8 ms·

Revealed: the 30-year economic betrayal dragging down Generation Y’s income

109 points by sasvari 11y ago

dpina 11y ago
This appears to be correct based on everyone of my age sharing the same problems, but the article doesn't give any reasons on why it happens. Would be good to get some more information on causes as this is a rather very interesting topic. Any HN readers have good sources?
- Pxtl 11y ago
  Seems obvious - economic turmoil and globalization has ravaged the job market, educational requirements have crept upwards, educational costs have climbed too, and housing prices went skyward. Where a highschool-educated man once could get s factory job and buy a house on that salary, a modern young person gets a part-time job with an expensive degree and uses it to pay off a pile of student debt and while a house is completely out of reach.
  - cmdkeen 11y ago
    Different countries have different problems which the article barely touches though the graph hints at. The UK has a skills shortage, it's vacancy to applicants ratio is back to pre-recession levels despite huge levels of immigration from the EU. London is the 6th largest French city in terms of population, tens of thousands of millennials from Southern and Eastern Europe have migrated to the UK. This is brilliant because they are often well educated (by someone else) and motivated - we have several recently arrived European devs in our office. However at the same time it takes people longer to get into jobs. Since the 90s the concept of a degree being a pre-requisite for professional jobs has been pushed and pushed. I remember at my grammar school it being assumed you were going to university. Combine this with the rise of the "gap year" and people are emerging into the job market years later than they used to, with different expectations about the kind of work they will do. The article (it is the Guardian after all) highlighted a charity sector employee - not a sector you traditionally associate with pay rises keeping up with the commercial sector. I know far too many acquaintances who emerged from university unwilling to work for a profit making enterprise. Many European countries, especially in the south, have completely different issues - huge problems with youth unemployment which is driving emigration. A labour market which has two tiers of employees due to the difficulty of laying off permanent employees causing young people to disproportionately end up on casual contracts. Someone much better placed will no doubt be able to explain the issues in the US and Canada, indeed I'd be unsurprised if there weren't different issues within the US.
    - stuaxo 11y ago
      Hm, not fully convinced about the skills shortage in the UK ? There is a shortage of jobs, which things like workfare don't help with (if there is a job, just employ these people).
      - cmdkeen 11y ago
        The FT tweeted this chart recently - https://twitter.com/ftdata/status/705059490765348864 https://twitter.com/ftdata/status/705059490765348864 It's clearly for the job market overall, there will be variation within sectors. Given over 2 million private sector jobs have been created over the past few years while the public sector has shed jobs I doubt workfare is involved.
      - crdoconnor 11y ago
        There's always a 'skills shortage' for employers who see an opportunity to undercut their current workforce somehow.
        Pxtl 11y ago
        Exactly. I'll believe in a "skills shortage" when competition for employees drives wages up.
    - tomp 11y ago
      I don't believe there's a skill shortage in the UK. Maybe for industries like banking and programming, but in general, it's really hard for a skilled (STEM, except programmer) graduates to get jobs paying more than 30k (in London).
      - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
        Not even programming. CS has one of the worst employment rates of all degrees. Admittedly a lot of arts grads don't get jobs as artists, where most CS grads are only really interested in a programming job. But even so - the skills shortage is somewhat mythical. As you say - the remuneration shortage is more obvious than the skill shortage. Housing costs in London are in the same ballpark as SF, but £40k is considered a generous salary for permanent developers. £60k might be possible for seniors. It isn't unusual to find web dev jobs offering <£20k. Work in the City offers much better pay, but the culture can be pretty horrific for anyone who isn't suited to it.
- lkrubner 11y ago
  The world economy slowed in 1973. No one really knows why. Some books focus on the effects in the USA, some focus elsewhere. In the West this has been "The Great Stagnation" whereas in several countries in Asia this has been "The Great Bounce Back" as formerly wealthy civilizations, such as China, recovered some of the ground they lost in the 1800s. Sad to say, I'm not aware of any books that tell the whole international story. For the USA, there have been an abundance of books and articles showing the decline of the middle class: http://billmoyers.com/2015/01/26/middle-class/ http://billmoyers.com/2015/01/26/middle-class/ Tyler Cowen came up with the phrase Great Stagnation: http://www.amazon.com/Great-Stagnation-America-Low-Hanging-Eventually/dp/0525952713/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1457354526&sr=8-3&keywords=tyler+cowen http://www.amazon.com/Great-Stagnation-America-Low-Hanging-E... Some writers treat this as a political issue: http://www.amazon.com/Boiling-Point-Republicans-Middle-Class-Prosperity/dp/0679404619/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1457354859&sr=8-4&keywords=decline+of+middle+class http://www.amazon.com/Boiling-Point-Republicans-Middle-Class... Some writers focus on long-term factors that have little to do with politics. Robert Gordon got good reviews for his historical analysis of the specialness of the 2nd Industrial Revolution 1860-1940, and why the current era is not as robust: http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Fall-American-Growth/dp/0691147728/ref=pd_rhf_dp_s_cp_1?ie=UTF8&dpID=51N3J9armvL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_SL500_SR92%2C135_&refRID=0TSBYD4ETDER5E9DVG22 http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Fall-American-Growth/dp/06911...
