“Instead, the young must now buy back, item by item and at retail prices, what their grandparents received as a bounty of prior civilizational investments”
The young must do so out of incomes that rose modestly while the prices of the essential elements of life rose radically. Price indexes measure the individual cost of discrete goods, but they are not intended to convey the total cost of personally repurchasing a destroyed commons.
This type of failure is well understood as a threat in economics. The old joke is that when a man marries his cleaner, the GDP of both households collapses even while the actual labor being done remains the same and everyone is better off. In our case, we’re seeing the opposite: a thousand small divorces and social fragmentations which boost the appearance of GDP but leave everyone poorer in reality.
Occasionally, researchers succeed in capturing and modelling these hidden transitions, and we get a glimpse into the deep faultlines under society — direct evidence that official measures miss what households actually feel. In 2024, for example, a compelling study by Lawrence Summers and colleagues
that the gap between depressed consumer sentiment and cheerful official statistics closes once borrowing costs (excluded from the modern CPI but important for family finances) are counted as part of the cost of living. The consumers were right.
What actually got cheaper over the past fifty years? Electronics, entertainment, fast fashion, processed food, toys, screens of every kind. And what got more expensive, usually by many multiples? Housing, education, childcare, healthcare, insurance.
Absurdly, both of these movements register in the statistics as progress: one shows up as asset appreciation and the other as consumer surplus. But the lived reality for families feels like a pincer.
Robert Sampson’s research on Chicago found that the collective efficacy which keeps neighborhoods safe — mutual trust plus the willingness of residents
to intervene for the common good
— is strongest where residents own their homes and stay put. Ownership is both a private good and the raw material of the social capital whose destruction started this spiral. A generation locked out of ownership is locked out of both.
Marriage follows the same pattern. Women now substantially outnumber men on university campuses and outpace them in degrees earned, yet the preference for husbands who match or exceed a wife’s income and education has not correspondingly relaxed. The result is a radical market mismatch.
