37 ms·

American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals

81 points by spking 14y ago

BrianPetro 14y ago
The repercussions of dropping out of college constantly cross my mind. Luckily, articles like this ease my self doubts. :)
- breckenedge 14y ago
  Except that four out of five jobs lost during the recession were employees with less than a college diploma [0]. Rather than dropping out, I strongly recommend transferring to a lower-cost school or switching majors. The article talks about law school students. A huge number of students entered law school right at the start of the recession. There just wasn't market demand for that many new lawyers when they graduated in 2011. [1] [0]: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2190273/Georgetown-University-report-College-graduates-better-recession-high-school-diplomas.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2190273/Georgetown-U... [1]: http://chronicle.com/article/Unemployment-Among-Recent-Law/132189/ http://chronicle.com/article/Unemployment-Among-Recent-Law/1...
tokenadult 14y ago
From the article: "Three and a half years after the worst recession since the Great Depression, the earnings and employment gap between those in the under-35 population and their parents and grandparents threatens to unravel the American dream of each generation doing better than the last." There have been many postings to Hacker News recently with similar themes. The situation described increasingly looks like the situation in the worst-off countries in western Europe, where an ossified social welfare system insulates the older generation (approximately people from the oldest people now living down to people with birth years before 1970) from the economic situation of the younger generation. The United States used to be much less like that, but the Silent Generation (roughly, the people born during the Great Depression) throughout their lives acquiesced in government policies that resulted in an enormous income transfer to people in their generation at the expense of younger people, including Baby Boomers like me. [AFTER FIRST EDIT: A friend who is a Ph.D. policy analyst for the federal government sent me a link the other day raising the question "Has the US median household income really stagnated over the past 30 years?" http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/12/the-7-most-illuminating-economic-charts-of-2012/ http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/12/the-7-most-illuminating-eco... (point 6 in the link). I think the statement is surely correct that actual ability to spend on the part of Americans on goods and services they desire has increased in all income quintiles over the last thirty years. Some economic statistics don't take account of tax policy and transfer payment (entitlement) policy well enough to reflect the actual economic well being of American families. Official inflation statistics have also badly overstated increases in "cost of living" throughout my adult life, failing to take into account changed consumption patterns and changing (improving) quality of many goods and services, thus making people think they are poorer than they actually are. By observation of actual consumption patterns, young people today are better off in general than young people a generation ago, which is the consistent expectation of American culture.] I support United States policies that move in the direction of east Asian rather than western European patterns of government spending and social welfare, putting more of the investment in future generations back in the hands of families and less in the hands of bureaucrats. I'm in favor of a big boost in the minimum age for all kinds retirement benefits (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) as the only possible way to keep taxation for those programs from crippling the opportunities of my children. (Yes, I support that even though I am middle-aged and that will put off my retirement. I'm already slated to retire well after age 65 by the last Social Security reform that was passed in the early 1980s to favor the Silent Generation.) I'm also in favor of greatly expanded parental choice in education so that families with children have the power to shop to help children gain good primary and secondary educations that launch the children into adulthood with a reasonable chance of employment. I live in the first state (Minnesota) to have charter schools, to have statewide public school open enrollment (the school district in which I live has enrolled students whose residence addresses are in FORTY-ONE other school districts around the state), and to have statewide dual enrollment of senior high school students in college-level classes. Even at that, I was a homeschooling parent here, and there is more that Minnesota and every state in the country can do to expand parental choice in education. But the parade of horribles that some people claim will happen if parents gain more choice has NOT happened in Minnesota over the last quarter century, and more states ought to at least emulate the example of my state, where educational achievement compared to educational spending is moderately high by the unambitious standards of the United States. I'm glad that through homeschooling and other alternative approaches I used to educate my children that now my oldest son, already grown into adulthood, gained sufficient work skills that he has gainful full-time employment even in today's bleak job market. His generation should be spared from the policy mistakes of my parents' generation. ANTICIPATORY EDIT NOTICE: I posted an outline of what I think the policy problem is here first. I've been looking up some sources and may do some more edits as this thread continues to interest other participants here on HN, until I run out of time on my edit window.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  > I support United States policies that move in the direction of east Asian rather than western European patterns of government spending and social welfare This is going to be very difficult to pull off without a massive cultural change. The Confucian influence on East Asian culture has resulted in a much higher degree of filial piety (孝) than in the West, which makes it possible for people to live in old age without social welfare. I just can't see Americans taking care of their retired parents, nor can I see the parents being OK with depending on their children. > I'm also in favor of greatly expanded parental choice in education so that families with children have the power to shop to help children gain good primary and secondary educations that launch the children into adulthood with a reasonable chance of employment. This is also untenable in most of America due to the lack of good public transportation and the low population density. In fact, such a system already exists (to a degree) in NYC, the one place where population density and public transportation infrastructure is quite similar to Asia. But in most American cities, the good schools are in the suburbs, which are usually in separate counties from the city. And the minute that you try to make the schools children attend unrelated to where they live, the wealthy parents will simply pull their children out of public schools and send them to private schools instead (we saw this before with forced busing). And without the well-off students as their peers in the public schools, the poorer students won't improve, no matter how much money you throw at the situation. In fact, I saw this problem in the (good) public suburban school system I was in. Despite it having a desegregation program that brought poor black students from the city (by way of a 45-minutes-each-way bus ride) to my school, I almost never interacted with them in the classroom because of separate tiers of education