A defining feature of the past several decades, viewed from a sufficient distance, is the systematic failure of the older cohort to create the conditions for the younger one.
This is the generational version of a question that all cultures ask at every scale: whether each generation is leaving the next better positioned than it found them, or worse. And the answer, in our case, is by now hard to mistake. A generation has been raised under conditions deliberately worse than those their parents took for granted, in exchange for narratives that frame the worsening as their own choice or their own failure. The cultural conversation has not learned to discuss this honestly, and the failure to discuss it is itself diagnostic.
I want to introduce a frame for what is happening, drawn from a concept Erik Erikson developed for individual psychology, and worth extending to cultural function. The frame is generativity. The diagnosis is that we are losing the capacity for it, and that the loss is most visible in the relationship between generations as it has been organized over the past forty years.
The Concept of Generativity
Erikson used the term generativity to describe the orientation of mature adults toward the conditions of life for those who come after them. Generativity is the active production of meaning, structure, and possibility for the next cohort. The opposite of generativity, in Erikson's framework, is stagnation, which is the closing off of attention to anyone beyond oneself. The mature adult, in the framework, is one who has turned outward, who has accepted that the work of this stage of life is producing the conditions in which others can begin theirs. I want to extend the concept beyond individual psychology to cultural function. Cultures, like individuals, can be generative or stagnant.
A generative culture actively produces the meaning systems, formative institutions, frameworks for experiencing existence, and structures of belonging that allow individual humans to live lives worth living. It does this not as a passive consequence of being a culture, but as an ongoing work that must be performed by each generation for the next.
A stagnant culture has lost the capacity to produce these things, even though it may continue to benefit from the legacy of previous generations. The stagnant culture appears to be functioning because the inherited infrastructure is still in place, but it is no longer reproducing itself, and the gap between what it claims to provide and what it actually produces widens with each generational cohort.
The question I am asking (with prejudice) is whether our culture, taken broadly, is currently generative or stagnant. The answer I am proposing is that it is closer to stagnation than the official conversation acknowledges, that the failure is most visible at the generational scale, and that an honest reading of the past several decades cannot avoid the diagnosis.
Narrative and Function
Two things are worth paying attention to. The first is the coherence of cultural self-narration, the stories a culture tells itself about what it is and what it is for. The second is the intactness of generative function, the actual capacity to produce meaning, form persons, and transmit frameworks for living. These are independent in principle--it is the gap between them that is diagnostic.
A culture whose self-description and operative production line up is doing what we hope cultures exist to do. A culture whose self-description has become ceremonious while its production has degraded is in the condition that historians recognize of late-period civilizations, in which the inherited infrastructure can disguise the degradation for a long time.
The question worth asking is not which condition we sit in, as that would not be entirely uniform and might be contested--but which way we have been moving, and the direction over the past several decades should not be in dispute among observers willing to look.
The Generational Ledger
The most concrete face of generative atrophy in our moment, and the one most resistant to argued dismissal, is the economic relationship between generations. This is where the diagnosis becomes measurable, documentable, and most difficult to evade.
I want to be careful about this framing because the topic invites factional argument from multiple directions. This is not a political claim. It is a structural observation about generational generativity, the question of whether grouped generational cohorts are producing the conditions for the next ones or extracting from them. Cultures that retain generative capacity at the generational scale leave the next cohorts better positioned than they were. Cultures that have lost generative capacity at the generational scale leave the next cohorts worse positioned, and dress the leaving in narratives that obscure what has happened.
If the general direction is clear, the specific pattern will obviously be uneven. Within any cohort, there are people for whom the conditions described do not apply. Some in the younger cohort inherit wealth or land in well-positioned work. Some in the older cohort watched the cultural drift with the same dismay that the analysis describes and never participated in the arrangements that benefited their generation. The pattern is not a uniform system imposing the same outcome on every individual, and an analysis does not require that. What it requires is the aggregate, the cohorts taken as wholes, and the direction of the zeitgeist.
The single most measurable signal is the collapse of intergenerational financial mobility, which has been documented across decades and across administrations of both parties.
