Over at the Washington Post, Catherine Rampell answers the burning question about millenials, “Why aren’t they getting married or buying houses, and why are they still living with their parents?”

Spoiler alert, it’s because they have crap jobs and they are up to their ears in debt, something which seems to escape all those sage analysts who have spilled barrels of ink over this:

Millennial homeownership rates are way, way down. And believe it or not, that’s probably a good thing.

………

Homeownership rates among Americans under age 35 are barely more than half the national number, at just 34.1 percent. This too is a record low and about a fifth below its peak from the go-go years of the mid-2000s.

………

Many colorful theories abound for millennials’ abandonment of homeownership. There are, for example, lots of think pieces about millennials’ purported love of the sharing economy and associated communitarian disavowal of all kinds of ownership — whether that be of houses, cars, bikes or even clothes.

But this explanation is wrong, at least when it comes to housing.

So why are young people delaying getting that deed?

One, they’re putting off getting married, which many still see as a prerequisite to homeownership. (Though a large chunk of millennials, I should note, instead view homeownership as a prerequisite to marriage.)

Two — and this is part of the reason they’re delaying marriage, too — is that they’re poor.

Relative to earlier generations, today’s cohort of young people is making less money, given their levels of education; more indebted with student loans; more likely to be underemployed; struggling harder to sock away savings; and facing shallower income-growth trajectories.

She’s right, and it’s blatantly obvious to anyone who isn’t busy yelling, “Hey, you kids get off my lawn!”

But for the average pundit, bemoaning the sad states of today’s youth is a an article that writes itself.

It’s catnip for hack writers.