Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Am I missing something?
Philosophers, novelists, sociologists, anthropologists, and economists used to define, study, and critique generational divides before advertising became such a pervasive part of the modern economy
That eliminates the marketing effort to convince a consumer that they are part of a particular group. Getting individuals to self-identify themselves as members of various groups is a highly effective advertising delivery channel. Convincing you to use groupings as a convenient, time-saving shorthand (like branding is a convenient shortcut) gets you to buy more, more frequently.
Marketers and advertisers fear you insisting upon evaluating situations and people one-on-one, as they come up in your life, and using the marinating and revealing effects of time to judge value and character.
And they still do...
It's not really fixed as far as I can tell. Around the actual turn of the millennium, millennials were said to start in 1980. Now it's more commonly pegged at 1982.
Generations are really a blunt and rather useless tool IMO. Besides "only 90's kids will remember this" memes.
Market research organizations I think.
They segment people into generations (and smaller subcategories) in order to better understand how to sell them products and services.
They are marketing buckets.
The corporate mindset is so pervasive in north america, that we take on their concepts and discuss them even outside of their area of application.
This is why we talk about which movie 'grossed' the most on the weekend, instead of comparing movies on their artistic or cultural merits.
I think it's mostly nonsense though. I think the underlying grouping that generation is a proxy for, is age group. 18-25 year olds behave differently from 25-35 or 35-50 (with some fuzziness at the edges). In other words it's loose grouping based on age/maturity.
Containers and such arent new. We have had FreeBSD jails for 2 decades plus
What is new is the thinking that is a better way of doing things. Jury is still out on that :)
But really, it's all arbitrary and pointless, I agree.
Maybe they should have been called the grunge generation.
It's just an arbitrary label for people born in a certain period of history. These people generally have shared experiences that are different from the experiences of other generations.
> Who draws a line between generations and why?
Same people that draw a line between lemons and limes. It's sometimes a useful distinction so people remember it and use it.
> People do not stop being born, nor do they magically change because they supposedly belong to an imaginary generation.
There is no sharp dividing line between lemons and limes, either. Fruits in the citrus family can be crossbred with each other and you will end up with hybrids that cannot easily be classified as lemons or limes. There's no sharp line between "tall" and "short", or "white" and "gray". That's just the way names generally work, outside of fields like mathematics where you can use more precise definitions.
> Same people that draw a line between lemons and limes
I mean, I doubt it is really the exact same people who do this. At the very least it is a separate department that does the lemon-lime distincting.
(Ohyyfuvg.)
edit: never mind, it's not actually true - gullible me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lime_(fruit)
There is, if you care about scurvy: http://nowiknow.com/dont-forget-the-lime/
The Age of Enlightenment prized composure and disparaged human emotion. The Romantics countered, to hell with composure! As William Blake wrote, "those who restrain desire do so because there's is weak enough to restrain." A life of love needed no guiding hand. Lord Byron wrote, "love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey."
Three generations later the pendulum swung back. The Dark Romantics underscored human fallibility. The Realists derided Romantic values and urged a return to everyday concerns and simplicity. Victorian culture prized moral strictness and Charles Darwin wrote, “the highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
Then the pendulum swung again, culminating with the Roaring 20s, the rise of Flappers, drinking, spending, and (relative to the time prior) lots of sex. Americans valued optimism and prosperity.
That was until the Depression hit and war pulled us back to stricter social norms. Those too were repealed and replaced by 1970s "counter-culture," "if it feels good do it." That lasted till now, and many are suspecting that Gen Z is a reaction to Millenials. They've accepted the progress we've made but also reject the mistakes we've made. I won't mention surveys right now else this will become political, but basically every generation is a reaction to the one prior. And sometimes reactions take 2-3 generations, but it's always a cycle.
One big trend is a massive shift towards saving and financial responsibility, more risk-averse, less willing to take on debt. Far less substance abuse (2013, 66% of teenagers (older members of Generation Z) had tried alcohol, down from 82% in 1991). 40% drop in teen pregnancy, a 38% drop in drug and alcohol abuse, and a 28% drop in dropout rates.
