Comment by hotnfresh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hotnfresh | Hacker News Reader

My dad (high school diploma) blundered through his 20s with a series of gigs and barely-paying-the-bills solo businesses, had an expensive divorce (kids in the mix, too), a kid out of wedlock, then finally got his career going as he approached 35. Worked for a railroad. Started at the bottom, worked his way to upper-middle-management before the railroad sold, MBAs took over from career railroad guys in upper management, and they ruined his work-life with constant pointless meetings and having to put up with idiots who didn’t know how anything worked calling the shots, before ultimately “encouraging” him and a bunch of the other expensive career guys into somewhat-early retirement. FFS, he was literally raised in a barn—and not a nice one, and not one attached to hundreds of acres of valuable paid-off farmland or anything like that—they were a kind of poor that barely exists outside the homeless, these days.

My mom was about 30 when they got married. Junior college stenography degree. Never worked for pay again after getting married. Dad was a railroad man (working class, nothing fancy) and mom a homemaker.

They followed a playbook that’d spell doom today, but rode rising real estate prices and real honest-to-god pensions to a couple million dollars invested plus social security. We did a couple weeks of driving or (sometimes) air travel vacation every year. All the usual American Dream stuff.

Shit was simply different for the Boomers. Almost every plausible life-path got downgraded a couple notches since then, in terms of quality of life and retirement outcomes. Except now everyone gets a shiny gee-whiz slate in their pocket. Hooray.

Perhaps this is what reaching the top of an S curve looks like. There is no economic growth wave due to population growth wave to surf.

This is a huge component of the answer. No one wants to hear it because of what implies for their agency, but demographics is destiny.

The high home prices, inflated away wages, and poor quality of life for long hours worked, plus no fault divorce, the family court system, etc, may be contributing to the demographic issue.

Yeah, to be clear, I don’t mean that as a “them damned boomers!” post. They’re not to blame for circumstances conspiring to put life on (relatively) easy mode for them. If they’re guilty of anything (at least, many of them) it’s failing to appreciate how much harder it’s gotten to achieve what they’d consider a basic, unremarkable, ordinary, comfortable middle-class life.

Locally though there are areas that have grown quite a bit compared to others, the average misses nuance. LA has grown by a million people since 1970, while chicago has lost almost as much in that time. Are things more affordable than Chicago in Southern California? Certainly not, even if economically speaking the region is "more productive" by whatever measure.

Really what makes things cheap is a simple formulaic application of supply and demand to things like housing, which takes up the bulk of the American take home pay bar almost nothing else in comparison. Boomers had things cheap not because of riding off a population boom, but a home building boom, that zoning changes in the decades since have made impossible to replicate.

I think this about property too.

The price of property in Australia has increased so much but the demographics aren’t there to support continued growth. Yes immigration is a thing but most immigrants don't move to Australia with $4 million(AUD) in the bank to continue fueling the boom.

What happens when demand falls ?

Population is still growing just fine, due to immigration. Not sure what you are saying here.

“My herd is fine — I can just keep buying replacement cows!”

This suggests that something is deeply wrong with society in at least two places:

1. whatever is distressing the native population so badly they stopped breeding; and,

2. casual psychopathy towards people, which is inherent in such a policy analysis.

I mean, re:2 you just compared new Americans to cattle, so you might have a point here

“My kids keep dying, but I can just adopt more.”

Same sentiment, closer to the actual concept of a nation state.

Or maybe, “my kids can’t have grandkids, so I’ll just adopt myself some.” The reasonable question you have to ask isn’t “how do I adopt more grandkids?” It’s “Why can’t MY kids have their own kids?”

They are having their own kids. What the hell are you even talking about?

Population is growing, but the growth rate has been falling for a long time.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/popu...

There’s plenty of growth, it just isn’t going to the people who work for a living, even if they’re highly educated, highly skilled, and working long hours.

Back in the day on would get into the top 1% by getting a good degree and working hard. And getting a good degree and job was a function of who and where you were born.

Now that is even more amplified.

Most young people will become rich by inheritance in US.

