Obama is not a socialist and there is very little that he could do with such strong opposition and control from the GOP in the house, and until recently, the senate.
Didn't Democrats have control of both the House and the Senate for a period? Also, doesn't being the POTUS mean you know how to bridge gaps and compromise? Sounds like a convenient excuse to point fingers at the other side.
You mean all of 2 years out of his 8? Remember the big healthcare reform bill that got passed and the American Recovery Act that prevented the American car manufacturers from closing up shop?
What do you know, things can get passed when that party has control, but since then the GOP did everything possible to block all their efforts. So yeah, not much help for those millennials from the GOP.
Perhaps the reason the Democrats lost their super majority was because they rammed ACA and ARRA down the throats of congress with no bipartisan cooperation. It's hard to get the other side to work with you when you've demonstrated how little their opinions matter to you in the first place.
That's generally the nature of massive reform. It had to be done and there were political costs associated with it, but it was worth it from a net cost and health outcomes perspective. Desegregation was pretty unpopular as well, are you saying that shouldn't have happened either?
Care to cite that source? Is this in recent memory or a poll done at the height of ad campaigns being run trying to assuage folks one way or the other?
I guess what I mean is, when compared to a single-payer system, most Democrats were unhappy with the ACA. I'd be wary of believing any polls about the ACA in general because Democrats likely feel a duty to support it in the face of criticism from Republicans. A much more informative poll would be asking Democrats whether they would have preferred a single-payer system.
There are decidedly left and right wings of the Democratic Party. He had a filibuster-proof majority of Democrats, but he did not have a filibuster-proof majority of liberals.
Possibly. But I think it moreso indicates that two party systems are actually multiparty systems without any of the benefits of multiple parties. The various factions operate within their party.
The Republicans have the same issue, but they're less pronounced.
I would say the republicans have even more factional problems than the democrats...tea party and trump, moderates, Cristian coalition, etc..! But since they don't control the White House, they are at least unified in there Obama hate, which is mostly how they are perceived.
Obama had filibuster-proof majorities for his first two years (when they passed the ACA with only one republican house vote and none in the senate) then a split congress for four.
When measured by party control, Clinton, GHW Bush, and Reagan all faced more opposition in congress than Obama has.
None of the past administrations faced such partisan Congresses,
This is unthinking lack of research. You only need to go back to Clinton to find a congress that vociferously was against him, to the point they impeached him. Clinton handled it because he was very good at handling compromise and the politics game.
Or maybe it's from someone who actually has paid attention to what is happening in Congress. I've read several blogs from political scientists (Jonathan Bernstein, for example) who have pointed out exactly how obstructionist the GOP controlled Congress was compared to other situations with split government.
Just hitting the highlights: the Senate for 6 out of 8 years has routinely refused to confirm justices, including at the SC level, and refused to confirm administration officials both via filibuster threats from the GOP. Through the House, they've actually shut down the government multiple times (Newt only tried this once, and it backfired badly) and they've threatened to default on all government debt, which is completely unprecedented. And all of this was driven by the GOP.
That you can even compare this to 2 years of partial obstruction under Clinton shows how little attention you actually have paid to this.
The President also gets the credit for every success. For example, all the articles comparing the party of the President with economic results. Never mind that the party controlling Congress at the time might be the other one.
I'm not suggesting that I'm in favor of this, but the idea is that the country has plenty of wealth, it is just concentrated in older generations who were able to build it through decades of economic largesse, so, well, that's who should should be paying for it.
Well we could start with some common sense tax reform, like not letting anything above $112k not be taxable for social security, a system through which old people are living off the backs of the young and straddling them with debts for services they will never see themselves - a ponzi scheme
I think having no cap on income for SS would make sense and make the system solvent - so basically, cut a tax only for the wealthy retired folks living off of backs of young folks, who are not exempt and they will never get there by subsidizing old folks in exchange for interest payments on private loans in the 7% range.
But the super wealthy -- the ones the Sanders crowd really dislike -- don't tend to have earned income anyway. They primarily benefit from capital gains which are entirely exempt from SS and Medicare entirely.
There's still a huge gap from $112 to having income in long term capital gains tax. Just because there are more things to do with capital gains tax reform, doesn't mean we can't have common sense reforms like this one.
People who are capable of earning greater than $112k a year are probably capable of changing the way they're compensated in order to avoid the higher SS rate.
I've realized it's pretty much pointless, and here's why. There's a bunch of people who don't really pay taxes and don't understand how wealth and taxes work. But they have to file a 1040 every year, so when you talk about taxes they think "income taxes". If you mention "capital gains", mostly their eyes just rollover because they can't conceptualize even what you are talking about.
They just don't understand they are agitating against hardworking doctors, lawyers, engineers, small business owners, and etc., while giving the people who do nothing but open an envelope every month a pass. They are probably 'useful' in a sense.
Hardly man. I'm a small business owner. I pay a hell of alot in income taxes. I have invested money.
The thing is - we all use our resources in this country. We all use the roads, the land, the water, the minerals, and every other item out there. My company probably uses more than the average person. It should be taxed at least equally - if not more as a result.
I have a bunch of people that drive all over the place. They write on paper. Many miles of roads are used slightly because of them. Paper is produced for them to write on. My grandma has never drove a day in her life - and at 95 still walks everywhere she needs to.
She makes pennies on the thousand dollar compared to me. Taxes provide infrastructure and resources. The poor are overly taxed.
Roads roads roads. It's always roads that people bring up when defending socialism. Look up how much our roads cost to maintain and compare it to our entitlements spending and you'll get a better understanding of what socialism looks like. There's not a capitalist alive who isn't comfortable paying taxes for roads.
Ok then, what about the health of your consumers (not just medically)? Is the community at large not an asset we all tap in to every day? People have noticed that there is a growing portion of that asset that can't contribute as well as they could. Namely because of difficulties acquiring education, healthcare and financial security.
That's where things get very fuzzy. It's easy to link tax dollars to roads because the road is either there, and well maintained, or it is not. In order to make the argument that businesses get more from their dollars by giving it to the government to improve the "health" of the workforce than they would investing it how they see fit, you need to be able to measure it, and that's not an easy thing to do. If it were obvious, like taxes for roads, you'd get little argument from businesses over taxes. The problem is, it's not obvious nor easy to prove.
Absolutely, it's hard to prove. Maybe the answer isn't in government, it just seems like a silly thing to leave to the invisible hand of capitalism, seeing as that exact reasoning appears to have brought us here.
I live in taxachusetts and really enjoy not having to worry about healthcare and having an (albeit poorly) functioning public transit system with real subways. It... actually seems to work out guys.
The rise in government's share of the economy correlates with the rise in the economic ills. What is the basis for thinking there is an inflection point where the correlation reverses?
Economic ills? Well consider that numerous other developed nations have large amounts of state-owned industry and that if anything their economies are stronger than ours.
The 'rise in the economic ills' also correlates with a rise in life expectancy. To make a modest proposal, does that mean we should start killing off the elderly and the very young?
Well, if the correlation exists because government spending is a lagging/sticky indicator, and what's actually happening is that globalisation is hollowing out the manufacturing/wage earning class,there's no evidence that it will reverse, but the causation of this phenomenon is the opposite direction: government expenditure is increasing as a percentage of the economy because the other private part is collapsing, not because government expenditure is crowding private expenditure. In this instance it is an early indicator of distress, but not necessarily the cause.
> The rise in government's share of the economy correlates with the rise in the economic ills.
That's pure BS that's never been supported by any evidence.
Every developed country with strong property rights has seen an increase in quality of life and prosperity as the share of government's spending as % of GDP increased.
You won't see it on recent graphs though. If you want to see evidence that this is true, you have to look as far back as the 19th century.
There is plenty of information to suggest that %30-%40 is the optimal level of government's share in spending and the fact that most of the developed world has converged on those numbers over time should dissuade all but the most delusional libertarians that the notion of "minuscule government" is nothing more than a wet dream.
I think for many millennials, the conclusion of this article doesn't come as a surprise. As a member between the Gen X and the millennial crowd, I've certainly seen how much harder people just a few years younger than me have it as well as how much easier for those slightly older.
Older generations don't realize that their wealth is primarily built up in what is really an elaborate ponzi scheme of sorts, money which is really borrowed from future generations.
I'm in the same boat, born on a cusp year of the two generations, and I have long felt like a surfer who is struggling to ride the crest of a wave but who knows that the crash to shore is fast approaching.
I think a lot of us are. My parents are Boomers and we were born between 78 and 82.
Technically being born in 78 makes you GenX. Yet if you have a brother born only 4 years later, it's another generation? We had the exact same experience, Atari 2600 on a TV that is now weird to even think existed. No TV remotes, walk up and change the channel. Rotary phones, city directories and phone books. Need the time and temp? You called the city "time and temp" number. Riding a bicycle to the comic book store and arcade, which were common then. I remember the USSR and my brother and I saw the Challenger blow up on TV at school as if it were 9/11. None of this is the Millennial experience, and they couldn't even describe these details. The world really did change after ~1995, when the internet went mainstream with Win95. Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, and BBSs were around and used occasionally but I never felt they were significant enough to change society as the internet did post 1995.
In many ways, if you were born from the early 80s back to the 20s you might have had a fairly similar childhood. Stuff that a kid born after the rather dramatic changes the internet caused will never really experience how the world felt different. Similar to how in my grandmother's childhood, she remembers being the first house in the neighborhood to have electricity hooked up. That's a game changer from previous generations.
