The War Against Youth
Twenty-five years ago young Americans had a chance.
In 1984, American breadwinners who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as those under thirty-five. The year Obama took office, older Americans made almost forty-seven times as much as the younger generation.
This bleeding up of the national wealth is no accounting glitch, no anomalous negative bounce from the recent unemployment and mortgage crises, but rather the predictable outcome of thirty years of economic and social policy that has been rigged to serve the comfort and largesse of the old at the expense of the young.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, human potential has been consistently growing, generating greater material wealth, more education, wider opportunities — a vast and glorious liberation of human potential. In all that time, everyone, even followers of the most corrupt or most evil of ideologies, believed they were working for a better tomorrow. Not now. The angel of progress has suddenly vanished from the scene. Or rather, the angel of progress has been sent away.
This article lit my hair on fire, and maybe specifically because it is so rhetorically strong I wanted to talk about it a bit and make sure I wasn't simply swept along with its argument.
There are obvious problems with certain points. Two that jumped out were that the author never credits the private aid given by older family members as a generational investment, but is happy to talk about private business sector impoverishment in multiple contexts. Another is contrast of federal aid in pensions and medical care for the elderly with spending on the department of education - additional federal dollars are invested in youth through military benefits and food stamps and in the United States the bulk of our education spending is done at the local and state level - so looking only at the federal level and then only at certain corners of that is a little dodgy. On the other side, the author fails horrendously by not addressing the generational nature of the worldwide economic dislocation that global warming will increasingly cause through the rest of this century.
Still, the main thrust of the article seems valid, and I've passed it along to most of my cousins and classmates though facebook. Thoughts on the article and ways to address the problem? This is sort of a weak way to end an OP (discuss.) but it seems as though while the problem is unitary the manifestations and treatments for it are many.
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The Baby Boomers are old now, which is why it seems the system is favouring the elderly - yet if you and me and everyone here went out and had five kids (I'm not volunteering!), in thirty years time I expect we'd see the system favouring `youth' again.
That is extremely misleading. The average 65+ American is not making 47 times as much as a 30 year old. I'd assume they'd be making much less, especially since I'd think most would be retired. You can create weird stats like this because the vast majority of the country's wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small segment of the population. That segment is naturally going to be old, because they've been around for a while and have had the time to make the necessary connections.
I think this argument has more weight when it comes to health care and retirement, since the young will be paying for the old boomers health care for decades, and its going to cost us... possibly everything. But those initial stats are alarmist drivel, and don't increase our understanding of anything.
Neither is really all that practical due to current voting demographics.
Keep your government out of my medicare!
In NZ people also speak of generational theft in a similar way as above, but also focus on the spike in private property values over the last decade and how this is funded, that being foreign debt. That latter point seems to generate more rage, probably because health and welfare are universal, whereas house buying remains an individual's responsibility.
There are a couple good blog post on the topic but would need to hunt about to find
Workers under 25 are disproportionately likely to be making minimum wage, working less than full-time, and working without benefits. They're more likely to be laid off during recessions. Average wages across the board have been stagnant since 1970 - but for young workers, they've declined (after adjusting for inflation). Add to this rising costs of education and housing - the latter of which is a boon to older homeowners but a curse to first-time homebuyers and renters - and it's pretty clear that the youngest generation of workers is getting squeezed. Hard.
Two-and-a-half things have to happen. First, young people need to start voting, and they need to start voting in their own interests. Second, baby boomers need to die. It sucks to say it, but I know a number of people in my immediate cohort who earnestly believe that they either won't get out of debt, or won't be able to buy a home, until their parents die and leave them whatever's left of their money.
Out of the few people I know under 35 who have zero debt and decent assets, every single one of them inherited money. Every last one. Everybody else is just biding their time, treading water until they get their share of the last generation's pie. It's something nobody talks about, except late at night after a few too many drinks.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I wish I could support the notion that this is a major problem beyond anecdotal experience, but this is a message I've heard many, many times: "I got so deep in debt (overwhelmingly student debt), that only a sudden and possibly death-related influx of capital will ever enable my participation in the housing market."
You know, that market that resides at the center of many, many interacting markets critical to growth. I would be shocked if the youth's barriers to entry into the housing market doesn't become an increasingly large impediment to economic recovery.
Honestly, it's not the homeowners market I'm concerned about - it's just that a home is the most common capital asset a person might own, so when somebody says "I can't buy a home," it usually means "I don't have very much in savings or other assets."
If the situation were simply that young people had assets, but they were in retirement accounts or other investments, and they were choosing not to buy homes for whatever reason, I wouldn't have a problem with that.
