Revealed: the 30-year economic betrayal dragging down Generation Y’s income
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
“I worry that I’m never going to live up to my own expectations. I live in terror that I will wake up on my 50th birthday in a perfectly ordinary house, with a perfectly ordinary family and unremarkable job – living an unremarkable, ordinary, average life.
If these are your biggest fears in life, take a step back to realize what you've got. Entitlement and bizarre expectations about what "life" is are to blame here. Not every one is above average.
But at the same time this shouldn't preclude a conversation about why, given the massively increased pool of wealth that has been created in the last few decades, the poor and middle classes are expected not to share in it.
It's definitely healthy for me to recognise that I as a middle class westerner live better than almost everyone in a developing economy but if the answer to "where has all the new wealth gone?" is not "too the poorest economies!" then I think it's only natural to feel cheated if the answer is "be happy with what you have and stop asking questions!"
It's definitely healthy for me to recognise that I as a middle class westerner live better than almost everyone in a developing economy but if the answer to "where has all the new wealth gone?" is not "too the poorest economies!"
Luckily, the answer is "to the poor and middle class".
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/13/this-...
As you would be the first to agree though, wealth increases need not be zero sum. For the most part, growth in developing and middle income countries isn't at the expense of wealthier countries at all.
On the other hand, rising costs of London property - referenced in the article as a key concern of "millenials" - is pretty close to a zero sum game, and it's generally not poor and middle class people, and certainly not the lower deciles of world income, that are winning it.
Actually I'm trying to change the subject from money. Who cares about green pieces of paper multiplied by chained CPI [1]? What matters is goods and services.
As noted above I don't think you can name a single good and service that the bottom has less of, beyond maybe obsolete goods like land lines or investments like "shares in BRK.A" or "land in central London".
The graph I link to demonstrates things are definitively not zero sum - virtually everyone has experienced gains.
[1] Chained CPI is meaningless over time, since the basket of goods changes every year. Not to mention the biggest contributors to CPI growth - health care and education - are not hedonically adjusted.
It might be open to question how many young people with much less living space than previous generations actually are worse off given that thanks to economic development they'll live longer and have access to digital goods that didn't exist and more opportunity to avoid expensive housing through increased relocation opportunity than their elders did at the same age. But then again, if I wanted a graph which indicates a large fraction of people in countries like Britain who would be considered low-mid income by national standards are actually worse off, I could always use yours...
If you are simply advocating in favor of ending left wing policies like exclusionary zoning and buying elderly votes with cash taken from the young, I agree with you.
Which didn't strike me as the sort of sentiment you'd tend to disagree with either.
[1]by implication they're arguing they'd be less bothered if their purchasing power wasn't growing due to outsourcing competing with their job, since at least that'd be helping poorer people out.
Also important to remember that almost everyone on this site is going to be way above average income wise.
Sometimes I get the feeling like you were responding to, and then I remind myself that I grew up with next to nothing. I was lucky enough to realize in college (computers were just becoming ubiquitous when I started college) I had a knack for programming and it was the right time to have that knack. I have had experiences I never thought possible when I was a kid.
But there is a benefit to the feeling - the drive work hard.
I agree with the sorts of benefits that this feeling can induce in the best of cases.
On the other hand, I don't think that everyone really understands what "hard work" means. To the self-entitled it means "got a college education" and "show up for work every day". Well so did everyone else.
I don't know, I have mixed feelings about this. I realize that this generation is getting stiffed in a sense, by circumstances beyond their control. But hey, we aren't growing up having to go to war in Europe, or during the Depression, or the Bubonic plague for that matter. So we've got that going for us, which is nice. Ever rising economic standards on a magnified level (meaning every generation is richer than the previous, not just by overall trend) doesn't seem plausible over the long-term. We need to get used to that.
I agree. Going to college and showing up is baseline. I do think that kids today come across as entitled, but I'm sure I was the same way at 18 years old.
Having grown up helping my dad do labor type work for 2-3 jobs while trying to make ends meet, I know hard labor work. That is something I never want to have to do again.
Is this generation getting stiffed? There really are more opportunities now than ever before. College is simply not required for anything in IT. The rise of free online education is amazing. $5/month gets you a server on the internet that lets you start any business you can come up with. Many of the traditional barriers are gone. What has changed though is that people are required to be self reliant, which can be a tough thing for many.
