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Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

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Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#41
post #11

> Women now substantially outnumber men on university campuses and outpace them in degrees earned, yet the preference for husbands who match or exceed a wife’s income and education has not correspondingly relaxed. The result is a radical market mismatch. College educated women marry at the same rate they used to. They marry similarly earning men without collage degrees, who exist. Marriage rates collapsed among non e…

In divorces involving college educated women, they initiate 90% of them. It’s bad news all round.

This means that when marriages implode women are the ones that call in the accident after the car has already crashed rolled over and caught fire. It tells you nothing about what killed the marriage

Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Robbery" is a very immature and totally counterproductive way to think about rising costs.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/19/us-inflatio... > Half of recent US inflation due to high corporate profits, report finds

1. Voluntary transactions (even if high-margin for one side) is not "robbery"

2. None of the examples GP listed has anything to do with high corporate profits

Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#43
>For example: an American family in 1975 could send their children to public school on the assumption that the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families, communities like their own, and would speak English as a first language. Now, realistically, many parents must turn to private schooling for the same reassurances.

It was hard to take the rest of the article seriously after reading this.

Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#44

> It’s Hard to See My Parents Live So Lavishly While We’re Struggling While I won't deny there are some problems currently, I think people comparing where they start to where others end is a huge mistake and leads to a lot of unnecessary anguish. Someone in their 60s is supposed to be doing better than someone in their 20s. They had 40+ years to work and save. If they did it right, that will put them in a better posi…

Well a lot of those now 60 year olds were buying houses and land in their 20s-30s..

Those 60-year-olds existed in a brief and exceptional moment of wealth creation brought about by factors that are unlikely to happen again in ours or our children's lifetime. The problem being that the American ethos decided to pretend that brief moment was normal and sustainable.

Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#45

> It’s Hard to See My Parents Live So Lavishly While We’re Struggling While I won't deny there are some problems currently, I think people comparing where they start to where others end is a huge mistake and leads to a lot of unnecessary anguish. Someone in their 60s is supposed to be doing better than someone in their 20s. They had 40+ years to work and save. If they did it right, that will put them in a better posi…

Well, anecdote, but I’ll chime in.

I’m the only person in my friend group able to afford a house in the foreseeable future and that’s been because of various strokes of luck (and some hard work of course).

My wife’s situation is the same. We’re all in our 30s.

And we’re talking any house here. Not the ridiculously expensive ones in major cities.

Som have confided in me that this feels hopeless, things keep getting more expensive, money keeps feeling like it’s worth less etc.

The general feeling at this point is past resentment with them. It’s more of accepted hopelessness.

Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#46

>For example: an American family in 1975 could send their children to public school on the assumption that the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families, communities like their own, and would speak English as a first language. Now, realistically, many parents must turn to private schooling for the same reassurances. It was hard to take the rest of the article seriously after reading this.

[deleted]

Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to qualify this with start to buy a house and get a mortgage and then pay off when older than 20s-30s. I think some people in the comments are thinking you are saying they could outright buy a house straight out of school! (Which in a way might be a symptom explained in the article!

It should be noted the house my parents bought in their early 40s was a 3 bedroom, 1 bath, with no air conditioning. The school district was so-so, the lot wasn't very big, and the economy in that city at the time was declining. Most young people wouldn't be too interested in that today. (Interestingly the cost of housing in the Bay Area back then - late 1980s - was the same as that Rust Belt city; we almost ended up…

So many comments eager to dismiss the message with the same old refrains. Refrains that were directly addressed in the article.

Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#48

Every time I think I have money I get massive insurance bills, massive property tax bills that increase seemingly every year, a fence I had to install so my kids don't get mangled by the pitbull 2 doors down that was $12k that was $4k 10 years ago. I know because my parents installed the same fence at their house. I'm paying a not insignificant portion of my income into a social security program that I'll never see a…

I think a couple of things are play here

1. corporate consolodation - the only promise of capitalism is that competition lowers prices. Competition is at an all time low.

2. economics and the fallacy of unlimited growth. We live on a finite size planet, and every company is acting as though it expects 10% growth to increase forever. If demand increases and supplies dwindle thats one large prevailing force that would mask as inflation.

The establishment and universities are failing us as they refuse to critically study and address these major conceptual issues.

Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#49

"Marriage follows the same pattern. Women now substantially outnumber men on university campuses and outpace them in degrees earned, yet the preference for husbands who match or exceed a wife’s income and education has not correspondingly relaxed. The result is a radical market mismatch." I read a lot on this particular topic and this is a little too narrow of a reading. There is a more dominant trend - women and men…

I find it interesting how you frame the cultural drift as men falling "behind". I assume you're speaking about politics? I don't know what other aspects of culture that have the genders diverging.

A growing segment of young men increasingly embrace violence, conspiracy theories, far-right politics and machismo in general. Women can tolerate and even embrace a lot of male-coded things, like sports and cars and video games, but do you really expect them to embrace the manosphere or Trumpism? Not to say that this is universal - but there is a clear trajectory and we see it throughout the developed world (see: South Korea).

Re: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

#50

>For example: an American family in 1975 could send their children to public school on the assumption that the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families, communities like their own, and would speak English as a first language. Now, realistically, many parents must turn to private schooling for the same reassurances. It was hard to take the rest of the article seriously after reading this.

Let's look at those claims: "the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families"

In 1975, the single motherhood rate was 15%. In 2015, it was 40%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_parents_in_the_United_S...

"communities like their own,"

In 1970, the US was 83.5% non-Hispanic White. In 2020 it was 57.8%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...

"and would speak English as a first language"

In 1980, Spanish speakers were 5% of the US. In 2024, it was 13.9%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States...

So the claims are factual. Do you just object to pointing it out?

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