The Cohort We Built

Generation Alpha — born from 2010 through the end of 2024, currently aged from infancy to about fifteen — is the largest generation ever to exist on the planet. McCrindle Research’s count, cited by the IMD business school in Lausanne, places the cohort at roughly two billion people once the final birth year closes out. They will, by 2030, account for 11 percent of the global workforce. Most of them will live to be older than ninety. A non-trivial share will live past one hundred and twenty, if the longevity curve holds.

They are also the first generation in American history to be raised inside a fully completed experiment whose results were already known when the experiment was run. Granite State Report has, across the last two months, looked at the survival forecasts for the millennials, now aged 30 to 44, and for Generation Z, currently aged 14 to 29. This is the forecast for the cohort beneath both of them — the kids in New Hampshire’s elementary schools right now, the toddlers in our daycares, the babies born last week at Concord Hospital and Memorial Hospital and Speare Memorial in Plymouth. Most of these kids will be alive in 2110.

What follows is not speculation. The earliest Gen Alphas are now in high school. Their reading scores have been measured. Their attention spans have been measured. Their screen exposure has been measured. The amount of textbook-replacement money spent on their education has been audited. Their mental-health diagnostic rates have been logged by the federal statistical agencies. The climate scenarios under which they will be working at age forty have been published by the IPCC. The actuarial life-expectancy tables exist. We are not guessing. We are reading the data we already have.

The Education Experiment We Ran on Them

Start with the part that is closest to home, because it is the part New Hampshire taxpayers paid for and have not yet examined. Over the past decade, U.S. schools spent approximately $30 billion replacing K-12 textbooks with laptops and tablets, according to Fortune’s analysis of Department of Education spending. The Qustodio family-tech research firm reports that 60 percent of American students now have a school-provided device, and another 14 percent bring their own from home.

The results are on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) record. Only 33 percent of U.S. fourth graders were proficient in reading in 2022 — the lowest figure since the assessment began measuring this consistently. The share at or above basic reading level dropped to 40 percent, down from 2019. Sixty-five percent of fourth-grade Gen Alphas are now reading below proficiency. Fifty-six percent cannot perform math at their grade level. The PIRLS international study scored the Gen Alpha cohort at 500 — below the OECD average — and the 2023 PISA scores for the oldest Gen Alphas, 15-year-olds, came in at 504 in reading. Below average. The same direction.

Researchers studying the cohort have begun describing it, plainly, as the first U.S. generation to test as less cognitively capable than its parents at the same age. That sentence is uncomfortable. It is also accurate. A large JAMA Pediatrics analysis associated higher screen-time exposure — television, video games, leisure internet — with measurably lower reading and math performance. The dose-response relationship is established. Several states began rolling out classroom cellphone bans in 2025 and 2026 in response, with New Hampshire among them; Granite State Report covered the legislative debate over HB 131 in our prior session.

The implication for the next eighty years is the part that, again, almost no one will say cleanly. A generation that arrives at age eighteen with a measurably weaker reading and quantitative reasoning baseline than its parents will not invisibly catch up across its lifetime. The gap compounds. It compounds in college completion rates, in lifetime earnings, in occupational sorting, in the kinds of work the cohort is capable of performing, and ultimately in the kind of country these kids will be voting in by 2050.

The Attention Experiment, Which Was Even Worse

Children between 8 and 12 spend an average of four hours and 44 minutes per day in front of a screen. For 13- to 18-year-olds — the older edge of Gen Alpha — that number climbs to seven hours and 22 minutes. The average Gen Alpha child’s recreational attention span, measured across multiple studies, is now approximately eight seconds. The same as Gen Z’s, and noticeably shorter than the millennial baseline of twelve seconds at the same age.

Ninety percent of Gen Alpha parents report their children regularly used tablets or smartphones by age four. Seventy-three percent of Gen Alpha kids use two or more screens simultaneously as a default behavior. The optimal length for educational video targeting this cohort — meaning, the length at which retention does not collapse — is now three to five minutes. Gen Alpha children spend, by direct measurement, about 50 percent less time on a single task than millennials did at the same age.

This is not a generational lifestyle preference. It is a measurable neurological adaptation to the input environment we built around them. The brain is plastic; we kept it on TikTok and YouTube Shorts; it adapted. The adaptation has costs. Eighty-five percent of Gen Alpha parents report their children have difficulty focusing on traditional long-form reading. The cohort’s daily recreational reading time — fifteen minutes — is the lowest ever measured for any age group in the modern Scholastic and Common Sense Media datasets.

