Gen Z does not dream of labor
vox.com
vox.com
I think this is pretty much the whole story. It’s very hard to be motivated to work when you could save your entire adult life and still struggle be able to afford such “entry level” things as a house or even a new car. People are willing to save and/or hustle for 5-10 years to get material rewards, but beyond that it feels pointless. Why be miserable grinding for two decades just so you can get one hand on the ladder? Instead people look for ways to have a life they find interesting or satisfying now.
The average house sold today costs $374K. The median salary is $51K.
You can argue that those houses that were sold back then were smaller, but they were also made of vastly better materials than modern home construction, and it's not like people even have the opportunity of buying those smaller homes unless they want to live in a slum.
> The average house sold in 1946 cost 1.75X. The median salary was X.
> The average house sold in 2022 cost 7.33Y. The median salary is Y.
Its clear from all the communications, unionizations, Great Resignation, and more that wages are completely broken.
And that above shows what it looks like.
We're one of the lucky ones. We're finalizing our recent house purchase. First time homebuyer. $375k , which was at the top of our budget. I make $150k, which is still a 2.5 factor differential... Which is .75 ABOVE what it would have been in the post-war boom 1946.
Im in my 40's, and its taken me 20+ years to actually get enough of a footing to even look at a proper house. I feel immensely sad for all younger. Can't afford a $600/mo mortgage so they're stuck with $1000 rents.
Loans are for people to borrow money when they don't need money.
I think GP is just trying to make sure we're comparing apples to apples. To me it almost comes across as you cherry picking data (average house price vs median salary).
The median house price so far this year is over $390K, by the way. The earlier value was for last year.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=OBTh only has data for median house prices from 1963, and household income from the mid '80s. The spread growing isn't heartening.
First you're getting a vastly different product today than in 1946. Consumer demands are far higher too.
Also to compare affordability the metric for most people would be the median percentage case of mortgage payments vs the persons take home pay. When measured this way it's been hovering around 30% for the past 40 years in the UK.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-house-prices-unlikely-cra...
Is that true? Something like 40% of the UK housing stock was built pre-WW2. Sure they’ll no longer have a coal bunker and they most likely have had insulation upgrades etc. but a pre-WW2 house in 1946 is still a pre-WW2 house today. The modern build will have less living space, predominately through smaller room sizes but should be cheaper to heat.
>> Also to compare affordability the metric for most people would be the median percentage case of mortgage payments vs the persons take home pay
That lops off all the people who can’t afford a mortgage so i dont think that logic works.
Are you? You're getting a place to live and property you own.
Horseshit. Homes built in 1946 are selling for millions of dollars, even if they're going to be torn down and rebuilt for marginal cost. You're not buying a house, you're buying the land and taking responsibility for everything on it.
And even then, the lumber you get out of such an old house is quite valuable virgin oldgrowth, a better quality product than you can buy at a lumber yard today.
And, to pick a nit... comparing the median income to median house price is an examination of relative price, not absolute.
To compare the 1946 houses location you need to pick something with the same level of amenity, which will be probably a country town.
That $150k house in the boonies, even if it was built yesterday, has less value, because the community it is in is in the process of dying and has no opportunity. That same house in the same town sold for $60k in 1989, while that very town was much more functional, alive, and happy than it is now.
No way this is even close to being true. Newer houses with all the advancements in materials and construction science are much better than the post-war garbage that was spewed out.
I made a small fortune in my early 20s fixing and renovating those post-war houses. They're almost universally junk in comparison.
I've heard this about pretty much every place, at this point.
("Move somewhere cheaper!" … and get "geographic multiplier"'d into a lower salary, and you're right back where you started.)
0: https://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/north-carolina/ashevill...
As a millennial in my 30s I was fortunate to be able to break in and start earning a nice paycheck without a college degree, but even that possibility is deteriorating now due to a sudden flood of entry level applicants. Companies are now seeking mid-level-to-senior candidates almost exclusively because they don’t want to bother with training and mentoring a newbie, they want someone who can hit the ground running. There are still some possibilities for one to get one’s foot in the door with barely paid or unpaid college internships but from my perspective the gates are slowly closing.
This job is truly an anomaly. There are very few careers where you can earn top 1% income with no degree, no physical exertion, under 8 hours a day "on the clock", the freedom to quit any time and have multiple new offers within days, etc, etc.
Out of the hundreds I’ve had this conversation with, two that I’m aware of took my advice and just tried to start making stuff. One now runs a dev shop, the other is at alphabet making bank.
I think, more than anything else, learned helplessness is crippling people. so many are mollycoddled from cradle to grave and never understand their own capabilities.
I was able to excel at CS in college because my parents shoved a DOS computer in front of me when I was 5 and challenged me with math and general problem solving at every opportunity. My whole childhood was basically debugging and critical thinking. If you didn't have that growing up, it's really hard to start learning the skills when you're 30.
let me guess: because not anybody wants to be a programmer? different people have different ambitions, not anybody needs to be a coder
and life would be pretty mundane if all people were doing is writing code
Almost anybody who works in retail, manual labor, etc would jump on a job offer for 5x more money, better hours, and better working conditions. The reason they don't is they can't get the offers because the skills are hard to learn.
Anyone talented at something thinks everyone is like them. Some singers think this too, they’ll say all you have to do is X, Y and Z and you’ll be a great singer like me, easy!
It’s like saying “I don’t understand why not everyone is fit, all you need is to eat less and go walk outside for free”.
I have taught a few people programming and almost everyone started picking up the basics and moving along well but some would just completely give up once no one was prodding them. This usually correlates with other things like health and general life situation. Some people just aren’t motivated to get up, go run, eat healthy, and learn a valuable skill.
If you are motivated and have the right material to learn from, you can do basically anything. This seems pretty true for me. I haven’t found any skill I can’t just grind through learning if I put the time in.
If more software developers used examples like those, maybe more people would consider software as a career? If nothing else, seems like I should give it a go when I have those conversations with people.
[0] Adafruit have an image of a 1967 article in Cosmopolitan, which quotes Hopper. https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/03/12/a-1967-cosmopolitan-art...
The market is flooded with coders, which is why you see coveted companies have the exhausting interview processes that they do. And that's where the big bucks are made.
Smaller companies with low or inexistent barriers to entry may appear appealing to your average bootcamp coder that lacks deep understanding that comes with a CS degree and/or years of experience, but they come with their own severe drawbacks one of them being the fallacy that one can jump from these to the FAANGs, another being the veneer of a career while in reality you're as expendable and replaceable as a minimum wage worker.
The world has changed - simple labor that requires a few days of training doesn't pay much. Most jobs, with few exceptions, that require a decade of training, do pay well. That's why there's such a huge gap between Amazon packers and electricians, and an even bigger gap with surgeons.
If you want to do well in the modern economy, you have to choose your specialization wisely. Most simple labor will be automated very soon anyway.
False.
A plumber making $80k (US median seems to be around $60k) isn't going to be able to save up for a down payment if they're paying a typical mid-sized city's rent (~$1.2k a month). Not to mention housing costs going up during this period of saving up.
I lead a team that includes Zoomers and they are making six-figure salaries and are way ahead of where I was (accounting for inflation) when I was at their age.
This is more generational comparison garbage like the claims that Millennials were the downfall of our civilization. Just ignore it and move on.
It's just very silly to find a website, grab a number, and then conclude that saving 200k in 8 years is realistic
Roughly 2/3 of Americans own homes.
If you live in an area where homes are priced like luxury investments, then yes, you'll have a hard time buying when you also cannot afford other luxuries. If you live in an area where they are not, it isn't unattainable at all, especially if you combine income with a marriage partner.
It isn't as diverse as some other parts of the country, but there's groups of people from all over the world. Within a 2 hour drive from me, you'll find enclaves from Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Mexico and others.
I know an Englishman who lives in an Indonesian village (not an enclave). He is constantly reminded that while his presence is cherished, he isn't, and never will be "one of them." He still loves it, though, so there's that.
What on earth makes you think they are second class citizens? They vote, attend school board meetings, own homes and live just like anyone else.
In my neighborhood I would say at minimum 25% of the home owners are non-white families, if not more.
Bunch of representative bias anecdotes, mostly be people who don’t live there, or haven’t in 20 years.
And yet, if the same environment were to be encountered in another country, it would be “culture”.
In the last year or two a locally-famous lighthouse went up for sale and was bought for cash by some guy from silicon valley. Instead of being turned into an attraction, or a house, or hell even an Airbnb spot, it remains untouched much to the chagrin of the locals. I guess the new owner can't be bothered to come out here and just liked the idea of bragging that he owned it.
There's a few islands of sanity here in the midwest, primarily around college towns. But... prices have doubled since 2016, at least in my area.
We're closing on a house. $375k. I'm one of the lucky ones. Like, super lucky. But it sold back in 2016 for $170k.
For all the cultural likes and dislikes, mass of people is generally moving when they have pragmatic reason to do so.
Every time the Midwest comes up on this site, you get these laughably stupid takes that it's some bombed-out shithole with no jobs other than crime, and where people kill minorities on sight. At least once every couple weeks, there will be a decently sized comment thread about how it's economically desolate and morally evil, and that no sane person would ever move here.
My only response to that is please don't ever stop believing that. Stay away. Don't come crush the housing market with your $200k+ FAANG salary so you can tut-tut the people that live here about how racist, sexist, classist, etc. they are despite having never actually talked to one of them in your life. For those that got dealt a bad hand in life, there is at least a chance for them in the Midwest. If keeping that chance alive means that somebody living in a coastal city thinks my community is human garbage, so be it.
Rural areas also tend not to be great places for LGBT people, either.
People who pick just what’s attractive at the moment are pretty short-sighted and I have no sympathy for them.
What's attractive and what's viable are often two separate things. NYC is not viable for someone making $40k a year, but neither is moving to the Rust Belt where their "options" are working part-time in department stores or literal crime.
Something tells me that this is a situation that can't be won in some people's minds. If someone makes the rational decision to not move somewhere that is not economically viable, in an area that's projected to become even more unviable with time, that's not good enough for some. If someone lives in a shitty area and moves elsewhere for better career prospects, but still can't make ends meet, well, according to posts like this, they should just have moved somewhere shitty instead.
If we applied the same to degrees, I doubt you'd feel the same about all of the "short-sighted" people who chose to study trades or liberal arts at a state school and now have poor economic prospects, instead of choosing what's attractive at the moment like STEM.
