Smashing the clichés about millennials

They're not so different after all

A millenial.
(Image credit: Zinkevych/iStock)

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For years, millennials have been caricatured as a generation of "hipster brats" who "fritter away our paychecks on avocado toast" instead of buying cars and houses and becoming economically productive citizens, said Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post. Actually, "they're just broke." A new research paper from the Federal Reserve examines the cohort born between 1981 and 1997 and smashes the millennial clichés. The paper's conclusion: Millennials do have the same economic and consumer aspirations as earlier generations. We simply paid more for our education, have more debt, and entered an economy with fewer employment opportunities and lower pay. "Scarred by the Great Recession," we don't easily make major financial commitments. "Millennials don't spend money all that differently from past generations; they just have less of it," said Jordan Weissmann at Slate. Their actual spending preferences, on cars, food, and housing, for example, are fairly equivalent to those of Generation X and even of baby boomers. Millennials behave differently because they are "less well off than members of earlier generations when they were young, with lower earnings, fewer assets, and less wealth."

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