IMO, the main people getting stiffed are the poor and blue collar workers. The people who would never have gone to college regardless of cost. The people who would have had great lives in a factory situation.
This is fairly myopic and complements the common tech-centric sentiment seen around here of "Why don't you just teach yourself to program and pull in six figures? You can do it for free!"
> What has changed though is that people are required to be self reliant, which can be a tough thing for many.
Our current upheaval in economic relations makes it next to impossible for many to plan to make a living in the long-term. Pulling a jack-of-all-trades switch up every few years is less self-reliance and more desperation.
> IMO, the main people getting stiffed are the poor and blue collar workers.
This has always been the case. The problem now is that what were once secure, well-paying white collar jobs no longer are. As time marches on, these degree holders are not seeing fair compensation or opportunities for a career. These people are being driven into being the new poor and blue collar working classes.
And that's always been a shit place to be.
Killing off unions and free trade has been awesome for those at the top, but shit for 99% of the population.
https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2016/01/...
"From 1948 to 1979, productivity rose 108.1 percent, and hourly compensation increased 93.4 percent. From 1979 to 2013, productivity rose 64.9 percent, and hourly compensation rose 8.2 percent." http://www.epi.org/publication/raising-americas-pay/
Figure 3: (1979 - 2013) Top 1% up 138% Bottom 90% up 15%.
The data you are citing is restricted to a slice of the top 20% of the world. Indians and Chinese (i.e. the bottom 50% or so) don't count?
Also note that you cite data on productivity for the economy as a whole, but hourly compensation only for "production and nonsupervisory workers". That's a weird comparison to make - what if the increase in productivity was caused primarily by people outside this narrow group?
So, it says just about nothing about the US income distribution.
PS: I suspect that bump is basically China + India, and the Dip is the US/EU middle class. Yes, outsourcing and free trade is great for other people.
It's not great for wealthy people who were enjoying economic rents by excluding desperately poor people from the global economy. So what? Do people earning $2,000/year (1/10 of what a poor American consumes) not count?
Of note the rich got a free ride while breaking the US middle class. That's actually bad for long term economic growth. It also entrenched and entrenched authoritarian governments around the world ex: China.
etc etc.
Or: "It sure does cause people to work harder."
Both of these sentences cannot be true at the same time.
/drove a checkout part time for 4 years a while back, proud of my scan rates. There is an art to it the mastery of which brings great satisfaction.
PS: I am sure the company’s bottom line loved your metrics. But, again that’s just driving corporate profits not middle class incomes.
Agreed. It is precisely because I found myself on a trundling career that had little in the way of prospects after graduation (and that job I found by literally showing up on doorsteps and being a general pain in the ass), no hope of ever owning property in London, being stuck in a squalid flatshare, and having nothing to lose that I gave it all up (not that there was much to give up), started a company, lived in a squat, and a decade on employ 50 people and own (well, the bank owns me) the roof over my head.
What was it Baldwin said? "The most dangerous creation in the world, in any society, is the man with nothing to lose."
This world is currently producing vast numbers of young people with nothing to lose. Some despair, others start businesses, others start criminal enterprises or join IS.
While there's something to be said for the motivation that the total absence of prospects can grant, it's a generally crappy situation which would better be served by reducing wealth inequality. Dare I say "Universal Income".
My biggest fear in life is waking up on my 50th and not owning a house, not having a family, and not having a ordinary job... because so far is how my life is going.
I currently live with my parents, have negative net worth, have no friends, no girlfriend, no job, and can't afford to buy a new PC, and my current one is trying to die on me, and I need it to do the occasional odd-job that shows up.
Take every odd job that shows up, and amass some savings towards a long-term goal. Travel the US, or the world if you can manage.
Making friends is easy, keeping them can hard. Join some local clubs/organizations and put yourself out there.
Fear can be a motivator if you let it, use it to help you avoid the undesirable outcome.
Some of these sound like platitudes, but they do hold substance. It's easy to find yourself in a situation that seems hopeless. What you do from that place is important.
For hundreds of years, we've been taught that it is "I versus Everyone Else" in economically liberal societies. To think that will go away, and not go into hyperdrive, when people are desperate, cold and hungry seems unrealistic to me.
I truly want my assumption to be proven wrong, though.
What job do you want? What's preventing you from getting a position somewhere in that field?
I'm assuming you're putting a lot of work into achieving your goals, what are the obstacles you're coming up against?
So that might be his biggest obstacle.