I think the typical 20 year generational divide is broken with the advent of certain technologies. There has to be a break between those who meaningfully experienced the world prior to the internet and those who don't really remember life without it.
Because "generations" are mostly marketing bullshit that are constantly being adjusted to sell the latest newborn consumers youth products. As a GenXer, I always thought it was funny that GenX was defined down to the point that Douglas Coupland (b.1961), the guy who literally wrote the book, was too old to be a GenXer.
(The other aspect to this is that when I was young, almost everything I read about "Generation X" was a humungous load of bullshit. So I assume any article about "Millennials" has the same veracity.)
Essentially, I agree with you that technological revolution is what really matters. This business about media consumption identification, whether it was Brady Bunch or Super Mario Bros, doesn't really matter to anyone but the marketers.
The "generations" are astrology signs for marketers. Make enough vague implications about a large enough group of people and enough will be "true" that they will sort of identify with it.
Different sources and countries use different ranges, so where you fall depends on which you consult (for Millenials, some use 1976 as a starting year, others use 1978, and still others use 1980 or 1981.) Some also carve out additional generations (MTV generation / Doom Generation / XY Cusp Generation along with Echo Boomers / Generation McGuire) for people born in the edge years. Here's more:
Excerpt: "The XY Cusp includes those people born in the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s. The word XY is used because their generational identity is mixed, uncertain, or deviant from X or Y or both, but do not constitute a separate generational group in themselves. Some place the years between: 1976-1983 [3] [4][5] [6] People born within this group are in parallel situations with people born in between previous generations: Generation Jones between Boomer and X - late 50s, early 60s, (teens of the 70s); between Silents and Boomers - late 30s, early 40s (teens of the 50s); and the Beat generation between G.I. and Silents - late 10s, early 20s (teens of the 30s). They are referred to as Cusper Groups, Transitional Times, or Buffer Zones. John Losey states "If you couldn't neatly place yourself in any of the [generations], then you're probably a Cusper. 1943-1947, 1962-1967 and 1976-1983 are each considered transition times. Many people born during these cusp periods identify with the generations on either side."
From a technology standpoint, there was a real break around 1995 or so. It's not so much the consumer tech itself. Oh, it's incrementally advanced in a lot of ways but a 2016 laptop, for example, would be clearly recognizable as such to someone in 1995. A smartphone less so but it would have existing analogs in devices like the Palm Pilot.
What would be vastly sea-change-levels different is the pervasiveness of connectivity and access to a vast store on even real-time information and data about almost everything.
The first Palm Pilot was released in late 1997. it would've been a really, really big deal to have one in 1995.
Laptops would've been recognizable, but their utility was severely limited without WiFi, which I think was arguably a bigger transition (wired Internet -> wireless) than BBS -> Internet. So I guess I'm agreeing with you, connectivity was the big phase change!
I didn't realize they were quite so late. That said, the "1995" transition date was probably more like 1998 or so. WiFi connectivity was still in its infancy at the turn of the century and the availability of meaningful amounts of online content and services was only a few years ahead of that.
Laptops were somewhat useful even prior to WiFi. I had my first one in 1997 or so. It was convenient to take work home, for example. But you're right that, viewed through the lens of today, they weren't a huge win relative to wired desktops for many uses.
> Oh, it's incrementally advanced in a lot of ways but a 2016 laptop, for example, would be clearly recognizable as such to someone in 1995. A smartphone less so but it would have existing analogs in devices like the Palm Pilot.
That's kind of backwards for 1995. Palm Pilots weren't around until 1996, but the first PDA+Phone combo -- a smartphone, except the name wasn't applied to that combination until much later -- was the IBM Simon in 1994 (though the first really popular PDA+Phone was the Nokia 9000 in 1996.) (Obviously, non-Palm PDAs were available and popular before 1995; the Psion Organizer had been around since 1984, and the Psion Series 3 in 1991 was a turning point for the category.)
I completely agree. Born in Zimbabwe in '87, where things (including culture) have always been a little behind - up to and including my childhood including rotary telephones, watching 9/11 on a black-and-white TV and a VIC 20. Keeping in mind that poverty is distinct to debt, I haven't been directly impacted by the debts on the previous generation and genuinely have no idea what other millennials are going on about (although I am slowly warming up to their struggle).
At the very least the formal ranges of generational divides seem to only strictly apply to developed countries.
> Difference in effort, intelligence, experience, drive?
Unlikely. Much more likely causes are technological change and systemic changes in international political economy that reduce wages and consumer investment earnings.
Slowly increasing ages of those who retire, combined with reduction in the work force size required to maintain the status quo (globalization/mechanization).
The rent in a handful of cities. There are plenty of places in the US (both urban and not) where $1K or so per month will get a decent apartment. Yes, there is a lot of tech concentrated in the expensive cities but the same could be said of other countries like the UK. Of course, there are cheaper places in the world to live but then you may be looking at remote work or lower salaries and the same logic applies in the US.
It seems hard enough to establish credibility for an in-office job these days. I can't even imagine trying to get a remote gig.
Perhaps that says more about me though?
Granted, I've deliberately eschewed larger cities, and as a consequence I've had a harder time convincing people that just because my degree was in math I can still be a competent developer.
This is a problem definitely. Freelancing may be required. Save up 5k and that should keep you fed and accommodated in say Laos for a year ... plenty of time to get the freelancing going. Charge as if you are in the US and invest most of it!
Yep, I did this (after going the traditional college route and languishing for a few years after) but more like 15k over three years. I'm a pretty good web developer now but it's still very tough establishing that initial credibility. Plus, I wanted to have many experiences outside of just programming, like learning the language for instance.
I've found that my past employers actually didn't care at all about my degree. I actually never finished university but it never comes up. They want to see what I've built and hat is the determining factor. The first job is the hardest since you have to build a portfolio on your own. After that it has seemed pretty easy.
Not trying to refute your point but rather to suggest that there are other ways to get n the door aside from leaning on your degree.
What the best way to get gigs thats not race to the bottom style jobs on Upwork? I am in that exact situation right now trying to work remote, I have some professional experience but I'm still a junior dev.
For remote work, you're only a junior dev if you tell them you're a junior dev.
If you can show potential employers a profile of existing work and can convince them that you will bring worth to their company then you can find work.
I think this is the hardest thing for me to do. While I can show my skills and a portfolio of work, I am the worst at providing an air of confidence and will often find myself in the moment of hearing their requirements and thinking, "I'm so screwed... I am useless to them." This to me is the hardest thing I've been trying to overcome lately. At the keyboard I'm calm and collect, but dear god am I a lamb facetime to facetime.
As an X-er watching the millenials and the boomers lobbing grenades at each other, it amuses me that the millenial argument sounds like this: "Those greedy boomers have fucked up the world for everyone else with their overly lavish and unsustainable lifestyles... and they won't let us into their cushy club!"
Point of fact is that if you were to give the choice between today's 20-year-old lifestyle and the same in 1970, you'd be insane to choose 1970, especially if you were a minority or a woman. Sure, houses are cheaper in `70, but the jobs are much more menial, life is less comfortable, medicine is less advanced (particularly pain medication), social opportunities are much more stratified, entertainment is much harder to get, communication is considerably more limited, shopping times are much more limited, so on and so forth. Summing up the differences between now and then as merely "houses and uni costs" is basically just propaganda.
First that first paragraph is a Straw man argument. So I will ignore.
Your other point is they if A gets better it is ok if B gets worse.
I think lack of affordability of essentials like somewhere to live is of grave concern. Unaffordable housing causes homelessness. It means people have to start families later and have less time to raise their children.
My first paragraph wasn't meant to be a summation of yours, sorry, it's just that your statement reminded me of the last part of it. It's just odd that the criticisms of the boomers includes both "they're being unsustainable" and "they won't let us be unsustainable wtih them".
As for starting families later, that happens with wealthy, stable societies. People were starting to have children later well before housing costs j-curved. Family sizes have reduced as well - plenty of western democracies are now below replacement birthrate.
In short, the problem is this: housing costs are a problem. Bitching about the boomers is going to help no-one, especially the millenials. Rather than spend that energy creating division, find forward-thinking solutions. Instead of being bitter about the one problem that generation has, be happy that things like job quality has improved[1] (yes, for the slightly lower amount of jobs per worker these days), education is more available[2], society is less discriminatory, food supply is of better quality, entertainment is more easily accessed, travel is much easier, so on and so forth.
Hence why I say that focusing only on house + uni price is just propaganda.
[1] Those jobs that immigrants do in modern western societies, the ones that the natives don't do because they're too menial? Those were the jobs that the young boomers and earlier had to do.
[2] Uni courses are more expensive, but there's a ton of education out there that isn't in the form of a four-year degree, and that's independent of the amazing resources available on the internet.
Working class wages were proportionately higher in 1970. Drawing a dividing line is hard, but somewhere between 1970 and 1980, wage gains became decoupled from productivity increases.
Medicine quite simply hasn't advanced significantly since 1970. Access to medicine by the underserved has, and accounts for much of increases in outcomes, as well as reduced environmental polutants and healthier lifestyles: clean air, clean water, unleaded petrol, lead-free paint, reduced smoking, and reduced alcohol consumption.
"Lifestyle" shopping was only just being invented at about this time -- shopping as recreation largley didn't exist. "Amazon" was called "Sears, Roebuck", you could buy a house, or a bed, or a wardrobe, with a 100% satisfaction guarantee.
