Unless you’ve been under a rock the last decade or so, you will be familiar with the line of argument that millennials are a uniquely put-upon (or, in the vernacular, “screwed”) generation.  They are over-educated, over-indebted, condemned to never get on the success ladder, etc…you know the story. The question is: how true is it?

The answer is: it depends in large part on which millennials we are talking about and to whom you want to compare them.

Let’s start with comparing millennials to what are known as “Gen X”. Short diversion here: Millennials are people born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s, while Gen X, according to current popular definition covers people born from the late 1960s to late 1970s (personally, I find this definition ludicrous because it would exclude in all the characters in Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X, none of whom could have been born after about 1963, but I shall bow to popular culture here).  Now it just so happens that the Public Policy Forum recently published some work by the excellent Jennifer Robson of Carleton University (with co-author Andrée Loucks) which – among other things – compared the financial position of Gen X in 1999 vs Millennials in 2016 (to operationalize the two generations she looked at 25-33 year olds in each of the two reference years.  Here are some of the key comparisons (all figures in $2016) using Statistics Canada’s Survey of Financial Security:

	Gen X 1999	Millennial 2016
Median Income after Taxes and Transfers	$30,529	$38,378
Median Total Assets Including Pensions	$53,362	$96,662
Median Total Debts	$13,794	$25,750
Share with Financial Assets too low to keep from poverty for one month	41.8%	30.5%

Are millennials more indebted than Gen X?  Yep.  But they also have higher income and assets, so colour me mostly unimpressed with claims that Millennials are a uniquely deprived generation.  (also: insofar as the debt is student debt, repayment assistance for borrowers in repayment is considerably more generous now than it was twenty years ago).

A slightly different point: when millennials talk about employment woes, they have literally NOTHING on Gen X.  Youth unemployment is currently at historic lows – under ten percent.  Even at the very brief height of the 2009 recession, unemployment among 20-24 year-olds never really rose above 15 percent; in contrast, it was consistently over 17 percent every summer from 1991 to 1994.  Put simply, there is almost no serious comparison one can make which suggest that Millennials are worse off than Gen X.

But wait, you say: aren’t we always hearing about how university graduates are worse off now than before 2008?  Isn’t this a contradiction?  Good question!  Yes, indeed we are hearing this.  But let’s look at this phenomenon in detail.  First, university graduates are a minority of every generation; college graduates did *waaay* better in the 2010s than they did in the 1990s, particularly in resource-intensive sectors of the economy.  Second of all, comparing “average” university graduates in the 1990s to those in the 2010s is not an apples-to-apples comparison: even adjusting for population growth there were nearly twice as many university graduates in the early 2010s as in the 1990s.  The average university graduate might not even have gone to university twenty years earlier.  That’s what success in access means.  But assuming all these new students are of slightly lower academic ability, we shouldn’t be surprised if they drag average university graduate incomes down.  At the same time, they may be driving total generational incomes up, because compared to their equivalents in previous generations, they have a lot more options and higher levels of success.  So, there’s no actual contradiction here.

So, are millennials just whinging?  Well, no, not quite.  While Canadian millennials are having an OK time of it, American ones are not.  And among some (not all) Canadian millennials, the state of the housing market is a genuine cause for complaint.  More on both tomorrow.