related young adult deaths are up 300% compared to 20 years ago.

Millennials are also devastatingly lonely. For all of our time on social media and living in big, dynamic cities, one in five of us says we have no friends and no acquaintances beyond our immediate families.

We are also a generation looking toward a future world that is going to look very different because of climate change -- something Boomer-elected politicians have done virtually nothing to stave off.

With so little political power, Millennials have taken on the burden of making individual decisions to save the planet. A third of young women say worries about climate change have made them have fewer children than they would like, or to forgo having children at all.

Climate concerns influence what we eat, and account for the huge uptick in vegetarianism and veganism among the young. We know individual choices aren't going to save the future. But with so few other options, we're doing what we can - often at great personal cost.

The real answer is getting Millennials into positions of power. 70% of Millennials say human behavior causes climate change; only about half of Boomers say the same. The few Millennials in Congress (including @aoc) are leading the way on climate, but conservatives are in the way.

The oldest Millennials are turning 40 this year, but there are zero Millennials in the Senate. When Boomers were in their 30s, several them held Senate seats. Boomers continue to dominate all of Congress, as well as state houses and executive offices. Millennials are shut out.

Nearly 80 percent U.S. senators are 55 and older. Zero percent are under the age of 40.