Student loans were instituted as a solution to the rising cost of higher education and have, predictably, made that cost rise further while transferring the proceeds to financial intermediaries and the institutions that capture them. A generation has been saddled with debt that previous generations did not carry, in exchange for credentials whose value has been diluted by the same expansion that produced the debt. The narrative offered to the indebted is that they made personal choices and bear personal responsibility for the outcomes. The operative reality is that the structure was built by older cohorts that benefited from the financial flows it generated, and that the younger cohorts entered the structure under conditions of asymmetric information and limited alternatives.
Housing has produced a parallel pattern in the opposite direction. The older cohorts, having purchased homes when prices bore some relation to wages, have watched those homes appreciate to levels that have priced the younger cohorts out of ownership. The accumulated equity is real wealth, transferred to the older cohorts by the simple mechanism of holding while prices rose. The cumulative effect is the production of generations as renter classes, paying ever-larger fractions of income to landlords and financial institutions for shelter that previous generations could buy outright on a single salary. The narrative focuses on market forces and individual responsibility for housing decisions. The operative reality is generational extraction at scale.
Wages, adjusted for productivity, have been roughly flat for decades while the cost of the major life expenditures, housing, healthcare, and education, has risen sharply. The dual-income household has become a necessity rather than a choice for most families seeking the standard of living that the single-income household routinely produced two generations ago. The implications for child-rearing, family formation, and the simple availability of adult time for the work of forming the next generation are profound, and they show up downstream in declining birth rates, delayed family formation, and the felt impossibility of replicating the conditions in which the current adults were themselves raised.
The medical and insurance system is a pervasive case of the pattern, and possibly the one that touches the largest number of Americans most directly. The narrative is healthcare; the operative function is financial extraction through a system of intermediaries positioned between people and the medical care they need. Insurance, pharmaceutical pricing, hospital billing, and administrative overhead capture enormous value while delivering health outcomes that lag every peer country. The young pay premiums that subsidize the old. The healthy pay to subsidize the sick, which is defensible in principle, but in practice also subsidizes the apparatus that mediates the transfer. The structure is presented as the unavoidable outcome of complex policy tradeoffs. The actual structure is one in which a layer of well-positioned actors takes its share at every transaction, and the political system has been organized to prevent the simplifying reforms that would reduce the extraction. The cost falls disproportionately on the cohorts least able to absorb it.
The national debt, financed largely by transfers of obligation to future taxpayers, is the same dynamic at the level of the political economy. Decisions about spending, taxation, and entitlements have been made by cohorts who will not bear the costs, and the costs have been deferred onto cohorts who had no role in the decisions. The narrative is about complex policy tradeoffs and difficult fiscal realities. The operative reality is that the political system has been organized to prioritize the preferences of the older cohorts, which vote in higher numbers and hold the political and financial capital, over the interests of the younger cohorts, which do not yet vote in comparable numbers and have not yet accumulated the leverage to insist on consideration.
I want to acknowledge, before going further, that the framing is contested. Economists and policy analysts who have carefully examined these conditions sometimes argue that the patterns are better explained by demographic shifts, technological transformation, globalization, the integration of women into the workforce, and a series of policy choices made over decades whose intentions were varied and whose outcomes were largely unforeseen. There is substance in these readings. The wage stagnation is partly a productivity-and-globalization story. The housing prices are partly a regulatory and supply story. The student debt is partly a policy story about how higher education was financed. The medical system has complexities that resist any single-cause explanation. These readings are not entirely wrong, but they do not displace the generational reading.
The deeper diagnostic, however, does not finally turn on which causes were responsible. No generation is formally obligated to produce better conditions for the next; the obligation, where it exists, is cultural rather than contractual. What a generative culture does, almost by definition, is orient itself toward producing those conditions and treat that orientation as part of what mature adult life is for. The absence of that orientation, the willingness to look at the situation of the younger cohorts and conclude that the situation is their problem rather than ours, is what marks an unhealthy culture. The patterns have many causes. The unwillingness to accept responsibility for the patterned outcomes, regardless of cause, is a sign that something has gone wrong upstream of those causes.
The 2008 Inflection
If the pattern can be traced through many decades and many decisions, there is one moment that crystallizes it more clearly than any other, and the moment deserves to be named directly. The political and financial response to the 2008 financial crisis was the moment when the older cohorts, through the institutions they controlled, made an explicit choice to protect themselves at the expense of the people who would bear the long-term consequences of that decision.