Remote work would also have a cascading effect. Say 20 people move to a rural area, well they need food, and their vehicles fixed, and their house maintained, etc. They need to fund their hobbies and generally would bring more money to those areas. Big cities with a lot of power don't want that to happen because they will lose their tax base. I suspect some city governments are incentivizing businesses to bring employees back to the office because of this.
People who chose to study trades would be doing well off, that’s a terrible analogy.
> liberal arts
Liberal arts has pretty much always had terrible prospects. That’s not short sighted, that’s just straight up blind.
That may be true in some areas. I can only speak anecdotally. I brought a couple members of the LGBT community with me to a very rural area that is about as cowboy-midwest as it gets. Everyone has been very civil and even the "Good ol boys" have been very respectful with them to my pleasant surprise. There are plenty of openly LGBT working in the local stores.
All of that said I have advised them against hanging out in the local bars after listening to the scanner a bit. There are a few regular angry drunks. Perhaps I am too overly cautious.
Speaking from experience, they're going to be on good behavior around you and others. It's what happens when they think no one will notice or no one will hold them to account when real discrimination occurs.
I've met plenty of people who claim to be LGBT supporters in public, but have no problem harassing LGBT people, discriminating against them and calling them slurs when they think no one else is looking. Same thing goes for people in power, like bosses and owners, or police and judges. Discrimination doesn't always look like American History X or the Westboro Baptist Church, the vast majority of it is low key and insidious.
That's the very reason I suggested staying away from the bars. When people are drunk their inhibitions are gone and judgement is very poor. The LGBT hate crime that I know of happened about 23 years ago outside a bar.
Even if you ignore first time homeowner benefits and such, the usual thing necessary is not living in the middle of California.
Often if you actually dig into it you find abject refusals to consider locations outside of a particular one, or the famous “spend less on candles. no” type of thing.
Sounds like this was either a long time ago or in city/town where not many people want to live.
Historically, the cost of a house has hovered around 4.5 to 5.5x annual median income. It's currently at the highest level it's ever been, at least according to this graph:
https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco....
In places like the UK we have the same phenomenon but most people are on 2-5 year fixed rates.
The median home price in Canada is $800k and rising, while in the US it is $400k and rising. Housing prices in the US could easily double.
Actually the latest quarter median prices fell in the US, which may continue as interest rates increase.
Broadly speaking though, prices certainly are up over the last couple years.
For example, when I bought my first home the price was around 4.5x my income. But the interest rate on that first mortgage was 8.25%
Where I live, Boise, housing prices have shot up dramatically, over twice. Median house prices in Boise is $536k. So you would really need to make $214K/year to afford the mortgage under the old rules. And nobody makes that kind of money here.
The prices are based on the ability to repay based on the income - with lower interest rates the same income and service a much larger loan, hence the increased prices.
The world has changed, from very high rates to current very low rates, and seems like it might be changing back to middle rates.
You got lucky and bought when it was cheap. Don't act like anyone can do what you did.
If your typical rent is $1200, that means property values in your area are almost certainly low enough to qualify for FHA loans, which only require 3.5% down due to government subsidies. 3.5% of $450k is $16k - so it only takes about 3 years to save for that down payment.
Home prices are high _because_ FHA loans allow people to have greater purchasing power (among many other reasons like NIMBYism).
> spending $3k a month on day care
It costs $3200/mo to pay someone $20/h for 40 hours a week, in what world does day care (where one caretaker takes care of multiple children!) cost $3000/mo? The average cost of child care in California, which has _the_ highest cost of labor in the US, is $956/mo [2]. If you use the infant care cost it's $1400/mo, still nowhere near $3000. Maybe in the middle of New York City it costs $3000, but that's not a realistic living scenario for a plumber.
If your spouse makes $3000/mo then the rent increase (call it an extra $800/mo to get to $2k/mo) and childcare cost ($1000/mo) are more than covered by their extra income.
Please just look at the data and take a moment to understand what expenses outside of SF/NYC/LA look like.
[1]: https://www.kff.org/report-section/ehbs-2020-summary-of-find...
[2]: https://www.epi.org/child-care-costs-in-the-united-states/#/...
The link you provided says $1,412. And this shows roughly $2500 in LA County and $3300 in SF County.
https://insightcced.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/INSIGHT_C...
> The average annual cost of infant care in California is $16,945—that’s $1,412 per month. Child care for a 4-year-old costs $11,475, or $956 each month.
$1400 for an infant, $950 for a 4 year old. And that's in _the_ highest cost of living state in the country. If you put Michigan it drops to $905/741.
> And this shows roughly $2500 in LA County and $3300 in SF County
Your link comes off as incredibly biased. In literally the second sentence it says "Black and brown people and women of color experienced profound losses of health, community, income, and business at rates far more severe than white households" There's a clear ultra-left political lean to it.
I also literally said that SF/LA/NYC are not representative of costs in the rest of the country. If you're a plumber in SF you make over 6 figures, easily. A plumber makes $80k in a random Midwest city, not in SF/LA. The state of California reported median plumbers in the East Bay made $115k in 2021 [1]. You are fundamentally trying to mislead by using Midwest wages and San Francisco costs. Not to mention that the inflated cost of living is caused by a housing shortage which subsidizing healthcare and childcare doesn't fix.
[1]: https://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/OccGuides/Summary.asp...
Tell me you have no children without telling me you have no children?
The daycare my child went to is $2500/month. Not quite $3K but I'm not in the most expensive areas. I have no doubt it can go over $3K in SF/Palo Alto/etc.
Not only an ad hominen, but changing topics?
> I just looked and a Platinum plan in CA for a family costs $1400.
I don't know where you looked but it's wrong.
I literally just went to https://www.coveredca.com/ and filled in details for a quote.
A platinum plan with Blue Shield is $2530.04/month.
With Kaiser, it is $2637.23/month.
i'm not a parent and don't want to be one but know enough parents to know that daycare is bloody fucking expensive, usually thousands/mo, unless the parents have a support system, but even then it's a trade-off.
the silver lining of course is that it's a temporary expense.
also assumes that you are mentally strong enough to live like a pauper to hopefully afford the bare minimum required to scrounge up a downpayment.
doesn't assume building a maintenance fund (2% of home value per year), closing costs (2% of home value, one-time cost), purchasing stuff to fill the home (like furniture/appliances), etc.
You have farfetched dreams that government run anything would somehow be not shit. You'd hardly get any coverage and I doubt the deductible would be anywhere sufficient.
I'm not sure everyone knows there's a no free healthcare, we may move in different cicles.
Having lived with socialized healthcare and still paying private insurance in order to access expedient, competent, comfortable care is especially frustrating.
In the US, you won't get the chance to have a bill, because you will be denied care if you're unable to pay for the care or are uninsured. The one exception to this is that emergency rooms are obligated to stabilize patients in crisis, but that type of care is limited. For example, they'll patch you up if you get stabbed and then send you a bill for it, but nobody is getting treatment for non-acute emergencies, like chronic conditions, or the insulin they need to survive diabetes, or life-saving chemo or radiation therapy for cancer.
Your creditors might feel differently about bills not costing you anything when they take you to court to collect on your debt. Those bills might cost you your savings, income and/or assets.
On the private insurer side, if you're prescribed an on-patent medication that has no generics, every insurer I've had has fought me every step of the way for coverage, and some plans just don't cover brand name medication at all. Even when you work with your doctor and insurer to get coverage for specific medications, insurers will decide 4 months later that they don't want to cover it anymore and you have to jump through those hoops all over again.
My "favorite" experience was having to cycle through several medications that I had been prescribed in the past that weren't effective in order to make my insurer happy so that they'd cover the medication that does work. Apparently the private insurer knows how to treat patients better than doctors do. Then I moved and had to switch insurers, and the insurer wanted me to go through the process of taking drugs that don't work all over again. I gave up and just pay for the actually-efficacious prescription out of pocket, and none of those costs go towards my deductible. I now pay $18 per pill for something that costs $34 total for a 30-day supply, which is about a dollar per pill, in other first world countries.
If it was possible, I'd drop my own coverage instantly for Medicaid. Doing so would make my life immeasurably better.
> Doesn't seem like the rest of the world's universal healthcare did any better than ours?
On every metric, other countries' healthcare systems outperform the healthcare system in the US, resulting in higher quality care and patient outcomes, all for much less than the US spends[1].
[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...
I also care for a family member on Medicaid and, while it’s very far from perfect, I agree that in many every-day scenarios it’s remarkably superior to my employer-provided coverage.
Most of the downsides I’ve experienced are issues with getting specialist appointments in a timely fashion and providers creating unexpected reimbursement loopholes - which are thankfully rare, but remarkably abusive when they have occurred.
Eg: Medicaid will get you booked with an allergy clinic four months out and during the appointment they tell you “Oh by the way, Medicaid only covers ~5 basic allergen tests; if you want the standard regional allergen test that’s $150 up front and if you want the full spectrum test that’ll be $300.”
Meanwhile, half a year prior, I went to the same clinic, got my appointment booked for 2-3 weeks out, and wasn’t even asked about the test type - they hit me with the full spectrum and I just had to toss a minor copay on the way out the door.
I guess the overall moral of the story is that our healthcare system is broken and jammed up with perverse incentives at every rung of the ladder.
The median household income = 67K[0]. >60% of US households own a home.[1] Clearly 80K is more than enough to safe up for a down payment.
[0]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...
> The term "home-ownership rate" can also be misleading because it includes households that owe on a mortgage.
Depending on your credit score and your down payment, you can wind up functionally renting a home for many years even if you "own" it on paper. It isn't until the final years of a 30 year mortgage that you actually significantly pay down the principal.
As long as interest rates remain low and the credit requirements are lax, most of America can in fact "own" a home. Expect prices to skyrocket, as buyers become more and more decoupled from the cost.
Is that really all your definitive "false" relies on? Hell I know tradesmen that make well over that and live in more rural areas.
2) Median house (not a Bay Area house) in 2019 was like 320k. Crazy house valuations are only from the last 1.5-2 years and wouldn't have affected generational norms (and we all know why the suddenly exploded). Even then, the median house is 410k, so all you needed/need you need to save is 65-80k in the /worst/ case.
3) Most people buying houses are/should be dual income, given the size of the median house. And given that you're competing against double income people (don't like it? you'd have to roll back the drive for emancipation/equality :)). If you double the income above you can save for a downpayment in like 3 years. I know families where neither partner probably makes 80k buying houses in boring cities e.g. in Texas - and not a starter house either... How? Dual income + non-coastal prices. And yeah, there are tons of jobs in the area.
My dad was a solider in Latin America, my mom, a nurse. Their job required, at most, 2 years of education beyond High School.
