9 ms·

Perhaps my friends and I are outliers, none of us inherited any wealth or were given trust funds or lump sums when hitting adulthood but all of us are better of

Perhaps my friends and I are outliers, none of us inherited any wealth or were given trust funds or lump sums when hitting adulthood but all of us are better off than our parents at the same age and their parents are better off than their parents (with one exception). All either studied hard in school and went on to get a degree or left school at 18 and apprenticed in a trade or got specific qualifications. I read so much about declining wealth and how each generation is worse off that I have to assume I’m in a lucky bubble because it’s not the case for me. None of us are rich but the system appears to be working from a sample of say 30 people aged 25 to 45 from different parts and backgrounds in the UK.

jibbit 2y ago
did you buy a house? when?
- simonbarker87 2y ago
  Yes, 2014 with a 95% mortgage
  - scarby2 2y ago
    is you're birth year 87? In which case you were able to save a deposit within 6 years of graduating? When i was at that stage my outgoings (rent, food, council tax, car, insurance) were probably 90% of my salary.
pertymcpert 2y ago
Where are you and how long did it take to save up for a downpayment?
- simonbarker87 2y ago
  First house was in the North of England, took 4 years to save up enough.
  - thereticent 2y ago
    Are you in the black as a household overall? We aren't yet. Our projection is that we will be in 5-7 years. I'm turning forty soon. Just to give you an anchor point.
    - koolba 2y ago
      What does “in the black” mean at a household level? Total assets minus loan balances being positive?
      - thereticent 2y ago
        Sorry, yes. I was thinking net worth > 0.
        simonbarker87 2y ago
        Ah, I was wondering too but my reply button was gone, yes I would say we’ll be net > 0 around the same time as you age wise. If we hadn’t had to renovate a 60s property we’d possibly be there already but UK housing stock needs work sadly.
    - whateveracct 2y ago
      Does home price count as an asset in this "in the black" calculation?
scarby2 2y ago
> None of us are rich but the system appears to be working from a sample of say 30 people aged 25 to 45 from different parts and backgrounds in the UK. I have a similar sample, all middle class in their 30's. The only ones who have bought houses have been given significant assistance from their parents, now none of them are poor by any stretch, but few have any significant assets.
throwaway314155 2y ago
> Perhaps my friends and I are outliers That's it, you're outliers.
fumar 2y ago
How can you compare these experiences to a greater upward mobility which does not exist? You don’t have a baseline for comparison. What if you had 2x more leisure time with the same fiscal wealth? What if you had easier access to healthcare?
- dingnuts 2y ago
  what if we lived forever and money grew on trees
  - ericjmorey 2y ago
    You didn't even try to understand what you scoffed at. Do better.
brundolf 2y ago
Which fields? I feel like software has been an outlier here for a decade; the only place where traditional economic intuitions still apply (semi-smart people can work hard, learn a technical skill, find a job in their field, pay off their loans, make more than their parents, afford a house, and have a comfortable personal life and relatively fulfilling work life) Everything I've heard from the rest of the economy is that this model is dead
- simonbarker87 2y ago
  Fair question, it’s a mix: IT admin, manufacturing project manager, primary school teacher, tree surgeon, mortgage advisor, doctor, something in finance, secondary school teacher, plumber, software developer, power electronics engineer, charity sector project lead So a real mix
  - Aromasin 2y ago
    Okay, so a lot of ~£40k a year salaries (outside of medicine and finance) to afford a £400k house when your parents might have had a £20k salary to afford an £80k house? There's a real disparity when you consider what they did too. If your parents are anything like mine, they were in the pub 4 days a week, drinking and eating with friends. I can managed that just a few times a month. Wealth compared to income from my experience is significantly lower by .lost metrics.
    - directevolve 2y ago
      This paper has an excellent, readable breakdown of how compensation and productivity has changed since the 1970s.
      - RugnirViking 2y ago
        Which paper?
  - the_real_cher 2y ago
    Maybe you have an exceptional friend group because .. outside of your anecdata .. the statistically average salaries for many of those professions over large sample sets is below the median in the us and they are definitely not seeing their purchasing power increasing yearly
tekla 2y ago
Yep. A good friend of mine grew up to a very poor immigrant family, both him and his sister got full rides to good schools because of grades, and at age 30 bought a house in NJ with a very good school with 4 kids after saving non stop and living with his parents and taking care of them. The system works fine if you don't need nonstop luxuries
- tmn 2y ago
  It’s really incredible how much people feel entitled to in the us. And by entitled, I mean they spend money on these things because it’s beneath them to think they shouldn’t have said experience or thing.
- ericjmorey 2y ago
  Prior generation was buying houses at 20 with less skill. I'm happy to see that your friend made it work for himself, but his was a much harder path than most people saw in prior generations.
thereticent 2y ago
Same here, but we are in a very similar boat in our voyage through socioeconomic statuses (though I'm in Ohio River Valley US). I may be fooled by the discourse that [Xennials/Oregon Trail gen/Gen Y/Elder Millennials], but we supposedly saved more, delayed gratification, planned more, and worked more than even Gen Z (who, don't get me wrong, have it worse because of undercompensation vs purchasing power and sheer hopelessness). I doubt we're typical, is my point.
giantg2 2y ago
"in the UK" In the US, my anecdotes seem to show that things have stayed neutral or declined slightly. It seems harder to get a decent job than our parents. It seems that fewer of us have bought homes, or delayed buying due to financial reasons. Seems like more of us are working multiple jobs too. I think the aggregate measures showed real income only trending up slightly over the past couple generations.
swatcoder 2y ago
