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Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

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Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#111

Post by victor9000 »

ghastmaster wrote: post #63
victor9000 wrote: post #55

Denying your own child a $15K business loan just to placate your sadistic delusions perfectly describes the mindset of aging boomers. They're happy to watch their own children struggle for the opportunity to validate their ideology. They don't have enough empathy to help their own children, so it's futile expecting them to care about anyone else in society. They use tragedy of the commons situations to justify endles…

Without knowing the personality of the child and the history of behavior, it is rather hard to determine whether the parent made the correct decision or not. The article provides very little context. Sometimes this may be the correct decision based on the individual. Every child is different and requires different approaches to discipline and support.

The article makes it pretty clear

> It’s not that I can’t afford to help him,” Steve told me. “I just have a real problem with handouts. And I want him to have the satisfaction of knowing he’s built something himself, with his own hard work. That’s how I was raised, too.

So it has nothing to with the son, Steve is just looking to validate his world view. The reality of the situation is that the boomer generation was provided with an immense amount of social assistance, affordability, and opportunity. Yet these are the same benefits they deny even their own children in favor of sadistic fantasies.

Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#112

Post by eudamoniac »

victor9000 wrote: post #55

Denying your own child a $15K business loan just to placate your sadistic delusions perfectly describes the mindset of aging boomers. They're happy to watch their own children struggle for the opportunity to validate their ideology. They don't have enough empathy to help their own children, so it's futile expecting them to care about anyone else in society. They use tragedy of the commons situations to justify endles…

If a bank has determined the venture is probably doomed and won't loan the money, why should the parent support this doomed venture? People have idiotic business ideas constantly, way more frequently than they have good ones. On average denying such a loan is correct.

Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#113

Post by eudamoniac »

standardUser wrote: post #27

"Marriage follows the same pattern. Women now substantially outnumber men on university campuses and outpace them in degrees earned, yet the preference for husbands who match or exceed a wife’s income and education has not correspondingly relaxed. The result is a radical market mismatch." I read a lot on this particular topic and this is a little too narrow of a reading. There is a more dominant trend - women and men…

I'm not certain what falling behind culturally means, but it has been my heavily-validated experience that the culture of man women actually date and have sex with is an unabashedly masculine type. The further from engaging in feminine culture and thought patterns, the better for the man. But I am getting the feeling that is not what you meant.

Fwiw I am 5'8" with an average face and I've had sex with over 40 women, none from clubs or bars, and am married. So I am doing something right. And it's been my wide experience that you really want to be a traditionally masculine guy. I have no social media and I engage in no modern cultural trends, music, media etc. Whatever mainstream culture is trying to do to men, drift away from that at top speed.

And yes I am right wing, and no the leftist women in Seattle did not actually care. They just say they care to signal something. So that aspect of cultural drift is also not really a problem.

Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#115

Post by [deleted] »

dachworker wrote: post #40
standardUser wrote: post #27

"Marriage follows the same pattern. Women now substantially outnumber men on university campuses and outpace them in degrees earned, yet the preference for husbands who match or exceed a wife’s income and education has not correspondingly relaxed. The result is a radical market mismatch." I read a lot on this particular topic and this is a little too narrow of a reading. There is a more dominant trend - women and men…

I find all this gender wars crap competely untrue in real life. I wouldn't be surprised if it was all due to sampling errors.

[deleted]

Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#116

Post by pibaker »

ctoth wrote: post #85
standardUser wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those 60-year-olds existed in a brief and exceptional moment of wealth creation brought about by factors that are unlikely to happen again in ours or our children's lifetime. The problem being that the American ethos decided to pretend that brief moment was normal and sustainable.

What factors? Why are they unlikely to come about again? How do we make them come about again? You realize that your comment reads like "well, actually things shouldn't be getting better over time" I, for one, completely disagree.

[dead]

Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#117

Post by tzs »

atmavatar wrote: post #106
jamilton wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify, I object that any of these things matter much for general outcomes. If the article had immediately supported these claims, maybe I'd be more accepting, but as is it appears I'm supposed to have taken it as a given.

It's a pretty well-established fact that children of two-parent families have significantly better outcomes than those of single-parent families. However, I'll concede its juxtaposition with overall whiteness and Spanish language fluency as additional metrics of population-level success are highly suspect, even if we grant that being a white, English-first speaker may contribute significantly to an individual's succe…

> It's a pretty well-established fact that children of two-parent families have significantly better outcomes than those of single-parent families

Does there being children from single-parent families in the same school as your child lead to your child having significantly worse outcomes?

