Gen Z does not dream of labor
vox.com
vox.com
I think this is pretty much the whole story. It’s very hard to be motivated to work when you could save your entire adult life and still struggle be able to afford such “entry level” things as a house or even a new car. People are willing to save and/or hustle for 5-10 years to get material rewards, but beyond that it feels pointless. Why be miserable grinding for two decades just so you can get one hand on the ladder? Instead people look for ways to have a life they find interesting or satisfying now.
The world has changed - simple labor that requires a few days of training doesn't pay much. Most jobs, with few exceptions, that require a decade of training, do pay well. That's why there's such a huge gap between Amazon packers and electricians, and an even bigger gap with surgeons.
If you want to do well in the modern economy, you have to choose your specialization wisely. Most simple labor will be automated very soon anyway.
False.
A plumber making $80k (US median seems to be around $60k) isn't going to be able to save up for a down payment if they're paying a typical mid-sized city's rent (~$1.2k a month). Not to mention housing costs going up during this period of saving up.
Where I live, Boise, housing prices have shot up dramatically, over twice. Median house prices in Boise is $536k. So you would really need to make $214K/year to afford the mortgage under the old rules. And nobody makes that kind of money here.
You got lucky and bought when it was cheap. Don't act like anyone can do what you did.
Roughly 2/3 of Americans own homes.
If you live in an area where homes are priced like luxury investments, then yes, you'll have a hard time buying when you also cannot afford other luxuries. If you live in an area where they are not, it isn't unattainable at all, especially if you combine income with a marriage partner.
Rural areas also tend not to be great places for LGBT people, either.
2) Median house (not a Bay Area house) in 2019 was like 320k. Crazy house valuations are only from the last 1.5-2 years and wouldn't have affected generational norms (and we all know why the suddenly exploded). Even then, the median house is 410k, so all you needed/need you need to save is 65-80k in the /worst/ case.
3) Most people buying houses are/should be dual income, given the size of the median house. And given that you're competing against double income people (don't like it? you'd have to roll back the drive for emancipation/equality :)). If you double the income above you can save for a downpayment in like 3 years. I know families where neither partner probably makes 80k buying houses in boring cities e.g. in Texas - and not a starter house either... How? Dual income + non-coastal prices. And yeah, there are tons of jobs in the area.
Historically, the cost of a house has hovered around 4.5 to 5.5x annual median income. It's currently at the highest level it's ever been, at least according to this graph:
https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco....
Even if you ignore first time homeowner benefits and such, the usual thing necessary is not living in the middle of California.
Often if you actually dig into it you find abject refusals to consider locations outside of a particular one, or the famous “spend less on candles. no” type of thing.
Sounds like this was either a long time ago or in city/town where not many people want to live.
If your typical rent is $1200, that means property values in your area are almost certainly low enough to qualify for FHA loans, which only require 3.5% down due to government subsidies. 3.5% of $450k is $16k - so it only takes about 3 years to save for that down payment.
Home prices are high _because_ FHA loans allow people to have greater purchasing power (among many other reasons like NIMBYism).
also assumes that you are mentally strong enough to live like a pauper to hopefully afford the bare minimum required to scrounge up a downpayment.
doesn't assume building a maintenance fund (2% of home value per year), closing costs (2% of home value, one-time cost), purchasing stuff to fill the home (like furniture/appliances), etc.
Is that really all your definitive "false" relies on? Hell I know tradesmen that make well over that and live in more rural areas.
The median household income = 67K[0]. >60% of US households own a home.[1] Clearly 80K is more than enough to safe up for a down payment.
[0]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...
It's just very silly to find a website, grab a number, and then conclude that saving 200k in 8 years is realistic
My dad was a solider in Latin America, my mom, a nurse. Their job required, at most, 2 years of education beyond High School.
I am a data analyst, with a Bachelor's and a Master's. I earn more than they both did together, adjusted for inflation. My friends are in "specialized jobs" as well -- some even being doctors and lawyers. We still have zero hope of affording a house, let alone retirement.
Edit: for anyone wondering, my education was completely free as in my country college is free and I took my Master's in a Nordic country, where education is also free (I worked there to support myself too).
This is ridiculous. If that’s actually true, move. Lower your expenses. Figure out something else.
Rent in my town is one of the cheapest among bigger cities and I already live very frugally (public transit, only shop for groceries on sale and healthy food, don't go out to parties, don't drink, no addictions, no online subscriptions, only free hobbies + gym). GenXers and Boomers left a shitty world for Gen Z and, for some, life is just not the fairy tale you are used to - sorry mate.
I think the key for me is the fact I choose not to incur educational debt getting a BS and/or MS, I also choose to live in a non-coastal region that does not have crazy housing prices. I also had lots of support from my parents* when I was younger so establish myself financially (like enabling me to be able to save for the down payment on this home)
I worked very hard and now make a pretty decent wage after decades of working lower wage jobs.
* To be clear this is just basic support like a stable roof over my head, the were lower middle class as well, their combined income was less than 6 figures, we had a basic home, food, etc but no luxuries, no vacations, one of the reasons I did not go to college was I did not want debt, and the family had no money for tuition
Over the course of a few years that's well into 6 figures of support
The problem is that most people don't get to choose. There are few of these high paying jobs, so by definition most people are excluded. Either because they're not "smart" enough to get into elite training programs (e.g. medical school) or because they don't have enough money to spend years in training with zero or negative income.
What doesn't pay well is zero-effort required jobs like Starbucks barista or social media influencer (is this even a job?). If anyone can do it with no pain required to pass some sort of schooling then it's not going to pay well. Nursing pays well because people are too lazy to make it through 4 years of schooling.
If you're going to come in and claim life circumstances prevent people from getting a 4 year degree, a public school costs at most $120k including living expenses for 4 years. Even if you get _no_ financial aid - which doesn't happen as FAFSA exists - $120k is an entirely manageable sum to pay off over the course of 20 years. And that calculation assumes you don't work at all during summers or during the school year.
