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Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

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Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#91

Post by goodcanadian »

brudgers wrote: post #63
BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #24

Since the beginning of the financial crisis the media has constantly been repeating that the housing market was key to recovery and that the government had to do things to help prop up house prices. As someone who would like to own a house in the future, I find it quite unfair that the government is helping to maintain bubble prices. It is yet another way for current homeowners to to extract as much money as possible…

Why do you want to own a house? Is it as an impediment to relocating? For the risk of a highly leveraged investment? Or so that you can spend time and money fixing leaking pipes on Tuesday evening and patching the gypsum board on Saturday? Ever notice how most small businesses deal with real-estate? Hint: they don't negotiate a thirty year lock-in.

I would rather fix leaky pipes than fight a landlord trying to get him to do it. I much prefer living in a house that I own.

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#93

Post by kamaal »

jayunit wrote: post #64
rayiner wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The punchline, of course, is that retirement won't be a realistic option for our generation at 60. 25-75 leaves 50 working years, and that's what it'll probably take so we can pay for the boomer generation to retire and also save for our own. And I don't think it's a bad thing. It's patently ridiculous for a person to spend half their life not working, why should it involve less than an unreasonable savings rate to d…

> It's patently ridiculous for a person to spend half their life not working Why is this ridiculous? The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were…

You are onto something here.

Let me explain you what the problem is. The concept of work is relatively modern compared to the entire human history. Organized work is something that was needed to scale organized living, and growth of human population. Without agriculture, architecture, transport, communication and health care human kind wouldn't have made it till now. Hunter gatherers had it a little easy, each man for his own or at the max his offspring. But this was not scalable, then extremely unpredictable. To scale we had to get down to staying at one place for long periods of time[read: civilization], and then produce food in bulk quantities[Read: Agriculture/farming]. But no man would work for others, so then came in the concept of doing other kind of work. Like building homes, pottery, carts etc and then people would trade one for the other.

This was still OK, until the kingdoms and kings came along. And then automatically came the concept of slavery, then soldiers who are supposed to die for king. Misery was the norm in this era. A lot of people were stuck building large monuments and cities for kings. Its during this period the notion 'born into richness' and 'born into poverty' evolved and to a very large extent continues till today.

If you are born to some one poor, the world assumes you now have absolutely no 'right' to be rich. And if you do get rich by your work, the rick kids/people think of it as unfair to them. And now matter how lazy, unproductive some rich guy is he considers it unfair to him that he must become poor out of his own actions.

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#94

Post by mjmahone17 »

sjg007 wrote: post #11

You can get loan forgiveness in public sector jobs: teachers, peace corp, and government service. You can become a nurse after college, you don't have to write code, but it is not for everyone. The boomers will be retiring so there will be a huge need for medical and care givers. Also when they go, the jobs they left will open up (minus some losses for productivity). You can go the trade route as well, or accountancy…

Capitalism has an unnerving tendency to force people to work in the jobs that "no one wants to do" or that everyone needs, and aren't viewed as jobs that deserve high incomes. For instance, the US went to war partially because its citizens were being impressed into a foreign navy for essentially no pay. Young people were forced to become soldiers via the draft. Entire racial groups were forced to do manual labor that was "beneath" freemen. My guess is that, unless healthcare workers are able to demand higher wages in some way, that we'll "find" a cheap labor supply, be they foreign workers or "recruited" young workers. Or, for much the same reasons that teachers are underpaid compared to their skills and education level, society as a whole will refuse to raise healthcare wages once those jobs become a cornerstone of our society.

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#95

Post by ChuckMcM »

brudgers wrote: post #63
BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #24

Since the beginning of the financial crisis the media has constantly been repeating that the housing market was key to recovery and that the government had to do things to help prop up house prices. As someone who would like to own a house in the future, I find it quite unfair that the government is helping to maintain bubble prices. It is yet another way for current homeowners to to extract as much money as possible…

Why do you want to own a house? Is it as an impediment to relocating? For the risk of a highly leveraged investment? Or so that you can spend time and money fixing leaking pipes on Tuesday evening and patching the gypsum board on Saturday? Ever notice how most small businesses deal with real-estate? Hint: they don't negotiate a thirty year lock-in.

