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Percentage of Young Americans Living with Parents Rises to 75-Year High

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Re: Percentage of Young Americans Living with Parents Rises to 75-Year High

#251
post #57

Not sure if Australia's current housing situation is analogous to America's one, but one of the primary motivators on our side of the pond is financial. Rents within 60km/35mi of the main Sydney CBD have crossed well over 50% of the average persons wage, at around $700/week. I currently live 45km from Sydney and pay $800/wk for a detached house primarily because I don't want to live in a 1 bedroom box in the city. Un…

I don't understand how politicians don't consider that a crisis. Too many fat happy landlords I suppose.

One of the fattest landlords is now President

Re: Percentage of Young Americans Living with Parents Rises to 75-Year High

#252
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what the math is on the 0.1%'s money. If the 0.1% became significantly more generous with their money, how much would that actually benefit everyone else?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/economic-inequali...

When that article laid out that it was talking about a survey I sat down and thought about what kind of distribution there likely is. My first guess was:

  f(x) = 500 / (1-x)
where x is 0..1 (excl. 1), 0 being the poorest person and the one right before 1 the richest.

This yields 88.8% being owned by the richest 20% when using 1mio slices (the only reason I'm not trying to integrate symbolically is that I'm too lazy to try to revive my college math skills).

This is strikingly close to the 84% that the article claims is reality.

So, what's wrong with this then now?

The journalist writes that it "should" be different but doesn't provide for an explanation that says why the distribution should be following a different mathematical formula (and which).

Who is being stupid here, me or the journalist?

Re: Percentage of Young Americans Living with Parents Rises to 75-Year High

#253

23 year old Indian developer here. The concept of 'moving out' of your parents home is baffling for most of us. I now live in a different city and I share a decent apartment with friends. I can afford to live alone in the apartment I now live in - the rent is 30% of my monthly income and the apartment is 15 minutes away from where I work - but living alone would be just awful. So I'm now paying 11% of my income for r…

I think it does vary here in the US. I'm 30, also a developer, and my girlfriend and I have been living with my father for two years now.

I make about the same income he does... but in living together we can do so much better. There's always someone excited to make dinner every night.

We get to spend a lot of time together, and even though it's hard sometimes, and requires more emotional work, I think we've all grown from it. We buy a lot of groceries, and keep things clean. This summer I rebuilt some of our pantry space. My dad is really awesome though... He's super supportive, we smoke weed together, play LOL, work on projects around the house, go hunting, butcher our own animals, raise chickens.

My girlfriend and I have our own room, and we've been using the money saved to build a tiny house on a carhauler trailer. So we may not live with him forever, but I think all of our lives have been enriched a lot being together.

It's hard sometimes too, and some days I feel really angry with him. But some days I feel angry with my girlfriend too =) but also i still love them, and working through those things has only made me stronger

Re: Percentage of Young Americans Living with Parents Rises to 75-Year High

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the selling points on a societal level. Why is the government, and by extention you and me, supporting liberal arts degrees that will do little to support economic growth? I've never head an argument made against this question.

Our society is simply misguided in conflating education with employment. It is good for society as a whole to be educated, to understand history and science and literature, let alone practical skills such as cooking, filing taxes, and applying for a mortgage. The problem is that we treat colleges as "skill mills," where we expect to go in, like raw materials into a machine, and emerge as an employable middle-class wo…

When employers stop treating degrees being a better worker then the public will change it's perception. Sadly neither of those will happen soon and I don't think universities will go out of this without a fight.

I mean, who the hell has 200k to spend "for fun" at a liberal arts college?

Re: Percentage of Young Americans Living with Parents Rises to 75-Year High

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the selling points on a societal level. Why is the government, and by extention you and me, supporting liberal arts degrees that will do little to support economic growth? I've never head an argument made against this question.

Our society is simply misguided in conflating education with employment. It is good for society as a whole to be educated, to understand history and science and literature, let alone practical skills such as cooking, filing taxes, and applying for a mortgage. The problem is that we treat colleges as "skill mills," where we expect to go in, like raw materials into a machine, and emerge as an employable middle-class wo…

I have this conversation frequently. And I am speaking about the USA since that is where I live.

