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It's not about owning an house, having kids, or a luxury car. Most people just want to work with dignity, a mean to reach their workplace wether by car or a decent public transport, affording to live in a place you can call your home, in which maybe one day you could raise a family if you find a person that shares your view of life. This is not granted at all, for most people this is just not the reality and actually it's getting worse year by year.

The thing is that someone has to clean the toilets, sweep the floors, maintain that public transportation, or have the skills to fix up your car, etc. Dignity means a lot of things to different people. If you live in a society that enables you to work with dignity, it's because there is a lot of undignified labor sustaining it. The things we wish for don't just magically happen. It takes a lot of undignified human labor to get there. Now let's say you automated all undignified labor. Now your competition increased a hundred fold, greatly lowering your odds if finding dignified labor.

And the world churns.

I don't see that a contradictory. A job cleaning toilets or repairing cars can be dignified if you get paid a living wage, have reasonable working conditions, and aren't mistreated by your company.

Ask recent grads what they would think about a janitor position for $55,000 a year (average U.S. living wage). My guess is the percent who would be happy with that? < 1%.

Not everybody goes to University, what example is that one? A lot of people would be happy to take a janitor position if it allowed to live decently, without living in fear for your future.

Um 60% of americans go to college. We cant all have cushy office jobs with 3 hours of real work a day.

Someone has to be the janitor, the checkout clerk, the garbage collector, the factory worker, etc. etc. etc.

I don't have a degree. I'd love a cleaning job I can actually live on. The last one I had worked the shit out of me and paid peanuts. See: the problem.

This is so defeatist. You may need these roles filled, but you can pay much better for them and give them more respect socially. If you automate them, you can implement massive redistributionary schemes to ensure that benefits people. It’s a lack of political will, not possibility.

> but you can pay much better

Yes

> for them and give them more respect socially

How? You can't dictate social behavior.

You can't dictate it, but you can influence it.

Imagine if we teach from primary school student to clean their own classroom and bathroom so that everyone must do at least once every x days/week, it think it would help reconsider how we view this jobs. This is just an example, but I think there are plenty of ways for a government to incentivize desirable behavior (even social).

You're going to get parents with torches and pitchforks if you ask primary students to clean the school bathrooms....

I think any solution to this whole constellation of problems with the economy will have to be extralegal first anyways. Social movements and the like.

It's not much to do with the money. It is just work most people will be unwilling to do.

The number of college graduates who will willingly work in housekeeping or dusty construction sites even for 100K USD a year will be next to zero.

People will not downgrade their quality of life compared to what they grew up with. And you're lying to yourself if you think a construction site is as comfy as the Meta HQ.

In the baby boom generation it was pretty normal to be married, have a (small) house, and a kid or two by 26-30 or so. From the families I know of that era, usually they had a lower end car and probably just one for the family. This seems pretty uncommon for the zoomers I know.

I simply don’t believe this is as hard as everyone makes it out to be. I still think it’s an issue of heightened expectations.

There is a strong belief that everyone should be able to afford a place to live, alone, in some place with a convenient location (downtown or within walking distance of transit), and then after a few years you should be able to buy a house.

When I grew up, I had multiple roommates, and we’d carpool whenever possible. I scrimped and saved pretty hard to get a down payment saved up. By my day’s standards, it wasn’t crazy to cook 99% of your own food, brew all your coffee at home or the office (hopefully free), get any free food you can possibly convince your employer to give you, and have one TV everyone fights over. My dad made his own “furniture” (until my mom moved in and smacked some sense into him…). My mom grew up sleeping in an hot attic with 3 siblings, because the other 5 siblings took up all available rooms.

I’m not saying life shouldn’t improve each generation, but I think people are expecting it to improve way faster than it actually is.

It doesn't matter how much you cook at home if wages haven't kept up with house prices (in australia anyway) - https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/the-charts-that-show-why...

In the US and probably in Australia at the top of the market. If housing prices crash like they did in 2008/2009, those charts will look a whole lot better.

It would need a very big crash, this is 50 years of price increases - https://www.realestatebusiness.com.au/industry/29004-50-year...

It's the much quoted - boomers pulling up the ladder after them in action. In the oz market new home buyers can't compete with investors that are pushing up prices.

From the peak in 2006 to the lowest point in 2012 the US we saw housing price drops of close to 1/3.