The article says that the average net worth of Americans under 35 is $3662. Imagine working 15 years and only accumulating a month or two's pay. That's not unusual in my experience. (BTW, it also doesn't say how that figure was determined - a lot of 'net worth' statistics only look at people with net worth above zero; so it's entirely possible that the actual average is much lower.)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
But in the meantime we get to work like motherfuckers to pay for their pensions when they eventually retire so some of us can get jobs!
Yeah. it's misleading. They're using networth numbers, not income. So older people have more money than younger people really
There are two factors at work here: older people own more than they historically did and younger people own less. When did people start focusing on retirement savings? That may explain some of the skew higher. Are those numbers adjusted for inflation? As for younger people worth less, I think I'd attribute that at first glance to student debt
I think a certain amount of it is simply perception rather than malice. It was simply easier to leave the nest and become independent in your early 20s during the 1960s-80s than it is today. Education and housing were cheaper, wealth inequality was lower, taxes were more progressive, the economic environment was simply less hostile to young people.
I think a lot of boomers presume that things are the same or better for their kids. I've listened to both sides of these discussions, for multiple families - parents who say things like 'yeah, it's hard to find a job, it took me three weeks to find my first job when I was starting out' and their kids saying, 'Dad, I've been looking for six months.' A sympathetic parent would give their kid the benefit of the doubt and understand that it's just hard. An unsympathetic parent might presume that their kid just wasn't looking hard enough, or wasn't looking in the right way.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I love my parents, but yup. They're one of the homeowners that cashed out before the fall, too, so hopefully whatever share of whatevers left will be enough to really wipe out our debt.
And I make damn good money...but student debt for three degrees, some medical expenses, housing ain't cheap, etc. Plus fuck it, why should we live a spartan lifestyle while the boomers live it up.
But that doesn't really help the cycle.
He then destroyed my parent's business by pulling out the equity that collateralized the business' payroll credit because "you kids don't know the meaning of hard work."
It comes back to what I said about the generation as a whole being incredibly selfish. On their watch the education they got for free or a small (relativity) amount of money has now become prohibitively expensive, the jobs they walked into out of highschool now require a degree and/or years of experience, the houses they were able to buy with modest incomes when they were young are now priced out of reach for anyone but them, the post war wealth they grew up in has been spent unsustainably leaving massive debt, the list goes on.
Personally I don't think it matters if they understand what they've done to us or not, the world will be better off once they're all dead.
Or, you know, don't exist anymore. Or only exist in Bangladesh.
I can't exactly go and do what my granddad did and end up with a mansion on a lake like he has. He worked shift work in an oil refinery and got the job with a high school diploma.
I got lucky that my parents were pretty great. My dad went to West Point (mostly to avoid getting drafted, ironically enough), but my mom worked through college and pretty much said "that shit sucked, I'm not making my kids do that", so they put a bunch of money away (they also started investing in the stock market before it became super-saturated in the 90s...) and put me and my brother through school.
It's too bad that their peers are mostly assholes, though, especially taken as a whole.
Real estate is insane in a lot of places at the moment, and I doubt it's going to reverse course anytime soon.
Look at the long-term comparisons, though.
It's not just that 65-year-olds have higher net worth than 35-year-olds. That would be fine and dandy.
According to the article 65-year-olds today have higher net worth than 65-year-olds 30 years ago; and 35-year-olds today have lower net worth than 35-year-olds 30 years ago. (Again, I don't know how the particular figure from the article was determined, but it's in line with other things I've read.)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I believe when you compare net worth at the same point in life across generations, we're still screwed. Basically we have less now at 30 than they did at 30. If we have anything at all.
This, I reckon, is mostly due to the fact that populations are expanding but centralized locations of employment are not (and actually, most are shrinking).
And in the few places it is (like where I live), you should see the fucking sprawl. The greater DFW area is about 75 miles across now.
I'm mostly the same, I lucked out in the parents department and have parents that will support me as and when they can. So yeah, there are individuals out there who are sympathetic to how much harder the world has become for their kids than it was for them. But that doesn't mean I'm particularly inclined to forgive the generation as a whole for what they've done to their kids, and in all likleyhood, grandkids. I'm also not one to shrug off the fact that most of my fellow 20 somethings weren't as lucky as me in the parent lottery, and are in most cases, completely fucked for the foreseeable future.
Just to be clear I'm not saying you are, I'm pretty much just getting my rant on over a subject that hits a very personal sore point for me. I've only just gotten a job after a period of being on the metaphorical scrapheap for a number of years and I have very few guarentees that I won't be back there in a year or so.
