Many millennials are worse off than their parents | Hacker News Reader

Many millennials are worse off than their parents

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43 pointshalabarouma10 comments

Turns out sidelining, dissolving and privatizing any kind of social safety nets for older folks just leads to those older folks squeezing any and all assets in search of passive income. When the only rational choice for support in the years where your body can no longer perform labor is rent-seeking, can we be surprised that the rents are sought?

Agreed. The difference to before is probably only that rent seeking is possible, because the post-war generation had lots of innovations (oil, plastics, electronics) to exploit.

Why isn't the "but you have iPhone" thing working on them? It seems to work on a lot of other people.

Isn't this explained by where many places are in the demographic transition? In most of the developed world, Millennials are fewer in number than Baby Boomers. Generation X is also smaller, and some of the same problems afflict them. Instead of binning people into generations, can't we express this loss of prosperity as a function of the increasing dependency ratio?

I agree that demographics are a factor, but definitely not the only one and likely not the most impactful factor. Financial conditions are another big cause that likely had just as much if not more of an effect than demographics. We're coming out of a decade of near-zero interest rates, after a financial crisis, where millennials were just starting their careers and couldn't benefit from low rates anywhere near as much as older, more established (wealthier) generations. Millennials also have a significantly higher inflation-adjusted cost of living for essentials (housing, healthcare, education, food).

I’m genuinely curious whether the outlier is the baby boom generation (extending to a lesser degree to the Xers). The macroeconomic factors that caused the boomers to thrive are pretty extreme and unsustainable.

Is there any reason we expect sustained growth in that degree?

You can explain it 1000 different ways, Boomers will never admit it

(in the US)

Where real wage growth has stagnated since what, the 1970's? Although productivity/person is way up. So this is almost guaranteed, no?

Yes, especially with the huge cost of living increases, particularly in college, food, and housing.

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