Generation Z is coming of age at a particularly difficult time. Zoomers, as they’re known, are aged between 13 and 28, and have already lived through a global financial crisis, a historic pandemic, and several wars. Now, many of them confront an entry-level job market muddled by advances in AI.
According to a recent Harvard University poll, more than 40 percent of Americans under age 30 admit they are “barely getting by” financially; fewer than one in five trust the federal government to do the right thing; and just 15 percent believe the country is headed in the right direction.
How do Gen Z’s worries about America impact their views about the world? For answers, I spoke to Kyla Scanlon on the latest episode of FP Live. Scanlon is a 27-year-old commentator who has been dubbed the “economic advisor for Gen Z” and is the author of In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or download the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: I want to start with the economy. You coined the term “vibecession,” which neatly described how people feel about the economy, whether or not the data and numbers had caught up. So, let’s start there. Stock markets seem to be returning to normal after the post-Liberation Day blip. Unemployment is stable. And yet, we’re hearing warnings about recessions. What’s going on?
Kyla Scanlon: We’ve gotten relatively solid economic data over the past couple of days, and the stock market is green again. But when you dive deeper into the data, you see some things that are concerning.
Kevin Roose of the New York Times wrote this excellent piece about the AI job apocalypse and what young people face in the labor market. The unemployment rate for young people is 5.8 percent, which is quite high. A lot of entry-level jobs are being replaced by AI, like research and analysis. The overall economy is relatively resilient in the face of tariffs. The tariffs keep wavering, so who knows what will happen when they go into effect. We just saw 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum. So things data-wise seem OK, but when you dive deeper into factors for young people, it’s a different economic story.
RA: Let’s talk about young people, specifically Gen Z. It’s worth just pointing out that no generation is a monolith. You’ve written a fair bit about the micro-generations within Gen Z. Can you tell us about those?
KS: So, I’ve been on book tour for about a year now and visited over 25 college campuses. I’ve talked to a lot of young people about what they’re feeling, what they are facing, and how they’re thinking about their educational and career prospects. Rachel Janfaza created this graphic of Gen Z 1.0 and Gen Z 2.0. And I thought, there’s a Gen Z 1.5. So, I built on her work and I wrote this piece about Gen Z and the end of predictable progress.
Gen Z 1.0 is the bridge generation. So that’s someone like me, a rather ancient Gen Z; I’m 27. They graduated right before the pandemic or were in college during the pandemic. You didn’t have the same disruption that the younger part of the generation had. You were able to navigate digital spaces fluently, but it didn’t feel like technology was your entire life. You didn’t have iPads in classrooms, for example.
Gen Z 1.5 might have been in high school during COVID. They entered college, perhaps under [U.S. President Donald] Trump and graduated under [former President Joe] Biden. They have a particularly complex relationship with institutions because they saw that the institutions were able to respond during COVID. But during that pandemic, they also saw that the systems bend and break.
And then Gen Z 2.0 is the youngest part of the generation, the first group to graduate into this new digital economy. They’ve never known a world without smartphones. The layer of digital reality is simply reality to them. Of course, I’m speaking in very broad strokes, but a helpful way to separate the generation is by their interaction with digital technology and then how the pandemic disrupted the developmental parts of their lives.
RA: There’s a term Gen Z uses: FAFO. It stands for “F-Around and Find Out.” My understanding is that it’s basically a sense that the system’s broken, so let’s take some big swings and risks.
KS: I wrote a piece about this in my newsletter titled FAFOnomics. I was writing about the Trump administration and how they really use the strategy.
RA: A very different generation.
KS: Yeah. But it is this idea of taking a big swing and seeing what happens. There’s this element of, “I don’t really believe in the future. I don’t think I have a financial future. I don’t believe I’m going to be able to retire.” The metrics in the Harvard youth poll that you quoted, for instance, show a lot of nihilism in the younger generation. And so, you might see this FAFO mentality: “I’m not going to save any money. I’m not going to invest. I might not even get a job.” A lot of that comes from economic uncertainty, discomfort, and not knowing if a path is even available. And that’s where you get that F’ing around and finding out.
RA: In South Korea, there’s a version of FAFO called shibal biyong, which translated basically means “fuck-it spending.” You buy a crazy expensive thing because the system is broken, so you might as well just have fun. And it makes me wonder if, with everything online and the creation of a sort of global monoculture, whether Gen Z in America is different from Gen Zs elsewhere? Boomers, for example, are specifically an American thing, because that’s when there was a U.S. baby boom.
