Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 284 posts

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

#201

Post by dbatten »

eppsilon wrote: post #183
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…

The US' national debt was 89% of GDP in 1950. Now it is 104%. [1] I somewhat agree with you (there was a long period in between when the debt-GDP % was much lower), but the current situation isn't as dire as you suggest. 1. https://www.thebalance.com/national-debt-by-year-compared-to...

Weren't there some expensive wars around that time? I think I'm recalling that correctly.

Seriously, though, a fairer point of comparison might be the late '60s and early '70s - right when Boomers were entering adulthood. National debt as a percentage of GDP was in the 30s around then.

Still, your response to the parent comment is still somewhat justified - yes, national debt is higher now, but it's not like it's orders of magnitude higher, right?

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

#202

Post by mturmon »

maccard wrote: post #58
AlphaSite wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its q uniquely american thing. It doesn't exist in the UK to the best of my knowledge.

Definitely not. Look at any UK based news paper, and you'll find articles comparing Millenials to Boomers - [0][1] are two articles I found within 30 seconds. Looking at places like /r/unitedkingdom, you'll find it full of people talking about other generations being selfish etc, where we're just trying to get by.. [0] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/baby-boomers-v-millennial... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/soc…

Agreed, and adding -- One can see the notion of epochal/generational change in earlier UK contexts. For instance, the post-WWI era ushered in a time of great social change and the "Bright Young Things" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_young_things). And of course the "Swinging Sixties" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swinging_Sixties) after the costs of WWII were paid.

I don't think this is at all an American phenomenon.

Another reference point: kids who always grew up with a smartphone, vs. slightly-older kids who got their first one, say, in college. Totally different thing.

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

#203

Post by dragonwriter »

jdlyga wrote: post #82
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 kind of like separating the 19th century from the 20th century at WW1. Millenials are separated from Gen X by having computers and the internet introduced at some point while they were growing up. Whereas Gen Z are the kids who have had iPads since they were babies.

> Millenials are separated from Gen X by having computers and the internet introduced at some point while they were growing up.

I'm in Gen X (and not at the very end). I used a computer at school in 4th grade, had my first computer at home within a year, had a PC clone at home (our third family computer) by the end of 6th grade, had a modem and CompuServe account in middle school.

Millennials may be distinguished by being likely to have had access to the Web before leaving high school, but not by having (personal) computers introduced while they were growing up.

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

#204

Post by yourapostasy »

hnaccy wrote: post #125
roymurdock wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They rarely coin words into mainstream lingo. But they are uniquely positioned with their data streams to detect trends as they are happening. And they will happily co-opt a term and promote it, if the term makes it easier for consumers to self-identify as part of a group.

That eliminates the marketing effort to convince a consumer that they are part of a particular group. Getting individuals to self-identify themselves as members of various groups is a highly effective advertising delivery channel. Convincing you to use groupings as a convenient, time-saving shorthand (like branding is a convenient shortcut) gets you to buy more, more frequently.

Marketers and advertisers fear you insisting upon evaluating situations and people one-on-one, as they come up in your life, and using the marinating and revealing effects of time to judge value and character.

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

#205

Post by vinceguidry »

> As a caveat, spending on avocado toast wasn’t specifically tracked for this analysis.

We need an Avocado Toast Index to track consumption patterns across generations to go along with the Big Mac Index that tracks purchase parity across countries.

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

#206

Post by ralmeida »

humanrebar wrote: post #132
Waterluvian wrote: post #123

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.

Isn't that an argument that the inflation adjustment isn't suitable for this comparison?

Or that housing prices are too high.

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

#207

Post by curo »

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…

The world runs in cycles. You start to see various shifts when you zoom out historically. Conservative / liberal oscillations for instance:

The Age of Enlightenment prized composure and disparaged human emotion. The Romantics countered, to hell with composure! As William Blake wrote, "those who restrain desire do so because there's is weak enough to restrain." A life of love needed no guiding hand. Lord Byron wrote, "love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey."

Three generations later the pendulum swung back. The Dark Romantics underscored human fallibility. The Realists derided Romantic values and urged a return to everyday concerns and simplicity. Victorian culture prized moral strictness and Charles Darwin wrote, “the highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”

Then the pendulum swung again, culminating with the Roaring 20s, the rise of Flappers, drinking, spending, and (relative to the time prior) lots of sex. Americans valued optimism and prosperity.

That was until the Depression hit and war pulled us back to stricter social norms. Those too were repealed and replaced by 1970s "counter-culture," "if it feels good do it." That lasted till now, and many are suspecting that Gen Z is a reaction to Millenials. They've accepted the progress we've made but also reject the mistakes we've made. I won't mention surveys right now else this will become political, but basically every generation is a reaction to the one prior. And sometimes reactions take 2-3 generations, but it's always a cycle.

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

#208

Post by rootusrootus »

Waterluvian wrote: post #123

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.

There could be lots of reasons for that, however. Since you have not provided enough information to make speculation possible, I will mention my own to illustrate my point:

My parents bought their house in 1970, when my dad was making about 15K. The house was about 30K. To buy that same house today you would need to make about 150K. Inflation adjusted, my dad's income then would only be about 100K now or maybe a little less.

But ... what changed? In 1970, we lived in a remote area, where it took close to an hour to get there from the nearest city of any size. But about 10 years later the freeway was built and the nearest city expanded, now the property is still technically rural but it's 15 minutes from the city. It would be hard to argue that the value of the property hasn't been significantly increased as a result. Not many people wanted to live that far out in 1970; my dad's coworkers at IBM all told him he was crazy. Today that area is very popular.

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

#209

Post by SeanAppleby »

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…

Hackernews is probably also an extremely skewed financial cross-section.

Most of my friends from my higher education and career, as well as everyone I know who I've heard mention hackernews, are like you said, making more than their parents and enjoying a higher quality of life but still not planning on buying property because housing costs are too high in cities.

But if I go back to the town where I grew up, most of the people I know that didn't move away to go to a good university or go into a field like tech or finance are worse off than their parents on any metric I can think of.

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

#210

Post by softawre »

gambiting wrote: post #36
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…

Agreed. I live the life of incredible luxury compared to when my parents were my age, definitely in terms of "life experiences" and material possessions....except for housing. Getting on the property ladder seems like a dream that's very far away, even when working as an IT professional.

You could move, right?
Post reply on HN