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> The affluent and the talented are flooding into superstar cities and tech hubs, creating a vicious competition for space that is pushing out the young, the le

> The affluent and the talented are flooding into superstar cities and tech hubs, creating a vicious competition for space that is pushing out the young, the less advantaged, and those who do not own homes, reinforcing the deepening class divides in our cities. The author managed to jump to this conclusion without actually offering any evidence for the claim, or even entertaining other explanations of the trends seen in the data. Likewise I can claim that millennials are leaving because baby boomers have rigged the housing market in their favour, saddled them with debt by hollowing-out funding for education, placed an undue tax burden on them via property tax controls, and locked-out up to 80% of the rental market in some cities via rent control, which allows older generations to avoid participating in a fair market and massively inflates prices in the remaining 20%. But no, it's talented people's fault, apparently. When the previous generation has kicked away the ladder, why are we surprised that those following them can't climb upwards?

ianai 11y ago
People often fail to get this. Just because you can see a trend in data does not mean a hypothesis is proven. You'd have to have said hypothesis based on some other reasoning/empirics and then go searching for data to test the hypothesis.
- deathhand 11y ago
  'search for data to test the hypothesis'? That's not how science works. The data is given and you test your idea against that. You are not allowed to 'search for data' to prove the hypothesis because that leads to bias errors.
  - JetSetWilly 11y ago
    You should phone up CERN and tell them to call off the search for the higgs boson. Karl Popper may have prescriptively described science as working in one particular fashion, but in the real world it doesn't work that way at all, when you look at what scientists actually do.
    - deathhand 11y ago
      For tangible objects I agree. This thread is originally talking about social issues however. Social issues can be hypothesized in any way because there is such a wide variety of human behavior.
    - guscost 11y ago
      The Higgs is what Popper called a "risky prediction" in his writing. Not seeing a spike (the expected outcome without the theory) would have falsified it, so it qualifies as science. You could say that 125 GeV was one of a few different predictions, but it was still risky to predict a spike somewhere around there. Also the hardcore Popperians will reply that many people who the mainstream considers scientists don't actually do science ;)
  - joncrocks 11y ago
    He may have worded it slightly awkwardly, but the point is that you're looking to predict results, not pluck them from datasets. If you start with data, and then look for patterns you can almost always find them. Whether they are predictive is what you're trying to understand. I would also note that he didn't say 'discard data that disagrees with the hypothesis', which I think is what you're commenting on. This is as you correctly point out dangerous, and not how you science.
  - dllthomas 11y ago
    You conflate the quoted "test the hypothesis" with your "prove the hypothesis".
vacri 11y ago
Out of curiosity, do you think millenials have a better or worse quality of life than the generation before the boomers?
- jahewson 11y ago
  The generation before the boomers ("greatest") had a tough time going through the depression and WWII. But after that their quality of life rose substantially into the 1970s. Since then it's mostly plateaued. It was the greatest generation who turned their back on progressive taxation and properly funding state affairs in the late 1970s - but it has been the boomers who mostly reaped the benefits.
- tracker1 11y ago
  That depends... food is generally abundant, and though less cheap than a few years ago, still far less than before WWI in terms of percentage of income. Technology and the opportunity to learn almost anything has never been better. Beyond that, it comes down to upbringing and lifestyle, of which I kind of feel the millenials have been coddled much more as a general statement that prior generations. This may well mean higher rates of depression, which can greatly affect the perception of quality of life. Both of my grandmothers grew up on farms, and have a very different view of the world than the generations that came after mine (I'm GenX). It's a matter of perspective as much as anything. My only advice to those in their late teens, is if you go to college, make it for something practical and ideally that you enjoy... minimize you debt, and prefer the cheaper route as opposed to what you think might be a better option, with few exceptions after 5 years of graduating, it probably won't matter, but you'll be much happier without a debt you can't declare bankruptcy on that's a multiple of your expected annual salary for your chosen career path. Few people can get by and be successful without college... making it into the top 5-8% of wage earners is the top 1% for people who don't have an education beyond high school. In generations past, many people moved for other chances, and opportunities... I don't see this as all that different really.
- yazaddaruvala 11y ago
  With respect, "quality of life" is extremely vague. On the one hand: - Better hospitals/vaccines/doctors/dentists/optometrists - Fewer wars / more freedom* / better sense of equality* - Cheaper/More effective modes to access knowledge or communicate over distance - Cleaner/Cheaper water, heat, electricity - Robots do increasingly more "mundane" work. Vacuum, drive*, wash dishes, wash clothes - Cheaper, higher quality, entertainment. TV, Movies, Video-Games, Twitch, Youtube On the other hand: - I live in a tiny apartment / Less privacy overall (surveillance included) - I work a lot / had to move cities in order to get an appropriate job (three times now) - Other people can't even get jobs / don't get paid enough to live in small apartments - The environment is in a crappier state - The media is more negative, fear-mongering even. Forcing comedians to tell the news such that the tone balances to neutral Which is objectively better?
