People who are twenty-five today are doing worse than people of that age ten years ago, and much worse than people who were twenty-five back in 1996.4 The same is true, incidentally, of people who are thirty-five, forty-five, and probably fifty-five, but for the young this reversal of the traditional American trajectory is acutely painful: they know that no amount of labor will ever catapult them into the ranks of the winners.