By asahifile 
What this is about
This review covers the Economist’s leader “The comeback cohort” (October 17th 2026, p.12) together with the Finance & economics article “Escaping the middle-age trap” (p.63). It uses data on 32 rich countries to examine the economic turnaround—and the cultural revival—of a generation once written off as lost. The author is unnamed.
Key points
Millennials, born between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s, came of age in the wake of the global financial crisis. Youth unemployment rose above 50% in parts of Europe; about 40% of their German peers lived with their parents; and they were lectured for spending on brunch. Now aged roughly 30 to 45, they have turned their fortunes around, earning more than any recent generation did at the same age and catching up on home-ownership.
Across 32 rich countries, the article finds only three where millennials are worse off than previous generations at the same age, once incomes are adjusted for inflation: Italy, Greece and Japan. At 30, Italians earned 10% less than Gen-Xers had. In Japan, a 35-year-old’s household earnings in 2019 were below those of a 35-year-old in 1994. In the other 29 countries, real incomes are higher than those of the past generation.
For the turnaround, the article credits markets and events rather than policy. Covid-19 triggered early retirement among older workers, opening a senior-management vacuum that millennials filled. Tech leaders such as Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman are themselves millennials. The cultural revival is visible everywhere: “The Big Bang Theory,” from 2007, is the fifth-most-streamed series in America this year, and the sequels and reboots that now fill cinemas are nostalgic bets on the same cohort.
The article recalls how different this once looked. In the 2010s, social movements such as UK Uncut, Spain’s indignados and Occupy Wall Street were spearheaded by millennials, and the cohort flocked to elderly left-wingers like Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Bernie Sanders. Today, the article notes, many millennials would still vote for these old-timers—but it is no longer in their economic interest to do so.
What bothered me
I cannot accept this article’s cheerful conclusion at face value. It declares that millennials’ prospects “improved thanks to markets and events, not the state-funded rescue.” But that is the story only in countries where the fruits of growth were shared across generations. Where sharing failed, a different path unfolds. The proof is the very three exceptions the article concedes—above all Japan.
Japan’s exception is not a statistical footnote; it is the structure itself. That a 35-year-old’s household earnings in 2019 fell below those of a 35-year-old in 1994 means that for a quarter-century Japan’s growth was not passed to its younger generation. Growth itself did not vanish; distribution across generations failed. The article waves this away as an outlier, but to me it is the predictable outcome of leaving distribution to markets and chance.
So I reject the lazy “work hard and you’ll be rewarded” reading. Millennials’ rebound was not carried by effort alone. The accident of pandemic-era early retirement and the tailwind of a booming tech industry did much of the work. The mechanism happens to hold in countries where conditions align, and fails where they do not. I will say it plainly: a generation’s comeback is not proof of effort; it is a contingent event that happens only where the conditions for growth and distribution coincide.
What it means for the world
Globally, the lesson cuts both ways. For countries where the comeback happened, it is a reminder that luck and timing—not only policy—shape generational fortunes, which counsels humility before claiming any single cause. For the countries that did not see it, the article is a warning: when the fruits of growth are not distributed across generations, the “lost generation” label stops being a metaphor and becomes a ledger entry.
The deeper question the article sidesteps is who bears the cost when distribution fails. A generation that earns less than its parents at the same age is not merely unfortunate; it is carrying the deferred bill of choices made by earlier generations. Any serious account of generational economics must ask not only whether a cohort recovered, but whether the gains of one era were extracted from the next. The answer, in the three exceptions the article names, is not comforting.
Who should read this
Anyone involved in economic and social-security policy should read it. It is also worth a look for readers who sense that their generation is not better off than the one before, and want a frame for understanding why.
Quotations
“Policymakers should note that millennials’ prospects improved thanks to markets and events, not the state-funded rescue.”
Source: The Economist, October 17th 2026, p.12
Source: The Economist, October 17th 2026 (Leader, p.12 / Finance & economics, p.63)