Millenials aren't entitled; Boomers were just lucky | Hacker News Reader

Millenials aren't entitled; Boomers were just lucky

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This is what has always confused me when hearing people talk about "the economy"... Clearly in the US we romanticize the post-WWII era beyond belief, and indeed it was an incredibly prosperous time. But is it really reasonable to use that as a baseline for comparison as to what constitutes the "normal" state of things? During that time you had so many favorable factors aligning in just the right way that made the post-WWII era what it was, that to me it seems more like an example of an improbable and unusually prosperous situation, not "the way things are supposed to be". It just seems like now anything short of the economy of the mid-20th century is seen as a disaster.

I remember during the last recession how much everyone was always equating it to the Great Depression. I'm sorry but... what? Yes I know a lot of people were out of work, many in my family were as well. But my grandparents went through something of an entirely different magnitude in the 1930s. It's just not even comparable. But because we collectively have this idea in our heads of the post-WWII situation being "the real America", as soon as things deviate a bit and go south it's as if we're in an apocalyptic situation. Just seems to me like people need a bit more long-term historical perspective.

The Boomer generation (economically speaking) came up in possibly the most favorable conditions possible. But to them it was just the "normal" way of things so they wonder why younger people can't be just as successful.

Agreed see also the late 90's - that wasn't normal.

Also the 2004-2008 economy - people say the bankers ruined the economy - my view is the bankers made 04-08 too good and the following depression was more normal.

That's a very odd view. The bankers did ruin the economy, because an economy with a bubble + the ensuing shock is far worse by most metrics than one where the bubble never happened in the first place.

> because an economy with a bubble + the ensuing shock is far worse by most metrics than one where the bubble never happened in the first place.

Only for those who invested directly or indirectly into the bubble.

What about the people that started their career right after the bubble popped? There is a large segment of the population that has had its career and income dramatically stunted because they entered the workforce right after the housing bubble popped.

"You can even see this in the statistics, a divot from 2008 to 2012 where millions of jobs and billions in earnings should be. In 2007, more than 50 percent of college graduates had a job offer lined up. For the class of 2009, fewer than 20 percent of them did. According to a 2010 study, every 1 percent uptick in the unemployment rate the year you graduate college means a 6 to 8 percent drop in your starting salary—a disadvantage that can linger for decades. The same study found that workers who graduated during the 1981 recession were still making less than their counterparts who graduated 10 years later. “Every recession,” Spriggs says, “creates these cohorts that never recover."[1]

[1] http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenni...

> What about the people that started their career right after the bubble popped?

These belong to the group that I called "[those who] invested indirectly into the bubble".

I agree they had bad timing, the original question though was are those people worse than normal - or just normal and the people who graduated 5 years earlier were unusually lucky.

Economic shocks, espescially those on the scale of 2008, affect far more people than the ones involved in the bubble.

I agree with this to an extent. Where I'd diverge is on the question of whether we should say that some of the reasons things aren't "as good" as they were in the post war period is because certain segments of society (business interests, capital owners, etc) have used their influence to improve their prosperity at the expense of the average citizen. To the degree to which that's the case, describing the post war period as "lucky" will gloss over the systematic process of favoring corporate interests over individual interests and normalize the idea that a strong prosperous middle class is an abnormal scenario that we shouldn't attempt to replicate. I don't believe it's easy to return to the specific economic circumstances of the post war period but I'm not sure we're trying very hard right now in the U.S.

Good points. I'd agree (as would most people) that a strong middle class is highly beneficial. I think the disconnect I see is more related to how likely/realistic that particular set of conditions is. But of course just because something is hard to attain doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for it. The issue is that a lot of people who benefitted from these circumstances perhaps don't realize how fortunate they were.

>It just seems like now anything short of the economy of the mid-20th century is seen as a disaster

Well, I think it's also about what Boomers did with the prosperity of that time. Many of the countries destroyed post-WWII invested heavily in building a floor on their economies that made sure people had equitable access to things like healthcare and education.

The US, especially from the 1970s on, did precisely the opposite. And it's into that era of privatization, destruction of unions, and massive wealth inequality that millenials were born.

Generalizing so broadly is a terrible way to understand the nuance of the real world.

The thing is the boomers who are still alive are either the ones who "made it" or the ones who were "born to make it." What you don't see are all the Vietnam vets who died from heroin overdose on the streets in the 60s. Looking at a typical Vietnam vet's life its hard to say that all boomers were that lucky.

As a near-Boomer (early Gen-Xer) I do believe I fell into a lucky time. I left high school, then a quick college-paying stint in the service to a red-hot economy in 1990. (Ronald Reagan was to thank for that, and Bill Clinton kept it going.) I started in Programming then, it's been a great ride to this day.

I think kids today have it harder, the opportunity isn't there. AI may take the programming jobs, I'm not sure. (Kids today also have to be exceptionally well-grounded, I think there's a lot more ways to go astray.)

I wish the Millenials good luck-- they'll need it.

"Your generation isn't like mine!" says person worried about history repeating itself.

There are plenty of things to complain about re: Baby Boomers, but this article is silly on numerous levels, particularly with logic and statistics.

"the rest of the worlds’ factories were destroyed, while ours were not. Globalization hadn’t taken off, so there was no competition between, say, auto workers in the U.S. and auto workers abroad." Not sure what factories being destroyed has to do with globalization, but OK...

"Digging into Chetty's data" - what a joke - those who did not live during the Great Depression earned more than those who lived in it - holy shit, what a conclusion - going to be tough for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences to ignore such astute work...

The fact that the author is a PhD candidate at NYU, will soon be an assistant professor at PSU, and is presumably a millennial isn't going to endear any Baby Boomer (or reasonable human of any generation) to the millennials with such a half-ass screed.

Boomers were lucky, but it was because of energy. Energy undergirds economies and builds wealth. Energy production per capita was sharply on the rise (and overall wealth therefore expanding) when most Boomers were born. By the time GenXers grew up and Millenials were born, energy, and economic growth, had entered a plateau, with many little bumps and dips, and a measured all-time peak in 2005. There may yet be another peak coming. But if the likes of Richard Duncan[0] are right, it will eventually decline, such that per-capita energy utilization will look like a transient pulse of very short duration on the timeline of history, resembling some of these graphs here[1], and not the infinitely upward-sloping curve imagined by techno-optimists.

Boomers simply had the good luck to be born on the upward-sloping portion of the per-capita energy utilization curve.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olduvai_theory

[1]https://duckduckgo.com/?q=olduvai+theory&iar=images&iax=imag...

That sounds like bullshit. Seems much more likely that energy use and production follows the economy rather than the other way around.

Boomers did well because the population was much smaller and globalisation wasn't a thing.

On the way up, energy use follows economic activity. On the way down, it's vice versa.

I won't even comment on the generalization, but... why can't it be both? They're not mutually exclusive.

Agreed. Its too complex an issue for it to boil down to "Generation A has it easier than B".

Damn you scrollwheel hijackers!

I can't understand. Millenials and those titles are ocidental stuff or "usonians" only?

The whole thing is a bit silly, kind of like astrology, but yes these labels mostly were invented and applied in the West.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation#List_of_generations

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