I think, uh-oh. An older population means lower birth rates, higher medical costs, young paying for the old and then not getting their fair share, grouchier people.

That’s the “frame” most of us immediately work from. (And if you don’t think our brains are programmed to work on fast categorizations, read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. It’s fascinating).

But it’s the wrong frame.

I recently spent a few days in lovely Vancouver with the Network on an Aging Society, which I’ve joined as their communications person. While I’m not abandoning 20-somethings directly, I think I’ve said about all I can on the topic–at least in a fresh way. Instead, I’ll be folding their story into the story of the elderly in society because the two are integrally linked.

So what is this different framework we should be using in thinking about an aging society? Well, it begins from a point of strength. Sure, the elderly face declining health, declining productivity on the job, and sometimes greater dependence, but those things are minor compared with the positives we can tap. And tap them we must.

As one of the Network members put it, we have a scotoma when it comes to aging.  A scotoma is a small stroke in the eye that makes us blind to certain things yet we’re not aware were missing it. In this case, we’re blind to the positives that an aging society can create– but only if we fundamentally change how we do things.

To tap into the potential of an aging society, we have some serious work to do in both changing the conversation we have about the topic and changing the way we now compartmentalize the life course. If you think about it, our lives are divided into three spheres, broadly: education, work, retirement. We pack all the education in the front end, to be completed by about 25. Then we spend the next big chunk of life working, and the rhythms of the work day shape our lives in big and small ways. Finally, we quit working and rest and play–in often a role-less role.

What if, instead, we rethought those big blocks? What if we spread learning throughout life? What if we staggered work differently? What if we redesigned retirement? Rather than rigid boundaries, what if the learning-work-retirement parsing was more fluid.  So instead of retiring at age 60 or 65, what if we allowed a worker to just change jobs, even within the same company? They could scale back to a part-time position or take a job with less stress and more flexibility, but they’d stay working until, say, 75.

Changing tasks on the job regularly has been linked with a cognitive boost, so changing to a different job, something that interests you or something that is simply different, could help stem cognitive decline slightly, and make employers fret less about lost productivity among older workers.

Young adults often feel like the elderly should move on and make room for them in the workforce, claiming that the elderly are taking their jobs. But that’s a fallacy. The workforce is not a lump of labor vying for a fixed number of jobs. There’s simply no hard evidence that older workers displace younger workers on the job escalator. As Bloomberg Business recently put it:

The idea that older workers displace younger ones assumes that there’s a fixed amount of work to be done. That’s known as the lump-of-labor fallacy—and it’s at play in the anti-immigration camp as well. By and large, economies don’t work that way. Workers earn incomes and spend the money and the recipients of the money hire more people and off we go. Growth.

They’re basing their assessment on the result of a paper by economists Jonathan Gruber and Kevin Milligan.

Or in another re-imagining of how things work, what if we shifted learning from only at the front end and made it truly a life-long opportunity. The nature of our workforce today requires that we have regular tune-ups of what we thought we knew. In many respects, we have to continually reinvent our jobs if we want to stay employed and viable. But maybe there’s a better way to integrate learning and education throughout the life course, and sync it up with work and other demands more seamlessly.

There’s much to think about, and much to do in a very quick time frame. We’ve been coasting along on policies and institutional ways of doing things that are backward-looking, not forward-looking. If you imagine the country in 2035, it’s going to look amazingly different than it does today. The path into adulthood will likely remain slow and circuitous as more young people delay marriage, build and rebuild careers, and explore their options. As a result, there will be a slower accumulation of assets and financial stability. There will be more single people. There may be more intergenerational living. And there will be more elderly people –especially if scientific breakthroughs slow the aging process (and you know they’re trying: think of the profits potential!). A few hitches might alter that scenario: namely, the high rates of obesity. But nonetheless, society will look and function differently than it does today. It’s time to rethink the game plan.

