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Comment by wonderwonder | Hacker News Reader

Millennials face a very real risk of being a lost generation financially. They have endured 2 major, years long recessions, and now the Covid pandemic coupled with social isolation and massive unemployment that does not appear to have an end date in sight. Housing is more expensive for them than prior generations, wages are stagnant, school is expensive and social conflict is also currently on deck.

WW2 was of course a much more trying time but it was followed by massive economic growth for most sectors of the population, I don't see that happening after the pandemic, wealth is just being silo'd and prosperity limited.

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> They have endured 2 major, years long recessions,

What are these recessions? I'm an "elder millennial" and the .com bust came while I was in high school. Even entering the job force with a two year degree, I graduated well after it was over. Leaving, the GFC and our current one, but our current one isn't years long...yet.

The GFC was definitely a fucking mess for all of us. I have literally never had a real promotion and it wasn't until like five jobs in that I learned about annual cost of living adjustments. I still don't have a "senior" title despite having worked in industry for 15 years...

I feel like GenX got the biggest shaft. They graduated in the 80s-90s into an economy where unions were in decline and Asia had come into manufacturing dominance. Saw a brief boom in the 90s, only to have numerous accounting scandals destroy any investments they managed to save during that era. Went through the housing boom/bust, then were in their mid careers by the time the GFC hit. Now they are in their 50s/60s with a pandemic and another recession landing, and this recession looks to be inflationary, which means any savings they had is going to get eaten away.

Sorry to nitpick but the social isolation and massive unemployment are being caused by our response to the pandemic, not by the pandemic itself. Lockdowns are a choice, with tradeoffs.

Exactly and by not locking down properly we have managed to extend the pandemic in the US and its associated quasi lock down leading to our current situation. I agree with your response.

Have we? It doesn't seem possible to permanently stop outbreaks without having either reached 20-25% of the population infected, or locking down until a cure or vaccine is discovered. Plenty of places that locked down much more stringently than the US are having new outbreaks now - Europe, New Zealand, Australia and even parts of China.

Anyway, I seem to remember that extending the pandemic was the whole point of the lockdowns. The messaging at the beginning was that we would spread out cases over time, in order to keep under emergency healthcare capacity. Not prevent cases entirely. By that metric, hasn't the US been wildly successful? Or has the goal changed - and if so, why?

Other places have managed to become entirely COVID-free due to properly following lockdown policies. The US is still gaining thousands of cases a day–the only reason this isn’t more is that most people are staying inside. The places you mentioned with “new outbreaks” have a handful of new cases, and yet are taking it significantly more seriously than the United States.

Europe is having a handful of new cases? No, that isn’t true. Spain is reporting more than 10,000 new cases a day.

I did not specifically mention Spain, I was thinking of the other things on your list that are actually countries–as far as I am aware, cases in Australia are still going down, in China they are a negligible number, in New Zealand they had a couple dozen that they immediately locked down over and will likely stop the spread of. But since you brought it up, let's look at Spain–why does it have so many new cases every day? Because they aren't following the policies!

Yes, that is exactly my point.

> It doesn't seem possible to permanently stop outbreaks without having either reached 20-25% of the population infected, or locking down until a cure or vaccine is discovered.

You can't magically make yourself immune to future outbreaks by locking down - the only way to avoid outbreaks in the absence of widespread immunity is to maintain the lockdown indefinitely, until a cure or vaccine is discovered and widely distributed.

So, it's not true that we could have eliminated the virus and been happily back to normal in the US if we had just locked down harder/better/longer. We would either still be locked down with no end in sight, or have opened back up and now be experiencing another outbreak.

Not sure about China, but FWIW Australia and NZ are still quite locked down.

Death or lifelong respiratory syndrome isn't a great way to live either.

Especially death. Death is a HORRIBLE way to live. /s

That's true. Without the lockdowns, everyone would have had some very small increased chance of death or lifelong respiratory issues.