logingone 11y ago
The boomers are starting to be ushered along. The next 10 or 20 years might be quite game-changing.
- bagels 11y ago
  What do you mean by 'ushered along'?
  - tracker1 11y ago
    Dying off... Part of why we're going to see a large uptake in the number of celebrity deaths in the next decade or two.
- s_kilk 11y ago
  Boomers: a problem that solves itself, if you wait long enough.
  - stretchwithme 11y ago
    Earth: a problem that solves itself, if you wait long enough.
    - cmdrfred 11y ago
      > Humanity: a problem that solves itself, if you wait long enough. Fixed it for you.
      - ourmandave 11y ago
        Lunch: a problem that gets fixed for you, if you wait in a restaurant long enough.
taneq 11y ago
Wow, are they really trying to declare a dichotomy between "talented" and "young"?
- Swizec 11y ago
  Don't be daft! Millenials can't be talented. Anything worth paying attention to was created before 1989. /s
  - gaius 11y ago
    You're wrong - Taylor Swift was born in 1989.
    - dozzie 11y ago
      Since when is she worth attention?
- pjc50 11y ago
  Only a fraction of young people are "talented". At least 50% of them will be ""below average"", whatever that means.
  - tomp 11y ago
    No, 50% of them will be (at or) below median. The word "average" has multiple meanings, but it's most commonly used to mean "mean", i.e. "arithmetic average". It's perfectly possible for most people to be below the mean (e.g. in a room full of schoolkids and Bill Gates, only one person is above-average wealthy).
    - Sharlin 11y ago
      But this is not a room of schoolkids with one billionaire. It's a large sample of the general population, with the variable being measured known to be roughly normally distributed.
LordKano 11y ago
I have always found it to be extremely annoying when I hear people talk of senior citizens being "On fixed incomes", like I'm only making this much money because I choose not to be rich. There are enough Baby Boomers to dominate politics, compared to so called Gen-X and the Millennials will one day soon be the dominant demographic so for people like me, when we were young, the older people stomped on us and when we're old, the younger people will stomp on us.
- morgante 11y ago
  > I have always found it to be extremely annoying when I hear people talk of senior citizens being "On fixed incomes" It's such a ludicrous statement. Are the rest of us on variable incomes which we can scale up and down at will?
  - brbsix 11y ago
    When I hear senior citizens on fixed incomes, I assume we're talking about people who have left the workforce, permanently. Unlike almost everyone else currently in the workforce, there is absolutely no expectation of any future change in income. In this regard, it does not seem silly at all.
    - sedachv 11y ago
      > Unlike almost everyone else currently in the workforce, there is absolutely no expectation of any future change in income. Social Security is adjusted for inflation: https://www.ssa.gov/news/cola/ https://www.ssa.gov/news/cola/ Likewise bond yields and stock prices will change with inflation/deflation. Any retirement scheme not adjusted for inflation is a rip-off at best and a scam at worst.
      - paulsutter 11y ago
        Matching inflation would be no change in income, which is exactly why they do it.
      - 11y ago
manyxcxi 11y ago
I'm buying a house right now, and while I don't feel it's rigged- it sure is a pain the butt. You realize rent control isn't just about baby boomers, right? Pretty much all the minority advocacy groups fight for more rent control, or at the very least section 8 housing- and I'd like to see a single study showing a city > 100,000 people with 80% of the market locked up in rental control. I have a hard time believing any market would even get to 30%, after all the people with REAL money (the developers/land owners) want nothing to do with it. Also agree with you on getting let down by our parents/grandparents on the education issue. I was born in '82 and had it rough, I can only imagine what a kid born in '92 had to deal with. Edit: I'm moving from Seattle to Portland, so does that mean I'm one of these people they're talking about that has to move out, or one of the assholes moving in? Both?
- bunnymancer 11y ago
  Well Portland is hotter than Seattle right now so you're a privileged asshole..? I dunno.. Enjoy your move and please help keep Portland weird :)
  - manyxcxi 11y ago
    I actually grew up in Portland, in SW- and having been outbid by 10 and 20% on multiple other houses I got to experience the heat from that housing market. For us, we're moving back home. So maybe when I moved to Seattle I was the asshole and now I'm just a movie trope small town dude moving back from the big city to raise the kids. EDIT: I'll add that having grown up there really helped me know what were completely BS/bubble prices on properties. Houses with bids going to $560k where the neighborhood was in the high 200s, low 300s a decade before. Where you know the traffic sucks, the neighborhood isn't anything special, and generally know what the neighborhood is like crime/people wise made it so much easier to just look at a house price and say no without getting caught up in the frenzy.
- predius 11y ago
  San Francisco has just under that– around 73%. https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-San-Francisco-apartments-are-under-rent-control https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-San-Francisco-apart...
robbiemitchell 11y ago
In what cities does rent control lock up 80% of the rental market?
emodendroket 11y ago
Boston, one of the cities mentioned here, has no rent control (thanks to a statewide ballot since city ballots to end it lost; shrewd political play there) so I think we can be pretty confident that is not the cause of our problems in this city.
tn13 11y ago
When I pay around $3K in rent and when I shop at Target or Wallmart I always ask myself where do that cashier live. There is no way she could afford a $3K rent.