In the areas that rose the most, they dropped 50%.

Based on that article you linked a 50% drop in the hottest markets wouldn’t bring price to income ratios down to 1975 but it would be kinda close.

Especially when you consider house sizes now vs then.

Seems we're talking about different markets - the 2007/2008 crash didn't really change prices here, just slowed growth. There seems no crash in site here. https://creditmediation.com.au/news/2024/10/10/the-rise-and-...

According to that article government stimulus propped up property prices.

Maybe there’s something unique to the Australian market that justifies 30 years of rising prices with no corrections.

Or maybe you’re overdue for a massive bust.

It’s much the same in the US. The 2008 housing crisis contributed massively to our current housing shortage, zoning has gotten tricky, and while wages have grown by 20-30% since the 70s, housing prices have doubled.

The problem, it seems, is the stratification of classes expanding.

Expectations are a factor, but also practicality. Back then you could get a decent job with a high school education or even less. If you had a good job, you could afford a house and a car with one income.

My uncle worked in the GM plant for many years, owned a nice house and a car and a bass boat and is comfortably retired. His wife never worked. I remember my aunt telling us that we shouldn’t get him books for Christmas presents because he couldn’t read very well.

Now to do this you need both parents working. They both need degrees that need paying off, and they need to live in a major metro area, because they both need to have good paying, specialized jobs. In the old days you might move to some little town so the dad could work at some factory, but now the mom has to also find a job in her specialty, so you need to be in a big city to find jobs for both of them within commuting distance.

In this context, everyone is bombarded with social media telling them that they should have fancy cars and houses and vacation in Bali, and they’re stretched to the breaking point and can’t have any kids.

Autoworkers were not the norm. They had the strongest unions in the country, and were able to bargain for wages you couldn't get anywhere else. Their compensation was so good GM and Ford eventually went bankrupt, while Chrysler kind of disappeared.

I remember as a degreed electrical engineer making $35k when the average auto worker was making almost $80k. That's an aberration and could never have continued.

The problem is you had to know someone that worked at GM to get a job at GM.

I had a family friend that was a union boss and after high school he got his son into GM. The family friend though wasn't going to get me in.

It was huge money at the time but it is also why GM stopped being competitive. I think the union boss friend retired at 45 or something completely ridiculous.

Of course he also had the nicest sports car, a huge boat, a huge house for the time.

I very recently did the math and with my CS job (and my wife's salary) in our early 40s (so both full time for at least 15 years) we could about now have bought the kind of house my parents bought when I was a kid - if it were the same price, just adjusted for inflation. But it's three times that adjusted cost. (Not the US, Germany)

Not sure that is a heightened expectation, you're just out of luck if you don't already have a house. And people in their twenties just have it even worse.

Is this one of the most expensive places to live in the nation? As population grows globally, I would expect the most desirable homes to outpace others.

Anyways, I dunno how things work in other nations, and real estate is so different that it can be difficult to compare. For example, there are ways to "rent" a home in Korea for an absolutely massive one-time deposit that you eventually get back. England has 14 trillion box homes slammed together with a quarter inch strip of land in the back yard. Japan has people knocking down their home every single time they buy a new property.

I'm not far out of my 20s, and really, all I did on a SINGLE income was (like I said) scrimp and save. We lived in a cheapo apartment until we could save up for a down payment on a condo. That appreciated (as homes do), and now I have enough for a sizeable down payment on a house.

I also didn't take any special routes of privilege, really. I joined the military as a college dropout, served for 6 years, got experience in a career, then left and got a job in the real world. Much of my saving was done while in the military, because especially when you're new, you pay for nothing. Not food, not housing, not work clothing, not healthcare, etc.

Plus, when compared with median salaries, US housing is shockingly affordable.

The houses they lived in are illegal to build today.

The portion of labor's share of all income has dropped precipitously since the 80's. This is a public policy failure. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA

The median age for first marriage is now 28 and 30 for women and men, respectively. It's generally a bad idea to buy a house if you're single, so a lot of the people who could buy in their 20s, don't.

Baby boomer here. Married at 28, rented until 30, first kid at 31. Lower end cars for the first couple of decades.

But let me talk about my parents. As a baby, my dad lived in a tent. (I believe it was brick walls with a tent roof, but I'm not certain of that.) They moved to an actual house, with an outhouse. (While he was still a child, they got indoor plumbing.)

