Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise
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While I won't deny there are some problems currently, I think people comparing where they start to where others end is a huge mistake and leads to a lot of unnecessary anguish.
Someone in their 60s is supposed to be doing better than someone in their 20s. They had 40+ years to work and save. If they did it right, that will put them in a better position than a 20 year old... just like that 20 years old should be in a better position when they are in their 60s. It would be pretty disheartening if people in their 20s saw that it just gets worse.
PS: also, what's the obsession of young people with home ownership
So it can be done. Even today.
The German equivalent is that everybody is complaining about rising rents in city centers because everybody wants to live in city centers. Home ownership in Germany basically means that you'll have to pay it off for the rest of your life anyway (and that's not a new phenomenon) so in the end there isn't all that much difference to renting finance-wise, except that renting is usually much less hassle.
What the calculation looks like is extremely dependent on local constants, of course. I'm some countries, housing depreciates.
This entire problem more or less resolves to the cost of land. It became effectively super-cheap post-WW2 for the aforementioned reasons. Now we've run out that runway and will face rolling bankruptcies across all sorts of municipalities due to infra maintenance costs.
I think some people in the comments are thinking you are saying they could outright buy a house straight out of school! (Which in a way might be a symptom explained in the article!
(Interestingly the cost of housing in the Bay Area back then - late 1980s - was the same as that Rust Belt city; we almost ended up there.)
You realize that your comment reads like "well, actually things shouldn't be getting better over time"
I, for one, completely disagree.
We now have renewable energy sources for both of these things spinning up faster than ever. It won't be all that long before we can generate a majority of our energy with clean power that doesn't require consuming any non-renewable resources.
No; much more important differences between then and now are the top marginal tax rates and the labor power.
Less than half a million Americans died in WW2. For American demographics, the war was a footnote, unlike the utter devastation it inflicted on Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia, the USSR.
I don't want to get too specific here for privacy reasons, but I believe the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out and getting an apartment right away during/after college. With almost zero real expenses outside my student loans, and the median software engineer salary for the region, I was able to save enough for a down payment after just a couple years. I did this because I disliked the idea of having no equity and paying rent to offset someone else's mortgage instead of saving for my own. My parents really liked that reasoning.
In many respects I'm fundamentally an outlier, yet once I bought mine, my peers with much lower incomes started doing the same after I explained the financials. When they actually sat down and calculated the mortgage payments, they realized it wasn't that bad, as long as they got something on the smaller side, which is still bigger than an apartment anyway.
To be clear, housing costs were crazy and still are. But I sense "crazy" is pretty relative when talking to people online from other countries. Housing in the US is expensive, especially compared to various convenient periods within the last 100 years. But even now, it's not the unrealistic back-breaking dream it seems to be when I talk to Europeans about it, and I suspect that's why so many Americans on social media overestimate the costs.
It was very clever of you to choose to be born to tolerable parents with enough spare cash to let you live with them and save up, rather than jerks or even just poor parents that needed your help as soon as you got a job.
That is 'small' cheat code if parents tolerable. I have multiple peers which got much better life and places to live because lived with parents in their 20s.
It just doing napkin math and even if you live 5 years with parents and doing minimal savings (saving rent and part of food) you already poses good chunk of deposit when comes to buying property.
And plenty of people do. I know people who could live at home rent-free and chose apartments anyway because they wanted independence sooner. That's a legitimate preference, but it's still a tradeoff, and pretending the tradeoff doesn't exist because some people don't get the choice at all helps nobody. "Not everyone can do X" is true of literally every piece of financial advice ever given. It doesn't make X bad advice for the people who can.
Isn't this exactly "spend the youthful years struggling and get to enjoy the fruits when you are older"? ;)
This would be accurate if remuneration were proportionate to how much you struggle, but from my observation of life, it really is not. There's no shortage of people who bust their asses for wages that I wouldn't be getting out of bed for.
I’m the only person in my friend group able to afford a house in the foreseeable future and that’s been because of various strokes of luck (and some hard work of course).
My wife’s situation is the same. We’re all in our 30s.
And we’re talking any house here. Not the ridiculously expensive ones in major cities.
