This article is adapted from a lecture presented at the Mises Student Circle “Why the Economy Is Failing Generation Z” on November 1, 2025, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
I’m happy to say that this year my wife and I will have celebrated 25 years of marriage and are looking forward to the next 25! For those who are familiar with my research, you’ll know that the topic of marriage and family life is a central focus of my work in part because it is so intensely personal. Now, on a personal note, within our marriage, one of our so-called difficulties has been an ongoing, low-level conflict . . . we can’t seem to agree on selecting a movie to enjoy together.
Back in the days of Blockbuster Video, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we were that couple who spent an hour or so meandering the aisles only to come away empty handed or with a few flicks that we agreed we probably wouldn’t watch together. Our track record scrolling our Netflix account isn’t much better. Alas, we’ve weathered the cinematic storm for a successful marriage.
All kidding aside, when it comes to movie recommendations, we were traveling internationally recently, and on the return flight, my wife insisted that we watch a film about marriage that she was sure I would love. She assured me that it lined up with my research and that even though it fits the rom-com/drama category, I would truly enjoy it. I was skeptical.
Despite my doubts, the film, Celine Song’s The Materialists, hit the nail on the head. It takes a deep dive into the difficulty of moving into married life in these challenging times. The film had me more than intrigued, as it powerfully illustrates what millennials and Gen Z are facing in marriage markets.
It puts on the silver screen the question raised by the sociologist Andrew Cherlin: Is marriage the cornerstone of adult life, or is it the capstone? For Cherlin, the traditional family has undergone a process of what he calls deinstitutionalization. He has noted that this process has been going on since the close of World War II. And now, well into the twenty-first century, it does appear that in our everyday experience, in anecdotal storytelling, and even in film, marriage is indeed a capstone institution. Indeed, for young people there is an increasingly long list of personal milestones that have to be knocked out before even approaching the question of marriage and family life.
The transformation that Cherlin has described, and that is portrayed in The Materialists, is important on an institutional and indeed a civilizational level. The issue here isn’t about mere marginal economic technicalities, or policy measures that will produce stronger family institutions and raise birth rates or decrease divorce. In fact, it can be the case that societies that have been characterized by lifelong monogamous fidelity can be replaced or displaced by polygamous ones, with all the consequences that come with it. In this sense, the film serves as a subtle warning of what life could look like if Western civilization gives way to other forms of family life.
Speaking of the film, and here I give my spoiler alert, let’s take a look at the lead characters. First, our female protagonist, Lucy (portrayed by Dakota Johnson), is a professional matchmaker in New York City. In the opening scenes, she essentially laments to one of her friends that although she’s one of the best in her profession, she anticipates dying alone. Not a very uplifting start to the film! However, things take a turn when in a single scene the viewer is introduced to the devilishly handsome Harry (played by Pedro Pascal) and to Lucy’s old flame, John (played by Chris Evans), who’s no slouch. The compellingly awkward nature of that scene comes from the fact that it is a revelation of both our social and economic crises.
Harry is looking for a match, and he’s a real catch, and is unsurprisingly a hedge fund manager. Further, he’s the owner of a $12 million Tribeca condo, and clearly over six feet tall—a height that is a nonnegotiable for all of Lucy’s female clients. He is so well off financially that it’s later revealed that he had earlier “invested” in an extension of his femurs in order to top two meters in height. So, he is what Lucy refers to as a “unicorn” in the marriage market.
In sharp contrast, we have John, who stumbles onto the scene, serving champagne at a highclass wedding reception. John’s no slouch physically, but he is the proverbial starving artist who is looking to become a professional stage actor.
In an instant, Lucy is confronted with Mr. Right, Mr. Big Bucks, Harry, who stands in stark contrast to John, her old flame, who can’t rub two dimes together.
To the trained eye of the economist, these two men are a clear depiction of the marriage prospects that face the haves and the have-nots. The Harrys versus the Johns, the hedge fund managers versus the starving artists. Of course, as rom-coms go, you already know the outcome. But this scene is truly one where art imitates life. We know that marriage prospects for poor men are not nearly as good as those for wealthier ones. The data across the West bears this out.
