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The Grinch Stealing the Future of Gen Y and Z

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Re: The Grinch Stealing the Future of Gen Y and Z

#51

Post by lordnacho »

echelon wrote: post #34
staringback wrote: post #27

And yet home ownership rate is higher today than it was at any time between (1965-1997) with an upward trend. If housing was so easily affordable back "then", why didn't everybody buy a house? Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

People are looking at modern times as if they're worse, when they're almost strictly better than everything that came before us. Far less of the world lives in poverty. People in developed nations have more access to information, entertainment, lifestyle choices, etc. Big media sells fear. Social media amplifies rage. They both create a miasma of doom that isn't reflective of the upward trajectory we've been on and c…

Aren't there a bunch of statistics that show stagnation for the great many over recent decades?

Averages might be going up, but they are averages: an attempt to boil down a large number of data points into a single number.

Re: The Grinch Stealing the Future of Gen Y and Z

#52

Post by ch4s3 »

malandrew wrote: post #37
ch4s3 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see where you're coming from, but talking to my father-in-law who grew up in Queens in the 60s and he remembers something quite different. The city was a dangerous mess and they never went to Manhattan, they essentially never left Astoria. They didn't take vacations, have A/C, his room was basically a walk in closet with a window, they ate awful food most fo the time, and went to a low cost catholic school. He has…

Came here to say the same. The cities boomers grew up with are not the cities of 2022. Most of the interesting things that exist today in cities either didn’t exist for boomers when they were our age or was incredibly scarce and only within the reach of extremely wealthy. If you want the boomer city experience, you need to go pick a city today that compares to a NYC, LA, Miami or SF in the 1960s and 1970s. Nothing li…

Yeah, for sure. I think people REALLY underestimate how shitty food was in the 60s and 70s too. My mother-in-law told me she didn't really encounter food made with fresh vegetables until the late 80s, and my own father who grew up on a farm told me that he was so sick of mac and cheese and frozen fish sticks by late Winter(when they were running out of preserved food) that he would eat with his eyes closed.

Re: The Grinch Stealing the Future of Gen Y and Z

#53

Post by lordnacho »

malandrew wrote: post #46
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These types of arguments basically always reek of bootlicking to me. It's always a vague "things were better" when the material reality of the situation is everyone feels insanely economically insecure and feels a massive amount of anxiety. We're watching the aggregation of wealth by massive corporation and the loss of "good jobs", while wealth concentrates in the hands of those who already possess it. I refuse to be…

That’s not the material reality you’ve described because you immediately followed with “…everyone feels…”. Material reality would be something measured in objective material benefits enjoyed. Everything people read and consume today teaches them to feel things are worse because doomscrolling produces greater engagement. It’s the same reason people feel “injured” (offended) by things that boomers in their day would fi…

> objective > material benefits > enjoyed

There isn't a way to transmute "stuff consumed" into enjoyment/utility/value. We can sort of guess that people who were near starvation but are now eating regularly are somehow doing better, but we are so incredibly far from that world that it's worth asking ourselves whether it is really the same thing at all to say people with more TVs in their homes are better off.

You're right about doomscrolling though. But there again, people are doing it more. It adds to GDP. Are people better off?

Re: The Grinch Stealing the Future of Gen Y and Z

#54

Post by dragonwriter »

ericmcer wrote: post #49
dragonwriter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels like social security should be split into two things: disability for workers pre-retirement, and a Trust fund for retired workers. It...is: the Old Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund and the Disability Insurance Trust Fund are separate funds that pay for different programs administered by Social Security. > They are using the first as a justification to plunder the second No, “they” (who?) aren’t. > If…

Thats true I definitely don’t know all the details of SS, just that it makes up an obscene amount of my yearly taxes (13%). So would you pay into the trust if it was optional? Why can’t I defer my SS payments by paying an equal amount into my 401k? If the purpose is to prevent society having to support elderly workers who failed to save anything that would also tick the box, but then the govt wouldn’t get to touch th…

> So would you pay into the trust if it was optional?

