How Birth Year Shapes Your Economic Future
Does it even make sense to divide us by generations?
From avocado toast jokes to accusations of entitlement, every generation seems to get its turn in the spotlight of stereotypes. In this episode of The Missing Middle, economist Mike Moffatt and journalist Cara Stern dig into where these labels come from and, more importantly, whether generations really do experience the economy differently.
They explore how major historical shocks from the Great Depression and World War II to 9/11, the Great Recession, and the pandemic, shape our values, anxieties, and opportunities. The conversation moves beyond clichés to examine how birth year, cohort size, housing markets, job markets, technology, and public policy combine to create very different economic realities for Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z.
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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, which has been lightly edited.
Mike Moffatt: So, Cara, as a Gen Xer, I got to ask you, have you had your avocado toast today?
Cara Stern: I’m so glad that’s become a joke, because for a while there, it seemed like that wasn’t said as a joke. “That’s why you can’t afford a house! It’s just because of all that avocado toast you’re eating, just stop spending all that money, and you’ll be able to afford it. Stop complaining.”
Mike Moffatt: Yeah. Whereas, we were just told that we don’t care about anything. And my response to that is, meh.
Cara Stern: But I’d rather “meh” than the kind of stereotypes I’ve heard about Millennials. The usual is entitled, expecting to be celebrated, just for participating. I remember booking a real estate pundit who was talking about whether we should be able to see what people are bidding on homes, which I’m like, I don’t know if that’s going to make prices go up or down, but it’s definitely fairer to know what’s actually happening. And I remember, even in that situation, being told, well, that’s basically a participation medal. Millennials just want participation medals.
And you’d hear they would job hop all the time. They won’t stay where they’re going. They’re not committed or loyal to their employers. They’re absolutely hemorrhaging money on frivolities, like avocado toast or fancy coffee and new phones every year. We’ve heard it all.
We just spend all our money on things that don’t matter. But at least now we’re old enough that we get to do the same thing to Gen Z, which is kind of fun. So, I can sit here being like, they get all their news on TikTok. Oh my gosh, they’re so easily offended and clearly not as hardworking as we were.
The weirdest thing with Gen Z, to me, is they’re completely fine with mobile technology. I’ve heard that they book plane tickets on their phone instead of pulling out the laptop! I will never understand that! They’re just a bunch of weirdos.
Mike Moffatt: Well, I would also say that you have Boomers who think that it’s strange not to call up a travel agent if you want to go somewhere. So absolutely there are these kinds of generational differences where I think Boomers have a different view of things, different view of what homes cost, how easy it is or not easy it is to get your first job.
So there are these kinds of big differences in outlook. And I do think that the year you were born, on some level, does change your thinking.
Cara Stern: We hear a lot of these stereotypes, like obviously, we were joking. But we hear a lot about these different generations and how they’re this way or that way. And of course, when you look closer, you’re going, “Okay, well, I can think of lots of people in that generation that they’re not like that.” It actually doesn’t paint a full picture.
Does any of this actually matter when we group people that way? Is this just a marketing thing, or is there actually anything real there?
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, there’s one view that some people have that this is horoscopes for statistical nerds. People who are born under this year, sign or this way or that way, but, I would argue that it does make a difference. That one of the things that we see is that there are different numbers of people born in different years.
So as somebody born in 1977, which was kind of the low point for births in Canada. There weren’t a lot of us, so schools had trouble staying open. You saw empty classrooms. For my generation, in most parts of Canada, you didn’t really have that many portable classrooms. You didn’t really need them, because you had these schools that were under populated. And, 5, 10, 15 years later, it was just the opposite, right?
How many people are there looking for entry level jobs versus the number of jobs out there? That makes a difference. Whether or not you are graduating during a recession or an economic boom.
So it absolutely does make a difference. It’s not just horoscopes for actuaries. The year that you were born in, and the generation that you were born in, really does dictate a lot of how you interact with society and the economy.
Cara Stern: Have we always grouped people into different generations like this?
Mike Moffatt: Well, the concept of generations goes back to antiquity. It’s one of the most commonly used words in the Old Testament or the Torah. But, they meant it in a different way there. You have grandfather, father to son, that kind of generational thing.
But in the kind of modern meaning, which is a social cohort of all the people born within the same decade or the same set of years, that goes back to the 1920s from a guy going by the name of Karl Manheim, who wrote an essay called The Problem of Generations. And Mannheim’s basic idea is that generations are created early. So when you have a group of young people who experience a major historical shock at the same time, they internalize those events during their childhood, and it becomes part of their personality during their childhood, teens and early adulthood.
So a classic example is the greatest generation. So these were kids that were born in the 1910s and 1920s. They fought in World War 2 and that was their defining moment. You had the Silent Generation, who were kids that were born during the Great Depression or during World War 2 during a time of deprivation, when the economy wasn’t doing well. There was rationing, and it was hard to get material goods.
