7 ms·

Yes, but if the current young generation of americans is poorer than the preceding generations (a conclusion I think is inescapable at this point), then it is w

Yes, but if the current young generation of americans is poorer than the preceding generations (a conclusion I think is inescapable at this point), then it is worthwhile considering why. The world is certainly richer than it was in the 80s. We are vastly more efficient at producing all sorts of goods. So, then, why is the current generation of Americans unable to afford what was available to the middle class previously? I believe that the answers to this crucial question are obscure and are unlikely to be found in conventional economic and political analysis.

taurath 10y ago
The wealth is somewhere. I know quite a few millennial friends who will be rich when their parents die, and quite a few who will have nothing.
- ljf 10y ago
  Think they will be rich... Wait until the health care and other end of life costs start to add up. Even here in the UK they can be high, if you end up spending time in a 'home' that can quickly eat through savings. So unless there are amazing full life health care and other insurance policies covering these guys then there is ever chance that all that money could go.
  - taurath 10y ago
    Then the health care business owners will be rich, and then the health care business owners children!
  - branchless 10y ago
    This. The entire point of the establishment convincing people to hand over large chunks of their labour for fiat currency is because they are giving you peanuts. You can't cash it in! All these houses "worth" $1MM - who is going to buy them? Demographics are shifting as the boomers die off.
- branchless 10y ago
  The new american dream: forget working, are your parents in real estate or not?
hayksaakian 10y ago
Instead of paying a mortgage, they pay student loans. I think it's that simple.
- mac01021 10y ago
  The article points out that college-educated millennials are less likely to live with their parents than millennials who have not been to college.
- awesomerobot 10y ago
  For a while my student loans were more than my mortgage.
  - tobltobs 10y ago
    Coming from a country where education is free and renting (was) normal it sounds crazy to make so much debt. The 'crazy' is not meant offensive, more like interesting.
qsymmachus 10y ago
> I believe that the answers to this crucial question are obscure and are unlikely to be found in conventional economic and political analysis. It's pretty straightforward actually. The change you're looking for starts in the 80s: http://eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2015/05/Piketty-Graph.png http://eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/...
- carsongross 10y ago
  That's what, it is not why.
  - forthefuture 10y ago
    Why is even easier. Rich people want more money and have better means of getting it.
    - carsongross 10y ago
      Easier? Hmmm. I wonder why rich people before 1980 wanted less money and had worse means of getting it.
      - dota_fanatic 10y ago
        > and had worse means of getting it. Easy. It was harder and less acceptable to use international labor then, there were that many fewer college educated people, and that's 36 years behind the current level of automation technology.
        c0nducktr 10y ago
        Additionally, declining union membership means current workers have less ability to bargain for better wages.
        __jal 10y ago
exstudent2 10y ago
The US was the only major industrial nation not to be completely devastated in WWI and WWII. They/we benefitted from this enormously throughout the 20th century. It was only a matter of time before things normalized.
- carsongross 10y ago
  Are you sure that that is correct? Do you believe in the Ricardian argument for free trade? If so, why did we not become richer as other countries became better trading partners?
  - exstudent2 10y ago
    I don't think we have free trade (although I would certainly support it!). I think we probably are richer than we were pre-war. We're just not at the peak we were after the war when we had a monopoly on success. We also profited greatly supplying the wars. We haven't had a "market" like that since then. The US was mostly its own customer during the cold war.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    What other major industrial nation was not devastated during either World War? (I guess you can say "Canada" but I'm not sure how "major" or "industrial" they would have been in WWI).
    - carsongross 10y ago
      You are assuming the conclusion. My question is: the standard Ricardian argument for international free trade assumes that as trading partners become more productive, all trading partners benefit. Do you think this is the case? Certainly the original post does, as confirmed in his response. If that is so, why would other countries becoming better at making things make us poorer?
      - Camillo 10y ago
        It may have made America as a whole wealthier, but destroyed the working class.
joe_the_user 10y ago
Even more, Young Americans are living with their parents instead of saving money rather than living with their parents to save money. What happens when they have children? Where will their adult children live? In their parents tiny 2 room apartments? Basically, the full effects of the declining net income of adult Americans is being masked by people living off the accumulated wealth of their parents (both consuming their houses and getting hand-outs). Which implies that there's cliff that the American lifestyle will fall off at some point and then things will be ugly even in comparison to now.
- mac01021 10y ago
  I think three-generation households have been somewhat common throughout most of history, even in the USA (although admittedly probably not in the sort of high-rise apartment buildings where many people live now).
  - joe_the_user 10y ago
    It does really matter how many generations one crams together, eventually net income has to pay for lodgings consumed.