Where are you getting this number, that is not even remotely close to any of the nurses and lower level health practitioners I know
in Germany even if you're poor you can go to the University and succeed
my friends all studied and they were from normal working-class families
everyone gets a chance and all you need is put some effort
Except in the US there are enclaves of destitute poverty, generational poverty, extreme levels of incarceration, job prohibitions for low-level convicts (which can be 1/2 the men in some areas), high crime, schools with low graduation rates, weak access to things like dental care, poor transit options for medical care, pollution, insufficient care for the elderly, lack of mental health care, opioid addiction, children with high rates of lead poisoning, etc. Those people have the deck stacked against them.
It's not clear if there's a simple correlation between "training required" and "automation ready". For example, people have been talking about automating radiology for years, although I'm currently finishing up a study on one such system and we certainly aren't there yet. Meanwhile, the relatively "low skill" job of construction is considered very difficult to automate due to the high variability in environments and materials.
This uncertainty means that reluctance to join professions that "may" be automated in the coming years might be interpreted as a result of risk-aversion, and that risk is higher when the job training is longer.
> It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.
> By business I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
Continuing to play the “optimize myself based upon some meta game as see it” is not a viable strategy.
There is no science that says Musk is certainly on the right path to human longevity.
None of the rich are infallibly and unassailably correct; pointing at them as correct is an appeal to authority which is ludicrous when we have plenty of evidence to show politics is corrupted such that elites are “too big to fail.”
I’m not obligated to make choices based upon your view of the problem and your solution is more of the same “boot straps”.
This culture is a joke. Moral relativism it is; if my choices screw any of you, oh well. Free market.
I kinda gave up on that dream, being priced out. So I quit, either to make a TC which can afford that life (>$200K/yr) or to live the rest of my days in a hedonistic manner. Current plan is to grind leetcode/sys design and apply to high-TC companies over and over until I can afford the life I want, or die trying.
On topic: I have the same feeling. I'm trying to get a dev job, that would be a huge jump of income for me. But I'm 34, how much should I grind just to get "entry-level" stuff?
I was pretty unmativated in my job, just coasting by and pretty much doing the bare minimum that allowed me to be in peace with myself. Remote work increased my productivity and my hapiness overall, but it's still insufficient to buy a home, I'm basically a rent slave.
If I get a dev job, it will probably mean 30-40k to me, here in Spain. Maybe 50K if I manage to climb the ladder, given I'm 34.
With that income I can buy a flat (not a house) in my mid-sized spanish city, but that's about it.
Best of luck, whatever you decide.
I have not too much experience in that sector, but I would say earning 30k-50k is only possible if you live in a city with good communications with the bigger ones, like Alcalá de Henares (near to Madrid, or Manresa (near to Barcelona). In some places with lower COL, like Andalucía, this is really difficult.
I think becoming a software engineer is totally possible for you, you are only in your mid-30s. However, I think you need to like the field, at least a bit. Do you enjoy it?
Hate to break it to you, but many, many people raise kids and own a home with way less than $135k, even in your area. If you don’t want to attempt it because it’ll be hard, stressful, risky, etc.; maybe that’s worth reflecting on? Sometimes your standards/expectations are what need to change.
And also simultaneously, especially American culture is super judgemental of people whonhave kids and struggle financially in any way. It is big in personal responsibility in relation to having them, paying health care or ensuring school or even supervising etc. I find it unfair that in same environment people end up blamed for having too high standards when they internalize all that and insist on being responsible and financially well off.
(Of course this is different if the intention is "buy a place, wait until it rises in value, flip it, and repeat")
That said, you need to want to put down roots, and you need to like where you're putting those down. I love Vancouver, I've been here 20 years, I left for 5, and came back. This is where I want to raise my kids. But this is a highly privileged perspective backed by having a good well-paying job that lets me afford to live here (in a 3-bedroom condo in east van).
Still, travelling the world for 5 years sounds like a fantastic plan to figure out what you want to do in life and scouting out parts of the world that you can imagine living. That could mean finding something more rural, or finding a city more off the beaten path that you identify with that doesn't have international prestige and ridiculous VHCOL.
Moving is an option (my partner has restrictions: No states with anti-abortion laws, which removes many inexpensive places), if I go remote. Seems like every other dev has the same idea and that's helping drive prices up everywhere - along with other factors, of course.
It’s possible but not easy (and harder now), and you have to be patient and careful and a bit lucky.
That I can remember of: Vercel, Gatsby, Gitlab, and much more.
Move to somewhere cheaper if you can?
This anecdote is presented as the norm, but it’s actually far from it.
“Minimum wage” is the tip off that the journalist went out searching for the most extreme anecdote they could find. For all the talk about minimum wage jobs, only around 1% of jobs actually pay federal minimum wage. That number is falling rapidly as it becomes trivial for anyone to walk into a $15/hr job with benefits almost anywhere except the smallest towns.
Of course it’s not possible for someone earning minimum wage to save up money and buy a house in their 20s. Minimum wage jobs are literally the lowest paying jobs a person could possibly find. Anchoring expectations that no job should exist unless it pays enough to buy a house in your 20s in any city you want is blatantly unrealistic.
I see this stat a lot and it leaves me wondering how many people are within, say, 50 cents or 5%[0] of minimum wage. The percent of workers earning minimum wage doesn't seem that useful (and I guess neither would the figures returned for my request).
In any case I'd find hours required to live alone within ~30 minutes of work a more compelling statistic. It adjusts for CoL and represents a reasonable lifestyle to shoot for.
0: not suggesting these are equivalent figures
* Person A is making minimum wage, but with good benefits, consistent hours, and a reasonable cost to live within walking distance of the job.
* Person B is making minimum wage plus a buck per hour, but is technically not a full-time employee so no benefits at all. Shifts are often changed with little notice, sometimes to hours that are not very transit-friendly, and living within walking distance is utterly off the table for anyone short of a rich techie.
Who's really better off? It's easy for full-time internet commentators to look at simplistic stats and draw simplistic (self serving) conclusions, but your metric is much better and closer to the ones used by people who actually study issues such as poverty.
That is incorrect. There are whole categories of jobs that are exempt from minimum wage, and that doesn't even count gig work.
I'm presuming you're talking about tipped jobs? It seems reasonable to presume that they earn close to minimum wage when factoring in tips, otherwise people would switch to non-exempt jobs.
But we're seeing this in the US, between covid restaurant layoffs and closures; Tipped dining service is struggling to recruit.
