 Good afternoon. I'm David Gray, and on behalf of the New America Foundation, thanks for joining us. Thanks for those who are watching over the web. As we gather today to talk about why 20 and 30-something's young adults are moving back home, it's a fascinating topic as we think about research that Pew and others have looked at the rise since 1980, so about the number of 25 to 34 year olds who were living with their parents, in particular 18 to 24 year olds. And what are the implications for families? What are the causes, economic and otherwise, of the trend, and are there solutions that are there pros and cons to this? I'm sure there are both, and are the things policy-wise that we should be doing to change, and what are the implications for families? And all of that today we'll discuss. And we're thrilled today that Katherine Newman is back. She's a friend of New America, and she has a terrific book on sale outside called The Accordion Family, which is a commend to you. She's at Johns Hopkins, and we're glad Katherine, you're with us again today. So we'll hear from Katherine to talk a bit about her researcher work, her insights on the trend, and then Phil Longman, who's a fellow here and a longtime leader at the New America Foundation. We'll have a chance to respond, and then we'll have any questions that you have for Katherine and for Phil, and we'll talk about the the trend and where we go from here. So please join me in welcoming Katherine Newman. Katherine? Well, thanks so much, David, and thank you, Phil, for your interest in this topic. I'm looking forward to the discussion. So, um, oops, where am I slide? Wait, now it's here. Good. All right. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks again. So I've been interested for some time now in the patterns of home-leaving that have developed in the advanced industrial and post-industrial world, and I've been particularly interested in the lengthening period of time that young people have been attached to their natal families in some countries, and the very early departure of young people in other countries. And if we were to generalize at 10,000 feet, I've lumped these patterns roughly according to the structure of the welfare states that undergird them. In the weak welfare states of southern Europe and Japan, where social transfers are fairly minimal and privatized housing is the norm, the patterns of elongated attachment to the natal home is the most pronounced in the world. In the generous welfare states of the Nordic countries, young people continue to leave home at a very early age, as they have consistently done since the development of all of those social protections. In some respects, that Nordic pattern is a twist on a century-old pattern of home-leaving in which young people left your northern European families and joined the households of their masters to work as servants. And so this actually goes all the way back to the Middle Ages as we're looking for the cultural origins of these patterns. But you do have these very distinctive extremes of the weak welfare states on the one hand and the very, very strong welfare states on the other and distinctive patterns of home-leaving associated with both. In the middle, we find countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, the liberal states, to use Esping Anderson's terminology. And in common with the Nordic countries, the U.S., for example, has a very large rental sector in housing and has therefore very low barriers to entry. And for middle and upper middle class students, a stock of transitional housing attached to colleges and universities. But the U.S. is in the middle for less virtuous reasons as well. We offer fairly weak protections in the labor market, more akin to those in southern Europe and Japan, and lengthening requirements for education among those who hope to reach the professions. And these social facts, unstable employment and expensive time-consuming education, have combined to create this boomerang phenomenon in the pattern of home departures in which young people in the middle and upper middle class leave to go to college and return to the nest to seek shelter. So what I want to do now is just to run through some of the variations so you can just see I'm not making this up, and then talk a little bit about the causal linkages between welfare states and patterns of home-leaving. So if we were going to look, for example, at this European quality of life survey data that lets us see just how much variation there is across the EU in residential patterns, you see that there's really quite an extraordinary degree of difference. A hefty proportion of young people, both men and women, are living with their parents in the southern European countries, while a very tiny proportion are doing so on the far left-hand side of this chart in the Nordic countries. When we look at this slide now restricted to men age 20 to 34 living with their parents, we can see that this pattern diminishes actually as they get older. So when you get to the green bar, which is 30 to 34, not surprisingly the pattern goes down, but it's still quite high if we look at the southern European countries that you are hearing so much about these days in the Euro crisis zone, Italy, Greece and Spain. So on average across the southern countries about 40% of men in their early 30s are staying at the inn of mom and dad. The pattern looks a little bit different for women, but the difference is between the southern states of the EU and the northern ones remains. So you have both for men and women a delayed departure pattern in the southern European countries. Now the southern European cultures are exceeded only by Japan, which is really out on the edge. The proportion of unmarried young adults who live with their parents has remained high and largely stable for three of the six age and sex groups in this chart. And it's grown by five or six percent for the other three. Now this is going back into the period looking before the bursting of the bubble in Japan and right into the middle of that bursting period, which they're still mired in now. And it shows this arrangement persisting with unmarried men and women remaining with their parents in Japan in this age group, leveling off at around 65%. Well unmarried people in Japan have always lived with their parents. The proportion who follow the American custom of living with roommates or living alone even in their 30s has never climbed above 30% in Japan. What has changed is the age of marriage. If you can squint here and see these numbers and if you look down this chart you'll see that the age of marriage has absolutely skyrocketed in Japan over the last 30 or 40 years. So starting off in 1950 where the age of marriage for women was about 23 it's now up to 28 and a half and it was 25 or so for men is now up to 30 and this has enormous consequences. It is bound up in the pattern of home leaving. Now other changes during the last 40 years or so have also contributed to the pattern of delayed departure. Unemployment being an important force here. It has steadily worsened in Japan especially among younger age groups following the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble. It's not that surprising when you look at the top line here that's 15 to 19 year olds they're still in school but look down at the next line the 20 to 24 age group and you'll see that in 1968 it was way down at 1% and it's climbed it's now up to about 7% over this space of time and that's quite a significant jump. In fact it's jumped into all these age groups so that 20 to 24 age group sets the pattern that we're seeing accelerate in Japan because those people have now emerged into their 30s and they're still home with mom and dad. All around the developed world global competition has led to increased pressure to liberalize labor laws and permit temporary work short term contracts and part term arrangements. In Japan this has led to a sharp upswing in what they call free ters. This is not a positive term this is a negative term in Japan and it refers to temporary workers. It expresses a kind of social disdain for this category and a second class citizenship within the labor market. Free ters are not earning the kinds of wages that will support a family. The free ters phenomenon now engulfs about one third of the Japanese youth labor market up from about 12% in 1980 and something closer to 5% before that so it has sharply turned upwards. And again it's not surprising then that you find Japanese young people staying home in ever larger numbers they're not earning the kind of money it takes to live independently and they don't have contracts that are durable enough for them to persuade anyone to loan them money for home buying and I'll get to the home buying question in just a moment. Well there are free ters all over the world it seems. In response to international competition in Spain for example the government authorized the use of temporary labor contracts for the first time in the mid 1980s. Older workers who were already in the labor market could protect themselves politically from this impact but within a fairly short period of time young men were pretty substantially affected. So between 1987 and 2007 the proportion of young salary workers holding a temporary contract increased by more than 25% in each of the age groups you see here reaching its maximum at least as of the data I had I suspect if I could go back and redo this for today it would be even higher. In the 1990s when three out of four employed people in the 20 to 24 age group and one out of two of those between 25 and 29 had only a temporary labor contract and the mean wage of full time young salary workers is well below that for the rest of the sample and it kept worsening throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. So the introduction of these temporary labor contracts really hit new entrance to the labor market very hard. Now what does that got to do with young people where they live? Well it has