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Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

These numbers are really grim, and considering the job market only gets more cruel a few years after the top end of this age bracket, it makes it hard for young people to have a lot of hope for the future.

Granted, maybe some of them are reflective of age-agnostic trends but still! Start in higher debt then make less than ever! As a young person looking at these numbers I realize I am squandering my blessings as a high paid tech worker.

We are setting up our future for failure while claiming we needed to make these sacrifices for today.

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Welcome to "staying competitive".

Here at Spain (and generally Southern Europe) we've been told over and over again that we have to stay competitive, which is just an euphemism for working more and earning less (i.e. becoming Europe's China).

In a globalized market with a (still) steadily growing population, competition is growing and therefore salaries are shrinking.

It's happening in all industries (e.g. tech firms offshoring) but also at homes. I don't know about the USA but here in Spain housewives love hunting for sales, buying as cheap as they can, and proud about it. Why are they surprised later when their children can't find a decent salary? Buying Perú's asparagus cheaper than in our home country (including transportation across the Atlantic!) is only driving prices lower and lower, which hinders the whole economy in the long term.

And now the USA is going to sign a trade agreement with Europe which will further increase competition and will drive wages even lower than they're now for both parties.

On the other hand, isn't this just leveling the playing field for developing countries? After all, for them to grow, we have to shrink.

Seems to me it's the government which needs to stay competitive, not the workers, ie regulation and bureaucracy.

What a cliché.

EDIT (to elaborate): IMHO economy (like most things) is all about trade-offs. I know the states and bureaucracy are cumbersome, but they offload risk from individuals into society (which isn't always a bad thing).

I respect your views on deregulation (and share them to some extent), but your phrase is really a cliché and does not address my comment (since deregulation is orthogonal to labor competition).

A cliché? Or general agreement? I thought people generally agreed that Spain has issues in that regard.

"I know the states and bureaucracy..."

I wasn't referring to states in general, you were talking about Spain, I was responding about Spain. I'm not a ranting libertarian, I'm aware of a state's role in society. Knee jerk pouncing on a cliché that wasn't here.

we've been told over and over again that we have to stay competitive, which is just an euphemism for working more and earning less

How much of that extra work is unnecessary (in Spain)?

The problem in Spain is that the government and its regulations are so bad, that the only way Spain can become competitive is if the government gets its act together. Until then (i.e. always) lower wages and longer hours will have to do.

(i.e. always)

Based on above comments I hope you're voting for Podemos.

* if the government gets its act together*

That won't happen spontaneously.

> I hope you're voting for Podemos.

It doesn't appeal to everyone.

Although Podemos isn't trying to market itself as a left-wing party, it indeed is (and everyone knows it). Its leaders had strong political connections with left-wing movements (some of them were political advisors for Chávez) and promote socialist ideas (some of them good, some bad, in my opinion).

Unfortunately a right-wing Podemos is unlikely to succeed due to the traditional conservatism of the right-wing, and the "indignado" market share is already taken by Podemos.

Some far-right parties grew a bit nothing real but for the moment.

I wouldn't say bureaucracy or the State is the problem in Spain, but the political caste (in both our traditional left and right-wing parties), rampant corruption and a general lack of faith in democracy (or, more specifically, in the currently available democratic instruments).

As far as I can tell we're not facing this problem alone, but we're pretty young as a democratic society and most of our politicians inherited their position or remained on it under an amnesty after Franco's dictatorship (hence the usage of "caste").

I think (though it's hard to analyze when you're involved in the situation) we're in the middle of a social and generational change. We've got daily news of corruption cases amongst the mainstream parties and people are really fed up. "Podemos" (literally "We can", a left-wing grassroots party) rose as an alternative to that political caste, and most surveys situate them as a heavy contender (if not winner) for the upcoming elections.

Not long ago you'd hear lots of people claim they were not interested in politics, so they were pretty much puppets in the hands of our politician's interests. Nowadays, thanks to the 15M movement and Podemos, there are political debates on Saturday night prime time. Politics are in vogue.

Perhaps that's the government competition you were talking about?

We'll see what happens.

