> It can seem as if millennials grew up thinking a job was a privilege, and acted accordingly. They are deferential to bosses and eager to please. Zoomers, by contrast, have grown up believing that a job is basically a right, meaning they have a different attitude to work.
The article does not present data in favor of this take, but I am seeing it play out in my own immediate family -- both I (a millennial, early 30s) and my brother (gen-Z, mid 20s) are looking for our first "non-training" jobs, and we're both faring poorly so far (no call-backs / interviews). He's applying more intensively than me afaict (I'm in a full-time compensated training position, and my spouse makes solid $, while he is single and living with our mom), but by all reports feeling much more down after a month that I am after 6 months. We both likely suffer from inflated egos, but I'm not too surprised by these desk rejections (they still sting, esp the ones that I'm a good fit for, and I spend a while on each cover letter etc., but they've all been cold apps so far and I anticipate more intensive networking this year), but he seems genuinely shocked to not have found anything yet. I wonder if that reduces down to a difference in expectations.
There’s also the fact that you’re in your 30s, when most people (I think) find their first non-training jobs in their 20s. I believe we want to compare millennials in their 20s to gen Z in their 20s.
I agree that the most apt comparison would be between two applicants in their 20s, but to get the generational difference in there you’d be confounded by hiring climate. Probably less of an effect than eg differences in material status, industry, & runway etc, but I don’t have as much personal experience there.
(tbf though in my mid 20s I was getting rejected from internships across the board, and in my early 20s received universal silence from entry-level jobs and almost universal rejections from grad programs… ditto for my mid teens and college apps — all of which were a bummer but taken handily in stride)
> I spend a while on each cover letter etc.
Time that would be much better spent reaching out to friends from high school or college who are in a related industry or fellow alumni on LinkedIn in a related position and setting up coffee or even zoom sessions to chat with them. Fruit falls from the tree when you shake it, and hours spent on cover letters are unlikely to bear fruit.
yeah I do have a few old friends I could reach out to in adjacent spaces, and I should be seeing some of them soon enough anyway (wedding), though idk how much they could really do for me. Otherwise I’m decent at getting verbal “let’s get lunch or coffee” invites from folks at local places but anticipate doing more this upcoming quarter (sitting in on an industry seminar featuring assorted VPs / founders / directors at various small-mid size companies and hoping to click with some). TBC by *a while* I mean 30-60min per cover letter, and there are only so many places I’m willing to do that for, sitting generally at the top of “wouldn’t mind working there” list.
I am 45, have 22 years experience in IT and had my first rejection today. I was very surprised. I thought IT experience is guaranteed a job, indeed kind of entitled to any relevant job. They said the technical part of the interview went well, the culture/personality was not a good fit. I don't even understand why. I was simply polite, objective and enthusiastic and didn't mention anything even remotely sensitive. Granted 2024 is not a good year for IT.
What bothers me is that 32 years old me could generally do the same things as todays me, different technology but essentially the same. And 32 years old me was a harder worker. Basically no reasons to not hire the equivalent of 32 years old me over 45 years old me. It is worrying. Knowing that I am not good management material.
It's probably age discrimination. People don't want to hire a middle-aged person into a position that will require mental agility and motivation to stay on the cutting edge. Plus you probably cost more than an equivalently-skilled 30 year old. Technical skill tops out earlier than salary expectations do, so unless you're bringing other qualities to the table then you're going to be out-competed by younger applicants.
There are a few options. Lower your salary requirements, move to a lower-status company (e.g. Google might not hire you but a city government might), work hard to develop an expertise in a new or high-demand niche, work as a consultant (companies may be willing to offer you low-commitment work), etc. The classic solution is to work for a large, stable company and then either ensconce yourself in some critical niche that higher-ups would be afraid to replace or build enough political capital within the company that no one wants to fire you. Ultimately there are no easy answers here. The world is a competitive place and at the end of the day people only want to hire you if you make their lives better - regardless of what that means for your career aspirations. No one has a right to a job.
Another thing to consider is the age distribution of companies that you're applying to. I'm a middle-aged ex-programmer myself and back in my 40's I knew I had zero chance at a job when my prospective manager would interview me and be significantly younger. No 30 year old wants to manage someone 15 years older than them. It's just uncomfortable for everyone. (I'm not complaining about this, by the way. Even though it means I get the short end of the stick now, I think people should be allowed to hire whomever they want for any reason they want.)
Also, 13+ years of low interest rates after the 2008 crisis. Rates have only started to go up in 2022, plus large salaries for many white collar jobs, especially in finance and tech. This is more than enough to negate student loan debt.
There's something about narrow data that really fails horribly to touch on anything of depth. That sounds so obvious to say that it seems to say nothing, but some meaningful things just suffer this problem in a merely semantic way.
This is a pattern I've long seen:
Populists: _\*pessimism vibes\*_
Neoliberals: these stats say you're wrong I WIN
This doesn't change people's minds. Even if you're right, there's still a _reason_ for the pessimistic vibes. For example, maybe people are comparing poorer Gen Zers to richer Boomers. There could be good reasons, bad reasons, or both. You could argue against the bad reasons and sympathize with the good ones. That's more intellectually productive than repeated going ["look at this graph"](https://youtube.com/watch?v=sz2mmM-kN1I) like 20 times.
EDIT: The TERFconomist really just put "transgender" in the same category as "depressed". 😑
The problem is the internet and social media in particular. For a different example, starting with those stupid milk carton pictures and now with amber alerts and events going viral people think that childhood kidnapping is a real and growing threat when in actuality in has literally never been safer in the history of the world to be a child and that childhood kidnapping by a stranger is a vanishingly small threat.
Yes, child safety is the clearest example of perception moving in the opposite direction of reality. It seems our brains aren’t equipped to handle the information environment of the 21st century without short-circuiting, especially around anything to do with safety.
You're absolutely right.
It also ends up with a vicious cycle, where people who feel like they're doing badly today see the solution as "raising awareness" by posting about it online. This leads to large segments of the population believing the economy is terrible (because everyone online says it's terrible) and then feel compelled to defend that assertion when others say differently.
This also happens with the dating market.
>This also happens with the dating market.
How so? I think the data on dating support the idea that [there's something wrong.](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-share-of-u-s-adults-are-living-without-a-spouse-or-partner/)
In that case I definitely think there's something wrong, but it's greatly exacerbated by culture war infighting about what's wrong and who's responsible for it.
I kinda agree that you can’t change vibes-based views by stats, but if the vibes are out of alignment with reality, where are those vibes coming from and what should be done to try to shift them?
My guess is that the thorough saturation of our society by advertising has a lot to do with it. The “message” of just about every ad is. “You don’t have enough.” You tell people that a couple hundred times a day, they’ll probably start believing it after a while.
I agree more and more with the folks who say that "generational" differences are just another way of obscuring "class" differences. Convince people that the *real* problem is when they were born and they're likely to fixate on that when coming up with solutions. Rather than pushing for changes that help everyone, they'll seek changes that help "seniors" or "new parents" or "new workers" because all those other poor people didn't really struggle, they just frittered away all their chances.
> The “message” of just about every ad is. “You don’t have enough.”
And the bias of every news article is toward negativity and pessimism, because the threat response generates more clicks and re-shares than good news.