  - flubert 10y ago
    >high-rise apartment buildings where many people live now Does anyone have a break down of what percentage of people live in single-family homes, vs. an apartment/other?
- hiram112 10y ago
  The younger generation is simply not having children at the high rate of previous generations. Anecodotally, most of my mid 30's friends have either 0 or 1 child, a few that got started earlier have two. On the other hand, the millions of legal and illegal immigrants, especially from Latin America, are keeping the birth rate up. They do, in fact, many times live in much more crowded conditions. I have met a few Hispanic immigrants in my area as I speak Spanish, and in each case, they lived in single family homes with multiple families / generations.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mac01021 10y ago
> (a conclusion I think is inescapable at this point) It's not obvious to me. Possibly only because I'm uninformed, though, so feel free to point me at any relevant data. There are a variety of trends which could be happening and which might explain this particular cohabitation-with-one's-parents phenomenon without having to mean that the current young generation has less wealth than its predecessors.
jimrandomh 10y ago
It's caused by corruption in local governments. Not enough housing is being built; this means that prices rise until enough people are living with their parents or with enough roommates to cover the shortfall. The reason not enough housing is being built is because local governments are preventing it, using zoning. If the restrictions were loosened, rents would fall. If the restrictions were eliminated entirely, they'd fall precipitously.
- zanny 10y ago
  Its a bit outdated, but the numbers have not radically changed[1] - around 10% of all housing is unoccupied in the US. Sure, its a huge place, and I can imagine few people want to live in Nowhere Nebraska, but that does not change the reality that we have some ~6x more unoccupied houses than homeless, and the vast majority of new construction is the same old unsustainable unaffordable suburban sprawl we have had run rampant with McMansions in this country for the past twenty years. [1]http://www.realtytrac.com/content/news-and-opinion/americas-142-million-vacant-homes-a-national-crisis-7723 http://www.realtytrac.com/content/news-and-opinion/americas-... What we need is not the creation of new houses, but new cities, or the dramatic rebuilding of the old ones. We need high density urban environments with low cost of living built around foot and public transit, no cars, and with mixed use building again, without the zoning hell that currently cripples growth in almost every corner of the US today.
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    "We need high density urban environments " Who is "we"? Actual, real-world people vote against high-density urban environments with their feet, and pretty much always have. It's just that in past ages it was only the rich who could afford a country home. That's changed, thanks largely to modern transportation making it possible to work in the city and live in the burbs.
    - zanny 10y ago
      "We" is society at large. And half the point of this article is that "young Americans" cannot afford those country homes with long commutes, and thus still live with their parents. For the current upcoming generation, they do not have the means to afford those homes either. If you want to house them independently they need denser Urban living since modern transportation in the form of personal automobiles is also incredibly expensive.
runT1ME 10y ago
>I believe that the answers to this crucial question are obscure and are unlikely to be found in conventional economic and political analysis. I'm astounded by this comment. Are you saying that the obvious answers of asset based inflation caused by our monetary policy does not majorly impact real estate in a way that hurts younger generations and the middle class? I can't see how. It's basic math. If assets rise in price and two people are leveraged into assets the same amount, who gets richer, the person with a 100k asset or the person with a 500k asset?
- carsongross 10y ago
  I think you are on to the truth of the matter, but I don't think "asset based inflation" is the conventional wisdom. I very much view this as an intergenerational financial war, the Boomers (and Greatest) on the Millennials and X.
  - UncleOxidant 10y ago
    It is a generational wealth transfer. But when boomers die, they're generally leaving that wealth to millenials, aren't they? Except that the boomers also have a lot of debt.
    - carsongross 10y ago
      That would depend very much on how the wealth is consumed I would guess. If it is used to finance vacations to Mexico and throw away imported consumer goods, that wealth will be lost. If it was used to build nice cities and finance great art, it would be preserved.
      - UncleOxidant 10y ago
        Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it was used to build nice cities and finance great art.
    - runT1ME 10y ago
      It is not generational wealth transfer, it is wealth transfer from the poor/middle class to the rich. It just so happens a lot of the 'rich' are boomers and not rich are millennials, but that's current happenstance.
rhino369 10y ago