Communications and entertainment are about the only area with significant improement, though I'd argue the quality of news coverage 1970 - 1980 was far higher than today -- most cities had multiple local papers with detailed coverage, and newsmagazines weren't the joke they are today. Television was more limited and video didn't exist, but movie theaters were much more common (and cheaper), and live performances easier to find. There was also a form of entertainment and information called "books", freely available in these terminal service devices called "libraries".
You've failed to account for decreased labour union participation (stronger job security), general life and housing security, highly subsidised educational opportunities, the burgeoning of opportunities resulting from the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights movement, the long boom in opportunity in California (offsetting the decline of the rust belt), affordable air conditioning making life in the southeast comfortable for the first time, and the fact that in 1970, the advances of the next 30 years were rapidly approaching. I (and others) see the information revolution as largely played out -- its peak period seemed to be ~1995 - 2005.
Sources: varied, though Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth covers much of the changes in lifestyle, transport, health, communications, and work, from 1870 - 2015. It's especially damning on info/comms technologies excepting 1995-2005, and healthcare since 1970. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century is one of many books addressing the rise in inequality, see also Anthony Atkinson's Inequality.
Yeah, my 'factual errors' are 'extreme', and then you rebut pretending that books don't exist anymore. You're painting an overly rosy picture of the past, and you are wrong about medicine not improving in the past 45 years (mental health in particular). Not to mention that you seem to think that the civil rights movement was done and dusted by 1970. Union participation is not a measure in and of itself of life quality, and you conveniently ignore that jobs back then tended to be much more menial and boring - in the modern day we have the relative luxury of saying 'no' to those jobs (hence immigrants doing them).
And, frankly, saying the internet and mass interpersonal communication was 'played out' as of 2005 is utter horseshit. Besides, how seriously should we take a source which damns radio, television, the film cinema, the telephone, and the internet, over 150 years when humanity had none of these beforehand? Should we go back to pre-1870 times, when being illiterate was commonplace instead of being notably unusual? I'm not sure how info/comms was somehow better then. Picking out 1995-2005 as being 'the only good decade for comms' is ludicrous.
It's also possible for inequality to increase, yet have the lower bound also increase. Yes, income disparity has increased, but life quality is not measured only in dollars. Try being gay in the '70s for a clear example. And it's not like homeless people are a new thing this century - they were around back then as well.
Those things of which you speak of as possible are indeed possible. They are not, however, true facts which reflect the reality of the past 46 years. As the citations I've given support. Strongly.
They are, by the way, books. Of whose existence I'm somewhat aware, and which was a point of my earlier comment.
2. Anything dealing with the brain including diagnosis and treatment. Before CT and MRI - neurologists and neurosurgeons where operating blind. CT and MRI combined with computer technology allow the surgeon to plan and execute a much safer and gentler approach. In addition, during this time, our knowledge of practical neuro-anatomy has increased and enabled much better surgical approaches.
If you are talking about public health advances as opposed to medical advances, then actually good nutrition, good sanitation, and elimination of environmental toxins is probably responsible for almost the entire improvement in life expectancy. However, this has been truethroughout history and is not something new since the 1970's.
Overal LE increased at twice the rate 1900-1950 as 1950-2000. Source: Gordon 2016.
One of the NYTime health reporters had a statistc in a 1990s book that 85% of human L.E. improvements were from public health, not diect medical, meaasures. Laurie Garret IIRC.
"In all, 86 per cent of the increased life expectancy was due to decreases in infectious diseases. And the bulk of the decline in infectious disease deaths occurred prior to the age of antibiotics. Less than 4 per cent of the total improvement in life expectancy since 1700s can be credited to twentieth-century advances in medical care.”
― Laurie Garrett, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
Intensive methods have worked in some areas. Sanitation, clean water, waste disposal, nutrition, vaccinations, hazard and toxin removal, and general preventive care -- all the nonsexy stuff, matter far more.
I know a couple of people who've done that, they all regret it to some extent. Not necessarily doing it, but ignoring other factors of their lives and not being able to easily quit when it wasn't fun anymore. Not saying people shouldn't do it, but it's just not comparable. Once you've realize you don't have to be part of the rat race there are a lot of opportunities, but at the same time societies rules unfortunately doesn't go away. Having some sort of degree and experience to show helps a lot whether it's being involved in a project or getting a visa.
Young people in developed nations are the next wave to get hammered by globalization. The capital markets aggressive search for efficiency will leave no developed world worker unscathed until they are all at parity with developing nations. But if it's any consolation they aren't the only ones. The only difference is that most of the baby boomers made it into the asset class before globalization was in full swing.
the appropriate response for ordinary americans seems to be democratic isolationism, imo. oppose trade deals like ttip, tpp and tpa -- these deals serve to enrich those who are already the global winners and provide nothing for the emerging intelligentsia of the first world. globalism might benefit those in power at the moment, but it provides nothing for those of us who need to work through a career or two to be comfortable. i may be poor, but i have far more in common with a poor texan than a rich chinese man.
Which is something I've been ranting about this very thing for years, often to much undeserved derision in my opinion. You touch the point but don't nail it down. You need to identify exactly what you have in common with the Texan vs the Chinese man.
I would argue this is the beauty of the true American exceptionality, in that the American Revolution, despite the British propoganda attempting to paint it as hardly more than a momentary lapse in military judgement, truly was the unique act in history of an imperfect overthrow of monarchy for individualism.
In politics I always see a thing that divides the people, but the American principles we are fighting for are about unity under the common societal belief structure that each man is his own King. Immigrants swear alligience, and military take oaths, not to the queen or king, but to the Constitution. The Supreme law of the land, constructed to protect the rights established naturally upon all men. Not to establish any right, but to protect them all.
I want the rest of the world to be granted inspiration of our constitution, but we need to stop doing it by military might, and do it by example instead.
The US was founded by wealthy land owners because they preferred to keep their money rather than pay taxes to the British Empire.
I sympathise with that but lets not pretend it was founded with the freedoms and protections of ALL people in mind. Slaves and women were not granted those rights.
The country was founded by oligarchs for oligarchs and it has remained that way.
I think that's a bit harsh when you consider that they could have just set up another monarchy and made themselves the newest round of nobility or something. It was a cutting edge experiment in liberty at the time.
You have a point about the government being set up to serve the wealthy and propertied, but that's likely true no matter which time period you live in.
> You need to identify exactly what you have in common with the Texan vs the Chinese man.
Worker class vs capitalist class. Under the current system, the classes are incentive-incompatible and human beings are surprisingly receptive to incentives on an intuitive level.
>Its research found that some of the pay squeeze was due to under-35s entering the job market as the recession hit, but it also concluded that generational pay progress had ground to a halt even before the financial crisis struck in 2007/8.
Interesting. I graduated into the worst of the financial crisis (Lehman brothers went under the month after I finished my studies), and I remember reading a lot about the former -- that those graduating into a recession make less in their lifetimes -- but was unaware of the latter part of this statement.
I think there's a trade-off, millennials will live a life with more public conveniences. Internet, social networks, free games, etc. Not my cup of tea, but as a millennial I think the generational values are generally geared more to life experiences over money.
A lot of things such as electronics are getting cheaper which probably softens the blow of stagnating wages but the essentials such as rent and food are still rising in cost.
Do you have any evidence that increased government spending harms economic growth? It seems like an a priori certainty in right wing thought, but what evidence I've seen suggests that the effect is minimal or even beneficial (within the spending ranges that we see in modern developed nations).
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but I think it's important to note that if you make the reductio ad absurdum argument that a tax rate of 100% has strongly negative effects, sure I'll go with that, but if there's a claim that what we have right now is either too much or too little, then there needs to be some sort of evidence to support that claim.
There's another pole to reductio towards, though -- governmental spending increases without commensurate increases in taxation. I don't know enough macro to know what the resulting inflation would look like, what would happen to interest rates or exports or quality of life etc etc... No doubt mainstream economists would be aghast at the thought (it isn't a mainstream idea, after all -- our recent stimulus has been monetary, not fiscal, and it's only meant to be a short-term thing) so it's probably not such a crash hot idea either.
Not to champion austerity (and no, I'm really not championing austerity), but if increased spending is paid for with increased borrowing, government bonds will complete in capital markets and make borrowing generally more expensive for everyone.
Of course right now capital is ridiculously cheap and the economy still isn't doing very well...
And government projects improve people's ability to work, whether it's by education or welfare, or negotiating trade treaties, or protecting trade routes (military).
For example, the US gets immense economic benefits from it's oversized military, being able to lean on people to give it favourable terms - something to remember for the people who want to 'stop being world cop' (a self-imposed role, taken to improve it's economic power).
Do you have any evidence that increased government spending harms economic growth?
It depends on the spending....the obvious counter-example are roads, which had a huge positive effect on growth when they were built. Alternately, spending on bombs for war have a negative effect....they blow up in the desert and don't help anyone except the people who built it (so you might as well have left those dollars with the taxpayers).
A similar argument is "more/less regulation." It really depends on the details of the regulation.
3. Looking at the historical data there's nothing obvious that would distinguish genX vs genY except maybe kids graduating right after the 2008 recession which isn't normally attributed to government spending. Pre-recession government spending was around 18% which is in the post-WWII range.
Considering that the U.S. economy has been a long term bull run since 1900, it seems increased government spending actually help economic growth. But anyway, the percentage of government spending on GDP has been stabilized in the last 30 years.
Should be "get paid less". We really need to end the framing of whatever people are paid as assuming that it's equal to what they earn (as in what they actually deserve given actual work value etc)
Not sure what you mean by "overall," but isn't this trivially contradicted?