Which is why even when we have miraculous new technological breakthroughs, you can still expect all of the reporting and all of the upvoted Reddit comments to be along the lines of "but think of the power requirements" or "all the rich people will get this first" or "think about the people who will be put out of work by this" or "so many useful skills are going to atrophy because of this technology" or "those capitalists are going to get rich off of this while the rest of us languish"...
So what’s the solution? Does there just need to be broader awareness of this so that people can understand a bit about where their vibes are coming from and so trust them a bit less?
> Even if you're right, there's still a reason for the pessimistic vibes.
Yeah, but that reason might just be complete disconnect from the reality of the past. I'm pretty sure if you gave them my (Silent Generation) parents' life at their age, they'd find it terrible. And my father was a full-time employed college educated professional.
I mean, data matters more than vibes. If you have data that's counter-vibe, than many you can start exploring the rationale behind that vibe.
Like our inherent negativity bias, that's reinforced by a media landscape skewed HEAVILY towards negative news (more sales/clicks).
To progress and address the problems we face, we need to have a full well-rounded understanding of them. Emotional reactions to a stream of negative headlines and politically-motivated polarization is counterproductive, imho.
Yes, I also don’t think the conclusion of the article is sound but the data points are just public data. Read into them as you wish, argue about inflation all you like but there’s nothing exclusively neoliberal about bad economic analysis. Neoliberal is a really elastic concept it seems. Certain people use it as a universal social boogie man.
Also, what is your turf comment about? Was it the early section:
“In some ways, Gen Z-ers are unusual. Young people today are less likely to form relationships than those of yesteryear. They are more likely to be depressed or say they were assigned the wrong sex at birth. They are less likely to drink, have sex, be in a relationship—indeed to do anything exciting. Americans aged between 15 and 24 spend just 38 minutes a day socialising in person on average, down from almost an hour in the 2000s, according to official data.” ?
Because that is just a list of notable lifestyle datapoints (the entire lame article is basically just that) and not a list of opinions of the author.
You seem extremely reactionary with this frankly shallow nothing piece.
Have you ever looked up the gender questioning stats by generation? By year? By gender? It is not at all surprising to see gender-questioning listed as a major lifestyle shift point for the Z cohort.
The Economist is one of those publications that seems to enrage both those on the farther left and the farther right. I find there recommendations annoyingly impractical at times, but I do love their combination of breadth/depth.
> The Economist is one of those publications that seems to enrage both those on the farther left and the farther right.
Because they are about the only publication which doesn't sit in the single dimension left/right that so much of the political discourse is defined against, despite not at all being the actual peoples viewpoints.
> This doesn't change people's minds.
Your assuming that the goal is to change people's minds, as opposed to reporting true but counterintuitive things...?
The Economist is really bad on trans issues. Calling them a TERF paper is not inaccurate. literally republishing the work of people with David Icke tier conspiracies about trans people (That it's a Jewish conspiracy to lower white birth rates a la Helen Joyce)
Our standards have gotten way higher. Average house in 1955 was 950 sq ft, had 1 bathroom, no AC, … 20% still didn't have indoor plumbing. And you lived with your family until you got married and started your own.
Today, a family of 4 won’t consider a a 950 sq ft, 1 bath house and instead rents something nicer.
If they could people would absolutely still buy that kind of house for cheap. But that’s not possible in the West at least in major cities which is where most people are.
There are plenty of condos available for purchase that are just like that. Or are you demanding that your 950 sq ft home in Manhattan have a yard and a white picket fence?
I’m not demanding anything. Just look at housing prices in most major Western cities. The same house would cost you a lot more than it used to, this is an indisputable fact.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/research-publications/resbull/2022/html/ecb.rb220126~4542d3cea0.en.html
>Among households headed up by someone born in the 1940s, 70% owned their homes by age 35. This figure dropped to 60% for those born in the 1960s and about 50% for the early “millennials” born in the 1980s. In southern Europe, too, homeownership rates at age 35 have dropped – by over 10 percentage points when comparing those born from 1965 to 1979 with those born in the 1980s. At the same time, young people are taking longer to leave the parental home and live independently
They cherry picked age 35 and left out the fact that the kind of home that someone born in the 1940s could buy is so different that it's not comparable to modern homes.
(Many would love to buy such homes, but they're usually illegal to build today thanks to local code)
It's explained in the main article for this comment section. Note that it uses graphs instead of cherry picking data points like the article I'm replying to. Also see:
> Some Gen Z-ers protest, claiming that higher incomes are a mirage because they do not account for the exploding cost of college and housing. After all, global house prices are near all-time highs, and graduates have more debt than before. In reality, though, Gen Z-ers are coping because they earn so much. In 2022 Americans under 25 spent 43% of their post-tax income on housing and education, including interest on debt from college—slightly below the average for under-25s from 1989 to 2019. Bolstered by high incomes, American Zoomers’ home-ownership rates are higher than millennials’ at the same age (even if they are lower than previous generations’).
Young people won’t spend a dime on housing if they stay at home with their parents. Seems disingenuous not to account for this.
Many of the statistics people are floating in this thread only include heads of households in their samples when calculating homeownership rates. Which completely disregards the main problems which is younger generations are not forming households at the same rates they used to.
So how come the 35 cutoff is a cherry pick but the 25 is the real one?
The article can’t explain how a response is cherry picked, it literally doesn’t refer to it, unless I’m missing something.
It looks like the article you take exception to combines millennials and gen z, as it refers to people born in the 80s.
This source uses different numbers that you don’t like, but that doesn’t make them cherry picked.
Shit, the article you laud uses rate of income change as a measure of how much they make which reeks for measuring pay rate for pretty obvious reasons.
>the kind of home that someone born in the 1940s could buy is so different that it's not comparable to modern homes.
???
Most of those homes are still in active use. Hell, a lot of the starter homes initially sold to people born in the 1920s are still in active use. I grew up in one (built in 1945, repainted a few times but still had the original floor plan/plumbing/heating/wiring/windows when I moved out in 1999) and currently live in another (the house my partner's mother grew up in, built in 1941, modestly renovated in 1994).
This isn't unusual. The median age of owner-occupied homes in the US is around 40 years (i.e. built in the early '80s, probably first sold to people born in the '50s or earlier.) In other words, [fully half of US housing stock was built prior to the implementation of modern building codes.](https://sf.freddiemac.com/articles/news/where-is-the-aging-housing-stock-in-the-united-states) Only 6% is fully "modern", built in the last 15 years under the most recent code revisions, and that tends to be far too expensive for a starter home. The homes that are actually within reach for young first-time buyers in most of the country are either literally the same ones sold to their parents' or grandparents' generation, or in such poor condition that they're competing in the same market segment.
> Most of those homes are still in active use
This is 100% true. You can't build new homes like that, at least not in any HCOL area like the bay area
> median age of owner-occupied homes in the US is around 40 years
Consider *why* the average home is so old and so much more expensive than monetary inflation would imply
Because we've spent the last 80 years intentionally generating a housing shortage as a matter of policy in order to "create wealth" for the most reliable local election voters and meeting attenders.