I am a data analyst, with a Bachelor's and a Master's. I earn more than they both did together, adjusted for inflation. My friends are in "specialized jobs" as well -- some even being doctors and lawyers. We still have zero hope of affording a house, let alone retirement.
Edit: for anyone wondering, my education was completely free as in my country college is free and I took my Master's in a Nordic country, where education is also free (I worked there to support myself too).
I think the key for me is the fact I choose not to incur educational debt getting a BS and/or MS, I also choose to live in a non-coastal region that does not have crazy housing prices. I also had lots of support from my parents* when I was younger so establish myself financially (like enabling me to be able to save for the down payment on this home)
I worked very hard and now make a pretty decent wage after decades of working lower wage jobs.
* To be clear this is just basic support like a stable roof over my head, the were lower middle class as well, their combined income was less than 6 figures, we had a basic home, food, etc but no luxuries, no vacations, one of the reasons I did not go to college was I did not want debt, and the family had no money for tuition
Over the course of a few years that's well into 6 figures of support
We are a "normal" midwest 2 parent household, in the 50th percentile of income band for the region.
My over arching point is there has to be some personal accountability. it is easy to be a victim, blame the system, blame rich people, blame everyone but yourself for your own circumstances.
Life is hard and often unfair, and I freely admit I am one serious illness away from bankruptcy, there are things we need to do change the system in many ways
However alot of the talk I see about "solutions" will in reality just make things worse and further push victim culture that i see today.
I don't have all the answer, but "woe is me, life is soo hard and unfair" attitude I see I can assure people is not a solution
When you are one major accident or illness away from losing everything you have saved is kind of makes sense to blame those who have fought so hard to make sure typical people don't have access to effective health care at a reasonable cost.
Medical costs however would not the cause of my problems as even in the worst case I would be protected by bankruptcy laws would would allow me to discharge my medical debt while keeping my primary home, and a significant chunk of my personal possessions.
This is ridiculous. If that’s actually true, move. Lower your expenses. Figure out something else.
Manhattan used to be very cheap, but it hasn't been that way for at least 30 years. Too many people want to live there now. Basic economic rules of supply and demand dictate the prices.
The only solution is to not play the game. You want a house, buy it where you can afford. There's no magic fairy that will sell you a standalone house in Manhatten on a cashier's salary.
Apparently moving countries is good enough for his dad but another city in the US I asking too much?
Rent in my town is one of the cheapest among bigger cities and I already live very frugally (public transit, only shop for groceries on sale and healthy food, don't go out to parties, don't drink, no addictions, no online subscriptions, only free hobbies + gym). GenXers and Boomers left a shitty world for Gen Z and, for some, life is just not the fairy tale you are used to - sorry mate.
It's not so much a solution as it is a sneering dismissal of real problems that they don't want to hear about anymore.
How, exactly, are we going to supply all of that to the firehose of people graduating with mostly-useless degrees and job skills?
All the fruits are going to small number of people in the top. You say mostly useless degrees… what about all the mostly useless things - the lamborghinis? the never ending houses? the gimmicks, gadgets, iphones every 6 months…
Why do we supply that and dont supply basic living conditions to everyone?
Why? Because the medium of exchange function stops the moment economic growth stops growing at the rate of productivity. This is because the richest individuals are hoarding employment opportunities and get to save money against the will of the rest of the population. If one guy is doing the work of two, then one person has nothing to do. We grow the economy two fold, so there is enough to do for everyone, even though there are enough products and services for everyone. It's that stupid.
You’re not forced to live in a bigger city.
You weren’t forced to uselessly over-educate yourself.
You aren’t forced to stay where you are, in a dead-end, complaining about how it’s everyone’s fault but your own.
Either way, telling people to pull themselves up by their bootstrap when a house costs over a million dollars and wages have stagnated for decades is very uncharitable.
I live in Canada, at this rate owning a house is a dream long gone for many people include me.
Go on Zillow and do some basic research.
My education is none of your concern, especially because I actually got paid both for my Bachelors and Masters, due to academic performance scholarships. It cost me nothing and still paid better than most jobs.
I’m not in a deadend, I do very well, I just have zero prospects of retiring or owning a house. I’m not complaining though, I got it better than many people. I’m grateful for that, and especially even more grateful for not having to be someone so bitter like you. Have fun dying soon of old age in your rich life, with no friends or family bc none can stand your boomer personality :)
The problem is that most people don't get to choose. There are few of these high paying jobs, so by definition most people are excluded. Either because they're not "smart" enough to get into elite training programs (e.g. medical school) or because they don't have enough money to spend years in training with zero or negative income.
in Germany even if you're poor you can go to the University and succeed
my friends all studied and they were from normal working-class families
everyone gets a chance and all you need is put some effort
you'd need to study 3 years to get your Abitur, however (which is only 1 year more than Gymnasium folks would)
ps. this may be different by state
Except in the US there are enclaves of destitute poverty, generational poverty, extreme levels of incarceration, job prohibitions for low-level convicts (which can be 1/2 the men in some areas), high crime, schools with low graduation rates, weak access to things like dental care, poor transit options for medical care, pollution, insufficient care for the elderly, lack of mental health care, opioid addiction, children with high rates of lead poisoning, etc. Those people have the deck stacked against them.
What doesn't pay well is zero-effort required jobs like Starbucks barista or social media influencer (is this even a job?). If anyone can do it with no pain required to pass some sort of schooling then it's not going to pay well. Nursing pays well because people are too lazy to make it through 4 years of schooling.
If you're going to come in and claim life circumstances prevent people from getting a 4 year degree, a public school costs at most $120k including living expenses for 4 years. Even if you get _no_ financial aid - which doesn't happen as FAFSA exists - $120k is an entirely manageable sum to pay off over the course of 20 years. And that calculation assumes you don't work at all during summers or during the school year.
Where are you getting this number, that is not even remotely close to any of the nurses and lower level health practitioners I know
It's not clear if there's a simple correlation between "training required" and "automation ready". For example, people have been talking about automating radiology for years, although I'm currently finishing up a study on one such system and we certainly aren't there yet. Meanwhile, the relatively "low skill" job of construction is considered very difficult to automate due to the high variability in environments and materials.
This uncertainty means that reluctance to join professions that "may" be automated in the coming years might be interpreted as a result of risk-aversion, and that risk is higher when the job training is longer.
> It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.
> By business I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
Continuing to play the “optimize myself based upon some meta game as see it” is not a viable strategy.
There is no science that says Musk is certainly on the right path to human longevity.
None of the rich are infallibly and unassailably correct; pointing at them as correct is an appeal to authority which is ludicrous when we have plenty of evidence to show politics is corrupted such that elites are “too big to fail.”
I’m not obligated to make choices based upon your view of the problem and your solution is more of the same “boot straps”.
This culture is a joke. Moral relativism it is; if my choices screw any of you, oh well. Free market.
It seems like younger generations view of their parents times are getting rosier and rosier.
I think so. Next will be Gen Alpha (apparently) who will complain about how easy Gen Z had it or maybe they'll blame Millenials.
I'm Gen X and in a small town I was never able to afford a home. And now rent is nuts people are being kicked out for "reno-victions". My parents born in '43 and '44 managed to buy a house but with help a program similar to Habitat for Humanity only a local organization. And then the early 80s inflation hit but they had a locked in mortgage but many people lost their homes.
It's always the same thing history repeats. But now people have so much more opportunities with the Internet they can choose almost any job. Even for me working from home was futuristic fantasy if it was even that. I think the trend to dehumanize and blame previous generations for the current generations' problems is a dangerous trend.
It's been going on since as long as I've been alive. I'm mid-late GenX and I remember the news constantly telling me my generation is lazy. I remember them doing the same thing with GenY, and now GenZ, neither of which was true outside the norms of every generation. Modern news is a blight on society.
This anecdote is presented as the norm, but it’s actually far from it.
“Minimum wage” is the tip off that the journalist went out searching for the most extreme anecdote they could find. For all the talk about minimum wage jobs, only around 1% of jobs actually pay federal minimum wage. That number is falling rapidly as it becomes trivial for anyone to walk into a $15/hr job with benefits almost anywhere except the smallest towns.
Of course it’s not possible for someone earning minimum wage to save up money and buy a house in their 20s. Minimum wage jobs are literally the lowest paying jobs a person could possibly find. Anchoring expectations that no job should exist unless it pays enough to buy a house in your 20s in any city you want is blatantly unrealistic.
I see this stat a lot and it leaves me wondering how many people are within, say, 50 cents or 5%[0] of minimum wage. The percent of workers earning minimum wage doesn't seem that useful (and I guess neither would the figures returned for my request).
In any case I'd find hours required to live alone within ~30 minutes of work a more compelling statistic. It adjusts for CoL and represents a reasonable lifestyle to shoot for.
0: not suggesting these are equivalent figures
* Person A is making minimum wage, but with good benefits, consistent hours, and a reasonable cost to live within walking distance of the job.
* Person B is making minimum wage plus a buck per hour, but is technically not a full-time employee so no benefits at all. Shifts are often changed with little notice, sometimes to hours that are not very transit-friendly, and living within walking distance is utterly off the table for anyone short of a rich techie.
Who's really better off? It's easy for full-time internet commentators to look at simplistic stats and draw simplistic (self serving) conclusions, but your metric is much better and closer to the ones used by people who actually study issues such as poverty.
That is incorrect. There are whole categories of jobs that are exempt from minimum wage, and that doesn't even count gig work.
I'm presuming you're talking about tipped jobs? It seems reasonable to presume that they earn close to minimum wage when factoring in tips, otherwise people would switch to non-exempt jobs.
But we're seeing this in the US, between covid restaurant layoffs and closures; Tipped dining service is struggling to recruit.
Having said that, most tipped employees are doing much, much better…which is why they aren’t clamoring to go wash dishes in the back.
https://www.minimum-wage.org/articles/minimum-wage-exemption...
I kinda gave up on that dream, being priced out. So I quit, either to make a TC which can afford that life (>$200K/yr) or to live the rest of my days in a hedonistic manner. Current plan is to grind leetcode/sys design and apply to high-TC companies over and over until I can afford the life I want, or die trying.
Moving is an option (my partner has restrictions: No states with anti-abortion laws, which removes many inexpensive places), if I go remote. Seems like every other dev has the same idea and that's helping drive prices up everywhere - along with other factors, of course.
Even staying just in the State of Oregon finds places under $200k (perhaps not the most desirable of building types, but certainly above a mobile home). But that may really put you in the "sticks" - south middle of Oregon is some of the most unpopulated land in the USA.
