I'm a new immigrant millennial to the US (from the UK of all places) and for me the American dream is dead.
I know I'm playing the world's smallest violin and I will gather little sympathy since I am one of those tech workers with a big fat paycheck, but the fact that someone like me isn't thriving might be another symptom of how fucked up things are.
It seems that my timing has played a big role. We moved here last year when the tech market was on fire and people were jumping companies getting obscene amounts of money. Things turned south very quickly. Companies stopped hiring and started laying off people instead. My company virtually froze my salary at the same time that inflation was soaring. Combined with a tumbling stock price, I’ll be taking home less money this year than last. Also my wife has been unable to find a stable job, which has further affected our household income.
Buying a home? Give me a break. I love to share the Zillow home price index graph to visually show people how Covid has screwed the housing market [1]. And at least before we had the option to move far from the city to a cheaper location and work remotely, but now employers are forcing us to go back to the office, so the choice is between unaffordable rent or multi-hour daily commutes (I’m in the second camp).
I know this comment sounds whiny but I can’t help to feel that we are just getting dealt a shit sandwich after another. We might be in a world of extravagant productivity but I’m sure as hell not reaping the benefits. I’m supposed to be a top 5% earner and yet I don’t feel my standard of living is much better than my working class upbringing - at least back then we owned our apartment and weren’t told how privileged we were.
I would be cautious how much of your frustration is because of the US changing or not meeting your expectations vs you happening to make major life decision right when there happened to be major world changing events. (Covid, Russia/Ukraine primarily.)
Since you aren’t in your old life anymore, you don’t know exactly how good or bad it would have been had you stayed.
Moving on beyond that, some places are definitely worse off than others within the US. Housing where I live is getting more expensive, but incomes are also going up substantially. And they are building thousands of new housing.
You mention being a top 5% earner. Unless that is top 5% locally, you are probably using up a lot of that top 5% income to live in a top 1% location.
According to the stats, we make top 5% income of our area. It sure doesn't feel like it. Makes me wonder how people in much lower income who hasn't inherited their home can make ends meet here (the answer is probably not very well).
Regarding your first point, you are right, you can't A/B test your life. In any event I'm reporting my current experience, which is both not better than my previous and expected one.
Do you have the corresponding statistics (income percentiles vs. average house cost) for all areas in the US handy, allowing you to quickly determine this is not possible? Or do you not like the idea and therefore reject it?
because thats not the way debate works. you dont get to make a(n absurd) claim and then demand the other person disprove it with data across 100% of the spectrum.
I didn't say that this is how debates work. How they should work however:
> A: [some statement]
> B: I don't think that is the case. Could you share an example?
> A: [example]
See where nobody had to disprove anything with data across 100% of the spectrum? That's because nobody made the claim that A is wrong. You however made an absolute claim, so you have to provide the data for it.
* people in the area are not owning their houses, but (the companies owned by) people who live somewhere in Florida do (or the richer part of the same town)
* people bought their houses 40 years ago when it was still possible to do so, but would now be totally priced were they required to buy it now
* same but the rental equivalent for rent controlled apartments (or kind landlords)
* due to the interest rate increases, mortgages for new homes have increased rapidly, like even if the house price is the same as 1.5 years ago, the mortgage is now three times as much for the same down payment and duration.
I’m going to assume you live near the coast, probably in the Bay Area or NYC or Seattle?
I think as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized the American Dream has changed. The coastal cities are no longer available even for relatively middle class families, you’ll have to move inland if you want land and property consistently and for relatively cheap.
Yep - was barely scraping by it felt like, while in a coastal city. After we had kids, it was way worse. We moved inland, bought a house, and can afford an in-home nanny. It feels closer to what the cumulative household income we have is supposed to feel like.
I think it was always supposed to be "work hard, adapt, and you'll have a good life." This is out of reach for many, certainly, but it's not so far out of reach that a BLS.gov average tech salary can't live comfortably.
I'm always reminded of my sister in law who, with her husband, has a 5 bedroom house, two kids, brand new cars, hunting land, and a family lake cabin ... off a teacher and electrician salary. Her father has even more and sold cattle feed. The secret sauce was location. They live in southern Minnesota and never bothered to chase the coastal dream.
People tend to underestimate the cost of living in a high demand place.
You could make top 10% incomes globally, but if you are living in a top 1% location then you are being priced out by the 9% of the population making more than you.
If you want to live with a certain lifestyle of cars/vacations/personal services etc then you can’t be spending up on the other parts of your budget like housing location.
Yeah, there's a telling degree of overlap between the "The American Dream is dead crowd" and the "I refuse to live anywhere but an expensive coastal city" crowd. Not to say that the latter can't be caused by the former, but it indicates a frustration with a particular experience that isn't really fully representative of what the "American Dream" is supposed to offer. Notably, for all of their complaining the actual emigration rate of this population seems to be very low.
While not unique, the Bay Area is also something of an outlier in that it's hard to drive out of extremely high housing prices from not only SF but the South Bay generally.
I live 60-90 minutes outside of the Boston metro and, while were I am isn't many areas of the Midwest cheap, it's pretty affordable. Except for one short stint, I've never had to commute into the city, so living in the city would be a lifestyle choice which has historically not been one that a lot of middle class families made--even when a lot of urban CoL was lower.
The coast is only a correlation. There is a direct tradeoff between economic opportunity and cost of living. I live in an East Coast city with a crap local job market and a 2 hour rush hour commute to the high-wage regional economic center. Living here is pretty cheap. Living in Chicago isn't. If you are professionally and financially established enough to pick and choose remote work or have a pied-à-terre, then sure, moving to a less expensive area is a great move. If you're working in a structured trade that will yield work most anywhere, that works too. Beyond that, it just doesn't work. Cost of living is so much higher now than it was 20 years ago that is just not feasible for most young people to build up enough money to break away from professional hubs. Most people's wages are not double what they were 10 years ago, but getting a room in a shared apartment is way more than double, as is health care, and other major expenses— not to mention student loans. The difficulty that imposes when accumulating capital for down-payment is not linear. Hovering around the break-even line is stressful, but falling below it pulls you under fast, like an undertow. A few overdrafts leading to a missed credit card payment plus a broken car or illness can fuck you over for a few years if you're treading water.
>you’ll have to move inland if you want land and property consistently and for relatively cheap.
Except that I live inland and apart from people coming from the coasts, it's gotten too expensive for "local" people. That $500K house is cheap if you've made your money elsewhere (or work remotely), but for anyone working in the limited local industry, it's out of reach.
Also hard to attract doctors / lawyers / professors / other white collar professionals who aren't on the brink of retirement age because they realize that while the cost of living is better here, they are giving up career opportunities and money not being in coastal cities.
Yes, okay, I am on board with leaving the big city for lower cost of living. Where are the tech sector jobs outside of coastal cities? You might find some in Austin or Arizona, but those places are already two feet in the door for a cost of living crisis.
That's fine but two factors stand out: how secure is my employment opportunity and what is the wage compared to the cost of living? In both cases the rural option is worse than in cities and it also comes with the drawback of being far away from humanity.
These are all major US metros where you will easily make > $100k as a software engineer ($125k median), while you'll find many Single Family Home options for $300k - $400k. That kind of home price / income ratio with low tax rate for that housing space is practically unheard of in the world (in the good way).