  - steve-benjamins 11y ago
    Thanks. Just bought the Great Stagnation off of your comment.
    - roymurdock 11y ago
      Consider reading this literature review from an MIT professor of 21 different texts that tackle the Great Recession and its causes if you're looking for more info on the subject: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1949908 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1949908 Lo thinks that the Reinhart/Rogoff This Time is Different is among the best-researched texts with the most quantitative support and analysis while still maintaining its readability.
- 9912871 11y ago
  The baby boomers and the hippie generation have sold out technology and thus jobs to overseas countries while holding and controlling real estate themselves. [Disclaimer: somewhat of a hippie myself, but there's a lot of hypocrisy in that area.]
- fucking_tragedy 11y ago
  Profits from labor's vastly increased productivity over the 40 years have been captured almost entirely by employers/owners/shareholders. Nothing ever trickled down. What power we had to recapture the gains you and your parents worked hard for has been whittled away by years of anti-labor legislation and rhetoric. Negotiating for increased wage for the average laborer in a non-unicorn market is difficult. Without union representation, it is a solitary worker with little funds versus firms and industries made up thousands of well-moneyed and well-lawyered people who share the same interest in wanting to make sure you never see more money than they absolutely have to give you. Without solidarity, you can be fired and replaced without repercussions for your employer from your fellow workers, all of whom share the interest in seeing you get paid fairly so that one day they might, too. Globalization has made it easy to avoid pesky things like fair compensation, hours, working conditions, benefits and taxes that we've come to take for granted in the US.
- dnautics 11y ago
  Deficit spending by governments creates a generational obligation wherein the future generations must pay for profligate spending in the past (which they cannot go back in time and vote against). The primary means of paying down this debt is through currency devaluation; note how the person in the article claims her pay raises have at best tracked her cost of living increases. This transfer of wealth across generations also hurts the poor the hardest; if inflation weren't so bad for the poor we wouldn't have to raise the minimum wage periodically. I suggest reading "the great wave: price revolutions and the rhythm of history". I found it to be a surprisingly easy read.
twoodfin 11y ago
As @ModeledBehavior pointed out on Twitter, it's potentially misleading to compare median household income across generations when young people are increasingly delaying marriage.
- IanCal 11y ago
  I expect these figures will use the OECD scale for equivalising (is that the right verb?) the income. Or at least some scale like this. The source dataset certainly seems to: http://www.lisdatacenter.org/data-access/key-figures/inequality-and-poverty/ http://www.lisdatacenter.org/data-access/key-figures/inequal...
  - twoodfin 11y ago
    I don't disagree that it's possible, but I'd like to find documentation. The income inequality analysis you linked to seems to be applying the equivalizing to produce a proxy for individual income. EDIT: Here's more on the datasets the Guardian used: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/07/millennials-how-we-revealed-predicament-generation-y-data http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/07/millennials-how... It does say they used equivalized household income.
- tomp 11y ago
  Hm... IMO, falling median household income is the reason for delaying marriage...
  - dagw 11y ago
    How so? I mean being an unmarried couple isn't cheaper than being a married couple. At least among everybody I know, the reason for delaying marriage is that marriage isn't seen as that important any more, especially before kids show up in the picture. The only argument I could see is that falling median household income is the reason people are delaying having kids, which then makes getting married early less important.
    - 11y ago
andrewclunn 11y ago
So Australia didn't get on the free trade agreement train. Could it be that decreased prices from outsourcing labor helps those who are already established and the poor in foreign countries, but at the expense of unskilled and new workers at home?
forgetsusername 11y ago
I sort of went down the rabbit hole in The Guardian's Generation Y coverage, and ended up in an article with Millennials confessing their greatest fears: “I worry that I’m never going to live up to my own expectations. I live in terror that I will wake up on my 50th birthday in a perfectly ordinary house, with a perfectly ordinary family and unremarkable job – living an unremarkable, ordinary, average life. If these are your biggest fears in life, take a step back to realize what you've got. Entitlement and bizarre expectations about what "life" is are to blame here. Not every one is above average.
- fucking_tragedy 11y ago