It seems like younger generations view of their parents times are getting rosier and rosier.
I think so. Next will be Gen Alpha (apparently) who will complain about how easy Gen Z had it or maybe they'll blame Millenials.
I'm Gen X and in a small town I was never able to afford a home. And now rent is nuts people are being kicked out for "reno-victions". My parents born in '43 and '44 managed to buy a house but with help a program similar to Habitat for Humanity only a local organization. And then the early 80s inflation hit but they had a locked in mortgage but many people lost their homes.
It's always the same thing history repeats. But now people have so much more opportunities with the Internet they can choose almost any job. Even for me working from home was futuristic fantasy if it was even that. I think the trend to dehumanize and blame previous generations for the current generations' problems is a dangerous trend.
It's been going on since as long as I've been alive. I'm mid-late GenX and I remember the news constantly telling me my generation is lazy. I remember them doing the same thing with GenY, and now GenZ, neither of which was true outside the norms of every generation. Modern news is a blight on society.
The reason for that is the same and will stay the same, for the entirety of humanity. Land is a finite resource that must be shared with other humans. Money is a public utility that must be shared with other humans. Humans don't like sharing these exclusive types of things.
You have these people complaining that India should "fix poverty" instead of doing a miniscule (by international standards) space program. The solution to homelessness requires existing landowners to give up their land. They don't want to give up their land, so instead, homelessness acts as the pressure relief valve/externality. In fact, homelessness is considered a price worth paying.
The same is true with money. People like having more money than they actually need. The ability to save against the wishes of other people and thereby indebt them is exactly what they want, the resulting unemployment is considered a price worth paying.
1. Women entering the workforce, essentially doubling the labor pool.
2. Immigration - at least a million a year, every year.
3. Globalization - instead of local workforce, many companies can now outsource labor to cheaper countries without regulation.
4. Manufacturing - due to NAFTA, companies who once manufactured in the US can now get much cheaper labor to Mexico. This is related to #3.
5. Automation - The amount of labor needed to perform a task has been greatly reduced.
Simply put, because the alternative is worse. What is your BANTA? Living in destitution? You don't have to go extreme into the "enjoy life now" end either; it's a balance.
Suppose you have a credit card that is not yet at its limit, and you are not accumulating late fees... you can buy a $200 TV in exchange for paying $5/mo in perpetuity, at a 30% APR. Interest rates connect the indefinite future back to the past and in fact they set an equivalent time horizon. So you can phrase the exact problem as asking what cancelling an unused $5/mo Netflix account is really worth to you, and the answer is again $200. The indefinite future of payments is just 1/r, a conversion factor of 40 months in this case.
If you are getting into late fees those can triple interest or so, you might have a time horizon only a year off. Or if you are into payday loans and 400%/year interest, the indefinite future is literally only 3 months away, you cannot rationally “think past tomorrow.” At 30%/year your rational time horizon is a little over 3 years. If you then have debt paid back and a retirement account in an S&P index fund and we call that 10% year on year, your indefinite future is 10 years away.
“People are willing to save and/or hustle for 5-10 years” indeed, 5-10 years is financial eternity for most people!
Half the issue is that people have been indoctrinated to expect home ownership and long for some golden age seen on TV that never existed.
Home ownership was never universal in the US. It has been within a few percent of 65% since the 1960s[1]. It was always out of reach for the lowest earners, like those that make minimum wage.
Some people whos parents owned houses will inevitably be unable to afford them themselves. Some people whos parents couldn't will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...
Expecting to own the building and land on which you live and from which you contribute to society is a product of indoctrination? That makes sense if you're completely against land-ownership (which is, on the surface, a reasonable idea), but surely accepting the only current alternative (paying rent) is the product of an even more sinister form of indoctrination?
https://dqydj.com/historical-homeownership-rate-united-state...
Counter narrative: Nigerians come to the US and have excellent upward mobility. The ones I know are willing to work hard, defer gratification, and sacrifice for their children.
And I wonder what percentage of Starbucks managers started out as Starbucks wage-slaves.
I believe store managers do tend to come from on the floor staff but there is likely no path from store manager to Starbucks corporate.
Programming is almost uniquely privileged where you end up interacting with higher up corporate positions frequently and you will pretty easily be able to learn their jobs and jump over if you want.
While retail workers don’t see at all what goes on in an office separate to them. They just get instructions dictated down.
I've heard this about pretty much every place, at this point.
("Move somewhere cheaper!" … and get "geographic multiplier"'d into a lower salary, and you're right back where you started.)
0: https://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/north-carolina/ashevill...
This job is truly an anomaly. There are very few careers where you can earn top 1% income with no degree, no physical exertion, under 8 hours a day "on the clock", the freedom to quit any time and have multiple new offers within days, etc, etc.
Out of the hundreds I’ve had this conversation with, two that I’m aware of took my advice and just tried to start making stuff. One now runs a dev shop, the other is at alphabet making bank.
I think, more than anything else, learned helplessness is crippling people. so many are mollycoddled from cradle to grave and never understand their own capabilities.
As a millennial in my 30s I was fortunate to be able to break in and start earning a nice paycheck without a college degree, but even that possibility is deteriorating now due to a sudden flood of entry level applicants. Companies are now seeking mid-level-to-senior candidates almost exclusively because they don’t want to bother with training and mentoring a newbie, they want someone who can hit the ground running. There are still some possibilities for one to get one’s foot in the door with barely paid or unpaid college internships but from my perspective the gates are slowly closing.
> I think this is pretty much the whole story. It’s very hard to be motivated to work when you could save your entire adult life and still struggle be able to afford such “entry level” things as a house or even a new car.
This makes sense if the father were also a receptionist in a similar sized company.
The average house sold today costs $374K. The median salary is $51K.
You can argue that those houses that were sold back then were smaller, but they were also made of vastly better materials than modern home construction, and it's not like people even have the opportunity of buying those smaller homes unless they want to live in a slum.
> The average house sold in 1946 cost 1.75X. The median salary was X.
> The average house sold in 2022 cost 7.33Y. The median salary is Y.
Its clear from all the communications, unionizations, Great Resignation, and more that wages are completely broken.
And that above shows what it looks like.
