12 ms·

Expectation vs. Reality: The Hard Hand Dealt Young People in 2023

91 points by BerislavLopac 3y ago

hamilyon2 3y ago
Is there a research into modern labor? I am interested in age and sex structure of workforce, unpaid work, including by women and seniors, entrepreneurship as form of labor, across decades and countries.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  You probably have to do this country by country, unless an aggregate site like Statista compares countries. For the UK you'd probably want ons.gov.uk for the US you'd want bls.gov
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
I'm an 'elder millennial' and I'm so used to seeing articles about how my generation has been screwed that I have to remind myself I'm not 'young' anymore and we're now talking about a whole new generation that's starting behind the 8 ball.
- kodah 3y ago
  The experience of millennials is quite diverse. Some of us are doing great, but the statistics show otherwise: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/02/14/millennial-life-how-young-adulthood-today-compares-with-prior-generations-2/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/02/14/millenn... Hidden in those statistics are also some burgeoning equity issues which are only beginning to show their face with GenZ.
  - timmg 3y ago
    FYI, that article is 4 years old. I think things have changed a lot since then.
    - MattGaiser 3y ago
      https://www.redfin.com/news/gen-z-millennial-homeownership-rate-home-purchases/ https://www.redfin.com/news/gen-z-millennial-homeownership-r... Millennial home ownership rates are a bit behind, but not by a crazy amount for example.
      - timmg 3y ago
        I would think the want/need for owning a home to be enhanced by marriage/children. Since younger generations are less likely to do those things -- and more likely to do them later -- than earlier generations, that must count for some of the difference(?)
        mrguyorama 3y ago
        You have it backwards. Plenty of millennials want kids and marriage and a home, but the shitty situation we find ourselves in means we cannot responsibly have kids.
        ghaff 3y ago
        Certainly if someone is single/doesn't have kids, there's almost certainly less urgency to buy a place given that, money aside, it may be a fairly significant time commitment and it certainly increases the friction of moving somewhere different for a job or other reason.
  - NickC25 3y ago
    Some of us (I'm 33, so old-ish millennial here) are doing well, yes, but some of us have been doing terrible. The economy has, overall, not been kind to us. Boomers need to retire already, because they've held onto the top rung of the ladder for far too long, which has caused severe ripple effects in our economy. Their mentality, while not inherently bad, has not kept up with reality. I personally have struggled and am extremely fortunate that I've had great parents who were wealthy enough to partially support me. I wasn't able to get into a good company after college and that has absolutely wrecked my career - taking odd jobs and short-term employment to put food on the table and pay rent. As I'm not an engineer, my career prospects are quite dim. Now that there's an entire new generation entering the workforce, I'm afraid that there's millions of people in my position who simply won't be able to afford anything, much less a home or a family. That's not good for the economy, but the folks at the top don't really care as long as they get paid.
    - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
      >Boomers need to retire already, because they've held onto the top rung of the ladder for far too long Boomers will just leave their wealth to their kids, so if you don't have well off parents, you'll still find yourself underneath the ladder, holding the short stick, at the upcoming generational wealth transfer. We need more inheritance taxes, at least in Europe, which at his point is a feudal state from this tax-free inter generational wealth transfers in some parts.
- treis 3y ago
  As a fellow millennial I don't know what people are talking about. The world is way better today than when I was a kid: All sorts of racism and prejudice are at much lower levels than when I was a kid. I went through two economic crises by the time I was 21. The US fought two wars in my prime war fighting years. (Though fortunately not me but friends died). Technology has continued it's steady march. If you gave me a choice between being born today and being born when I was I'd take today without hesitation. Things haven't become Utopian yet but they are steadily getting better.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    They are talking about the economic situation. You are a millenial on hn, you are probably doing fine. A lot of your peers otoh are living with their parents still, have a mountain of debt, have put off having kids, aren’t in a career path to change much of this and don’t have the skills or the money or time to switch into a more lucrative field and be competitive relative to new grads.
    - treis 3y ago
      > A lot of your peers otoh are living with their parents still, have a mountain of debt, have put off having kids, aren’t in a career path to change much of this and don’t have the skills or the money or time to switch into a more lucrative field and be competitive relative to new grads. Yes I know. This happened because they graduated into the face of one of the recessions. Or maybe they went to war and lost their 20s battling PTSD. These effects persist for a long time which is why a lot of my generation was left behind. Obviously can't predict the future, but for those that came of age post 2008 the economy has been remarkably resilient. They haven't experienced something like a chunk of engineering graduates that can't get jobs. I was lucky and made it out, but the average starting salary of my degree from my school went down significantly because of 2008. A graduate today has no living memory of what an economic recession in the US looks like. And if anyone is wondering it's a lot worse than today or what happened during Covid.
    - listenallyall 3y ago
      There's a bit of an exaggeration here... somehow his "peers" are also choosing to order enormous quantities of their meals from DoorDash (doubling the cost), getting bottle service at nightclubs, and taking Instagram-worthy vacations to exotic locales.
giantg2 3y ago
"That fact gives the young unprecedented leverage, which has so far gone unrealised." No, it doesn't. It doesn't matter if the population is aging. If the youth are still a minority, then the status quo won't change. They don't really have any additional leverage in a democratic system. Edit: why disagree?
- Timon3 3y ago
  To give an example - Germany has way too few people in elderly care, and conditions are worsening, so numbers are dropping. What is the solution by the leading party voted for by boomers? They would like to introduce a year of mandatory service after the young are done with school to keep the cost low.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    Yep, exactly.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
    >They would like to introduce a year of mandatory service after the young are done with school to keep the cost low. This has been the norm in Austria for a while which I assume is where Germany got the idea. Military service is mandatory here but if you want to legally avoid it, you have to do mandatory civil duties in public services that suffer from labor shortages.
    - Timon3 3y ago
      No, Germany got it from themselves. We used to have it until a couple of years ago. They want to re-introduce it without the military aspect, as the only reason is saving costs for the elderly.
      - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
throwaway22032 3y ago
I feel like there's an issue with the crystallization of popular destinations that means that regardless of policy, in 2020 we have a different benchmark than 1960. For example, when London was cheaper, it was a very different place to today. Pollution, lots of areas that regular people wouldn't want to go to, generally just a less global city and less developed. Moving there or living there now is different to how it was. There's a ton more competition. There's more people in the entire country, "everyone" wants to go to University, etc. I feel like we need to go back to basics, like the social housing boom, and say - what do we need for people to settle down, feel ownership over their communities, raise families and get married, etc. I don't think that "people can afford to rent in huge cities" is sustainable as a goal.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Perhaps leaving aside today's problems in US West Coast cities, Western cities (certainly in the East Coast of the US but more broadly) 40 years or so ago were a lot grittier, more dangerous, less desirable, and yes cheaper than they are today. If I look at my cohort from grad school in the Boston area, I don't think anyone lived in--or even especially near--the city. And it wasn't because of cost. The city was still losing population well into the 90s.
- fallingfrog 3y ago
  >>I don't think that "people can afford to rent in huge cities" is sustainable as a goal. One wonders, then, what cities are for, exactly?
  - throwaway22032 3y ago
    I mean huge cities. World cities like London, NYC, etc. The ones that people _move continents_ to live in. I don't think it's feasible any more in the internet age for popular places like that to remain accessible to all.
automatic6131 3y ago
