The thing emptying twenty-somethings’ wallets isn’t laziness. It’s that the assets their parents bought for a song now cost roughly five times what they did, and the wages they earn don’t come close to covering the difference. In Is Gen Z Lazy?, Caroline Downey of National Review argues that the young’s turn toward democratic socialism is the petulant entitlement of a generation financing its own “doom spending” on avocado toast and Tulum weekends — and that what Gen Z really needs is a stern lecture on why the free market works both logically and morally.
Let’s concede the true part. Credit card delinquency among the young is real; some of them really are financing vacations they cannot afford. The economy under Carter in the seventies was a meat grinder, and anyone romanticizing the past should remember that. Entitlement exists in every generation; the twenty-something who expects a corner office without doing the work has always been annoying. Grant that Stalin and Mao were monsters — the gulag was a catastrophe, and I have no patience for the campus tankie — and move on. The comfortable have always written the most virulent critiques of those they resent, and have done it for a very long time; the rhetorical move with Marx’s father owning a vineyard is not new.
But Downey’s column requires you to believe that the reason a young person cannot buy a house is a failure of personal budgeting, which means you have to completely ignore the actual price of the house. A house in 1970 cost roughly two and a half to three times the median household income. Today, in the markets where young people actually live and work, it costs eight or ten times. The price was bid up by a financial system that treats shelter as a speculative asset instead of plumbing. That gap is not bridged by skipping vacations. That gap is bridged by capital — by having parents who can hand you a down payment, which is exactly what Downey means when she sneers at “silver spoons.” She has identified the actual problem and refused to follow it: the economy now requires inherited wealth just to get the keys to the front door, because we spent forty years inflating the price of assets while letting wages flatline. A thousand dollars on a trip does not explain a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar shortfall in a down payment.
And the asset isn’t performing. Roughly $1.7 trillion in student debt outstanding, the average borrower carrying somewhere north of thirty thousand dollars, the price of an entry-level credential roughly doubling every decade. The universities sold the degrees. The employers refused to pay what the degrees had been priced to command. The young are left holding paper that was, in any honest accounting, a financial product sold on a promised yield that never arrived — a degree priced as a down payment on a middle-class life, but in practice not delivering the income it had been priced to command. The buyer paid. The asset didn’t perform. That is the borrower’s problem only if you think a twenty-year-old signing a tuition contract is the party with the leverage in the room.
The variable that changed is not the work ethic. In 1975 a young couple with two factory jobs could buy a starter home, raise two kids, and pay off the mortgage in twenty years. The mathematics of that life are not available now. They are not available because the asset class has been deliberately inflated — by mortgage interest deductions, by Federal Reserve policy, by zoning that constricts supply, by NIMBY-ism that protects existing owners’ equity — and the wages have not kept pace. The largest intergenerational wealth transfer in the history of the species is moving in the wrong direction, and the young people Downey is lecturing about hard work are paying the down payments on their parents’ retirement.
Now the tell. The writer wants this framed as a moral diagnosis because the structural diagnosis would indict her. The people who own the homes are her readers. The universities that priced the tuition are her friends. The retirement plans that depend on stock portfolios at all-time highs are her employers’ employers. If the cause is character, the remedy is a lecture. If the cause is extraction, the remedy is uncomfortable. The catechism of the comfortable never names itself; it names the worker instead.
Notice what the piece defends, when it bothers defending anything. It defends the rollback of DEI hiring preferences as a service to young men squeezed out by quotas. It defends H-1B expansion as a way to bring in workers “purported to be highly skilled but aren’t necessarily so” — i.e., cheaper. Neither defense engages the actual problem the writer claims to care about: that young men’s wages have stagnated for forty years. Both moves convert a structural problem into a culture war. Both moves are also the moves the comfortable prefer, because they don’t ask who is actually paying the wages in question.
The free market is not a moral monolith. When a private equity firm buys a starter-home neighborhood, strips the upkeep, and rents them back to the same kids at a thirty percent markup, that is the free market working exactly as designed. It is perfectly logical. It is also a racket. Telling a young man the system is morally flawless while his rent eats sixty percent of his take-home pay is not tough love. It is a lie told by people who already hold the deed.
So what gets built instead. Take the community land trust. A nonprofit buys a piece of land and holds it permanently. The family on top buys only the house — the walls, the roof, the things that wear out. They pay a ground lease to the trust, usually a few hundred dollars a month. When they sell, they keep the appreciation on the house, but the land stays in the trust, priced for the next family at the same income bracket. The resale formula is the point: the house never re-enters the speculation market. The Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont, has been doing this since 1984 and has resold homes to hundreds of low- and middle-income families at prices well below the regional median. The mechanism is concrete: separate the cost of the structure from the cost of the dirt, and the structure becomes affordable to a working family on a normal wage.
Or build a robust social housing sector — the kind Vienna has been running for a century, where middle-class people actually want to live because it is well-managed and beautiful. Or build a universal child allowance, because if you want young people to have families, you pay them in actual cash, not just tell them to stop buying avocado toast. Or build sectoral wage boards so that a kid starting an apprenticeship in the trades makes a living wage on day one. Or, like Alaska since 1980, invest a share of finite resource wealth in a permanent fund and mail a portion of the earnings to every resident, regardless of age or income. The 2023 check was about $1,300 per person. It is not a transformation. It is a floor — a country deciding that a finite resource, oil like a housing boom, belonged to no one and could be squandered, and choosing instead to invest it and write itself a rule that no government could break the principal.
The piece ends by suggesting that “some of their fears have merit.” That is as close as National Review will get to conceding the actual diagnosis. Let me do that work for them. Gen Z is not lazy. Gen Z is paying, in cash and in time, for the asset inflation their parents enjoyed and they cannot afford. The remedy isn’t tough love. The remedy is the one the comfortable never want to discuss: build the housing that isn’t priced as a luxury good, finance the education that isn’t priced as a luxury good, and pay the wage that hasn’t moved in forty years because somebody has been catching the difference. Anyway.