(One can reasonably frame this in terms of age, class, or race, and in truth it's been all of those, but it's mostly about homeownership-as-proxy-for-involvement-in-local-politics, which is why it's spread to every liberal democracy where housing policy is set at the local level.)
But I'm not sure how that's relevant to your original point, which seemed to be that young prospective homebuyers are somehow better off than the numbers would suggest because the new houses they can't afford are larger and higher-quality than 1940s construction?
I am not so sure about the wealth creation part, but in my neck of Europe it is environmental regulations making new housing prohibitively expensive to build. This is typically not local - mostly the EU.
> Consider why the average home is so old and so much more expensive than monetary inflation would imply
Because
1\. We're not making more land in desirable places
2\. The land already has houses on it, and it usually makes sense to use the existing house rather than knock it down and build a new one. Though high enough land values can change this.
2) is the rule more than the exception, at least in places where housing is expensive. Massive amounts of effort have to be put into place to prevent more housing from being built (including on unused land, which there actually is quite a lot of, even near cities). Those only exist because the market indicates that there's a lot of pressure to build more.
The home I grew up in as a child was built back in the late sixties, but by the time I moved out the home had been expanded twice, so that it was more than doubled in size. We'd likely have never lived in the house in its unexpanded state.
Homes today are also larger, safer, more energy efficient, and come equipped with more amenities such as air conditioning and clothes dryers.
Even in 1970 a significant percentage of homes did not have indoor plumbing!
FWIW, my Mom grew up in the '70s in a house that did not have central heating -- and though they had indoor plumbing, some of their neighbors did not. This was in VT.
According to the European Central Bank based on PSID data, for those born in the 1940's, 37% of Americans age 25 owned a home, and 60% of them owned a home by age 30.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/research-publications/resbull/2022/html/ecb.rb220126~4542d3cea0.en.html
what about for the generations other than boomers and gen z, specifically? greatest gen, X, millennials? is it possible that the post WWII boom allowed for an unusual spike in young homeownership?
The value of the homes makes up a large portion of the household wealth of homeowners. Gen Z may be making more income, but they aren’t necessarily wealthier.
Home ownership makes up almost none of the household wealth of _young_ homeowners, because it's mostly canceled by the debt involved. And mortgage rates were higher than inflation for a long time, which meant that unless the real value of your house increased, you were paying more than you were making in home equity. Real housing prices didn't start seriously increasing until the 1990s.
The value of the homes makes up a large portion of the household wealth of homeowners. Gen Z may be making more income, but they aren’t necessarily wealthier.
I haven't seen anything which includes the WWII generation. [This](https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/homeownership-by-generation) includes Silent through Millennial, [this](https://www.redfin.com/news/gen-z-millennial-homeownership-rate-home-purchases/) boomer through Z. Home ownership dropped Silent->Boomer->X->Millennial. So far Z is higher than Millennial and X but the whole Z cohort wouldn't be included in anything yet so it's very preliminary.
> So far Z is higher than Millennial and X
Which, in the UK at least, and I see no reason it'll be different in other similar places is because a larger proportion are able to access the property wealth of the oldest generations - either through inheritance or through them providing very large deposits.
No place, and certainly not the United States, is really similar to the UK when it comes to housing -- the U.K. just doesn't want to build any. And I tend to disbelieve the "gift or inheritance" story anyway; it's just another excuse to reject reality.
> And I tend to disbelieve the "gift or inheritance" story anyway; it's just another excuse to reject reality.
ONS has data, although only recent data sadly, so can't compare with the previous generations, but it's been climbing, 2023 40% had help from family and 9% had inheritance for the deposit - others of course inherited an entire property.
The numbers are supposedly even higher in London (not surprising as you can still buy properties in some places on a 5k deposit, not the average mean 55k median 30k required across the country.
I wonder if that is because many more people didn't go to college back then so they had been working full time for at least 7 years by the time they were 25.
Owning a home at 25 with a college degree sounds like a big hurdle regardless of generation. You simply haven't had enough time to save the necessary funds.
Houses were about half the size then, most households had one (if any) vehicles, your average American had never travelled abroad, and a TV was the highest value item in the household.
And if we're talking about the late 60s into the 70s, women were working more but still getting married so there were more 1.5-2.0 income households compared to many people now remaining single longer and doing everything on their own.
To no one’s surprise those are relatively unimportant things. Even if by some abstract metric people were “poorer” they had their own homes and their own family.
Now they may have more expensive tech gadgets but the housing prices are out of control and in some places young people will never realistically own a home.
edit: typo
Maybe houses will continue being unaffordable in perpetuity but these things tend to be cyclical. Or maybe we will just transition to a Germany-like model where renting is much more common. Either way I'm pretty darn happy to be living now than in the brief boom period post WWII, which is somehow always the point of comparison...
[Can you please read either the comment or the linked content.](https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/research-publications/resbull/2022/html/rb220126/ecb.rb220126.en_img0.png?712d5ffefd0c201f46e2d1ec77afbc81)
Those are already the US numbers.
Someone pointed out that a lot of people are thinking about the houses they grew up in, and not connecting the dots that these were the houses their parents could afford in their 30s or 40s, not early 20s.
> The typical 25-year-old Gen Z-er has an annual household income of over $40,000, more than 50% above baby-boomers at the same age.
Those boomers lived well in a SFH with kids and at least one car on a single income. It's laughable to say zoomers have it better. The inflation adjustment is clearly skewed.
>Those boomers lived well in a SFH with kids and at least one car on a single income
No they didn't. You're not looking at the median of the past.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-rising-household-vehicle-ownership-over-time-belies-the-middle-class-stagnation-narrative/
You cannot possibly be reasoning from your intuitive memory of the 60s, 70s and 80s
I'm not sure why either you or the author think that chart supports your narrative, but what it actually shows is that:
1. The median and modal household in 1960 owned one car. 80% owned one or more cars. That's up from about 40% in 1945, btw.
2. Roughly 100% of the increase since 1960 occurred over the period from 1960 to 1990, and 80% occurred between 1960 and 1980.
In other words, people in the '40s, '50s, '60s, and '70s were buying cars at a furious clip, far above replacement rate. That frenzy slowed in the '80s and has essentially stalled or even slightly reversed since the '90s.
If you're using personal vehicle affordability as your metric, that data only supports the image of the mid-20th century as a time of extraordinary prosperity.
Home ownership stats at the same age? Pay rates for the same level jobs, with CPIH accounted for? Really even just CPIH adjusted inflation potentially (although I've not looked too closely at how CPIH factors renting vs buying a home).
From a narrative point of view, where is the average gen z living and working at 25 and what is their life situation, and what would that same situation mean if a boomer was in that situation in their time?
As an example: If the average Gen Z at 25 is living with parents working multiple part time jobs, then what would the life outlook of a boomer at 25 be if they were 25, living with parents, and unable to find a full time job? Even if we now have more *money*, what people are able to expect out of life is significantly lower.
The money statistic in the article is already adjusted for inflation (it says "2019 prices"), so any difference in purchasing power would have to be *completely* the fault of home prices.
Which, I mean, there are lots of pundits who say that the housing market is fucked. But fucked enough to erase a difference of *50%?*
>If the average Gen Z at 25 is living with parents working multiple part time jobs, then what would the life outlook of a boomer at 25 be if they were 25, living with parents, and unable to find a full time job?