President Barack Obama today [Feb 13] announced a new initiative to boost our nation’s community colleges and help workers attain the skills they need to earn middle-class jobs. President Obama’s Community College to Career Fund would invest $8 billion over the next three years to boost partnerships between community colleges and regional employers. This initiative, jointly administered by the Departments of Education and Labor, aims to train 2 million workers for careers in high-growth industries such as health care and advanced manufacturing.

Loyal readers, you know how I feel about community colleges and a quick path to advanced manufacturing. Win-win. And if employers get on board and help schools tailor their training to fit the local demands, it’s even better. (And “local demands” is important in this equation as young people are often looking for work near home, and employers are looking for local talent).

These advanced manufacturing jobs are high-paying with solid career ladders. I’ve been spending some time out at Austin Polytech, here in Chicago, a high school that is working very hard to train the next generation of manufacturing employees. The school, which serves a largely African American student body, has designed a career track for students that leads directly to advanced manufacturing jobs. The people behind the program are leaders in the city’s manufacturing community, and kids leave high school with a nationally recognized manufacturing credential–if all goes well. They also leave with pre-calculus classes and other advanced math because today’s factory worker isn’t stuffing sausages anymore. He or she is running machines that need computer programming to shave off a piece of metal to an nth degree.

And these jobs pay well. Starting salary for a young person out of high school is in the high $30s (without a college degree mind you), and the career path can take one to earnings of $80,000. Not bad for a day’s work.

The thing I like about the Polytech program is that it works with employers directly to place students in summer jobs first and later full-time jobs. And it urges employers to assign the young person a mentor to make sure both the employer and the employee are having a good experience. And, they also ask that the employers pay for continued training–which many employers willingly do. As one human resources director said of manufacturing jobs today, employees in their company are never done learning; constant training is a part of the job.

I tagged along with a student who was doing a mock interview with one of the employer partners, Arrow Gear, in Downers Grove. In this case, the young woman said upfront that she was going to college for engineering. For her, that’s probably a great decision. She loves math and she’s a sharp kid. But as I sat there, with 30 years of hindsight, I couldn’t help think, are you kidding me? Why not work a couple of years at $40,000 and then go to college? You’d have the money to pay for it instead of taking out loans, and you’d also have something truly valuable to bring an engineering degree: real experience in building things.

I know, I know, college is a great idea too. It truly is. But maybe because I came from a family that saw no shame in a hard day’s work, I don’t see a job in manufacturing as a “second place” prize. I see it as an interesting job that pays well and has a lot of learning potential.

Hopefully, the new funding for community colleges that Obama is promoting will help sharpen the classes that colleges offer, and make them more relevant and viable. If actual employers get involved and help shape the curriculum, that will certainly help. Right now, too many students get lost in a meandering stream of classes with a vague idea of “getting a degree.” Perhaps with a more direct, and clear, path from school to work, whether it be in manufacturing or health care (another booming field), more kids will see the wisdom of spending tuition money on something that will get them a foothold on a middle-class life. And perhaps as more kids meet with success, the second-class status that these routes now have will vanish.

The death of a parent, as anyone will tell you, is never easy. It helps a little–but only a little– that my dad lived a long and good life. It also helps to feel the outpouring of support from family and friends, and the small-town rallying when a member of their community dies.

As many of you readers know, I grew up in a tiny town, population 1,000, rimmed by farmland, a mere interruption of sight lines, in northern Iowa. In a town that size, if you didn’t know someone personally, you at least knew of them. And so, as the doorbell set to ringing on Friday as the news of Dad’s death made its way along the gossip chain, faces I hadn’t seen in 20 years–a little more wrinkled perhaps but still identifiable–transported me back to an earlier time.

The bell would ring, and there they’d be, these memories of my childhood. I’d take the tupperware filled with snickerdoodles, warm chocolate chip cookies, or   the delicious Norweigian cracker/cookies (that I can never remember the name of) to the kitchen and pour a couple cups of coffee for the company. Black, no sugar, no cream. The now gray-haired couple of my youth, or in many cases, the remaining widow, would profess not to want to intrude, but with a little coaxing would take a seat on the couch “only for a minute.”

