The economics of loneliness.

"If Millennials are different, it's not because we're more or less evolved than our parents or grandparents, it's because they have changed the world that have produced people like us," said Millennial Malcolm Harris. So, "What made millennials the way they are? Why are they so burned out? Why are they having fewer kids? Why are they getting married later?" Harris says that millennials are suffering a "crisis of extreme capitalism" because "wages are stagnant and exploitation is up, competition among workers is up too". In his book, 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century', Prof Thomas Piketty argued that returns on capital are far higher than economic growth, leading to concentration of capital in the hands of some people which is why inequality is increasing. Between 1948 and 2017, productivity has increased by 246.3% while hourly compensation has increased by 114.7%. Other economists have disagreed with Piketty's theory. Prof M Rognlie said that inequality was due to the sharp increase in the value of certain scarce commodities, such as land, while others put it down to the low cost of capital. Following the subprime crisis of 2008 the Federal Reserve reduced cost of borrowing to zero making capital extremely cheap. With no earnings from fixed income instruments money was diverted to shares, leading to enormous rises in stock prices and enormous returns on capital. The biggest indictment of capitalism is in price gouging of consumers. It is shocking that a vial of insulin in the US costs $300, while the same type of insulin will cost around Rs 300 in India for a vial of 300 units. This makes insulin 70 times more expensive in the US, when recombinant insulin was first introduced around 1980, at the time of birth of millennials. Harris is wrong in thinking that millennials are no different from their parents or grandparents. Their grandparents will have endured two world wars and the Great Depression, while most of their parents will have gone through the horrors of World War II which was followed by a period of reconstruction resulting in fast economic growth in the US and Europe. The GI bill which provided loans at low interest to buy homes and farms and helped with higher education resulted in increasing prosperity and a baby boom. But, could the baby boom be the reason for economic growth? Canadian economist, Clarence Barber "observed that during the 1920s, in the years preceding the 1929 crash, the rate of population growth had fallen by approximately a third in western and northern Europe and by half in the US", wrote Prof S Mihm. Millennials are a lonely generation, aggravated by the internet, wrote C Beaton. Harris thinks that a revolution is necessary to reduce exploitation of capitalism. Perhaps, all they need is a revolution of dating. And mating.