American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals

American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals
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There have been many postings to Hacker News recently with similar themes. The situation described increasingly looks like the situation in the worst-off countries in western Europe, where an ossified social welfare system insulates the older generation (approximately people from the oldest people now living down to people with birth years before 1970) from the economic situation of the younger generation. The United States used to be much less like that, but the Silent Generation (roughly, the people born during the Great Depression) throughout their lives acquiesced in government policies that resulted in an enormous income transfer to people in their generation at the expense of younger people, including Baby Boomers like me.

[AFTER FIRST EDIT: A friend who is a Ph.D. policy analyst for the federal government sent me a link the other day raising the question "Has the US median household income really stagnated over the past 30 years?"

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/12/the-7-most-illuminating-eco...

(point 6 in the link). I think the statement is surely correct that actual ability to spend on the part of Americans on goods and services they desire has increased in all income quintiles over the last thirty years. Some economic statistics don't take account of tax policy and transfer payment (entitlement) policy well enough to reflect the actual economic well being of American families. Official inflation statistics have also badly overstated increases in "cost of living" throughout my adult life, failing to take into account changed consumption patterns and changing (improving) quality of many goods and services, thus making people think they are poorer than they actually are. By observation of actual consumption patterns, young people today are better off in general than young people a generation ago, which is the consistent expectation of American culture.]

I support United States policies that move in the direction of east Asian rather than western European patterns of government spending and social welfare, putting more of the investment in future generations back in the hands of families and less in the hands of bureaucrats. I'm in favor of a big boost in the minimum age for all kinds retirement benefits (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) as the only possible way to keep taxation for those programs from crippling the opportunities of my children. (Yes, I support that even though I am middle-aged and that will put off my retirement. I'm already slated to retire well after age 65 by the last Social Security reform that was passed in the early 1980s to favor the Silent Generation.)

I'm also in favor of greatly expanded parental choice in education so that families with children have the power to shop to help children gain good primary and secondary educations that launch the children into adulthood with a reasonable chance of employment. I live in the first state (Minnesota) to have charter schools, to have statewide public school open enrollment (the school district in which I live has enrolled students whose residence addresses are in FORTY-ONE other school districts around the state), and to have statewide dual enrollment of senior high school students in college-level classes. Even at that, I was a homeschooling parent here, and there is more that Minnesota and every state in the country can do to expand parental choice in education. But the parade of horribles that some people claim will happen if parents gain more choice has NOT happened in Minnesota over the last quarter century, and more states ought to at least emulate the example of my state, where educational achievement compared to educational spending is moderately high by the unambitious standards of the United States. I'm glad that through homeschooling and other alternative approaches I used to educate my children that now my oldest son, already grown into adulthood, gained sufficient work skills that he has gainful full-time employment even in today's bleak job market. His generation should be spared from the policy mistakes of my parents' generation.

ANTICIPATORY EDIT NOTICE: I posted an outline of what I think the policy problem is here first. I've been looking up some sources and may do some more edits as this thread continues to interest other participants here on HN, until I run out of time on my edit window.

This is going to be very difficult to pull off without a massive cultural change. The Confucian influence on East Asian culture has resulted in a much higher degree of filial piety (孝) than in the West, which makes it possible for people to live in old age without social welfare. I just can't see Americans taking care of their retired parents, nor can I see the parents being OK with depending on their children.

> I'm also in favor of greatly expanded parental choice in education so that families with children have the power to shop to help children gain good primary and secondary educations that launch the children into adulthood with a reasonable chance of employment.

This is also untenable in most of America due to the lack of good public transportation and the low population density. In fact, such a system already exists (to a degree) in NYC, the one place where population density and public transportation infrastructure is quite similar to Asia. But in most American cities, the good schools are in the suburbs, which are usually in separate counties from the city.

And the minute that you try to make the schools children attend unrelated to where they live, the wealthy parents will simply pull their children out of public schools and send them to private schools instead (we saw this before with forced busing). And without the well-off students as their peers in the public schools, the poorer students won't improve, no matter how much money you throw at the situation.

In fact, I saw this problem in the (good) public suburban school system I was in. Despite it having a desegregation program that brought poor black students from the city (by way of a 45-minutes-each-way bus ride) to my school, I almost never interacted with them in the classroom because of separate tiers of education for gifted students starting in the 7th grade.

And don't forget that once the wealthy have pulled their children out of the public schools, they'll vote for ballot initiatives and candidates that reduce funding for public schools. The poor, who care less about the quality of education their children are receiving, won't bother to fight back.

> the parade of horribles that some people claim will happen if parents gain more choice has NOT happened in Minnesota over the last quarter century

You're ignoring the fact that Minnesota has one of the whitest populations of any state in the country. I can assure you that an undercurrent of socioeconomically-associated racism still exists in large swathes of the US where there are significant black and Hispanic populations. While most people don't mind if their children associate with middle class black and Hispanic children, they certainly don't want them associating with minority children from the ghetto. And for the most part, the kids follow their parents' lead. At my school, there were some children of African and Hispanic immigrants, whose parents were highly educated and had jobs in engineering, medicine and science and kept their children on the straight and narrow (usually much more so than the white parents did). They were treated exactly like any of the white children, and often used as examples of how racism had been "eradicated" from the school system. But in reality, people wanted nothing to do with the students from the ghetto.

This is the reason why charter schools have become so popular in Minnesota, but remain politically untenable in so many other parts of the country. And I don't know how it is for those students in your school district from the 41 other districts, but the poor students in the ghettos where I grew up don't even have 1 car in the family, let alone gas money for the long daily trip to a good school.

> I'm in favor of a big boost in the minimum age for all kinds retirement benefits (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) as the only possible way to keep taxation for those programs from crippling the opportunities of my children.

I'm pretty sure this is a foregone conclusion. There's simply no way around the math other than increasing the retirement age. If you go back 50 or 100 years, people didn't sit around for 20 or 30 years after retiring doing nothing - they simply died earlier. So if you're going to live until 80 or 90, you'd better work until at least 75.