8 ms·

Data and graphs showing millenials' bad economic odds

66 points by tekdude 6y ago

elhudy 6y ago
I question whether these generational comparisons are using the right statistics. In the very least they don't seem to paint a complete picture. Maybe I am biased because I'm a very successful millennial. I have the world at my hands. Access to written knowledge from any point in the history of time. Tens of thousands of video games and movies available for under $10 and/or a small subscription price. I can learn the arts, pick up any hobby, or even teach myself to code for free. I can fly around the world and stay in hostels in other countries at the same price (or cheaper than) I pay rent in the US. If I run out of tp it is delivered to my doorstep the next day. Sure, I make a lot of money and still can hardly afford a house. I graduated with more student loan debt than both my parents combined. They had different experiences in those regards. But I wouldn't trade my life in this millennial generation, for a life in the boomer generation, for anything.
- ratbert 6y ago
  You are biased due to that. There aren't that many high-paying jobs in the economy overall. Home ownership was usually the only tangible payoff for ordinary people. https://danielmiessler.com/projects/reading/summary-the-war-on-normal-people/ https://danielmiessler.com/projects/reading/summary-the-war-...
  - elhudy 6y ago
    Sure, but my high salary doesn't enable any of the things I mentioned. I'm still capable of making observations about the world around me; my friends, family, who have low salaries have access to these things and are seemingly able to achieve happiness through them. I am NOT saying the article is wrong by any means, only that there are other considerations as well, which are always ignored in generational comparisons.
    - qqqwerty 6y ago
      I think you have a strong disconnect with how impactful your high salary is on your quality of life. If someone has significant student loans and is driving for uber to make a living, I highly doubt they are traveling and staying in cheap hostels. And I highly doubt they have the time to indulge in the arts, work on hobbies, or teach themselves how to code because they are working 60+ hours a week to make ends meet. And less extreme. I know plenty of professionals in the bay area who aren't in tech, making decent, but not great, salaries + benefits. For most of these folks, every expense needs to be scrutinized and home ownership is a pipe dream.
      - elhudy 6y ago
        I think you're making incorrect assumptions about my "disconnect" and using that to validate your dismissal of my opinion that other variables are important when doing cross-generational comparisons.
- luckylion 6y ago
  Interesting point. It's similar to how we consider inflation with regards to technological advancements. A cell phone still costs the same it did 10 years ago, but it's 5 times are fast now, so it actually got cheaper for that purpose. The car you can buy today is many times better than any car you could've bought 50 years ago. Relatively, both you and your parents could buy a car, and they may have more money to spare than you would today. But they were definitely unable to buy a car that's anywhere near as good as what you can buy today.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    It's one of the things that makes it hard to do meaningful standard of living comparisons over time. And it's especially easy to be dismissive of electronics etc. relative to the increase in prices of elite educations and homes in elite cities. And the cost of healthcare (although it's also much better in many respects). However, I suspect a lot of people on the younger side would be pretty horrified at the level of communications, information access, ability to timeshift, and just the general friction of everything including payments, shopping, and more a few decades ago. I've said it before only half-jokingly. If I were transported back to my late-eighties job as a product manager, I'd quit in shear frustration after a week or two because of the almost complete lack of information and communications tools.
    - cmehdy 6y ago
      Anyone transported to the past would be faced with the knowledge of what they have in this current era being compared to past situations. The main thing about people in the 80s is that they knew that what they had in the 80s was all there was. You likely can transport someone from 2100 into 2020 and they might be incredibly frustrated with the limitations of technology, communication, friction of social interactions, and so on. As to the point of the person you're replying to, about cars and phones: Those cars will also save many more people, which depending on the side you're on can mean that you're more likely to survive now or that there's much more "competition" likely to survive now. Smartphones are better than the blackberries of a decade ago but they also shove social media down your throat in a way that had no equal before, which leads to significant impairments of mental health in younger generations. There are many ways to look at the issue and we can almost endlessly zoom in and find discrepancies, but I wouldn't be surprised if a certain version of the central limit theorem ended up applying when comparing generations: the amount of seemingly random variables added up "even out" enough that the curves all end up looking like similar distributions, which can be compared.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- robbyt 6y ago
  That's great you've been successful. However, since your story doesn't mirror the majority of your peers, consider yourself an outlier. What can you do to help more people become as financially successful as you are?
  - Mirioron 6y ago
    The parent poster's point is that life has significantly improved in ways that aren't easily expressed through monetary value. If you lived in the 70s you could not have the convenience of a smartphone no matter how rich you were. People living in the 70s didn't have the ability to use a smartphone, use wikipedia, play video games, post on social media. You could've been the richest person that has ever lived and you wouldn't have been able to do what basically every teenager does in the US on a daily basis now.
    - jbay808 6y ago
      My smartphone is in many ways a curse and a burden, but I need to carry it because I'm expected to answer phone calls within seconds no matter where I am, and text messages within minutes. In the '90s, I could go out for a whole weekend and come home and check my answering machine and nobody would be offended, because that was the norm. I could still opt to live like that now, but the repercussions would be much more severe, because the competitive landscape has shifted.