You had the Baby Boomers who grew up in the postwar baby boom and so on. You had Generation Xers like me who grew up in this baby bust where there weren’t a lot of us running around and those childhood experiences shaped how we interact with the world.
Cara Stern: It seems interesting to look back at those times and be like, OK, those were the moments that shaped those generations. It’s so different seeing it as it’s happening. I wonder, when you’re thinking of you as a Gen X, the stereotypes that you’re hearing now, were those relevant to you at the time? Did you feel them at the time? Did they make sense? Or was it only in looking back that you noticed it?
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I think there’s a little bit in hindsight where you kind of notice the things that happened and how they impacted you and your friends in your cohort.
So, if you look at Generation X — and it’s a big cohort spanning almost two decades — so it depends a little bit where you were born in that cohort, but the experience in a lot of our formative years was this real feeling that you’re on your own. You had the kind of latchkey kid phenomenon, where you have two parents working, kid comes home from school at 8 or 9 years old, has their own key, unlocks the door, makes their own peanut butter jelly sandwich, goes and watches Looney Tunes or The Flintstones or whatever.
You had deep job loss, recessions in the early 80s and early 90s where we saw our parents get laid off or some of us went into a job market that was really weak. You had the whole 1980s Reagan, Thatcher, Mulroney shift away from big government and towards kind of individualism, big loss of union jobs. You had government inaction or incompetence during the Aids crisis.
I remember one of the big formative things in my childhood is watching the Challenger blow up on live TV, killing some astronauts, including an elementary school teacher. We saw that happen live, so that and that recognition that there weren’t that many of us, the kind of bust generation, we really grew up and internalized this idea that you are on your own, nobody’s looking out for you. You’ve got to kind of make it or break it by yourself. I’m guessing your generation and your experiences as a Millennial differed from ours.
Cara Stern: For sure. And you’re saying that you guys were taught to be very independent and rely on yourself. And it’s unfortunate, I didn’t realize that meant that you’d be the last generation to be able to do that when it comes to moving up in classes in Canada. Now we just all need our family’s help to get us there.
It’s unfortunate. If only we were raised with a little bit more of that independence maybe, I don’t know, that’s what someone maybe that’s what I would tell me about why we don’t do that.
But for my generation, I think about the internet and social media playing a huge, huge role in shaping how we see the world.
You can look back to big events like 9/11, obviously a huge one, and the Great Recession. A lot of us — obviously it’s a big generation as well — but a lot of us graduated or were in the early years of our career during the Great Recession.
So you get out of school, you do all the right things, you go to university — I think we’re the most educated generation that there ever was — and we all did the things you’re supposed to do and you graduate and you’re like, where is my decent paying job? I thought that I’d be able to buy the things I need to live the kind of life that my parents were able to live. That really shaped a lot of people.
I notice that with a lot of Millennials, there seems to be a bit of hesitancy to invest, for example in some of the stock market. Of course, you’ve got the people investing in Bitcoin. But there’s definitely a lot of people who have a lot of distrust because the first year as an adult, there was a once in a lifetime market crash. And then again, with the pandemic, not many years later, 12 years later.
There’s also the sense of both opportunity, but also instability that goes along with that. So a lot of people would look at Millennials and say, “Oh my God, you guys can make so much money in tech. You can make so much more money than I ever could have imagined making at that age.”
And there are Millennials who have made a ton of money, but there’s also the other side of that, where there’s a lot that haven’t. There’s a lot of instability. So yes, there are opportunities and flexible work like gig work, and there wasn’t the same sort of flexibility for your generation. But at the same time, it came with the lack of stability on the other side of it.
And that’s not even getting into the climate anxiety that we all grew up with. Climate change has played a huge role in how a lot of us see the world.
Mike Moffatt: Well, yeah absolutely. And sort of in Gen-X, we had nuclear war anxiety and hiding under desks during schools. But you see these differences.
The first job I ever had was delivering the Toronto Star. And I started in 1985. And you do the math on that. I was eight years old. If we did that nowadays, if I had my Gen Alpha kid, out on their own delivering newspapers at eight years old, I’d probably be arrested, right?
Cara Stern: So definitely a change of culture there.
Mike Moffatt: Massive, massive change in culture. And that’s actually one of the reasons why I find this “generations” label so useful. It’s that different birth cohorts often have trouble relating to each other, because they don’t often recognize how their formative years shape their personalities, or that they had a different set of opportunities in their adult life than the rest of us.
And one of my favorite examples goes back to the late 1980s, when I was a kid, one of my older relatives, we had to move her into a nursing home, and we had to clean out her apartment. And she was in her late teens when the depression started. So, she was born a little bit after 1910, and they really struggled through it.