We're one of the lucky ones. We're finalizing our recent house purchase. First time homebuyer. $375k , which was at the top of our budget. I make $150k, which is still a 2.5 factor differential... Which is .75 ABOVE what it would have been in the post-war boom 1946.
Im in my 40's, and its taken me 20+ years to actually get enough of a footing to even look at a proper house. I feel immensely sad for all younger. Can't afford a $600/mo mortgage so they're stuck with $1000 rents.
Loans are for people to borrow money when they don't need money.
First you're getting a vastly different product today than in 1946. Consumer demands are far higher too.
Also to compare affordability the metric for most people would be the median percentage case of mortgage payments vs the persons take home pay. When measured this way it's been hovering around 30% for the past 40 years in the UK.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-house-prices-unlikely-cra...
Horseshit. Homes built in 1946 are selling for millions of dollars, even if they're going to be torn down and rebuilt for marginal cost. You're not buying a house, you're buying the land and taking responsibility for everything on it.
And even then, the lumber you get out of such an old house is quite valuable virgin oldgrowth, a better quality product than you can buy at a lumber yard today.
And, to pick a nit... comparing the median income to median house price is an examination of relative price, not absolute.
Is that true? Something like 40% of the UK housing stock was built pre-WW2. Sure they’ll no longer have a coal bunker and they most likely have had insulation upgrades etc. but a pre-WW2 house in 1946 is still a pre-WW2 house today. The modern build will have less living space, predominately through smaller room sizes but should be cheaper to heat.
>> Also to compare affordability the metric for most people would be the median percentage case of mortgage payments vs the persons take home pay
That lops off all the people who can’t afford a mortgage so i dont think that logic works.
Are you? You're getting a place to live and property you own.
No way this is even close to being true. Newer houses with all the advancements in materials and construction science are much better than the post-war garbage that was spewed out.
I made a small fortune in my early 20s fixing and renovating those post-war houses. They're almost universally junk in comparison.
Let's test that theory. So assuming that person in their 20's doesn't want to move to the Bay Area/Seattle/Austin/NYC they can find a nice house in a metro area within a 20-30 minute drive of plenty of medium-high paying jobs, for around $200k.
So assuming they're smart enough to put 20% down on that house, they need to save around $40k. In your 5-10 year time frame that means they need to save $4-$8k per year.
So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the generation dropping $1,200 on iPhones and having an average of 50 games in their Steam account can probably save like $5k per year if they really try.
Maybe in 2000. I don't think that's true in any major metropolitan area (say over 1 million). Which is also coincidentally where most people live.
It’s weird to see these opinions presented as a new phenomenon. Wanting to avoid work and indulge in leisure is a tale as old as time. It’s even a common theme among characters in ancient writings.
What is new is the way people with these feelings can go online and connect with millions of other people who want to talk about these feelings as if they were the real truth about life. How everyone else is wrong if they don’t see it. Many of these forums become de facto “safe spaces” where rules explicitly forbid anything other than supporting and agreeing with these perspectives.
It was easy to dismiss these as fringe movements when it was incels writing unhinged rants blaming women for all of their personal problems, but for some reason the media is trying to treat the “antiwork” style rants as something deeper. Of course, this falls apart when the content and actors are examined in any remotely critical manner, as famously happened when the antiwork moderator gave a disastrous direct TV interview without the carefully crafted veneer of journalistic thinkpieces obscuring the sheer absurdity of the echo chamber they’ve built for themselves.
I grew up just barely before internet access and social media were ubiquitous. There was no shortage of people eschewing work and embracing lives of leisure right out of high school or college. I knew a large number of people who embraced “couch surfing” lifestyles or international vagabonding as their way of life. As far as I can tell, the difference was that by the time they reached mid 20s they were quickly running out of peers who would tell them it was a good idea to embrace such a lifestyle forever. The real world catches up and you notice that your real-world friends who work normal jobs and “settle down” are actually having a good time (on average) while the vagabonding lifestyle gets progressively less glamorous as you get older.
Not so much in the social media era, where a new set of friends and confirmatory feedback is always just a few clicks away on your phone. Want to read posts about how it’s actually someone else’s fault that you’re not successful? No problem, the internet will deliver volumes of such content.
> As far as I can tell, the difference was that by the time they reached mid 20s they were quickly running out of peers who would tell them it was a good idea to embrace such a lifestyle forever. The real world catches up and you notice that your real-world friends who work normal jobs and “settle down” are actually having a good time (on average) while the vagabonding lifestyle gets progressively less glamorous as you get older.
ARE the people working normal jobs and settling down having a good time?
Interestingly, my sister and I, who now live together, took very different paths in our 20s and therefore ended up with different social circles. I was more of the studious, behave, responsible sort and so most of my friends/network is as well. My sister was a party girl (lots of raves, drugs, etc. - very much the vagabonding type of lifestyle).
Now we're in our 30s and while my friends might have slightly nicer apartments, their situations aren't that different.
My proper middle-class friends can't afford houses, can't afford kids (or they have to give up their career/take a huge standard of living cut), can't afford healthcare, are buried under student loans, and can't save enough for retirement.
My sister's vagabonding friends can't afford houses, can't afford kids, can't afford healthcare, and can't save for retirement, but at least they got to have some fun.
I'd say that the reward for behaving is much less than it used to be.
we have almost 3 years of deferment now for student loan debt, if they have not been able to improve their situations in that time this speaks more to financial ignorance than it does not being able to afford things.
I wonder how many of your friends know what a 50/30/20 budget is? Do they actually track all of their expenses properly, etc.
Also of note is that I have a professional graduate degree, as do many of my colleagues, which tends to have higher student debt.
While we've had three years of deferments and that's been awesome for people like me (and presumably you) who've been comfortably employed the whole time, a lot of people were also impacted financially by the pandemic so it ended up being a wash. Think of increased childcare costs as schools randomly closed, people who work in academia/local government being furloughed, etc.
I will say that those who have done the best financially have been those who left the US.
I'd also say a lot of the problem is housing. Planning can only get you so far when rent goes up every year more than your wages do.
Also this doesn't address the point that my sister's friends, who are just as irresponsible, are better off.
I worked my ass off in the last decade to improve my situation, with the help of my family.