There are so many substandard developers making $100k in the u.s. that would never be able to find job elsewhere in the world, those of us who live in the U.S. should really be grateful despite all of its shortcomings.
That may still happen, Generation X doesn't get to claim that one as solely their own.
That being said, kids have something else to replace that fear with nowadays: the constant potential threat of a possible school shooter.
I agree that it was more prominent in the public imagination, and you're right that "duck and cover" videos and similar were part of what kept it there, but I would dispute that the threat is any less 'real' now than it was in the 80's.
Looking around the world, I'd say there are currently three regions of instability that could lead to nuclear weapons used in anger (I'd add a fourth one if Trump is elected US President, and I'm not joking about that, the guy has already called for killing innocent people to further his own goals (killing the families of terrorists), and I could see Trump and Putin being a toxic combination in terms of diplomatic action).
The three regions I'm referring to are:
1. North Korea.
2. Middle East.
3. India and Pakistan.
North Korea are clearly threatening to develop nuclear weapons, and have a powerful ally in China, which allows them to get away with it so far. Even if the weapons are developed as a form of self defence, the question is what the leadership sees as valid threats, and considering their somewhat ruthless approach to their own people, I wouldn't put it past the North Korean government to do something reckless beyond their own borders.
The Middle East appears to be a huge mess, I'm sure I don't need to explain how chaotic the region is. Isreal are the only country in the region with nuclear weapons at the moment, but with the activity in the region it never seems far from disaster. Even if Isreal didn't push the button themselves, other more radical groups may go down that route. Russia's support for Assad and Turkey's membership of NATO are a bit of a concern when viewed in combination.
India and Pakistan are both nuclear powers, engaged with a minor conflict with each other over their borders. Things appear to be settling down recently but if either side gets a war-hungry government then work on developing a peaceful resolution could be undone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India–Pakistan_border_skirmish...
During the Cold War there was a really good chance of that happening, and there were several instances where equipment malfunctioned (and showed impending missile launches when where there was none) and the only thing that stopped it was the right general making a smart call that it wasn't real, or several other close calls, from global destruction.
North Korea isn't likely to bring that about. The Middle East isn't too likely to bring that about. India and Pakistan aren't going to bring that in either.
Russia is still capable to do that, but I think they're not too serious about their desire to actually go into war and are more taking advantage of NATO's unwillingness to go into war to make a few small land grabs (that was a little scary, though).
The tension and complex web of polar opposite alliances across the whole world just isn't there like it was in WWI, WWII, and Cold War days. It could still develop in the next decade or two, sure, but I really don't think we're there right now.
For all the ills that Capitalism might have, I do think it's helped tie all the countries that participate in it to each other's fates, to a certain extent, and they don't want to see the other countries fail (or attack them directly) since it will now affect their own economy, probably for the worst.
Trump is a wild card, but I think assuming he won the nomination he'll calm down his rhetoric, since he needs to in order to win the moderate vote anyway. If he actually made it into office, then that's admittedly a wild card. I'd like to think that he didn't actually believe that shit he said and will be more concerned with internal politics than foreign, and/or will head the advice of people who have been there a lot longer. Hopefully.
The Wikipedia article has details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_and_cover
Which I would actually consider worse than a nuclear wasteland in some significant ways.
A rich man asked a Zen master to write something down that could encourage the prosperity of his family for years to come. It would be something that the family could cherish for generations. On a large piece of paper, the master wrote, "Father dies, son dies, grandson dies."
The rich man became angry when he saw the master's work. "I asked you to write something down that could bring happiness and prosperity to my family. Why do you give me something depressing like this?"
"If your son should die before you," the master answered, "this would bring unbearable grief to your family. If your grandson should die before your son, this also would bring great sorrow. If your family, generation after generation, disappears in the order I have described, it will be the natural course of life. This is true happiness and prosperity."
An executive from America was standing at the pier of a Mexican village, taking a much needed vacation. It was his first in more than 10 years. He noticed a small boat docked with just one fisherman on board. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The executive complimented the Mexican fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The fisherman replied, only a little while.
The executive then asked, why didnt you stay out longer and catch more fish?
The fisherman replied, I have enough to support my family for a little while.
The executive then asked, but what do you do with the rest of your time?
The Mexican fisherman said, I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, and stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life.
The executive scoffed, I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise.
The Mexican fisherman asked, But, how long will this all take?
To which the American replied, 15-20 years.
But what then?
The American laughed and said thats the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions.
