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Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

consumeraffairs.com

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Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#81

Post by buildartefact »

hot_gril wrote: post #73
telchior wrote: post #59

One of the items this article doesn't cover is healthcare spending, which has increased between 2 and 8 times since 1980 (depending on whether you're looking at individual spending or share of GDP). Here's a decent collection of charts: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe... It has been shocking to me to see how cheap and effective healthcare can be in other countries, from an emergency visit…

I always see the healthcare cost to consumer compared to other countries, but that isn't the true cost to society if the govt is subsidizing the rest. AFAIK the US healthcare is still truly more costly. Monopolies or something, idk.

The US federal government also spends more per capita on healthcare than almost every other nation.

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#82

Post by m00x »

kbrannigan wrote: post #31

The proliferation of payment plans. Everyone can "afford" a flagship smartphone. Only 36$ per month Everyone can afford a car only : 340$ a month. numbers add up fast digging themselves into a hole

That's incorrect.

If anything, banking and lending regulation have only increased since the boomer era. We made it more convenient, but we also made it harder for businesses to trap people in bad loans.

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#83

Post by mattrick »

gruez wrote: post #45
kbrannigan wrote: post #31

The proliferation of payment plans. Everyone can "afford" a flagship smartphone. Only 36$ per month Everyone can afford a car only : 340$ a month. numbers add up fast digging themselves into a hole

>Everyone can "afford" a flagship smartphone. Only 36$ per month Everyone can afford a car only : 340$ a month. But auto loans were around since the 20s. What changed? https://lendedu.com/blog/history-of-auto-lending-industry

It seems like everywhere is pushing financing as an alternative to payment upfront. Even small (<$50 purchases) are being offered financing through services like Klarna. It really feels like it's become an option for almost any purchase now.

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#84

Post by hot_gril »

SQueeeeeL wrote: post #77
hot_gril wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always see the healthcare cost to consumer compared to other countries, but that isn't the true cost to society if the govt is subsidizing the rest. AFAIK the US healthcare is still truly more costly. Monopolies or something, idk.

It actually just is, if we're talking about purchasing power of an individual, which is pretty much the only thing the average person cares about

It matters when you're talking about policy. Subsidizing healtchare doesn't fix the problem of anticompetitive behavior among the suppliers, or pushing unnecessary treatment/drugs.

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#85

Post by falcolas »

elzbardico wrote: post #8

Boomers in their twenties were mostly working. Gen Z in their twenties is finishing college, working towards a master's or even a PhD. EDIT: No value judgments here. This is just a fact, people entered the active workforce earlier.

My mother, a baby boomer ('48), worked as a waitress part time to pay her way through college in her 20's.

My dad worked for ma'bell, and earned somewhere around $150k in today's dollars as an high-school-educated lineman when he retired (and was then hired back on to train). And that's with a fully funded pension plan.

So, even if they were in the workforce earlier (they weren't, I (as a genX) was working part time in college at 18, my wife full time), the workforce was very different.

The times, they've changed.

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#86

Post by wbsss4412 »

arcticbull wrote: post #54
ctoth wrote: post #16

At least they can buy cheap TVs, right? I wonder if we can finally accept that just because things like phones and TVs got better faster than purchasing power got worse, doesn't mean that it hasn't been getting worse for a while. I'd even go so far to say that technical progress in a couple areas has hidden some pretty stark declines. Or at least allowed some people to point at shiny things getting better when compla…

As usual, there's a few chart crimes in here. Chart 1 shows CPI and inflation adjusted wages on the same graph? Why? Inflation adjusted wages already take into account CPI. There's no sensible reason to plot these two on the same graph. The caption is "wages are up 80% but that didn't keep up with living costs" - you cannot draw that inference from this graph. This graph actually shows that in fact wages grew faster…

> Housing is another red herring, of course, because the average new American home is 2x bigger now than it was in the 70s. Roughly speaking 1 square foot of the average home costs exactly the same as it used to in the 1970s. [1] And the average family has become smaller. So yes, housing is more expensive in big cities but that's because of zoning as Mr. Andreessen will tell you.

Just because houses have gotten bigger and families have gotten smaller, doesn’t mean you can buy an average 1970s house in major cities for the same inflation adjusted price. A lot of those old homes are either gone, extremely expensive, or situated in different metro areas than younger generations live in today.

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#87

Post by bamboozled »

shrubble wrote: post #12

I really feel for the younger than Gen X (which I am) groups. My older brothers who are boomers did have it easier (than me) and I had it easier than the younger groups. Purchasing power and a general decline in society's support along multiple axes for what most would call a 'normal' life really does make me think that some form of strife or revolution is coming.

It does feel inevitable because at some stage, young people aren't going to care about supporting rich older people and check out of the boomers preferred systems of politics and taxes.

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#88

Post by nemo44x »

Pxtl wrote: post #58
andrew_ wrote: post #28

My parents are boomers and frequently talk about the 2020s being 70s dejavu. My father entered his 20s in in 1968, and the tail end of his 20s in a deep recession and purchased a modest home in 1976 at a blistering 14% on 30 year fixed. His experience in the Midwest did not match with the assertions in the article.

How much was the total price of that modest home? 14% of cheap is still cheap.

It’s pretty much the same as today when you consider inflation and interest rates. People love to believe homes were basically free back then but they weren’t. Interest rates were super high and people still paid the same percentage of their monthly income line today.

There has been sone warping to be sure in and around metro areas people want to live in. Those areas were being abandon back then. Most places in the country are really cheap.

But overall it’s about the same.

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#89

Post by lotsofpulp »

davesque wrote: post #34
stolenmerch wrote: post #14

It seems the annual income vs. CPI is the core chart here. Something happened in the decade of 2000-2010 to throw things out of whack. I'm not informed enough to know if that was the result of policy decisions or what, but I'd like to know how wage growth declined so dramatically during this time while prices seemed to maintain its projected linear growth.

One thing jumps out in my mind. I think of the 2000s as being the decade in which tech companies that survived the dot com bust turned into tech giants. And these companies would go on to rack up market caps that broke historical records. I remember everyone was sort of in awe of the numbers and generally had a pretty positive sentiment towards the success. However, I'm not sure I can craft a really clear narrative t…

> I remember everyone was sort of in awe of the numbers and generally had a pretty positive sentiment towards the success. However, I'm not sure I can craft a really clear narrative that connects this back to stagnant wages. But it seems related.

The relation I can think of is the tech giants obviating away many instances of labor that were being sold.

Email, travel agents, streaming, GPS mapping apps, etc all let people do a lot more with the labor of a lot fewer.

But that is not solely the domain of tech giants or tech companies. Automation has been happening for decades, along with outsourcing to countries with cheaper labor.

Since prices (wages) stayed stagnant, one can conclude that the supply of labor increased more than the demand for labor.

Edit: another factor increasing supply of labor is women joining the workforce

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#90

Post by elzbardico »

Things have been bad for the young for quite some time. It all started way back in the dawn of neo-liberalism. Since then, productivity has been raising without salaries growing as much. And worse than income concentration, we've seen an absurd level of wealth concentration since the late 80s and early 90s. Late Gen-Xers were already pretty much fucked.
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