To further punctuate this point, the film flashes back to a breakup scene between Lucy and John. They’re searching for parking in the middle of Manhattan to go to a nice restaurant to celebrate their anniversary. They’re stuck in a traffic jam, and John is upset by having to pay such high prices for parking after having paid a nonrefundable reservation fee. Lucy storms out of the car after John voices his complaint, and he laments that he doesn’t make enough money to make her happy, to which Lucy replies, “I don’t want to hate you. . . . However much you hate me, I promise I hate myself more . . . it’s not because we’re not in love, it’s because we’re broke.”
Inflation Culture, Marriage, and Fiat Money
How is it that we’ve gotten to the point where despite personal love and affection, because of the material difficulties facing young people, matters of life, love, and family have been pushed to the side? Are the penniless Lucy and John merely loathsome, base, consumeristic materialists, as the film title suggests? Are they simply weak-willed young punks unwilling to work hard for a living? I think not. Rather, I want to argue that they are among the losers in what I call inflation culture.
In yesterday’s chapel session here at Cornerstone University, I alluded to just one of the challenges facing young people today. I referred to the increase in the average age at first marriage for (not so) young men in the United States—now topping 30 years of age. Women average over 28 years old for the same milestone.
As Dr. Alex Pollock, one of our speakers here today, has noted, marriage is in fact the pathway to homeownership. It’s not the other way around. In other words, high home prices aren’t delaying marriage. Rather, delayed matrimony is pushing homeownership to later ages. Indeed, the average age of the first-time home buyer in the US has now topped 40. If we’re talking about a joint mortgage, with a married couple both signing on, that would mean, all else equal, that we have a 41-year-old man and a 39-yearold woman representing the average first-time home-buying couple. These realities can be, in a word, demoralizing.
These kinds of outcomes, and the behaviors and attitudes that underlie them, have become a part of our culture. But as social scientists, as young economists, we must search for the real causes of these phenomena. I firmly believe that Professor Guido Hülsmann has, along with the sociologist Jan Toporowski, correctly identified the culprit that has driven these sorts of changes. According to Hülsmann in his book The Ethics of Money Production, “The government’s fiat [money] makes inflation perennial, and as a result, we observe the formation of inflation-specific institutions and habits.” It is this inflation culture, its shared attitudes and practices, that I believe are at the center of what ails both millennials and Gen Z as they move toward adulthood and family life.
To make this practical, and do what might be called applied economics, let’s discuss some of those institutionalized behaviors. There are three areas that I’ve been reflecting on that I want to highlight for you today, and that are hopefully an extension of what’s already been articulated in Hülsmann’s work. In addition, I want to provide countercultural solutions to these habits of mind and practice. Indeed, there are solutions that can be seized upon in matters of policy and personal practices.
The Three Habits of Inflation Culture
The first habit in the inflation culture is economic dependency, and the personal mindset that I’d like to propose as its antidote is courageous independence. This isn’t a sort of reckless adventurism or throw-caution-to-the-wind sort of approach to life. No. This courageous independence moves us toward successful adulthood and family life.
The second inflation culture habit is financial speculation. This approach to personal finance has been described as seeking or chasing yield. This stands in stark contrast to sound savings patterns. Now, as anyone familiar with the consequences of an inflationary economy knows, it is indeed savers who are punished by fiat inflation. Despite this challenge, I dare someone to try living in an inflationary world without any savings at all, or having lost everything in unwise speculation. These paths present far worse outcomes.
A third mental habit of the inflation culture that I believe can be gleaned from looking at our world, our media, and even our dating markets is cynicism and distrust. Some have called this the development of a low-trust society. While there are certainly multiple causes for this decivilizing pattern, here I lean on one of the ancient prophets, who said, “Your silver is filled with dross, so your wine is now full of water.” When the money is untrustworthy, every transaction is loaded with mutual suspicion. To be countercultural in the midst of this situation is to arm oneself with rational or reasonable optimism. That’s not easy, but if we seek a better future, we’re unlikely to think of how to achieve it if we’re always and only swallowing the proverbial black pill.
