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Comment by virmundi | Hacker News Reader

I’m waiting for housing to drop in price over the next few years. The boomers are dying. Their houses, and I mean all those investment properties as well as their private homes, will hit the market when their kids don’t want them.

The price of education will only decrease when more people take up manual labor jobs. You can get paid 24$ here in Florida if you’re willing to work on a ladder.

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Friend skipped college and joined the electricians union during the 2007-8 crash. Started his own business three years ago and is already charging essentially whatever he wants as most electricians are old and retiring. He barely knows any electricians our age.

I knew a man that joined the Navy because he advanced so fast as an electrician that in his early 20s he had people working for him that had been in the industry for 30 years and he was tired of being hassled by them.

I knew another man that started working at a shipyard out of high school as a rigger (guy that lifts stuff, doesn't get much more blue collar), and in a couple years was supervising the assembly of Warships making thousands of dollars a week - SV eat your heart out.

This is something Mike Rowe has been advocating for years. Not only is college not cheap, even if it was free it's a worse option in every way for a lot of people.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathycaprino/2018/08/30/dirties...

Unfortunately it’s not just about the money. In many circles of our society, non white collar work is seen as inferior and lower class. This stigma needs to be lifted before we can expect more people to enter these trades.

The stigma will automatically be lifted once people see non white collar workers living in the nice parts of town sending children to the nice schools and generally having a nicer quality of life.

Maybe. Or maybe it'll just cause frustration, resentment and denial when people realise the expensive degrees that were supposed to confer on them a superior intellect and lifestyle don't seem to have worked.

It looks like the US population is expected to increase [0]. If the boomers are dying, it looks like we're going to have people to replace them.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183481/united-states-pop...

In theory housing prices could still go down if the people replacing dying boomers have less money to spend on housing.

Just to follow up on this thought: in theory this would not be a departure from the historical norm unless boomers are more wealthy in comparison to incoming people than previous generations of older folks were.

It won't happen within a few years. Boomers are still relatively healthy thanks to improved health care. If you count on that, then you should expect at least decades more.

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