Traffic patterns in the San Francisco bay area are all kinds of wacky because the region has a lot of cross-exurb commutes - basically people who live in one suburban (or semi-urban) area and commute to a different one. For example, people who live in Fremont and commute to Palo Alto, or who live in San Mateo and commute to Sunnyvale.
In a lot of the urban planning, you can see remnants of the old idea that people would live in the suburbs and commute to a central urban economic center. That's just not really the gold standard anymore.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It all kind of leads back to how the idea that "constant growth will stabilize the economy!" is quite obviously a doomsday scenario.
Yeah, I don't this is at all true.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
No government healthcare for us? Fine, then, no government healthcare for you, either.
Consider that in all of these countries, multi-generational housing is already the norm, and the youth has been priced out of the real estate market in large citites for at least a generation.
Arguably, multi-generational housing has been the norm for most times and places; nuclear-family housing as the norm is pretty modern.
It's conceivable that nuclear-family housing as the norm is a historical hiccough of the 20th century.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Here's a graph of Colombia's growth in housing prices, for example:
Note no contraction during the GFC.
I could write pages and pages on this topic, but it's hard to throw something comprehensive together quickly!
It's not quite that simple though since those people who thinks it's so easy are themselves responsible for the societal and economic movements that made it not so easy.
Old People are fucking the youth because Old People vote. And they vote in their own interests, which means more government services and less taxes.
I agree; for years now I've expected multi-generational households to make a comeback in the US. Anecdotally it's already happening here in high-cost-of-living-land, and countrywide it seems to be a trend.
My point was mostly that real estate in a lot of places worldwide has been trending upwards at an unsustainable pace. Prices in many large cities in moderately desirable countries with economies that range from 'meh' to 'okay' are increasing rapidly and in some places prices rival those found in Western cities. I imagine it's partly due to the free flow of capital combined with the wealthy in developing countries (China, Russia, etc.) that want to move their wealth outside of their home state.
And if you think the youth here are feeling squeezed, imagine how frustrating it is everywhere else when they will not in their wildest dreams be able to get ahead.
Then again, many of them actually have social safety nets.
What does the amount of land have to do with the amount of housing available?
Well, that level of selfishness is what happens when you have parents who went through the Depression and WWII and gave their kids everything they didn't have: those kids start to think they simply deserve those things and they'll start rigging the system in order to maintain getting what they think they're owed.
That's so weird. In the Inland Empire there are places that just five years ago used to be huge empty lots and are now acres of empty apartment/town home complexes simply because a wealthy person gets a bigger tax write off for having that many empty places for living.
I bolded what I still say is not accurate or supported (unattainable expensive by Western standards). Three cities Chile is the only price listed above (1720, 943 and 1899 per square meter). Compare to Boston (my city in the US), 4,000+ outside city center, 6500+ in the city center. Housing in the developing world is not comparable to the developed world. It may be that by local income standards housing is becoming relatively very expensive, but not by Western standards.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
We'll begin urbanizing again (rather than suburbanizing) simply because that'll be the only way developer's can stand to make money. Multi-generational housing is likely going to play a part in that, but even just straightfoward multi-family dwellings will do the trick of lowering the barriers to entry for home ownership. On the even larger plus side, most people want to live in urban areas to begin with anyway so you aren't even being economically coercive just meeting a demand whose supply is needlessly constrained by a variety of factors.
The cost of education is proceeding at such an unsustainable rate at a time when information dissemination has become virtually free means the two are going to collide at some point. I don't know how that's going to happen, but it will come to a head and both ourselves and the next generation will be a bit screwed, though I would expect some aspects of that to be ameliorated once the full force comes to light, but succeeding ones will reap a whirlwind.
Health care is going to have its costs constrained at some point simply due to the sheer math of it as well. Depending on how things unfold now will determine how draconian it will wind up being, but it is going to happen. Once that does there will be a massive amount of free money available to play with since it would have otherwise gone towards various doctors' bills.
Pensions and retirement. That's where everybody is basically screwed. No idea what's going to happen there but anyone who isn't already rich is pretty well fucked.
The current approach that we have been taking for the last half century is unsustainable. Thus it won't be sustained. At that point something else will happen, and it will likely lead to things improving for our generation. Not out of some naive hope, but because all the other options manage to be worse.
There's still cheap houses available in less desirable locations, but then you're probably stuck driving long distances all the time. With gas continually rising I don't see that being sustainable for long.
So we need to invent some sort of 'elevating' device. An 'elevator' if you will. I sure hope the boys in the lab are getting close to discovering this century and a half old technology.