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> There were no federal student loans.

This is a hilarious one to include on your list because it shows you are missing the forest for the trees. Federal student loans didn't exist because they didn't need to exist as college was cheaper, living a middle class life didn't require college, and low paying jobs still paid a high enough percentage of living costs to allow people to pay their way through college by working. Today college is more of a requirement, most young people and families can't afford tuition so they need to take out loans, and low paying jobs do not pay enough to get out in front of that loan debt. The current situation is objectively worse.

Colleges may have been cheaper 50 years ago, but it was also roughly half as common to go to college. It was especially uncommon for women and POC to enroll. Overall, the government is subsidizing colleges more, but the subsidy is spread thinner. In-state tuition without assistance tends to be $6000-12,000, which isn't much in the grand scheme of things.

As a slight tangent, student loans and grants tend to be the least efficient form of subsidy for higher education because they incentivize colleges to increase tuitions to make them more resort-like.

In-state tuition without assistance tends to be $6000-12,000 _per year_. My college bill is ~$11.5k/yr at a state school (not including housing, which I pay $1200/mo for - above average for college but dead average for 1b apartments).

Working for my university's housing and dining services (a major employer of students), I would make $8.50/hr my first year, with potential $0.25-$0.50 raises each year. At $8.50/hr, it would take 1350 hours to pay for my tuition alone before taxes. Full time employees work 2080 hours/yr but also get paid vacation while student employees do not.

So I would argue that state school tuition is a bit much in the grand scheme of things.

People I know who went to college 40-50 years ago talk about paying for college by working summer jobs at the grocery store. People I know who graduated in the last 10 years talk about how they're still paying off loans.

Certainly to be an unpopular take: It's the God-shaped hole in western hearts. While religious affiliation has been in decline since the mid-1970s, the rate of decline between 2017-2022 has sharply accelerated [1]. The distribution of previously-religious but now unaffiliated skews heavily to the younger age brackets [2]. Younger generations are simple much less religious than older generations.

Therefore, (American) culture has changed with the decline of religion in a very unfortunate way. Religion created communities and communities supported families and people in emotional, physical, and economic terms. That support system is eroding at an increasing rate. Then beyond that at an individual level, meaning and contentment now rely on the individual creating meaning or deriving it from some worldly source instead of coming from a higher power. Then when that source lets down the person, nihilism becomes attractive. So what is someone to do? In American politics you can only rely on the government less than half the time. Even the best non-profit and civic organizations are prone to corruption. If the person looks inward what happens when they let themselves down? Like it or not, religious modalities play a fundamental part in Western psychology - in other words, people need "a bigger reason" than themselves. Anecdotally the young people in my church (as far as I know) are the happiest young people I know - much happier than many of the children at my kids' school and friends' kids.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/wp-content/uploads/site...

[2] https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/the-decline-of-...

I'm not religious but I think about this often. I know multiple young families that aren't "very religious" but seek out a church as soon as they move to a new place, for the community.

There are some secular community groups and activities but nothing that really replaces organized religion. Especially in the way that a church community cuts through a cross-section of society while most other communities are organized around more specific subsets and interests.

> In many cases we have replaced those personal obligations (e.g. to take care of elders) with abstract government funded systems.

I can almost guarantee that young people don't have social security on the top of their minds. It's school school school internship work, that's it. Those bars are raised each year. Leisure time is social media and video games. All that got amplified in 2020. Not hard to see why they're depressed.

[Edit] I was standard college undergrad class of 2018, and right on the cutoff for gen Z. Our high school and college class was clearly more studious than class of 2016, and clearly less than class of 2020. I was also right there when childhood became virtual, starting with the iPhone and Facebook in middle school.

> I can almost guarantee that young people don't have social security on the top of their minds. It's school school school internship work, that's it. Those bars are raised each year. Leisure time is social media and video games. All that got amplified in 2020. Not hard to see why they're depressed.

You’re assuming a level of insight into people’s meta-knowledge of their own mental state that I don’t think is warranted. Maybe they’re not thinking of social security, but maybe there’s mental health benefits to caring for elderly grandparents at home that people don’t appreciate.

As to leisure—in the 1950s, half of 16-19 year olds had jobs. Today it’s around 30%. Maybe having a real, if menial job is more fulfilling than playing video games or doing bullshit box checking exercises for college applications? That’s a cultural change too.

Taking care of elderly family members at home went away well before the recent dip in mental health and falls in line with the decline of family values. I'm personally saddened by the change, but I don't think it explains much here.

I'm guessing fewer 16-19yo have jobs mainly because school is more important now. College attendance is way up. But more importantly, the whole phone / social media thing is life-sucking even for kids who don't actively engage in it.

It's incredibly ironic that you're accusing the parent post of "assuming a level of insight into people’s meta-knowledge of their own mental state" while up and down the thread you're making gigantic reactionary assumptions about what cultural factors are causing teens to feel less fulfilled today. It feels good and easy to pine for the "good old days" where 50% of kids flipped burgers at McDonald's or whatever but the fact of the matter is, given how many confounding variables there are, you're just as clueless as anyone else about this.