KS: In developed nations, at least, there seems to be a Gen Z experience. You see a lot of younger people leaning toward more far-right parties. We saw it in the German elections, in the South Korea elections this week. Young men are increasingly swinging right, whereas young women are not. And young men are really, really swinging right. Across the globe, we’re seeing that big move and this divergence in gender. A lot of it does have to do with, as you said, a monoculture that is allowed through social media. So obviously everybody follows different influencers depending on their country, but because of the global economic circumstances, they’re watching this content that might be telling them that they are not man enough, that they will never achieve their dreams as a man, that there’s no opportunity left for them as men. They might start coalescing around similar political opinions. Social media is so powerful because it allows all of us to talk to one another, but then there’s that negative impact doing a number on Gen Z.
RA: When I travel around the world, I often ask people, especially young people, if they think their lives will be better than those of their parents. And again, this is a huge generalization, Kyla, but my sense is that young Americans would tend to say no—whether because of the housing market, climate change, or any number of reasons. But if you ask young Indians that question, you get a very different answer. The future looks brighter in relative terms, at least compared to that of their parents.
KS: There’s actually data on this. Stefanie Stantcheva at Harvard does some of the best research; she has a paper with co-authors around upward mobility and zero-sum thinking in the United States. We have seen a decline in elements of upward mobility, so people have a harder time progressing than their parents did. And then there’s a lot more zero-sum thinking, or believing that if someone else gets ahead, it’s at the cost of your own progress. So, I’m not surprised to hear that difference. When you look at countries like India, they are growing, their populations are huge, they’re exploring new technological pathways, there’s been a lot of investment in them as a country. And so, for them, it feels more like a bright new dawn. Versus for Americans, it might feel like dusk is coming or night might be here. Even if that’s not true, because of the economic frustrations and the lack of upward mobility, both in terms of the housing market and then career progression, people feel like they just don’t have the future that their parents did.
RA: There’s a clear disillusionment among Gen Z about the promises of the American dream. How do they see America’s place in the world?
KS: That Harvard youth poll talks about low support for foreign intervention. The thread is that when people feel that things are bad in the United States, they wonder, “Why would you spend all this money overseas when I cannot buy a house and I cannot get a job and I cannot afford health care?” So, a lot of people are looking at the involvement, which I think is quite necessary for the United States to do abroad, and saying, “Well, I’d rather this money be spent on things that citizens here need.” It’s quite understandable considering the economic circumstances.
RA: And where does China fit into this then? In the 1990s, there was this big clamor to get into China to take advantage of globalization and arbitrage and the gap in labor costs. But in the last few years, there’s been a real shift in Washington. Now, there’s a bipartisan consensus that this went too far, that there’s a mismatch between how China consumes so little but manufactures so much; today, China is the primary adversary for the United States. Is there a generational consensus as well?
KS: I was at the Reagan National Economic Forum last week and I heard a panel with Jamie Dimon, who said China is an adversary, but that what the United States really is facing is the enemy within. We have so much polarization. No one agrees on the morals or the standing of the United States. And so the question of “how does a collective young generation feel about China?” ends up being internal; they don’t really know how to feel, because we don’t have very clear American values because of the amount of infighting. This great division has made it complicated for young people to form opinions. On the one hand, China produces these relatively cheap goods and sends them to us; that seems quite nice. But there’s the geopolitical adversary perspective. So, because of the polarization, there isn’t a clear perspective on what we should do about China. Because clearly, the two countries are incredibly reliant on one another.
RA: It strikes me that Donald Trump spoke to a lot of the economic anxieties you mentioned earlier, some of which are unique to Gen Z, but some of which are more general. So, why does Trump resonate with young people?
KS: Young people moved toward Trump partly because they wanted the economy to be better. One frustrating thing about the Biden administration is they invested a lot of money into manufacturing, which is great. We needed that. But there wasn’t a lot of investment in people.
A lot of young people gravitated toward MAGA because it didn’t feel like the Democrats were offering them much of anything from an economic perspective. It goes back to the idea that they wanted a new normal, they wanted a new path forward. And Trump was that motivating force. He was talking about fixing the economy, making things cheaper, making eggs less expensive. And now the polling data is starting to flip; a lot of young people are less supportive of Trump, partly because he has taken a skewer to the economy in terms of tariffs and what those potentially could do in the long run.
Many Gen Z-ers came of age watching political gridlock and rising inequality and a system that was very detached from their lived reality. And so MAGA’s idea of ripping things to pieces and perhaps building them back up again might sound quite appealing.