>Between 2022-2023, £4.8 billion was added to UK student debt in interest alone. Students incur debt in order to pursue an education which will further their career prospects, then find themselves trapped by the interest – often necessitating more loans just to keep afloat. A very strange lie to encounter. In the UK, student debt repayment is linked to income (something like, 9% of all your income above £21k). If you don't earn, you don't pay. The interest accrues yes, but again, if you lose your job, you pay nothing. If you earn less than £21k, you pay nothing. It's nothing at all like a loan, and is more accurately, a income tax for graduate. Although, regressively, those who earn the most will pay the least. Those on modest salaries post university might pay it for their whole working lives. (one more thing, it's automatically written off after 40 years or so).
- stu2b50 3y ago
  I’d also note that this is how it works in the US as well for loans provided by the federal government. In addition, as long as you make payments, excess interest will not accrue and your principal won’t increase. They’re also written off in 20 years. It’s mostly with private student loans that people go completely underwater in the US
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    > I’d also note that this is how it works in the US as well for loans provided by the federal government. Only if you switch to the income-based repayment plan, which has to be reverified every year. Prior to December 2020 taxes were owed on forgiven debt the year it was finally forgiven. Which could be very harsh if the debt was large. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/how-to-get-income-driven-repayment-plan-forgiveness https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/how-t... I'm not sure how it works in the UK, but in the US at least this extra debt is negatively factored into things like credit scores. And regardless of the payment, it takes a bite out of income. I couldn't afford a PPACA medical plan for a few reasons, but partly because I was paying for loans. None of these repayment plans factor in affordability for the payee, they are a straight percentage of income basis or treat the payee as some sort of national average in terms of expected affordability.
Kapura 3y ago
It breaks my heart to talk to my mum and have her not understand that I'm over 30 and straight up cannot afford to buy property. "Why don't you sell your car for a down payment?" as if that would be anywhere near enough. I think part of what makes her said, is it felt _so easy_ for folks born in the post-war boom to get in on some of that increased productivity, and she's devastated that I have seemingly missed out on that boat.
- Dig1t 3y ago
  It just depends on WHERE you try to buy property. Yes of course it's going to be hard to buy a house in a popular area because you are competing with lots of rich people who also want to live there. But there are still tons of places with extremely cheap land in the developed world. Judging by your use of the word "mum" I'd guess you're in the UK. And yes, things are way harder in the UK since people get paid way less than America, the government takes way more from you in taxes, and the cost of basic things like food are higher. But I think you could still do what your mom is suggesting in some places in the UK. I can find plenty of starter homes in Scotland for 80k pounds for example. I just think it's silly to expect houses to be cheap exactly where you want to live, because odds are tons of people also want to live there too and you have to compete with them. But if you are willing to be flexible, there is still plenty of space for the next generation to own property.
  - mmarq 3y ago
    You can find houses for 30K in Liverpool, because the UK outside of London is poorer than a random Eastern European country (which is one of the many reasons why Eastern Europeans are running away from the UK). How much do you think you are going to make in a place such as Scotland or northern England?
    - Dig1t 3y ago
      >UK outside of London is poorer than a random Eastern European country Yeah that's true, I think a lot of people in the US don't understand this at all. Everything British seems fancy and expensive, and we assume they all live like Londoners. But you are right that wages are not going to be great in Scotland or northern England. But a great strategy that works well in the US, and I suspect would work well in the UK, is to just spend a few years living as cheaply as possible in a big city like London. Hoard as much money as possible, then take that and buy a house in a cheaper area. In the US it is possible to live in a place like San Francisco for a few years, and if you live with roommates and don't fall for all the trappings that Californians go for (like ordering DoorDash every day or buying Teslas), you can easily save enough to buy a house for cash in a cheaper area. This strategy even works for tradespeople like plumbers/carpenters. Once you own a house outright, most other things are relatively cheap living on local wages and you can live any kind of life you want.
Lastodon 3y ago
"Why is our population declining? Why aren't millennials reproducing?" Truly a mystery!
- bick_nyers 3y ago
  Must be that damned internet!
  - 0xcafefood 3y ago
    No, it's because they're buying avocado toast.
- tomp 3y ago
  You literally couldn't be more wrong. Fertility rate is inversely correlated with income. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
  - mrkeen 3y ago
    The article says that young people are poor, old people are rich. Parent comment claims that young people are not having kids because poor. Your graph says that richer people had fewer kids (in the last 12 months). Your graph would only refute the parent comment if you could show that people have fewer kids because they're richer, not because they're older (confounding factor) and/or people with more kids don't have to sacrifice an income to look after said kids (reverse causation)
  - swagasaurus-rex 3y ago
    Here’s a better explanation: fertility is inversely correlated with price of living That explains why poor countries have high birth rates and rich countries have low birth rates
    - tomp 3y ago
      This is US-only data.
bix6 3y ago
“So how did one of the most influential 20th-century economists get it all so profoundly wrong?” Well gee maybe economists should’ve shared a grindstone with psychologists instead of operating in a vacuum. And now it’s 2023 and every article about this talks about how wrong Keynes was. Who cares how wrong he was, let’s just fix the issues already.
yotamoron 3y ago
Well, its very simple - millenials and GenZs have no political power, so the hangry wolves are just eating the food from their plates. Drugged and blinded by social network, mobile apps, insane conspiracy theories and radical agendas, they keep missing the most obvious of things - there are no free meals, and all the sharks and wolves of the world will eat away on your hard work if you will not fight for it. What's right is not important - what's actually happening is.
- codingdave 3y ago
  Millenials and GenZs have all the political power if they just stand up and take it. The younger generations can change the entire demographic of the elected leadership if they so choose. Why else do you think the older powers are trying to control who votes? Why else is there so much false rhetoric trying to convince people that their vote doesn't matter?
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    The only way political power translates to economic power is through socialism (when considered not just to be control of the means of production, but control of everything, including living arrangements). And while certain things are socialistic in Western countries, it would be a dramatic upheaval to make everything socialistic. In the US there's only about 107 million Millennials and GenZers of voting age. This compares to about 150 million of GenX and older. Some of those people undoubtedly can't vote due to citizenship constraints, but Millennials and GenZers certainly can't control political power, even if they unified. https://www.statista.com/statistics/797321/us-population-by-generation/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/797321/us-population-by-... 2022: GenZ = 69.58 million, 1997-2012 births, so about half can vote. Millennials = 72.24 million GenX = 65.37 million Baby Boomers = 68.59 million Silent = 18.29 million Greatest = 670 thousand This distribution appears to be similar for the UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/bulletins/populationandhouseholdestimatesenglandandwales/census2021unroundeddata https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
  - jhanschoo 3y ago
xwdv 3y ago
Although millennials were dealt a hard hand, I got to say there’s probably nothing better you could be right now than a millennial that has actually made it. A millennial with house, spouse, cars, family, six figure salaries, and still young enough to have a lot of years ahead of you, but not so young that you fall prey to the insidious life ruining traps Gen Z easily does. And you got to grow up with memories of a wholesome low-tech childhood, where tech was still friendly and not out to package you into some kind of product to be sold. To be a young well off millennial is basically like being part of a Boomer v2.0.0 generation.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  >To be a young well off millennial is basically like being part of a Boomer v2.0.0 generation. TIL that being well off is great. As a fellow millennial who hasn't "made it", could you please guide me with some tips on how to "make it"?
  - whateveracct 3y ago