It's the role of science to tell us what that increased chance is, and the role of politics to decide whether that warrants the long-term decreased quality of life for a much higher fraction of people that the lockdowns/shutdowns will cause. At any rate, none of this was forced, certainly not by science (which can't make normative prescriptions).

There would also be the increase of all kind of death and disablement due to the breakdown of the medical system. So prob 1 month of all emergency cases wouldnt been treated. (Pulling this number out of thin air, maybe somebody has a good source)

That didn't happen anywhere in the world, regardless of the severity of lockdowns.

Good remark. Seems Japan was a bit in trouble: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/24/japa-a24.html

I only remember that northern italy might have had a similiar problem, and I guess Wuhan and wouldnt be surprised about Brasil.

According to media here France choose the 'culling' strategy (or more nobly called age triage) and offered palliative services to people who had covid and were considered too low survival chance.

Isolation, sure. But unemployment is unavoidable when hundreds of thousands of people die.

During the Black Death, wages rose dramatically due to a shortage of workers. Economically speaking, depopulation is quite good for the survivors.

How does that make sense? In a dumb sense, if a factory worker drops dead, a job just opened up.

The factory worker didn't die, people stopped buying the factory's product so they were laid off.

How so? Almost 3 million people die every year in the US.

This is not true. Sweden experienced a spike in unemployment, despite not having a lockdown. "People are too afraid about getting sick and dying to go outside" is pretty much directly attributable to the pandemic.

> People are too afraid about getting sick and dying to go outside

This is still a response to the pandemic, just a non-governmental one. I'm not saying such a response isn't justified, but it is not directly attributable to the disease.

If a hurricane came and destroyed a bunch of people's homes and businesses and people stopped working, it would be more reasonable to say that "the hurricane caused mass unemployment" than it would be to say "the hurricane didn't cause unemployment, it was just people's individual decisions to not work out of a pile of flooded rubble that's causing the unemployment."

This doesn't seem like a fair analogy for a number of reasons. But mostly just that COVID itself is not destroying businesses, whereas a hurricane literally is.

A hurricane isn't directly destroying anything except the building the business operates from; the business still exists. In principle employees could still walk to the rubble to work and customers could walk to the rubble to exchange money for services, but the material conditions make both of those untenable, in the same way the material conditions of COVID make working and buying things untenable.

I'm trying to assume a good faith argument here, but I'm struggling to. So I'll just say that we see the situation very differently.

Sweden experienced a spike from ~7% to ~9%. US has experienced a spike from ~3% to ~14%. Sure, some of it might be attributable to social attitudes, but I don't think that such a big discrepancy can be explained by this. I think it's mostly lockdown policies causing this.

Sweden: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRHUTTTTSEM156S US: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

I do agree that lockdowns increase unemployment compared to not, holding all things being equal (which is almost the point).

For comparison, two countries more culturally similar to Sweden who did institute lockdown measures:

Norway: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LMUNRRTTNOM156S

Denmark: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRHUTTTTDKM156N

Norway went from ~2% to ~9.5% and is now back to ~4.5%. And you can barely see a blip in Denmark from 5% to 6%.

This leads us to the obvious conclusion ???.

> WW2 was of course a much more trying time but it was followed by massive economic growth for most sectors of the population, I don't see that happening after the pandemic, wealth is just being silo'd and prosperity limited.

I could see it happening, but not in a good way. One (not all that unlikely) scenario is that the economic winners manage to place themselves out of harms way in the pandemic & social unrest that follows, and then everybody else just...dies off. That'd leave all the survivors extremely well off, and everybody else drops out of the population and ends up forgotten.

Globally, WW2 worked this way as well. There was a huge loss of life in Europe, in Russia, in China, in Japan, basically everywhere that the war was actively fought. 2/3 of Europe's Jewish population just died off, up to 20% of Poland and Russia, 8-10% in Southeast Asia, 4% in China. "Most sectors of the population" in the U.S. did well because the war wasn't fought here and we were the last developed nation left standing.