for gifted students starting in the 7th grade. And don't forget that once the wealthy have pulled their children out of the public schools, they'll vote for ballot initiatives and candidates that reduce funding for public schools. The poor, who care less about the quality of education their children are receiving, won't bother to fight back. > the parade of horribles that some people claim will happen if parents gain more choice has NOT happened in Minnesota over the last quarter century You're ignoring the fact that Minnesota has one of the whitest populations of any state in the country. I can assure you that an undercurrent of socioeconomically-associated racism still exists in large swathes of the US where there are significant black and Hispanic populations. While most people don't mind if their children associate with middle class black and Hispanic children, they certainly don't want them associating with minority children from the ghetto. And for the most part, the kids follow their parents' lead. At my school, there were some children of African and Hispanic immigrants, whose parents were highly educated and had jobs in engineering, medicine and science and kept their children on the straight and narrow (usually much more so than the white parents did). They were treated exactly like any of the white children, and often used as examples of how racism had been "eradicated" from the school system. But in reality, people wanted nothing to do with the students from the ghetto. This is the reason why charter schools have become so popular in Minnesota, but remain politically untenable in so many other parts of the country. And I don't know how it is for those students in your school district from the 41 other districts, but the poor students in the ghettos where I grew up don't even have 1 car in the family, let alone gas money for the long daily trip to a good school. > I'm in favor of a big boost in the minimum age for all kinds retirement benefits (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) as the only possible way to keep taxation for those programs from crippling the opportunities of my children. I'm pretty sure this is a foregone conclusion. There's simply no way around the math other than increasing the retirement age. If you go back 50 or 100 years, people didn't sit around for 20 or 30 years after retiring doing nothing - they simply died earlier. So if you're going to live until 80 or 90, you'd better work until at least 75.
donretag 14y ago
The employment problem is precisely why I do not think the housing market will ever "recover". Housing prices did not crash, they simply aligned themselves with current and forecasted salaries. Attempts at raising housing prices to "normal" levels is a fools game. Create the jobs and the salaries first and the rest will follow.
- cglace 14y ago
  I don't understand why everyone wants housing prices to go up. As a person looking to buy a home in the near future I certainly do not hope the housing prices head towards their prerecession levels.
  - phillmv 14y ago
    Why, they're investments. Of course you want prices to go up! You're sinking a huge quantity of money - presumably, above that of an equivalent rental unit in your region - and by golly, you need returns on that or else you're just fritting it all away. It's all compounded by the fact that housing is the only major asset investment that the vast majority of people ever engage in.
    - Joeri 14y ago
      They're only an investment if you buy more housing than you need. After all, you need housing, so when you sell that home at increased value, you will need to use that revenue to buy new housing which has also risen in cost. In short, only if you can sell your home and buy a cheaper home can it be considered an investment. Otherwise it's just non-liquid capital.
      - plorkyeran 14y ago
        In theory, if you buy enough housing to fit a few kids then you'll have more housing than you need by the time you're looking at retirement, so you can cash out your 'investment'. Of course, in reality this never seems to actually happen.
patja 14y ago
Yes, by all means, let's sue the schools! I was promised a six figure job if I finished this expensive law degree, but there was a recession and now I have to shift gears.
rdl 14y ago
It is jarring just how different tech (and SFBA) are from the rest of the country.
- sneak 14y ago
  I think this sort of view-bubble perspective adjustment is very healthy and helpful for understanding our businesses' places (and strategies!) in the larger economy.
frozenport 14y ago
I think its dead for white people, for many foreigners I know its as real as ever.
saosebastiao 14y ago
Gen Y's and Baby Boomers are the two largest examples of irrationality that this nation has ever seen. Gen Y for thinking that you can just do whatever you want and expect a high salary for it. I look at my peers from high school and can't believe some of the entitlement issues they have. Boomers for thinking that they could continuously f* over an entire generation with their robbing of social welfare systems and expecting people with no right to vote to pick up the tab 30 years into the future. When payroll taxes reach 20%, Social Security Recipients will become the next Westboro Baptists.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  To be fair some of the feelings of entitlement and the sense of "do whatever you want" of Gen Y come from the boomers. When growing up I remember being told from an early age by adults that my generation would have it great, their generation was putting everything in place for peace and prosperity such as access to education, better medicine and technology etc. The overriding message was really just to work hard and everything would come good. It didn't matter whether you studied the liberal arts, technology or just got a job straight out of school and worked your way up. Now Gen Y have grown up and complain "getting a job with liveable pay and reasonable stability is hard, and I have a masters!" they get told "the world doesn't owe you a living!" which is technically true but non helpful.
  - vacri 14y ago
    The overriding message was really just to work hard and everything would come good. On the other hand, every gen before Y was told "just work hard", no light at the end of the tunnel, no 'it gets better'.
- slurry 14y ago
  Really? You'd think the generation that let World War I happen, or the many generations that practiced lynching as not merely a means of punishment but a form of entertainment, or the generation that thought Andrew Jackson's bank policy was a good idea, would have us beat. I would be more worried if your peers were satisfied with drudge work for low wages. No kind of progress is possible if you're content to live in the gutter. Also, if wages were rising, social security taxes wouldn't have to go up at all.
bmmayer1 14y ago