ianai 11y ago

People often fail to get this. Just because you can see a trend in data does not mean a hypothesis is proven. You'd have to have said hypothesis based on some other reasoning/empirics and then go searching for data to test the hypothesis.

deathhand 11y ago
'search for data to test the hypothesis'? That's not how science works. The data is given and you test your idea against that. You are not allowed to 'search for data' to prove the hypothesis because that leads to bias errors.
- JetSetWilly 11y ago
  You should phone up CERN and tell them to call off the search for the higgs boson. Karl Popper may have prescriptively described science as working in one particular fashion, but in the real world it doesn't work that way at all, when you look at what scientists actually do.
  - deathhand 11y ago
    For tangible objects I agree. This thread is originally talking about social issues however. Social issues can be hypothesized in any way because there is such a wide variety of human behavior.
  - guscost 11y ago
    The Higgs is what Popper called a "risky prediction" in his writing. Not seeing a spike (the expected outcome without the theory) would have falsified it, so it qualifies as science. You could say that 125 GeV was one of a few different predictions, but it was still risky to predict a spike somewhere around there. Also the hardcore Popperians will reply that many people who the mainstream considers scientists don't actually do science ;)
- joncrocks 11y ago
  He may have worded it slightly awkwardly, but the point is that you're looking to predict results, not pluck them from datasets. If you start with data, and then look for patterns you can almost always find them. Whether they are predictive is what you're trying to understand. I would also note that he didn't say 'discard data that disagrees with the hypothesis', which I think is what you're commenting on. This is as you correctly point out dangerous, and not how you science.
- dllthomas 11y ago
  You conflate the quoted "test the hypothesis" with your "prove the hypothesis".

