Get Ready for the Mindset Shift of 'Retro Capitalism'

The "everything bubble" has popped, and millennials may not like what happens next.

- NICK LICHTENBERG

A confession: Even though I'm a business journalist who works for Fortune magazine, I'm also a millennial-and I'm as skeptical about capitalism as the rest of my generation.

Why shouldn't we be? We came of age in an economic system that has repeatedly failed us: two recessions before we turned 40 (with another looming); a multi-decade housing crisis that is keeping many of us off the wealth-building "elevator" our parents enjoyed; and an increasingly undeniable environmental disaster to contend with.

No wonder my generation loves to complain online about how "late capitalism" has shaped us, from our attitude in the workplace (casual) to our family-planning decisions (delayed). Our ambivalence is so strong that we seem to be so far bucking the usual trend of getting more politically conservative as we age, according to a recent analysis of voter surveys in the U.S. and U.K. by the Financial Times' John Burn-Murdoch.

The late-capitalism meme evokes Karl Marx or Slavoj Zizek, expressing our feeling of living through the waning days of a corrupt economic era, one that's collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions and perhaps giving way to a new system. The socialist millennial icon Bernie Sanders helped popularize that idea during his star-making 2016 presidential campaign: "You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country," he thundered at one point.

But then 2022 happened, and now those prophesying the imminent demise of capitalism have some tough truths to swallow. Even in a year when inflation raged, markets quaked, and the mighty were brought low, it has become clear that this economic system is not about to crash and burn, and allow socialism to sprout from its rubble.