Why Millennials Are Doing Worse Than Their Parents - Scott Galloway

We're eating each other in the US internally. A third of Republicans and Democrats see members of the other party as their mortal enemy. 25% of America is comfortable with an autocrat, as long as the autocrat represents his or her ideals. 54% of Democrats are worried that their kid is gonna marry a Republican. And so, the fastest way to defeat an enemy is to atomize them. (airplane flying)

In the 1950s, a young person had a 90% chance of out-earning their parents. Now, it's a 50% chance. Only half of Millennials are earning more than its parents. Since 1989, people under the age of 40 have seen their share of the nation's wealth plummet from 19% to 9%, and for the first time in US history, young people are no longer better off economically than their parents were at the same age. Nice, positive headlines to get us started today. What- where did you learn that?

(clears throat) Well, look, um, first of all, it's great to be with you, but the ... Where you mentioned that for the first time in our nation's history, a 30-year-old man or woman isn't doing as well as his or her parents, that's kind of a gr- breakdown in what is the fundamental compact between a society and its populous. And that is if you play by the rules, and you're a good person, and you work hard, your kids will do better than you. That's kind of what you want. Anyone who has kids knows you're only as least happy as your least happy kid, and if your kids, on average, aren't doing as well as you, it means to have kids in a nation, means your life is gonna go, is gonna, eh, quality of life is gonna degrade, emotionally and psychologically, which means society no longer works for you. And it- and we gotta hope it's temporary. But that's the bad news. The good news is, depending on how you look at it, this is a problem of our own making. You mentioned that the wealth of people under the age of 40 as registered by their percentage of GDP has been cut in half, and there's this illusion of complexity that the incumbents will try and foment among media and the populous to explain why these very intractable problems are intractable. And they're not. When we, the two biggest tax deductions in America that we have passed, and we have decided make sense are mortgage interest and capital gains. Who owns home and owns stocks? People my age and older. Who rents and makes their money working? People your age and younger. So we've effectively decided that the two biggest tax cuts that further enrich the wealthiest generation in history, and that is US baby boomers. If we look at the biggest transfer of wealth that's recurring in the world, it's a transfer of wealth of one and a half trillion dollars from people of working age in the United States to people of retirement age in the form of Social Security. And again, that cohort receiving a trillion and a half dollar transfer payment from young people are the wealthiest cohort in the history of the planet. So education is skyrocketing, uh, regressive tax ra- I mean, you can just go on and on and on. This isn't an accident. This isn't forces greater than us. These are deliberate decisions, mostly because old people vote, mostly because presidential politics start in Iowa and Maine, the two oldest, Whitest states in the nation, and what do you know? We have a society that tilts capital away from your generation to mine. And it is, uh, i- it's, it's dumb, it's short-sighted, and it's also morally corrupt. Uh, and there's, it just goes on and on and on. Education. When I applied to school in the '80s, to college, the admissions rate was 76%, the tuition was $1200 a year. That same school, the admissions rate is 6% and the tuition is closer to $30,000 a year. So e- everything we've done has sort of stacked the deck. It's sort of Baby Boomers have decided heads I win, tails you lose.