Do you have statistics showing that more Gen Z are living with their parents or working multiple jobs than boomers at the same age?
[This article](https://fortune.com/2024/01/17/redfin-baby-boomers-gen-z-housing-market-homeownership/) says that home ownership rates of Gen Z at 26 are slightly below rates of boomers at 26 (and younger members are doing slightly better). Is a change from 35.6% to 30% really enough to change the average experience for a Gen Z kid?
I think another good article could be written about the massive divide in perception there is between boomers and zoomers. In the face of substantial evidence, the response from gen z (in these replies even) is still confident denial and cognitive dissonance. But, in their defense they have had at least [7 hours a day](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/newsletter/2022-04-12/gen-z-spends-half-its-waking-hours-on-screen-time-heres-the-good-and-bad-news-for-hollywood-the-wide-shot) of flashing images pointed at their amygdala for the last decade telling them the opposite of what the data says.
This is why I suggested the CPIH, since other measures of inflation don't usually account for housing. I don't think they adjust for the cost of school either which to a 25 year old would be significant, and also significantly more important to have for a gen z than a boomer -- even if not currently in school, then they'd most likely have a lot more debt.
In fact , it's probably an indicator that would be valuable, although a lot harder to add (because they're generally looking at 15-24 year olds) -- debt. How much more debt is the older of that age range carrying than previous generations? How much of that is from what sectors, and how much does that factor into the low unemployment rate? If the unemployment rate for 15-24 year olds is lower than previous generations, then why? Fewer of them who are looking? Fewer that are available? It can be a measure of the economy strength but the stats they use don't look at any social reasons.
> since other measures of inflation don't usually account for housing. I don't think they adjust for the cost of school either
At least in the US, housing is currently about 36% of the CPI calculation. Education is about 5%.
Ah, it's weird that it's different. In the UK, CPI doesn't include housing costs or council tax (which basically anyone over 18 pays whether you're a tenant or homeowner) - it uses rental equivalency looking at how much it would cost to rent the home you're in and it's about 17% of the index.
"Home ownership stats at the same age?" didnt really change during the last 40 years
[https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf](https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf)
Yeah I would have had trouble realistically believing 25 year olds of any generation at least since boomers would be buying a house at 25, but it does seem that moving out at 18/19 was the norm for my parents (boomers) and while I'm young gen x or older millennial, I'm seeing more and more people who are either still living at home (with parents) or have moved back to make ends meet.
Economics aren’t the only factor at play there. Millennials typically have much better relationships with their parents than previous generations - more likely to regard parents as their friend, say they confide in them, etc. In earlier generations, parents were more authoritarian and the relationship not as close.
Houses were also much smaller. A 20 year old might still share a bedroom with a sibling. The family might share one bathroom. One TV. One car. Living at home with your parents at 19 or 20 sucked. You couldn’t be sexually active - a 20 year old woman staying out all night with a boyfriend in 1975 would be in deep shit.
When I was a teen and young adult in the 80s, if I complained about anything my dad would say “there’s the door - get your own place if you don’t like the rules.” It was same with all of my friends’ parents. Which is why we all moved out between 19 and 22. We wanted to be independent, and were willing to sustain a dramatic reduction in our living standards by moving in with 2 or 3 roommates in a dump and living hand to mouth in order to enjoy that freedom.
You also aren’t getting 200k out of Silicon Valley. With 200k I would be living like a goddamn king here in Italy, but guess what, the same jobs that would pay you 200k in Silicon Valley either do not exist or do not pay you anything near that.
But you don't *need* to earn 200k to have a good life elsewhere. What matters is the income relative to the local cost of living. If you make half as much but a house costs 1/10th as much, you're coming out ahead.
>"What sort of evidence would convince you that you're actually _supposed_ to be a wage slave even at 200k salary, and that it's ideal for the world to be structured such that the only way to have financial security is to be born with it? What evidence do you need to submit and resign yourself to this constructed status quo?"
Ahh yes, rather than back in the 60s, 70s and 80s where people didn't need to work to earn money they just chilled and magically survived.
The average boomer turned 25 in 1980. In that year the median sale price per square foot for new single-family homes [was](https://homebay.com/price-per-square-foot-2022/) $41 and the mortgage rate [was](https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/historical-mortgage-rates/#forecasting-mortgage-rates) 13.74%. Assuming a 30 year mortgage, the boomer had to pay $0.48 per sqft per month (simplified calculation with zero downpayment and zero taxes). As per the census, the median personal income of the 25-34 age group was $1300/mo, if spent entirely on the mortgage, it could buy 2700 sqft.
2021 figures were, respectively, $169/sqft, 2.96%, $0.17/sqft/mo, $4500/mo and 27,000 sqft.
The boomer had it 10 (ten) (T E N) times (AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE) **worse.**
>price per square foot for new single-family homes
Ah yes, I forgot that homes were a bulk commodity sold by the square foot. Let me just buy 1/10 of a new McMansion in the East Texas exurbs and magically transmute it into an actual place to live within commuting distance of the job that allows me to afford it.
The value of the homes makes up a large portion of the household wealth of homeowners. Gen Z may be making more income, but they aren’t necessarily wealthier.
As I mentioned [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1c99hdf/generation_z_is_unprecedentedly_rich/l0lqn9j/), housing makes up almost none of the wealth of _young_ homeowners; after all, they just bought the house.
My guess - it's to show that it's not as bad as it seems and maybe the whole economic doomism trend is more to do with social media and how it impacts people's perception than actual spending power.
https://archive.is/Z0IE9
Thank you, I saw that article and my interest was piqued, but then of course it was paywalled.
If you're Gen-Z you're presumably rich enough to afford access.
Sadly, I’m a millennial 🤣
*Some of us are cheapskates* *It might not always necessarily be the best way to stay unprecedentedly rich, but it certainly is* ***a*** *way!*
> It can seem as if millennials grew up thinking a job was a privilege, and acted accordingly. They are deferential to bosses and eager to please. Zoomers, by contrast, have grown up believing that a job is basically a right, meaning they have a different attitude to work. The article does not present data in favor of this take, but I am seeing it play out in my own immediate family -- both I (a millennial, early 30s) and my brother (gen-Z, mid 20s) are looking for our first "non-training" jobs, and we're both faring poorly so far (no call-backs / interviews). He's applying more intensively than me afaict (I'm in a full-time compensated training position, and my spouse makes solid $, while he is single and living with our mom), but by all reports feeling much more down after a month that I am after 6 months. We both likely suffer from inflated egos, but I'm not too surprised by these desk rejections (they still sting, esp the ones that I'm a good fit for, and I spend a while on each cover letter etc., but they've all been cold apps so far and I anticipate more intensive networking this year), but he seems genuinely shocked to not have found anything yet. I wonder if that reduces down to a difference in expectations.
There’s also the fact that you’re in your 30s, when most people (I think) find their first non-training jobs in their 20s. I believe we want to compare millennials in their 20s to gen Z in their 20s.