Rent-control may end up trapping you in another way; fear to move because of your current deal. Had a friend stay in a three-bedroom apartment long after he should have moved up to a house for just this reason.
Also, this type of stuff is costly to deal with, in terms of emotional and physical health, and probably even monetary costs:
https://www.thecut.com/2022/04/texas-woman-charged-with-murd...
> She miscarried at a hospital and allegedly confided to hospital staff that she had attempted to induce her own abortion and she was reported to the authorities by hospital administration or staff,”
Here, you have precedent being set that a woman should play it safe and withhold information from their healthcare provider, lest they be put through an ordeal like this.
Of course, just don't expect me to care about your housing costs if that is your reason you choose to stay in a high COL area.
And I'm not sure what precedent that example sets relevant to me because nobody I know would try and induce their own abortion in an anti-abortion state instead of just driving out of state and going to a professional clinic.
That I can remember of: Vercel, Gatsby, Gitlab, and much more.
Move to somewhere cheaper if you can?
Hate to break it to you, but many, many people raise kids and own a home with way less than $135k, even in your area. If you don’t want to attempt it because it’ll be hard, stressful, risky, etc.; maybe that’s worth reflecting on? Sometimes your standards/expectations are what need to change.
And also simultaneously, especially American culture is super judgemental of people whonhave kids and struggle financially in any way. It is big in personal responsibility in relation to having them, paying health care or ensuring school or even supervising etc. I find it unfair that in same environment people end up blamed for having too high standards when they internalize all that and insist on being responsible and financially well off.
On topic: I have the same feeling. I'm trying to get a dev job, that would be a huge jump of income for me. But I'm 34, how much should I grind just to get "entry-level" stuff?
I was pretty unmativated in my job, just coasting by and pretty much doing the bare minimum that allowed me to be in peace with myself. Remote work increased my productivity and my hapiness overall, but it's still insufficient to buy a home, I'm basically a rent slave.
If I get a dev job, it will probably mean 30-40k to me, here in Spain. Maybe 50K if I manage to climb the ladder, given I'm 34.
With that income I can buy a flat (not a house) in my mid-sized spanish city, but that's about it.
Source: https://amp.thecalifornian.com/amp/4625295002
The national percentile doesn’t really matter when your income is not portable, and you can’t just move and take it with you.
As another post said, it’s doable on $135k but it’s not easy in the SF Bay Area.
With remote work, it's a lot more portable than you might think.
I have not too much experience in that sector, but I would say earning 30k-50k is only possible if you live in a city with good communications with the bigger ones, like Alcalá de Henares (near to Madrid, or Manresa (near to Barcelona). In some places with lower COL, like Andalucía, this is really difficult.
Best of luck, whatever you decide.
I think becoming a software engineer is totally possible for you, you are only in your mid-30s. However, I think you need to like the field, at least a bit. Do you enjoy it?
When I see experienced people in videos etc they do everything so much quicker. I know this is normal but it feels that it will take me a lot of time to get there.
I'm currently in a self-paced bootcamp (open-bootcamp) and so far I'm happy. I went with beginner knowledge on Git, CSS, JS and Python, and I improved a lot of my OOP understanding which was very lacking, and their full-stack path touches also Java. I plan to take some compiled languages too, purely out of interest.
They also have projects, although I'm not sure how they structure that, but I hope that takes me up to speed to be productive.
It’s possible but not easy (and harder now), and you have to be patient and careful and a bit lucky.
(Of course this is different if the intention is "buy a place, wait until it rises in value, flip it, and repeat")
That said, you need to want to put down roots, and you need to like where you're putting those down. I love Vancouver, I've been here 20 years, I left for 5, and came back. This is where I want to raise my kids. But this is a highly privileged perspective backed by having a good well-paying job that lets me afford to live here (in a 3-bedroom condo in east van).
Still, travelling the world for 5 years sounds like a fantastic plan to figure out what you want to do in life and scouting out parts of the world that you can imagine living. That could mean finding something more rural, or finding a city more off the beaten path that you identify with that doesn't have international prestige and ridiculous VHCOL.
not everyone has dreams of planting roots
Rent, travel and see the world, and be free!
Counter narrative: Nigerians come to the US and have excellent upward mobility. The ones I know are willing to work hard, defer gratification, and sacrifice for their children.
Simply put, because the alternative is worse. What is your BANTA? Living in destitution? You don't have to go extreme into the "enjoy life now" end either; it's a balance.
Suppose you have a credit card that is not yet at its limit, and you are not accumulating late fees... you can buy a $200 TV in exchange for paying $5/mo in perpetuity, at a 30% APR. Interest rates connect the indefinite future back to the past and in fact they set an equivalent time horizon. So you can phrase the exact problem as asking what cancelling an unused $5/mo Netflix account is really worth to you, and the answer is again $200. The indefinite future of payments is just 1/r, a conversion factor of 40 months in this case.
If you are getting into late fees those can triple interest or so, you might have a time horizon only a year off. Or if you are into payday loans and 400%/year interest, the indefinite future is literally only 3 months away, you cannot rationally “think past tomorrow.” At 30%/year your rational time horizon is a little over 3 years. If you then have debt paid back and a retirement account in an S&P index fund and we call that 10% year on year, your indefinite future is 10 years away.
“People are willing to save and/or hustle for 5-10 years” indeed, 5-10 years is financial eternity for most people!
And I wonder what percentage of Starbucks managers started out as Starbucks wage-slaves.
I believe store managers do tend to come from on the floor staff but there is likely no path from store manager to Starbucks corporate.
Programming is almost uniquely privileged where you end up interacting with higher up corporate positions frequently and you will pretty easily be able to learn their jobs and jump over if you want.
While retail workers don’t see at all what goes on in an office separate to them. They just get instructions dictated down.
Half the issue is that people have been indoctrinated to expect home ownership and long for some golden age seen on TV that never existed.
Home ownership was never universal in the US. It has been within a few percent of 65% since the 1960s[1]. It was always out of reach for the lowest earners, like those that make minimum wage.
Some people whos parents owned houses will inevitably be unable to afford them themselves. Some people whos parents couldn't will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...
Expecting to own the building and land on which you live and from which you contribute to society is a product of indoctrination? That makes sense if you're completely against land-ownership (which is, on the surface, a reasonable idea), but surely accepting the only current alternative (paying rent) is the product of an even more sinister form of indoctrination?
https://dqydj.com/historical-homeownership-rate-united-state...
Let's test that theory. So assuming that person in their 20's doesn't want to move to the Bay Area/Seattle/Austin/NYC they can find a nice house in a metro area within a 20-30 minute drive of plenty of medium-high paying jobs, for around $200k.
So assuming they're smart enough to put 20% down on that house, they need to save around $40k. In your 5-10 year time frame that means they need to save $4-$8k per year.
So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the generation dropping $1,200 on iPhones and having an average of 50 games in their Steam account can probably save like $5k per year if they really try.
Maybe in 2000. I don't think that's true in any major metropolitan area (say over 1 million). Which is also coincidentally where most people live.
But yeah, within the hour and a half commute zone of a metro area, you can find affordable housing.
Nope, again using the Detroit example you have Warren, Oak Park, Southfield etc literally sharing its border and within a 20-30 minute drive of anywhere in downtown Detroit or further out in ritzy Oakland county. Same goes for Arlington, Irving and several other suburbs of Dallas. I'd keep going down the list, but you get the point. Pretty much every major metro areas has housing under $200k with less than a 30-minute drive of downtown or major job centers in suburbs.
I know California is a different world, and that's fine. But the US is quite large with many large cities where you can find good careers and affordable housing. It just may not look as cool to post on Instagram...which I guess is the bigger problem.
> I think this is pretty much the whole story. It’s very hard to be motivated to work when you could save your entire adult life and still struggle be able to afford such “entry level” things as a house or even a new car.
This makes sense if the father were also a receptionist in a similar sized company.
The reason for that is the same and will stay the same, for the entirety of humanity. Land is a finite resource that must be shared with other humans. Money is a public utility that must be shared with other humans. Humans don't like sharing these exclusive types of things.
You have these people complaining that India should "fix poverty" instead of doing a miniscule (by international standards) space program. The solution to homelessness requires existing landowners to give up their land. They don't want to give up their land, so instead, homelessness acts as the pressure relief valve/externality. In fact, homelessness is considered a price worth paying.
The same is true with money. People like having more money than they actually need. The ability to save against the wishes of other people and thereby indebt them is exactly what they want, the resulting unemployment is considered a price worth paying.
1. Women entering the workforce, essentially doubling the labor pool.
2. Immigration - at least a million a year, every year.
3. Globalization - instead of local workforce, many companies can now outsource labor to cheaper countries without regulation.
4. Manufacturing - due to NAFTA, companies who once manufactured in the US can now get much cheaper labor to Mexico. This is related to #3.
5. Automation - The amount of labor needed to perform a task has been greatly reduced.
It’s weird to see these opinions presented as a new phenomenon. Wanting to avoid work and indulge in leisure is a tale as old as time. It’s even a common theme among characters in ancient writings.
What is new is the way people with these feelings can go online and connect with millions of other people who want to talk about these feelings as if they were the real truth about life. How everyone else is wrong if they don’t see it. Many of these forums become de facto “safe spaces” where rules explicitly forbid anything other than supporting and agreeing with these perspectives.
It was easy to dismiss these as fringe movements when it was incels writing unhinged rants blaming women for all of their personal problems, but for some reason the media is trying to treat the “antiwork” style rants as something deeper. Of course, this falls apart when the content and actors are examined in any remotely critical manner, as famously happened when the antiwork moderator gave a disastrous direct TV interview without the carefully crafted veneer of journalistic thinkpieces obscuring the sheer absurdity of the echo chamber they’ve built for themselves.
I grew up just barely before internet access and social media were ubiquitous. There was no shortage of people eschewing work and embracing lives of leisure right out of high school or college. I knew a large number of people who embraced “couch surfing” lifestyles or international vagabonding as their way of life. As far as I can tell, the difference was that by the time they reached mid 20s they were quickly running out of peers who would tell them it was a good idea to embrace such a lifestyle forever. The real world catches up and you notice that your real-world friends who work normal jobs and “settle down” are actually having a good time (on average) while the vagabonding lifestyle gets progressively less glamorous as you get older.
Not so much in the social media era, where a new set of friends and confirmatory feedback is always just a few clicks away on your phone. Want to read posts about how it’s actually someone else’s fault that you’re not successful? No problem, the internet will deliver volumes of such content.
