Are Baby Boomers Putting Their Millennial Children At Financial Risk?

A new book by Wall Street Journal writer Joseph C. Sternberg argues the economic practices of the baby boomers are imperiling the economic security of their children.

The baby-boom generation was born between 1946 and 1964; Millennials are defined as being born between 1981 and 1997, according to Pew Research Center.

The decade Sternberg refers to in the book’s title, “The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future,” is the one following the global financial crisis of 2008.

He tells Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson he chose to focus on that decade in particular because it was the period when the largest number of millennials were graduating from college and entering the early stages of their careers.

“We were doing that during a period when the economy was unusually bad. I mean, we were seeing a lot of economic conditions that America hadn’t experienced since the Depression in the 1930s,” Sternberg says. “That has had a really profound implication for millennials’ prospects. If you lose that first decade when you are supposed to really be getting your economic feet, it becomes very difficult for you to try to claw your way back from it.”

Interview Highlights

On how job creation in the U.S. is failing millennials

“I had started out thinking that this was only going to be a book about the past decade, and what I realized is that the story needed to start a little earlier than that in order to make sense of what has really happened to the millennials. Really the way that America was doing job creation has been misfiring in some ways for decades. There were a lot of things that were going wrong in terms of the way we were incentivizing various investments, so the way we were thinking about productivity, the way we were thinking about what the job market should look like in the future, and the policy choices that the boomers were