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Comment by rangibaby | Hacker News Reader

The effects of the Lehman shock and 3/11 disaster hit the middle class hard, the blame is pointed at millennials for being thrifty (Why aren't young people buying luxury cars? Why do young people buy everything second hand?), but the reality is that middle class Japanese have less disposable income than 10,20, and especially 30 years ago

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Japanese GDP now is ~$500B less than it was in 1995. [1] A country can't experience 25 years of economic stagnation as a whole and magically generate a large cohort of young people with money to throw around.

Things are a little better in purchasing power per capita terms [2], but not by enough to make a difference.

[1] https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

[2] https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

"Japanese GDP now is ~$500B less than it was in 1995."

Yet in 2012 it was $800B more than in 1995?

From your graph it has been mostly been stable.

Hence "economic stagnation".

Changing economic conditions definitely makes a lot more sense to me. And activities in the middle of the night tend to be more expensive anyway (just think about bars and clubs), so you can save plenty of money by just going to bed and walking around for free the next day in the sunlight to hang out with your friends.

Seems to be the recurring theme to blame millennials for the hardships of the middle class globally.

I wonder if any developed countries middle class is faring well currently?

Like a bunch of other people in this thread, apparently, I was also in Japan about a month ago.

From what I saw, the whole place looked middle-class, and like everyone was doing fine. I think I might have seen one homeless person the whole time I was there (and I'm not sure about that; they were just begging, and didn't have a bunch of stuff with them); I saw more poverty in Germany, and I see far more in the US.

Japan's middle class might not have as much disposable income as it did in the 1980s, but from what I saw, it wasn't doing badly at all. It certainly looks a lot healthier than the US's middle class.

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