A Twitter conversation last night reminded me that I meant to do a little more digging into car ownership to find out if millennials are really less likely to own cars than previous generations. For starters, here’s overall car ownership:

Starting around 2003, car ownership rates started to level off for an obvious reason: we had hit a rate of nearly one vehicle for every adult in the country. There just wasn’t much higher to go. Then, when the Great Recession started in 2009, car ownership dipped modestly.

Now here’s the rate of householders (owners + renters) who are car-free:

We have more recent data here, so we can see that car-free living went up during the Great Recession but then dipped back down when the economy picked up. The recession hit young people worse than the middle-aged, so a sizeable gap had opened up by 2011. That gap narrowed a bit by 2016 as people started buying cars again, but it was still bigger than it was in 2005. Young people weren’t giving up their car-free status quite as quickly as everyone else.

Is that because more millennials had decided to give up on cars? Or because millennials were hit harder by the recession and didn’t recover as quickly? Here’s a Fed study that looks into that question:

The far right column shows the change in car ownership. The number for millennials is slightly higher than the others, but they’re all very close to zero, which suggests no change by age group once you control for income. In other words, millennials have reduced their car ownership slightly, but mainly because they were harder hit by the recession.

Overall, I’d say the evidence suggests, at most, a very slight decline in millennial preference for cars. The notion that they’ve given up on cars in favor of bicycles and mass transit just isn’t true.

So why is this so commonly asserted? At a guess, it’s because the people who write about it mostly live in large cities, where it’s common to be carless—and became even more common during the recession. That led to lots of feature stories about young people who don’t even have driver’s licenses anymore, and eventually to a vague conviction there was some kind of trend here. Not only was this an overreaction to something that was mostly a symptom of the recession, but it’s also a bit of a “no one I know voted for Nixon” thing. Even if millennials in New York and San Francisco are driving less, that’s only a tiny fraction of the whole country. When you broaden your focus, there’s really nothing much going on.

WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

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Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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