If we're going to make random stabs in the dark and bring in our own bargain basement personal opinions into this, I can tell you at least that interacting with my abusive family much less has only been fantastic for my mental health. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone, but maybe that's not important and I should just universalize this viewpoint like you, right?

> while up and down the thread you're making gigantic reactionary assumptions about what cultural factors are causing teens to feel less fulfilled today. It feels good and easy to pine for the "good old days"

To be clear, Taylor Lorenz is the one pining about the 1950s. She’s the one saying “things are worse now” and arguing that changes since then are making young people unhappy.

TFA rejects Lorenz’s premise by pointing out that the economically, young people aren’t worse off. I’m simply pointing out that, unless you want to dismiss Lorenz’s (quite common) view altogether, it’s worth looking at what other things have changed.

> So what has changed since the 1950s?

Income inequality has increased greatly from it's low in the 1950s. This means more people make less than X% of the median wage.

Housing has become much more expensive versus average wages.

Minimum wage has not increased with inflation.

Fallback jobs that require little training and can be done by most people have become fewer and fewer. The remaining jobs have less of a path upwards.

The top Federal tax bracket was 90% in the 1950s and it's under 40% now.

Etc. etc.

What has changed since the 1970s is a greater proportion of productivity improvement has gone to capital vs labour. This means working people have to work much harder for comparatively less.

Ascribing the resulting unhappiness to departing from some sort of communal idyll where young people 'knew their place' is rather regressive I'd suggest.

> What has changed since the 1970s is a greater proportion of productivity improvement has gone to capital vs labour.

The evidence just doesn't support this. There are analyses that purport to, but they look at wages rather than total compensation (including benefits)

Do you think adding ~10k/year/person for very good group health insurance[0] fully closes that gap? I recall the divergence being a good deal larger than that. At the median, that's about a 20% boost in wages; still doesn't close the gap here, for instance: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

[0] 2020-2021 prices from a previous employer's details

This chart tracks the income (including benefits) of "production/nonsupervisory workers" and compares it to per capita GDP. This is not quite the same claim as the one I was replying to, which is that labor in general gets a smaller share of the national income than it used to.

Yes, but the big increase in reported mental health issues started around 2007 or so.

Not communal idyll but a shift in expectations.

The internet, social media, higher living standards, globalization, etc. all of these things have moved people out of their local bubble and into a global worldview. It's much easier to be depressed when your expectations are 10x those of your parents or grandparents because you are now growing up in a more stable time and have more exposure to what is possible.

There will be exceptions but talk to older boomers or ideally the silent gen then talk to a recent college grad. I'm not playing "whose suffering is the greatest" or "greater suffering invalidates lesser suffering" but there is a massive difference in perspective and expectations.

I fall into the expectations trap myself and talking to older family members helps me get grounded, avoid doom-spiraling, and appreciate the freedom and opportunities that exist today.

Productivity is up due to technology, not increased working hours. Americans work a lot less now than they did in the 1950s: https://www.humanprogress.org/senator-sanders-and-the-averag.... In fields where technology doesn’t help, productivity is basically flat for decades.

Likewise, capital’s share of GDP is flat since the 1950s and if you factor out real estate, has declined from 25% to under 20%. https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/deciphering-the-fall...

I would also posit that moving far away from grandma and not being forced to socialize with mixed-age communities at church had a much greater impact on ordinary people than whether capital has 20% or 25% share of GDP.

I wouldn't call most of what you're talking about "cultural" I'd put it down to relativity and zero-sum (to most players) rat-races.

No medicaid; but also health care was far simpler and cheaper. That meant some died, yes, but less of a constant weight of "because I don't have a better job I won't be protected like those higher income people are."

No student loans; less need for them. Almost nobody went to college - but they got jobs anyway.

Not having to take out a bunch of debt to go to college to do a job that doesn't require specialized knowledge is a materially better prospect even in a pure economic sense than having to do a bunch more work to get a mostly-unrelated credential for squarely-lower-middle-to-middle-class-jobs. It's simply lower personal cost.

You had much lower costs because the frontier was much more accessible and growing cheaply, too. Fewer people in the country. More un- or barely-developed land in growing areas. Less competition for more resources = lower personal cost. Materially better.

We also have new forms of peer-to-peer mass communication so any relative advantage someone has today is magnified and amplified. None of your old buddies were hopping on private jets and traveling across the world doing influencer stuff and able to shove it in your face constantly back then. We've coupled increasing inequality with increasing visibility of that inequality. I don't think you have to pull in broad cultural things beyond just (failing) keeping up with the Joneses.

Some things are better, sure. But an awful lot of things are worse. I do think that on the whole, things have gotten worse. Not for me personally so much as for my children and their peers.

> There were no federal student loans.

True -- but by the same token, it was possible to "work your way through college". This is largely impossible now.

> True -- but by the same token, it was possible to "work your way through college". This is largely impossible now.