      - Mirioron 6y ago
        It's undoubtedly true that from an individual's perspective it can seem like a curse. However, what's important in discussions like this is the utility it provides to the population - how it makes people's lives and their economic activity more efficient. Better communication methods are obviously useful there.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I think you're missing his point. Although you can, of course, disagree with it in any case. Even though people of relatively recent generations were more successful on average, that didn't give them access to many of the services and capabilities that people just take for granted today. Pick your year--1970, 1980, 1990. Plop many people down into those years and they would not be happy even if they had a good job and could buy a nice suburban house. (Middle class people were generally leaving the cities during that period.)
- sprafa 6y ago
  Yes you are biased. The data shows it.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  There's ~0 reason for housing to get more expensive over time in countries where land is not scarce. It's an abject policy failure.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    There's plenty of inexpensive housing out in the not scarce land. It's just that a lot of people (for various reasons) want to jam themselves onto islands and peninsulas where land is scarce.
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      Tokyo manages to have a huge population and low housing prices. It's not just the scarcity. It's also the case that public policy can impact which areas are desirable, and whether more areas can be made desirable (for instance, by building usable mass transit).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - elhudy 6y ago
    Absolutely agreeable.
- george_morgan 6y ago
  "I have the world at my hands. Access to written knowledge from any point in the history of time. Tens of thousands of video games and movies available for under $10 and/or a small subscription price. I can learn the arts, pick up any hobby, or even teach myself to code for free. I can fly around the world and stay in hostels in other countries at the same price (or cheaper than) I pay rent in the US. If I run out of tp it is delivered to my doorstep the next day." Every other generation has all this now, too. But they also have houses and less debt.
  - elhudy 6y ago
    >Every other generation has all this now, too. But they also have houses and less debt. According to the graph, G.I.s had much higher economic output per population than boomers did, and experienced some of the same technological advancements towards the ends of their lives (fast cars, color television, even early PCs). Would you rather have been born into the G.I. generation or the boomer generation?
- xd 6y ago
  Don't let the downvotes get you down. Your understanding of the opportunities in front of you coupled with a positive-can-do attitude is what the world needs right now.
- qqqwerty 6y ago
  This is a fairly narrow view of the issue. For one, I think most people throughout history would refuse to trade places with previous generations, with maybe the main exception being those that were significantly impacted by war. And secondly, the article is focused on economic prospects of our generation, many of the ramifications of which will not play out for decades. Millennials are still relatively young. Being poor in your 20s is a lot different than being poor in your 60s. A few other things to consider. The TP delivered to your house was done so by someone working a low paying gig work job. There is a good chance, that like you, they graduated with significant student load debt. How do you think they feel about their economic future? And in 30 years, what is social security and medicare going to look like? We are racking up major deficits to deal with the impact covid-19. Climate change is going to be an issue in our lifetime, and I strongly believe that if our generation does not tackle this issue, that it will significantly alter the course of humanity. And to add to all of this, we are already shifting towards populism in our politics. If that shift continues due to economic issues of subsequent generations, things will get weird.
  - elhudy 6y ago
    >This is a fairly narrow view of the issue. Actually, I'm taking a broader view of the issue. >article is focused on economic prospects of our generation, many of the ramifications of which will not play out for decades My response is not focused on the economic ($$) future of millennials. In fact, I am not even in disagreement that millennials are disadvantaged economically particularly when looking at CoL and debt. I am pointing out that the article eschews the extreme compounding increases in technological advancements that my generation is fortunate to experience. Is that agreeable? Or would you say that when comparing generational success and/or happiness we should only consider variables where millennials lag? > The TP delivered to your house was done so by someone working a low paying gig work job. There is a good chance, that like you, they graduated with significant student load debt. How do you think they feel about their economic future? The same person who delivers my TP probably gets their tp delivered as well. Even though they are a blue collar worker, likely with debt. Isn't that value worth consideration when comparing generational wealth? How is that being accounted for in the article? If it isn't being accounted for, then why not?
netsectoday 6y ago
Reading this article as a millennial really hits home as I remember entering the workforce as a teenager mid 2001 as soon as I could drive (months before 9/11), re-entering the workforce as a young adult early 2008 as soon as I had a degree (months before the great recession), then building a company as an adult for two years and launching it January 2020 (months before the end of the world). There have been no breaks. Nothing has been easy. I don't really know what true success looks like... I struggle and by the skin of my teeth (and now my family's teeth) and the hits just keep coming. We have a house, but I literally fought for it with every ounce of effort I had and got extremely lucky. This is our version of success; we enjoy rays of sunshine from the eyes of hurricanes.
- tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
  I've had a similar trajectory. Graduated college in 2008. Just decided to purchase my first home a few months ago, signed the contract literally a few weeks before covid.