everything to do with where they live because it tells you what they can afford. And so when you look at this chart for example which looks at the proportion of young workers with temporary contracts mapped against those who live at home with their parents you see a pretty robust relationship. So you can see here this is across the European Union Quality of Life Survey that the proportion of young people 25 to 39 and that's not so young actually who live at home goes way up as their temporary employment increases. Now rocky employment patterns are not the only causal factor at play here. Variations in the form and the cost of housing make a big difference as well. So in some countries especially in the weaker welfare states privately owned housing is the main form of residence. Private housing is the safety net underneath families who can't rely on the state for welfare payments. So much so that in places like Italy family property is seldom traded on anything approaching the open market and in Spain owner occupied housing takes up over 80% of the households. In Italy it's a similar pattern especially the further south you go. So these are the countries in which the mortgage system that we know here in the US is very underdeveloped or we might say with hindsight is prudent if you will. It typically requires in many of the European countries down payments of over 50% of the value of a house. If you have to save 50% of the value of a house and all you can get is a temporary labor contract at a modest wage the likelihood that you'll ever be able to live in owner occupied housing goes down precipitously. So this combination of high levels of owner occupied housing and weak labor market prospects make it very difficult for young workers to be on their own. It right up and including those in their 30s and so they are at the end of mom and dad instead. And so what this chart is showing you is the proportion of owner occupied housing. As owner occupied housing goes up as a proportion of the housing market altogether you see in more and more young people in accordion families. Well Europeans are not unaware of this problem. The Euro barometer survey completed in 2007 asked respondents why young adults are living with their parents longer than they used to. And the combination of affordability and lack of housing supply came up as the overwhelming response. So they're not unaware of this. Now what about the United States? Well those of you who are like I am parents of young people in their 20s and 30s may be wondering if this is going to be your problem in the future. And the short answer is that you would have been far more likely to confront the issue in 1940 than now. The most dramatic pattern the most dramatic change in patterns of home leaving occurred after the Second World War when the proportion of unmarried 25 year olds who lived with mom and dad declined very sharply. That slide increased between 1940 and 1970 basically the period in which the baby boom was born and raised and which wages were rising rapidly and which home ownership became more and more accessible to the average American. Historically white men were far more likely to live with their parents and black men interestingly enough and the gap between the two groups narrowed after 1940 and eventually reversed direction in 1970. Since 1970 black men have experienced much steeper increases in rates of living at home than white men have. But from around 1980 onward they were more likely to live with their parents than they had been at any point prior in the 20th century. American women tend to leave home earlier than men because they marry earlier and for that reason fewer women of both races live with their parents at age 25. Trends in cohabitation with parents for white women paralleled that of white men. Namely that there's a steep decline in living with parents between 1940 to about 1960 followed by a gradual rise that's far below the original high levels of the 1940s. But essentially men and women are following similar patterns in the United States and that's my last slide. But if you have had a chance to look at the Washington Post this morning which I know is sort of a religious custom here at New America. You will see that this is very much in the news these days. So the Census Bureau released a report just this morning that showed that the number of adults sharing households with family members or other individuals jumped by more than 11 percent between 2007 and 2010 and young adults are the most likely among them to double up. They account for more than half of those who moved in with family members. Between 2007 and 2010 the number of adult children who lived at home with their parents increased by 1.2 million to include now 15.8 million Americans. And those between the ages of 25 and 34 made up two thirds of that increase and that I think is a very important number. Let me just repeat that between the ages of 25 and 34 a period when we normally think people are going to become economically independent made up two thirds of the increasing proportion of young people young. I use that young in quotes here heading back to the family home. And of course there's a lot of logic to this. There's a lot of sense in it because if we looked at what would happen to the poverty rates if they didn't move back in with their parents you would see a truly astounding statistic. So for young adults the poverty rate for those doubled up with young adults doubled up with their parents would have been 45.3 percent had they been living on their own. But it's down to 8.4 percent because they're in households that have higher incomes than they do on their own. So what this tells us is that this is a phenomenon that is very much of the moment. It is not however a recession induced creation. It has been exacerbated by the recession. There is no question about that. That's what these Census Bureau numbers are telling us. But it actually has emerged long before the recession took grip on all of us. It really goes back to the 1980s with the liberalization of these employment laws the introduction of much more widespread short term part time contracts and the increasing need for higher education and for experience in the professional labor market. So what many Americans are doing when they come home is sheltering against the cost of getting a master's degree working as an intern for nearly nothing in order to qualify for what they hope will become more elevated jobs in the long distant future. Most of the book The Accordion Family is actually about the varying reactions to these phenomenon. And this was what I found as a social scientist most interesting. So I've shown you that these patterns are more or less crisscrossing the advanced industrial world with the exception of the Nordic countries where the state benefits are so strong that essentially it's not necessary. Young people can depend on government for very generous unemployment stipends, huge housing subsidies, nearly free higher education and all of those combined prevent or make it unnecessary to have accordion families in the Nordic countries. But everywhere else this phenomenon is growing. But it's not interpreted in the same way every place. And this I found quite interesting. So in Japan, for example, this is widely regarded as something of a social catastrophe. And in the interviews we did with Japanese parents and their children, there was fairly strong consensus about this that essentially somehow a defective generation was born, went after free to jobs voluntarily as if the bubble had never burst and this was completely irrelevant. The Japanese airwaves are flooded constantly with news of stagnation, economic stagnation. It is not as though the Japanese consumer of news is not exposed to the economic history of the country. But the cultural norms are such that this has factored out as an explanation for why this so-called aberrant pattern has developed. And you end up with very strong internal negative norms aimed at young people and laterally at their parents who are said to have produced a defective generation for all kinds of reasons I can go into if you're interested in the Q&A period. If we shift the lens over to Spain, we see a completely different reaction. First of all, it is not regarded as the fault of young people. It is regarded as the fault of government, of big business and other powerful actors who were responsible according to the average interviewee in Spain for creating these contracts that made it very difficult for young people to manage an independent life. And so there's a very strong politicized reaction, very much born, I argue in the book, out of the experience of a generation schooled in anti-Franco policies and protests and worried more than anything about why young people don't seem to be more angry and more protest inclined than they are. If we look at Italy, we see a country which in general doesn't seem to think there's much of a problem here. The phenomenon is enormously widespread and the Italian government is very concerned about the growth of these accordion families. But the average Italian interviewee that we contacted for the accordion family doesn't really seem to see this as a problem at all. In fact, the reaction of many of the mothers that we interviewed was, why would he ever leave me, my 35 year old son, whose laundry I'm doing? The notion that somehow you don't want to lose your role as a parent is extremely important to Italian families. And so while the government would in a sense like this to be defined as a social problem and even move to make it illegal to live at home after the age of 18, a piece of legislation that failed miserably when it was discovered its author had lived at home until he was 30. We have a real divergence between popular normative concepts and government policy or government concerns, which are very easy to understand given the difficulty of mounting any form of effective state when you've got declining birth rates that are so sharply