Som have confided in me that this feels hopeless, things keep getting more expensive, money keeps feeling like it’s worth less etc.
The general feeling at this point is past resentment with them. It’s more of accepted hopelessness.
That’s an incredibly new, and probably temporary, phenomenon.
Across the vast majority of space-time the non-working elderly are poorer than their still working children and rely on them.
As late as the Greatest Generation senior discounts weren’t a sick joke.
Currently, the barrier to entry has never been lower, and the access to information has never been better. I don't see either of those things changing any time soon.
Of course, even with that, basic financial literacy with younger generations seems to be at an all time low. The finger pointing on that could go in many directions.
Strongly doubt the xennials will be as rich in twenty five years as 70 year olds are now.
Xennials have benefitted from the same forces that made the boomers rich. They're not young adults.
Xennials were at prime house buying age when houses were really cheap after the 2008 housing crash.
If you bought at exactly the right second of the crash, houses were where they were at the peak of the late 80s bubble.
It's young adults that are getting screwed. Xennials are no longer young adults.
P.S. I bought my first house in 2001 at the age of 28. In hindsight I got super lucky and timed it perfectly. I bought it the month I paid off my student loans, which took me ~4 years of accelerated payments.
1) Not enough young people can contribute to make social security payments to the elderly, across most of the developed world. A typical pension in Belgium is almost comparable to a typical young person’s salary.
2) At a young age, the previous 2–3 generations could afford social mobility levers, i.e. a house and car.
Note that I’m not commenting on the management, investment strategy, returns, or sustainability of social security (point 1).
“Across the vast majority of space-time”, the elderly also somewhat contributed to the tribal/community needs, trained their replacements, cared for grandchildren, and so on. Oh, and everyone was poor, so the range in standard of living was reasonably tight.
That an ungenerous and frankly dismissive reading of the article.
Joe asked his dad for the $15k loan to start a business, not go on vacations. He used his dad's retirement lifestyle as a goal for his future retirement. He used his dad's historical entrepreneurship as his current goal of starting a modest small business. Nobody of sound mind would even think you could live like a retiree on $15k.
Joe's own dad wasn't even as dismissive as you're being. He denied the loan because he considered it a form of coddling his son. There's no evidence in the article he thought his son would use it to attempt to live his retirement lifestyle.
Edit: clarifications
But I also think that attitude is a load of shit.
Early on in the 1980's I went to a community college to get the first couple of years of college out of the way. I sublet a room from a single woman (probably her landlord had no idea) and I rode a 10-speed bike between a pizza restaurant I worked at and the community college (yeah, sucked in the Kansas winter-time).
Later, at a university, I was able to work as a dishwasher at a dorm and pay my way through college.
But there's probably no way my kids can do the same 40 years later.
It would be, to me, a tragedy if our kids only finally "make it" when their parents die and all our assets are cashed in and divided among them. For myself, this would have come at a time when I didn't need the windfall.
I'd rather help them out now as they are trying to climb the ladder to homeowner, etc.
(It sure would have been nice if one of my parents could have forked over the cash to buy me that Macintosh Plus back in 1986. Alas, a student loan I was nervous to apply for did the trick.)
Totally not on his radar: changes in tuition over time, portion of budgets of public colleges that were coming from state funds (his tuition wasn't free but was close), vs changes in median hourly wages over the same period.
Very clearly on his radar: those students were not gonna donate to anyone's campaign regardless of what he said.
This is cultural bias spoken as though it’s universal
Plenty of fulfilling lives out there that don’t include home ownership, being a parent, having secondary schooling or being partnered with offspring.
Plenty of fulfilling lives out there for any conceivable metric, it doesn't mean that the article is incorrect.
For me, home ownership nor children would be part of my “ideal middle-class existence” quite the opposite. I want stable housing, I don’t necessarily want to own it and all the burden that comes with ownership, and I definitely did not and still do not want responsibility over bring a child into the world. Thankfully, my wife agrees.
If we were to even approach a definition it might be something like “Do you have stable housing, access to nutrition, hygiene, transportation, etc. while also having enough capital resources and time to achieve your personal goals?” And that’s going to look different for everyone.