vacri 11y ago

Out of curiosity, do you think millenials have a better or worse quality of life than the generation before the boomers?

jahewson 11y ago
The generation before the boomers ("greatest") had a tough time going through the depression and WWII. But after that their quality of life rose substantially into the 1970s. Since then it's mostly plateaued. It was the greatest generation who turned their back on progressive taxation and properly funding state affairs in the late 1970s - but it has been the boomers who mostly reaped the benefits.
tracker1 11y ago
That depends... food is generally abundant, and though less cheap than a few years ago, still far less than before WWI in terms of percentage of income. Technology and the opportunity to learn almost anything has never been better. Beyond that, it comes down to upbringing and lifestyle, of which I kind of feel the millenials have been coddled much more as a general statement that prior generations. This may well mean higher rates of depression, which can greatly affect the perception of quality of life. Both of my grandmothers grew up on farms, and have a very different view of the world than the generations that came after mine (I'm GenX). It's a matter of perspective as much as anything. My only advice to those in their late teens, is if you go to college, make it for something practical and ideally that you enjoy... minimize you debt, and prefer the cheaper route as opposed to what you think might be a better option, with few exceptions after 5 years of graduating, it probably won't matter, but you'll be much happier without a debt you can't declare bankruptcy on that's a multiple of your expected annual salary for your chosen career path. Few people can get by and be successful without college... making it into the top 5-8% of wage earners is the top 1% for people who don't have an education beyond high school. In generations past, many people moved for other chances, and opportunities... I don't see this as all that different really.
yazaddaruvala 11y ago
With respect, "quality of life" is extremely vague. On the one hand: - Better hospitals/vaccines/doctors/dentists/optometrists - Fewer wars / more freedom* / better sense of equality* - Cheaper/More effective modes to access knowledge or communicate over distance - Cleaner/Cheaper water, heat, electricity - Robots do increasingly more "mundane" work. Vacuum, drive*, wash dishes, wash clothes - Cheaper, higher quality, entertainment. TV, Movies, Video-Games, Twitch, Youtube On the other hand: - I live in a tiny apartment / Less privacy overall (surveillance included) - I work a lot / had to move cities in order to get an appropriate job (three times now) - Other people can't even get jobs / don't get paid enough to live in small apartments - The environment is in a crappier state - The media is more negative, fear-mongering even. Forcing comedians to tell the news such that the tone balances to neutral Which is objectively better?

logingone 11y ago

The boomers are starting to be ushered along. The next 10 or 20 years might be quite game-changing.

bagels 11y ago
What do you mean by 'ushered along'?
- tracker1 11y ago
  Dying off... Part of why we're going to see a large uptake in the number of celebrity deaths in the next decade or two.
s_kilk 11y ago
Boomers: a problem that solves itself, if you wait long enough.
- stretchwithme 11y ago
  Earth: a problem that solves itself, if you wait long enough.
  - cmdrfred 11y ago
    > Humanity: a problem that solves itself, if you wait long enough. Fixed it for you.
    - ourmandave 11y ago
      Lunch: a problem that gets fixed for you, if you wait in a restaurant long enough.

taneq 11y ago

Wow, are they really trying to declare a dichotomy between "talented" and "young"?

Swizec 11y ago
Don't be daft! Millenials can't be talented. Anything worth paying attention to was created before 1989. /s
- gaius 11y ago
  You're wrong - Taylor Swift was born in 1989.
  - dozzie 11y ago
    Since when is she worth attention?
pjc50 11y ago
Only a fraction of young people are "talented". At least 50% of them will be ""below average"", whatever that means.
- tomp 11y ago
  No, 50% of them will be (at or) below median. The word "average" has multiple meanings, but it's most commonly used to mean "mean", i.e. "arithmetic average". It's perfectly possible for most people to be below the mean (e.g. in a room full of schoolkids and Bill Gates, only one person is above-average wealthy).
  - Sharlin 11y ago
    But this is not a room of schoolkids with one billionaire. It's a large sample of the general population, with the variable being measured known to be roughly normally distributed.