It can be done, if you are willing to do Community College and then head to a state university to finish up. We asked our friend's daughter, who was choosing which college to attend about going to a local state university. She replied, "what do I tell my friends?" as in it was beneath her. Which was funny as both her parents went to state universities.

That depends on where you are, I think. Community colleges are certainly less expensive, but they are very expensive nonetheless. And state colleges are often not much cheaper than others.

The cost of education across the board has risen to an insane level, well above the rate of inflation.

True, I'm from California where Community College is currently free for all high school graduates. When I went, it was cheap enough to be basically free.

> There were no federal student loans.

The GI Bill from WW2 and Korea led to an explosion in college students. Before that, college was simply too expensive for anyone but the very rich to attend, and then...you get lots of people going on the military's dime.

9% of the American population served in WWII, and I'm assuming less than that took advantage of the GI Bill. So this was not universal by any means.

Those that did basically exploded the number of people attending college. So even if it wasn't universal, it was a contributing factor to education accessibility.

> So what has changed since the 1950s?

Trajectory of how well off average American will be in x years?

To add numbers to this:

A teenager in 1950s would be 40-50 when the productivity-wage breakdown happened [1]. Their generation not only benefited, they caused that for juiced returns on their stocks.

A teenager today was born an entire generation after that decoupling — and has only known a world where their parents were exploited by 1950s teenagers.

I don’t think it’s surprising that a generation where hard work was rewarded was more optimistic than one born to parents for whom that didn’t apply.

[1] - https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

I think that chart should be expressed in gold not in dollars to fully appreciate what's happening.

This phenomenon is probably not unique to the USA.

Or maybe those changes are fine. You have no idea, I have no idea! But I surely don't know how you're saying this with such certainty!

> We have eliminated social roles and duties and obligations that used to apply to young people. In many cases we have replaced those personal obligations (e.g. to take care of elders) with abstract government funded systems. And maybe those changes aren’t all conducive to the well being of young people.

Wait, are you trying to say that kids these days don't work hard enough?

> So what has changed since the 1950s? Culture.

Culture always changes. That's expected.

What wasn't expected is the near-total collapse of the middle class and the redistribution of wealth to the rich. That's more of a punch in the gut than the most baroquely decorated food made in a jello mold (50s culture).

What percentage people owned their own homes back then, and what percentage of income did people they spend on their houses mortgages? I'm willing to bet those statistics are telling.

Home ownership is up significantly since 1950: https://dqydj.com/historical-homeownership-rate-united-state...

> So what has changed since the 1950s?

I think that a major component of the overall mental health crisis for young people is the fact that more and more teens understand mental illness, are able to identify their struggles, and getting a diagnosis for things like anxiety and depression is easy enough- but the situation for treatment, at least in the US, is absolutely abysmal. I was diagnosed with a few learning disabilities at 8, anxiety later on so have been seeing psychologists and psychiatrists for a very long time now. I can afford top-tier care out-of-pocket and am very experienced at navigating this landscape, and at 32, I still struggle to find competent psychiatrists. It's a very complicated field which requires a certain nuance in practice but I usually come across mental health professionals entrenched in pop psychology, not science, so I just have a great therapist and have neurologists handle my meds now. This scenario becomes even more difficult for adolescents because many psychiatrists and psychiatrists do not see adolescents, and even fewer will see children.

tldr; adolescents are more aware of their mental health struggles than they were just 10 years ago but access to proper mental health care has not improved, and finding a psychiatrist or psychologist who is taking new patients is twice as hard as it was before covid

> There were no federal student loans. [..] Almost nobody went to college.

How much did college cost? How necessary was a college degree for success?

My mom, in the late 60's, paid for her master's degree at an accredited university with a summer waitressing job. It enabled her to get a career as a teacher.

Separately, my father built a 2k square-foot house on 5 acres of land for $10k in the 70's (about $100k adjusted for inflation). He did this on a telephone lineman's budget without a degree.

There was the GI bill, which both of my grandfathers used to get professional degrees essentially for "free" (one accountant and one doctor). I guess it wasn't really "free" because one of them had to fight through North Africa and Italy to get it, and the other one had to drop a few bombs on Germany before spending the rest of the war in a POW camp.

Only about 9% of the US population was in the military during WW2. The percentage dropped with future wars.

Notably, the GI bill's college funding mostly benefited white veterans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill#Racial_discriminatio...

Both the UC and CUNY system were famously tuition free until things like this started happening:

1960: The Master Plan for Higher Education in California maintains that tuition at University of California and state colleges should be free, but that fees are necessary to help cover non-instructional costs. “The two governing boards reaffirm the long established principle that state colleges and the University of California shall be free to all residents of the state.”

1966: Ronald Reagan assumed office of Governor of California and changed the course of the state’s higher education system. In his eight years, he cut state funding for college and universities and laid the foundation for a tuition-based system.

According to a New York Times article from 1982, during his eight years as governor, “Reagan fought hard in the legislature to impose tuition at four-year colleges. He lost the battle to lobbyists for the university, … However, the Legislature agreed to increase student registration fees.”

[0]https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/what-happened-to-ca...