Re: church attendance, 41% among Generation Z, compared to 18 percent for Millennials at the same ages, 21 percent of Generation X, and 26 percent of Baby Boomers
Whereas Millennials were largely just magnifications of earlier trends in Gen X and Baby Boomers, Gen Z seems to be a rebuttal. It's too complex to make bets, but if I had to make a bet, I imagine 2-3 generations of risk aversion / conservative values before those become overbearing and we have another counter-conservative shift.
Also feel free to share your disagreements. I love history but I'm certainly not an expert in cultural movements.
I think it's just a part of a bigger pattern that groups of humans tend to fall into where they pick arbitrary lines to divide them into groups so that they can justify condescending the other group.
There is also the other component that people like to tell narratives with history, which is easier when you can condense the actions of millions of people into a number of categories you can count on your hand. Largely speaking, I think the world is just really complex and the ways we try to simplify it and comprehend it break down in some illogical ways because they were never superbly accurate models in the first place.
It's good to know (I wasn't aware before) that this trend isn't present in all groups of humans, it gives me hope that it is able to be overcome collectively.
Did you just place yourself in the group of persons above such baseless group-defining behavior?
[0] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/baby-boomers-v-millennial... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/apr/29/millennials-...
I don't think this is at all an American phenomenon.
Another reference point: kids who always grew up with a smartphone, vs. slightly-older kids who got their first one, say, in college. Totally different thing.
1. Age distribution is not uniform: the histogram of people's ages really is multimodal (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/...) so talking about generations is a way to think about the "clusters" of ages.
2. Intuitively there is a certain zeitgeist that comes from being around for certain events or being affected by certain societal or economic forces. What did it mean to be a teenager or a college student in 1968? Do Americans who recall September 11, 2001 versus those too young to remember it think differently about things? How did the recession of 2007 affect those who were starting off their careers versus those who were about to retire? Generations are an attempt to generalize the answers to these questions.
In my experience, that's not true at all, to them it was merely an historical event, whereas I quite distinctively remember the shock, despite not even being an American.
Are they the original "fake news"?
*I should point out that the "boomers" are real insofar that birthrates did rise and fall. The rest is bullshit. There's no "boomlet" caused by them. "Greatest" is more senial Regan shit still haunting us. X, Y, is being too lazy to even find a bullshit name, and millennial is believing that the way we count years somehow matters—actually probably does in a bunch of ways completely unrelated to the things marketing cares about.
No that's not where they originated from.
> The idea that demographic trends are descrete or have some sort of constant period is ludicrous
Named generations don't have a constant period. (They tend to run between about 12 and 25 years.)
> I should point out that the "boomers" are real insofar that birthrates did rise and fall.
True.
> There's no "boomlet" caused by them.
Without attributing what caused it, there was a continuous nearly monotonic decline in US birthrates from the peak of the Baby Boom in 1954 through 1976 (Gen X is usually tagged as ending between 76 and 80, then a run up to a peak in 1990, followed by a drop back to the 1976 low in 1995, hovering around that point or slightly under through the end of the millennium, where it started dropping again.
The Millennial/Gen Y group does correspond to a boomlet.
Still a low spread. No overlap is also weird, insofar that generations are supposed to be real phenomena and not just an arbitrary division.
> No that's not where they originated from.
How much does their current incarnation owe to whatever came before?
> The Millennial/Gen Y group does correspond to a boomlet.
You need to look at that children/potential mother rate. Constant means pure echo. Secondary crest further either shows we have more mothers and they mimick their own mothers in having more kids, a true cultural inheritance, or it shows that there is enough variation in maternity age that generations are sufficiently convolved such that no 1 generation begets the next. Those two can maybe be teased apart by combining the per-whole-population and per-potential-mother rates to get the mothering/potential mother rate.
Has anyone actually done any of these statistics?
Several generation labels have overlap (recently, the “Xennial” group overlapping Gen X and Millennials is an example), and the boundaries are recognized as fuzzy, anyway.