The Mental Health Numbers That Are Already Locked In

Approximately 8 percent of Gen Alpha children have been formally diagnosed with anxiety disorders. Depression diagnoses among children ages 6 to 12 rose 27 percent between 2016 and 2021, and the projected increase by 2032 is another 33 percent on top of that. These are diagnoses among children — not adolescents, not college students. Children.

The drivers are partially environmental and partially structural. Gen Alpha kids have grown up inside a continuous background ambient of school shootings, pandemic disruption, climate news, parental economic stress carried from the millennial and Gen Z cohorts above them, and the same algorithm-driven social-comparison feeds that produced the Gen Z mental-health crisis — only Gen Alpha hit those feeds earlier, more constantly, and with less developed cognitive scaffolding to defend against them.

The actuarial implication is that Gen Alpha will arrive at age 18 with a higher baseline psychiatric load than any earlier American cohort, including Gen Z. Whether the cohort is more or less resilient than Gen Z when they hit it is an open empirical question. The early data is not encouraging.

The World They Will Actually Work In

The leading edge of Gen Alpha — the kids born in 2010 — will turn 18 in 2028. They will enter the labor force into a market that has already absorbed two waves of large-language-model deployment. The entry-level white-collar tier that Gen Z is being squeezed out of right now will not exist in the same shape by the time Gen Alpha shows up. It will be either reconstituted around AI-supervisor roles — humans managing fleets of automated agents — or it will have collapsed entirely into a much smaller funnel, with most college graduates routed into skilled trades, service, healthcare, or platform work.

The trades will be the boom sector for the same reasons they are already booming for Gen Z. Plumbing, electrical, HVAC, line work, advanced manufacturing, robotics maintenance, and elder-care nursing will be the high-leverage occupations for the cohort whose parents did not save them an inheritance and whose entry-level office jobs no longer exist. The Atlanta Fed’s 2026 work on Arrow’s learning-by-doing framework applies even harder to Gen Alpha than to Gen Z: the workforce ladder that produces the next cohort of senior employees does not refill itself without entry-level on-ramps, and the corporate sector is currently dismantling those on-ramps to harvest near-term margin.

By 2050, when the median Gen Alpha is about thirty-five years old, the U.S. workforce will look structurally unlike any prior labor market in the country’s history. A small upper tier of AI-supervisor and creative-strategy roles, much of it inherited rather than competed for. A larger skilled-trades and direct-care tier that is hard to automate and where wages will rise to clear scarcity. A platform-work and gig-economy tier absorbing whatever the middle of the credential pyramid used to occupy. And a non-trivial share of the cohort doing something that does not currently have a job title — speculative roles tied to longevity medicine, climate adaptation, robotics, biotech, and the second-order industries that will exist by then.

By 2030, Gen Alpha will already account for 11 percent of the global workforce. By 2040, the leading edge will be in their late twenties and the heart of the cohort will be in early career. By 2050, this generation will be running the institutions that millennials and Gen Z built and complained about.

The Climate They Will Spend Their Lives Inside

Generation Alpha is the first generation in American history for whom climate change is not a forecast, a controversy, or a future risk. It is the foundational ambient condition of their entire lives. The IPCC’s mid-emissions scenarios place global temperatures at 1.5°C above pre-industrial by the early 2030s — when Gen Alpha is in their teens and early twenties — and 2.0°C by approximately 2050, when they are in their twenties and thirties. The 3°C trajectory is not impossible; it remains in the plausible band by 2100, when the youngest Gen Alphas are still alive and in their late seventies.

A 2021 Science paper by Thiery et al., updated through 2025, projects that children born around 2020 — the heart of the Gen Alpha cohort — will live through approximately seven times as many heatwaves, twice as many droughts, three times as many crop failures, and twice as many wildfires as someone born in 1960. Those are the median estimates. The high end is worse.

For New Hampshire specifically, the implications are not theoretical. Late-summer maximum temperatures in central New Hampshire are projected, under SSP3-7.0, to rise 3°C to 5°C above the 1991–2020 baseline by 2100. The state’s ski economy operates on a much narrower margin under those temperatures. Foliage season shortens. Mosquito and tick-borne disease load increases. Heat-related hospital admissions among elderly residents — many of whom will be Gen Alpha’s own parents and grandparents — rise materially. The fiscal cost of climate adaptation in this state, currently postponed every legislative session, will be paid largely out of Gen Alpha’s working years.

The Longest Lives Ever Lived

Average global life expectancy at birth for someone born in 1980 was about 62 years. For someone born in 2017 — squarely Gen Alpha — it is roughly 72 years globally, and substantially higher in the developed world. U.S. life expectancy at birth for Gen Alpha sits at about 78 to 80 years on the current actuarial tables. With moderate gains from longevity medicine — GLP-1s already reshaping metabolic-disease curves, mRNA platforms now extending into oncology, and the first credible senolytic compounds in trials — the upper-income decile of Gen Alpha is projected to clear 90 routinely, and a meaningful subset will reach 110 to 120.

