I know. I went to grad school, but I got a job offer while hardly trying. (It was before the Oil crisis.) I graduated from grad school in 1980, also not a great year, and also got several job offers without trying very hard. But it was not just me - omg I need to find a job was not a big topic of conversation, and everyone found one.
I also started to work when there was still the expectation of lifetime employment at the Bell System and IBM. My uncle worked in the defense industry, and got laid off all the time when a contract ended, but that was a special case - non-defense companies didn’t do that as often.
I feel doomed and hopeless every time I read threads like these.
To be fair, the higher population today means that affordable housing is going to be further away from cities than it used to be. It is kind of inevitable. 17 years ago homes in the heart of Silicon Valley were unaffordable to me, even coming from an expensive part of NJ. Now where I live would be unaffordable for many.
Exactly. If you don’t currently have a pension, it’s pretty much a given that you will never get a job that offers one. They’re almost exctinct in the US. As for college, it’s normal for people to graduate with a mountain of student debt, and to spend the first decade or so of employment trying to work their way out from under it. Housing is unaffordable for anyone who doesn’t want to live in the ghetto, or have a 50-mile commute to work. Statistics might say things are getting better, but pretty much every “real-world” measure says that the average young person is worse off than before.
Younger people are going to cope by defining “success” in a different way than their parents. Baby Boomers and Gen Xers were raised to believe the American Dream was having a house, 2.5 kids, college diploma, multiple cars, and yearly trips to Disney World. Are these things nice? Sure. But are they the absolute metrics of success? No.
Will society crumble to pieces if people decide the idea of a “starter” house is outdated? No. Nor will it crumble as more households become multigenerational, or when kids take longer to finish college, or when instead of forking money over for a car note, people support public transit. Things will just be different. Not worse, just different.
I imagine there will be a change in how we view employment too. Boomers were the ones who encouraged their children to look their noses down on “McJobs” and follow their passions. But if everyone has a “McJob” , then the stigma diminshes. I know I’ve lost some of my job snobbery after reading about college grads lining up at McDonalds and Walmart.
Things are also looking up for young people in some ways. Affordable health care, for instance. Even the hipster DIY aesthetic offers something for the un- and underemployed. I envision seeing more more community gardens, tiny housing developments, intentional communities, gift economies, and other innovations (and gimmicks) that will relax the pressure somewhat.
Don’t fear. Bad changes are always associated with an upside.
Not to mention that success is still completely possible. It’s just requires a larger investment and the risk that comes with that. You can’t skate through life and expect to drift up to the top eventually, but if you have some focus and vision and work consistently towards it, you can have a strong career.
There’s also the fact that taxes (which inflation doesn’t take into account) have gone up so much. And despite that, we still have huge underfunding for certain social programs. Several decades ago, pension payments in Canada used to be 1.8% for the employee only, now it’s 9.9% combined (employee and employer) and might even rise! That’s an extra $4,000 per year just to support the previous generations! You also have sales taxes which were 2-5% a few decades ago but are now up to 15% in Canada. As well, you also have more expensive university, land transfer taxes, and capital gains taxes introduced in the past few decades. Not taking into account the huge government deficits we currently have, millennials are still being taxed for everything they have.
Yeah, it’s not a solution by any means, but the effect of Kickstarter on the creative community is huge. I’ve meant more than a few young adults who have crowdfunded their way to a sideline career.
Gigantic success is probably easier now than it used to be, since there are more avenues to a market than before. But success in terms of security and a nice middle class life? Possibly harder.
In the US income tax revenue has been at historic lows. It hasn’t helped.
Good points. One thing that gives me hope is the rise of the global middle class in latin america and asia. There are endless millions of households all over these places where houses making 5-40k a year are entering the global marketplace, they will soon reach something like 2 billion people and keep growing. As their incomes go up and the standards of living in the west goes down there will be a market overlap for cheap consumer goods and cheap services.
The demand for a western lifestyle on a 30k household budget is hopefully going to create a massive new market for cheap drugs, consumer goods, medical interventions, cars, etc.
The big thing seems to be sharing housing right now. Kids live with parents, parents live with kids, sibling live together, friends live together, people have roommates with strangers, etc.
Only if your income is high enough that payroll taxes are inconsequential.
And we could get those things. So could our parents. My father came out of the army and, without any college, got a reasonable job. In 1951 he and my mother who also had a job, could afford a nice new house in a nice new neighborhood. After I was born, soon after, they could afford this life even with my mother staying home. Sure things were tight, but they could manage it. How many could today?
Why do you think kids refuse starter houses? There is an increase in renting. Townhouses are smaller than the old starter houses. Not every place has reasonable public transportation. And, with two earners necessary to make it, that means you need two cars.
McJobs are bad not because of status but because they are soul deadening. Is it awful to enjoy going to work? Anyhow kids today are grateful for any job. None of my daughter’s friends, who came out of college to find that only 30 hour a week no benefits jobs in retail were available - if they were lucky - turn down their noses at anything.
Nope. Here is tax revenue as a percent of GDP.
SSI is 5.4% in 2012 versus 6% from 1991 to just recently. In any case payroll taxes are admittedly regressive, but they fund something we all will benefit from (if we live) and so is a bad example.
In any case I said income tax, and you can see how that has dropped from the same table.