I'm reasonably wealthy and live in a single family home on the coast. (Well 1 mile from the coast.) So this is not about me. But the truth is, I probably couldn't live anywhere else (beyond living a couple hours away and having a horrendous commute) because:
1) My job is here and they won't let me work remotely. While I don't need this specific job, I've lived in cheaper areas and the jobs available were few and far between. You can find them, it's just a huge pain in the ass and they don't treat their employees nearly as well. I've even worked for myself, but it's a lot more work and not everyone is cut out for it. I threw in the towel after 5 years because it was burning me out so much.
2) My spouse has medical issues that even the best doctors in the big cities are having trouble treating. There's no way they'd be able to treat her in the sticks. You just can't get the types of services needed for some things in lower-cost-of-living areas.
"We’ve strayed so far from the original intentions of our economic model..."?
I think this demonstrates that "young people", or at least this author, aren't really participating in "reality" at all.
The economic system is doing exactly what it was intended to do: scrape the financial assetts of the masses of the unwashed herd into the bank accounts of the predetary rich. It's a win-win-win for the rich, the richer, and the richest. Exactly as it was "intended".
As long as "young people" of all ages continue to throw themselves gushingly at every corporate exploit that crawls out from under a rock, expect the expoitation to continue.
Perhaps consider how much your "lifestyle" depends directly on corporate platforms?
... and that's still a better deal than the UK, where the norm is no equity and an capped salaries for "IT personnel" (their words, not mine).
Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Europeans could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?).
Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. I recall someone pitching the "Silicon Roundabout" and that Cambridge and Oxford were going to be the new Stanford and MIT.
It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for UK nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US [0].
> Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent.
Am I the only one who finds it hilarious that the UK/Rishi Sunak keeps trying to push the UK as the potential world leader in AI regulation despite the UK having no world leading AI company?
They trot out that shite anytime they can, it doesn't change the economics of "we have a small market mindset and can't value tech from a global perspective". Also eco-classism means tech is surpressed by finance anywhere it can be.
> Buying a home? Give me a break. I love to share the Zillow home price index graph to visually show people how Covid has screwed the housing market [1]. And at least before we had the option to move far from the city to a cheaper location and work remotely, but now employers are forcing us to go back to the office, so the choice is between unaffordable rent or multi-hour daily commutes (I’m in the second camp).
Remote work also screwed a lot of low cost cities as tech workers moved there, outbid everyone, and priced out local residents from housing market.
However, remote work is here to stay. Live where you want and look for remote jobs while working your current job. Recently, two of my friends switched their jobs to fully-remote positions.
(I know in the news it is layoffs all the time but there are still many companies hiring fully remote workers.)
Sure, but why would I move to the boonies in the US to get a remote job? I might as well move back to my home country, with my family, friends, and no worries about immigration status.
If the solution is to move to a rural area, I double down on my point of the American dream being dead.
> I know I'm playing the world's smallest violin and I will gather little sympathy since I am one of those tech workers with a big fat paycheck, but the fact that someone like me isn't thriving might be another symptom of how fucked up things are.
You don't have to preface your struggles and frustrations like this. Everybody's problems are real to them and diminishing them doesn't do anybody any good.
> Buying a home? Give me a break. I love to share the Zillow home price index graph to visually show people how Covid has screwed the housing market [1]. And at least before we had the option to move far from the city to a cheaper location and work remotely, but now employers are forcing us to go back to the office, so the choice is between unaffordable rent or multi-hour daily commutes (I’m in the second camp).
For reference, I purchased a home and I believe it to have been a huge mistake. I'll be looking to sell it basically at-cost in about a year or so. The homebuying gold rush made a lot of people, including me, buy houses because they thought it was their chance, only to then realize that many houses were deceptively priced/kinda shitty. I think your feelings around commuting are valid, and I don't mean to diminish the desire to own a home, I'm just trying to be a voice of "it's not always better". I didn't really have anybody in my life when I bought, saying that type of thing, so I'm trying to advocate for homebuying-realism when I can.
> I know this comment sounds whiny but I can’t help to feel that we are just getting dealt a shit sandwich after another. We might be in a world of extravagant productivity but I’m sure as hell not reaping the benefits. I’m supposed to be a top 5% earner and yet I don’t feel my standard of living is much better than my working class upbringing - at least back then we owned our apartment and weren’t told how privileged we were.
I feel this big time too. I make pretty far above my city's "upper tier" of income for tech workers and still generally feel strapped. I have gotten a handful of bad beats in a row.
Thanks for your comment, I think the HN crowd might be more understanding. In the general population, someone making 6 figures complaining about cost of living (particularly tech workers, since we are usually blamed for the problem) is frowned upon.
> In the general population, someone making 6 figures complaining about cost of living (particularly tech workers, since we are usually blamed for the problem) is frowned upon.
This is one of the reasons why people generally associate with people in similar circumstances. As in, it's normal for people making 6 figures to feel comfortable griping to other people making 6 figures because we get it.
> I purchased a home and I believe it to have been a huge mistake. I'll be looking to sell it basically at-cost
If the worst part of the experience was breaking even, you're ahead. You bought at a peak. Refinance every few years and ride it out.
Rent never gets cheaper over time, you get no privacy and own nothing. If shit hits the fan, you're homeless in 60-90 days. By comparison, foreclosure buys you a year.
As a UK person who always dreamed of moving to the US, how have you found it from a social perspective? I always imagined it would be a much friendlier place than the UK and that there were more things to do regardless of whether you had geek or jock interests, does it match that expectation?
I moved from the UK but I'm not british, so not sure how useful my experience will be to you.
Since I am married and an introvert I haven't really socialized that much since we moved. People seem pretty open although it seems to me you need to get into some kind of shared hobby to meet people (isn't that just true about making friends as an adult?). However I never had a bad experience socializing in the UK, in fact I made several good friends there.
Something that is specifically different than Europe - from what I’ve heard - is that while going out and doing social hobbies is still an excellent way to make friends… it’s not the only way to make friends in Europe. Whereas in the US, I’d say it’s about the only thing available.
Third spaces are almost nonexistent in the US and spaces overall where you can just easily socialize with strangers are incredibly uncommon in the US. Go out to most any bar in places like NYC or SF and you’ll have a hard time making any new friends. The same cannot be said in Europe. While in Europe, folks would just chat me up at random whereas in the US - this has never happened.
It’s a different culture and the atmosphere of most bars here is to make money off expensive drinks - not to make you happy. It’s one of the things where I find it funny how folks recommend chatting up the bartender as a way to get introduced to the regulars. Any bar I’ve gone to - the bartenders are too busy to even know anyone. I’ve got to some bars for 6+ months and ordered regularly from the exact same bartender - they didn’t know my name or even recognize me.
It’s a different culture in the US. It’s capitalistic.
>While in Europe, folks would just chat me up at random whereas
I'm European and been to several other European countries (well mostly the German speaking ones) and never been chatted up by strangers. Maybe you're only in the largest capital cities/big metro areas and are from a country that's seen as exotic over here as not many from there move here (Mexico, US, Canada, New Zeeland, etc) so the locals were curious why you're there and wanted to practice their English with you, because that never happened to me when I was a solo traveler or an immigrant here probably because I'm from a neighboring country that's known so nobody is curious. I had the exact opposite experience in the US, people would randomly chat me up or be very open when I was chatting them up, even had a fling on vacation there.