Recall the context from the article:

>> For example: an American family in 1975 could send their children to public school on the assumption that the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families, communities like their own, and would speak English as a first language. Now, realistically, many parents must turn to private schooling for the same reassurances.

It is listing things about other children that it implies drag down your child and so leads parents to turn to private schooling.

Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#118

Post by mindslight »

archonis wrote: post #81
mindslight wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW the traditional path for renovations was to add "sweat equity" by doing the work yourself, slowly and without permits. You can still do this today, perhaps even more effectively than previously with Youtube videos/LLMs. Although you might need to hire more "handymen" to replace what would have been bartered labor with friends/family (tying back to the social capital concept of the article). (I'm not trying to de…

The flipside is a lot of municipalities have become a lot more aggressive about enforcement, and changing regulations (especially regarding gas and electric) and manditory inspections mean that there's less that you can get away with.

Mandatory inspections? Like the city insists on periodically inspecting the inside of your home?

I have no desire to deal with gas in my home, and my state exempts homeowner electrical.

I think the bigger issue is that the market doesn't really value renovation much any more - it's quite content with beige and builders' grade! And the low-effort fashions change so often you're never going to win that game on DIY timescales. So it's not so much sweat equity any more, but rather sweat comfort and convenience.

Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#119

Post by otterdude »

win311fwg wrote: post #52
otterdude wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a couple of things are play here 1. corporate consolodation - the only promise of capitalism is that competition lowers prices. Competition is at an all time low. 2. economics and the fallacy of unlimited growth. We live on a finite size planet, and every company is acting as though it expects 10% growth to increase forever. If demand increases and supplies dwindle thats one large prevailing force that would…

> the only promise of capitalism is that competition lowers prices. The only promise of capitalism is that you are allowed to own capital. Competition and prices come from markets, not capitalism.

You have it backwards.

People have owned property, and worked since the dawn of time, the core original idea in the wealth of nations is that competition lowers prices... thats where the idea of markets come from.

The only real "benefit" come from competition through lower prices, the rest of the factors ie property and labor in a free exchange are the requirements to reach the optimal outcome.

Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#120

Post by tzs »

like_any_other wrote: post #50
jamilton wrote: post #43

>For example: an American family in 1975 could send their children to public school on the assumption that the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families, communities like their own, and would speak English as a first language. Now, realistically, many parents must turn to private schooling for the same reassurances. It was hard to take the rest of the article seriously after reading this.

Let's look at those claims: "the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families" In 1975, the single motherhood rate was 15%. In 2015, it was 40%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_parents_in_the_United_S... "communities like their own," In 1970, the US was 83.5% non-Hispanic White. In 2020 it was 57.8%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d... "and would speak English as a…

> In 1970, the US was 83.5% non-Hispanic White. In 2020 it was 57.8%

The claim was that in 1070 the vast majority of students in a public school were from the same community, and that this is not true now. The data you cite does nothing whatsoever to support (or to refute) that claim.

It just supports the claim that communities today probably have a different makeup than communities in 1970.

Also, in the 1970 I don't believe that most students in a typical public school were from the same community, unless we consider "white people" to be a community. Most people consider themselves to be part of several communities, and identify more strongly with those communities than with a broad racial community.

At my school in the '70s for example even though it was maybe 85+% white most of the white students would more strongly associate with communities based on something other than being white. One big group was the military kids from families stationed at the nearby major air force base. That community was majority white but had a fair number of black kids. Another was the kids from the farms from the vast agricultural areas that surrounded our town. That community was majority white but had a pretty substantial number of hispanic kids (the farms had more hispanics than whites because the farm laborers were mostly hispanic, but a lot of their kids went to the high school in a different town). There was also a Mormon community, which was very white, and a Catholic community which was more mixed.

A white Catholic air force kid would be more likely to identify with an hispanic Catholic aggie kid than with a white Mormon kid, because the Catholic community is probably a bigger part of their identity than the generic white community.

> In 1975, the single motherhood rate was 15%. In 2015, it was 40%

The questionable part of the article was the implication that it matters if your child goes to a school with a higher percentage of single mothers than schools in the '70s had, leading parents to send their kids to private schools to avoid such children.

There is research that children of single mothers have a harder time in school. But does having such children in the same school as your child cause your child to have a harder time?

> In 1980, Spanish speakers were 5% of the US. In 2024, it was 13.9%

This actually suggests the article's claim is wrong. The claim was that a "vast majority" in the '70s spoke English and now that is not the case. But by the most commonly accepted ranges to count as a "vast majority" that would still be vast majority speaking English.

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