We aren't poorer (well we might be a little bit because of the Great Recession), housing just costs a lot more than it used to. Our parents just didn't get to buy a house for cheap. They also got all the increase in value. We have to buy an expensive house that probably won't increase in value all that much. Why is housing more expensive? I'm not totally sure, but I suspect it's the effect of stretching suburbia to the limits. When my parents house was built it was the frontier between rural Illinois and the Chicago suburbs. Now it's considered a middle rung suburb. There are suburbs an hour further away from Chicago. But we've hit the limits on what a person can tolerate re:commutes. You just can't commute for over 2 hours each way. We should be rezoning inner rung suburbs and cities for increased density housing. Then again telecommuting and/or autonomous cars might destroy all the downsides to commuting.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  > Why is housing more expensive? Probably because land area is zero-sum and population is twice the size it was in the 60s. Also rent-seeking, foreign investors buying houses with cash, etc. It's a combination of factors. > We should be rezoning inner rung suburbs and cities for increased density housing. Agreed. Most of the suburbs are hideous, inefficient (most houses built before 1973 have marginal to no insulation) and in many places crumbling from age.
gerbilly 10y ago
You could start by compare the ratio of executive pay to regular worker pay in both periods. We've been kicking our earnings up to the top more and more.
AnthonyMouse 10y ago
> Yes, but if the current young generation of americans is poorer than the preceding generations (a conclusion I think is inescapable at this point), then it is worthwhile considering why. The answer is multifaceted, but part of the problem is that some of the major reasons are extremely politically inconvenient. For example, what are the economic consequences of women entering the workforce in large numbers in recent generations? Increased labor supply drives down wages per employee, then more two income families increase price inflation (especially real estate prices). Together they transfer most of the economic value of women working into the hands of employers and existing land owners, when the economic value of the domestic labor it displaced had previously gone primarily to the woman and her family. And people who remain single are extra screwed because they suffer the same wage and price consequences without the second income. But for cultural and biological reasons when one spouse is a homemaker it will almost always be the wife rather than the husband, so policies that would increase the standard of living by reducing the number of two income families have consequences anathema to the left (fewer women working) and the right (less value captured by employers and land owners). So we don't talk about it.
- naveen99 10y ago
  don't forget upto 40% of her output goes to the government in taxes. so even the civil service / employees of the state (who don't care about left or right) prefer both working...
  - douche 10y ago
    Or nearly 100% of the second income being hoovered up by the childcare racket, if they have children.
    - uptown 10y ago
      This is very true. We made the choice to have my wife stay home and raise our children rather than go back to work. We're fortunate to be able to do so, but when doing the math and calculating the after-tax income she's bring home, so much of that income would have gone straight to child-care that it was a no-brainier to have her be the caretaker in these early years of their development. The cost of childcare is a very real challenge for the United States.
UncleOxidant 10y ago
> The world is certainly richer than it was in the 80s It's debatable. I was in my 20's in the 80's. I was able to buy a 3br/2ba, 1500sq ft. house when I was 26. I had my school loans paid off a couple of years after I graduated - that's not happening for 20-somethings now. > I believe that the answers to this crucial question are obscure I don't think they're so obscure. If we are wealthier now, then it's likely that the wealth is in much fewer hands than it was in the 80's and before. Income stagnation. Wealth accumulating in fewer and fewer hands. Back in the 1860's Marx told us this is what happens in Capitalist economies. While you may not agree with his prescription (and I certainly don't agree with most of it) his diagnosis was pretty much spot on.
- flubert 10y ago
  >that's not happening for 20-somethings now. This chart [1] seems to imply that 21% of people under 25 own a house, which is higher than the 14% of under 25's who owned a house in 1994. http://thereformedbroker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-11-at-12.02.42-PM.png http://thereformedbroker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Scre... ...maybe someone can check this against another data source.
- gozur88 10y ago
  >It's debatable. I was in my 20's in the 80's. I was able to buy a 3br/2ba, 1500sq ft. house when I was 26. I had my school loans paid off a couple of years after I graduated - that's not happening for 20-somethings now. No, it's really not debatable the world is richer than in the 80s. Much of that wealth has been accumulating outside the US, though, particularly in India and China. With interest rates as low as they are you could definitely get into a 1500 sq ft. house by age 26 today. You just can't do it in the places many 26 year olds want to live.
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    There's no way that 26-year-olds can afford a 1500sf house in those areas because the only jobs available are at Walmart. The places where 26-year-olds can get good-paying jobs are also places where the real estate is much more expensive.
nradov 10y ago
Population growth is one of the major reasons. There are simply more people competing for the same fixed amount of real estate.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
I think it's double-ended - if Mom and Dad bought a 4,000 sq ft monster with a three car garage, why not occupy some of it? I think simply calling it "poorer" is a different thing. My uncles lived with their Mom until they got married. They are roughly Silent Generation or WWII. Its just The Way It Was. We had a massive housing boom; now it's over.
collyw 10y ago
To me it seemed like the normal cyclic nature of economics. We had a bubble around 2006-2007, and when it was ready to crash / correct the governments around the worlds threw everything at keeping asset prices high (we have had "emergency" low interest rates here in Europe for ~8 years)now. Great if you are older / richer. Shit if you are under 40.