    Life really turns on a few moments in time all told. For my wife and myself, STEM degrees with in-state tuition (I turned down a prestige private university) with automatic test-score-based scholarship went a long way for me and my wife. Ended up with $40k in debt total which was pretty easy to pay down in a couple years in industry. Parents haven't helped once financially past college (including home buying). They had some savings for me and sent some money for food. And they bought a new car and gifted us their '08 Civic upon graduation (still going strong!) More recently, we moved out of an expensive coastal city to a suburb of a smaller nearby city in the first summer of the pandemic. When mortgage rates were sub-3% (with 20% down) and before the housing market got crazy hot. That was just luck = preparation (saved money and built credit and no debt) meets opportunity (turns out our savings were enough for 20% down if we looked to the burbs and we could get a low rate and go under asking for a 3k sqft, newish house). That's the best financial decision we've made since our college decisions. It really is a combination of luck and a few consequential decisions. It helped that we were both pretty academically smart and lived in a state with great engineering and CS programs at in-state schools. But we haven't made 100s of savvy financial decisions with huge ROI. Just a few sensible ones and dodged some bullets such as private university, burdensome house, etc.
angarg12 3y ago
I'm a new immigrant millennial to the US (from the UK of all places) and for me the American dream is dead. I know I'm playing the world's smallest violin and I will gather little sympathy since I am one of those tech workers with a big fat paycheck, but the fact that someone like me isn't thriving might be another symptom of how fucked up things are. It seems that my timing has played a big role. We moved here last year when the tech market was on fire and people were jumping companies getting obscene amounts of money. Things turned south very quickly. Companies stopped hiring and started laying off people instead. My company virtually froze my salary at the same time that inflation was soaring. Combined with a tumbling stock price, I’ll be taking home less money this year than last. Also my wife has been unable to find a stable job, which has further affected our household income. Buying a home? Give me a break. I love to share the Zillow home price index graph to visually show people how Covid has screwed the housing market [1]. And at least before we had the option to move far from the city to a cheaper location and work remotely, but now employers are forcing us to go back to the office, so the choice is between unaffordable rent or multi-hour daily commutes (I’m in the second camp). I know this comment sounds whiny but I can’t help to feel that we are just getting dealt a shit sandwich after another. We might be in a world of extravagant productivity but I’m sure as hell not reaping the benefits. I’m supposed to be a top 5% earner and yet I don’t feel my standard of living is much better than my working class upbringing - at least back then we owned our apartment and weren’t told how privileged we were. [1] https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/ https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/
- 908B64B197 3y ago
  ... and that's still a better deal than the UK, where the norm is no equity and an capped salaries for "IT personnel" (their words, not mine). Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Europeans could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?). Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. I recall someone pitching the "Silicon Roundabout" and that Cambridge and Oxford were going to be the new Stanford and MIT. It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for UK nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US [0]. [0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-brain-trade http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...
PragmaticPulp 3y ago
The reality is hard, but the expectation half of this balance is getting exaggerated: > We could be working 15-hour weeks, enjoying our free time, and living like people of the future. Keynes’ 15-hour workweek essay wasn’t meant to be a rigorous study of how the future was going to look, nor was it representative of a widespread belief. Yet to this day it’s a favorite of journalists looking to anchor economic expectations so far away from reality that no living conditions could sound good by comparison. More practically, I still see a lot of exaggerated expectations in the juniors coming through my employer. Maybe I’m getting old, but it’s becoming frustrating to watch people get six-figure jobs right out college doing remote coding work from the comfort of their homes with ample mentoring, only to complain because Reddit and Blind led them to believe they’d be earning $300K at FAANG jobs while working 20 hours per week. I know that’s not the focus of this article, but I do think it’s representative of how the gap between expectation and reality is being stretched wider and wider as people fall deeper into the internet/social media reality distortion field.
- leetcrew 3y ago
  are their expectations unreasonably high, or are yours too low? last year a junior on my team worked with a few other juniors and a PM to implement a straightforward automation project. their system saved about $50mm last year, and that number is projected to increase as the company grows. you don't necessarily find such low hanging fruit every year, but would he really be wrong to think his contribution is worth more than $150k?
  - applied_heat 3y ago
    Automation of what if you don’t mind sharing some general information? A physical machine? Filling and filing of a form?
    - leetcrew 3y ago
      I'd rather not share too many details, but it's similar to how credit card applications are processed. there's an automated system that can automatically approve some applications, with a manual fallback. the system my junior colleague worked on did not use such sophisticated heuristics, but it still dramatically reduced the amount of cases that require human intervention.
guender 3y ago
[dead]
trabant00 3y ago
> We could be working 15-hour weeks, enjoying our free time, and living like people of the future. Matt Gallagher asks: Why aren’t we? Simple, two reasons: 1) world wide living standards are the highest they've been despite what click-bait negativity would want you to believe. 2) people want MORE and are willing to compete for it. If we go back to living standards from 100 years ago (life expectancy, poverty levels, human rights, etc) and nobody wants to compete for more than that, sure, we can have 15 hours work weeks and all the leisure in the world.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
JohnCClarke 3y ago
> We could be working 15-hour weeks, enjoying our free time, and living like people of the future. France has rigorous 35 hour work weeks and a 78% labor force participation rate. The USA has 40+ hour work weeks and a 56% labor force participation rate. The choice is real.
- bobolino123 3y ago
  How do you count breaks in both countries? In Germany and Switzerland for example breaks don't count as working so if you have 42.5h you are at least 47.5h per week in the office. Hours per worker might be lower since there are tax-favourable incentives like "mini job" that push it down artificially.
- treis 3y ago
  You're not making a like for like comparison. OCED has the US at 78% and France at 81% https://data.oecd.org/emp/labour-force-participation-rate.htm https://data.oecd.org/emp/labour-force-participation-rate.ht...
Xen9 3y ago
Technological development (excluding AI agents) enables freedom of the masses if and only if the masses simultaneously and continuously pursue their self-interests instead of getting abused by the minority who achieve / maintain wealth (in order to achieve their self-interests) by abusing others. The average human never evolved to pursue their self-interests in this sense. They recognise stealing and killing when done in front of them by primitive means. But debts, employment et cetera are beyond this comprehension.
rgbrenner 3y ago
I think the point of this article is true, but the writer does a poor job at making the case. It starts off with an 85 year old Kaynes quote, which reads the same as: "They said there were going to be flying cars.. what went wrong?" Then follows it up with just comparing age groups without showing similar stats for older groups when they were the same age. Saying retirees have less debt than people just entering the work force isn't some big revelation. Even in the best of times that would be expected... and they repeat that mistake for pretty much all of the stats.
coding123 3y ago