Mom would retell the story of dad’s last days, and everyone would express such surprise at his quick decline, while noting the blessing it was that he didn’t have to go to the nursing home. Inevitably, they’d tell a funny story about dad, and then, tapped out of thoughts about dad, would turn to me and ask, “And Barb, are you still in Chicago then?”

The rules of behavior are ingrained and well practiced in this aging community. The acceptable dishes to bring to the grieving family are set: sweets of any kind, coffee cakes or cinnamon buns breakfast, sloppy joes or hot dishes for lunch, and rolls–always rolls. You can never have enough rolls. The mode of delivery is the same: sweets are delivered in tupperware, the hot dishes in glass casseroles, the sloppy joes in one-gallon plastic ice cream buckets. Attached to each is a piece of masking tape with “Johnson” or “Sversen” printed in magic marker,  for easy return and thank-you cards.  If you can’t deliver the food yourself, you send your daughter.

My dad was a well-known guy. He owned a local business and had been one of the town’s leaders. He was also a very dear man. Not everyone I’m sure remembers him that way, but you’d never know it. He had outlived most of his close friends, and many others had fled the cold Iowa winter for warmer climes this particular February. But yet the doorbell kept ringing. My brother’s friends showed up. Two of my high school friends came by. My mom’s bridge partners stopped in. A few people from church, dad’s business friends, and people who lived down the street from us years ago stopped by.

Most touching, to me at least, the parents of the two brothers who lived across the street came to pay their respects, since their boys “were working the evening shift at GrainMillers or they’d have come themselves.”  Dad had always loved watching those two boys–young men really–come and go. A few years back, they’d bought the ranch-style home within viewing distance of my Dad’s lazy-boy, when they’d both taken a job at the mill and moved into town from nearby Stacyville. “Those two are hard-working boys,” he’d say with a nod of appreciation. At the first flake of snow, they’d be over shoveling mom and dad’s walk, unasked. And one night at 11pm they came running when my mother knocked because dad had fallen and she couldn’t lift him.

By Saturday afternoon, the food was piled in stacks on the counter tops. The two local restaurants were competing to send the best broasted chicken with all the trimmings, and we’d come home from making the funeral arrangements to find a plate of cheese and cold cuts arranged in the shape of a flower from the local grocery store. The rolls were going fast, and the doorbell did not stop ringing.

It’s that kind of connection, and goodness, that sustains us. It will be the support that keeps my mother from slipping into isolation and depression. It is the support that keeps people rooted to place. Small town life is not my own choice–the inward-looking tendency, its rigid rules and repressions leave me cold– but it is a tribe, my tribe, with its own sustaining culture.

My visits home now will be less frequent, my connection to place less firm. That’s ok. I’ve been slowly leaving for 30 years. But that place has left an indelible mark, a culture, that I’ll take with me.

Twenty five years later, Rex and I took the El down to City Hall to retrace our steps, but alas, Christmas Eve was on Saturday this year and City Hall was closed. Petros was closed as well. But it didn’t matter. We were still together in the empty Loop.

And now we’re off to Buenos Aires to celebrate, so the blog will be on hiatus until Jan 10 or so.

But before we go, and without sounding too sanctimonious I hope but with 25 years of it under my belt, here’s my 6 tips for a successful marriage, followed by Rex’s 6 tips:

My list, in no particular order:

1. Marry a decent person with a sense of humor.
2. Learn to change. Marriage is about two people. That means your way of doing things butts up against someone else’s equally good way of doing things. And life will throw curve balls. Adapt.
3. Learn to let it go. In the heat of the moment, take a breath, hold your tongute, and force yourself to laugh (at yourself usually). Do. not. dwell.
4. Do things together, even things you personally don’t like.
5. Don’t think the grass is greener on the other side. It ain’t.
6. Don’t overanalyze things. It’s really not that complicated. Ever.

