I am one of those people, though in my case it was not so much for cost saving reasons as it was the easiest means of leaving a coastal city that would clearly be hard hit by Coronavirus.
oddly enough I'm morbidly curious about the decline in birth and marriage rates due to this whole episode. hard to hook up in your parent's home.
Economic crises almost always cause huge drops in fertility rates, look at the US rate post GFC.
Fertility being correlated with income levels, the people spending time at home together are already not going to have kids, the others are unemployed/under massive financial stress/still going to work.
> People are spending more time at home together, could there be a birth boom in Q1/Q2 of next year?
Birth control is cheap and well understood these days, I doubt many people are actively trying to have kids during a pandemic (financial + health risks). If anything I'd expect more breakups than births
Birth rates generally decline in times of uncertainty; most people are aware of and practice family planning. For many, having a child right now would be fiscally irresponsible.
not just fiscally - if you have a choice, why would you choose to go to the hospital for a traumatic process, tying up valuable doctors but also potentially exposing yourself to covid...
Anecdotally where I live several OB/GYNs (my wife is a resident) have told me they will be delivering a ton of babies over this upcoming winter, and that they are busier than ever - with obstetric cases.
Also anecdotally, we're expecting our first - we were waiting for the right time, had it all planned out.. then COVID pulled the rug out from under everything so we said screw it and just went for it. I suspect we're not alone in this...
Cannot agree more. There's nothing wrong to live with your kids. I have a child now and would love to live with my parents (a little bit so they can take care of it) provided we all had big enough house.
In many countries it's not only acceptable, but customary to live with your parents if you are single - even well into your 30s. In parts of Latin America (most/all of it?), people will find it odd if you leave home "for no good reason".
I don’t think living together is going to really make the impact eventful... it’s like saying, not buying that coffee in the morning is going to help you save money (with the pretense that not buying that coffee means you’ll be able to eventually afford a $2mil home on a $40k/year income).
I live downtown in a coastal city. What I’m seeing is a lot of young men living in the streets. This is the other side of this story some young adults don’t have a home to go back to after job loss and eviction.
We’re seeing just the tip of the iceberg. I expect a lot more social upheaval in the coming years. Social services are going to get severely strained.
I’m a renter. Do I need to prove I’ve lost my job to not pay? Do I get to skip out on paying for a luxury apartment if I have money in the bank? Does my landlord get to skip her mortgage? Or only the portion paid by my rent? What about the bank who holds the mortgage? Or the retired bond holder who ultimately gets the mortgage payments?
Every step along the way requires somebody to not get paid.
If the government intervenes, at which step should they do it?
I’m not saying no actions should be taken, just that it’s more complicated than pure rent forgiveness. Perhaps the answer is some kind of short term UBI, but that gets expensive quick. Zero interest government loans puts the burden back on the individual. I’m not fully clear on how to beat balance individual ownership versus protecting the system from collapse. (The latter involves propping up the banks)
It is very complex, but what's the alternative? Widespread evictions (in the midst of "stay inside," no less)? A bad answer is so much better than none at all, in the same way that a badly-implemented draft and a poorly-trained army is a vastly superior response to an invasion than nothing.
I think the starting principle I'd take is that this is going to go very poorly for some people, and our only decision is for whom it goes poorly. (After all, if we do nothing, it will clearly go poorly for many people, and as you point out there's no obvious solution where it works well for everyone.) There is a productivity loss that needs to be borne by someone, and it seems to me the obvious approach is to ask who can bear it with the least impact on the long-term good of society / the nation / humanity.
The answer is probably that certain people in the chain you mention, possibly the landlord, probably the bank, and perhaps (but probably not) the retiree, can afford to just not get paid. It's unfair for them, but they will do fine: they won't lose out on revenue that they need to put food on the table or a roof over their heads (the whole point here is to keep roofs over heads). Everyone upstream of them gets to not pay them.
And yes, it's unjust to take money from people (or really, require that people keep providing services without being paid for them) without their consent, but it's also unjust to draft people for a war without their consent. We do it anyway because the alternative - choosing to not fight the war - is unjust too.
It’s not an easy solution. Even if the Govt pays, we pay as taxpayers. My inclination is if the broader “we” decide someone doesn’t have to pay, then “we” have to be willing to pay for it.
As of now there is an eviction moratorium in most of America, but when the moratorium ends do you have to catch up on 12 months of rent ?
How is any family, which was already living paycheck to paycheck ever going to sort that out. What's going to happen is tons of Americans are simply not going to be able to pay, their credits will be ruined and the rent won't be paid anyway.
It would be nice to present a goal, no one pays rent until we have a functioning economy again, and then sort out the details a bit later. The government could forgive property taxes as well, Banks could delay mortgage payments until the end of the pandemic.
I spoke to one friend who was three months behind on rent at a point. Telling him to Buck up and figure it out, isn't going to do any good. Money ultimately is an abstraction, as a society we very much can shape the rules around it. I can't imagine millions of homeless families being worse than landlords having to seek out different arrangements with their Banks.
Overalla lot of people aren't going to be able to pay rent through no fault of their own, they shouldn't be evicted as punishment. Or you can tell me ,how would anyone catch up on a year of rent once the eviction moratorium is over ?
This didn't answer the question at all. People understand renters who lost their jobs can't pay their rent.
The problem is, you can't just say "so don't pay rent" and magically make that OK. That rent money in turn pays for maintenance/upkeep, mortgage payments, property taxes, wages for property managers and repairmen etc. You can't pretend like all land is owned by some king who can just afford to not get rental payments.
If the government doesn't collect property taxes, how do they pay for schools, roads and firefighting next year? If the bank doesn't collect their mortgage payments, they go insolvent and don't have the cash to give you when you try to withdraw from your checking account.
Flipping your final line around, how would the elderly widow relying on renting out her former family home handle receiving no income for a year?
The current defacto situation involves millions of renters just being unable to pay. They can't be evicted in most of America.
Landlords are going to lose money.
>Flipping your final line around, how would the elderly widow relying on renting out her former family home handle receiving no income for a year?
She still will not get any income until the eviction moratorium is lifted. The only thing she can do is sue her tenants for money they don't have. Even in good times evictions can take months to a year.
It can be argued this is the risk of doing business. If tenants can't pay they can't.
The backlog of evictions ( which are one of the most stressful things you can experience) will clog courts. At least if we establish renters will not be able to pay, we can develop an alternative plan. Better to have a plan than saying everyone has to survive the best they can.
Someone with an economic degree would work out the details. Obviously I can't write a full relief bill in a comment
> Unless we just forgive rent until a vaccine is out, many people will never catch up.
If 'we' forgive rent owed landlords, will 'we' also forgive the mortgages those landlords owe the banks? Will 'we' also forgive the obligations the banks which owe to other banks and their investors? Will 'we' also forgive the obligations those investors owe, for example to pensioners? Will 'we' then step up and pay for those pensioners' food and … rent?
An economy is a gigantic web of interlocking relationships. It takes years (one might even say centuries!) to build and develop all of those, but it takes far less effort to destroy them. It is computationally impossible for anyone to understand all of an economy, and thus impossible for anyone to make good decisions on behalf of an entire economy.
If we are worried about folks without resources, we should give them some. Yes, that runs the risk of encouraging those who want to get those resources (e.g. student financial aid encourages the growth of the academic industry, mortgage assistance encourages the growth of the real estate industry &c.): we should probably just give the poor some amount of money and let them make their own decisions about it. Call it unemployment or UBI or whatever.
The fact that it's impossible to make good decisions doesn't change the fact that a decision has to be made, nonetheless. This isn't a computer game where there's an answer to the puzzle from the designer, where the COVID-19 monster shows up but it has a weak spot on the back of its tail where you can land a critical hit. There is no good solution. Our job is to find the least-bad one.
I think there's a good argument that yes, forgiving all of those rents and paying for the pensioners' pensions is less bad than not doing anything. (We might also want to consider why pensioners are living off of complex financial relationships instead of, like, cash, and whether that risk/reward tradeoff was good for society, but we won't be able to see the results of any changes we make for another generation or two.)
I do think that, yes, "we will just give you money" (and "we will increase taxes on people who won't get evicted if we do") is a fine answer too.
But also, the amount of benefit that any intervention can have drops rapidly by the month. Every time rent payments (or mortgages, or pension-funded bills) are due, there's a new batch of people who can't pay it. A bad answer today, and maybe a workaround for second-order effects later, is a lot better than a better answer in three months.
> The fact that it's impossible to make good decisions doesn't change the fact that a decision has to be made, nonetheless.
Does it? Maybe the right answer is not to make all decisions in one place: maybe the right answer is to let every citizen make his or her own decisions. The one who is willing to trade the emotional cost of moving back in with his loving family in order to have more money for lunches with friends does so, while the one with abusive parents chooses to cancel cable rather than moving back in — and so forth.
> We might also want to consider why pensioners are living off of complex financial relationships instead of, like, cash
Because storing all of one's life savings under the mattress is susceptible to theft. Even taking a broader definition of 'cash' to include a bank account, would you at age 60, with another 20 years to live, rather be earning 0.06% (the current savings account rate) or 1% (or more) per annum? At 0.06%, one would need about $100,000,000 to earn the $64,000 median U.S. income in interest. Alternatively, if you figure that you will live a maximum of 50 more year, you will need over $3 million in order to retire and just spend the money. You gotta invest to have something to live off of.
> Does it? Maybe the right answer is not to make all decisions in one place: maybe the right answer is to let every citizen make his or her own decisions.
That is one of the possible decisions, yes. It does seem to be the decision the US is going with, for the most part.
(I'm a little confused what you mean by "cancel cable" - do you live somewhere where the cost of a monthly cable TV bill is comparable to the cost of a monthly rent bill?)
> would you at age 60, with another 20 years to live, rather be earning 0.06% (the current savings account rate) or 1% (or more) per annum?
It depends on the risk profile. If you can guarantee me 1% or more per annum without risk, then obviously I'll take it, but if you could make that guarantee, then savings accounts would just make the same investment and offer 1% interest too.
Also, if you tell me that my options are earning 1% on my savings and setting up a system of complex dependencies that leads to a thousand people becoming homeless over the rest of my life, or 0.06% and not doing so, that may influence my answer.
The reason retired people can’t live off of cash is simple - inflation. In many countries, governments provide and guarantee retirement. US has largely shifted to saved retirements in the form of IRA/401Ks. These are investment accounts, which means your principle is not protected, but you earn interest to, hopefully, protect you from inflation and build returns. In practice, those retired end up bearing the same market risk as normal investors, whereas a government insured pension is only as risky as the government itself (which differs by country).
Oh hm, I guess there's a natural experiment there - are countries that have government-backed pensions more willing to do rent cancellations than the US is? (There are a lot of confounding factors, to be fair.)
I've never seen a government tasked with taking care of the populace actively work against them as much as this one has. Assistance is endless paperworks, checks, administrators, double check. All to make sure the people that need that help can't get that help. It would be so much easier for everyone for government assistance to be cash. But we'd rather have endless "programs" marked up 100% where in the end assistance is 50% cash and 50% administration.
If 'we' forgive the rent owed to landlords, what about the property taxes that can be just as large as the mortgage. NYS has an eviction moratorium, but they still want their taxes.
I've seen a documentary about San Francisco it's crazy how middle income people are being pushed farther from the city. One teacher had several bus transfers and then a long walk to get to her job. Even bus stops where "poor" people (less than $100,000/year) are being crowded by private buses like Google forcing city buses to wait which adds to the wait down the line. Nuts!
Same here. The rust belt cities across the northeast and stretching into the Midwest don't seem to be doing that bad either.
I see the "jobs in places not SF or NYC" situation as kind of like how the people who spend MSRP minus $2k for a 5yo 4Runner feel the need to loudly proclaim how everything else is crap because they have this massive sunk cost they need to justify to themselves. All I know is my car starts every morning and I'm not making payments on it.
The main part of the documentary is a teacher who can't afford to live anywhere near the school that employs her. I think the cheapest rent was $3,500/month and she made 60K per year (?). I believe she worked in San Francisco but had to move to Oakland. She had to take multiple buses and then walk a few miles from the final stop. But in the end she found a place in San Francisco near her school which she could afford.
It also showed Google and other large companies with their private buses. There was a lot of conflict between average citizens and the "Google buses", at least in the video there was.
California: Tax the hell out of people who need to drive because they can't afford to live near prime transit locations. Then be subjected to such transit which is unsafe, unreliable, and unpleasant to say the least.
I moved back into my parents house after my lease expired, primarily to have regular social interaction again.
> "While moving back home during the pandemic makes sense and is seen as socially acceptable or even smart, it also means you are living with people who still see you as your 18-year-old self."
One of the biggest things I’ve noticed among millennials is how many parents fail to understand the emotional and mental situation of what their children are currently experiencing. I feel so incredibly lucky that my parents understand that I’m not 18, and they’re happy to help out during these uncertain times. I’m so much more productive working from my parents house because I now have enough space for a decent home office.
I also have coworkers that have openly talked about how their parents refuse to let them move back in during the pandemic, citing the “time to grow up” mentality. I’m all for taking personal responsibility in one’s life, but there are a whole lot of older people out there that are oblivious to just how serious the pandemic has been economically.
I will probably be going against the grain here, but I managed to rent a flat by myself while in university years ago with a part time job in a supermarket at weekends and applying for some hardship funds and other money available at the time.
Rents have risen a lot since then, but is it really impossible for someone in work to be able to afford rent? Or are they insisting on living in a fashionable part of town? (For me independence from my parents was quite a high priority in those days).
In a lot of areas normal jobs are literally impossible to do at the moment. It isn't a matter of whether or not people want to do them. In my city in a non-US country you actually are doing something illegal if you go to work in certain industries or undertake extremely common activities that were normal 6 months ago. This is unique and far beyond anything me (or my parents) have ever known. No obvious end to a lot of this is in sight.
While I’m sure they’ve gone down a little in certain urban cores, like SF, they remain absurdly high in the midsize, Midwestern city where I grew up and now live. When I moved back, apartments here were going for only a bit less than what I paid in Los Angeles and seem to have not gone down at all. Home prices also remain artificially high because there are less listings and more interested buyers.
Not in my case, I was easily able to afford rent and I’ve stayed employed throughout the pandemic as a tech worker.
The challenge has been maintaining my sanity. My previous apartment was small and didn’t have space for a good home office setup since I never expected to work from hone when I leased it. Additionally, I was having little social interaction due to the pandemic since Texas wasn’t doing a good job preventing spread early on.
My other reason for moving in with my parents was that my company did a lot of business in the travel industry and I feared layoffs. Not having to worry about my living situation while looking for another job in the midst of a crisis was a huge relief in my mind. Fortunately, I’ve been able to stay at the same company so far.
If being independent is the absolute most important thing to you, that’s great. But I’d argue that America’s individualistic culture is one of the biggest reasons we’re struggling to get past this pandemic. People demand the right to ignore basic public health requests, and it’s a major problem.
I started as a trainee broadcast engineer in London on £17,800 a year in 2003. This left me with £1,082 a month (back then student loan payments were far higher than now). Rent for a tiny bedsit with a shared bathroom was £520 a month, 2 mile walk from work. I could live further out, but commuting costs outweighed any savings.
That's the equivalent of £828 a month now. Bills were included.
You can actually pick up a studio flat for £737 in the same area, which actually looks better - it's about 60 square feet which I think it a little smaller than the one I had, but it has it's own toilet. Council tax is on top of that at £45 a month, but still fits in the budget, just.
Assuming the same 50% of take home wage in rent, or a net wage of £1500pcm, would be about £21k/year
My £17800 salary in 2003 would be £28,300 today, or net of £1900pcm, so could afford (on the same ratio) £910 a month, which gives you a fair amount of choice at the moment in W14 according to rightmove.
I'm surprised as I felt renting was far harder now than 20 years ago, but seems it might be slightly better. Of course rents on tiny studios are presumably depressed because of covid19, I'm not sure what they were this time last year.
Where I live, most property agents will do a credit and income check, and would turn you away for not meeting the "minimum income level" for renting those places.
Even if you feel you can afford spending 50% of your income, it doesn't follow that you can easily find a landlord who allows it.
If you have a bad credit rating, as many people do these days, it will be even more difficult as more landlords check that than income.
In my case, where I am currently living, I had insufficient income at the time I moved in to qualify, and was only allowed to rent on the condition that I paid 12 months rent up front. And then I had to do it again the following year. Obviously that's only available to people with decent savings.
But that's no different to 2003 (you could have a guarantor - typically a parent - who would be on the hook for your rent if you didn't pay it)
Before I started looking I was under the impression things were harder now then they were in 2003, but it seems not, at least in this one case (tiny studio/bedsits in a dodgy part of west london) -- unless asking prices on rent are massively depressed due to covid.
In 2006/7 I lived in Tunbridge wells, paying £800pcm for a 2 bed flat that looked almost identical to this one, although it was in the next door house and had a garage instead of a parking spot.
Things seem to have become more difficult to obtain in some cases. Back in 2003, nobody asked me for proof of income for renting. Just basic credit checks (which don't directly know about income or bank balances). Proof of income is more recent.
(And difficult if you're self-employed with highly irregular income, I found.)
If using a guarantor, a guarantor has to pass similar checks.
Guarantor works a lot better for a young person starting out in a cheap-ass room in a shared place, whose parents expect this. For a flat and an older adult with retired parents on a low pension, or their own housing costs, not so much.
Good like finding a guarantor if your parents or friends:
- don't have enough spare income to cover your rent in addition to their own expenses
- don't pass the credit check themselves
- can't pass the proof-of-income check themselves
- don't have enough assets to use as security
- are not happy using their assets as security for you (e.g. their limited life savings or their one and only home)
Some people don't have parents, and these days, quite a lot of parents rent precariously too. They would be turned down as guarantors.
More parents renting is a factor which has changed in recent years.
I imagine most people don't have friends who would be willing to be long term rent guarantors, even if they could be.
>Things seem to have become more difficult to obtain in some cases. Back in 2003, nobody asked me for proof of income for renting. Just basic credit checks (which don't directly know about income or bank balances). Proof of income is more recent.
