Young 'to be poorer than parents at every stage of life'
bbc.com
bbc.com
(That said, I suspect most of us HN readers will not be poorer than their parents. Tech is an area of boom in an economy of bust, after all, so factor that in when reading responses on here)
They've also both had work most of their adult life, and their pensions funds have always done well on the stock market, whereas my wife has been without a job since the financial crisis hit and government in the Netherlands went in austerity mode.
To be honest that wasn't _all_ our savings, and they were already spent on the house of course, but it was a financial loss equal to most of our original savings.
Sure, you're paying more than you would have if you waited, but you were happy to pay XXXXUSD per month to have somewhere to live, and your relative mobility has actually increased if we assume that the housing market fell by a flat percentage.
And I don't believe those actually exist any more.
Also, I no longer trust the justice system to protect my rights as a property owner. Having been primed by software-based DRM to not want to buy something unless I can truly own it, I find that land property in the US is often heavily encumbered with covenants, regulations, local ordinances, mortgage terms, and recurring taxes, to the point where it feels like paying rent and signing a lease feels less restrictive.
I do know for certain that I will never sign another mortgage for as long as I live. Those lenders can go FOADIAF.
I don't get this. If you rent instead, you'll just be sinking monthly payments into that (maybe more, maybe less than with buying).
And there's no need for a job that lasts 30 years, you just need to keep the ability to make the payment every month. But that is also true when renting.
Anecdotally, I have realized more value per dollar spent on rented homes than on purchased homes. If I had never purchased a home in the past, renting instead, I believe without a shred of doubt that I would have a greater net worth today.
I cannot make a rational case for home purchase now, because I cannot guarantee so many years of steady paychecks within an acceptable commuting radius of any home I could buy. Look back 30 years before now, to 1985. How many jobs existed then in the U.S. that no longer exist now? Do you think you can predict what the job market will look like in 2045?
If your job was to make buggy whips, would you feel safe making a 30-year financial commitment in 1890? Perhaps, but the Ford Model T came in 1908. Technology develops faster now. I get the impression that jobs that don't even exist this year may become obsolete before 30 years elapse, and yet employers still routinely hire based on specific experience rather than aptitude or trainability.
Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that I will never take on debt to buy a home again, and I don't expect to ever be able to afford to buy anything without doing so.
The problem comes when the town's economy crashed (because the buggy whip factory was the big business), or the nation's economy crashes (recession/depression/downturn/whatever), and I have to sell my house. Then I can really get burned.
And the next problem: When I buy a house, I can't be sure what the economic environment will be when I need to sell it.
I would say that, over the long haul, if you live in a town where there's enough variety of employment that you can probably continue to find work even if you lose your current job, most of the time owning your own house is a net win. (Be sure to hear all the caveats in that sentence!)
After the 2008 crash, I was planning on moving, but abruptly changed my plans when I lost close to a 80K on the value of my home.
Fast forward 6 years and suddenly the market was showing signs of rebounding. I had always been in contact with my real estate agent, but I was considering a large scale remodel and staying put where I was. My agent offered to start looking for something that I might like.
A year later the process went shockingly fast. I was assuming the house would sit for a while since the market was still pretty soft. I cleaned and de-cluttered my house and it went on the market. Within hours I had two listings for the next day - which ballooned to four the morning of. When I got back, I had two offers. The house was on the market less than two days.
I credit the ability to sell my house and make a few grand on it to my agent. It was priced and marketed really well by him and his company. This is the second house he's sold for me. The other house was on the market at the height of the housing boom and sold in less than a week.
https://thezikomoletter.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/you-are-nat...
meanwhile, parents' mortgage is from the 1980s or 1990s and easily affordable in today's money, even if their nominal market value takes a slump, the mortgage is easily covered and the rebound in values 3-4 years later will put you far ahead again. if you were smart enough to hold steady or even double-down when the financial markets were down, well then you're even richer today.
it was essentially a transfer of wealth from one generation to well-positioned members of the previous generation, and of course bankers/traders. but it wasn't a conspiracy... some people are just better positioned for and better able to see a massive market shift like that.
i personally lost some (not that much) money during that time, and my parents gained money. ultimately their money is my money so i'm fortunate in that regard, but the same exact thing happened to me. i did everything 'right', including saving and investing, and still got somewhat shafted personally due to a combination of extrinsic market forces and personal decisions.
