CathInfo.com

The median age at first marriage for American men in 1970 was 23.2 years old. Today it is over 30.
A full American generation has been added to the waiting room of adult life — not because young men don’t want families, but because they cannot afford to start one, and they cannot afford to start one because the thing they earn has lost its ability to buy the life their fathers bought on one income at twenty-three.

In 1960, more than half of all thirty-year-olds in this country were both married and homeowners. In 1990, that number was 43%.

In 2026, it is about 12%. The American Dream did not become harder in my lifetime. It ceased to exist. Children living in single-parent households: 12% in 1970, over 25% today.

When men cannot provide, families do not form. When families do not form, children are raised without fathers. When children are raised without fathers, boys grow up without a model of what a productive adult man even looks like.

If you measure America’s prosperity in ounces of gold — a real monetary metal — a very different picture emerges. In August 1999, at the absolute peak of the dot-com bubble, it took 44 ounces of gold to buy one unit of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

That was the high-water mark of American financial wealth. It has never been matched before or since in the entire recorded history of the country.

Today, in April 2026, it only takes about 10 ounces of gold to buy the Dow. Since 1999, measured in real, unprintable money, the entire American stock market has lost 77% of its value.

 Three-quarters of the real wealth held in equities by every pension fund, every 401(k), every endowment, every family trust in the United States — gone. Not in a crash. Not in an event you can point to. Vaporized slowly, continuously, invisibly, over 27 years, by the quiet debasement of the yardstick itself.

This is worse than the Great Depression. By a lot. During the Depression, the Dow-to-gold ratio fell from roughly 18 in 1929 to about 2 in 1932 — and then it recovered. The loss, while violent, was visible. People knew what had happened to them.

The loss since 1999 has been 3 times larger in aggregate, but nobody is angry, because nobody can see it. The number on the 401(k) statement keeps going up.

The house appraises for more every year. The grocery bill rises a little each month, but nobody connects that rise to the 77% collapse of real equity wealth, because the official inflation statistics, which are constructed by the same government that benefits from understating them, insist that there has barely been any inflation at all.

The entire postwar middle class — the economy built by the G.I. Bill, single-earner households, thirty-year mortgages at 6%, and a gold-backed dollar — has been quietly destroyed over the last 50 years. Not by a villain. Not by a specific policy. By the gradual, almost imperceptible erosion of the unit of account.

Your grandfather was paid in dollars that were redeemable for gold at $35 an ounce. Your father was paid in dollars that were promised to hold their value but didn’t. And you are being paid in dollars that have lost more than 99% of their purchasing power against gold and 77% of their purchasing power against the stock market since 1999. You have not gotten richer.

The labor force participation rate for prime-age American men — men between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four, the exact demographic that is supposed to be working, marrying, and fathering children — was roughly 97% in the early 1970s. In 2026, it is around 89%. That is a one-in-twelve collapse. Roughly 7 million prime-age American men have simply walked off the field.