> millennials don't have anywhere near as much share of wealth as Gen X had
I hate to go there, but isn't this because of their unrealistic views on work? I've heard of millennials not turning up for work because they "didn't feel like working" that day. Anecdotal, sure, but I've heard too many of these stories from too many different people for it to be co-incidence. You don't want to work, well okay that's your prerogative, but how can you then complain about getting fired?
Yes. That's why the quoted factoid talks about "at this stage in their life". If you look back at boomers and genx, they had 4 and 2 times as much wealth as millennials do when they were the same age.
> I've heard of millennials not turning up for work because they "didn't feel like working" that day.
Why would that matter? Even if that happens sometimes it's not like it changes things on a generational level if the lowest earners get fired slightly more often.
I missed and am continuing to completely miss this. Do you mean in the article? If true, would that align with the difference in population size (distribution of a finite amount of wealth to more people)? It would be interesting if so, because it could mean that we're in for even more interesting times when the population shrinks in 50 years.
> Why would that matter? Even if that happens sometimes it's not like it changes things on a generational level if the lowest earners get fired slightly more often.
True, but do they? I'm not saying they don't, but haven't seen anything to indicate they do. I've seen people get away with things that would have gotten me fired at their age, so am inclined to believe people are not getting fired more often.
As the comment above you stated, the lower decile/quintile performers getting fired (or lower salaries) because of their laziness, does not explain this, because most of the wealth is accumulated by the average and higher earners anyway.
If you want to talk about reasoning though, I actually did give a reason this could be the case (if indeed it really is), by suggesting it could be related to the difference in population size between when the baby boomers were around, and now.
> Many previous reports have found that millennials are, on average, worse off financially than their parents and grandparents were at the same age, despite being better educated.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/09/millennials-own-less-tha...
EDIT: Probably this:
https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-highest-earning-...
You're quite confused. First boomers and millennials are approximately equal in size, adjusting the boomers for back when they were the same age as the millennials. GenX is smaller.
Secondly, you seem to think I'm using averages. I'm not. The boomer generation had 4x as much wealth distributed over a similar size generation when they were as old as millennials. The GenX generation had twice as much wealth distributed over a population that was smaller.
> so am inclined to believe people are not getting fired more often.
If people aren't getting fired more often, what difference does your discussion about people calling in sick matter?
Any links to show this?
It feels like now is the golden age to enter employment, at least in technical fields. Starting salaries and total comp are through the roof, so anyone having graduated recently can jump start their earnings in their 20s at a very high level.
Adjusted for inflation, I've hired new graduates at salaries 3x what my starting salary was (again, adjusted for inflation). Back a few decades ago tech was just another professional job, salaries were ok but nothing like the incredible numbers of today.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/09/millennials-own-less-tha...
No, no confusion. You need income to start building wealth (unless you just inherit it).
More specifically, you need enough income over and above the necessities of life, so you can start saving and investing all the extra, in order to build wealth. Time is your friend in investing, so the earlier you can get started the more wealth will grow.
If one can start with an extremely high salary out of school in your early 20s, that gives the opportunity to save a lot and invest it early in life, apply some F.I.R.E. and suddenly the idea of being able to retire before 40 is realistic.
I don't know. Older people have a lot of vague, thinly supported stereotypes about the young, and they always have.
Actually, we all have stereotypes about each other. Millennials and Gen Z think Boomers were the generation that had everything handed to them: affordable college, affordable housing, secure low-skill high-pay union jobs, etc. And now they have the gall to judge younger generations for complaining about their challenges living in a much more competitive and unequal world.
I don't know if anyone's right about anyone else here.
maybe it has to do with the fact that most people inherit when they're old?
Though the related question about inheritance could extend to increased lifespans, retirement, and higher healthcare costs. Where life expectancy has increased 33% in the last 100 years. In part due to better healthcare treatments.
(Though, student loan debt, stagnated wage growth, and other exceeding wage growth factors are more likely l
> As far as I can tell, the difference was that by the time they reached mid 20s they were quickly running out of peers who would tell them it was a good idea to embrace such a lifestyle forever. The real world catches up and you notice that your real-world friends who work normal jobs and “settle down” are actually having a good time (on average) while the vagabonding lifestyle gets progressively less glamorous as you get older.
ARE the people working normal jobs and settling down having a good time?
Interestingly, my sister and I, who now live together, took very different paths in our 20s and therefore ended up with different social circles. I was more of the studious, behave, responsible sort and so most of my friends/network is as well. My sister was a party girl (lots of raves, drugs, etc. - very much the vagabonding type of lifestyle).
Now we're in our 30s and while my friends might have slightly nicer apartments, their situations aren't that different.
My proper middle-class friends can't afford houses, can't afford kids (or they have to give up their career/take a huge standard of living cut), can't afford healthcare, are buried under student loans, and can't save enough for retirement.
My sister's vagabonding friends can't afford houses, can't afford kids, can't afford healthcare, and can't save for retirement, but at least they got to have some fun.
I'd say that the reward for behaving is much less than it used to be.
we have almost 3 years of deferment now for student loan debt, if they have not been able to improve their situations in that time this speaks more to financial ignorance than it does not being able to afford things.
I wonder how many of your friends know what a 50/30/20 budget is? Do they actually track all of their expenses properly, etc.
Also of note is that I have a professional graduate degree, as do many of my colleagues, which tends to have higher student debt.
While we've had three years of deferments and that's been awesome for people like me (and presumably you) who've been comfortably employed the whole time, a lot of people were also impacted financially by the pandemic so it ended up being a wash. Think of increased childcare costs as schools randomly closed, people who work in academia/local government being furloughed, etc.
I will say that those who have done the best financially have been those who left the US.
I'd also say a lot of the problem is housing. Planning can only get you so far when rent goes up every year more than your wages do.
Also this doesn't address the point that my sister's friends, who are just as irresponsible, are better off.
I worked my ass off in the last decade to improve my situation, with the help of my family.
>>(and presumably you)
Nope, self educated, The only debt I have is my mortgage for which I about 50%+ positive equity, and have an aggressive pay-down rate that will see it paid in full in a few years from now to bring myself back to a debt free status
I do feel for people that were sold the bill of goods that is debt funded education, personally I think the way to fund education is for people to enter the workforce and have employers fund the education of the employee's.
Debt, nor government financed, is the correct way.
I also do not support Student loan forgiveness, However I do support cancelling all interest on federally owned student loans. The principle however should be paid back.
>>I will say that those who have done the best financially have been those who left the US.
that seems very subjective, but the studies I have seen do not support that. The data indicates that lots of people in the US have improved financially. Most of the Pandemic relief payments to individuals when to pay down debt, or still sits in saving accounts.
You could say that regionally, "Blue" coastal states seem to have been hit harder due to their draconian reaction to the pandemic. Nationally however I dont believe that statements bears true in the data
>Planning can only get you so far when rent goes up every year more than your wages do.
I agree there, Social stigma against multi-generational housing is a big contributor. Same with child raising. Family support structures is traditionally how families moved from one economic class to another. We have more than a generation now of destruction of the traditional family...
It's common nowadays to blame it on say increase house prices, and while these are indeed very valid complaints, one shouldn't forget that these increased prices are offset by decreases in other areas. A century back, housing may have been cheap, but it was entirely normal for most of your income to be spent on food, spending whatever you could save on other necessities such as clothing. That did not stop people from working hard.
It sounds like the author is just projecting their own values onto the upcoming generation, viz "Gen Z cares about X" when really the author just cherry picks stuff that reaffirms his/her values
I refuse to buy into any of this "Gen Z thinks X" or "Millennials think X" BS. The armchair sociologists should go out and actually contribute something worthwhile to society as opposed to shitting out newspaper articles like this
At first, I thought this paragraph was a direct quote, as it definitely shows the author willing to make fairly strong claims on her own account. I feel the norm here is for the author to be neutral and use quotes and data to express the point.
I think if we're bullshitting ourselves about (all) news media we can say it's neutral. But really it's just a bunch of assumptions. The appeal of news articles is like a reverse Occam's Razor: the more assumptions the better
But at least the author is a little honest and says "according to common narratives" aka "I'm bullshitting"
Such as? We expect them to get buy on little money, no insurance in a lot of cases while they have to deal with the rude public, random scheduling changes, and being treated like trash by their managers.
I find it particularly annoying because it's also an example of prejudicial ingroup/outgroup formation based on demagoguery. I'd go as far as saying it shares some of the same elements of racism-based demagoguery, but the targets are vague enough that it doesn't cause the same extreme social problems that racism does.
… and our article author thinks what, that Gen Z invented this? That generations before Gen Z "dream of labor"? Dreaming of labor is called a nightmare. I work to make ends meet.
I don't know... I think it's possible to think about work not as a zero-sum game but as an opportunity to grow and promote growth. But at the same time this is kind of a white collar mindset... it's hard to sell people on growth when the work is more demeaning
Sure, here on HN, the average person is a programmer or sysadmin, and there you very much can have growth. Learning new languages and technologies, getting to work with high end equipment, etc.
But exactly what growth can an Amazon warehouse worker expect? Your job is to take things and put them in a box. There's no advanced techniques, no special knowledge, no skill to be obtained besides learning to perform the same movements better than you did your first week, and which are useful nowhere else.
There was another article on here the other day about how half of Gen Z wants to start their own business and I think that's more accurate. Or at least give that a shot before giving in to working for someone else all their life. It just seems archaic now to give half of your waking life to a company.
Most of us would gladly give even more time just to start something that we get all of the profits from and therefore have more control over the whole of our lives. And I'm not talking about starting a billion dollar tech company, just something to pay the bills and save a little.
the reality is that not everyone of them will end up rich, beautiful and famous... in fact only a tiny tiny minority will
Given the stories I've heard, and things I've myself seen, I'm not convinced it is true — not for _most_ millennials. I do hope I'm wrong though.
(I think the main difference between now and 1999 is that simply working a job you hate no longer guarantees you the ability to buy the stuff you don’t need.)
One lense that I don’t see put for often is: it’s not that GenZ is particularly poorly situated, it’s that the American Boomers, specifically, we’re the luckiest demographic cohort in world history, luckier than those who came before or after. Folks born in the 1850s might have technically been able to buy “a house” but it would not be a house that a modern person would find acceptable — plumbing, electricity, climate control, insulation, weatherproofing, fire safety, appliances and amenities, would all be abysmal by our standards. (The foundations of such houses were usually just a few big rocks.) In theory, a modern young person could build a house conforming to 1900 “average house” standards for cheap, but nobody wants such a house, and nobody builds them, and it is likely that such a house would be in violation of code. The richest person in 1900 couldn’t buy a house as good as the median US house.