Salesman A sells $100 of product @ 40% margin, bringing in $40 of "profit," and is paid $20.
Salesman B sells $100 of product @ 40% margin, bringing in $40 of "profit," and is paid $41.
The owner is up $20 from Salesman A, and down $1 from Salesman B, and can merrily continue overpaying Salesman B.
"But no owner would do that because it's obvious that this is ridiculous." Certainly. But replace "Salesman A" with "QA Lead," and "Salesman B" with "Director of HR," and who knows who's contributing how much?
E.g., you start adding and/or cutting sales, QA, and director positions and see how the organisational performance responds.
You'll also typically find (unless, say, you're a Google, Apple, Intel, and Cisco colluding with illegal mutual noncompete agreements on labour) that you're taking prices from the market on what people demand to be paid.
In practice, the information's far less clear, and rules of thumb or gut feels get invoked a fair bit.
But overall, yes: companies which are aiming for profitability have to balance their costs, including labour, with revenues.
Although it's stretching far outside this immediate generational discussion, he premise that employers should profit by always paying employees less than the value they generate is itself the very definition of capitalist exploitation. There's absolutely no reason this type of profit-driven employment relationship is the only way to structure a successful economy for a society.
Anyway, to the exact topic at hand: The consolidation of power by corporations and capital basically means a different power structure. We can accept the profit premise and still recognize that the employees' pay goes up and down in relation to their power in the relationship. Before unions, employers were happy to pay poverty wages and profit handsomely. Yes, there's a point where no profit or actual loss means they can't keep the employee, but there's a huge margin between the cheapest dirt pay you can get a desperate immigrant to accept and the pay you can manage to pay an organized, powerful union employee while still profiting. The power balance between employees and employers has changed over the last couple generations with the rise of unions and public works and minimum wage and worker protection laws and then today's conglomerations of oligarchies and the undermining of unions and of laws that protect workers' interests.
Isn't it also true that Millenials put less value on financial success and more value on fulfillment and life experiences than did previous generations? Could it be that Millenials are "set to earn less" because they are actually fine with earning less?
Perhaps they watched their Baby Boomer parents chase after money and accumulate stuff and end up unhappy anyways and decided that they would pursue other more rewarding aspects of life.
Meanwhile, 40-year-olds (firmly members of generation x) are committing suicides[1] in record numbers (males in particular), and 10 years from now the same will be said about millennials having it easier as compared to their younger counterparts.
When boomers wanted cars, we subsidized cars. When they wanted education, we subsidized education. When they wanted gas, we subsidized gas. When they wanted suburbs, we subsidized suburbs. When they wanted to take a loan out of their retirement, we paid for it out of ours. When they wanted to eat themselves into oblivion, we paid for their health care. Now that they are sated, millenials want the same...but the boomers have indebted us and destroyed our government, and they refuse to make any of the sacrifices that they decided we would make without asking for our permission.
There is a coming political doomsday in the US, and it will have nothing to do with left vs right, but rather the haves vs the have nots...and it just so happens that boomers are the haves and millenials are the have nots. It won't end pretty.
That broad generalization doesn't fly with my observations. There are plenty of wealthy (or at least high income) millenials and plenty of poorer baby boomers.
Decreases in female fertility rates all over the world will only make this worse (Peak Population). Most industries will settle into global duopolies and there will be those who own non growth based assets and those that do.
There are mitigating strategies that we can use to our advantage. Rejecting car & home ownership culture, enforcing various frugal lifestyle patterns (cook and eat home, body weight exercise), cheap travel (couchsurfing/airbnb), geoarbitraging income can do wonders on a personal level. There are several changes on the horizon that could cause interesting ripples soon - for example, what happens when mobile solar power, electric transport, better batteries and global internet coverage enables entirely new kinds of productive lifestyles outside of expensive cities?
While interesting I cant see these things having a huge effect on the global macro economy, the crushing weight of globalization and mechanism will march on, while the technocrats might avoid it, the vast majority of the working class are in trouble.
Home ownership is a great asset if you're using the home yourself. On the other hand a car is a actually a liability that depreciates over time requiring inspections in regular intervals, compulsory car insurance and a parking lot at both the departure location and the destination.
A home is no different from a car in that it also depreciates, things break, needs to be maintained, repaired, etc.
The only real difference is that in major populated areas, the land it sits on tends to be rare and valuable, which allows its value to keep up with or even exceed the rate of inflation.
There is a difference though in that you may or may not--depending upon where you live--be able to reasonably manage without owning a car. You're likely to have to pay for other transportation as a result but it will probably be less.
On the other hand, you have to live somewhere and, absent having access to somewhere you can live for free, you're going to have to pay for housing one way or another.
Also that in most places, mortgage payments + taxes are cheaper than rent for the same property, plus you are building equity. The only real difficulty is scraping up enough cash in hand to pay the down payment - which is where the massive increases in house prices really hose you. 20% of 100k is not unreasonable to save up over a few years on a median salary. 20% of 500k or 1M is completely out of the reach of people outside the top income brackets.
The biggest advantage of home ownership is the tax break. You can leverage capital 4:1 (with a 20% down payment) and your capital gains will be tax-free up to $250,000 per person.
The second biggest advantage is that you can fix your housing costs. Good luck finding a rental that will have the same monthly payment for 30 years, but it's not hard to get a 30-year fixed rate mortgage.
You would be hard pressed to find rentals that have the same monthly payment even for 2 years, let alone 30.
I remember distinctly in 2008-2009, even as the housing prices were crashing, our rent went up by $90/month (outpacing inflation by 7%), and that's when we made the decision to buy a house (the $8000 first time homeowner credit/subsidy helped also)
It's very hard for me to envision a future I want to save for where I'm not the owner of a house - of my own space. That said, I imagine subscription car usage will be a shift that happens over a generation or two...
Millennials do value work ethic less than other generations: "Asked who has the better work ethic, about three-fourths of respondents [edit: Millennials] said that older people do" (http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/10/millennials-con...). This can be good or bad but either way it might have some effect on the relative earnings.
Sure, but is that metric useful? Wouldn't hours worked, vacation taken, etc. be more useful? And even then, you'd have to adjust for under-employment and precarity, don't you think?
I just don't see a self-perception survey like this as very useful in determining the actual working habits of generations.
That doesn't really help without a baseline. If the boomers averaged x hours of vacation time, and millennials are average x/2, then wanting more doesn't speak to a lack of work ethic.
One is that wages have stagnated for most jobs since the 1980s. Which has meant that it's harder to get ahead and easier to fall behind unless you step into a high paying career early or are lucky enough to climb some business ladder into high ranks.
Another is that if you look at the employment after the 2008 economic crash the majority of the impact was on folks under 25. Unemployment shot up, as did underemployment, and that situation has persisted for the better part of a decade before recovering at an agonizingly slow pace. Literally millions of people, most of them millenials, just fell out of the job market, and millions more were stuck in crappy, underpaying jobs for years. That kind of thing has a dramatic long term impact on your career development and thus your earnings, your savings, your personal investment, and so on.
The last is the massive cost increases in housing and education. In combination with the other two these things have significantly hampered millenials ability to earn money, to save money, and to build up wealth and stability via home ownership (which has traditionally been a classic way to do so for Americans). Millenials can barely afford to live in the cities where there are jobs and if they don't have a decent-ish job they can't afford to move to where there are, they can't save, and they can't accrue wealth.
This is the result of it pays to invest. It doesn't pay to work. This benefits the older generations who have more stored up wealth than younger people so they can live in the best spots and do nice things while saving money.
The Stagnation Hypothesis basically explains all of this.
I would like to remind you that earnings, prices in general are phenomenon which relate back to the real world in some way. That is to say they must be side affects of something else.
The cartoon series The Venture Bros symbolizes the Stagnation Hypothesis. If you don't want to watch the entire series to understand the point, just take a look at the episode: Season 3 Episode 2: The Doctor Is Sin (the intro even features Dr T. Venture offering jobs to migrant laborers for which they are absurdly under qualified and very low wages. This, in light of the frequent complaints of worker scarcity in the midst of stagnant wages is quite poignant).
In the series the grandfather (deceased) was able to do all kinds of amazing innovations, space stations, underwater laboratories, biospheres, rolling walkways, new fabrics, all kinds of new machines. The next generation symbolized by Dr T. Venture was unable to compete with all this amazing success and began to act as a hanger-on, a me-too, acting as if he knew what was going on but in actuality understanding nearly none of it and therefore became reliant on sexing up what is really ancient technology to make himself look good to investors and his own self image. His sons, the next iteration of Ventures are permanent children, living in a technology wonderland they effectively treat as magical surroundings. Not only do they not understand the technology of their grandfather, but they don't understand there is anything to understand, despite the fact that as clones they are actually technological artifacts themselves.
Unfortunately this supposed comedy show is a reasonable interpretation of the last few generations.
If you exclude computation (electronics/robots/AI/internet) then there just aren't very many parts of the economy that are genuinely growing. This has been going on since the early 70s.
This has been obfuscated by the accounting of the economy.
The government and central banks have an incentive to produce numbers that sound rosy because they noticed long ago that if the people in the economy felt like things were going well, that they were more likely to spend, invest and work. There is a self fulfilling prophesy nature to it all.
The source of wealth or 'more stuff' is the ability to produce more stuff for less cost. Lower the inputs, up the outputs. Technology is a key element in making that happen.
