In the US economy, since the modern pattern of economic growth started back in the early 19th century, average annual growth has been remarkably close to 2% per year on a per capita basis (as I have noted here and here). It would be an extraordinary reversal of fortune for this process to stop and then to reverse itself. But polling data suggests that about 75% of Americans believe that when today’s children grow up, they will be worse off than their parents.

It isn’t just America, either. Across high-income countries of the world, and a number of middle-income countries as well, majorities or near-majorities believe that when children in their country grow up, they will be worse off than their parents. Marta Doroszczyk compiles some polling data for a short article on “Generational Concerns” in the March 2025 issue of Finance & Development from the IMF. Here’s an illustrative figure:

What to make of this?

1) Polling data is rarely simple to interpret. My guess is that when many people are asked about economic prospects for the long-run and the next generation, they have a tendency to react based on medium-run or even short-run concerns–and probably not just economic concerns, either. My guess is that few people have recently looked up the per capita growth statistics before answering.

2) It’s not hard to understand why people in Japan, which has had an economy stuck in slow growth since the early 1990s, or Greece, which has been struggling through one economic crisis after another for a couple of decades now, might be pessimistic about the economic future.

3) But even those types of issues and patterns duly noted, there’s a widespread economic pessimism here, which reaches beyond the particulars of any single country.

4) Back in 2019, the OECD put out a report on what it means to be “middle class.” A central theme in the report was that, across many countries, “middle class” referred to a sense that access to consumption were available in three main areas spending on housing, health care, and higher education. In a lot of countries, those are areas where prices have been rising rapidly.

5) It’s interesting to consider some of the more optimistic countries at the bottom of the figure: India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Israel, Philippines, Poland.

6) If someone is determined to be pessimistic, it can be hard to talk them out of it. But pessimism affects politics. If we are heading into a time when future generations are actually worse off, we are in a zero-sum or negative-sum economy, in which the only way to benefit some group–or to pursue objectives like enviromental protection–is to cause equivalent losses for other groups. The underlying politics of that setting will be full of bitterness and suspicion. in a US political context, and perhaps a European one as well, it feels to me as if there is room for a politics of optimism and abundance, but it needs to be backed up by actual public and private investments, accomplishments, and observable progress.

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