> You need to look at that children/potential mother rate.
For what end? The boomlet absolutely occurred (the attribution of it as an echo boom is occasionally made, but isn't really signficant or essential.)
My personal theory is that it is just an artifact of US boomer navel-gazing and self-exceptionalism.
Also that it fits in nicely with peoples' tendency to want to drop other people into little buckets so that they don't have to think about them too hard. People do the same thing with race, believing these differences between us are discrete and fall into categories that define our essence, rather than continuous multivariate gradations.
Thinking about it further newspapers have always printed daily horoscopes, so obviously there's money to be made pandering to peoples self identity.
Not really. People like to categorize things in attempt to draw any kind of conclusions from it. Sometimes it can be helpful and sometimes not.
The trends they are describing were most likely occurring consistently over time and not at any particular point, but if you take two points in time 30 years apart and compare them it might look like a drastic change.
Ergo, the generation thing is always there, just that it takes a different form in different countries.
I'm in Gen X (and not at the very end). I used a computer at school in 4th grade, had my first computer at home within a year, had a PC clone at home (our third family computer) by the end of 6th grade, had a modem and CompuServe account in middle school.
Millennials may be distinguished by being likely to have had access to the Web before leaving high school, but not by having (personal) computers introduced while they were growing up.
First, there were actual population boom waves - one peaked after WW2, another peaked in the late 70s, another roughly after 2000. Also there was birth rate decline as an after shock from the transformation to the market economy. These waves seem to get generated by strong historical events or inadequate access to housing. In general, thanks to immigration and larger differences in the age of motherhood, these waves slowly disperse.
Second, because there was a lot of politically different historical periods in Czech Republic in the past 100 years, people born around the same time tend to have quite different experiences. So you have generation which was born in democratic Czechoslovakia after WW1, generation that grew up under Nazism, generation that grew during Communist purges in the 50s, generation that grew during a period of cultural renaissance in the 60s, generation that grew during a period of political tightening (normalization) in the 70s and 80s and generations born after the democratic revolution of 1989.
These different generations were largely learning a different language (German, Russian, English) and each was under influence of quite different culture than others.
You mean like you just did?
Yes - you're missing the detail of the first of these generations - those returning to the United States from having served in World War 2, took full advantage of the economic preeminence of the US, and begat the "baby boom generation".
So of course you are correct - births happen continuously and there is not an obvious "banding" of "generations" ... but in this case there was a very clear and pronounced age band, and all of the subsequent "generations" (baby boomers, gen X, gen Y, Millenials, etc.) proceeded from there.
I don’t know what’s not clear — if you grew up in China during the cultural revolution, you will be different than if you were born before or after. Your basic assumptions about humanity and government will be affected by such experiences and it will carry with you thru life.
Woodstock music festival happened in 1969 right when everybody was in the their 20s or about to hit 30.
Then they all had kids at roughly the same time, the 1970s and early 80s. Housing boom of the 1980s. Lots of new kids shows that happened in this time period as well.
Now all of those kids are buying houses and having kids. Another housing boom.
Not really, am from a Slavic country and we definitely speak of generations as well.
I don’t think we ever had a name for it, but those generational differences were implied.
America since roughly the 1920s has been different. The invention of radio and television allowed a small set of companies to dictate culture across the whole nation (and later, the whole English-speaking world). Moreover, their incentive is always to seek the latest hot fad rather than broadcast the same messages over and over; stations that do the latter (eg. public radio, classical music) get eclipsed by ones that don't.
As a result, the cultural experience of people born at the same time will be roughly similar. You can talk to most early Millenials about Transformers and My Little Pony and Voltron and G.I. Joe and Punky Brewster and Full House and they'll know what you're talking about. You can talk to most baby boomers about Beatlemania and the Ed Sullivan Show and the JFK assassination and they'll know what you're talking about. You generally cannot talk to the former about the latter.
In other areas where mass-culture has been exported and widely adopted, you see generations arise as well. People have spoken about generations in Japan since the 1980s, and people are starting to talk about generations in China.