You’re aware these people dealt with the draft, significantly higher crime, high inflation, 14% mortgage rates and the continuing tide of automation too right? Watch “Falling Down” to see what the silent generation thought of no fault divorce, computerization and the iron curtain falling down (yes, one of the reasons for the title…)

People of my generational cohort have it easy by comparison. The unemployment rate was < 4.5% when I graduated college. SPX (a big chunk of my own retirement) is up 65% in the last four years.

Do people not have any sense of history?!

If it was worse during the great depression we’re having it good? Maybe it’s not that bad yet but it looks like it’s coming fast

The great depression? My man we had 5% GDP growth last quarter after just seeing 15% unemployment 3 years ago. What the actual fuck are you talking about?

I think you're both talking past each other. We have it better now in many ways than our parents and grandparents did. But they had it better in other ways.

The necessities were more affordable then, as were the simplest pleasures. My mother's father was a milk man, and her mother was a gas station clerk. They had 3 kids, a house and 2 horses. But, calling the next town over was exorbitantly expensive, their siblings were drafted, their uncles and aunts had had polio, they couldn't get kiwi fruit or sushi.

My siblings can talk to anyone anywhere in the world real time for free, eat any food they can conceive of for relatively cheap, were never drafted, have an endless stream of stimulating entertainment, can read any book they like at a whim, diseases like measles are a fairy tale. But with 17 years of education and two salaries they can barely afford a house, a basket of groceries for a week costs them a day's labor, they're constantly bombarded with bad news, real or not.

Things are better for us, but the basics were easier for them. Something's not quite right, and we can all feel it, even though the measures all tell us it's better than ever. I think the real problem is that we mostly agree that things will not be better for our grandkids. Increased international tensions and drug resistant disease mean that the two main ways we are better off won't last, and on top of that, the basics are unaffordable.

I'm not even convinced the basics were cheaper or easier then, food spending as a percentage of the median income is near the lowest ever. People just had very few options and didn't know what they didn't have.

You can live the 1960's middle class lifestyle today, it's just considered lower middle to lower class. I think that's great, it means our country is becoming wealthier every year!

> Shit was simply different for the Boomers. Almost every plausible life-path got downgraded a couple notches since then, in terms of quality of life and retirement outcomes. Except now everyone gets a shiny gee-whiz slate in their pocket. Hooray.

My father-in-law didn’t do quite as well but had the same kind of easy mode experience – working as a letter carrier for years was enough to support a stay-at-home wife, kids, house, pension, etc. He upgraded towards the end by moving into being a supervisor and then the IT group - by virtue of having bought a PC in the late 80s, the regional postmaster knew him as one of the most experienced - and retired at 60.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but I feel it’s constantly hard for most people of that generation to understand how much different things are now.

You live on a different planet than me.

None of what you are saying is supportable by any data or statistics.

The boomers had everything worse. When they were born, something like two thirds of them had indoor plumbing. And a third of them did not.

My parents, my grandparents, they grew up the same way everybody else did back then. They worked on a farm from the age of like 5 doing manual labor.

When you are talking about your parents, you are talking about the luckiest people in the country. Nobody got a pension back then. Maybe if you worked for IBM, but that was not the norm.

What you are saying, "every plausible life-path got downgraded a couple notches since then" is completely false. Every plausible life-path has been upgraded since then, the things you are saying just aren't true.

> The boomers had everything worse. When they were born, something like two thirds of them had indoor plumbing. And a third of them did not.

Yeah, I know, I’ve hand-pumped water at the well my dad used growing up. The ‘40s and ‘50s were rough for a lot of families—but their kids basically just had to not constantly fuck up for multiple decades to be on track for at least moderate success.

I think it’s why a lot of that generation (my parents included) assume anyone who’s not doing at least decent is basically not trying at all, or is astonishingly useless. For their relatives who didn’t climb out of poverty with the rest of the wave, that’s mostly true.

(YMMV for minorities over the same time span, of course—racist FHA policy and other measures meant e.g. black folks didn’t get such an easy on-ramp to the postwar-success highway, to put it mildly)

Persistent, generational poverty among very white, rural communities disagrees that success was a given for anyone.

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