Because they can ask those things more quickly and easily now. There's a bunch of jerks in California who are hellbent on connecting every DB in the world to every other DB that we can thank for this.
> Guarantor works a lot better for a young person starting out in a cheap-ass room in a shared place, whose parents expect this. For a flat and an older adult with retired parents on a low pension, or their own housing costs, not so much.
Absolutely. When my mother-in-law divorced and moved into a rented house, I was her guarantor.
I did have parents in 2003, but they lived 3000 miles away in a greek village where there was an ISDN line a 20 minute ride down the mountain, so not too practical. But this artcile is about 18-29 year olds moving in with their parents, not 50 year olds.
> 18-29 year olds moving in with their parents, not 50 year olds.
It applies in that age range as well.
A 29 year old moving in with their 64 year old parent(s) who are themselves poor and renting while on the edge of official retirement age, is going to find their parents probably rejected as guarantors.
> Where I live, most property agents will do a credit and income check, and would turn you away for not meeting the "minimum income level" for renting those places.
This is where room in a shared house comes into play. They're available for $4-500 a month in my city.
Where I live, there's a minimum income level for shared house rooms as well, and the cost of a room can be 50% of someone's income if they are working but poorly paid, so they won't be allowed it.
Luckily rooms are more likely to be rented somewhat informally, or by less stringent agents & landlords, compared with flats, so there's a decent market of these without a hard income requirement, alongside those with the requirement.
Similar story, also 2003. Think the pay was £24K, but I had to be in for work quite early in the morning so that limited the location. Rent was £800 a month for new building, but in a not-so-nice neighborhood. It was a 1BR, the sort of size that's big for a student but small for anyone else. Had its own kitchen and bathroom.
Moved in with a friend after that, saved about £100 a month, but also in a nicer part of town.
Have to say the budget felt stretched at £24K, luckily that went up a lot pretty fast.
There aren't studio or one bedroom below about £1200 a month in London, closer to £1500 toward the center.
You're talking about Kensington in London? That's the center and one of the most expensive location in the city.
Where the fuck do you see a place for £737 in there?
Either it's a flatshare (that's a bit low, must be 6+ people) or you confused 737 per month with 737 per week (that'd be £3000 a month, possible for a luxury 1 bedroom in that area the size of what people consider a 2 bedroom, typical ads that come at the top of rightmove).
reports "Rents in the capital are down 4.2 per cent as tourists stay away and short-let landlords switch to long-term contracts, flooding the market."
I suspect rents on tiny bedsit studios are down even more, especially as weekly commuters no longer need them, and young people move to live with parents.
Wow, they are less than 3x3 meters (10x10 feet) including the corner for shower. The bed is literally touching the cooker/oven in the first one.
That explains the £737. Can't even put a desk to do your homework. Nobody would want to live there, especially with COVID.
Regular studios in student accommodations go for double that in this area. I've actually seen friends paying as much as £2000 a month, when they come from far or from abroad, don't have the luxury to visit 10 properties and landlord won't rent to students with no income.
Yup, but that's what I got for £520 in 2003, and managed to live there just fine. Hell for 2 months I lived there with my girlfriend (now wife) before we moved out towards Reading for an actual 1 bed flat. I was working shifts then though so could drive to work mostly off peak, get free parking, and it was only 7 days a fortnight.
The room in my hall of residence was smaller than that, although being in Exeter it cost far less (£90 a week, so £390 a month).
Of course I had an office to go to for that time, clearly it's different in the last 6 months.
TL;DR: London will chew you up and spit you out unless you live so far out that your commute is measured in 1.5-hour increments, or unless you're already rich. A young person is sentenced to renting.
My personal story:
I lived there up until about a year ago, not far from the center. Being a young person, I earned the usual entry-level software developer salary. I tried to live a relatively frugal lifestyle, which included not going out and spending not a whole lot on personal entertainment costs.
The rent was £1500, so I had to rent a flat with my friend. Travel was expensive, and a fixed cost in my circumstances. Bills were not included, so we had to pay those as well. I tried to cut costs as much as I could, and in retrospect maybe I could have cut £80-100 a month from my grocery spending by shopping in cheaper stores, or perhaps even another £50 on top of that if I was willing to trade off some of my sanity/time for the savings. I had some savings, but not a whole lot.
The whole time, I was cutting into my savings each month and literally losing my money by staying in London. Even if I tried to save harder, that would get me nowhere nearer to saving up for a deposit for the next few years.
I eventually decided to leave the city behind and move to Scotland. Instant quality of life improvement, and I actually got the chance to start building up my savings rather than chipping away at them.
You didn't manage to rent a flat by yourself. You were given money to do so, by your own admittance. I don't blame you for taking advantage, but you're using it to argue that young people can or should be able to make it on their own. You've just got anonymous parents supporting you in place of your own parents.
Sorry but that doesn't address the issue at all. I got the majority of money through working, and that was at weekends and holidays, I wasn't in a position to work full time, which i am assuming the people in the article are. The university hardship funds were a bit of extra money, but not a huge amount. No one has explained what has gotten so expensive that a full time low wage job can't support it.
This is something that really depends on where you live more than anything. I will say there is no state currently where you can afford an apartment by yourself making minimum wage.
I've seen this claim and associated study pop up a couple of times. The study is done year on year and it's been amusing watching the increasingly long lengths they go to to hide the fact that their comparing _average_ rent for a _two bedroom_ apartment to the _minimum_ wage.
Anecdotally, this is simply not true. I lived in a fairly nice area next to my university for the better part of the past five years at well below the poverty level. (~$10,000) per year so far less than minimum wage.
I'm mostly voicing a much more general confusion here. I think you have to bolt down our [lets be honest] mostly imaginary system to reality in some spots. Rents can simply be adjusted to whatever people can pay. That way there is no technological or economic progress to be had for those at the bottom. The fix is in?
Or let me put it like this: If I want a banana I want to pay for what it costs to grow the banana, the packaging, the logistics of it and for those who perform the miracle of trade. If all the steps involved also involve maximizing wealth extraction from those employed in those steps by [any and all means!] my banana will naturally grow in price to the point where my minimum wage has doubts if it can afford it. Not just now but forever! Regardless of anything.
Regulation cant be like: We will cap the price of bananas at this point since everyone involved in making them happen for me has to pay rent that grows along with the kiwi's. I very much doubt we cant fix rent. There might be a layer or 2 of maximized wealth extraction above it. Those are not impossible to fix. If we had real collective goals we could just be like: It wont happen - forever! and get a really cheap but highly profitable banana in return.
Note: I can stack bricks and run tubes though them. Its not hard and not a lot of work. IOW: I'm not impressed by a concrete box. End of the day my government owns all the land.
You clearly do not understand the economics behind renting. Wealth extraction as you call it, isn't pure profit for the layers above. Your rent pays for the landlord's mortgage, maintenance, inspection and risk being taken on from a tenant. Your landlord pays the bank, who use the money to pay off their own obligations, including your grandparents pension plan. It would never be possible to adjust that system.
The other reason things are so high is there are too many people and not enough houses, so there's little opportunity for competition.
When, if or where people are either poor or primitive enough it works like this: You build a house then you live in it.
There is nothing in this that suggests one needs to spend 1/4 or 2/3 of the productive labor in their lives to maintain the house.
Progress is to reduce the maintenance cost. The lower it is the lower the salaries can be which increase productivity exponentially.
IOW grandpa's pension plan is for a large part to continue to pay for housing. He spend his entire life busting his ass but some how didn't manage to earn a place to live.
It's still possible possible to build a house today and live in it, and there is plenty of land, even some going for cheap. But most people don't want that because they make that trade off for today's luxuries.
Ok, I will give you that London prices are silly, but it isn't the norm as far as the UK goes. And again I shared a flat, why does no one under 30 expect to do this any more?
Well, people live in flatshare a lot. I don't think you can ask why they don't do it when they do it ^^
One cultural thing I noticed in London and I assume in the UK at large is the lack of studios. There are plenty of 1 bedroom but there aren't studios (200-300 sqft).
If you go to Paris for comparison, you will see an incredible amount of studios.
It makes a world of difference when you get 25+, you make a living and you want to be independent (forget about dating and getting married otherwise). In the absence of studio, you're forced to pay up a lot to get a one bedroom (more than what low end jobs earn so they're stuck with flatmates).
> "While moving back home during the pandemic makes sense and is seen as socially acceptable or even smart, it also means you are living with people who still see you as your 18-year-old self."
I feel that this is the case for many people and in other contexts. If you develop a lot during say two years of employment, then depending on who your manager is, you may still be seen in the same way as when you started.
There is an inherent poetic dilemma with reconciling yourself with how you age. Parents can buffer this change, whether for positive or negative effect.
I think it’s cultural. American society absolutely looks down on those that live with their parents as failures. If I were to guess, some parents might see their children asking to return home as a reflection on their ability as a parent to prepare for the “real world”, but that’s just my guess.
I don't think it has much to do with wealth. In fact, in old societies primogeniture practiced by the wealthy meant that the eldest son was expected to stay at home. The second sons with limited inheritance often set out on their own.
In the US context, it has historical connections to the glorification of pioneerism and expansion through the western frontier (along with the genocide that accompanied that).
After that, in the post WW2 period, opportunity in the US was so abundant that a (commonly white male) school dropout could walk into a factory and get a job with benefits. The same person could then afford a modest house (not the gigantic houses of today), support a family on a single income, and had access to affordable health care and good public education for their kids.
In the context of that sort of opportunity, staying at your parents' home in adulthood was far more indicative of personal failings, and that's where the current trope disparaging adult (mostly male) children living at home originated.
But given how diminished all of those opportunities are today (no lands to forcibly take from less technologically advantaged peoples, no new factories, expensive housing where jobs are available, high qualifications required), it's a trope that's pretty irrelevant today.
I'm not sure how irrelevant it is (though Covid may change that).
If I wasn't engaged I would have gone home to WFH immediately during the pandemic, it would have been nice to spend time there and be with family (rare opportunity for easy ability to work remotely and spend time with family on the east coast).
That said, most of the successful people I know moved out to areas with more opportunity and those that stayed behind (particularly those that live at home) are more likely to have 'personal failings' of some sort.
Maybe this isn't true if you were lucky enough to grow up in an economic hub to start, but if you didn't there's still some truth to it.
Obviously during the pandemic this changes and no longer becomes relevant since remote opportunity and being able to save money by living home (since everything is locked down anyway) makes way more sense. Most people don't think independently from the cultural context though so it'd take a while for this to update.
Why live in Palo Alto and waste lots of money on rent because of stupid housing policy when you don't have to? When you can't go out and do stuff?
You are conflating two independent phenomena here. One is the pandemic related pattern of young people moving back in with their parents. The other is the cultural judgment reserved for young people who never leave their parents home well into adulthood. I was addressing the latter.
> That said, most of the successful people I know moved out to areas with more opportunity and those that stayed behind (particularly those that live at home) are more likely to have 'personal failings' of some sort.
Sounds like you are almost defining "personal failings" as "unable to gain the skills to compete and thrive in a high opportunity area".
If that's the case, perhaps we should reconsider whether such a high level of achievement should be required in order for a person to establish a basic non extravagant life on their own independent of their parents.
> Why live in Palo Alto and waste lots of money on rent because of stupid housing policy when you don't have to? When you can't go out and do stuff?
I hear sentiments like this a lot lately, and it feels short-sighted to me. COVID restrictions are not going to be around forever. There are financial, professional, social, and other costs that come with moving somewhere else.
For people who genuinely don't like it in $HCOL_AREA regardless of the pandemic, and see this as a way to get out permanently, then that's great, and they should do that. If it's more like "it's expensive here and I can't go out to my favorite bars/restaurants right now", the latter half of that situation should fix itself by next summer, and hopefully earlier in some fashion. Sure, that's a while to wait, but isn't much time when considering that an alternative is to uproot your entire life.
Honestly I hear this much more from those closer to poverty. I think they view it as children should be self sufficient so I no longer have to pay for them. I think a lot of what people consider “cold hearted” in the modern world is really just veiled economic uncertainty. People would rather be considered strict than poor.
Nah, rich people boost their kids through life. Poor people are the ones who subscribe to Labour Theology: Hard Work is Righteous, Assisting Kids Ruins Them.
Not OP, but at my parents' home it's such a classical traditional division of labor that the housewife does all the cleaning, it's her domain, her full-time job. She'd be self-conscious of not doing her part (and annoying) if someone else was doing it.
It wasn't even considered normal for me to cook anything in the kitchen while I still lived at home. It was like being in someone else's workshop and using all their tools and putting things back not quite where they like them or wasting soap/water when washing implements or being too messy or abusive to the equipment. It was impossible to not cause some sort of trouble, I literally started grilling outside daily to not touch the kitchen and still feed myself real food as a young adult.
One could argue it was the parents refusing to grow up, but it's also arguably a predictable outcome when the husband works like a blue-collar dog to pay the bills and the wife doesn't have to work a formal job. Obviously the husband is going to expect the wife to keep the house clean and do all the cooking, if she slacks off on these relatively trivial duties while he's grouchy and overworked, bad times for sure.
It's not peculiarly American, it's a Western European, especially Northwestern European, pattern. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2917824/, particularly the multigenerational household columns in the various tables.[1] And I'd bet it's related to the phenomenon of late marriage that has historically distinguished Western Europe from most of the rest of the world for the past 500 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajnal_line
I'm tempted to admit that the expression of this otherwise shared culture might be intensified by some of the more distinctive aspects of American culture (e.g. pioneer spirit, as mentioned elsethread), but I hesitate because assuming America is exceptional is a bad habit I'm trying to kick =)
[1] That paper is something of a rebuttal to the argument that NW European culture (including North American culture) was always strongly nuclear. But the lack of multigenerational living seems pretty clear; what they seem to show instead is that the trend of the elderly living alone is relatively new. Which doesn't seem surprising. A culture that pressures children to move out of the home doesn't imply a culture that pressures the elderly to live alone.
There are people who never grow up if given the opportunity to keep living with their parents. My cousin is one of them.
Get a job? Why? Go to school? Why? Things are fine. I have someone to cook my meals and a warm bed to sleep in.
My uncle ended up booting my cousin out of the house. It was the best thing that happened to him. He matured significantly, went back to school, has a great job. He even admits it himself that he was in a rut that would have never ended had he been able to keep living at home. Living at home sheltered him from the real world.
> There are people who never grow up if given the opportunity to keep living with their parents. My cousin is one of them.
The case of a totally unmotivated individual not engaging themselves in school or work is totally different than the case of working young adults who want to live independently of their parents, but can't afford to do so due to high cost of living, high debt, or other financial factors. I know people who have been in both categories, and they are not much alike.
Interestingly in most parts of Asia(East, SE, South), living with your parents is the norm, so parents usually prefer if their kids stay with them but it does mean way less personal space and freedom.
Due to the culture, everyone will go out of their way to make you feel as independent as possible. Plus there's single day hotels if you want to have a room alone with someone who should not meet your parents yet. In the end, living with your parents then boils down to going to a restaurant with them on the weekends to honor your ancestors, but most of the time they behave more like roommates.
I will never understand this mentality, I mean if the child is an out and out slacker maybe I could understand, but to this day, if I fell on hard times I have a host of family members that would take us in, no questions asked. We as a family where raised that way to the extent that I could show up on a second or third generation cousins door step and they would take us in. That fairly distance relatives I can't imagine a family where the dynamic is that they will not let their direct descendant come home to catch their breath. I mean that is your legacy.
I actually had to come home when I was in my early 20's. I spent my high-school and post-secondary years pursuing culinary arts. It never dawned on me to actually get a job in a commercial kitchen until I had my culinary degree due to the fact that I worked thru school as a finish carpenter and made a pretty good wage for a 18-19 year old kid. Anyways with degree in hand, I set off for New Orleans to make a name for myself as a chef. From the moment I got into a commercial kitchen I realized I had made a big mistake, while I loved cooking, being a chef in a commercial kitchen has little to do with actual cooking. So I came home hat in hand with no direction, went back to carpentry while I regrouped, the entire time my grandfather (I was raised by my grandparents) kept saying you know you really have a knack for programming those computers. I always viewed it as a hobby but folded to his suggestions and took a job at a local shop doing custom business software. This was the dawn of the internet, so there where still small shops doing desktop software for small businesses. Anyways the rest is history but the point being, is I knew I could come home, I could not imagine not having that relief valve as a young person, especially in today's climate.
> how many parents fail to understand the emotional and mental situation of what their children are currently experiencing.
This is crucial to understanding:
- The immediate distress of young males. They have no chance of seducing externally if they don’t have moral support at home. Explains the billion of 9Gag posts about young people who fall addicted to gaming and joke about virginity and lack of self confidence, who joke about the thing they know they’ll fatally become. They’re stuck in a bad place in life.
- The rise in what all Democrat fans would call “Extreme right”, which they don’t understand is just people who we’ve abandoned, who count on no-one because no-one cares for them. Isolation and individualism goes hand in hand. I keep telling my leftist friends if they want solidarity to triumph, they can’t just focus on women-at-the-workplace, one day they’ll have to face the men-at-the-game-addiction-station question. Especially if they want a cohesive society.
Living with the parents isn’t the best way to get social interactions, unless it is a venue where they can be for _caring for others_. Because young men are especially deprived of places where they can care for someone, women being very independent nowadays, especially in their 20ies. And caring for someone is the blood of the soul.
I’m surprised, I didn’t expect to have resonating words ;) Listen to Karen Straughan for example, she’s a good resource on how to learn to see boys where they are, not for what we project of them. She shakes me every time.
> Living with the parents isn’t the best way to get social interactions, unless it is a venue where they can be for _caring for others_. Because young men are especially deprived of places where they can care for someone, women being very independent nowadays, especially in their 20ies. And caring for someone is the blood of the soul.
I think you put that very nicely.
