Asset-hoarding Boomers rob the young   Our finances have gone ‘Vanity Fair’ 

“The world is a looking glass,” wrote William Makepeace Thackeray in the novel Vanity Fair, “and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.” What Americans under 40 see when they look in the mirror is the nervous, despairing face of the perpetual supplicant, dependent on the elder generations for economic survival. One-third of millennials in America — who are now well into their 30s — still take money from their parents to help pay bills. Insofar as this kind of shameful information may not be reported to pollsters, the percentage may be much higher. The recent absurdity of the 50-year mortgage debate only highlights this generation’s hopeless position. 

Thackeray’s great work has special relevance for those of us grappling with the 21st-century economy, which is becoming like that of the 19th in the sense that few own and many want. Vanity Fair, which has the not-so-subtle subtitle A Novel Without a Hero, is about inheritance and the spiritual vacuum that forms when people have little hope for economic security except through the death of their family members. For Thackeray, inheritance is a gravitational force that warps everything — identity, relationships, behaviour, language.

The characters in the novel who stand to inherit something, like Pitt Crawley or George Osborne, are fundamentally differentiated from Becky Sharp, one of the novel’s many non-heroes who has to use sex and manipulation to compensate for the lack of any expected funds from relatives. To be disinherited in this world is tantamount to death. Similarly, many of Henry James’s novels turn on the relations between petite bourgeoisie bohemians who don’t have money (often European) and naïve new money Americans whose fortunes stand to last for generations. It is hard, according to these novelists, to be kind or good without capital.

The 19th century was a high and mighty era of peace in Europe and America, and explosive growth in sectors such as industrial production, banking, and global commerce. Its works of fiction mapped the strange social codes and psychological tensions that were produced by wealth distribution defined by new dynasties. The tech economy, now supercharged by AI, has produced its own form of dynastic power, and accelerated what was already a vastly unequal 21st-century economy. It is punishing workers entering the job market, and rewarding asset holders, especially homeowners who acquired homes before the year 2000 or thereabouts. The great bourgeois fiction of the mid-to-late 19th century, therefore, holds clues about the social pathologies and antipathies that are emerging in our own time. 

A popular genre of posting on Twitter, 4chan, and Reddit, for instance, concerns the selfishness of boomers: millennials vent about parents whose retirement accounts and first, second, or even third homes are worth far more than their children and grandchildren can earn. These parents are refusing to help their children or to disperse their wealth to their children and grandchildren, all with a “we earned this” attitude. No matter how apocryphal, accurate, or fair these posts are, their popularity tells us something about how Americans born roughly after 1980 perceive their inheritance or lack of it.

Post-Eighties financial deregulation and the housing inflation of the late Nineties and early 2000s, the zero interest rate policy of the 2010s and early 2020s produced, broadly speaking, asset inflation and wage stagnation. The result of this is that younger people, if they haven’t gone into tech, finance, medicine, or law — and sometimes even if they have — struggle to buy a home without the help of their parents or inheritance from their parents, and cannot achieve middle-class security even with what used to be middle-class incomes.

So while the meme or myth of the selfish, pleasure-seeking boomer retiree is unfair to many boomers who do try to help their children, the larger problem is the demoralising need to ask for money or assets and the lack of real incentives to get younger people working, marrying, and raising families.

Thus, the Victorian and Edwardian novels, once read as artefacts of a time when class strictures drove people into perverse, deceptive, and morally toxic behaviours, are suddenly cyclical prophecies. The OnlyFans girls and crypto-influencers are 19th-century archetypes in an ultra-contemporary guise. Today, work does not actually produce security, which was the great promise and payoff of mid-century American life; only capital and assets produce it now.

The novels of Thackeray, James, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope, and Edith Wharton deal with more than class resentment and issues of inheritance and money. A careful reader must work hard to decide what is a symptom and what is a cause. The great novels of the late 19th century ask whether vanity, moral corruption, and spiritual emptiness are eternal human failings or specific pathologies produced by economic structures — or both. The novels themselves suggest the latter: that K-shaped economies don’t merely reveal human weakness but actively generate and exploit it. 

This has dire practical consequences. As Henry Adams wrote, “Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organisation of hatreds.” Whether of the Left or Right variety, the populist political movements of the last few years reflect a deep and dangerous animus between increasingly ossified classes and generations. It is one of the ironies of history that universal unfairness tends to give rise to revolutions that are far crueler and more destructive than their causes. The end of the 19th century, we should note with trepidation, gave rise to the wars, revolutions, and genocides of the first half of the 20th century. In other words, today’s schemers and social-climbers are the 21st-century equivalent of the younger characters in Vanity Fair. Behind the façade, they’re begging their parents to sell some Nvidia from their IRA, or gambling on altcoins in place of any hope of an inheritance, and they may soon evolve into figures much angrier and more combative.

Speaking as someone born in 1989, I can attest that there’s something maddening about feeling like there’s no amount of labour that can produce the comfortable, normal life largely enjoyed by one’s parents and perhaps grandparents (who worked hard and were rewarded). I feel like my generation has handled this, despite its infamous quirks and social conventions, relatively gracefully. But economic conditions seem even worse for rising generations. It is not unreasonable to expect that pressure in the system and distrust of asset holders by the asset-less will only grow.

If the world is a mirror, and what one sees in the mirror becomes progressively more ugly, dislocated and unhappy, then it is only a matter of time before someone chooses to smash the mirror.

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