As a member of Generation Y, it is hard to have much sympathy for the "plight" of GenY compared to pretty much any other generation in world history. We haven't been drafted into foreign wars or had to suffer through a real depression. A third of us didn't die in an influenza epidemic. Our women and minorities haven't had to face entrenched and legally immovable workplace discrimination. We have had to face no real looming foreign threat, let alone a nuclear one. Most of us (who are called "GenY") didn't have to escape persecution or immigrate with $1 in our pockets with a chance of being turned back at the border, or get spat on by natives when we arrived. With the help of technology, the Pax Americana and a stable world order, improved healthcare, reduced social barriers and relative economic stability, the generation born in the 80's to 90's is probably the most privileged. Generation. Ever. In history. For 15,000 years of human civilization. I mean, it's now considered normal (and even a human right by some) to take 2-3 weeks vacation every year. So when I read that "I got a $150,000 education and now I have to work for only $40,000," or (as I've heard before), "I have a college education, I shouldn't be working at Pier One," I just want to vomit. My immigrant grandparents would have killed for the chance to work at Pier One. The world doesn't owe you a living because you graduated from a top tier school with a degree in Environmental Studies, or even took out a loan to go to law school. Look, it's not like Generation Y--or, specifically, individuals in Generation Y like in every generation--don't have any problems, but you have to have a sense of perspective. Success for any generation has always been about hard (productive) work, to better one's self and one's family. The American Dream has always been about being born into rags and working into to riches, not from being born into riches and being owed something by the virtue of your privilege, which is what this "death of the American Dream" nonsense is about. By this article's own admission, we've been so warped by our parents' relative privilege that it's hard to see the big picture. Look at the big picture.
- koralatov 14y ago
  Not that I'm defending grumblers, but I think a lot of the upset and anger comes from the fact that the opportunities aren't as readily available as they once were. The developed world is a much more regimented place than it once was, with fewer employers will to take chances on the people they employ. The classic trap a lot of Gen Y find themselves in is that they're not considered for jobs because they don't have experience, and can't get experience because they can't get the jobs. It's a pretty good catch-22.
lispertoascheme 14y ago
The article focuses on a couple of lawyers. Lawyers are classic parasites. They need to find money-making entities to act as "hosts". When the economy is sinking, there are less healthy hosts for the parasites to target. The few parasites who are lucky enough to find hosts that can act as hosts will be in good stead (the article admits profits have risen at law firms, even if hiring has plummeted). It's strange to think the American Dream (How do you define it? Is it home ownership and progeny?) must be funded through parasitic behavior. Be a host not a parasite and you will always be able to live the Dream, no matter what direction the economy goes. That's because you create value instead of merely searching out others who are creating it.
nn2 14y ago
Less jobs for lawyers generally seems like a good thing to me. Like investment banks lawyers do not create much (any?) value. That's a good sign for society. There may be some hope left. Now it's not good for those who wasted a lot of money on a law school. They made a bad decision and will adjust.
- antiterra 14y ago
  And yet there are more and more law schools gleefully suckering new students into the major and getting rich off of it, while not being able to provide a return on the investment. That's a very bad thing. Lawyers as a whole are not a symbol of malaise. It really depends on what kind of lawyers are around. You increase regulation in an industry, then companies in that industry are going to need to hire lawyers to advise the companies on how to comply. You're also going to need people familiar enough with the law to write good regulatory legislation. You want startups to make deals with each other, and to receive investments? You're going to want lawyers who can sort out the terms and put it in writing that reflects the intent of all stakeholders. So much misery and broken friendship between co-founders could have been easily relieved by using contracts instead of handshakes. If you're investing in a company, it's likely you'll want a lawyer to perform due diligence on the company's current contractual obligations.
- robryan 14y ago
  And there is already lots of pointless patent litigation being thrown around.
beatpanda 14y ago
I don't know, I never found the idea of "The American Dream" all that appealing in the first place. The whole thing sounds like kind of a drag.
btilly 14y ago
Back in 2008 I was reading articles based on previous financial crises saying that after the kind of debt crisis that the USA was then going through, the average was 10 years to really recover, followed by a return to normal growth. So, 4 years in, things still suck. If that is true, we should have about 6 years left until the American dream starts to work again across much of the country. Unfortunately for everyone who entered the work force in that 10 year period, initial poor wages tend to turn into lifetime poor earnings. A whole generation does indeed look set to lose out economically for their whole lives. But if you can adjust to current reality, your future is likely to be better than your present. You just have to set expectations realistically low.
- genwin 14y ago
  As population increases and resources dwindle, we get closer to subsistence living or even a population crash. The decade-long cycle might be close to breaking, then. Yes the trick is to lower one's expectations. Ultimately we can be content with little more than a warm dry place to sleep and enough food.
ap22213 14y ago
One of the puzzling parts of the current working situation is that the people who are working seem to be putting in way more hours and effort than they used to. What I can't put a finger on is the underlying reason why me and about all of my working friends have almost zero time anymore to do recreational activities, or to spend time with our families and friends. We workers seem all over-burdened with our work. But, it hasn't always been this way. Our workloads have been slowly but steadily creeping up since the 90s. And, the companies that we're working for are overflowing with cash. Yet, these same companies aren't hiring new people to alleviate the situation. Often, the excuse I hear is that there are no qualified people to hire.
- Tichy 14y ago
  Maybe you are just too nice to say "no" to more hours?
- greenyoda 14y ago
  To your employer, there's no situation that needs alleviation. They're very happy that they can get you to work more hours for the same pay, and even happier that they don't have to pay increasingly costly health benefits for an additional employee when one employee can be made to do the work of two. They obviously don't care that you're suffering. And "no qualified people to hire" is a euphemism for "no qualified people willing to work for the low salaries that we're willing to pay them for the long hours we expect them to work." Double that salary and they'd probably have qualified candidates flying in from across the country and pounding down their doors.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    At least in software, salaries are high enough and there's even enough competition on culture that this can't really be the case. Furthermore, it's not actually possible for one employee to do the work of two. There actually is a shortage of qualified people in the world. The fact is, business has become increasingly more sophisticated and, consequently, difficult over the past several decades. Operations have become increasingly driven by increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques and modeling and much of the drone work has been replaced by computers. In the early days of digital electronics, actual engineers were paid to minimize logical expressions using Boolean algebra or Karnaugh maps. These days we use algorithms and engineers have to solve more difficult problems. If you had the chops to be a white-collar worker at Sears Roebuck corporate in 1960, you don't have nearly the chops required to be a white-collar worker at Amazon corporate in 2012, because there's been half a century of innovation in operations by dozens of firms trying to beat Sears Roebuck. The end result is that more jobs require numeracy and specialized skills, but if anything there are fewer people with these skills because mathematics requirements were dumbed down to get more people into universities and out with degrees. The stereotypical unemployed Gen-Yner is a liberal arts graduate, and for good reason. The engineers are fine.