There's some evidence that the Internet is actually destroying mass culture and the concept of generations with it. Notice that the generation after Millenials hasn't even been named, and they also seem a lot more diverse in their cultural & musical tastes and a lot more accepting of diversity in general. But it'll take a while (a few generations, at least) before this really takes hold, assuming we don't get a major event that reverses it.
Not sure if with "comming from" you are referring to Poland or Germany but regarding the latter I have to answer with a confident "Stimmt nicht!".
There is a big discussion in Germany regarding the so called "Generationenvertrag" which is about the young generation financing the older generation's retirement. Which is working worse every year.
Also there are public discussions about social injustice particularly impacting the current generation and with regard to retirement a bleak outlook compared to the previous generation (not really the current) of retired citizens.
That said, I think "milleanials", "gen-X" etc. are arbitrary divisions - just a shorthand for talking about a specific age group.
In the States they use "baby boomers", "generation x", "millennials" more, but it's the same thing.
It's all based on the postwar period (WWII, generally).
People like to categorise and be categorised to justify their actions or lack of action.
The average young person/couple that I know are able to do and buy far more than their parents (e.g. eat out, order takeaway, take holidays, go to bars, buy things for hobbies, buy clothes, ...).
They just don't own property and have no path that leads there.
In some sense you could say that they have higher incomes whilst having lower wealth, but that doesn't really capture it.
Housing just went bonkers which makes retirement impossible.
But that's a separate subject in my opinion.
Within bounds it's possible to compare. Two families living on the same street, one has $10k higher income than the other, the higher income family has (at least the potential for) a higher QoL.
But comparing someone with a high income in a downtown flatshare who has an ~infinite entertainment budget to someone who is well on the way to owning a home outright in the suburbs is really hard (e.g. a 30yo in London, vs their parents at 30yo).
The former doesn't have a higher or lower QoL than the latter because you can't define a benchmark without it being opinionated.
Other areas do exist that could allow people to move out of the city to a cheaper owned home in the suburbs. Personally I don't think that's a good solution though because suburbs are pretty inefficient and seem likely to exacerbate the climate problem we're running full speed into. I just wanted to point out that you can form some comparison because they are both still relatively attainable. (I might be mistaken on the real estate landscape in the UK since I'm from the US, if so just disregard this comment)
My other comment is mostly aimed at GP, but it seems that it has persisted down the comment chain, which is that from everything I've heard and read, "Higher income, lower wealth" is not an accurate assessment of what is happening when you factor in inflation. It's more of "The same/lower income, lower wealth" on average. Even still though, given the ideals of a capitalist system saying that owning capital is literally worth capital itself, lower long term wealth is most definitely a long term problem because this is a runaway feedback loop of capital concentrating in the top and the lower non capital owning members of society are slaves to capital. You might be technically earning a wage and thus not fit the technical definition of slavery, but if you have less and less freedom (defined as less freedom through lack of actual choice) because of it, I see very little difference.
On the flip side, my parents talk about when I was first born and they had to choose between two toys because they couldn't afford both (a mirror and a little bird - maybe $20 each). I have never had an issue with access to money, even when I had nearly nothing in the bank and was paying down my student loans as fast as possible and something came up - a quick call to the bank was all that stood between me and enough to finance a full repair across the next 3 months instead of a bandaid. My parents didn't have that type of access to credit.
Me and my dad worked in a similar role (software development - him for a bank, me for defense) out of college. Granted, even inflation adjusted I made a lot more than him right out of school.
Also, even though my parents had a house way younger than me I wouldn't want a credit card with the interest rate my parents were paying on their house. It was insane.
When it seems like owning a home is completely unachievable, there's no point in saving so you might as well have those experiences.
Also I'd separate travel from those other things. Witnessing other cultures through travel is a very valuable experience IMO.
Community? What's that?
As for travel, it depends. I have a lot of friends doing “Instagram travel”. Literally deciding where to go based on where they can snap the best shot. There are also a lot of people doing very touristy things that don’t provide any sort of insight or deep meaning.
Even traveling like that, they might accidentally pick up some culture by osmosis on the way to their next selfie-spot...
