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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

The first example is a junior level social worker -- that's fine, but come now: we all know that social work is not a high-paying industry.

The second example is a lady with 76k in debt, who has managed to pay down nearly 70% of it. Somehow this doesn't qualify as savings to the author.

The third woman actually makes a lot (they won't say how much) and has "achieved financial stability" (thus undermining the thesis of the article), but sends "the majority" of her paychecks to her family.

Finally, by the fourth example: someone with three jobs, who still manages to save $200 a month! I do feel for her, though. (Note to author: why in the world would you bury this example??)

The fifth example spends on expensive exercise classes and "also likes to go out to dinner with her friends"...but still saves $600 a month.

For the very last example, we have a 28-year-old man, earning well below average in NYC (90k a year), who nonetheless saves $2,000 a month. I'm sensing a bias here.

This is a ridiculous article. It should be titled: "These 20-somethings mostly manage to save despite difficult life choices and low incomes, and so can you."

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> The first example is a junior level social worker -- that's fine, but come now: we all know that social work is not a high-paying industry.

This is an unfair dismissal. Most industries are not high paying, therefore most workers are not earning enough to save. You're basically saying "they're not saving because they're not earning more!" Also, what is your proposed solution here? To stop having social workers?

> someone with three jobs, who still manages to save $200 a month!

Saving $200 a month is basically nothing, especially in NYC. It would take multiple years just to save a few months worth of rent.

> Also, what is your proposed solution here? To stop having social workers?

Training for a job that pays below what you need to live comfortably is a choice. You may feel passionate enough about that job that you are willing to accept the consequences of a low salary. If you are not, then you should not train to do that job.

I do sympathize, as it's essentially impossible for a 16- or 17-year-old to fully understand the lifetime ramifications of the profession they're about to choose.

But if people stopped making dangerous financial compromises to take jobs they are passionate about, then those jobs will either have to get funded more such that the salaries go up, or yes, they'll cease to exist.

I think social work is a job that's extremely valuable to society, so I would hope that, in the face of a shortage (due to people not wanting to take the job because of low pay), legislatures and whatnot would vote to fund it more. But that's up to communities to decide.

> Saving $200 a month is basically nothing, especially in NYC.

The woman who saves $200/mo (the article actually says $200-$300/mo, so it's a bit better, even) lives in Bensenville, Illinois.

I think the pertinent question is do we just stop having social workers?

They provide essential services, you're focusing too much on the choice to do something that pays a lot vs choice to do something you're passionate about

How about the choice to do something that simply needs to be done?

Under the current circumstances, if someone chooses to do a job because they find it socially important then they won’t have much leverage to bargain for better pay.

If there are people who will todo your job for the amount of money you find unacceptable, you will have a hard time bargaining for more money.

We, the people who pay for social worker through taxes, must be willing to pay them more. AND the social workers must be willing to walk away if their own needs aren’t being met.

> But if people stopped making dangerous financial compromises to take jobs they are passionate about, then those jobs will either have to get funded more such that the salaries go up, or yes, they'll cease to exist.

If a "passion" is common enough, it will get systematically exploited by employers.

How is it exploitation to pay market wage if it’s well above minimum wage?

Because minimum wage is well below what it should be if you want to consider it as the line for what is and isn't exploitive.

Like any industry social work has a ladder and options including getting licensed as an lcsw and doing more profitable private therapy or even being head of hospital departments or other administration tasks. You certainly have the lower paying end as well but no it’s not a poverty guarantee.

> Training for a job that pays below what you need to live comfortably is a choice. You may feel passionate enough about that job that you are willing to accept the consequences of a low salary. If you are not, then you should not train to do that job.

My problem with this is that there are a lot of jobs in the US that are important (physical therapists, speech language pathologists, some nursing positions, pharmacy techs, educators) that are getting to be not worth paying for the training. You don't make enough to money to pay it back.

And I want people to choose to do those jobs. :)

I'm not dismissing the person. I'm saying: if the author's purpose is to generalize from this example to all 20-somethings, it's obviously biased. Placing this example first was an editorial decision, and it's designed to elicit sympathy. Imagine if the author had led with the 28-year old NYC resident who saves 2k a month.