I think the craziest thing about things right now is inflation. It's not a single number. A lot of people go- oh well it's at %19 more than 2019, so now you need a 20% pay bump. Well... that's not actually accurate. Because heating or cooling your home (which you now spend all your time in) which was already expensive is even more expensive, we have to deal with energy bills that are, for some people, upwards of 15% of their paycheck. That's huge. Then because we still drive pretty much the same (work actually reduced our driving because our cars would just sit at the office all day). We'd kind of just take care of a few errands on the way to work or the way home. Now those errands are straight up, drive out, drive back. We're still driving at least as much or more - so again, we're paying more for energy that way. Now housing. Housing is totally crazy. It's not even about the fact that we have high home prices, it's that now everyone gets their wife to take out a loan, pay down a credit card or two with that money, then buys their house to stay under the 45% Debt To Income Ratio. So reality is we've got $1000 left per month for grocery outlet food that's pretty much expired the day we bring it home. I'm pretty sure things are not sustainable right now for a large swath of people. On top of all that, not everyone got that 20% pay bump - if any at all! And to top off my last thought. I live in CA, so obviously I'm on a bit of a high blip here, but, don't you remember a few years ago shopping at pretty much any grocery store and paying like $2.50 for bags of chips, or cheese dip, sour cream, a few potatoes. All that stuff is now $5. I feel like any random item I pick up at Safeway or Raleys is straight up $5. That's what I felt like shopping at whole foods for organic natural grass fed vine-ripened potatoes. Now every grocery store is whole fucking foods! edit: removed duplicate posts (hn is getting hammered or something right now)
thrawa8387336 3y ago
The world is just poorer and that's what it takes to take care of the environment. What do you mean no everyone can burn thousands of gallons of gasoline every year? What do you mean most people will not travel internationally?
Proven 3y ago
[dead]
fourseventy 3y ago
If you are a young person in the USA you are leading an extremely priviledged and lavish life compared to the vast majority of people in all of human history. The fact that people still find time to complain and somehow play victim is crazy to me.
- theandrewbailey 3y ago
  If we consider what our parents accomplished when they were our age compared to where we are now, and find ourselves lacking, shouldn't everyone be concerned about the deteriorated conditions, no matter where this happens to be? The forward march of history and progress may have taken a step back.
  - bequanna 3y ago
    This is a good way to think about it. My parents were able to buy a 4br mostly modern rambler home when they were in their early 20s with one blue collar income.
- bequanna 3y ago
  “Be happy with what you have” is typically not a good strategy to suggest to those who wish to work hard and improve their lives.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  Why are there so many people compelled to leave such useless comments every time this subject comes up? No one experiences life relative to all of humanity. Why is this a surprise anymore?
sircastor 3y ago
The majority of people are faced with a tough decision: Do the thing that benefits your community to your own (often mild) detriment, or do the thing that benefits you at the cost of the community. I think generally people are willing to sacrifice a little for the benefit of their community. Let the city tax you more to build a library, pay a bit more at the restaurant so the workers there make a bit more, whatever. But sometimes if we're scared or anxious about the future and our place it in, we lean more into the self-interest category. You get a few generations of this and it's going sideways. You get a few folks that lean so hard into it, and have enough charisma and opportunity to convince people that what they're doing is great, and it's going sideways very fast. Tragically, many the benefits that previous generations enjoyed were not a windfall, but a debt that is coming due. And each subsequent generation is borrowing more to pay the inherited debt.
- 0xcafefood 3y ago
  > But sometimes if we're scared or anxious about the future and our place it in, we lean more into the self-interest category. This is very well put. The bailouts that kept housing prices high for Baby Boomers will end up being a tax paid by their children. Or by their grandchildren but many will never have any because of the unaffordable living situation for younger people.
reducesuffering 3y ago
Modernity in the US is definitely a case of extreme outcomes. There are many people who are struggling to get pay to afford a lifestyle of their parents, with high housing prices. Yet, there are also people who grew up in the same conditions, that were able to dork around in high school, graduate university cheaply through community college and state schools, earn $150k out of college, $300k in a few years, and build $1m equity by their 28th birthday, hustling when and where it counts.
foxes 3y ago
Why? Unchecked capitalism.
danking00 3y ago
These conversations never seem to mention what seems to me a relevant and related problem: the growth in commuting time during the rush hour. Yes, there are cheaper places to move. Yes, the price of my parents' home roughly matched inflation. Yes, after inflation, I earn about what my parents did at this stage of their life. So, why not just buy a home like my parents' in my hometown? The commute time into the city (Boston) has gone from ~45 minutes when my parents bought in the 80s to 90 minutes today, with high variance. That's 1.5 additional lost hours per day with no compensation in inflation-adjusted salary, home price, or cost of education. My father made roughly the same as me, inflation-adjusted, without a college degree or the associated costs. In comparison, I started my working life with ~100k in debt (they couldn't afford to help me pay). It's all very frustrating because it feels like we have the technology to solve these problems and yet we're hung up on non-technological problems.
- 0xcafefood 3y ago
  The US has chosen to pursue population growth, largely through immigration, as a route towards short-term economic growth. Things like overloaded infrastructure (more expensive housing, longer commutes on overcrowded streets, etc) are some of the consequences of that choice.
johnea 3y ago
"We’ve strayed so far from the original intentions of our economic model..."? I think this demonstrates that "young people", or at least this author, aren't really participating in "reality" at all. The economic system is doing exactly what it was intended to do: scrape the financial assetts of the masses of the unwashed herd into the bank accounts of the predetary rich. It's a win-win-win for the rich, the richer, and the richest. Exactly as it was "intended". As long as "young people" of all ages continue to throw themselves gushingly at every corporate exploit that crawls out from under a rock, expect the expoitation to continue. Perhaps consider how much your "lifestyle" depends directly on corporate platforms?
zackmorris 3y ago
I've been living under various forms of burnout since the Dot Bomb around 2001. The big thing that changed vs 1990s optimism for the future is wealth inequality. It would be interesting to build a graph of where an individual's productivity goes in the economy.. Say a person earns $100 per day at their job. They actually produced around $400, but that extra money gets skimmed by their employer to cover loss leaders, ads, leases, utilities, administrators, profit, etc. This is the US median individual income of $38,000 divided by (US GDP of $23 trillion divided by 135 million workers = $170,000) = 22% remaining. Then the worker's rent takes $25-50. Debts for education, a vehicle, etc take another $10-25. Utilities, food and other living expenses take the remainder until less than $10 is left. Play with the numbers all you want, at any job anywhere, and this fractionalization of productivity always plays out. So workers have to choose whether to spend the 2.5% of the productivity they get to keep ($10/$400) on saving it or spending it on recreation. We blame them for spending it on recreation. Why don't we ask where the other $390 went? This is the central crisis IMHO, and why I always place blame on the wealthy. Because they have the means to automate the busywork of the economy and free everyone from this exploitation that's been the daily lived reality for nearly all people for thousands of years. But they profit from it, so they never will. They can't, not because they're incapable, but because their attention is focused on ego-based goals. So they buy a yacht or build a rocket rather than building clean water infrastructure, free municipal solar power, mass transit, home hydroponic gardens, basically anything like solarpunk, and wokeism itself. That's why they demonize it. I think that enough young people have woken up post-pandemic that a shift is inevitable. Away from the centralized control of the wealthy to a distributed resource-based economy that takes capital out of the equation. Which will be some form of "your money's no good here", an homage to the Earth First! and Back to Basics movements of the 70s and early 80s during stagflation. Not that people don't want money, but that their basic needs are fulfilled enough that they don't need to work every day just to survive. The fact that sentence is laughable is maybe the great tragedy of our time. So I expect a huge backlash to that, and outlandish political maneuvers to do anything except help the average working person. And people will vote for the status quo candidates who promise security, over the ones that could help liberate them from the futility of the workaday world and a "retirement" bereft of savings.
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
The difference in population in the United States between 1970 and 2020 was 200 million to 330 million. A 65% increase. Were (net) 40 million new units of housing created in that time? Were (net) 100 million new jobs created? This is why when we hear about the poor zoomers and millennials complaining about their bad jobs and wanting to unionize, it's always fast food or coffee shops and similarly marginal employment.