I think I understand this problem, and I have empathy for these men (it also took me a long time to get my first relationship, I know how it feels). I just don't know what the solution is. Their frustration might to some extent be caused by the independence of women (where women now may prefer to be single than to be in a relationship they don't really want), but I don't think it's right to hold back on women's emancipation in order to make men feel better about themselves.
What exactly is the right's suggested solution here (I ask this out of genuine curiosity)? Today's mainstream right looks at these frustrated men's hardening hearts, and all it seems to see is an opportunity to accelerate that hardening for political gain, by convincing them that the source of their woes (and the rightful targets of their anger) are immigrants/feminists/protestors/... I'm skeptical that we should expect any workable solutions from there.
Also, as a side note, why do you feel the need to use quotes around "Extreme right"? Do you disagree with labeling rising movements like QAnon and incel/blackpill subculture as "extreme right"?
Not 100% sure, I think we'd benefit from society broadening what acceptable ways of living and gender roles are available for men. There are plenty of women that grow up feeling dejected or romantically undesirable, but we don't necessarily see the same sort of frustration expressed the way we're familiar with in young men. My take is that there are social expectations for how men are supposed to act or live, and there are elements of said expectations that contribute to the frustration and loneliness we see in many of them today. I think the world would be better if a lot of young men felt able to express what was bothering them to their peers, as well had peers (not necessarily always romantic) that cared enough to at least listen.
I was once browsing a Reddit group for Transmen, and a discussion the members were having on socializing with masculinity hit a lot of the notes I expected. [1]
The use of quotes might be because the labels of "right" and "left" are very geographically dependent. The political Overton window in the USA is very different to other English-speaking countries, not to mention the rest of the world. For the record, I don't disagree with the labelling, just explaining the possible reasons.
Since the pandemic hit, my parents have been trying to convince me to move back in with them. I'm working remotely now, they say, so I don't have to live in the city, so I might as well live with them, right?
I have to keep making different excuses. They don't seem to quite get the message that as much as I love them, I just don't want to live with them...
At the start of the lockdown in France, my parents asked me to move back (temporarily) with them, mostly so that I don't spent all the lockdown alone. I nearly refused, because then I didn't though the lockdown would be so long, a few weeks at most. In the end I still went back for the duration of the lockdown and I'm thankful I did.
If you're doing ok on your own and your parents aren't worried about your financial capacity, they're probably just worried in general, about your physical or mental health, or their own. Sounds more like they just have the same general anxiety as most of us. They might want it for themselves more than you.
I don't think they're worried, they just like to see me. Which, all things considered, I really appreciate—it's certainly better than the other way around.
I guess the original reason I posted the anecdote is, I wonder how many of the people who've moved back home just did it because they could, since they're working remotely anyway.
I was in a similar boat. I eventually said sure why not, might actually be great!, sold my house, and moved back in with them. A month later and now I live with my sibling because I hit my breaking point.
It really just depends on your relationships with your parents. I moved in with my parents when I started working remotely a few years ago, and lived with them for two years until I moved in with my fiance. Moving in with them was a fantastic decision.
That said, we immigrated to the US from a country where it is normal/expected to live with your parents until marriage or later. I don't think my fiance would have had a good time moving back in her with parents for 2 years like I did.
Millennials face a very real risk of being a lost generation financially. They have endured 2 major, years long recessions, and now the Covid pandemic coupled with social isolation and massive unemployment that does not appear to have an end date in sight. Housing is more expensive for them than prior generations, wages are stagnant, school is expensive and social conflict is also currently on deck.
WW2 was of course a much more trying time but it was followed by massive economic growth for most sectors of the population, I don't see that happening after the pandemic, wealth is just being silo'd and prosperity limited.
The optomisit in me hopes that when the truth about climate change really dawns then the effort to battle it could cause a similar transfer of wealth to a post war rebuilding. Lets hope we can actually solve the problem though or it wont matter much.
A lot of post-WW2 wealth transfer was from old failing empires to US of A. While climate change wealth transfer would accelerate transfer from US of A to ex-2nd and, especially, 3rd world. Either way, US and rich West people are looking to grim future compared to their parents. The rest of the world... We'll be fine one way or another.
In an era of rampant misinformation feeding reality-denial, I think our collective willingness to respond to global catastrophe is worse off today than a hundred years ago. The US response to the coronavirus epidemic is a great example of this.
You hear it time and time again: people who have personally felt the loss of loved ones to pandemic or wildfire or flood still deny the cause. I fully expect 50% of the (surviving) public to point out that "some scientists disagree" on the cause of global climate change while we slowly perish in a Water World dystopia.
Not sure about the rest of the EU, but in the UK it's unusual to have very long-term mortgages that seems to be described here. The norm is 2->3 year variable rate (tracking an underlying rate + a %) or a 2->5 year fixed, maybe a 10 year fixed. After that they tend to 'default' to a worse rate for the remainder, but with no penalties generally for switching.
Remortgaging is a normal part of life, but you can imagine that there might be penalty clauses if you've signed up for a 10 year fixed and in year 2/3 you want to remortgage at different terms.
At least in Germany, it's common to have a fixed interest rate for up to 30 years (more common are 10 and 20, 30 is rare). You can refinance, but you have to basically pay a fee that covers the expected loss for the bank, so that may not be worth it. Other countries differ, for example AFAIR it was common in Poland to have housing credits pegged to the swiss franc.
However, I'm fairly certain that the GP is exaggerating. Even 15 years ago, no bank asked for 10%. 5% would have been a lot, something around 3.5 - 4% common. My parents paid between 7 and 10% when they built their house, but that's like at least 40 years now. Today, something around 2% is the going rate.
At least in the booming markets, however, the rise in prices has completely eaten the gain in interest. I could for the same monthly installmend pretty much finance the same size as I could 10 years ago, the interest rate would be lower, but the principal substantially higher.
That's interesting. In the US, it's called a "pre-payment penalty," where you have to pay a fee if you want to pay off a loan early. It's not imposed by regulation, but is up to each lender, so you can choose a loan that does not have such a penalty.
Often consumers with weak credit or low incomes end up with loans that have worse terms, such as these penalties.
My family refinanced our home loan, and it was just a matter of going to the bank and signing the paperwork that they filled out for us. It took less than an hour, and the ROI was not hard to compute.
Perhaps I don’t understand why there should be a penalty to pay off a loan too early? I’ve given the bank back their money; isn’t that exactly why I was paying interest in the first place?
They write the terms to benefit themselves; in this case, to guarantee a minimum payout from the effort/risk. Not justifying it but a bank does as a bank does.
Because paying off a loan early means that loan has had less time to generate interest, which means the bank gets less money.
On an extreme example, imagine taking out a loan, then you pay it all back the next day. The loan has earned no interest, but the bank had to spend a bunch of time and money to get the loan set up.
Of course, early payment penalties are still pretty scummy. However, it does make sense why a bank would have one.
I don't know if they're scummy. When I buy a typical corporate bond I expect that the company will pay until maturity. If I buy a callable bond wouldn't I expect to be compensated for the one sided exposure to interest rate risk I'm exposing myself to (rates go up I lose, rates go down I lose)?
With consumer debt we have different expectations of what's fair, but consider the bank's risk profile here - if interest rates go up those outstanding mortgages are taking them for a ride, and if they go down the customers refi... seems natural they'd want to minimize prepayments.
In my view, the chance that a loan will be paid off early can be worked into the risk calculation that the bank uses for coming up with the interest rates and fees that they are willing to offer, and also for computing the cash value of the mortgage on the secondary market. At the end of the day, the bank just wants to know that they can sell the loan for more than it cost to originate it.
An issue with consumer debt is that a proliferation of fees and "fine print" make it confusing for folks to understand what they're signing up for, and to do comparison shopping on loans.
Traditionally, folks were advised to be wary of prepayment penalties because of a widespread strategy to prepay a loan if possible. When interest rates were high, this was like an investment with a guaranteed percentage return.
For instance, my family took out a loan with a particular payment, but we paid more than the minimum each month because we could afford it. On the other hand, being able to drop back to a lower payment was a kind of safety net in case something happened to one of our jobs, or something like that.
Think of it like returning an item to a store and paying a restocking fee. Stores would prefer all sales be final, but where they allow returns, they prefer to charge for the service when they can. You bought a mortgage from the bank, now you want to return it. They want to charge you for that.
See, the bank is not like your friend that lends you money. When your friend lends you money they are happy to receive payment early because they didn't actually want to lend it at all, it was a favor to you. They probably didn't charge interest, but if they did they did so because they "had to" (meaning they can't afford to lend you money as a flat out favor so they'll take the market rate, like when my friend the mechanic fixes my car but asks me to pay him because he's gotta live).
When the bank lends money they _want_ to lend it, it's the whole point of their business. That's why they exist, to charge interest. When you pay back early you're reneging on the deal, so to speak, and defeating the purpose of the business. They don't want the money back until the agreed upon time, it throws a wrench in their plans, budgets, forecasts, etc. The fee covers the cost of this inconvenience and discourages you from doing so.
It’s the same in Germany, it’s laid out in the mortgage terms. As a rule of thumb, you can pay up to 5% of the principal in a single lump sum every year on top of your usual payments directly reduces the principal at no extra fee. You can negotiate higher yearly extra payments, but that usually comes at the cost of higher interest.
Sometimes you’re able to refinance at no prepayment fee, but that comes down to how hard the bank wants to keep you as a customer etc.
It’s also important to compare the purchasing power of those two groups.
Sure, interest rates may be lower, but the purchasing power (a.k.a how much does a dollar/euro get me?) has also declined dramatically over the last several years. If your parents are retired and on a fixed income, tax increases and insurance premium hikes are a major factor to consider as well.
We have low mortgage rates right now because the European Bank has set low interest rates for loans; consequentially, we now have very low (nearly non-existent) interest on savings, and because of 'cheap' mortgages, more people want to buy houses which drives up the price.
So while mortgages have low interest, houses are expensive. To the point where you need a double income for a reasonable house.
My parents started off with a (iirc) 12.5% interest rate, but over the years were able to remortgage the house and eventually to a payment-free one (so they will never pay off the remaining balance on their mortgage, meaning they don't own the house (fiscally) and pay taxes on the monetary value it represents).
To the point where you need a double income for a reasonable house.
Even for a double income, it's insane. In NL, the average price of a home is 315k, while the median full-time income is 36k per year (pre-tax). Even with a double income, that's 4.5 years of household income, comparable to the peak ratio in the US before the housing bubble burst in 2008.
Just being curious - if your parents are stuck with 10% interest rates while current interest rates are closer to 3%, why are they not borrowing a 3% to reimburse their 10% loan?
It's going to depend a lot on personal situation, but they might not be able to obtain a new loan due to credit assessment, and therefore be stuck with the old one.
Perversely, at least in the UK, a lot of people are paying higher rent than they would be for a mortgage for a similar place, but they can't get a mortgage due to "affordability", despite a demonstrated history of paying the rent.
Similarly, people can be on a 10% mortgage, paying it consistently, but unable to open a new, cheaper mortgage to replace it because their current circumstances don't pass the criteria. Criteria may include age (time to retirement) and current income.
7 billion people in the world. We can't all live in the few best cities. Why should it be so cheap to live there, if everywhere else is unacceptable to you?
If that’s all it takes to lay claim to a city, then people will just move and have kids in desirable places. The problem of the math not working out still doesn’t go away.
The relevant metric is monthly mortgage payment, not interest rate. When interest rates go down principle payments can be expected to go up as people can afford to bid more for the house.
I mean.....at least here in UK, your parents would just simply.....remortgage? How are they "stuck" exactly? Even if there is a penalty to pay for remortgaging, surely it must be worth paying if you can bring down your mortgage from 10% interest to literally 1-2% like many available right now?
"Major, years-long recessions"? In the lives of anyone 25 and under, there have been three recessions, the current 7-month recession, the 2008 recession which lasted 18-months, and the 2001 recession which lasted 8-months. Recessions in the US almost never last more than a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
That may be true academically, but it’s important to point out that everything doesn’t just go back to normal when the textbook definition has ended. The wealth transfer from working class to the rich in 2008 was staggering, and so many people feel that we never really recovered from that crisis.
I think you're mixing up your generational labels. Millennial are pushing 40. Under-25s are typically referred to as "GenZ" or, more colloquially, "zoomers".
Those are some... VERY specific timings. For many, the 2008 recession lasted >10 years. Putting a very narrow specific figure on it needs a little bit of perspective. 10 years is obviously ridiculous as it represents the extreme, but the impact of any academically-defined "18-month" recession is always going to be multi-year.
> Millennials face a very real risk of being a lost generation financially
I think it's already a done deal. Millennials aren't as young as they seem (over 30) and as the own a minuscule percentage of US household wealth. The numbers are incredible.
"Indeed, at a median age of 35, Gen Xers owned just 9% of the nation’s wealth in 2008 — less than half what boomers had at that age. And millennials will have to triple their net worth in the next four years to catch up to Generation X at 35, and increase their wealth sevenfold to catch up to boomers at that age."
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-depressing-chart-show...
The funny thing is that across that millennials seem to love politicians that HATE them.
Obama's big thing was Obamacare which was basically a tax on the young (force them to buy insurance to subsidize capped insurance rates on older people). Bernie's big thing is expanding Medicare and Social Security.
My point wasn't to pooh-pooh on the Democrats (Republicans are worse obviously with their awful tax policies). My point was that they should care about millennial issues. Whether you like or not WE are the ones paying for increased social security, medicare, NOT the boomers. They are getting way more out of the system than they ever put in.
The Boomers basically took all the wealth in this country and regulated everyone out of it. There are so many issues that are good for the country and good for millenials that never seem to gain traction. Student loans reform for instance or Housing (especially zoning and property tax laws e.g. Prop 13).
Obamacare banned declining coverage for pre-existing conditions and allowed < 26-ers to stay on their parents' health plans. It also created exchanges with subsidies for those who don't have employer health plans - of whom a large proportion are under-employed youngsters.
Since they don't see things getting better for them as they get older, maybe it's not so irrational to support expansion of Medicare and Social Security.
It's not as illogical or against their self-interest as you think.
Except that you skip over the most important provisions.
Do you think that insurance for a 60 year old is 3x as expensive as a 30 year old for health care? The government MANDATES that to be the case. Who do you think pays for that?
Obamacare mandates that a 64 year old get charged no more that 3x a 27 year old.
Employers. Or the government - via subsidies. And the insureds themselves.
Have you considered that many millennials are OK with paying more if it means everyone is taken care of? People don't always vote for policies that benefit solely themselves.
> Have you considered that many millennials are OK with paying more if it means everyone is taken care of? People don't always vote for policies that benefit solely themselves.
So that's why they vote for policies that exclusively benefit Boomers. Gotcha!
Have you considered that maybe Millenials just don't understand how money and taxes work?
I was talking to my friend the other day that lives in California and didn't know what Prop 13 was. He was a state champion debater in California but didn't know how property taxes worked in the state. I was shocked. If that's the slightest indication - most millennials have absolutely no idea how money and taxes work.
I've talked to friends about zoning, depreciation laws, capital gains taxes, backdoor Roth laws ect. They don't even have a clue.
> So that's why they vote for policies that exclusively benefit Boomers
And I would disagree with the "exclusively" part of that sentence. I've already shown you how millennials benefit from Obamacare. Your note about young people subsidizing over-60s is a red herring. Over-65s are already on Medicare and it's pretty good. Why wouldn't millennials want that for themselves?
Most people don't understand taxes and money - this isn't specific to any particular age group. And frankly, as I've opined elsewhere on this site, retirement savings laws particularly are overly complicated for nearly everyone.
> I've already shown you how millennials benefit from Obamacare.
Actually you didn't. Pointing out a single feature that benefits them while ignoring all the others is not a cost benefit analysis.
> Your note about young people subsidizing over-60s is a red herring.
And this a straw man. Actually, no - its wrong.
I worked on Obamacare for 2 years. I think it's a decent law a vacuum. I can't possible pretend its good for young people. It's good for my 60 year old aunt who has diabetes who thinks she pays too much for insurance but actually is getting the deal of a century considering how much health care costs.
Obamacare did little to slow health care spending (another long story) but it did work to spread the costs around - mostly to young people.
Sorry to nitpick but the social isolation and massive unemployment are being caused by our response to the pandemic, not by the pandemic itself. Lockdowns are a choice, with tradeoffs.
Exactly and by not locking down properly we have managed to extend the pandemic in the US and its associated quasi lock down leading to our current situation. I agree with your response.
Have we? It doesn't seem possible to permanently stop outbreaks without having either reached 20-25% of the population infected, or locking down until a cure or vaccine is discovered. Plenty of places that locked down much more stringently than the US are having new outbreaks now - Europe, New Zealand, Australia and even parts of China.
Anyway, I seem to remember that extending the pandemic was the whole point of the lockdowns. The messaging at the beginning was that we would spread out cases over time, in order to keep under emergency healthcare capacity. Not prevent cases entirely. By that metric, hasn't the US been wildly successful? Or has the goal changed - and if so, why?
Other places have managed to become entirely COVID-free due to properly following lockdown policies. The US is still gaining thousands of cases a day–the only reason this isn’t more is that most people are staying inside. The places you mentioned with “new outbreaks” have a handful of new cases, and yet are taking it significantly more seriously than the United States.
I did not specifically mention Spain, I was thinking of the other things on your list that are actually countries–as far as I am aware, cases in Australia are still going down, in China they are a negligible number, in New Zealand they had a couple dozen that they immediately locked down over and will likely stop the spread of. But since you brought it up, let's look at Spain–why does it have so many new cases every day? Because they aren't following the policies!
> It doesn't seem possible to permanently stop outbreaks without having either reached 20-25% of the population infected, or locking down until a cure or vaccine is discovered.
You can't magically make yourself immune to future outbreaks by locking down - the only way to avoid outbreaks in the absence of widespread immunity is to maintain the lockdown indefinitely, until a cure or vaccine is discovered and widely distributed.
So, it's not true that we could have eliminated the virus and been happily back to normal in the US if we had just locked down harder/better/longer. We would either still be locked down with no end in sight, or have opened back up and now be experiencing another outbreak.