Millions.. Then what?
The American said, Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.
Those are the fears of someone who has never had to worry about their next meal, a roof over their head, whether they can afford to see a doctor or if their kids will have a better life than they did.
There are plenty of people in Generation Y who would recognize that this person has been driven somewhat delusional through boredom and wealth.
That's not what it's about. I'm a Millennial and whilst I would never word it like the author did, I understand where they're coming from.
The issue is with one of courage vs. conformity. The author fears those things because they see the paths that are expected of them, and doesn't like where they lead. If they were happy to live a simple life (and there's nothing wrong with that, if that's what you want) then they wouldn't have those concerns.
Speaking as a Millennial in my 30s I've realised I'm prepared to give up on quite a lot in order to keep my own dreams alive. I'm not ready to 'settle down' into a life I do not want. My opinion may change as I get older, but for now I would rather avoid the trap of a huge mortgage and the lifestyle that must be maintained to support it (i.e. reduced career options, reduced travel options, etc...). It's not about entitlement, it's about recognising I have options.
At least in my case, it isn't so much that an average life is "bad"; I am obsessive about personal development, and I push myself extremely hard. Ending up "normal" would basically mean my work had been futile, which would be pretty depressing.
>I worry I’ll never afford my own home, or always have to flatshare
>Salaries don’t, and never will, reflect the rising cost of living
>My degree was a waste of time
But i guess wanting to be a grown adult without having to have rommates is entitlement.
Retirees capturing more wealth than an entire generation of working college graduates? Dont be ridiculous, thats not entitlement.
This has given my drive I didn't have before: I actively manage my career (next step being starting for myself) and have feeling for investments/planning that I wouldn't have otherwise had.
Hey, you're me.
>If I was just 2-3 years older I could have bought a house for 80k instead of
Yeah, this stuff is frustrating in hindsight. But the economic tide ebbs and flows. It's important to be ready for the next opportunity; it's not always obvious in advance.
Personally, I believe ours will come as the Baby Boomers (who haven't saved enough) try to liquidate their McMansions to fund retirement and find no worthy buyers. We just have to stop them from voting themselves legislation to compensate.
It's become clear that the UK government (no matter which of the two parties are in power) will do whatever it takes to allow the young to take on enough debt to fund ever-increasing house prices. I genuinely expect to see some kind of scheme that either explicitly gives these people the money their house "should" be worth, or in some way tilts the field so that they make it up in other ways.
On the plus side, my shares in house builders have done really well, and some of them have got so much money they don't know what to do with it; big dividends and occasional special dividend payments ahoy.
Too late. In the UK at least, the state pension is being increased from ~£110pw to ~£150pw, despite the fact that pension payments are among the government's biggest liability and we're apparently in a time of austerity so severe that we're required to starve disabled people by removing their living allowance unless they submit to humiliating tests.
Meanwhile, the chancellor is planning some more pension "reforms" later this month, which is most likely going to involve removing the deferral of tax on pension contributions, i.e. moving all the tax payments that were due to happen in fifty years' time to today. That means the current pensioners will benefit from tax paid on current pension payments as well as tax paid on current pension contribuitions. By the time millennials retire, the deferred payments will have expired, and only the current contributions will remain.
Add on to that the massive blackhole that will be the forgiving of student loan debt (which even by the government's own optimisitic predictions, 40% of which will be unpaid over its lifetime - many experts predict this will be higher), and you begin to see exactly how fucked millennials will be come retirement.
If you want some insight into what's going to happen politically and economically, remember this one fundamental fact: Baby boomers will never willingly pay for their stuff. They use their political might to ensure that future generations will pay the bills.
Social Security, Medicare, public pensions, infrastructure, college...
He was prepared (waited 10 years).
You can do it, you just have to look at the past as a guide and when opportunities arise, strike. Also don't be afraid of leverage. Good luck :-)
Like many people on HN, this has hit us hard. I had just finished grad school in 2008 and was single - it was unclear if buying a house/condo made sense then. Fast forward 5 years ... married, jobs, ready to settle ... except now, everything seems pretty expensive. Okay .. lets wait it out. 2013-2016 ... prices keep increasing. Everyone and their uncle is investing in real-estate. REIT are scooping up properties and collatorizing the rent payment. If we had taken a mortgage, our monthly payment would have been fixed but with rents, it keeps going up. I also did the math ... I paid about 180K in rent (averaging between 2500 and 3K a month in places where I lived). I have nothing to show for that.
