Alice Lassman Says Generation Z Faces $94,101 Debt Shift
Generation z is approaching money differently as economist and author Alice Lassman calls its outlook “disillusionomics.” She says the shift reflects a generation facing an average of $94,101 in personal debt and a future many no longer expect to follow the rules their parents used.
“I actually was sitting for a while with trying to understand this broad trend, or this broad glue that was connecting together a lot of the disparate Gen Z trends that we were seeing,” Lassman said in an interview with Fortune. She said she came up with the term herself to describe how Gen Z copes with an uncertain and mystifying financial future.
Alice Lassman and 2008
Lassman tied that outlook to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, which she said hit her when she was in elementary school. “Since then it’s been kind of a perpetual crisis,” she said. The Great Recession of 2008 and the ensuing “jobless recovery” affected millions of lives, and the unemployment rate for 16-to-24-year-olds reached 10.8% last year, compared with 4.3% overall.
That backdrop helps explain why Gen Z is described as distrustful of traditional financial prudence. Lassman said, “The economic system their parents are talking to them about isn’t really going to work out for them in the same way.” She also said, “I think there’s this general sense of kids at school and … the content that they’re being exposed to, that things aren’t fitting, that like the economic system they think their parents are talking to them about isn’t really going to work out for them in the same way.”
Gen Z Debt and Spending
The numbers put that skepticism in sharper relief. Gen Zers average $94,101 in personal debt, higher than millennials’ average of $59,181 and Gen X’s average of $53,255. One-third of Gen Z says they believe they will never own a home, and many say they are planning to forgo having children.
At the same time, many Gen Zers are spending hundreds of dollars on concert tickets or international travel. The “YOLO economy” emerged in 2021 amid the meme-stock craze, and Lassman’s framing suggests those choices are part of the same pattern: treating life less as a march through familiar milestones and more as a search for income streams and immediate experiences. For readers in this generation, the practical takeaway is plain: the debt burden is already larger than that of older groups in the figures Lassman cites, while the usual markers of stability are losing their pull.
