Older generations don't realize that their wealth is primarily built up in what is really an elaborate ponzi scheme of sorts, money which is really borrowed from future generations.
If I were 20 I'd consider working remote and just go live in a much cheaper country. You could get a boomer lifestyle yet!
Perhaps that says more about me though?
Granted, I've deliberately eschewed larger cities, and as a consequence I've had a harder time convincing people that just because my degree was in math I can still be a competent developer.
Not trying to refute your point but rather to suggest that there are other ways to get n the door aside from leaning on your degree.
I guess I didn't articulate myself well- I think we're in accord here.
The degree seemed to hamper me-at best not help-in getting a CRUD gig in smaller cities.
I'm 'coming around'- started looking into work in Kansas City or St. Louis. Those are probably as large a city as I can handle.
For remote work, you're only a junior dev if you tell them you're a junior dev.
If you can show potential employers a profile of existing work and can convince them that you will bring worth to their company then you can find work.
Point of fact is that if you were to give the choice between today's 20-year-old lifestyle and the same in 1970, you'd be insane to choose 1970, especially if you were a minority or a woman. Sure, houses are cheaper in `70, but the jobs are much more menial, life is less comfortable, medicine is less advanced (particularly pain medication), social opportunities are much more stratified, entertainment is much harder to get, communication is considerably more limited, shopping times are much more limited, so on and so forth. Summing up the differences between now and then as merely "houses and uni costs" is basically just propaganda.
Your other point is they if A gets better it is ok if B gets worse.
I think lack of affordability of essentials like somewhere to live is of grave concern. Unaffordable housing causes homelessness. It means people have to start families later and have less time to raise their children.
As for starting families later, that happens with wealthy, stable societies. People were starting to have children later well before housing costs j-curved. Family sizes have reduced as well - plenty of western democracies are now below replacement birthrate.
In short, the problem is this: housing costs are a problem. Bitching about the boomers is going to help no-one, especially the millenials. Rather than spend that energy creating division, find forward-thinking solutions. Instead of being bitter about the one problem that generation has, be happy that things like job quality has improved[1] (yes, for the slightly lower amount of jobs per worker these days), education is more available[2], society is less discriminatory, food supply is of better quality, entertainment is more easily accessed, travel is much easier, so on and so forth.
Hence why I say that focusing only on house + uni price is just propaganda.
[1] Those jobs that immigrants do in modern western societies, the ones that the natives don't do because they're too menial? Those were the jobs that the young boomers and earlier had to do.
[2] Uni courses are more expensive, but there's a ton of education out there that isn't in the form of a four-year degree, and that's independent of the amazing resources available on the internet.
Working class wages were proportionately higher in 1970. Drawing a dividing line is hard, but somewhere between 1970 and 1980, wage gains became decoupled from productivity increases.
Medicine quite simply hasn't advanced significantly since 1970. Access to medicine by the underserved has, and accounts for much of increases in outcomes, as well as reduced environmental polutants and healthier lifestyles: clean air, clean water, unleaded petrol, lead-free paint, reduced smoking, and reduced alcohol consumption.
"Lifestyle" shopping was only just being invented at about this time -- shopping as recreation largley didn't exist. "Amazon" was called "Sears, Roebuck", you could buy a house, or a bed, or a wardrobe, with a 100% satisfaction guarantee.
Communications and entertainment are about the only area with significant improement, though I'd argue the quality of news coverage 1970 - 1980 was far higher than today -- most cities had multiple local papers with detailed coverage, and newsmagazines weren't the joke they are today. Television was more limited and video didn't exist, but movie theaters were much more common (and cheaper), and live performances easier to find. There was also a form of entertainment and information called "books", freely available in these terminal service devices called "libraries".
You've failed to account for decreased labour union participation (stronger job security), general life and housing security, highly subsidised educational opportunities, the burgeoning of opportunities resulting from the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights movement, the long boom in opportunity in California (offsetting the decline of the rust belt), affordable air conditioning making life in the southeast comfortable for the first time, and the fact that in 1970, the advances of the next 30 years were rapidly approaching. I (and others) see the information revolution as largely played out -- its peak period seemed to be ~1995 - 2005.
Sources: varied, though Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth covers much of the changes in lifestyle, transport, health, communications, and work, from 1870 - 2015. It's especially damning on info/comms technologies excepting 1995-2005, and healthcare since 1970. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century is one of many books addressing the rise in inequality, see also Anthony Atkinson's Inequality.
And, frankly, saying the internet and mass interpersonal communication was 'played out' as of 2005 is utter horseshit. Besides, how seriously should we take a source which damns radio, television, the film cinema, the telephone, and the internet, over 150 years when humanity had none of these beforehand? Should we go back to pre-1870 times, when being illiterate was commonplace instead of being notably unusual? I'm not sure how info/comms was somehow better then. Picking out 1995-2005 as being 'the only good decade for comms' is ludicrous.
It's also possible for inequality to increase, yet have the lower bound also increase. Yes, income disparity has increased, but life quality is not measured only in dollars. Try being gay in the '70s for a clear example. And it's not like homeless people are a new thing this century - they were around back then as well.
They are, by the way, books. Of whose existence I'm somewhat aware, and which was a point of my earlier comment.
I'd suggest you read some.
This is not true. Here are just 3 examples:
1. Childhood cancer - Less than 50% 5 year survival in 1970 vs greater than 80% 5 year survival now. http://www.cancer.gov/types/childhood-cancers/child-adolesce...
