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Most Americans Doubt Their Children Will Be Better Off, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds

Dim view of economy underpins pessimism about future and record-low happiness in U.S.



An overwhelming share of Americans aren’t confident their children’s lives will be better than their own, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NORC Poll that shows growing skepticism about the value of a college degree and record-low levels of overall happiness.

The survey with NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization that measures social attitudes, showed pervasive economic pessimism underpins Americans’ dim hopes for the future. Four in five respondents described the state of the economy as not so good or poor, and nearly half said they expect it will get worse in the next year.

The WSJ-NORC poll surveyed 1,019 adults from March 1 to 13, largely before the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and subsequent turmoil in the financial industry. Roughly 4 in 10 cited healthcare and housing costs as big worries, and nearly two-thirds said inflation is a major concern.

“No matter how much they increase your pay, everything else is going up,” said Kristy Morrow, a coordinator for a hospital who lives in Big Spring, Texas. “I do fear that for the kids.”

Ms. Morrow, 37, said she’s concerned her children will be worse off because deep divisions in America have left people unable to fix the country’s problems. The single mother of two young boys and an adult daughter, who earns about $45,000 a year, said she traded her Chevrolet Tahoe for a GMC Terrain to lower her gas costs and is teaching her boys the importance of spending money on needs, not wants.

The findings showed fresh anxiety about the strength of the job market, which was a rare point of economic optimism as recently as last year. More than half of respondents said it wouldn’t be easy to find another job with comparable pay and benefits. That was the highest level since 2010, according to NORC’s General Social Survey.

Recent economic data show the labor market is strong despite job-cut announcements from large technology companies. Employers added more than 800,000 jobs in the first two months of the year and the unemployment rate is trending near a half-century low. Available jobs exceed the number of unemployed Americans seeking work and a broad gauge of layoffs is holding at low levels.


Inflation remains high, running in February at nearly triple the rate recorded in the year before the pandemic began. To combat price increases and cool the economy, the Federal Reserve has raised its benchmark interest rate to the highest level since 2007, putting pressure on consumers and businesses. Many economists expect the Fed’s actions and tighter credit conditions stemming from the banking turmoil will push the U.S. into a recession this year.

A plurality of respondents, 44%, said their finances are in worse condition than they expected for this stage in life, and more than a third said they are not at all satisfied with how they are getting along financially. Fewer than 3 in 10 agreed that people like them and their family have a good chance of improving their standard of living.

“That strikes me as something that’s kind of an intractable level of pessimism,” said Jennifer Benz, vice president of public affairs and media research at NORC. She said that lower gas prices or other marginal changes in the economy are unlikely to shift people’s fundamental disappointment with their financial standing.

For more than three decades, NORC has asked Americans whether life for their children’s generation will be better than it has been for their own using its General Social Survey. This year 78% said they don’t feel confident that is the case, the highest share since the survey began asking the question every few years in 1990. White respondents were more likely to say they are not confident than Black and Hispanic respondents.

One reason Americans worry the next generation will fall behind is that they are losing faith in the power of a college education to move them up the economic ladder. Some 56% of respondents said that a four-year college degree wasn’t worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with heavy debt. Meanwhile, 42% of respondents said it was worth it because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more. That marked a reversal from the last time the question was asked in 2017, when a narrow plurality viewed college as worth the investment.

Sylvia Vallejo, a 44-year old who lives in Adelanto, Calif., credits a full scholarship with allowing her to get a bachelor’s degree in business administration and, eventually, an administrative job in the construction industry making about $75,000 a year. Her father left Mexico with a third-grade education, she said, and was able to support a wife and six children on his salary as a factory worker in Los Angeles. That scenario isn’t possible today, she said.

Yet she doesn’t think that going to college is the best option for many who want to get ahead. While working for a healthcare company, she said, she met young women who were lured to attend private colleges with the promise of a lucrative medical career. Instead they landed in $8-an-hour jobs struggling to pay some $20,000 in student loans.
“We have to make some concessions for people who have good experience but don’t have the education,” said Ms. Vallejo, who is a single mother. She said she was only able to send her 18-year-old son to college because he picked a state school and secured tuition grants.

In the survey, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to view the economy negatively, part of a historic pattern where people feel less optimistic when the opposing party controls the White House. Those who lack a college degree and those living in rural areas also viewed the economy more negatively. Hispanic respondents were less likely to be pretty well satisfied with their financial situation than white or Black respondents.

Just 12% of respondents described themselves as “very happy,” the lowest share on record since NORC began asking the question every few years starting in 1972 as part of the General Social Survey. Three in 10 respondents called themselves “not too happy,” the highest share on record over that half-century period.

Lynnette Richardson, a 62-year-old administrator for a residential facility for people with developmental disabilities who lives in Spokane, Wash., described herself as “pretty happy” on the survey despite having suffered two heart attacks last year and losing her job of 17 years in early 2020.

Those events strengthened her faith in a higher power and made her value her friends and family even more, she said. Her new job pays $73,000 a year, which she said allows her to live comfortably even though high medical expenses weigh on her budget.

“I should have died twice last year,” she said. “I feel very lucky.”

With the progression of technology, and the negative impact it has by causing isolation.... I think the youths are pretty fuked.

My bet is that some kind of civil war and/or holocaust is going to happen in the US in about 20 to 50 years is going to happen.