So we’re in a place that our ancestors would view as a hypertech Jetsons future, except we got out over our skis for weird demographic and economic reasons and it’s currently very expensive to buy the latest hypertech magic house, and impossible to buy (what that ancestor or would call) a “normal” house.
This perspective — comparing more to any generation other than the Boomers provides a more realistic perspective.
While the location is the same in a geographic sense as in 1900, a google maps view of that era would show them being in a small town compared to a city with incredible amenities these days.
The amenity is simply walkability. If the same mix of businesses that are spread across many square miles of ordinary suburbia were structured in the form of an old-style main street, that would be just as much of a huge cultural and infrastructure amenity.
The way to feel better about this is to also be one of the shareholders.
I left Amazon after a 10+ year career.
I was encouraged to hire foreign nationals from specific countries, because their visa situation makes it harder for them to leave Amazon without having to leave the country.
When my own people were being let go for no reason at all, I was told not to interfere. I was directly mentored on disconnecting myself from individuals in my organization, because it would help me do what’s “right for Amazon”.
I sat in an off site with various leaders from the broader company. American workers just won’t work as hard, I was told. We need to expand our engineering pool to other markets, to cut costs and because those people have a lower standard of living and will work harder. I am quoting multiple Amazon L10s.
Those 10 years, I was miserable. I cut off from my family. My friends eventually stopped calling. I became more and more isolated. I put on excess body weight. My mental health suffered.
To be clear, I’m immensely privileged and left Amazon with a boatload of money and assets. In retrospect, I was part of a machine that exploited people. That’s where my money came from.
Gen Z needs to realize that being smart about this and simply “dreaming” isn’t enough. My former Amazon bosses are ready to replace Americans with workers on the global market. They have no empathy, and they openly view it as a weakness. It is LITERALLY a rat race.
In that situation it's not worth joining since within a year you'll probably need to start interviewing again.
>> have no empathy, and they openly view it as a weakness.
You should hire a 3rd world troll farm to stalk these people everywhere they go urging them to kill themselves.
Only way to repent for your sins.
Edit:
>> On the issue of empathy, I think this quote from Captain G. M. Gilbert at the Nuremberg trials sums it up;
"In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” <<
So yes, the world is likely better off with them dead :)
Generally speaking, most people would prefer not to work if they could get away with it. Especially young people. Careerism among young people has always been an anomaly; it's always been common for younger people to have the dream of being an artist or a famous-for-being-famous celebrity or some sort of woodland hermit spending their days frolicking in a leafy glade. Some of them succeed, but most of them eventually give up and get a job and/or a career eventually when they get tired of sleeping on other people's couches and never having any money.
The whole 'Generation' thing honestly seems a little arbitrary to me. I get that there are broad cohorts of people who are similarly affected by large societal trends and have something in common, but 90% of writing I see about generations and their attitudes or opinions is really just "young people be like this and old people be like that" filtered through an absolute blindness to anything that happened more than half a decade ago.
I think I was raised in the time and place where working just doesn't ever get the luxuries of life. For example, working as a plumber and can afford 2 1/2 kids, a house and a car, that is always impossible. At least in my country. I think America is an anomaly for that such of things to happen. I kept wondering whether that was because America itself is outsourcing their inequalities to outside world, because they won the war.
So to me, today's situation is just a reversion to the norm. Being a mere plumber with 2 1/2 kids in college and with a house and a car is never realistic to begin with. This type of situation was just a good times event, and only happen due to some abnormalities. But it is abnormality.
I mean, the history of the world has shown that feudalism is the default choice. People can never be equal. People aren't born equal. Some people are born stronger, faster, smarter, more beautiful, etc. Equality seems to be just abnormalities. An unstable form. The stable form is feudalism.
The post war capitalist system they enjoyed was a temporary anomaly. It isn't compatible with modern life, yet the system is still there. We need to end this gerontocracy and oligarchy.
The software engineering industry is a miniature example of what the boomers had. I am a software engineer, but I have the self awareness to know it's temporary and lucky. So many on HN don't.
I am currently reading this, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...
It is interesting to see that even inequality is the default outcome, the natural order of things, even when we start from equality. It seem the law of physics and the law of this world converges toward inequality.
The only way to fight against inequality aggressively is to do the unnatural things, that is, to redistribute wealth aggressively. I'm not saying that doing unnatural things are bad since humans have been doing unnatural things to ease living, but I wonder what would be the side effect or unintended consequences of aggressive wealth redistribution.
The natural order of things? Is this some kind of joke? Since when are humans golems? A truly natural economic order looks like this: https://www.naturalmoney.org/NaturalEconomicOrder.pdf
>It seem the law of physics and the law of this world converges toward inequality.
No, you are mistaken again, the money and land system converge toward inequality. After all, time does not stand still, humans are faced with a perpetual increase in entropy, but the banker and the saver, with their eternal money and claims to land, do not have to fear the laws of physics, instead, they get to use the laws of physics as weapons, to extract "concessions" from the people around them. The people that do not have money or land end up subsidizing those who do.
>The only way to fight against inequality aggressively is to do the unnatural things, that is, to redistribute wealth aggressively.
That honestly is completely irrelevant. This wealth redistribution nonsense is just another bandaid to subsidize the rich. When I said subsidy I mean it. Negative interest rates make the whole argument about wealth redistribution completely irrelevant. The moment people have to be responsible for the costs that their capital incurs nobody is going to envy them for their wealth. It's only because those costs have been forbidden by law/decree and secretly passed onto the rest of society that we even want to be wealthy ourselves.
Think about how much maintenance a single family home requires. In an economy with no growth, capital depreciation is just a pure loss. If you have idle capacity, you will have to pay to keep the factory well maintained. No, a negative interest rate isn't some kind of financial repression or wealth redistribution scheme. Your house isn't trying to steal your wealth by depreciating. It's recognizing the fact that almost nothing on this planet lasts forever. If physical capital depreciates, then money must represent that depreciation. If it does not, then either abundant capital must be destroyed or the economy must be forced to grow.
Imagine you have a banana. It will spoil within a week or two. Now imagine having a banana coupon that does not spoil. If the super market orders bananas and can't sell them, it will have to take the loss, effectively subsidizing the holder of the banana coupon by letting him avoid the spoilage of bananas. The actual banana is not exploitative, the banana coupon is exploitative. This is because the holder of the banana coupon has no obligation to tell the super market when he is going to buy the banana, so the supermarket must keep guessing when he is going to buy a banana. This is the root of speculation.
Have you ever wondered why permanent inflation is the norm? It's precisely because money must spoil at the rate labor spoils. Capital depreciation is represented by a permanent decline of the unit of account aka inflation.
Welfare in the form of unemployment benefits is quite frankly a direct subsidy to the owners of money. It's so painfully obvious. Our society has an incredibly high degree of the division of labor. You cannot just farm your own food, you must buy it from specialized "dealers" aka supermarkets. To buy food you need to get money from someone else first. During a depression, there is capital abundance, meaning the owners of capital would have to pay for capital depreciation, as I said, they prefer removing or preventing abundant capital which means firing people. This means you cannot get money through employment, forcing you to go into debt. Borrowing would raise the interest rate above 0% again. However, since 2008 banks refuse to lend money to risky borrowers. This means that direct borrowing isn't possible. Instead, the government must borrow on behalf of all those people that were fired. That borrowing then forcibly raises the interest rate back to 0% or higher again. If you were offered a -3% interest rate due to capital depreciation and the government were to step in and give you a 0% interest rate, what else could this be other than a subsidy? Of course, since money cannot represent capital depreciation, we are forced to play this stupid game no matter what.
Oh they definitely have the opportunity (speaking as a Millenial). If you're in the US, payed attention in school, are median IQ, and worked a bit at programming, you have your choice of $120-200k remote software jobs all over the US where the median home is $400k.
The problem with capitalism, is that it didn't get rid of feudalism entirely, it merely turned everyone into a little feudal lord, small enough that we don't hurt each other. Wealth inequality throws a wrench into that so capitalism is guaranteed to break down eventually just like Feudalism.
The step after capitalism would be Freiwirtschaft (land value tax and demurrage currency) and we are not that far away from it. Interest rates are already at 0% as predicted, we just need people to stop saving with cash. Baden Württemberg is adopting a land value tax in Germany. it's just a matter of time until this brutal chapter of humanity is over.
I think my definition of feudalism is somewhat loose. But what I mean generally is that a few people become owners and the rest employees.
For example, tech companies that have controls over people's lives. Upperclass people having maids, drivers, cooks.
Why can't people save cash?
I don't for a moment deny that kids entering the workforce today are entering an environment that's challenging in many ways, but this particular claim is inaccurate. Let's take a look at the list of US recessions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
We're not in a recession now (though that could change very soon). The most recent recessions are 2020 (COVID) and 2007-2009. Just over ten years in between. Turns out that's the longest recession-free interval in the nation's history. Back to back, my ass. I graduated from high school just before the 1981-82 recession, but I was fully in the workforce for the next four - every six to ten years. By the author's reasoning, that would mean I had it far harder than today's kids.
Recessions are not the problem. (They're a problem, but not relevant to OP.) The problem is wage inequality, and stagnation of wages for the lower echelons even during good times. Today's kids are not facing economic uncertainty because of a few events, but because of a continual downward slide in the value of low-end wages vs. low-end expenses over decades.
Who TF “dreams” of being some billionare’s “labor”?
Folks “labor” out of a lack of choice; so they might survive in this world. They labor for the chance to dream.
Those people, perhaps without realizing it, often enjoy 'being some billionare’s labor'.
And even those with the coveted skills - they'd probably rather work for themselves than someone else. But either they don't have the business skills, or the financial means.
That said, sure, speaking in absolutes is absolutely wrong. ;)
Because it promised a good life for their family; and they'd end up having pride in the work they did.
Is this a dream of labor? IMO, no. The work was the vehicle to their dreams, not the dream itself. Perhaps this is too fine a delineation, but that's my view of it.
Of course, such a job - a job an uneducated man or woman can be the "breadwinner" for their family with - barely exists today. My own father made $40 an hour as a lineman for Mountain Bell (plus a pension), back in the 80's. That exact same job today pays minimum wage, with no retirement benefits.
> Presented by UPWORK
Reminds me of this essay by Paul Graham:
A lot of jobs will hire hourly and cap the worker at 34-39 hours as well to avoid providing benefits.
The only thing they need is a new style of music to go with it.
Gen Z 'counterculture' doesn't have a music genre because it doesn't need one. it's not pushing back or claiming anything, it's just nihilism with memes.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968%E2%80%931969_Japanese_uni...