RA: There are elements of Trump’s agenda—blowing up the system—that appeal to younger people who feel the system needs to be blown up. But then what happens next; what gets rebuilt when you favor blowing up the system because you’re so tired of the other possibilities?
KS: Right. And if you don’t have a stake in the system, you don’t really care. There was a Peter Thiel email to Mark Zuckerberg where he talked about that. He wrote that if the millennials don’t have a stake in the system, they’re going to want to blow it up because why would they care otherwise? And Tim Walz did an interview where he said part of the reason that young people voted for Trump is because he’s entertaining.
So not only is Trump promising to blow things up, but he’s also wildly entertaining and funny. A young person prone to elements of financial nihilism might feel tapped out of the system. So you have this perfect package. People will rally behind this guy; he’s entertaining, he has a good social media presence, and they don’t care what happens because nobody’s given them a chance.
RA: I, myself, am what we call a geriatric millennial. I also identify with some of these fears at a different level. But one that is more obviously generational is when and how you get your first job. I think AI will end up playing a big part in how young people enter the workforce. There’s a school of thought that AI will just expand the pie, but there’s another that a lot of entry-level jobs and internships that my generation had will be done by AI. I mean, my first job was transcribing tape.
KS: Of course, there’s always technological change. There’s a great paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research about nails. Nails used to be like 0.5 percent of GDP; this tiny thing used to be such a big part of our economic growth. And now it’s like a millionth of a percent or something like that. It just shows how much technology has changed the composition of the economy. Technology is always going to change; it’s always going to come along and take people’s jobs. And it’s very sad when that happens. It is important that during that time, a government provides a training program or guardrails for people.
The government seems quite uninterested in putting up guardrails, and it could lead to a lot of problems down the road. I’m an optimist with AI. I think it could be a great complement to the human experience, but ideally not a replacement. And I think a lot of people would agree with that.
RA: Fake news is age old, obviously. Misinformation is age old. But it’s been weaponized as disinformation in the last 10 or 15 years. Add on how AI can just manufacture things, like deepfake videos that were unimaginable even two or three years ago. As a journalist, I especially worry that people are unable to define truth and reality. It seems worse now than it’s ever been before. And it’s harder for your generation than it has been for any previous generation. How do you think Gen Z, which is digitally native in a way that even my generation wasn’t, will navigate this problem?
KS: Gen Z is not very good at digital literacy. Polls show that they’re more susceptible to falling for ChatGPT hallucinations. They’re like the boomers in that regard. Data supports the idea that millennials, so your generation, is actually the most technologically fluent because you grew up at the beginning of the internet, so know better that some stuff isn’t real on the internet. Whereas if you were immersed in it from day one, it’s a totally different experience.
And so the problem of defining truth is definitely a big one. However you feel about the Trump administration, they are lying quite a bit. They’re lying about what the “Big, Beautiful Bill” will do to deficits. There’s a lot of nonpartisan research that shows that deficits will expand if they pass a bunch of tax cuts, which I think is common sense. And so it’s challenging because you have the highest level of respect, which is the government, lying to its citizens.
And then as you said, you have this deepfake world. We need to figure out a way to verify what’s true and what’s not. Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, also participates in a company called Worldcoin where they want to scan your eyeballs and use that to verify that you are indeed the real human in the deepfake. You have the maker of the poison selling the antidote.
RA: I’m allowed to say this: If you think millennials are best equipped, then I feel very scared for everyone else, because I do not feel best equipped to deal with the avalanche of mis- and disinformation out there.
Kyla, not just in the U.S., but globally, we have very old elected leaders. Gen Z is starting to have people run for office, reach positions of power, and shape policy. What is your sense of what Gen Z’s political priorities will be when they are in those policymaking roles?
KS: I hope they get there. We do have a bit of a gerontocracy. The senator in my home state of Kentucky is Mitch McConnell, who’s been in office longer than I’ve been alive. It creates misaligned incentives for people who are in office to create policies supportive of the age group that they represent. And older people tend to vote more.
But when younger people get the opportunity to hopefully set policy, there will be a lot of focus on, for instance, climate change. That is a concern for a lot of young people. There will be a focus on economic foundations, so think of the housing market, of child care. Child care is exorbitantly expensive, which has prohibited some people from having children. And then I think elder care, too; we’re going to have a massively aging population. I think 20 percent of the population will be over the age of 65 by 2030. Those will be some of the main policies: more of a social safety net, and more focus on the planet.
The problem right now is that we really have really kicked the can down the road on a lot of really big issues. Somebody’s going to have to reckon with that, and the reckoning is going to come at a time when younger people are taking the reins.
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