  - Balgair 6y ago
    We had friends conceive the week before covid blew up in the US (estimated, of course). They both lost their jobs in the fallout. No home ownership, no healthcare, and a new one on the way. It's a bit challenging these days for a lot of people.
- darkteflon 6y ago
  We must be the same age - this has been my experience exactly. You just have to find a way to laugh about it, don’t you. Laugh, and sob quietly into your pillow at 3am.
  - netsectoday 6y ago
    Laughing helps sometimes. My response has been something along the lines of exponential mental hardening. Looking back each year just thinking "You had no idea what was in store and weren't completely ready, do better". At this point that timeline is now in months.
ghiculescu 6y ago
It's interesting the Lost generation, 100 years ago, fairs the next worse, and most similarly to millennials. I re-read The Sun Also Rises[1] yesterday. You could change the names and it'd be the story of plenty of people I know today. History repeats itself. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises - if you haven't read it, it's the best book.
- voisin 6y ago
  A Moveable Feast is another good one from Hemingway with themes that strike me as oddly similar the millennial generation. Just hoping I can’t say the same thing about Steinbeck’s books in the next few years.
api 6y ago
I am so nostalgic for the 1990s. I am a young Xer, almost an old millennial, kind of on the cusp. I've wondered if this is a cognitive artifact of my age in the 90s, teens to 20, but I have asked older and even a few younger people and many have also expressed nostalgia for that decade. Boomers and much older Xers often agree. My teens were rough anyway. It was not my personal best decade, but I would go back in a second... not necessarily literally but definitely to the zeitgeist. I find myself unable to describe the optimism of that time to people who were not of age during it. The best I can do is encourage people to watch some old Star Trek TNG. You couldn't even write that today. Dark edgy music and culture was in, but that was an artifact of the optimism. Nobody wants a Nine Inch Nails or early Tool now because the world is darker than the music. Pretty Hate Machine would be journalism, not harmless cathartic emotional escape and fantasy. For my money the optimism ended decisively on 9/11. The shift was incredibly deep and profound. We have never recovered, though a rally was attempted in the late oughts. That rally crashed into resentment driven identity politics; the alt-right and its fellow travelers or "cancel culture" on the other side. Superficial optimism doesn't stick and won't until we get past 9/11 and all it seemed to mean. The terrorists won.
- Jeema101 6y ago
  I think I am about the same age as you and agree completely. That optimistic world of the 90s (and 80s IMO) no longer exists. The country never did recover from 9/11 and has stumbled from one crisis to the next ever since - the War on Terror, Iraq War, Katrina, oil crisis, subprime mortgage meltdown, Occupy Wall St, college tuition debt crisis, and now the pandemic and current protests. Where it all ends I don't know.
  - api 6y ago
    The thing is nothing much actually changed, at least not physically. We lost a few thousand people and some buildings. More people die every year of the flu. Covid has killed over 50X 9/11 and yet 9/11 felt like a much more profound loss of... something. It's all in our heads. Digging out is going to be tough though because the shift was profound and deep. I don't think we can go back. That's not exactly what I'm saying. What I'm wondering is if we can go forward. Going forward always involves a bit of going back. Some of the 90s optimism was resurrected 60s optimism. But it also involves invention of new things.
bronzeage 6y ago
Debt and overleverage is stealing from the future. We got into 2020 with nearly every corporate in america deep into debt which used to finance buybacks. The last 3 years of profit and growth were stolen from the future by the CEOs and past shareholders of these companies, and now the Fed is bailing them out by encouraging even more debt and leverage during coronavirus crisis.
- voisin 6y ago
  The problem starts with government. No one in leadership among any of the parties has shown any real concern for debt and have been loading up one debt for decades. The only politically acceptable solution to that debt is to slowly inflate it away. Any other solution will be divisive. So the government loads up on debt and inflates it away, keeping interest rates lower for longer than they should. Then it filters down to corporations and individuals. Interest rates are low and debt requirements are lax, and if you aren’t willing to take on debt, you will be outbid by someone who is. I expect deflation in the near term, and tremendous inflation in the long term.
- bagacrap 6y ago
  Do you have any examples of a corporation that took on debt to buy back stock?
4636760295 6y ago
Yeah, this makes sense. I got it especially bad, since I joined startups that raised a huge amount of money on promises of riches, and then failed after burning through hundreds of millions of dollars. The founders cashed out before the companies imploded, but regular employees were left holding the bag. I have lots of illiquid startup stock that's now worthless, after about 10 years in Silicon Valley. I do feel like the cards are stacked against everyone who isn't already rich. The system is designed to help keep the rich people rich, and make sure the poor stay poor. I'm excited about the uprising, because we might finally be seeing a period of time that brings about real change. I'd love to see politicians abolished and replaced with real direct digital democracy. Politicians are a leftover from the colonial era when government representatives were necessary because it wasn't possible to have real democracy.
- ghiculescu 6y ago
  If you were fortunate enough to get multiple jobs in Silicon Valley - even if they didn’t go as well as they could have - it’s hard to honestly claim the cards are stacked against you. Most people drew a much weaker hand.
  - war1025 6y ago
    People have a hard time remembering that if you are in the 51st percentile you're "doing better than most". I feel like we tend to think more in terms of school grading where even an 80% is "not very good".
  - 4636760295 6y ago
    That's fair, I am well aware of my luck in this case. I guess I just wish that someone had explained to me the real value of SV lottery tickets when I was younger. FWIW I grew up poor, and am certainly not wealthy now (I'm still a wage slave), but at least I can afford to buy food and new clothes. Growing up I had to rely on charity.