Most people are not well off and anecdotally I also don’t know many happily married couples nor happily married parents.
Directionally, humans want stability before trying to create offspring. This is the whole r/K selection thing. And even though what constitutes stability is going to vary wildly based on culture, expanding the scope to "present & past" is more of an exploration in what constitutes that stability rather than a repudiation of the main point.
Congrats.
When I was a kid I used to think that theives would break through my windows and steal my TV. Now that I'm an adult, I realize I'm being robbed daily through legal channels.
> Half of recent US inflation due to high corporate profits, report finds
2. None of the examples GP listed has anything to do with high corporate profits
You can call these transactions "voluntary", but when a huge percentage of the people in America do not make enough money to save, period, that means that all their income is going to necessities (with "a few small luxuries" also being a necessity for any human being).
Many of the companies making the biggest profits are also the companies that own the highest percentage of their respective markets.
People don't have a choice.
Has nothing to do with "the biggest corporations" reaping "the biggest profits". The largest companies that sell basic needs to Americans make like 10% overall profit.
Cost and necessity of permits for renovations plus re-asessment of property after renovation for tax increase means every path forward is much more expensive than it would have been in decades past.
(I'm not trying to detract from the thrust of your comment though! I'm describing a dynamic of coping rather than sustaining)
I have no desire to deal with gas in my home, and my state exempts homeowner electrical.
I think the bigger issue is that the market doesn't really value renovation much any more - it's quite content with beige and builders' grade! And the low-effort fashions change so often you're never going to win that game on DIY timescales. So it's not so much sweat equity any more, but rather sweat comfort and convenience.
1. corporate consolodation - the only promise of capitalism is that competition lowers prices. Competition is at an all time low.
2. economics and the fallacy of unlimited growth. We live on a finite size planet, and every company is acting as though it expects 10% growth to increase forever. If demand increases and supplies dwindle thats one large prevailing force that would mask as inflation.
The establishment and universities are failing us as they refuse to critically study and address these major conceptual issues.
The only promise of capitalism is that you are allowed to own capital. Competition and prices come from markets, not capitalism.
People have owned property, and worked since the dawn of time, the core original idea in the wealth of nations is that competition lowers prices... thats where the idea of markets come from.
The only real "benefit" come from competition through lower prices, the rest of the factors ie property and labor in a free exchange are the requirements to reach the optimal outcome.
There is another concept, market capitalism, which describes where markets and capitalism come together. That may be what you are thinking of, but that isn't what we are talking about in the discussion. The original comment clearly wrote "capitalism" and not "market capitalism". What was said about markets in that comment holds true even without capitalism, so we have logical confirmation that it wasn't a case of accidentally leaving out "market" in front of "capitalism".
I read a lot on this particular topic and this is a little too narrow of a reading. There is a more dominant trend - women and men are drifting apart culturally faster than they are economically. Men who keep pace culturally can get away with falling behind economically, and, to a lesser degree, vice versa. But you can't fall behind on both and expect to find a lot of women interested in dating or marrying you.
All three are dangerous partners to have. Simple rationality implies avoiding them.
If kids flock to Andrew Tate, the problem are not the kids, nor their gender, but society as a whole must have fucked up enormously and failed 50% of the human population.
Generalising comments like yours ruin lives and you should feel ashamed about it. Sadly, you can find them on the front page of any left-of-centre newspaper.
But when there is sexual avuse or rape scandal, conservatives effectively argue that rape is normal and real victim is the rapist. They are the ones who push them towards Tate, by making his argument.
It is all older generation who see raping as positive thing for hard profile position. Who enabled and helped abusers for decades. Young just learned from them.
https://xcancel.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1750849189834022932
South Korea seems like a bit of an outlier, in the other countries it’s the women who are strongly moving left while the men show a weaker drift towards the right. So it doesn’t seem accurate to frame the divergence as men becoming far-right fascists. Would you take offence if I said women are becoming Stalinist communists? Neither framing seems accurate to me.
What I think is happening is that women are broadly swayed by social issues and men are more likely to be against mass immigration and focus more attention on the economy. At least that seems to be the case in my country (which isn’t on the graph). A small minority of men buy into the Tate far-right manosphere but I don’t think that’s responsible for the entirety of the shift, let alone the entirety of the shift on the men’s side.
