The post is a satisfying inversion of the usual one. Instead of boomers tutting at feckless youth, here the young are quietly repairing the wreckage their elders left behind. Like its mirror image, it flatters whoever is telling it, and, also like its mirror image, it turns out to be a blend of something genuinely real and something quite misleading. Separating the two is worth the effort, because the real parts are interesting in their own right, and the misleading part is precisely the same error the “kids these days” complaints make, merely pointed in the opposite direction.
What is genuinely changing
Begin with the grain of truth, because there is a solid one. Younger cohorts really have changed some behaviours, and the data are not subtle about it. Long-running surveys such as Monitoring the Future show teenage smoking, drinking and drug use falling to the lowest levels ever recorded, with record shares of teenagers reporting no alcohol, cannabis or nicotine at all in the previous month. Cigarette smoking among the young peaked in the late 1990s and has dropped steeply ever since. Alongside those behavioural shifts sit real changes in stated attitudes, on the environment, on social tolerance, and more. So the claim is not a fantasy. On a number of specific measures, the young are doing demonstrably less of what used to count as ordinary risk.
And a real intergenerational squeeze
The story also rests on a real grievance, and it is an economic one. In an influential 2017 study in Science, the economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues measured absolute mobility, the share of children who grow up to earn more than their parents did, and found that it had collapsed. It fell from around ninety per cent for those born in 1940 to roughly fifty per cent for those born in the 1980s. What had once been a near-certainty became a coin flip.
Younger people, in other words, are not imagining the steeper climb; the ladder genuinely did get harder to climb. To that extent the word “damage” in the headline points at something true. Millions of younger people face materially worse odds than their parents did at the same age, and feeling aggrieved about it is not entitlement but arithmetic. Any honest account has to grant that the frustration underneath the meme is grounded in fact.
Why “boomer damage” is the wrong frame
Here, though, the story goes wrong, and it goes wrong in a specific and revealing way: it converts a set of conditions into a cast of characters. Chetty’s own analysis is unusually pointed about the cause. The collapse in mobility was driven overwhelmingly not by slower economic growth but by how unequally the growth that did happen was shared, a matter of tax, wage, housing and education policy accumulated across decades. That is a structural and political story rather than a moral tale about a generation’s character, and no cohort convened to vote it into being.
The fall in youth risk behaviour resists the heroic reading just as firmly. It is best explained by changes in circumstance, more involved parenting, far more time spent online and correspondingly less unstructured time to get into trouble, and shifting social norms, rather than by any collective decision among the young to undo their elders’ mistakes. Boomers did not, as a bloc, choose to harm anyone, any more than Gen Z has, as a bloc, chosen to save the world. Treating either generation as a single moral agent is exactly the mistake that powers the “kids these days” grumbling in the other direction, and it is no more accurate for being aimed at the old than at the young.
What the evidence does and does not settle
A few honest limits belong here. The behavioural declines are real but partial, since some risks have climbed even as others have fallen, and drinking less is not the same thing as flourishing. The mobility figures are largely American and describe averages across an enormous and varied population, not the fate of any particular person. And attributing outcomes to conditions rather than to cohorts does not mean that nobody bears responsibility; specific policies had specific advocates, and generations do hold real political power at particular moments. The point is narrower than that. It is simply that “boomers” and “the young” are far too blunt as the units by which to hand out blame and credit for changes this large.
Read this way, the satisfying headline dissolves into something less satisfying and considerably more useful. Some real things are improving, some real things have grown harder, and none of it amounts to a war between a wicked generation and a virtuous one. The young are not so much reversing boomer damage as living through, and responding to, a different set of conditions from the ones their parents met. The productive question was never which generation to thank or to blame. It is which of those conditions, the inequality, the housing costs, the norms, the policies, we would actually choose to change. That question, unlike the blame, has answers.