Edit+ The above fueled by 'a hack' on the normal state of things; the outward growth of cities and freeways to previously rural land to create the suburbs we know today.
In the UK it's not about saving, it's about income multipliers, which don't really involve financial discipline beyond the basic level of "have an emergency fund so you can interview properly".
In a silly limiting example, imagine you earn 40K. It's not intractable to save enough to hit a 5%, 10%, or whatever deposit on a 1 million property.
What is intractable is ever earning enough that 4x your income is equal to the remaining ~800-900K mortgage.
I don't personally subscribe to this mentality — I've seen other friends save up $50k, double it with patient investing, and then scrape together a down payment. Even if you end up leaving SV, having had property here can be a good investment.
I might one day own a house, but that's not going to happen for at least a decade or more until my position rises from entry level to middle to a high-enough level where I actually have the liquid capital for a down payment on something worth dealing with a long term mortgage for, and have enough money set aside to deal with potential catastrophic repair or even just regular maintenance. Right now, if I come home and my roof is caved in, the floor is flooded, or my PSU explodes away half the house, I'm gonna shrug and call my landlord and renters insurance agency, and let them solve all these catastrophic problems on their time and their dime/
I'm in no hurry to get one, so I don't see a point to save specifically for a house at the expense of efficiency (spending 15 minutes to order and eat a meal vs. 1hr+ cooking one), or other more fruitful investment opportunities than home ownership. Not to mention, it would make moving around for better employment much more involved and stressful if I had a house I needed to sell or rent out in order to leave the city.
Millennials are poor: ~10% have $15k saved up https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/09/a-growing-percentage-of-mill...
Millennials are rich: ~47% have $15k saved up https://www.sfgate.com/personal-finance/article/Millennials-...
Avoid articles that stereotype any generation, because they're garbage that distort the truth to push agendas and generate clicks.
What can 15K get you today? An OK used car, maybe, and it's like 1/10th of the down-payment that's expected on a house that's still too far away from work, which you can't expect to stay at because no one has a stable career anymore.
It's also not JUST the home price, it's the career, being able to expect to stay in the same area for a long time and generally do well.
I happen to live near Seattle, but I think the same could be said of a majority of the 25 most populated metro-areas in the US, if not a similar proportion of cities in most other countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...
I'm extrapolating that any place with >5% population growth over the ~10 year period is in a similar bind due to various policies.
But if you look at healthcare you simply couldn't buy an insurance that offered 75% survival rate for cancer 40 years ago, today most insurances do..
I am not saying health insurance isn't too expensive and shouldn't be public. I'm saying product is better.
I'm not saying everything is fine and dandy. It's not.
I'm saying we often underestimate what we take for granted today, that wasn't possible 40 years ago.
Assumption: Average student loan debt in the US is $25,000 with a 6.8% interest rate, with a 10 year repayment plan. Graduation age is 21 and retirement age is 65. Market return rate is 7%.
If you took that student loan money and instead invested it in the market after the 10 year loan period you would have $49,673. Leave it in the account until retirement and it grows to $495,642.
Of course half a million bucks won't be worth as much in 2062, but the difference between having the loan and not is substantial. This is one of those cases where subsidies up front can save a whole lot of money in the long run.
Right. When I was a student in the mid-90s students were poor. We wore second-hand clothes because they were cheap, not because they were “vintage fashion” (which costs as much or more than new!), we re-used teabags instead of Starbucks every day, we went to the market at closing time to buy for pennies the produce the stallholders were about to throw away instead of takeaways and eating out, we drank crap beer at the union instead of going to clubs, we used PCs in the library rather than having our own laptops... students today are massively wealthier in every way than we were, even accounting for loan repayments.
Virtually none of the students I knew when I was one I the 1990s did most of those things, more of the people I've known as students recently do them. (Yeah, we didn't have Starbucks per session, but we did have the overpriced trendy on-campus coffee stand with similar choices and, adjusted for inflation, higher prices then Starbucks has today, and it was busy constantly.)