Do you have a citation for this?
A lot of studies find evidence of the need for men to have a suitable income to be marriageable. I haven't seen evidence that just being culturally aligned is equally effective.
Fwiw I am 5'8" with an average face and I've had sex with over 40 women, none from clubs or bars, and am married. So I am doing something right. And it's been my wide experience that you really want to be a traditionally masculine guy. I have no social media and I engage in no modern cultural trends, music, media etc. Whatever mainstream culture is trying to do to men, drift away from that at top speed.
And yes I am right wing, and no the leftist women in Seattle did not actually care. They just say they care to signal something. So that aspect of cultural drift is also not really a problem.
College educated women marry at the same rate they used to. They marry similarly earning men without collage degrees, who exist.
Marriage rates collapsed among non educated women/men. Complete collapse is among previously incarcerated men who are largely out of marriage market. And generally among poor.
But like, college educates women are the demographic that do marry.
What seems to happen is that if the marriage does not work, they tend to ve at the loosing side of it and have real option to leave.
They’ve got it better than I did at their age.
Maybe it’s worse elsewhere.
Excellent explanation of why, despite the hollowed out middle class, we see a surge of developer housing marketed to those who wish to retain the pretense of class status.
> It’s not that I can’t afford to help him,” Steve told me. “I just have a real problem with handouts. And I want him to have the satisfaction of knowing he’s built something himself, with his own hard work. That’s how I was raised, too.
So it has nothing to with the son, Steve is just looking to validate his world view. The reality of the situation is that the boomer generation was provided with an immense amount of social assistance, affordability, and opportunity. Yet these are the same benefits they deny even their own children in favor of sadistic fantasies.
their logic was that theyd given my sisters tens of thousands of dollars over the years and my sisters remained dependent, but ive been financially independent since college. they never gave me money and id never asked
according to them: they perceived they had made me tougher when reality is that i simply never asked for money when my sisters did, because i assumed that would mean if i ever asked they would respect the request
fucked me up to the point where they noticed how annoyed i was and have offered money since, when i didnt need it, and ive pretty much made a point i hope theyre buried with it
“The cheap and effective Catholic school system of old has largely collapsed due to the dearth of nuns“
I am over 60 and can assure you that the older women who taught me in public school would be federal judges and high class lawyers today. The system will be righted when schoolteachers get the pay and respect of eg federal judge and not a moment before.
Quality has deteriorated because we aren’t willing to pay for what we used to get for free.
https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/?speaker=johann-kurtz
"Johann Kurtz is a legacy adviser and succession strategist, helping individuals and families to arrange their affairs towards lasting good. He is a Substack bestseller, and his blog Becoming Noble – on philosophy, theology, and history – is read by tens of thousands each week. He recently published a book titled Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity & Thousand-Year Families which reveals that true charity is a multi-generational project—and that virtuous family dynasties are its indispensable guardians. It equips leaders to embrace this sacred duty and forge a legacy they will be forever proud of."
Here is the substack, Becoming Noble:
https://becomingnoble.substack.com/
"Build family, resources, and security as the West declines. Get the weekly email to join the new elite." and "Our old ways have been forgotten. Subscribe to learn them again."
* * * *
> For example: an American family in 1975 could send their children to public school on the assumption that the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families, communities like their own, and would speak English as a first language.
I've read about family decline going back decades, maybe forever. I strongly doubt the first language of children affects other kids' educations - except maybe exposing other kids to new languages and perspectives. Kurtz includes no specific claim about and no basis for the state of these issues or their impacts. It's all just implied, a dog whistle: Who are these other people?
> My argument is that previous generations received an enormous stock of social capital: trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam and adults could be relied upon
In the latter, I think a lot of those things would be news to prior generations, and of course you can read people in any generation in history decrying current failure of morals (which I think means, it's not like the idealistic views I formed in my childhood).
And he even cites fictional, rose-colored nostalgia as evidence (quoting Scott Alexander):
> The childhood depicted in nostalgic media rested on a dense web of adults who knew each other, shared a rough moral sense, and could be relied upon to mind each other’s children. That web is now a feature of particular places (often expensive places) rather than a general inheritance, and discerning which places have kept it is of key importance for families hoping to raise agentic children with deep networks of trusted friends.
