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Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

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231–240 of 284 posts

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

#231

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…

seems like a generalization to say 'baby boomers directly responsible for...' How do you consign direct responsibility to a group of people only tied together by their year of birth? Are you sure you are not yourself unconsciously kicking the can down the road through some horrid act or inaction on your part?

The argument is that the baby boomers, by being a demographic bulge, have a relatively large electoral influence and so over time government policies have been disproportionately targeted to their changing needs.

While 'directly responsible' is a bit of a stretch, at least in the UK voting preferences are currently quite correlated with age (though this hasn't always been the case). Because the current crop of older people are much more likely to vote than younger people, the political parties have made various commitments to protect and increase social security for pensioners. These pensioners are of the same generation that had free education in the 60/70s and then voted for tax cuts in the 80s when they were earning, of course.

Yes it is a generalisation, it's far from the only factor that determines policies and the demographic bulge isn't as pronounced in the UK as it is in the US but I still think it's interesting to see how government policies have changed to follow the bulge as it ages. Of course, many baby boomers will tell you that they paid taxes all their lives, thank you very much, and had mortgage rates of 25% etc etc etc.

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

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

But people of the same age also have very different experiences for the same event. A 15 year old in NYC would remember 9/11 way differently than one from Colorado.

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

#233

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…

Social Security was founded in 1935, so before boomers ever were born, although it had a different feel from today's program. Social Security is funded (you actually pay taxes for it), but the rest of the government borrows from it quite recklessly which is why republicans want you to believe it's not funded. With simply upping the ceiling on the amount taxed into it we can easily fund it for the foreseeable future.…

It's disingenuous to say that the government borrows from SS. The SSA needs a savings account for its money and the Treasury offers that, though T-Bonds.

It's two sides of the same coin with totally different implications. It's, "I bought a CD." vs. "The bank keeps borrowing from me."

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

#234

It's painful to see that younger people are worse off - poorer and life expectancy I see is down again. I thought we were trying to give our children a better life? How did we become so narcissistic that we don't even want to make future generations better off?

IMO:

* Capitalism naturally leads to growing wealth concentration/inequality over time, especially when combined with automation and globalization

* People say “one person being richer doesn’t make you poorer”, but that’s BS. When people compete for scarce resources, i.e. homes in cities, the wealthy can outbid the middle class constantly

* I think that home ownership in cities becoming unaffordable for the middle class is mostly a result of the wealthy gobbling up property

I don’t think there was an intentional “fuck our kids” push from boomers, this is just the natural result of unchecked capitalism and growing wealth inequality. It won’t be reversed until we do something to REDUCE wealth inequality, which I don’t see happening any time soon. If wealth inequality keeps increasing, of course desirable scarce resources will be increasingly owned by the ever-wealthier upper class.

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

#235

Millenials are killing everything. Except the economy. Boomers killed that.

Boomers made the economy grow incredibly and had some busts along the way. They got up and kept going. The boomers are the most creative and productive American generation period. Millenials are still living with their (wealthy) boomer parents, delaying marriage and waiting for their boomer parents to die, whereupon the millenials will inherit their boomer parents' wealth. Unfortunately this will fail, b/c millenials…

Actually, we're one of the most financially paranoid generations in history. Thanks for that by the way.

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

#236
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

I'm curious about those surveys, if you feel you could present them in a way that won't upset people with you. As a Millennial who teaches Gen Zers, observing the micro-generational differences and comparing them to reported trends (and trying to figure out what is simply a difference of age) is always interesting to me.

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

#237
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?

I am from India and I practically grew up listening how unfortunate my elders were. Every time I complained of the cable TV not working, the standard reply was - “When I was of your age, I had to look out a window”. Ergo, the generation thing is always there, just that it takes a different form in different countries.

While i can say i had similar experiences, it is indeed true that middle class wealth and options are only showing up in the recent generation(s). A lot of these things are based in reality albeit personal experiences can differ a lot and some elders may just be exaggerating

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

#238

From the article: “What’s old is new again. The paper observes that some of the millennials’ parents were subject to similar baseless grumbles of "kids these days" from their elders.” I don’t know though. Seems like part of the nastiness of the times is the baby boomers constantly taking jabs at millennials. Perhaps the silent generation complained the boomers weren’t “frugal enough” but I have a hard time believing…

Boomers originally earned the label of "the 'me' generation."

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

#239
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's funny how this "generation" thing only quite exists (as far as I know) in the English-speaking world. Not really, am from a Slavic country and we definitely speak of generations as well.

That's a bit different though. Most Slavic countries were part of the Eastern Bloc. Hard to have a bigger generation gap than the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Well, my grandma lived through Petersburg’s blockade (she were about 5 at the time). My parents lived through the fall if the Iron Curtain.

I don’t think we ever had a name for it, but those generational differences were implied.

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

#240
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 is not just the English-speaking world. Most of Europe experienced a baby-boom in the years after WWII (Germany a decade later). This had very real social consequences, for example the impact of the youth culture in the late 60's. So at least the baby-boom generation is not an arbitrary distinction but a very real social phenomenon.

That said, I think "milleanials", "gen-X" etc. are arbitrary divisions - just a shorthand for talking about a specific age group.

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