>>(and presumably you)
Nope, self educated, The only debt I have is my mortgage for which I about 50%+ positive equity, and have an aggressive pay-down rate that will see it paid in full in a few years from now to bring myself back to a debt free status
I do feel for people that were sold the bill of goods that is debt funded education, personally I think the way to fund education is for people to enter the workforce and have employers fund the education of the employee's.
Debt, nor government financed, is the correct way.
I also do not support Student loan forgiveness, However I do support cancelling all interest on federally owned student loans. The principle however should be paid back.
>>I will say that those who have done the best financially have been those who left the US.
that seems very subjective, but the studies I have seen do not support that. The data indicates that lots of people in the US have improved financially. Most of the Pandemic relief payments to individuals when to pay down debt, or still sits in saving accounts.
You could say that regionally, "Blue" coastal states seem to have been hit harder due to their draconian reaction to the pandemic. Nationally however I dont believe that statements bears true in the data
>Planning can only get you so far when rent goes up every year more than your wages do.
I agree there, Social stigma against multi-generational housing is a big contributor. Same with child raising. Family support structures is traditionally how families moved from one economic class to another. We have more than a generation now of destruction of the traditional family...
> millennials don't have anywhere near as much share of wealth as Gen X had
I hate to go there, but isn't this because of their unrealistic views on work? I've heard of millennials not turning up for work because they "didn't feel like working" that day. Anecdotal, sure, but I've heard too many of these stories from too many different people for it to be co-incidence. You don't want to work, well okay that's your prerogative, but how can you then complain about getting fired?
maybe it has to do with the fact that most people inherit when they're old?
It's common nowadays to blame it on say increase house prices, and while these are indeed very valid complaints, one shouldn't forget that these increased prices are offset by decreases in other areas. A century back, housing may have been cheap, but it was entirely normal for most of your income to be spent on food, spending whatever you could save on other necessities such as clothing. That did not stop people from working hard.
It sounds like the author is just projecting their own values onto the upcoming generation, viz "Gen Z cares about X" when really the author just cherry picks stuff that reaffirms his/her values
I refuse to buy into any of this "Gen Z thinks X" or "Millennials think X" BS. The armchair sociologists should go out and actually contribute something worthwhile to society as opposed to shitting out newspaper articles like this
I find it particularly annoying because it's also an example of prejudicial ingroup/outgroup formation based on demagoguery. I'd go as far as saying it shares some of the same elements of racism-based demagoguery, but the targets are vague enough that it doesn't cause the same extreme social problems that racism does.
Such as? We expect them to get buy on little money, no insurance in a lot of cases while they have to deal with the rude public, random scheduling changes, and being treated like trash by their managers.
At first, I thought this paragraph was a direct quote, as it definitely shows the author willing to make fairly strong claims on her own account. I feel the norm here is for the author to be neutral and use quotes and data to express the point.
I think if we're bullshitting ourselves about (all) news media we can say it's neutral. But really it's just a bunch of assumptions. The appeal of news articles is like a reverse Occam's Razor: the more assumptions the better
But at least the author is a little honest and says "according to common narratives" aka "I'm bullshitting"
… and our article author thinks what, that Gen Z invented this? That generations before Gen Z "dream of labor"? Dreaming of labor is called a nightmare. I work to make ends meet.
I don't know... I think it's possible to think about work not as a zero-sum game but as an opportunity to grow and promote growth. But at the same time this is kind of a white collar mindset... it's hard to sell people on growth when the work is more demeaning
Sure, here on HN, the average person is a programmer or sysadmin, and there you very much can have growth. Learning new languages and technologies, getting to work with high end equipment, etc.
But exactly what growth can an Amazon warehouse worker expect? Your job is to take things and put them in a box. There's no advanced techniques, no special knowledge, no skill to be obtained besides learning to perform the same movements better than you did your first week, and which are useful nowhere else.
There was another article on here the other day about how half of Gen Z wants to start their own business and I think that's more accurate. Or at least give that a shot before giving in to working for someone else all their life. It just seems archaic now to give half of your waking life to a company.
Most of us would gladly give even more time just to start something that we get all of the profits from and therefore have more control over the whole of our lives. And I'm not talking about starting a billion dollar tech company, just something to pay the bills and save a little.
(I think the main difference between now and 1999 is that simply working a job you hate no longer guarantees you the ability to buy the stuff you don’t need.)
One lense that I don’t see put for often is: it’s not that GenZ is particularly poorly situated, it’s that the American Boomers, specifically, we’re the luckiest demographic cohort in world history, luckier than those who came before or after. Folks born in the 1850s might have technically been able to buy “a house” but it would not be a house that a modern person would find acceptable — plumbing, electricity, climate control, insulation, weatherproofing, fire safety, appliances and amenities, would all be abysmal by our standards. (The foundations of such houses were usually just a few big rocks.) In theory, a modern young person could build a house conforming to 1900 “average house” standards for cheap, but nobody wants such a house, and nobody builds them, and it is likely that such a house would be in violation of code. The richest person in 1900 couldn’t buy a house as good as the median US house.
So we’re in a place that our ancestors would view as a hypertech Jetsons future, except we got out over our skis for weird demographic and economic reasons and it’s currently very expensive to buy the latest hypertech magic house, and impossible to buy (what that ancestor or would call) a “normal” house.
This perspective — comparing more to any generation other than the Boomers provides a more realistic perspective.
While the location is the same in a geographic sense as in 1900, a google maps view of that era would show them being in a small town compared to a city with incredible amenities these days.
Given the stories I've heard, and things I've myself seen, I'm not convinced it is true — not for _most_ millennials. I do hope I'm wrong though.
The way to feel better about this is to also be one of the shareholders.
the reality is that not everyone of them will end up rich, beautiful and famous... in fact only a tiny tiny minority will
I left Amazon after a 10+ year career.
I was encouraged to hire foreign nationals from specific countries, because their visa situation makes it harder for them to leave Amazon without having to leave the country.
When my own people were being let go for no reason at all, I was told not to interfere. I was directly mentored on disconnecting myself from individuals in my organization, because it would help me do what’s “right for Amazon”.
