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No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

robkhenderson.com

71–80 of 600 posts

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#71
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the thing. Most people can't afford a home here; we're renters. The exception is upper class people riding stock market hype bubbles.

False. The homeownership rate is about 66%. Most people can afford a home here. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

I don’t know why we call having a mortgage “ownership”: it’s not. Across the western world mortgages are getting larger and longer relative to income.

More people are in more significant debt bondage than in the past, that’s not an improvement.

The proportion of owned outright homes has been declining in the western world for 30 years.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#72
post #58
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever wonder about who can afford to make all-cash, above ask offers on houses? Or you can rent that house after the PE firm buys it and rents it out... https://www.propublica.org/article/when-private-equity-becom... https://www.thesling.org/are-hedge-funds-and-private-equity-...

>Or you can rent that house after the PE firm buys it and rents it out... That's fine? It's still contributing to the housing supply, it's not like they're hoarding the houses. Moreover unless you want to ban rentals entirely, you're going by definition need people owning more than one house. Finally, the fact that rents are sky-high as well, suggests that housing is expensive in general, not only home ownership.

It's fine if you're trying to keep people off the streets.

It's not fine if you're trying to keep a middle class.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#73
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a bit disingenuous. Home ownership under 35 is nearly 40%. 35 and up it increases to above 60% https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/07/younger-house... has some nice statistics.

Those numbers are made up, just like all the others.

Your instinct that those numbers don't match the reality you see is probably right. But it's less likely the #s are made up and more likely there are qualifiers.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#74
The article seems to contain a lot of hand-wringing about upper class' beliefs allegedly harming lower class families, but I don't see any mention about the main change in the labor force since 1960 - namely the participation rate of women. Men probably work less nowadays simply because it's easier to do in a two-income household vs a one-income household.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#75
This discusses what "elites" think a lot, but does not discuss why that matters

From 1950 to 1979, times we think of more stable families, the Gini index in the US never went above 39. From 1993 to 2019 it never went below 40. There has been a shift where working class men were more on par with the heirs of the USA, but things have shifted so this is less so. The shift in power to what elites think is more important coincides with a shift of income and wealth to these heirs.

Another problem cited is a lack of "a submissive attitude toward the boss". From the 1930s to the 1970s, US workers had larger union representation, and engaged in sit-down strikes and wildcat strikes. This does not sound like a submissive attitude toward the boss. As the heirs have successfully cracked down on worker organization, this becomes individualized, with submissive workers getting low pay (according to this) getting work, and those not "submissive" as this says, who seek higher pay not being connected to production, leading to instability outside of the workplace.

There has been a conscious shift by the mentioned elite to remove workers representation, power, organization, pay and stability. These are seen as less of a problem than some supposed lack of a paternal attitude from the elite to lecture the working class about their lack of a "submissive" attitude as this says.

It's the same nonsense we've heard since 1980, from funded think tanks and various establishment institutions, it goes hand in hand with the policies and shift in income and wealth disparity which led to this.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#76

We didn't want young men to do anything. We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders, and that meant moving factories (where these young men's grandfathers were working 60 years ago) overseas while doing nothing on the whole to retrain the workforce. We got the shareholder returns. Too bad that can't buy a functional society for people born after 1980.

Gen Z are the richest generation in all of American history on a median per-capita real income basis, compared to older generations when they were the same age. And it's not even close. Millenials are the second richest in American history. The only problem is housing. Any discussion not focused 100% on housing is not grounded in reality.

Income isn't the only measure of wealth. Also, there are two major expenses affecting Gen Z:

1. Education

2. Housing

Both have been increasing at a rate faster than inflation for some time now. While Gen Z may have a greater income, their major expenses are even greater. When all is said and done, they're poorer as a result. Turns out that simply having money is insufficient to solving all financial problems.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not all about food and fuel anymore Is it, though? The biggest IP bubble now is AI, and the main bottleneck of AI is energy to power those datacenters. Doesn't google use as much energy as a few small countries now? Biggest pharma IP now is Ozempic, which let's be honest here, is because westerners are addicted to processed corn and fried stuff. And hectares of monoculture corn sprayed with Roundup and sprinkl…

Yes, everything is ultimately dependent on physical resources, but the value creation is at a higher level, and you hopefully get more value out of less resource as things advance. I don't consider AI a positive example, it's a hype bubble for sure. But think how much computing power per watt you get compared to 30 years ago.

Consider also the green revolution which enabled more calories to be grown per hectare. I don’t know if it takes less water and nutrients, though.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#78
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gen Z are the richest generation in all of American history on a median per-capita real income basis, compared to older generations when they were the same age. And it's not even close. Millenials are the second richest in American history. The only problem is housing. Any discussion not focused 100% on housing is not grounded in reality.

Income isn't the only measure of wealth. Also, there are two major expenses affecting Gen Z: 1. Education 2. Housing Both have been increasing at a rate faster than inflation for some time now. While Gen Z may have a greater income, their major expenses are even greater. When all is said and done, they're poorer as a result. Turns out that simply having money is insufficient to solving all financial problems.

Also, healthcare and childcare.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#79
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: Nobody in a village should take up 2 houses for themself. But some can, and can even take up 100 houses... so long as the other villagers are fighting amongst themselves, over whether their house should be larger than that of their neighbor. Turns out most of their problems are arguably traceable back to those people with 100+ houses each. Which would be glaringly suspicious to an outside observer. But the vill…

Institutional housing ownership in the US is not a material contributor to housing price inflation [1]. With that said , we are approaching a housing shortage of +4.5M [2] units, and in concert with YieldStar's Backpage revenue maximization engine [3] (which is laundering landlord price fixing), renters are being squeezed (because where are you going to go if you can't afford to buy? you will pay, or you will be home…

A 4.5M unit shortage wouldn't be present if the past several administrations hadn't allowed huge amounts of immigration in the past decade. Reality isn't constrained to "you have to build as fast as possible since your population is going to increase very quickly and there's nothing you can do about that".

If every person who came to the US in the past ten years went home, there would be a colossal increase in housing availability and rent prices would crater.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#80

simply, when a boy is dependent on his mother's approval for a sense of self it's all the justification he needs, and there is almost no increasingly-terrible situation in which a mother will not love her son. the worse his life, the more he depends on her, the less abandoned she is. it's the definition of a co-dependent cycle. Maybe he replaces her or shares that role with other women, but he ends up in the same cyc…

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