There is no current "bright side" where people are excited about good things happening, so that means morale is down. Many people hate the activities of black people and there's a renewed hatred of jews just like before WWII. So, something bad will happen.

When I was a kid, people believed that we would be exploring the universe in starships so there was hope. In reality, most people are depressed wage slaves afraid to live near black people, etc. Black people don't even know what they want to do with their lives and are not thinking about colonizing Jupiter, etc so they are hopeless.

Imagine when white people get to be in the same mental state as blacks...THEN there will be trouble.

Things will not get better for a hundred years or more.

The pessimism really all comes down to debt, with things more unaffordable compared to people's earnings. The federal govt and the Federal Reserve just can't let things be, with interventions that help in the very short-term but make things more expensive in the long-term. Always. The Federal Reserve Board have specified they think a recession is necessary to get inflation down to the level they want. Young people's jobs will be a lot of the first cut.

Debt debt debt. It's no wonder Zoomers feel like they've been dealt a bad hand. They have been. Inreal termscollege tuition, mortgages and rent, new and used vehicles are all 35-100% more expensive than what generations before them paid. It's a good thing they don't really have to worry about medical costs yet. All of the things I just mentioned are fuked because of government and the Federal Reserve. The pain of a recession is necessary to bring them back to some semblance of alignment with historical prices and wages. But of course federal politicians and the Federal Reserve will intervene in the coming recession, to try making things less painful for a short while, kicking the can down the road, creating more debt.

I say let the chips fall where they may, let things correct on their own. Almost all of the pessimism comes down to Keynesian economics, which is a nice theory, but politicians and central banks only follow half of it. When things are good in Keynesian theory politicians are supposed to cut back on spending. But the Left of society assures austerity isn't allowed. They see more taxes collected as a reason to expand spending, just as they do when the economy shrinks.

81 million people voted for this though

I've had my 2nd grader in after school programs since kindergarten. That way he can play and socialize with other kids, plenty from other schools. And he can get most/all of his homework done there too. He has made as many friends there as at school. I know in school they have kids sitting and unable to talk to each other more so than in the past, so programs like that are vital. Ditto for over the summer. Mostly gone are the days of "go outside and play" with kids coming home when the street lights come on. Now "go out and play" means let me take you to a park a few miles away. So we're spending $3K for him to go to a summer day camp, which is cheap because we're friends with the owner.

When I was a kid I got to know a lot of kids who lived on my street and nearby streets by riding a crammed school bus. Tons of goofing around, gossiping, singing songs from the radio with each other. But my 2nd grader has only rode the bus for most of one year so far, and what a schitshow. There was no bus for a year due to Covid. Then he rode a nearly empty bus with a mask on, so the few kids on it all sat apart like Chinese factory workers not talking to each other. They're constantly short of bus drivers, so we don't even know if the bus is coming half of the time, and if it does it could be 30 minutes different than the day before. So we've mostly dropped him off ourselves, which I swore I'd never do. We live close to the school so no biggie, but it's a magnet school so half of the kids in the school live 5-10 miles away because they can't afford to live in our neighborhood.

Making sure your kids are socialized requires a lot more time from parents and money than when we were coming up. I'll take my son and a friend or two, who don't live within kid biking distance for him to just go play with on a regular basis, to fun parks or those jumping trampoline places, which means hours of time from me or my wife, and a few bucks as well. It's a similar story for my nephew on the other side of the country (SoCal). He had one kid his age in vicinity of his house. Only now that he's a teen and doing school sports is he fully socialized with kids his own age.

It feels like the only people having multiple kids are people like us that make a very good living, and broke ass parents in sketchy neighborhoods. It seems like the households in the $50-150K bracket are all having maybe one kid, and they're having that one kid when they're around 40 yrs old. The parents at my son's magnet school who are young almost all live far away. My son went to a birthday party last year. The birthday boy is able to go to my son's school without winning a lottery because the mom lies and uses the grandmother's address as the child's. Of ~15 kids that were at the party, only one lives anywhere near us. So say what we will about lower income homes, they have kids and they live near each other and know each other better. It's the upper middle and upper income household kids that are more isolated from kids their own age. So we have to plan to make sure our kids are socializing with each other, especially if they're naturally a little shy to begin with.

So it ends up a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fewer kids people have, the more time it requires on the part of parents, which discourages young people from having kids. And the cycle repeats. It's harder having kids today, but I still encourage people to do it. What are you gonna do after age 40 besides stuff that's purely self indulgent? Why work hard and plan diligently for a lonely retirement? If you don't have kids you're probably going to do lots of self-destructive, rotter behavior and die before age 70 anyway. If you have kids you don't go to that food festival/sports game every weekend where you consume 5000 calories of beer and pulled pork in a couple hours, you exercise for reasons that aren't vain; you want to be healthy for them as they grow older and have kids of their own.


/truthful rant

Edit: my Boomer mom has joked quite a few times about how she and my dad would be thrown in jail if they raised kids today like me and my siblings were raised in the 80s and 90s. She isn't totally wrong. As the youngest kid by a good margin I definitely remember when I wasn't playing with friends having to let myself into an empty house (sometimes having to knock in a panel of the garage door to break in) a lot when I was a young kid. Like me, she would've had to make a lot of food all at once and give us leftovers throughout the week like I do. Still though, have kids guys. It sounds hard but it's worth it. And it makes you a better human.