So your European vacation experience doesn't really match mine at all of living here long term. People here also seem very reserved of being approached by foreigners they don't know. I mean, if you're an interesting character they might do some small talk with you to be polite and get to know you, but that's as far as the interaction goes, then they go back to their drinks/friends, they won't be your friends. These bar interactions aren't a reliable way to socialize and make friends, it's just single use superficial interactions that last the night, as explained in Fight Club. And judging by the posts on local subreddits, I'm not the only expat struggling with loneliness in the German speaking parts of Europe.
Surely this isn't true in small to medium sized towns? Perhaps in cities but you could probably say the same thing of anywhere in the world? The coffee shop/local bar where everyone knows each others name is a staple in American shows, there must be at least a grain of truth in it.
Those shows are from 30+ years ago. TV isn’t always a semblance of real life. Do you think that everyone could relate to having a very nice home with a live in caretaker for your father, a very nice upscale and large apartment in an expensive metro, and constantly having people come to your home practically unannounced… No? Doesn’t sound like much of a real life situation for most Americans. Yet, Frasier was a huge show…
Yes, but I would still be surprised if small towns in America don't have coffee shops, diners and bars where there are regular customers who are on first name basis with the staff. What the establishment sells might differ from location to location but the social aspect just seems to be a universal across the entire planet.
I went to a dozen countries last year in Europe. It was relatively easy to talk to strangers in a lot of contexts - not just bars. Even in places like Poland I was being chatted up.
To be clear, I don't think I'm even a very approachable person nor am I good looking or appear rich or anything of the sort. There's just way less stranger danger outside of the US - AFAICT.
>isn't that just true about making friends as an adult?
For people without kids, I think that's generally true. Pretty much everyone I socialize with locally is associated with a local outdoor club. There are still people from school and professional acquaintances I keep in touch with, but that's usually not local.
Timing is a big deal; the economic system favored those of earlier generations (also when fewer people lived), and now I think we basically have to wait for Boomer generation to cede influence -- they were dealt a nice economic hand and capitalism thrived to where we are now, maybe a variant of "peak capitalism", which younger generations are rebelling against because they can't participate as much and the negative externalities of such a system are apparent (e.g. oligarchic control, regulatory capture, weakening of federal governments, and just plain classic corruption allowed within legal bounds...).
This isnt about generation vs generation. It's elite vs. the proletariat and the pain is just distributed unevenly across generations.
Obviously theyre more than happy with millenials blaming their parents as it exculpates them for turning the crank on the dynastic, parasitic wealth extraction engine.
No. Russia managed to create lots of oligarchs in between the years between 1989-1994 by following western advice on capitalist shock therapy. Many of the lucky winners passed the privatized and extracted wealth of the Soviet Union down to their children.
Something similar is happening today in the west at a less accelerated rate.
Asking which generational label applies is pretty strange. All of them do.
Hm, sure, yes "labels" is better. But labels are just a way to group birthdates which then can be mapped backed to generational labels. So, oligarchs made in 1989-1994, when were they born? They seem to be older than the generations discussed in the article: how can one not use timing as a variable for this? Yes, indeed elite vs. non-elite, but still, who are the elite and when did they become the elite -- probably before the generations singled out in the article. And what environment allowed for their growth? One you've provided is economic period that allowed for oligarchs in Russia, therefore elite, to be forged. Elites will persist as a group because of the inertia of their wealth, which, agreed, means they transcend generational labels, but they have to start somewhere/sometime.
It is generational. The boomers could afford a house in the suburbs (owned, not rented), a car, and steak for dinner for themselves, a wife, and a couple kids on a factory workers salary.
Sorry, but this mentality is counter-productive and plays right into the hands of oligarchs. Instead of recognizing that wealth and power is increasingly accruing to a smaller and smaller set of uber-wealthy (who pass that wealth on and otherwise rig the game for their offspring), we allow ourselves to be distracted by culture wars and generation wars rather than recognizing it as a smokescreen from the concentration of wealth and power that is driving the bad outcomes.
Yeah...grandpa could afford a middle-class lifestyle working in the finger-cutting factory. Maybe even making Management one day--with training paid for by the parent company--if he worked hard enough!
Jeff Bezos would have you working under the same conditions, pissing in bottles and living in his parking lot.
Grandpa's earned wealth isn't why you can't afford a house.
I have encountered this video and it is worth to take a look. The conditions for living are never going to be the same as they were, but not due to "boomers" or whatever the favorite scapegoat is but... well watch it:
13 minutes, 20 seconds. I've felt like you but I was glad I clicked.
TL;DW: wealthy people own most things and their incomes are from what they own/control. They earn more than they spend and buy more control with the excess leading to ever more consolidation of wealth.
You may be "just a nick," but with links in general and video links especially, it's considerate of others' time to give more information to help them understand what you're linking and decide if it's worth viewing. Just dropping a link to a video is almost always just noise.
> Sure, and then they start to argue with you instead with the author. Not interested into that.
If that's your attitude, it would probably make more sense for you to not post at all. Otherwise you're going to get "argued" with, one way or another.
> No, I'm not going to watch some random youtube video, of unknown length, to try to find out what your point is. If you want to say something, say it.
Exactly! It's also by an unknown individual.
I'm not going to waste my time on a Youtube video without a tl;dr summary (and on many topics, an explanation of why the maker has credibility and where he's coming from ideologically).
Surprisingly sober and non-bombastic commentary. Does a good job of discussing dynamics but it's hard to see how this doesn't suppress market activity and reduce the tacit value and productivity of the population. Said differently: how we avoid a smaller pie.
It breaks my heart to talk to my mum and have her not understand that I'm over 30 and straight up cannot afford to buy property. "Why don't you sell your car for a down payment?" as if that would be anywhere near enough. I think part of what makes her said, is it felt _so easy_ for folks born in the post-war boom to get in on some of that increased productivity, and she's devastated that I have seemingly missed out on that boat.
It just depends on WHERE you try to buy property. Yes of course it's going to be hard to buy a house in a popular area because you are competing with lots of rich people who also want to live there.
But there are still tons of places with extremely cheap land in the developed world.
Judging by your use of the word "mum" I'd guess you're in the UK. And yes, things are way harder in the UK since people get paid way less than America, the government takes way more from you in taxes, and the cost of basic things like food are higher. But I think you could still do what your mom is suggesting in some places in the UK. I can find plenty of starter homes in Scotland for 80k pounds for example.
I just think it's silly to expect houses to be cheap exactly where you want to live, because odds are tons of people also want to live there too and you have to compete with them. But if you are willing to be flexible, there is still plenty of space for the next generation to own property.
You can find houses for 30K in Liverpool, because the UK outside of London is poorer than a random Eastern European country (which is one of the many reasons why Eastern Europeans are running away from the UK). How much do you think you are going to make in a place such as Scotland or northern England?
>UK outside of London is poorer than a random Eastern European country
Yeah that's true, I think a lot of people in the US don't understand this at all. Everything British seems fancy and expensive, and we assume they all live like Londoners.
But you are right that wages are not going to be great in Scotland or northern England. But a great strategy that works well in the US, and I suspect would work well in the UK, is to just spend a few years living as cheaply as possible in a big city like London. Hoard as much money as possible, then take that and buy a house in a cheaper area.