Yes, you and I are outliers and so are many people here. Those of us who work in tech, and many of the people we find ourselves bonding with and staying close to in our adulthood, are lucky to have taken up in a sector that happened to see disproportionate growth during our careers and admitted many people from modest backgrounds. But people who didn't stumble onto that path, or perhaps hoped to follow their parents into professions that were more flat or failing (medicine, education, academia, farming, manufacturing, "the trades"). In aggregate, some of those people are still doing okay, some are doing well, and some are flailing in desperation for having made the wrong bet. Of the people I grew up with in a modest blue collar community, I don't know anyone besides the few most ambitious and capable that were able to find the security that their parents had. And as one of those more ambitious and capable people who later circled with people of fancier backgrounds, I similarly don't know anyone who pursued things like academia or medicine and found what they expected there either. Appreciate what you have! Many don't share it.
- chefandy 2y ago
  As someone in the US that’s bounced in and out of tech, including some longish stints in blue collar jobs, it honestly blows my mind that the tech scene is so all-encompassing that many in it feel like it is representative of… anything else. I’m not talking about the tech libertarian types that think any impediment to the ultra rich vacuuming up everyone else’s wealth is tantamount to dictatorship. I’m talking about the typical happy path developer (I shy away from saying average because all us developers are above-average developers) that went to college for comp sci right after high school pretty quickly secured a junior role for maybe 6x-9x the (ridiculous) Federal Poverty Level. To be clear: I’m not saying they’re bad people or anything— most people think their experiences are more representative than they are. But, from outside, some of the assumptions software folks make about the world just seem utterly ridiculous. Consider that on average, junior developers make more money than a first year medical resident that has a PhD in perhaps the highest demand field in the US and works shifts of 16-30 hours with many consistently logging 80 hours per week, and occasionally end up working much more. Ask that medical resident what a really bad day, and a really bad week at work looks like for them and ask a developer with the same amount of post-school experience the same question, and then consider how much more school it took… and then ask that same question to an aircraft mechanic, a chef with a culinary degree, a construction worker, a public defender, a commercial fisherman, a firefighter, a nurse… the software industry is more than an aberration — it’s a different planet. The kind of shit I’ve seen developers say they’re going to “pivot to” if the software industry falls apart is, frankly, flabbergasting. If we see the sort of sustained job losses some fear in software, there are going to be a whole lot of people learning some extremely bitter, difficult truths about the world outside. I’m not saying we all didn’t and don’t work hard to get where we are — it’s just that what developers get vs what’s expected of us and what we had to do to get there is very different than what it is for almost the entire rest of the working world. It’s easy to see your own contributions to your success and miss the industry and market scaffolding you could stand on to get what you did.
dclowd9901 2y ago
I'm in the same position as you, but I see myself as rather lucky. I worked very hard but I also was taught hard work translates into success, many people don't see that relationship. And I happened to be interested in a lucrative career path.
- palata 2y ago
  > I also was taught hard work translates into success, many people don't see that relationship. That's a typical confirmation bias: you worked hard and got successful, so you're tempted to think that it's because you worked hard. Some don't work hard and get successful, many work hard and don't get successful. The one thing that you clearly can't rule out is luck. Tell people in Gaza that if they work hard they will end up in a situation similar as yours...
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    some work hard and get successful; some work hard and fail all who don't try fail
    - palata 2y ago
      I fail to see how this is related to what I said.
      - dasil003 2y ago
        It's related because you said "you can't rule out luck" which is basically casting doubt on the whole idea of hard work having an impact on success. Well, no reasonable person would say hard work guarantees success, or that all success is luck. The truth is luck and serendipity affect all outcomes, but to use that to question the impact of a human's agency on their own life outcomes is an insidiously disempowering perspective.
        palata 2y ago
        Sorry, to me it looks like a lot of words that say nothing. Obviously, if you don't do, you don't do. > to use that to question the impact of a human's agency on their own life outcomes I'm not doing that at all. I am not saying that the effort put into achieving something is worth nothing. What I am saying is that whenever someone is successful, it means that they have been incredibly lucky (and on top of that they worked a lot, maybe). Whenever they compare themselves to someone else who also worked hard but was not successful, the first conclusion to make is that this someone else was not as lucky. But the first thing that happens when someone gets successful is that they forget how lucky they are, and just start talking about merit. My point is just that whenever you talk about merit, just remember that you were not born in a poor family in a war zone, and that does not make you more deserving.
Drew_ 2y ago
> Perhaps my friends and I are outliers, none of us inherited any wealth or were given trust funds or lump sums when hitting adulthood > all of us are better off than our parents at the same age and their parents are better off than their parents These are conflicting statements. Your group are all beneficiaries of generational wealth by this description. Maybe it isn’t as overt as a trust fund, but you definitely inherited wealth and opportunity from your parents.
- flappyeagle 2y ago
  Oh get off your high horse.
  - Drew_ 2y ago
    I’m not on a high horse.
- monktastic1 2y ago
  It's hard to understand what you're saying here. Being better off than your parents implies that you are a beneficiary of generational wealth? Connect the dots for us.
  - Drew_ 2y ago
    OP described a group of families that accrued wealth over 3 generations "without inheriting any wealth". Assuming they weren't orphaned at birth, each generation definitely benefited from the fruits of the previous generation. Even without an overt handout like a trust fund, we still inherit wealth from our ancestors (eg: housing, health care, education, credit, social networks, etc). In this case, the "handout" would have been their upbringing. They feel "the system is working" because of this, but not everyone in the system has an ancestry like this.