Also, I just want to add: I'm not engaging you in a debate about whether or not social workers "should" be paid more. I don't run the world.

$40,000 is an above-average income for a 22-year-old in America. If anything they should have picked someone who made less if they wanted to generalize to all 20-somethings.

> Also, what is your proposed solution here? To stop having social workers?

Reduce expenses to live within your means, or figure out how to earn more money. The plight of... every person on earth

>Reduce expenses to live within your means

Which is cool until the point that rents take up 100% of your income and then you're screwed.

Let's imagine a world where almost everyone makes $7 an hour. You would expect pricing in the world to reflect that and housing to fit in that budget.

But now in that world you create a small percentage of people that can print as much money as they want. These people that print as much money also have a terrible problem as they are completely greedy and always want more. You'd expect the first outcome of this situation to be asset inflation. The behavior of the greedy would be to buy up as many 'real' assets with their fake money as quickly as possible. Eventually the behaviors of the people earning $7 simply don't matter. The greedy will extract as much wealth as possible and drive up costs beyond the point of survival until a significant portion of the population is tossing the other half of the population in to guillotines.

It is important to keep income inequality under control if you want a stable society (that's not a police state).

True, but many people look back and say “back in the day people could do X” and cherry pick.

What they ignore is how long people lived at home for, how many people jumped immediately into marriage. This whole business of everyone having their own place is not sustainable, despite what we see in TV.

Interesting thing I learned during the pandemic: There are actually countries where more people live alone than in the United States. In particular, in Sweden, the vast majority of all unattached adults, even young ones, live alone, without roommates. So, I have to push back against the idea that a permanent housing shortage forcing people into multi-person living arrangements is the natural default.

> Reduce expenses to live within your means, or figure out how to earn more money.

This means "stop having social workers".

You can only reduce expenses so far, and the easiest way to earn more money is to get a new job.

Unions & collective bargaining is another option - depending on the profit margins of the companies involved.

Basically, if social workers collectively refused to work for the current pay, either social work would be eliminated (unlikely), or pay would rise - either through government subsidies, or at the expense of profit margins.

True. I wonder if social workers would find themselves in the "not allowed to strike" group of government employees.

A lot of social workers are not government employees, there are a bunch of private counseling practices, NGOs, and hospital systems and the like that employ social workers as well. (I’m only familiar with the situation in the US)

But I think your point stands even aside from any regulatory specifics. Asking social workers to strike for better wages is essentially asking some of the most vulnerable in our society (e.g. kids in the foster system) to bear the brunt of our collective underinvestment in meeting their needs. I think that’s less acceptable of an impact compared to stressing out some BigCorp’s bottom line in the case of Amazon or Starbucks and similar

"I don't want to see you, I don't want to hear from you."

People in the US seem to just hate poor people

You're too kind. It's not hate. It's contempt.

I've decided that many Americans believe that the definition of "freedom" is "freedom from having to even think about people who are outside of my family/social group". The homeless person on the street isn't a tragedy because human beings shouldn't have to sleep on the street, it's a tragedy because I have to see it and think about it.

Saving $200 a month just means you won't have to go into debt when you need to hire a plumber or auto mechanic or have a very-minor, insured ER visit.

[EDIT] Assuming you don't have more than ~2 such urgent expenses per year, that is. And none worse than that.

I have I think good insurance. It still asks for $350 for an ER visit.

This is probably off topic, but I would gladly pay a few more $$ in taxes to have social workers have pay equity with other professionals.

Don't most government jobs have a great benefits plan including 401k with matching and the ability to have loans dismissed?

Someone with the skills to be a social worker, on average, can use those skills for higher paid work.

They are knowingly trading the good feeling they get when helping people for the cash they could get by being a cold capitalist. You can make the argument social workers should be paid more but probably not the argument the person is employed in the highest saving ability profession they could reasonably hope to work in.

Again, you seem to believe that eliminating the job of social worker from society is a viable option.