    - ghiculescu 6y ago
      Congratulations (seriously) on making it, then. I only called your comment out because I think many people in the HB bubble have very inflated standards about a “good” life.
rdiddly 6y ago
I graduated into the early 90s recession. It shaped my outlook in various ways. Took about 10 years to finally get into a respectable job, and then 9/11 killed that. Another half-decade of underperformance, another tenuous success, then 2008 killed that. Another 10 years to finally get out of debt and start to get a foothold, and now this. Still don't own a home, although that's partly by choice. So I sympathize on the one hand, and yet, for n recessions millennials have been through, I've been through n + 1, so the talk about how uniquely screwed they are rubs me the wrong way a little bit.
- game_the0ry 6y ago
  True - timing is more relevant than when you were born. The more relevant discussion is wealth inequality in general across generations. Plenty of broke boomers too.
supernova87a 6y ago
Well, it's hard to compete with the generation that grew up in post-war and full growth economy, fueled by huge technology gains and a country open to expansion. It was like all you had to do to have a good life was... be alive. Things get less giddy and boundless (for people on the whole) when a country reaches middle age and there's not new jobs just for the asking. When people reminisce about "how resilient and capable we were back then", just remember that nothing hurts too bad when you've got a free ride on an elevator to the top floor. And now consider southern Europe where it's our situation and wages are 1/2 what we have (though with more social services to take up the slack).
game_the0ry 6y ago
I made this comment on a thread about people having fewer babies nowadays, and I think its relevant here: Millenial here, born in mid-80s. Have seen or experienced: > dot-com boom / bust (junior high) > 9/11 (high school) > War on Terror (college) > student loans (probably for the rest of my life) > the worst recession since the Great Depression, and the lasting economic / career effects that never goes away when you go through that (right when I graduated college) > the divisive culture wars between old / young, rich / poor, establishment / anti-establishment, etc > Trump as president > Covid-19 > narcissistic boomer parents > narcissistic boomers in all levels and areas of institutional leadership whose baseline modus operandi is incompetence, corruption, and greed > and a lot more that stresses me out From my perspective, the world is back-sliding - everything feels like its getting worse, not better. Economic data backs this - real wages are level while cost of living is increasing. And you wonder why we are putting have having children? It's because we do not know what economic optimism and financial security feel like. Edit - the last 20 years notwithstanding, maybe there is still some things to be optimistic about: > people are waking up (just look at the comments in this thread) > mainstream media is finally talking about this > if you are reading this, you have access to some kind of computing device, which means you're richer than most in the world All in all, what really sucks is we our standard of living won't be as comfortable as when we were kids, and the same will probably be true for our kids.
cgshep 6y ago
This thread resonates a lot having graduated in 2013. I've worked for several years in three major European cities — London, Cambridge and Brussels — on above average salaries as a data scientist in the financial sector. I'm also a former Samsung employee; I received a good hand from life's lottery. Yet, a modest family home is out of my reach once childcare and other bills are considered. This is in sharp contrast to my parents who school without degrees, bought a 3-bedroom house in their early 20s and who are now both retired. What went wrong?
sukilot 6y ago
This thread has quite a few people looking into rose tinted mirrors and forgetting that the US Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War and oil crisis and the computer/internet (!) revolution happened. All the people saying riffs of "OK, Boomer" should go visit BLM protest and ask people there how envious they are of their grandparents.
- voisin 6y ago
  I think many white people would say they are envious of the opportunities that their parents and grandparents had laid at their feet. I think many non-white people would say the opposite. I think this is the crux of the issues - they persist across generations.
collective-intl 6y ago
I actually don't think the data and graphs prove their point. Millenials are young and so the appropriate comparison has to be to to other generations when they were the same age. You can throw out half their graphs based in that point. The remaining ones are cherry-picked to be misleading. Growth in the overall economy, while good, does not indicate the absolute level of success. Would you have rather grown up in India where there's been much higher growth in the last few decades? In general, real wages have only grown over time. Today, we benefit from all the growth of previous generations. Median household income is not flat, but up steadily every decade. Yes, on the high end, it has grown even more (because a smart person can contribute more than in the past b/c less manual work, information tech). But what no one says is that wages are up for lower incomes as well. And, the safety net is bigger: government transfers for unemployment, food stamps, child tax credits, etc are WAY up compared to previous generations. Boomers barely got a dime. Before the pandemic, the economy was absolutely the best it's ever been by a long shot. Why didn't they show an actual comparison of employment rates? Millennials would be dominating. Millennials also dominate on education. Our lives are so much richer because we've more likely gone to college and can access so much information from our smart phones. In the same way that news is mostly all the bad things happening around the world (another shooting, another disaster), journalism and politics is often about all things gone wrong in our society. Consequently, nearly everything you read and hear about current times is exaggerated in a negative way. (Often for the good purpose of trying to improve it.) This article is a perfect example. Try to stay skeptical when everyone is saying our world is regressing to poverty and nastiness. Because the truth is we have a vibrant and beautiful society that's damn near the best it's ever been. And the future holds even more promise. -- A young millenial