The problem is that (ex-computation) new innovations are far less likely to affect the average person. Name a single invention outside computers of the last several decades. I do not mean a hypothetical abstraction in a laboratory somewhere.
When people find themselves coming up with close to nothing they resort to saying: well, maybe new innovation is bound up inside classical things we have but cannot see inside of (we are at the Dr T. Venture stage here).
It is certainly true that minor improvements accumulate into a quality of their own over time. That is Toyota's business model. The insides of the cars experience consistent iterative improvement. There are similar analogs in other industries.
But. And this is the key point. That utterly fails to explain why new innovations aren't reaching the common person. If we really were experiencing a boom in innovation and invention we would expect to see thousands of new fields and sub-fields opening up. What new materials technology do you have inside your home that did not exist in 1970? What forms of transport? There are literally dozens of major areas that have not seen any major innovation and they have stopped being labeled 'technology' as a result.
With any technology there exists diminishing returns. Even in computation as Moore's Law attests to.
The real mark of true innovation and invention is the new thing associated with the typical household. For example; suppose the manufacture of aerogel could be brought down by 2 orders of magnitude.
That is, to put it most softly, a load of bullshit. The cutting edge of science and technology is every bit as innovative, hell perhaps more innovative than anything happening in the 70s.
I love how every one of your statement is predicated by "excluding computers, the internet, etc". That's like saying "aside from that whole steam power thing the industrial revolution was no big deal"
We have rockets that can land autonomously, stunningly high energy density batteries that have ushered a revolution in portable electronics (go ask your parents about NiCd batteries and how shit they were),god damn electric planes at prototype stage, carbon fiber solar panels pushing 35% efficiency, network of satellites that can pinpoint you on the meter level an connection to said network so cheap it's a basic addon to consumer hardware, and the the technology to fab transistors at 14 fucking nanometers (a feat thought to be impossible in your golden age of innovation).
You mention household energy bills, ignoring the efficiencies gained by vastly more efficient electronics, better available windows, insulation and = hot water heating, if you live in Seattle you can now have your energy usage broken down by device just by an analysis of noise on your input lines so you can better curb usage.
What do we have in our homes that wasn't around in the 70s. Hmmm, let's think, flat screen displays, solid state digital storage of high fidelity media, maybe you're an audiophile and have a nifty set of electrostatic speakers, a mechanical pencil at your desk, or maybe just a gel pen, LED light bulbs giving you long lasting pleasant lights at 50x the efficiency of incandescent and those are just the things that don't rely on a mirco controller to function. And you have the fucking gall to suggest innovation is slowing down.
The best part about it all, is to the public these innovations come so fast and hard that it's all "no big deal".
> That is, to put it most softly, a load of bullshit.
I would have said the same thing a few years ago. I would have said it was preposterously stupid. Then I changed my mind when I saw the map must be fitting the map of some territory other than ours. Keep an open mind if you can.
Incidentally some version of the Stagnation Hypothesis is believed by Peter Thiel, Larry Page and Elon Musk. So I am in terrific company. Many of their projects are motivated by a belief in the Stagnation Hypothesis.
> The cutting edge of science and technology is every bit as innovative, hell perhaps more innovative than anything happening in the 70s.
That isn't even true in software development. I don't think that is even controversial on HN. And now that Moore's Law has almost completed its journey in hardware it appears that for the first time ever laptops are coming out that are slower than the previous iteration (I don't have one myself but I think that's the Macbook Air and due to battery size).
I'm not saying there's no innovation any longer in computer science generally. The opposite is so. However in the present and near future we're going to be retrenching a good bit (making FPGAs for routine junk, making algorithms more efficient since hardware is no longer quite picking up the slack, and lest we forget, you can't yet parallelize everything just because the capacity exists, that's a key unsolved problem).
> I love how every one of your statement is predicated by "excluding computers, the internet, etc". That's like saying "aside from that whole steam power thing the industrial revolution was no big deal"
I do appreciate the significance of computation or I would not be here.
I'm saying it is not enough by itself. Example; can Silicon Valley give us 12% GDP next year? I don't think so. But historically during the industrial revolution we did get splendid growth rates like that (and much higher) because of technological development.
> We have rockets that can land autonomously,
Elon Musk's project. A believer in the Stagnation Hypothesis who did it precisely because he believes in it. Same goes for his car, energy and transport projects. He is doing them because nobody else is doing them. Half a century since the moon landings anyone? Or did we not want those asteroids mined and moon hotels? Half a century is a long time before we return to the first stage of space economic development.
I have a chart in my office of the necessary stages to make space economy prosper, and we're just getting back to 1983 with Elon Musk's reusable rocket project.
Take a look at it. Google "Integrated Space Plan" by Rockwell International and Ronald M. Jones.
There was a plan. It was taken deadly seriously. And it did fail.
> stunningly high energy density batteries that have ushered a revolution in portable electronics
This does not impress me. Li-ion has already reached diminishing returns.
Battery technology overall is supremely unimpressive despite a century of people banging away at it.
The one thing that would be really impressive is a secure containment for a nuclear battery. That would enable a battery life of thousands of years. That my friend, is impressive.
Also impressive was Velkess's physical house battery using a flexible lasso-like flywheel. It was for houses and it would give you 15kwh at first prototype for 6.5k. The impressive part was the expected lifecycle would, if the prototype had been iterated, of a half century. Naturally they are bankrupt because nobody in Silicon Valley had the balls to back Bill Grey's genuinely innovative idea.
So far chemical batteries seem like a bust to me. It's all fancy press releases and no ultimate results applicable to any market.
That incidentally is the shared characteristic of the majority of so-called technology you hear about in the media.
Lots of press releases. No available tech. That'...
> That utterly fails to explain why new innovations aren't reaching the common person.
Because you can't innovate more land out of nothing. People need someplace to live and until they don't, land will continue to be the most constrained and contested "wealth" unit.
I agree the land issue (rent seeking really) is an important factor in explaining stagnation (because of the opportunity cost of tying up dead capital into illiquid assets) but I suspect it too is a side affect.
The majority of constraints on land use appear to be artificial such as corruption/NIMBYism/regulatory.
Why though, have those constraints come into existence? They didn't always exist. In my country getting official approval from the government in order to construct a house only came in the 80s, long after one might make complaint about factories belching smoke in the wrong area and other such externalities.
My feeling is that we've been giving our wealth away for trinkets.
True wealth sustains life: strong social ties, housing, food and the means of production.
We've been convinced to trade true wealth away for non-essentials. Fancy vacations in far away places and 2-3 cruises a year-people used to do that maybe once in their lives, 50inch flat panels in every second room in the house, huge houses with fewer kids in them, 64 bit cellphones, fancy kitchens with wolf stoves and granite counter tops all these things are non-essential.
My parents used to save for years to buy a new car or to buy a new stereo. It was easy, just write "New car" on an envelope and put cash in it every month, then 4-5 years later you bought the car cash, no loan. This went even moreso with luxury items like new TVs and stereos.
The quality of cars and electronics has increased, but the quality of our food and our social lives has decreased.
Cooking of real food at home must be on the decline. Every time I go to the grocery store every other person's order consists entirely of boxed processed food.
Instead of cooking and having dinner with the kids, in our industry, we now get texts[1] on our fancy cellphones at 7:00 pm to fight a fire in production because no software company wants to properly plan anything anymore[2] and then we feel awesome about solving the problem we created by being disorganized scatterbrains.
My suggestion, buy as many of the essentials of life in cash. The rest that you have to borrow for; pay it off quickly. Invest in long term investments and start early. Be frugal and forget about the fancy new doodad, or if you insist save up for it an pay for it cash. Cook at home and spend time with you kids and your friends.
[1] A text, god forbid not a human voice! People are addicted to texting because it allows them to have conversations with multiple people at once. We communicate more than ever but those conversations are shallower.
> My feeling is that we've been giving our wealth away for trinkets.
If you want a great example of this, look at post-USSR Russia and what happens when you trade wealth for trinkets.
Massive regional concentrations of wealth, hopeless money-losing industries that are technologically behind by 25-30 years, massive brain drain, absolutely stagnated sciences, rising nationalism and censorship of the press.
But hey, at least gas is semi-cheap and everybody has cars and iphones.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadTo help you out, here's what the latest June 2016 polling says about Democrats and that ACA: "16 percent of Democrats report an unfavorable opinion, down from 25 percent in April." (http://kff.org/global-health-policy/poll-finding/kaiser-heal...)
The Republicans have the same issue, but they're less pronounced.
When measured by party control, Clinton, GHW Bush, and Reagan all faced more opposition in congress than Obama has.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111th_United_States_Congress#S...
This is unthinking lack of research. You only need to go back to Clinton to find a congress that vociferously was against him, to the point they impeached him. Clinton handled it because he was very good at handling compromise and the politics game.
Just hitting the highlights: the Senate for 6 out of 8 years has routinely refused to confirm justices, including at the SC level, and refused to confirm administration officials both via filibuster threats from the GOP. Through the House, they've actually shut down the government multiple times (Newt only tried this once, and it backfired badly) and they've threatened to default on all government debt, which is completely unprecedented. And all of this was driven by the GOP.
That you can even compare this to 2 years of partial obstruction under Clinton shows how little attention you actually have paid to this.
[Edit] Here's an example article that describes the situation just three years ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/05/13...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12115982
https://www.google.com/search?q=hugo+chavez+american+celebri...
They just don't understand they are agitating against hardworking doctors, lawyers, engineers, small business owners, and etc., while giving the people who do nothing but open an envelope every month a pass. They are probably 'useful' in a sense.