91 points by BerislavLopac 3y ago

Is there a research into modern labor? I am interested in age and sex structure of workforce, unpaid work, including by women and seniors, entrepreneurship as form of labor, across decades and countries.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
You probably have to do this country by country, unless an aggregate site like Statista compares countries. For the UK you'd probably want ons.gov.uk for the US you'd want bls.gov

wing-_-nuts 3y ago

I'm an 'elder millennial' and I'm so used to seeing articles about how my generation has been screwed that I have to remind myself I'm not 'young' anymore and we're now talking about a whole new generation that's starting behind the 8 ball.

kodah 3y ago
The experience of millennials is quite diverse. Some of us are doing great, but the statistics show otherwise: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/02/14/millennial-life-how-young-adulthood-today-compares-with-prior-generations-2/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/02/14/millenn... Hidden in those statistics are also some burgeoning equity issues which are only beginning to show their face with GenZ.
- timmg 3y ago
  FYI, that article is 4 years old. I think things have changed a lot since then.
  - MattGaiser 3y ago
    https://www.redfin.com/news/gen-z-millennial-homeownership-rate-home-purchases/ https://www.redfin.com/news/gen-z-millennial-homeownership-r... Millennial home ownership rates are a bit behind, but not by a crazy amount for example.
    - timmg 3y ago
      I would think the want/need for owning a home to be enhanced by marriage/children. Since younger generations are less likely to do those things -- and more likely to do them later -- than earlier generations, that must count for some of the difference(?)
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        You have it backwards. Plenty of millennials want kids and marriage and a home, but the shitty situation we find ourselves in means we cannot responsibly have kids.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        Certainly if someone is single/doesn't have kids, there's almost certainly less urgency to buy a place given that, money aside, it may be a fairly significant time commitment and it certainly increases the friction of moving somewhere different for a job or other reason.
- NickC25 3y ago
  Some of us (I'm 33, so old-ish millennial here) are doing well, yes, but some of us have been doing terrible. The economy has, overall, not been kind to us. Boomers need to retire already, because they've held onto the top rung of the ladder for far too long, which has caused severe ripple effects in our economy. Their mentality, while not inherently bad, has not kept up with reality. I personally have struggled and am extremely fortunate that I've had great parents who were wealthy enough to partially support me. I wasn't able to get into a good company after college and that has absolutely wrecked my career - taking odd jobs and short-term employment to put food on the table and pay rent. As I'm not an engineer, my career prospects are quite dim. Now that there's an entire new generation entering the workforce, I'm afraid that there's millions of people in my position who simply won't be able to afford anything, much less a home or a family. That's not good for the economy, but the folks at the top don't really care as long as they get paid.
  - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
    >Boomers need to retire already, because they've held onto the top rung of the ladder for far too long Boomers will just leave their wealth to their kids, so if you don't have well off parents, you'll still find yourself underneath the ladder, holding the short stick, at the upcoming generational wealth transfer. We need more inheritance taxes, at least in Europe, which at his point is a feudal state from this tax-free inter generational wealth transfers in some parts.
treis 3y ago
As a fellow millennial I don't know what people are talking about. The world is way better today than when I was a kid: All sorts of racism and prejudice are at much lower levels than when I was a kid. I went through two economic crises by the time I was 21. The US fought two wars in my prime war fighting years. (Though fortunately not me but friends died). Technology has continued it's steady march. If you gave me a choice between being born today and being born when I was I'd take today without hesitation. Things haven't become Utopian yet but they are steadily getting better.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  They are talking about the economic situation. You are a millenial on hn, you are probably doing fine. A lot of your peers otoh are living with their parents still, have a mountain of debt, have put off having kids, aren’t in a career path to change much of this and don’t have the skills or the money or time to switch into a more lucrative field and be competitive relative to new grads.
  - treis 3y ago
    > A lot of your peers otoh are living with their parents still, have a mountain of debt, have put off having kids, aren’t in a career path to change much of this and don’t have the skills or the money or time to switch into a more lucrative field and be competitive relative to new grads. Yes I know. This happened because they graduated into the face of one of the recessions. Or maybe they went to war and lost their 20s battling PTSD. These effects persist for a long time which is why a lot of my generation was left behind. Obviously can't predict the future, but for those that came of age post 2008 the economy has been remarkably resilient. They haven't experienced something like a chunk of engineering graduates that can't get jobs. I was lucky and made it out, but the average starting salary of my degree from my school went down significantly because of 2008. A graduate today has no living memory of what an economic recession in the US looks like. And if anyone is wondering it's a lot worse than today or what happened during Covid.
  - listenallyall 3y ago
    There's a bit of an exaggeration here... somehow his "peers" are also choosing to order enormous quantities of their meals from DoorDash (doubling the cost), getting bottle service at nightclubs, and taking Instagram-worthy vacations to exotic locales.

giantg2 3y ago

"That fact gives the young unprecedented leverage, which has so far gone unrealised." No, it doesn't. It doesn't matter if the population is aging. If the youth are still a minority, then the status quo won't change. They don't really have any additional leverage in a democratic system. Edit: why disagree?

Timon3 3y ago
To give an example - Germany has way too few people in elderly care, and conditions are worsening, so numbers are dropping. What is the solution by the leading party voted for by boomers? They would like to introduce a year of mandatory service after the young are done with school to keep the cost low.
- giantg2 3y ago
  Yep, exactly.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  >They would like to introduce a year of mandatory service after the young are done with school to keep the cost low. This has been the norm in Austria for a while which I assume is where Germany got the idea. Military service is mandatory here but if you want to legally avoid it, you have to do mandatory civil duties in public services that suffer from labor shortages.
  - Timon3 3y ago
    No, Germany got it from themselves. We used to have it until a couple of years ago. They want to re-introduce it without the military aspect, as the only reason is saving costs for the elderly.
    - ChuckNorris89 3y ago

throwaway22032 3y ago

I feel like there's an issue with the crystallization of popular destinations that means that regardless of policy, in 2020 we have a different benchmark than 1960. For example, when London was cheaper, it was a very different place to today. Pollution, lots of areas that regular people wouldn't want to go to, generally just a less global city and less developed. Moving there or living there now is different to how it was. There's a ton more competition. There's more people in the entire country, "everyone" wants to go to University, etc. I feel like we need to go back to basics, like the social housing boom, and say - what do we need for people to settle down, feel ownership over their communities, raise families and get married, etc. I don't think that "people can afford to rent in huge cities" is sustainable as a goal.

ghaff 3y ago
Perhaps leaving aside today's problems in US West Coast cities, Western cities (certainly in the East Coast of the US but more broadly) 40 years or so ago were a lot grittier, more dangerous, less desirable, and yes cheaper than they are today. If I look at my cohort from grad school in the Boston area, I don't think anyone lived in--or even especially near--the city. And it wasn't because of cost. The city was still losing population well into the 90s.
fallingfrog 3y ago
>>I don't think that "people can afford to rent in huge cities" is sustainable as a goal. One wonders, then, what cities are for, exactly?
- throwaway22032 3y ago
  I mean huge cities. World cities like London, NYC, etc. The ones that people _move continents_ to live in. I don't think it's feasible any more in the internet age for popular places like that to remain accessible to all.