affected by the accordion family. Because one of the outcomes, one of the very clear outcomes of accordion family structures is that they lead to much, much later, if ever, formation of adult households, much lower marriage rates, and plummeting fertility rates. So in Japan, in Italy, in Spain, in Portugal, in all of these countries in Ireland I could have included as well that were famous for their very large families. We are now looking at way, way below replacement fertility rates. Let me just say a few words about the cultural response in the United States and then I would love to have the comments. In the United States I found that families were ambivalent about this phenomenon. If their children were making progress toward a future that the whole family could endorse, if they were at home because they were saving up for a home they would own someday, putting themselves through a master's degree program, working as an intern somewhere, all of which was a down payment on a certain kind of acceptable future, then it was not only embraced, it was almost celebrated, celebrated both among the children and among the parents. And in fact, when those children came home, they came home, they come home in a new and improved form. They are not the 15 year olds who required surveillance, they are not the people you set your watch and ask where is Johnny at midnight. They are the older version, more independent, not financially, but more autonomous and easier to take care of, in fact not requiring needing to be taken care of at all. So parents were, I found, extending their own sense of youth through the appearance of their children back at home. They were not losing the active role as parents, they're not becoming grandparents, they're not moving on in any way in their own life course because their children aren't either. And so what we're seeing in the U.S. is an acceptance of this pattern up to a point. When it starts to extend toward 30, when there's no end in sight, then we see growing frustration. Not necessarily within the household but growing frustration in the country about the prospects for the next generation to ever be able to assume the kind of professional identity and autonomy that we have grown to expect as normal. But in between there's actually a fair amount of intergenerational solidarity within American households and a recognition that this is after all what families are for. Now for the family to make up for everything that the labor market is not providing is another matter and so there are limits to this generous attitude. But on the whole I found most American families did not define this as a social catastrophe. We're miles away from their Japanese counterparts in thinking about this and understood that this is part of what families do for one another, that there is an intergenerational mobility compact at play and that that is the heart of what families provide. So much so that interestingly to me, and I'll make this my last comment, in the Nordic countries it was the actual absence of the need for family to move across that barrier in support of the next generation that was generating social concern. So I went to Sweden and to Denmark thinking that I was going to be studying the total absence of the problem I was interested in, the accordion family. And it's true, you don't see accordion families in the Nordic countries for all the reasons I've explained. But it wasn't Nirvana, the Nordic families that we interviewed expressed a certain reservation about how little the generations seemed to need each other and how in a sense atomistic or lonely they sometimes feel because that bound, that bond is actually not as strong as they think it should be and a certain amount of worry that they'd gone too far in making it too easy for the generations not to be reliant on one another. And that truly surprised me especially as an American thinking about all the many things we have to worry about from educating our children to providing for the elderly, wouldn't it be wonderful if we didn't have to worry about those things which is more or less the way the Nordic social state is set up. And it turns out there are other things you can worry about once you've emptied your worry bin from those phenomena. So I would love to have some comments and thank you very much for your interest. Phil, come on up here and then we'll both, both of you can sit up here. But thank you so much Catherine. The interplay between the US experience and that of other industrialized countries is fascinating and of course just in thinking about the high level in the 1940s of interplay between generations I suppose has some impact. We're returning to something that hasn't been out of the mindset of some Americans to have this kind of experience and maybe are looking, and that impacts our ability to sort of cope and deal with it positively. But in any case, Phil Longman, Phil? Well, I want to first say just what a thrill it is to be able to share a podium with Professor Newman. We've only just met but I have been a distant admirer of hers since at least the 1980s when I first came across her work. At the time she was writing about something that I was very interested in and that the culture as a whole seemed to be completely missing, which was this phenomenon of dramatic downward mobility among younger people long before the Great Recession. 1987 was according to Newsweek the year of the Yuppie and I think it was 1988 that you had a very nice rejoinder that actually the Yuppie was a very endangered species and not at all typical of what was going on with baby boomers in general, let alone what came afterwards. So I'm thrilled to be here for that reason. Also, I just want to say this book is a very good read. Professor Newman gave you a lot of graphs and statistics, but the book is full of anecdote and storytelling. As someone who probably as we speak, son is in the basement watching video games. It's not being recorded, right? But I can relate, I'm sure many of you can relate to this phenomenon, the social phenomenon that we're talking about. I think in the time I have here, I just want to take a few stabs at maybe trying to better clarify for myself and perhaps others if we can put our heads together about what ultimately is behind this phenomenon. Now I know what it's like to publish a book. The editors make you put titles on books that maybe you don't feel that comfortable with. But the subtitle of this book is boomerang kids, anxious parents and the private toll of global competition or globalism. That's a big word, right? And it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Whatever it means to you, it no doubt has something to do with this phenomenon, a lot to do with this phenomenon. But if we're going to talk about globalism, if we define it as basically a phenomenon of increased international trade and competition, migrations of people across national borders and communication, right? Big wooly idea of what is globalism, right? Then I'm not sure how well that explanation fits the facts as we know them about this phenomenon of downward mobility among the young and its eventual manifestation in boomerangs and accordion families. One reason I say that is because if we look at young men who were college educated in 1970 for example, they were at that time making about 70% as much money as young men as their fathers were as middle aged men at the top of their career. These are college graduates, right? By 1980 it had already slipped a 50% and by 1990 it had already slipped a 40%. So we're seeing this dramatic decrease in male wages relative to their fathers among college graduates. Now it's hard to say that that phenomenon could be explained in total by increased foreign competition. College graduates don't face that much foreign competition. It's also overwhelmingly a male phenomenon because when we look at the same patterns among women we don't see it, right? Today's college educated women make less in real terms than their mothers did or as college educated women of last generation did. They make a little bit less, maybe 77% less, right? But that is but nothing compared to the decline in real wages for men and wages for men as compared to what their fathers were earning, right? So this is a largely male phenomenon, not entirely one, but we need an explanation that can get to why there would be this skew towards men more than women in describing why it fell the way it did. And in having that conversation it could get kind of dicey exactly why it is. We don't want to talk about competition between men and women in the labor force. And yet in all other realms of life we naturally acknowledge the force of the law of supply and demand. At the time that this decline in male wages first started people thought well it's probably a function of just the sheer size of the baby boom. We had this gigantic generation coming in all at once. Naturally that sheer size would drive down young people's wages and it led to people like Richard Easterland to predict that the generation X was going to be the most prosperous generation there ever was because it was a comparatively small generation. Well that prediction got blown to hell because generation X is even in worse shape than boomers. I mean the general pattern is early wave boomers born 46 to 54 pretty good shape, maybe arguably the richest cohorts ever, right? And as you go down the age scale it just gets worse and worse and worse and worse, ending now with millennials. And the best thing you can say about millennials is they have a lot of their life in front of them, more chance to recover. Let's think about some other things that have changed in these generational terms that might account for this downward mobility besides increased inequality, sorry increased globalism. One sea change is the growth of predatory lending. That occurred. When I was a college student in the 1970s, no college student had a credit card. It just couldn't have one, right? By 10 years ago, a typical