tarr11 14y ago
This looks like an example of "Software Eating the World". http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651... Many law firms are doing automated textual analysis of legal work that used to be done by associates. The fact that they are still making more profit implies that they've just gotten more efficient. I suppose that there are a set of legal software companies that are probably profiting pretty well on this. "Similarly, the number of hours logged by first-year and mid-level legal associates -- a productivity measure of young lawyers -- fell 12 percent from 2007 at some of New York’s largest law firms, says Jeff Grossman, national managing director of Wells Fargo Private Bank’s Legal Specialty Group in Charlotte, North Carolina. Yet profits per partner climbed $50,697 to $1.5 million on revenue of $66 billion last year, according to a separate survey of 86 of the world’s top law firms by The American Lawyer magazine."
- helmut_hed 14y ago
  "Textual analysis" also sounds like the sort of thing that could be profitably outsourced. I understand that in the medical world, reviewing medical images may now be done by qualified technicians in lower-wage countries.
angersock 14y ago
I'm so sick of hearing about how bad we--us poor, lost kids from Generation Y--have it. I'm so sick of hearing about the odds, about the unemployment rate, about how everything's our fault because we're too entitled, or about how nothing's our fault because the economy you see. I live in a rented house with several other young folks trying to get by in our industry. I'm working today instead of taking a bus home to see my family. I'd work tomorrow if I needed to. My computer equipment is worth more than I have in the bank, because that's my capital investment in myself and my work. My roommates are all fleeing rolling boulders of student debt--a situation I'm not in only because I devoted a sizeable chunk of my old salary to paying it off. Once that debt was paid off, I quit my job, because the company was never going to go anywhere with its attitude and codebase. We don't have or want picket fences, we don't have two cars in the 'burbs, we don't want to sit in front of the TV and veg out. That's something we inherited from the boomers and Madison Avenue. The people I know, whether they're architects, or lawyers, or coders, or dealers, or hustlers, all are in pursuit of the same dream that our forefathers pursued. We're all good people, with strong work ethics and a desire to see our kids grow up better than we did into a world kinder than ours. We want to live in a country where you can build a business, help your community, and do so without worrying about getting blackbagged or destroyed by bureaucracy, where you can smoke a joint or drop acid and go into work that afternoon and change the fucking world with a commit or a hammer. (And we're doing this in the Midwest, in Texas no less--no Bay Area bubble for these views!) We aren't afraid of evil brown people somewhere else in the world, and we don't want to cast a "supporting vote" in a system as obviously corrupt and rigged as the current US government. We don't want to take away people's rights because we're afraid for our own little lives and our stuff from Ikea. We don't care about your abortion, or your sexuality, or whatever you do in your free time. Don't tell me, don't show me, don't bloody try to sell me this notion that the American Dream is dead--we're just returning to its roots.
- Permit 14y ago
  An exercise in trading anecdotes isn't going to get anyone anywhere. The fact that the people you've surrounded yourself are relatively well off does not offset problems surrounding unemployment and falling wages.
michaelochurch 14y ago
Law (which OP focuses on) is a bizarre profession, because it used to be driven by an arms race dynamic. Most of what lawyers do, at the top of the profession, isn't intellectually difficult. The game is about being able to generate work for the other team faster than they can adapt to it. When litigation happens between large corporations, it's about playing the process, not arguing or interpreting the law itself. It devolves into brute-force process playing. It's not what you see in the movies, since cases so rarely go to trial. So, even though the work itself isn't challenging, large law firms have traditionally sought very qualified people, not because of the work, but because there's a complex, ever-evolving game in this war of attrition. The winning team is the one that generates work faster than the other can keep up, and you need to be smart, driven, and brutal enough to work the angles. This also explains the 70-hour weeks that became the norm in biglaw. The game is about beating the other side to death with excess work, so the best hires are people who can do huge amounts of boring, procedural work and not get completely exhausted. What changed is that there's now less work to go around, due to cost-cutting and "demand destruction" among these firms' Wall Street clientele. There's no longer 70 hours of work per associate. Now the firms are overstaffed relative to the actual workload. Well, the partners want to keep their lifestyles, so associates get axed. What's most disgusting about it is the recent trend of "stealthing", which is disguising a layoff as a performance-based firing. There's also a bimodal income distribution. There's "biglaw" which has a hard salary floor of $165k per year, and "everything else" where the average might be $50k. Law is one profession where it's not at all uncommon to be making less at 35 (after not making partner, and being lucky if you crack 120k) than at 26. White-shoe law is melting down. So is investment banking, on which it relies, but banking's degradation is more graceful. Banking is just hiring fewer people and reducing bonuses, while law has this problem of large numbers of marginally qualified people who've spent large amounts of money on JD degrees. What have we learned from the Law Crash? (Yes, there was a Law Bubble, and boy has it crashed.) I think the lesson is about how of an influence respectability has over peoples' work lives. The attraction of the legal profession wasn't just the money, but also the prestige. You're not some plumber or computer programmer-- occupations whose average members now seem to be doing better than average attorneys-- you're a lawyer. Even now, with law imploded, I think that impulse is strong. What we're out of touch with is that most upper-middle-class Americans would see it as weird and risky for a young person to go off to Silicon Valley, and upper-class would only approve it if you were a VC, not an entrepreneur. People are desperate for the credibility and respectability of being a "professional", but the professions are under attack. Doctors are being pillaged by health-insurance barbarians, the law bubble is collapsing, and academia's a non-concern by this point. Which means that the best (and, for many, only) ways for most people to make a decent living are in formerly "unrefined" lines of work. For a lot of people, it's a shock. Millennials, for their part, often feel cheated out of this. They should. They were put through a 16+ year game to lead them to believe they'd have a certain kind of elite life, and then most were dumped into a featureless landfill of confusion and mediocrity. They've been pumped and dumped.
jinushaun 14y ago
The American Dream is a Boomer phenomenon. Gen Y are not Boomers.

