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Millennials 'set to earn less than Generation X'
- naaaaak 10y agoLooks like 8 years of "hope and change" really helped those who voted so heavily for him. Article might be about the UK but it's true here as well.
- aioprisan 10y agoObama is not a socialist and there is very little that he could do with such strong opposition and control from the GOP in the house, and until recently, the senate.
- marknutter 10y agoDidn't Democrats have control of both the House and the Senate for a period? Also, doesn't being the POTUS mean you know how to bridge gaps and compromise? Sounds like a convenient excuse to point fingers at the other side.
- aioprisan 10y agoYou mean all of 2 years out of his 8? Remember the big healthcare reform bill that got passed and the American Recovery Act that prevented the American car manufacturers from closing up shop? What do you know, things can get passed when that party has control, but since then the GOP did everything possible to block all their efforts. So yeah, not much help for those millennials from the GOP.
- marknutter 10y agoPerhaps the reason the Democrats lost their super majority was because they rammed ACA and ARRA down the throats of congress with no bipartisan cooperation. It's hard to get the other side to work with you when you've demonstrated how little their opinions matter to you in the first place.
- aioprisan 10y agoThat's generally the nature of massive reform. It had to be done and there were political costs associated with it, but it was worth it from a net cost and health outcomes perspective. Desegregation was pretty unpopular as well, are you saying that shouldn't have happened either?
- marknutter 10y agoYou're comparing desegregation to the ACA? I'm pretty sure most Democrats are unhappy with the ACA.
- aioprisan 10y agoCare to cite that source? Is this in recent memory or a poll done at the height of ad campaigns being run trying to assuage folks one way or the other? To help you out, here's what the latest June 2016 polling says about Democrats and that ACA: "16 percent of Democrats report an unfavorable opinion, down from 25 percent in April." (http://kff.org/global-health-policy/poll-finding/kaiser-health-tracking-poll-june-2016/ http://kff.org/global-health-policy/poll-finding/kaiser-heal...)
- marknutter 10y agoI guess what I mean is, when compared to a single-payer system, most Democrats were unhappy with the ACA. I'd be wary of believing any polls about the ACA in general because Democrats likely feel a duty to support it in the face of criticism from Republicans. A much more informative poll would be asking Democrats whether they would have preferred a single-payer system.
- michaelchisari 10y agoThere are decidedly left and right wings of the Democratic Party. He had a filibuster-proof majority of Democrats, but he did not have a filibuster-proof majority of liberals.
- marknutter 10y agoDoesn't that indicate his ineffectiveness as a POTUS, though? He couldn't even work with his own party.
- michaelchisari 10y agoPossibly. But I think it moreso indicates that two party systems are actually multiparty systems without any of the benefits of multiple parties. The various factions operate within their party. The Republicans have the same issue, but they're less pronounced.
- seanmcdirmid 10y agoI would say the republicans have even more factional problems than the democrats...tea party and trump, moderates, Cristian coalition, etc..! But since they don't control the White House, they are at least unified in there Obama hate, which is mostly how they are perceived.
- michaelchisari 10y agoYou're right, the factional problems of the Republicans are huge this time around. But they weren't so much in 2008.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago2008 basically started the tea party. I would also claim that Democrat factions were pretty subdued before 2008 as well.
- elgabogringo 10y agoObama had filibuster-proof majorities for his first two years (when they passed the ACA with only one republican house vote and none in the senate) then a split congress for four. When measured by party control, Clinton, GHW Bush, and Reagan all faced more opposition in congress than Obama has.
- bullfightonmars 10y agoObama and the Democrats had a filibuster proof majority of the Senate for something like 60 days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111th_United_States_Congress#Senate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111th_United_States_Congress#S...
- aioprisan 10y agoNone of the past administrations faced such partisan Congresses, they've only gotten more extreme over the years.
- ktRolster 10y agoNone of the past administrations faced such partisan Congresses, This is unthinking lack of research. You only need to go back to Clinton to find a congress that vociferously was against him, to the point they impeached him. Clinton handled it because he was very good at handling compromise and the politics game.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- MisterBastahrd 10y agoThe current Congress is the mentally unhinged bastard stepchild of that one.