The thing is - we all use our resources in this country. We all use the roads, the land, the water, the minerals, and every other item out there. My company probably uses more than the average person. It should be taxed at least equally - if not more as a result.
I have a bunch of people that drive all over the place. They write on paper. Many miles of roads are used slightly because of them. Paper is produced for them to write on. My grandma has never drove a day in her life - and at 95 still walks everywhere she needs to.
She makes pennies on the thousand dollar compared to me. Taxes provide infrastructure and resources. The poor are overly taxed.
Why not cultivate your crop, you know?
Multiplier Effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplier_(economics)
Velocity of Money
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money
Sectoral Balance Identity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_balances
Endogenous Money Creation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_money http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521915...
http://www.moneychimp.com/features/market_cagr.htm
Are there any developed economies with a higher figure?
Heck, where's the evidence for your purported correlation in the first place?
That's pure BS that's never been supported by any evidence.
Every developed country with strong property rights has seen an increase in quality of life and prosperity as the share of government's spending as % of GDP increased.
You won't see it on recent graphs though. If you want to see evidence that this is true, you have to look as far back as the 19th century.
There is plenty of information to suggest that %30-%40 is the optimal level of government's share in spending and the fact that most of the developed world has converged on those numbers over time should dissuade all but the most delusional libertarians that the notion of "minuscule government" is nothing more than a wet dream.
I can guarantee most of those burnouts have neither paid attention to history nor basic economics.
Older generations don't realize that their wealth is primarily built up in what is really an elaborate ponzi scheme of sorts, money which is really borrowed from future generations.
Technically being born in 78 makes you GenX. Yet if you have a brother born only 4 years later, it's another generation? We had the exact same experience, Atari 2600 on a TV that is now weird to even think existed. No TV remotes, walk up and change the channel. Rotary phones, city directories and phone books. Need the time and temp? You called the city "time and temp" number. Riding a bicycle to the comic book store and arcade, which were common then. I remember the USSR and my brother and I saw the Challenger blow up on TV at school as if it were 9/11. None of this is the Millennial experience, and they couldn't even describe these details. The world really did change after ~1995, when the internet went mainstream with Win95. Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, and BBSs were around and used occasionally but I never felt they were significant enough to change society as the internet did post 1995.
In many ways, if you were born from the early 80s back to the 20s you might have had a fairly similar childhood. Stuff that a kid born after the rather dramatic changes the internet caused will never really experience how the world felt different. Similar to how in my grandmother's childhood, she remembers being the first house in the neighborhood to have electricity hooked up. That's a game changer from previous generations.
I think the typical 20 year generational divide is broken with the advent of certain technologies. There has to be a break between those who meaningfully experienced the world prior to the internet and those who don't really remember life without it.
(The other aspect to this is that when I was young, almost everything I read about "Generation X" was a humungous load of bullshit. So I assume any article about "Millennials" has the same veracity.)
Essentially, I agree with you that technological revolution is what really matters. This business about media consumption identification, whether it was Brady Bunch or Super Mario Bros, doesn't really matter to anyone but the marketers.
cough
http://www.esds1.pt/site/images/stories/isacosta/secondary_p...
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2008/04/fin...
The old Wikipedia article on XY Cusp before it got edited:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JCDenton2052/mh5
Excerpt: "The XY Cusp includes those people born in the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s. The word XY is used because their generational identity is mixed, uncertain, or deviant from X or Y or both, but do not constitute a separate generational group in themselves. Some place the years between: 1976-1983 [3] [4][5] [6] People born within this group are in parallel situations with people born in between previous generations: Generation Jones between Boomer and X - late 50s, early 60s, (teens of the 70s); between Silents and Boomers - late 30s, early 40s (teens of the 50s); and the Beat generation between G.I. and Silents - late 10s, early 20s (teens of the 30s). They are referred to as Cusper Groups, Transitional Times, or Buffer Zones. John Losey states "If you couldn't neatly place yourself in any of the [generations], then you're probably a Cusper. 1943-1947, 1962-1967 and 1976-1983 are each considered transition times. Many people born during these cusp periods identify with the generations on either side."
There's definitely no single standard.
What would be vastly sea-change-levels different is the pervasiveness of connectivity and access to a vast store on even real-time information and data about almost everything.
Laptops would've been recognizable, but their utility was severely limited without WiFi, which I think was arguably a bigger transition (wired Internet -> wireless) than BBS -> Internet. So I guess I'm agreeing with you, connectivity was the big phase change!
Laptops were somewhat useful even prior to WiFi. I had my first one in 1997 or so. It was convenient to take work home, for example. But you're right that, viewed through the lens of today, they weren't a huge win relative to wired desktops for many uses.
That's kind of backwards for 1995. Palm Pilots weren't around until 1996, but the first PDA+Phone combo -- a smartphone, except the name wasn't applied to that combination until much later -- was the IBM Simon in 1994 (though the first really popular PDA+Phone was the Nokia 9000 in 1996.) (Obviously, non-Palm PDAs were available and popular before 1995; the Psion Organizer had been around since 1984, and the Psion Series 3 in 1991 was a turning point for the category.)
I completely agree. Born in Zimbabwe in '87, where things (including culture) have always been a little behind - up to and including my childhood including rotary telephones, watching 9/11 on a black-and-white TV and a VIC 20. Keeping in mind that poverty is distinct to debt, I haven't been directly impacted by the debts on the previous generation and genuinely have no idea what other millennials are going on about (although I am slowly warming up to their struggle).
At the very least the formal ranges of generational divides seem to only strictly apply to developed countries.
Unlikely. Much more likely causes are technological change and systemic changes in international political economy that reduce wages and consumer investment earnings.
If I were 20 I'd consider working remote and just go live in a much cheaper country. You could get a boomer lifestyle yet!
Perhaps that says more about me though?
Granted, I've deliberately eschewed larger cities, and as a consequence I've had a harder time convincing people that just because my degree was in math I can still be a competent developer.
Not trying to refute your point but rather to suggest that there are other ways to get n the door aside from leaning on your degree.
I guess I didn't articulate myself well- I think we're in accord here.
The degree seemed to hamper me-at best not help-in getting a CRUD gig in smaller cities.
I'm 'coming around'- started looking into work in Kansas City or St. Louis. Those are probably as large a city as I can handle.
For remote work, you're only a junior dev if you tell them you're a junior dev.
If you can show potential employers a profile of existing work and can convince them that you will bring worth to their company then you can find work.
Point of fact is that if you were to give the choice between today's 20-year-old lifestyle and the same in 1970, you'd be insane to choose 1970, especially if you were a minority or a woman. Sure, houses are cheaper in `70, but the jobs are much more menial, life is less comfortable, medicine is less advanced (particularly pain medication), social opportunities are much more stratified, entertainment is much harder to get, communication is considerably more limited, shopping times are much more limited, so on and so forth. Summing up the differences between now and then as merely "houses and uni costs" is basically just propaganda.
Your other point is they if A gets better it is ok if B gets worse.
I think lack of affordability of essentials like somewhere to live is of grave concern. Unaffordable housing causes homelessness. It means people have to start families later and have less time to raise their children.
As for starting families later, that happens with wealthy, stable societies. People were starting to have children later well before housing costs j-curved. Family sizes have reduced as well - plenty of western democracies are now below replacement birthrate.
In short, the problem is this: housing costs are a problem. Bitching about the boomers is going to help no-one, especially the millenials. Rather than spend that energy creating division, find forward-thinking solutions. Instead of being bitter about the one problem that generation has, be happy that things like job quality has improved[1] (yes, for the slightly lower amount of jobs per worker these days), education is more available[2], society is less discriminatory, food supply is of better quality, entertainment is more easily accessed, travel is much easier, so on and so forth.
Hence why I say that focusing only on house + uni price is just propaganda.
[1] Those jobs that immigrants do in modern western societies, the ones that the natives don't do because they're too menial? Those were the jobs that the young boomers and earlier had to do.
[2] Uni courses are more expensive, but there's a ton of education out there that isn't in the form of a four-year degree, and that's independent of the amazing resources available on the internet.
Working class wages were proportionately higher in 1970. Drawing a dividing line is hard, but somewhere between 1970 and 1980, wage gains became decoupled from productivity increases.
Medicine quite simply hasn't advanced significantly since 1970. Access to medicine by the underserved has, and accounts for much of increases in outcomes, as well as reduced environmental polutants and healthier lifestyles: clean air, clean water, unleaded petrol, lead-free paint, reduced smoking, and reduced alcohol consumption.
"Lifestyle" shopping was only just being invented at about this time -- shopping as recreation largley didn't exist. "Amazon" was called "Sears, Roebuck", you could buy a house, or a bed, or a wardrobe, with a 100% satisfaction guarantee.
Communications and entertainment are about the only area with significant improement, though I'd argue the quality of news coverage 1970 - 1980 was far higher than today -- most cities had multiple local papers with detailed coverage, and newsmagazines weren't the joke they are today. Television was more limited and video didn't exist, but movie theaters were much more common (and cheaper), and live performances easier to find. There was also a form of entertainment and information called "books", freely available in these terminal service devices called "libraries".
You've failed to account for decreased labour union participation (stronger job security), general life and housing security, highly subsidised educational opportunities, the burgeoning of opportunities resulting from the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights movement, the long boom in opportunity in California (offsetting the decline of the rust belt), affordable air conditioning making life in the southeast comfortable for the first time, and the fact that in 1970, the advances of the next 30 years were rapidly approaching. I (and others) see the information revolution as largely played out -- its peak period seemed to be ~1995 - 2005.