66 points by tekdude 6y ago

I question whether these generational comparisons are using the right statistics. In the very least they don't seem to paint a complete picture. Maybe I am biased because I'm a very successful millennial. I have the world at my hands. Access to written knowledge from any point in the history of time. Tens of thousands of video games and movies available for under $10 and/or a small subscription price. I can learn the arts, pick up any hobby, or even teach myself to code for free. I can fly around the world and stay in hostels in other countries at the same price (or cheaper than) I pay rent in the US. If I run out of tp it is delivered to my doorstep the next day. Sure, I make a lot of money and still can hardly afford a house. I graduated with more student loan debt than both my parents combined. They had different experiences in those regards. But I wouldn't trade my life in this millennial generation, for a life in the boomer generation, for anything.

ratbert 6y ago
You are biased due to that. There aren't that many high-paying jobs in the economy overall. Home ownership was usually the only tangible payoff for ordinary people. https://danielmiessler.com/projects/reading/summary-the-war-on-normal-people/ https://danielmiessler.com/projects/reading/summary-the-war-...
- elhudy 6y ago
  Sure, but my high salary doesn't enable any of the things I mentioned. I'm still capable of making observations about the world around me; my friends, family, who have low salaries have access to these things and are seemingly able to achieve happiness through them. I am NOT saying the article is wrong by any means, only that there are other considerations as well, which are always ignored in generational comparisons.
  - qqqwerty 6y ago
    I think you have a strong disconnect with how impactful your high salary is on your quality of life. If someone has significant student loans and is driving for uber to make a living, I highly doubt they are traveling and staying in cheap hostels. And I highly doubt they have the time to indulge in the arts, work on hobbies, or teach themselves how to code because they are working 60+ hours a week to make ends meet. And less extreme. I know plenty of professionals in the bay area who aren't in tech, making decent, but not great, salaries + benefits. For most of these folks, every expense needs to be scrutinized and home ownership is a pipe dream.
    - elhudy 6y ago
      I think you're making incorrect assumptions about my "disconnect" and using that to validate your dismissal of my opinion that other variables are important when doing cross-generational comparisons.
luckylion 6y ago
Interesting point. It's similar to how we consider inflation with regards to technological advancements. A cell phone still costs the same it did 10 years ago, but it's 5 times are fast now, so it actually got cheaper for that purpose. The car you can buy today is many times better than any car you could've bought 50 years ago. Relatively, both you and your parents could buy a car, and they may have more money to spare than you would today. But they were definitely unable to buy a car that's anywhere near as good as what you can buy today.
- ghaff 6y ago
  It's one of the things that makes it hard to do meaningful standard of living comparisons over time. And it's especially easy to be dismissive of electronics etc. relative to the increase in prices of elite educations and homes in elite cities. And the cost of healthcare (although it's also much better in many respects). However, I suspect a lot of people on the younger side would be pretty horrified at the level of communications, information access, ability to timeshift, and just the general friction of everything including payments, shopping, and more a few decades ago. I've said it before only half-jokingly. If I were transported back to my late-eighties job as a product manager, I'd quit in shear frustration after a week or two because of the almost complete lack of information and communications tools.
  - cmehdy 6y ago
    Anyone transported to the past would be faced with the knowledge of what they have in this current era being compared to past situations. The main thing about people in the 80s is that they knew that what they had in the 80s was all there was. You likely can transport someone from 2100 into 2020 and they might be incredibly frustrated with the limitations of technology, communication, friction of social interactions, and so on. As to the point of the person you're replying to, about cars and phones: Those cars will also save many more people, which depending on the side you're on can mean that you're more likely to survive now or that there's much more "competition" likely to survive now. Smartphones are better than the blackberries of a decade ago but they also shove social media down your throat in a way that had no equal before, which leads to significant impairments of mental health in younger generations. There are many ways to look at the issue and we can almost endlessly zoom in and find discrepancies, but I wouldn't be surprised if a certain version of the central limit theorem ended up applying when comparing generations: the amount of seemingly random variables added up "even out" enough that the curves all end up looking like similar distributions, which can be compared.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
robbyt 6y ago
That's great you've been successful. However, since your story doesn't mirror the majority of your peers, consider yourself an outlier. What can you do to help more people become as financially successful as you are?
- Mirioron 6y ago
  The parent poster's point is that life has significantly improved in ways that aren't easily expressed through monetary value. If you lived in the 70s you could not have the convenience of a smartphone no matter how rich you were. People living in the 70s didn't have the ability to use a smartphone, use wikipedia, play video games, post on social media. You could've been the richest person that has ever lived and you wouldn't have been able to do what basically every teenager does in the US on a daily basis now.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    My smartphone is in many ways a curse and a burden, but I need to carry it because I'm expected to answer phone calls within seconds no matter where I am, and text messages within minutes. In the '90s, I could go out for a whole weekend and come home and check my answering machine and nobody would be offended, because that was the norm. I could still opt to live like that now, but the repercussions would be much more severe, because the competitive landscape has shifted.
    - Mirioron 6y ago
      It's undoubtedly true that from an individual's perspective it can seem like a curse. However, what's important in discussions like this is the utility it provides to the population - how it makes people's lives and their economic activity more efficient. Better communication methods are obviously useful there.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I think you're missing his point. Although you can, of course, disagree with it in any case. Even though people of relatively recent generations were more successful on average, that didn't give them access to many of the services and capabilities that people just take for granted today. Pick your year--1970, 1980, 1990. Plop many people down into those years and they would not be happy even if they had a good job and could buy a nice suburban house. (Middle class people were generally leaving the cities during that period.)
sprafa 6y ago
Yes you are biased. The data shows it.
maxerickson 6y ago
There's ~0 reason for housing to get more expensive over time in countries where land is not scarce. It's an abject policy failure.
- ghaff 6y ago
  There's plenty of inexpensive housing out in the not scarce land. It's just that a lot of people (for various reasons) want to jam themselves onto islands and peninsulas where land is scarce.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    Tokyo manages to have a huge population and low housing prices. It's not just the scarcity. It's also the case that public policy can impact which areas are desirable, and whether more areas can be made desirable (for instance, by building usable mass transit).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- elhudy 6y ago
  Absolutely agreeable.
george_morgan 6y ago
"I have the world at my hands. Access to written knowledge from any point in the history of time. Tens of thousands of video games and movies available for under $10 and/or a small subscription price. I can learn the arts, pick up any hobby, or even teach myself to code for free. I can fly around the world and stay in hostels in other countries at the same price (or cheaper than) I pay rent in the US. If I run out of tp it is delivered to my doorstep the next day." Every other generation has all this now, too. But they also have houses and less debt.
- elhudy 6y ago
  >Every other generation has all this now, too. But they also have houses and less debt. According to the graph, G.I.s had much higher economic output per population than boomers did, and experienced some of the same technological advancements towards the ends of their lives (fast cars, color television, even early PCs). Would you rather have been born into the G.I. generation or the boomer generation?
xd 6y ago
Don't let the downvotes get you down. Your understanding of the opportunities in front of you coupled with a positive-can-do attitude is what the world needs right now.
qqqwerty 6y ago
This is a fairly narrow view of the issue. For one, I think most people throughout history would refuse to trade places with previous generations, with maybe the main exception being those that were significantly impacted by war. And secondly, the article is focused on economic prospects of our generation, many of the ramifications of which will not play out for decades. Millennials are still relatively young. Being poor in your 20s is a lot different than being poor in your 60s. A few other things to consider. The TP delivered to your house was done so by someone working a low paying gig work job. There is a good chance, that like you, they graduated with significant student load debt. How do you think they feel about their economic future? And in 30 years, what is social security and medicare going to look like? We are racking up major deficits to deal with the impact covid-19. Climate change is going to be an issue in our lifetime, and I strongly believe that if our generation does not tackle this issue, that it will significantly alter the course of humanity. And to add to all of this, we are already shifting towards populism in our politics. If that shift continues due to economic issues of subsequent generations, things will get weird.
- elhudy 6y ago
  >This is a fairly narrow view of the issue. Actually, I'm taking a broader view of the issue. >article is focused on economic prospects of our generation, many of the ramifications of which will not play out for decades My response is not focused on the economic ($$) future of millennials. In fact, I am not even in disagreement that millennials are disadvantaged economically particularly when looking at CoL and debt. I am pointing out that the article eschews the extreme compounding increases in technological advancements that my generation is fortunate to experience. Is that agreeable? Or would you say that when comparing generational success and/or happiness we should only consider variables where millennials lag? > The TP delivered to your house was done so by someone working a low paying gig work job. There is a good chance, that like you, they graduated with significant student load debt. How do you think they feel about their economic future? The same person who delivers my TP probably gets their tp delivered as well. Even though they are a blue collar worker, likely with debt. Isn't that value worth consideration when comparing generational wealth? How is that being accounted for in the article? If it isn't being accounted for, then why not?