    - monktastic1 2y ago
      So by your definition, anyone who isn't an orphan is a beneficiary of generational wealth? In fact, even orphans are, because they inherited genes, weren't left to die, etc.? I suppose that is a definition, but it doesn't seem like a useful one, especially in the context of this conversation. Or maybe I've just misunderstood you?
laurencerowe 2y ago
I'm a little surprised by this. While I'm better off than my parents I went into a much more highly paying field (software engineer vs teacher/social worker.) If I did a similar job to them I would have no hope of ever affording a similar house to them. They were part of a generation that benefited from enormous house price appreciation due to a combination of falling interest rates went from almost 15% down to under 5% (this is about 3x on its own) and the fall in house building which drove up prices and rents generally. This effect is somewhat less pronounced outside of southern England.
- simonbarker87 2y ago
  You make a good point about higher paying fields in the younger generations. While there is a spread of occupations that I replied to another commenter with you may have hit on something. Nearly everyone has an occupation in a higher paying field than their parents/grandparents and everyone is dual income whereas, I assume, this was less so in the previous generations. Thinking of one (not me) it’s delivery driver -> enlisted service -> mid level finance (not London) Hmmm, food for thought, thank you
  - laurencerowe 2y ago
    > Nearly everyone has an occupation in a higher paying field than their parents/grandparents and everyone is dual income whereas, I assume, this was less so in the previous generations. That is unarguably true of our parents' and grandparents' generations, but I don't think it is as true of people of my age or younger (born in early 1980s.) There was a huge expansion of higher skilled jobs after the war with large numbers of people moving into the middle classes. For me and everyone I know our mothers (born 1950s) worked. We all grew up in dual income families. My great-grandfather was a miner. His son, my grandfather enlisted in the forces during the war, seems to have been recognised as being technically apt and worked with radar, became an officer and in the early 1960s left to be a manager at an engineering company. His daughter, my mum, became a teacher (first in family to go to college) and his son did not go to college but became an IT manager (married a teacher). All of us grandchildren went to university but basically have similar jobs to our parents' generation. Several of my siblings and cousins own houses but they got help from parents or partners' parents and mostly bought outside the south east. Renting a flat in London as a fairly highly paid IT contractor I had to pay six months up front because my parents didn't earn enough to be guarantors.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Sure maybe there was some inertia from the benevolent bettering institutions of the New Deal that have given a chance to Americans. I just think you'd have to be so willfully in denial as to miss the darkness we are descending into. To miss how bitterly the GOP and the wealthy are building empires of lies and bespoke manufactured realities to make up down and left right, to cover for horrible treacherous actions against the possibility of the individual, stacking the deck for empire and inherited wealth. (And Dems are frequently unwilling to bite the donor class that makes winning elections possible, after the courts have obstructed democratic funding reforms.) Are actively opposing the possibility of people doing good for themselves & the world. I strongly recommend folks go read one of the darkest periods of America, before enough was enough Adam Hochschild's American Midnight (2022) tells an amazing story of a circa-WW1 state that had radicalized against people, that had been totally overrun by well monied powers. Of Hoover using the full power of the police state to surveil as Ralph Van Demand had done during the Philippines civil war, of of the postal service run by someone using it for information control, of American Defense vigilanism. Its not a tale of what happened next, how that broke, just a long amazing story of how dark America got, how badly the state was an extension of capital and power, and how deeply it subverted the individual, the union, any attempt for everyday humans to make any claim to life liberty, or pursuit of happiness. We face today not quite such amassed power, but a completely warped infosphere where these bespoke realities create lifestyle beliefs where people are on board with incredible trains of lies crafting false enemies, supporting the opposite of the signalling they claim. Its different than dark; the world today is overloaded by hell's din, by monsters of abuse, doing their worst to harm us for greed and for the possibility of undoing the good of the world.
geodel 2y ago
Well things worked out for you and they have worked out for me as well. For a long time I have this arrogance expressed privately usually to myself or very close people that it is all due to hard work, diligence, thrift that I reached where I am today. But lately after reading and observing around quite a bit I come to realize due to being ended up in a fast growing sector at least a minimum level of success was guaranteed. I see same thing at my company where a lot of VPs, Sr VPs and above reached to that level primarily they started a decade or two earlier than me and growth was much faster than compare to when I joined in mid 2000s. They can talk down to me just like I can talk down to more juniors about value of hard work, drive and so on. However, joining a growing sector early was best thing career wise. No amount of hard work will help if one is starting at a middling IT job in middling company in 2025 like I did in 2005.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Well, and even the company matters. I was in IT since post-grad school (with a bit of engineering earlier). But with dot-bomb, a company that struggled through and then 2008, I was only in an "OK" position. It was really the period post 2010 that set things up a lot better.
  - geodel 2y ago
    Indeed. For me 2010-11 was when I got a full-time job as compared to contracting (small time) which was big jump for me in terms of job quality and money. Interesting enough I met many people who joined Amazon in same time frame and earning about 50% more than me in straight first job that I earned after with 8-10 years of experience. So yeah company part is important.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I wouldn't even say it was work quality; the job I had for a good period really set me up for my ultimate full-time job and I mostly liked it. But that ultimate job was a public company and even if not FAANG level comp, set me up pretty well and provided the leverage to make investments that were pretty solid during that very good period.