What are all the capitalists going to do if everybody wants to go for the big bucks and not do things like social work, nursing and many other jobs? Society is seriously f...ed up if it's ok to exploit people who do a valuable job for society and only selfishness gets rewarded.

Same for entrepreneurs. What are the genius billionaires going to do if nobody wants to work for them and everybody wants to be an entrepreneur? We need to reward all kinds of useful jobs and not have all reward go to the sociopaths at the top.

If nobody does at the current wage, then wages will have to rise to meet supply/demand.

As it stands individuals see the good feels as part of their wages. Otherwise they would do something higher paying. IF nobody does the job because the good feels does nothing for them then they'll have to start paying as much as the cold capitalist job.

Your argument ignores the fact that people need to work at every point in their adult life unless they're privileged enough to have someone subsidize their existence. There is a large group of people in society who only have low paying work available to them with their current set of skills. Without being able to save, they don't have the means to acquire new skills. So they're quite literally trapped in low paying jobs.

Also, I think you're too hung up on "social work = good feels." Do fast food workers get good feels from their work?

You don't have the opinion social workers have the skills to obtain higher paid work? How do you have such low opinion of social workers that you find their skills non-transferable and even compare their skill level to that of fast food workers? This is a pretty uncharitable view of the skilled people helping our more vulnerable elements of society.

And as an aside, very few people deliberately take a reduced fast food wage in the goal of helping others whereas a large number of our skilled and caring social workers knowingly entered social work knowing their college education could be used for higher paying endeavors.

I'm not comparing social workers to fast food workers. I'm saying there are other low-paid jobs in addition to social work.

And I would be very curious to hear some suggestions for jobs a social worker could get without any additional training that pay better than social work. NYC requires posting salaries in job openings, so with a suggested job alternative, we can easily find if there are many job openings for the new line of work and whether or not the job would pay materially better than social work.

If your position is they're literally getting the highest amount possible they could, even more than they could in private cold capitalist industries they're qualified for, then it's kind of crazy to characterize them as being the victims of sub-market pay. They're the market makers in that case at the top of their skill pyramid!

Which leads me to my response:

>What are all the capitalists going to do if everybody wants to go for the big bucks and not do things like social work, nursing and many other jobs?

Well if what rcme says is true, they're being paid the top dollar of anybody with their skills... that kind of answers the question. They're at the biggest buck profession they can get (remember rcme thesis is they don't have the resources to retrain or whatever) therefore the profession will still exist.

Yes, that's how it works. Certainly nobody would just complain loudly that "Nobody wants to work anymore!" and demand more suffering for the people at the bottom of society.

It would be an interesting experiment if we fired all the social workers and gave the money of the salary and all the overhead of those programs directly to the poor, and compare the outcomes.

Would you give that money to the abused/neglected kids that social workers protect, or the parents that are abusing/neglecting them?

Who would be in charge of identifying who gets that money and managing the systems that distribute that money and would they get paid more than the social workers that got fired?

I would do a negative income tax basically at the lowest earnings (that is they basically get graduated credits). I'd simplify the tax code so we'd only need half the IRS or less and then repurpose some of them to making sure the negative income tax is refunded. Unemancipated children would not be included in the refund.

My prediction is especially neglect but also abuse are often symptoms of poverty and insufficient economic security. I do not believe economically starving the parents is somehow going to help the neglect of overburdened parents, but I can respect some possible hints that may be drawn from your question. My belief is the number of kids saved through such a measure would outdo the number the social workers would have saved. But that is just a theory.

Is nobody else going to tell this guy that the earned income tax credit already exists?

Yes, because statistically valid studies are cheap and don't require highly-trained professionals.

This feels a lot like the lectures these people are tired of. "Why didn't you pick a higher-paying career, why did you go to college if you couldn't afford it, why not cut out all unnecessary expenses and stop seeing your friends".

