You’ve heard all the stereotypes about the “baby boomerang,” a generation of milk-fed “emerging adults” who, by choice or necessity, live in their parents’ basement while they work, study or watch Girls in their underwear.

Now a new report from the US census bureau confirms it: for the first time since the government started tracking such data, living with one’s parents is the most common domestic arrangement for Americans in the 18-34 age bracket.

It didn’t used to be this way. Living with a spouse was the most common arrangement for young people in 1975, with 57% of the 18-34 population setting up home compared to just 26% living with their parents, and 11% living in other arrangements such as with roommates.

But by 2014, those numbers had changed drastically, with some 31% of young people living with their parents, 27% living with a spouse, and 21% “other.” The report does not break down the 1975 data by race, but in 2014, slightly more black and Hispanic youngsters reported living with their parents than white and Asian Americans, a disparity which puts the lie to the oft-parroted misconception that this is a disease of the privileged.

This data correlates with a drop in marriage and birthrates. The percentage of women who’d given birth fell for all age groups, with the steepest drop occurring in younger women. This continues the trend seen in previous reports that found the United States birthrate fell by 8% from 2007 to 2010.

By 2013 it had dropped a full 9% from the 2007 high, with an average of just 1.87 children per woman, which is below the rate of replacement. (The drop was sharpest for immigrants and non-white women.) The US birthrate is now at its lowest point ever recorded. Is America’s youth so obsessed with sexting and Pornhub that they never learned to copulate IRL, or is there something deeper going on?

While some will no doubt attribute this to the unique moral depravity of the Kardashian generation, it correlates strongly with changes brought on by the transition from postwar New Deal democracy to post-Reagan global capitalism. The drop in births coincides with the 2007 financial crisis (which was itself a failure in financial regulation), and has continued a decade into the uneven “recovery.”

In 1975, a strong labor movement guaranteed benefits and a living wage to workers without college degrees. Now, manufacturing jobs have been outsourced and American union membership hovers around 11%. One must have a college degree to compete in the labor market, but tuition costs — and resulting student debt — have skyrocketed as education has become more commodified.

A robust economy and top tax rates of 70% or more once funded federal housing programs spawned by the New Deal and the Great Society. Now, decades of neoliberal cuts to taxes and welfare programs have left the housing question to the vicissitudes of the free market. Wages have stagnated while rents have soared. All the while, our Silicon Valley overlords are replacing traditional, benefit-granting employment with app-based serfdom.

I don’t mean to idealize the economic system of the postwar era, which harbored no small measure of racism and sexism. But it does explain a lot about why millennials are so broke, beyond “because Facebook ruined our brains”.

On the flipside, cuts to Medicare mean that increasing numbersof older people will need their kids to move in and care for them. (It’s OK; we’re unemployed, anyway.) That’s right: some millennials live with our parents because they need us.

Although it was unfettered capitalism that brought us here, the current state of affairs is, ironically, not great for growth, which capitalist economies need to survive. Fewer traditional households means lower rates of consumption as fewer people buy crap for their kids.

Fewer babies born means fewer workers to exploit for profits, and a thinner tax base to work with as the older population retires and starts to collect Social Security. These effects will only intensify as Baby Boomers move to fixed incomes. This goes without saying, but relying on wealth grandfathered in from a more progressive and prosperous time is not a sustainable long-term model. Not to mention, many families never had much wealth to begin with, even in the ‘good old days’ of 1950s dad patriarchy and KKK rallies.

The current economic system contains within it the ingredients for its own failure. Breaking this negative feedback loop could take another war, or, less likely for the US, massive redistributive programs. It’s no wonder the under-30 set threw their lot in with a democratic socialist for president.

Unfortunately, just because the system isn’t working doesn’t mean it will concede defeat and go away. It’s much more likely to keep limping along and cannibalizing all of us, starting with the most vulnerable and finishing with its own gilded tail.

If we can take anything positive away from this latest report, it’s that issues like housing and care must become major sites of struggle if we’re ever going to wake up from this recurring nightmare.