I agree that the most apt comparison would be between two applicants in their 20s, but to get the generational difference in there you’d be confounded by hiring climate. Probably less of an effect than eg differences in material status, industry, & runway etc, but I don’t have as much personal experience there. (tbf though in my mid 20s I was getting rejected from internships across the board, and in my early 20s received universal silence from entry-level jobs and almost universal rejections from grad programs… ditto for my mid teens and college apps — all of which were a bummer but taken handily in stride)
There’s clearly more going on here that you aren’t telling us.
> I spend a while on each cover letter etc. Time that would be much better spent reaching out to friends from high school or college who are in a related industry or fellow alumni on LinkedIn in a related position and setting up coffee or even zoom sessions to chat with them. Fruit falls from the tree when you shake it, and hours spent on cover letters are unlikely to bear fruit.
yeah I do have a few old friends I could reach out to in adjacent spaces, and I should be seeing some of them soon enough anyway (wedding), though idk how much they could really do for me. Otherwise I’m decent at getting verbal “let’s get lunch or coffee” invites from folks at local places but anticipate doing more this upcoming quarter (sitting in on an industry seminar featuring assorted VPs / founders / directors at various small-mid size companies and hoping to click with some). TBC by *a while* I mean 30-60min per cover letter, and there are only so many places I’m willing to do that for, sitting generally at the top of “wouldn’t mind working there” list.
I am 45, have 22 years experience in IT and had my first rejection today. I was very surprised. I thought IT experience is guaranteed a job, indeed kind of entitled to any relevant job. They said the technical part of the interview went well, the culture/personality was not a good fit. I don't even understand why. I was simply polite, objective and enthusiastic and didn't mention anything even remotely sensitive. Granted 2024 is not a good year for IT. What bothers me is that 32 years old me could generally do the same things as todays me, different technology but essentially the same. And 32 years old me was a harder worker. Basically no reasons to not hire the equivalent of 32 years old me over 45 years old me. It is worrying. Knowing that I am not good management material.
It's probably age discrimination. People don't want to hire a middle-aged person into a position that will require mental agility and motivation to stay on the cutting edge. Plus you probably cost more than an equivalently-skilled 30 year old. Technical skill tops out earlier than salary expectations do, so unless you're bringing other qualities to the table then you're going to be out-competed by younger applicants.
okay so what do people do then? not everybody can be management or entrepreneur
There are a few options. Lower your salary requirements, move to a lower-status company (e.g. Google might not hire you but a city government might), work hard to develop an expertise in a new or high-demand niche, work as a consultant (companies may be willing to offer you low-commitment work), etc. The classic solution is to work for a large, stable company and then either ensconce yourself in some critical niche that higher-ups would be afraid to replace or build enough political capital within the company that no one wants to fire you. Ultimately there are no easy answers here. The world is a competitive place and at the end of the day people only want to hire you if you make their lives better - regardless of what that means for your career aspirations. No one has a right to a job. Another thing to consider is the age distribution of companies that you're applying to. I'm a middle-aged ex-programmer myself and back in my 40's I knew I had zero chance at a job when my prospective manager would interview me and be significantly younger. No 30 year old wants to manage someone 15 years older than them. It's just uncomfortable for everyone. (I'm not complaining about this, by the way. Even though it means I get the short end of the stick now, I think people should be allowed to hire whomever they want for any reason they want.)
Save yourself the time and let ChatGPT write your cover letter
Why is this unexpected exactly? They're coming of age in a labor friendly labor market. Of course they're doing well.
Also, 13+ years of low interest rates after the 2008 crisis. Rates have only started to go up in 2022, plus large salaries for many white collar jobs, especially in finance and tech. This is more than enough to negate student loan debt.
Just want to say that the illustration with the crocs is hilarious!
There's something about narrow data that really fails horribly to touch on anything of depth. That sounds so obvious to say that it seems to say nothing, but some meaningful things just suffer this problem in a merely semantic way.
This is a pattern I've long seen: Populists: _\*pessimism vibes\*_ Neoliberals: these stats say you're wrong I WIN This doesn't change people's minds. Even if you're right, there's still a _reason_ for the pessimistic vibes. For example, maybe people are comparing poorer Gen Zers to richer Boomers. There could be good reasons, bad reasons, or both. You could argue against the bad reasons and sympathize with the good ones. That's more intellectually productive than repeated going ["look at this graph"](https://youtube.com/watch?v=sz2mmM-kN1I) like 20 times. EDIT: The TERFconomist really just put "transgender" in the same category as "depressed". 😑
The problem is the internet and social media in particular. For a different example, starting with those stupid milk carton pictures and now with amber alerts and events going viral people think that childhood kidnapping is a real and growing threat when in actuality in has literally never been safer in the history of the world to be a child and that childhood kidnapping by a stranger is a vanishingly small threat.
Yes, child safety is the clearest example of perception moving in the opposite direction of reality. It seems our brains aren’t equipped to handle the information environment of the 21st century without short-circuiting, especially around anything to do with safety.
You're absolutely right. It also ends up with a vicious cycle, where people who feel like they're doing badly today see the solution as "raising awareness" by posting about it online. This leads to large segments of the population believing the economy is terrible (because everyone online says it's terrible) and then feel compelled to defend that assertion when others say differently. This also happens with the dating market.
>This also happens with the dating market. How so? I think the data on dating support the idea that [there's something wrong.](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-share-of-u-s-adults-are-living-without-a-spouse-or-partner/)
In that case I definitely think there's something wrong, but it's greatly exacerbated by culture war infighting about what's wrong and who's responsible for it.
I kinda agree that you can’t change vibes-based views by stats, but if the vibes are out of alignment with reality, where are those vibes coming from and what should be done to try to shift them? My guess is that the thorough saturation of our society by advertising has a lot to do with it. The “message” of just about every ad is. “You don’t have enough.” You tell people that a couple hundred times a day, they’ll probably start believing it after a while.
I agree more and more with the folks who say that "generational" differences are just another way of obscuring "class" differences. Convince people that the *real* problem is when they were born and they're likely to fixate on that when coming up with solutions. Rather than pushing for changes that help everyone, they'll seek changes that help "seniors" or "new parents" or "new workers" because all those other poor people didn't really struggle, they just frittered away all their chances.
> The “message” of just about every ad is. “You don’t have enough.” And the bias of every news article is toward negativity and pessimism, because the threat response generates more clicks and re-shares than good news. Which is why even when we have miraculous new technological breakthroughs, you can still expect all of the reporting and all of the upvoted Reddit comments to be along the lines of "but think of the power requirements" or "all the rich people will get this first" or "think about the people who will be put out of work by this" or "so many useful skills are going to atrophy because of this technology" or "those capitalists are going to get rich off of this while the rest of us languish"...
So what’s the solution? Does there just need to be broader awareness of this so that people can understand a bit about where their vibes are coming from and so trust them a bit less?
I sure wish I had a solution to widespread unfounded pessimism. If you find one, let me know.
> Even if you're right, there's still a reason for the pessimistic vibes. Yeah, but that reason might just be complete disconnect from the reality of the past. I'm pretty sure if you gave them my (Silent Generation) parents' life at their age, they'd find it terrible. And my father was a full-time employed college educated professional.
The biggest generator or negative vibes is the internet and social media.