Not sure about China, but FWIW Australia and NZ are still quite locked down.
That's true. Without the lockdowns, everyone would have had some very small increased chance of death or lifelong respiratory issues.
It's the role of science to tell us what that increased chance is, and the role of politics to decide whether that warrants the long-term decreased quality of life for a much higher fraction of people that the lockdowns/shutdowns will cause. At any rate, none of this was forced, certainly not by science (which can't make normative prescriptions).
There would also be the increase of all kind of death and disablement due to the breakdown of the medical system. So prob 1 month of all emergency cases wouldnt been treated. (Pulling this number out of thin air, maybe somebody has a good source)
I only remember that northern italy might have had a similiar problem, and I guess Wuhan and wouldnt be surprised about Brasil.
According to media here France choose the 'culling' strategy (or more nobly called age triage) and offered palliative services to people who had covid and were considered too low survival chance.
This is not true. Sweden experienced a spike in unemployment, despite not having a lockdown. "People are too afraid about getting sick and dying to go outside" is pretty much directly attributable to the pandemic.
> People are too afraid about getting sick and dying to go outside
This is still a response to the pandemic, just a non-governmental one. I'm not saying such a response isn't justified, but it is not directly attributable to the disease.
If a hurricane came and destroyed a bunch of people's homes and businesses and people stopped working, it would be more reasonable to say that "the hurricane caused mass unemployment" than it would be to say "the hurricane didn't cause unemployment, it was just people's individual decisions to not work out of a pile of flooded rubble that's causing the unemployment."
This doesn't seem like a fair analogy for a number of reasons. But mostly just that COVID itself is not destroying businesses, whereas a hurricane literally is.
A hurricane isn't directly destroying anything except the building the business operates from; the business still exists. In principle employees could still walk to the rubble to work and customers could walk to the rubble to exchange money for services, but the material conditions make both of those untenable, in the same way the material conditions of COVID make working and buying things untenable.
Sweden experienced a spike from ~7% to ~9%. US has experienced a spike from ~3% to ~14%. Sure, some of it might be attributable to social attitudes, but I don't think that such a big discrepancy can be explained by this. I think it's mostly lockdown policies causing this.
Really? Lives were lost, but WWII came and went rather quickly, a handful of years. Millenials are dealing with multi-decade problems, potential solutions to which are discussed in terms of generations, decades rather than years.
For perspective: US WWII deaths: 407k over ~6 years. US COVID Deaths: 196k and counting over ONE year. So, even adjusted for population growth, the US is losing people to covid faster than it did during WWII. (The math is radically different for other countries, but in the US it is an interesting comparison.)
? 80+ million people died...
That is not something that is just shrugged off. Entire ethnic groups were culled. To suggest that WW2 had no long term affects and indeed affects that did not last generations is to demonstrate a fragile grasp of history.
For perspective, the Soviet Union lost something in the region of TWENTY MILLION people. Exact numbers are disputed in the range of millions; the Soviet state lacked the capacity to track accurately, having convulsively emerged from feudalism only twenty years previously. It also, frankly, displayed a spectacular disregard for human life even of its own troops and civilians.
> The US is losing people to covid faster than it did during WWII.
This is a huge tragedy; the US responded to the war by trying to win it, deploying huge scientific and technical resources to that purpose. The US (and the UK) has responded to COVID largely by wishing it would go away, leaving the public to their own devices, locking down too late and too incoherently, and waiting for the private sector to develop a cure.
Can we please stop with the term "Millennials"? The article talks about 18-29 year olds. The most widely accepted definition of Millennials is people born 1981 to 1996, which would be 24-39 year olds. Not the same.
Regardless, the financial differences between people the exact same age are always vastly larger than the financial difference between so-called "generations".
It's funny, when we talk abstractly, we can look at the statistics and see that wealth in concentrated in the hands of a small % of people.
But then when we break it down by age, or by gender, then suddenly, magically, this wealth becomes distributed to the entire age group, or the entire gender, so that "Boomers" are all well-off, or men are all well-off, when the reality is that it's not even remotely true, and a lot of people of all different groups are struggling.
Hmm the article is not about Millennials but perhaps the comment was. I don't think GenZ has "experienced" two years long recessions like Millennials have.
Hell, depends on what you mean by "experienced" as well. I'm a mid-range Millennial, and was in college during the Great Recession - not even aware of it until after it was over. This year is the first recession I'm actually experiencing.
My grandfathers were an accountant and an engineer. The latter was really sought after too, he oversaw the construction of roads and spent months away and refused jobs to spend time home too.
My parents were both musicians/painters/other artistic stuff on the side. We were always tight money-wise but somehow had a two kids middle class upbringing on the absolute best part of town. Every time I think of this my admiration for my father grows.
Me and my sister became STEMpunks. My sister dropped it to be a full-time mom after a year of not liking the idea of daycare; but by then she had married well.
Once every other day I wish I had become a musician like my dad. But I don't think I could pull it off. Besides, they didn't save much so I (very gladly) chip in with about half of what they need to survive -- it's not as easy anymore.
There's always this kind of narrative floating around that's simply not true. Sure things are getting bad right now but times have been good for a decade. Also people always say this kind of thing and extrapolate current trends into the future. After the 2008 crisis which many thought would take a long time to recover from we've had unbelievable growth for a decade.
The recovery from 2008 was very uneven, because I'm in tech I did quite well but many of the people I knew from my community that were not in tech did badly. I think this unevenness in recovery is why that narrative persists so strongly.
> They have endured 2 major, years long recessions,
What are these recessions? I'm an "elder millennial" and the .com bust came while I was in high school. Even entering the job force with a two year degree, I graduated well after it was over. Leaving, the GFC and our current one, but our current one isn't years long...yet.
The GFC was definitely a fucking mess for all of us. I have literally never had a real promotion and it wasn't until like five jobs in that I learned about annual cost of living adjustments. I still don't have a "senior" title despite having worked in industry for 15 years...
I feel like GenX got the biggest shaft. They graduated in the 80s-90s into an economy where unions were in decline and Asia had come into manufacturing dominance. Saw a brief boom in the 90s, only to have numerous accounting scandals destroy any investments they managed to save during that era. Went through the housing boom/bust, then were in their mid careers by the time the GFC hit. Now they are in their 50s/60s with a pandemic and another recession landing, and this recession looks to be inflationary, which means any savings they had is going to get eaten away.
> WW2 was of course a much more trying time but it was followed by massive economic growth for most sectors of the population, I don't see that happening after the pandemic, wealth is just being silo'd and prosperity limited.
I could see it happening, but not in a good way. One (not all that unlikely) scenario is that the economic winners manage to place themselves out of harms way in the pandemic & social unrest that follows, and then everybody else just...dies off. That'd leave all the survivors extremely well off, and everybody else drops out of the population and ends up forgotten.
Globally, WW2 worked this way as well. There was a huge loss of life in Europe, in Russia, in China, in Japan, basically everywhere that the war was actively fought. 2/3 of Europe's Jewish population just died off, up to 20% of Poland and Russia, 8-10% in Southeast Asia, 4% in China. "Most sectors of the population" in the U.S. did well because the war wasn't fought here and we were the last developed nation left standing.
That analysis completely fails after WWI. The actual cause of the post war boom was a massive increase in agricultural efficiency. This freed up a large chunk of household budgets to be spent of consumer goods which kicked off a long cycle of economic growth.
Timeline and geography doesn't work out for your hypothesis. The Green Revolution began in earnest in the late 50s; at that point, the post-war expansion in the U.S. was alread 10-15 years old and slowing down. It also started in developing nations like Mexico, India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines - there's perhaps some influence through international trade, but if that's the cause you'd expect Mexico and India to be the geopolitical superstars rather than the U.S.
The timeline does match up with the Marshall Plan and redevelopment of Japan. A much simpler explanation is that the U.S. was the only nation whose capital stock remained intact after WW2. This allowed us to produce high-value goods more efficiently than everywhere else, which allowed us to export more, which led to a strong currency and ample buying power on world markets. Post-war unionization also spread the fruits of this productivity to society as a whole, rather than concentrating it among capital owners.
The US also saw a short term boom after WWI just look at the 20’s. That doesn’t explain why the boom continued for so long after WWII. Also, the green revolution was more a global phenomenon, the US saw significant agricultural productivity growth in the 1940’s from increased mechanization and fertilizer usage.
The 1920s boom was partially global - the U.S, France, and Great Britain boomed, along with non-belligerents like Venezuela. Weimar Germany had one of the worst economic collapses in history. Additionally, the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires disintegrated, with widespread hardship (revolutions, civil war, economic problems) occurring during the early 20s and then subsequent trajectories defined by how stable and how market-friendly the successor states were.
See a pattern there? It's really awesome to win a war, particularly if it was never fought on your territory or you got reparations. It really sucks to lose a war. Over the short term (~10-20 years), this effect dwarfs the normal peacetime business cycle. Over the long term (~50-100 years), it's dwarfed by things like the political-economic system, technological development, alliances, population growth & demographics, etc, which tend to set up the winners of next war.
(The U.S. experienced a similar boom after the end of the Cold War in 1991.)
I agree that the US experienced a war related boom after WWI and WWII. I am simply saying the boom lasted as long as it did in large part from the green revolution. This didn’t just mean increased prosperity at home, but a continued stream of new markets opening up. China’s boom for example was delayed due to internal politics, but that just extended the same long term trend for even longer.
The boomer generation wasn’t shaped by a few good years, it was shaped by a lifetime of prosperity which is extremely unusual in historic terms. IT technology played a major role, but looking at the industrial revolution for comparison you find plenty of crashes even during a period of rapid growth.
I think this is only really true if Millennials continue to attempt to live like their parents.
First thing people need to do is stop fetishizing home ownership. It's not a magical object, instead of buying a home put your money in an index fund, you'll be better off financially anyway in 20 years. Owning a home is just a status symbol people are obsessed with for your quality of life it doesn't matter if you own or rent. Even better would be to share a space with peers. Not only does it make housing cheaper, it makes everything cheaper. Nobody in their 20s or 30s needs to be isolated in some giant house.
Education is predominantly getting much more expensive at elite institutions, but good public universities in-state are still affordable, or go and move abroad and get a degree in Europe if you're American. If you don't like to go to university, pick up a vocation, a lot of them pay well. In general be ready to move to improve your circumstances. Physical mobility in the US has fallen to extreme lows, it's one of the easiest way to improve your situation.
Being a millenial myself I'm actually not pessimistic about the generation at all, or at least not fatalistic. This isn't an economy any more where you get a job at 23 and then you're set for life and then live in a suburb with your labradoodle. To me that's a positive.
18-29 year olds are sort of between generations but largely fall into Gen Z; certainly they're the youngest end of Millenial, and can not really be said to have endured the 2008-2011 recession as they were not working at that time.
> certainly they're the youngest end of Millenial, and can not really be said to have endured the 2008-2011 recession as they were not working at that time.
My 2 & 4 year old aren't working right now, and they've certainly endured the coronavirus pandemic. I don't know why not yet being in the labor force would prevent one from being accurately described as having endured an economic downturn any more than any other adverse conditions. It's hardly as if not being the breadwinner of the household insulates you from the effects if their income is reduced or eliminated.
As a 29 year old, I reject this sentiment. I may not have been working but my decisions regarding college and overall early adult life were heavily affected by the 2008-2011 recession because of how it affected my family.
We endured it, just in a different way than those who were working.
Multi generation homes used to be norm but societies became wealthy enough to move away from that ( and various frictions it creates) looks like we’re literally moving back. Good for the environment, bad for the economy and mental well being.
"Societies became wealthy enough..." I'd argue that value systems shifted. Consumerism and careerism took over family and home.
"bad for the economy and mental well being"... quite the leap. It's good the family economy of those involved, and for many parents and children it can be a great thing for mental health as well.
Is it really bad for mental well being? I know a lot of people nowadays (including me) have the desire to live separately from parents. But mental health has been going down, with increasing rates of reported loneliness and isolation.
Society has made us individualistic / "independent". But has it really made our mental health better?
Edit: and as others have pointed out, more people living separately is not ecologically efficient / sustainable.
But in America, at least, a lot of people’s parents are fully gone down the road of selfishness and cruelty.
It would be nice if we had a culture that encouraged multigenerational support, but you can’t pull that out of thin air. It’s something that would’ve needed to be in place prior to the pandemic. I think millennials may come out changed from this, as, at least in my experience, we’re already more supportive of each other and collectively-oriented then our parents generation, but that would be a change felt far off in the future.
The suburbs are similar. Dealing with bad relationships by spreading farther apart is economically and ecologically terrible. We need to fix the people.
Need to redefine courtship culturally in the western world and we can make it work, that's the biggest friction with having young adults back home. It used to be, and in many cultures it is still true, that the parents were heavily involved in that process, but the western world moved away from that dynamic.
My family spends about three months a year working remotely from my inlaws' place in Malaysia. Frankly it's the best time of the year for my mental well being. Things run so much more smoothly with more adults in the house.
And maybe it makes sense to start framing the US in those terms too. We had the whole manifest destiny thing, and now it's time to move back to traditional life.
I grew up on the farm, but have spent most of my adult life living in big cities. But I take a month or so home most years for a bit of farm work / harvest celebration.
Corono got me good traveling SEA in February, and have been now living and working at home since March. I could have never thought about living here beforehand. At least I always think that twenties and thirties are for the movement of the city, and then the farm work / home life can begin.
But having been somewhat forced to force myself to settle for an indefinite period, it is giving me much appreciation for a different kind of life. Building stuff, farming and a lot of cooking / baking / fermenting has brought out a real positivity, which now seems impossible to find in the city.
It's even got to the point where we've started inviting friends to come and live and work with us, and there seems to be that community feeling bubbling up all around.
Commuting and travel seem so weird to me by this point, and I know that the logistics are hell to try and rearrange the entire economy to be kind of segmented, but I'm starting to believe that this is the only realistic hope we have left.
Don't let the awesomeness turn to pessimism! The gap between "this is great" and "this is the only realistic hope" is huge. Others - even outside of farm life - have found community too.
I guess it wasn't worded clearly, but I meant that it's the only hope for a less wasteful economy.
EDIT to add: In the short term! Right now the infrastructure is totally oil based, and consumerism relies on ecological destruction. But I am definitely not saying that we can't have a global zero carbon everything you want economy. But that is a question that I do not have the patience or information to ponder seriously!
Those parents often shout about "greedy developers" (or, if pressed, "parking and neighbourhood character") when, heaven forfend, someone tries to build new homes near them.
Treating homes an investment was one of the worst mistakes of the 20th century.
You say mistake as if it were an intentional choice that turned out to be a bad one. I don't know my history of this subject very well, did policymakers really sit down and encourage homes to be treated as investment, leading them to become less affordable? Or were homes becoming less affordable just the natural consequence of having an expanding population and fixed supply of land? I'd always sort of assumed the latter.
As soon as we let people vote to deny their neighbours the right to build a home (or convert a house to apartments, etc.) we gave homeowners the rights of a cartel to increase the value of their asset.
"Time to grow up, at least for now, while the company to which I pay my long term care premiums is solvent and likely to be able to provide care when I am frail, though it is looking like it might not always be the case, in which case I would prefer for you to live with me at that point."
I think people need to start realising just how incredibly much the government is now stepping in at each of these crises to make them as smooth as possible. But there is a downside to this. You are not allowing the normal economic effects to happen because you are wanting to keep everything as it is, but then guess what, the status quo stays, and anyone joining the ladder is finding it increasingly difficult.
What's amazing is how the narrative around this however is that we need MORE government to set things right. Yet in the tech bubble the government blew up the real este bubble, in 2008 all the banks got saved along with loads of other insurance and other businesses, and now we have the largest stimulus packages ever. (on top of government subsidised student loans, which have made loads of money available for college, pushing up prices).
It's counter intuitive but in the long run this is BAD for anyone that doesn't already have something. It inflates asset prices, it locks in people who already have something. It's bad for millennials. And millennials shouldn't be arguing for more government intervention, but less. Let things fail, so that the waste can get burned off.
Unfortunately it seems a lot of people think things literally need to be burned down for there to be change. But let's be clear, 30-40 years of interventions by governments did this, which is exactly what left leaning people want of government.
Hm, maybe that's how the statement should be interpreted, but I was interpreting it in light of the "too big to fail" mantra after the 2008 recession. Lots of banks and auto companies were bailed out to keep them afloat. So I interpret it as "let companies go bankrupt".
No, it's zombie companies kept alive by stimulus cheques, and management who get to stick around and failing companies that should have gone under 20 years ago.
a better solution is raising minimum worker benefits & protections, pigovian taxes as well where necessary, etc. If a company cannot earn enough money while meeting some basic minimum requirements to society then it should fail quickly.
In the scenario you're asking for - the zombie companies just layoff employees, cut wages/benefits, landlords evict, etc. The zombie lives on just fine until the market corrects while everyone else fails.
You're correct that failing companies need to fail but your "just let the free market handle it" approach is a fairy tale.
Yes. It's the sort of take by people who have made zero effort to study history or economics.
"Keep the budgets tight" was the mantra in the early 30s in response to the depression. It took a World War that killed millions of people (and was -- surprise! -- a major artificial government stimulus) to get out of it.
Yes, providing monetary liquidity and fiscal stimulus during times of extreme stress is not purely good. It can have an effect of keeping some companies alive that perhaps should not be. That is bad and we should try to minimize it in the context of a recovery effort. But the fact that it's not perfect is not a reason to claim that burning everything down and creating a decades-long horrible depression in which many die of starvation, and that cripples the country, is a preferable alternative.
They think that if you let everything burn down then green shoots will pop up and everything will be happy and folks will rebuild and it'll be better and the government oughta get its snout out of our business and just let pure capitalism run its course and...
> It took a World War that killed millions of people (and was -- surprise! -- a major artificial government stimulus) to get out of it.
You are describing the broken window fallacy here. War and destruction doesn't help the economy. What happens in war is that useful resources in the economy are diverted from productive use and mutual beneficial trade to death and destruction.
