These troubles, many economists fear, left serious scars, and not just psychic ones. Now that the economy has entered a steady but slow recovery, younger millennials wonder if they can make up that gap. Lisa Kahn, a labor economist at the Yale School of Management, studied the earnings of men who left college and joined the work force during the deep recession of the early 1980s. Unsurprisingly, she found that the higher the unemployment rate upon graduation, the less graduates earned right out of school. But those workers never really caught up. “The effects were still present 15 or 20 years later,” she said. “They never made that money back.”

Kahn worries that the same pattern is repeating itself. And new research from the Urban Institute augurs that this emerging income gap is compounding into a wealth gap. The institute’s research shows that even as the country has grown richer, Generations X and Y, meaning people up to about age 40, have amassed less wealth than their parents had when they were young. The average net worth of someone 29 to 37 has fallen 21 percent since 1983; the average net worth of someone 56 to 64 has more than doubled. Thirty or 40 years from now, young millennials might face shakier retirements than their parents. For the first time in modern memory, a whole generation might not prove wealthier than the one that preceded it.

The millennials’ relationship with money seems quite simple. They do not have a lot of it, and what they do have, they seem reluctant to spend. Millennials are buying fewer cars and houses, and despite their immersion in consumer culture, particularly electronics, they are not really spending beyond their limited means. Their credit-card debt has declined, most likely because many millennials cannot get a credit card, and in part because they know they cannot afford to spend now and pay back later. “They have this risk aversion that we’ve seen with millennials since they were teenagers,” Howe said. “It’s declining alcohol use, declining drug use. I mean, declining sex.”

There might be one more factor at play in the millennials’ economic anxiety. For my grandmother’s generation, the economic boom that followed World War II expanded the middle class and its share of the nation’s wealth. Our great recession, however, came after three decades of wage stagnation for a huge swath of middle-class American workers, which is one reason income inequality has yawned to levels not seen since the late 1920s. And since the worst days of the recession ended, inequality has continued to grow. Corporations that shed workers became leaner and more profitable. Members of the 1 percent have taken nearly all the wage gains made in the recovery. Their incomes bounced back. Nearly everyone else’s fell. Worse, our savings rate before the recent crisis was near a record low.

During World War II, the ethos was “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” But the 21st-century rallying cry among the young is “We are the 99 percent.” This recession’s emphasis was never on making do with little; for many millennials, it has seemed more about wondering why they had to make do with so little when so few had so much. This sentiment was captured in recent exit polls that found that nearly two-thirds of presidential voters 29 and younger thought the American economic system favored the wealthy.