taurath 10y ago

The wealth is somewhere. I know quite a few millennial friends who will be rich when their parents die, and quite a few who will have nothing.

ljf 10y ago
Think they will be rich... Wait until the health care and other end of life costs start to add up. Even here in the UK they can be high, if you end up spending time in a 'home' that can quickly eat through savings. So unless there are amazing full life health care and other insurance policies covering these guys then there is ever chance that all that money could go.
- taurath 10y ago
  Then the health care business owners will be rich, and then the health care business owners children!
- branchless 10y ago
  This. The entire point of the establishment convincing people to hand over large chunks of their labour for fiat currency is because they are giving you peanuts. You can't cash it in! All these houses "worth" $1MM - who is going to buy them? Demographics are shifting as the boomers die off.
branchless 10y ago
The new american dream: forget working, are your parents in real estate or not?

hayksaakian 10y ago

Instead of paying a mortgage, they pay student loans. I think it's that simple.

mac01021 10y ago
The article points out that college-educated millennials are less likely to live with their parents than millennials who have not been to college.
awesomerobot 10y ago
For a while my student loans were more than my mortgage.
- tobltobs 10y ago
  Coming from a country where education is free and renting (was) normal it sounds crazy to make so much debt. The 'crazy' is not meant offensive, more like interesting.

qsymmachus 10y ago

> I believe that the answers to this crucial question are obscure and are unlikely to be found in conventional economic and political analysis. It's pretty straightforward actually. The change you're looking for starts in the 80s: http://eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2015/05/Piketty-Graph.png http://eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/...