Sources: varied, though Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth covers much of the changes in lifestyle, transport, health, communications, and work, from 1870 - 2015. It's especially damning on info/comms technologies excepting 1995-2005, and healthcare since 1970. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century is one of many books addressing the rise in inequality, see also Anthony Atkinson's Inequality.
And, frankly, saying the internet and mass interpersonal communication was 'played out' as of 2005 is utter horseshit. Besides, how seriously should we take a source which damns radio, television, the film cinema, the telephone, and the internet, over 150 years when humanity had none of these beforehand? Should we go back to pre-1870 times, when being illiterate was commonplace instead of being notably unusual? I'm not sure how info/comms was somehow better then. Picking out 1995-2005 as being 'the only good decade for comms' is ludicrous.
It's also possible for inequality to increase, yet have the lower bound also increase. Yes, income disparity has increased, but life quality is not measured only in dollars. Try being gay in the '70s for a clear example. And it's not like homeless people are a new thing this century - they were around back then as well.
They are, by the way, books. Of whose existence I'm somewhat aware, and which was a point of my earlier comment.
I'd suggest you read some.
This is not true. Here are just 3 examples:
1. Childhood cancer - Less than 50% 5 year survival in 1970 vs greater than 80% 5 year survival now. http://www.cancer.gov/types/childhood-cancers/child-adolesce...
2. Anything dealing with the brain including diagnosis and treatment. Before CT and MRI - neurologists and neurosurgeons where operating blind. CT and MRI combined with computer technology allow the surgeon to plan and execute a much safer and gentler approach. In addition, during this time, our knowledge of practical neuro-anatomy has increased and enabled much better surgical approaches.
3. Low birthweight/premature infant mortality - We are much better at saving low birthweight / premature infants. See http://www.hrsa.gov/healthit/images/mchb_infantmortality_pub...
I would call these significant medical advances.
If you are talking about public health advances as opposed to medical advances, then actually good nutrition, good sanitation, and elimination of environmental toxins is probably responsible for almost the entire improvement in life expectancy. However, this has been truethroughout history and is not something new since the 1970's.
One of the NYTime health reporters had a statistc in a 1990s book that 85% of human L.E. improvements were from public health, not diect medical, meaasures. Laurie Garret IIRC.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/12627.Laurie_Garrett
"In all, 86 per cent of the increased life expectancy was due to decreases in infectious diseases. And the bulk of the decline in infectious disease deaths occurred prior to the age of antibiotics. Less than 4 per cent of the total improvement in life expectancy since 1700s can be credited to twentieth-century advances in medical care.”
― Laurie Garrett, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
Intensive methods have worked in some areas. Sanitation, clean water, waste disposal, nutrition, vaccinations, hazard and toxin removal, and general preventive care -- all the nonsexy stuff, matter far more.
It's easy to buy into the "unlimited resources and growth" hype when you're at the peak. Sort of like the bullish delusions of 2007 stock market.
(Link from 2015)
I would argue this is the beauty of the true American exceptionality, in that the American Revolution, despite the British propoganda attempting to paint it as hardly more than a momentary lapse in military judgement, truly was the unique act in history of an imperfect overthrow of monarchy for individualism.
In politics I always see a thing that divides the people, but the American principles we are fighting for are about unity under the common societal belief structure that each man is his own King. Immigrants swear alligience, and military take oaths, not to the queen or king, but to the Constitution. The Supreme law of the land, constructed to protect the rights established naturally upon all men. Not to establish any right, but to protect them all.
I want the rest of the world to be granted inspiration of our constitution, but we need to stop doing it by military might, and do it by example instead.
The US was founded by wealthy land owners because they preferred to keep their money rather than pay taxes to the British Empire.
I sympathise with that but lets not pretend it was founded with the freedoms and protections of ALL people in mind. Slaves and women were not granted those rights.
The country was founded by oligarchs for oligarchs and it has remained that way.
You have a point about the government being set up to serve the wealthy and propertied, but that's likely true no matter which time period you live in.
Worker class vs capitalist class. Under the current system, the classes are incentive-incompatible and human beings are surprisingly receptive to incentives on an intuitive level.
Interesting. I graduated into the worst of the financial crisis (Lehman brothers went under the month after I finished my studies), and I remember reading a lot about the former -- that those graduating into a recession make less in their lifetimes -- but was unaware of the latter part of this statement.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1900_2020...
One way or another, it comes out of our pocketses.
Could you elaborate?
Of course right now capital is ridiculously cheap and the economy still isn't doing very well...
For example, the US gets immense economic benefits from it's oversized military, being able to lean on people to give it favourable terms - something to remember for the people who want to 'stop being world cop' (a self-imposed role, taken to improve it's economic power).
http://static.cdn-seekingalpha.com/uploads/2012/5/10/sauploa...
It depends on the spending....the obvious counter-example are roads, which had a huge positive effect on growth when they were built. Alternately, spending on bombs for war have a negative effect....they blow up in the desert and don't help anyone except the people who built it (so you might as well have left those dollars with the taxpayers).
A similar argument is "more/less regulation." It really depends on the details of the regulation.
2. Your link is biased. Here's a longer term more accurate graph. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
3. Looking at the historical data there's nothing obvious that would distinguish genX vs genY except maybe kids graduating right after the 2008 recession which isn't normally attributed to government spending. Pre-recession government spending was around 18% which is in the post-WWII range.
Salesman A sells $100 of product @ 40% margin, bringing in $40 of "profit," and is paid $20.
Salesman B sells $100 of product @ 40% margin, bringing in $40 of "profit," and is paid $41.
The owner is up $20 from Salesman A, and down $1 from Salesman B, and can merrily continue overpaying Salesman B.
"But no owner would do that because it's obvious that this is ridiculous." Certainly. But replace "Salesman A" with "QA Lead," and "Salesman B" with "Director of HR," and who knows who's contributing how much?
E.g., you start adding and/or cutting sales, QA, and director positions and see how the organisational performance responds.
You'll also typically find (unless, say, you're a Google, Apple, Intel, and Cisco colluding with illegal mutual noncompete agreements on labour) that you're taking prices from the market on what people demand to be paid.
In practice, the information's far less clear, and rules of thumb or gut feels get invoked a fair bit.
But overall, yes: companies which are aiming for profitability have to balance their costs, including labour, with revenues.
Anyway, to the exact topic at hand: The consolidation of power by corporations and capital basically means a different power structure. We can accept the profit premise and still recognize that the employees' pay goes up and down in relation to their power in the relationship. Before unions, employers were happy to pay poverty wages and profit handsomely. Yes, there's a point where no profit or actual loss means they can't keep the employee, but there's a huge margin between the cheapest dirt pay you can get a desperate immigrant to accept and the pay you can manage to pay an organized, powerful union employee while still profiting. The power balance between employees and employers has changed over the last couple generations with the rise of unions and public works and minimum wage and worker protection laws and then today's conglomerations of oligarchies and the undermining of unions and of laws that protect workers' interests.
Perhaps they watched their Baby Boomer parents chase after money and accumulate stuff and end up unhappy anyways and decided that they would pursue other more rewarding aspects of life.
Where did you get that from? Maybe that's all that's left when no financial success can be had, and they're trying to make do with the lemons.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/health/us-suicide-rate-sur...
There is a coming political doomsday in the US, and it will have nothing to do with left vs right, but rather the haves vs the have nots...and it just so happens that boomers are the haves and millenials are the have nots. It won't end pretty.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/mar/15/babyboomers...
The only real difference is that in major populated areas, the land it sits on tends to be rare and valuable, which allows its value to keep up with or even exceed the rate of inflation.
On the other hand, you have to live somewhere and, absent having access to somewhere you can live for free, you're going to have to pay for housing one way or another.
The second biggest advantage is that you can fix your housing costs. Good luck finding a rental that will have the same monthly payment for 30 years, but it's not hard to get a 30-year fixed rate mortgage.
I remember distinctly in 2008-2009, even as the housing prices were crashing, our rent went up by $90/month (outpacing inflation by 7%), and that's when we made the decision to buy a house (the $8000 first time homeowner credit/subsidy helped also)
I just don't see a self-perception survey like this as very useful in determining the actual working habits of generations.
Edit: I looked it up and found this "gen X and especially the millennials were much more likely to say they wanted a job with more vacation – that was more flexible." (http://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/un...)
If people aren't thinking with their best interest in mind, there isn't much you can do.
One is that wages have stagnated for most jobs since the 1980s. Which has meant that it's harder to get ahead and easier to fall behind unless you step into a high paying career early or are lucky enough to climb some business ladder into high ranks.
Another is that if you look at the employment after the 2008 economic crash the majority of the impact was on folks under 25. Unemployment shot up, as did underemployment, and that situation has persisted for the better part of a decade before recovering at an agonizingly slow pace. Literally millions of people, most of them millenials, just fell out of the job market, and millions more were stuck in crappy, underpaying jobs for years. That kind of thing has a dramatic long term impact on your career development and thus your earnings, your savings, your personal investment, and so on.
The last is the massive cost increases in housing and education. In combination with the other two these things have significantly hampered millenials ability to earn money, to save money, and to build up wealth and stability via home ownership (which has traditionally been a classic way to do so for Americans). Millenials can barely afford to live in the cities where there are jobs and if they don't have a decent-ish job they can't afford to move to where there are, they can't save, and they can't accrue wealth.