college student arrived on campus and was greeted with someone behind a folding table who was giving away credit cards and using that user's terms. And a huge part of this generational downward mobility we're seeing now is the result of credit card debt to begin with, right? The other thing of course is the cost of tuition and the user's terms by which increases in higher education costs have been financed. We have basically gone through a system of grants to one of loans and not just any loans but user's loans. So we're now looking at, and I'm sure you've all seen the statistics of the average 20-something coming out of class. I guess the class of 2011 has average student debt of $23,000, right? And 50%, I think it is, are either unemployed or working a job that doesn't require a college degree. I mean, absolute disaster. But if we're going to lay blame for it, I would look to predatory lenders before I would look to competition from Indian telemarketers or any other kind of foreign labor competition. Another sea change is healthcare costs. So I once worked out how long it took the average worker in 1962 to earn the per capita cost of healthcare. You know, most of us remember 1962 is a relatively prosperous time, right? Huge portions of the American population are going to college for the first time, moving to the suburbs, owning homes for the first time. The intellectuals are all moaning about the misery of affluence, right? Right? And yet, you know, median hourly wage is about $1.75, right? And as measured in per capita GDP, you know, this was a year that was much less wealthy than ours. So how come they felt so rich, right? Well, here's the answer, or at least a large part of the answer. In 1962, the average worker by the second week in January earned enough to pay for the per capita cost of healthcare in the United States. You know, for himself, typically, you know, his parents, his children, right? The financing of that, of course, was all complicated by insurance and stuff, but that's the bottom line number, right? So what is Health Freedom Day today, right? Health Freedom Day today is about the third week in March, right? That's when the average median worker, making the median wage, earns the per capita cost of healthcare. This generation that is just now passing, the so-called greatest generation, this generation, we remember fondly for many things that they did, but they also left behind some incredible debts and some incredible expectations that we now have to deal with. So for example, in the 1970s, retirees in that era were getting about $250,000 to $300,000 in today's money out of Social Security beyond what they had paid in. This was a gigantic windfall, and it helped to define what our common ideas were about what's a respectable middle-class retirement and also about what is required to finance such a retirement, right? Well, that level of generosity with that generation was not sustainable. In 1983, we had probably the last big bipartisan deal in Washington. Tip O'Neill got together with Ronald Reagan. They had this gigantic compromise between cutting taxes and raising benefits, and the compromise was we're going to cut taxes, I mean, we're going to raise taxes on young people, and we're going to cut their benefits, which they did. And so now, coming forward, we're looking at a situation where barely half of the baby boom generation is even remotely equipped to finance their retirement, even a minimal retirement, and in which the assets have not been set aside to pay for that. So we're looking at a gigantic downward mobility among working-class and middle-class baby boomers whose Social Security has been cut. The way that translates into the life cycle is that for someone who retired in the 1970s, probably never paid more than 2% of their wages into Social Security, and maybe by the very end of their working life, they were paying 6% or 7% for people who are baby boomers and younger are paying one out of $8 they ever earned into Social Security and are now promised back, assuming no cuts and benefits, are promised back only about a dollar on a dollar, right? And many people their return will be negative. So this is just another big thing that changed, right? But if you're paying one out of $8 that you ever earned into Social Security, obviously it takes longer to get that down payment for a house or whatever. So these are some of the things that you're talking, that may also be at work here. Now, another thing I really like this book about this book was you're allowing yourself some to listen to your intuition into sort of the intangible sides of life, right? They come out of all this fieldwork and talking to real people. This is much harder to describe, but it comes across, at least for me, in listening to these interviews, I can imagine what Christopher Lash would say, right? There is a note frequently heard of narcissism, right, of entitlement. And I think you do a very good job of navigating between blaming the victim and talking about slacker culture and all those parasite singles and nasty names that we can come up with. But there is something there too about attitude and expectation, right? And part of this, I think, is the younger generation does not have a concept of thrift because it looks up the age chain or age ladder and sees people who did very well in life without being thrifty. And so it's not really so surprising that they do not themselves have this sense of necessary thrift or of necessary trade-off in their expectations. But I think it is subjectively something that's important to this phenomenon. Another thing that's, I think, subjectively important, and I wouldn't say this except for my son in the basement with the video games, is that the circumstances of home life are so radically different. It is comfortable to be at home. He has no problem occupying his time with those video games. When I was his age, right, I was so bored in my suburban house that I got up at age 14 and ran away and went to work on a farm, right? Because the only thing else to do is just sit in the basement and smoke pot and that got old, right? And video games are a lot more addictive than pot, right, and they can take up a lot more time. And you can just fall into that and wake up and be 35 years old and, you know, nothing pushed you out like I think it would for younger people. I'll just finally say another thing that I like about this book, which is its willingness to embrace what could be good about all of this. Right? In some ways, maybe what we're seeing is life as it's supposed to be, right? Intergenerational, interdependence, mutual aid at the family level. It's very difficult for different cultures to adjust to this because we've come to have ways of keeping score that don't value this. But, you know, as you heard in Scandinavia, when you have this cradle to grave welfare state that ameliorates some of these tensions, what you often find is this great malaise and uneasiness about the breakdown of interdependence. So I don't think this is all bad. What's really tough going forward is, as you say, its effects on family formation going forward, right, is that we can do this now for one generation. Basically, one generation that's living off the unfunded pensions of the previous one. But when the screw turns to the next generation, the older generation now is not going to have had those gigantic windfalls in their pensions. And they'll be lucky to have much net wealth at all. So now what does it look like, right? And this is a problem as much in the Nordic countries as anywhere else because those cradle to grave welfare states need babies to finance them over time. And Sweden and other countries have already made draconian cuts in the size of their welfare state, particularly their pension systems. I feel sorry for many Swedes who don't even know themselves what their government has done to their pension system going forward. But they have cut future benefits, gigantically. So in some senses we have this gigantic problem and in some senses the solution may be in the family. One of the ways I think the Greeks are handling what's going on with them, right? This is anecdotal, but many Greeks still have at least some family member that has a little farm. And they are or a little store or a little craft shop, right? The globalization, if by that you mean commercialization, mass market control of everything hasn't happened to such an extent in Greece as it hasn't happened elsewhere. Which means that the society has a great deal of resiliency when bad things happen. So people move back with their families, their families move back to the farm and they have much tighter social cohesion, higher levels of social trust. And they cope in a way I don't think Swedes could cope where they forced into the same economic situation. I'll just conclude by saying what I think ultimately has to happen here because obviously this social dynamic that we've discovered here we're talking about is non-sustainable. It can't go on for more than maybe one or more two generations without traumatic hardship. I think ultimately the thing to focus on is what can we do to restore the economic foundation of the family as family. Right? So that the family is not conceived of simply as a consumption unit whose members may or may not have an objective rational reason to stay together, but rather they are bound by a common enterprise that integrates the various talents and abilities of its members as they age to the life cycle. So I'm not suggesting that world would be a better place if we all went back and became small scale farmers, right? But if we did, right, this problem wouldn't be a problem, right? We'd have other problems, right? But to the extent that we can think about ways to foster small scale enterprise, small scale enterprise that is consistent with family life, right? And it's also consistent with human capital formation that doesn't wind up getting taxed away either by the state or by gigantic corporations. That is