You're right that the broken window fallacy is a fallacy when the economy is not in a depression, but it can be a bit more situational and complex than that.
When aggregate demand is "stuck" at a depressed level (high unemployment causes low demand, resulting in more low unemployment), the stimulus of war can actually help pull the economy out of its stuck position, even if the war is destructive. Of course, once it's no longer stuck, the continued destructive stimulus is just destructive.
There are better fiscal ways to pull the economy out of a depression than war, because most wars don't pay much in the way of dividends, unlike large scale public works. But even if the stimulus isn't a great ROI in "normal" times, it can have a high ROI in "depressed" times due to its ability to get demand unstuck.
Capitalism did this, governments intervened when it became necessary to prevent things from effectively burning to the ground because the market can’t/won’t fix it.
Letting banks burn down in 2008 would no doubt have been a cathartic moment, but it would be pragmatically a poor decision. Immediately post-crisis those responsible should be held responsible and actual action should be taken, but we don’t elect governments to lead us and then have them do nothing in a crisis.
> But let's be clear, 30-40 years of interventions by governments did this, which is exactly what left leaning people want of government.
You Unironically say this yet Trump (a very right candidate) is the one pumping money into the economy to save his election chances.
The reality is each party wants to spend money where it feels it is important. Republicans/right wingers have given up fiscal responsibility a LOOOOOONG time ago.
So why call out the side that's at least honest about its intentions? If you think government intervention is a bad thing, isn't the side that's upfront and honest about its desired amount of intervention still better?
You can either take the view that the honesty is better or you can take the view that at least one party is sufficiently embarrassed by it that they don't proclaim it's a good thing and when they do it they hide it.
"millennials shouldn't be arguing for more government intervention, but less"
Your argument that government intervention is bad for millennials is flawed. Without government intervention such as eviction moratoriums, unemployment benefits and federal government stimulus checks there would have been massive homelessness. Prior to the pandemic 40% of americans could not cover a $400 emergency, all of these people would have been on the street without the government stepping in. At one point the unemployment rate as 15%. I cant really see how this would have been good for them.
I would argue that specific and targeted government intervention such as complete student loan forgiveness would have a massive beneficial effect on millenials.
Some programs benefit them but the things you listed were secondary interventions, interventions. If there was no stimulus and business stayed open that would have benefited them.
Burn it down is always a mistake in hindsight. There is alot of low hanging fruit to fix these issues; higher taxes; amendment to fix Citizen's United; revamp the Supreme Court..
All of these are easier then digging a shaft, jumping in, and trying to climb out.
Speaking as someone who has no assets, no 401k, no home.
I'm saying this couldn't work without explicitly including restrictions on the freedom of the press, since "the press" is the very vehicle by which money gets turned into political influence. Unless this amendment includes something akin to the fairness doctrine I can't see how it could possibly have the effect you are looking for.
Perhaps corporations are not people, however "the press" is made of corporations. If there is to be no restriction on the press then what is to stop any corporate entity from advancing the cause of their politics as a member of the so-called press?
> Don't be afraid of change. If something isn't working; we should fix it.
Furthermore, this is a binary line of thinking that isn't even fit for a children's book. The world is not split between those that want change, and those that are afraid of change. It is very much possible for intelligent adults to consider the details of what is being prescribed and conclude that "that sounds at least as bad or possibly worse than the status quo."
By all means, extrapolate your position. The press is corporate, but every story I've ever seen has a byline. That means the actual speech is from a person.
You're listing one possibly problem when this addresses dozens of issues. Removing corporate money from law making will make it was easier to address these issues in the future, with sensible legislation.
Not to mention that if "shall not be infringed" and "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" are and indication they'd find a way to ignore it when they do abridge the freedom of the press.
Eviction moratoriums, unemployment benefits, and stimulus spending is the least the government can do when they're the arbiters of who is considered 'essential' and allowed to work. The real question is what happens when the restrictions on evictions are lifted and people are inevitably evicted into a second outbreak.
I don't really agree with that assessment. If there is mass layoffs for example, and renters can't pay rent, why would a landlord evict the tenant? Who is going to take their place? I think many landlords would prefer a potential to pay (owing rent) than full eviction and being forced to lower rent and uncertainty wouldn't they? I'm not saying there would be no evictions, but everyone homeless doesn't seem like a fully realistic outcome considering renting is a marketplace.
> I think many landlords would prefer a potential to pay (owing rent) than full eviction and being forced to lower rent and uncertainty wouldn't they
Every land lord thinks they'll be able to rent their apartment, hence the need for the eviction moratorium. Their view is: if I leave in a tenant who won't pay, definitely won't make money, but if I evict them I can find someone else.
>Your argument that government intervention is bad for millennials is flawed. Without government intervention such as eviction moratoriums, unemployment benefits and federal government stimulus checks there would have been massive homelessness. Prior to the pandemic 40% of americans could not cover a $400 emergency, all of these people would have been on the street without the government stepping in. At one point the unemployment rate as 15%. I cant really see how this would have been good for them.
It wouldn't have been "good for them" but it will hurt a hell of a lot less than when (at some undetermined point in the future) things come crashing down so hard that the government can't prop them up.
We're preventing fire crackers from going off and eventually we're gonna get hit with a bomb.
Right now the Fed's back is pretty close to the wall in terms of policy levers it can pull. Imagine a financial crisis comes along in 2021 or something, we could really be screwed.
The issue is not really that the government is bad, the problem is it has become a proxy for ultra rich to push their agenda. You can probably make it more efficient by limiting corporate sponsorship and making it more transparent. Millennials don't have many options or tools at their disposal to influence the direction we are heading.
This might be unpopular, but they're not going to let major things fail because of political reasons. Popular opinion thinks the US is declining, and failures only add to that perceived momentum. That's why there's endless stimulus.
For letting major businesses fail, we really do have the resources to let those former employees do nothing but sit at home and use the internet all day and have no bills. But the US can't handle someone not working and still being able to pay their bills.
If we let large numbers of businesses fail, the people who have a lot of money now will buy up their assets and we'll come out with more concentrated wealth in society.
I will grant you that the federal government in the US could have done better in some ways by just sending out checks to every citizen instead of loans to businesses, but I don't think that's what you had in mind when you talk about less government.
I hope to build a household that the kids will consider staying without won't havinc to wait until a disaster strikes and 20 governors panic to find a way to avoid accountability by being "firm and comprehensive" rather than finding a balance.
I hope we see a cultural shift toward recognizing that so-called "flyover country" is actually ripe for re-development and cultural renewal. There are tens of thousands of small towns and cities in the Midwest in which buying a house is still possible for the average middle-class person.
The main issue, of course, is the lack of jobs in the area, but with remote work growing, that might become less of an issue.
Also, many rural areas have cooperatives for their internet and have gigabit fiber, now. I live 40-50 minutes from the closest 'town' and 3-4 hours from the closest urban center, and I will have fiber by the end of this month. Remote work is absolutely an option.
That being said, no one should consider flyover country to move to. Please stay away from my flyover country, it's bad enough with east and west coast investment firms buying all the property and driving regular folks out of the market entirely. When my partner and I bought the property our home is on, in 2009, we paid ~$3,000/acre. This was a high price.
The place next to ours sold last week for ~$13,000/acre to an investment firm from New Jersey.
I feel a shift coming, and I feel like the smart money is way out in front of it - buying up land that would be ripe for development once people figure out how much cheaper it is in the country.
And it's killing the people who live out here, right now. I can't imagine what it will look like if people start moving out here.
> And it's killing the people who live out here, right now. I can't imagine what it will look like if people start moving out here.
To be blunt, this is what already happened to all of the "desirable" cities on the West Coast and, as those of us who've lived here since basically the beginning said: buck you, you can't stop it. Start preparing now for what a wave of migration looks like and take steps to make room for the new arrivals before they[0] show up and outbid everyone who's already there.
Yes, this is going to look like "density" or "growth" or "change." Genuinely sorry, but the world is not a static place and since freedom of movement inside the United States is still a thing, all pretending that it won't happen or trying to make policies to limit it will do is turn whatever other area into one of haves and have-nots.
0 - I wrote "they" because I'm not leaving. I must be one of the tiny minority of people who likes where I live and have no plans to depart. If everyone else wants to pack up from the West Coast city where I live and move to Omaha, good on 'em.
One downside is that all of those areas, which have been unattractive for new employers for whatever reason, will no longer need to become attractive to new employers in a heavily WFH economy.
A majority? That's astounding. Unless unemployed, why don't millennials do what we did in our twenties, find two or three roommates and split the rent?
Many of them already are, except in many cities, it's 5-6 housemates, including 1 actual roommate (as in sharing the same room). This is the case I would say for the majority of my mid-20s friends, except those in the software industry. In the software industry there's more people managing with just their partner or 1 housemate. Living alone is the least common. Is it that unreasonable that many would choose to go back to their parents when there's now no actual reason for them to be in that situation if they're working from home indefinitely?
I've lived my 20s far away from home, and having moved back in in my 30s now, even if it took some time amd awkwardness, my parents understand I've grown and changed and they respect my need for space and intimacy.
Chiming in with the rest here. Moved in with my parents, and honestly I think this is great. I've traded in a bit of freedom for much healthier meals and people to talk with. I'm also saving a ton on rent, to the point where I'm throwing in nearly 70% of my paycheck into savings. I'm not thinking of keeping this up in the long term, but I'm glad I did this for now.
I think we’re going to have to accept we’re the uncommon ones around here.
I don’t know what the stats are but I’ve got a feeling that most people on HN (particularly those in expensive cities) get along with their parents quite well. I’ve noticed in my time in SV that I’ve never really heard anyone say their parents are/were abusive. Or that they even really hated their parents. On the contrary, I hear most people liking their parents quite a bit.
Abusive or terrible people for parents just don’t seem too common around these parts. Makes sense, abused children don’t tend to be rising stars - they kill theirselves instead.
The higher you get, the more supportive the parents are. It’s hard to get far alone and without a kickstart.
On the contrary, my mom and I get along swimmingly. We also know that we don't want to be in each other's hair endlessly and our limit for each other's presence is around 2 weeks.
> I’ve never really heard anyone say their parents are/were abusive.
There are probably many people in your social circle with abusive parents. Just because they don't talk about it doesn't mean it didn't happen. People tend to keep their skeletons in their closets.
Related: Many men would not believe how common sexual assault of women is. A lot of men are like, "I don't know any women who have been assaulted." Really, it's that you don't know any women who have told you that they have been. For many reasons, most women only bring that kind of stuff up around a select trusted set of people, if any.
I always try to be mindful when interacting with people that almost everyone has some trauma in their past or some cross to bear. Just because they aren't showing it doesn't mean it isn't there.
> There are probably many people in your social circle with abusive parents. Just because they don't talk about it doesn't mean it didn't happen. People tend to keep their skeletons in their closets.
I've asked directly to a lot of people about their relationship with their parents. My point is more like: They all seem to love their parents. They call them daily or, minimum, weekly. They enjoy their family gatherings and being around their parents overall.
If you did the ACE test with the younger crowd in SV's tech sphere, I would really doubt many people with troubled parents would show up. I get a score of 7 on that test and I don't see many 7+'s here. https://acestoohigh.com/got-your-ace-score/ If you had shitty parents, you probably wouldn't get into tech here. The people I know with shit parents are not in tech.
Already have it, but the US does not make this easy.
It took me weeks of leaving voicemails that were never returned and then two months to get an actual appointment. My primary care doctor was unable to find anyone suitable in the local hospital network. They wouldn't even return his calls.
If you're able to be persistent enough, try looking at Psychology Today. They let you search for therapists and psychiatrists in your area. (Ignore the articles, please ignore the articles.) If you don't have insurance or a lot of money, some providers may still be willing to work with you for a reduced fee.
I'm 34 and bipolar. I'm stable on medication but my dad doesn't believe mental illness exists and attributes every symptom to a lack of moral character... or demon possession.
I don't see myself changing how I feel about him any time soon.
It can't help but be a little frustrating, however well-intentioned, when someone without the experience to accurately inform the comment says something like "but he's still your dad", "she's still your mom", et cetera. Bridges burn just as well from either end. And I think it's genuinely difficult for most good or even decent parents, in particular, to imagine how bad bad parents can be.
yeah, and these are still the scars from the cigarettes she put out on my thigh. Sometimes bridges are burnt, and sometimes they were never built in the first place.
"The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb"
I'm willing to give HorizonXP the benefit of the doubt. Devoid of context, my statement isn't all that different from what some young adults would say. Parents or/and their children can mature as they grow older and relationships can heal.
My father was physically abusive too. But I'm merely providing my own perspective on my own experience. Your perspective on your experience is your own. I would never try to compare or equate.
I'm glad you have good experiences with your parents, but some people don't. I really clearly remember a guy I worked with at one point telling me about the murder trial his father was in, really brutal stuff. It's not like everyone is possible to live with, unfortunately some people are seriously fucked up in a way that doesn't improve with time.
My wife has a staff of 20 and most of them are young-ish. Like a few years out of college, first real professional job. About half of them have packed up their apartments and gone home to their parents. They're still paying their rent but they're living with their parents so they can have a little social interaction and have more room than their apartments. Its caused a little concern with the higher ups because they didn't realize people were leaving the local area. Lots of internal arguments over it.
Time zone differences. Remote people are less likely to want to come back to the office after or might be slow to do such (“cant yet. Have to find a place to live. Will take months.”) Taxation purposes. Plenty of reasons afaict.
> Remote people are less likely to want to come back to the office after or might be slow to do such
I'm in the same area code as my employer and I am far less likely to want to come back to the office after. My "office" is a 15-person open space pod with no barriers, no door, and a handful of breakout rooms per floor for one-on-one meetings that are always occupied by someone camped out in there for the entire day (the lunch wrappers and multiple soda cans are a dead giveaway).
Meanwhile, at home, my family might be in a smallish apartment but I have a bedroom I can use as a home office, my own food with all of the zero-sugar soda I can buy, a restroom where no one is ever sitting in a stall gabbing away on the phone, and I'm not sitting four feet from my boss' shoulder while we're both doing technical calls.
Its pretty disgraceful that for 99.99% of millennials covid is just a mild disease. We're shutting down everything for the benefit of baby boomers again. When its all over there will be no thank-you. House prices aren't even getting cheaper so young people again be shafted. Its crazy.
To be fair there are quite a few millennials for whom loss of beloved parents and grandparents to an avoidable cause would be something of a downside too...
Anecdotally, I find that the lockdown is much more strongly supported among millennials than among older people. They may claim they’re doing it for the benefit of boomers, but did the boomers actually ask for it?
Your argument is that we should just let older people die? No offense but I disagree, I really don't want my parents to pass away from a pandemic we could have absolutely under control if people and our government just acted responsibly. Your comment is "pretty disgraceful"
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 334 ms ] threadoddly enough I'm morbidly curious about the decline in birth and marriage rates due to this whole episode. hard to hook up in your parent's home.
Fertility being correlated with income levels, the people spending time at home together are already not going to have kids, the others are unemployed/under massive financial stress/still going to work.
Birth control is cheap and well understood these days, I doubt many people are actively trying to have kids during a pandemic (financial + health risks). If anything I'd expect more breakups than births
Also anecdotally, we're expecting our first - we were waiting for the right time, had it all planned out.. then COVID pulled the rug out from under everything so we said screw it and just went for it. I suspect we're not alone in this...
heh heh heh you sure did. congrats on becoming a parent soon!
We’re seeing just the tip of the iceberg. I expect a lot more social upheaval in the coming years. Social services are going to get severely strained.
Unless we just forgive rent until a vaccine is out, many people will never catch up.
I’m a renter. Do I need to prove I’ve lost my job to not pay? Do I get to skip out on paying for a luxury apartment if I have money in the bank? Does my landlord get to skip her mortgage? Or only the portion paid by my rent? What about the bank who holds the mortgage? Or the retired bond holder who ultimately gets the mortgage payments?
Every step along the way requires somebody to not get paid.
If the government intervenes, at which step should they do it?
I’m not saying no actions should be taken, just that it’s more complicated than pure rent forgiveness. Perhaps the answer is some kind of short term UBI, but that gets expensive quick. Zero interest government loans puts the burden back on the individual. I’m not fully clear on how to beat balance individual ownership versus protecting the system from collapse. (The latter involves propping up the banks)
I think the starting principle I'd take is that this is going to go very poorly for some people, and our only decision is for whom it goes poorly. (After all, if we do nothing, it will clearly go poorly for many people, and as you point out there's no obvious solution where it works well for everyone.) There is a productivity loss that needs to be borne by someone, and it seems to me the obvious approach is to ask who can bear it with the least impact on the long-term good of society / the nation / humanity.
The answer is probably that certain people in the chain you mention, possibly the landlord, probably the bank, and perhaps (but probably not) the retiree, can afford to just not get paid. It's unfair for them, but they will do fine: they won't lose out on revenue that they need to put food on the table or a roof over their heads (the whole point here is to keep roofs over heads). Everyone upstream of them gets to not pay them.
And yes, it's unjust to take money from people (or really, require that people keep providing services without being paid for them) without their consent, but it's also unjust to draft people for a war without their consent. We do it anyway because the alternative - choosing to not fight the war - is unjust too.
How is any family, which was already living paycheck to paycheck ever going to sort that out. What's going to happen is tons of Americans are simply not going to be able to pay, their credits will be ruined and the rent won't be paid anyway.
It would be nice to present a goal, no one pays rent until we have a functioning economy again, and then sort out the details a bit later. The government could forgive property taxes as well, Banks could delay mortgage payments until the end of the pandemic.
I spoke to one friend who was three months behind on rent at a point. Telling him to Buck up and figure it out, isn't going to do any good. Money ultimately is an abstraction, as a society we very much can shape the rules around it. I can't imagine millions of homeless families being worse than landlords having to seek out different arrangements with their Banks.
Overalla lot of people aren't going to be able to pay rent through no fault of their own, they shouldn't be evicted as punishment. Or you can tell me ,how would anyone catch up on a year of rent once the eviction moratorium is over ?
