History is only possible in hindsight; it is therefore only now, as that cohort approaches middle age, that it becomes meaningful to do history of the Millennial generation.
The Theft of a Decade, by Wall Street Journal editor Joe Sternberg (b. 1982), is a solid early contribution to this genre, if limited by its lens. Sternberg is a business writer, and so he is naturally interested in the economic prospects of his generation. These, he argues, have been stymied by the eponymous "theft of a decade": the period between 2008 and 2018, which the much-maligned Baby Boomers have "stolen" from their Millennial offspring.
How, exactly, can this be so? As Sternberg tells it: Baby Boomer voters and leaders were integral to a series of policy decisions that directly benefited their generation at the expense of future ones. Sternberg dutifully drags out old saws about debt financing of entitlement programs, or the Ponzi-scheme structure of Social Security. But he also draws on more interesting cases, from mortgage structure to trade policy, to make the point that society has become tilted toward the old and away from the young.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Sternberg's discussion of the Great Recession, central to the book. In this account, the root of the crisis came in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the homeownership rate among young people—then meaning Boomers—dropped slightly. In response, government began to build the subprime mortgage apparatus that would eventually bring down the economy, an apparatus that was only added to by Boomer policymakers like successive HUD secretaries Henry Cisneros and Andrew Cuomo.
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