The cohort will not all share this curve. The class gradient on U.S. life expectancy has widened, not narrowed, for three consecutive decades. Lower-income Gen Alphas will likely live shorter lives than their parents — a continuation of the trend that has already cost Gen X and millennials roughly two to three years off the upper-income comparison. The bifurcation will widen across Gen Alpha’s lifetime. By age 70, a Gen Alpha whose parents earned in the top decile will look biologically a decade younger than a Gen Alpha whose parents earned in the bottom decile. That gap is the most-replicated finding in the longevity literature, and it is getting wider, not narrower.

Retirement, for the cohort as a whole, will not exist on the terms their grandparents knew it. The standard working age will extend to 70 or 72 in the upper-income tier, and into the late seventies in skilled trades that pay enough to defer. The Social Security trust fund’s projected 2033–2035 shortfall will be resolved before Gen Alpha is voting in significant numbers, and the resolution — whatever combination of payroll-cap increases, age increases, and benefit trims Congress chooses — will define Gen Alpha’s retirement expectations from the moment they enter the workforce.

What New Hampshire Specifically Owes This Cohort

The state’s demographics work harder against Gen Alpha than against any earlier generation here. New Hampshire is already the second-oldest state in the country. By 2040, the population over 85 will have risen 243 percent and the population over 65 by 129 percent. Gen Alpha will be in their late twenties and thirties at that point — early career, peak workforce-participation years, the cohort the state is structurally betting on to staff its hospitals, its trades, its schools, and its long-term-care facilities.

The state is not currently producing the housing, the childcare, the K-12 quality, or the workforce-training pipeline needed for Gen Alpha to choose to stay. Median single-family home price hit $535,000 in 2025 — a 122 percent rise across the decade. The state is meeting roughly 80 percent of its 2020–2025 housing-production goal. Childcare costs in New Hampshire are among the highest in New England and the highest as a percentage of household income in the country. The state’s K-12 funding formula has been ruled unconstitutional by the state supreme court more than once. The community-mental-health system operates under a federal consent agreement that is not being met.

These are not abstractions. The Gen Alphas who are in fifth grade in Northfield-Tilton or in Concord or in Manchester right now will turn 18 around 2033. Whether they stay in New Hampshire, leave for North Carolina or Texas or Massachusetts the way their parents’ generation left for Boston, or simply cannot afford to form households in either place — that decision is being made for them right now by every legislative session, every zoning vote, every school board budget, and every gubernatorial veto of housing legislation.

The Honest Forecast

Gen Alpha is the cohort the country, and this state, get one final clean shot at. The pre-conditions of their adulthood are already set: they have been measured, they have been raised, the experiment we ran on their early literacy and attention has produced the results it was going to produce, the AI labor market they will enter will be the one Gen Z is currently sorting through to find a path. None of that is changeable now.

What is changeable is what we build for them from here. The housing they will need to form households in. The schools that will retrain the reading and math baseline that the device-experiment damaged. The mental-health system that will catch the diagnostic load that is already projected. The climate-adaptation infrastructure that determines whether central New Hampshire is a livable summer climate in 2070. The Social Security and Medicare resolution that determines what kind of retirement they think they are working toward. The trade-school and apprenticeship pipelines that determine whether the lower two-thirds of this cohort has a livable wage.

These are not Gen Alpha’s decisions. They are millennial and Gen X and boomer decisions, made now, on Gen Alpha’s behalf, with money that will be repaid by Gen Alpha’s working years.

The cohort will, on the data, mostly survive. They will live longer than any generation in human history. The upper tier will accumulate more wealth and live in better health than any cohort the country has produced. The middle tier will work longer, retire later, raise smaller families, and live with structurally weaker household balance sheets than their grandparents did at the same age. The lower tier — and this is the warning the state should already be hearing — will be the largest American cohort in modern history to enter adulthood with a measurably weaker educational baseline, a documented mental-health load, and a labor market that no longer offers them the entry-level on-ramps their parents had.

The forecast for Generation Alpha is not catastrophic. It is consequential. The difference between the upper-tier outcome and the lower-tier outcome — and the size of each tier — is, almost entirely, a function of choices the rest of us make in the next fifteen years. The math is unforgiving, and the kids are watching, and most of them will still be alive in 2110 to grade what we did.

That is the honest version. It is not what the marketing department of the American Dream would prefer the data say. It is what the data actually says.