  I can find someone out of touch with reality in Generation ___, as well. Those are the fears of someone who has never had to worry about their next meal, a roof over their head, whether they can afford to see a doctor or if their kids will have a better life than they did. There are plenty of people in Generation Y who would recognize that this person has been driven somewhat delusional through boredom and wealth.
- jahnu 11y ago
  Yeah some people do seem to be very entitled. But at the same time this shouldn't preclude a conversation about why, given the massively increased pool of wealth that has been created in the last few decades, the poor and middle classes are expected not to share in it. It's definitely healthy for me to recognise that I as a middle class westerner live better than almost everyone in a developing economy but if the answer to "where has all the new wealth gone?" is not "too the poorest economies!" then I think it's only natural to feel cheated if the answer is "be happy with what you have and stop asking questions!"
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    What specific goods and services do you believe have become available, but not for the poor and middle classes? Can you name a few? It's definitely healthy for me to recognise that I as a middle class westerner live better than almost everyone in a developing economy but if the answer to "where has all the new wealth gone?" is not "too the poorest economies!" Luckily, the answer is "to the poor and middle class". https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/13/this-may-be-the-most-important-chart-for-understanding-politics-today/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/13/this-...
radicalbyte 11y ago
I'm on the edge of this group (1980/1982-wife); living in the UK house prices were rising twice as fast as my wage. If I was just 2-3 years older I could have bought a house for 80k instead of the 250k I had to pay years later (two double-median incomes). This has given my drive I didn't have before: I actively manage my career (next step being starting for myself) and have feeling for investments/planning that I wouldn't have otherwise had.
- forgetsusername 11y ago
  >I'm on the edge of this group (1980/1982-wife) Hey, you're me. >If I was just 2-3 years older I could have bought a house for 80k instead of Yeah, this stuff is frustrating in hindsight. But the economic tide ebbs and flows. It's important to be ready for the next opportunity; it's not always obvious in advance. Personally, I believe ours will come as the Baby Boomers (who haven't saved enough) try to liquidate their McMansions to fund retirement and find no worthy buyers. We just have to stop them from voting themselves legislation to compensate.
  - EliRivers 11y ago
    "We just have to stop them from voting themselves legislation to compensate." It's become clear that the UK government (no matter which of the two parties are in power) will do whatever it takes to allow the young to take on enough debt to fund ever-increasing house prices. I genuinely expect to see some kind of scheme that either explicitly gives these people the money their house "should" be worth, or in some way tilts the field so that they make it up in other ways. On the plus side, my shares in house builders have done really well, and some of them have got so much money they don't know what to do with it; big dividends and occasional special dividend payments ahoy.
  - efaref 11y ago
    > We just have to stop them from voting themselves legislation to compensate. Too late. In the UK at least, the state pension is being increased from ~£110pw to ~£150pw, despite the fact that pension payments are among the government's biggest liability and we're apparently in a time of austerity so severe that we're required to starve disabled people by removing their living allowance unless they submit to humiliating tests. Meanwhile, the chancellor is planning some more pension "reforms" later this month, which is most likely going to involve removing the deferral of tax on pension contributions, i.e. moving all the tax payments that were due to happen in fifty years' time to today. That means the current pensioners will benefit from tax paid on current pension payments as well as tax paid on current pension contribuitions. By the time millennials retire, the deferred payments will have expired, and only the current contributions will remain. Add on to that the massive blackhole that will be the forgiving of student loan debt (which even by the government's own optimisitic predictions, 40% of which will be unpaid over its lifetime - many experts predict this will be higher), and you begin to see exactly how fucked millennials will be come retirement.
crdoconnor 11y ago
Number of mentions of the increases the share of income and wealth taken by the 0.1% / 1%: precisely zero. Incitements to blame grandma for your economic woes in this article: many and varied. Or, as Jay Gould put it: "I can hire one half of the working classes to kill the other".
ordbajsare 11y ago
Generation Y was the first to feel the effects of the fall of the Bretton Woods system and the rise of western democratic socialism.
tyfon 11y ago
Being born in 1980 I think this is the first time I've seen myself included in the group millennials. I have always though of that group as those born after 1990. My age group, at least in Norway, seems to be fully employed and own houses etc.
- dnautics 11y ago
  That's unsurprising. Norway and Sweden have had low headline inflation for the past few decades. Note how the person in the article complains that her cost of living scaled with her promotions and pay raises. Although there was a brief bout of deflation in 2008, one of the primary mechanisms of the generational theft is deficit spending y governments which perpetuates secular inflation and steals from the future to pay the present.