The architecture of the crisis is by now well documented. A financial sector had spent two decades building extractive structures organized around housing debt and the derivatives layered on top of it. The structures generated enormous returns for those positioned within them, and when they collapsed, the collapse threatened to destroy the wealth of the people who had built them. The political response was to socialize the losses while preserving the gains--for those who were paying attention, the foxes were guarding the henhouse (Eric Holder, Attorney General at the time, had previously worked at a major law firm that represented large financial institutions, and the Justice Department did not bring criminal charges against senior executives at the largest institutions central to the crisis).
At the same time, millions of households experienced foreclosures, job losses, and large drops in net worth, with far less direct relief than institutions received. The institutions that had produced the crisis were rescued. The individuals who had grown wealthy through the extractive structures kept their wealth. The legal accountability that might have followed in a previous era did not follow. The political class that managed the response was either compromised by its proximity to the financial sector or lacked the will to do otherwise, and in many cases both.
What followed in the years after was, in my view, the most consequential failure of generational generativity in living American memory. The same extractive arrangements that had produced the crisis were resumed within a few years. The monetary response of sustained near-zero interest rates kicked the underlying problem down the road by inflating asset prices, benefiting the cohort that already owned assets at the expense of the cohort that did not. The wealth transfer that resulted, from young to old and from poor to rich, was on a scale that previous generations would have understood as a defining political event, and our political conversation has barely engaged it.
The pattern is not unique to the United States. The Greek experience after 2008 is the clearest international example and a textbook case of what I have elsewhere called structural victim-blaming. A financial crisis whose causes lay in the structures of European banking and the political class that shaped them was resolved through austerity imposed on the Greek population, who were then offered a moralized narrative about their own profligacy as the explanation for what they were being asked to bear. The Greek people had not built the financial structures that produced the crisis. They had not made the policy choices that left them exposed to it. They were nonetheless told, repeatedly and with institutional weight, that the suffering they were undergoing was a consequence of their own collective character. This is victim-blaming at a national scale.
The pattern is consistent. Decisions made by the financial and political class produce consequences. The consequences are then assigned to the population that is bearing them, dressed in the language of personal or collective responsibility. The mechanism repeats wherever the basic arrangement repeats.
I am aware that the analysis I have just offered carries an emotional charge. I am not pretending it doesn't. The recognition that something has been done, that decisions were made by identifiable people in identifiable institutions, and that those decisions reliably benefited specific cohorts, at the cost of the cohorts that would inherit the consequences, is the kind of recognition that produces a moral response in anyone whose moral apparatus is functioning. I want to engage the topic structurally rather than as a denunciation, but I also want to be clear that the structural and moral readings point in the same direction. What happened was unconscionable. The structure does not excuse the people who participated in it; the participation, repeated and consistent across institutions, is what produced the structure.
The political consequences are still unfolding. The MAGA movement and its analogs elsewhere are, at their core, coalitions of people who registered the betrayal even when they could not articulate it precisely. The fact that the response took the forms it did, including forms that did not actually address the underlying extraction and, in some cases, compounded it through other means, does not change the fact that the emotional conclusion was accurate. People knew something had been done to them. They knew the official explanations did not account for it. They knew the institutions that were supposed to represent them had not. That the response was then captured and redirected by other interests is a separate phenomenon. The original perception was real and was responding to real conditions.
The recent (and shocking) reemergence of the Epstein matter into public consciousness fits the same pattern and warrants proper identification. What the case represents is not a new phenomenon but the latest visible instance of something serious historians have always understood about concentrated power: that predation and secrecy travel together at the apex, that the institutional capacity to suppress unwelcome knowledge has been one of the durable functions of the arrangements that protect the powerful, and that what changes from era to era is not the underlying behavior but the visibility of it.