The slight perspective change needed is not a rejection of success, but a rejection of the conventional notion of success.
https://www.businessinsider.com/learn-excel-tiktok-miss-exce...
We did it guys!
My suggestion to anyone who does not dream of labor: if you don't want nice things, that is fine. Nobody is stopping you from living in a low cost of living area that may or may not have its issues.
But if you desire things in life, there should not be a mechanism that magically redistributes these things to you, or makes them available to you at a "fair" price.
No, the only "fair" thing is that you work for the money needed to purchase what you want, and you have the freedom to choose both what you do for work and what you want.
Heading out to Eden, hey brother
Gonna live like a king off whatever I find
Gonna eat all the fruit and throw away the rind"
- Star Trek, "The Way to Eden"
Every generation thinks they invented sex and every generation thinks they invented utopias. They'll outgrow it.
1. We are too restrictive on immigration
2. Politicians keep pushing to hand out freebies for votes. Stealing the gift of purpose and motivation from many. Forcing them to be state dependents who live troubled, meaningless lower middle class lives in perpetuity.
Let's look at a typical scenario. You graduate from university with 100k in student loans. Let's say you get a fairly decently paid entry-level job paying 75k. Great, you might be able to pay down those loans in 10 years, if not more. And when you're finally ready to buy a house, the ones that haven't been converted to rentals are all costing 8 or 10 times your annual salary. So you're asking someone at 21 to hope that everything works out and they might get the American Dream in their late 30s. Assuming there's no intervening major crises.
Sure, there might be ways to slightly goose things, but they turn into terrible-quality-of-life stuff like "work 3 jobs", "live on rice and beans forever", or "constantly job-hop to seek out a higher salary." If these are your alternatives, maybe it doesn't seem so absurd to embrace stagnation.
I'm in my early 40s. I did everything "right" -- I got a full-ride to university, studied CS, and acquired 15 years experience. I work for a mid-sized fintech firm and draw just over 100k. It's full remote since long before Covid, I generally work about 40-42 hours a week, and the technology is both interesting and feels actually important. I still don't feel like buying a new house is affordable on my budget. (Here's where you say "I should have been job-hopping every two years and making 400k at a FAANG by now/chasing an exit at some kale-as-a-service startup").
My parents were able to buy a house in 1988 for about 4x their annual salary, where the "salary" came from a modest skilled-trade worker. If I were to buy a comparable house in the same basic middle-class suburb, I'm looking at 6x my salary. I'm lucky in that I can live with them, pay down their mortgage, and be able to live reasonably well. But I sure as hell don't feel light years better off than my parents were at 40.
A 100k balance at graduation is definitely not "typical". The average right now is $31k.
On the one hand, I'm tempted to say; life's hard, it's always been hard, and you're only feeling vindicated now because the Internet makes it easy to connect with other people who share or support your views — so grow up.
On the other hand, I'm down with the sentiment 100%. Live to live. I get that, and I support it. Why work towards a career if the structure that supports that career has only been put there because it benefits people who are already at the top? Drop out and live your life on your own terms.
I guess the middle ground would be: Be ambitious, have goals, have aspirations, but only when they support your happiness and the happiness of those around you. In other words; live life on your own terms, but make those terms less shallow. I think this is different to just living for yourself, for one important reason; it is more likely to benefit society, and therefore _you_ in the long run.
Shit article.
Let's say that model does work, I'm going to guess it won't be that beneficial to most. The majority will probably sell at any opportunity they get, and a small percentage will continue to hold as the company becomes more valuable.
the effect you get by offering ownership is that existing personell will be more motivated to work harder and stay at your company for longer (so that the shares can vest)
this still won't solve the problems described in the article however
because home prices have boosted drastically, even rents are up, and with renting you throw cash away you could otherwise save towards buying a home
thus, a generation who expects and plans to live in cars
at least those not born with a silver spoon in their mouth or who otherwise can get high paying jobs. which describes the vast majority of American youth
Everyone is getting hired on as a contractor and getting shitty health insurance and getting treated like dirt.
Everything is too expensive. College enrollment is dropping down the toilet in a time we cannot hire enough public defenders to run our courts. Hospitals are closing due to lack of doctors.
Health costs will bankrupt you. Rent is INSANE. .2% of the US population is homeless.
Meanwhile the conservatives are whipped into a frenzy over the same "cancel culture" BS the party has been propagandizing for decades.
The 1% are killing the earth and stealing everything you produce and laughing while you bleed in the streets. But yeah, lets obsess over a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the populations sexual preferences.
The oligarch class of this country would rather let the whole thing burn than compromise ANY of their privilege.
Cynical, jaded and ironic like Gen Y and X but I’ve grown up on/in the internet and the accelerated mass culture in which we live.
Honestly in high school I felt like an oddball but I think I’d be normal if not cool as a zoomer since I was there at the beginning of most of the memes.
We also developed a cultural immune system to a lot of the bad shit of the internet, like “don’t feed the trolls” and now seeing the rest of the world learn this immune system badly and slowly makes us say ‘oh no’.
I definitely have my 'oh no' moments. It does make me wonder what our social responsibility is here. As kids on the internet, most of our adults could be forgiven for not knowing what was going on, since they didn't understand the internet. We can see the trainwrecks coming, at least. Should we do something?
There are comments here questioning has anybody ever dream of labor? LoL.
I wish I could recall where I saw it.
I'm also curious to see if companies run by Gen Z pay better or worse than Boomer run companies. If they're not I don't see how the situation will change for the next generations.
https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
but the prices of houses have shot up massively. So, not sure why you are so certain that wages rising would lead to significant inflation in housing prices.
If you hypothetically doubled everyone’s pay you think that wouldn’t lead to significant inflation in housing prices?
In any case real household income is up:
No it doesn't, continue reading.
Your own first data series suggests there's over ~15,000 Billion USD of personal disposable monthly income. Per capita, that would be something like 45,300 USD disposable monthly income.
I suppose this takes into the account all of the millionaires' and billionaires' capital gains, illustrating how little of the overall income is garnered by the US working class. And even in the stats I quoted, you can see the unequal distribution: The high-wage-earners' wages didn't stagnate, they increased; but low-wage earners earn less.
Anyway, the reason extra pay does not immediately translate to inflation is that price levels are the result of a combination of factors, including power relations of different social forces, and the distribution of income in society. If all wages were to double tomorrow, I suppose there would be some inflation in various sectors of the economy, but not uniformly, nor by anywhere near a factor of two.
Less to gain => less invested.
side hustles are better than jobs. Unless you work for google, jobs have low pay and too many restrictions and requiremnets. crypto, amazon, shopify mean more opportunities and control.
Many employers (not the tech industry) enjoyed a weak labor market for roughly 2 decades. And each time when things began to heat up a recession would come by and cool things down - flooding the market with newly unemployed qualified candidates.
This sustained discrepancy caused many employers "people management" skills to atrophy. Treating employees badly was OK because 1) Where else are they going to go? 2) Even if they quit you can just hire someone else who is likely just as qualified. Because of this, anti-social behavior among management never seemed to impact the bottom line, so it became embedded into the culture of these businesses - "That's how we've always done things here!"
Things changed sharply in 2020. You had the pressure of Baby Boomers retiring. And unlike other generations, many Boomers actually saved for retirement; employers did not have the power to retain them. Second, COVID pulled a ton of people out of the workforce for several reasons: needing to provide childcare, death, "long COVID", etc all pulled people permanently or semi-permanently out of the labor pool. At the same time, consumer spending shifted placing additional demand on many industries that were now shorthanded (and short-supplied).
The problem is many of these companies do not have the ability to attract and retain employees. On your local news you might've heard a sob story of a local employer having to cut hours or close-up shop because they "can't find anyone wiling to work" - but if you dig a little deeper you'll find they have a reputation in the community for being a bad employer. People do want to work - just not for them. And because there's no longer a cushion of qualified labor that has to settle for their anti-social work environment, they can't hire anyone to operate their business due to their poor reputation among the local workforce.
If you're young, your first step into the labor market is likely going to be one where you're asked to pull double-duty by an organization that, again, has a poor reputation. Their first experience in the workforce isn't at some friendly company, but rather a hostile employer who drove experienced labor away, forcing them to "settle" for someone with no work history. Thus giving these young workers probably the worst (modern) experience possible of what it means to be in the workforce. Thus the aggressive job-hopping - it's not a candidate problem it's a company problem.
So how does this get fixed? Well, if the labor market stays hot long enough, many of the anti-social companies will just get out-competed by ones able to attract and retain skilled labor. In this situation the rising tide will NOT being lifting all boats.
Not so much.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/03221...
Many other sources cite similar numbers, or even worse. $200K is not enough to retire on. In fact, I've read that Boomers staying in the workforce out of necessity is a factor making things worse for those entering the job market. I'm pretty sure having to support Boomer parents isn't going to help later generations either.
Fortunately, I think this part of your argument is not essential. You make a lot of other great points that are unaffected by whether this part works.
So they’re not “rebelling against work” and the article as a whole is just so reductionist. What most are doing is questioning 1) what we find acceptable in a work environment and 2) what we find acceptable to pay people for a day of their labor.
If you’re Gen Z, unlike middle to older millennials, chances are you weren’t raised with the “bootstraps” narrative quite as baked into things because their parents weren’t all able to pay for college with summer jobs or a house with an entry level job. They also are part of the first generation that is questioning if college is worth it. Left and right, up and down, all they see are closing doors and lack of financial mobility.
So what’s the logical response to seeing a system that doesn’t seem like they can work within it? A call for change. “No, I won’t work for $7.25. No, I don’t want six figure debt to get a degree and maybe have a job. No, I can’t do what I love for pay because no one respects it since it isn’t STEM.”
The list goes on.
I am a middle millennial, but I think because of my upbringing (not in the USA), I am still fine with the bootstraps narrative, but at the same time also acknowledge that I cannot get a house with an entry level job (I have some other comments in this same thread that reflect this thinking), therefore I do need to study and get a better paying job. I am actually confused on how people were able to get a house with an entry level job at all.
My story is I came from outside of USA, got a green card, worked low paying jobs such as deli, laundry, dry clean, sushi, coffee, and then save money and got into a programming bootcamp, and then worked part time as SWE, then went to get a CS degree at a local public college. Currently I don't have any debt and earn L4 FAANG level salary. I always wondered that my fellow friends graduated from expensive Ivy Leagues, still have student debt and still not making more than me. I don't question the necessity of education but I do question the worth of expensive educations that my friends went through. I didn't go to montessori schools like them or was raised with privileges, but in the end (as of today) I still stand to them as equal (if not more) socio-economically, and I came from a 3rd world country.