And here’s Rex’s list–and seriously, we did not compare before we made this list!

1. Don’t just settle for someone because you think no one who is right for you will come along.
2. Recognize that relationships start from a sexual attraction but its the emotional attachment that lasts for the long haul. But don’t let the physical die altogether.
3. Marry someone you like. (see #2–it’s surprising how many people miss this one)
4. Don’t carry a grudge. Everybody has differences.
5. Be willing to compromise.
6. Don’t obsess about things because there are no hard and fast rules.

There’s no secret to a good marriage, if you ask me. It’s just learning to be happy with life however it comes at you. And it’s nice when it comes at you with someone whom you’ve grown to love so deeply.

So what are your tips to good marriage or partnerships?

I thought of that as I read the latest salvo against our public schools, in this case the offers by private profiteers of a “choice” to dodge the public schools and flee to the safety of online courses–as chronicled in Lee Fang’s article for The Nation, and Stephanie Saul in the New York Times. It’s just the latest–but perhaps the most damaging– in a long line of retreat from public goods and into the arms of a world tailored to our unique selves.

This steady disappearance of the public systems we take part in daily is for many a sign of progress. But in this headlong race to privatize everything–and its cousin, tailoring everything to our circumstances, we risk losing the very fabric that stitches us together in a society. We risk losing the “public” spaces; the “we” in a rush for the “me.”

The daily interactions in public spaces, whether on a public bus, at the park, on our sidewalks and highways, in a classroom, at the doctor’s office, or at the DMV, are shared experiences, and ultimately meritocratic. Even Bill Gates has to renew his driver’s license. Our interactions remind us what we have in common with others–sometimes others we would not otherwise meet. The rules (wait your turn in line) and customs (say thank you to the bus driver) reflect back on us the order of our ideal society.

Public education is one of the most prominent of these public goods. It is in school that we learn to be part of a society, to share, to exchange, to take turns. It is where we forcibly shed the individual myopia and ego, where we first realize that there are better soccer players or spellers than us, or that not everyone is waiting with bated breath to hear our answer. It is where we realize that some kids have it harder than others.  We learn our ABCs and 123s, of course, but it is the physical togetherness and a shared experience that binds us. It is these shared experiences that make us feel so bound to our “Class of 1992″ or that makes us cheer wildly for our football team. It is this communal glue that provides us with an identity beyond ourselves.

When we whittle away at this public-ness, we run into trouble. When we carve ourselves off from public spaces via experiences tailored to our preferences and income level, it will nudge us ever closer to little islands of privacy–and disconnect us from the larger good. We will buy our way into a “concierge” medical service so we don’t have to “suffer” through a waiting room. We will gate ourselves off in our “own” communities so we don’t have to live next door to someone who might opt for pink flamingos in the yard. Or we can skip the classroom altogether and learn what we want online. The latter has been in the news of late as private corporations rush to offer “choice” to school children and their families through online classrooms.

The latest push to give children a choice to learn online instead of in a classroom is couched in language that suggests they will be rescued from the grip of the public. “Kids have been shackled to their brick-and-mortar school down the block for too long,” Ronald Packard, CEO of K12, Inc., a private company offering online courses (for a fee), told the New York Times, adding that for the first time, every child, regardless of where he or she lives, has a choice. (One hears in that choice a choice to withdraw).

Beyond the question of whether a private company, with a bottom line to attend to, can truly educate all children (aka, the public), there is the question I’ve been clumsily trying to make and that Tony Judt in Ill Fares the Land puts so much better: The “one-size-fits-all” public services, he says, might have had their faults, but “their provision was universal, for good and ill they were regarded as a public responsibility.”