drmath 2y ago
Whether or not you're really outliers, it would be very surprising if "my friends and I" were representative of the general population.
frontfor 2y ago
While I don’t doubt things have worked out well for you, how many of you are able to afford owning real estate?
bjourne 2y ago
You all studied so hard but never heard about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_bias?
cool_dude85 2y ago
I have a very different experience. I did all the right things, more or less, got into a good field with a secure job in the broader tech industry, and indeed I make very good money. Despite this, I can not afford to buy the house I grew up in; a 3 bedroom SFH with a decent sized yard and a pool, around 1400 square feet, 45 minutes away from downtown without traffic in a hot real estate market. My father was able to purchase this home as a tradesman with 4 kids, being the only parent who worked outside the home.
- abustamam 2y ago
  Same. Though my dad was also a software engineer, but he was just never good at negotiating raises. My wife and I both work and we could maybe swing the price of the house I grew up in, but the mortgage would be roughly the same as our rent now currently. Similar case for my wife. Her parents bought in 2000 with a combined household salary of less than mine alone. The mortgage would be twice our monthly rent. Fortunately we stand to inherit that house, which sort of proves the article's point.
csomar 2y ago
Very anecdotal. You can't just look at yourself and your circle (which is similar to yourself) and extrapolate to the general population. Also most people in HN are in Tech which did well in the last 15-20 years comparing to other fields.
djtango 2y ago
My dad migrated to London in the 70s and bought his first property in London around age 26. He didn't have a degree but did get a professional qualification. I ended up getting a good degree at a top uni and started my career at Amazon but definitely couldn't have amassed the necessary amount for a down payment for a place in London by the time I was 26. By the time my dad was 35 he had two kids and my mum was a full time mum. This doesn't sound remotely close to the reality of my numerous banking, lawyer, accountant, engineering and doctor friends. The only people I know who are remotely close to being able to own a property in London and have only one breadwinner work in hedge funds.
- simonbarker87 2y ago
  Of my friends only one set lives in London and I have no idea how they afford it, one or both of them must be on silly money and it’s pretty clear most of the money must go into the mortgage. I started my career is a very cheap part of the UK so I sort of have to carve London out of any generalisations I make.
- svara 2y ago
  You can't compare London from back then to London today though. In terms of its place among cities around the world, it's a different place now. There certainly would have been locations where your dad would not have been able to afford property, and conversely there certainly are places where you can afford property. Point being, things change, but this anecdote doesn't illustrate that you're worse off than a previous generation.
scotty79 2y ago
Some of it might be declining costs of everything apart form limited resources (like housing). Perhaps you generation is better off than their parents were in terms of everything except real estate. But their parents are also better off now than they used to be when they were their age, because everything (except housing) is much cheaper (relatively) than it used to be thanks to optimizations in production and economies of scale of last 5 decades.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
You're outliers. Boomers hold the bulk of the wealth in the US.
NoLinkToMe 2y ago
You're not an outlier. If you look at US GDP per capita, adjusted for inflation, it's higher than ever. If you then look at the median personal income, also adjusted for inflation (i.e. the middle class), you see the same trend. There's a lot of doom and gloom but it doesn't seem consistent with the data. There's a weird tendency to zoom in on particular data points that paint a particularly negative story and leave out the rest. For example, we look at housing and will say that its prices outpaced inflation. And that's true, sort of. But it's also completely untrue. For example, if I look at my own situation compared to my parents: I have a 1.5% interest rate on my mortgage, my parents paid 15%. Homes are now about 50-75% bigger than my parents' generation, on average. And the average home is shared by 33% fewer people than my parents' generation. So the cost to rent the money to buy a certain area of home for 1 person, i.e. housing costs, has actually gone down, despite the average price of a house having gone up. In all fairness I wouldn't want to trade with the average person in past generations.
- hello_moto 2y ago
  GDP (per capita or not) cannot show wealth inequality. Personal income does not include capital gain. Wealth grow is not included in either of these dataset. CEO unrealized gain is huge and represents a huge chunk of his/her eventual hidden income that becomes wealth.
- eli_gottlieb 2y ago
  So you're saying that on average if you can afford to buy a house, it's bigger and better than it used to be, but also that the fraction of people who can afford to do that is stagnating or declining.
- borgdefenser 2y ago
  Romanticizing the past while at the same time having an apocalyptic view of the future, while I don't know if it is a human thing to do, it is certainly a western thing to do. I think about how much is it worth for me to work remote vs working at the same factory for 40 years like my father. Some people pretend like this is just a given in the modern world and basically worthless. In reality, it is hard to put a price tag on because the difference is so valuable to me. I actually could have been the 4th generation working at a flour mill if I had wanted. Even if the flour mill paid double what it does, my life is so much more grand than what that would have been, it isn't even close.
SkyPuncher 2y ago
The argument in your case is you should actually be _much_ better off than you are without this massive wealth transfer. That’s part of the challenge in the populous understanding this issue. Many people are better off than their parents, but for being the richest country in the world most people should be far better off.