The problem is, you can't just say "so don't pay rent" and magically make that OK. That rent money in turn pays for maintenance/upkeep, mortgage payments, property taxes, wages for property managers and repairmen etc. You can't pretend like all land is owned by some king who can just afford to not get rental payments.
If the government doesn't collect property taxes, how do they pay for schools, roads and firefighting next year? If the bank doesn't collect their mortgage payments, they go insolvent and don't have the cash to give you when you try to withdraw from your checking account.
Flipping your final line around, how would the elderly widow relying on renting out her former family home handle receiving no income for a year?
Landlords are going to lose money.
>Flipping your final line around, how would the elderly widow relying on renting out her former family home handle receiving no income for a year?
She still will not get any income until the eviction moratorium is lifted. The only thing she can do is sue her tenants for money they don't have. Even in good times evictions can take months to a year.
It can be argued this is the risk of doing business. If tenants can't pay they can't.
The backlog of evictions ( which are one of the most stressful things you can experience) will clog courts. At least if we establish renters will not be able to pay, we can develop an alternative plan. Better to have a plan than saying everyone has to survive the best they can.
Someone with an economic degree would work out the details. Obviously I can't write a full relief bill in a comment
The extreme urgency of now
05/05/2020 by David McWilliams & John Davis
Web player: https://podplayer.net/?id=104174933
Episode:
https://media.acast.com/the-david-mcwilliams-podcast/theextr...
If 'we' forgive rent owed landlords, will 'we' also forgive the mortgages those landlords owe the banks? Will 'we' also forgive the obligations the banks which owe to other banks and their investors? Will 'we' also forgive the obligations those investors owe, for example to pensioners? Will 'we' then step up and pay for those pensioners' food and … rent?
An economy is a gigantic web of interlocking relationships. It takes years (one might even say centuries!) to build and develop all of those, but it takes far less effort to destroy them. It is computationally impossible for anyone to understand all of an economy, and thus impossible for anyone to make good decisions on behalf of an entire economy.
If we are worried about folks without resources, we should give them some. Yes, that runs the risk of encouraging those who want to get those resources (e.g. student financial aid encourages the growth of the academic industry, mortgage assistance encourages the growth of the real estate industry &c.): we should probably just give the poor some amount of money and let them make their own decisions about it. Call it unemployment or UBI or whatever.
I think there's a good argument that yes, forgiving all of those rents and paying for the pensioners' pensions is less bad than not doing anything. (We might also want to consider why pensioners are living off of complex financial relationships instead of, like, cash, and whether that risk/reward tradeoff was good for society, but we won't be able to see the results of any changes we make for another generation or two.)
I do think that, yes, "we will just give you money" (and "we will increase taxes on people who won't get evicted if we do") is a fine answer too.
But also, the amount of benefit that any intervention can have drops rapidly by the month. Every time rent payments (or mortgages, or pension-funded bills) are due, there's a new batch of people who can't pay it. A bad answer today, and maybe a workaround for second-order effects later, is a lot better than a better answer in three months.
Does it? Maybe the right answer is not to make all decisions in one place: maybe the right answer is to let every citizen make his or her own decisions. The one who is willing to trade the emotional cost of moving back in with his loving family in order to have more money for lunches with friends does so, while the one with abusive parents chooses to cancel cable rather than moving back in — and so forth.
> We might also want to consider why pensioners are living off of complex financial relationships instead of, like, cash
Because storing all of one's life savings under the mattress is susceptible to theft. Even taking a broader definition of 'cash' to include a bank account, would you at age 60, with another 20 years to live, rather be earning 0.06% (the current savings account rate) or 1% (or more) per annum? At 0.06%, one would need about $100,000,000 to earn the $64,000 median U.S. income in interest. Alternatively, if you figure that you will live a maximum of 50 more year, you will need over $3 million in order to retire and just spend the money. You gotta invest to have something to live off of.
That is one of the possible decisions, yes. It does seem to be the decision the US is going with, for the most part.
(I'm a little confused what you mean by "cancel cable" - do you live somewhere where the cost of a monthly cable TV bill is comparable to the cost of a monthly rent bill?)
> would you at age 60, with another 20 years to live, rather be earning 0.06% (the current savings account rate) or 1% (or more) per annum?
It depends on the risk profile. If you can guarantee me 1% or more per annum without risk, then obviously I'll take it, but if you could make that guarantee, then savings accounts would just make the same investment and offer 1% interest too.
Also, if you tell me that my options are earning 1% on my savings and setting up a system of complex dependencies that leads to a thousand people becoming homeless over the rest of my life, or 0.06% and not doing so, that may influence my answer.
How anyone making $100k can be considered "poor" is beyond me.
No wonder everyone on the West coast thinks being a Millennial sucks.
It's just part and parcel of living where everyone else wants to live.
Another way to say that is "where the jobs are".
At least in my peer group people seem to be doing pretty well.
From my perspective here, Millennials aren't having any harder of a time integrating into society than anyone before them did.
I see the "jobs in places not SF or NYC" situation as kind of like how the people who spend MSRP minus $2k for a 5yo 4Runner feel the need to loudly proclaim how everything else is crap because they have this massive sunk cost they need to justify to themselves. All I know is my car starts every morning and I'm not making payments on it.
The main part of the documentary is a teacher who can't afford to live anywhere near the school that employs her. I think the cheapest rent was $3,500/month and she made 60K per year (?). I believe she worked in San Francisco but had to move to Oakland. She had to take multiple buses and then walk a few miles from the final stop. But in the end she found a place in San Francisco near her school which she could afford.
It also showed Google and other large companies with their private buses. There was a lot of conflict between average citizens and the "Google buses", at least in the video there was.
> "While moving back home during the pandemic makes sense and is seen as socially acceptable or even smart, it also means you are living with people who still see you as your 18-year-old self."
One of the biggest things I’ve noticed among millennials is how many parents fail to understand the emotional and mental situation of what their children are currently experiencing. I feel so incredibly lucky that my parents understand that I’m not 18, and they’re happy to help out during these uncertain times. I’m so much more productive working from my parents house because I now have enough space for a decent home office.
I also have coworkers that have openly talked about how their parents refuse to let them move back in during the pandemic, citing the “time to grow up” mentality. I’m all for taking personal responsibility in one’s life, but there are a whole lot of older people out there that are oblivious to just how serious the pandemic has been economically.
Rents have risen a lot since then, but is it really impossible for someone in work to be able to afford rent? Or are they insisting on living in a fashionable part of town? (For me independence from my parents was quite a high priority in those days).
https://www.cbpp.org/blog/census-income-rent-gap-grew-in-201...
While I’m sure they’ve gone down a little in certain urban cores, like SF, they remain absurdly high in the midsize, Midwestern city where I grew up and now live. When I moved back, apartments here were going for only a bit less than what I paid in Los Angeles and seem to have not gone down at all. Home prices also remain artificially high because there are less listings and more interested buyers.
The challenge has been maintaining my sanity. My previous apartment was small and didn’t have space for a good home office setup since I never expected to work from hone when I leased it. Additionally, I was having little social interaction due to the pandemic since Texas wasn’t doing a good job preventing spread early on.
My other reason for moving in with my parents was that my company did a lot of business in the travel industry and I feared layoffs. Not having to worry about my living situation while looking for another job in the midst of a crisis was a huge relief in my mind. Fortunately, I’ve been able to stay at the same company so far.
If being independent is the absolute most important thing to you, that’s great. But I’d argue that America’s individualistic culture is one of the biggest reasons we’re struggling to get past this pandemic. People demand the right to ignore basic public health requests, and it’s a major problem.
That's the equivalent of £828 a month now. Bills were included.
You can actually pick up a studio flat for £737 in the same area, which actually looks better - it's about 60 square feet which I think it a little smaller than the one I had, but it has it's own toilet. Council tax is on top of that at £45 a month, but still fits in the budget, just.
Assuming the same 50% of take home wage in rent, or a net wage of £1500pcm, would be about £21k/year
My £17800 salary in 2003 would be £28,300 today, or net of £1900pcm, so could afford (on the same ratio) £910 a month, which gives you a fair amount of choice at the moment in W14 according to rightmove.
I'm surprised as I felt renting was far harder now than 20 years ago, but seems it might be slightly better. Of course rents on tiny studios are presumably depressed because of covid19, I'm not sure what they were this time last year.
Even if you feel you can afford spending 50% of your income, it doesn't follow that you can easily find a landlord who allows it.
If you have a bad credit rating, as many people do these days, it will be even more difficult as more landlords check that than income.
In my case, where I am currently living, I had insufficient income at the time I moved in to qualify, and was only allowed to rent on the condition that I paid 12 months rent up front. And then I had to do it again the following year. Obviously that's only available to people with decent savings.
Before I started looking I was under the impression things were harder now then they were in 2003, but it seems not, at least in this one case (tiny studio/bedsits in a dodgy part of west london) -- unless asking prices on rent are massively depressed due to covid.
In 2006/7 I lived in Tunbridge wells, paying £800pcm for a 2 bed flat that looked almost identical to this one, although it was in the next door house and had a garage instead of a parking spot.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/84635425#/
£800 in 2007 is £1,117.29 today, so a near identical flat for £900 is an interesting price point.
That flat is southeast England in the middle of nowhere.
Not london, not greater london by any metric, it's nowhere.
Properties have increased significantly in cities but not in the desolated countryside. No argument there.
(And difficult if you're self-employed with highly irregular income, I found.)
If using a guarantor, a guarantor has to pass similar checks.
Guarantor works a lot better for a young person starting out in a cheap-ass room in a shared place, whose parents expect this. For a flat and an older adult with retired parents on a low pension, or their own housing costs, not so much.
Good like finding a guarantor if your parents or friends:
- don't have enough spare income to cover your rent in addition to their own expenses
- don't pass the credit check themselves
- can't pass the proof-of-income check themselves
- don't have enough assets to use as security
- are not happy using their assets as security for you (e.g. their limited life savings or their one and only home)
Some people don't have parents, and these days, quite a lot of parents rent precariously too. They would be turned down as guarantors.
More parents renting is a factor which has changed in recent years.
I imagine most people don't have friends who would be willing to be long term rent guarantors, even if they could be.
Because they can ask those things more quickly and easily now. There's a bunch of jerks in California who are hellbent on connecting every DB in the world to every other DB that we can thank for this.
Absolutely. When my mother-in-law divorced and moved into a rented house, I was her guarantor.
I did have parents in 2003, but they lived 3000 miles away in a greek village where there was an ISDN line a 20 minute ride down the mountain, so not too practical. But this artcile is about 18-29 year olds moving in with their parents, not 50 year olds.
It applies in that age range as well.
A 29 year old moving in with their 64 year old parent(s) who are themselves poor and renting while on the edge of official retirement age, is going to find their parents probably rejected as guarantors.
This is where room in a shared house comes into play. They're available for $4-500 a month in my city.
Luckily rooms are more likely to be rented somewhat informally, or by less stringent agents & landlords, compared with flats, so there's a decent market of these without a hard income requirement, alongside those with the requirement.
Moved in with a friend after that, saved about £100 a month, but also in a nicer part of town.
Have to say the budget felt stretched at £24K, luckily that went up a lot pretty fast.
Do that every month from age 21 and you'd be able to get a 10% deposit on a house by the time you're 40.
You're talking about Kensington in London? That's the center and one of the most expensive location in the city.
Where the fuck do you see a place for £737 in there?
Either it's a flatshare (that's a bit low, must be 6+ people) or you confused 737 per month with 737 per week (that'd be £3000 a month, possible for a luxury 1 bedroom in that area the size of what people consider a 2 bedroom, typical ads that come at the top of rightmove).
The area near "West Kensington" and "Kensington Olympia" tube stations. It's technically in Hammersmith+Fulham.
Kensington borough contains(ed) Grenfell, it's not one of the most expensive places in the city, it's varied, like many boroughs.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/49989753#/ - £737
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/66191535#/ - £758
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/95389700#/ - £806
The £806 is prety much what I got for £520, and inflation wise pretty much the same price.
I suspect the prices are so low because of covid, I don't have any evidence of that though.
Here's a pre-covid article with some average rents: https://www.simplybusiness.co.uk/knowledge/articles/2019/09/.... Dagenham (Zone 5) studio: £688
https://www.homesandproperty.co.uk/property-news/renting/ave...
reports "Rents in the capital are down 4.2 per cent as tourists stay away and short-let landlords switch to long-term contracts, flooding the market."
I suspect rents on tiny bedsit studios are down even more, especially as weekly commuters no longer need them, and young people move to live with parents.
That explains the £737. Can't even put a desk to do your homework. Nobody would want to live there, especially with COVID.
Regular studios in student accommodations go for double that in this area. I've actually seen friends paying as much as £2000 a month, when they come from far or from abroad, don't have the luxury to visit 10 properties and landlord won't rent to students with no income.
The room in my hall of residence was smaller than that, although being in Exeter it cost far less (£90 a week, so £390 a month).
Of course I had an office to go to for that time, clearly it's different in the last 6 months.
My personal story:
I lived there up until about a year ago, not far from the center. Being a young person, I earned the usual entry-level software developer salary. I tried to live a relatively frugal lifestyle, which included not going out and spending not a whole lot on personal entertainment costs.
The rent was £1500, so I had to rent a flat with my friend. Travel was expensive, and a fixed cost in my circumstances. Bills were not included, so we had to pay those as well. I tried to cut costs as much as I could, and in retrospect maybe I could have cut £80-100 a month from my grocery spending by shopping in cheaper stores, or perhaps even another £50 on top of that if I was willing to trade off some of my sanity/time for the savings. I had some savings, but not a whole lot.
The whole time, I was cutting into my savings each month and literally losing my money by staying in London. Even if I tried to save harder, that would get me nowhere nearer to saving up for a deposit for the next few years.
I eventually decided to leave the city behind and move to Scotland. Instant quality of life improvement, and I actually got the chance to start building up my savings rather than chipping away at them.
Anecdotally, this is simply not true. I lived in a fairly nice area next to my university for the better part of the past five years at well below the poverty level. (~$10,000) per year so far less than minimum wage.
I'm mostly voicing a much more general confusion here. I think you have to bolt down our [lets be honest] mostly imaginary system to reality in some spots. Rents can simply be adjusted to whatever people can pay. That way there is no technological or economic progress to be had for those at the bottom. The fix is in?
Or let me put it like this: If I want a banana I want to pay for what it costs to grow the banana, the packaging, the logistics of it and for those who perform the miracle of trade. If all the steps involved also involve maximizing wealth extraction from those employed in those steps by [any and all means!] my banana will naturally grow in price to the point where my minimum wage has doubts if it can afford it. Not just now but forever! Regardless of anything.
Regulation cant be like: We will cap the price of bananas at this point since everyone involved in making them happen for me has to pay rent that grows along with the kiwi's. I very much doubt we cant fix rent. There might be a layer or 2 of maximized wealth extraction above it. Those are not impossible to fix. If we had real collective goals we could just be like: It wont happen - forever! and get a really cheap but highly profitable banana in return.
Note: I can stack bricks and run tubes though them. Its not hard and not a lot of work. IOW: I'm not impressed by a concrete box. End of the day my government owns all the land.
The other reason things are so high is there are too many people and not enough houses, so there's little opportunity for competition.
There is nothing in this that suggests one needs to spend 1/4 or 2/3 of the productive labor in their lives to maintain the house.
Progress is to reduce the maintenance cost. The lower it is the lower the salaries can be which increase productivity exponentially.
IOW grandpa's pension plan is for a large part to continue to pay for housing. He spend his entire life busting his ass but some how didn't manage to earn a place to live.
Neither could I which is why I shared. Is that something that isn't expected any more?
Yes. I've seen what my younger sisters and exes earned working in London in jobs like waitress or saleswoman or law.
The salary simply doesn't cover rent and bills for a one bedroom. It doesn't matter how you put it, it just doesn't work.
One cultural thing I noticed in London and I assume in the UK at large is the lack of studios. There are plenty of 1 bedroom but there aren't studios (200-300 sqft).
If you go to Paris for comparison, you will see an incredible amount of studios.
It makes a world of difference when you get 25+, you make a living and you want to be independent (forget about dating and getting married otherwise). In the absence of studio, you're forced to pay up a lot to get a one bedroom (more than what low end jobs earn so they're stuck with flatmates).
I feel that this is the case for many people and in other contexts. If you develop a lot during say two years of employment, then depending on who your manager is, you may still be seen in the same way as when you started.
There is an inherent poetic dilemma with reconciling yourself with how you age. Parents can buffer this change, whether for positive or negative effect.
In the US context, it has historical connections to the glorification of pioneerism and expansion through the western frontier (along with the genocide that accompanied that).
After that, in the post WW2 period, opportunity in the US was so abundant that a (commonly white male) school dropout could walk into a factory and get a job with benefits. The same person could then afford a modest house (not the gigantic houses of today), support a family on a single income, and had access to affordable health care and good public education for their kids.
In the context of that sort of opportunity, staying at your parents' home in adulthood was far more indicative of personal failings, and that's where the current trope disparaging adult (mostly male) children living at home originated.
But given how diminished all of those opportunities are today (no lands to forcibly take from less technologically advantaged peoples, no new factories, expensive housing where jobs are available, high qualifications required), it's a trope that's pretty irrelevant today.
If I wasn't engaged I would have gone home to WFH immediately during the pandemic, it would have been nice to spend time there and be with family (rare opportunity for easy ability to work remotely and spend time with family on the east coast).
That said, most of the successful people I know moved out to areas with more opportunity and those that stayed behind (particularly those that live at home) are more likely to have 'personal failings' of some sort.
Maybe this isn't true if you were lucky enough to grow up in an economic hub to start, but if you didn't there's still some truth to it.
Obviously during the pandemic this changes and no longer becomes relevant since remote opportunity and being able to save money by living home (since everything is locked down anyway) makes way more sense. Most people don't think independently from the cultural context though so it'd take a while for this to update.
Why live in Palo Alto and waste lots of money on rent because of stupid housing policy when you don't have to? When you can't go out and do stuff?