- chanux 11y ago
  I thought millennials are people who were born in 2000s xD
- pcurve 11y ago
  It used to be called Generation Y for a very long time, covering people born from 1980 through mid 90s. The term is more apt for people born after generation y. Then in 2004, couple of researchers coined the term millennials and made up their own segmentation. http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/03/generations3/30ebe0c8d.png http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/03/ge...
- Godel_unicode 11y ago
  I think you might be interested to learn how severely leveraged Norwegian millenials are, and how much their economy depends on oil. Norway is economically a one-trick petroleum economy, and has more in common with Saudi Arabia than with the United States. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-16/scandinavia-s-richest-millennials-might-be-in-trouble http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-16/scandinavi... http://country-facts.findthedata.com/compare/15-179/Saudi-Arabia-vs-Norway http://country-facts.findthedata.com/compare/15-179/Saudi-Ar...
ap22213 11y ago
As a parent of young kids, the future really worries me. Unless there's a new industrial revolution in the next decade, my kids' generation is going to be the first in a very long time that will have a worse life than their parents.
cmdrfred 11y ago
A combination of debt, joblessness, globalisation, demographics and rising house prices* is depressing the incomes and prospects of millions of young people across the developed world, resulting in unprecedented inequality between generations. * The question is if all the other factors are true, how can the prices continue to rise?
- branchless 11y ago
  House prices continue to rise because it's how we print money. Govts want "growth" when this simply means printing more. So they let banks take more of our labour for the same pile of bricks and then tell us things are improving. Of course we can't include house prices in inflation fully because that would short-circuit the soft default.
agentgt 11y ago
I'm 35 and for the most part like many software engineers relatively well off so I'm probably myopic of the full situation but here is what I have noticed differently among peers 5 to 10 years younger than me (that are often developers as well)..... they don't seem to mind not having wealth. When I was college as an intern I opened a Roth IRA and put my earnings into it (I was fortunate to go a relatively cost effective school). I was absolutely afraid I was going to retire with no money. When I got out of college my first goal was to buy a two family or something I could rent and live in. Which I eventually did waiting for the market to tank. I negotiated for raises or position title changes as often as I could. I absolutely was completely focused on provincially building wealth... people of similar age to me were equally concerned. I can't say the same for folks 5-10 years younger (I'm not saying there aren't wealth focused millennials.. I just haven't met many yet). For example one individual I know went to Europe out of college used some parents money for as long as possible and then eventually came back home (the thought of asking my parents for money makes me uncomfortable). I somewhat admire the guts it takes to not worry about the future like that and live life (and this is coming from someone who left a job and started a company).
11thEarlOfMar 11y ago
Wasn't sure at first why the title bugged me. I think it is the word 'betrayal'. Parents want their kids to do well. And what that means is likely evolving over time. But is it a right to do better than your parents? Is it an entitlement? I don't think so. Each generation has issues it needs to solve, and by definition those issues are left to them by prior generations. One generation had to survive the Great Depression. The next, World War II. Then, political upheaval of Vietnam. Then 'stagflation', Internet bubble bursting, mortgage crisis... Each person has their own set of opportunities that are influenced by both personal and national economic circumstances. But it is the personal circumstances that make the difference. More than ever, parents need to teach their kids to be resourceful and adaptable. Competition for jobs is more global than it has ever been. I once jokingly advised my kids to become dentists because that was one job that could not be off-shored. Then this whole robotics thing came along ... What I find interesting are the opportunities for young people in 2016 that prior generations have not seen. First and foremost is the elective jobs that are available: Find something to sell on eBay, borrow your parent's car and drive for Lyft or Uber, build up a stake, rent an apartment and become a hotelier with AirBnb, or buy a car and rent it out through GetAround.com... These are jobs that you can do if you want to do them and can serve both as a place to start now and as a fall back if you find yourself unemployed in the future. I am not saying it is easy. It wasn't easy for any generation.
kfk 11y ago
And yet in Bulgaria you can live very well with $1000 per month. With $2000 you build enough savings in 30 years to leave well another 30 years without working. The thing is, the biggest issue is not lack of jobs, it's mobility. If people could really easily move between countries, they could live much better lives. Of course, to do that we need to have many more remote jobs (hopefully this is coming), kill stupid cultural/political barriers (difficult), stop thinking people should remain in a 20km radius from were they were born. Consider that a lot of this welt they talk about is in real estate. The moment you stop paying 50% of your income in rent, you become automatically richer than your parents.