That's not the competition I talking about, but it is good to hear that it's there. The UK is also sick of its traditional parties, but is voting to the right, away from Europe. Party loyalty is usually ideology loyalty, and in a changing world the suitability of an ideology to the global context will change, so the traditional parties are likely a write off as their idea of keeping abreast is fringe tinkering. My point was that all of the responsibility of competition shouldn't have to fall on the worker when there is scope for the government to ease things for the worker. I'm not saying eg get rid of the health service, (Republicans, we're talking Europe here) but aligning processes with countries that have obviously more efficient ways of doing things. A chap on TV the other night was talking about this, he'd moved north, iirc, Denmark, giving an example of company registration taking a matter of hours. What excuse is there for the Spanish government to slack off on such trivial lubricants, the result of which then weighs on the worker?

> [...] giving an example of company registration taking a matter of hours. What excuse is there for the Spanish government to slack off on such trivial lubricants, the result of which then weighs on the worker?

Crony capitalism, though I would call that an explanation, not an excuse. How else would you explain the tax on renewable energy?

I guess it's also incompetence. The traditional model of parties is fundamentally broken, and professional politicians (i.e. influence peddlers) are a plague in our Establishment.

Thank you for submitting HN's most hackneyed comment.

Please try harder to follow the HN guidelines.

Presumably that means many people think it, yet nothing is being done about it.

Governments don't have to be competitive if they mutually limit migration - and this is one problem.

People need the option to leave a system that doesn't work for them, or that system won't see a need for change. The same competitive forces that are so important to capitalism should apply to nation-states as well.

They do have the option to leave, and looking around London that's exactly what they're doing, which is not good for the countries they're leaving. I'd say it's more important that they have the means to change that system.

Why do you think it's bad for the countries they are leaving that people can go and find work elsewhere and gain experience and skills (and most likely, return with these)?

There doesn't seem to be much of a downside to me.

In the context of Spain: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f7bdd5ce-995e-11e3-91cd-00144feab7...

The wealthy in the United States have been extracting wealth from the middle-class and capturing more of the annually generated income for some time. This isn't about being competitive, it's about robber-barons actually robbing others through political capture.

> competition is growing and therefore salaries are shrinking

I'm a fan of asking naive questions, so here's one:

If salaries are shrinking everywhere, then where is all the money?

Towards second world countries like China that have been quietly busting their asses after WWII.

I agree, and would also add that economics is not a zero-sum game.

from the global data trends it seems clear that an increasing proportion is being captured and kept in th capitalist/owner class, at the expense of labor. there's been a noticeable shift worldwide overall

Careful with your use of the word "we".

What is happening is that between 1974 and 1994, the generation that was then in power decided to stop paying off their own debts, and started deferring payment to future generations. The effect is similar to being forced to cosign a mortgage before you are even born, then when you turn 18, your parents kick you out of their house and stop making the payments. You then have to pay for two houses, and can probably only live in the worst one.

It's a really nasty thing for your elder generation to do, but all your life, they have taught you that you aren't allowed to murder all of them and sell off the assets they purchased with your labor as collateral. So it becomes somewhat of a tradition for each generation to refinance the debts of the previous with the labor of the next as security. But at some point, a generation realizes that the only way they can afford the same lifestyle as their parents is by having two incomes and fewer children.

"Our" grandparents needed to make the sacrifice back before they died. But they didn't, and now they can't. So I prefer to let their creditors go find them in Hell if they want their money back. I am perfectly willing to be responsible for my own financial decisions, but rolling over the debts of the fathers unto the fourth generation seems more than a little bit unfair.

And that is justified in large part by use of the pronoun "we". I, specifically, am being taxed to pay for the economic benefits enjoyed by entire generations of older people who reaped more than they ever sowed. And my gruel, along with that of younger generations, has become thinner ever since.

I even get angry when my spouse says "we need to do X" and really means "I want you to do X, and expect nothing--even gratitude or acknowledgement--in exchange", so I can't imagine how politicians can so easily get away with doing the same thing to entire nations. What "we" need to be doing is demanding that some specific people be held individually responsible for their own bad behavior.

So, for everything you said above, how do you define the pronoun "we"? People in the USA who entered the workforce in the 90s/00s?

"We" without an explicit antecedent includes anyone that is foolish enough to join in.

It's pretty great--all the while, even in tech we're watching fewer IPOs (and thus good exits for non-founders), companies whose business proposition is often literally "We externalize our costs by ignoring local laws and screwing our emplo^Hcontractors", and all the while pissing off everyone else in the economy by telling them how awesome the future is going to be.

And we still haven't managed to engage (politically or otherwise) the folks actually running the government. Things aren't looking good.

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