A confession: Even though I’m a business journalist who works for Fortune magazine, I’m also a millennial—and I’m as skeptical about capitalism as the rest of my generation. Why shouldn’t we be? We came of age in an economic system that has repeatedly failed us: two recessions before we turned 40 (with another looming); a multi-decade housing crisis that is keeping many of us off the wealthbuilding “elevator” our parents enjoyed; and an increasingly undeniable environmental disaster to contend with.
No wonder my generation loves to complain online about how “late capitalism” has shaped us, from our attitude in the workplace (casual) to our family-planning decisions (delayed). Our ambivalence is so strong that we seem to be so far bucking the usual trend of getting more politically conservative as we age, according to a recent analysis of voter surveys in the U.S. and U.K. by the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch.
The late-capitalism meme evokes Karl Marx or Slavoj Zizek, expressing our feeling of living through the waning days of a corrupt economic era, one that’s collapsing under