There is no equivalent of a public bus or a public classroom online. In fact, the online communities are the exact opposite of public spaces. We self-select into the online worlds, balkanizing by interests, splintering down to the most specialized slices. You don’t have to ride with someone who is talking too loud, or who is softly weeping with her face to the window, or who is reading a book you never heard of. You might run across those ideas or people online, but you don’t have to sit with them for 30 minutes—time to wonder, to sympathize, and yes to fume. You click and you’re gone. Some will say that’s the exact reason they love the internet, or private taxis. They don’t have to be bothered. It is why we live in gated communities as well. In those havens, we don’t have to brush up against humanity if we don’t want to.

But the atomized “me” worlds that we retreat to are not community. They are not the building blocks to a society with a purpose and a sense of “we.”

If we can buy our way out of public spaces, or if we can tailor those “public” spaces to our own interests and prejudices, then what becomes of the larger purpose of building and sustaining a society? How do we convince people to sacrifice for a larger good? It gets harder, that’s for sure. Just look at the military. Without a national draft–a truly public experience– we have relegated the duty (yes, that old-fashioned word) to a smaller and smaller group doing endless tours of duty. Meanwhile the majority of us, untouched by it, don’t support– or protest– the wars. My 90+-year-old parents, who lived through WWII and its example after example of shared sacrifice, grow wistful at the memory. It was hard, but everybody was on the same footing. Everyone sacrificed. No one was able to buy a toaster. No one. And it was that sense of shared sacrifice that built a stronger society.

While libertarians likely cheer this “less public/more private” thinking, Judt reminds us that “the reduction of ‘society’ to a thin membrane of interaction between private individuals …was first and above all the dream of Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Nazis.” And any society, wrote Edmund Burke, that destroys the fabric of its state, will soon be “disconnected into the dust and power of individuality.”

I fear that dismantling has been well underway for far too long. As the students in my friend’s class reveal, “public” is, in their minds, already “the other”—the “they” as Nietzsche put it. We have rushed headlong into a privatized, personally tailored world of a “we” and “they” — devoid of an “us.”

At a time in life that is traditionally the most mobile, young people in their 20s are forced by circumstances to clip their wings. A recent report by the Brookings Institution finds that Americans of all ages are not moving as much, mainly because of the recession and the housing collapse. When you can’t sell your house or don’t have the savings to move after a layoff, the options shrink pretty quickly. In fact, mobility is at its lowest point since 1948.

For young people, the constraints are slightly different. For the younger set, those ages 18-25, the lack of jobs coupled with college debt makes taking a risk and moving to Dallas or Phoenix or Atlanta a little scarier. It’s a vicious Catch-22 for many. They’re out of work, and a job pops up in a distant city, but their college loans on top of rent make moving impossible. So they’re stuck living at home with their parents and no job. That makes their personal economy grind to a halt.

Here’s a couple of charts that tell the story. In the graph on the right, the highest bars belong to young adults in their 20s– the “lifeblood of the economy” as the Brookings report puts it. The tan bars in the chart on the right are pre-recession mobility trends by age, and the blue bars are post-recession. Look at that drop for 20-24 year olds especially.

Source: Brookings Institution

So what are the consequences of this? Less risk-taking, for one. More “settling” and running in place. For young people, it’s a tough situation, especially if they’re tied to areas with sluggish job growth, which is many areas these days– or in a home whose value has plummeted. This latter group of homeowners could be particularly vulnerable to foreclosure because they are at an early point in their career, earning less, in less secure jobs, and more than likely have started a family (thus the need to put down some roots and buy a house).

Being stuck with a house that has lost a lot of value or that won’t sell for a decent price means that these young people will likely tough it out, perhaps passing on a job offer elsewhere or clinging to a thankless job because they feel they have no choice.

On the other hand, the rural brain drain might be staunched for the next several years. For a long time now, small towns in rural America have been losing their young people to the sexier big cities. (One of the more intriguing books on this topic is Hollowing Out the Middle.) Their exodus has created a huge problem for these small towns dotting the landscape. I’ve watched as my own hometown, population 1,000, ages. My dad, who still lives in town, plays cribbage every Wednesday with four of his friends. The “young one,” as he tells it, is 84. Dad is 95, and he’s not the youngest.