the way forward. So those are my comments. Thank you very much. Bill, very good. Why don't you both sit up here if you would and we'll get into Q&A here for a second. I'll start by commenting on Sweden since the Nordic countries were mentioned. I, as mentioned some beforehand, spent part of the morning on the phone with a researcher in Sweden who actually isn't kind of an accordion family situation. They live on a farm near Uppsala, near, on the same farm with his wife's parents, except they live on sort of one end of the farm and then others live on the other end of the farm. And it's different from sort of everyone living on the same small house. And Phil's heard me talk about this before, but there's, when you talk, Catherine, a little bit about the loneliness within the Nordic countries in terms of family intergenerational cohabitation, it is consistent with the experience I had last summer in a debate at the Swedish Embassy about U.S. versus Sweden. And there was all this discussion around how great the Swedish policies were. And yet then six women who worked at the Swedish Embassy just, we were talking casually afterwards. And all six of them said they much rather lived, would much rather live and raise their kids here than in Sweden. And now part of that is weather and consumption. But to a person, they all talked about the sort of the loneliness of trying to raise a child over there versus car pooling and community parks and some things which sort of brought people together here that had not experienced at home as mothers, which I thought was really interesting in a small sample size, but it just dealt with their loneliness in their country compared with the experience they had as mothers here. I'm going to start with the first two questions here just to think with, as you formulate yours. And just to ask Catherine a little bit for start, for first of all, is the opportunity just to respond to anything that Phil said, both about the role that globalism may or may not play in terms of the, as a motivator for some of the conclusions. And then also when you look at the younger generation itself, its relationship to its role models who may have gotten away with something, or their own comfort level being able to play video games in the basement, how you view that analysis. But I'm very interested in your thoughts on the future, about if this trend just sort of continues. Phil's narrative is we can't continue it for too much longer, but a generation or two is relatively long in some circles. Where does this all go? And do you see a sort of a limit to it where it just, of course, corrects at some level, or is there a policy response that's going to be necessary to address it? And then Phil, I'm tempted to ask you more about your teenage years. I'd be interested in more about demographics. First of all, I talked a bit about the family as an economic unit. Phil and I have a paper, it's a couple of years old, but our paper, which is outside, gets into that a little bit more. But Phil has such a great sense of demography, particularly on fertility rates have come up here. How much do you sort of tie this analysis to some of the decline in fertility rates of, you know, Korean, Japan, and Italy and some of the other countries as some of these same forces that Catherine's talking about as a driver of some of those declines? And where do you see sort of that going? And maybe just a chance for you to expound on where you ended in terms of maybe it just takes a recapitalization of the family as an economic unit to change that. But just more on the demography of this whole problem and where you see it all headed. But Catherine, anything you want to respond to that came up? Well, first let me thank Phil. One of the great things about having such a strong commentator is that, you know, he should have written this book. It would have been even better if he had. You raised so many important points. So let me start first with globalization. I do think it's an important driver, but of course it isn't ever a force that happens by itself or without political interventions that translated into different kinds of labor market adaptations. We did see a huge wave of downsourcing, outsourcing, downsizing and restructuring of the American labor market that was accompanied by, that was certainly, I think, globalization was implicated there. But so too was the decline in labor unions, the transformation from a blue collar industrial economy to a white collar economy, which privileged women's skills more than were true before. I mean the male-female comparison you may really can't be understood without understanding what happened to manufacturing labor, which was primarily a male regime, which has tanked along with, and there I would have to say globalization is really quite a powerful driver in that. But I think I accept the point that you can't explain everything this way. I think without the intervention of the political variables or the variables that have to do with labor market structures and how union density figures in that, it really wouldn't make much sense at all. But I do think it's out there and it's an important force because how labor markets were restructured, how governments around the world and private sector in the U.S. restructured labor markets to, for the first time, permit what was illegal in places like Spain, part-time short-term contracts, which almost instantly surrounded and infused the younger generation because the older generation was protected against it. It was labor market entrance that got hit by this particular intervention. And why did they do it? Well, to listen to many of my Spanish interviewees, it was a conspiracy, so to speak. But really, they were losing market share and they were worried about losing market share, so they liberalized labor markets. Even in the Nordic countries, the Flex Security System itself was a response to pressures on labor markets in the Nordic countries. And I should add the youth unemployment rate in Sweden is enormous. This is not a question of protection against globalized pressures in the Nordic countries, but the state response to it was very different. The kind of safety net and cradle-to-grave orientation still protects young people from the pressures we're talking about even though there's very high youth unemployment. So high youth unemployment doesn't turn into youth poverty and it doesn't turn into dependency within the household. And it's interesting that you mentioned your friends on the farm because the only place you see accordion families in the Nordic countries is in the rural areas where land is staying inside the household. And when I instructed my interviewers to choose their sample, I said, you know, choose the dominant pattern for two-thirds and the non-dominant pattern for one-third. They had to look high and low to find the one-third of Swedish and Danish families that were in accordions, but where they found them, they were all on the farm. A couple of other things I want to mention. First, I do think it's true that there are cultural variables and comfort levels that are implicated here. I have to say I didn't find very many young people in basements watching video games. I really didn't. I found them mostly scrambling to get internships. They were working, you know, 50, 60-hour weeks for nothing. I found them trying to find a way to afford a master's degree without piling on more loans on top of that. Most of the time they weren't slacking off, but where the comfort factor does enter in, I think, is a kind of cultural similarity between generations that's much more pronounced now than it was in the past. When I was a young person like you, I fled the suburbs. I fled my family much as I loved them later on because the cultural gap and the political gap between me and my parents was enormous. The gap between me and my children, I would argue, well, one of them is in the audience, is virtually zero. Our education is very similar. Our political tastes are very similar. There's not really very much that makes it uncomfortable to be at home because we are much... The generation gap just basically doesn't exist right now. And that's the comfort factor that I think makes a bigger difference here. The one point I would make on the fertility side, and then I want to fill way in here, is that the solution, if you want to call it that, that we've adopted in the U.S., which is not a solution to downward mobility, but it is certainly helping to prop up our social security system, such as it is, is immigration. If we didn't have the levels of immigration that we have, our fertility patterns would not look all that different from the ones that are causing so much alarm elsewhere in the world. But immigration is a politically very difficult solution in the countries I've been talking about. There is no history or tradition of it. Even in the Scandinavian countries, which are famous for their egalitarian and sort of, you know, accommodating social norms, the capacity to absorb an immigrant population that comes from a more traditional and religious background has proven very vexing. And we're going to see that explode. In fact, I didn't originally expect, when I wrote the accordion family, to have any commentary on immigration at all. It never even occurred to me to be an issue. And interview after interview, the question of immigrants came up in the Western European countries. It doesn't come up in Japan, because there are virtually no immigrants in Japan, which is one of the reasons their fertility rates are so low. So what is protecting us is our immigrant population, which at least for one or two generations tends to have more children, then that slows and comes back to the norm after several generations. But I, you know, whether that's going to be a solution depends a lot on the politics of immigration, which is very, very difficult in countries that have no history of it. So I think that, you know, over the long run, can this continue? No, I don't