Making it on their own: the baby-boom meets generation X (EXCERPT), Monthly Labor Review Online, Feb. 1998

Making it on their own: the baby-boom meets generation X

Geoffrey Paulin and Brian Riordan

In a popular 1970s television series, Mary Tyler Moore portrayed Mary Richards, a young woman living alone in Minneapolis and working as an associate producer at a televison news program. In some ways, the Richards character typified the successful young singles of the baby-boom generation. To illustrate, the opening theme song asked, "How will you make it on your own?" Richards would toss her hat into the air in a gesture indicating that she would indeed succeed. However, the theme song’s question might get a very different answer from today’s young singles. Structural changes in the economy may have altered the outlook for young single women and men, making the theme song’s concluding lyric, "You’re gonna make it after all," a less-likely outcome for contemporary young singles.
How do today’s young singles—often called "Generation X’ers"—compare to their baby-boom counterparts who entered the labor market 10 or even 20 years ago? And do the figures look the way they do because of real, structural changes in the economy, or could it be that despite gains in employment, differences in wages or other economic measures persist among men and women, or whites and minorities? As labor force participation has increased among these groups, per capita income has declined, in real terms, even though some segments of the population currently earn more than did their counterparts in earlier years. Despite these other changes, relative to everyone else in the economy, are young singles today doing worse, holding their own, or perhaps even doing better than their counterparts from the previous generation?
To answer these questions, this article examines various measures of economic well-being for 18- to 29-year-old single persons in three periods: 1972–73 (Boomers I), 1984–85 (Boomers II), and 1994–95 (Generation X). Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, it analyzes differences in incomes and spending patterns to see how, if at all, these measures have changed, and how today’s young singles are indeed "making it on their own."

This excerpt is from an article published in the February 1998 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.

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