Yes, all these people could probably make different choices to save a bit more money, but a) min-maxing life like that sucks, and b) most people constantly giving this advice didn't do that themselves. Is there a single person in America who:

1. At 17 years old ignored every single adult in their life and wisely chose to go to trade school instead of college because their 30-year projections of their own life showed loans might be too much of a burden

2. Stifled all personal ambition and passion and chose a career with the most objective earning potential

3. Cut off all friendships and moved to the lowest cost-of-living area where they could still find a job

4. Lived like an ascetic hermit until they had a large enough emergency fund in the bank

The answer is no, this person does not exist, if they did they would be miserable, and nobody wants to live in a world where this lifestyle is necessary for an average person to feel financially comfortable.

Edit: Also, when you describe $40,000 as a "low income", are you aware that the median income for a 20-24 year old is less than that?

I am certain that people who want to read an article with this title are convinced that life has dealt them an unfair hand, and are willing to ignore or dismiss every example to the contrary.

...as this author has almost systematically done. It's not really a "lecture" when I'm just re-stating the facts in the story, is it?

> It's not really a "lecture" when I'm just re-stating the facts in the story, is it?

If that was indeed what you were doing, no. But that was not what you were doing.

>I am certain that people who want to read an article with this title are convinced that life has dealt them an unfair hand, and are willing to ignore or dismiss every example to the contrary.

Wow, this is unrealistically antagonistic. I think you need some qualifiers somewhere in that assertion. Anybody who simply "wants to read an article with this title"? Every example to the contrary?

The person you're replying to did not say "anybody". They said "people". In conversational English, the phrasing you quoted is not equivalent to "literally every single person who wants to read this article".

Maybe stop assuming absolutism where most people would never intend it? Interpret posts with the most charitable interpretation possible given what's written? (Y'know, like the HN guidelines require of us in order to keep conversations civil?)

It's true, if you had only restated the facts it would not have been a lecture.

... which is... what they did.

> This feels a lot like the lectures these people are tired of.

How do you figure? The person you're replying to is pointing out that the majority of people profiled for the article seem to be doing just fine: they are saving at a decent (some at a more-than-decent) rate, and are living fairly comfortably. Lecturing them about something they're already doing seems pointless.

Only two of the people profiled in the article seem to actually be struggling, and might get lectures they're tired of. If the others are getting these lectures, then whoever is doing the lecturing clearly doesn't know how well they're actually doing!

You are replying to something that the grandparent did not actually write.

> when you describe $40,000 as a "low income", are you aware that the median income for a 20-24 year old is less than that?

Are you aware that something can be low even when there are other things that are even lower? Also I don't see where the parent mentioned "$40,000" at all, so maybe you clicked the reply button on the wrong post?

I can confirm that this does suck.

I think you laid out nicely why I stopped paying attention to both NYT and WaPo. They might be the best newspapers in the country and the "paper of record" but there's way too much of this shaping the story to a desired narrative rather than the facts that happens. It's sad, because there are so many stories out there in the world that need to be told. Each of the examples you gave has way more interesting subject matter - how many young people are supporting family? How did a young person attain financial stability so quickly? How does a young man making well below average manage to save so much? And on and on. But it likely caters to their demographics and/or people buying newspapers (or - whoever paid to submarine this story) to spin that young people today are lazy and not saving. Yawn.

Not sure about average in NYC, we have a lot of millionaires that will drag that up, but he’s well above median household income, which is something like $70k.

I mean, sure. But my point remains: 90k is not even remotely a lot of money in NYC, even if it's above the median.

Anyone who manages to save 24k a year on a 90k salary in NYC -- where the median studio apartment will set you back more than 2k a month and coffee and lunch out can easily exceed $20 -- is doing a good job.

$90k isn't too bad though.

London has similar conditions to that and far fewer people are earning $90k+.

It's not bad, but compared to the others he's clearly an outlier in terms of his savings rate.

> The second example is a lady with 76k in debt, who has managed to pay down nearly 70% of it. Somehow this doesn't qualify as savings to the author.

Not only that, but she manages to maintain an emergency fund of $10k. I... think she's doing just fine?

> For the very last example, we have a 28-year-old man, earning well below average in NYC (90k a year), who nonetheless saves $2,000 a month. I'm sensing a bias here.

$90k a year is definitely not "well below average in NYC" - median household income is only $70k a year! (1)

1 - https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewy...