In the US it is possible to live in a place like San Francisco for a few years, and if you live with roommates and don't fall for all the trappings that Californians go for (like ordering DoorDash every day or buying Teslas), you can easily save enough to buy a house for cash in a cheaper area. This strategy even works for tradespeople like plumbers/carpenters.
Once you own a house outright, most other things are relatively cheap living on local wages and you can live any kind of life you want.
There's no hoarding or saving. The wage/rent ratio is insanely skewed. This isn't a 'be smart' situation it's a 'something has to change before the bottom falls out' situation.
I did this in the Bay Area (one of the most expensive areas in the world to live). I lived with 5 roommates in a house. It wasn't the most comfortable, but it wasn't horrible either. The fact that there were 5 of us in one house meant we got the rent down to a very reasonable amount. I lived like this for many years and was able to save enough to buy a house for cash in a cheaper state.
Anyone can do this same strategy, it works well. Maybe they won't earn enough to buy an _entire_ house somewhere else, but they can earn enough to afford a large portion of one.
Aiming for a world where anyone can live wherever they want for peanuts is just not a realistic concept. Even when you build densely like in New York City, there will always be droves of people competing for the space in whatever system you build.
Sounds like you live in a privileged environment. Vast majority of people have never owned any property, nor anything else of real value actually. It's perfectly ok to not own.
I don’t think you understand the UK somewhat unusual and reasonably unique relationship with housing property.
Our entire social system is built around the idea that people own property, and that’s the primary driver of wealth generation. Not owning property in the UK means giving up to 70% of your salary each month on rent, and getting a shoe box in return, because renters are second class citizens in the UK with little protection.
It’s simply impossible to build any kind of wealth or security in the UK without owning property. You will forever find yourself living paycheque-to-paycheque, or waiting for the moment you get no-fault eviction which can be served to you after only 6 month from the start of your let. (And it happens, even to those with high earnings).
The UK has a strange, and incredibly unhealthy, obsession with home ownership and property prices. Millennials and GenZ pay every day for this unjust social folly.
If you rent in the UK, you experience a form of poverty that has been unknown in continental Europe since the 60s. Regular evictions and rent hikes, pest infestations, mould, damp, etc…
You would fall under the definition of a homeless person in a more serious country.
I'm an 'elder millennial' and I'm so used to seeing articles about how my generation has been screwed that I have to remind myself I'm not 'young' anymore and we're now talking about a whole new generation that's starting behind the 8 ball.
I would think the want/need for owning a home to be enhanced by marriage/children. Since younger generations are less likely to do those things -- and more likely to do them later -- than earlier generations, that must count for some of the difference(?)
Certainly if someone is single/doesn't have kids, there's almost certainly less urgency to buy a place given that, money aside, it may be a fairly significant time commitment and it certainly increases the friction of moving somewhere different for a job or other reason.
You have it backwards. Plenty of millennials want kids and marriage and a home, but the shitty situation we find ourselves in means we cannot responsibly have kids.
Some of us (I'm 33, so old-ish millennial here) are doing well, yes, but some of us have been doing terrible. The economy has, overall, not been kind to us.
Boomers need to retire already, because they've held onto the top rung of the ladder for far too long, which has caused severe ripple effects in our economy. Their mentality, while not inherently bad, has not kept up with reality.
I personally have struggled and am extremely fortunate that I've had great parents who were wealthy enough to partially support me. I wasn't able to get into a good company after college and that has absolutely wrecked my career - taking odd jobs and short-term employment to put food on the table and pay rent. As I'm not an engineer, my career prospects are quite dim.
Now that there's an entire new generation entering the workforce, I'm afraid that there's millions of people in my position who simply won't be able to afford anything, much less a home or a family. That's not good for the economy, but the folks at the top don't really care as long as they get paid.
>Boomers need to retire already, because they've held onto the top rung of the ladder for far too long
Boomers will just leave their wealth to their kids, so if you don't have well off parents, you'll still find yourself underneath the ladder, holding the short stick, at the upcoming generational wealth transfer. We need more inheritance taxes, at least in Europe, which at his point is a feudal state from this tax-free inter generational wealth transfers in some parts.
As a fellow millennial I don't know what people are talking about. The world is way better today than when I was a kid:
All sorts of racism and prejudice are at much lower levels than when I was a kid.
I went through two economic crises by the time I was 21.
The US fought two wars in my prime war fighting years. (Though fortunately not me but friends died).
Technology has continued it's steady march.
If you gave me a choice between being born today and being born when I was I'd take today without hesitation. Things haven't become Utopian yet but they are steadily getting better.
Easy: as an engineer, my father in his late 30's could support my mother being a SAHM, three kids, buy a 120m² (IIRC?) small house with a garden, and all the modern commodities (well, safe for electronics that didn't exist at the time).
Nowadays, I'm also an engineer in my mid 30's, and I can just buy a 40m² flat. Never talk about kids.
Having a SAHP is always a difficult thing to compare to todays world. A lot of people can’t have a SAHP because their peers don’t have a SAHP. When your peers are willing and able to spend more on housing and cars… then you have to get the second income to keep up with them or accept a lifestyle more in line with lower income people (except with a SAHP).
But that's not a generalizable like for like comparisons. Yes, cities are more expensive today but they're also not crack induced hellscapes. Crack induced hellscape is obviously an exaggeration but cities were legitimately much worse. Violet crime was 2-3 times higher, pollution was terrible, and they were generally not very nice. It's not a surprise they were cheaper to live in back then.
The houses I grew up in are more affordable today then they were when my parents bought them. Inflation adjusted price is about the same but interest rates were far higher.
I have no idea where you live, but that does not really reflect what's happening in my country (France).
Criminality rates are roughly stables since the 80's (https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/sites/default/files/...), French cities in the 80's were definitely not ‶crack-induced hellscapes″ (and if they ever were, it's definitely now, just visit Paris or Marseille by night), and safe for pollution, I don't think they were notably worst or better to live in than now.
They are talking about the economic situation. You are a millenial on hn, you are probably doing fine. A lot of your peers otoh are living with their parents still, have a mountain of debt, have put off having kids, aren’t in a career path to change much of this and don’t have the skills or the money or time to switch into a more lucrative field and be competitive relative to new grads.
> A lot of your peers otoh are living with their parents still, have a mountain of debt, have put off having kids, aren’t in a career path to change much of this and don’t have the skills or the money or time to switch into a more lucrative field and be competitive relative to new grads.
Yes I know. This happened because they graduated into the face of one of the recessions. Or maybe they went to war and lost their 20s battling PTSD. These effects persist for a long time which is why a lot of my generation was left behind.
Obviously can't predict the future, but for those that came of age post 2008 the economy has been remarkably resilient. They haven't experienced something like a chunk of engineering graduates that can't get jobs. I was lucky and made it out, but the average starting salary of my degree from my school went down significantly because of 2008.
A graduate today has no living memory of what an economic recession in the US looks like. And if anyone is wondering it's a lot worse than today or what happened during Covid.
There's a bit of an exaggeration here... somehow his "peers" are also choosing to order enormous quantities of their meals from DoorDash (doubling the cost), getting bottle service at nightclubs, and taking Instagram-worthy vacations to exotic locales.