I sat in an off site with various leaders from the broader company. American workers just won’t work as hard, I was told. We need to expand our engineering pool to other markets, to cut costs and because those people have a lower standard of living and will work harder. I am quoting multiple Amazon L10s.
Those 10 years, I was miserable. I cut off from my family. My friends eventually stopped calling. I became more and more isolated. I put on excess body weight. My mental health suffered.
To be clear, I’m immensely privileged and left Amazon with a boatload of money and assets. In retrospect, I was part of a machine that exploited people. That’s where my money came from.
Gen Z needs to realize that being smart about this and simply “dreaming” isn’t enough. My former Amazon bosses are ready to replace Americans with workers on the global market. They have no empathy, and they openly view it as a weakness. It is LITERALLY a rat race.
In that situation it's not worth joining since within a year you'll probably need to start interviewing again.
>> have no empathy, and they openly view it as a weakness.
You should hire a 3rd world troll farm to stalk these people everywhere they go urging them to kill themselves.
Only way to repent for your sins.
Edit:
>> On the issue of empathy, I think this quote from Captain G. M. Gilbert at the Nuremberg trials sums it up;
"In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” <<
So yes, the world is likely better off with them dead :)
Generally speaking, most people would prefer not to work if they could get away with it. Especially young people. Careerism among young people has always been an anomaly; it's always been common for younger people to have the dream of being an artist or a famous-for-being-famous celebrity or some sort of woodland hermit spending their days frolicking in a leafy glade. Some of them succeed, but most of them eventually give up and get a job and/or a career eventually when they get tired of sleeping on other people's couches and never having any money.
The whole 'Generation' thing honestly seems a little arbitrary to me. I get that there are broad cohorts of people who are similarly affected by large societal trends and have something in common, but 90% of writing I see about generations and their attitudes or opinions is really just "young people be like this and old people be like that" filtered through an absolute blindness to anything that happened more than half a decade ago.
I think I was raised in the time and place where working just doesn't ever get the luxuries of life. For example, working as a plumber and can afford 2 1/2 kids, a house and a car, that is always impossible. At least in my country. I think America is an anomaly for that such of things to happen. I kept wondering whether that was because America itself is outsourcing their inequalities to outside world, because they won the war.
So to me, today's situation is just a reversion to the norm. Being a mere plumber with 2 1/2 kids in college and with a house and a car is never realistic to begin with. This type of situation was just a good times event, and only happen due to some abnormalities. But it is abnormality.
I mean, the history of the world has shown that feudalism is the default choice. People can never be equal. People aren't born equal. Some people are born stronger, faster, smarter, more beautiful, etc. Equality seems to be just abnormalities. An unstable form. The stable form is feudalism.
The problem with capitalism, is that it didn't get rid of feudalism entirely, it merely turned everyone into a little feudal lord, small enough that we don't hurt each other. Wealth inequality throws a wrench into that so capitalism is guaranteed to break down eventually just like Feudalism.
The step after capitalism would be Freiwirtschaft (land value tax and demurrage currency) and we are not that far away from it. Interest rates are already at 0% as predicted, we just need people to stop saving with cash. Baden Württemberg is adopting a land value tax in Germany. it's just a matter of time until this brutal chapter of humanity is over.
I think my definition of feudalism is somewhat loose. But what I mean generally is that a few people become owners and the rest employees.
For example, tech companies that have controls over people's lives. Upperclass people having maids, drivers, cooks.
Why can't people save cash?
The post war capitalist system they enjoyed was a temporary anomaly. It isn't compatible with modern life, yet the system is still there. We need to end this gerontocracy and oligarchy.
The software engineering industry is a miniature example of what the boomers had. I am a software engineer, but I have the self awareness to know it's temporary and lucky. So many on HN don't.
I am currently reading this, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...
It is interesting to see that even inequality is the default outcome, the natural order of things, even when we start from equality. It seem the law of physics and the law of this world converges toward inequality.
The only way to fight against inequality aggressively is to do the unnatural things, that is, to redistribute wealth aggressively. I'm not saying that doing unnatural things are bad since humans have been doing unnatural things to ease living, but I wonder what would be the side effect or unintended consequences of aggressive wealth redistribution.
The natural order of things? Is this some kind of joke? Since when are humans golems? A truly natural economic order looks like this: https://www.naturalmoney.org/NaturalEconomicOrder.pdf
>It seem the law of physics and the law of this world converges toward inequality.
No, you are mistaken again, the money and land system converge toward inequality. After all, time does not stand still, humans are faced with a perpetual increase in entropy, but the banker and the saver, with their eternal money and claims to land, do not have to fear the laws of physics, instead, they get to use the laws of physics as weapons, to extract "concessions" from the people around them. The people that do not have money or land end up subsidizing those who do.
>The only way to fight against inequality aggressively is to do the unnatural things, that is, to redistribute wealth aggressively.
That honestly is completely irrelevant. This wealth redistribution nonsense is just another bandaid to subsidize the rich. When I said subsidy I mean it. Negative interest rates make the whole argument about wealth redistribution completely irrelevant. The moment people have to be responsible for the costs that their capital incurs nobody is going to envy them for their wealth. It's only because those costs have been forbidden by law/decree and secretly passed onto the rest of society that we even want to be wealthy ourselves.
Think about how much maintenance a single family home requires. In an economy with no growth, capital depreciation is just a pure loss. If you have idle capacity, you will have to pay to keep the factory well maintained. No, a negative interest rate isn't some kind of financial repression or wealth redistribution scheme. Your house isn't trying to steal your wealth by depreciating. It's recognizing the fact that almost nothing on this planet lasts forever. If physical capital depreciates, then money must represent that depreciation. If it does not, then either abundant capital must be destroyed or the economy must be forced to grow.
Imagine you have a banana. It will spoil within a week or two. Now imagine having a banana coupon that does not spoil. If the super market orders bananas and can't sell them, it will have to take the loss, effectively subsidizing the holder of the banana coupon by letting him avoid the spoilage of bananas. The actual banana is not exploitative, the banana coupon is exploitative. This is because the holder of the banana coupon has no obligation to tell the super market when he is going to buy the banana, so the supermarket must keep guessing when he is going to buy a banana. This is the root of speculation.
Have you ever wondered why permanent inflation is the norm? It's precisely because money must spoil at the rate labor spoils. Capital depreciation is represented by a permanent decline of the unit of account aka inflation.
