Explore how people in the U.S. aged 18 to 34 have changed over four decades
census.socialexplorer.com
census.socialexplorer.com
Granted, maybe some of them are reflective of age-agnostic trends but still! Start in higher debt then make less than ever! As a young person looking at these numbers I realize I am squandering my blessings as a high paid tech worker.
We are setting up our future for failure while claiming we needed to make these sacrifices for today.
And we still haven't managed to engage (politically or otherwise) the folks actually running the government. Things aren't looking good.
:(
Here at Spain (and generally Southern Europe) we've been told over and over again that we have to stay competitive, which is just an euphemism for working more and earning less (i.e. becoming Europe's China).
In a globalized market with a (still) steadily growing population, competition is growing and therefore salaries are shrinking.
It's happening in all industries (e.g. tech firms offshoring) but also at homes. I don't know about the USA but here in Spain housewives love hunting for sales, buying as cheap as they can, and proud about it. Why are they surprised later when their children can't find a decent salary? Buying Perú's asparagus cheaper than in our home country (including transportation across the Atlantic!) is only driving prices lower and lower, which hinders the whole economy in the long term.
And now the USA is going to sign a trade agreement with Europe which will further increase competition and will drive wages even lower than they're now for both parties.
On the other hand, isn't this just leveling the playing field for developing countries? After all, for them to grow, we have to shrink.
EDIT (to elaborate): IMHO economy (like most things) is all about trade-offs. I know the states and bureaucracy are cumbersome, but they offload risk from individuals into society (which isn't always a bad thing).
I respect your views on deregulation (and share them to some extent), but your phrase is really a cliché and does not address my comment (since deregulation is orthogonal to labor competition).
"I know the states and bureaucracy..."
I wasn't referring to states in general, you were talking about Spain, I was responding about Spain. I'm not a ranting libertarian, I'm aware of a state's role in society. Knee jerk pouncing on a cliché that wasn't here.
we've been told over and over again that we have to stay competitive, which is just an euphemism for working more and earning less
How much of that extra work is unnecessary (in Spain)?
Based on above comments I hope you're voting for Podemos.
* if the government gets its act together*
That won't happen spontaneously.
It doesn't appeal to everyone.
Although Podemos isn't trying to market itself as a left-wing party, it indeed is (and everyone knows it). Its leaders had strong political connections with left-wing movements (some of them were political advisors for Chávez) and promote socialist ideas (some of them good, some bad, in my opinion).
Unfortunately a right-wing Podemos is unlikely to succeed due to the traditional conservatism of the right-wing, and the "indignado" market share is already taken by Podemos.
Some far-right parties grew a bit nothing real but for the moment.
As far as I can tell we're not facing this problem alone, but we're pretty young as a democratic society and most of our politicians inherited their position or remained on it under an amnesty after Franco's dictatorship (hence the usage of "caste").
I think (though it's hard to analyze when you're involved in the situation) we're in the middle of a social and generational change. We've got daily news of corruption cases amongst the mainstream parties and people are really fed up. "Podemos" (literally "We can", a left-wing grassroots party) rose as an alternative to that political caste, and most surveys situate them as a heavy contender (if not winner) for the upcoming elections.
Not long ago you'd hear lots of people claim they were not interested in politics, so they were pretty much puppets in the hands of our politician's interests. Nowadays, thanks to the 15M movement and Podemos, there are political debates on Saturday night prime time. Politics are in vogue.
Perhaps that's the government competition you were talking about?
We'll see what happens.
Crony capitalism, though I would call that an explanation, not an excuse. How else would you explain the tax on renewable energy?
I guess it's also incompetence. The traditional model of parties is fundamentally broken, and professional politicians (i.e. influence peddlers) are a plague in our Establishment.
People need the option to leave a system that doesn't work for them, or that system won't see a need for change. The same competitive forces that are so important to capitalism should apply to nation-states as well.
There doesn't seem to be much of a downside to me.
I'm a fan of asking naive questions, so here's one:
If salaries are shrinking everywhere, then where is all the money?
What is happening is that between 1974 and 1994, the generation that was then in power decided to stop paying off their own debts, and started deferring payment to future generations. The effect is similar to being forced to cosign a mortgage before you are even born, then when you turn 18, your parents kick you out of their house and stop making the payments. You then have to pay for two houses, and can probably only live in the worst one.
It's a really nasty thing for your elder generation to do, but all your life, they have taught you that you aren't allowed to murder all of them and sell off the assets they purchased with your labor as collateral. So it becomes somewhat of a tradition for each generation to refinance the debts of the previous with the labor of the next as security. But at some point, a generation realizes that the only way they can afford the same lifestyle as their parents is by having two incomes and fewer children.
"Our" grandparents needed to make the sacrifice back before they died. But they didn't, and now they can't. So I prefer to let their creditors go find them in Hell if they want their money back. I am perfectly willing to be responsible for my own financial decisions, but rolling over the debts of the fathers unto the fourth generation seems more than a little bit unfair.
And that is justified in large part by use of the pronoun "we". I, specifically, am being taxed to pay for the economic benefits enjoyed by entire generations of older people who reaped more than they ever sowed. And my gruel, along with that of younger generations, has become thinner ever since.
I even get angry when my spouse says "we need to do X" and really means "I want you to do X, and expect nothing--even gratitude or acknowledgement--in exchange", so I can't imagine how politicians can so easily get away with doing the same thing to entire nations. What "we" need to be doing is demanding that some specific people be held individually responsible for their own bad behavior.
