Why Are Millennials So Darn Optimistic?

Were they all born with their heads up their asses in the sand? They profess to be more optimistic than they were before the world wide financial meltdown.

Confident. Connected. Open to Change. [ed- link added] That's how Pew Research defines the Millennial generation -- Americans born since 1980. We're socially liberal, technologically savvy and wildly optimistic.

Wait ... wildly optimistic? In these economic times? Actually, as National Journal's Eliza Krigman points out, our optimism is only growing, recession be damned:

Based on previous Pew research, Millennials are actually slightly more optimistic about their future earning potential than they were in 2006, before the recession.

There's nothing wrong with sunniness, but rising optimism through a recession has the whiff of naivité. As the Atlantic's Don Peck wrote in our brilliant new cover story, young Americans have lots of reasons to be pessimistic:

A whole generation of young adults is likely to see its life chances permanently diminished by this recession. Lisa Kahn, an economist at Yale ... found that, all else equal, for every one-percentage-point increase in the national unemployment rate, the starting income of new graduates fell by as much as 7 percent; the unluckiest graduates of the decade, who emerged into the teeth of the 1981-82 recession, made roughly 25 percent less in their first year than graduates who stepped into boom times...

That seems to be a case of damn bad parenting. Perhaps that's why they put a priority on good parenting. These youngsters have been isolated from economic reality. Bad things do happen to good people and they're almost certainly gonna happen to them.

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