think this continue. In fact, I don't even think it can continue for one generation, because the equity value that's going to reside in the millennial generation is virtually negative. For all the reasons you mentioned, high rates of loans and indebtedness, immobility in the labor market, overcredentialism or underemployment, depending on how you want to look at. All of those factors are going to combine to make this generation of millennials in an almost impossible situation if and when they ever have children of their own. They are not going to have the cushion that the baby boom generation is able to provide for the millennials, not even close to it. Now, what about that baby boom generation? I think there's a lot of questions here about whether or not parents are going to end up using up their retirement resources to support the next generation. They're already doing that to a large degree by indebting themselves, because a lot of the debt for college education is falling on the parent side as well. They were up until the great housing crash, stripping their equity to pay for the education of the next generation. That's going to affect the resources left for the baby boom generation that is not as well treated by Social Security, as you've mentioned, to fund their own retirement, their own health care. The housing account, which was funding all of this, has evaporated now, and it won't even be available to the next generation who will not become homeowners. One of the things the Washington Post article, the Census Bureau study points out, which I thought was really fascinating, was that because young people can't afford to buy homes, they're also not buying furniture, cars, or any of the other things that stimulates a consumer economy, and that is part of the drag on economic recovery. So all in all, no, I don't think this can last. I don't even think this can last right now. It's already buckling under the weight of what families can do. So although to me, there is a virtue in accordion families, and actually I have a great deal of respect for the adaptive capacity of families all around the world to do what they can for their children to be that haven in a heartless world, there are also limits, and I think we've reached them already. Thank you, Catherine. Phil, anything before we open up? No, I'll just open up another possible line of discussion, right, which is what is the role of higher education in this phenomenon. You know, I touched upon it in talking about the debt load that now accompanies it. But we, I think many of us have been under the thrall of the idea that the road to upward mobility of the American dream has been to get at least this four-year higher education thing, and the larger percentage of the population that had it, the richer our country would be. I think this thought really needs to be scrutinized. I mean, not just higher education as an abstraction, but it's the particular delivery system by which it's given and when it's given over the life cycle, how it's financed, but ultimately to the idea that countries succeed when they have 50%, 60%, 70% of their people trained to be managers or professionals. You know, economies I think we're finding out don't need that many people, and the great source of labor demand now is at lower scale that will be aggravated by the aging of the population. There's also a very important nexus between higher education and fertility. I mean, there's very few iron laws in the social sciences, but you know, here's closer, close one, right? It's the higher the level of education, particularly for women, the lower the birth rate, right? And this in extreme forms, what this looks like is countries like Bulgaria, where you have universal education, higher education, so almost every young adult is either in school, right, into their late 20s. Well, I shouldn't say that, every young woman is. The pattern is girls tend to do better than boys in school. The girls move to the big cities where the university is, right? The young men are left behind on the farm, right? The girls work all through the years in which nature wants them to have children getting some degree. When they get the degree, they have neither a job nor children, right? Nor a husband, right? Because the man out in the countryside is unmarriageable, right? Who would want to marry this dirt farmer, right? And it, you know, Bulgaria could say, people do say there, you know, we did everything right, right? We pursued a pattern of higher education, right? We're going to become knowledge workers and connect to the great 21st century global economy that way. And it's been an absolute disaster, you know? Would they be better off having sort of trained the next generation to do something else? I think we, you know, it needs to be thought through. But to the extent that this is ultimately a problem of human capital and of human capital formation in these countries with sub-replacement fertility, it's an urgent problem, right? Education is getting in the way, right? So we have to either figure out a way to better reconcile the pursuit of higher education with the formation of families or face the consequences, right? All right. Let's open it up. We've got the dropout argument going here. I'm interested in what country is doing it right, by the way. Who's the model out there for a second? But let's see the hands. Let's take a couple of questions. Please identify yourself as you ask the question and we've got a microphone for you. So we'll start with the lady here and we'll just work our way forward if we can. Thank you. I'm Kathleen Connell from UC Berkeley, the Graduate School of Management. I'm in trade with the question that I think both of you ended on, which is how long can this be sustained? And if you look at the data that both of you have presented, if we are looking at your son as an example, and you are in the second cohort of the baby boom generation, you're not the first cohort, so you're struggling, you don't have the equity, you used it for maybe to support your mother or father because you had the sandwich generation situation, and you are now supporting your children in college, you don't have the health care, you don't have the benefits that you might have had. How can you assume that we can even sustain this more than a few more years before this whole system becomes delinquent in terms of the ability to have any capital left to support it? Secondarily, are we going to need to expand the taking care of the children on health care beyond age 25? If you think people are staying home till 30 or 34, does it seem reasonable to address that social policy? Interesting. Let's take a second question just as we go down, so we just pair them up here as we do. So take the second question here and we'll just come down and rose here. Close Gandalia from World at Work. My question is, in the long term, what are going to be effects of the people that are moving home and taking internships, temporary jobs, low-paid jobs on the accrual of benefits over lifetime? All right, so you have the benefits question, then we have the two-part question there on can we really sustain this for even more than a few years, and should we increase this interesting question past age 26? Should the affordable health care, should we look to, how does it impact the health care piece? So anything that you've heard here spark your interest of it for an answer, start with Catherine here. I think the question of whether something can last is a very class differentiated answer. At the very bottom of the American class structure, we've been mired in accordion families and broken equity for generations. And it has had very profound effects indeed on human capital reproduction. At the very top, what I think is really happening is that these dilemmas are creeping up the class structure and becoming more and more problematic for the middle class and even the upper middle class. And that's why we have health care to 26. It's not because poor people were demanding health care. We've never done anything because they were demanding it, but because the middle class was stuck and strapped and unable to launch the next generation. And if we really cared about universal coverage, yes, we would extend it to 30 and probably even beyond. It remains to be seen how much we do care about that. I think that when the Supreme Court finally rules on this, the biggest political problem for both Republicans and Democrats will be what to say to those millions of middle class people who have been able to cover their children through the age of 26 given the current legislation. That goes, and that's a very serious blow to a politically important population. So I think that our health care system is clearly broken. The insurance structure doesn't work at all, and this is just one of the many manifestations of it not working. In terms of whether or not this can last, well, like I said, I think it already doesn't last. And the question is really, how serious does this get and to whom? As far as what kind of political response we can expect, what kind of policy response we can expect. Ultimately, without a return to robust employment levels, I don't see any of this disappearing. I see national downward mobility as a consequence, and the reemergence perhaps depending on the politics of it of conditions of old age that looked like they used to. The reason that old age doesn't spell poverty was the social security system. It may start to look like that again. Bill, do you want to say anything just building on the cruel benefits question Catherine sort of ended on a bit over time? Well, I mean, take a slightly different tack. I mean, what's the closest we've ever been to being here before, right? That would be the last generation that had it bad off at the opening gate at life was that same greatest generation that came of age in the Great Depression, right? They actually have a lot of things in common with millennials in sort of psychodynamic things, relatively close