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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?
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…
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?
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…
I think that, like most stats now, it's inflated by the bullhorn of the internet. Basically it probably happened but the world at large didn't have the ability to hear about it. Sort of like crime rates, even though they are lower than nearly any other time in the US the fact that the internet and 24 hour news cycle constantly talk about crimes the population as a whole feels its a bigger problem than it used to be.
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?
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 be a teenager or a college student in 1968? Do Americans who recall September 11, 2001 versus those too young to remember it think differently about things? How did the recession of 2007 affect those who were starting off their careers versus those who were about to retire? Generations are an attempt to generalize the answers to these questions.
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?
Are they the original "fake news"?
*I should point out that the "boomers" are real insofar that birthrates did rise and fall. The rest is bullshit. There's no "boomlet" caused by them. "Greatest" is more senial Regan shit still haunting us. X, Y, is being too lazy to even find a bullshit name, and millennial is believing that the way we count years somehow matters—actually probably does in a bunch of ways completely unrelated to the things marketing cares about.
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?
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 differences between us are discrete and fall into categories that define our essence, rather than continuous multivariate gradations.
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…
Average expenditure at 30: $45,000 That's strange to me - is everyone living on debt? Factor in median household income for a fam with Bachelors degrees: $68,728 , which is $52,000ish net of tax. How are people spending that much? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
"Housing and food are two areas where millennials have spent less than previous generations." Spending less on food I would believe; we have tremendous abundance and it's inexpensive relative to everything else. Housing, though? That...doesn't seem correct, unless they're including in the calculation millennials who live with their family and pay nothing for housing. Can anyone point to a reference that backs up the…
If you can obtain a mortgage, you are more likely to (be willing to) spend more on that mortgage than you would on the rent for a number of reasons.
Anecdotally, I see people attempting to spend as little as possible on flatshares because they don't think they'll ever have a high enough income to bother with that, so they don't save either, and just enjoy themselves with the money left over (spending as little time at home as possible).