So perhaps the lack of mobility will have a silver lining for towns like this– the best and the brightest will stay put, and the low cost of living might begin to attract those with college loans that make it impossible to live in the “big city.” I’ve already noticed an uptick in articles about city dwellers who abandon the ship to set up a creamery or a brewery or an art studio in a small town. More power to them. Maybe they’ll bring the needed life to small-town America.

* * *

Thanksgiving is a great holiday. Food, no religion, no gift-giving pressure. Growing up, Thanksgiving was about getting out the good china, polishing my grandmother’s silver, and filching black olives from the appetizer tray–one for each finger tip. The windows steamed up, pots clanked, and my sister muscled through the  potatoes with a wire masher to the clackety-clack rhythm of a horse in a trot on a city street. Oh, who’s kidding whom? It’s a tense disaster of a day in our family.

The day would start innocently enough, with a parade on tv, and the big hunt about to commence. Bob White and his glam wife Ellie, would arrive from “the cities” in their 1970s-flotilla Lincoln Continental–their Bloody Marys ensconced in cupholders (way before cupholders were de rigeur) and Bob’s revered rifle in the trunk. Bob was a 6-foot 5 Mr Magoo. Always a little tipsy, he was a larger-than-life entertainer. He could tell a joke, improvise boogie-woogie on the piano, and tell a helluva joke. A grain dealer, he spent his days with a phone to his ear and his evenings with a drink in hand at the Little Wagon or Richards in Minneapolis.

But on Thanksgiving morning, he was in Iowa, for the big pheasant hunt. He fancied himself a Hemingway sort, hoping to relive some sort of male-bonding fraternity of his youth.  I’d beg and beg to go along, and more often than not I got my wish. It was more about being where the fun was than killing a poor pheasant, because as we all know, men have more fun than women on holidays. And my mother was not having fun in that kitchen.

Her turkey is seared in our memories. It would begin about three days before Thanksgiving when she’d put the rock-solid frozen bird in a pan in the garage to thaw out (on the logic that it was cooler in the garage than inside).  When sufficiently thawed, she’d move it in to the kitchen counter for a day because there was no longer enough room in the fridge. There it would sit, all pink-skinned and goose-pimply.

In the meantime (meaning about a week before–she’s’ a planner, that one), she’d cream some onions, bake the sweet potatoes until their skin was dry and cracked (no marshmallows for us), and do something nearly unrecognizable with Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, canned green beans, and onion rings. All of which sat on the counter or in the fridge, uncovered (she has a distaste for aluminum foil or that new-fangled Saran wrap.)

Thanksgiving day itself would start before dawn, when that bird finally went into the oven. From then on, it was nonstop muttering and clanking pots.  We were banned, banned from entering the kitchen. If you dared to enter, asking, say, for some more nuts, the glare alone would drive you back to the television room nut-free. “What do you want more nuts for?” she’d bark. “They’ll just spoil your dinner.” (That, I believe, was the point. We’d been here before).

In the midst of this somewhere, we hunters would return, glorious in our prize. We’d have generously plucked the birds already, and Bob White–not understanding the code of behavior–would stride into the no-fly zone and plop the newly dead birds into the sink. OMG.

Any kitchen on Thanksgiving is a choreographed dance that only the host knows, and it’s best to take on a task like folding napkins or filling water glasses. I learned this valuable lesson at a tender age 8. Bob White never, ever figured that out.

My mother would take that pheasant, slam it into a pan, and shove it in the oven, with the pellets still poking out of its skin. She was having none of it.