So, my natural response to the Gen Zs would be like, "Yes I agree, don't work for $7.25. But why go to expensive college and get 6 figure debts, why not go to a trade school? Doing what you love is nice, but market forces still exist, and no amount of regulations can change that. People buy what they need first. We can't force people to spend money on art yet, when they need engineering first"
What do you think?
Simply put? They were given a false bill of goods. We were all told that if we went to college, it would all sort itself out. Then the recession happened and all hell broke loose lol.
(Half) jokes aside, the answer is a lot more complicated and I want to address more of your response, but I am not at my computer and trying to keep track of it while writing on mobile is going to make me want to give up, so I’m going to take a look at this when I’m at my computer tonight or tomorrow for sure and get back to you. Promise!
>if they have their criteria on what is acceptable pay, won't the natural course of things is to quit on the unacceptable job and just find a better paying jobs, which means business as usual...I was under the impression that the article seem to imply that Gen Z don't have the capability of choosing good jobs because of lack of good job market or marketable skills etc,
I'd argue that it isn't business as usual because Gen Z is leveraging this once-in-a-few-decades opportunity where employees have some power into "what can you do for me?" discussions with companies and it's working [1]. Gone are the days of "company loyalty," partially because without pensions there's no incentive to put anything on the line for company. At the end of the day, they're remembering the core reason why people work in the first place: To get paid. I don't produce video content for a company "for the team" or "because I love the culture," I do it because they pay me, and it just so happens I also respect the company and want to see it grow. But that second consideration will never - and should never - outweigh #1. Gen Z seems to be internalizing this lesson very well.
>I am actually confused on how people were able to get a house with an entry level job at all.
It's simple: they don't. That era ended decades ago in the US. As for your bit about bootstraps, Americans' belief in that took a nasty plunge during The Great Recession and has been under sharp scrutiny for the better part of a decade [2]. The rise of student loan debt is also a huge factor here, as more and more millennials are putting off the next stage of their lives, such as homeownership/marriage/kids/etc., to try and tackle their high five-figure and six-figure debt.
Want to know one of the biggest examples of this? Medicine. Some figures [3]
* [US] The average medical school debt is $215,900, excluding premedical undergraduate and other educational debt.
* The average medical school graduate owes $241,600 in total student loan debt.
* 76-89% of medical school graduates have educational debt.
* 43% of indebted medical school graduates have premedical educational debt.
* The average medical school graduate owes 6 times as much as the average college graduate.
* 55% of medical school students use loans specifically to help pay for medical school (as opposed to undergraduate or premed debt).
* Adjusted for inflation, average medical school debt is over 4x what it was in 1978. Almost double what it was in 1998.
Now sure, you can go "well they'll be doctors so they'll pay it off quickly." But you know who suffers here? Small, rural communities, and generally any area that has a small medical footprint [4]. I digress, but these issues have very far-reaching implications and impacts. People who owe $250,000 USD do not want to go work in a small community where they'll make pennies compared to elsewhere. The interest alone is crushing.
>Currently I don't have any debt and earn L4 FAANG level salary.
Congratulations, I sincerely mean that. Many millennials didn't clue in to the opportunities in coding until it was too late. Now yes, you can always do coding bootcamps or teach yourself, but not everyone can easily switch over to a job like that, and frankly in the 2010's that's where a lot of the opportunity to "pull yourself up" lay. People who are working for pennies often barely have the energy to cook for themselves, let alone teach themselves how to code.
>So, my natural response to the Gen Zs would be like, "Yes I agree, don't work for $7.25. But why go to expensive college and get 6 figure debts, why not go to a trade school? Doing what you love is nice, but market forces still exist, and no amount of regulations can change that. People buy what they need first. We can't force people to spend money on art yet, when they need engineering first"
You're right, and that's exactly what Gen Z is asking/saying! They are going, "Wow you millennials got rocked and the same way is paved for us. Screw that." Though I do have a pretty huge caveat about "forcing people to spend money on art," but that's a whole other discussion. Suffice to say arts and humanities deserve the same investment we give STEM. It's not about forcing people to pay for it, it's about supporting them and creating opportunity for art and culture. I don't see why that isn't a worthwhile investment.
[1] https://time.com/6143212/us-wage-growth-record-high/
[2] https://money.howstuffworks.com/bootstrap-myth-climbing-econ...
[3] https://educationdata.org/average-medical-school-debt
[4] https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/dealing-shortage-rural...
> I'd argue that it isn't business as usual because Gen Z is leveraging this once-in-a-few-decades opportunity where employees have some power into "what can you do for me?" discussions with companies and it's working [1]. Gone are the days of "company loyalty," partially because without pensions there's no incentive to put anything on the line for company. At the end of the day, they're remembering the core reason why people work in the first place: To get paid. I don't produce video content for a company "for the team" or "because I love the culture," I do it because they pay me, and it just so happens I also respect the company and want to see it grow. But that second consideration will never - and should never - outweigh #1. Gen Z seems to be internalizing this lesson very well.
Ahh I see, that makes sense. Yes the environment today is once in a lifetime opportunity. I wonder though whether this kind of environment will stay. I.e as a software engineer, yes we can say more and more that it is all mostly money, not work culture or for the team. But for Gen-Z ers that work in low paying warehouse jobs, they won't be as fortunate.
> It's simple: they don't. That era ended decades ago in the US. As for your bit about bootstraps, Americans' belief in that took a nasty plunge during The Great Recession and has been under sharp scrutiny for the better part of a decade [2]. The rise of student loan debt is also a huge factor here, as more and more millennials are putting off the next stage of their lives, such as homeownership/marriage/kids/etc., to try and tackle their high five-figure and six-figure debt.
Yeah, I figured such. I guess this is the reality of today's world, not just in the US but also (and way worse) in other countries. However, I still believe that IT jobs (software engineering, IT related work) and to a lesser extent, a craft-based work like woodworking, plumbing, is still the ticket from poverty to at least middle class. The cost for this trade-based schools are lesser than college. In some sense, we still have a bit leftover of the pull yourself up from the bootstrap.
> Congratulations, I sincerely mean that. Many millennials didn't clue in to the opportunities in coding until it was too late. Now yes, you can always do coding bootcamps or teach yourself, but not everyone can easily switch over to a job like that, and frankly in the 2010's that's where a lot of the opportunity to "pull yourself up" lay. People who are working for pennies often barely have the energy to cook for themselves, let alone teach themselves how to code.
Indeed, I was lucky. I actually got to a programming bootcamp after rejections from 9 bootcamps lol. At that time, I had only $14k in bank and $12k went to bootcamp. That was around 6 - 7 years ago.
Yes not that many people can do coding. However, what do you think about my comment above about trade schools being a ticket for people from poverty to at least middle class.
> You're right, and that's exactly what Gen Z is asking/saying! They are going, "Wow you millennials got rocked and the same way is paved for us. Screw that." Though I do have a pretty huge caveat about "forcing people to spend money on art," but that's a whole other discussion. Suffice to say arts and humanities deserve the same investment we give STEM. It's not about forcing people to pay for it, it's about supporting them and creating opportunity for art and culture. I don't see why that isn't a worthwhile investment.
Yes, so I think Gen Z and the generations below should be educated financially and what are the implications of going to expensive colleges.
Japan is an interesting one in this regard. Arts and culture are highly regarding (besides STEM) as well. You can very well find people who go into some random candy shop and decides that "I want to be a candy master" and actually make a living. Japanese values their own thing, created by their own people over generally imported stuffs from other countries (i.e, China).
What do you have in mind in regarding of supporting/creating opportunity for art and culture?
Very good example. I have multiple friends in "warehouse jobs" and they hate it. It breaks down their bodies, the breaks are inadequate, the pay is JUST barely enough to keep them from quitting on the spot, etc. They have no energy for anything beyond work. They go home, try to recover, and wake up the next day to do it all again. God forbid they get a night shift.
>a craft-based work like woodworking, plumbing, is still the ticket from poverty to at least middle class.
Carpentry is a solid profession but you need to be good. Very good. It's a lot of work getting the referrals to keep a steady income stream. I have a couple of buddies who do it and it's really feast or famine unless you link up with a general contractor who can give you a ton of work. As for plumbing, it's an apprenticeship situation usually, so breaking in can be hard. The more plumbers there are, the less work there is for plumbers, so some are not too keen to set you up. This varies wildly of course, but you can't just set up shop as a plumber anywhere you want with ease. It can be a tricky road. You're right though, good opportunities there. If you've got the mind to learn it that is. Those aren't exactly easy jobs!
The arts and culture argument is tricky and multi-faceted but I'll try to keep this as concise as I can. Know that this won't have as many citations and is largely opinion-based. That seems appropriate to me though when discussing something as difficult to quantify as "the value of art." I think an example will be the best way to describe this.
In the 1960's and 1970's, there was a lot more investment at the federal level in the arts. While there were different grants out there at different levels, the most noteworthy then - and largely today - is probably the NEH: The National Endowment for the Humanities. If you have a cultural/arts project you think is worthwhile, you can apply for a piece of that pie. During that time these film programs opened up all over the US built on a similar model: Teach kids how to shoot, edit, and generally work with 16mm film. The focus was providing an opportunity in impoverished communities, though it certainly wasn't restricted to that. Apalshop is one of the most famous examples (in Appalachia, which is one of the biggest examples of poverty in the US), and what's so cool is it is still running to this day [1]. These programs sprung up everywhere and produced a staggering amount of documentaries and other 16mm film projects that have contributed richly to American culture, while also paving the way for a whole generation of filmmakers and creating opportunities where there seemingly was none for many. Sadly, the NEH has been systematically defunded over the decades, especially under Ronald Reagan (surprise surprise), and most of these programs shuttered in the early 90's. My home city of New Orleans has one of the only remaining ones from that original era actually, called NOVAC. But that's another story haha.
Anyway this example is sort of designed to hit a lot of points for me. It wasn't just about "hey let's art because art and uhhh yeah that's good right?" This program 1) contributed to American culture, 2) provided opportunities to people who had few, 3) created tons of jobs, and 4) just overall integrated well with their communities. The relative investment compared to, say, yet another tank or fighter jet, was very minimal and created concrete outcomes for communities and enriched the American people. I think the need for tax dollars to go towards those projects is self-evident, though obviously not everyone agrees with that.
Hopefully that makes sense lol
I.e, only a few musicians make it, a few actors make it, compare it with traditional engineering, medicine, accounting, and law as profession.