109 points by sasvari 11y ago

dpina 11y ago

This appears to be correct based on everyone of my age sharing the same problems, but the article doesn't give any reasons on why it happens. Would be good to get some more information on causes as this is a rather very interesting topic. Any HN readers have good sources?

Pxtl 11y ago
Seems obvious - economic turmoil and globalization has ravaged the job market, educational requirements have crept upwards, educational costs have climbed too, and housing prices went skyward. Where a highschool-educated man once could get s factory job and buy a house on that salary, a modern young person gets a part-time job with an expensive degree and uses it to pay off a pile of student debt and while a house is completely out of reach.
- cmdkeen 11y ago
  Different countries have different problems which the article barely touches though the graph hints at. The UK has a skills shortage, it's vacancy to applicants ratio is back to pre-recession levels despite huge levels of immigration from the EU. London is the 6th largest French city in terms of population, tens of thousands of millennials from Southern and Eastern Europe have migrated to the UK. This is brilliant because they are often well educated (by someone else) and motivated - we have several recently arrived European devs in our office. However at the same time it takes people longer to get into jobs. Since the 90s the concept of a degree being a pre-requisite for professional jobs has been pushed and pushed. I remember at my grammar school it being assumed you were going to university. Combine this with the rise of the "gap year" and people are emerging into the job market years later than they used to, with different expectations about the kind of work they will do. The article (it is the Guardian after all) highlighted a charity sector employee - not a sector you traditionally associate with pay rises keeping up with the commercial sector. I know far too many acquaintances who emerged from university unwilling to work for a profit making enterprise. Many European countries, especially in the south, have completely different issues - huge problems with youth unemployment which is driving emigration. A labour market which has two tiers of employees due to the difficulty of laying off permanent employees causing young people to disproportionately end up on casual contracts. Someone much better placed will no doubt be able to explain the issues in the US and Canada, indeed I'd be unsurprised if there weren't different issues within the US.
  - stuaxo 11y ago
    Hm, not fully convinced about the skills shortage in the UK ? There is a shortage of jobs, which things like workfare don't help with (if there is a job, just employ these people).
    - cmdkeen 11y ago
      The FT tweeted this chart recently - https://twitter.com/ftdata/status/705059490765348864 https://twitter.com/ftdata/status/705059490765348864 It's clearly for the job market overall, there will be variation within sectors. Given over 2 million private sector jobs have been created over the past few years while the public sector has shed jobs I doubt workfare is involved.
    - crdoconnor 11y ago
      There's always a 'skills shortage' for employers who see an opportunity to undercut their current workforce somehow.
      - Pxtl 11y ago
        Exactly. I'll believe in a "skills shortage" when competition for employees drives wages up.
  - tomp 11y ago
    I don't believe there's a skill shortage in the UK. Maybe for industries like banking and programming, but in general, it's really hard for a skilled (STEM, except programmer) graduates to get jobs paying more than 30k (in London).
    - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
      Not even programming. CS has one of the worst employment rates of all degrees. Admittedly a lot of arts grads don't get jobs as artists, where most CS grads are only really interested in a programming job. But even so - the skills shortage is somewhat mythical. As you say - the remuneration shortage is more obvious than the skill shortage. Housing costs in London are in the same ballpark as SF, but £40k is considered a generous salary for permanent developers. £60k might be possible for seniors. It isn't unusual to find web dev jobs offering <£20k. Work in the City offers much better pay, but the culture can be pretty horrific for anyone who isn't suited to it.
lkrubner 11y ago
The world economy slowed in 1973. No one really knows why. Some books focus on the effects in the USA, some focus elsewhere. In the West this has been "The Great Stagnation" whereas in several countries in Asia this has been "The Great Bounce Back" as formerly wealthy civilizations, such as China, recovered some of the ground they lost in the 1800s. Sad to say, I'm not aware of any books that tell the whole international story. For the USA, there have been an abundance of books and articles showing the decline of the middle class: http://billmoyers.com/2015/01/26/middle-class/ http://billmoyers.com/2015/01/26/middle-class/ Tyler Cowen came up with the phrase Great Stagnation: http://www.amazon.com/Great-Stagnation-America-Low-Hanging-Eventually/dp/0525952713/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1457354526&sr=8-3&keywords=tyler+cowen http://www.amazon.com/Great-Stagnation-America-Low-Hanging-E... Some writers treat this as a political issue: http://www.amazon.com/Boiling-Point-Republicans-Middle-Class-Prosperity/dp/0679404619/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1457354859&sr=8-4&keywords=decline+of+middle+class http://www.amazon.com/Boiling-Point-Republicans-Middle-Class... Some writers focus on long-term factors that have little to do with politics. Robert Gordon got good reviews for his historical analysis of the specialness of the 2nd Industrial Revolution 1860-1940, and why the current era is not as robust: http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Fall-American-Growth/dp/0691147728/ref=pd_rhf_dp_s_cp_1?ie=UTF8&dpID=51N3J9armvL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_SL500_SR92%2C135_&refRID=0TSBYD4ETDER5E9DVG22 http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Fall-American-Growth/dp/06911...
- steve-benjamins 11y ago
  Thanks. Just bought the Great Stagnation off of your comment.
  - roymurdock 11y ago
    Consider reading this literature review from an MIT professor of 21 different texts that tackle the Great Recession and its causes if you're looking for more info on the subject: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1949908 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1949908 Lo thinks that the Reinhart/Rogoff This Time is Different is among the best-researched texts with the most quantitative support and analysis while still maintaining its readability.
9912871 11y ago
The baby boomers and the hippie generation have sold out technology and thus jobs to overseas countries while holding and controlling real estate themselves. [Disclaimer: somewhat of a hippie myself, but there's a lot of hypocrisy in that area.]
fucking_tragedy 11y ago
Profits from labor's vastly increased productivity over the 40 years have been captured almost entirely by employers/owners/shareholders. Nothing ever trickled down. What power we had to recapture the gains you and your parents worked hard for has been whittled away by years of anti-labor legislation and rhetoric. Negotiating for increased wage for the average laborer in a non-unicorn market is difficult. Without union representation, it is a solitary worker with little funds versus firms and industries made up thousands of well-moneyed and well-lawyered people who share the same interest in wanting to make sure you never see more money than they absolutely have to give you. Without solidarity, you can be fired and replaced without repercussions for your employer from your fellow workers, all of whom share the interest in seeing you get paid fairly so that one day they might, too. Globalization has made it easy to avoid pesky things like fair compensation, hours, working conditions, benefits and taxes that we've come to take for granted in the US.
dnautics 11y ago
Deficit spending by governments creates a generational obligation wherein the future generations must pay for profligate spending in the past (which they cannot go back in time and vote against). The primary means of paying down this debt is through currency devaluation; note how the person in the article claims her pay raises have at best tracked her cost of living increases. This transfer of wealth across generations also hurts the poor the hardest; if inflation weren't so bad for the poor we wouldn't have to raise the minimum wage periodically. I suggest reading "the great wave: price revolutions and the rhythm of history". I found it to be a surprisingly easy read.