That analysis completely fails after WWI. The actual cause of the post war boom was a massive increase in agricultural efficiency. This freed up a large chunk of household budgets to be spent of consumer goods which kicked off a long cycle of economic growth.

Timeline and geography doesn't work out for your hypothesis. The Green Revolution began in earnest in the late 50s; at that point, the post-war expansion in the U.S. was alread 10-15 years old and slowing down. It also started in developing nations like Mexico, India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines - there's perhaps some influence through international trade, but if that's the cause you'd expect Mexico and India to be the geopolitical superstars rather than the U.S.

The timeline does match up with the Marshall Plan and redevelopment of Japan. A much simpler explanation is that the U.S. was the only nation whose capital stock remained intact after WW2. This allowed us to produce high-value goods more efficiently than everywhere else, which allowed us to export more, which led to a strong currency and ample buying power on world markets. Post-war unionization also spread the fruits of this productivity to society as a whole, rather than concentrating it among capital owners.

The US also saw a short term boom after WWI just look at the 20’s. That doesn’t explain why the boom continued for so long after WWII. Also, the green revolution was more a global phenomenon, the US saw significant agricultural productivity growth in the 1940’s from increased mechanization and fertilizer usage.

For comparison I would suggest you look at how common and large US recessions where from 1800-1900. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...

The 1920s boom was partially global - the U.S, France, and Great Britain boomed, along with non-belligerents like Venezuela. Weimar Germany had one of the worst economic collapses in history. Additionally, the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires disintegrated, with widespread hardship (revolutions, civil war, economic problems) occurring during the early 20s and then subsequent trajectories defined by how stable and how market-friendly the successor states were.

See a pattern there? It's really awesome to win a war, particularly if it was never fought on your territory or you got reparations. It really sucks to lose a war. Over the short term (~10-20 years), this effect dwarfs the normal peacetime business cycle. Over the long term (~50-100 years), it's dwarfed by things like the political-economic system, technological development, alliances, population growth & demographics, etc, which tend to set up the winners of next war.

(The U.S. experienced a similar boom after the end of the Cold War in 1991.)

I agree that the US experienced a war related boom after WWI and WWII. I am simply saying the boom lasted as long as it did in large part from the green revolution. This didn’t just mean increased prosperity at home, but a continued stream of new markets opening up. China’s boom for example was delayed due to internal politics, but that just extended the same long term trend for even longer.

The boomer generation wasn’t shaped by a few good years, it was shaped by a lifetime of prosperity which is extremely unusual in historic terms. IT technology played a major role, but looking at the industrial revolution for comparison you find plenty of crashes even during a period of rapid growth.

"Major, years-long recessions"? In the lives of anyone 25 and under, there have been three recessions, the current 7-month recession, the 2008 recession which lasted 18-months, and the 2001 recession which lasted 8-months. Recessions in the US almost never last more than a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...

That may be true academically, but it’s important to point out that everything doesn’t just go back to normal when the textbook definition has ended. The wealth transfer from working class to the rich in 2008 was staggering, and so many people feel that we never really recovered from that crisis.

It really felt like the 2008 crisis never ended, it just trailed off into an exponential decay.

This really does do a good job of explaining it, I feel the same way, you just said it better than me.

> In the lives of anyone 25 and under

I think you're mixing up your generational labels. Millennial are pushing 40. Under-25s are typically referred to as "GenZ" or, more colloquially, "zoomers".

> ... 7-month recession [...] lasted 18-months [...] lasted 8-months ...

Those are some... VERY specific timings. For many, the 2008 recession lasted >10 years. Putting a very narrow specific figure on it needs a little bit of perspective. 10 years is obviously ridiculous as it represents the extreme, but the impact of any academically-defined "18-month" recession is always going to be multi-year.

The slow recovery and after effects is also part of that timeline.

this recession isn’t over

Also depends where you're from. Any country that traded with the Soviet Union had a recession in the 90's

It's also worth noting that basically in the last 20 years the US has been at war with some random part of the world.