The sad fact is that most people need a job to live in the world. And increasingly jobs are more scarce for many majors and not paying as well at they did historically. Hence more children are living beyond college with their parents. And then we have the automation threat to jobs...

I believe that there are many great life skills that are learned in college. Liberal Arts colleges think they have a lock on critical thinking skills and problem solving but I know a lot of people with technical degrees (chemistry, engineering,...) that have critical thinking and problem solving skills.

I think knowing history is also useful and a good thing. But as a parent I first and foremost want my kids to be able to live financially independently. It takes getting a job to do so. I haven't been able to reconcile that successfully in my meager brain with getting a college education regardless of employment.

Plus employee / employer trust is no longer a reality.

Re: Percentage of Young Americans Living with Parents Rises to 75-Year High

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/economic-inequali...

When that article laid out that it was talking about a survey I sat down and thought about what kind of distribution there likely is. My first guess was: f(x) = 500 / (1-x) where x is 0..1 (excl. 1), 0 being the poorest person and the one right before 1 the richest. This yields 88.8% being owned by the richest 20% when using 1mio slices (the only reason I'm not trying to integrate symbolically is that I'm too lazy to…

>So, what's wrong with this then now?

If you think that having wealth should be rewarded more than creating wealth then nothing I guess.

Geometrically increasing wealth is caused by the "compound interest effect" where wealth begets wealth.

In other words, it's a signal that creating wealth is steadily diminishing in importance while owning it is increasing in importance.

Re: Percentage of Young Americans Living with Parents Rises to 75-Year High

#257

I have two girls, 24 and 18 years old. Both live at home right now. The 24 year old graduated from a selective private liberal arts college in 2015 and is working part time in a library. She does not qualify for health insurance or many other benefits. She does not make enough to live on her own. She is also in graduate school online for a Master of Library Science (MLS). She wants to be a librarian and you pretty mu…

I'm sorry, I can't defend being willingly going into a limited career path. And this is not simply "humanities pay less". There are a lot of "different" professions that can evolve and become good (high-paying) positions. Even librarian studies can go to become an archivist, managing some private collection, etc. But requiring an overpriced Master degree for a librarian position IS A SCAM. And getting yourself into a…

Why not just make the education less insanely expensive? STEM fields pay more but we need other jobs filled that are not STEM which is something we forget very regularly. We cannot just expect to have a permanent underclass of essential workers that we then turn around and deride for making shitty choices at every opportunity and basically hold in perpetual servitude.

Re: Percentage of Young Americans Living with Parents Rises to 75-Year High

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand that either but for the purposes of the question it isn't really needed. The library has decided these are the requirements yet is paying a salary to a worker that doesn't sustain those requirements, and I'm wondering why this is allowed.

FuzzyZeus you are correct. However the free market is dictating that an MLS is required. this may change in time. Many librarian jobs are going away with the advent of great search engines and robotic book stack pickers. She got 4 years of experience in the college library doing digital library work (scanning, tagging, metadata, etc.). We are hopeful this will sustain her once she is a librarian for ten or more years…

The more she gets involved in library community event planning and digital work, the better, I think. I have a librarian friend who has been running a 20s and 30s social events group (they do book discussions, game nights, movie nights, adult coloring nights, mug painting, etc) through her library and has been slowly taking up more and more of the libraries resources and become more prominent in the library as the program has been expanded.

Re: Percentage of Young Americans Living with Parents Rises to 75-Year High

#260

Cost of tuition continually grows, most graduates are not falling into extremely lucrative salaries and average salaries are not keeping up with inflation. This is far from surprising but is very concerning. Another avenue to pursue this discussion from is the % of income allocated to retirement savings. I have a sneaky suspicious most of my peers are saving less for retirement than the same demographic 10, 20, 30 ye…

I'm curious why anyone thinks it's a big problem. SSI and SNAP have really high velocity. For one thing, velocity is a good thing on its own. For another, they're both composed of everybody's favorite convenient social fiction - money. The both run around 5% of GDP. So say that doubles. People not working is only actually a problem if the overall economy experiences something akin to opportunity loss from them not do…

I am listening to this book now called "The Dictator's Handbook". One of the arguments is that as more people become economically productive, the level of autocracy in a society decreases because it is in governments' interest to liberate productive people to generate wealth. So a society in which many people are unproductive is also a society more liable to become a dictatorship.
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