And because of that, she hoarded everything. She could not turn down a deal, and she always wanted to have lots of food around, all kinds of stuff. I remember, I was probably about 11, 12 years old at the time. And I remember cleaning enough powdered hot chocolate mix and tea to last a century.
She had tea towels that she had bought in the 1960s, and this is, again, the late 80s, completely unwrapped. It had not been used, and I couldn’t relate to that as a kid. I found that very weird behavior because it struck me as incredibly wasteful, why buy these things and not use them? But now that I’m older and have that kind of middle-aged guy hobby of reading history and spent a lot of time reading about the depression and thinking about the depression. I understand it on an intellectual level.
Maybe not an emotional one, but I can understand it better than I did when I was a kid, when it just struck me as very odd behavior. Now, have you ever had those experiences where you are dealing with somebody who’s a different generation and you just feel like you’re from two different worlds or vice versa, have them just not be able to understand what you’re doing, because they don’t understand the circumstances under which you exist?
Cara Stern: For sure, the first thing that comes to mind is the job market. You hear a lot of people saying, well, you just go knock on the door, hand in your resume, make sure you talk to a person and talk to a manager and that’s how you’ll get a job. That actually did apply when I was a teenager. It does not apply anymore. It’s all online nowadays. And that’s still the case I think, even if I was applying for jobs now, it’s all online. You’re competing against robots.
People don’t understand how difficult it is. There is not the same sort of way that you can just show you’re a keener and just go in there and work your way up in a company — start at the bottom and move up. It doesn’t seem to be working the same way that it did in the past. Things have changed. I think technology has been a big one for that.
Housing, of course, is another one, because as I said, people would always say, “You’re just not spending your money on the right things. You’re not working hard enough.” And, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve had this argument with. I keep saying, “The version of you who worked hard to get this giant house, that exact same version of you nowadays would not get those same outcomes. You can work just as hard, but you’re still not making it as successful as you have.”
That’s something that is really hard for people to understand. And I think it’s something that even Millennials need to realize. Things have changed since we were 20-somethings. Things have changed nowadays for people in Gen Z and I’m worried about Gen Alpha. They’re growing up in a different time period.
And I hope we all remember the way that people have spoken to us when we start talking to younger generations. Our university experiences were very different from what they are like nowadays.
When you talk about things like someone keeping everything around, I think about how so much of our things that we buy have become quite disposable.
Things don’t last. And so there’s less of a need to hold on to things. And so there’s a little bit more of a willingness to throw things out. And that has led to, I think, the Millennial ideal of minimalism. That’s an aesthetic you see a lot online, especially when you’re looking at homes and interior decorating online.
It seems like a lot of it really points to being quite minimalist, and I think it’s a bit of a reaction to the fact that people are living in smaller spaces than they grew up in. And so they need to have fewer things. You just can’t fit in that much inside there. So I think that’s how it became such a big, popular aesthetic.
One of the biggest differences between generations seems to be in those sizes. Like we talk about Baby Boomers being a huge generation. You said you guys were the bust generation, and then Millennials are also a huge generation. How much does size affect your generational experience?
Mike Moffatt: I think quite a bit in a few ways. One is, again, that kind of level of competition. How many people might be competing for that entry level job? But a lot of it is also political clout. If you look, there’s this kind of running meme that, for most of the last 30-some-odd years, the president of the United States has been born in 1946.
Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and George W Bush were all born within about two months of each other, in 1946, which is absolutely bananas. Biden was born in ’42 and a lot of that has to do with the fact that there are just so many Baby Boomers and they are voting for somebody in their own cohort.
And you see this, policy wise, that one of the things I often hear is, “Well, we built all this social housing and apartments in the ’70s. Why can’t we do that now?” And we go, “Well, look who was around in the ’70s.” It was all the Baby Boomers moving in with mom and dad, and they all needed housing. And there was a ton of them, and they had a ton of political clout. So we built a lot of that back then.
Why didn’t we build that stuff in the ’90s? Well, it’s because there were like four Gen Xers in the country and that was about it. And they didn’t. We didn’t need to be housed.
Now at the same time it was great for us. Home prices were relatively cheap because we weren’t competing with hundreds of thousands other home buyers. And, we had easy rules to build homes. And that’s a whole other pile of episodes. But the short answer does matter. And we look at what policy areas become important over time. And they really do track what Baby Boomers have been interested in over the last 10 or 15 years. Where’s all the money going? It’s to Old Age Security, it’s to GIS, it’s to health care and so on. It’s just because there are so many Baby Boomers who have these needs and it affects public policy.
Cara Stern: You think that Millennials were such a big generation that at some point we’d be able to say, “OK, let’s make policies that work for Millennials.” And I don’t know how much of it is people not voting and how much of it is that a lot of Millennials are getting help from their Baby Boomers parents who have done quite well.
