Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

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Pretty much all of those.

The "older generation" mismanaged the economy for 40 years, and now their children are paying for it.

This is what happens when you base an economy purely off of what equities trade at in two exchanges.

EDIT:

Downvote me all you want, but it's true. I'm 32. I have no debt, a good paying job, no spouse, no kids. I live in the same county my parents did at my age, in a major-ish American metro in the lower Midwest.

I cannot afford the same standard of living they did at my age.

Why? Because of inflation. Why is inflation high? Because we had to print a bunch of money out of nowhere to keep the economy from collapsing during COVID. Why did we have to keep the economy from collapsing during COVID? Because the average American household is living paycheck-to-paycheck and has no emergency savings. They're living paycheck-to-paycheck because the average wage has not kept up with both the costs of living and the value created by labor for the last four decades. The value created by labor went to earnings-per-share on stocks, bonds, and other investment instruments issued by companies. The average person cannot afford to have the returns on such investments factor into their five-to-ten-year financial goals. More and more, they cannot afford to have returns on such investments factor into their 20-30-year financial goals, either.

This shift did not come from nowhere; it came from human behaviors, modalities, and policies. There were people alive and in a majority to make this happen during that period of time.

> I cannot afford the same standard of living they did at my age.

I think you have to carefully define "standard of living", because I doubt your parents had a better cell phone, more reliable car, larger TV, and a more energy-efficient dwelling than you do.

(I also don't know enough about my parent's exact finances to be able to determine if I am "better off now than they were at my age" though I suspect I am.)

I don't think there is a reasonable definition of 'standard of living' that weights phone specs or TV size over access to housing, healthcare, childcare, education.

Technological advances in luxury goods do not make up for outpacing increases in inelastic necessities, even if off set by some abstracted purchasing power parity.

Exactly. I can't pay for the huge expensive necessities in my life, but hey, my cell phone and TV are high-tech so my standard of living is great!

> 32

You didn't have a spouse or kid well before the covid/inflation boogeyman, as did all of your peers.

People forget, finances for Millennials weren't great pre-COVID either. Lots of student debt taken on by a generation who were told they'd be absolutely nothing unless they got, at the very least, a bachelor's degree.

COVID just made things much, much worse.

> they'd be absolutely nothing unless they got, at the very least, a bachelor's degree.

I have long told people what degree you get matters. There are a lot of interesting areas of study that are not valuable in the workplace. If you want your degree to get you a good job - which is the implication of the statement - you need a degree that is valuable. If you can afford to not have a good job (either because you are rich or you already have one) then go ahead and study something interesting to you that the market doesn't value.

I think you’re naive to think that even a hypothetical affluent highly responsible nation of hundreds of millions of people with excess savings in their bank accounts is supposed to magically deal with an unemployment rate of 15% that occurred basically overnight without doing any kind of quantitative easing.

I think the lack of housing supply is still the core culprit and that major reforms need to be made to the US’ approach to building.

It might not have completely negated the need to print off all of that money, but it would have negated a good deal of it. The alternative would have been to have backed the checks with pre-existing money. That would have meant having a sane tax policy and a lack of military adventures in the United States over the last 30 years.

The lack of housing supply happened because some geeked-up bankers 15-20 years ago decided to gamble the nation's economy on its ability to pay for mortgage rates that had gone out of their teaser rates. That destroyed the residential construction industry. We never caught up, because catching up means that the people responsible for the whole mess to begin with would have faced real financial consequences. The fact that building codes and zoning laws are what they are doesn't help, but it all comes back to money, and remember, there's a reason those zoning laws and building codes were there to begin with.

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