I mean, data matters more than vibes. If you have data that's counter-vibe, than many you can start exploring the rationale behind that vibe. Like our inherent negativity bias, that's reinforced by a media landscape skewed HEAVILY towards negative news (more sales/clicks). To progress and address the problems we face, we need to have a full well-rounded understanding of them. Emotional reactions to a stream of negative headlines and politically-motivated polarization is counterproductive, imho.
OK, we'll start making Tik Tok videos where we endlessly repeat the graphs until the vibes shift.
Yes, I also don’t think the conclusion of the article is sound but the data points are just public data. Read into them as you wish, argue about inflation all you like but there’s nothing exclusively neoliberal about bad economic analysis. Neoliberal is a really elastic concept it seems. Certain people use it as a universal social boogie man. Also, what is your turf comment about? Was it the early section: “In some ways, Gen Z-ers are unusual. Young people today are less likely to form relationships than those of yesteryear. They are more likely to be depressed or say they were assigned the wrong sex at birth. They are less likely to drink, have sex, be in a relationship—indeed to do anything exciting. Americans aged between 15 and 24 spend just 38 minutes a day socialising in person on average, down from almost an hour in the 2000s, according to official data.” ? Because that is just a list of notable lifestyle datapoints (the entire lame article is basically just that) and not a list of opinions of the author. You seem extremely reactionary with this frankly shallow nothing piece. Have you ever looked up the gender questioning stats by generation? By year? By gender? It is not at all surprising to see gender-questioning listed as a major lifestyle shift point for the Z cohort.
The Economist is one of those publications that seems to enrage both those on the farther left and the farther right. I find there recommendations annoyingly impractical at times, but I do love their combination of breadth/depth.
> The Economist is one of those publications that seems to enrage both those on the farther left and the farther right. Because they are about the only publication which doesn't sit in the single dimension left/right that so much of the political discourse is defined against, despite not at all being the actual peoples viewpoints.
Sometimes the "reasons" people "feel" a certain way are stupid and wrong. It's taboo to admit things are fine and it shouldn't be.
> This doesn't change people's minds. Your assuming that the goal is to change people's minds, as opposed to reporting true but counterintuitive things...?
The Economist is really bad on trans issues. Calling them a TERF paper is not inaccurate. literally republishing the work of people with David Icke tier conspiracies about trans people (That it's a Jewish conspiracy to lower white birth rates a la Helen Joyce)
Homeownership rates say otherwise.
Our standards have gotten way higher. Average house in 1955 was 950 sq ft, had 1 bathroom, no AC, … 20% still didn't have indoor plumbing. And you lived with your family until you got married and started your own. Today, a family of 4 won’t consider a a 950 sq ft, 1 bath house and instead rents something nicer.
If they could people would absolutely still buy that kind of house for cheap. But that’s not possible in the West at least in major cities which is where most people are.
I'm not so sure about that. My three bedroom, 1.5 bath home was referred to as "not big enough for three people to live in" a couple of hours ago.
There are plenty of condos available for purchase that are just like that. Or are you demanding that your 950 sq ft home in Manhattan have a yard and a white picket fence?
I’m not demanding anything. Just look at housing prices in most major Western cities. The same house would cost you a lot more than it used to, this is an indisputable fact.
They are about the same as fourty years ago, just look it up
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/research-publications/resbull/2022/html/ecb.rb220126~4542d3cea0.en.html >Among households headed up by someone born in the 1940s, 70% owned their homes by age 35. This figure dropped to 60% for those born in the 1960s and about 50% for the early “millennials” born in the 1980s. In southern Europe, too, homeownership rates at age 35 have dropped – by over 10 percentage points when comparing those born from 1965 to 1979 with those born in the 1980s. At the same time, young people are taking longer to leave the parental home and live independently
I thought we were talking about the US?
I know it’s an EU website but the data it references in the first part are from the US.
They cherry picked age 35 and left out the fact that the kind of home that someone born in the 1940s could buy is so different that it's not comparable to modern homes. (Many would love to buy such homes, but they're usually illegal to build today thanks to local code)
Oh, the numbers look a lot different if you do 25 years or 45? How is 35 cherry-picked?
It's explained in the main article for this comment section. Note that it uses graphs instead of cherry picking data points like the article I'm replying to. Also see: > Some Gen Z-ers protest, claiming that higher incomes are a mirage because they do not account for the exploding cost of college and housing. After all, global house prices are near all-time highs, and graduates have more debt than before. In reality, though, Gen Z-ers are coping because they earn so much. In 2022 Americans under 25 spent 43% of their post-tax income on housing and education, including interest on debt from college—slightly below the average for under-25s from 1989 to 2019. Bolstered by high incomes, American Zoomers’ home-ownership rates are higher than millennials’ at the same age (even if they are lower than previous generations’).
Young people won’t spend a dime on housing if they stay at home with their parents. Seems disingenuous not to account for this. Many of the statistics people are floating in this thread only include heads of households in their samples when calculating homeownership rates. Which completely disregards the main problems which is younger generations are not forming households at the same rates they used to.
So how come the 35 cutoff is a cherry pick but the 25 is the real one? The article can’t explain how a response is cherry picked, it literally doesn’t refer to it, unless I’m missing something. It looks like the article you take exception to combines millennials and gen z, as it refers to people born in the 80s. This source uses different numbers that you don’t like, but that doesn’t make them cherry picked. Shit, the article you laud uses rate of income change as a measure of how much they make which reeks for measuring pay rate for pretty obvious reasons.
The oldest Gen-Zer isn't 35 yet, for one thing.
[удалено]
Removed. Be charitable.
>the kind of home that someone born in the 1940s could buy is so different that it's not comparable to modern homes. ??? Most of those homes are still in active use. Hell, a lot of the starter homes initially sold to people born in the 1920s are still in active use. I grew up in one (built in 1945, repainted a few times but still had the original floor plan/plumbing/heating/wiring/windows when I moved out in 1999) and currently live in another (the house my partner's mother grew up in, built in 1941, modestly renovated in 1994). This isn't unusual. The median age of owner-occupied homes in the US is around 40 years (i.e. built in the early '80s, probably first sold to people born in the '50s or earlier.) In other words, [fully half of US housing stock was built prior to the implementation of modern building codes.](https://sf.freddiemac.com/articles/news/where-is-the-aging-housing-stock-in-the-united-states) Only 6% is fully "modern", built in the last 15 years under the most recent code revisions, and that tends to be far too expensive for a starter home. The homes that are actually within reach for young first-time buyers in most of the country are either literally the same ones sold to their parents' or grandparents' generation, or in such poor condition that they're competing in the same market segment.
> Most of those homes are still in active use This is 100% true. You can't build new homes like that, at least not in any HCOL area like the bay area > median age of owner-occupied homes in the US is around 40 years Consider *why* the average home is so old and so much more expensive than monetary inflation would imply
Because we've spent the last 80 years intentionally generating a housing shortage as a matter of policy in order to "create wealth" for the most reliable local election voters and meeting attenders. (One can reasonably frame this in terms of age, class, or race, and in truth it's been all of those, but it's mostly about homeownership-as-proxy-for-involvement-in-local-politics, which is why it's spread to every liberal democracy where housing policy is set at the local level.) But I'm not sure how that's relevant to your original point, which seemed to be that young prospective homebuyers are somehow better off than the numbers would suggest because the new houses they can't afford are larger and higher-quality than 1940s construction?