Of course, we all make our own decisions. We have decided to buy (at what may well be the top of the market). We had a need to buy in 2013 and I wish we had not let "expensive prices" deter us. The monthly payment argument was as valid then as it is today. If/when the market turns, we'll buy a bigger place. Right now, we're buying a small starter place and at take a stab at the American dream. That's the logic I'm using. I really wish real estate wasn't causing so much misery but it is... I can't outsmart the market :(
In financial planning it's called vulture money.
Where a highschool-educated man once could get s factory job and buy a house on that salary, a modern young person gets a part-time job with an expensive degree and uses it to pay off a pile of student debt and while a house is completely out of reach.
The UK has a skills shortage, it's vacancy to applicants ratio is back to pre-recession levels despite huge levels of immigration from the EU. London is the 6th largest French city in terms of population, tens of thousands of millennials from Southern and Eastern Europe have migrated to the UK. This is brilliant because they are often well educated (by someone else) and motivated - we have several recently arrived European devs in our office.
However at the same time it takes people longer to get into jobs. Since the 90s the concept of a degree being a pre-requisite for professional jobs has been pushed and pushed. I remember at my grammar school it being assumed you were going to university. Combine this with the rise of the "gap year" and people are emerging into the job market years later than they used to, with different expectations about the kind of work they will do. The article (it is the Guardian after all) highlighted a charity sector employee - not a sector you traditionally associate with pay rises keeping up with the commercial sector. I know far too many acquaintances who emerged from university unwilling to work for a profit making enterprise.
Many European countries, especially in the south, have completely different issues - huge problems with youth unemployment which is driving emigration. A labour market which has two tiers of employees due to the difficulty of laying off permanent employees causing young people to disproportionately end up on casual contracts.
Someone much better placed will no doubt be able to explain the issues in the US and Canada, indeed I'd be unsurprised if there weren't different issues within the US.
There is a shortage of jobs, which things like workfare don't help with (if there is a job, just employ these people).
It's clearly for the job market overall, there will be variation within sectors. Given over 2 million private sector jobs have been created over the past few years while the public sector has shed jobs I doubt workfare is involved.
Admittedly a lot of arts grads don't get jobs as artists, where most CS grads are only really interested in a programming job.
But even so - the skills shortage is somewhat mythical.
As you say - the remuneration shortage is more obvious than the skill shortage.
Housing costs in London are in the same ballpark as SF, but £40k is considered a generous salary for permanent developers. £60k might be possible for seniors.
It isn't unusual to find web dev jobs offering <£20k.
Work in the City offers much better pay, but the culture can be pretty horrific for anyone who isn't suited to it.
Tech is a winner-take-all industry. You get nothing for being second place. This requires long-working hours (it needed to ship yesterday!) and people you can exploit (younger folks who don't know any better). Moreover, the ever changing nature of languages and tools makes it that on the surface, a young person in their mid to late 20s seems as much experience as an older person. When you combine this, you get shitty software that has shipped fast.
Can we do anything about it? Unionizing software or having some kind of guild membership is not going to happen in my lifetime. (we're all too libertarian). We can slow down the churn of tools (this is also hard and requires discipline ... if we all understood the damage caused by the new new thing, maybe we can do it but I doubt it - can you make a promise to NOT learn any new languages this year? I don't know if I can). We can do our own startups (this requires access to funds that not everyone has, and perhaps a particular lifestyle situation; also ... odds of me getting into something like YC are near 0 I feel). Or, we can change fields. As someone who loves tech and not much else, I have severe doubts I'll be able to find something I have as much passion for as tech. But hey ... who knows. Life is a new adventure everyday :)
Sad to say, I'm not aware of any books that tell the whole international story.
For the USA, there have been an abundance of books and articles showing the decline of the middle class:
http://billmoyers.com/2015/01/26/middle-class/
Tyler Cowen came up with the phrase Great Stagnation:
http://www.amazon.com/Great-Stagnation-America-Low-Hanging-E...
Some writers treat this as a political issue:
http://www.amazon.com/Boiling-Point-Republicans-Middle-Class...
Some writers focus on long-term factors that have little to do with politics. Robert Gordon got good reviews for his historical analysis of the specialness of the 2nd Industrial Revolution 1860-1940, and why the current era is not as robust:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Fall-American-Growth/dp/06911...
