"Downward Mobility" article published in NY Mag in 1982

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The economic realities of adult life have come as a rude surprise to Mark and Alison Kramer and many others whose childhoods coincided with the great boom time of the fifties. A house, a car, staples of middle-class life, now seem like luxuries. . . .

Growing up in the fifties, the assumption for most people was that they would equal or do better than their parents. Upward mobility was an immutable fact of American life. Since 1890, every group of Americans had done better than the one before it, and at a faster rate. That’s no longer so.

“The baby boom generation may never achieve the relative economic success of the generations immediately preceding it or following it.” . . .

“If anyone would have told us we’d be earning $60,000 a year, I would’ve thought we’d be living like millionaires,” says Susan Beltzer, whose husband is a Manhattan lawyer. “That’s not true.” Sustained inflation means that to have the same buying power today that one’s parents enjoyed 30 years ago, one would have to make more than three times as much. And the tax bite on that inflated income, given its higher bracket, is much greater. Worse, the cost of housing has soared, and that, combined with high interest rates, has made it impossible for most in the baby-boom generation to afford the houses they grew up in.

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