Millennials Really Are Suffering

As the age profile of Republican voters has risen, a certain note of complaint about young people has become a more prominent part of conservative conversation: Why are millennials so entitled and socialist? Maybe they should quit buying so much avocado toast and pay down their student loans instead. So it’s refreshing to read a book by a right-of-center author who takes the side of the generation born from 1981 through 1996. The millennials aren’t whiners, Wall Street Journal editorialist Joseph Sternberg writes in “The Theft of a Decade”: They have legitimate complaints about economic trends that have hit them particularly hard.

People in the middle of that generation reached adulthood just as the economy fell into the most severe recession since the Great Depression. That recession was followed by a disappointingly slow recovery. Sternberg notes that the effects of entering the labor force in a weak economy are not transitory: Lifetime earnings are measurably lower.