Welfare in the form of unemployment benefits is quite frankly a direct subsidy to the owners of money. It's so painfully obvious. Our society has an incredibly high degree of the division of labor. You cannot just farm your own food, you must buy it from specialized "dealers" aka supermarkets. To buy food you need to get money from someone else first. During a depression, there is capital abundance, meaning the owners of capital would have to pay for capital depreciation, as I said, they prefer removing or preventing abundant capital which means firing people. This means you cannot get money through employment, forcing you to go into debt. Borrowing would raise the interest rate above 0% again. However, since 2008 banks refuse to lend money to risky borrowers. This means that direct borrowing isn't possible. Instead, the government must borrow on behalf of all those people that were fired. That borrowing then forcibly raises the interest rate back to 0% or higher again. If you were offered a -3% interest rate due to capital depreciation and the government were to step in and give you a 0% interest rate, what else could this be other than a subsidy? Of course, since money cannot represent capital depreciation, we are forced to play this stupid game no matter what.
Oh they definitely have the opportunity (speaking as a Millenial). If you're in the US, payed attention in school, are median IQ, and worked a bit at programming, you have your choice of $120-200k remote software jobs all over the US where the median home is $400k.
I don't for a moment deny that kids entering the workforce today are entering an environment that's challenging in many ways, but this particular claim is inaccurate. Let's take a look at the list of US recessions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
We're not in a recession now (though that could change very soon). The most recent recessions are 2020 (COVID) and 2007-2009. Just over ten years in between. Turns out that's the longest recession-free interval in the nation's history. Back to back, my ass. I graduated from high school just before the 1981-82 recession, but I was fully in the workforce for the next four - every six to ten years. By the author's reasoning, that would mean I had it far harder than today's kids.
Recessions are not the problem. (They're a problem, but not relevant to OP.) The problem is wage inequality, and stagnation of wages for the lower echelons even during good times. Today's kids are not facing economic uncertainty because of a few events, but because of a continual downward slide in the value of low-end wages vs. low-end expenses over decades.
Who TF “dreams” of being some billionare’s “labor”?
Folks “labor” out of a lack of choice; so they might survive in this world. They labor for the chance to dream.
Those people, perhaps without realizing it, often enjoy 'being some billionare’s labor'.
And even those with the coveted skills - they'd probably rather work for themselves than someone else. But either they don't have the business skills, or the financial means.
That said, sure, speaking in absolutes is absolutely wrong. ;)
Because it promised a good life for their family; and they'd end up having pride in the work they did.
Is this a dream of labor? IMO, no. The work was the vehicle to their dreams, not the dream itself. Perhaps this is too fine a delineation, but that's my view of it.
Of course, such a job - a job an uneducated man or woman can be the "breadwinner" for their family with - barely exists today. My own father made $40 an hour as a lineman for Mountain Bell (plus a pension), back in the 80's. That exact same job today pays minimum wage, with no retirement benefits.
> Presented by UPWORK
Reminds me of this essay by Paul Graham:
A lot of jobs will hire hourly and cap the worker at 34-39 hours as well to avoid providing benefits.
The only thing they need is a new style of music to go with it.
Gen Z 'counterculture' doesn't have a music genre because it doesn't need one. it's not pushing back or claiming anything, it's just nihilism with memes.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968%E2%80%931969_Japanese_uni...
The slight perspective change needed is not a rejection of success, but a rejection of the conventional notion of success.
https://www.businessinsider.com/learn-excel-tiktok-miss-exce...
We did it guys!
My suggestion to anyone who does not dream of labor: if you don't want nice things, that is fine. Nobody is stopping you from living in a low cost of living area that may or may not have its issues.
But if you desire things in life, there should not be a mechanism that magically redistributes these things to you, or makes them available to you at a "fair" price.
No, the only "fair" thing is that you work for the money needed to purchase what you want, and you have the freedom to choose both what you do for work and what you want.
Heading out to Eden, hey brother
Gonna live like a king off whatever I find
Gonna eat all the fruit and throw away the rind"
- Star Trek, "The Way to Eden"
Every generation thinks they invented sex and every generation thinks they invented utopias. They'll outgrow it.
Let's look at a typical scenario. You graduate from university with 100k in student loans. Let's say you get a fairly decently paid entry-level job paying 75k. Great, you might be able to pay down those loans in 10 years, if not more. And when you're finally ready to buy a house, the ones that haven't been converted to rentals are all costing 8 or 10 times your annual salary. So you're asking someone at 21 to hope that everything works out and they might get the American Dream in their late 30s. Assuming there's no intervening major crises.
Sure, there might be ways to slightly goose things, but they turn into terrible-quality-of-life stuff like "work 3 jobs", "live on rice and beans forever", or "constantly job-hop to seek out a higher salary." If these are your alternatives, maybe it doesn't seem so absurd to embrace stagnation.
I'm in my early 40s. I did everything "right" -- I got a full-ride to university, studied CS, and acquired 15 years experience. I work for a mid-sized fintech firm and draw just over 100k. It's full remote since long before Covid, I generally work about 40-42 hours a week, and the technology is both interesting and feels actually important. I still don't feel like buying a new house is affordable on my budget. (Here's where you say "I should have been job-hopping every two years and making 400k at a FAANG by now/chasing an exit at some kale-as-a-service startup").
My parents were able to buy a house in 1988 for about 4x their annual salary, where the "salary" came from a modest skilled-trade worker. If I were to buy a comparable house in the same basic middle-class suburb, I'm looking at 6x my salary. I'm lucky in that I can live with them, pay down their mortgage, and be able to live reasonably well. But I sure as hell don't feel light years better off than my parents were at 40.
A 100k balance at graduation is definitely not "typical". The average right now is $31k.
1. We are too restrictive on immigration
2. Politicians keep pushing to hand out freebies for votes. Stealing the gift of purpose and motivation from many. Forcing them to be state dependents who live troubled, meaningless lower middle class lives in perpetuity.
On the one hand, I'm tempted to say; life's hard, it's always been hard, and you're only feeling vindicated now because the Internet makes it easy to connect with other people who share or support your views — so grow up.