Now we’ll give a bit more detail about each of these habits and offer some personal choices that can improve your ability to resist these tendencies, as well as a few words about the policies that need to be repealed to put the inflation culture into retreat.
A word of caution is in order here. If we take that black pill, and throw up our hands in desperation, we merely give way to the inflation culture and its practices. If that’s what you do, then you become a willing participant in what Thorsten Polleit has called collective corruption. This is a sort of resignation where we recognize that if everyone around us took the high road by rejecting dependency, making historically sound investment decisions, and remaining trustworthy in all our dealings, then the entire inflationary system might collapse, and we would be hurt in the process. This is a troubling dilemma, to say the least. But bold, courageous, dare I say righteous, behavior in the face of such corruption is a call that liberty-minded, happy-warrior students such as yourselves should be eager to adopt. So, now let’s turn to those cures for your generation’s malaise.
When it comes to addressing economic dependency, we need to look to one at its consequences for a nation’s youth: prolonged adolescence. The delay of important adult milestones is the hallmark of this pathology. There are many other manifestations, but one that is particularly pronounced is the way in which European students, through a highly subsidized higher education system, extend the years of their youth into the 30s.
Now, one might say that we have the opposite problem in the US with respect to the out-of-pocket costs and the artificially high prices for higher education. Indeed, we have a higher price tag, but of course, the underlying reality of the student loan program is that payments are simply delayed into the future.
So, in both the European and American contexts, the costs of education are artificially lowered in the present, allowing this extended dependency and adolescence and increasing the future costs associated with adulthood. In our context, that means a tax on your future earnings via debt repayment. In the European case, it means paying upward of 50 percent of one’s income in taxation. Adulthood is delayed and made more difficult by economic dependency.
This phenomenon isn’t just reserved for students either. The roots of the welfare state and the dependency that it creates have been and continue to be a source of debate among economists. I take the view that at least in the American context, the rise of the welfare state is itself a consequence of inflationism. Historically, this is a reasonable position, simply because the roots of the inflation culture take us back to 1913 and the creation of the Federal Reserve System. This and the European central banks helped give rise to the unnecessarily long conflict of World War I, with its inflationary effects, followed by the boom of the 1920s and so forth.
In the US, welfarism in the form of old-age pensions, what we now call the Social Security system, came into effect as the populace realized that for some strange and stupefying reason, their personal savings weren’t lasting very long in their later years. And so, the cry for a welfare state for seniors went up to Capitol Hill, and policymakers have long known that to even suggest mild reforms to this form of welfarism is nothing short of political suicide. From where I stand, this is a clear pattern of inflationism leading to the dependency of welfarism.
Broadly speaking, welfare programs were birthed by lost purchasing power in housing, education, and healthcare. Once in place, welfare subsidies initiate an intervention spiral where prices in these categories continue to escalate in real terms, with no end in sight. So, we are now dependent on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for our first home; on the student loan program and federal and state grants for our education; and on our employers and Medicare and Medicaid for our healthcare—a truly servile people indeed.
In its most degrading form, welfarism makes women and children truly dependent on the federal government through programs like SNAP and EBT, not to mention Section 8 housing, which is administered by the states. These programs are often only given when a man or father is absent, so they encourage the destruction of the traditional family. As a result, our culture descends into a sort of extralegal polygamy where the welfare state becomes the ultimate polygamist.
think there is more than a kernel of truth in that assessment. Just think of the thousands of female-headed households that look to the welfare state as a substitute for a competent husband and father. It is no wonder, then, that political activism among the poor is on the rise. It should come as no surprise that this is the case when the rising number of households that fit this description are almost fully reliant on politicized income. We hear ongoing complaints about the deep divisions and political polarization in the US. I’m here to tell you that the historic root of it all is inflationary monetary policy.
What Do We Do Now?
So, how does one act counterculturally and rebel against the systems of dependency? How do you act in a wise and innocent way in the midst of this maelstrom?
First, I encourage you all toward the early development of personal courage that moves you toward competent independence. This is accomplished by taking small but wise risks in your youth.