I think the whole “first we’ll buy this 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom ranch, then upgrade to this 5 bedroom+bonus room, 4 bathroom McMansion a few years later” is going to become obsolete. Instead of the “starter” house being the expectation, people will rent longer and then, if they want, buy a house they can grow into and stay for a long time. The “let’s buy a starter home” step makes sense when you don’t have to put down much money and you can flip it easily. Neither of those things are a given anymore (if they ever were).
I think this is a positive sign. Just a few years ago, though, before the Recession was in full-swing, this wasn’t the case. I heard lots of Baby Boomers ragging on how if “kids these days!” hadn’t studied basketweaving in school, maybe they wouldn’t be wiping tables for a living. I heard a LOT of that. How could kids NOT internalize that as a sign of failure?
I think one of the reasons McJobs are soul deadening is because people don’t value them. People who work in retail are shat on by their bosses AND by their customers, because they are seen as worthless. But there’s nothing inherent about these jobs that requires them to be soul-deadening.
“A few decades ago” was 1993, when Canada already had the GST (which was higher in 1993 than it is today) so sales taxes were about the same. I don’t know where in Canada you live, but Ontario’s sales tax was 7% as far back as 1973, and the GST replaced a manufacturer’s sales tax that soaked up pretty much the same amount of money at the time the GST was introduced. Your pension contribution cannot be higher than $2356,20 a year unless you’re self employed and that is only 4.95% if you make less than $51,000 because after that you don’t pay any more.
As for income taxes, again in depends on your province, but federal income taxes have on average NOT increased in many years, even accounting for inflation.
The AVERAGE American home - not a “Starter home,” but the average home for everyone - in 1950 was just 983 square feet. I doubt many townhouses built today are that small.
Precisely.
Right, that’s exactly what I was thinking when **Voyager **made that “nice new house” comment. It’s totally fine for there to be inflation in what people’s expectations for things are now compared to the way they used to be; but when you combine it with pining for the good old days, it is a disconnect.
I don’t really see that as a negative thing though. Renting apartments in high density urban areas, using public transit or car sharing services, or just walking or biking…all that seems like a positive trend to me.
That is not my experience. Back in the era of the aforementioned Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, I worked at a sub shop. Three of my coworkers had degrees in philosophy from expensive private colleges. Two of them had bachelor’s degrees and worked at the same level I (who had just graduated high school) did; the third had a master’s and was the manager. I also had a friend whose older brother had a Ph.D. (in English I think) and was an assistant manager at Target–not sure if that counts but it seems like a definite “overqualified” scenario.
It’s an interesting point. But doesn’t that also account for some of the growth of (often decent) jobs in the health care sector?
Yeah, universities are kind of running a racket to some degree (this could easily be its own thread). They compete with each other to lure students with the most posh accommodations and accoutrements, and people wonder why costs are skyrocketing. I would love to see someone try setting up a Costco/Aldi style educational model, with no decked out lounges or leafy quad, but just leased, bare-bones office space and high quality instruction.
I am glad to see Obama beginning to demand accountability since so much of it is paid for by public subsidies (even at private colleges). I would also like to see the end of bachelor’s degrees in esoteric subjects unless they are paid for by the student or his/her family–no financial aid. I don’t want to banish American studies or semiotics from the university, but they should be part of sampler offerings to broaden students’ horizons, not as majors unless someone is going to get a doctorate and go on to teach the subject themselves (and relatedly, universities need to stop giving out way more Ph.D.s than there are job openings that require them).
There are bargains to be found though if you look hard enough.
It’s an interesting point about changing jobs. My wife is one of the very few Millennials in a job with a pension (she is a public school teacher). We were wondering about that, though: we don’t necessarily want to stay in Missouri forever, but aren’t sure if her pension (or more precisely, the years toward earning it) would be transferable if we moved to another state.
Right, and we’ve seen the same thing with building trades. I have known guys who grew up in families in which carpentry, plumbing, and other building contractor type work had been passed down from generation to generation (that is, from father to son to grandson) previously. One of them even had the last name Mason, suggesting this went way back. And this work is still in high demand (it’s a truism that if you need repairs or remodelling done, you are going to wait wait wait and you can’t get fed up and hire someone else, because they might be worse) and pays pretty well.
But these guys’ parents were so well propagandised by the culture around them that they became convinced that to provide their children a “better life”, they had to send them to expensive colleges instead, and never taught them the dad’s trade. In most cases from what I saw, the range of outcomes spanned dropping out after a year or so (partying it up on the way, or just struggling academically) all the way up to eking out a degree at a lower tier university, and then getting some crap office job that didn’t pay as well as the dad’s work, and seemed much more soul-deadening.
So Kickstarter is an alternative to a career? Sure, for 0.00001% of us.
Also, your earlier comment that 401Ks are something the previous generation didn’t have is just invalid. A 401k is just an investment vehicle. If anything they had a pension and the ability to invest in their future. The amount of companies that even offer a small amount of 401k matching is decreasing every year.
Maybe it’s time to stop posting, bud.
Maybe it’s time to start reading for comprehension, skippy.
I didn’t say Kickstarter is an alternative to a career. I said Kickstarter can be used to create a sideline career in addition to your real job. Almost 20,000 Kickstarter projects were fully funded last year. That’s millions of dollars funneled to creative people that didn’t have it a year ago. Ignoring that is ridiculous.
And the 401K investment vehicle was created in 1980. I wasn’t trying to make some grand point, just pointing out that 401Ks LITERALLY did not exist before the Millenial generation began.