On the other hand, I'm down with the sentiment 100%. Live to live. I get that, and I support it. Why work towards a career if the structure that supports that career has only been put there because it benefits people who are already at the top? Drop out and live your life on your own terms.
I guess the middle ground would be: Be ambitious, have goals, have aspirations, but only when they support your happiness and the happiness of those around you. In other words; live life on your own terms, but make those terms less shallow. I think this is different to just living for yourself, for one important reason; it is more likely to benefit society, and therefore _you_ in the long run.
Shit article.
Let's say that model does work, I'm going to guess it won't be that beneficial to most. The majority will probably sell at any opportunity they get, and a small percentage will continue to hold as the company becomes more valuable.
the effect you get by offering ownership is that existing personell will be more motivated to work harder and stay at your company for longer (so that the shares can vest)
this still won't solve the problems described in the article however
because home prices have boosted drastically, even rents are up, and with renting you throw cash away you could otherwise save towards buying a home
thus, a generation who expects and plans to live in cars
at least those not born with a silver spoon in their mouth or who otherwise can get high paying jobs. which describes the vast majority of American youth
Everyone is getting hired on as a contractor and getting shitty health insurance and getting treated like dirt.
Everything is too expensive. College enrollment is dropping down the toilet in a time we cannot hire enough public defenders to run our courts. Hospitals are closing due to lack of doctors.
Health costs will bankrupt you. Rent is INSANE. .2% of the US population is homeless.
Meanwhile the conservatives are whipped into a frenzy over the same "cancel culture" BS the party has been propagandizing for decades.
The 1% are killing the earth and stealing everything you produce and laughing while you bleed in the streets. But yeah, lets obsess over a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the populations sexual preferences.
The oligarch class of this country would rather let the whole thing burn than compromise ANY of their privilege.
Cynical, jaded and ironic like Gen Y and X but I’ve grown up on/in the internet and the accelerated mass culture in which we live.
Honestly in high school I felt like an oddball but I think I’d be normal if not cool as a zoomer since I was there at the beginning of most of the memes.
We also developed a cultural immune system to a lot of the bad shit of the internet, like “don’t feed the trolls” and now seeing the rest of the world learn this immune system badly and slowly makes us say ‘oh no’.
I definitely have my 'oh no' moments. It does make me wonder what our social responsibility is here. As kids on the internet, most of our adults could be forgiven for not knowing what was going on, since they didn't understand the internet. We can see the trainwrecks coming, at least. Should we do something?
There are comments here questioning has anybody ever dream of labor? LoL.
I wish I could recall where I saw it.
I'm also curious to see if companies run by Gen Z pay better or worse than Boomer run companies. If they're not I don't see how the situation will change for the next generations.
https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
but the prices of houses have shot up massively. So, not sure why you are so certain that wages rising would lead to significant inflation in housing prices.
If you hypothetically doubled everyone’s pay you think that wouldn’t lead to significant inflation in housing prices?
In any case real household income is up:
No it doesn't, continue reading.
Your own first data series suggests there's over ~15,000 Billion USD of personal disposable monthly income. Per capita, that would be something like 45,300 USD disposable monthly income.
I suppose this takes into the account all of the millionaires' and billionaires' capital gains, illustrating how little of the overall income is garnered by the US working class. And even in the stats I quoted, you can see the unequal distribution: The high-wage-earners' wages didn't stagnate, they increased; but low-wage earners earn less.
Anyway, the reason extra pay does not immediately translate to inflation is that price levels are the result of a combination of factors, including power relations of different social forces, and the distribution of income in society. If all wages were to double tomorrow, I suppose there would be some inflation in various sectors of the economy, but not uniformly, nor by anywhere near a factor of two.
Less to gain => less invested.
side hustles are better than jobs. Unless you work for google, jobs have low pay and too many restrictions and requiremnets. crypto, amazon, shopify mean more opportunities and control.
Many employers (not the tech industry) enjoyed a weak labor market for roughly 2 decades. And each time when things began to heat up a recession would come by and cool things down - flooding the market with newly unemployed qualified candidates.
This sustained discrepancy caused many employers "people management" skills to atrophy. Treating employees badly was OK because 1) Where else are they going to go? 2) Even if they quit you can just hire someone else who is likely just as qualified. Because of this, anti-social behavior among management never seemed to impact the bottom line, so it became embedded into the culture of these businesses - "That's how we've always done things here!"
Things changed sharply in 2020. You had the pressure of Baby Boomers retiring. And unlike other generations, many Boomers actually saved for retirement; employers did not have the power to retain them. Second, COVID pulled a ton of people out of the workforce for several reasons: needing to provide childcare, death, "long COVID", etc all pulled people permanently or semi-permanently out of the labor pool. At the same time, consumer spending shifted placing additional demand on many industries that were now shorthanded (and short-supplied).
The problem is many of these companies do not have the ability to attract and retain employees. On your local news you might've heard a sob story of a local employer having to cut hours or close-up shop because they "can't find anyone wiling to work" - but if you dig a little deeper you'll find they have a reputation in the community for being a bad employer. People do want to work - just not for them. And because there's no longer a cushion of qualified labor that has to settle for their anti-social work environment, they can't hire anyone to operate their business due to their poor reputation among the local workforce.
If you're young, your first step into the labor market is likely going to be one where you're asked to pull double-duty by an organization that, again, has a poor reputation. Their first experience in the workforce isn't at some friendly company, but rather a hostile employer who drove experienced labor away, forcing them to "settle" for someone with no work history. Thus giving these young workers probably the worst (modern) experience possible of what it means to be in the workforce. Thus the aggressive job-hopping - it's not a candidate problem it's a company problem.
So how does this get fixed? Well, if the labor market stays hot long enough, many of the anti-social companies will just get out-competed by ones able to attract and retain skilled labor. In this situation the rising tide will NOT being lifting all boats.
Not so much.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/03221...
Many other sources cite similar numbers, or even worse. $200K is not enough to retire on. In fact, I've read that Boomers staying in the workforce out of necessity is a factor making things worse for those entering the job market. I'm pretty sure having to support Boomer parents isn't going to help later generations either.
Fortunately, I think this part of your argument is not essential. You make a lot of other great points that are unaffected by whether this part works.