My radical opinion is that social workers should be able to make rent and be able to save for retirement.

Well, you're more than welcome to employ some!

> The second example is a lady with 76k in debt, who has managed to pay down nearly 70% of it. Somehow this doesn't qualify as savings to the author.

> The third woman actually makes a lot (they won't say how much) and has "achieved financial stability" (thus undermining the thesis of the article), but sends "the majority" of her paychecks to her family.

I’m simultaneously thrilled that I could pay 13k in medical bills in a recent family medical crisis, and very well aware that every time I’m able to do that kind of thing I have exactly the same savings of basically fuckall as I’ve always had. I’m similarly thrilled that I was able to pay off all of my outstanding debt after a few months not really recovering from burnout, again with approximately dick in savings. Neither of these achievements I feel bad about, but neither of them give me any kind of security in the sense people mean by “savings”.

Granted I’m 40, so I’m just resigned to probably making do until I don’t. So at least I don’t have 20 more years of that understanding to make do with people telling me I’m better off than I am.

The whole premise of the article is beyond ridiculous - you are not supposed to be saving in your 20s (which first half is spent on studies for many) but enjoying the life, whatever that means for you! Once responsibilities like parenting and career ladders come into play its too late, there is no going back to that sweet careless freedom.

If I had a dollar for every person telling me 'I should have traveled the world more when I was young', that would be quite a sum. Backpacking can be done extremely cheaply in places like India or Nepal, in 2010 I spent roughly 500$/month all costs included there. Was it fancy snobbish type of trip? Heck no, riding on top of buses or cramped inside in fetal position for 12 hours straight next to chickens, eating in local dhabas, and still those were the best moments of my life, 3 months felt like 2-3 decades there. As a bonus such an experience will make you a better person overall, certainly it worked for me.

You simply can't get this kind of exposure to the real world in any other way, expensive organized trips certainly don't do same magic.

Alternate view: Early life is the best time to save because of compounding interest. A dollar saved in your 20s has far more lifetime value than a dollar saved in your 30s, 40s or 50s. A year spent horsing around in Nepal "finding yourself" could easily mean having to delay retirement 5 years. I'd rather goof off and enjoy 20 carefree years when I'm old than 4 years when I'm young and have to work until I die.

The title has two parts, both of which you've provided ample commentary on, but only one explicitly. In Their 20s, Struggling to Save... and Tired of Being Lectured About It. "Ridiculous" and "and so can you" come down on one side of the question of, how should we morally judge people about their savings?

Also: Why would you already want to start saving in your twenties? If you have to pay debts etc, of course, there's nothing left for saving, but it'll work out in the future when the debts are paid.

The article may suck but every dataset I've seen supports the notion that average-net-worth-at-same-age took a sharp dive with Gen X, was even worse for Millennials, and is yet worse than that for Gen Z. IOW each generation has saved less than the Boomers when they were the same age, and the effect's gotten worse with each new generation.

Perhaps unsurprisingly—and, maybe even explaining most of the effect—home ownership rates at-same-age, by generation, look pretty similar. More 25-year-old Boomers owned their home, than Gen Xers, than Millennials, than Zers, and there's no later-in-life sharp uptick for those generations that makes up the gap. Worse with each generation.

And every attempt to fix this buy making housing affordable for younger people is met by extremely angry accusations of entitlement by the generation with the easiest access to wealth and good salaries in history, and spent their entire time on this earth making things shittier for next generations by making homes a for profit endeavor instead of a thing most people need, ignoring global warming and green energy for the enrichment of very few, removing and kneecapping what few social safety nets this country had, and treating people self medicating with drugs as criminals instead of people desperately trying to avoid burnout.

So yeah, any advice or claim from these people rings stupidly hollow, especially since they regularly seem to have no fucking clue what these young people are experiencing, because in their time, the minimum wage was enough to buy a medium size house, a small car, and have a family.

I actually agree with you. The problem is that you're doing a better job of making the case than the NY Times writer, who resorted to citing anecdotes that mostly contradicted the lede and tried to hide that fact.

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