I'm going to disagree that "the world is way better". Don't get me wrong, there's been progress, but there's also a lot of ways it's objectively worse.
+ Significantly more income inequality than 20+ years ago
+ Stagnated wages relative to inflation for much more than 20+ years
+ Economic mobility is significantly worse
+ The education system is in worse shape than 20+ years ago
+ Higher education is more costly, and no longer improves prospects of gainful employment nor additional earning potential
+ Health insurance costs that significantly outpace inflation
+ Kids today will be living under a surveillance state from day 1
Yes, technology has advanced, and some social issues have made progress, but others have had significant setbacks (rollback of Roe v Wade, uptick in far right ideologies).
>+ Significantly more income inequality than 20+ years ago
This is slightly true. Gini index when I was born was 38ish and now it's 40ish. So slightly worse but also because the rich have gotten richer. Not because the poor have gotten poorer in an absolute sense.
>+ Stagnated wages relative to inflation for much more than 20+ years
That's an odd way to say things aren't different from what they were 20 years ago.
>+ Economic mobility is significantly worse
I don't think that is true. Do you have a cite.
Addressing one more:
>Health insurance costs that significantly outpace inflation
Anyone talking about health insurance is just not remembering how it was. If words like "HMO" and "pre-existing condition" and "Lifetime maximum" don't send shivers down your spine then you're not correctly remembering how terrible it was. For all the flaws the US health care system has it's simply miles ahead of what it was pre-Obamacare.
There's also studies out there that show where you were born/raised can have a significant impact on mobility
>>+ Stagnated wages relative to inflation for much more than 20+ years
>That's an odd way to say things aren't different from what they were 20 years ago.
That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that wages have gone up at a lower rate than inflation, therefore leaving the majority of the working class with less buying power than they used to have.
>>+ Significantly more income inequality than 20+ years ago
>This is slightly true. Gini index when I was born was 38ish and now it's 40ish. So slightly worse but also because the rich have gotten richer. Not because the poor have gotten poorer in an absolute sense.
I think there's more than just the Gini index. Here's an interesting chart that shows the slight rise in Gini that you referenced, but combined with other measures that factor into income inequality. The data is only until 2015, but I doubt it's gotten any better since then.
>>Health insurance costs that significantly outpace inflation
>Anyone talking about health insurance is just not remembering how it was. If words like "HMO" and "pre-existing condition" and "Lifetime maximum" don't send shivers down your spine then you're not correctly remembering how terrible it was. For all the flaws the US health care system has it's simply miles ahead of what it was pre-Obamacare.
I didn't say that health insurance isn't better than it was. All I'm saying is that costs have outpaced inflation. It doesn't matter because the US healthcare system is still a massive farce and simply exists to leach profits off the American public. Even those that make well into the 6 figures are just one accident or diagnosis away from being massively in debt or driven into destitution just to afford medical care.
+ Significantly more income inequality than 20+ years ago
The opposite is occurring in countries that prioritized manufacturing jobs and skilled trades. The liberal arts, service led economy turned out to be a lie - as some of us knew all along.
+ Stagnated wages relative to inflation for much more than 20+ years
Inflation can be supply side, demand side, or both. US monetary policy, trade policy and foreign aid lifted about 2 billion people out of poverty in places like China, India and elsewhere. That is 2 billion new consumers of the same day-to-day living essentials you want -- at the very same time US supply side capacity was reduced by offshoring and new regs. We made the bed we are now sleeping in.
+ Economic mobility is significantly worse
For those without skills in demand this is true. Unskilled and wrong-skilled labor is largely worthless in the US, but pays a subsistence wage in some other countries - in exchange for horrid working conditions.
+ The education system is in worse shape than 20+ years ago + Higher education is more costly, and no longer improves prospects of gainful employment nor additional earning potential
I don't see the problem. I have kids in school and they are learning about gender equality, racism, white privilege and social justice. This is what the teachers want to teach, what the school boards support & what the media talks about most days. Isn't this an improvement from the barbaric reading, writing & arithmetic days of old?
+ Health insurance costs that significantly outpace inflation
Hold on there. My 83 year old father only expended hundreds of thousands of medicare dollars on chemo and supportive care for an extra three months of life - for which my family is very grateful. We cannot deprive the elderly of extra time, no matter how miserable it may be, just to make healthcare more affordable for kids and people in the prime of their life. That would be agism!
+ Kids today will be living under a surveillance state from day 1
But fortunately the surveillance will be from the CCP via TikTok, and from corporations via Instagram, SnapChat, etc. We don't need to worry about USGOV surveillance because its only weaponized against prominent political opponents, and not against the average citizen.
In sum... the status quo is what most people claimed they wanted without any serious consideration of the follow on effects. You get not only the government you deserve in a democracy, but also the economy and social structure you deserve.
Put yourself in the position of your own child, born today. Can you offer them a better start than your parents did you? Without knowing anything about you it's more likely you have more debt, worse housing, and more expensive childcare to deal with.
>Put yourself in the position of your own child, born today. Can you offer them a better start than your parents did you?
Wayyyyyyyyyyyyy better. My parents entered the work force at the tail end of stagflation. They got to pay 18% on their first mortgage in an economy with twice the unemployment of today.
That and since we (for the most part) don't count cohabitating women as whores or birth control a sin means I was much more experienced in relationships than my parents were when they had me. My kid is getting a far more stable environment than I did. And I in turn had a more stable childhood than they did because I wasn't raised by WWII vets that coped with PTSD by drinking.
And all that doesn't touch on things like if my kid were Gay, transexual, black/brown, had a mental illness, had a disability, or any number of other things society has become much more enlightened on. Or the cleanliness of the air they're breathing, the lack of lead in our paint, and so on.
I mostly agree with these points from a European perspective, but to contrast this: income decreased on average, the gap between rich and poor increased, many markets are not as competitive anymore, owning housing got unrealistic for most working people, ...
The reality is hard, but the expectation half of this balance is getting exaggerated:
> We could be working 15-hour weeks, enjoying our free time, and living like people of the future.
Keynes’ 15-hour workweek essay wasn’t meant to be a rigorous study of how the future was going to look, nor was it representative of a widespread belief. Yet to this day it’s a favorite of journalists looking to anchor economic expectations so far away from reality that no living conditions could sound good by comparison.
More practically, I still see a lot of exaggerated expectations in the juniors coming through my employer. Maybe I’m getting old, but it’s becoming frustrating to watch people get six-figure jobs right out college doing remote coding work from the comfort of their homes with ample mentoring, only to complain because Reddit and Blind led them to believe they’d be earning $300K at FAANG jobs while working 20 hours per week. I know that’s not the focus of this article, but I do think it’s representative of how the gap between expectation and reality is being stretched wider and wider as people fall deeper into the internet/social media reality distortion field.
> More practically, I still see a lot of exaggerated expectations in the juniors coming through my employer. Maybe I’m getting old, but it’s becoming frustrating to watch people get six-figure jobs right out college doing remote coding work from the comfort of their homes with ample mentoring, only to complain because Reddit and Blind led them to believe they’d be earning $300K at FAANG jobs while working 20 hours per week
This, my friends, is an example of corporate speak. What this statement misses, is that, you NEED $300k salaries to buy houses in places where you get said salaries.