> That said, most of the successful people I know moved out to areas with more opportunity and those that stayed behind (particularly those that live at home) are more likely to have 'personal failings' of some sort.
Sounds like you are almost defining "personal failings" as "unable to gain the skills to compete and thrive in a high opportunity area".
If that's the case, perhaps we should reconsider whether such a high level of achievement should be required in order for a person to establish a basic non extravagant life on their own independent of their parents.
I hear sentiments like this a lot lately, and it feels short-sighted to me. COVID restrictions are not going to be around forever. There are financial, professional, social, and other costs that come with moving somewhere else.
For people who genuinely don't like it in $HCOL_AREA regardless of the pandemic, and see this as a way to get out permanently, then that's great, and they should do that. If it's more like "it's expensive here and I can't go out to my favorite bars/restaurants right now", the latter half of that situation should fix itself by next summer, and hopefully earlier in some fashion. Sure, that's a while to wait, but isn't much time when considering that an alternative is to uproot your entire life.
Still a year or so where it's not worth it.
Maybe that's not enough for some people to be worth the effort, but if your lease was ending and you don't have a ton of stuff it's pretty easy to do.
It wasn't even considered normal for me to cook anything in the kitchen while I still lived at home. It was like being in someone else's workshop and using all their tools and putting things back not quite where they like them or wasting soap/water when washing implements or being too messy or abusive to the equipment. It was impossible to not cause some sort of trouble, I literally started grilling outside daily to not touch the kitchen and still feed myself real food as a young adult.
One could argue it was the parents refusing to grow up, but it's also arguably a predictable outcome when the husband works like a blue-collar dog to pay the bills and the wife doesn't have to work a formal job. Obviously the husband is going to expect the wife to keep the house clean and do all the cooking, if she slacks off on these relatively trivial duties while he's grouchy and overworked, bad times for sure.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxYl93p0ksc
The fact that it's somehow related in American culture is very unfortunate.
I'm tempted to admit that the expression of this otherwise shared culture might be intensified by some of the more distinctive aspects of American culture (e.g. pioneer spirit, as mentioned elsethread), but I hesitate because assuming America is exceptional is a bad habit I'm trying to kick =)
[1] That paper is something of a rebuttal to the argument that NW European culture (including North American culture) was always strongly nuclear. But the lack of multigenerational living seems pretty clear; what they seem to show instead is that the trend of the elderly living alone is relatively new. Which doesn't seem surprising. A culture that pressures children to move out of the home doesn't imply a culture that pressures the elderly to live alone.
Get a job? Why? Go to school? Why? Things are fine. I have someone to cook my meals and a warm bed to sleep in.
My uncle ended up booting my cousin out of the house. It was the best thing that happened to him. He matured significantly, went back to school, has a great job. He even admits it himself that he was in a rut that would have never ended had he been able to keep living at home. Living at home sheltered him from the real world.
The case of a totally unmotivated individual not engaging themselves in school or work is totally different than the case of working young adults who want to live independently of their parents, but can't afford to do so due to high cost of living, high debt, or other financial factors. I know people who have been in both categories, and they are not much alike.
At least to my knowledge (of S.Korea) and my experience, most will eat together, watch some shows together.
I actually had to come home when I was in my early 20's. I spent my high-school and post-secondary years pursuing culinary arts. It never dawned on me to actually get a job in a commercial kitchen until I had my culinary degree due to the fact that I worked thru school as a finish carpenter and made a pretty good wage for a 18-19 year old kid. Anyways with degree in hand, I set off for New Orleans to make a name for myself as a chef. From the moment I got into a commercial kitchen I realized I had made a big mistake, while I loved cooking, being a chef in a commercial kitchen has little to do with actual cooking. So I came home hat in hand with no direction, went back to carpentry while I regrouped, the entire time my grandfather (I was raised by my grandparents) kept saying you know you really have a knack for programming those computers. I always viewed it as a hobby but folded to his suggestions and took a job at a local shop doing custom business software. This was the dawn of the internet, so there where still small shops doing desktop software for small businesses. Anyways the rest is history but the point being, is I knew I could come home, I could not imagine not having that relief valve as a young person, especially in today's climate.
This is crucial to understanding:
- The immediate distress of young males. They have no chance of seducing externally if they don’t have moral support at home. Explains the billion of 9Gag posts about young people who fall addicted to gaming and joke about virginity and lack of self confidence, who joke about the thing they know they’ll fatally become. They’re stuck in a bad place in life.
- The rise in what all Democrat fans would call “Extreme right”, which they don’t understand is just people who we’ve abandoned, who count on no-one because no-one cares for them. Isolation and individualism goes hand in hand. I keep telling my leftist friends if they want solidarity to triumph, they can’t just focus on women-at-the-workplace, one day they’ll have to face the men-at-the-game-addiction-station question. Especially if they want a cohesive society.
Living with the parents isn’t the best way to get social interactions, unless it is a venue where they can be for _caring for others_. Because young men are especially deprived of places where they can care for someone, women being very independent nowadays, especially in their 20ies. And caring for someone is the blood of the soul.
"The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel it's warmth"
I think you put that very nicely.
I think I understand this problem, and I have empathy for these men (it also took me a long time to get my first relationship, I know how it feels). I just don't know what the solution is. Their frustration might to some extent be caused by the independence of women (where women now may prefer to be single than to be in a relationship they don't really want), but I don't think it's right to hold back on women's emancipation in order to make men feel better about themselves.
What exactly is the right's suggested solution here (I ask this out of genuine curiosity)? Today's mainstream right looks at these frustrated men's hardening hearts, and all it seems to see is an opportunity to accelerate that hardening for political gain, by convincing them that the source of their woes (and the rightful targets of their anger) are immigrants/feminists/protestors/... I'm skeptical that we should expect any workable solutions from there.
Also, as a side note, why do you feel the need to use quotes around "Extreme right"? Do you disagree with labeling rising movements like QAnon and incel/blackpill subculture as "extreme right"?
Not 100% sure, I think we'd benefit from society broadening what acceptable ways of living and gender roles are available for men. There are plenty of women that grow up feeling dejected or romantically undesirable, but we don't necessarily see the same sort of frustration expressed the way we're familiar with in young men. My take is that there are social expectations for how men are supposed to act or live, and there are elements of said expectations that contribute to the frustration and loneliness we see in many of them today. I think the world would be better if a lot of young men felt able to express what was bothering them to their peers, as well had peers (not necessarily always romantic) that cared enough to at least listen.
I was once browsing a Reddit group for Transmen, and a discussion the members were having on socializing with masculinity hit a lot of the notes I expected. [1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FTMMen/comments/irh34j/there_is_too...
My sarcastic response is that I hope they enjoy the retirement home their kids put them in in the future.
I don't actually mean that, but just to make a point...
Since the pandemic hit, my parents have been trying to convince me to move back in with them. I'm working remotely now, they say, so I don't have to live in the city, so I might as well live with them, right?
I have to keep making different excuses. They don't seem to quite get the message that as much as I love them, I just don't want to live with them...
But it was only temporary.
I guess the original reason I posted the anecdote is, I wonder how many of the people who've moved back home just did it because they could, since they're working remotely anyway.
That said, we immigrated to the US from a country where it is normal/expected to live with your parents until marriage or later. I don't think my fiance would have had a good time moving back in her with parents for 2 years like I did.
WW2 was of course a much more trying time but it was followed by massive economic growth for most sectors of the population, I don't see that happening after the pandemic, wealth is just being silo'd and prosperity limited.
You hear it time and time again: people who have personally felt the loss of loved ones to pandemic or wildfire or flood still deny the cause. I fully expect 50% of the (surviving) public to point out that "some scientists disagree" on the cause of global climate change while we slowly perish in a Water World dystopia.
Meanwhile my parents are stuck with their much higher 10% boom years interest rate, even though the absolute amount was much lower initially.
Of course this is in Europe, not the states.
Remortgaging is a normal part of life, but you can imagine that there might be penalty clauses if you've signed up for a 10 year fixed and in year 2/3 you want to remortgage at different terms.
However, I'm fairly certain that the GP is exaggerating. Even 15 years ago, no bank asked for 10%. 5% would have been a lot, something around 3.5 - 4% common. My parents paid between 7 and 10% when they built their house, but that's like at least 40 years now. Today, something around 2% is the going rate.
At least in the booming markets, however, the rise in prices has completely eaten the gain in interest. I could for the same monthly installmend pretty much finance the same size as I could 10 years ago, the interest rate would be lower, but the principal substantially higher.
Often consumers with weak credit or low incomes end up with loans that have worse terms, such as these penalties.
My family refinanced our home loan, and it was just a matter of going to the bank and signing the paperwork that they filled out for us. It took less than an hour, and the ROI was not hard to compute.
On an extreme example, imagine taking out a loan, then you pay it all back the next day. The loan has earned no interest, but the bank had to spend a bunch of time and money to get the loan set up.
Of course, early payment penalties are still pretty scummy. However, it does make sense why a bank would have one.
With consumer debt we have different expectations of what's fair, but consider the bank's risk profile here - if interest rates go up those outstanding mortgages are taking them for a ride, and if they go down the customers refi... seems natural they'd want to minimize prepayments.
An issue with consumer debt is that a proliferation of fees and "fine print" make it confusing for folks to understand what they're signing up for, and to do comparison shopping on loans.
Traditionally, folks were advised to be wary of prepayment penalties because of a widespread strategy to prepay a loan if possible. When interest rates were high, this was like an investment with a guaranteed percentage return.
For instance, my family took out a loan with a particular payment, but we paid more than the minimum each month because we could afford it. On the other hand, being able to drop back to a lower payment was a kind of safety net in case something happened to one of our jobs, or something like that.
See, the bank is not like your friend that lends you money. When your friend lends you money they are happy to receive payment early because they didn't actually want to lend it at all, it was a favor to you. They probably didn't charge interest, but if they did they did so because they "had to" (meaning they can't afford to lend you money as a flat out favor so they'll take the market rate, like when my friend the mechanic fixes my car but asks me to pay him because he's gotta live).
When the bank lends money they _want_ to lend it, it's the whole point of their business. That's why they exist, to charge interest. When you pay back early you're reneging on the deal, so to speak, and defeating the purpose of the business. They don't want the money back until the agreed upon time, it throws a wrench in their plans, budgets, forecasts, etc. The fee covers the cost of this inconvenience and discourages you from doing so.
Sometimes you’re able to refinance at no prepayment fee, but that comes down to how hard the bank wants to keep you as a customer etc.
If you get a standard 30-year fixed, the mortgage company can't impose a prepayment penalty.[1]
[1]https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/when-are-prepayment-...
Sure, interest rates may be lower, but the purchasing power (a.k.a how much does a dollar/euro get me?) has also declined dramatically over the last several years. If your parents are retired and on a fixed income, tax increases and insurance premium hikes are a major factor to consider as well.
So while mortgages have low interest, houses are expensive. To the point where you need a double income for a reasonable house.
My parents started off with a (iirc) 12.5% interest rate, but over the years were able to remortgage the house and eventually to a payment-free one (so they will never pay off the remaining balance on their mortgage, meaning they don't own the house (fiscally) and pay taxes on the monetary value it represents).
Even for a double income, it's insane. In NL, the average price of a home is 315k, while the median full-time income is 36k per year (pre-tax). Even with a double income, that's 4.5 years of household income, comparable to the peak ratio in the US before the housing bubble burst in 2008.
Perversely, at least in the UK, a lot of people are paying higher rent than they would be for a mortgage for a similar place, but they can't get a mortgage due to "affordability", despite a demonstrated history of paying the rent.
Similarly, people can be on a 10% mortgage, paying it consistently, but unable to open a new, cheaper mortgage to replace it because their current circumstances don't pass the criteria. Criteria may include age (time to retirement) and current income.
I live in Munich, and it's difficult to imagine that I can ever buy a house here, even with a relatively good salary.
I think you're mixing up your generational labels. Millennial are pushing 40. Under-25s are typically referred to as "GenZ" or, more colloquially, "zoomers".
> ... 7-month recession [...] lasted 18-months [...] lasted 8-months ...
Those are some... VERY specific timings. For many, the 2008 recession lasted >10 years. Putting a very narrow specific figure on it needs a little bit of perspective. 10 years is obviously ridiculous as it represents the extreme, but the impact of any academically-defined "18-month" recession is always going to be multi-year.
That's all budget that is subtracted from domestic spending policy. And military budget is frickking huge.
I think it's already a done deal. Millennials aren't as young as they seem (over 30) and as the own a minuscule percentage of US household wealth. The numbers are incredible.
"Indeed, at a median age of 35, Gen Xers owned just 9% of the nation’s wealth in 2008 — less than half what boomers had at that age. And millennials will have to triple their net worth in the next four years to catch up to Generation X at 35, and increase their wealth sevenfold to catch up to boomers at that age." https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-depressing-chart-show...
The funny thing is that across that millennials seem to love politicians that HATE them.
Obama's big thing was Obamacare which was basically a tax on the young (force them to buy insurance to subsidize capped insurance rates on older people). Bernie's big thing is expanding Medicare and Social Security.
So, I don't see things changing any time soon.
The Boomers basically took all the wealth in this country and regulated everyone out of it. There are so many issues that are good for the country and good for millenials that never seem to gain traction. Student loans reform for instance or Housing (especially zoning and property tax laws e.g. Prop 13).
Here is a good link to what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh6hesHk6yE&t=1250s
Since they don't see things getting better for them as they get older, maybe it's not so irrational to support expansion of Medicare and Social Security.
It's not as illogical or against their self-interest as you think.
Do you think that insurance for a 60 year old is 3x as expensive as a 30 year old for health care? The government MANDATES that to be the case. Who do you think pays for that?
Obamacare mandates that a 64 year old get charged no more that 3x a 27 year old.
Employers. Or the government - via subsidies. And the insureds themselves.
Have you considered that many millennials are OK with paying more if it means everyone is taken care of? People don't always vote for policies that benefit solely themselves.
So that's why they vote for policies that exclusively benefit Boomers. Gotcha!
Have you considered that maybe Millenials just don't understand how money and taxes work?
I was talking to my friend the other day that lives in California and didn't know what Prop 13 was. He was a state champion debater in California but didn't know how property taxes worked in the state. I was shocked. If that's the slightest indication - most millennials have absolutely no idea how money and taxes work.
I've talked to friends about zoning, depreciation laws, capital gains taxes, backdoor Roth laws ect. They don't even have a clue.
And I would disagree with the "exclusively" part of that sentence. I've already shown you how millennials benefit from Obamacare. Your note about young people subsidizing over-60s is a red herring. Over-65s are already on Medicare and it's pretty good. Why wouldn't millennials want that for themselves?
Most people don't understand taxes and money - this isn't specific to any particular age group. And frankly, as I've opined elsewhere on this site, retirement savings laws particularly are overly complicated for nearly everyone.
Actually you didn't. Pointing out a single feature that benefits them while ignoring all the others is not a cost benefit analysis.
> Your note about young people subsidizing over-60s is a red herring.
And this a straw man. Actually, no - its wrong.
I worked on Obamacare for 2 years. I think it's a decent law a vacuum. I can't possible pretend its good for young people. It's good for my 60 year old aunt who has diabetes who thinks she pays too much for insurance but actually is getting the deal of a century considering how much health care costs.
Obamacare did little to slow health care spending (another long story) but it did work to spread the costs around - mostly to young people.
Anyway, I seem to remember that extending the pandemic was the whole point of the lockdowns. The messaging at the beginning was that we would spread out cases over time, in order to keep under emergency healthcare capacity. Not prevent cases entirely. By that metric, hasn't the US been wildly successful? Or has the goal changed - and if so, why?
> It doesn't seem possible to permanently stop outbreaks without having either reached 20-25% of the population infected, or locking down until a cure or vaccine is discovered.
You can't magically make yourself immune to future outbreaks by locking down - the only way to avoid outbreaks in the absence of widespread immunity is to maintain the lockdown indefinitely, until a cure or vaccine is discovered and widely distributed.
So, it's not true that we could have eliminated the virus and been happily back to normal in the US if we had just locked down harder/better/longer. We would either still be locked down with no end in sight, or have opened back up and now be experiencing another outbreak.
Not sure about China, but FWIW Australia and NZ are still quite locked down.
Let's have police enforce our laws, give people school choice, and encourage everybody to have a job, become religious, and raise a family.
It's the role of science to tell us what that increased chance is, and the role of politics to decide whether that warrants the long-term decreased quality of life for a much higher fraction of people that the lockdowns/shutdowns will cause. At any rate, none of this was forced, certainly not by science (which can't make normative prescriptions).
I only remember that northern italy might have had a similiar problem, and I guess Wuhan and wouldnt be surprised about Brasil.
According to media here France choose the 'culling' strategy (or more nobly called age triage) and offered palliative services to people who had covid and were considered too low survival chance.
This is still a response to the pandemic, just a non-governmental one. I'm not saying such a response isn't justified, but it is not directly attributable to the disease.
Sweden: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRHUTTTTSEM156S US: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
For comparison, two countries more culturally similar to Sweden who did institute lockdown measures:
Norway: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LMUNRRTTNOM156S
Denmark: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRHUTTTTDKM156N
Norway went from ~2% to ~9.5% and is now back to ~4.5%. And you can barely see a blip in Denmark from 5% to 6%.
This leads us to the obvious conclusion ???.
Really? Lives were lost, but WWII came and went rather quickly, a handful of years. Millenials are dealing with multi-decade problems, potential solutions to which are discussed in terms of generations, decades rather than years.
For perspective: US WWII deaths: 407k over ~6 years. US COVID Deaths: 196k and counting over ONE year. So, even adjusted for population growth, the US is losing people to covid faster than it did during WWII. (The math is radically different for other countries, but in the US it is an interesting comparison.)
> The US is losing people to covid faster than it did during WWII.
This is a huge tragedy; the US responded to the war by trying to win it, deploying huge scientific and technical resources to that purpose. The US (and the UK) has responded to COVID largely by wishing it would go away, leaving the public to their own devices, locking down too late and too incoherently, and waiting for the private sector to develop a cure.
