A majority of young adults in the U.S. live with their parents
pewresearch.org
pewresearch.org
Not everybody has parents that they can tolerate.
It's a failure of reproduction of the middle class, though. When you're born rich, it's easy to die rich (without being adventurously stupid), when you're born poor, it's effortless to die poor. The middle-class is the class that has to rebuild every generation. We've allowed so much corruption and rent-seeking that it's not happening anymore.
My mental health deteriorated too. Looking back I should have built a support network and gone to therapy.. a lot of therapy. This all hit me at the end of college and in grad school. So I was broke too.
I didn't really have family to fall back on either, I was lonely and felt alone.
I'm still working on it, despite marriage/kids etc... I actually wish I had capitalized on my alone time in retrospect. Hence therapy!
>Regardless, I don't believe I'll ever feel the way I once did about this world.
Do you want to feel that way? What you have now is perspective and you know more about yourself.
That's what college is for.
The issue isn't that young people don't want to move into their own place. It's that they literally can't without ruining themselves. For me, moving out of my parents place would mean moving to a tiny shithole that costs over 800CAD and is situated in the worst neighborhood of my city. It would be worse for my mental health (which is already hampered because I find modern cities unbearable) but also an idiotic financial decision.
Point is, all I want is to move away and live in solitude and independence but I think the government would probably find me even if I moved into a cabin in the woods in Yukon.
We live in an age of literal miracles. Thinking rocks, floating metal, what amounts to telepathy, machines roaming the countryside that dwarf giants, bodies being reshaped and redrawn, pandemics being fought back after a year or two. There really need to be some hard questions asked about why exactly a kid can't expect to move in to their own a home at 20.
I'm not saying there are easy answers. Maybe the world is just so complicated that a normal 20 year old can't make a meaningful contribution any more. But it is worth at least talking form time to time about why it is so hard to for young people to be independent. What exactly is the deal they are being offered here?
?? Please elaborate.
Ask foreigners: They don't have parent's insurance or homes, yet are expected to survive without being able to take jobs that are reserved for Americans only. Americans have it easy.
They're all pretty mundane because humans can get used to anything given a few months. But the things we have these days are all crazy.
And exactly what jobs are reserved for Americans? Only ones I know of are DoD or security clearance.
Although it is illegal to discriminate based on country of origin, companies do it all the time - at the least, they will outright reject a candidate based on this criteria and at the worst, they string them along on years of abuse/slavery through an H1B and lower salary compared to Americans.
Nobody wants to do extra paper-work and run through the hassle (laws) of hiring a foreigner if the risk is higher than hiring an American - if they do, they better get a better deal.
Ask HR, STEM international students, someone on H1B. There are lucky ones, especially CS majors, but the majority is abused by the system due to the power imbalance. This is unknown to the average American, you don't know how much the balance has been tilted in your favor from the start.
> The days of showing up to the border with the close on your back and $50 in your pocket are long over.
You seem blind to the realities. Americans complain too much because they can, millions of people are just happy to have a way to survive. I did not even touch upon illegal immigrants who live in the shadows/fear, working quietly for a better future...
Remember tech wanted to increase the quota for H1Bs? It was a pro-immigration marketing stunt - because it is cheaper for them to abuse more workers.
Progressives/liberals fight for minorities' rights, but who cares about immigrants, even if they are the backbone of your economy? Tech doesn't care, they profit from it. Tech (indeed, American enterprise) has always been a marketing show for the rich.
Side note: Elon's hack in to the US as a Canadian > Aware it would be easier to enter the United States from Canada,[23] Musk applied for a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
https://medium.com/p/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale-4fecf809581...
Btw, I don't blame Americans on this, they might actually be the victim of their own creation - the tech industry has been brainwashing the American public for the last decade.
Note: Your policies also affect the entire world due to your power stance internationally.
You can, just not a nice one in a major city. Given the choice between my parent's house and a small condo, house is a lot nicer.
Given the options, it will never be the case that a 20 year old can have the same standard of living as what they grew up with right away. You choices are to lower your standard of living as you just aren't as valuable economically or stay put.
People are not valued anymore, the current generation only seeks "quick money".
Ex: 4HWW, Robinhood, FIRE, crypto, social media, (even startups) etc. promote this mentality and are either responses or symptoms of this shift.
https://m-g-h.medium.com/why-we-are-dispensable-7a577eba4f3e
Middle class America had it good after world war 2 until capital and the rest of the world caught up.
The standard of middle class consumption has soared.
The wealthy folks are raking it in like never before.
I agree there's a housing crisis, not sure how we arrived at one, "manufactured" or whatever.
Just one data point, personal.
As a young professional I bought a fairly new house in the Portland Oregon suburbs in the 1980s for about 2x my salary.
Today my daughter, a young professional, would have to pay closer to 8x her salary (if you believe Zillow) to buy that very same "starter" house, which is now 35 years older.
Rents have commensurately increased. To quote Jimmy McMillan: "the rent is too damn high".
It is far harder to build new housing in the US than it used to be, which drives up prices for existing homes, which benefits the local homeowners (voters!) at the expense of everyone else.
Portland is trying not to ruin what made it unique with density everywhere and they are not making new land so all of that equals higher prices.
Once interest rates go back to 7% and people start leaving you will see prices go down.
Salem or Gresham would be a cheaper city to move to.
When housing is 8x income and the bank won't lend you more than 5x income you need to start with a 40% equity to get anywhere
We have on average gotten more wealthy, but the p50 and p20 brackets definitely are worse off than in past generations and worse off than in comparable post-industrial economies.
The key issue is the cost of housing; which the USA is reluctant and resolve. Student loan debt also factors in to this situation.
Are those driving the USA's decline? Or simply symptoms of a systems dedicated more to Wall Street and less to Main Street?
>> What is most striking though is that contrary to popular perception, more of the poorest Indians live in nuclear families than the affluent do
Quoted from this . https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54053091
Eh? So if more people went to college it would show up as more living at home?
Over winter break I had to turn in my room key to the desk and my access card was deactivated. Those who paid to stay thru winter had to move to a specified dorm.
So yeah, you still have to depend on someone else for housing while in the dorms, at least how I experienced it.
You can save and invest, cut your insurance costs for vehicles, use their health insurance, not have to buy all the other appliances that people tend to, etc.
You can compress this chart by literally decades in a few years.
https://fourpillarfreedom.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/sav...
Yes, you need to launch sometime, but why not wait and do it in a financial Saturn V?
That'll keep the economy driving forward, plus create a lot of nice blue collar jobs for people. Plus, it could drive a baby boom.
Additionally, monetary policy in the US is responsible for inflating assets and they are showing no intention to raise rates in any significant way. Maybe prices cool off a bit when they eventually start to raise rates but I expect there will be no bust. These prices are the new normal.
Median income statistic as proof
I am very smart.
This statement isn't accurate. What triggered this movement was the economic fallout from the government's reaction to the Covid 19 pandemic; not the pandemic itself.
Furthermore, it would be hekpful to understand how many of these households were eventually victims (?) of Covid 19. That is, risk adverse individual moves home. Carries on with usual lifestyle. Eventually gets sick, infects others at home, and so on.
It seems pretty straightforward to me that a massive pandemic is going to hurt the economy, regardless of government action. I'm sure there will be other data points to look at in the future for what the consequences of various responses were (e.g. Sweden vs neighbors/etc?).