The great bust? The soaring cost of living the American dream

What do Zohran Mamdani's messaging surrounding affordability and JD Vance's calls for strong private sector unions and the breaking up of Big Tech have to do with each other? A rapidly shifting economic landscape. Across the U.S., there appears to be a sense of deteriorating job prospects and wealth creation among the younger generation, which has only been exacerbated by the rise of AI. It has even called into question the American Dream, which has promised financial success and happiness through hard work and determination.

Quote: "In some ways the game is rigged," Vice President JD Vance said during an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. "We ran the experiment of offshoring all of our industrial jobs, becoming a services and finance economy, and allowing Wall Street to come in and buy every asset of modern life and turn it into an investable—line goes up—asset. Socialism is the alternative if we don't have a pathway to give people a sense that the system is not rigged and the American Dream is attainable."

Investing behavior in recent years helps explain similar sentiment among the retail crowd, which has been seeking big gains over a short timeframe to catch up in the rat race. What started as crypto mania during the late 2010s morphed into meme stocks during the pandemic, and prediction markets are only the latest iteration of that notable risk-filled trade. It comes as the share of young adults who live with their parents continues to increase, per the Federal Reserve, with 49% of adults under the age of 30 living with a parent in 2025, up by 6 percentage points since 2022, and up 12 percentage points since 2019.

Different standards? While baseline costs of things like housing, healthcare, and food have soared over the decades, so have expectations and what it takes to get there. Many young adults today are saddled with tremendous student debt in college programs that have marketed upward success, compared to the 1950s, when on-the-job knowledge and blue-collar work were considered sufficient to support a household. Stay-at-home wives during that era also eliminated the modern hefty expense of childcare, while material standards were exponentially lower (1,000 square foot homes, one bathroom, lean travel budgets, rare dining out, limited subscription services, etc.)

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