What's more? The average new grad is NOT starting at zero. They are starting at negative. So, the $300k salaries are required to get to zero first. By the time these graduates get to zero, house prices have increased substantially. So they will likely need $400k salaries to afford houses by then.
What's more, the execs and upper management are making a HELL LOT MORE every passing year, without adequate checks on their productivity. At the same time, the new grad must grind to keep making them richer.
The gen Z new grad understands this predatory exploitation very well. That's why people are complaining. Reddit and Blind are merely the channels by which the complaints are happening.
Stop this corporate-speak. Let profits got to employees, not just the shareholders passively earning income. The world will be a happier place with this small change.
> it’s becoming frustrating to watch people get six-figure jobs right out college doing remote coding work from the comfort of their homes with ample mentoring, only to complain because Reddit and Blind led them to believe they’d be earning $300K at FAANG jobs while working 20 hours per week
How many people are actually doing this? These people are a vocal minority. Do not fall into the "millennials are entitled" trap because a few spoiled knuckleheads posted some stupid stuff on Reddit.
Look at what's actually happening in the economy and you'll see that the expectations are not any higher than they were for older generations going back at least a few decades, but that there's a growing divide between the millennials who are doing well and those who are not. As one of those who is doing pretty well, I am incensed on behalf of my friends and peers who are doing less well through no fault of their own.
are their expectations unreasonably high, or are yours too low?
last year a junior on my team worked with a few other juniors and a PM to implement a straightforward automation project. their system saved about $50mm last year, and that number is projected to increase as the company grows. you don't necessarily find such low hanging fruit every year, but would he really be wrong to think his contribution is worth more than $150k?
I'd rather not share too many details, but it's similar to how credit card applications are processed. there's an automated system that can automatically approve some applications, with a manual fallback. the system my junior colleague worked on did not use such sophisticated heuristics, but it still dramatically reduced the amount of cases that require human intervention.
>Between 2022-2023, £4.8 billion was added to UK student debt in interest alone. Students incur debt in order to pursue an education which will further their career prospects, then find themselves trapped by the interest – often necessitating more loans just to keep afloat.
A very strange lie to encounter. In the UK, student debt repayment is linked to income (something like, 9% of all your income above £21k). If you don't earn, you don't pay. The interest accrues yes, but again, if you lose your job, you pay nothing. If you earn less than £21k, you pay nothing. It's nothing at all like a loan, and is more accurately, a income tax for graduate. Although, regressively, those who earn the most will pay the least. Those on modest salaries post university might pay it for their whole working lives. (one more thing, it's automatically written off after 40 years or so).
I was refused a mortgage because of my student loan payments. The articles point is not that having a student loan ruins your life, it is that it makes it harder to do things like access housing (true) and that that means education is for many a net negative for their other all wealth (true for at least some people).
It's oversold, but it's still true when you get past the oversell...
Also, the opportunity cost of student loan interest is absolutely enormous. Imagine if you graduated college in 2014 with no loans and started investing your excess earnings in the stock market instead of paying off student loans.
I’d also note that this is how it works in the US as well for loans provided by the federal government. In addition, as long as you make payments, excess interest will not accrue and your principal won’t increase. They’re also written off in 20 years.
It’s mostly with private student loans that people go completely underwater in the US
I'm not sure how it works in the UK, but in the US at least this extra debt is negatively factored into things like credit scores.
And regardless of the payment, it takes a bite out of income. I couldn't afford a PPACA medical plan for a few reasons, but partly because I was paying for loans. None of these repayment plans factor in affordability for the payee, they are a straight percentage of income basis or treat the payee as some sort of national average in terms of expected affordability.
Sure, but the only qualification to be on IBR is that your IBR payment isn't higher than your standard repayment payment, so it's less a qualification and more a guardrail. Filling out a single form every year on a website is not the worse fate.
The debt is of course on your credit report, but if you are making payments, more likely than not it's going to be beneficial, as young people are unlikely to have other debts that are considered "old". My own student loans carried the "age of credit" criteria on my credit report for a while.
They are a percentage of income, but that is no different than the UK version. And to be fair to IBR, it's more nuanced that that - the income cutoff for the percentage varies state-by-state (so, someone in New York has a much higher cutoff than someone in Arkansas).
I feel like there's an issue with the crystallization of popular destinations that means that regardless of policy, in 2020 we have a different benchmark than 1960.
For example, when London was cheaper, it was a very different place to today. Pollution, lots of areas that regular people wouldn't want to go to, generally just a less global city and less developed.
Moving there or living there now is different to how it was. There's a ton more competition. There's more people in the entire country, "everyone" wants to go to University, etc.
I feel like we need to go back to basics, like the social housing boom, and say - what do we need for people to settle down, feel ownership over their communities, raise families and get married, etc.
I don't think that "people can afford to rent in huge cities" is sustainable as a goal.
Perhaps leaving aside today's problems in US West Coast cities, Western cities (certainly in the East Coast of the US but more broadly) 40 years or so ago were a lot grittier, more dangerous, less desirable, and yes cheaper than they are today. If I look at my cohort from grad school in the Boston area, I don't think anyone lived in--or even especially near--the city. And it wasn't because of cost. The city was still losing population well into the 90s.
These conversations never seem to mention what seems to me a relevant and related problem: the growth in commuting time during the rush hour.
Yes, there are cheaper places to move. Yes, the price of my parents' home roughly matched inflation. Yes, after inflation, I earn about what my parents did at this stage of their life.
So, why not just buy a home like my parents' in my hometown? The commute time into the city (Boston) has gone from ~45 minutes when my parents bought in the 80s to 90 minutes today, with high variance. That's 1.5 additional lost hours per day with no compensation in inflation-adjusted salary, home price, or cost of education.
My father made roughly the same as me, inflation-adjusted, without a college degree or the associated costs. In comparison, I started my working life with ~100k in debt (they couldn't afford to help me pay).
It's all very frustrating because it feels like we have the technology to solve these problems and yet we're hung up on non-technological problems.
The US has chosen to pursue population growth, largely through immigration, as a route towards short-term economic growth. Things like overloaded infrastructure (more expensive housing, longer commutes on overcrowded streets, etc) are some of the consequences of that choice.
The article says that young people are poor, old people are rich.
Parent comment claims that young people are not having kids because poor.
Your graph says that richer people had fewer kids (in the last 12 months).
Your graph would only refute the parent comment if you could show that people have fewer kids because they're richer, not because they're older (confounding factor) and/or people with more kids don't have to sacrifice an income to look after said kids (reverse causation)
I think few Baby Boomers will ever acknowledge the straight line between the bailouts that propped up housing resale values 15 years ago and their low number of grandchildren.
The majority of people are faced with a tough decision: Do the thing that benefits your community to your own (often mild) detriment, or do the thing that benefits you at the cost of the community.
I think generally people are willing to sacrifice a little for the benefit of their community. Let the city tax you more to build a library, pay a bit more at the restaurant so the workers there make a bit more, whatever. But sometimes if we're scared or anxious about the future and our place it in, we lean more into the self-interest category.
You get a few generations of this and it's going sideways. You get a few folks that lean so hard into it, and have enough charisma and opportunity to convince people that what they're doing is great, and it's going sideways very fast.
Tragically, many the benefits that previous generations enjoyed were not a windfall, but a debt that is coming due. And each subsequent generation is borrowing more to pay the inherited debt.