What is documented in this case is sufficient: a network involving extremely wealthy and powerful people operated for an extended period, with substantial institutional knowledge of its existence; legal accountability was conspicuously inadequate; and the deaths and suppressions surrounding the case have been handled in ways that strain credibility. This is not a conspiracy theory; it is the documented record. What is novel is not the predation but its visibility. The internet and the social media environment have eroded the institutional capacity to keep such matters within the closed circles that previous eras maintained, and the result is that patterns historians have always known about are now appearing to ordinary observers in a form closer to their actuality.
The cultural response, the way the case has been processed and not processed, is itself diagnostic. A generative culture would have pursued this to whatever conclusions the evidence supported. A culture in advanced generative atrophy has not.
I have come to think of the generation that came of age in the postwar prosperity and reached its full cultural influence in the period from roughly 1980 to 2020, as the Selfish Generation. The label is descriptive, not personal. The Silent Generation got its name from a cohort posture toward institutions, yet plenty of people in that cohort were not silent. The Selfish Generation gets its name from a cohort posture toward generational responsibility, and there are plenty of people in this cohort who tried to live otherwise, who watched the cultural drift with the same dismay the analysis describes, and who sometimes worked actively to slow it. The label names a movement, not a population. The pattern was produced in part by conditions the cohort did not choose, including unprecedented postwar prosperity that did not require the disciplines of restraint that scarcer conditions tend to produce. The result, in cultural aggregate, has been less generative than any cohort in recent memory.
The Pattern Generalizes
The pattern across these examples is consistent enough to constitute a finding rather than a list of grievances. The older cohorts, taken as a whole and acknowledging the substantial variation among individuals, have captured value at scale that would otherwise have been available to the younger cohorts. The institutions that mediated these transfers have positioned themselves as intermediaries, allowing them to take their share of the captured value while presenting the entire structure as natural, inevitable, or chosen. This is the operative function showing through where the generative function could be.
The cultural failure is not the existence of these conditions, which, after all, are the product of decisions made over decades by many actors with varying intentions. The cultural failure is the inability to discuss the situation honestly, in terms that name what has happened and locate responsibility where it actually sits. The conversation required to address these conditions, generation by generation, would involve the older cohorts acknowledging the structural advantage they captured, the institutions acknowledging the role they played, and the political system acknowledging that its arrangement has been organized around interests it does not name. None of that is happening at any meaningful scale, and the failure to have the conversation is itself diagnostic. A generative culture would have it. A culture in advanced generative atrophy substitutes victim-blaming for the structural conversation and treats the symptoms of extraction as personal failures of those being extracted from. The kids are anxious. Young people lack resilience. They should buy fewer lattes.
The young people are not failing on their own. They are inheriting a structure that has been organized to extract from them while telling them the extraction is their choice, and they are responding to that structure in the ways the architecture of the human mind responds to such conditions: with declining willingness to participate in the institutions that have failed them, declining willingness to form families they cannot afford to support, declining willingness to invest in a future that has been mortgaged in advance. The mental health crisis, the falling birth rates, the political alienation, the retreat from civic participation, the various forms of withdrawal that the older cohort regards as character failures in the younger, are downstream of a more basic refusal: the refusal (conscious or not) to keep playing a game whose rules have been arranged to ensure they cannot win.
Bread and Circuses
One historical mechanism is worth naming briefly before closing. Bread and circuses was the Roman observation that a class that has stopped producing legitimacy for its position will produce distraction in its place. The mechanisms vary across eras; the function is consistent. Spectacle, manufactured outrage, political theater, large-scale events designed to coalesce support or sow disharmony, and at the extreme end, war itself--all serve to pull collective attention away from questions the arrangement cannot answer honestly. It is not a stretch to see, in some of what is currently being staged at the highest levels of political and media life, including what at first looks like factional conflict, the contemporary form of the pattern. The deeper questions remain unaddressed because the apparatus is busy producing the conditions that prevent them from being addressed.
Closing
The generational ledger is the most concrete face of what has happened, and it is the one that an honest reading of the past forty years cannot avoid. People in the conditions that produce falling birth rates, political alienation, the retreat from family formation, and the various forms of withdrawal that the older cohorts regard as character failures in the younger cohorts are reporting, through their lives, what the culture is failing to provide. The institutional response, the smooth procedural accommodation that mistakes the symptoms for choices and the lecture about personal responsibility that mistakes the structural for the individual, tells us where the culture currently is.
