When Camelia Kuhnen, a professor of finance at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, wants to know how people are feeling, she looks to The Conference Board and the University of Michigan.

“So there's a confidence measure and the sentiment measure,” she explained.

Younger adults tend to be more optimistic, she said; the latest Conference Board data reflects this.

Chief economist Dana Peterson said that while confidence has been falling this year, younger people, “they're not as disenchanted, I guess, as the older groups.”

In fact, she said there was a bump for young adults in November. They’re still trying to figure out why.

“And even if did a six-month moving average, the November number would still be slightly better,” Peterson said. “But certainly for the other age groups, it was materially worse.”

The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey tells a slightly different story. We’ll get preliminary consumer sentiment data from the University of Michigan on Friday.

Director Joanne Hsu said age groups converged this year: not confident, not thriving.

“Our questions are very much going to be picking up how people feel about their living standards, about cost of living, and that's one of the reasons, I think that young consumers in our data are expressing as much pessimism as they are,” she said.

And that pessimism is why Camelia Kuhnen at UNC remains concerned.

“If anything, you want young people to be those most optimistic about the potential of the American economy,” she said.

Because if they’re losing hope, she added, they might not invest in themselves or their communities.