We’re trying to build a place where people don’t need their parents’ wealth in order to get ahead, but there are a lot who have had it, so maybe that it’s not as important to them compared to people who haven’t been able to. Would you say that’s part of it?
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I think that’s part of it. That you do have people who are getting a fair bit of inherited wealth and, because of that, aren’t looking to rock the boat. I feel like there’s also a level of polarization in or around Millennials, that your generation doesn’t necessarily agree on the problems or the solutions in a way that other generations might.
But yeah, it’s an ongoing question I have. I think we’ll have to have David Coletto or people like that on to explain, because it is a bit of a puzzle to me why we haven’t seen this level of political clout from Millennials in a way that we saw from the Baby Boomers in the ’70s and ’80s.
I’m at a bit of a loss, if you’ve got, ideas, if our audience has ideas, leave them in the comments because that’s one of the questions that I’ve had, but I’ve never really been able to come up with an answer that I’ve been satisfied with.
Cara Stern: One thing that bothers me is that it shouldn’t rely on a generation being big enough to be able to change policy. I don’t know why we’re building policy just for the biggest generation, for the loudest voices. I understand why, because they’re the ones who vote. So politicians do that. But I wish that people understood. I wish we had a sense of responsibility for future generations.
And I know people feel it like when it comes to their own kids, their own grandkids, a lot of people do feel that sense of responsibility. But I wish it was across the board, we’d look at like, how do we help future generations? So they don’t need to struggle more than we did, that we can keep the ladder there so they can keep climbing up.
I know when I think about a lot of unions, for example, you had people who would have some really good pensions, the employer would be trying to cut money and they’d say, “OK, well, what if you guys kept your pensions, but the new people coming in, they won’t get the same pensions.” And people go, “Well, I guess that’s a fair compromise. At least we won’t be affected.”
A lot of that has happened over and over and over in society, where people said, “OK, well, as long as it doesn’t affect me, fine. I understand this is not sustainable for the future.” And instead of being like, let’s equalize it or find a solution that does keep things as good for the future as it was for them, a lot of people just kind of go, “OK, well, I’m sorry we can’t afford that anymore.”
And I want to see more people have that kind of feeling that they need to help future generations. They need to make sure that everyone can get ahead, whether or not they have parents to help them. I feel like it’s the right thing to do, but also because, think about if you want to live in a society where people cannot get ahead without their parents giving them money. That’s not that’s not the society I want to live in.
It’s not great. Even if you’re not directly affected, I think you will be if everyone around you can’t afford homes just because their parents didn’t buy one. It’s a real problem. And I think we kind of have this duty to the future to not pull the ladder up behind us.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And it’s a large part of why we started the Missing Middle Initiative and why I do what I do for a living.
I believe that one of the things that makes a society work is that we should have a better standard of living than our parents had, and our kids should have a better standard of living than we have.
I’ve heard people call it the campground theory. That you should leave a campground better than when you found it. That’s where I am on this, that we have a duty to future generations to leave them better off. And I do feel that we don’t, we’re not doing a great job of that. Boomers get a lot of flack for that.
Mike Moffatt: But, I think my generation, Gen X, could be doing a whole lot more as well. So I’m cautiously optimistic with podcasts like this one, we can help create that future, because I do think we are going to a very dark place if we have future generations who think that the deck is stacked against them and they’ll just never be able to succeed.
Cara Stern: Yeah. I don’t want to live in a society filled with hopeless people. And that’s a lot of what we’re trying to get out with this demographics show. We want to talk about how generations are experiencing the economy differently. We’re not just focusing on the younger generations and how difficult it is for them, because there are challenges all across the economy for different generations.
Everyone experiences it differently.
There are, I understand, Boomers have done quite well, but they’re all struggling in different ways. And if we are trying to fix it, to make it more equal for future generations, they actually have needs that need to be addressed too. We want to tackle all of that on this show, so we’re really hoping that you’ll tune into the rest of them.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. So that’s the key that we are looking at. How the different generations are shaping Canada, but also how Canada is shaping those generations. So, hope you’ll stick around for more, data driven social commentary on the importance of demographics that with everything else going on in the world, we feel that is an issue that isn’t receiving quite enough attention.
And we’re hoping to change that.
Cara Stern: Thanks so much for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin and our editor is Sean Foreman.
Mike Moffatt: And if you have any questions about the hoarding behavior of the Silent Generation, please let us know in the comments or send us an email to [email protected].
Cara Stern: And we’ll see you next time.
Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:
Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative
You had Looney Tunes and Flintstones after school?! Luxury! I had fuzzy Mighty Mouse and Giligan's Island reruns from the Detroit station and had to go over to Gordie Ferguson's house to watch them in colour.