jibbit 2y ago

did you buy a house? when?

simonbarker87 2y ago
Yes, 2014 with a 95% mortgage
- scarby2 2y ago
  is you're birth year 87? In which case you were able to save a deposit within 6 years of graduating? When i was at that stage my outgoings (rent, food, council tax, car, insurance) were probably 90% of my salary.

pertymcpert 2y ago

Where are you and how long did it take to save up for a downpayment?

simonbarker87 2y ago
First house was in the North of England, took 4 years to save up enough.
- thereticent 2y ago
  Are you in the black as a household overall? We aren't yet. Our projection is that we will be in 5-7 years. I'm turning forty soon. Just to give you an anchor point.
  - koolba 2y ago
    What does “in the black” mean at a household level? Total assets minus loan balances being positive?
    - thereticent 2y ago
      Sorry, yes. I was thinking net worth > 0.
      - simonbarker87 2y ago
        Ah, I was wondering too but my reply button was gone, yes I would say we’ll be net > 0 around the same time as you age wise. If we hadn’t had to renovate a 60s property we’d possibly be there already but UK housing stock needs work sadly.
  - whateveracct 2y ago
    Does home price count as an asset in this "in the black" calculation?

scarby2 2y ago

> None of us are rich but the system appears to be working from a sample of say 30 people aged 25 to 45 from different parts and backgrounds in the UK. I have a similar sample, all middle class in their 30's. The only ones who have bought houses have been given significant assistance from their parents, now none of them are poor by any stretch, but few have any significant assets.

throwaway314155 2y ago

> Perhaps my friends and I are outliers That's it, you're outliers.

fumar 2y ago

How can you compare these experiences to a greater upward mobility which does not exist? You don’t have a baseline for comparison. What if you had 2x more leisure time with the same fiscal wealth? What if you had easier access to healthcare?

dingnuts 2y ago
what if we lived forever and money grew on trees
- ericjmorey 2y ago
  You didn't even try to understand what you scoffed at. Do better.

brundolf 2y ago

Which fields? I feel like software has been an outlier here for a decade; the only place where traditional economic intuitions still apply (semi-smart people can work hard, learn a technical skill, find a job in their field, pay off their loans, make more than their parents, afford a house, and have a comfortable personal life and relatively fulfilling work life) Everything I've heard from the rest of the economy is that this model is dead

simonbarker87 2y ago
Fair question, it’s a mix: IT admin, manufacturing project manager, primary school teacher, tree surgeon, mortgage advisor, doctor, something in finance, secondary school teacher, plumber, software developer, power electronics engineer, charity sector project lead So a real mix
- Aromasin 2y ago
  Okay, so a lot of ~£40k a year salaries (outside of medicine and finance) to afford a £400k house when your parents might have had a £20k salary to afford an £80k house? There's a real disparity when you consider what they did too. If your parents are anything like mine, they were in the pub 4 days a week, drinking and eating with friends. I can managed that just a few times a month. Wealth compared to income from my experience is significantly lower by .lost metrics.
  - directevolve 2y ago
    This paper has an excellent, readable breakdown of how compensation and productivity has changed since the 1970s.
    - RugnirViking 2y ago
      Which paper?
- the_real_cher 2y ago
  Maybe you have an exceptional friend group because .. outside of your anecdata .. the statistically average salaries for many of those professions over large sample sets is below the median in the us and they are definitely not seeing their purchasing power increasing yearly

tekla 2y ago

Yep. A good friend of mine grew up to a very poor immigrant family, both him and his sister got full rides to good schools because of grades, and at age 30 bought a house in NJ with a very good school with 4 kids after saving non stop and living with his parents and taking care of them. The system works fine if you don't need nonstop luxuries

tmn 2y ago
It’s really incredible how much people feel entitled to in the us. And by entitled, I mean they spend money on these things because it’s beneath them to think they shouldn’t have said experience or thing.
ericjmorey 2y ago
Prior generation was buying houses at 20 with less skill. I'm happy to see that your friend made it work for himself, but his was a much harder path than most people saw in prior generations.

thereticent 2y ago

Same here, but we are in a very similar boat in our voyage through socioeconomic statuses (though I'm in Ohio River Valley US). I may be fooled by the discourse that [Xennials/Oregon Trail gen/Gen Y/Elder Millennials], but we supposedly saved more, delayed gratification, planned more, and worked more than even Gen Z (who, don't get me wrong, have it worse because of undercompensation vs purchasing power and sheer hopelessness). I doubt we're typical, is my point.

giantg2 2y ago

"in the UK" In the US, my anecdotes seem to show that things have stayed neutral or declined slightly. It seems harder to get a decent job than our parents. It seems that fewer of us have bought homes, or delayed buying due to financial reasons. Seems like more of us are working multiple jobs too. I think the aggregate measures showed real income only trending up slightly over the past couple generations.

