No, millennials don't have it worse than previous generations
matthewbarnett.substack.com
matthewbarnett.substack.com
Please show me the nurse or teacher whose wages have risen proportionately to the cost of healthcare or education…
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-eve...
The first house they rented was $10 per month.
Minimum wage at that time was 75 cents per hour.
Ignoring taxation, you could rent a place for two people for approximately 15 hours a month. I don't think that there is an equivalent situation anywhere in the USA at this point...
There are plenty of tradespeople who would beg to differ.
Reaching the median household income requires around $26 an hour for a single income. It’s getting harder to make that in the trades. Especially when you’re effectively trading your long term health for a paycheck.
I’ve seen trade jobs and apprenticeships paying less than what fast food restaurants are offering right now, but everyone swears to me that it’s a 6 figure job. Glassdoor and BLS tell different stories, at least for the regions I’ve lived.
Well I was going to double check and back up my data, but the BLS website is down till Tuesday???
A bunch of secondary data suggests the average wage for most trades hovers around that average. This implies many Tradespeople earn in excess of the average and that they very much can hope to raise a family of four etc.
Those jobs disappeared 40+ years ago and regardless they weren’t available to everyone.
But there are real downsides: spiralling cost inflation in vital goods (where unions, and in the case of the US organized crime, takes hold), low levels of competition, low levels of trade...the container ship was so revolutionary because it broke the back of the deliberate slow work of dock worker's unions (not just in the US).
Where the US really stands out is low levels of redistribution, and low levels of tax on middle and lower classes (to fund redistribution)...I suspect that isn't quite as popular as romanticizing a past that never existed.
What would be nice is some kind of self-aware synthesis of these views, one that isn't based on therapeutic expressions but actual analysis. For example, recognizing that opening the labor force to women and more immigration increased labor supply and drove down wages. Opening up international capital flows opened the doors to outsourcing and deindustrialization. Pitting the various ethnic groups in the U.S. against each other and promoting multi-culturalism has likewise resulted in an erosion of solidarity and thus an increase defecting on the social compact. I can respect people saying that on balance they think things are better today or worse today as long as there is some argument to back that up that takes the relevant tradeoffs into account. But there is unfortunately very little of that type of analysis on offer in these types of articles.
It seems it's quite possible for members of the dominant group to reap benefits from a system that benefits them, while members of the oppressed group experience abuse. No schizophrenia needed to explain this.
Yes? I mean, the US civil rights movement originated how many generations ago? Do you actually believe these issues and all those factors vanished in thin air once the leaders of those civic movements were assassinated?
It's simply not possible to come up with any remotely rational argument about these deep social problems plaguing the US that involves any type of denialism.
This statement is a non-sequitur to the current discussion.
> It's simply not possible to come up with any remotely rational argument about these deep social problems plaguing the US that involves any type of denialism.
This statement is a non-sequitur both to the current discussion and to your previous sentence.
As someone who lives in Europe and benefits from unions in multiple ways on a daily basis, I really do not understand how this absurd myth regarding "unions protect and foster bad performers" came from.
I mean, the core belief that supports this idea is that the only thing that's needed for a professional to enjoy decent and safe working conditions where he is fairly compensated for his work is to be really good at his job. No need to even have negotiation in the picture, rewards just magically fall from the sky as some sort of cargo cult.
But reality does not really work like that, does it? Specially for non-white collar jobs whose role in the production chain is designed to be easily replaceable and there are diminished returns in employee performance.
That's equating Apples and Oranges. Gross domestic product is the total value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country and does not correlate to personal income.
"Income" means more than just income. It also factors in profits, and money leaving the economy through trade.
So it's not comparing apples to oranges, but it's still very wrong. Most obviously, the profit is a big factor. GDP can go up and everybody's salaries go down: it means that somebody is making more profit.
And, of course, GDP is the sum. You get the mean by dividing by the population. But that makes the assumption that income is divided equally, which it isn't. Income inequality means that the median can go down while the mean goes up.
In other words, yeah, TFA is BS. But it's worth noting that salaries + profits should equal GDP. (There are some other factors involving taxes and trade, but that's the gist.)
> If GDP is calculated correctly, it should correspond to mean income levels,
"even if these gains merely reflected the fact that old people are getting richer, rather than young people, it wouldn't make much of a difference to my general argument, as millennials will eventually get older, and thus benefit from these gains just as old people do now."
Let me rephrase that: even if I'm wrong and millennials are worse off, I'm sure they'll do better later.
Further down he answers the question about whether it's harder for millennials to buy a home with the national home ownership rate... a stat that isn't broken down by age group.
I read this entire article and I regret it.
Oh, that explains why the house that sold for $300k in 1990 sold today for $2M (only 3X adjusted for inflation). It must have gotten 3X larger and 3X better built, even though it is the exact same house with a couple extra layers of paint and a redone kitchen.
Also, apart from debt, none of them are broken down per generation. The author does acknowledge this but without additional data this is mostly an opinion piece with graphs.
Higher consumption doesn’t mean higher disposable income, it means higher consumption. I consume a lot more and have more “disposable income” because I cannot afford things like children, a house, a nice car, that would make my income non-disposable.
You will realize the gains that older people have now when you’re older is a huge maybe.
The author is taking the wrong thing away from Bulmol’s Cost Disease. The split between goods becoming much much cheaper and services much much more expensive (remember that increased consumption thing? I can afford very nice acrylic nails but not the labor for someone else to install them) is that when you need services the bill hits like a truck and cost of living tracks mostly goods not services.
Houses being bigger is meaningless when the location is what you’re paying for. If you don’t have the choice to pay less for less it doesn’t make any difference that you’re now “getting more.”
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_GDP_per_capita_...
I said comparing the mean and the median was a quick way to avoid posting clickbait.
Because it's clear that the median and mean aren't strongly correlated anymore.
If GDP is calculated correctly, it should correspond to mean income levels
the growth in average personal consumption, which has risen about 950% since 1950, clearly indicating that Americans today have far more disposable income than in the past.
data sources oftentimes only include people's after-tax take-home pay, after deducting worker benefits like health insurance. When you try to include these benefits, the growth in real income has been much larger than these statistics generally show.
Then we're treated to "don't worry, old people will die," "college and healthcare are like jewelry," "everything is fine because old people are buying multiple houses," a truly bizarre assertion that home prices have gone up because new houses are bigger, completely failing to explain why older, smaller house prices have risen at a faster rate, everything is fine because the millenials are in ten percent less debt than GenX, and then we throw out the Gini coefficient because taxes are satisfactory wealth redistribution.
The confidence with which bizarre, stridently incorrect conclusions are drawn from single charts is breathtaking. I predict a rapid growth in subscriber count for this newsletter.
As the author kindly points out… member of Gen Z … ah, inexperience… happy to forget I read this and give them a break.
In particular the commentary about wealth versus age is an important one. Baby boomers are an outsized generation. They are in retirement which is the wealthiest period of one’s life. So one should expect inequity to rise with their rising wealth, then fall after they pass away.