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Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

bloomberg.com

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Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#121

Post by oblio »

klodolph wrote: post #32
iagooar wrote: post #6

It's funny how this "generation" thing only quite exists (as far as I know) in the English-speaking world. There is no such idea of generations of people where I come from. It's hard for me to even grasp the idea of it. Who draws a line between generations and why? People do not stop being born, nor do they magically change because they supposedly belong to an imaginary generation. Am I missing something?

> It's hard for me to even grasp the idea of it. It's just an arbitrary label for people born in a certain period of history. These people generally have shared experiences that are different from the experiences of other generations. > Who draws a line between generations and why? Same people that draw a line between lemons and limes. It's sometimes a useful distinction so people remember it and use it. > People do…

> There is no sharp dividing line between lemons and limes, either

There is, if you care about scurvy: http://nowiknow.com/dont-forget-the-lime/

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#122

Post by gaius »

esotericn wrote: post #16

I think the term "poorer", and the monetary analysis done here, is too high level to extract real meaning. The average young person/couple that I know are able to do and buy far more than their parents (e.g. eat out, order takeaway, take holidays, go to bars, buy things for hobbies, buy clothes, ...). They just don't own property and have no path that leads there. In some sense you could say that they have higher inc…

eat out, order takeaway, take holidays, go to bars, buy things for hobbies, buy clothes

Right. When I was a student in the mid-90s students were poor. We wore second-hand clothes because they were cheap, not because they were “vintage fashion” (which costs as much or more than new!), we re-used teabags instead of Starbucks every day, we went to the market at closing time to buy for pennies the produce the stallholders were about to throw away instead of takeaways and eating out, we drank crap beer at the union instead of going to clubs, we used PCs in the library rather than having our own laptops... students today are massively wealthier in every way than we were, even accounting for loan repayments.

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#123

Post by Waterluvian »

This is a very complex subject and I'm not trying to reduce it to something simple. But a big smell to me that something's just plain messed up is this fact:

I make more money (inflation adjusted) than my parents did combined when they bought the house I grew up in. I would have to double my salary to afford buying/maintaining that house today.

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#124

Post by icebraining »

realbarack wrote: post #45
iagooar wrote: post #6

It's funny how this "generation" thing only quite exists (as far as I know) in the English-speaking world. There is no such idea of generations of people where I come from. It's hard for me to even grasp the idea of it. Who draws a line between generations and why? People do not stop being born, nor do they magically change because they supposedly belong to an imaginary generation. Am I missing something?

A couple things: 1. Age distribution is not uniform: the histogram of people's ages really is multimodal ( https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/... ) so talking about generations is a way to think about the "clusters" of ages. 2. Intuitively there is a certain zeitgeist that comes from being around for certain events or being affected by certain societal or economic forces. What did it mean to…

9/11 is an interesting example; the youngest Millennials (born '81-'96, according to Pew and others) were only five at the time, so do their experiences really match the teenagers and young adults at the time, who had enough context to understand what they were watching?

In my experience, that's not true at all, to them it was merely an historical event, whereas I quite distinctively remember the shock, despite not even being an American.

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#125

Post by hnaccy »

roymurdock wrote: post #51
sdegutis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generations has been a concept long before marketing. I do wonder about who draws the line for where a generation begins/ends, but the concept is pretty clear: you are one generation, your children another, your parents another, your grandparents another. Hence the base word "generate".

Market research agencies draw the line nowadays and their terms get picked up in general lingo Philosophers, novelists, sociologists, anthropologists, and economists used to define, study, and critique generational divides before advertising became such a pervasive part of the modern economy

Millennials, Gen X, and Gen Z don't seem to have been coined by market research agencies.

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#126

Post by will_brown »

Baby Boomers are directly responsible for all the debt in the country, they invented it to pay for their lavish life styles they couldn’t afford and so they invented debt to kick the can down the road to future generations, and payment has come due. 1950 federal debt was ~$250B now $21T. Credit cards didn’t exist before baby boomers now $19T in consumer debt. Student loans didn’t exist before the boomers, now it’s more than $1T debt. Medicare/Medicaid didn’t exist before the boomer generation, now that’s >$50T in unfounded debt by all estimates.

What a revelation.

As it turns out all this bullshit about millennials not wanting to get married, or own houses, or own a car is manufactured news...and people really do want to have families and own things, only they can’t afford any of those things.

Wow next thing we will hear is millennials are not choosing to be uninsured, but they can’t afford healthcare insurance.

Edit: removed “Medicare/social security” with Medicare/Medicaid...that slip triggered the HN pedantics and in their mind made the remainder of the comment “patently false”

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#127

Post by dymk »

glup wrote: post #115
lucisferre wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > Who draws a line between generations and why? > Same people that draw a line between lemons and limes I mean, I doubt it is really the exact same people who do this. At the very least it is a separate department that does the lemon-lime distincting.

Hi HN, are key limes lemons or limes?

Neither, it’s actually a form of tropical potato

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#128

Post by humanrebar »

maxxxxx wrote: post #107

I think the big problem is that there are less stable paths now. Previous generations had a clear path to getting a house, affordable education and stable retirement whereas now you have to take on a lot of debt, gamble in the stock market and have to have some level of luck to retire safely. Any major health expense or company layoff may destroy your well laid-out plans and put you back to zero. I think today's life…

Arguably, Boomer style retirement based on being independently wealthy was/is a fleeting historical oddity. Historically people died young or moved in with family.

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#129

Post by toomuchtodo »

will_brown wrote: post #126

Baby Boomers are directly responsible for all the debt in the country, they invented it to pay for their lavish life styles they couldn’t afford and so they invented debt to kick the can down the road to future generations, and payment has come due. 1950 federal debt was ~$250B now $21T. Credit cards didn’t exist before baby boomers now $19T in consumer debt. Student loans didn’t exist before the boomers, now it’s mo…

I agree with most of this except the part about inventing debt; come on now, debt has existed as a concept far back into human history.

EDIT: Yes all, I understand credit is now more easily available than ever, and I would argue that ease of credit is a substantial problem allowing for the transfer of responsibility to future generations.

@infogulch: I agree with everything you said, but that is not what OP said, and hence, not what I replied to. Internet Talking is hard!

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#130

Post by komali2 »

throw_away2 wrote: post #47
iagooar wrote: post #6

It's funny how this "generation" thing only quite exists (as far as I know) in the English-speaking world. There is no such idea of generations of people where I come from. It's hard for me to even grasp the idea of it. Who draws a line between generations and why? People do not stop being born, nor do they magically change because they supposedly belong to an imaginary generation. Am I missing something?

The whole thing was invented by two boomers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio... My personal theory is that it is just an artifact of US boomer navel-gazing and self-exceptionalism. Also that it fits in nicely with peoples' tendency to want to drop other people into little buckets so that they don't have to think about them too hard. People do the same thing with race, believing these diff…

I feel you there, although I do think it can be useful to say things like "people born before 1980 will not experience climate change like those born after."
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