Millennials Are Doing Fine These Days

Over at Vox, Aditi Shikrant takes on the question of why custom picture framing is so expensive. I’m curious about that myself. But she goes off the rails here:

The perception that custom framing is too pricey is also a symptom of a different reality: Millennial consumers — long past their poster-hanging days — have less money than previous generations. Young adults are decorating homes and apartments with more budget-friendly art.

We really need to stop this. It’s just not true:

Millennial incomes are no lower than previous generations. Nor, generally speaking, are millennials more in debt, less likely to own a home, or less likely to spend money. You can pick out a few small differences depending on how you cherry pick years and which generations you compare to, but millennials right now are roughly as well off as young people in previous generations and their spending habits are pretty similar too.

This hasn’t always been true, of course. Millennials were hit pretty hard by the Great Recession. But a decade of recovery has put millennials in roughly the same financial position as Gen Xers and boomers when they were young.

Millennials have pretty clearly struggled harder in certain ways compared to previous generations—college debt is an obvious example—but it’s time to stop pretending that in 2019 they’re all poor little mice who spend money more frugally than their parents. The evidence just doesn’t back that up.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, custom framing is apparently expensive because, in addition to the obvious labor costs, frame shops have to keep lots and lots of different options in inventory.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate