The wealth gap between young and old people

> What I'm saying is that average income might not have risen, but median income has.

That's exactly reversed; adjusted for inflation, the average (mean) income has risen, the median has not.

For disciplined spenders who use the credit card for convenience, spend carefully and pay it off every month, you are correct. But for people who tend to maintain a balance and who spend with less care and discretion, it enables them to spend more than they would if they had to spend cash, and, the things they buy effectively cost more due to interest expenses.

Either or both of those behaviors reduces the amount available to save and invest, which goes directly against growing wealth. It is really important to start saving and investing early, and that is when this behavior can cause the most harm. Averaging over the population, credit card debt is a drag on savings and reduces wealth. Since credit card debt has expanded into such a large number over the last 40 years or so, it has a more pronounced effect on younger persons.

> To suggest wages in general have stagnated isn't true

This is false.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/09/incomes

http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/09/17/223374331/the-s...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/31/w...

I've never felt millenials have been relatively happy socialites.

I've felt millenials are the generation that feels the most helpless. Gen-X felt like they were promised something awesome and then screwed out of it. Millenials feel like they've got no chance to compete, so they don't expect it.

Gen-X resented the fact that they had to try so hard to win the rat race. Millenials know they have no hope of winning or even finishing, so the best they can hope for is to make the race more tolerable.

It's why you see things about how Millenials are more interested in comfort and work-life balance than straight up salary. Unlike the boomers who expected to work for a while and then retire on a nice nest-egg, and the Gen-Xers who struggled to meet an ever elusive goal of retirement, millenials don't have any expectation of retirement through normal means. They figure they're working forever, so they might as well get comfortable.

I mean, years ago I talked to gen-x'ers and there was a lot of dissatisfaction and a feeling of a loss of control and opportunities, but a lot of people who gave up on their dreams and settled for a job that they hate with a pension.

But with millenials, they're happy if they can take their 6 figure student loans and find any job at all, and a pension is a bizarre concept from a foreign world. They can't really hope to retire in the traditional sense, it's more like playing the lottery. There are some enterprising people who might make start-ups to try to get rich, but it's either get-rich or get-by, there's no sort of middle-class accumulation of wealth and a nice retirement at 65 any more. It's win big and buy a jet or eat spaghetti at home and avoid debt.

So if you have two jobs to choose from, neither with a salary that makes an early retirement seem a reality, and one makes life a little bit more tolerable, your decision is between a life spent (at least partially) working a more tolerable job, or a life spent working a less tolerable job. So you opt for the job that pays a bit less but gives you more leeway for work-life balance. Boomers see that as an irresponsible happy-go-lucky delay of retirement, while millenials feel that that retirement idea is not really feasible, and if you're going to be working forever, you might as well enjoy it. Gen-X kind of got stuck in the middle where they end up trying to work really hard at something they hate for the chance to get that retirement but keep getting the rug pulled out.

It's kind of like 3 people doing the limbo. The boomer plays, kind of bends a bit at the knees, leans his head back and gets under the stick. The Gen-X plays and when he first sees the bar it's nice and high, but as he gets closer and starts to go under the bar it keeps kind of getting lowered, so he keeps bending and contorting and struggling to get under the bar eventually. It hurts, but they still have hope they can get under it. The millenial looks at the bar, sitting ankle high and says fuck it and just decides to make the best of it on this side of the bar.

Then the boomers hear about the x'ers struggle and say just bend your knees and lean your head back, it's not so hard, nobody had trouble with it in our day and we didn't even go to college. Then the boomers hear about the millenials not even bothering to try to get under the bar and say "they're just fooling around, they aren't thinking about their future, they're never going to get under that bar unless they stop fooling around and try."

But the fact that the bar has moved is so often ignored. We're just all asked to bend further, and then blamed for not doing the impossible. The biggest difference between millenials and x'ers is that he millenials ARE aware of it, and that's why they can seem to be happy-go-lucky and less serious.

It's easy to motivate you to work hard when you might feel like you can retire early and live in comfort. It's a lot harder to motivate you to sacrifice a lot to work hard when it feels like there will be no end to that work, ever.

X'ers just got screwed because they got caught in the transition between easy future and no future.

> I'm arguing those aren't looking at the complete picture.

Right; I'm arguing that non-monetary compensation in no way has contributed in an amount adequate enough to compensate for the stagnation/backslide of wages. Wages have stagnated, full stop.