And there are things that rest on speculation:
> The socializing that happened in parks, neighborhoods, boy scouts, etc. now must happen in the private domain.
Why? I see plenty of kids in parks and neighborhoods, in all sorts of neighborhoods in cities. It also ignores where much childhood socialising takes place now: Online.
And he also seems to verge into incel territory, again without saying the quiet part out loud:
> Women now substantially outnumber men on university campuses and outpace them in degrees earned, yet the preference for husbands who match or exceed a wife’s income and education has not correspondingly relaxed. ... For a regular man, this implies that becoming marriageable now requires clearing exceptional bars: a degree (with the debt that comes attached) and an income well above the male median (also — 6ft, muscular physique, etc. etc.).
I read: those women ruining everything by getting educations and careers, and declining to do free menial labor for men!
> Move the at-home spouse into the labor market and every service she provided must be repurchased from the latest private equity roll-up (nursery, takeaway, cleaner, security system…).
Second and more fundamentally, most people know neoliberalism fucked us. Like, not just that we're at the end of a typical cycle, but that what predated it was better. That's why the middle is falling out of western politics and populism is rising: voters are bitter, angry, and looking for the next thing. It turns out you can't turn everything--romance, friendships, caring for children, education, health care, free time--into a (preferably unregulated) market and still have a functioning society.
Third, we have to ban social media, and here I mean any communications platform where you can farm engagement and virality (Reddit is social media because there's a feed and engagement metrics; Usenet and forums are not). This seems like a wildly hot take, but the truth is we should ban video news; only banning social media is a huge concession.
Fourth and finally, don't fall into the "make America great again" trap. Pick a decade and I'll point out some insane awfulness: Jim Crow, marital rape wasn't a concept until the 80s, homophobia, OPEC, Vietnam, the Cold War, unbelievable pollution, smoking literally fuckin everywhere, etc etc. Going back isn't an option.
It's hard, but we can do hard things. I actually think we're in a really exciting time. We've never had more resources, we've never been better at making decisions (honestly just read about Robert McNamara), and we're newly unburdened by a prevailing orthodoxy. If we do it right, the next era could be really incredible.
It was hard to take the rest of the article seriously after reading this.
In 1975, the single motherhood rate was 15%. In 2015, it was 40%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_parents_in_the_United_S...
"communities like their own,"
In 1970, the US was 83.5% non-Hispanic White. In 2020 it was 57.8%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
"and would speak English as a first language"
In 1980, Spanish speakers were 5% of the US. In 2024, it was 13.9%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States...
So the claims are factual. Do you just object to pointing it out?
(And the amount of parents which are interested in their children attending private schools vs those who have access to and can afford them is an entirely different discussion.)
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_205.10.a...
Has religiosity actually decreased? Christianity certainly has, maybe even all god-based religions, but the religion of formal education seems to have fully picked up the slack. There are a shocking number of people who believe that you will be stricken to the hell of flipping burgers at McDonalds if you don't praise the institution and attend college worship. And it seems likely that anyone who buys into that religion is prone to want to send their kids to private schools given the prevailing ideas about what private school offers.
> And the amount of parents which are interested in their children attending private schools vs those who have access to and can afford them is an entirely different discussion.
It is, indeed. There is a huge chasm between wants and musts. It would require an entirely different discussion to turn us towards wants. Although it is not clear what purpose that discussion would serve? What were you hoping to add by mentioning this?
This is fair* (and I expect many Christians would agree with you in generalities of "everyone worships something"); what I was getting at here was that (by the first numbers I found) those who regularly attend organized "god-based" worship has dropped by ~1/3 over the past 20 years or so, and so I would expect roughly a corresponding drop in attendance in parochial schools. If the drop is less than that,** that would seem to support the author's hypothesis.
> What were you hoping to add by mentioning this?
Along the same lines as the previous: even if more families aren't able to send their kids to private schools, but desire to do this, the could support two parts of his narrative: (1) decrease in social capital (of which he defines part as, to paraphrase, schools that people trust); and (2) that more essential parts of life (such as education, as opposed to television) are becoming rapidly more expensive.