A significant number of you are business students, and as entrepreneurs, reasonable risks must be taken. It will take sound judgment and the marshalling of resources, but as you do these things, the central question you must answer is: What are the risks that I’m willing to take in order to provide value to my neighbors? This approach stands in stark contrast to the more risky and speculative pathways that lead to a quick buck.
Briefly, the next countercultural move you should be making is to resist risky financial speculation and instead pursue sound financial practices and savings that help you build a future.
On this point, we can start with the policy front. Here, we should call for the repeal of the policy choices that drive us toward financial speculation and educate others about these policies.
Here we ask: How can power be stripped from the centralized institutions that promote expansionary fiscal and monetary policy? Of course, there is the call to abolish the Fed. However, if there are incremental steps that can be achieved on the way to abolition, or that might spur abolition that leads to a free market in money production, then these steps certainly warrant our attention and action. These kinds of measures will all tend to reduce the likelihood of reckless financial speculation.
One immediate and simple step would be to bar the Fed from buying mortgage-backed securities. This would have the effect of reducing the outsized gains that accrue to holders of real estate. This would reduce speculative action in that market, which ended in disaster for so many who wound up underwater in the 2008 financial crisis. The same thing can happen again and should be avoided.
At the level of individual choice, the counterinflation culture move involves, first, living below your means.
There are many folks who are standing at the ready in the Austro-libertarian movement to provide sound financial advice, and who are actively providing business and investment opportunities that are helping others stay ahead of lost purchasing power. Get yourself a financial mentor who understands how the economy really works from an Austrian perspective. One thing I know is that the older folks in this movement are eager to help you and show you the way to sound financial practices that lead to a better financial future. Seek them out. They aren’t hard to find.
Finally, with respect to the cynicism and distrust that emerges in the inflation culture, the responsibility to resist this decivilizing trend falls largely to you as individuals. There are many ways to build communities of rational hope, of optimism and trust, and joining events such as this is a great step in that direction.
You’re surrounded by like-minded peers, and you have powerful networking tools at your disposal to foster these relationships and to help each other advance in knowledge and in personal and professional development. Use those networks to cheer each other on. This will have the effect of steering you away from falling prey to the doom porn that pervades much of social media. We need to be positive builders of a better future, and not self-fulfilling prophets of disaster.
Speaking of doomsday prophets, policymakers need to be rebuked, even mocked for falling prey to the doomsayers of the past whose ideas still rear their ugly heads, like Paul Ehrlich and his infamously bad predictions in The Population Bomb. Unfortunately, politicians of all stripes adopted policies that were attempts to avoid the Malthusian starvation that allegedly was going to overtake the world at the turn of the millennium.
Of course, now the doomsday prophets have assured us that we are on the brink of mass extinction and a world on fire. Here I would point to someone who has been a friend of the Mises Institute, Alex Epstein, who has defended energy development and the need to spur economic activity—not to curtail it. Be an active spreader of these ideas. On the policy front, this can include measures like easing energy-production permitting, just for starters.
Returning briefly to personal steps to resisting green hysteria, we know that many Gen Zers are planning never to have children, because those little ones add to the carbon footprint, and after all, so the argument goes, who would want to bring a child into a world of rising sea levels and boiling oceans?! Nonsense. The pathway to building a freer future is to raise independent-minded free people, and that starts with individual households. I would encourage you to seriously consider marriage and family life earlier than public school teachers, media pundits, and the DINKs on TikTok are telling you to do. Don’t live in fear.
Finally, if you think back to the characters that we described at the beginning of this discussion, they were in large part victims of the inflation culture. Early in the film, they had largely succumbed to the cynicism and distrust of others, where material wealth is the main gravitational force in relationships, rather than the belief that a young, relatively poor couple can figure it out and build a better future. I’m glad that the film had a happy ending: John makes concrete decisions to take on sound responsibilities with the rational hope that he and Lucy will find a way to make things work. This kind of lifelong commitment requires courage and trust from both of them.
Despite the challenges we’ve outlined, I’m confident that, armed with discernment into how the economy truly works, and with the recognition that economics and cultural practices are deeply intertwined, you will have sharp enough vision to see through the smoke and mirrors of the inflation culture, and help make tomorrow freer, more peaceful, and more prosperous.
