Millennials Really Are Buying Fewer Cars Per Capita

Will somebody teach The Atlantic and Bloomberg how to do long division?

By Joe Cortright, City Observatory:

"Today, we take down more breathless contrarian reporting about how Millennials are just as suburban and car-obsessed as previous generations. Following several stories drawing questionable inferences from flawed migration data claiming that Millennials are disproportionately choosing the suburbs (they’re not) come two articles in quick succession from Bloomberg and the Atlantic, purporting to show the Millennials’ newfound love of automobiles."

"But there’s a huge problem with this interpretation: there are way, way more people in the so-called 'GenY' than there are in 'GenX.' Part of the reason is that the GenY group–also often called the 'echo boom'–were born in years when far more children were born in the US. The bigger, and less obvious problem is the arbitrary and varying periods used to define 'generations.'"

"This is where long division comes in. Let’s look at the rate of car buying on a per person basis for each of these two groups.  By normalizing the data to account for the different number of people in each group, we get a much more accurate picture of the behavioral differences of individuals in each group–this is dead simple standard fare in statistical analysis. The 78 million GenYers bought about 3.7 million cars, or about 47.5 cars per 1,000 persons in the generation. Meanwhile, 45 million GenXers bought 3.3 million cars, or about 73.7 cars per 1,000.  Rather than being just as likely or more likely than GenX to buy cars, the typical member GenY is actually 36 percent less likely to buy a car than the previous generation."