- ktRolster 10y agoIf you look at the Newt, he was more insane by an order of magnitude than Ryan.
- 58028641 10y agoThe US president cannot do much without congress yet people never fail to blame the president for every problem.
- WalterBright 10y agoThe President also gets the credit for every success. For example, all the articles comparing the party of the President with economic results. Never mind that the party controlling Congress at the time might be the other one.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- zeofig 10y agoYeah, we should've voted for the other guy! What an awful mistake /s
- 58028641 10y agoAnd people wonder why we want a socialist for president
- elgabogringo 10y agoBecause you are gluttons for punishment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12115982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12115982
- jolux 10y agoVenezuela is nowhere close to what Bernie Sanders believes in.
- elgabogringo 10y agoNow Bernie supporters wouldn't get caught dead with Maduro, but Hugo Chavez was quite popular with the American left back in the day: https://www.google.com/search?q=hugo+chavez+american+celebrities https://www.google.com/search?q=hugo+chavez+american+celebri...
- Joof 10y agoIt's a somewhat poor comparison because Venezuela is primarily an oil economy.
- marknutter 10y agoBut if Millennials are earning less money, who will pay for socialism?
- sanderjd 10y agoI'm not suggesting that I'm in favor of this, but the idea is that the country has plenty of wealth, it is just concentrated in older generations who were able to build it through decades of economic largesse, so, well, that's who should should be paying for it.
- drchiu 10y agoI think for many millennials, the conclusion of this article doesn't come as a surprise. As a member between the Gen X and the millennial crowd, I've certainly seen how much harder people just a few years younger than me have it as well as how much easier for those slightly older. Older generations don't realize that their wealth is primarily built up in what is really an elaborate ponzi scheme of sorts, money which is really borrowed from future generations.
- dleslie 10y agoI'm in the same boat, born on a cusp year of the two generations, and I have long felt like a surfer who is struggling to ride the crest of a wave but who knows that the crash to shore is fast approaching.
- BuckRogers 10y agoI think a lot of us are. My parents are Boomers and we were born between 78 and 82. Technically being born in 78 makes you GenX. Yet if you have a brother born only 4 years later, it's another generation? We had the exact same experience, Atari 2600 on a TV that is now weird to even think existed. No TV remotes, walk up and change the channel. Rotary phones, city directories and phone books. Need the time and temp? You called the city "time and temp" number. Riding a bicycle to the comic book store and arcade, which were common then. I remember the USSR and my brother and I saw the Challenger blow up on TV at school as if it were 9/11. None of this is the Millennial experience, and they couldn't even describe these details. The world really did change after ~1995, when the internet went mainstream with Win95. Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, and BBSs were around and used occasionally but I never felt they were significant enough to change society as the internet did post 1995. In many ways, if you were born from the early 80s back to the 20s you might have had a fairly similar childhood. Stuff that a kid born after the rather dramatic changes the internet caused will never really experience how the world felt different. Similar to how in my grandmother's childhood, she remembers being the first house in the neighborhood to have electricity hooked up. That's a game changer from previous generations. I think the typical 20 year generational divide is broken with the advent of certain technologies. There has to be a break between those who meaningfully experienced the world prior to the internet and those who don't really remember life without it.
- pmiller2 10y agoOTOH, Gen X might earn more than their parents, but they have less wealth than their parents did at the same age: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-07-10/economic-setbacks-have-hurt-generation-x-more-than-millennials https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-07-10/economic-... (Link from 2015)
- Mao_Zedang 10y agoMore "money" less buying power.
- hiou 10y agoYoung people in developed nations are the next wave to get hammered by globalization. The capital markets aggressive search for efficiency will leave no developed world worker unscathed until they are all at parity with developing nations. But if it's any consolation they aren't the only ones. The only difference is that most of the baby boomers made it into the asset class before globalization was in full swing.
- nyolfen 10y agothe appropriate response for ordinary americans seems to be democratic isolationism, imo. oppose trade deals like ttip, tpp and tpa -- these deals serve to enrich those who are already the global winners and provide nothing for the emerging intelligentsia of the first world. globalism might benefit those in power at the moment, but it provides nothing for those of us who need to work through a career or two to be comfortable. i may be poor, but i have far more in common with a poor texan than a rich chinese man.