automatic6131 3y ago

>Between 2022-2023, £4.8 billion was added to UK student debt in interest alone. Students incur debt in order to pursue an education which will further their career prospects, then find themselves trapped by the interest – often necessitating more loans just to keep afloat. A very strange lie to encounter. In the UK, student debt repayment is linked to income (something like, 9% of all your income above £21k). If you don't earn, you don't pay. The interest accrues yes, but again, if you lose your job, you pay nothing. If you earn less than £21k, you pay nothing. It's nothing at all like a loan, and is more accurately, a income tax for graduate. Although, regressively, those who earn the most will pay the least. Those on modest salaries post university might pay it for their whole working lives. (one more thing, it's automatically written off after 40 years or so).

stu2b50 3y ago
I’d also note that this is how it works in the US as well for loans provided by the federal government. In addition, as long as you make payments, excess interest will not accrue and your principal won’t increase. They’re also written off in 20 years. It’s mostly with private student loans that people go completely underwater in the US
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  > I’d also note that this is how it works in the US as well for loans provided by the federal government. Only if you switch to the income-based repayment plan, which has to be reverified every year. Prior to December 2020 taxes were owed on forgiven debt the year it was finally forgiven. Which could be very harsh if the debt was large. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/how-to-get-income-driven-repayment-plan-forgiveness https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/how-t... I'm not sure how it works in the UK, but in the US at least this extra debt is negatively factored into things like credit scores. And regardless of the payment, it takes a bite out of income. I couldn't afford a PPACA medical plan for a few reasons, but partly because I was paying for loans. None of these repayment plans factor in affordability for the payee, they are a straight percentage of income basis or treat the payee as some sort of national average in terms of expected affordability.

Kapura 3y ago

It breaks my heart to talk to my mum and have her not understand that I'm over 30 and straight up cannot afford to buy property. "Why don't you sell your car for a down payment?" as if that would be anywhere near enough. I think part of what makes her said, is it felt _so easy_ for folks born in the post-war boom to get in on some of that increased productivity, and she's devastated that I have seemingly missed out on that boat.

Dig1t 3y ago
It just depends on WHERE you try to buy property. Yes of course it's going to be hard to buy a house in a popular area because you are competing with lots of rich people who also want to live there. But there are still tons of places with extremely cheap land in the developed world. Judging by your use of the word "mum" I'd guess you're in the UK. And yes, things are way harder in the UK since people get paid way less than America, the government takes way more from you in taxes, and the cost of basic things like food are higher. But I think you could still do what your mom is suggesting in some places in the UK. I can find plenty of starter homes in Scotland for 80k pounds for example. I just think it's silly to expect houses to be cheap exactly where you want to live, because odds are tons of people also want to live there too and you have to compete with them. But if you are willing to be flexible, there is still plenty of space for the next generation to own property.
- mmarq 3y ago
  You can find houses for 30K in Liverpool, because the UK outside of London is poorer than a random Eastern European country (which is one of the many reasons why Eastern Europeans are running away from the UK). How much do you think you are going to make in a place such as Scotland or northern England?
  - Dig1t 3y ago
    >UK outside of London is poorer than a random Eastern European country Yeah that's true, I think a lot of people in the US don't understand this at all. Everything British seems fancy and expensive, and we assume they all live like Londoners. But you are right that wages are not going to be great in Scotland or northern England. But a great strategy that works well in the US, and I suspect would work well in the UK, is to just spend a few years living as cheaply as possible in a big city like London. Hoard as much money as possible, then take that and buy a house in a cheaper area. In the US it is possible to live in a place like San Francisco for a few years, and if you live with roommates and don't fall for all the trappings that Californians go for (like ordering DoorDash every day or buying Teslas), you can easily save enough to buy a house for cash in a cheaper area. This strategy even works for tradespeople like plumbers/carpenters. Once you own a house outright, most other things are relatively cheap living on local wages and you can live any kind of life you want.

Lastodon 3y ago

"Why is our population declining? Why aren't millennials reproducing?" Truly a mystery!

bick_nyers 3y ago
Must be that damned internet!
- 0xcafefood 3y ago
  No, it's because they're buying avocado toast.
tomp 3y ago
You literally couldn't be more wrong. Fertility rate is inversely correlated with income. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
- mrkeen 3y ago
  The article says that young people are poor, old people are rich. Parent comment claims that young people are not having kids because poor. Your graph says that richer people had fewer kids (in the last 12 months). Your graph would only refute the parent comment if you could show that people have fewer kids because they're richer, not because they're older (confounding factor) and/or people with more kids don't have to sacrifice an income to look after said kids (reverse causation)
- swagasaurus-rex 3y ago
  Here’s a better explanation: fertility is inversely correlated with price of living That explains why poor countries have high birth rates and rich countries have low birth rates
  - tomp 3y ago
    This is US-only data.

bix6 3y ago

“So how did one of the most influential 20th-century economists get it all so profoundly wrong?” Well gee maybe economists should’ve shared a grindstone with psychologists instead of operating in a vacuum. And now it’s 2023 and every article about this talks about how wrong Keynes was. Who cares how wrong he was, let’s just fix the issues already.

yotamoron 3y ago

Well, its very simple - millenials and GenZs have no political power, so the hangry wolves are just eating the food from their plates. Drugged and blinded by social network, mobile apps, insane conspiracy theories and radical agendas, they keep missing the most obvious of things - there are no free meals, and all the sharks and wolves of the world will eat away on your hard work if you will not fight for it. What's right is not important - what's actually happening is.

codingdave 3y ago
Millenials and GenZs have all the political power if they just stand up and take it. The younger generations can change the entire demographic of the elected leadership if they so choose. Why else do you think the older powers are trying to control who votes? Why else is there so much false rhetoric trying to convince people that their vote doesn't matter?
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  The only way political power translates to economic power is through socialism (when considered not just to be control of the means of production, but control of everything, including living arrangements). And while certain things are socialistic in Western countries, it would be a dramatic upheaval to make everything socialistic. In the US there's only about 107 million Millennials and GenZers of voting age. This compares to about 150 million of GenX and older. Some of those people undoubtedly can't vote due to citizenship constraints, but Millennials and GenZers certainly can't control political power, even if they unified. https://www.statista.com/statistics/797321/us-population-by-generation/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/797321/us-population-by-... 2022: GenZ = 69.58 million, 1997-2012 births, so about half can vote. Millennials = 72.24 million GenX = 65.37 million Baby Boomers = 68.59 million Silent = 18.29 million Greatest = 670 thousand This distribution appears to be similar for the UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/bulletins/populationandhouseholdestimatesenglandandwales/census2021unroundeddata https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
- jhanschoo 3y ago

xwdv 3y ago

Although millennials were dealt a hard hand, I got to say there’s probably nothing better you could be right now than a millennial that has actually made it. A millennial with house, spouse, cars, family, six figure salaries, and still young enough to have a lot of years ahead of you, but not so young that you fall prey to the insidious life ruining traps Gen Z easily does. And you got to grow up with memories of a wholesome low-tech childhood, where tech was still friendly and not out to package you into some kind of product to be sold. To be a young well off millennial is basically like being part of a Boomer v2.0.0 generation.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
>To be a young well off millennial is basically like being part of a Boomer v2.0.0 generation. TIL that being well off is great. As a fellow millennial who hasn't "made it", could you please guide me with some tips on how to "make it"?
- whateveracct 3y ago
  Life really turns on a few moments in time all told. For my wife and myself, STEM degrees with in-state tuition (I turned down a prestige private university) with automatic test-score-based scholarship went a long way for me and my wife. Ended up with $40k in debt total which was pretty easy to pay down in a couple years in industry. Parents haven't helped once financially past college (including home buying). They had some savings for me and sent some money for food. And they bought a new car and gifted us their '08 Civic upon graduation (still going strong!) More recently, we moved out of an expensive coastal city to a suburb of a smaller nearby city in the first summer of the pandemic. When mortgage rates were sub-3% (with 20% down) and before the housing market got crazy hot. That was just luck = preparation (saved money and built credit and no debt) meets opportunity (turns out our savings were enough for 20% down if we looked to the burbs and we could get a low rate and go under asking for a 3k sqft, newish house). That's the best financial decision we've made since our college decisions. It really is a combination of luck and a few consequential decisions. It helped that we were both pretty academically smart and lived in a state with great engineering and CS programs at in-state schools. But we haven't made 100s of savvy financial decisions with huge ROI. Just a few sensible ones and dodged some bullets such as private university, burdensome house, etc.