My parents had their first child when my mom was 30. Before that, they both worked - both of them in tech, too! They rented until they were 39 and 36, when they bought their first house.

We look at the baby boomers and think that where we are now is abnormal. I wonder if instead, where we are now is normal, and the baby boomers were a temporary bit of extraordinarily good times.

Owning a home at 26 wasn’t unusual in the 80s. It is now. The average age of a first time homebuyer in that time has slipped by nearly a decade.

Obvious selection bias… me and most of my peers had homes, spouses (though not necessarily married), and decent cars by our late 20s or early 30s (in the early 00s). Various white collar careers outside DC. It often did take two incomes to make it work, where my parents generation was largely single income.

It feels like that’s less common now.

I bet owning a home was also an actual priority back in the 80s. In fact I bet back in the 80s priorities were fewer and most people focused. Nowadays there are infinite priorities and "must haves" - many of which are way more accessible than saving 50%+ of your income towards a single purchase.

This is an unrealistic by definition.

No it isn't, this used to be the norm.

Unless a person inherits a house, it would take at least 10 years (probably 30) to fully own one.

Most people say 'have a house' in the sense of having owner's title of one, not of having their mortgage fully paid off. You're being ridiculously pedantic while ignoring the fact that it used to be massively easier for people to get socially established on a median kind of salary.

It's been unrealistic for long enough. I was 26 in 2009. I did so happen to own a "luxury" car, but it was $8000 used. I wasn't able to buy a house until I was 36. Part of that was due to moving around, which brought with it different opportunities.

I still can't afford a luxury car. I guess I could finance one but that seems like a serious waste of money. We've got this funny blind spot around cars in general as a status symbol. You can get a fun to drive, older, sports car. If you do a lot of long trips then a larger vehicle might be more comfortable than a luxury model. Not saying anything against them but don't aspire to owning something unless you actually want to be sitting in it.

The luxury car at 26 wasn’t normal at all. The vast majority of people would never have seriously considered a luxury car.

I make many times the median income, I’m married to a doctor, I live in a low cost of living area, and I’ve never owned a luxury car, nor do I intend to.

No, that was never the norm. I'm amazed at the extent to which people are looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses. There were certainly groups of people in particular places that were able to start quickly, but the norm was young couples sharing a single old beater and just squeaking into a house in their late 20s.

This is really like people looking back on the 2020s and saying "It was normal back that to make $250k out of college."

Funny thing is I am in my thirties and both my grandparents, who started as lower middle class to lower class backgrounds had all those things by 26 except maybe the luxury car but one of my grand parents had a bulldozer around the same age. My grandparents house cost $4000 to build in 1956 on two acres of land. It is worth in the neighborhood of $300k today. In their fifties another grandparent had a private airplane and multiple properties and comercial real estate. My parents went to college and got cushy middle class jobs and had houses that they paid off early. My generation has had it harder. But mind you my grandfather on one side grew up in the depression and lived in a rural house without running water or electricity for a time. My feeling is these kind of opportunities for intelligent Americans to build a successful life and enter the upper middle class or upper class are structurally less available today. I think that it has to do with credentialism and inflation of the costs of living and litigiousness and over regulation.

In 1956 you could build a decent house for the price of a year's income. Not that it was paid off in a year. But now to build a house may be 2-3+ years income depending on the size.

There are exceedingly high expectations on the employer side as well. Companies want to do more with very less. Sometimes you can find really under paying job adverts like beginner positions asking people to know front end, back end and everything else under the sun. It is no wonder there are issues like Soham Parekh when everyone wants that 1% engineer.

It is not reasonable to accept this narrative when the jobs report which should be straight up objective has been revised down by several orders of magnitude for more than a couple instances after-the-fact, where even the people who have a decade of direct experience are unable to find work.

What you call unrealistic by definition is realistically necessary in all but the little luxury car part, and its assumed you don't have a fully paid off mortgage either. The fact that its not should scare everyone because what that means is the resources required to produce children aren't available anymore, and that is just another sequential pipeline failure whose results will become evident with time and hysteresis with no solution due to mathematical chaos (non-determinism).

The primary issue is communication is jammed. AI imposes costs on the job seeker as much as the employer that requires labor to the point where matches aren't happening and the Shannon limit has likely been reached resulting in similar system behavior we typically attribute to the label RNA Interference (in cellular networks), but in communication networks.