I would like to remind you that earnings, prices in general are phenomenon which relate back to the real world in some way. That is to say they must be side affects of something else.
The cartoon series The Venture Bros symbolizes the Stagnation Hypothesis. If you don't want to watch the entire series to understand the point, just take a look at the episode: Season 3 Episode 2: The Doctor Is Sin (the intro even features Dr T. Venture offering jobs to migrant laborers for which they are absurdly under qualified and very low wages. This, in light of the frequent complaints of worker scarcity in the midst of stagnant wages is quite poignant).
In the series the grandfather (deceased) was able to do all kinds of amazing innovations, space stations, underwater laboratories, biospheres, rolling walkways, new fabrics, all kinds of new machines. The next generation symbolized by Dr T. Venture was unable to compete with all this amazing success and began to act as a hanger-on, a me-too, acting as if he knew what was going on but in actuality understanding nearly none of it and therefore became reliant on sexing up what is really ancient technology to make himself look good to investors and his own self image. His sons, the next iteration of Ventures are permanent children, living in a technology wonderland they effectively treat as magical surroundings. Not only do they not understand the technology of their grandfather, but they don't understand there is anything to understand, despite the fact that as clones they are actually technological artifacts themselves.
Unfortunately this supposed comedy show is a reasonable interpretation of the last few generations.
If you exclude computation (electronics/robots/AI/internet) then there just aren't very many parts of the economy that are genuinely growing. This has been going on since the early 70s.
This has been obfuscated by the accounting of the economy.
The government and central banks have an incentive to produce numbers that sound rosy because they noticed long ago that if the people in the economy felt like things were going well, that they were more likely to spend, invest and work. There is a self fulfilling prophesy nature to it all.
The source of wealth or 'more stuff' is the ability to produce more stuff for less cost. Lower the inputs, up the outputs. Technology is a key element in making that happen.
The problem is that (ex-computation) new innovations are far less likely to affect the average person. Name a single invention outside computers of the last several decades. I do not mean a hypothetical abstraction in a laboratory somewhere.
When people find themselves coming up with close to nothing they resort to saying: well, maybe new innovation is bound up inside classical things we have but cannot see inside of (we are at the Dr T. Venture stage here).
It is certainly true that minor improvements accumulate into a quality of their own over time. That is Toyota's business model. The insides of the cars experience consistent iterative improvement. There are similar analogs in other industries.
But. And this is the key point. That utterly fails to explain why new innovations aren't reaching the common person. If we really were experiencing a boom in innovation and invention we would expect to see thousands of new fields and sub-fields opening up. What new materials technology do you have inside your home that did not exist in 1970? What forms of transport? There are literally dozens of major areas that have not seen any major innovation and they have stopped being labeled 'technology' as a result.
With any technology there exists diminishing returns. Even in computation as Moore's Law attests to.
The real mark of true innovation and invention is the new thing associated with the typical household. For example; suppose the manufacture of aerogel could be brought down by 2 orders of magnitude.
This would be a leap t...
I love how every one of your statement is predicated by "excluding computers, the internet, etc". That's like saying "aside from that whole steam power thing the industrial revolution was no big deal"
We have rockets that can land autonomously, stunningly high energy density batteries that have ushered a revolution in portable electronics (go ask your parents about NiCd batteries and how shit they were),god damn electric planes at prototype stage, carbon fiber solar panels pushing 35% efficiency, network of satellites that can pinpoint you on the meter level an connection to said network so cheap it's a basic addon to consumer hardware, and the the technology to fab transistors at 14 fucking nanometers (a feat thought to be impossible in your golden age of innovation).
You mention household energy bills, ignoring the efficiencies gained by vastly more efficient electronics, better available windows, insulation and = hot water heating, if you live in Seattle you can now have your energy usage broken down by device just by an analysis of noise on your input lines so you can better curb usage.
What do we have in our homes that wasn't around in the 70s. Hmmm, let's think, flat screen displays, solid state digital storage of high fidelity media, maybe you're an audiophile and have a nifty set of electrostatic speakers, a mechanical pencil at your desk, or maybe just a gel pen, LED light bulbs giving you long lasting pleasant lights at 50x the efficiency of incandescent and those are just the things that don't rely on a mirco controller to function. And you have the fucking gall to suggest innovation is slowing down.
The best part about it all, is to the public these innovations come so fast and hard that it's all "no big deal".
I would have said the same thing a few years ago. I would have said it was preposterously stupid. Then I changed my mind when I saw the map must be fitting the map of some territory other than ours. Keep an open mind if you can.
Incidentally some version of the Stagnation Hypothesis is believed by Peter Thiel, Larry Page and Elon Musk. So I am in terrific company. Many of their projects are motivated by a belief in the Stagnation Hypothesis.
> The cutting edge of science and technology is every bit as innovative, hell perhaps more innovative than anything happening in the 70s.
That isn't even true in software development. I don't think that is even controversial on HN. And now that Moore's Law has almost completed its journey in hardware it appears that for the first time ever laptops are coming out that are slower than the previous iteration (I don't have one myself but I think that's the Macbook Air and due to battery size).
I'm not saying there's no innovation any longer in computer science generally. The opposite is so. However in the present and near future we're going to be retrenching a good bit (making FPGAs for routine junk, making algorithms more efficient since hardware is no longer quite picking up the slack, and lest we forget, you can't yet parallelize everything just because the capacity exists, that's a key unsolved problem).
> I love how every one of your statement is predicated by "excluding computers, the internet, etc". That's like saying "aside from that whole steam power thing the industrial revolution was no big deal"
I do appreciate the significance of computation or I would not be here.
I'm saying it is not enough by itself. Example; can Silicon Valley give us 12% GDP next year? I don't think so. But historically during the industrial revolution we did get splendid growth rates like that (and much higher) because of technological development.
> We have rockets that can land autonomously,
Elon Musk's project. A believer in the Stagnation Hypothesis who did it precisely because he believes in it. Same goes for his car, energy and transport projects. He is doing them because nobody else is doing them. Half a century since the moon landings anyone? Or did we not want those asteroids mined and moon hotels? Half a century is a long time before we return to the first stage of space economic development.
I have a chart in my office of the necessary stages to make space economy prosper, and we're just getting back to 1983 with Elon Musk's reusable rocket project.
Take a look at it. Google "Integrated Space Plan" by Rockwell International and Ronald M. Jones.
There was a plan. It was taken deadly seriously. And it did fail.
> stunningly high energy density batteries that have ushered a revolution in portable electronics
This does not impress me. Li-ion has already reached diminishing returns.
Battery technology overall is supremely unimpressive despite a century of people banging away at it.
The one thing that would be really impressive is a secure containment for a nuclear battery. That would enable a battery life of thousands of years. That my friend, is impressive.
Also impressive was Velkess's physical house battery using a flexible lasso-like flywheel. It was for houses and it would give you 15kwh at first prototype for 6.5k. The impressive part was the expected lifecycle would, if the prototype had been iterated, of a half century. Naturally they are bankrupt because nobody in Silicon Valley had the balls to back Bill Grey's genuinely innovative idea.
So far chemical batteries seem like a bust to me. It's all fancy press releases and no ultimate results applicable to any market.
That incidentally is the shared characteristic of the majority of so-called technology you hear about in the media.
Lots of press releases. No available tech. That'...
Because you can't innovate more land out of nothing. People need someplace to live and until they don't, land will continue to be the most constrained and contested "wealth" unit.
The majority of constraints on land use appear to be artificial such as corruption/NIMBYism/regulatory.
Why though, have those constraints come into existence? They didn't always exist. In my country getting official approval from the government in order to construct a house only came in the 80s, long after one might make complaint about factories belching smoke in the wrong area and other such externalities.
True wealth sustains life: strong social ties, housing, food and the means of production.
We've been convinced to trade true wealth away for non-essentials. Fancy vacations in far away places and 2-3 cruises a year-people used to do that maybe once in their lives, 50inch flat panels in every second room in the house, huge houses with fewer kids in them, 64 bit cellphones, fancy kitchens with wolf stoves and granite counter tops all these things are non-essential.
My parents used to save for years to buy a new car or to buy a new stereo. It was easy, just write "New car" on an envelope and put cash in it every month, then 4-5 years later you bought the car cash, no loan. This went even moreso with luxury items like new TVs and stereos.
The quality of cars and electronics has increased, but the quality of our food and our social lives has decreased.
Cooking of real food at home must be on the decline. Every time I go to the grocery store every other person's order consists entirely of boxed processed food.
Instead of cooking and having dinner with the kids, in our industry, we now get texts[1] on our fancy cellphones at 7:00 pm to fight a fire in production because no software company wants to properly plan anything anymore[2] and then we feel awesome about solving the problem we created by being disorganized scatterbrains.
My suggestion, buy as many of the essentials of life in cash. The rest that you have to borrow for; pay it off quickly. Invest in long term investments and start early. Be frugal and forget about the fancy new doodad, or if you insist save up for it an pay for it cash. Cook at home and spend time with you kids and your friends.
[1] A text, god forbid not a human voice! People are addicted to texting because it allows them to have conversations with multiple people at once. We communicate more than ever but those conversations are shallower.
[2] Fail fast + short term methodologies.
If you want a great example of this, look at post-USSR Russia and what happens when you trade wealth for trinkets.
Massive regional concentrations of wealth, hopeless money-losing industries that are technologically behind by 25-30 years, massive brain drain, absolutely stagnated sciences, rising nationalism and censorship of the press.
But hey, at least gas is semi-cheap and everybody has cars and iphones.