netsectoday 6y ago

Reading this article as a millennial really hits home as I remember entering the workforce as a teenager mid 2001 as soon as I could drive (months before 9/11), re-entering the workforce as a young adult early 2008 as soon as I had a degree (months before the great recession), then building a company as an adult for two years and launching it January 2020 (months before the end of the world). There have been no breaks. Nothing has been easy. I don't really know what true success looks like... I struggle and by the skin of my teeth (and now my family's teeth) and the hits just keep coming. We have a house, but I literally fought for it with every ounce of effort I had and got extremely lucky. This is our version of success; we enjoy rays of sunshine from the eyes of hurricanes.

tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
I've had a similar trajectory. Graduated college in 2008. Just decided to purchase my first home a few months ago, signed the contract literally a few weeks before covid.
- Balgair 6y ago
  We had friends conceive the week before covid blew up in the US (estimated, of course). They both lost their jobs in the fallout. No home ownership, no healthcare, and a new one on the way. It's a bit challenging these days for a lot of people.
darkteflon 6y ago
We must be the same age - this has been my experience exactly. You just have to find a way to laugh about it, don’t you. Laugh, and sob quietly into your pillow at 3am.
- netsectoday 6y ago
  Laughing helps sometimes. My response has been something along the lines of exponential mental hardening. Looking back each year just thinking "You had no idea what was in store and weren't completely ready, do better". At this point that timeline is now in months.