Most of my friends from my higher education and career, as well as everyone I know who I've heard mention hackernews, are like you said, making more than their parents and enjoying a higher quality of life but still not planning on buying property because housing costs are too high in cities.
But if I go back to the town where I grew up, most of the people I know that didn't move away to go to a good university or go into a field like tech or finance are worse off than their parents on any metric I can think of.
It's surreal to how alien a lot of the perspectives on HN are, even though many people here come from a similar background to mine.
I make more money (inflation adjusted) than my parents did combined when they bought the house I grew up in. I would have to double my salary to afford buying/maintaining that house today.
My parents bought their house in 1970, when my dad was making about 15K. The house was about 30K. To buy that same house today you would need to make about 150K. Inflation adjusted, my dad's income then would only be about 100K now or maybe a little less.
But ... what changed? In 1970, we lived in a remote area, where it took close to an hour to get there from the nearest city of any size. But about 10 years later the freeway was built and the nearest city expanded, now the property is still technically rural but it's 15 minutes from the city. It would be hard to argue that the value of the property hasn't been significantly increased as a result. Not many people wanted to live that far out in 1970; my dad's coworkers at IBM all told him he was crazy. Today that area is very popular.
“What’s old is new again. The paper observes that some of the millennials’ parents were subject to similar baseless grumbles of "kids these days" from their elders.”
I don’t know though. Seems like part of the nastiness of the times is the baby boomers constantly taking jabs at millennials. Perhaps the silent generation complained the boomers weren’t “frugal enough” but I have a hard time believing they had such widespread disdain for their kids as the boomers do. Anyone seen any research that quantifies that?
"Older people love to gripe about the entitled, lazy millennial generation. But it's nothing new – by delving into the archives, we found plenty of parallels stretching back 2,000 years."
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20171003-proof-that-people-...
It's always interesting when I hear boomers complain about millennials. Didn't they have an influence on raising the same generation they complain about?
I don't think "millennials" are really all that different from the previous generation. However they do have very different forces pushing them in different directions.
I would guess that has more to do with the rates than any moral superiority between generations.
At the end of the day, marriage is a choice you make every day. Different cultures have higher and lower divorce rates largely based on how seriously they take that commitment.
Basically it probably happened but the world at large didn't have the ability to hear about it. Sort of like crime rates, even though they are lower than nearly any other time in the US the fact that the internet and 24 hour news cycle constantly talk about crimes the population as a whole feels its a bigger problem than it used to be.
As a Gen X'er I can personally remember the mid-70s to the late 80s and the hate spewed out at baby boomers by previous generations. I don't think the Millennials have it any worse or better. Those who are currently going through it always see it as the worse.
I think out of everyone my generation had it the easiest. We were teenagers and young adults during a time of general peace and prosperity.
I'm holding on to my nastiness.
I think today's life is just more stressful. With some luck you can do incredibly well but it can also go the other way big time.
It was an illusion that never really materialized for most people.
What a revelation.
As it turns out all this bullshit about millennials not wanting to get married, or own houses, or own a car is manufactured news...and people really do want to have families and own things, only they can’t afford any of those things.
Wow next thing we will hear is millennials are not choosing to be uninsured, but they can’t afford healthcare insurance.
Edit: removed “Medicare/social security” with Medicare/Medicaid...that slip triggered the HN pedantics and in their mind made the remainder of the comment “patently false”
EDIT: Yes all, I understand credit is now more easily available than ever, and I would argue that ease of credit is a substantial problem allowing for the transfer of responsibility to future generations.
@infogulch: I agree with everything you said, but that is not what OP said, and hence, not what I replied to. Internet Talking is hard!
But, not to put words in OP's mouth, I don't think that's what OP was saying. Baby boomers have normalized the concept of average people using debt to get things they want now but can't afford, and millennials are the first generation that has grown up with it pervasively.
Debt is a powerful tool for enabling opportunities when the decision is highly calculated and considered. For example a business that can directly weigh a break-even point for going into debt to make an investment that would simply have not have been possible otherwise. Or perhaps buying a house (though that is a bit more debatable these days).