This is probably a contentious topic, but housing security is a useful thing. Owning a residence, and perhaps more saliently owning it without debt, provides a certain level of housing security that is quite precious when you are older. The other benefit of owning property is that you can use it to generate income when you're not using it. While being a landlord is a pain, if you're willing to give up some of the return you can negotiate that out to a third party and that provides a bit of income security.

Sometimes having one less thing to worry about can be the difference between taking a risk that changes your life in a positive way and not taking it.

The bottom line for me is that I've never heard anyone say "I wish I had more things to worry about."

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#96

Post by randomdata »

pnathan wrote: post #83
moocow01 wrote: post #21

A lot of this article has points I agree with but feels swarmy and misdirected. The take-away seems to be "forget about getting educated, pick up a few O'reilly books, make a website, make sure your friends are doing the same". Yeah a lot of stuff is tough for young folks. Yeah we probably have got some tough things coming. We've got a lot of collective debt, healthcare problems, student debt, global warming, etc etc…

About two years I broke out the BLS data for US employment % vs level of education into a series of graphs. Numbers for the non-HS degree went up to about 17% unemployment worst scenario. Grad degrees topped out at 4%. The biggest differentiator was high school: that dropped outcomes by about 5%, iirc. Some college - not even completed college - dropped about 4% down in the outcome. People with BS+ degrees did quite…

What I've been always interested in is why people leave school at given intervals, statistically speaking.

If, for argument's sake, 90% of high school dropouts are dropouts because they were too lazy to go to school, it stands to reason that they will also do poorly in the workplace, being too lazy to go to work. That doesn't mean the remaining 10% who had to drop out due to unfortunate life circumstances will also have trouble finding and maintaing quality work the same way.

Because of that, it is really not clear what role education plays. Does the education and degree count for something, or does increasing levels of education just increasingly filter out those who lack the qualities that are appealing in the workplace, placing a bias towards those who have more education with respect to such interpretations?

The answer to that makes a huge difference in determining if education pays or not.

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#97

Post by usaar333 »

Suncho wrote: post #68

While I think he's made some important observations and I agree with some of his advice, I don't agree with his conclusion that young people are screwed. Here's an important insight that I definitely agree with: "But won’t a college degree pay for itself? It probably won’t." It won't. You probably shouldn't get one if your goal is to make money. Here's some advice I disagree with: "My advice to young people is to fig…

> It won't. You probably shouldn't get one if your goal is to make money.

For most majors, this is true. Absolutely not true for lucrative fields that effectively require one: engineering, medicine, finance

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#98

Post by philwelch »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #95
brudgers wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you want to own a house? Is it as an impediment to relocating? For the risk of a highly leveraged investment? Or so that you can spend time and money fixing leaking pipes on Tuesday evening and patching the gypsum board on Saturday? Ever notice how most small businesses deal with real-estate? Hint: they don't negotiate a thirty year lock-in.

This is probably a contentious topic, but housing security is a useful thing. Owning a residence, and perhaps more saliently owning it without debt, provides a certain level of housing security that is quite precious when you are older. The other benefit of owning property is that you can use it to generate income when you're not using it. While being a landlord is a pain, if you're willing to give up some of the ret…

I own a house. I can't wait to sell it. For me, the house is one more thing to worry about. On the other hand, my apartment lease gives me no worries.

If I was rich, I might like to own a house, but only for the freedom of doing whatever I want with it.

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#99

Post by usaar333 »

I'm finding it hard to reconcile Lesson 2 which implies a school even of the caliber of UC Berkeley isn't worth it with Lesson 4 to get successful friends.

A selective college is probably the best place to develop close friendships with people destined to be successful.

Re: Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive

#100

Post by [deleted] »

sswezey wrote: post #7
ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

While it is true that a four year college degree at Yale, or Stanford or USC can easily set you back $200K, the only reasonable thing about 'point 2' is that we don't need Spanish Majors, but we do need scientists, mathematicians, and engineeers. And a California State education is about $5k a year [1] or $20K for four years. Same cost as a car these days. You can pay off a car with a 60month loan, why not your colle…

College costs a lot more than just tuition. You have room and board, fees and 'service charges' galore, textbooks, living expenses, etc.

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