to their parents, for example, relatively suppressed, a relative easiness with collective action, right? Faith in big institutions, which shows up in all the things. So there's certain, if generations have personalities, and that's controversial, but to the extent that they do and that they're measurable, the millennials and that. So what saved the Great Depression? Well, World War II saved them, right? So we could do that, right? We could have another great big war, right? But what ultimately saved them was this sort of gigantic mobilization, right, of youth into gigantic institution building things. Now, Michael Lins here, he's just written a book about Hamiltonianism, right? Here's one way I think Michael and I might agree, right, is that one component of what is needed here is in addition to my vision of all kinds of small-scale ownership, right, is also combined with that, right, a mass mobilization. Now, what does that look like in practical terms? In healthcare, right, we can argue to the end of the day about how we could finance it this way or that, tax this person, tax that person, this copay, whatever, right? There isn't enough money to cover the demand given the inefficiency of the delivery system, right? But there's gigantic numbers of things that we could do to change the delivery system itself, right, such that it was more valuable or efficient. But they would require, you know, tremendous concentrations of federal power and mobilization of manpower, much in the way we did in World War II, right? For example, we could build VA-like hospitals, right, in every congressional district that would serve as the civilian population like VA hospitals do, right? But that would mean putting a lot of people to work in public works projects, right? When you came out on the other side of it, you would have a public health system that wasn't single payer, it was like single provider, right? That would be one example. Infrastructure, you know, is commonly talked to, is another thing around which we could rally gigantic amounts of idle youth, right? So that's a competing vision, right? I don't see any kind of laissez-faire capitalist solution coming along. We will just limp along this way for a long time. It's an interesting comparison between millennials and those who also came out of the Great Depression. Let's continue to move our way down. Have the lady here and the gentleman over here, and we'll just move down to Michael. Hi, my name is Amy Wozewik. I'm from the Institute for Women's Policy Research. IWPR recently released with the Rockefeller Foundation the results of a survey of economic security last fall and found some of the same things that Dr. Newman talked about in the Washington Post article of the Census Bureau. So I was wondering specifically since young adults were found, as you've discussed, to be a really big part of that booming generation, what specific policy ideas do one or both of you have to work on changing that? To bringing about change to this problem. Okay, very good. And the gentleman here on the far right. Yeah. Oh, okay. I didn't realize you had a question. Okay, we'll go here and we'll come back. Please. Hi, I'm Randy Sim. Looking at you, we're talking about education and internships and that sort of thing. I recently saw the assertion that about 30% of the jobs in the United States require a college degree. So when we're looking at a lot of the countries you referred to were homogenous countries compared to the diversity in the United States and income, social structure, all that kind of stuff. Can education and similar things really be the driver in the United States if this is a general trend of accordion families? All right. Thought on education or on the question of just general policy solutions? Well, I think we're of one mind here at this table and that is, you know, I think Roosevelt got it right and I'm waiting for the millennial generation and everybody else to return to that model because it was the institutional model. And while the Second World War tightened labor markets by putting everybody to work either for the military or for suppliers to the military, before that we had massive public works that put millions of Americans back to work in a very short period of time with the same kinds of infrastructure needs that we have now. Clearly that's not a politically very popular point of view at the moment, but I must say I'm at a loss to understand why because it's never been beneficial for anybody, for any generation or any country to have millions of people out of work for a long period of time. They don't recover. They don't get to come back into the fold when the economy gets better. They are damaged. That's what the lesson of the Great Depression showed us. So the generation that entered the labor market on the eve of the Great Depression did very poorly pretty much throughout their lives even when the Second World War came and tightened up labor markets because they were so desperately damaged for such a long period. So we know what happens when you hit entry into a labor market like this one. You have scarring effects and they are drastic. And so I've never understood why anyone thought it would be beneficial either to have a welfare system that put people on the sidelines from the labor market or that was completely allergic to the idea of government spending on public works which puts people back to work building the things that we need. So I guess for me the only policy idea I can think of that makes a difference is the one that Roosevelt had and I think it was quite successful against a backdrop that was extraordinarily difficult even more so than the one we face right now. With respect to what we do about education I guess what I would say is that I do believe in higher education I do believe it's valuable I do believe that it helps to equip people for the kind of economy we'd like to grow in the future but I also think we went off track when we dropped what was a fairly robust commitment to high skilled vocational education which was a norm in the 1940s. The Germans got it right and they still have it right and that's one of the reasons why even in the midst of a worldwide downturn precision manufacturing has been robust in Germany and young people in the working class who are not college bound have good jobs that train them in high skills and provide them with a good standard of living and one of the books I'm working on now has to do with why we fell off that track and what we would have to gain by going back to it and as a new resident of the great city of Baltimore with its enormously poor population stuck in the middle of what was a post-industrial city that has not found another way it seems to me that this is extraordinarily important if the Germans can do it I don't see why we can't so to me we need a different educational strategy that opens up avenues that we shut down with a kind of college for all insistence that I think probably was not wise at least not to this exclusive level Phil why don't you hold those thoughts let's just take two more questions you can respond on the education or to the other policy pieces we sort of go down the line but in interest of time we'll take the gentleman and then come forward James saying we've talked about a very large global group but we've kind of talked about it as sort of homogeneous but clearly there are lots of differences continuing students, they're unemployed, there are people like the Freeders and like heavily indebted young adults which are probably unique to the United States as we look at these various, as we parse the group do we get a better idea of exactly what kind of problems they have and whether in fact treating them as a homogeneous group is a good idea alright let's see if there's a second question as you you know Rachel Hannah if you have a question that hasn't been asked alright we'll come forward then and I'll have the ladies question here as a second did you have one Mike or alright we'll wait hi my name is Erica Geordi and I'm from Generations United and full disclosure I'm a 26 year old newlywed master's student intern living with my parents and just this summer hopefully and I'm wondering in your research what you found from your studies of young people after they left the home after they went out on their own and what kind of success they may have achieved alright let's start with Phil this time and Catherine will have a good response to your most recent question but just either the gentleman's question or to respond to the two previous ones anything spark your interest Phil? well I have to confess I am such a geezer now I can't hear the questions alright we're getting a little bit into the gentleman's question about the differences we don't want to treat homogeneous either within a country or globally there's a great diversity between the different populations we're talking about and yet we're making some general conclusions about them should we be more specific in terms of some of our that makes me think there's some outliers that haven't been discussed that are examples to prove the rule here you can't emphasize enough the diversity and your book does a very good job of that in some parts of the world like Spain Spain is a place where Franco was in charge until the mid 70's so the 60's doesn't happen in Spain it was like this delayed effect and when the 60's did happen in Spain it happened in a much more dramatic way so the fall off in church attendance for example was gigantic so you have a militant secularism by our standards a militant feminism because it has been pent up for so long so even to this day in Italy in a lot of the lower southern European places a lot of this stuff is caught up with extreme hostility to traditional notions of marriage and family in the way that typical American might have been thinking in 1979 so they just have not moved on to some extent there's some of that going on in Asia too particularly with women because the sort of opening up the