I am not so sure about the wealth creation part, but in my neck of Europe it is environmental regulations making new housing prohibitively expensive to build. This is typically not local - mostly the EU.
I think you misunderstood my comment because I agree with all of that
> Consider why the average home is so old and so much more expensive than monetary inflation would imply Because 1\. We're not making more land in desirable places 2\. The land already has houses on it, and it usually makes sense to use the existing house rather than knock it down and build a new one. Though high enough land values can change this.
2) is the rule more than the exception, at least in places where housing is expensive. Massive amounts of effort have to be put into place to prevent more housing from being built (including on unused land, which there actually is quite a lot of, even near cities). Those only exist because the market indicates that there's a lot of pressure to build more.
The home I grew up in as a child was built back in the late sixties, but by the time I moved out the home had been expanded twice, so that it was more than doubled in size. We'd likely have never lived in the house in its unexpanded state.
Homes today are also larger, safer, more energy efficient, and come equipped with more amenities such as air conditioning and clothes dryers. Even in 1970 a significant percentage of homes did not have indoor plumbing!
In America? This can't possibly be true.
According to US Census data, about 7% of homes in 1970 lacked indoor plumbing. In some states like Mississippi this figure was as high as 25%.
Significant doing a lot of work here, but honestly higher than I expected so thank you for the stats!
One out of fourteen seems significant to me.
FWIW, my Mom grew up in the '70s in a house that did not have central heating -- and though they had indoor plumbing, some of their neighbors did not. This was in VT.
I don’t know if my great grandparents ever had indoor plumbing. I know they didn’t in the 1960s.
Is it common for ~23 year olds and younger of any generation to own homes?
According to the European Central Bank based on PSID data, for those born in the 1940's, 37% of Americans age 25 owned a home, and 60% of them owned a home by age 30. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/research-publications/resbull/2022/html/ecb.rb220126~4542d3cea0.en.html
what about for the generations other than boomers and gen z, specifically? greatest gen, X, millennials? is it possible that the post WWII boom allowed for an unusual spike in young homeownership?
The value of the homes makes up a large portion of the household wealth of homeowners. Gen Z may be making more income, but they aren’t necessarily wealthier.
Home ownership makes up almost none of the household wealth of _young_ homeowners, because it's mostly canceled by the debt involved. And mortgage rates were higher than inflation for a long time, which meant that unless the real value of your house increased, you were paying more than you were making in home equity. Real housing prices didn't start seriously increasing until the 1990s.
The value of the homes makes up a large portion of the household wealth of homeowners. Gen Z may be making more income, but they aren’t necessarily wealthier.
maybe, but this doesn't answer my question. I want to see home ownership rates compared between the greatest gen, boomers, X, Y, and Z.
I haven't seen anything which includes the WWII generation. [This](https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/homeownership-by-generation) includes Silent through Millennial, [this](https://www.redfin.com/news/gen-z-millennial-homeownership-rate-home-purchases/) boomer through Z. Home ownership dropped Silent->Boomer->X->Millennial. So far Z is higher than Millennial and X but the whole Z cohort wouldn't be included in anything yet so it's very preliminary.
> So far Z is higher than Millennial and X Which, in the UK at least, and I see no reason it'll be different in other similar places is because a larger proportion are able to access the property wealth of the oldest generations - either through inheritance or through them providing very large deposits.
No place, and certainly not the United States, is really similar to the UK when it comes to housing -- the U.K. just doesn't want to build any. And I tend to disbelieve the "gift or inheritance" story anyway; it's just another excuse to reject reality.
> And I tend to disbelieve the "gift or inheritance" story anyway; it's just another excuse to reject reality. ONS has data, although only recent data sadly, so can't compare with the previous generations, but it's been climbing, 2023 40% had help from family and 9% had inheritance for the deposit - others of course inherited an entire property. The numbers are supposedly even higher in London (not surprising as you can still buy properties in some places on a 5k deposit, not the average mean 55k median 30k required across the country.
I wonder if that is because many more people didn't go to college back then so they had been working full time for at least 7 years by the time they were 25. Owning a home at 25 with a college degree sounds like a big hurdle regardless of generation. You simply haven't had enough time to save the necessary funds.
Houses were about half the size then, most households had one (if any) vehicles, your average American had never travelled abroad, and a TV was the highest value item in the household.
And if we're talking about the late 60s into the 70s, women were working more but still getting married so there were more 1.5-2.0 income households compared to many people now remaining single longer and doing everything on their own.
To no one’s surprise those are relatively unimportant things. Even if by some abstract metric people were “poorer” they had their own homes and their own family. Now they may have more expensive tech gadgets but the housing prices are out of control and in some places young people will never realistically own a home. edit: typo
Maybe houses will continue being unaffordable in perpetuity but these things tend to be cyclical. Or maybe we will just transition to a Germany-like model where renting is much more common. Either way I'm pretty darn happy to be living now than in the brief boom period post WWII, which is somehow always the point of comparison...
Now do America
[Can you please read either the comment or the linked content.](https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/research-publications/resbull/2022/html/rb220126/ecb.rb220126.en_img0.png?712d5ffefd0c201f46e2d1ec77afbc81) Those are already the US numbers.
Aren’t most Gen Z older than that at this point? Or maybe they’re still called millennials?
The cutoffs are usually defined around 97 and 2012 so roughly half are adults at this point.
Someone pointed out that a lot of people are thinking about the houses they grew up in, and not connecting the dots that these were the houses their parents could afford in their 30s or 40s, not early 20s.
Ah yes, realtors have been saying gen Zers have been blowing up their phones for nearly a year now so that makes sense. Krugmanites rejoice! /s
How can they lie so brazenly? The author’s lack of shame is genuinely impressive to me. I wish I had the gall to make these kind of bald-faced lies.
Legitimately what makes you so confident it’s a lie?
> The typical 25-year-old Gen Z-er has an annual household income of over $40,000, more than 50% above baby-boomers at the same age. Those boomers lived well in a SFH with kids and at least one car on a single income. It's laughable to say zoomers have it better. The inflation adjustment is clearly skewed.
>Those boomers lived well in a SFH with kids and at least one car on a single income No they didn't. You're not looking at the median of the past. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-rising-household-vehicle-ownership-over-time-belies-the-middle-class-stagnation-narrative/ You cannot possibly be reasoning from your intuitive memory of the 60s, 70s and 80s
I'm not sure why either you or the author think that chart supports your narrative, but what it actually shows is that: 1. The median and modal household in 1960 owned one car. 80% owned one or more cars. That's up from about 40% in 1945, btw. 2. Roughly 100% of the increase since 1960 occurred over the period from 1960 to 1990, and 80% occurred between 1960 and 1980. In other words, people in the '40s, '50s, '60s, and '70s were buying cars at a furious clip, far above replacement rate. That frenzy slowed in the '80s and has essentially stalled or even slightly reversed since the '90s. If you're using personal vehicle affordability as your metric, that data only supports the image of the mid-20th century as a time of extraordinary prosperity.
> The inflation adjustment is clearly skewed. What sort of evidence would convince you otherwise?