swatcoder 2y ago

Yes, you and I are outliers and so are many people here. Those of us who work in tech, and many of the people we find ourselves bonding with and staying close to in our adulthood, are lucky to have taken up in a sector that happened to see disproportionate growth during our careers and admitted many people from modest backgrounds. But people who didn't stumble onto that path, or perhaps hoped to follow their parents into professions that were more flat or failing (medicine, education, academia, farming, manufacturing, "the trades"). In aggregate, some of those people are still doing okay, some are doing well, and some are flailing in desperation for having made the wrong bet. Of the people I grew up with in a modest blue collar community, I don't know anyone besides the few most ambitious and capable that were able to find the security that their parents had. And as one of those more ambitious and capable people who later circled with people of fancier backgrounds, I similarly don't know anyone who pursued things like academia or medicine and found what they expected there either. Appreciate what you have! Many don't share it.

chefandy 2y ago
As someone in the US that’s bounced in and out of tech, including some longish stints in blue collar jobs, it honestly blows my mind that the tech scene is so all-encompassing that many in it feel like it is representative of… anything else. I’m not talking about the tech libertarian types that think any impediment to the ultra rich vacuuming up everyone else’s wealth is tantamount to dictatorship. I’m talking about the typical happy path developer (I shy away from saying average because all us developers are above-average developers) that went to college for comp sci right after high school pretty quickly secured a junior role for maybe 6x-9x the (ridiculous) Federal Poverty Level. To be clear: I’m not saying they’re bad people or anything— most people think their experiences are more representative than they are. But, from outside, some of the assumptions software folks make about the world just seem utterly ridiculous. Consider that on average, junior developers make more money than a first year medical resident that has a PhD in perhaps the highest demand field in the US and works shifts of 16-30 hours with many consistently logging 80 hours per week, and occasionally end up working much more. Ask that medical resident what a really bad day, and a really bad week at work looks like for them and ask a developer with the same amount of post-school experience the same question, and then consider how much more school it took… and then ask that same question to an aircraft mechanic, a chef with a culinary degree, a construction worker, a public defender, a commercial fisherman, a firefighter, a nurse… the software industry is more than an aberration — it’s a different planet. The kind of shit I’ve seen developers say they’re going to “pivot to” if the software industry falls apart is, frankly, flabbergasting. If we see the sort of sustained job losses some fear in software, there are going to be a whole lot of people learning some extremely bitter, difficult truths about the world outside. I’m not saying we all didn’t and don’t work hard to get where we are — it’s just that what developers get vs what’s expected of us and what we had to do to get there is very different than what it is for almost the entire rest of the working world. It’s easy to see your own contributions to your success and miss the industry and market scaffolding you could stand on to get what you did.

dclowd9901 2y ago

I'm in the same position as you, but I see myself as rather lucky. I worked very hard but I also was taught hard work translates into success, many people don't see that relationship. And I happened to be interested in a lucrative career path.

palata 2y ago
> I also was taught hard work translates into success, many people don't see that relationship. That's a typical confirmation bias: you worked hard and got successful, so you're tempted to think that it's because you worked hard. Some don't work hard and get successful, many work hard and don't get successful. The one thing that you clearly can't rule out is luck. Tell people in Gaza that if they work hard they will end up in a situation similar as yours...
- dingnuts 2y ago
  some work hard and get successful; some work hard and fail all who don't try fail
  - palata 2y ago
    I fail to see how this is related to what I said.
    - dasil003 2y ago
      It's related because you said "you can't rule out luck" which is basically casting doubt on the whole idea of hard work having an impact on success. Well, no reasonable person would say hard work guarantees success, or that all success is luck. The truth is luck and serendipity affect all outcomes, but to use that to question the impact of a human's agency on their own life outcomes is an insidiously disempowering perspective.
      - palata 2y ago
        Sorry, to me it looks like a lot of words that say nothing. Obviously, if you don't do, you don't do. > to use that to question the impact of a human's agency on their own life outcomes I'm not doing that at all. I am not saying that the effort put into achieving something is worth nothing. What I am saying is that whenever someone is successful, it means that they have been incredibly lucky (and on top of that they worked a lot, maybe). Whenever they compare themselves to someone else who also worked hard but was not successful, the first conclusion to make is that this someone else was not as lucky. But the first thing that happens when someone gets successful is that they forget how lucky they are, and just start talking about merit. My point is just that whenever you talk about merit, just remember that you were not born in a poor family in a war zone, and that does not make you more deserving.

Drew_ 2y ago

> Perhaps my friends and I are outliers, none of us inherited any wealth or were given trust funds or lump sums when hitting adulthood > all of us are better off than our parents at the same age and their parents are better off than their parents These are conflicting statements. Your group are all beneficiaries of generational wealth by this description. Maybe it isn’t as overt as a trust fund, but you definitely inherited wealth and opportunity from your parents.

