Things Will Turn Out Better Than You Think

Well, at least I can say that after re-reading my whiny 1982 New York Times essay

In 1982, near the end of my senior year in college, I had an enormous breakthrough as an aspiring journalist: I got an op-ed published in The New York Times. It was headlined: ’82 Gown Isn’t Going to Town.

Looking back with perspective on that essay now, I can report three takeaways:

-        I was a whiner.

-        People who pout about the economy today are whiners.

-        Things are likely to turn out better than you think.

First of all, things were actually really bad in 1982. The Fed’s rate had hit a high of 19% in 1981, and had fallen to 14% about the time I was graduating in June 1982. A 30-year mortgage rate for a house was about 16%.

Compare that to today. In late December the Fed held rates at around 5.5%. You can get a mortgage for around 7.5%.

Unemployment in late 1982 was more than 10%, higher than any time after World War II. Today’s unemployment rate is 3.7%. Inflation had hit a high of 14.6% in 1980 and by 1982 had come down to 6.2%. Today it’s about 3.2%.

So, yeah, things looked bleak in 1982. In the Times essay, I wrote that I was graduating into a rotten economy, and that hardly any of us twenty-somethings were ever going to live as well as our parents’ generation. I got the idea for writing it after one of my professors conducted an informal poll in class. Here’s how I described it:

The professor wanted to determine what the class expected to be doing in five years. Every year he asks his students the same questions about future salaries, family plans and goals, and he records the results.

The professor said he was surprised that less than 50 percent of my class expected to be earning more money in five years than their parents did now, and that just a handful expected to own their own home within five years. He said that a few years ago almost everyone would have responded more optimistically to these questions. More interesting, though, was that 27 of 29 students said they expected to be happy even though they might not own a home or make much money. ''You'll be the luckiest because you will be happy living with less,'' the professor soothingly told us. ''You were never lied to. You knew things were bad right from the start. You will be a well-adjusted group.''

(Reading that again, I realize that telling us we’d be OK because we knew things were terrible was kind of an asshole-ish thing to do.)

I spent the whole essay whimpering about my generation’s misfortune. “The bottom line is that we are among the first generation of college graduates who will most likely not be able to give our children things that we had when we were growing up,” I wrote.

So, you probably know how this turned out. I was insanely off the mark.

By the second half of the ‘80s, interest rates, inflation and unemployment were dropping like a rock. The stock market was on fire, creating the impetus for movies like Wall Street and bestselling books like Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker.

In my personal life, my whiny 1982 self got a newspaper job, rapidly advanced as the economy boosted the news business, and got hired by USA Today in 1985 (giving me a couple years of experience before writing a bunch of breaking cover stories about the giant crash of the overheated stock market in 1987). By 1987, I had bought my first house and gotten married. A decade later, I had two young kids and we were living in a much bigger house than the one I grew up in.

Overall, in the past 40 years or so, total family wealth in the U.S. has risen from about $38 trillion, adjusted for inflation, to more than $140 trillion. The S&P 500 index rose about 2,800% from 1983 to 2023. Widening wealth gaps have meant that a bigger chunk of the population hasn’t benefited nearly as much as the top 10%, but in general, most everyone’s career prospects and standards of living are far better today than when I graduated.

But, of course, people don’t measure their current state against 1982, especially since more than half the U.S. population was born after 1982. You measure your current state against how things were maybe a couple years ago.

In September, a poll by Harris for my old employer USA Today found that: “Two-thirds of Americans believe younger people face hardships today that earlier generations didn’t, and 65% of Gen Zers and 74% of millennials say they believe they are starting further behind financially than earlier generations at their age.” The story went on: “They're telling us they can't buy into that American dream the way that their parents and grandparents thought about it ‒ because it's not attainable.”

Oy, sounds familiar.

And just in December, surveys showed that much of the U.S. population believes we’re in a recession even though the economy is actually, empirically, quite good. (See the statistics above.) Said one story: “The latest findings indicated nearly two-thirds of Americans, 66%, say the current economic environment – including factors such as elevated inflation, rising interest rates and changes in income or employment – has negatively impacted their finances this year.”

I’m guilty too. I’d like to climb back on my whiny horse and complain that 2023 sucked compared to, say, 2019 to 2021. It’s also easy to think that because things are like they are now, they are not likely to change, and that some crazy event – a war, a climate catastrophe, an alien invasion – will make things worse.  

Yet I find my 1982 essay both embarrassing and heartening. As Mark Twain (may have!) said, “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” My grandfather would tell me about getting by in the Great Depression on a can of beans and bathtub gin. To him, whatever was going on in the 1980s seemed near miraculous.

When I graduated college in 1982, as mortgage rates were 16% and unemployment was 10%, I had eight channels of TV I could watch, talked to friends on a rotary-dial phone attached to the kitchen wall, listened to music on cassette tapes, and had to walk into a store to buy anything.

Compared to that, what’s going on in 2023 is near miraculous. And if history rhymes, it will only get better. It would be a wonderful outcome if, some years down the road, all of you who are depressed about the economy today can look back on your outlook and feel as sheepish as I do now.

Unlike USA Today, The New York Times has digitized much of its content from the past. So this time, you can actually go to a link and read my old essay: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/22/opinion/82-gown-isnt-going-to-town.html?searchResultPosition=2

But here’s the image anyway…