> But sometimes if we're scared or anxious about the future and our place it in, we lean more into the self-interest category.
This is very well put. The bailouts that kept housing prices high for Baby Boomers will end up being a tax paid by their children. Or by their grandchildren but many will never have any because of the unaffordable living situation for younger people.
“So how did one of the most influential 20th-century economists get it all so profoundly wrong?”
Well gee maybe economists should’ve shared a grindstone with psychologists instead of operating in a vacuum. And now it’s 2023 and every article about this talks about how wrong Keynes was. Who cares how wrong he was, let’s just fix the issues already.
I think the point of this article is true, but the writer does a poor job at making the case. It starts off with an 85 year old Kaynes quote, which reads the same as: "They said there were going to be flying cars.. what went wrong?"
Then follows it up with just comparing age groups without showing similar stats for older groups when they were the same age. Saying retirees have less debt than people just entering the work force isn't some big revelation. Even in the best of times that would be expected... and they repeat that mistake for pretty much all of the stats.
"That fact gives the young unprecedented leverage, which has so far gone unrealised."
No, it doesn't. It doesn't matter if the population is aging. If the youth are still a minority, then the status quo won't change. They don't really have any additional leverage in a democratic system.
To give an example - Germany has way too few people in elderly care, and conditions are worsening, so numbers are dropping. What is the solution by the leading party voted for by boomers? They would like to introduce a year of mandatory service after the young are done with school to keep the cost low.
>They would like to introduce a year of mandatory service after the young are done with school to keep the cost low.
This has been the norm in Austria for a while which I assume is where Germany got the idea. Military service is mandatory here but if you want to legally avoid it, you have to do mandatory civil duties in public services that suffer from labor shortages.
No, Germany got it from themselves. We used to have it until a couple of years ago. They want to re-introduce it without the military aspect, as the only reason is saving costs for the elderly.
"We’ve strayed so far from the original intentions of our economic model..."?
I think this demonstrates that "young people", or at least this author, aren't really participating in "reality" at all.
The economic system is doing exactly what it was intended to do: scrape the financial assetts of the masses of the unwashed herd into the bank accounts of the predetary rich. It's a win-win-win for the rich, the richer, and the richest. Exactly as it was "intended".
As long as "young people" of all ages continue to throw themselves gushingly at every corporate exploit that crawls out from under a rock, expect the expoitation to continue.
Perhaps consider how much your "lifestyle" depends directly on corporate platforms?
If you are a young person in the USA you are leading an extremely priviledged and lavish life compared to the vast majority of people in all of human history. The fact that people still find time to complain and somehow play victim is crazy to me.
If we consider what our parents accomplished when they were our age compared to where we are now, and find ourselves lacking, shouldn't everyone be concerned about the deteriorated conditions, no matter where this happens to be? The forward march of history and progress may have taken a step back.
Why are there so many people compelled to leave such useless comments every time this subject comes up? No one experiences life relative to all of humanity. Why is this a surprise anymore?
How do you count breaks in both countries? In Germany and Switzerland for example breaks don't count as working so if you have 42.5h you are at least 47.5h per week in the office. Hours per worker might be lower since there are tax-favourable incentives like "mini job" that push it down artificially.
Technological development (excluding AI agents) enables freedom of the masses if and only if the masses simultaneously and continuously pursue their self-interests instead of getting abused by the minority who achieve / maintain wealth (in order to achieve their self-interests) by abusing others.
The average human never evolved to pursue their self-interests in this sense. They recognise stealing and killing when done in front of them by primitive means. But debts, employment et cetera are beyond this comprehension.
Modernity in the US is definitely a case of extreme outcomes. There are many people who are struggling to get pay to afford a lifestyle of their parents, with high housing prices. Yet, there are also people who grew up in the same conditions, that were able to dork around in high school, graduate university cheaply through community college and state schools, earn $150k out of college, $300k in a few years, and build $1m equity by their 28th birthday, hustling when and where it counts.
The difference in population in the United States between 1970 and 2020 was 200 million to 330 million. A 65% increase.
Were (net) 40 million new units of housing created in that time? Were (net) 100 million new jobs created?
This is why when we hear about the poor zoomers and millennials complaining about their bad jobs and wanting to unionize, it's always fast food or coffee shops and similarly marginal employment.
I've been living under various forms of burnout since the Dot Bomb around 2001. The big thing that changed vs 1990s optimism for the future is wealth inequality.
It would be interesting to build a graph of where an individual's productivity goes in the economy..
Say a person earns $100 per day at their job. They actually produced around $400, but that extra money gets skimmed by their employer to cover loss leaders, ads, leases, utilities, administrators, profit, etc. This is the US median individual income of $38,000 divided by (US GDP of $23 trillion divided by 135 million workers = $170,000) = 22% remaining. Then the worker's rent takes $25-50. Debts for education, a vehicle, etc take another $10-25. Utilities, food and other living expenses take the remainder until less than $10 is left. Play with the numbers all you want, at any job anywhere, and this fractionalization of productivity always plays out. So workers have to choose whether to spend the 2.5% of the productivity they get to keep ($10/$400) on saving it or spending it on recreation.
We blame them for spending it on recreation.
Why don't we ask where the other $390 went?
This is the central crisis IMHO, and why I always place blame on the wealthy. Because they have the means to automate the busywork of the economy and free everyone from this exploitation that's been the daily lived reality for nearly all people for thousands of years. But they profit from it, so they never will. They can't, not because they're incapable, but because their attention is focused on ego-based goals. So they buy a yacht or build a rocket rather than building clean water infrastructure, free municipal solar power, mass transit, home hydroponic gardens, basically anything like solarpunk, and wokeism itself. That's why they demonize it.
I think that enough young people have woken up post-pandemic that a shift is inevitable. Away from the centralized control of the wealthy to a distributed resource-based economy that takes capital out of the equation. Which will be some form of "your money's no good here", an homage to the Earth First! and Back to Basics movements of the 70s and early 80s during stagflation. Not that people don't want money, but that their basic needs are fulfilled enough that they don't need to work every day just to survive. The fact that sentence is laughable is maybe the great tragedy of our time.
So I expect a huge backlash to that, and outlandish political maneuvers to do anything except help the average working person. And people will vote for the status quo candidates who promise security, over the ones that could help liberate them from the futility of the workaday world and a "retirement" bereft of savings.
The world is just poorer and that's what it takes to take care of the environment. What do you mean no everyone can burn thousands of gallons of gasoline every year? What do you mean most people will not travel internationally?
Is there a research into modern labor? I am interested in age and sex structure of workforce, unpaid work, including by women and seniors, entrepreneurship as form of labor, across decades and countries.
You probably have to do this country by country, unless an aggregate site like Statista compares countries. For the UK you'd probably want ons.gov.uk for the US you'd want bls.gov
> We could be working 15-hour weeks, enjoying our free time, and living like people of the future. Matt Gallagher asks: Why aren’t we?
Simple, two reasons: 1) world wide living standards are the highest they've been despite what click-bait negativity would want you to believe. 2) people want MORE and are willing to compete for it.
If we go back to living standards from 100 years ago (life expectancy, poverty levels, human rights, etc) and nobody wants to compete for more than that, sure, we can have 15 hours work weeks and all the leisure in the world.