- arca_vorago 10y agoWhich is something I've been ranting about this very thing for years, often to much undeserved derision in my opinion. You touch the point but don't nail it down. You need to identify exactly what you have in common with the Texan vs the Chinese man. I would argue this is the beauty of the true American exceptionality, in that the American Revolution, despite the British propoganda attempting to paint it as hardly more than a momentary lapse in military judgement, truly was the unique act in history of an imperfect overthrow of monarchy for individualism. In politics I always see a thing that divides the people, but the American principles we are fighting for are about unity under the common societal belief structure that each man is his own King. Immigrants swear alligience, and military take oaths, not to the queen or king, but to the Constitution. The Supreme law of the land, constructed to protect the rights established naturally upon all men. Not to establish any right, but to protect them all. I want the rest of the world to be granted inspiration of our constitution, but we need to stop doing it by military might, and do it by example instead.
- 10y ago
- hkmurakami 10y ago>Its research found that some of the pay squeeze was due to under-35s entering the job market as the recession hit, but it also concluded that generational pay progress had ground to a halt even before the financial crisis struck in 2007/8. Interesting. I graduated into the worst of the financial crisis (Lehman brothers went under the month after I finished my studies), and I remember reading a lot about the former -- that those graduating into a recession make less in their lifetimes -- but was unaware of the latter part of this statement.
- bunkydoo 10y agoI think there's a trade-off, millennials will live a life with more public conveniences. Internet, social networks, free games, etc. Not my cup of tea, but as a millennial I think the generational values are generally geared more to life experiences over money.
- angersock 10y agoEh, but in exchange we lost affordable health care, affordable schooling, and other things.
- shostack 10y agoDon't forget paid off homes and retirement.
- imtringued 10y agoA lot of things such as electronics are getting cheaper which probably softens the blow of stagnating wages but the essentials such as rent and food are still rising in cost.
- WalterBright 10y agoMight want to consider the increasing drain on the economy that the government takes. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1900_2020USp_XXs2li111mcn_F0t_US_Total_Government_Spending http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1900_2020... One way or another, it comes out of our pocketses.
- badsock 10y agoDo you have any evidence that increased government spending harms economic growth? It seems like an a priori certainty in right wing thought, but what evidence I've seen suggests that the effect is minimal or even beneficial (within the spending ranges that we see in modern developed nations).
- jolux 10y agoYou're entirely right, government spending does not harm economic growth.
- badsock 10y agoI can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but I think it's important to note that if you make the reductio ad absurdum argument that a tax rate of 100% has strongly negative effects, sure I'll go with that, but if there's a claim that what we have right now is either too much or too little, then there needs to be some sort of evidence to support that claim.
- bottled_poe 10y ago> "a tax rate of 100% has strongly negative effects" Could you elaborate?
- badsock 10y agoI'm saying that I wouldn't argue that communism (in the sense that all value produced is publicly owned) is a good economic system.
- quadrangle 10y agoShould be "get paid less". We really need to end the framing of whatever people are paid as assuming that it's equal to what they earn (as in what they actually deserve given actual work value etc)
- pasquinelli 10y agoWhat someone gets paid has to be, overall, less than what they earn, overall. Otherwise it'd be uneconomical for their employer.
- dropit_sphere 10y agoNot sure what you mean by "overall," but isn't this trivially contradicted? Salesman A sells $100 of product @ 40% margin, bringing in $40 of "profit," and is paid $20. Salesman B sells $100 of product @ 40% margin, bringing in $40 of "profit," and is paid $41. The owner is up $20 from Salesman A, and down $1 from Salesman B, and can merrily continue overpaying Salesman B. "But no owner would do that because it's obvious that this is ridiculous." Certainly. But replace "Salesman A" with "QA Lead," and "Salesman B" with "Director of HR," and who knows who's contributing how much?
- dredmorbius 10y agoIn theory: marginal productivity of labour. E.g., you start adding and/or cutting sales, QA, and director positions and see how the organisational performance responds. You'll also typically find (unless, say, you're a Google, Apple, Intel, and Cisco colluding with illegal mutual noncompete agreements on labour) that you're taking prices from the market on what people demand to be paid. In practice, the information's far less clear, and rules of thumb or gut feels get invoked a fair bit. But overall, yes: companies which are aiming for profitability have to balance their costs, including labour, with revenues.
