Citation?
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I like Olivia a lot, but her lyrics shouldnāt be used to title economic graphs.
Iād be interested in seeing this graph compared to each generationās net worth so that we can take into account the rising costs of housing, other essentials, and student loan debt.
Also noticed how worrying it is that boomers and Gen X had linear income growth uninterrupted from 30-55yo, while milennials saw a dip at 35, a prime age for first time house buying, having children, and general adulting.
Maybe the economy actually sucks for them?
Itās normalized though, I donāt see how this wouldnāt be accounted for.
I couldnāt read the article but most likely that didnāt account for student loan debt.
But most relevant to this discussion, every generationās income has dropped in the last 2-3 years. Wouldnāt that support CW, et alās point?
As much as Iāve been on your side, āAdjusted by household sizeā is a big fuckin adjustment, and I agree with Spinetta that net worth may be more informative than just income.
- Gen zās didnāt
- I suspect strongly, although do not know, this is the result of the recession and two stimulus payments, which falsely elevated median income for millennials right before the covid contraction hit. Data is also from 2023 and doesnāt capture later gains. We have other data sources showing income is up later on.
How so? (real question, not sure how this would particularly favor younger generations)
I feel like this is really funny, but I donāt get the joke.
Yeah now that I think of it, three good measures would be net worth, leisure spending, and consumer debt. Pick a basket of leisure/discretionary goods/services that are widely consumed by the average person if they can afford it, and show how much is spent on that.
I think that would be fairly hard to distort, the trick is measuring it - youād need the help of retailers and credit card companies.
Pretty sure consumer debt goes up during good times, confused by this point
Earlier generations having more children earlier in life is a substantial increase in the denominator, even if incomes are otherwise equal.
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Yeah and unless Iām misunderstanding how its adjusted I think a possible interpretation is that people feel like they need X% more money than they used to have kids. Guess would need the data on relative numbers of kids by age to see how much of the effect is due to that.
All four of the graphs in that article have Olivia Rodrigo lyrics as the title.
I donāt know why they decided to go full āHow do you do, fellow kidsā with that one, especially for an article that doesnāt seemed aimed at Gen Z. It seems aimed at Boomers who love the āback in my dayā bullshit that Gen X has heard for damn near half a century now.
To a degree, but rich people also have fewer kids than poor people. Thereās a fair amount of womenās lib in the graph, too, where in the Greatest and Silent generations, getting married is a division by two in the graph thatās much less likely to be the case in Gen Z and Millennials, but then the former households get compensated by domestic work and childcare being āfreeā while they are out of pocket expenses for the latter households. Iām not saying that women staying home is better, but it does substantially lower the out of pocket expense of having children.
My sister in law worked for a while after college, but then she ended up having 5 kids. At that point, it made no economic sense for her to keep working rather than providing her own childcare until all the kids were in school. Iām not putting forth because her family was rich, but had she kept working, theyād be higher on that graph and yet also poorer than when she was providing unquantified childcare that would not appear in such a graph.
So, by not counting domestic and childcare work as having any monetary value on that graph, households with one earner and one domestic laborer, which are pretty common in older generations, look a lot poorer on that graph than they actually were. Thereās also the situation where when a household has one earner and one domestic laborer, the out of pocket cost of having one extra kid is much lower than it is for households with two earners, who generally only get a modest discount on childcare costs per child for enrolling multiple kids at the same center. Thus, youād expect the former households to have more children, and further lower themselves on the graph, even if their out of pocket expenses havenāt gone up nearly as much as they would have for two earner households, whoād need that much more income to have more kids.
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Also, gotta love that canyon in the millennial graph right around age 20 aka the collapse of 2008.
Regarding housing, looking through an earnings call transcript for one of the largest homebuilders. Year over year, new build single family homes sold to become rentals are +34% and now make up 6.6% of all their new homes sold - and they just started doing deals like this recently.
From the call, āthere are large appetites to place dollars at scale into this space.ā
Late stage capitalism is really looking to trap as many younger people as possible as permanent renters, and if it succeeds, then those people will really get the screws turned on them.
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I donāt know what you mean by if. Itās already happened, itās just a matter of how quickly it accelerates. I really think itād take some sort of government intervention to stop it at this point. We know thatās not happening.
Iām a guilty party myself. I had 2 offers on my house and took the all cash offer, which was an investor, because I needed the money to get stuff set up in my new home. I couldnāt wait the 30 days to close and risk the other FHA loan falling through.
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I think weāre closer to government action than it looks like (5-10 years maybe), but it remains to be seen how much of the housing market they can corner in the mean time - especially in markets where theyāre being more aggressive about it.
I donāt really blame any individual for taking the best offer, otherwise youāre putting yourself at a disadvantage in the dynamic.