That's all budget that is subtracted from domestic spending policy. And military budget is frickking huge.

My grandfathers were an accountant and an engineer. The latter was really sought after too, he oversaw the construction of roads and spent months away and refused jobs to spend time home too.

My parents were both musicians/painters/other artistic stuff on the side. We were always tight money-wise but somehow had a two kids middle class upbringing on the absolute best part of town. Every time I think of this my admiration for my father grows.

Me and my sister became STEMpunks. My sister dropped it to be a full-time mom after a year of not liking the idea of daycare; but by then she had married well.

Once every other day I wish I had become a musician like my dad. But I don't think I could pull it off. Besides, they didn't save much so I (very gladly) chip in with about half of what they need to survive -- it's not as easy anymore.

(None of this is in America.)

Anecdotally at least, all of my friends around my age (32) have by now managed to buy homes at very reasonable rates (<2.5% ish).

Meanwhile my parents are stuck with their much higher 10% boom years interest rate, even though the absolute amount was much lower initially.

Of course this is in Europe, not the states.

Is refinancing not a thing in Europe?

It is definitely a thing (saved a lot myself). But amazingly, not everyone knows about it.

It's a thing. Not sure if whole EU but in Poland by law you don't pay fees when refinancing after 3 years.

Not sure about the rest of the EU, but in the UK it's unusual to have very long-term mortgages that seems to be described here. The norm is 2->3 year variable rate (tracking an underlying rate + a %) or a 2->5 year fixed, maybe a 10 year fixed. After that they tend to 'default' to a worse rate for the remainder, but with no penalties generally for switching.

Remortgaging is a normal part of life, but you can imagine that there might be penalty clauses if you've signed up for a 10 year fixed and in year 2/3 you want to remortgage at different terms.

The US doesn't have the penalty fees, only transaction fees.

At least in Germany, it's common to have a fixed interest rate for up to 30 years (more common are 10 and 20, 30 is rare). You can refinance, but you have to basically pay a fee that covers the expected loss for the bank, so that may not be worth it. Other countries differ, for example AFAIR it was common in Poland to have housing credits pegged to the swiss franc.

However, I'm fairly certain that the GP is exaggerating. Even 15 years ago, no bank asked for 10%. 5% would have been a lot, something around 3.5 - 4% common. My parents paid between 7 and 10% when they built their house, but that's like at least 40 years now. Today, something around 2% is the going rate.

At least in the booming markets, however, the rise in prices has completely eaten the gain in interest. I could for the same monthly installmend pretty much finance the same size as I could 10 years ago, the interest rate would be lower, but the principal substantially higher.

That's interesting. In the US, it's called a "pre-payment penalty," where you have to pay a fee if you want to pay off a loan early. It's not imposed by regulation, but is up to each lender, so you can choose a loan that does not have such a penalty.

Often consumers with weak credit or low incomes end up with loans that have worse terms, such as these penalties.

My family refinanced our home loan, and it was just a matter of going to the bank and signing the paperwork that they filled out for us. It took less than an hour, and the ROI was not hard to compute.

Perhaps I don’t understand why there should be a penalty to pay off a loan too early? I’ve given the bank back their money; isn’t that exactly why I was paying interest in the first place?

They write the terms to benefit themselves; in this case, to guarantee a minimum payout from the effort/risk. Not justifying it but a bank does as a bank does.

Because paying off a loan early means that loan has had less time to generate interest, which means the bank gets less money.

On an extreme example, imagine taking out a loan, then you pay it all back the next day. The loan has earned no interest, but the bank had to spend a bunch of time and money to get the loan set up.

Of course, early payment penalties are still pretty scummy. However, it does make sense why a bank would have one.

I don't know if they're scummy. When I buy a typical corporate bond I expect that the company will pay until maturity. If I buy a callable bond wouldn't I expect to be compensated for the one sided exposure to interest rate risk I'm exposing myself to (rates go up I lose, rates go down I lose)?