(Not stating which of his points I agree with, but I think that "private school enrollment is declining" does not necessarily rebut the core of his arguments.)
* Though I think my meaning was clear
** Though of course this becomes more complicated when you look at figures for all private schools
Why's that? Around here the parochial schools are fuller than ever. Not because people have taken a greater interest in the religion — the local data shows the same decline in god-based religious observance that you spoke of — but because they are the schools which have gained a reputation for providing a better education, which strikes a chord with those fearing the fiery hell of the McDonald's grill.
Heck, even if we assume for the sake of discussion that the original claim is the truth and that parents must turn to private schools, why does that preclude parochial schools? On the premise given, if that's where the "desirables" are found that is where the students needs to go, even if one doesn't buy into the religious foundation of the school.
> the could support two parts of his narrative
If it had said that parents want to turn to private schools then you'd have a point, but it says they must. "I cannot afford it" doesn't fly for things you must do. Since it is something they have no choice in now, that they didn't do decades ago, where is it showing up in the data? Another comment indicated that charter school growth is where the data suggests there is a clear growing trend. We could accept the premise that parents actually see those features in charter schools instead, but then that same comment pointed out that charter schools are often the most diverse, which contradicts the original premise.
However, I'll concede its juxtaposition with overall whiteness and Spanish language fluency as additional metrics of population-level success are highly suspect, even if we grant that being a white, English-first speaker may contribute significantly to an individual's success (for reasons which include the unsavory).
Does there being children from single-parent families in the same school as your child lead to your child having significantly worse outcomes?
Recall the context from the article:
>> For example: an American family in 1975 could send their children to public school on the assumption that the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families, communities like their own, and would speak English as a first language. Now, realistically, many parents must turn to private schooling for the same reassurances.
It is listing things about other children that it implies drag down your child and so leads parents to turn to private schooling.
Another comment shows how private school enrollment has held steady or declined since ‘75. However it is true that public school enrollment has partly been eaten away by charter schools. However charter schools are the most diverse as they are most likely to be found in larger cities. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/06/us-public...
So like the op commenter I too found it hard to trust the rest of the article. I’m deeply inclined to agree with the conclusions however such a clearly motivated list of statistics, regardless of truth, as the #2 factor turned me off of the rest of the piece.
The claim was that in 1070 the vast majority of students in a public school were from the same community, and that this is not true now. The data you cite does nothing whatsoever to support (or to refute) that claim.
It just supports the claim that communities today probably have a different makeup than communities in 1970.
Also, in the 1970 I don't believe that most students in a typical public school were from the same community, unless we consider "white people" to be a community. Most people consider themselves to be part of several communities, and identify more strongly with those communities than with a broad racial community.
At my school in the '70s for example even though it was maybe 85+% white most of the white students would more strongly associate with communities based on something other than being white. One big group was the military kids from families stationed at the nearby major air force base. That community was majority white but had a fair number of black kids. Another was the kids from the farms from the vast agricultural areas that surrounded our town. That community was majority white but had a pretty substantial number of hispanic kids (the farms had more hispanics than whites because the farm laborers were mostly hispanic, but a lot of their kids went to the high school in a different town). There was also a Mormon community, which was very white, and a Catholic community which was more mixed.
A white Catholic air force kid would be more likely to identify with an hispanic Catholic aggie kid than with a white Mormon kid, because the Catholic community is probably a bigger part of their identity than the generic white community.
> In 1975, the single motherhood rate was 15%. In 2015, it was 40%
The questionable part of the article was the implication that it matters if your child goes to a school with a higher percentage of single mothers than schools in the '70s had, leading parents to send their kids to private schools to avoid such children.
There is research that children of single mothers have a harder time in school. But does having such children in the same school as your child cause your child to have a harder time?
> In 1980, Spanish speakers were 5% of the US. In 2024, it was 13.9%
This actually suggests the article's claim is wrong. The claim was that a "vast majority" in the '70s spoke English and now that is not the case. But by the most commonly accepted ranges to count as a "vast majority" that would still be vast majority speaking English.