Is it primarily an issue of where they're spending the money?
I have had more employers in 15 years of work than both of my parents accumulated over a combined total of nearly 80 years. I have never, ever been promoted within the same company, but I have been summarily tossed to the curb for no individually-attributable reason--along with several of my office-mates--a total of four times.
I have a lot of envy for what the Baby Boomer generation already got, and in combination with the condescending attitude they have (in aggregate) towards the younger generations, it fuels a lot of resentment.
Their formula of education plus hard work equals success has not been even remotely accurate for me. Education plus hard work equals screw you, buddy, because I already got mine. Enjoy your layoffs and unaffordable housing and tuition increases well in excess of inflation and slashed employer-granted benefits and mountains of political debt, because your parents have decided to sell their house at 20x what they paid for it, buy a plush RV, and split their well-funded retirement between any convenient US state and Snowbirdland, Mexico.
And what really kills me is that I have never seen anyone from my parents' generation working particularly hard. Maybe they did all that before I was born, and just coasted along afterward? Maybe I don't really know what hard work looks like?
Well, anyway, thanks for all the inter-generational tension, Boomers. We'll air it out by having Thanksgiving dinner at your house again this year, because none of your kids can afford homes big enough to hold everyone.
That and we can't afford to have our own kids...
For me tech will make you either much poorer or much richer than your parents.
i've got some perhaps surprising news for you, my young friend... 20 years ago was 1995.
sure we didn't have broadband and fancypants angular.js but i'm pretty certain developers were around waaaay back during web 1.0 (to use a turn of phrase).
Are we?
Yes, tech workers are very underpaid, even if their pay is good relative to the rest of the economy right now.
My question is more that I would be very interested to see data supporting the idea that there has been a large drop in developer salaries.
This report outlines how STEM wages have stagnated since about 2000[0]
2015[1] CS graduates have starting salaries that are about 4% lower than 2014[2] graduates. Do that for a few years and it adds up.
Anecdotally, I am a "Senior" software engineer that has been writing software for nearly 20 years (professionally 10), work for a household name software company on the east coast, and having trouble affording any real estate in the area without an insane commute.
[0] http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-mi...
[1] https://www.naceweb.org/uploadedFiles/Content/static-assets/...
[2] https://www.naceweb.org/uploadedFiles/Content/static-assets/...
It was through these discussions and sharing of perspective - just one man's view of the world - that I was taught to value health, happiness, and appreciate a life not defined by the materialism that could've been a real sink-hole for me if I'd tried to achieve even greater "status" than he did.
Just to put a last bit of context on it, every five years of so my parents would think about getting a used Corvette convertible, but they could never justify what seemed like such a wasteful purchase...by comparison, my Dad drove a 1991 Ford Ranger pickup, purchased new, babied as a second vehicle, until eventually selling it with 80,000 miles on it for 3x the book value sometime around 2010.
I'm a big-time car guy and have dreamed of a Lamborghini Countach since forever. But now, having lived in the "real world" for over a decade, I'm just happy to have a nice 4-banger Toyota with good air conidtioning, tinted windows that gets 30 mpg when I keep my foot out of it. Looking at 2008, all I can think about is how greed is a terrible, toxic basis for a value system.
People look at the past with rose colored glasses.
But it's a massive improvement if you talk about the numbers who were living in poverty and now aren't.
Much progress. Much yet to do. Both are true.
2) The % of the world living in extreme poverty has declined dramatically in the past half century.
http://www.vox.com/2015/8/13/9145467/extreme-poverty-global-...
The story of the last 50 years is really about members of the western middle class finally having to deal with competition from the rest of the world due to globalization. While this has certainly had some downsides for the western middle class it has been an INCREDIBLY HUGE BOON for everyone else. It's very hard to overstate how fast east asia has transformed from poverty to relative wealth and how good this has been for hundreds of millions of people.