flappyeagle 2y ago
Oh get off your high horse.
- Drew_ 2y ago
  I’m not on a high horse.
monktastic1 2y ago
It's hard to understand what you're saying here. Being better off than your parents implies that you are a beneficiary of generational wealth? Connect the dots for us.
- Drew_ 2y ago
  OP described a group of families that accrued wealth over 3 generations "without inheriting any wealth". Assuming they weren't orphaned at birth, each generation definitely benefited from the fruits of the previous generation. Even without an overt handout like a trust fund, we still inherit wealth from our ancestors (eg: housing, health care, education, credit, social networks, etc). In this case, the "handout" would have been their upbringing. They feel "the system is working" because of this, but not everyone in the system has an ancestry like this.
  - monktastic1 2y ago
    So by your definition, anyone who isn't an orphan is a beneficiary of generational wealth? In fact, even orphans are, because they inherited genes, weren't left to die, etc.? I suppose that is a definition, but it doesn't seem like a useful one, especially in the context of this conversation. Or maybe I've just misunderstood you?

laurencerowe 2y ago

I'm a little surprised by this. While I'm better off than my parents I went into a much more highly paying field (software engineer vs teacher/social worker.) If I did a similar job to them I would have no hope of ever affording a similar house to them. They were part of a generation that benefited from enormous house price appreciation due to a combination of falling interest rates went from almost 15% down to under 5% (this is about 3x on its own) and the fall in house building which drove up prices and rents generally. This effect is somewhat less pronounced outside of southern England.

simonbarker87 2y ago
You make a good point about higher paying fields in the younger generations. While there is a spread of occupations that I replied to another commenter with you may have hit on something. Nearly everyone has an occupation in a higher paying field than their parents/grandparents and everyone is dual income whereas, I assume, this was less so in the previous generations. Thinking of one (not me) it’s delivery driver -> enlisted service -> mid level finance (not London) Hmmm, food for thought, thank you
- laurencerowe 2y ago
  > Nearly everyone has an occupation in a higher paying field than their parents/grandparents and everyone is dual income whereas, I assume, this was less so in the previous generations. That is unarguably true of our parents' and grandparents' generations, but I don't think it is as true of people of my age or younger (born in early 1980s.) There was a huge expansion of higher skilled jobs after the war with large numbers of people moving into the middle classes. For me and everyone I know our mothers (born 1950s) worked. We all grew up in dual income families. My great-grandfather was a miner. His son, my grandfather enlisted in the forces during the war, seems to have been recognised as being technically apt and worked with radar, became an officer and in the early 1960s left to be a manager at an engineering company. His daughter, my mum, became a teacher (first in family to go to college) and his son did not go to college but became an IT manager (married a teacher). All of us grandchildren went to university but basically have similar jobs to our parents' generation. Several of my siblings and cousins own houses but they got help from parents or partners' parents and mostly bought outside the south east. Renting a flat in London as a fairly highly paid IT contractor I had to pay six months up front because my parents didn't earn enough to be guarantors.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

Sure maybe there was some inertia from the benevolent bettering institutions of the New Deal that have given a chance to Americans. I just think you'd have to be so willfully in denial as to miss the darkness we are descending into. To miss how bitterly the GOP and the wealthy are building empires of lies and bespoke manufactured realities to make up down and left right, to cover for horrible treacherous actions against the possibility of the individual, stacking the deck for empire and inherited wealth. (And Dems are frequently unwilling to bite the donor class that makes winning elections possible, after the courts have obstructed democratic funding reforms.) Are actively opposing the possibility of people doing good for themselves & the world. I strongly recommend folks go read one of the darkest periods of America, before enough was enough Adam Hochschild's American Midnight (2022) tells an amazing story of a circa-WW1 state that had radicalized against people, that had been totally overrun by well monied powers. Of Hoover using the full power of the police state to surveil as Ralph Van Demand had done during the Philippines civil war, of of the postal service run by someone using it for information control, of American Defense vigilanism. Its not a tale of what happened next, how that broke, just a long amazing story of how dark America got, how badly the state was an extension of capital and power, and how deeply it subverted the individual, the union, any attempt for everyday humans to make any claim to life liberty, or pursuit of happiness. We face today not quite such amassed power, but a completely warped infosphere where these bespoke realities create lifestyle beliefs where people are on board with incredible trains of lies crafting false enemies, supporting the opposite of the signalling they claim. Its different than dark; the world today is overloaded by hell's din, by monsters of abuse, doing their worst to harm us for greed and for the possibility of undoing the good of the world.

geodel 2y ago

Well things worked out for you and they have worked out for me as well. For a long time I have this arrogance expressed privately usually to myself or very close people that it is all due to hard work, diligence, thrift that I reached where I am today. But lately after reading and observing around quite a bit I come to realize due to being ended up in a fast growing sector at least a minimum level of success was guaranteed. I see same thing at my company where a lot of VPs, Sr VPs and above reached to that level primarily they started a decade or two earlier than me and growth was much faster than compare to when I joined in mid 2000s. They can talk down to me just like I can talk down to more juniors about value of hard work, drive and so on. However, joining a growing sector early was best thing career wise. No amount of hard work will help if one is starting at a middling IT job in middling company in 2025 like I did in 2005.

ghaff 2y ago
Well, and even the company matters. I was in IT since post-grad school (with a bit of engineering earlier). But with dot-bomb, a company that struggled through and then 2008, I was only in an "OK" position. It was really the period post 2010 that set things up a lot better.
- geodel 2y ago
  Indeed. For me 2010-11 was when I got a full-time job as compared to contracting (small time) which was big jump for me in terms of job quality and money. Interesting enough I met many people who joined Amazon in same time frame and earning about 50% more than me in straight first job that I earned after with 8-10 years of experience. So yeah company part is important.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I wouldn't even say it was work quality; the job I had for a good period really set me up for my ultimate full-time job and I mostly liked it. But that ultimate job was a public company and even if not FAANG level comp, set me up pretty well and provided the leverage to make investments that were pretty solid during that very good period.

