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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

I don’t think we’re going to a regime of low prices and suppressed wages. That phase of the world’s economic cycle is on its last legs. Demographics are collapsing across the world and the most prosperous, numerically largest baby boomer generation are entering their non-productive, fiscally conservative retirement years.

This just might be the “new normal”. The lack of readily available products might be a problem, but there’s also a good chance we see much higher wages across the board

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Not if the fed has anything to say about it. The plan now is to let it crash since hourly workers have gotten uppity and are refusing to work terrible jobs for even worse pay. All the talk of "wage price spiral" and all that shows their hand.

Its incredible to me how more people don't revolt just watching Powell talk. He flat out does not acknowledge the possibility that wages should rise due to increased productivity. Any wage increase is just a sign of inflation.

The whole goal of the Fed is to keep salaries down. The reason is that inflation is measured only on household items that can be bought by low income families. You don't see the Fed worrying about inflation in housing, in stocks, and investments in general. That inflation they consider to be good.

Well, all of that is true. There’s also the printing of many trillions of dollars to raise all prices on all things.

Actually there are more millenials than baby boomers. If we see significant wage increases and Real Estate decreases, the millenial generation might start to procreate to a reasonable extent.

I think we're already "procreating to a reasonable extent," where "reasonable" is defined in a context where many of us aren't in a stable enough financial situation to responsibly have kids. An alternative phrasing would be "might be able to buy houses and start families."

> If we see significant wage increases and Real Estate decreases, the millenial generation might start to procreate to a reasonable extent.

The leading edge of millennials are already way out of their best reproduction years. Middle's very much iffy. The youngest are OK but will be starting to enter that "your risk of complications and birth defects are increasing a ton year over year" territory soon.

> Actually there are more millenials than baby boomers. If we see significant wage increases and Real Estate decreases, the millenial generation might start to procreate to a reasonable extent.

And cheat on Capital?

Eh, not really. I mean, yes, but no. Based on terminology, I'm going to stick with the US demographic. In that setting, the peak 5 year bracket of millennials is currently 7.2% of US population and 23.8M people against a world background of 7.8B people. The boomer peak at the same age was was 8.4% and 22.7M people against a global population of 5.9B. So, yes, there are quantitatively more millennials now, and the number of millennials is larger at the same cohort timepoint, but as a fraction of population, they're smaller and will have a smaller effect on global affairs.

Globally, it's a bit different, the bulge of millennials is in fact larger by all measures, but that bulge isn't really driven by the US or Europe, it's the Middle East, and to a lesser extent, East Asia.

https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...

https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2021/

https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/1...

https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/1997/

Big ifs attached to a short fuse

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