Go look at a picture of what Shanghai looked like in 1990 vs today: http://gizmodo.com/5558350/shanghai-skyline-before-and-after
Having seen the changes over last 20 years in India, the middle class is now a lot vulnerable and in the fix with absolutely zero safety net. The earning power of the middle class might have doubled but the expenses and the standard of living has increased manifolds, thus pushing them further to the bottom.
We are clearly in situation no. 2 and these are exactly the periods in history where revolutions start. When the rich get so greedy they make people's quality of life decrease in a broad scale they invariably are tamed by violent uprisings.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+gdp+%2F+world+pop...
1. I was not particularly well off in my 20s, nor were quite a few of my friends. Yes, the ones who went to law school did pretty well. To be sure, student debt was a vastly smaller problem them.
2. A large number of the people I deal with, and who are within five years of my age either way, are parents of young adults in the work force. There may be occasional bemusement by the younger generation's expectations, but I don't see much resentment.
3. Most of the boomers barely made it into the long economic expansion that followed WW II (though on the other hand you can say we owe our existence to it). You could see things getting tighter and tougher by the beginning of the 1970s. The consumer goods we could afford were a lot shinier and nicer than what our parents had, but the economic security was harder to come by.
How can anyone be surprised that a candidate who decries all these things is having such success? Everyone in the newer generations know that they're getting the short stick and that we gave it to them. Bernie Sanders is just pointing out the obvious.
http://www.dol.gov/wb/factsheets/Qf-ESWM07.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm
We just don't need guys on an assembly line tightening the same bolt ten thousand times a day for forty years, like my grandfather did (true story.)
I would argue that we do need that.
You don't take a child straight from the womb to an r-rated movie, nor do you put a small plant start right into a torrent of rain. Living things need an environment and activities that match their lifecycle.
A society is also a living thing and has strata that are at different points in that continuum ... and if there is nothing appropriate for that strata, that strata will stagnate and die.
So when people look ahead to some golden utopia where we all work half time as knowledge workers and spend the other half on philosophy or maker projects, they ignore the fact that some sect of a society will not have the makeup for that.
You need to have something for them. Your society needs to have depth and breadth.
If you're borrowing $970K, you're monthly payment would be a lot more than $4K. When I was looking at mortgages, borrowing $600K was ~$4500/month in mortgage, property taxes and insurance. $970K would be more like $6K per month.
Here's a better plan: Buy a huge house for a fraction of that money in the north of England, rural Spain, anywhere in Japan which isn't Tokyo, etc., and telecommute to work.
The only program that does do that, FHA, have loan limits and in SF for a single family home that is about 625k...
BUT, in hot markets like SF and the east coast, no seller is going to accept your offer with only 3% down because of the risk the lender having an LTV issue and the sale falling apart. In markets like NYC, Boston, DC, SF, etc you need to come in with a) offer over ask b) at least 20% down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_board_game_Mono...
What I thought was particularly perverse was builders lamenting that no one wanted 3 bedroom condos, which is why they were building so few. Complete B.S.! Since they charge per square foot, no one can afford the 3 bedroom condos!
I recall reading somewhere how this will eventually affect the fertility rate. As a couple that waited quite a bit longer to have kids, I can see this being accurate.
Loosening the age to all years, I saw the average to be about 650-700k. That is 140k down payment plus a probably expensive upgrade to the old and aging systems in the house...
My house was built in 1870. It needed some work, but has mostly been fine because the previous owners (and probably the one before them too) had kept it pretty up-to-date.
An 140k downpayment sounds about right. It did wipe out all our savings, but that was only because we decided to buy and then sell. The equity in our old home basically offset it.
However I find it a bit dishonest on your part to claim it is easy with 2 programmer jobs to afford a 765k house, including a ~150k down payment which puts you at jumbo rate mortgage rates and hide the fact that you used the equity from a previous property and you bought an extremely old house (I've lived in Boston all of my life, no way would I buy a home that old).
2) We had the downpayment in cash. Selling the old house just let us replenish savings. Doesn't change the fact that it's possible to save 150k with two developers working (actually more, because we had previously saved for a down payment on our old house, and for extensive (100k+) renovations to our previous house).
