The Kids Are All Spite
Winning back young people doesn't run through cringey TikTok trends
Hello from federally occupied Washington, D.C.!
I, for one, am grateful to our gracious and merciful President for freeing us from the scourge of crime and “roving mobs of wild youths” in the city. He has taken the fight straight to the core of Crime City: the national mall…?
Never mind that violent crime in D.C. is down 35% since last year and, in fact, at its lowest point in 30 years or that our Lord and Savior is cutting programs like Job Corps and funding for after school programs that actually give young people a stake in their community and help them feel connected or that Trump has completely crushed the wildly successful investments in community violence intervention passed in the Biden administration or that Republicans are holding $1 billion in federal funding for D.C. hostage.
Never mind that the President himself has been found guilty of dozens of crimes and liable for sexual assault or pardoned 1,500 people convicted for at the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, many of whom went on to commit more violent crimes, or that the Trump administration is sending roving bands of wild adults in masks to throw people into vans, or that this administration is using crypto to make the Presidency a pay-to-play enterprise.
Something you should always be wary of is whenever someone has a “grand theory of everything” or “one thing that explains everything.” The world is too complicated, people are too complicated, and you can’t rely on anyone to act rationally or even the same way in the same circumstances. As the wise ancient philosopher Meek Mill said, “there’s levels to this shit.”
One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how much of life (in my cohort, at least) is explained by financial nihilism. The very digitally savvy economist Kyla Scanlon wrote about this two years ago, going through just how many financial crises Gen Z has lived through (I am not Gen Z, I am, in fact, very old but I would say a lot of this is true for people my age but it is especially true of people younger than me).
Let’s take quick stock of where we are.
The average age of the American homebuyer is 56 years old—In 1981, it was 31 years old. First time homebuyers made up less than a quarter of the total home buying market in 2023 and the average age is around 38 years old, about a decade later than it was 40 years ago. Home prices are up nearly 40% since the beginning of the pandemic and interest rates are still high enough that no one wants to sell their home because they’re locked in at a fantastic interest rate.
Student loan debt has exploded since the global financial crisis in 2008. At graduation, the average federal student debt at the time of graduation from a public college is more than $31,000 per person. If you went to a private college, it’s around $40,000. Now, employment numbers for new graduates are plummeting as employers are skittish about hiring and younger employees are more hesitant to leave their jobs. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York called this employment market the worst for new college graduates in at least a decade.
The college advantage that graduates are getting, especially for men, is also disappearing. The college wage premium has remained relatively stable for the last few decades, but that premium only applies if you can find a job after graduation. No longer does going to college, especially for men, mean that you have a better chance to find a job to pay off those record high student loan debts.
Nowhere is this more evident than in computer science. Growing up, especially in Princeton, I think I heard that computer science was the future and the most stable thing to go into, rather than get a useless liberal arts degree or do something stupid like major in political science with a concentration in American politics and minor in history after getting your absolute shit rocked trying to major in biology or chemistry for a year. The New York Times this week ran a whole story about how the field has since been thrown into turmoil for young graduates.
“Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 percent.”
Art history graduates! Half the unemployment rate of computer science majors! Eat your heart out, literally every family sitcom that has ever been made.
So how are young people dealing with this confluence of challenges? Fuckin’, not well! People ages 24-39 (39 is not young, but unfortunately I do not choose how to break down the data) own about $80,000 worth of debt and about half of them own homes whereas Gen Xers have about $135,000 in debt but a very healthy majority of them own their homes. Credit card balances, auto loans and personal loan balances have also exploded in the last 10-15 years.
Perhaps this is why an APA study from 2023 found 18–34 and 35–44-year-olds were more likely than those 65 and older to report they feel “consumed” by their worries about money (67% and 63% vs. 13%, respectively).
Fundamentally, all of this adds up to a broken promise we’ve made to young people. For 25 years—maybe more—kids have been told if they go to college and play by the rules, financially they’ll live a comfortable life, be able to buy a house, and raise a family. That’s just not true any more. And with things like AI threatening to take more and more entry level white collar jobs and more gigantic companies taking over the economy and our struggles to build housing in places people want to live, it’s not going to get better any time soon.
This is the thing I keep coming back to when people—many of you getting this email!—talk about student loan forgiveness. “Well, you signed a contract, you should deal with the consequences.” Well, it’s not like we’ve held up our end of the bargain either. New graduates are worse off than they’ve been in a long time and there are the same number of seats at elite universities as there were 30 years ago while the cost of college has doubled and the price of housing has exploded as well since 2000.
It’s harder to break into the job market, the housing market, and move up the career ladder because people aren’t retiring. Raising a family is just as inaccessible as buying a house because child care costs more than a mortgage in almost every state.
What does this all mean, other than I am very grumpy and tired? It means that young people’s politics are going to be exceptionally anti-system for the foreseeable future and less tied to a particular party. This idea of “I am going to be in debt for the rest of my life unless something radically changes” is really pervasive and, as stated above, not exactly unfounded! Trump was the anti-system candidate in 2024 and that’s why they shifted massively to the right from 2020.
But now Trump is the president—he is the system! To seize on this opportunity and get those people back in our camp, we can’t just be anti-Trump but anti the system that led to his rise in the first place. That means absolutely hammering the cost of living but also taking advantage of things like the Epstein Files that show that Trump is protecting the status quo where for the rich, it’s “for my friends, the world. For my enemies, the law.” These are all exhibits in the case against Trump and defining the status quo in a way that resonates with voters—something Trump has done really, really well even if he isn’t doing anything but making it worse.
If we want to win back young people and, therefore, the future, we need people who are willing to break things and build them back anew. We need leaders to speak plainly to Americans who are hurting and tell them that their pain is real and reflect their anger back to them and offer a new path—not doing whatever Pete Buttigieg was doing in this interview where he doesn’t answer a single question. Not to pick on him, lots of people do this! But people have no attention span or patience for politicians who come off like nerds and can’t just say “yes” or “no” and stand by their position with a stiff spine.
Here’s what else I am consuming this week:
Wage growth for top earners is once again outpacing wage growth for the lowest earners;
This piece on how the Sydney Sweeney story is a good example of how the right wing and left wing media ecosystems work differently;
A spike in homicides would rightly (and did) make headlines across the country. Now that homicides have fallen precipitously, there’s just a fraction of the coverage but we should all take note.
Best,
Zack