81 points by spking 14y ago

The repercussions of dropping out of college constantly cross my mind. Luckily, articles like this ease my self doubts. :)

breckenedge 14y ago
Except that four out of five jobs lost during the recession were employees with less than a college diploma [0]. Rather than dropping out, I strongly recommend transferring to a lower-cost school or switching majors. The article talks about law school students. A huge number of students entered law school right at the start of the recession. There just wasn't market demand for that many new lawyers when they graduated in 2011. [1] [0]: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2190273/Georgetown-University-report-College-graduates-better-recession-high-school-diplomas.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2190273/Georgetown-U... [1]: http://chronicle.com/article/Unemployment-Among-Recent-Law/132189/ http://chronicle.com/article/Unemployment-Among-Recent-Law/1...

tokenadult 14y ago

From the article: "Three and a half years after the worst recession since the Great Depression, the earnings and employment gap between those in the under-35 population and their parents and grandparents threatens to unravel the American dream of each generation doing better than the last." There have been many postings to Hacker News recently with similar themes. The situation described increasingly looks like the situation in the worst-off countries in western Europe, where an ossified social welfare system insulates the older generation (approximately people from the oldest people now living down to people with birth years before 1970) from the economic situation of the younger generation. The United States used to be much less like that, but the Silent Generation (roughly, the people born during the Great Depression) throughout their lives acquiesced in government policies that resulted in an enormous income transfer to people in their generation at the expense of younger people, including Baby Boomers like me. [AFTER FIRST EDIT: A friend who is a Ph.D. policy analyst for the federal government sent me a link the other day raising the question "Has the US median household income really stagnated over the past 30 years?" http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/12/the-7-most-illuminating-economic-charts-of-2012/ http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/12/the-7-most-illuminating-eco... (point 6 in the link). I think the statement is surely correct that actual ability to spend on the part of Americans on goods and services they desire has increased in all income quintiles over the last thirty years. Some economic statistics don't take account of tax policy and transfer payment (entitlement) policy well enough to reflect the actual economic well being of American families. Official inflation statistics have also badly overstated increases in "cost of living" throughout my adult life, failing to take into account changed consumption patterns and changing (improving) quality of many goods and services, thus making people think they are poorer than they actually are. By observation of actual consumption patterns, young people today are better off in general than young people a generation ago, which is the consistent expectation of American culture.] I support United States policies that move in the direction of east Asian rather than western European patterns of government spending and social welfare, putting more of the investment in future generations back in the hands of families and less in the hands of bureaucrats. I'm in favor of a big boost in the minimum age for all kinds retirement benefits (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) as the only possible way to keep taxation for those programs from crippling the opportunities of my children. (Yes, I support that even though I am middle-aged and that will put off my retirement. I'm already slated to retire well after age 65 by the last Social Security reform that was passed in the early 1980s to favor the Silent Generation.) I'm also in favor of greatly expanded parental choice in education so that families with children have the power to shop to help children gain good primary and secondary educations that launch the children into adulthood with a reasonable chance of employment. I live in the first state (Minnesota) to have charter schools, to have statewide public school open enrollment (the school district in which I live has enrolled students whose residence addresses are in FORTY-ONE other school districts around the state), and to have statewide dual enrollment of senior high school students in college-level classes. Even at that, I was a homeschooling parent here, and there is more that Minnesota and every state in the country can do to expand parental choice in education. But the parade of horribles that some people claim will happen if parents gain more choice has NOT happened in Minnesota over the last quarter century, and more states ought to at least emulate the example of my state, where educational achievement compared to educational spending is moderately high by the unambitious standards of the United States. I'm glad that through homeschooling and other alternative approaches I used to educate my children that now my oldest son, already grown into adulthood, gained sufficient work skills that he has gainful full-time employment even in today's bleak job market. His generation should be spared from the policy mistakes of my parents' generation. ANTICIPATORY EDIT NOTICE: I posted an outline of what I think the policy problem is here first. I've been looking up some sources and may do some more edits as this thread continues to interest other participants here on HN, until I run out of time on my edit window.

w1ntermute 14y ago
> I support United States policies that move in the direction of east Asian rather than western European patterns of government spending and social welfare This is going to be very difficult to pull off without a massive cultural change. The Confucian influence on East Asian culture has resulted in a much higher degree of filial piety (孝) than in the West, which makes it possible for people to live in old age without social welfare. I just can't see Americans taking care of their retired parents, nor can I see the parents being OK with depending on their children. > I'm also in favor of greatly expanded parental choice in education so that families with children have the power to shop to help children gain good primary and secondary educations that launch the children into adulthood with a reasonable chance of employment. This is also untenable in most of America due to the lack of good public transportation and the low population density. In fact, such a system already exists (to a degree) in NYC, the one place where population density and public transportation infrastructure is quite similar to Asia. But in most American cities, the good schools are in the suburbs, which are usually in separate counties from the city. And the minute that you try to make the schools children attend unrelated to where they live, the wealthy parents will simply pull their children out of public schools and send them to private schools instead (we saw this before with forced busing). And without the well-off students as their peers in the public schools, the poorer students won't improve, no matter how much money you throw at the situation. In fact, I saw this problem in the (good) public suburban school system I was in. Despite it having a desegregation program that brought poor black students from the city (by way of a 45-minutes-each-way bus ride) to my school, I almost never interacted with them in the classroom because of separate tiers of education for gifted students starting in the 7th grade. And don't forget that once the wealthy have pulled their children out of the public schools, they'll vote for ballot initiatives and candidates that reduce funding for public schools. The poor, who care less about the quality of education their children are receiving, won't bother to fight back. > the parade of horribles that some people claim will happen if parents gain more choice has NOT happened in Minnesota over the last quarter century You're ignoring the fact that Minnesota has one of the whitest populations of any state in the country. I can assure you that an undercurrent of socioeconomically-associated racism still exists in large swathes of the US where there are significant black and Hispanic populations. While most people don't mind if their children associate with middle class black and Hispanic children, they certainly don't want them associating with minority children from the ghetto. And for the most part, the kids follow their parents' lead. At my school, there were some children of African and Hispanic immigrants, whose parents were highly educated and had jobs in engineering, medicine and science and kept their children on the straight and narrow (usually much more so than the white parents did). They were treated exactly like any of the white children, and often used as examples of how racism had been "eradicated" from the school system. But in reality, people wanted nothing to do with the students from the ghetto. This is the reason why charter schools have become so popular in Minnesota, but remain politically untenable in so many other parts of the country. And I don't know how it is for those students in your school district from the 41 other districts, but the poor students in the ghettos where I grew up don't even have 1 car in the family, let alone gas money for the long daily trip to a good school. > I'm in favor of a big boost in the minimum age for all kinds retirement benefits (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) as the only possible way to keep taxation for those programs from crippling the opportunities of my children. I'm pretty sure this is a foregone conclusion. There's simply no way around the math other than increasing the retirement age. If you go back 50 or 100 years, people didn't sit around for 20 or 30 years after retiring doing nothing - they simply died earlier. So if you're going to live until 80 or 90, you'd better work until at least 75.