twoodfin 11y ago

As @ModeledBehavior pointed out on Twitter, it's potentially misleading to compare median household income across generations when young people are increasingly delaying marriage.

IanCal 11y ago
I expect these figures will use the OECD scale for equivalising (is that the right verb?) the income. Or at least some scale like this. The source dataset certainly seems to: http://www.lisdatacenter.org/data-access/key-figures/inequality-and-poverty/ http://www.lisdatacenter.org/data-access/key-figures/inequal...
- twoodfin 11y ago
  I don't disagree that it's possible, but I'd like to find documentation. The income inequality analysis you linked to seems to be applying the equivalizing to produce a proxy for individual income. EDIT: Here's more on the datasets the Guardian used: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/07/millennials-how-we-revealed-predicament-generation-y-data http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/07/millennials-how... It does say they used equivalized household income.
tomp 11y ago
Hm... IMO, falling median household income is the reason for delaying marriage...
- dagw 11y ago
  How so? I mean being an unmarried couple isn't cheaper than being a married couple. At least among everybody I know, the reason for delaying marriage is that marriage isn't seen as that important any more, especially before kids show up in the picture. The only argument I could see is that falling median household income is the reason people are delaying having kids, which then makes getting married early less important.
  - 11y ago

andrewclunn 11y ago

So Australia didn't get on the free trade agreement train. Could it be that decreased prices from outsourcing labor helps those who are already established and the poor in foreign countries, but at the expense of unskilled and new workers at home?

forgetsusername 11y ago

I sort of went down the rabbit hole in The Guardian's Generation Y coverage, and ended up in an article with Millennials confessing their greatest fears: “I worry that I’m never going to live up to my own expectations. I live in terror that I will wake up on my 50th birthday in a perfectly ordinary house, with a perfectly ordinary family and unremarkable job – living an unremarkable, ordinary, average life. If these are your biggest fears in life, take a step back to realize what you've got. Entitlement and bizarre expectations about what "life" is are to blame here. Not every one is above average.

