Forty years ago, the one-hit wonder, Timbuk 3 harmonized, “the future’s so bright, I’ve gotta wear shades.” In the four decades since, the long-run trends in consumer sentiment cast a decidedly darker outlook. Consumer sentiment measures Americans’ views on their economic future, and it’s been getting consistently more dire over time. When that demoralization becomes ingrained in a generation’s psyche, “eat and drink, tomorrow we die” becomes more than a slogan; it becomes a way of life. 

One of the institutions most dramatically undermined by this persistent gloom is the family. Of course, family formation and fertility choices are extremely complex. However, recent scholarship from Clara Piano and Christos Makridis has zeroed in on the role that collective pessimism has played in marriage delays and falling fertility. By measuring a nation’s beliefs about whether the future is full of promise or despair, they’ve shown that there’s a robust link between economic pessimism and tying the knot. 
Clearly, there are many causes of young people’s pessimism. One leading category that researchers have identified is uncertainty surrounding what comes next in life planning. Depression and anxiety are being driven by the elevated insecurity about educational outcomes, job prospects, and apprehension about mental and physical health amid a corrupted food and drug system. Further, it’s reasonable to expect that people will be gloomier in the present if they believe that rising crime rates, disastrous climate change, a robot/AI apocalypse, imminent job loss, economic upheaval, war, and more are on the not-too-distant horizon.

While these are valuable insights into the overcast views of the young, one underappreciated factor is expected inflation. Indeed, it makes up a significant part of the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment measurements, a key measure of the public’s views on what’s coming at them. A cursory appraisal of the trends in this dataset reveals that overall consumer sentiment has gone into the doldrums since the Covid outbreak, and reached its lowest measurement ever recorded, coinciding with the price inflation of June 2022. Not to be outdone, with the added price pressures stemming from the supply shock from the Iranian conflict, consumer sentiment reached its lowest point ever in April of 2026 at 49.8.

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