- quadrangle 10y agoAlthough it's stretching far outside this immediate generational discussion, he premise that employers should profit by always paying employees less than the value they generate is itself the very definition of capitalist exploitation. There's absolutely no reason this type of profit-driven employment relationship is the only way to structure a successful economy for a society. Anyway, to the exact topic at hand: The consolidation of power by corporations and capital basically means a different power structure. We can accept the profit premise and still recognize that the employees' pay goes up and down in relation to their power in the relationship. Before unions, employers were happy to pay poverty wages and profit handsomely. Yes, there's a point where no profit or actual loss means they can't keep the employee, but there's a huge margin between the cheapest dirt pay you can get a desperate immigrant to accept and the pay you can manage to pay an organized, powerful union employee while still profiting. The power balance between employees and employers has changed over the last couple generations with the rise of unions and public works and minimum wage and worker protection laws and then today's conglomerations of oligarchies and the undermining of unions and of laws that protect workers' interests.
- marknutter 10y agoIsn't it also true that Millenials put less value on financial success and more value on fulfillment and life experiences than did previous generations? Could it be that Millenials are "set to earn less" because they are actually fine with earning less? Perhaps they watched their Baby Boomer parents chase after money and accumulate stuff and end up unhappy anyways and decided that they would pursue other more rewarding aspects of life.
- aioprisan 10y ago> Isn't it also true that Millenials put less value on financial success and more value on fulfillment and life experiences Where did you get that from? Maybe that's all that's left when no financial success can be had, and they're trying to make do with the lemons.
- Joof 10y agoPeople justify things in many different ways; it's entirely possible this mentality is because it's further out of reach.
- and_so_on 10y agoMeanwhile, 40-year-olds (firmly members of generation x) are committing suicides[1] in record numbers (males in particular), and 10 years from now the same will be said about millennials having it easier as compared to their younger counterparts. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/health/us-suicide-rate-surges-to-a-30-year-high.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/health/us-suicide-rate-sur...
- saosebastiao 10y agoWhen boomers wanted cars, we subsidized cars. When they wanted education, we subsidized education. When they wanted gas, we subsidized gas. When they wanted suburbs, we subsidized suburbs. When they wanted to take a loan out of their retirement, we paid for it out of ours. When they wanted to eat themselves into oblivion, we paid for their health care. Now that they are sated, millenials want the same...but the boomers have indebted us and destroyed our government, and they refuse to make any of the sacrifices that they decided we would make without asking for our permission. There is a coming political doomsday in the US, and it will have nothing to do with left vs right, but rather the haves vs the have nots...and it just so happens that boomers are the haves and millenials are the have nots. It won't end pretty.
- Erik816 10y agoThat broad generalization doesn't fly with my observations. There are plenty of wealthy (or at least high income) millenials and plenty of poorer baby boomers.
- collyw 10y agoBoomers have done quite well considering. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/mar/15/babyboomers-welfare-politics-tax https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/mar/15/babyboomers...
- Sacho 10y agoWho's "we" and "us" in this scenario?
- Mao_Zedang 10y agoDecreases in female fertility rates all over the world will only make this worse (Peak Population). Most industries will settle into global duopolies and there will be those who own non growth based assets and those that do.
- guelo 10y ago(UK)
- haywirez 10y agoThere are mitigating strategies that we can use to our advantage. Rejecting car & home ownership culture, enforcing various frugal lifestyle patterns (cook and eat home, body weight exercise), cheap travel (couchsurfing/airbnb), geoarbitraging income can do wonders on a personal level. There are several changes on the horizon that could cause interesting ripples soon - for example, what happens when mobile solar power, electric transport, better batteries and global internet coverage enables entirely new kinds of productive lifestyles outside of expensive cities?
- Mao_Zedang 10y agoWhile interesting I cant see these things having a huge effect on the global macro economy, the crushing weight of globalization and mechanism will march on, while the technocrats might avoid it, the vast majority of the working class are in trouble.