3) I'm sorry you don't want an old house. Yes, they can have their problems, but so do houses of any age, including brand new ones. They also have charms that newer houses don't. It's a tradeoff. Newer houses are also available. The same day we first saw our house, we looked at another for around the same price built in the 70s a few blocks away (also in Medford). It needed a lot more work (a new kitchen) where our house was move in ready.
Get an inspection and figure out if the problems are deal breakers for you. Expensive problems are part of the "joy" of owning a house.
Prices are reasonable, but houses sell quick. Both the house we bought and the house we sold had multiple offers the Monday after the first open house weekend.
You aren't poorer than your parents. It's just that your expectations are bigger.
I find it highly ironic that while feminists wanted to enable women to have jobs, capitalism intervened and forced women to have jobs. So we have a reserse, but equally bad situation (earlier women had to be home, now they have to work).
The causes for the US development are many, if I had to guess I would mainly bet on the extensive natural resources they had available.
As for natural resources, Asia, Africa, and S. America are loaded with natural resources, yet the booms did not happen there.
They are also loaded with people. America was a free-for-all (except the American Indians, of course, who were overpowered by superior technology).
Maybe there was a lot of wealth in silver, I don't know about that. It seems that it had some land-based oil that they started extracting in the beginning of the 20th century, but I've no idea if they were as extensive as in the US (where there was Standard Oil, an immensely wealthy corporation).
Mind you, I'm not saying it was only the natural resources, there are other factors as well - different climate, geography, cultural background (English vs. Spanish/Portuguese), colonial history, ... I somewhere read that it's a curious phenomenon how so many countries in SA had so many dictatorships in sequence...
edit: Also you're attributing success to capitalism where it should be attributed to slavery. It's easy to have a very strong economy when you have free slave labor and most economic gains are still limited by manual labor. If you want to conflate capitalism with slavery I think that's not unreasonable since slavery of some kind is essentially the end goal of capitalism but I'd assume that's a move you don't want to make, so don't try to claim success for your economic system off the backs of abused slaves.
I also found the book's message darkly subversive sometimes. For example, all things being equal, it is better to spend more of your income on luxuries than on he biggies (housing, transportation, debt). If you do the former, you can easily roll back. If you do the latter, when times get tough, you're hosed. In yo face papaa!
Seems like a basic rule that has impact on more ideas recently discussed on hacker news: in a market where there is a short supply of high demand items, more money will cause more inflation.
This will also impact ideas around basic income.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/total_spending_chart
That more than explains the lower amount left for people.
On the contrary, I think the thing that has deceived us about how much poorer we've become is cheap stuff. TVs are cheaper than ever. We spend less as a percentage of income on food than we've ever done in the past. Even automobiles and computers are more affordable than they've ever been. To a superficial viewpoint, we have more purchasing power than we've ever had (and the CPI includes many of these items which give that superficial viewpoint).
But we see the true regression in purchasing power once we look at things that haven't benefitted from lowered manufacturing costs. Housing, education, health care and the like are showing the true nature of the situation of how poor we've become.
P.S. Yes, I know I took the quote out of context and I'm more agreeing with you than disagreeing with you. But there is a distinction to be made that it's not all stuff that's more expensive, just the important stuff.
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/COMPRNFB
A double income is not required to keep up with your parents, it is only required to keep up with the (much richer) Joneses.
If we aren't richer than our parents, it should be easy to name a good or service that we consume less of than them. Anyone care to do that?
Social Security and health care come to mind.
Did you mean "the basket of health care goods available in 1970"? I imagine we consume far more than that (e.g., MRIs, statins, etc). Would you be willing to stick to your parents health care choices?
Was medical bankruptcy a thing in the 1970s?
Allow me to quote myself, quoting you: "name a good or service".
> Would you be willing to stick to your parents health care choices?
Do you mean the health care choices they are exercising now? Who do you think is racking up the most MRI hours, 20 year olds or 60 year olds?
I'll put a finer point on it, both services are subsidized by the increasingly resentful youth.
Again - MRI is a service. Health care is a category.
Why would I, why would they? The issue at hand is cost; they pay much less than I do to utilize the same services due to now legally mandated insurance.
> Again - MRI is a service. Health care is a category.
Again... the health care industry is comprised of both services and goods, the unequal consumption of which is what you challenged anybody to point to.