donretag 14y ago

The employment problem is precisely why I do not think the housing market will ever "recover". Housing prices did not crash, they simply aligned themselves with current and forecasted salaries. Attempts at raising housing prices to "normal" levels is a fools game. Create the jobs and the salaries first and the rest will follow.

cglace 14y ago
I don't understand why everyone wants housing prices to go up. As a person looking to buy a home in the near future I certainly do not hope the housing prices head towards their prerecession levels.
- phillmv 14y ago
  Why, they're investments. Of course you want prices to go up! You're sinking a huge quantity of money - presumably, above that of an equivalent rental unit in your region - and by golly, you need returns on that or else you're just fritting it all away. It's all compounded by the fact that housing is the only major asset investment that the vast majority of people ever engage in.
  - Joeri 14y ago
    They're only an investment if you buy more housing than you need. After all, you need housing, so when you sell that home at increased value, you will need to use that revenue to buy new housing which has also risen in cost. In short, only if you can sell your home and buy a cheaper home can it be considered an investment. Otherwise it's just non-liquid capital.
    - plorkyeran 14y ago
      In theory, if you buy enough housing to fit a few kids then you'll have more housing than you need by the time you're looking at retirement, so you can cash out your 'investment'. Of course, in reality this never seems to actually happen.

patja 14y ago

Yes, by all means, let's sue the schools! I was promised a six figure job if I finished this expensive law degree, but there was a recession and now I have to shift gears.

rdl 14y ago

It is jarring just how different tech (and SFBA) are from the rest of the country.

sneak 14y ago
I think this sort of view-bubble perspective adjustment is very healthy and helpful for understanding our businesses' places (and strategies!) in the larger economy.

frozenport 14y ago

I think its dead for white people, for many foreigners I know its as real as ever.

saosebastiao 14y ago

Gen Y's and Baby Boomers are the two largest examples of irrationality that this nation has ever seen. Gen Y for thinking that you can just do whatever you want and expect a high salary for it. I look at my peers from high school and can't believe some of the entitlement issues they have. Boomers for thinking that they could continuously f* over an entire generation with their robbing of social welfare systems and expecting people with no right to vote to pick up the tab 30 years into the future. When payroll taxes reach 20%, Social Security Recipients will become the next Westboro Baptists.

jiggy2011 14y ago
To be fair some of the feelings of entitlement and the sense of "do whatever you want" of Gen Y come from the boomers. When growing up I remember being told from an early age by adults that my generation would have it great, their generation was putting everything in place for peace and prosperity such as access to education, better medicine and technology etc. The overriding message was really just to work hard and everything would come good. It didn't matter whether you studied the liberal arts, technology or just got a job straight out of school and worked your way up. Now Gen Y have grown up and complain "getting a job with liveable pay and reasonable stability is hard, and I have a masters!" they get told "the world doesn't owe you a living!" which is technically true but non helpful.
- vacri 14y ago
  The overriding message was really just to work hard and everything would come good. On the other hand, every gen before Y was told "just work hard", no light at the end of the tunnel, no 'it gets better'.
slurry 14y ago
Really? You'd think the generation that let World War I happen, or the many generations that practiced lynching as not merely a means of punishment but a form of entertainment, or the generation that thought Andrew Jackson's bank policy was a good idea, would have us beat. I would be more worried if your peers were satisfied with drudge work for low wages. No kind of progress is possible if you're content to live in the gutter. Also, if wages were rising, social security taxes wouldn't have to go up at all.

bmmayer1 14y ago

As a member of Generation Y, it is hard to have much sympathy for the "plight" of GenY compared to pretty much any other generation in world history. We haven't been drafted into foreign wars or had to suffer through a real depression. A third of us didn't die in an influenza epidemic. Our women and minorities haven't had to face entrenched and legally immovable workplace discrimination. We have had to face no real looming foreign threat, let alone a nuclear one. Most of us (who are called "GenY") didn't have to escape persecution or immigrate with $1 in our pockets with a chance of being turned back at the border, or get spat on by natives when we arrived. With the help of technology, the Pax Americana and a stable world order, improved healthcare, reduced social barriers and relative economic stability, the generation born in the 80's to 90's is probably the most privileged. Generation. Ever. In history. For 15,000 years of human civilization. I mean, it's now considered normal (and even a human right by some) to take 2-3 weeks vacation every year. So when I read that "I got a $150,000 education and now I have to work for only $40,000," or (as I've heard before), "I have a college education, I shouldn't be working at Pier One," I just want to vomit. My immigrant grandparents would have killed for the chance to work at Pier One. The world doesn't owe you a living because you graduated from a top tier school with a degree in Environmental Studies, or even took out a loan to go to law school. Look, it's not like Generation Y--or, specifically, individuals in Generation Y like in every generation--don't have any problems, but you have to have a sense of perspective. Success for any generation has always been about hard (productive) work, to better one's self and one's family. The American Dream has always been about being born into rags and working into to riches, not from being born into riches and being owed something by the virtue of your privilege, which is what this "death of the American Dream" nonsense is about. By this article's own admission, we've been so warped by our parents' relative privilege that it's hard to see the big picture. Look at the big picture.