With consumer debt we have different expectations of what's fair, but consider the bank's risk profile here - if interest rates go up those outstanding mortgages are taking them for a ride, and if they go down the customers refi... seems natural they'd want to minimize prepayments.

In my view, the chance that a loan will be paid off early can be worked into the risk calculation that the bank uses for coming up with the interest rates and fees that they are willing to offer, and also for computing the cash value of the mortgage on the secondary market. At the end of the day, the bank just wants to know that they can sell the loan for more than it cost to originate it.

An issue with consumer debt is that a proliferation of fees and "fine print" make it confusing for folks to understand what they're signing up for, and to do comparison shopping on loans.

Traditionally, folks were advised to be wary of prepayment penalties because of a widespread strategy to prepay a loan if possible. When interest rates were high, this was like an investment with a guaranteed percentage return.

For instance, my family took out a loan with a particular payment, but we paid more than the minimum each month because we could afford it. On the other hand, being able to drop back to a lower payment was a kind of safety net in case something happened to one of our jobs, or something like that.

Think of it like returning an item to a store and paying a restocking fee. Stores would prefer all sales be final, but where they allow returns, they prefer to charge for the service when they can. You bought a mortgage from the bank, now you want to return it. They want to charge you for that.

See, the bank is not like your friend that lends you money. When your friend lends you money they are happy to receive payment early because they didn't actually want to lend it at all, it was a favor to you. They probably didn't charge interest, but if they did they did so because they "had to" (meaning they can't afford to lend you money as a flat out favor so they'll take the market rate, like when my friend the mechanic fixes my car but asks me to pay him because he's gotta live).

When the bank lends money they _want_ to lend it, it's the whole point of their business. That's why they exist, to charge interest. When you pay back early you're reneging on the deal, so to speak, and defeating the purpose of the business. They don't want the money back until the agreed upon time, it throws a wrench in their plans, budgets, forecasts, etc. The fee covers the cost of this inconvenience and discourages you from doing so.

It’s the same in Germany, it’s laid out in the mortgage terms. As a rule of thumb, you can pay up to 5% of the principal in a single lump sum every year on top of your usual payments directly reduces the principal at no extra fee. You can negotiate higher yearly extra payments, but that usually comes at the cost of higher interest.

Sometimes you’re able to refinance at no prepayment fee, but that comes down to how hard the bank wants to keep you as a customer etc.

Interestingly, the US has laws that limit pre-payment penalties to a certain set of mortgages.

If you get a standard 30-year fixed, the mortgage company can't impose a prepayment penalty.[1]

[1]https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/when-are-prepayment-...

It’s also important to compare the purchasing power of those two groups.

Sure, interest rates may be lower, but the purchasing power (a.k.a how much does a dollar/euro get me?) has also declined dramatically over the last several years. If your parents are retired and on a fixed income, tax increases and insurance premium hikes are a major factor to consider as well.

We have low mortgage rates right now because the European Bank has set low interest rates for loans; consequentially, we now have very low (nearly non-existent) interest on savings, and because of 'cheap' mortgages, more people want to buy houses which drives up the price.

So while mortgages have low interest, houses are expensive. To the point where you need a double income for a reasonable house.

My parents started off with a (iirc) 12.5% interest rate, but over the years were able to remortgage the house and eventually to a payment-free one (so they will never pay off the remaining balance on their mortgage, meaning they don't own the house (fiscally) and pay taxes on the monetary value it represents).

To the point where you need a double income for a reasonable house.

Even for a double income, it's insane. In NL, the average price of a home is 315k, while the median full-time income is 36k per year (pre-tax). Even with a double income, that's 4.5 years of household income, comparable to the peak ratio in the US before the housing bubble burst in 2008.

Population density of NL is like 10x that of the US so I really would expect housing to be much more expensive in NL.

Just being curious - if your parents are stuck with 10% interest rates while current interest rates are closer to 3%, why are they not borrowing a 3% to reimburse their 10% loan?

