And that money, like any wealth in the United States, is extremely concentrated in the upper brackets. Mr. Jacobs, whose grandfather was a founder of Qualcomm, is expecting up to $ 100 million over the course of his life.
Most of his millennial colleagues, however, are left with a bad legacy – debt, poor job prospects, and the creation of a social safety net. The youngest of them were 15 years old in 2011 when Occupy Wall Street drew a line between belongings and everyone else. The oldest, if lucky, worked in a post-recession economy before the current recession. Class and inequality have been part of the political conversation for most of their adult lives.
In her day, the widening gap between rich and poor pushed left politics back into mainstream US politics. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. was 20 points behind Senator Bernie Sanders, the socialist candidate, in this year’s Democratic presidential primary. And over the past six years, millennials have transformed America’s Democratic Socialists from a fringe organization with an average age of 60 to a national force with chapters in each state and nearly 100,000 members, most of them under 35.
Both as a trust child and as an anti-capitalist, Mr. Jacobs is in a rare position among leftists fighting against economic inequality. But he’s not the only one trying to figure out how he put it, “What it means to be with the 99 percent when you’re the 1 percent.”
Challenge the system
“I’ve always been taught that this is what the world is like, that my family has wealth while others don’t, and that so I have to give some of it away, but not necessarily question why it was there . “Said Rachel Gelman, a 30-year-old in Oakland, California who describes her policies as” anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and abolitionist. “