koralatov 14y ago
Not that I'm defending grumblers, but I think a lot of the upset and anger comes from the fact that the opportunities aren't as readily available as they once were. The developed world is a much more regimented place than it once was, with fewer employers will to take chances on the people they employ. The classic trap a lot of Gen Y find themselves in is that they're not considered for jobs because they don't have experience, and can't get experience because they can't get the jobs. It's a pretty good catch-22.

lispertoascheme 14y ago

The article focuses on a couple of lawyers. Lawyers are classic parasites. They need to find money-making entities to act as "hosts". When the economy is sinking, there are less healthy hosts for the parasites to target. The few parasites who are lucky enough to find hosts that can act as hosts will be in good stead (the article admits profits have risen at law firms, even if hiring has plummeted). It's strange to think the American Dream (How do you define it? Is it home ownership and progeny?) must be funded through parasitic behavior. Be a host not a parasite and you will always be able to live the Dream, no matter what direction the economy goes. That's because you create value instead of merely searching out others who are creating it.

nn2 14y ago

Less jobs for lawyers generally seems like a good thing to me. Like investment banks lawyers do not create much (any?) value. That's a good sign for society. There may be some hope left. Now it's not good for those who wasted a lot of money on a law school. They made a bad decision and will adjust.

antiterra 14y ago
And yet there are more and more law schools gleefully suckering new students into the major and getting rich off of it, while not being able to provide a return on the investment. That's a very bad thing. Lawyers as a whole are not a symbol of malaise. It really depends on what kind of lawyers are around. You increase regulation in an industry, then companies in that industry are going to need to hire lawyers to advise the companies on how to comply. You're also going to need people familiar enough with the law to write good regulatory legislation. You want startups to make deals with each other, and to receive investments? You're going to want lawyers who can sort out the terms and put it in writing that reflects the intent of all stakeholders. So much misery and broken friendship between co-founders could have been easily relieved by using contracts instead of handshakes. If you're investing in a company, it's likely you'll want a lawyer to perform due diligence on the company's current contractual obligations.
robryan 14y ago
And there is already lots of pointless patent litigation being thrown around.

beatpanda 14y ago

I don't know, I never found the idea of "The American Dream" all that appealing in the first place. The whole thing sounds like kind of a drag.

btilly 14y ago

Back in 2008 I was reading articles based on previous financial crises saying that after the kind of debt crisis that the USA was then going through, the average was 10 years to really recover, followed by a return to normal growth. So, 4 years in, things still suck. If that is true, we should have about 6 years left until the American dream starts to work again across much of the country. Unfortunately for everyone who entered the work force in that 10 year period, initial poor wages tend to turn into lifetime poor earnings. A whole generation does indeed look set to lose out economically for their whole lives. But if you can adjust to current reality, your future is likely to be better than your present. You just have to set expectations realistically low.

genwin 14y ago
As population increases and resources dwindle, we get closer to subsistence living or even a population crash. The decade-long cycle might be close to breaking, then. Yes the trick is to lower one's expectations. Ultimately we can be content with little more than a warm dry place to sleep and enough food.

ap22213 14y ago

One of the puzzling parts of the current working situation is that the people who are working seem to be putting in way more hours and effort than they used to. What I can't put a finger on is the underlying reason why me and about all of my working friends have almost zero time anymore to do recreational activities, or to spend time with our families and friends. We workers seem all over-burdened with our work. But, it hasn't always been this way. Our workloads have been slowly but steadily creeping up since the 90s. And, the companies that we're working for are overflowing with cash. Yet, these same companies aren't hiring new people to alleviate the situation. Often, the excuse I hear is that there are no qualified people to hire.

Tichy 14y ago
Maybe you are just too nice to say "no" to more hours?
greenyoda 14y ago
To your employer, there's no situation that needs alleviation. They're very happy that they can get you to work more hours for the same pay, and even happier that they don't have to pay increasingly costly health benefits for an additional employee when one employee can be made to do the work of two. They obviously don't care that you're suffering. And "no qualified people to hire" is a euphemism for "no qualified people willing to work for the low salaries that we're willing to pay them for the long hours we expect them to work." Double that salary and they'd probably have qualified candidates flying in from across the country and pounding down their doors.
- philwelch 14y ago
  At least in software, salaries are high enough and there's even enough competition on culture that this can't really be the case. Furthermore, it's not actually possible for one employee to do the work of two. There actually is a shortage of qualified people in the world. The fact is, business has become increasingly more sophisticated and, consequently, difficult over the past several decades. Operations have become increasingly driven by increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques and modeling and much of the drone work has been replaced by computers. In the early days of digital electronics, actual engineers were paid to minimize logical expressions using Boolean algebra or Karnaugh maps. These days we use algorithms and engineers have to solve more difficult problems. If you had the chops to be a white-collar worker at Sears Roebuck corporate in 1960, you don't have nearly the chops required to be a white-collar worker at Amazon corporate in 2012, because there's been half a century of innovation in operations by dozens of firms trying to beat Sears Roebuck. The end result is that more jobs require numeracy and specialized skills, but if anything there are fewer people with these skills because mathematics requirements were dumbed down to get more people into universities and out with degrees. The stereotypical unemployed Gen-Yner is a liberal arts graduate, and for good reason. The engineers are fine.