When people "just put it on the CC", that debt is not carefully calculated or considered. When people go to college without a path to a career that can pay it back it's also not calculated or considered.
Debt is like a scalpel, but individuals use it like it's a hammer.
Well yes, that is after all a central point made by the article:
“We find little evidence that millennial households have tastes and preference for consumption that are lower than those of earlier generations, once the effects of age, income, and a wide range of demographic characteristics are taken into account,” wrote authors Christopher Kurz, Geng Li and Daniel J. Vine.
Debit does not work that way over the entire economy. It can change the distribution of wealth, it can incentive people to act differently, it can change the cost of transactions. But it can not anticipate future wealth.
Thats what caused the credit card explosion
https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/marquette-inter...
It's two sides of the same coin with totally different implications. It's, "I bought a CD." vs. "The bank keeps borrowing from me."
While 'directly responsible' is a bit of a stretch, at least in the UK voting preferences are currently quite correlated with age (though this hasn't always been the case). Because the current crop of older people are much more likely to vote than younger people, the political parties have made various commitments to protect and increase social security for pensioners. These pensioners are of the same generation that had free education in the 60/70s and then voted for tax cuts in the 80s when they were earning, of course.
Yes it is a generalisation, it's far from the only factor that determines policies and the demographic bulge isn't as pronounced in the UK as it is in the US but I still think it's interesting to see how government policies have changed to follow the bulge as it ages. Of course, many baby boomers will tell you that they paid taxes all their lives, thank you very much, and had mortgage rates of 25% etc etc etc.
They couldn't have kids. But they ended up running a drive in, where the kids who worked for them became like family. They put more than one through college, and took one in when he needed a home. Decades later, those kids would call and visit them.
Well, those kids may have turned out pretty well. But, generally, I've come to think of those who came after this "Greatest Generation" as "The Selfish Generation".
Really, we're speaking of more than one generation, here. The symbolic touch phrase might come from the 1980's, written in the movie "Wall Street":
Greed is good!
To which I might respond, "Divided we fall."
Patently false. In the US, Social Security was instituted as part of Roosevelt's New Deal in 1935. From a more global perspective similar systems have been around much longer.
Not just that, but the sad state of infrastructure, the condition of the environment, and climate denial. If WWII was the crucible of the greatest generation, then the (relative) peace of the 60s and 70s was the cradle of the worst generation. We (I'm 38) are now inheritors of a pretty messed up world on a very dangerous trajectory. I hope we can muster the courage to face it instead of being led like zombies toward our tech fantasies (myself included).
1. https://www.thebalance.com/national-debt-by-year-compared-to...
Seriously, though, a fairer point of comparison might be the late '60s and early '70s - right when Boomers were entering adulthood. National debt as a percentage of GDP was in the 30s around then.
Still, your response to the parent comment is still somewhat justified - yes, national debt is higher now, but it's not like it's orders of magnitude higher, right?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HBFIGDQ188S
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Composition_of_U.S._Long-...
But I didn’t say it was dire, that’s you reading “dire” into facts and numbers, which should be telling.
A couple moves forced by landlords deciding to move in or sell the property to people looking to remodel and flip and you might discover non-investment value to owning your residence.
(Renting comes with those and many other risks; essentially all the duties of ownership are risks—risk that the landlord will fail the duty—for renters. Unless the lease terms transferred to the duty to the renter, then they are just duties.)
I guess by some math they would leave the house to the kids, but that will be when the Boomers are ideally 80 and their kids are already grandparents. Assuming the wealth isn't spent on end of life care (it will be).
Is the part I was responding to.
* Capitalism naturally leads to growing wealth concentration/inequality over time, especially when combined with automation and globalization
* People say “one person being richer doesn’t make you poorer”, but that’s BS. When people compete for scarce resources, i.e. homes in cities, the wealthy can outbid the middle class constantly
* I think that home ownership in cities becoming unaffordable for the middle class is mostly a result of the wealthy gobbling up property
I don’t think there was an intentional “fuck our kids” push from boomers, this is just the natural result of unchecked capitalism and growing wealth inequality. It won’t be reversed until we do something to REDUCE wealth inequality, which I don’t see happening any time soon. If wealth inequality keeps increasing, of course desirable scarce resources will be increasingly owned by the ever-wealthier upper class.