carsongross 10y ago
That's what, it is not why.
- forthefuture 10y ago
  Why is even easier. Rich people want more money and have better means of getting it.
  - carsongross 10y ago
    Easier? Hmmm. I wonder why rich people before 1980 wanted less money and had worse means of getting it.
    - dota_fanatic 10y ago
      > and had worse means of getting it. Easy. It was harder and less acceptable to use international labor then, there were that many fewer college educated people, and that's 36 years behind the current level of automation technology.
      - c0nducktr 10y ago
        Additionally, declining union membership means current workers have less ability to bargain for better wages.
        __jal 10y ago

exstudent2 10y ago

The US was the only major industrial nation not to be completely devastated in WWI and WWII. They/we benefitted from this enormously throughout the 20th century. It was only a matter of time before things normalized.

carsongross 10y ago
Are you sure that that is correct? Do you believe in the Ricardian argument for free trade? If so, why did we not become richer as other countries became better trading partners?
- exstudent2 10y ago
  I don't think we have free trade (although I would certainly support it!). I think we probably are richer than we were pre-war. We're just not at the peak we were after the war when we had a monopoly on success. We also profited greatly supplying the wars. We haven't had a "market" like that since then. The US was mostly its own customer during the cold war.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  What other major industrial nation was not devastated during either World War? (I guess you can say "Canada" but I'm not sure how "major" or "industrial" they would have been in WWI).
  - carsongross 10y ago
    You are assuming the conclusion. My question is: the standard Ricardian argument for international free trade assumes that as trading partners become more productive, all trading partners benefit. Do you think this is the case? Certainly the original post does, as confirmed in his response. If that is so, why would other countries becoming better at making things make us poorer?
    - Camillo 10y ago
      It may have made America as a whole wealthier, but destroyed the working class.

joe_the_user 10y ago

Even more, Young Americans are living with their parents instead of saving money rather than living with their parents to save money. What happens when they have children? Where will their adult children live? In their parents tiny 2 room apartments? Basically, the full effects of the declining net income of adult Americans is being masked by people living off the accumulated wealth of their parents (both consuming their houses and getting hand-outs). Which implies that there's cliff that the American lifestyle will fall off at some point and then things will be ugly even in comparison to now.

mac01021 10y ago
I think three-generation households have been somewhat common throughout most of history, even in the USA (although admittedly probably not in the sort of high-rise apartment buildings where many people live now).
- joe_the_user 10y ago
  It does really matter how many generations one crams together, eventually net income has to pay for lodgings consumed.
- flubert 10y ago
  >high-rise apartment buildings where many people live now Does anyone have a break down of what percentage of people live in single-family homes, vs. an apartment/other?
hiram112 10y ago
The younger generation is simply not having children at the high rate of previous generations. Anecodotally, most of my mid 30's friends have either 0 or 1 child, a few that got started earlier have two. On the other hand, the millions of legal and illegal immigrants, especially from Latin America, are keeping the birth rate up. They do, in fact, many times live in much more crowded conditions. I have met a few Hispanic immigrants in my area as I speak Spanish, and in each case, they lived in single family homes with multiple families / generations.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mac01021 10y ago

> (a conclusion I think is inescapable at this point) It's not obvious to me. Possibly only because I'm uninformed, though, so feel free to point me at any relevant data. There are a variety of trends which could be happening and which might explain this particular cohabitation-with-one's-parents phenomenon without having to mean that the current young generation has less wealth than its predecessors.

jimrandomh 10y ago

It's caused by corruption in local governments. Not enough housing is being built; this means that prices rise until enough people are living with their parents or with enough roommates to cover the shortfall. The reason not enough housing is being built is because local governments are preventing it, using zoning. If the restrictions were loosened, rents would fall. If the restrictions were eliminated entirely, they'd fall precipitously.