ghiculescu 6y ago

It's interesting the Lost generation, 100 years ago, fairs the next worse, and most similarly to millennials. I re-read The Sun Also Rises[1] yesterday. You could change the names and it'd be the story of plenty of people I know today. History repeats itself. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises - if you haven't read it, it's the best book.

voisin 6y ago
A Moveable Feast is another good one from Hemingway with themes that strike me as oddly similar the millennial generation. Just hoping I can’t say the same thing about Steinbeck’s books in the next few years.

api 6y ago

I am so nostalgic for the 1990s. I am a young Xer, almost an old millennial, kind of on the cusp. I've wondered if this is a cognitive artifact of my age in the 90s, teens to 20, but I have asked older and even a few younger people and many have also expressed nostalgia for that decade. Boomers and much older Xers often agree. My teens were rough anyway. It was not my personal best decade, but I would go back in a second... not necessarily literally but definitely to the zeitgeist. I find myself unable to describe the optimism of that time to people who were not of age during it. The best I can do is encourage people to watch some old Star Trek TNG. You couldn't even write that today. Dark edgy music and culture was in, but that was an artifact of the optimism. Nobody wants a Nine Inch Nails or early Tool now because the world is darker than the music. Pretty Hate Machine would be journalism, not harmless cathartic emotional escape and fantasy. For my money the optimism ended decisively on 9/11. The shift was incredibly deep and profound. We have never recovered, though a rally was attempted in the late oughts. That rally crashed into resentment driven identity politics; the alt-right and its fellow travelers or "cancel culture" on the other side. Superficial optimism doesn't stick and won't until we get past 9/11 and all it seemed to mean. The terrorists won.

Jeema101 6y ago
I think I am about the same age as you and agree completely. That optimistic world of the 90s (and 80s IMO) no longer exists. The country never did recover from 9/11 and has stumbled from one crisis to the next ever since - the War on Terror, Iraq War, Katrina, oil crisis, subprime mortgage meltdown, Occupy Wall St, college tuition debt crisis, and now the pandemic and current protests. Where it all ends I don't know.
- api 6y ago
  The thing is nothing much actually changed, at least not physically. We lost a few thousand people and some buildings. More people die every year of the flu. Covid has killed over 50X 9/11 and yet 9/11 felt like a much more profound loss of... something. It's all in our heads. Digging out is going to be tough though because the shift was profound and deep. I don't think we can go back. That's not exactly what I'm saying. What I'm wondering is if we can go forward. Going forward always involves a bit of going back. Some of the 90s optimism was resurrected 60s optimism. But it also involves invention of new things.

bronzeage 6y ago

Debt and overleverage is stealing from the future. We got into 2020 with nearly every corporate in america deep into debt which used to finance buybacks. The last 3 years of profit and growth were stolen from the future by the CEOs and past shareholders of these companies, and now the Fed is bailing them out by encouraging even more debt and leverage during coronavirus crisis.

voisin 6y ago
The problem starts with government. No one in leadership among any of the parties has shown any real concern for debt and have been loading up one debt for decades. The only politically acceptable solution to that debt is to slowly inflate it away. Any other solution will be divisive. So the government loads up on debt and inflates it away, keeping interest rates lower for longer than they should. Then it filters down to corporations and individuals. Interest rates are low and debt requirements are lax, and if you aren’t willing to take on debt, you will be outbid by someone who is. I expect deflation in the near term, and tremendous inflation in the long term.
bagacrap 6y ago
Do you have any examples of a corporation that took on debt to buy back stock?

4636760295 6y ago

Yeah, this makes sense. I got it especially bad, since I joined startups that raised a huge amount of money on promises of riches, and then failed after burning through hundreds of millions of dollars. The founders cashed out before the companies imploded, but regular employees were left holding the bag. I have lots of illiquid startup stock that's now worthless, after about 10 years in Silicon Valley. I do feel like the cards are stacked against everyone who isn't already rich. The system is designed to help keep the rich people rich, and make sure the poor stay poor. I'm excited about the uprising, because we might finally be seeing a period of time that brings about real change. I'd love to see politicians abolished and replaced with real direct digital democracy. Politicians are a leftover from the colonial era when government representatives were necessary because it wasn't possible to have real democracy.

ghiculescu 6y ago
If you were fortunate enough to get multiple jobs in Silicon Valley - even if they didn’t go as well as they could have - it’s hard to honestly claim the cards are stacked against you. Most people drew a much weaker hand.
- war1025 6y ago
  People have a hard time remembering that if you are in the 51st percentile you're "doing better than most". I feel like we tend to think more in terms of school grading where even an 80% is "not very good".
- 4636760295 6y ago
  That's fair, I am well aware of my luck in this case. I guess I just wish that someone had explained to me the real value of SV lottery tickets when I was younger. FWIW I grew up poor, and am certainly not wealthy now (I'm still a wage slave), but at least I can afford to buy food and new clothes. Growing up I had to rely on charity.
  - ghiculescu 6y ago
    Congratulations (seriously) on making it, then. I only called your comment out because I think many people in the HB bubble have very inflated standards about a “good” life.