fucking_tragedy 11y ago
I can find someone out of touch with reality in Generation ___, as well. Those are the fears of someone who has never had to worry about their next meal, a roof over their head, whether they can afford to see a doctor or if their kids will have a better life than they did. There are plenty of people in Generation Y who would recognize that this person has been driven somewhat delusional through boredom and wealth.
jahnu 11y ago
Yeah some people do seem to be very entitled. But at the same time this shouldn't preclude a conversation about why, given the massively increased pool of wealth that has been created in the last few decades, the poor and middle classes are expected not to share in it. It's definitely healthy for me to recognise that I as a middle class westerner live better than almost everyone in a developing economy but if the answer to "where has all the new wealth gone?" is not "too the poorest economies!" then I think it's only natural to feel cheated if the answer is "be happy with what you have and stop asking questions!"
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  What specific goods and services do you believe have become available, but not for the poor and middle classes? Can you name a few? It's definitely healthy for me to recognise that I as a middle class westerner live better than almost everyone in a developing economy but if the answer to "where has all the new wealth gone?" is not "too the poorest economies!" Luckily, the answer is "to the poor and middle class". https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/13/this-may-be-the-most-important-chart-for-understanding-politics-today/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/13/this-...

radicalbyte 11y ago

I'm on the edge of this group (1980/1982-wife); living in the UK house prices were rising twice as fast as my wage. If I was just 2-3 years older I could have bought a house for 80k instead of the 250k I had to pay years later (two double-median incomes). This has given my drive I didn't have before: I actively manage my career (next step being starting for myself) and have feeling for investments/planning that I wouldn't have otherwise had.

forgetsusername 11y ago
>I'm on the edge of this group (1980/1982-wife) Hey, you're me. >If I was just 2-3 years older I could have bought a house for 80k instead of Yeah, this stuff is frustrating in hindsight. But the economic tide ebbs and flows. It's important to be ready for the next opportunity; it's not always obvious in advance. Personally, I believe ours will come as the Baby Boomers (who haven't saved enough) try to liquidate their McMansions to fund retirement and find no worthy buyers. We just have to stop them from voting themselves legislation to compensate.
- EliRivers 11y ago
  "We just have to stop them from voting themselves legislation to compensate." It's become clear that the UK government (no matter which of the two parties are in power) will do whatever it takes to allow the young to take on enough debt to fund ever-increasing house prices. I genuinely expect to see some kind of scheme that either explicitly gives these people the money their house "should" be worth, or in some way tilts the field so that they make it up in other ways. On the plus side, my shares in house builders have done really well, and some of them have got so much money they don't know what to do with it; big dividends and occasional special dividend payments ahoy.
- efaref 11y ago
  > We just have to stop them from voting themselves legislation to compensate. Too late. In the UK at least, the state pension is being increased from ~£110pw to ~£150pw, despite the fact that pension payments are among the government's biggest liability and we're apparently in a time of austerity so severe that we're required to starve disabled people by removing their living allowance unless they submit to humiliating tests. Meanwhile, the chancellor is planning some more pension "reforms" later this month, which is most likely going to involve removing the deferral of tax on pension contributions, i.e. moving all the tax payments that were due to happen in fifty years' time to today. That means the current pensioners will benefit from tax paid on current pension payments as well as tax paid on current pension contribuitions. By the time millennials retire, the deferred payments will have expired, and only the current contributions will remain. Add on to that the massive blackhole that will be the forgiving of student loan debt (which even by the government's own optimisitic predictions, 40% of which will be unpaid over its lifetime - many experts predict this will be higher), and you begin to see exactly how fucked millennials will be come retirement.

crdoconnor 11y ago

Number of mentions of the increases the share of income and wealth taken by the 0.1% / 1%: precisely zero. Incitements to blame grandma for your economic woes in this article: many and varied. Or, as Jay Gould put it: "I can hire one half of the working classes to kill the other".

ordbajsare 11y ago

Generation Y was the first to feel the effects of the fall of the Bretton Woods system and the rise of western democratic socialism.

tyfon 11y ago

Being born in 1980 I think this is the first time I've seen myself included in the group millennials. I have always though of that group as those born after 1990. My age group, at least in Norway, seems to be fully employed and own houses etc.