2. Anything dealing with the brain including diagnosis and treatment. Before CT and MRI - neurologists and neurosurgeons where operating blind. CT and MRI combined with computer technology allow the surgeon to plan and execute a much safer and gentler approach. In addition, during this time, our knowledge of practical neuro-anatomy has increased and enabled much better surgical approaches.
3. Low birthweight/premature infant mortality - We are much better at saving low birthweight / premature infants. See http://www.hrsa.gov/healthit/images/mchb_infantmortality_pub...
I would call these significant medical advances.
If you are talking about public health advances as opposed to medical advances, then actually good nutrition, good sanitation, and elimination of environmental toxins is probably responsible for almost the entire improvement in life expectancy. However, this has been truethroughout history and is not something new since the 1970's.
One of the NYTime health reporters had a statistc in a 1990s book that 85% of human L.E. improvements were from public health, not diect medical, meaasures. Laurie Garret IIRC.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/12627.Laurie_Garrett
"In all, 86 per cent of the increased life expectancy was due to decreases in infectious diseases. And the bulk of the decline in infectious disease deaths occurred prior to the age of antibiotics. Less than 4 per cent of the total improvement in life expectancy since 1700s can be credited to twentieth-century advances in medical care.”
― Laurie Garrett, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
Intensive methods have worked in some areas. Sanitation, clean water, waste disposal, nutrition, vaccinations, hazard and toxin removal, and general preventive care -- all the nonsexy stuff, matter far more.
It's easy to buy into the "unlimited resources and growth" hype when you're at the peak. Sort of like the bullish delusions of 2007 stock market.
Technically being born in 78 makes you GenX. Yet if you have a brother born only 4 years later, it's another generation? We had the exact same experience, Atari 2600 on a TV that is now weird to even think existed. No TV remotes, walk up and change the channel. Rotary phones, city directories and phone books. Need the time and temp? You called the city "time and temp" number. Riding a bicycle to the comic book store and arcade, which were common then. I remember the USSR and my brother and I saw the Challenger blow up on TV at school as if it were 9/11. None of this is the Millennial experience, and they couldn't even describe these details. The world really did change after ~1995, when the internet went mainstream with Win95. Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, and BBSs were around and used occasionally but I never felt they were significant enough to change society as the internet did post 1995.
In many ways, if you were born from the early 80s back to the 20s you might have had a fairly similar childhood. Stuff that a kid born after the rather dramatic changes the internet caused will never really experience how the world felt different. Similar to how in my grandmother's childhood, she remembers being the first house in the neighborhood to have electricity hooked up. That's a game changer from previous generations.
I think the typical 20 year generational divide is broken with the advent of certain technologies. There has to be a break between those who meaningfully experienced the world prior to the internet and those who don't really remember life without it.
(The other aspect to this is that when I was young, almost everything I read about "Generation X" was a humungous load of bullshit. So I assume any article about "Millennials" has the same veracity.)
Essentially, I agree with you that technological revolution is what really matters. This business about media consumption identification, whether it was Brady Bunch or Super Mario Bros, doesn't really matter to anyone but the marketers.
cough
http://www.esds1.pt/site/images/stories/isacosta/secondary_p...
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2008/04/fin...
The old Wikipedia article on XY Cusp before it got edited:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JCDenton2052/mh5
Excerpt: "The XY Cusp includes those people born in the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s. The word XY is used because their generational identity is mixed, uncertain, or deviant from X or Y or both, but do not constitute a separate generational group in themselves. Some place the years between: 1976-1983 [3] [4][5] [6] People born within this group are in parallel situations with people born in between previous generations: Generation Jones between Boomer and X - late 50s, early 60s, (teens of the 70s); between Silents and Boomers - late 30s, early 40s (teens of the 50s); and the Beat generation between G.I. and Silents - late 10s, early 20s (teens of the 30s). They are referred to as Cusper Groups, Transitional Times, or Buffer Zones. John Losey states "If you couldn't neatly place yourself in any of the [generations], then you're probably a Cusper. 1943-1947, 1962-1967 and 1976-1983 are each considered transition times. Many people born during these cusp periods identify with the generations on either side."
There's definitely no single standard.
What would be vastly sea-change-levels different is the pervasiveness of connectivity and access to a vast store on even real-time information and data about almost everything.
Laptops would've been recognizable, but their utility was severely limited without WiFi, which I think was arguably a bigger transition (wired Internet -> wireless) than BBS -> Internet. So I guess I'm agreeing with you, connectivity was the big phase change!
Laptops were somewhat useful even prior to WiFi. I had my first one in 1997 or so. It was convenient to take work home, for example. But you're right that, viewed through the lens of today, they weren't a huge win relative to wired desktops for many uses.
That's kind of backwards for 1995. Palm Pilots weren't around until 1996, but the first PDA+Phone combo -- a smartphone, except the name wasn't applied to that combination until much later -- was the IBM Simon in 1994 (though the first really popular PDA+Phone was the Nokia 9000 in 1996.) (Obviously, non-Palm PDAs were available and popular before 1995; the Psion Organizer had been around since 1984, and the Psion Series 3 in 1991 was a turning point for the category.)
I completely agree. Born in Zimbabwe in '87, where things (including culture) have always been a little behind - up to and including my childhood including rotary telephones, watching 9/11 on a black-and-white TV and a VIC 20. Keeping in mind that poverty is distinct to debt, I haven't been directly impacted by the debts on the previous generation and genuinely have no idea what other millennials are going on about (although I am slowly warming up to their struggle).
At the very least the formal ranges of generational divides seem to only strictly apply to developed countries.
Unlikely. Much more likely causes are technological change and systemic changes in international political economy that reduce wages and consumer investment earnings.