161–170 of 600 posts
What I took away from this article is that many low-income men have no real interest in being fathers or raising children. Yet, they tend to produce children anyway. We should focus on making birth control more accessible, instead of trying to make people take responsibility for raising children they obviously don't want. That guy who spends all his money on weed and booze while his kids go hungry? He should have got…
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False. The homeownership rate is about 66%. Most people can afford a home here. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
I don’t know why we call having a mortgage “ownership”: it’s not. Across the western world mortgages are getting larger and longer relative to income. More people are in more significant debt bondage than in the past, that’s not an improvement. The proportion of owned outright homes has been declining in the western world for 30 years.
So long as you make your payments on time, the lienholder cannot confiscate your property to make the pie whole. The money might be theirs, but the property is yours.
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This is the constant refrain of pro-illegal/poor/migrant immigration. My answer is: "in the first world, businesses should operate by offering competitive wages, and the lifestyle costs of first worlders should be balanced against those wages". I am uninterested in living in a materially wealthy society that can only operate on the back of a recently-arrived serf class, and it's bizarre to me that so many people defe…
"serf class"? Immigrants to America come here because they choose to. They're not serfs, they're not locked to the land. They move freely, and at much higher rates than other Americans do.
that's called exploitation
Born too late to enjoy exponential asset growth. Born too soon to see the true environmental impact of the asset growth. Lost generation, can I just get some drugs to cope please, my computer job is making me lose my humanity ;( Just kidding it’s all good :)
Unless you bought Bitcoin...
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Also: Nobody in a village should take up 2 houses for themself. But some can, and can even take up 100 houses... so long as the other villagers are fighting amongst themselves, over whether their house should be larger than that of their neighbor. Turns out most of their problems are arguably traceable back to those people with 100+ houses each. Which would be glaringly suspicious to an outside observer. But the vill…
>Also: Nobody in a village should take up 2 houses for themself. >But some can, and can even take up 100 houses... How much % of the housing supply is actually taken up by people with 100 houses?
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Gen Z is becoming homeowners at a record pace: https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/21/ge...
Record pace for only the last two generations: > Roughly 30% of 25-year-olds in 2022—the oldest of the Gen Z (born between 1997 to 2013)—owned their home in 2022, a slightly higher percentage than the 28% of Millennials (born between 1981 to 1996) who owned homes at that age and the 27% of Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980)—but lower than the rate for Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), 32% of whom owned ho…
If anything, such numbers indicate to me that homeownership rates haven't meaningfully changed and the only thing that did change is the advent of noisey narratives.
We didn't want young men to do anything. We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders, and that meant moving factories (where these young men's grandfathers were working 60 years ago) overseas while doing nothing on the whole to retrain the workforce. We got the shareholder returns. Too bad that can't buy a functional society for people born after 1980.
And ever-decreasing prices for consumers. Don’t forget that!
Free trade results in more goods for everyone, by enabling different places to focus on what they do best.
> while doing nothing on the whole to retrain the workforce.
I completely agree that some more attention needs to be paid to retraining. The answer to disappearing jobs is to prepare folks for new ones, not to artificially preserve the old ones. One has to be careful, though, not to distort the market for retraining itself.
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workforce in usa seems pretty good. Have you seen the homeprices they are able to afford ?
Have you seen the sacrifices made to afford those homes? Just because someone owns a home doesn't show the whole picture. There are plenty of Americans that own homes and are struggling to make ends meet elsewhere. Home ownership is set up to consume a person. Miss a payment and there are serious repercussions to one's financial well being, so it becomes a priority. Up to a point, miss a credit card payment and it's…
But what I see sounds mostly as FOMO and emotional decisions. Having home ain't some basic human right but a luxury, where I come from (central Europe) it was like that for hundreds of years. All generations living in 1 tiny basic house was the default, inheritance with many kids was very tricky and thus often cousins were forced to marry. Maybe there was some period in US where things were significantly cheaper, but what were the reasons? Maybe US wasn't so full of people. Maybe poor blue collar construction workers were squeezed much more harshly so that things were done cheaper. Also, construction got (at least in Europe) massively more complex and thus expensive due to regulations, materials etc. There can be 10,000 other reasons. But it seems otherwise smart folks here are mostly looking for first target to blame.
Cheap housing is a pipe dream in strongly capitalistic society like US. I know everybody not having it wishes for it dearly, at least until the moment they cross the fence to home ownership and then suddenly want to see their biggest investment appreciate sky high. Seems like human nature, me first and then the rest (I am not an exception, but then again stuff above doesn't make me lose sleep, life has way more important qualities than hoarding wealth at other's expense).
The article seems to contain a lot of hand-wringing about upper class' beliefs allegedly harming lower class families, but I don't see any mention about the main change in the labor force since 1960 - namely the participation rate of women. Men probably work less nowadays simply because it's easier to do in a two-income household vs a one-income household.
So your hypothesis is that factory jobs have not indeed dried up, and it's just all the women taking up those factory jobs instead?
No, the hypothesis is that men don't have as much responsibility. If they fail to provide women cover it.
The destruction of the traditional structures has its effects, good and bad. I dont' believe that women participating is a bad thing, on the contrary but new challenges come and taking an absolutist freedom stance without fixing the bugs that arise is a bad outcome.
It seems to me that nowadays social structure and norms are all in the ideal or virtual world, but the world is still physical and does not really care for ideals. As it never did.
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Even so, the IP is used to make things which require resources. Disney IP is used to make toys, movies, books, etc, that all require electricity, paper, computers, employees sitting and eating, commuting into the office. Or a vaccine patent will be used to make a vaccine which requires a factory to be built and operated, the product produced, stored, shipped, used, and disposed into a landfill.
That's true, but more and more products are moving away from dependence on the physical resources. Kids don't buy toys much anymore, they play digital video games. You can see a doctor on Zoom instead of driving to their office. I'm not saying that's better, but it's happening. The real problem I see is when people use wealth generated from intangibles to put the squeeze on physical resources, such as buying up land…