Don't forget about the depression. Started in '29 and didn't really resolve until after WW2, so almost 16 years.
And Europe certainly didn't bounce back after the war. Even the UK had rationing for several years after the war.
Regardless, the financial differences between people the exact same age are always vastly larger than the financial difference between so-called "generations".
But then when we break it down by age, or by gender, then suddenly, magically, this wealth becomes distributed to the entire age group, or the entire gender, so that "Boomers" are all well-off, or men are all well-off, when the reality is that it's not even remotely true, and a lot of people of all different groups are struggling.
My parents were both musicians/painters/other artistic stuff on the side. We were always tight money-wise but somehow had a two kids middle class upbringing on the absolute best part of town. Every time I think of this my admiration for my father grows.
Me and my sister became STEMpunks. My sister dropped it to be a full-time mom after a year of not liking the idea of daycare; but by then she had married well.
Once every other day I wish I had become a musician like my dad. But I don't think I could pull it off. Besides, they didn't save much so I (very gladly) chip in with about half of what they need to survive -- it's not as easy anymore.
(None of this is in America.)
What are these recessions? I'm an "elder millennial" and the .com bust came while I was in high school. Even entering the job force with a two year degree, I graduated well after it was over. Leaving, the GFC and our current one, but our current one isn't years long...yet.
The GFC was definitely a fucking mess for all of us. I have literally never had a real promotion and it wasn't until like five jobs in that I learned about annual cost of living adjustments. I still don't have a "senior" title despite having worked in industry for 15 years...
I feel like GenX got the biggest shaft. They graduated in the 80s-90s into an economy where unions were in decline and Asia had come into manufacturing dominance. Saw a brief boom in the 90s, only to have numerous accounting scandals destroy any investments they managed to save during that era. Went through the housing boom/bust, then were in their mid careers by the time the GFC hit. Now they are in their 50s/60s with a pandemic and another recession landing, and this recession looks to be inflationary, which means any savings they had is going to get eaten away.
I could see it happening, but not in a good way. One (not all that unlikely) scenario is that the economic winners manage to place themselves out of harms way in the pandemic & social unrest that follows, and then everybody else just...dies off. That'd leave all the survivors extremely well off, and everybody else drops out of the population and ends up forgotten.
Globally, WW2 worked this way as well. There was a huge loss of life in Europe, in Russia, in China, in Japan, basically everywhere that the war was actively fought. 2/3 of Europe's Jewish population just died off, up to 20% of Poland and Russia, 8-10% in Southeast Asia, 4% in China. "Most sectors of the population" in the U.S. did well because the war wasn't fought here and we were the last developed nation left standing.
The timeline does match up with the Marshall Plan and redevelopment of Japan. A much simpler explanation is that the U.S. was the only nation whose capital stock remained intact after WW2. This allowed us to produce high-value goods more efficiently than everywhere else, which allowed us to export more, which led to a strong currency and ample buying power on world markets. Post-war unionization also spread the fruits of this productivity to society as a whole, rather than concentrating it among capital owners.
For comparison I would suggest you look at how common and large US recessions where from 1800-1900. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
See a pattern there? It's really awesome to win a war, particularly if it was never fought on your territory or you got reparations. It really sucks to lose a war. Over the short term (~10-20 years), this effect dwarfs the normal peacetime business cycle. Over the long term (~50-100 years), it's dwarfed by things like the political-economic system, technological development, alliances, population growth & demographics, etc, which tend to set up the winners of next war.
(The U.S. experienced a similar boom after the end of the Cold War in 1991.)
The boomer generation wasn’t shaped by a few good years, it was shaped by a lifetime of prosperity which is extremely unusual in historic terms. IT technology played a major role, but looking at the industrial revolution for comparison you find plenty of crashes even during a period of rapid growth.
First thing people need to do is stop fetishizing home ownership. It's not a magical object, instead of buying a home put your money in an index fund, you'll be better off financially anyway in 20 years. Owning a home is just a status symbol people are obsessed with for your quality of life it doesn't matter if you own or rent. Even better would be to share a space with peers. Not only does it make housing cheaper, it makes everything cheaper. Nobody in their 20s or 30s needs to be isolated in some giant house.
Education is predominantly getting much more expensive at elite institutions, but good public universities in-state are still affordable, or go and move abroad and get a degree in Europe if you're American. If you don't like to go to university, pick up a vocation, a lot of them pay well. In general be ready to move to improve your circumstances. Physical mobility in the US has fallen to extreme lows, it's one of the easiest way to improve your situation.
Being a millenial myself I'm actually not pessimistic about the generation at all, or at least not fatalistic. This isn't an economy any more where you get a job at 23 and then you're set for life and then live in a suburb with your labradoodle. To me that's a positive.
My 2 & 4 year old aren't working right now, and they've certainly endured the coronavirus pandemic. I don't know why not yet being in the labor force would prevent one from being accurately described as having endured an economic downturn any more than any other adverse conditions. It's hardly as if not being the breadwinner of the household insulates you from the effects if their income is reduced or eliminated.
We endured it, just in a different way than those who were working.
It's not their home, it's their parent's home.
> still see you as your 18-year-old self
or worse, as a failure.
"bad for the economy and mental well being"... quite the leap. It's good the family economy of those involved, and for many parents and children it can be a great thing for mental health as well.
Society has made us individualistic / "independent". But has it really made our mental health better?
Edit: and as others have pointed out, more people living separately is not ecologically efficient / sustainable.
It would be nice if we had a culture that encouraged multigenerational support, but you can’t pull that out of thin air. It’s something that would’ve needed to be in place prior to the pandemic. I think millennials may come out changed from this, as, at least in my experience, we’re already more supportive of each other and collectively-oriented then our parents generation, but that would be a change felt far off in the future.
The only time I think it's a real bummer is when you want to get laid. But even in other cultures you work that out.
But, really, being part of a community and sharing resources is supposed to be a good thing.
And maybe it makes sense to start framing the US in those terms too. We had the whole manifest destiny thing, and now it's time to move back to traditional life.
Corono got me good traveling SEA in February, and have been now living and working at home since March. I could have never thought about living here beforehand. At least I always think that twenties and thirties are for the movement of the city, and then the farm work / home life can begin.
But having been somewhat forced to force myself to settle for an indefinite period, it is giving me much appreciation for a different kind of life. Building stuff, farming and a lot of cooking / baking / fermenting has brought out a real positivity, which now seems impossible to find in the city.
It's even got to the point where we've started inviting friends to come and live and work with us, and there seems to be that community feeling bubbling up all around.
Commuting and travel seem so weird to me by this point, and I know that the logistics are hell to try and rearrange the entire economy to be kind of segmented, but I'm starting to believe that this is the only realistic hope we have left.
I guess it wasn't worded clearly, but I meant that it's the only hope for a less wasteful economy.
EDIT to add: In the short term! Right now the infrastructure is totally oil based, and consumerism relies on ecological destruction. But I am definitely not saying that we can't have a global zero carbon everything you want economy. But that is a question that I do not have the patience or information to ponder seriously!
Edit: that point is less important now that the article's title has changed. The title was like: 30 million young adults moved back to their parents.
Treating homes an investment was one of the worst mistakes of the 20th century.
After a few decades of nobody having the rights to control their own property, it became ingrained that this is how it should be.
Increasing home ownership was an express goal of the Bush Administration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkAtUq0OJ68&ab_channel=vastg...
They wanted to promote an "ownership society": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ownership_society
Great questions.
It's a somewhat more archaic form of "heaven forbid" as I understand it. I think the word "forfend" is mostly heard in this idiom these days.
"Time to grow up"
What boomers mean:
"Time to grow up, at least for now, while the company to which I pay my long term care premiums is solvent and likely to be able to provide care when I am frail, though it is looking like it might not always be the case, in which case I would prefer for you to live with me at that point."
Depending on the city you live if you can save a ton of cash and spend some extra time with your family.
What's amazing is how the narrative around this however is that we need MORE government to set things right. Yet in the tech bubble the government blew up the real este bubble, in 2008 all the banks got saved along with loads of other insurance and other businesses, and now we have the largest stimulus packages ever. (on top of government subsidised student loans, which have made loads of money available for college, pushing up prices).
It's counter intuitive but in the long run this is BAD for anyone that doesn't already have something. It inflates asset prices, it locks in people who already have something. It's bad for millennials. And millennials shouldn't be arguing for more government intervention, but less. Let things fail, so that the waste can get burned off.
Unfortunately it seems a lot of people think things literally need to be burned down for there to be change. But let's be clear, 30-40 years of interventions by governments did this, which is exactly what left leaning people want of government.
I guess the waste here is people who simply can not pay for food or housing? What a naive take.
In the scenario you're asking for - the zombie companies just layoff employees, cut wages/benefits, landlords evict, etc. The zombie lives on just fine until the market corrects while everyone else fails.
You're correct that failing companies need to fail but your "just let the free market handle it" approach is a fairy tale.
"Keep the budgets tight" was the mantra in the early 30s in response to the depression. It took a World War that killed millions of people (and was -- surprise! -- a major artificial government stimulus) to get out of it.
Yes, providing monetary liquidity and fiscal stimulus during times of extreme stress is not purely good. It can have an effect of keeping some companies alive that perhaps should not be. That is bad and we should try to minimize it in the context of a recovery effort. But the fact that it's not perfect is not a reason to claim that burning everything down and creating a decades-long horrible depression in which many die of starvation, and that cripples the country, is a preferable alternative.
They think that if you let everything burn down then green shoots will pop up and everything will be happy and folks will rebuild and it'll be better and the government oughta get its snout out of our business and just let pure capitalism run its course and...
You are describing the broken window fallacy here. War and destruction doesn't help the economy. What happens in war is that useful resources in the economy are diverted from productive use and mutual beneficial trade to death and destruction.
When aggregate demand is "stuck" at a depressed level (high unemployment causes low demand, resulting in more low unemployment), the stimulus of war can actually help pull the economy out of its stuck position, even if the war is destructive. Of course, once it's no longer stuck, the continued destructive stimulus is just destructive.
There are better fiscal ways to pull the economy out of a depression than war, because most wars don't pay much in the way of dividends, unlike large scale public works. But even if the stimulus isn't a great ROI in "normal" times, it can have a high ROI in "depressed" times due to its ability to get demand unstuck.
Letting banks burn down in 2008 would no doubt have been a cathartic moment, but it would be pragmatically a poor decision. Immediately post-crisis those responsible should be held responsible and actual action should be taken, but we don’t elect governments to lead us and then have them do nothing in a crisis.
Source?
You Unironically say this yet Trump (a very right candidate) is the one pumping money into the economy to save his election chances.
The reality is each party wants to spend money where it feels it is important. Republicans/right wingers have given up fiscal responsibility a LOOOOOONG time ago.
But the most vocal people who want government intervention are left leaning.
He just didn't pick the same one as you.
Your argument that government intervention is bad for millennials is flawed. Without government intervention such as eviction moratoriums, unemployment benefits and federal government stimulus checks there would have been massive homelessness. Prior to the pandemic 40% of americans could not cover a $400 emergency, all of these people would have been on the street without the government stepping in. At one point the unemployment rate as 15%. I cant really see how this would have been good for them.
I would argue that specific and targeted government intervention such as complete student loan forgiveness would have a massive beneficial effect on millenials.
All of these are easier then digging a shaft, jumping in, and trying to climb out. Speaking as someone who has no assets, no 401k, no home.
thanks pnutjam
Cool, so instead of PACs we'd just candidate-backing "news" coalitions?
The press does it's fair share, but you're wrong. Don't be afraid of change. If something isn't working; we should fix it.
> Don't be afraid of change. If something isn't working; we should fix it.
Furthermore, this is a binary line of thinking that isn't even fit for a children's book. The world is not split between those that want change, and those that are afraid of change. It is very much possible for intelligent adults to consider the details of what is being prescribed and conclude that "that sounds at least as bad or possibly worse than the status quo."
Every land lord thinks they'll be able to rent their apartment, hence the need for the eviction moratorium. Their view is: if I leave in a tenant who won't pay, definitely won't make money, but if I evict them I can find someone else.
It wouldn't have been "good for them" but it will hurt a hell of a lot less than when (at some undetermined point in the future) things come crashing down so hard that the government can't prop them up.
We're preventing fire crackers from going off and eventually we're gonna get hit with a bomb.
Right now the Fed's back is pretty close to the wall in terms of policy levers it can pull. Imagine a financial crisis comes along in 2021 or something, we could really be screwed.
For letting major businesses fail, we really do have the resources to let those former employees do nothing but sit at home and use the internet all day and have no bills. But the US can't handle someone not working and still being able to pay their bills.
I will grant you that the federal government in the US could have done better in some ways by just sending out checks to every citizen instead of loans to businesses, but I don't think that's what you had in mind when you talk about less government.
The main issue, of course, is the lack of jobs in the area, but with remote work growing, that might become less of an issue.
That being said, no one should consider flyover country to move to. Please stay away from my flyover country, it's bad enough with east and west coast investment firms buying all the property and driving regular folks out of the market entirely. When my partner and I bought the property our home is on, in 2009, we paid ~$3,000/acre. This was a high price.
The place next to ours sold last week for ~$13,000/acre to an investment firm from New Jersey.
I feel a shift coming, and I feel like the smart money is way out in front of it - buying up land that would be ripe for development once people figure out how much cheaper it is in the country.
And it's killing the people who live out here, right now. I can't imagine what it will look like if people start moving out here.
To be blunt, this is what already happened to all of the "desirable" cities on the West Coast and, as those of us who've lived here since basically the beginning said: buck you, you can't stop it. Start preparing now for what a wave of migration looks like and take steps to make room for the new arrivals before they[0] show up and outbid everyone who's already there.
Yes, this is going to look like "density" or "growth" or "change." Genuinely sorry, but the world is not a static place and since freedom of movement inside the United States is still a thing, all pretending that it won't happen or trying to make policies to limit it will do is turn whatever other area into one of haves and have-nots.
0 - I wrote "they" because I'm not leaving. I must be one of the tiny minority of people who likes where I live and have no plans to depart. If everyone else wants to pack up from the West Coast city where I live and move to Omaha, good on 'em.
Not going to move there until there's a seismic shift away from racism, conservatism, hypocrisy etc.
Because we're not in our twenties anymore? We're supposed to start families now...
If you have the opportunity take it.
In other parts of the planet there isn't this weird pride that means the only way to assert independence is by having your own place.
Most parents are happy that you just keep the area clean and chip in for groceries and rent.
What's so bad about that?
I guess it's only a bummer when you wanna get laid, but there's probably ways around that.
My parents suck and I want nothing to do with them really
Everything in my life is better the less I deal with them
Everything
I don’t know what the stats are but I’ve got a feeling that most people on HN (particularly those in expensive cities) get along with their parents quite well. I’ve noticed in my time in SV that I’ve never really heard anyone say their parents are/were abusive. Or that they even really hated their parents. On the contrary, I hear most people liking their parents quite a bit.
Abusive or terrible people for parents just don’t seem too common around these parts. Makes sense, abused children don’t tend to be rising stars - they kill theirselves instead.
The higher you get, the more supportive the parents are. It’s hard to get far alone and without a kickstart.
There are probably many people in your social circle with abusive parents. Just because they don't talk about it doesn't mean it didn't happen. People tend to keep their skeletons in their closets.
Related: Many men would not believe how common sexual assault of women is. A lot of men are like, "I don't know any women who have been assaulted." Really, it's that you don't know any women who have told you that they have been. For many reasons, most women only bring that kind of stuff up around a select trusted set of people, if any.
I always try to be mindful when interacting with people that almost everyone has some trauma in their past or some cross to bear. Just because they aren't showing it doesn't mean it isn't there.
I've asked directly to a lot of people about their relationship with their parents. My point is more like: They all seem to love their parents. They call them daily or, minimum, weekly. They enjoy their family gatherings and being around their parents overall.
If you did the ACE test with the younger crowd in SV's tech sphere, I would really doubt many people with troubled parents would show up. I get a score of 7 on that test and I don't see many 7+'s here. https://acestoohigh.com/got-your-ace-score/ If you had shitty parents, you probably wouldn't get into tech here. The people I know with shit parents are not in tech.
It took me weeks of leaving voicemails that were never returned and then two months to get an actual appointment. My primary care doctor was unable to find anyone suitable in the local hospital network. They wouldn't even return his calls.
If you're able to be persistent enough, try looking at Psychology Today. They let you search for therapists and psychiatrists in your area. (Ignore the articles, please ignore the articles.) If you don't have insurance or a lot of money, some providers may still be willing to work with you for a reduced fee.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us
But yeah, when I was living with them in my 20s for my Masters? I felt just like you did.
I don't see myself changing how I feel about him any time soon.
It can't help but be a little frustrating, however well-intentioned, when someone without the experience to accurately inform the comment says something like "but he's still your dad", "she's still your mom", et cetera. Bridges burn just as well from either end. And I think it's genuinely difficult for most good or even decent parents, in particular, to imagine how bad bad parents can be.
yeah, and these are still the scars from the cigarettes she put out on my thigh. Sometimes bridges are burnt, and sometimes they were never built in the first place.
"The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb"
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And distance from that relative allows you to see that with more clarity as you are no longer in environment where it was normalized.
I'm curious why there would be arguments over this, why would higher ups want people to stay put when the work is remote anyway?
I'm in the same area code as my employer and I am far less likely to want to come back to the office after. My "office" is a 15-person open space pod with no barriers, no door, and a handful of breakout rooms per floor for one-on-one meetings that are always occupied by someone camped out in there for the entire day (the lunch wrappers and multiple soda cans are a dead giveaway).
Meanwhile, at home, my family might be in a smallish apartment but I have a bedroom I can use as a home office, my own food with all of the zero-sugar soda I can buy, a restroom where no one is ever sitting in a stall gabbing away on the phone, and I'm not sitting four feet from my boss' shoulder while we're both doing technical calls.
I never want to go back, and I loved my commute.
Traveling everywhere all year long was amazing before... the current situation.