- imtringued 10y agoHome ownership is a great asset if you're using the home yourself. On the other hand a car is a actually a liability that depreciates over time requiring inspections in regular intervals, compulsory car insurance and a parking lot at both the departure location and the destination.
- mifreewil 10y agoA home is no different from a car in that it also depreciates, things break, needs to be maintained, repaired, etc. The only real difference is that in major populated areas, the land it sits on tends to be rare and valuable, which allows its value to keep up with or even exceed the rate of inflation.
- ghaff 10y agoThere is a difference though in that you may or may not--depending upon where you live--be able to reasonably manage without owning a car. You're likely to have to pay for other transportation as a result but it will probably be less. On the other hand, you have to live somewhere and, absent having access to somewhere you can live for free, you're going to have to pay for housing one way or another.
- zone411 10y agoMillennials do value work ethic less than other generations: "Asked who has the better work ethic, about three-fourths of respondents [edit: Millennials] said that older people do" (http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/10/millennials-confident-connected-open-to-change.pdf http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/10/millennials-con...). This can be good or bad but either way it might have some effect on the relative earnings.
- michaelchisari 10y agoIsn't that just a measure of perception?
- zone411 10y agoIt's three-fourths of Millennials themselves who believe that, so it's not just the perception of other generations.
- michaelchisari 10y agoSure, but is that metric useful? Wouldn't hours worked, vacation taken, etc. be more useful? And even then, you'd have to adjust for under-employment and precarity, don't you think? I just don't see a self-perception survey like this as very useful in determining the actual working habits of generations.
- zone411 10y agoSure, that would be nice to know, but I haven't seen such data. Edit: I looked it up and found this "gen X and especially the millennials were much more likely to say they wanted a job with more vacation – that was more flexible." (http://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/unlocking-millennials.aspx http://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/un...)
- michaelchisari 10y ago
- RobLach 10y agoProbably because they're not just working hard enough amirite?
- InclinedPlane 10y agoThere are three main reasons for this. One is that wages have stagnated for most jobs since the 1980s. Which has meant that it's harder to get ahead and easier to fall behind unless you step into a high paying career early or are lucky enough to climb some business ladder into high ranks. Another is that if you look at the employment after the 2008 economic crash the majority of the impact was on folks under 25. Unemployment shot up, as did underemployment, and that situation has persisted for the better part of a decade before recovering at an agonizingly slow pace. Literally millions of people, most of them millenials, just fell out of the job market, and millions more were stuck in crappy, underpaying jobs for years. That kind of thing has a dramatic long term impact on your career development and thus your earnings, your savings, your personal investment, and so on. The last is the massive cost increases in housing and education. In combination with the other two these things have significantly hampered millenials ability to earn money, to save money, and to build up wealth and stability via home ownership (which has traditionally been a classic way to do so for Americans). Millenials can barely afford to live in the cities where there are jobs and if they don't have a decent-ish job they can't afford to move to where there are, they can't save, and they can't accrue wealth.
- thegayngler 10y agoThis is the result of it pays to invest. It doesn't pay to work. This benefits the older generations who have more stored up wealth than younger people so they can live in the best spots and do nice things while saving money.
- bricss 10y agoIt's not fair.