angarg12 3y ago

I'm a new immigrant millennial to the US (from the UK of all places) and for me the American dream is dead. I know I'm playing the world's smallest violin and I will gather little sympathy since I am one of those tech workers with a big fat paycheck, but the fact that someone like me isn't thriving might be another symptom of how fucked up things are. It seems that my timing has played a big role. We moved here last year when the tech market was on fire and people were jumping companies getting obscene amounts of money. Things turned south very quickly. Companies stopped hiring and started laying off people instead. My company virtually froze my salary at the same time that inflation was soaring. Combined with a tumbling stock price, I’ll be taking home less money this year than last. Also my wife has been unable to find a stable job, which has further affected our household income. Buying a home? Give me a break. I love to share the Zillow home price index graph to visually show people how Covid has screwed the housing market [1]. And at least before we had the option to move far from the city to a cheaper location and work remotely, but now employers are forcing us to go back to the office, so the choice is between unaffordable rent or multi-hour daily commutes (I’m in the second camp). I know this comment sounds whiny but I can’t help to feel that we are just getting dealt a shit sandwich after another. We might be in a world of extravagant productivity but I’m sure as hell not reaping the benefits. I’m supposed to be a top 5% earner and yet I don’t feel my standard of living is much better than my working class upbringing - at least back then we owned our apartment and weren’t told how privileged we were. [1] https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/ https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/

908B64B197 3y ago
... and that's still a better deal than the UK, where the norm is no equity and an capped salaries for "IT personnel" (their words, not mine). Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Europeans could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?). Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. I recall someone pitching the "Silicon Roundabout" and that Cambridge and Oxford were going to be the new Stanford and MIT. It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for UK nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US [0]. [0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-brain-trade http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...

PragmaticPulp 3y ago

The reality is hard, but the expectation half of this balance is getting exaggerated: > We could be working 15-hour weeks, enjoying our free time, and living like people of the future. Keynes’ 15-hour workweek essay wasn’t meant to be a rigorous study of how the future was going to look, nor was it representative of a widespread belief. Yet to this day it’s a favorite of journalists looking to anchor economic expectations so far away from reality that no living conditions could sound good by comparison. More practically, I still see a lot of exaggerated expectations in the juniors coming through my employer. Maybe I’m getting old, but it’s becoming frustrating to watch people get six-figure jobs right out college doing remote coding work from the comfort of their homes with ample mentoring, only to complain because Reddit and Blind led them to believe they’d be earning $300K at FAANG jobs while working 20 hours per week. I know that’s not the focus of this article, but I do think it’s representative of how the gap between expectation and reality is being stretched wider and wider as people fall deeper into the internet/social media reality distortion field.

leetcrew 3y ago
are their expectations unreasonably high, or are yours too low? last year a junior on my team worked with a few other juniors and a PM to implement a straightforward automation project. their system saved about $50mm last year, and that number is projected to increase as the company grows. you don't necessarily find such low hanging fruit every year, but would he really be wrong to think his contribution is worth more than $150k?
- applied_heat 3y ago
  Automation of what if you don’t mind sharing some general information? A physical machine? Filling and filing of a form?
  - leetcrew 3y ago
    I'd rather not share too many details, but it's similar to how credit card applications are processed. there's an automated system that can automatically approve some applications, with a manual fallback. the system my junior colleague worked on did not use such sophisticated heuristics, but it still dramatically reduced the amount of cases that require human intervention.

guender 3y ago

[dead]

trabant00 3y ago

> We could be working 15-hour weeks, enjoying our free time, and living like people of the future. Matt Gallagher asks: Why aren’t we? Simple, two reasons: 1) world wide living standards are the highest they've been despite what click-bait negativity would want you to believe. 2) people want MORE and are willing to compete for it. If we go back to living standards from 100 years ago (life expectancy, poverty levels, human rights, etc) and nobody wants to compete for more than that, sure, we can have 15 hours work weeks and all the leisure in the world.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

JohnCClarke 3y ago

> We could be working 15-hour weeks, enjoying our free time, and living like people of the future. France has rigorous 35 hour work weeks and a 78% labor force participation rate. The USA has 40+ hour work weeks and a 56% labor force participation rate. The choice is real.

bobolino123 3y ago
How do you count breaks in both countries? In Germany and Switzerland for example breaks don't count as working so if you have 42.5h you are at least 47.5h per week in the office. Hours per worker might be lower since there are tax-favourable incentives like "mini job" that push it down artificially.
treis 3y ago
You're not making a like for like comparison. OCED has the US at 78% and France at 81% https://data.oecd.org/emp/labour-force-participation-rate.htm https://data.oecd.org/emp/labour-force-participation-rate.ht...

Xen9 3y ago

Technological development (excluding AI agents) enables freedom of the masses if and only if the masses simultaneously and continuously pursue their self-interests instead of getting abused by the minority who achieve / maintain wealth (in order to achieve their self-interests) by abusing others. The average human never evolved to pursue their self-interests in this sense. They recognise stealing and killing when done in front of them by primitive means. But debts, employment et cetera are beyond this comprehension.

rgbrenner 3y ago

I think the point of this article is true, but the writer does a poor job at making the case. It starts off with an 85 year old Kaynes quote, which reads the same as: "They said there were going to be flying cars.. what went wrong?" Then follows it up with just comparing age groups without showing similar stats for older groups when they were the same age. Saying retirees have less debt than people just entering the work force isn't some big revelation. Even in the best of times that would be expected... and they repeat that mistake for pretty much all of the stats.

coding123 3y ago

I think the craziest thing about things right now is inflation. It's not a single number. A lot of people go- oh well it's at %19 more than 2019, so now you need a 20% pay bump. Well... that's not actually accurate. Because heating or cooling your home (which you now spend all your time in) which was already expensive is even more expensive, we have to deal with energy bills that are, for some people, upwards of 15% of their paycheck. That's huge. Then because we still drive pretty much the same (work actually reduced our driving because our cars would just sit at the office all day). We'd kind of just take care of a few errands on the way to work or the way home. Now those errands are straight up, drive out, drive back. We're still driving at least as much or more - so again, we're paying more for energy that way. Now housing. Housing is totally crazy. It's not even about the fact that we have high home prices, it's that now everyone gets their wife to take out a loan, pay down a credit card or two with that money, then buys their house to stay under the 45% Debt To Income Ratio. So reality is we've got $1000 left per month for grocery outlet food that's pretty much expired the day we bring it home. I'm pretty sure things are not sustainable right now for a large swath of people. On top of all that, not everyone got that 20% pay bump - if any at all! And to top off my last thought. I live in CA, so obviously I'm on a bit of a high blip here, but, don't you remember a few years ago shopping at pretty much any grocery store and paying like $2.50 for bags of chips, or cheese dip, sour cream, a few potatoes. All that stuff is now $5. I feel like any random item I pick up at Safeway or Raleys is straight up $5. That's what I felt like shopping at whole foods for organic natural grass fed vine-ripened potatoes. Now every grocery store is whole fucking foods! edit: removed duplicate posts (hn is getting hammered or something right now)

thrawa8387336 3y ago

The world is just poorer and that's what it takes to take care of the environment. What do you mean no everyone can burn thousands of gallons of gasoline every year? What do you mean most people will not travel internationally?

