In the column today, I wrote about why younger people may not be shifting right as they age, the way their Gen X, Boomer, and Silent Generation elders did. I posited that it may have something to do with the fact that they are not living the way their elders did. Their marriage rates, household ownership rates, and rate of reproducing are all much lower than those of the generations before them at the same time.
That is, they live less settled lives, with less property, and less investment in the communities around them. That means less conservatism.
Now, one question I didn’t address and don’t yet feel qualified to address is how much to blame this on the revealed preferences of Millennials and Generation Z, or on policy mistakes and conditions over which they have no control. I suspect both play a major role. That is, I suspect we are forming people to live less “rooted” lives and to adapt themselves to atomization. But I also strongly suspect that there are deformations in the housing market and even in the job market that are making it harder for Millennials to obtain what their forebears did.
The fact is both sides of the coin matter. One job we have as a civilization is to pass on what’s good to our children, and to do so in a way that binds them to their inheritance — that makes them want to preserve it, and innovate from within its traditions.
Some hope that Millennials are simply delaying rather than forsaking these achievements of settlement. I would just warn that if that’s true, Millennials are fast running into the harder biological realities that limit cultural adaptation, or at least should inform it. All Millennial women are now well past their peak years of fertility. A majority of them would be facing what are called “geriatric pregnancies” if they conceived today.