Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by win311fwg » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 1:07 AM UTC

otterdude wrote: post #119

win311fwg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Have what backwards? Capitalism and markets are clearly different concepts. Consider the single company town. The capital is privately owned but the economy is centrally planned. There is no competition lowering prices, but there is capitalism. The capital is most definitely not communally owned.

There is another concept, market capitalism, which describes where markets and capitalism come together. That may be what you are thinking of, but that isn't what we are talking about in the discussion. The original comment clearly wrote "capitalism" and not "market capitalism". What was said about markets in that comment holds true even without capitalism, so we have logical confirmation that it wasn't a case of accidentally leaving out "market" in front of "capitalism".

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

#122

Post by bryanlarsen » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 2:23 AM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #96

bryanlarsen wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd definitely take the other side of that bet. Xennials are significantly richer today than boomers were 25 years ago, generally own their house and have a 401K or similar. Xennials have benefitted from the same forces that made the boomers rich. They're not young adults. Xennials were at prime house buying age when houses were really cheap after the 2008 housing crash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-Shiller_index#/media/File... If you bought at exactly the right second of the crash, houses were where they were at the peak of the late 80s bubble.

Mortgage rates in the late 80s were well over double what they were post-crash. For a 25 year mortgage, twice the mortgage rate means about double the payments.

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

#123

Post by otterdude » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 2:29 AM UTC

win311fwg wrote: post #121

otterdude wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have what backwards? Capitalism and markets are clearly different concepts. Consider the single company town. The capital is privately owned but the economy is centrally planned. There is no competition lowering prices, but there is capitalism. The capital is most definitely not communally owned. There is another concept, market capitalism, which describes where markets and capitalism come together. That may be what…

[flagged]

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

#124

Post by vkou » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 7:15 AM UTC

eudamoniac wrote: post #109

ctoth wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The factors of millions of men (workers) dying in war while the country itself was untouched, and all of Europe being bombed, leading to cheap land, increased demand for labor, and a powerful dollar. We just have to nuke Europe and cull a bit of our own people too and we'll be in the golden age again. Or we have to get used to it.

> The factors of millions of men (workers) dying in war while the country itself was untouched,

Less than half a million Americans died in WW2. For American demographics, the war was a footnote, unlike the utter devastation it inflicted on Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia, the USSR.

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

#125

Post by vkou » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 7:20 AM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #15

thewebguyd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not hard to see why people find that unfair or whatever though. It’s complete disillusionment with the “dream.” Why is our society/economy structured in such a way that we spend our youthful years struggling and only get to enjoy the fruits when we are older? It’s why FIRE is so appealing to some, you get to get out early.

> It’s why FIRE is so appealing to some, you get to get out early. Isn't this exactly "spend the youthful years struggling and get to enjoy the fruits when you are older"? ;)

> spend the youthful years struggling

This would be accurate if remuneration were proportionate to how much you struggle, but from my observation of life, it really is not. There's no shortage of people who bust their asses for wages that I wouldn't be getting out of bed for.

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

#126

Post by watwut » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 7:26 AM UTC

sph wrote: post #80

watwut wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Men drift toward violent, toward far right and toward disdain of women. All three are dangerous partners to have. Simple rationality implies avoiding them.

Young men would not feel so alienated if progressives and social media didn’t keep telling them they are violent rapist scum too dumb to think for themselves. Their choice for role model is a society that despises and blames them, or hucksters despising and blaming the other side. Who is young Timmy gonna listen to? If kids flock to Andrew Tate, the problem are not the kids, nor their gender, but society as a whole m…

Progressives talk about simple real world fact that rape exists and is bad. Rape predates Tate.

But when there is sexual avuse or rape scandal, conservatives effectively argue that rape is normal and real victim is the rapist. They are the ones who push them towards Tate, by making his argument.

It is all older generation who see raping as positive thing for hard profile position. Who enabled and helped abusers for decades. Young just learned from them.

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

#127

Post by boogieknite » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 7:31 AM UTC

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…

happened to me when scraping together a down payment for a house offer during the low interest rates 5 years back. parents completely understood the interest rates were basically a winning lotto ticket that would never come again in our lifetime and refused to help back a competitive down payment with any money at all

their logic was that theyd given my sisters tens of thousands of dollars over the years and my sisters remained dependent, but ive been financially independent since college. they never gave me money and id never asked

according to them: they perceived they had made me tougher when reality is that i simply never asked for money when my sisters did, because i assumed that would mean if i ever asked they would respect the request

fucked me up to the point where they noticed how annoyed i was and have offered money since, when i didnt need it, and ive pretty much made a point i hope theyre buried with it

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

#128

Post by port11 » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 8:37 AM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #51

al_borland wrote: post #6

> It’s Hard to See My Parents Live So Lavishly While We’re Struggling While I won't deny there are some problems currently, I think people comparing where they start to where others end is a huge mistake and leads to a lot of unnecessary anguish. Someone in their 60s is supposed to be doing better than someone in their 20s. They had 40+ years to work and save. If they did it right, that will put them in a better posi…

> Someone in their 60s is supposed to be doing better than someone in their 20s. That’s an incredibly new, and probably temporary, phenomenon. Across the vast majority of space-time the non-working elderly are poorer than their still working children and rely on them. As late as the Greatest Generation senior discounts weren’t a sick joke.

Yes, Things Get Better Over Time, that’s also not a new phenomenon. Even if you don’t compare against a well-off previous generation, there are 2 issues:

1) Not enough young people can contribute to make social security payments to the elderly, across most of the developed world. A typical pension in Belgium is almost comparable to a typical young person’s salary.

2) At a young age, the previous 2–3 generations could afford social mobility levers, i.e. a house and car.

Note that I’m not commenting on the management, investment strategy, returns, or sustainability of social security (point 1).

“Across the vast majority of space-time”, the elderly also somewhat contributed to the tribal/community needs, trained their replacements, cared for grandchildren, and so on. Oh, and everyone was poor, so the range in standard of living was reasonably tight.

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

#129

Post by port11 » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 8:40 AM UTC

applicative wrote: post #104

I was aware that all these changes reduce to the fact that half society’s brainpower used to come cheap, but hadn’t registered this very pure expression of it “The cheap and effective Catholic school system of old has largely collapsed due to the dearth of nuns“

Is the modern non-Catholic school system somehow expensive or ineffective? I fail to understand this take. Education also got vastly more complex, we teach kids a bunch of new stuff.

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

#130

Post by UncleMeat » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 12:02 PM UTC

eudamoniac wrote: post #109

ctoth wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The factors of millions of men (workers) dying in war while the country itself was untouched, and all of Europe being bombed, leading to cheap land, increased demand for labor, and a powerful dollar. We just have to nuke Europe and cull a bit of our own people too and we'll be in the golden age again. Or we have to get used to it.

A 60 year old was born in 1966 and started their career in the mid 80s. That's displaced pretty far from ww2.