Going on 30, still living with mom and dad

Or maybe we won’t. Perhaps a chunk of millennials will never catch up, our lives channeled by the deep grooves of an economic calamity forced upon us by the timing of our births and graduations.

It could be a long struggle. “Lisa Kahn, a labor economist at the Yale School of Management, studied the earnings of men who left college and joined the work force during the deep recession of the early 1980s,” the New York Times’s Annie Lowrey wrote last March. “Unsurprisingly, she found that the higher the unemployment rate upon graduation, the less graduates earned right out of school. But those workers never really caught up. ‘The effects were still present 15 or 20 years later,’ she said. ‘They never made that money back.'” Citing additional research, Lowrey noted, “For the first time in modern memory, a whole generation might not prove wealthier than the one that preceded it.”

In April, Sarah Ayres of the liberal Center for American Progress attached numbers to the phenomenon: “We estimate that the nearly 1 million young Americans who experienced long-term unemployment during the worst of the recession will lose more than $20 billion in earnings over the next 10 years.” But as Weissmann and Derek Thompson noted in the Atlantic in August 2012, while the recession is partly to blame for a decrease in home and car purchases, “It’s highly possible that a perfect storm of economic and demographic factors — from high gas prices, to re-­urbanization, to stagnating wages, to new technologies enabling a different kind of consumption — has fundamentally changed the game for Millennials.”