I certainly am - in 1980 I'd probably be a cripple. In 2014, cheap airline fares + modern medicine fixed me up for a few thousand.
I'd agree if it were a self funding program, but it isn't. Due to the ever increasing deficit, scarcity increases with consumption - the earlier generations are paying less and drawing more than later generations.
> Also, we consume more healthcare today.
That is news to me - and probobly the entire health insurance industry, how did you arrive at that conclusion?
> Also, sarcasm doesn't mean what you think it means.
I made my point, being aware of my point you stated the opposite in a ridiculing manner: that is the very definition of sarcasm. It doesn't need to be a sassy remark made with an eye-roll and accompanied by a laugh track to be sarcasm.
Take any illness you might get and look at the outcome 40 years ago versus today. Look at the maintenance treatments people make for vision, dentistry, and orthodontics.
> I made my point, being aware of my point you stated the opposite in a ridiculing manner: that is the very definition of sarcasm.
That's not the definition of sarcasm.
Millenials own far fewer cars and homes than their parents ever did, in addition to having less (typically negative, due to debt) net worth. To reiterate, if millenials were to liquidate all of their assets (of which they have none anyway), they would still be in the hole for huge sums. I am fairly certain that my parents never had negative net worth; I know for a fact that they also had much more substantial savings and spending ability in their 20s despite coming from humble backgrounds and working menial jobs.
This isn't about keeping up with the Joneses, it's about reaching zero rather than being in the negative.
EDIT: And, as the other replier so far mentioned, millenials consume very little healthcare while being forced by law to spend vast sums to merely have the ability to spend more money (via high deductible plans) to get shitty quality care. For a time in the previous generation's course, it was normal to have mental health care as part of the standard of care, which has slipped away from us-- now, mental healthcare is barely consumed, and is ludicrously expensive when it is covered under the paltry plans at all.
http://www.google.nl/imgres?imgurl=http://1.bp.blogspot.com/...
Homeownership has been 64% or higher since 1970.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/Hi...
Houses have just become larger since then.
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7002/6843606169_618efc8942_d.j...
You are just plain wrong on all counts.
your graphs are just plain useless on all counts
Look at 1979 in the second chart... the trendline for the present is dropping beneath it. The size of house isn't relevant.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/02/18/stude...
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/021914... "Over 25% of them had late payments or are dealing with bill collectors, and well over half are still receiving some form of financial aid from their parents. One of the most disturbing findings of this study reveals that seven out of 10 young people define financial stability as being able to pay all of their bills each month."
http://www.millennialmarketing.com/2010/11/whats-not-on-mill...
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/04/30/homeownership...
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/04/chart-of...
http://www.businessinsider.com/millennial-home-ownership-sur...
http://www.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/blog/real-estate/2015...
...
My parents both consumed more education (much cheaper, less supply of students), earned relatively higher wages (inflation-adjusted) in a better job market (less unemployment, more aggregate demand, higher LFP rate), bought into the housing market with an affordable mortgage in a nice area, and are now expecting to collect a decent revenue of social security and health benefits on top of their pension funds.
If this holds true across the population on average, we will consume less education, housing, social security, and medical benefits than our parents. Not to mention have a poorer quality of life. On average. There will most certainly be exceptions.
The solution? Go back to a top 10 school and get that law/medical degree, then spend a decade or so paying off the loans (or have parents pay for it). Or go the high risk/high reward route of a startup and live/work like a college student for 1/20 chance to hit it big and become an angel/VC. Or network your way into finance/consulting/tech management.
I mean, land is a finite resource, and what with population growth that's happened in heat-riddled places like Phoenix, I think the overall per capita quality-adjusted land ownership has declined.
This is more of an orthogonal population matter, though.
"Wealth" in economics is the sum total of all of your physical and intangible assets, including a calculation of discounted future earnings.
So being rich and being wealthy are very similar concepts in economics - large NPV of assets and income. But in normal parlance, rich and poor can also refer to standard of living/quality of life/happiness.
So are you wealthier? Happier? Earning less?
Adjusted according to inflation I make slightly less money than they do - meaning I have less cash in my bank account. But the prices of everything are being driven down so quickly that I live a much fuller life than they did on a per-opportunity basis.