dnautics 11y ago
That's unsurprising. Norway and Sweden have had low headline inflation for the past few decades. Note how the person in the article complains that her cost of living scaled with her promotions and pay raises. Although there was a brief bout of deflation in 2008, one of the primary mechanisms of the generational theft is deficit spending y governments which perpetuates secular inflation and steals from the future to pay the present.
chanux 11y ago
I thought millennials are people who were born in 2000s xD
pcurve 11y ago
It used to be called Generation Y for a very long time, covering people born from 1980 through mid 90s. The term is more apt for people born after generation y. Then in 2004, couple of researchers coined the term millennials and made up their own segmentation. http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/03/generations3/30ebe0c8d.png http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/03/ge...
Godel_unicode 11y ago
I think you might be interested to learn how severely leveraged Norwegian millenials are, and how much their economy depends on oil. Norway is economically a one-trick petroleum economy, and has more in common with Saudi Arabia than with the United States. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-16/scandinavia-s-richest-millennials-might-be-in-trouble http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-16/scandinavi... http://country-facts.findthedata.com/compare/15-179/Saudi-Arabia-vs-Norway http://country-facts.findthedata.com/compare/15-179/Saudi-Ar...

ap22213 11y ago

As a parent of young kids, the future really worries me. Unless there's a new industrial revolution in the next decade, my kids' generation is going to be the first in a very long time that will have a worse life than their parents.

cmdrfred 11y ago

A combination of debt, joblessness, globalisation, demographics and rising house prices* is depressing the incomes and prospects of millions of young people across the developed world, resulting in unprecedented inequality between generations. * The question is if all the other factors are true, how can the prices continue to rise?

branchless 11y ago
House prices continue to rise because it's how we print money. Govts want "growth" when this simply means printing more. So they let banks take more of our labour for the same pile of bricks and then tell us things are improving. Of course we can't include house prices in inflation fully because that would short-circuit the soft default.

agentgt 11y ago

I'm 35 and for the most part like many software engineers relatively well off so I'm probably myopic of the full situation but here is what I have noticed differently among peers 5 to 10 years younger than me (that are often developers as well)..... they don't seem to mind not having wealth. When I was college as an intern I opened a Roth IRA and put my earnings into it (I was fortunate to go a relatively cost effective school). I was absolutely afraid I was going to retire with no money. When I got out of college my first goal was to buy a two family or something I could rent and live in. Which I eventually did waiting for the market to tank. I negotiated for raises or position title changes as often as I could. I absolutely was completely focused on provincially building wealth... people of similar age to me were equally concerned. I can't say the same for folks 5-10 years younger (I'm not saying there aren't wealth focused millennials.. I just haven't met many yet). For example one individual I know went to Europe out of college used some parents money for as long as possible and then eventually came back home (the thought of asking my parents for money makes me uncomfortable). I somewhat admire the guts it takes to not worry about the future like that and live life (and this is coming from someone who left a job and started a company).

11thEarlOfMar 11y ago

Wasn't sure at first why the title bugged me. I think it is the word 'betrayal'. Parents want their kids to do well. And what that means is likely evolving over time. But is it a right to do better than your parents? Is it an entitlement? I don't think so. Each generation has issues it needs to solve, and by definition those issues are left to them by prior generations. One generation had to survive the Great Depression. The next, World War II. Then, political upheaval of Vietnam. Then 'stagflation', Internet bubble bursting, mortgage crisis... Each person has their own set of opportunities that are influenced by both personal and national economic circumstances. But it is the personal circumstances that make the difference. More than ever, parents need to teach their kids to be resourceful and adaptable. Competition for jobs is more global than it has ever been. I once jokingly advised my kids to become dentists because that was one job that could not be off-shored. Then this whole robotics thing came along ... What I find interesting are the opportunities for young people in 2016 that prior generations have not seen. First and foremost is the elective jobs that are available: Find something to sell on eBay, borrow your parent's car and drive for Lyft or Uber, build up a stake, rent an apartment and become a hotelier with AirBnb, or buy a car and rent it out through GetAround.com... These are jobs that you can do if you want to do them and can serve both as a place to start now and as a fall back if you find yourself unemployed in the future. I am not saying it is easy. It wasn't easy for any generation.

kfk 11y ago

And yet in Bulgaria you can live very well with $1000 per month. With $2000 you build enough savings in 30 years to leave well another 30 years without working. The thing is, the biggest issue is not lack of jobs, it's mobility. If people could really easily move between countries, they could live much better lives. Of course, to do that we need to have many more remote jobs (hopefully this is coming), kill stupid cultural/political barriers (difficult), stop thinking people should remain in a 20km radius from were they were born. Consider that a lot of this welt they talk about is in real estate. The moment you stop paying 50% of your income in rent, you become automatically richer than your parents.