rdiddly 6y ago

I graduated into the early 90s recession. It shaped my outlook in various ways. Took about 10 years to finally get into a respectable job, and then 9/11 killed that. Another half-decade of underperformance, another tenuous success, then 2008 killed that. Another 10 years to finally get out of debt and start to get a foothold, and now this. Still don't own a home, although that's partly by choice. So I sympathize on the one hand, and yet, for n recessions millennials have been through, I've been through n + 1, so the talk about how uniquely screwed they are rubs me the wrong way a little bit.

game_the0ry 6y ago
True - timing is more relevant than when you were born. The more relevant discussion is wealth inequality in general across generations. Plenty of broke boomers too.

supernova87a 6y ago

Well, it's hard to compete with the generation that grew up in post-war and full growth economy, fueled by huge technology gains and a country open to expansion. It was like all you had to do to have a good life was... be alive. Things get less giddy and boundless (for people on the whole) when a country reaches middle age and there's not new jobs just for the asking. When people reminisce about "how resilient and capable we were back then", just remember that nothing hurts too bad when you've got a free ride on an elevator to the top floor. And now consider southern Europe where it's our situation and wages are 1/2 what we have (though with more social services to take up the slack).

game_the0ry 6y ago

I made this comment on a thread about people having fewer babies nowadays, and I think its relevant here: Millenial here, born in mid-80s. Have seen or experienced: > dot-com boom / bust (junior high) > 9/11 (high school) > War on Terror (college) > student loans (probably for the rest of my life) > the worst recession since the Great Depression, and the lasting economic / career effects that never goes away when you go through that (right when I graduated college) > the divisive culture wars between old / young, rich / poor, establishment / anti-establishment, etc > Trump as president > Covid-19 > narcissistic boomer parents > narcissistic boomers in all levels and areas of institutional leadership whose baseline modus operandi is incompetence, corruption, and greed > and a lot more that stresses me out From my perspective, the world is back-sliding - everything feels like its getting worse, not better. Economic data backs this - real wages are level while cost of living is increasing. And you wonder why we are putting have having children? It's because we do not know what economic optimism and financial security feel like. Edit - the last 20 years notwithstanding, maybe there is still some things to be optimistic about: > people are waking up (just look at the comments in this thread) > mainstream media is finally talking about this > if you are reading this, you have access to some kind of computing device, which means you're richer than most in the world All in all, what really sucks is we our standard of living won't be as comfortable as when we were kids, and the same will probably be true for our kids.

cgshep 6y ago

This thread resonates a lot having graduated in 2013. I've worked for several years in three major European cities — London, Cambridge and Brussels — on above average salaries as a data scientist in the financial sector. I'm also a former Samsung employee; I received a good hand from life's lottery. Yet, a modest family home is out of my reach once childcare and other bills are considered. This is in sharp contrast to my parents who school without degrees, bought a 3-bedroom house in their early 20s and who are now both retired. What went wrong?

sukilot 6y ago

This thread has quite a few people looking into rose tinted mirrors and forgetting that the US Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War and oil crisis and the computer/internet (!) revolution happened. All the people saying riffs of "OK, Boomer" should go visit BLM protest and ask people there how envious they are of their grandparents.

voisin 6y ago
I think many white people would say they are envious of the opportunities that their parents and grandparents had laid at their feet. I think many non-white people would say the opposite. I think this is the crux of the issues - they persist across generations.

collective-intl 6y ago

I actually don't think the data and graphs prove their point. Millenials are young and so the appropriate comparison has to be to to other generations when they were the same age. You can throw out half their graphs based in that point. The remaining ones are cherry-picked to be misleading. Growth in the overall economy, while good, does not indicate the absolute level of success. Would you have rather grown up in India where there's been much higher growth in the last few decades? In general, real wages have only grown over time. Today, we benefit from all the growth of previous generations. Median household income is not flat, but up steadily every decade. Yes, on the high end, it has grown even more (because a smart person can contribute more than in the past b/c less manual work, information tech). But what no one says is that wages are up for lower incomes as well. And, the safety net is bigger: government transfers for unemployment, food stamps, child tax credits, etc are WAY up compared to previous generations. Boomers barely got a dime. Before the pandemic, the economy was absolutely the best it's ever been by a long shot. Why didn't they show an actual comparison of employment rates? Millennials would be dominating. Millennials also dominate on education. Our lives are so much richer because we've more likely gone to college and can access so much information from our smart phones. In the same way that news is mostly all the bad things happening around the world (another shooting, another disaster), journalism and politics is often about all things gone wrong in our society. Consequently, nearly everything you read and hear about current times is exaggerated in a negative way. (Often for the good purpose of trying to improve it.) This article is a perfect example. Try to stay skeptical when everyone is saying our world is regressing to poverty and nastiness. Because the truth is we have a vibrant and beautiful society that's damn near the best it's ever been. And the future holds even more promise. -- A young millenial