Never forget: this was preventable

Back in the day when I worked for a research outfit, I was dazzled by the brilliance of Edward Tufte's volume, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. I still am. Erudite Partner even was enabled by a sympathetic boss to attend the great man's course. Tufte had a rule:

... the fundamental principle of good statistical data: Above all else show the data.

Andrew Van Dam's The unluckiest generation in U.S. history in the today's Washington Post follows Tufte's rule brilliantly and sadly convincingly, illustrated by nine mostly simple charts.

People aged 20 to 40 have been hammered by the coronavirus shutdown. And they bring along far less buffer which might help them to weather the storm. Many have lost jobs and essentially will have to start adult life over -- for the second time, having endured the 2008 recession.

He explains:

After accounting for the present crisis, the average millennial has experienced slower economic growth since entering the workforce than any other generation in U.S. history.

Millennials will bear these economic scars over the rest of their lives, in the form of lower earnings, lower wealth and delayed milestones, such as homeownership.

... Millennials had much less of a financial cushion than previous generations did at their age, Kent said, even though they had been doing many things right. The deck has been stacked against them. They just don’t have as many assets as previous generations did at their age.

The horror of this moment for the largest, most diverse, to my mind most interesting, generation in the country's history is all laid out here. Must reading....Another Washington Post article, A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, Census Bureau finds amid coronavirus pandemic, tells more of the story, with charts not quite elegant.

Some groups have been hit harder than others. Rates of anxiety and depression were far higher among younger adults, women and the poor. The worse scores in young adults were especially notable, given that the virus has been more likely to kill the elderly or leave them critically ill.

No kidding. What would you expect? My generation has full lives behind us, however fraught our pasts may have been; young people coming up face a very hard future. And they know it. We need to listen to them and learn.