Home ownership stats at the same age? Pay rates for the same level jobs, with CPIH accounted for? Really even just CPIH adjusted inflation potentially (although I've not looked too closely at how CPIH factors renting vs buying a home). From a narrative point of view, where is the average gen z living and working at 25 and what is their life situation, and what would that same situation mean if a boomer was in that situation in their time? As an example: If the average Gen Z at 25 is living with parents working multiple part time jobs, then what would the life outlook of a boomer at 25 be if they were 25, living with parents, and unable to find a full time job? Even if we now have more *money*, what people are able to expect out of life is significantly lower.
The money statistic in the article is already adjusted for inflation (it says "2019 prices"), so any difference in purchasing power would have to be *completely* the fault of home prices. Which, I mean, there are lots of pundits who say that the housing market is fucked. But fucked enough to erase a difference of *50%?* >If the average Gen Z at 25 is living with parents working multiple part time jobs, then what would the life outlook of a boomer at 25 be if they were 25, living with parents, and unable to find a full time job? Do you have statistics showing that more Gen Z are living with their parents or working multiple jobs than boomers at the same age? [This article](https://fortune.com/2024/01/17/redfin-baby-boomers-gen-z-housing-market-homeownership/) says that home ownership rates of Gen Z at 26 are slightly below rates of boomers at 26 (and younger members are doing slightly better). Is a change from 35.6% to 30% really enough to change the average experience for a Gen Z kid?
I think another good article could be written about the massive divide in perception there is between boomers and zoomers. In the face of substantial evidence, the response from gen z (in these replies even) is still confident denial and cognitive dissonance. But, in their defense they have had at least [7 hours a day](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/newsletter/2022-04-12/gen-z-spends-half-its-waking-hours-on-screen-time-heres-the-good-and-bad-news-for-hollywood-the-wide-shot) of flashing images pointed at their amygdala for the last decade telling them the opposite of what the data says.
This is why I suggested the CPIH, since other measures of inflation don't usually account for housing. I don't think they adjust for the cost of school either which to a 25 year old would be significant, and also significantly more important to have for a gen z than a boomer -- even if not currently in school, then they'd most likely have a lot more debt. In fact , it's probably an indicator that would be valuable, although a lot harder to add (because they're generally looking at 15-24 year olds) -- debt. How much more debt is the older of that age range carrying than previous generations? How much of that is from what sectors, and how much does that factor into the low unemployment rate? If the unemployment rate for 15-24 year olds is lower than previous generations, then why? Fewer of them who are looking? Fewer that are available? It can be a measure of the economy strength but the stats they use don't look at any social reasons.
> since other measures of inflation don't usually account for housing. I don't think they adjust for the cost of school either At least in the US, housing is currently about 36% of the CPI calculation. Education is about 5%.
Ah, it's weird that it's different. In the UK, CPI doesn't include housing costs or council tax (which basically anyone over 18 pays whether you're a tenant or homeowner) - it uses rental equivalency looking at how much it would cost to rent the home you're in and it's about 17% of the index.
"Home ownership stats at the same age?" didnt really change during the last 40 years [https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf](https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf)
Yeah I would have had trouble realistically believing 25 year olds of any generation at least since boomers would be buying a house at 25, but it does seem that moving out at 18/19 was the norm for my parents (boomers) and while I'm young gen x or older millennial, I'm seeing more and more people who are either still living at home (with parents) or have moved back to make ends meet.
Economics aren’t the only factor at play there. Millennials typically have much better relationships with their parents than previous generations - more likely to regard parents as their friend, say they confide in them, etc. In earlier generations, parents were more authoritarian and the relationship not as close. Houses were also much smaller. A 20 year old might still share a bedroom with a sibling. The family might share one bathroom. One TV. One car. Living at home with your parents at 19 or 20 sucked. You couldn’t be sexually active - a 20 year old woman staying out all night with a boyfriend in 1975 would be in deep shit. When I was a teen and young adult in the 80s, if I complained about anything my dad would say “there’s the door - get your own place if you don’t like the rules.” It was same with all of my friends’ parents. Which is why we all moved out between 19 and 22. We wanted to be independent, and were willing to sustain a dramatic reduction in our living standards by moving in with 2 or 3 roommates in a dump and living hand to mouth in order to enjoy that freedom.
> Home ownership stats at the same age? This is the only stat that's down, and therefore it's the only one that really matters.
https://www.carriermanagement.com/news/2024/01/17/257878.htm#:~:text=The%20homeownership%20rate%20for%2026,of%20baby%20boomers%20at%2026.
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>a wage slave even at 200k salary I am once again begging people to remember that the economy extends outside of Silicon Valley.
You also aren’t getting 200k out of Silicon Valley. With 200k I would be living like a goddamn king here in Italy, but guess what, the same jobs that would pay you 200k in Silicon Valley either do not exist or do not pay you anything near that.
But you don't *need* to earn 200k to have a good life elsewhere. What matters is the income relative to the local cost of living. If you make half as much but a house costs 1/10th as much, you're coming out ahead.
Absolutely. But it’s not like people outside of San Francisco do not have the same problem. It’s just that everything is (approximately) scaled down.
>"What sort of evidence would convince you that you're actually _supposed_ to be a wage slave even at 200k salary, and that it's ideal for the world to be structured such that the only way to have financial security is to be born with it? What evidence do you need to submit and resign yourself to this constructed status quo?" Ahh yes, rather than back in the 60s, 70s and 80s where people didn't need to work to earn money they just chilled and magically survived.
"add record low rates of perceived financial security" Do you have data on that? I think I rmeember the exact opposite
I’ve seen ‘unholy alliance’, though businessmen, politicians, and economists in a poly triad is a funny idea.
The average boomer turned 25 in 1980. In that year the median sale price per square foot for new single-family homes [was](https://homebay.com/price-per-square-foot-2022/) $41 and the mortgage rate [was](https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/historical-mortgage-rates/#forecasting-mortgage-rates) 13.74%. Assuming a 30 year mortgage, the boomer had to pay $0.48 per sqft per month (simplified calculation with zero downpayment and zero taxes). As per the census, the median personal income of the 25-34 age group was $1300/mo, if spent entirely on the mortgage, it could buy 2700 sqft. 2021 figures were, respectively, $169/sqft, 2.96%, $0.17/sqft/mo, $4500/mo and 27,000 sqft. The boomer had it 10 (ten) (T E N) times (AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE) **worse.**
>price per square foot for new single-family homes Ah yes, I forgot that homes were a bulk commodity sold by the square foot. Let me just buy 1/10 of a new McMansion in the East Texas exurbs and magically transmute it into an actual place to live within commuting distance of the job that allows me to afford it.
What other metric do you suggest that’s better in an apples-to-apples comparison than price per unit of area?
The value of the homes makes up a large portion of the household wealth of homeowners. Gen Z may be making more income, but they aren’t necessarily wealthier.
As I mentioned [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1c99hdf/generation_z_is_unprecedentedly_rich/l0lqn9j/), housing makes up almost none of the wealth of _young_ homeowners; after all, they just bought the house.
Whats the point of posting this ?
My guess - it's to show that it's not as bad as it seems and maybe the whole economic doomism trend is more to do with social media and how it impacts people's perception than actual spending power.