It's going to depend a lot on personal situation, but they might not be able to obtain a new loan due to credit assessment, and therefore be stuck with the old one.

Perversely, at least in the UK, a lot of people are paying higher rent than they would be for a mortgage for a similar place, but they can't get a mortgage due to "affordability", despite a demonstrated history of paying the rent.

Similarly, people can be on a 10% mortgage, paying it consistently, but unable to open a new, cheaper mortgage to replace it because their current circumstances don't pass the criteria. Criteria may include age (time to retirement) and current income.

Low interest rates are nice, but how many years do you need to work with an average middle class income to pay for an average flat/house?

I live in Munich, and it's difficult to imagine that I can ever buy a house here, even with a relatively good salary.

7 billion people in the world. We can't all live in the few best cities. Why should it be so cheap to live there, if everywhere else is unacceptable to you?

Maybe they were born in Munich.

If that’s all it takes to lay claim to a city, then people will just move and have kids in desirable places. The problem of the math not working out still doesn’t go away.

Where in Europe is this? We haven't seen 10% mortgage rates in the US since the 80s...

The relevant metric is monthly mortgage payment, not interest rate. When interest rates go down principle payments can be expected to go up as people can afford to bid more for the house.

I mean.....at least here in UK, your parents would just simply.....remortgage? How are they "stuck" exactly? Even if there is a penalty to pay for remortgaging, surely it must be worth paying if you can bring down your mortgage from 10% interest to literally 1-2% like many available right now?

>> WW2 was of course a much more trying time

Really? Lives were lost, but WWII came and went rather quickly, a handful of years. Millenials are dealing with multi-decade problems, potential solutions to which are discussed in terms of generations, decades rather than years.

For perspective: US WWII deaths: 407k over ~6 years. US COVID Deaths: 196k and counting over ONE year. So, even adjusted for population growth, the US is losing people to covid faster than it did during WWII. (The math is radically different for other countries, but in the US it is an interesting comparison.)

Give me a multi-decade problem over dying in a ditch any day

? 80+ million people died... That is not something that is just shrugged off. Entire ethnic groups were culled. To suggest that WW2 had no long term affects and indeed affects that did not last generations is to demonstrate a fragile grasp of history.

Did you forget that non-white people existed in the USA 1945-1965? Or did their experience not matter?

For perspective, the Soviet Union lost something in the region of TWENTY MILLION people. Exact numbers are disputed in the range of millions; the Soviet state lacked the capacity to track accurately, having convulsively emerged from feudalism only twenty years previously. It also, frankly, displayed a spectacular disregard for human life even of its own troops and civilians.

> The US is losing people to covid faster than it did during WWII.

This is a huge tragedy; the US responded to the war by trying to win it, deploying huge scientific and technical resources to that purpose. The US (and the UK) has responded to COVID largely by wishing it would go away, leaving the public to their own devices, locking down too late and too incoherently, and waiting for the private sector to develop a cure.

Really? Lives were lost, but WWII came and went rather quickly, a handful of years.

Don't forget about the depression. Started in '29 and didn't really resolve until after WW2, so almost 16 years.

And Europe certainly didn't bounce back after the war. Even the UK had rationing for several years after the war.

The optomisit in me hopes that when the truth about climate change really dawns then the effort to battle it could cause a similar transfer of wealth to a post war rebuilding. Lets hope we can actually solve the problem though or it wont matter much.

A lot of post-WW2 wealth transfer was from old failing empires to US of A. While climate change wealth transfer would accelerate transfer from US of A to ex-2nd and, especially, 3rd world. Either way, US and rich West people are looking to grim future compared to their parents. The rest of the world... We'll be fine one way or another.

? Climate change will disproportionately affect Africa and Asia.

A lot of international agreements seem to be geared towards rich countries paying off poor countries.

In an era of rampant misinformation feeding reality-denial, I think our collective willingness to respond to global catastrophe is worse off today than a hundred years ago. The US response to the coronavirus epidemic is a great example of this.

