In 2024, Pew asked 3,600 U.S. adults for the best age to get married, have a first child, and buy a home. A third to a half said there was no best age at all. Among those who did give an age, however, the answers clustered tightly: half put marriage and a first child between 25 and 29, while seven in ten put homeownership between 25 and 34.
The Heritage Foundation and related institutions have prescribed a “success sequence” for young people:
Achieve a high school education
Work full time
Marry before having children
in order to avoid poverty in adulthood. But this is an impoverished account of success for life in one of the richest societies ever to exist.
The World Bank’s poverty line for upper-middle-income countries is $8.30 per person per day; only about two percent of Americans fall below it. Abraham Maslow observed of Americans in 1943 that material needs had receded enough for other wants to become important—including the desire to fully exercise one’s capabilities.
Finish school, secure full-time work, marry, have children, buy the house. The prefabricated American life has the virtues of anything prefab: familiar components, a known order of assembly, and an obvious definition of finished. Components can be sourced from sea to shining sea, without the risk of specialized or experimental parts.
Antipoverty campaigners may reasonably demand to be shown a better blueprint. Everyone knows somebody whose experiments ended in debt, loneliness, addiction, or just years they wish they could get back. Failure yields many cautionary tales.
Sometimes there is no better blueprint because the point is not to know the destination in advance. Renting can preserve the ability to move when a good opportunity appears. That flexibility has a kind of option value that looks like nothing.
Because the opportunity may never come, and never be exercised. But if it does, the renter’s ability to capitalize on it quickly and decisively was not mere luck. The supposedly unfinished life had been carrying unused capacity the whole time.