tarr11 14y ago

This looks like an example of "Software Eating the World". http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651... Many law firms are doing automated textual analysis of legal work that used to be done by associates. The fact that they are still making more profit implies that they've just gotten more efficient. I suppose that there are a set of legal software companies that are probably profiting pretty well on this. "Similarly, the number of hours logged by first-year and mid-level legal associates -- a productivity measure of young lawyers -- fell 12 percent from 2007 at some of New York’s largest law firms, says Jeff Grossman, national managing director of Wells Fargo Private Bank’s Legal Specialty Group in Charlotte, North Carolina. Yet profits per partner climbed $50,697 to $1.5 million on revenue of $66 billion last year, according to a separate survey of 86 of the world’s top law firms by The American Lawyer magazine."

helmut_hed 14y ago
"Textual analysis" also sounds like the sort of thing that could be profitably outsourced. I understand that in the medical world, reviewing medical images may now be done by qualified technicians in lower-wage countries.

angersock 14y ago

I'm so sick of hearing about how bad we--us poor, lost kids from Generation Y--have it. I'm so sick of hearing about the odds, about the unemployment rate, about how everything's our fault because we're too entitled, or about how nothing's our fault because the economy you see. I live in a rented house with several other young folks trying to get by in our industry. I'm working today instead of taking a bus home to see my family. I'd work tomorrow if I needed to. My computer equipment is worth more than I have in the bank, because that's my capital investment in myself and my work. My roommates are all fleeing rolling boulders of student debt--a situation I'm not in only because I devoted a sizeable chunk of my old salary to paying it off. Once that debt was paid off, I quit my job, because the company was never going to go anywhere with its attitude and codebase. We don't have or want picket fences, we don't have two cars in the 'burbs, we don't want to sit in front of the TV and veg out. That's something we inherited from the boomers and Madison Avenue. The people I know, whether they're architects, or lawyers, or coders, or dealers, or hustlers, all are in pursuit of the same dream that our forefathers pursued. We're all good people, with strong work ethics and a desire to see our kids grow up better than we did into a world kinder than ours. We want to live in a country where you can build a business, help your community, and do so without worrying about getting blackbagged or destroyed by bureaucracy, where you can smoke a joint or drop acid and go into work that afternoon and change the fucking world with a commit or a hammer. (And we're doing this in the Midwest, in Texas no less--no Bay Area bubble for these views!) We aren't afraid of evil brown people somewhere else in the world, and we don't want to cast a "supporting vote" in a system as obviously corrupt and rigged as the current US government. We don't want to take away people's rights because we're afraid for our own little lives and our stuff from Ikea. We don't care about your abortion, or your sexuality, or whatever you do in your free time. Don't tell me, don't show me, don't bloody try to sell me this notion that the American Dream is dead--we're just returning to its roots.

Permit 14y ago
An exercise in trading anecdotes isn't going to get anyone anywhere. The fact that the people you've surrounded yourself are relatively well off does not offset problems surrounding unemployment and falling wages.

michaelochurch 14y ago

Law (which OP focuses on) is a bizarre profession, because it used to be driven by an arms race dynamic. Most of what lawyers do, at the top of the profession, isn't intellectually difficult. The game is about being able to generate work for the other team faster than they can adapt to it. When litigation happens between large corporations, it's about playing the process, not arguing or interpreting the law itself. It devolves into brute-force process playing. It's not what you see in the movies, since cases so rarely go to trial. So, even though the work itself isn't challenging, large law firms have traditionally sought very qualified people, not because of the work, but because there's a complex, ever-evolving game in this war of attrition. The winning team is the one that generates work faster than the other can keep up, and you need to be smart, driven, and brutal enough to work the angles. This also explains the 70-hour weeks that became the norm in biglaw. The game is about beating the other side to death with excess work, so the best hires are people who can do huge amounts of boring, procedural work and not get completely exhausted. What changed is that there's now less work to go around, due to cost-cutting and "demand destruction" among these firms' Wall Street clientele. There's no longer 70 hours of work per associate. Now the firms are overstaffed relative to the actual workload. Well, the partners want to keep their lifestyles, so associates get axed. What's most disgusting about it is the recent trend of "stealthing", which is disguising a layoff as a performance-based firing. There's also a bimodal income distribution. There's "biglaw" which has a hard salary floor of $165k per year, and "everything else" where the average might be $50k. Law is one profession where it's not at all uncommon to be making less at 35 (after not making partner, and being lucky if you crack 120k) than at 26. White-shoe law is melting down. So is investment banking, on which it relies, but banking's degradation is more graceful. Banking is just hiring fewer people and reducing bonuses, while law has this problem of large numbers of marginally qualified people who've spent large amounts of money on JD degrees. What have we learned from the Law Crash? (Yes, there was a Law Bubble, and boy has it crashed.) I think the lesson is about how of an influence respectability has over peoples' work lives. The attraction of the legal profession wasn't just the money, but also the prestige. You're not some plumber or computer programmer-- occupations whose average members now seem to be doing better than average attorneys-- you're a lawyer. Even now, with law imploded, I think that impulse is strong. What we're out of touch with is that most upper-middle-class Americans would see it as weird and risky for a young person to go off to Silicon Valley, and upper-class would only approve it if you were a VC, not an entrepreneur. People are desperate for the credibility and respectability of being a "professional", but the professions are under attack. Doctors are being pillaged by health-insurance barbarians, the law bubble is collapsing, and academia's a non-concern by this point. Which means that the best (and, for many, only) ways for most people to make a decent living are in formerly "unrefined" lines of work. For a lot of people, it's a shock. Millennials, for their part, often feel cheated out of this. They should. They were put through a 16+ year game to lead them to believe they'd have a certain kind of elite life, and then most were dumped into a featureless landfill of confusion and mediocrity. They've been pumped and dumped.

jinushaun 14y ago

The American Dream is a Boomer phenomenon. Gen Y are not Boomers.