You hear it time and time again: people who have personally felt the loss of loved ones to pandemic or wildfire or flood still deny the cause. I fully expect 50% of the (surviving) public to point out that "some scientists disagree" on the cause of global climate change while we slowly perish in a Water World dystopia.

There's always this kind of narrative floating around that's simply not true. Sure things are getting bad right now but times have been good for a decade. Also people always say this kind of thing and extrapolate current trends into the future. After the 2008 crisis which many thought would take a long time to recover from we've had unbelievable growth for a decade.

We privileged few may have experienced unbelievable growth, but most of my generation has not.

The recovery from 2008 was very uneven, because I'm in tech I did quite well but many of the people I knew from my community that were not in tech did badly. I think this unevenness in recovery is why that narrative persists so strongly.

I think this is only really true if Millennials continue to attempt to live like their parents.

First thing people need to do is stop fetishizing home ownership. It's not a magical object, instead of buying a home put your money in an index fund, you'll be better off financially anyway in 20 years. Owning a home is just a status symbol people are obsessed with for your quality of life it doesn't matter if you own or rent. Even better would be to share a space with peers. Not only does it make housing cheaper, it makes everything cheaper. Nobody in their 20s or 30s needs to be isolated in some giant house.

Education is predominantly getting much more expensive at elite institutions, but good public universities in-state are still affordable, or go and move abroad and get a degree in Europe if you're American. If you don't like to go to university, pick up a vocation, a lot of them pay well. In general be ready to move to improve your circumstances. Physical mobility in the US has fallen to extreme lows, it's one of the easiest way to improve your situation.

Being a millenial myself I'm actually not pessimistic about the generation at all, or at least not fatalistic. This isn't an economy any more where you get a job at 23 and then you're set for life and then live in a suburb with your labradoodle. To me that's a positive.

Not to mention low fertility rates meaning millennials will retire into a society with few young people to support them.

18-29 year olds are sort of between generations but largely fall into Gen Z; certainly they're the youngest end of Millenial, and can not really be said to have endured the 2008-2011 recession as they were not working at that time.

> certainly they're the youngest end of Millenial, and can not really be said to have endured the 2008-2011 recession as they were not working at that time.

My 2 & 4 year old aren't working right now, and they've certainly endured the coronavirus pandemic. I don't know why not yet being in the labor force would prevent one from being accurately described as having endured an economic downturn any more than any other adverse conditions. It's hardly as if not being the breadwinner of the household insulates you from the effects if their income is reduced or eliminated.

As a 29 year old, I reject this sentiment. I may not have been working but my decisions regarding college and overall early adult life were heavily affected by the 2008-2011 recession because of how it affected my family.

We endured it, just in a different way than those who were working.

> Millennials face a very real risk of being a lost generation financially

I think it's already a done deal. Millennials aren't as young as they seem (over 30) and as the own a minuscule percentage of US household wealth. The numbers are incredible.

"Indeed, at a median age of 35, Gen Xers owned just 9% of the nation’s wealth in 2008 — less than half what boomers had at that age. And millennials will have to triple their net worth in the next four years to catch up to Generation X at 35, and increase their wealth sevenfold to catch up to boomers at that age." https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-depressing-chart-show...

The funny thing is that across that millennials seem to love politicians that HATE them.

Obama's big thing was Obamacare which was basically a tax on the young (force them to buy insurance to subsidize capped insurance rates on older people). Bernie's big thing is expanding Medicare and Social Security.

So, I don't see things changing any time soon.

Millennials all dream of becoming older one day.

My point wasn't to pooh-pooh on the Democrats (Republicans are worse obviously with their awful tax policies). My point was that they should care about millennial issues. Whether you like or not WE are the ones paying for increased social security, medicare, NOT the boomers. They are getting way more out of the system than they ever put in.