Finally, a few hours later, Sally would be summoned to mash the potatoes and we’d know the moment was near when the bird would come out of the 275 degree oven, where it had been for the past 8 hours. Right behind it were the pheasants, now about one-third their original size, browned to a crisp.  “Dad,” she’d bellow, her voice dropping an ominous octave, “come and carve the [bleep-bleeped] bird.” A twinkle in his eye, and a wink, he’d kick down the footrest on his Lazy-Boy and say (with what I now think was a hint of dread), “I guess it’s time to eat.”

The kitchen was a scene of war-torn chaos. Dad in one corner, man-handling the bird with a blade that hadn’t been sharpened since 1948. Bob White looming, crest-fallen over his destroyed pheasant. Mom dodging people to get the green beans reheated while realizing she forgot to put the bread in the oven. Sue, my other sister, would be trying to wrest some semblance of order out of it all. And Elli, wise Ellie, would be sitting at the table, cracking a joke with a cocktail in her hand.

Dutifully, we’d take our seats at the table, where the sweet pickles, hunks of celery (bite-size were never in her vocabulary), and one remaining olive sat lonely on the “salad” plate. We’d tuck into the food, then someone would remember to say grace. We’d try to recall the words to a prayer and resort to “good food, good meat, good God let’s eat,” and we’d begin. Ten minutes later, done–with a few stray bb’s on our plates to attest to the grand hunt that morning. The bird? Well, we’re a family of dark meat eaters if that’s any signal.

After dinner, we girls would wash the endless dishes, cracking a window to let some air in the steamed-up room. Eventually a group of us hardy souls would take a walk, shivering in the moonless night, our voices carrying for seemingly miles in the crisp air. Back home, the table cloth would come off and a card game or a game of Pit would commence, a second round of food would make its way from the fridge, but eventually, like any holiday, it would end for another year.

I realize now that about as quickly as we ate that meal, time has passed. Bob and Ellie are both gone now, as are my sister Sue and her husband Jerry. The house  where we all grew up is owned by another family making its own memories. Dad shuffles down the hall with the help of a walker. The piano is silent.

But, gradually, we make new memories. This year, my niece-in-law Sunny is cooking the meal out at the family “ranch,” which once belonged to Sue and Jerry and is now where she and Eric (of birthday cake fame) live with their own kids. That house is filled with its own memories, of Jerry’s “put it on a cracker” happy hour concoctions, of Sue’s tidy kitchen and scented candles. Eric is shaking up tradition and planning to deep-fry the bird (no worries, he’s also one of the volunteer fireman in town). Tara, his sister, is bringing her own four kids, and my sister Sally’s son and wife and their kids are joining later.

The thing is, you can’t look back too long or you might miss the joy in the moment.

Invoking the famous “paradox of thrift” of John Maynard Keynes, the story quotes the ubiquitous Mark Zandi as saying that each time a new household is not formed, the economy misses out on about $145,000 in spending on things from drywall to brooms. By staying put in their parents’ household to save money, young adults are depriving local landlords, hardware stores, and plumbers of business.

The latest Census reports find that 14.2% of young adults aged 25-34 are living with their parents (or in dorms), up from 11.8% in 2007 when the recession took hold. The number of new households formed has declined sharply since 2007, from about 1.3 million to approximately 900,000 in 2010. Much of this is straight economics: the recession has squeezed everyone. According to Zandi, there should be about 1.1 million more households today than there actually are, a good chunk of this gap is driven by young adults staying put at home.

What struck me about the young man the Times included in the interview–and what we’ve heard in our own interviews–is the notion that renting is throwing money away. AND, the degree that “saving money” is front and center for this generation. Jay Bouvier, whom the Times interviewed, makes $45,000 a year in a secure job but he’s living at home in Bristol, CT, to save up for a down payment. No ramen and roaches for him. It makes you wonder if we haven’t feathered such a nice nest for kids–and raised their expectations of what’s a necessity–that they see no reason to suffer through a three-story walk-up with a shower from 1940 and radiators that clank like the chains of Ebenezer Scrooge.