liberation came later so there's still kind of the thrill of getting to be a wage slave not as here where people have sort of realized oh that's great I get to be a wage slave I'm now having second thoughts another thing that's very different between east and west is in the west and the middle east we see a gigantic correlation between what for lack of a better word we'll just call orthodox religiosity some people call it fundamentalism but if you believe in one of the books of Abraham and you believe in it literally whether you're Jewish or Christian or Muslim you will have a much larger family than your secular counterpart in your society so we have even I should say especially in Europe this is almost by Darwinian process this rejuvenation of the most religious and culturally conservative elements of society even as the larger society withers away in Asia you don't see this at all in Asia there's much more conformity of reproductive behavior across the board so it's not almost too much to say in Japan eventually everybody gets married it has exactly one kid and whether you're rich or poor or live in the country or the city doesn't really make that much difference and religiosity is not a factor that anybody can measure so these are all things that are very particular to culture and in the long view the society that stumbles upon some belief system combined with some economic system the right memes with the right incentives will inherit the earth because if only by default they'll be the ones that remember to have kids very good however poor those kids might be Catherine before you end with Mike's question do you want to address the ladies question so what happens when people move out well I didn't study that of course everybody has to draw the line somewhere you're going to tell us though next year but what I speculate about and this is pure speculation is that the period that young people end up coming home builds a foundation that one could at least imagine will underwrite greater intergenerational reciprocity as they get older and as their parents get older because they will have come back together as something closer to equals for an important period of time that builds potentially a foundation for the kind of care that their elders will need but one of the points I try and make in the book is that while the focus there was on what young people are doing and how that's changed it's the whole life course that's changed the life course of the parents has changed too we are seeing an elongation of all of these stations of life so where your parents are now experiencing delayed grandparenthood they're not moving on either and we're seeing to the demographic points the rate of first time births over the age of 40 and we are seeing a record number of people coming back into the labor market over the age of 70 now these are still marginal trends they're not going to transform the entire demographic pyramid but it tells us that what's changed here is the entire life course not just the one piece that we've been talking about here but there are limits people are not able to work until they're 95 and they are going to face the limit of those resources and I guess the question for your generation is going to be will having come home built a closer relationship that will assist the elders when they really need your help and my guess is that will probably be the case great we're going to end with Michael's question here it forms out an interesting article about a 50-something that moved home and they were sort of driving down what that is and of course on the other end of perspective it's the parents moving in with the children for elder care responsibility reasons well I just want to tease out what I thought was really crucial but it hasn't been discussed in the question period which was labor market deregulation as being correlated with this and you know just in preface to the question it's always fascinated me that most of the great economists of the last 150 years thought industrial capitalism was going to be a fleeting episode in human history for similar reasons whether it was David Ricardo he thought it wouldn't last more than a few generations of Keynes you'd have the euthanasia of the rentier that basically the fundamental flaw this was Carl Polanyi's view in the great transformation it was even George Fitzhugh who was this kind of nutty pro-slavery theorist in the American south but he made this argument I've never seen rebutted which is that feudalism to which he assimilated chattel slavery and socialism were the two stable forms of human civilization the authorities internalized the cost of reproduction including physical reproduction in slavery the slave owner or the feudal aristocrat you know had it because you owned the people you actually had to take care of the serfs and their children not only their working lives same within socialism but he predicted that industrial capitalism would be a flash in the pan because the capitalist could simply externalize all the costs of raising children and taking care of the elderly on society and then they could just use people and then toss them aside so to the extent that you didn't have these problems from 1945 up until the 70s maybe that was just because it wasn't an unregulated labor market you know I mean it seems to me you know so to the extent that you actually have a market in labor maybe all of these people on the right left and center are right that this is an inherently suicidal thing that it just it can't function it's kind of a Ponzi scheme and it collapses and it seems to me what's happening in this country and in the more liberal societies small l liberal is that basically the capitalist elite has the owners the renters I mean the real capitalists the people make their money from money have offloaded the cost of raising people and healthcare and all of that to the welfare state right I think in pushing back against Phil a little bit part of the problem with the solvency of the welfare state is that it's based largely on payroll and consumption taxes in Europe that are the masses themselves pay now if you have a system like that and you allow the employers to slash wages and use part-time workers essentially the majority of people are getting poorer and poorer profits are going more and more to the top which you're seeing here and at the same time the welfare state on which the plutocrats depend is collapsing because they can't afford to pay the taxes right so I'm trying to push beyond like the near term I mean is this some kind of existential crisis for a wage labor system I'm not coming out of the closet of Marxist or anything but it's just an interesting question this is great let's have Phil so we can the last word for Catherine here but Phil do you want to respond to that or anything else is the last word from you Michael's heard me say before that the future is medieval so I mean the fundamental problem with the capitalist system as we know it and I have to say too with the socialist system as we know it not all possible socialisms right but it does tend to cannibalize the human capital created by parents in a way that didn't happen in at least with a free holding peasantry right so all the money that I invest in my son's education endows him with some human capital the people that employ him in the future will take advantage of that endowment that my wife and I gave him but they won't give us anything and neither is my son required to give me anything directly right so right there is this kind of cannibalization or harvesting of the external costs right and in general you know I've written about this before if you look in our society not just at parents but anybody involved in the nurturing sector of the economy you know whether they're teachers or social workers or whatever they are right the market return to that is incredibly low right so and the farther away you get from young children the more money you get even within the nurturing sector right so college professors make more than nursing school teachers for some reason I don't know why because nursing school teachers should be just as important but the market system can't capture that so I agree with that I resist the thought that maybe a plantation system would help but it would maybe solve some problems let's give Shath and the last words Phil thank you first I'm going to go the other direction I guess that it's the social democracies that got it right and FDR who had the model that made the most sense industrial capitalism works as long as there is a robust welfare state as long as there is a regulated labor market and that was a period in which I think that I think we need to return to if we were able to the trouble is it's difficult to do that as an island in a sea of economies that are going in the other direction and willing to take everyone down with them but I do think that that was a period when we saw the rise of the labor high union density profitable industry and a social compact in a sense between labor and management that I think worked how we get back back to that politically is sort of beyond my pay grade I think but I do think it was a better a better system of social investment and a better a better mechanism for industrial production as well and we would do better to return to it and when we look at the more robust European economies which I agree are impinged upon by these worldwide trends but nonetheless in terms of their life expectancy the health of their populations even their fertility behavior are certainly in stronger condition than we are they do represent a model we could at least try to aspire to this one clearly isn't going to work and the question is how much does it take to break it and where will we find the social movements that will take us back to where we used to back to the future of the 1930s inspired by that word we will all go to work trying to solve that problem we're past two o'clock please join me in thanking Catherine Newman and Phil Longman