The Boomers basically took all the wealth in this country and regulated everyone out of it. There are so many issues that are good for the country and good for millenials that never seem to gain traction. Student loans reform for instance or Housing (especially zoning and property tax laws e.g. Prop 13).

Here is a good link to what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh6hesHk6yE&t=1250s

Obamacare banned declining coverage for pre-existing conditions and allowed < 26-ers to stay on their parents' health plans. It also created exchanges with subsidies for those who don't have employer health plans - of whom a large proportion are under-employed youngsters.

Since they don't see things getting better for them as they get older, maybe it's not so irrational to support expansion of Medicare and Social Security.

It's not as illogical or against their self-interest as you think.

Except that you skip over the most important provisions.

Do you think that insurance for a 60 year old is 3x as expensive as a 30 year old for health care? The government MANDATES that to be the case. Who do you think pays for that?

Obamacare mandates that a 64 year old get charged no more that 3x a 27 year old.

> Who do you think pays for that?

Employers. Or the government - via subsidies. And the insureds themselves.

Have you considered that many millennials are OK with paying more if it means everyone is taken care of? People don't always vote for policies that benefit solely themselves.

> Have you considered that many millennials are OK with paying more if it means everyone is taken care of? People don't always vote for policies that benefit solely themselves.

So that's why they vote for policies that exclusively benefit Boomers. Gotcha!

Have you considered that maybe Millenials just don't understand how money and taxes work?

I was talking to my friend the other day that lives in California and didn't know what Prop 13 was. He was a state champion debater in California but didn't know how property taxes worked in the state. I was shocked. If that's the slightest indication - most millennials have absolutely no idea how money and taxes work.

I've talked to friends about zoning, depreciation laws, capital gains taxes, backdoor Roth laws ect. They don't even have a clue.

> So that's why they vote for policies that exclusively benefit Boomers

And I would disagree with the "exclusively" part of that sentence. I've already shown you how millennials benefit from Obamacare. Your note about young people subsidizing over-60s is a red herring. Over-65s are already on Medicare and it's pretty good. Why wouldn't millennials want that for themselves?

Most people don't understand taxes and money - this isn't specific to any particular age group. And frankly, as I've opined elsewhere on this site, retirement savings laws particularly are overly complicated for nearly everyone.

> I've already shown you how millennials benefit from Obamacare.

Actually you didn't. Pointing out a single feature that benefits them while ignoring all the others is not a cost benefit analysis.

> Your note about young people subsidizing over-60s is a red herring.

And this a straw man. Actually, no - its wrong.

I worked on Obamacare for 2 years. I think it's a decent law a vacuum. I can't possible pretend its good for young people. It's good for my 60 year old aunt who has diabetes who thinks she pays too much for insurance but actually is getting the deal of a century considering how much health care costs.

Obamacare did little to slow health care spending (another long story) but it did work to spread the costs around - mostly to young people.

Can we please stop with the term "Millennials"? The article talks about 18-29 year olds. The most widely accepted definition of Millennials is people born 1981 to 1996, which would be 24-39 year olds. Not the same.

Regardless, the financial differences between people the exact same age are always vastly larger than the financial difference between so-called "generations".

Yeah "millennials" and "boomers" are turning into loose terms for "young" & "old". I'm Gen X and did not see many of these "boomer" benefits..

It's funny, when we talk abstractly, we can look at the statistics and see that wealth in concentrated in the hands of a small % of people.

But then when we break it down by age, or by gender, then suddenly, magically, this wealth becomes distributed to the entire age group, or the entire gender, so that "Boomers" are all well-off, or men are all well-off, when the reality is that it's not even remotely true, and a lot of people of all different groups are struggling.

Do you feel its natural or the conversation is being guided.

Hmm the article is not about Millennials but perhaps the comment was. I don't think GenZ has "experienced" two years long recessions like Millennials have.

Hell, depends on what you mean by "experienced" as well. I'm a mid-range Millennial, and was in college during the Great Recession - not even aware of it until after it was over. This year is the first recession I'm actually experiencing.

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