drmath 2y ago

Whether or not you're really outliers, it would be very surprising if "my friends and I" were representative of the general population.

frontfor 2y ago

While I don’t doubt things have worked out well for you, how many of you are able to afford owning real estate?

bjourne 2y ago

You all studied so hard but never heard about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_bias?

cool_dude85 2y ago

I have a very different experience. I did all the right things, more or less, got into a good field with a secure job in the broader tech industry, and indeed I make very good money. Despite this, I can not afford to buy the house I grew up in; a 3 bedroom SFH with a decent sized yard and a pool, around 1400 square feet, 45 minutes away from downtown without traffic in a hot real estate market. My father was able to purchase this home as a tradesman with 4 kids, being the only parent who worked outside the home.

abustamam 2y ago
Same. Though my dad was also a software engineer, but he was just never good at negotiating raises. My wife and I both work and we could maybe swing the price of the house I grew up in, but the mortgage would be roughly the same as our rent now currently. Similar case for my wife. Her parents bought in 2000 with a combined household salary of less than mine alone. The mortgage would be twice our monthly rent. Fortunately we stand to inherit that house, which sort of proves the article's point.

csomar 2y ago

Very anecdotal. You can't just look at yourself and your circle (which is similar to yourself) and extrapolate to the general population. Also most people in HN are in Tech which did well in the last 15-20 years comparing to other fields.

djtango 2y ago

My dad migrated to London in the 70s and bought his first property in London around age 26. He didn't have a degree but did get a professional qualification. I ended up getting a good degree at a top uni and started my career at Amazon but definitely couldn't have amassed the necessary amount for a down payment for a place in London by the time I was 26. By the time my dad was 35 he had two kids and my mum was a full time mum. This doesn't sound remotely close to the reality of my numerous banking, lawyer, accountant, engineering and doctor friends. The only people I know who are remotely close to being able to own a property in London and have only one breadwinner work in hedge funds.

simonbarker87 2y ago
Of my friends only one set lives in London and I have no idea how they afford it, one or both of them must be on silly money and it’s pretty clear most of the money must go into the mortgage. I started my career is a very cheap part of the UK so I sort of have to carve London out of any generalisations I make.
svara 2y ago
You can't compare London from back then to London today though. In terms of its place among cities around the world, it's a different place now. There certainly would have been locations where your dad would not have been able to afford property, and conversely there certainly are places where you can afford property. Point being, things change, but this anecdote doesn't illustrate that you're worse off than a previous generation.

scotty79 2y ago

Some of it might be declining costs of everything apart form limited resources (like housing). Perhaps you generation is better off than their parents were in terms of everything except real estate. But their parents are also better off now than they used to be when they were their age, because everything (except housing) is much cheaper (relatively) than it used to be thanks to optimizations in production and economies of scale of last 5 decades.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

You're outliers. Boomers hold the bulk of the wealth in the US.

NoLinkToMe 2y ago

You're not an outlier. If you look at US GDP per capita, adjusted for inflation, it's higher than ever. If you then look at the median personal income, also adjusted for inflation (i.e. the middle class), you see the same trend. There's a lot of doom and gloom but it doesn't seem consistent with the data. There's a weird tendency to zoom in on particular data points that paint a particularly negative story and leave out the rest. For example, we look at housing and will say that its prices outpaced inflation. And that's true, sort of. But it's also completely untrue. For example, if I look at my own situation compared to my parents: I have a 1.5% interest rate on my mortgage, my parents paid 15%. Homes are now about 50-75% bigger than my parents' generation, on average. And the average home is shared by 33% fewer people than my parents' generation. So the cost to rent the money to buy a certain area of home for 1 person, i.e. housing costs, has actually gone down, despite the average price of a house having gone up. In all fairness I wouldn't want to trade with the average person in past generations.

hello_moto 2y ago
GDP (per capita or not) cannot show wealth inequality. Personal income does not include capital gain. Wealth grow is not included in either of these dataset. CEO unrealized gain is huge and represents a huge chunk of his/her eventual hidden income that becomes wealth.
eli_gottlieb 2y ago
So you're saying that on average if you can afford to buy a house, it's bigger and better than it used to be, but also that the fraction of people who can afford to do that is stagnating or declining.
borgdefenser 2y ago
Romanticizing the past while at the same time having an apocalyptic view of the future, while I don't know if it is a human thing to do, it is certainly a western thing to do. I think about how much is it worth for me to work remote vs working at the same factory for 40 years like my father. Some people pretend like this is just a given in the modern world and basically worthless. In reality, it is hard to put a price tag on because the difference is so valuable to me. I actually could have been the 4th generation working at a flour mill if I had wanted. Even if the flour mill paid double what it does, my life is so much more grand than what that would have been, it isn't even close.

SkyPuncher 2y ago

The argument in your case is you should actually be _much_ better off than you are without this massive wealth transfer. That’s part of the challenge in the populous understanding this issue. Many people are better off than their parents, but for being the richest country in the world most people should be far better off.