But before I descend to the “kids these days” fist-shaker, it serves to remind that Bouvier is largely the exception. The recession has hit young people particularly hard. Many are unemployed with college debt hanging over their heads, and living on their own is a non-choice. College graduates are often working in jobs that don’t require a degree, and those with less or no postsecondary education are squeezed out of those jobs as a result. Young men who relied on the construction industry for a decent paycheck are sitting on their hands waiting for the market to recover (the paradox of thrift trickles down). This group– and those without a BA are the majority–is living at home out of necessity, not because they’re saving money for a down payment on a home of their own.

This brings up an issue of housing affordability. A forward-thinking group of architects and urban planners met in New York City recently to brainstorm about housing for a future with a changed demographic. As Michael Kimmelman in Thursday’s Arts Section of the Times reports, most new homes in NYC are designed for nuclear families. Yet only 17% of dwellings in the city are home to two parents raising kids. Young adults are delaying marriage and children well into their 30s, and for all the talk about how many kids are living at home these days, the real story is how much longer people are living on their own today–at both ends of the life course.

The architects and urban planners let their creativity flow with ideas for how to transform current housing to make it more affordable and more communal. Micro-lofts was one idea. Such lofts are about 150 square feet with 14-foot ceilings and a mini-kitchen. They’re clustered around larger communal space with a garden or a big living room. (Think dorms for adults–or more glamorously, hotel living). [Here's some images]

According to “The Tiny House” blog, cities experimenting with small-size suites include “Shoebox Lofts in Portland, Ore., Cubix Yerba Buena in San Francisco, and Moda Apartments in Seattle all have units in the 250- or 300-square-foot range.” Micro-lofts in Vancouver, according to one developer, “Have a fold-down wall bed, and when that wall bed is up, it has a fold-down table. We integrated a workbench with a built-in flat screen TV so that that does not take any room and created a glassy washroom enclosure that functions as a single area — shower, and toilet and sink all in one area.” (Reminds me of the ingenious room design at the Andaz Hotel Wall Street).

Smaller, smartly designed housing that can be built cheaper but not feel cheap is good for both a city’s citizenry and the planet. Denser living leaves a smaller footprint.

All this recalls the work of architect Bertrand Goldberg and his ideas for urban living and industrial design. His Jetson-like buildings (here and here) are typically cylindrical high-rises with pods arranged around a central communal space (for his hospitals anyway). Most famous for Marina Towers in Chicago and numerous hospitals across the country, Goldberg designed for efficiency (a hub and spoke design for hospital floors) and communal living–a city within a city–for residential. At the time (in the 1950s -1970s) he was ahead of the curve. Today’s architects are just following suit and pulling us into the future.

Federal subsidies and a redesign of the mortgage system would be needed to see these ideas get off the ground, but it’s certainly worth the conversation.

What’s so disturbing is how much the gap in net worth has widened over the years. While the median net worth of a household over age 65 grew 42% since 1984, for households under age 35, net worth shrank fully 68%.  Stunning. As I wrote months ago, we must rethink our policies and support young people more as they maneuver these rocky waters.

Some of you out there who have lived through recessions before might pshaw at the prospect that young adults need support. After all, we survived past recessions without any help. Why do they need support?  But the numbers are clear. Trends underway long before the recession– rising college costs, declining wages, eroding benefits, growing inequality– have left us all on shakier ground. A recession as deep and prolonged as this is only piling on risk and hardship, most profoundly for those just starting out in the workforce.

In other words, this one is different because we’re different. Our economy is a much higher-stakes game, and young people relative to retirees have been losing ground. The question is, are the odds of catching up later, in one’s 30s and 40s, shrinking too? The college payoff is declining as wages flatten and college costs rise. Housing values are in the toilet. The things that we count on, in other words, to raise net worth are eroding. Will this gap persist as a result? Only time will tell. Can we as a country afford to wait and see how it turns out? I don’t think so.