zanny 10y ago
Its a bit outdated, but the numbers have not radically changed[1] - around 10% of all housing is unoccupied in the US. Sure, its a huge place, and I can imagine few people want to live in Nowhere Nebraska, but that does not change the reality that we have some ~6x more unoccupied houses than homeless, and the vast majority of new construction is the same old unsustainable unaffordable suburban sprawl we have had run rampant with McMansions in this country for the past twenty years. [1]http://www.realtytrac.com/content/news-and-opinion/americas-142-million-vacant-homes-a-national-crisis-7723 http://www.realtytrac.com/content/news-and-opinion/americas-... What we need is not the creation of new houses, but new cities, or the dramatic rebuilding of the old ones. We need high density urban environments with low cost of living built around foot and public transit, no cars, and with mixed use building again, without the zoning hell that currently cripples growth in almost every corner of the US today.
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  "We need high density urban environments " Who is "we"? Actual, real-world people vote against high-density urban environments with their feet, and pretty much always have. It's just that in past ages it was only the rich who could afford a country home. That's changed, thanks largely to modern transportation making it possible to work in the city and live in the burbs.
  - zanny 10y ago
    "We" is society at large. And half the point of this article is that "young Americans" cannot afford those country homes with long commutes, and thus still live with their parents. For the current upcoming generation, they do not have the means to afford those homes either. If you want to house them independently they need denser Urban living since modern transportation in the form of personal automobiles is also incredibly expensive.

runT1ME 10y ago

>I believe that the answers to this crucial question are obscure and are unlikely to be found in conventional economic and political analysis. I'm astounded by this comment. Are you saying that the obvious answers of asset based inflation caused by our monetary policy does not majorly impact real estate in a way that hurts younger generations and the middle class? I can't see how. It's basic math. If assets rise in price and two people are leveraged into assets the same amount, who gets richer, the person with a 100k asset or the person with a 500k asset?

carsongross 10y ago
I think you are on to the truth of the matter, but I don't think "asset based inflation" is the conventional wisdom. I very much view this as an intergenerational financial war, the Boomers (and Greatest) on the Millennials and X.
- UncleOxidant 10y ago
  It is a generational wealth transfer. But when boomers die, they're generally leaving that wealth to millenials, aren't they? Except that the boomers also have a lot of debt.
  - carsongross 10y ago
    That would depend very much on how the wealth is consumed I would guess. If it is used to finance vacations to Mexico and throw away imported consumer goods, that wealth will be lost. If it was used to build nice cities and finance great art, it would be preserved.
    - UncleOxidant 10y ago
      Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it was used to build nice cities and finance great art.
  - runT1ME 10y ago
    It is not generational wealth transfer, it is wealth transfer from the poor/middle class to the rich. It just so happens a lot of the 'rich' are boomers and not rich are millennials, but that's current happenstance.

rhino369 10y ago

We aren't poorer (well we might be a little bit because of the Great Recession), housing just costs a lot more than it used to. Our parents just didn't get to buy a house for cheap. They also got all the increase in value. We have to buy an expensive house that probably won't increase in value all that much. Why is housing more expensive? I'm not totally sure, but I suspect it's the effect of stretching suburbia to the limits. When my parents house was built it was the frontier between rural Illinois and the Chicago suburbs. Now it's considered a middle rung suburb. There are suburbs an hour further away from Chicago. But we've hit the limits on what a person can tolerate re:commutes. You just can't commute for over 2 hours each way. We should be rezoning inner rung suburbs and cities for increased density housing. Then again telecommuting and/or autonomous cars might destroy all the downsides to commuting.

antisthenes 10y ago
> Why is housing more expensive? Probably because land area is zero-sum and population is twice the size it was in the 60s. Also rent-seeking, foreign investors buying houses with cash, etc. It's a combination of factors. > We should be rezoning inner rung suburbs and cities for increased density housing. Agreed. Most of the suburbs are hideous, inefficient (most houses built before 1973 have marginal to no insulation) and in many places crumbling from age.

gerbilly 10y ago

You could start by compare the ratio of executive pay to regular worker pay in both periods. We've been kicking our earnings up to the top more and more.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago

