Millennials Are Doing Fine These Days

Over at Vox, Aditi Shikrant takes on the question of why custom picture framing is so expensive. I’m curious about that myself. But she goes off the rails here:

The perception that custom framing is too pricey is also a symptom of a different reality: Millennial consumers — long past their poster-hanging days — have less money than previous generations. Young adults are decorating homes and apartments with more budget-friendly art.

We really need to stop this. It’s just not true:

Millennial incomes are no lower than previous generations. Nor, generally speaking, are millennials more in debt, less likely to own a home, or less likely to spend money. You can pick out a few small differences depending on how you cherry pick years and which generations you compare to, but millennials right now are roughly as well off as young people in previous generations and their spending habits are pretty similar too.

This hasn’t always been true, of course. Millennials were hit pretty hard by the Great Recession. But a decade of recovery has put millennials in roughly the same financial position as Gen Xers and boomers when they were young.

Millennials have pretty clearly struggled harder in certain ways compared to previous generations—college debt is an obvious example—but it’s time to stop pretending that in 2019 they’re all poor little mice who spend money more frugally than their parents. The evidence just doesn’t back that up.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, custom framing is apparently expensive because, in addition to the obvious labor costs, frame shops have to keep lots and lots of different options in inventory.

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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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