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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

#131

Post by anon27589421275 »

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…

You sound like you've simply got an axe to grind and you have no intention of analyzing this situation rationally.

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

#132

Post by anon27589421275 »

dachworker wrote: post #34
thinkingemote wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to qualify this with start to buy a house and get a mortgage and then pay off when older than 20s-30s. I think some people in the comments are thinking you are saying they could outright buy a house straight out of school! (Which in a way might be a symptom explained in the article!

My parents bought their house cash. No they were not high earners and not even median income earners. Yes the house is now worth close to a million dollars.

How is this totally random personal anecdote relevant to this incredibly complicated, large scale societal discussion?

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

#133

Post by bradleyjg »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #122
bradleyjg wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That exact dynamic—-sharply appreciating house price, falling interest rates, no prepayment penalty—-allowed them to use the homes as an infinite piggy bank. Very convenient.

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

#134

Post by bryanlarsen »

bradleyjg wrote: post #133
bryanlarsen wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That exact dynamic—-sharply appreciating house price, falling interest rates, no prepayment penalty—-allowed them to use the homes as an infinite piggy bank. Very convenient.

And xennials had access to same dynamic. Xennials houses were more expensive than boomer houses, but they were also much larger and financed more cheaply. Once you make those two adjustments, those who bought their house around the turn of the millennium were the ones who got the most value in terms of house payment as fraction of income, and who experienced the most appreciation the most quickly. And in 2000, it was Gen-X buying their first home, not boomers. (a very brief moment post-crash was even better).

It's young adults that are getting screwed. Xennials are no longer young adults.

P.S. I bought my first house in 2001 at the age of 28. In hindsight I got super lucky and timed it perfectly. I bought it the month I paid off my student loans, which took me ~4 years of accelerated payments.

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

#135

Post by psd1 »

flohofwoe wrote: post #28
simmerup wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you’re not British either then?

German, of course ;) The German equivalent is that everybody is complaining about rising rents in city centers because everybody wants to live in city centers. Home ownership in Germany basically means that you'll have to pay it off for the rest of your life anyway (and that's not a new phenomenon) so in the end there isn't all that much difference to renting finance-wise, except that renting is usually much less has…

The usual distinction between rent and mortgage is that your housing costs build equity when you are paying off your mortgage. Either way, your salary vanishes, but if you pay off the mortgage then you own a six-figure asset.

What the calculation looks like is extremely dependent on local constants, of course. I'm some countries, housing depreciates.

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

#136

Post by mindslight »

grebc wrote: post #110
mindslight wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of the path you have chosen for yourself, your existence is owed to your parents having had at least some, if not most, of those things.

I’d wager for the majority of human population, present & past, that the opposite is largely true. Most people are not well off and anecdotally I also don’t know many happily married couples nor happily married parents.

What would HN be without edgelords going "well akshually..." ? My statement is tautologically true. I don't know anybody whose parents did not have a child. So how much exactly did you "wager" and where do I pick up my winnings?

Directionally, humans want stability before trying to create offspring. This is the whole r/K selection thing. And even though what constitutes stability is going to vary wildly based on culture, expanding the scope to "present & past" is more of an exploration in what constitutes that stability rather than a repudiation of the main point.

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

#137

Post by applicative »

port11 wrote: post #129
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.

In the 30s, say, the proportion of Catholic population constituted by nuns living in poverty, chastity and obedience for the good of the church and its people was higher than the proportion of American schoolteachers to population today. Remember that in those days Cstholics were paying for our schools too. They could afford their own parallel school system because an astonishing proportion of the women committed to poverty and communal living to supply it. The rest of the United States benefited quite massively from these pious women. We noncatholics benefited again from the fact that women generally had so few choices. It was just a more complex version of the Catholic case.

I am over 60 and can assure you that the older women who taught me in public school would be federal judges and high class lawyers today. The system will be righted when schoolteachers get the pay and respect of eg federal judge and not a moment before.

Quality has deteriorated because we aren’t willing to pay for what we used to get for free.

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

#138

Post by OutOfHere »

standardUser wrote: post #44
Avicebron wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well a lot of those now 60 year olds were buying houses and land in their 20s-30s..

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.

AI and automation are creating plenty of wealth, just not for the worker :)

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

#139

Post by grebc »

mindslight wrote: post #136
grebc wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d wager for the majority of human population, present & past, that the opposite is largely true. Most people are not well off and anecdotally I also don’t know many happily married couples nor happily married parents.

What would HN be without edgelords going "well akshually..." ? My statement is tautologically true. I don't know anybody whose parents did not have a child. So how much exactly did you "wager" and where do I pick up my winnings? Directionally, humans want stability before trying to create offspring. This is the whole r/K selection thing. And even though what constitutes stability is going to vary wildly based on cult…

You used a lot of big words but nothing repudiates what I said.

Congrats.

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

#140

Post by mindslight »

grebc wrote: post #139
mindslight wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would HN be without edgelords going "well akshually..." ? My statement is tautologically true. I don't know anybody whose parents did not have a child. So how much exactly did you "wager" and where do I pick up my winnings? Directionally, humans want stability before trying to create offspring. This is the whole r/K selection thing. And even though what constitutes stability is going to vary wildly based on cult…

You used a lot of big words but nothing repudiates what I said. Congrats.

I don't know that I consider any of those big words...
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