For Massachusetts:
Lower employment by an entire %4. Lower wages by 4k/year (%10 less!!!), adjusted for inflation. More people living with parents, fewer people living alone (read: piled into group houses with their former college roommates/friends). More people in poverty. More people never married (can't afford a real wedding, or ring). More people with higher education, likely not being put to use. Student loan debt and credit card debt aren't even listed on here as statistics.
The bleakest part is that the damage has mostly already been done to this cohort of people who I am a part of. The low wages now cripple wage growth in the future, which is bound to be bearish for people who aren't already rich. The race to the bottom is a real thing.
Thankfully, many people are starting to refer to our period of time as "late capitalism" for increasingly obvious reasons. Things will have to bottom out and improve at some point.
Take Marriage, for instance. There's a lot that suggests that the newer generations simply put less stead in traditional institutions; not as a sign of wealth. Anecdotally, I was "half engaged" ('we're going to get married eventually, right?' 'yup.') but sans the ring/formality part for nearly a decade before we started settling things down. It just doesn't have the same meaning to us as to my parents, and although I can say my financial future seems a lot less stable than my parents's at my age, despite a _better_ employment position, that's not why I've avoided the ring song and dance.
That turned into a bit of a ramble, but you get my gist, I hope. I think we'd agree that having a broader sampling of metrics (including more hand wavy sociological ones) that might try and explain not only the statistics but whether we should be trying to correlate them at all would be valuable.
You cannot leap to the conclusion that people are not getting married because they cannot afford it. I seriously doubt that is correlated (of course I have no proof either).
It's hard to color outside the lines when your brain is being flooded with chemical compliance, but think about the people who are going to be on psychoactive prescriptions in the first place: people who can afford very expensive and time consuming behavioral healthcare. The subset of people who can afford behavioral healthcare are probably much better off than the people who would resort to crime in an economic downturn.
For better or worse, all these trends have had and will have important societal impacts. Why don't we see more discussions on this sort of thing? Other issues, like who's paying what in taxes, seem less important by comparison.
Note that I'm not making qualitative judgments on the people that fall into different categories. The numbers just jump out to me and I wonder why they aren't discussed more in conversations about who millenials are, what they think, and how they will approach the society, culture, and government.
There are many people who think this is exactly what the source of many of these trends. People have been ignoring "who is paying what" for far too long as the burden gets shifted from the wealthy who benefit disproportionately from our civil society to the middle and working classes.
Meanwhile the security/prison industrial complex and financial sector are essentially unregulated (total regulatory capture).
Language Other than English Spoken at Home was quite surprising for me. I had no idea it was that high.
I don't understand how the employment numbers can be that bad. 35% unemployment - that is mostly impacted by people rearing children and college age folk, I hope.
But yeah, the median income drop and poverty rate increase is pretty sad.
Its the other way around, if the jobs don't change but the number of degrees granted increases, then assuming degree holders cluster at the higher end, building downward would have to result in average salary of a degree holder decreasing over time.
Another interesting statistic is lifetime income. If you have a job that does not require a degree, and spend 10% of your working life earning a degree instead of earning income, your lifetime income will be about 10% lower. Its actually worse because starting wage for a coffee barista or waiter is the same, but presumably toward the end of your career you'll make more at a better job, but a degree holder will have retired for years 36-40 whereas a non-degree holder will continue to earn income for the full 40 years at the higher 36-40 yr rate. You'd see this a lot more in the trades, obviously 4 extra years of union master payscale is worth more than 4 extra years of journeyman.
The stats really are that bad.
Just to mention a few: Monterey Park, 20% whites, 66.9% asians (50% Chinese). Milpitas, 20% whites, 62.2% asians. Cupertino, 30% whites, 63.3% asians (20% Chinese, 20% Indians)
Just been to Monterey Park in LA area two weeks ago, and found I can live there naturally even if I can not speak an English word. At the contrast, I think that city would be a bit harsh for non-Chinese speakers...
More for geographic reasons. The Hispanics that are here for historic reasons (e.g., descendants of Californios) largely speak English.
It's frustrating when I chat with friends who are a few years older than me about this (mid 30s), and they blame all of this on millennials just being lazy. Or stupid, for picking bad degrees. I think the issues are larger and more systemic than that.
Perhaps your friends should listen to this specific podcast regarding 'lazy millenials': http://canadalandshow.com/podcast/geritocracy
I see opprobrium heaped on generations broadly as hugely inaccurate and misplaced.
Likewise, "living with a parent (18-34)"... "Bachelor's degree (18-34)"... Quite the bracket!
If one is in college, it is natural to assume that she or he is not fully employed, has low income, mostly not married, etc.
Bachelor's Degree or Higher, Age 18 to 34 Percent of total population age 18 to 34 years with bachelor's degree or higher
Both my fiancé and I are employed. Most would consider our combined income to be very good. Considering the economic climate we are both doing well.
The problem here, and why I think trends like "never married" and "living at home" are up, is that even though we make a very good wage we still aren't middle class due to student debt. So instead of buying a house we pay over $3k each month on our student debt. Instead of purchasing new cars and a house (thus pumping money back into the economy) we have to pay rent.
The point of this post is that even if you are one of the lucky ones to get a well paying job right out of college you'll most likely have to put off purchases that used to be the norm for middle class.
Every time I hear things like this I call up my mother and thank her for having me earlier than later. Also, I did not like the interface. I'd rather all the data was just <schplat!> there in one map.