Well, its very simple - millenials and GenZs have no political power, so the hangry wolves are just eating the food from their plates.
Drugged and blinded by social network, mobile apps, insane conspiracy theories and radical agendas, they keep missing the most obvious of things - there are no free meals, and all the sharks and wolves of the world will eat away on your hard work if you will not fight for it. What's right is not important - what's actually happening is.
Millenials and GenZs have all the political power if they just stand up and take it. The younger generations can change the entire demographic of the elected leadership if they so choose.
Why else do you think the older powers are trying to control who votes? Why else is there so much false rhetoric trying to convince people that their vote doesn't matter?
The only way political power translates to economic power is through socialism (when considered not just to be control of the means of production, but control of everything, including living arrangements). And while certain things are socialistic in Western countries, it would be a dramatic upheaval to make everything socialistic.
In the US there's only about 107 million Millennials and GenZers of voting age. This compares to about 150 million of GenX and older. Some of those people undoubtedly can't vote due to citizenship constraints, but Millennials and GenZers certainly can't control political power, even if they unified. https://www.statista.com/statistics/797321/us-population-by-...
2022:
GenZ = 69.58 million, 1997-2012 births, so about half can vote.
What do votes matter when just about every politician with reach got there by corporate sponsorship, and regardless of campaign promises hear most loudly the interests of lobbyists once in office?
Although millennials were dealt a hard hand, I got to say there’s probably nothing better you could be right now than a millennial that has actually made it. A millennial with house, spouse, cars, family, six figure salaries, and still young enough to have a lot of years ahead of you, but not so young that you fall prey to the insidious life ruining traps Gen Z easily does. And you got to grow up with memories of a wholesome low-tech childhood, where tech was still friendly and not out to package you into some kind of product to be sold.
To be a young well off millennial is basically like being part of a Boomer v2.0.0 generation.
Life really turns on a few moments in time all told.
For my wife and myself, STEM degrees with in-state tuition (I turned down a prestige private university) with automatic test-score-based scholarship went a long way for me and my wife. Ended up with $40k in debt total which was pretty easy to pay down in a couple years in industry.
Parents haven't helped once financially past college (including home buying). They had some savings for me and sent some money for food. And they bought a new car and gifted us their '08 Civic upon graduation (still going strong!)
More recently, we moved out of an expensive coastal city to a suburb of a smaller nearby city in the first summer of the pandemic. When mortgage rates were sub-3% (with 20% down) and before the housing market got crazy hot. That was just luck = preparation (saved money and built credit and no debt) meets opportunity (turns out our savings were enough for 20% down if we looked to the burbs and we could get a low rate and go under asking for a 3k sqft, newish house). That's the best financial decision we've made since our college decisions.
It really is a combination of luck and a few consequential decisions. It helped that we were both pretty academically smart and lived in a state with great engineering and CS programs at in-state schools. But we haven't made 100s of savvy financial decisions with huge ROI. Just a few sensible ones and dodged some bullets such as private university, burdensome house, etc.
Here’s a repeatable, no nonsense, passion free guide:
1) research careers, find out what the average salary is at the highest levels. If it takes more than 8 years to reach six figure income (before other forms of compensation) it’s probably not good enough. Also if it’s the type of job where you are paid primarily for the time you spend doing something rather than the value you create it’s a shitty job that doesn’t scale. Sorry. You need a career where you work less and decide more as you grow in skill and knowledge.
2) now get the entry level job
3) start looking for new job opportunities after a year and when a new higher paying job arises take it. This might happen around the 2 year mark.
4) repeat the cycle of taking a job and finding a better one until you max out salary and comp.
Other advice: your first few years in your career are not the time to make big expenses, this is the time to start paying down debt, saving and investing money. Plan to live with parents, roommates, trailer, car, whatever you need to do to have as low cost of living as possible. Do not worry about your love life because you will not find an optimal partner in these first few years, no one cares about you until you’re at least in the late 20s. If you can manage to get like a 90% saving rate and make good investments that track the markets, you will be doing very well later on.
Do not waste time and do no listen to people telling you to chase a passion or start a business. Being poor or having a shitty business take over your life sucks more than having a job you’re not passionate about.
If you already fucked up and you’re in your 30s, do not worry. Just pretend you’re still in your 20s and avoid revealing your age. People will assume you’re younger and you will be immune to the ageism that often halts people’s progress in a career. Being in your 20s is more about your status in life than your chronological age.
From another getting-older millennial, your best tip will be to be lucky. Barring that, manufacture your own luck. Hey, it works for some people(just not me, apparently).
I think the craziest thing about things right now is inflation.
It's not a single number. A lot of people go- oh well it's at %19 more than 2019, so now you need a 20% pay bump. Well... that's not actually accurate. Because heating or cooling your home (which you now spend all your time in) which was already expensive is even more expensive, we have to deal with energy bills that are, for some people, upwards of 15% of their paycheck. That's huge. Then because we still drive pretty much the same (work actually reduced our driving because our cars would just sit at the office all day). We'd kind of just take care of a few errands on the way to work or the way home. Now those errands are straight up, drive out, drive back. We're still driving at least as much or more - so again, we're paying more for energy that way.
Now housing. Housing is totally crazy. It's not even about the fact that we have high home prices, it's that now everyone gets their wife to take out a loan, pay down a credit card or two with that money, then buys their house to stay under the 45% Debt To Income Ratio. So reality is we've got $1000 left per month for grocery outlet food that's pretty much expired the day we bring it home.
I'm pretty sure things are not sustainable right now for a large swath of people. On top of all that, not everyone got that 20% pay bump - if any at all!
And to top off my last thought. I live in CA, so obviously I'm on a bit of a high blip here, but, don't you remember a few years ago shopping at pretty much any grocery store and paying like $2.50 for bags of chips, or cheese dip, sour cream, a few potatoes. All that stuff is now $5. I feel like any random item I pick up at Safeway or Raleys is straight up $5. That's what I felt like shopping at whole foods for organic natural grass fed vine-ripened potatoes. Now every grocery store is whole fucking foods!
edit: removed duplicate posts (hn is getting hammered or something right now)
I know I'm playing the world's smallest violin and I will gather little sympathy since I am one of those tech workers with a big fat paycheck, but the fact that someone like me isn't thriving might be another symptom of how fucked up things are.
It seems that my timing has played a big role. We moved here last year when the tech market was on fire and people were jumping companies getting obscene amounts of money. Things turned south very quickly. Companies stopped hiring and started laying off people instead. My company virtually froze my salary at the same time that inflation was soaring. Combined with a tumbling stock price, I’ll be taking home less money this year than last. Also my wife has been unable to find a stable job, which has further affected our household income.
Buying a home? Give me a break. I love to share the Zillow home price index graph to visually show people how Covid has screwed the housing market [1]. And at least before we had the option to move far from the city to a cheaper location and work remotely, but now employers are forcing us to go back to the office, so the choice is between unaffordable rent or multi-hour daily commutes (I’m in the second camp).
I know this comment sounds whiny but I can’t help to feel that we are just getting dealt a shit sandwich after another. We might be in a world of extravagant productivity but I’m sure as hell not reaping the benefits. I’m supposed to be a top 5% earner and yet I don’t feel my standard of living is much better than my working class upbringing - at least back then we owned our apartment and weren’t told how privileged we were.
[1] https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/