I mean, do we seriously believe that if we magically swapped these generations around things would've gone massively differently? I know that Americans put the individual first and foremost but I have absolutely no doubt that the current generation would have done mostly exactly the same mistakes if we had been born a few decades earlier. And similarly I'm pretty sure that my grandmother would be wasting her time on Instagram or playing Fortnite if she was born today. Does anybody really believe otherwise?
It's such a ridiculous thing to do. It's not like you can chose when you're born. It's just a way to deflect your own problems onto other people while at the same time not proposing anything constructive to move forward.
IMHO Millenials tend to be more aware of their financial weakness at a younger age relative to their older cohorts, thus resulting in more risk adverse behavior.
We need an Avocado Toast Index to track consumption patterns across generations to go along with the Big Mac Index that tracks purchase parity across countries.
If you can obtain a mortgage, you are more likely to (be willing to) spend more on that mortgage than you would on the rent for a number of reasons.
Anecdotally, I see people attempting to spend as little as possible on flatshares because they don't think they'll ever have a high enough income to bother with that, so they don't save either, and just enjoy themselves with the money left over (spending as little time at home as possible).
The annoying thing is that this is typically blamed on imaginary negative traits that millennials possess, such as laziness or spite borne out of feelings of entitlement. Whereas the fact is that Boomers had it really, really good, having grown up during an age of unprecedented growth, especially in contrast to the rest of the developed world, which was recovering from World War 2. That's the main reason they have done so well economically: America's rising tide has lifted all their boats. Unfortunately, this has come at the expense of subsequent generations, who now have to live with, and pay, their debt.
edit: not multiple orders of magnitude
I don't think so.
Especially when you're
- unable to understand cumulative interest (slept in math class),
- unwilling to take advantage of cheaper state and community colleges and trade schools,
- unwilling to avoid careers with little to no viable economic future (women's studies, fine arts, politics, history, English,etc.).
No you don’t. You don’t have to pay your parents debts. Not sure what “debt” you are referring to?
I can think of lots of debts that boomers incurred that will need to be paid (or absorbed) by subsequent generations.
- A vietnam war whose costs changed our economy and lead to the end of the dollars convertibility.
- A transition to urban life without investment in public transportation leading to a half century of malinvestment and disjointed transport infrastructure.
- Failure to invest the time and thought into learning how to eat and walk when you don't live on the farm anymore. Three square meals a day combined with driving everywhere has lead to an obesity and diabetic crisis.
That's strange to me - is everyone living on debt? Factor in median household income for a fam with Bachelors degrees: $68,728, which is $52,000ish net of tax.
How are people spending that much?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
The more salient question is 'why'.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/real-es...
Doesn't seem out of line with the previous generation?
If the next generation is even net poorer the property asset appreciation train might finally crash though, and I'm of mixed opinion if that is going to have a net good outcome, or if the front is going to fall off two generations from now.
Millenials are still living with their (wealthy) boomer parents, delaying marriage and waiting for their boomer parents to die, whereupon the millenials will inherit their boomer parents' wealth. Unfortunately this will fail, b/c millenials have neither a work ethic nor a saving ethic. In the end, they'll spend their parents money and the US economy will flat-line.
I'm not making anywhere near as much as I could be in software development right now and yet I'm making significantly more than the average household income in the US, just by myself (not including my girlfriend that lives and shares bills with me).
Also it's all relative. The types of jobs my parents worked were both middle-lower class jobs and we struggled at times to make ends meet. I ended up in one of the higher paying fields out there, so it makes sense that I make more than they did.
Comparatively, a good friend of mine's dad is a lawyer, but my friend is a teacher in the Pacific Islands (he studied for and tried being a lawyer for awhile, but his wanderlust got the better of him). He's making significantly less than his family did.