I have access to all the world's information, seemingly infinite entertainment, and a faster computer than they could even imagine in my pocket (not to mention my tablet and laptop). I can travel the world (I actually make money when I do so by Airbnb'ing my house), Amazon drops stuff they couldn't afford on my doorstop for very cheap.
So I make slightly more, but what I have access to is much greater than they did. I'd argue my life is much richer (er, wealthier), despite making slightly less.
The only thing I would push back on is the increasing cost of some of the more fundamental investments - higher education and housing. Can't (sustainably) enjoy fast computers/airplanes/Amazon without a degree and a home.
Richness, wealth, is not money. It's the things we want. My parents never had $2/lb strawberries in February, or MRI machines, HIV drugs, discount airlines, etc, etc.
We are insanely more wealthy than our parents.
Yes we "need" 2 incomes to buy a house, but that house is nearly TWICE the size of the one our parents had on average, and MUCH fuller with the things we want.
Nobody claimed we are brainwashed sheep most of all me -- the claim is that quality of life is reduced, and you suggest it's in exchange for an increase in consumer goods that we want. I respond that we don't actually want these goods; our recent ancestors did not want them, the desire has been manufactured by a well-paid hard-working team of expert psychologists. So we are not now meeting a desire that existed; a desire has been manufactured and then met. So when you compare our circumstances to that of the past you must consider the fact that advertisers had not become yet sophisticated enough to force us to want things we do not truly want, so our wants were different; driven by life, not driven by profit.
If you'd like to pretend you don't understand the difference between "having a happy life, supporting a family and taking care of yourself and those close to you" and "having expensive toys" then you are free to do so, just don't ask me to indulge your absurdity by pretending it's reasonable.
This is not true everywhere: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2398714/The-incredib...
Tech progress is learning. The "economy" is the act of economizing; learning to do more with less. It's a virtuous cycle.
Better medical care does, but it's expensive medical interventions that bankrupts middle class families. Also: Real estate - much further out of reach. Education - much deeper in debt. These are the things that really matter.
I'll give you cheap air travel, though. That stuff is great. Hooray for cheap jet fuel.
Medical incentives may be messed up in the US, but most people on the planet who have access to healthcare don't have to worry about it bankrupting them.
Could our parents afford to own a home, have children, live comfortably off one income? Can we? I guess we have plenty of fun cheap toys made by slave labor that we can't play with because we're always working so if that's how you measure richness then sure.
Yes we can. But it means tradeoffs most people aren't willing to make.
Part—not all, but part—of the supposed increase in quality of life due to cheaper goods is because entry level quality has dropped, for certain categories of goods.
Sure, we have cooler, cheaper toys and food is easier to get, but the rest of it makes it much harder to get by, in general.
Joking aside, I haven't seen outward bitterness regarding their poor lot from the current young generation so much as doubling-down on the rat race in an attempt to still top their parents somehow. It's pretty bad for their mental health, and not very effective so far, but may pay off in the long run.
Then Wall Street got corrupt. They demanded ever more from companies. Each quarter had to show more profit from the last otherwise they punished the company. Wall Street found ways of funneling any profits directly to investors instead of investing in the company (and, more importantly, it's employees). Pensions took a hit. Companies stopped offering them. Some companies 'borrowed' from pensions and lost it all. The employees did suffer. Employee loyalty dropped. Companies took that as an opportunity to treat employees as temporary; replacing them regularly with cheaper ones.
You'll have to wait until tomorrow night to hear the rest of the story. G'Night.
We receive a state pension at retirement that is dependent on national insurance contributions over the course of your working life.
You can also contribute to (and have recently probably been automatically opted into) private workplace pensions that your employer will probably match (up to a point).
You just forgot to mention how pensions funds invest heavily in 'evil' Wall Street
And how Wall Street has not been invented in the last couple of years.
And how people happily wound a rope on their necks for a bigger house.
I could be wrong, but the ridiculous income inequality overlaid with generational power broking for the past 20-30 years could really set off another "great awakening" type of social upheaval. 70 million Baby Boomers. 70 million Millenials. 30 million Gen-X in the middle to take sides.