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1949908
Lo thinks that the Reinhart/Rogoff This Time is Different is among the best-researched texts with the most quantitative support and analysis while still maintaining its readability.
The oil crisis gave the Right a convenient pretext to blame wage increases for inflation.
This became a standard element of economic orthodoxy, and ever since then increases in wages and salaries - which were a driver of post-war prosperity - have been labelled "inflationary', even though inflation is primarily caused by other factors.[1]
By a remarkable and unexpected coincidence, this was the moment when labour share of GDP and middle class prosperity both started to decline. See e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_share#/media/File:Adjuste...
[1] The Bank of England always plays on this. About a year ago there was talk of increasing interest rates to "head off inflationary pressure" just in case wages might have started rising in the future. Meanwhile asset inflation in the form of rising property prices is ignored, and more obvious drivers of increasing costs, like consumer energy prices, are downplayed.
[Disclaimer: somewhat of a hippie myself, but there's a lot of hypocrisy in that area.]
Nothing ever trickled down. What power we had to recapture the gains you and your parents worked hard for has been whittled away by years of anti-labor legislation and rhetoric.
Negotiating for increased wage for the average laborer in a non-unicorn market is difficult. Without union representation, it is a solitary worker with little funds versus firms and industries made up thousands of well-moneyed and well-lawyered people who share the same interest in wanting to make sure you never see more money than they absolutely have to give you. Without solidarity, you can be fired and replaced without repercussions for your employer from your fellow workers, all of whom share the interest in seeing you get paid fairly so that one day they might, too.
Globalization has made it easy to avoid pesky things like fair compensation, hours, working conditions, benefits and taxes that we've come to take for granted in the US.
I suggest reading "the great wave: price revolutions and the rhythm of history". I found it to be a surprisingly easy read.
When I was college as an intern I opened a Roth IRA and put my earnings into it (I was fortunate to go a relatively cost effective school). I was absolutely afraid I was going to retire with no money.
When I got out of college my first goal was to buy a two family or something I could rent and live in. Which I eventually did waiting for the market to tank. I negotiated for raises or position title changes as often as I could. I absolutely was completely focused on provincially building wealth... people of similar age to me were equally concerned.
I can't say the same for folks 5-10 years younger (I'm not saying there aren't wealth focused millennials.. I just haven't met many yet). For example one individual I know went to Europe out of college used some parents money for as long as possible and then eventually came back home (the thought of asking my parents for money makes me uncomfortable).
I somewhat admire the guts it takes to not worry about the future like that and live life (and this is coming from someone who left a job and started a company).
What I find interesting are the opportunities for young people in 2016 that prior generations have not seen. First and foremost is the elective jobs that are available: Find something to sell on eBay, borrow your parent's car and drive for Lyft or Uber, build up a stake, rent an apartment and become a hotelier with AirBnb, or buy a car and rent it out through GetAround.com... These are jobs that you can do if you want to do them and can serve both as a place to start now and as a fall back if you find yourself unemployed in the future.
I am not saying it is easy. It wasn't easy for any generation.
Incitements to blame grandma for your economic woes in this article: many and varied.
Or, as Jay Gould put it: "I can hire one half of the working classes to kill the other".
The thing is, the biggest issue is not lack of jobs, it's mobility. If people could really easily move between countries, they could live much better lives. Of course, to do that we need to have many more remote jobs (hopefully this is coming), kill stupid cultural/political barriers (difficult), stop thinking people should remain in a 20km radius from were they were born.
Consider that a lot of this welt they talk about is in real estate. The moment you stop paying 50% of your income in rent, you become automatically richer than your parents.
My age group, at least in Norway, seems to be fully employed and own houses etc.
The term is more apt for people born after generation y.
Then in 2004, couple of researchers coined the term millennials and made up their own segmentation.
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/03/ge...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-16/scandinavi...
http://country-facts.findthedata.com/compare/15-179/Saudi-Ar...
EDIT: Here's more on the datasets the Guardian used:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/07/millennials-how...
It does say they used equivalized household income.
At least among everybody I know, the reason for delaying marriage is that marriage isn't seen as that important any more, especially before kids show up in the picture.
The only argument I could see is that falling median household income is the reason people are delaying having kids, which then makes getting married early less important.
My dual income no kids friends seem to have plenty of house(s) and toys.
* The question is if all the other factors are true, how can the prices continue to rise?
Of course we can't include house prices in inflation fully because that would short-circuit the soft default.