If you can't notice there is a problem, how can you ever take any action to fix a problem you can't see. This is really disingenuous of the reality.

Career Development is another pipeline, if the first rung is gone, how do you get reinforcements that are competent? You've got a narrow lag period of time before the only candidates left are burnouts and those aging out, and eventually lost knowledge with no one able to do the job.

Nothing into a pipeline, nothing out.

Sorry but the down turn in the job market is real and absolutely worst then people on this website want to realize. most are struggling, juniors especially. The attitude of young people have nothing to do with that.

> The attitude of young people have nothing to do with that.

“Whither are the manly vigour and athletic appearance of our forefathers flown? Can these be their legitimate heirs? Surely, no; a race of effeminate, self-admiring, emaciated fribbles can never have descended in a direct line from the heroes of Potiers and Agincourt…”

Letter in Town and Country magazine republished in Paris Fashion: A Cultural History 1771

I think it might depend on what someone means by "luxury car". An affordable sportscar like a Miata or a Scion FRS doesn't seem all that unreasonable.

The other things (home, family, decent job) certainly don't seem unreasonable if we weren't living in a late stage capitalism dystopia.

Luxury cars have industry definitions and colloquial definitions. Miata’s don’t fit the industry definition, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone call a Miata a luxury car.

The person in the article is most likely talking about a Lexus, Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Volvo, Acura, or Infinity.

Part of the reason Boomers had it so easy was that they weren't all Psychology and English majors. They worked in hospitals, they worked in manufacturing, they worked trades - industries that are all facing labor shortages today because people consider it beneath them.

My boomer dad grew up poor & rural enough he started life with a dirt floor and outhouse, puttered around doing odd & entry-level jobs but nothing that could be called a career until he was 30 (no college, of course), had kids and a divorce and child support before marrying my mom, then finally started entry-level at a railroad and worked his way up. Retired a millionaire, liquid, not counting the paid off house (their houses had all been bought cash since he was 35 or so)

So made or suffered about three “blunders” or catastrophes that’d make life extremely hard now… and his was on easy mode anyway. Five total kids, divorce and tons of expenses, not getting into his career until his 30s, no degree.

We still took a two-week driving or sometimes flying vacation every summer. By the time he was 45 or so our houses were huge and nice. He spent many thousands (when $1,000 was still a lot of money, and not two costco trips…) a year on hobbies.

Retired with more than a million liquid. Despite all that. And a million was still a lot around the year 2000.

It really was different for them. Way, way, way easier.

[edit] oh and my mom quit her federal government job after they got married and never worked a paying job again. That was on one fucking income. A guy with no degree or connections or family money working on the railroad.

Yeah current generations are screwed unless they get lucky or play their cards right or have support from family. In 1950s-1960s America you had to actively try to screw up. I mean you have stories of ex-cons starting over and making a good life while now if you have any kind of record you'd be lucky to get a graveyard shift job stocking shelves at Walmart. In my personal case that is not the problem. I started in 2009 during the last recession and did not get a job in my field. I have a poor work history relative to my capabilities. I have always felt unwanted in the labor force. Fortunately I have had some inheritance and support from family to have a shot at life. It is still mind boggling how structurally stacked against people who get off track or don't start right the system today is versus what it was in the past. In the past companies needed people, they trained people on the job and developed people and career progression was possible for most people. Now there is no long term investment or commitment from either the employee or employer. Employers are looking for people who can builshit customers (because few companies actually make things anymore) or play a regulatory or compliance game. If you're a smart, capable guy or girl without connections or good work history you might as well kiss you hopes of having a professional career in many fields goodbye. The economy just needs people to make enough money to buy things. It is no longer about improving qualitative standards of living. Pensions...goodbye. Long vacations goodbye...unions...what a joke today, just an excuse to skim your paycheck for no protection, job security goodbye.

The reason I think is we outsourced our manufacturing and society simply needs fewer people to produce the output consumers demand.

Also culturally we have given up on employers investing in people for the long term.

Help is not needed and if it is it is not valued because everything is replaceable and successful career people job hop anyway.

You should google things before you say them to make sure they’re true.

What search terms would you suggest?

“Most popular majors” or “majors percentage”. It frustrated me because on this issue the results of a google search completely disagree with the idea students are mostly english or psychology. The most popular major is business.