Maybe not, but then again, I've been working most of my adult life for an employer of the kind that can be exempt (but which is opted-in) from SS.

> Why can’t I defer my SS payments by paying an equal amount into my 401k?

You can't opt out of the defined-benefit safety-net retirement backstop by putting more money into a no-guaranteed-benefit personally-directed retirement plan because... of the whole point of having a backstop.

> If the purpose is to prevent society having to support elderly workers who failed to save anything that would also tick the box

No, it wouldn't.

Re: The Grinch Stealing the Future of Gen Y and Z

#55

Post by fleddr »

ramesh31 wrote: post #11

Does anyone under 40 right now seriously expect to be able to collect social security at retirement age? It just seems like a cruel joke at this point.

I understand the doom and gloom mindset, it feels good to air some frustrations.

But you need to eradicate that mindset entirely. You should expect to collect social security. Period. And when this right comes under threat, you should fiercely defend it. Protest, unionize, become politically active. And as a starter, start showing up when there's something to vote on.

This lame attitude of "everything's shit and going to get worse, ah well" is absolutely ideal for those in power to strip you bare. Don't make it so easy for them.

Re: The Grinch Stealing the Future of Gen Y and Z

#57

Post by fleddr »

browheresmychar wrote: post #3

It's crazy how we make 10x more money for our companies than our grandparents or parents did but are unable to afford basic lives (wife, house, kids). My dad did it delivering pepsi products.

The answer is right there in the article: offshoring.

Post-war US had close to zero economical competition for a few decades. Which is exactly the time where your grandparents and parents spent most of their adult lives in. Middle class on easy mode, a simple job supports an entire family.

What changed is that the rest of the world caught up. Middle class on easy mode was a blip, not a permanent standard. What the west lost, the developing countries gained.

There's of course secondary factors too: different demographics (more workers, less elderly), women were not in the work force making labor more scarce, work was more stable and not constantly technically disrupted, etc.

It's complicated, but the idea that uneducated labor can support a middle class family is not coming back, ever.

Re: The Grinch Stealing the Future of Gen Y and Z

#58

Post by sanderjd »

ramesh31 wrote: post #11

Does anyone under 40 right now seriously expect to be able to collect social security at retirement age? It just seems like a cruel joke at this point.

I'm almost as close now to the age when I can start drawing social security as I am to the age when I started saying things like your comment :)

I've only become less convinced over time of the likelihood that SS payments will stop at some point. There are various kinds of restructuring I could envision, but I really don't see any mechanism by which SS payments entirely stop without replacement. We would let the real value of the payments inflate away way before we'd legislate them away. There's just no political mechanism by which that legislation could be passed.

Re: The Grinch Stealing the Future of Gen Y and Z

#59

Post by sanderjd »

malandrew wrote: post #47
drdec wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really the that for people who will be collecting in 8-10 years. For the under 40 crowd, they don't need it for 25 years and who knows how the demographics will play out then.

Imagine paying in from age 15 to age 55 and then being told that in 10 years you’re going to 74% of what you’ve been paying for for 40 years. You’re 4/5ths of the way there before the bait and switch.

I get the bait and switch feeling, I really do. But in reality that "paying in" is just a tax I've paid, and it's not unusual to get less than I was promised for a tax I've paid. Certainly I desire efficiency for my tax payments, but getting bent out of shape when that doesn't happen is just no way to live.

Re: The Grinch Stealing the Future of Gen Y and Z

#60

Post by dbjacobs »

staringback wrote: post #27

And yet home ownership rate is higher today than it was at any time between (1965-1997) with an upward trend. If housing was so easily affordable back "then", why didn't everybody buy a house? Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

From [1] we can see that home ownership had a run-up to 2008 as interest rates dropped and credit loosened, especially for younger people. When credit tightened home ownership took a major dive.

[1]: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/08/homeownership...

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