- internaut 10y agoThe Stagnation Hypothesis basically explains all of this. I would like to remind you that earnings, prices in general are phenomenon which relate back to the real world in some way. That is to say they must be side affects of something else. The cartoon series The Venture Bros symbolizes the Stagnation Hypothesis. If you don't want to watch the entire series to understand the point, just take a look at the episode: Season 3 Episode 2: The Doctor Is Sin (the intro even features Dr T. Venture offering jobs to migrant laborers for which they are absurdly under qualified and very low wages. This, in light of the frequent complaints of worker scarcity in the midst of stagnant wages is quite poignant). In the series the grandfather (deceased) was able to do all kinds of amazing innovations, space stations, underwater laboratories, biospheres, rolling walkways, new fabrics, all kinds of new machines. The next generation symbolized by Dr T. Venture was unable to compete with all this amazing success and began to act as a hanger-on, a me-too, acting as if he knew what was going on but in actuality understanding nearly none of it and therefore became reliant on sexing up what is really ancient technology to make himself look good to investors and his own self image. His sons, the next iteration of Ventures are permanent children, living in a technology wonderland they effectively treat as magical surroundings. Not only do they not understand the technology of their grandfather, but they don't understand there is anything to understand, despite the fact that as clones they are actually technological artifacts themselves. Unfortunately this supposed comedy show is a reasonable interpretation of the last few generations. If you exclude computation (electronics/robots/AI/internet) then there just aren't very many parts of the economy that are genuinely growing. This has been going on since the early 70s. This has been obfuscated by the accounting of the economy. The government and central banks have an incentive to produce numbers that sound rosy because they noticed long ago that if the people in the economy felt like things were going well, that they were more likely to spend, invest and work. There is a self fulfilling prophesy nature to it all. The source of wealth or 'more stuff' is the ability to produce more stuff for less cost. Lower the inputs, up the outputs. Technology is a key element in making that happen. The problem is that (ex-computation) new innovations are far less likely to affect the average person. Name a single invention outside computers of the last several decades. I do not mean a hypothetical abstraction in a laboratory somewhere. When people find themselves coming up with close to nothing they resort to saying: well, maybe new innovation is bound up inside classical things we have but cannot see inside of (we are at the Dr T. Venture stage here). It is certainly true that minor improvements accumulate into a quality of their own over time. That is Toyota's business model. The insides of the cars experience consistent iterative improvement. There are similar analogs in other industries. But. And this is the key point. That utterly fails to explain why new innovations aren't reaching the common person. If we really were experiencing a boom in innovation and invention we would expect to see thousands of new fields and sub-fields opening up. What new materials technology do you have inside your home that did not exist in 1970? What forms of transport? There are literally dozens of major areas that have not seen any major innovation and they have stopped being labeled 'technology' as a result. With any technology there exists diminishing returns. Even in computation as Moore's Law attests to. The real mark of true innovation and invention is the new thing associated with the typical household. For example; suppose the manufacture of aerogel could be brought down by 2 orders of magnitude. This would be a leap that would revolutionize everything insulation related. Household energy bills could probably be 1/10 of what they are today. And due to the thinness of the fabric and the money it would save, it would get rolled out very quickly indeed.
- gerbilly 10y agoMy feeling is that we've been giving our wealth away for trinkets. True wealth sustains life: strong social ties, housing, food and the means of production. We've been convinced to trade true wealth away for non-essentials. Fancy vacations in far away places and 2-3 cruises a year-people used to do that maybe once in their lives, 50inch flat panels in every second room in the house, huge houses with fewer kids in them, 64 bit cellphones, fancy kitchens with wolf stoves and granite counter tops all these things are non-essential. My parents used to save for years to buy a new car or to buy a new stereo. It was easy, just write "New car" on an envelope and put cash in it every month, then 4-5 years later you bought the car cash, no loan. This went even moreso with luxury items like new TVs and stereos. The quality of cars and electronics has increased, but the quality of our food and our social lives has decreased. Cooking of real food at home must be on the decline. Every time I go to the grocery store every other person's order consists entirely of boxed processed food. Instead of cooking and having dinner with the kids, in our industry, we now get texts[1] on our fancy cellphones at 7:00 pm to fight a fire in production because no software company wants to properly plan anything anymore[2] and then we feel awesome about solving the problem we created by being disorganized scatterbrains. My suggestion, buy as many of the essentials of life in cash. The rest that you have to borrow for; pay it off quickly. Invest in long term investments and start early. Be frugal and forget about the fancy new doodad, or if you insist save up for it an pay for it cash. Cook at home and spend time with you kids and your friends. [1] A text, god forbid not a human voice! People are addicted to texting because it allows them to have conversations with multiple people at once. We communicate more than ever but those conversations are shallower. [2] Fail fast + short term methodologies.
- antisthenes 10y ago> My feeling is that we've been giving our wealth away for trinkets. If you want a great example of this, look at post-USSR Russia and what happens when you trade wealth for trinkets. Massive regional concentrations of wealth, hopeless money-losing industries that are technologically behind by 25-30 years, massive brain drain, absolutely stagnated sciences, rising nationalism and censorship of the press. But hey, at least gas is semi-cheap and everybody has cars and iphones.