Proven 3y ago

[dead]

fourseventy 3y ago

If you are a young person in the USA you are leading an extremely priviledged and lavish life compared to the vast majority of people in all of human history. The fact that people still find time to complain and somehow play victim is crazy to me.

theandrewbailey 3y ago
If we consider what our parents accomplished when they were our age compared to where we are now, and find ourselves lacking, shouldn't everyone be concerned about the deteriorated conditions, no matter where this happens to be? The forward march of history and progress may have taken a step back.
- bequanna 3y ago
  This is a good way to think about it. My parents were able to buy a 4br mostly modern rambler home when they were in their early 20s with one blue collar income.
bequanna 3y ago
“Be happy with what you have” is typically not a good strategy to suggest to those who wish to work hard and improve their lives.
BeFlatXIII 3y ago
Why are there so many people compelled to leave such useless comments every time this subject comes up? No one experiences life relative to all of humanity. Why is this a surprise anymore?

sircastor 3y ago

The majority of people are faced with a tough decision: Do the thing that benefits your community to your own (often mild) detriment, or do the thing that benefits you at the cost of the community. I think generally people are willing to sacrifice a little for the benefit of their community. Let the city tax you more to build a library, pay a bit more at the restaurant so the workers there make a bit more, whatever. But sometimes if we're scared or anxious about the future and our place it in, we lean more into the self-interest category. You get a few generations of this and it's going sideways. You get a few folks that lean so hard into it, and have enough charisma and opportunity to convince people that what they're doing is great, and it's going sideways very fast. Tragically, many the benefits that previous generations enjoyed were not a windfall, but a debt that is coming due. And each subsequent generation is borrowing more to pay the inherited debt.

0xcafefood 3y ago
> But sometimes if we're scared or anxious about the future and our place it in, we lean more into the self-interest category. This is very well put. The bailouts that kept housing prices high for Baby Boomers will end up being a tax paid by their children. Or by their grandchildren but many will never have any because of the unaffordable living situation for younger people.

reducesuffering 3y ago

Modernity in the US is definitely a case of extreme outcomes. There are many people who are struggling to get pay to afford a lifestyle of their parents, with high housing prices. Yet, there are also people who grew up in the same conditions, that were able to dork around in high school, graduate university cheaply through community college and state schools, earn $150k out of college, $300k in a few years, and build $1m equity by their 28th birthday, hustling when and where it counts.

foxes 3y ago

Why? Unchecked capitalism.

danking00 3y ago

These conversations never seem to mention what seems to me a relevant and related problem: the growth in commuting time during the rush hour. Yes, there are cheaper places to move. Yes, the price of my parents' home roughly matched inflation. Yes, after inflation, I earn about what my parents did at this stage of their life. So, why not just buy a home like my parents' in my hometown? The commute time into the city (Boston) has gone from ~45 minutes when my parents bought in the 80s to 90 minutes today, with high variance. That's 1.5 additional lost hours per day with no compensation in inflation-adjusted salary, home price, or cost of education. My father made roughly the same as me, inflation-adjusted, without a college degree or the associated costs. In comparison, I started my working life with ~100k in debt (they couldn't afford to help me pay). It's all very frustrating because it feels like we have the technology to solve these problems and yet we're hung up on non-technological problems.

0xcafefood 3y ago
The US has chosen to pursue population growth, largely through immigration, as a route towards short-term economic growth. Things like overloaded infrastructure (more expensive housing, longer commutes on overcrowded streets, etc) are some of the consequences of that choice.

johnea 3y ago

"We’ve strayed so far from the original intentions of our economic model..."? I think this demonstrates that "young people", or at least this author, aren't really participating in "reality" at all. The economic system is doing exactly what it was intended to do: scrape the financial assetts of the masses of the unwashed herd into the bank accounts of the predetary rich. It's a win-win-win for the rich, the richer, and the richest. Exactly as it was "intended". As long as "young people" of all ages continue to throw themselves gushingly at every corporate exploit that crawls out from under a rock, expect the expoitation to continue. Perhaps consider how much your "lifestyle" depends directly on corporate platforms?

zackmorris 3y ago

I've been living under various forms of burnout since the Dot Bomb around 2001. The big thing that changed vs 1990s optimism for the future is wealth inequality. It would be interesting to build a graph of where an individual's productivity goes in the economy.. Say a person earns $100 per day at their job. They actually produced around $400, but that extra money gets skimmed by their employer to cover loss leaders, ads, leases, utilities, administrators, profit, etc. This is the US median individual income of $38,000 divided by (US GDP of $23 trillion divided by 135 million workers = $170,000) = 22% remaining. Then the worker's rent takes $25-50. Debts for education, a vehicle, etc take another $10-25. Utilities, food and other living expenses take the remainder until less than $10 is left. Play with the numbers all you want, at any job anywhere, and this fractionalization of productivity always plays out. So workers have to choose whether to spend the 2.5% of the productivity they get to keep ($10/$400) on saving it or spending it on recreation. We blame them for spending it on recreation. Why don't we ask where the other $390 went? This is the central crisis IMHO, and why I always place blame on the wealthy. Because they have the means to automate the busywork of the economy and free everyone from this exploitation that's been the daily lived reality for nearly all people for thousands of years. But they profit from it, so they never will. They can't, not because they're incapable, but because their attention is focused on ego-based goals. So they buy a yacht or build a rocket rather than building clean water infrastructure, free municipal solar power, mass transit, home hydroponic gardens, basically anything like solarpunk, and wokeism itself. That's why they demonize it. I think that enough young people have woken up post-pandemic that a shift is inevitable. Away from the centralized control of the wealthy to a distributed resource-based economy that takes capital out of the equation. Which will be some form of "your money's no good here", an homage to the Earth First! and Back to Basics movements of the 70s and early 80s during stagflation. Not that people don't want money, but that their basic needs are fulfilled enough that they don't need to work every day just to survive. The fact that sentence is laughable is maybe the great tragedy of our time. So I expect a huge backlash to that, and outlandish political maneuvers to do anything except help the average working person. And people will vote for the status quo candidates who promise security, over the ones that could help liberate them from the futility of the workaday world and a "retirement" bereft of savings.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

The difference in population in the United States between 1970 and 2020 was 200 million to 330 million. A 65% increase. Were (net) 40 million new units of housing created in that time? Were (net) 100 million new jobs created? This is why when we hear about the poor zoomers and millennials complaining about their bad jobs and wanting to unionize, it's always fast food or coffee shops and similarly marginal employment.