If you were given the choice to go back in time and live in your parents generation INSTEAD of the present, your life expectancy is lower, you dont have the Internet for information.
Overseas Phone Calls were a luxury back then, so was airplane travel. It seems to me inn absolute terms, the vast majority is better off vs if they were the same age in the 1980's
Being able to afford a new iPhone every other year is not prosperity.
But there are others who stayed about where they started (or rather their parents) who can't see much improvement in the last 20 years.
Also, the average price of college is <1 year of an average college grad earnings (according to a quick Google search). If you are indebted for life because of this, its your own fault.
More people than ever before own houses, and much larger ones than in the past. Your complaints don't seem to fit reality.
So you managed to pay off a college degree with no parental support, no scholarships, no grants, no subsidized federal loans, and at an interest rate of 4%+?
What's your secret? Be born before the 90s?
The rest of us have trouble finding work after graduation (engineers with masters degrees that can't find anything more than 45k) or are paid so poorly that they have no hope of ever paying off their loans (teachers in my high school were still paying their loans in their 50s and 60s, mostly because they wanted to procreate and housing in my town is very expensive).
Or maybe you're right. Maybe it is their fault entirely. Maybe if it's too expensive to be a teacher, nobody should train to be one. Maybe if it's too expensive to have children, then nobody should have offspring.
"Just be as perfect as me" is poor social policy. At best, it's merely smug advice.
That is, I never saw what my parents' life was like just after they graduated from college. When I was born, they were several years past that. When I was old enough to remember much, they were pretty much into their peak earning phase. If I expect that lifestyle just after graduating from college, yes, I'm going to have a lot of trouble paying down college loans...
The United States has been in deeper debt (as a percentage of GDP) before.
Even adjusting for the value of a dollar in 1950, the $260 billion owed was equivalent only to about 3.5 trillion dollars.
Nothing to sneeze at, but nowhere near 19 trillion.
The fact that so many people seem to think it is "no big deal" is part of the problem (on both a personal and national level).
Forget about overseas, INTERSTATE phone calls were a luxury!
The 1980s were a nightmare -- no GPS, no cell phones, no digital cameras.
He was in his early fifties when he retired and was actually retired longer than he worked in terms of time, and when he died he still had 6 digits in assets (not including his house.) He didn't do anything special except live modestly, save, and buy stocks.
Who can say they'll have the same experience working a blue collar job today?
In a growing economy, the odds of offspring doing better than parents is a function of the economy as many new avenues to prosperity open up. On the one hand is China where children have more opportunity than parents, on the other hand is Japan, a mature economy where growth has plateaued so there aren't massive opportunities for newer generations.
Also, after a certain level of achievement, there isn't much more to be had. So the progress would be incremental, on average, rather than tectonic, after the plateauing.
In other words, it's not expected that in large diversified economies there is the possibility for everyone to become a magnate.
https://www.google.fr/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&m...
You should look at this too rayiner. It's my new favorite chart. It explains so so much.
1) People in the age range 29-37 (cherry-picked?) are less wealthy than the previous generation. The Great Recession explains a lot of the difference.
2) All other age groups are wealthier than the previous generation, but the gain is much smaller than it has been in the past.
http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2013/08/26-years-of-growth-...
can you imagine having been a 10 year old in Shanghai in 1987?
For users/people who think you are "worse off" vs back then, could you let us know which country you are in?
For users who grew up in Asia/developing countries, I would think the young nowadays have a lot more opportunities/chances to strike it rich.
What seems to be occurring at this stage = there used to be a income/price discrepancy for work done, solely because most work had to be performed by locals. The main change now is a lot more of this work can be given/outsourced to employees who have lower wages in developing countries.
It would be interesting to see the results of the poll.
Eventually, no matter how imaginary money is, it's used to buy non-imaginary resources.
Or maybe it's just slower times before the next big breakthrough. Infinite energy from fusion, and AI doing all our work would certainly allow us to truly fill up the world.
I guess I don't feel poorer.
How do you do, fellow kids?
https://media4.giphy.com/media/ifxLK48cnyDDi/200_s.gif
Gen X stands ready to assume out natural leadership position in the counterrevolution. Our cynicism coupled with your enthusiasm...