LordKano 11y ago

I have always found it to be extremely annoying when I hear people talk of senior citizens being "On fixed incomes", like I'm only making this much money because I choose not to be rich. There are enough Baby Boomers to dominate politics, compared to so called Gen-X and the Millennials will one day soon be the dominant demographic so for people like me, when we were young, the older people stomped on us and when we're old, the younger people will stomp on us.

morgante 11y ago
> I have always found it to be extremely annoying when I hear people talk of senior citizens being "On fixed incomes" It's such a ludicrous statement. Are the rest of us on variable incomes which we can scale up and down at will?
- brbsix 11y ago
  When I hear senior citizens on fixed incomes, I assume we're talking about people who have left the workforce, permanently. Unlike almost everyone else currently in the workforce, there is absolutely no expectation of any future change in income. In this regard, it does not seem silly at all.
  - sedachv 11y ago
    > Unlike almost everyone else currently in the workforce, there is absolutely no expectation of any future change in income. Social Security is adjusted for inflation: https://www.ssa.gov/news/cola/ https://www.ssa.gov/news/cola/ Likewise bond yields and stock prices will change with inflation/deflation. Any retirement scheme not adjusted for inflation is a rip-off at best and a scam at worst.
    - paulsutter 11y ago
      Matching inflation would be no change in income, which is exactly why they do it.
    - 11y ago

manyxcxi 11y ago

I'm buying a house right now, and while I don't feel it's rigged- it sure is a pain the butt. You realize rent control isn't just about baby boomers, right? Pretty much all the minority advocacy groups fight for more rent control, or at the very least section 8 housing- and I'd like to see a single study showing a city > 100,000 people with 80% of the market locked up in rental control. I have a hard time believing any market would even get to 30%, after all the people with REAL money (the developers/land owners) want nothing to do with it. Also agree with you on getting let down by our parents/grandparents on the education issue. I was born in '82 and had it rough, I can only imagine what a kid born in '92 had to deal with. Edit: I'm moving from Seattle to Portland, so does that mean I'm one of these people they're talking about that has to move out, or one of the assholes moving in? Both?

bunnymancer 11y ago
Well Portland is hotter than Seattle right now so you're a privileged asshole..? I dunno.. Enjoy your move and please help keep Portland weird :)
- manyxcxi 11y ago
  I actually grew up in Portland, in SW- and having been outbid by 10 and 20% on multiple other houses I got to experience the heat from that housing market. For us, we're moving back home. So maybe when I moved to Seattle I was the asshole and now I'm just a movie trope small town dude moving back from the big city to raise the kids. EDIT: I'll add that having grown up there really helped me know what were completely BS/bubble prices on properties. Houses with bids going to $560k where the neighborhood was in the high 200s, low 300s a decade before. Where you know the traffic sucks, the neighborhood isn't anything special, and generally know what the neighborhood is like crime/people wise made it so much easier to just look at a house price and say no without getting caught up in the frenzy.
predius 11y ago
San Francisco has just under that– around 73%. https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-San-Francisco-apartments-are-under-rent-control https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-San-Francisco-apart...

robbiemitchell 11y ago

In what cities does rent control lock up 80% of the rental market?

emodendroket 11y ago

Boston, one of the cities mentioned here, has no rent control (thanks to a statewide ballot since city ballots to end it lost; shrewd political play there) so I think we can be pretty confident that is not the cause of our problems in this city.

tn13 11y ago

When I pay around $3K in rent and when I shop at Target or Wallmart I always ask myself where do that cashier live. There is no way she could afford a $3K rent.