> Yes, but if the current young generation of americans is poorer than the preceding generations (a conclusion I think is inescapable at this point), then it is worthwhile considering why. The answer is multifaceted, but part of the problem is that some of the major reasons are extremely politically inconvenient. For example, what are the economic consequences of women entering the workforce in large numbers in recent generations? Increased labor supply drives down wages per employee, then more two income families increase price inflation (especially real estate prices). Together they transfer most of the economic value of women working into the hands of employers and existing land owners, when the economic value of the domestic labor it displaced had previously gone primarily to the woman and her family. And people who remain single are extra screwed because they suffer the same wage and price consequences without the second income. But for cultural and biological reasons when one spouse is a homemaker it will almost always be the wife rather than the husband, so policies that would increase the standard of living by reducing the number of two income families have consequences anathema to the left (fewer women working) and the right (less value captured by employers and land owners). So we don't talk about it.

naveen99 10y ago
don't forget upto 40% of her output goes to the government in taxes. so even the civil service / employees of the state (who don't care about left or right) prefer both working...
- douche 10y ago
  Or nearly 100% of the second income being hoovered up by the childcare racket, if they have children.
  - uptown 10y ago
    This is very true. We made the choice to have my wife stay home and raise our children rather than go back to work. We're fortunate to be able to do so, but when doing the math and calculating the after-tax income she's bring home, so much of that income would have gone straight to child-care that it was a no-brainier to have her be the caretaker in these early years of their development. The cost of childcare is a very real challenge for the United States.

UncleOxidant 10y ago

> The world is certainly richer than it was in the 80s It's debatable. I was in my 20's in the 80's. I was able to buy a 3br/2ba, 1500sq ft. house when I was 26. I had my school loans paid off a couple of years after I graduated - that's not happening for 20-somethings now. > I believe that the answers to this crucial question are obscure I don't think they're so obscure. If we are wealthier now, then it's likely that the wealth is in much fewer hands than it was in the 80's and before. Income stagnation. Wealth accumulating in fewer and fewer hands. Back in the 1860's Marx told us this is what happens in Capitalist economies. While you may not agree with his prescription (and I certainly don't agree with most of it) his diagnosis was pretty much spot on.

flubert 10y ago
>that's not happening for 20-somethings now. This chart [1] seems to imply that 21% of people under 25 own a house, which is higher than the 14% of under 25's who owned a house in 1994. http://thereformedbroker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-11-at-12.02.42-PM.png http://thereformedbroker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Scre... ...maybe someone can check this against another data source.
gozur88 10y ago
>It's debatable. I was in my 20's in the 80's. I was able to buy a 3br/2ba, 1500sq ft. house when I was 26. I had my school loans paid off a couple of years after I graduated - that's not happening for 20-somethings now. No, it's really not debatable the world is richer than in the 80s. Much of that wealth has been accumulating outside the US, though, particularly in India and China. With interest rates as low as they are you could definitely get into a 1500 sq ft. house by age 26 today. You just can't do it in the places many 26 year olds want to live.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  There's no way that 26-year-olds can afford a 1500sf house in those areas because the only jobs available are at Walmart. The places where 26-year-olds can get good-paying jobs are also places where the real estate is much more expensive.

nradov 10y ago

Population growth is one of the major reasons. There are simply more people competing for the same fixed amount of real estate.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

I think it's double-ended - if Mom and Dad bought a 4,000 sq ft monster with a three car garage, why not occupy some of it? I think simply calling it "poorer" is a different thing. My uncles lived with their Mom until they got married. They are roughly Silent Generation or WWII. Its just The Way It Was. We had a massive housing boom; now it's over.

collyw 10y ago

To me it seemed like the normal cyclic nature of economics. We had a bubble around 2006-2007, and when it was ready to crash / correct the governments around the worlds threw everything at keeping asset prices high (we have had "emergency" low interest rates here in Europe for ~8 years)now. Great if you are older / richer. Shit if you are under 40.