Investing in the End

When a Society Can't Move Up

A communist and fascist walk into a bar.

“What’ll it be?” asks the bartender. “A Molotov Cocktail” they say in unison.

“That’ll be $24 each plus a service charge plus tax” says the bartender.

Neither able to afford the tab, they return to their homes which they lease.

The press whips out made-up labels trying to describe our political moment. We are in a pre-post-neo-liberal de-globalizing Marxist influenced hyper-capitalist world, don’t you know. Balancing along a series of hyphens may numb an anxious reader into submission. Surely, number of prefixes is proportional to explanatory power; if I don’t understand it, at least someone does. They do, right? These explanations are as complex as they are useless, so high flying they cruise at the same altitude as the cost of living. Reality is far simpler: we have reached an inflection where a critical mass of young lower- and lower-middle-income whites have been priced out of social mobility. Like a chain hanging over a cliff, the largest link has finally slipped over the precipice. Pulled by its weight, the rest will rattle down into the chasm.

This isn’t a claim that economic hardship only matters once it reaches white Americans. Minorities have endured stalled mobility far longer and still do. It is about the scale of the stall.

Opportunity Insights’ recent work offers a blunt mobility comparison between those born in 1992 versus 1978 at 27 years of age. Among whites born to parents in the bottom fifth of American household income, the odds of staying stuck at the bottom rose 19 percent. The odds of leaping from the bottom to the top fell 13 percent. For whites born to lower-middle income families, the typical household income in their late 20s fell by $7,000. Employment slipped, marriage dropped sharply, and early-adulthood mortality roughly doubled. Meanwhile, whites born to affluent parents have pulled further ahead. The late-millennial experience measured here offered a warning.

That experience has metastasized since 1992. The median age for first-time homebuyers is now 38, up from 28 in the 1990s. Not surprising, given median home prices have risen faster than wages for two decades. 76 percent of Gen Z has now abandoned a major goal due to affordability, compared to 45 percent of boomers. Only 30 percent expect to be better off than their parents. According to a 2025 Harvard Youth Poll, 39 percent of white 18–29-year-olds – a population equivalent to that of the entire state of Georgia - are “struggling” or “getting by with limited financial security.”

As this massive bloc abandons the old playbook, its gravitational pull warps America’s economic and social fabric.

A 2024 study found 11 percent of Gen Z owns bonds, 13 percent owns real estate, and 18 percent owns stocks. Above all, 20 percent own cryptocurrency. As of writing, cryptocurrency “StupidCoin” has a market cap of $1,331,401 USD, with over 994,841,831 STUPID Coins in circulation. Why not invest in meme coins when the traditional paths to wealth are themselves seen as a joke? “As you work hard, you’re able to move up through the system and succeed” cooed Eric Adams during his New York mayoral reelection campaign. Just days ago, Adams launched a meme coin that he said would “fight the rapid spread of antisemitism” in New York City. Over several minutes, it hit $580 million in market cap before crashing 80 percent. A wallet connected to the token’s deployer removed nearly $2.5 million just before the plunge.

Kalshi, a platform that allows individuals to gamble on global events, literalizes dissociation. It’s the gamification of civic life. Nearly 45 percent of all Kalshi’s traffic comes from 18-34-year-olds. Is that because younger people had a greater tendency to gamble? A walk through the slots at any airport terminal in Las Vegas would say otherwise. It is because, amongst young Americans, there is such a pervasive feeling of lost agency in the outcome of civic and global events that it might as well be a betting market. Why invest in an economy where the Fed Chairman is being investigated for reasons nobody can quite agree on, when you could make 4 percent return on your Kalshi bet that the rapture won’t happen this year?

Woven through all is the AI menace. A Harris Poll showed that 65 percent of Gen Z worry about becoming obsolete due to AI, and nearly half feel it has made their college degree less relevant. Speculation of what the next decade will bring abounds. You’ll need to pay for access to the AI which took your marketing job. You’ll have to enroll in the subscription service for the AI trained on your content. In a world where wish machines are owned and operated by a handful of trillionaires, where is your mobility? Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! Pull yourself into what? Into the void between manual labor jobs machines can’t yet do and the trillionaires who have automated the rest of the economy? The business you’d like to start cannot compete with billions of dollars in data centers. You’ll rent your home, you’ll buy groceries on a payment plan. Using a specific enough prompt, someone will generate you.

Into the economic and cultural breach slither those who say they can fix it. From the far-right, neo-Nazi commentator Nick Fuentes:

America First used to mean let's put the people’s interest first... now it means let's sacrifice those people if it means a bigger economy because then America will be first in size of GDP.

From the radical Anarchist David D’Amato:

GDP is not only a measuring tool; it is also itself a political ideology... The opacity of GDP to the common man makes it a useful tool of emotional and psychological manipulation.

The Gross Domestic Product of the country has itself become an “other”. Young Americans feel so dissociated from wealth and mobility that growth in GDP can only mean the enriching of the established rich, rather than the advancement of themselves. These politics are not a horseshoe. They are a downward spiral.

Extreme, inexcusable ideologies gain traction amongst young Americans failing to pry open windows of opportunity. The ANES 2024 Study found 18–34-year-olds rated white supremacists, fascists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan notably higher than middle-aged or older respondents. In a March 2025 Cato/YouGov poll, 62 percent of 18–29 reported a favorable view of socialism and 34 percent reported a favorable view of communism. A Harvard Youth Poll reports 39 percent of young Americans say political violence can be justified under at least one circumstance.

Ambiguity fuels radicalism. For each moment the establishment spends arguing over definitions, poisonously simple solutions gain ground. As the core promise of economic mobility slips further out of reach for larger segments of the population, the political ramifications will be dire. Those in the halls of power ought to tune into the ideas spreading across social media and livestreams. They ought to take seriously the intoxicating potential of the fringe and take action to address root causes of this crisis. Otherwise, one day soon, the patrons of the bar may decide not to go home.