> It’s Hard to See My Parents Live So Lavishly While We’re Struggling
While I won't deny there are some problems currently, I think people comparing where they start to where others end is a huge mistake and leads to a lot of unnecessary anguish.
Someone in their 60s is supposed to be doing better than someone in their 20s. They had 40+ years to work and save. If they did it right, that will put them in a better position than a 20 year old... just like that 20 years old should be in a better position when they are in their 60s. It would be pretty disheartening if people in their 20s saw that it just gets worse.
Sure. But my excuse for denying my children would be that I also struggled at their age—zero handouts from either parent.
But I also think that attitude is a load of shit.
Early on in the 1980's I went to a community college to get the first couple of years of college out of the way. I sublet a room from a single woman (probably her landlord had no idea) and I rode a 10-speed bike between a pizza restaurant I worked at and the community college (yeah, sucked in the Kansas winter-time).
Later, at a university, I was able to work as a dishwasher at a dorm and pay my way through college.
But there's probably no way my kids can do the same 40 years later.
It would be, to me, a tragedy if our kids only finally "make it" when their parents die and all our assets are cashed in and divided among them. For myself, this would have come at a time when I didn't need the windfall.
I'd rather help them out now as they are trying to climb the ladder to homeowner, etc.
(It sure would have been nice if one of my parents could have forked over the cash to buy me that Macintosh Plus back in 1986. Alas, a student loan I was nervous to apply for did the trick.)
In the early 2000s I saw a gubernatorial candidate talking to an audience of over achieving high school students and when asked about what he would do to make college more affordable. He told a story about how he waited tables to pay for college.
Totally not on his radar: changes in tuition over time, portion of budgets of public colleges that were coming from state funds (his tuition wasn't free but was close), vs changes in median hourly wages over the same period.
Very clearly on his radar: those students were not gonna donate to anyone's campaign regardless of what he said.
The problem is that someone in their 20s can't even envision a realistic path to where people in their 60s are. And for me personally, being somewhere between the two, I think I'm mostly doing things "right" and still am not optimistic I'll get to where my parents are. I don't even think I'll see all of the money I've paid into Social Security back, given the political rumblings about "reforming" that program. Which is to say that I can see why younger people might feel hard done by.
I purchased a house within commuting distance of Boston in my mid 20s, back in 2022. Didn't need PMI, the mortgage terms weren't unreasonable to me (fixed 5% interest), and the monthly payments for utilities plus the loan are still well within my means. It's even got an attached garage.
I don't want to get too specific here for privacy reasons, but I believe the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out and getting an apartment right away during/after college. With almost zero real expenses outside my student loans, and the median software engineer salary for the region, I was able to save enough for a down payment after just a couple years. I did this because I disliked the idea of having no equity and paying rent to offset someone else's mortgage instead of saving for my own. My parents really liked that reasoning.
In many respects I'm fundamentally an outlier, yet once I bought mine, my peers with much lower incomes started doing the same after I explained the financials. When they actually sat down and calculated the mortgage payments, they realized it wasn't that bad, as long as they got something on the smaller side, which is still bigger than an apartment anyway.
To be clear, housing costs were crazy and still are. But I sense "crazy" is pretty relative when talking to people online from other countries. Housing in the US is expensive, especially compared to various convenient periods within the last 100 years. But even now, it's not the unrealistic back-breaking dream it seems to be when I talk to Europeans about it, and I suspect that's why so many Americans on social media overestimate the costs.
> the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out
It was very clever of you to choose to be born to tolerable parents with enough spare cash to let you live with them and save up, rather than jerks or even just poor parents that needed your help as soon as you got a job.
> the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out
That is 'small' cheat code if parents tolerable. I have multiple peers which got much better life and places to live because lived with parents in their 20s.
It just doing napkin math and even if you live 5 years with parents and doing minimal savings (saving rent and part of food) you already poses good chunk of deposit when comes to buying property.
According to census bureau data, 1 in 3 people aged 18-34 now live with parents, a huge change from past generations. So you're hardly an outlier in that respect.
You might want to qualify this with start to buy a house and get a mortgage and then pay off when older than 20s-30s.
I think some people in the comments are thinking you are saying they could outright buy a house straight out of school! (Which in a way might be a symptom explained in the article!
It should be noted the house my parents bought in their early 40s was a 3 bedroom, 1 bath, with no air conditioning. The school district was so-so, the lot wasn't very big, and the economy in that city at the time was declining. Most young people wouldn't be too interested in that today.
(Interestingly the cost of housing in the Bay Area back then - late 1980s - was the same as that Rust Belt city; we almost ended up there.)
My parents bought their house cash. No they were not high earners and not even median income earners. Yes the house is now worth close to a million dollars.
Those 60-year-olds existed in a brief and exceptional moment of wealth creation brought about by factors that are unlikely to happen again in ours or our children's lifetime. The problem being that the American ethos decided to pretend that brief moment was normal and sustainable.
It was a US-specific thing created by massive post-war infrastructure investment (read: suburban sprawl) and cheap automobiles.
This entire problem more or less resolves to the cost of land. It became effectively super-cheap post-WW2 for the aforementioned reasons. Now we've run out that runway and will face rolling bankruptcies across all sorts of municipalities due to infra maintenance costs.
Working class parents in their 20s in the USA could afford to buy their own homes well into the 2000s. Some got burned by cyclical factors, high interest, etc...; but many still achieved sustained lifetime home ownership.
China is arguably currently also in an exceptional situation though. The question is how long that lasts. The next generation or the one after will most likely also complain that their parents were much better off when they were young ;)
The German equivalent is that everybody is complaining about rising rents in city centers because everybody wants to live in city centers. Home ownership in Germany basically means that you'll have to pay it off for the rest of your life anyway (and that's not a new phenomenon) so in the end there isn't all that much difference to renting finance-wise, except that renting is usually much less hassle.
The barrier to entry for investments used to be pretty high. Most people felt limited to what their employers offered. Even as access started getting easier, the knowledge was still difficult to get.
Currently, the barrier to entry has never been lower, and the access to information has never been better. I don't see either of those things changing any time soon.
Of course, even with that, basic financial literacy with younger generations seems to be at an all time low. The finger pointing on that could go in many directions.
Yes, the finger pointing can and does go in many directions. Meanwhile the observed pattern is the boomers (actual boomers) get the golden path and every other generation doesn’t. Maybe they were uniquely virtuous and wise.
Strongly doubt the xennials will be as rich in twenty five years as 79 year olds are now.
Yes but the article also cites that the average age for home ownership has gone way up, houses cost far more relative to median income than before, rent is more expensive, and cultural changes requiring two income families and paid childcare have driven up child care costs.
It’s not hard to see why people find that unfair or whatever though. It’s complete disillusionment with the “dream.” Why is our society/economy structured in such a way that we spend our youthful years struggling and only get to enjoy the fruits when we are older? It’s why FIRE is so appealing to some, you get to get out early.
> While I won't deny there are some problems currently, I think people comparing where they start to where others end is a huge mistake and leads to a lot of unnecessary anguish.
That an ungenerous and frankly dismissive reading of the article.
Joe asked his dad for the $15k loan to start a business, not go on vacations. He used his dad's retirement lifestyle as a goal for his future retirement. He used his dad's historical entrepreneurship as his current goal of starting a modest small business. Nobody of sound mind would even think you could live like a retiree on $15k.
Joe's own dad wasn't even as dismissive as you're being. He denied the loan because he considered it a form of coddling his son. There's no evidence in the article he thought his son would use it to attempt to live his retirement lifestyle.
"If they did it right" is a bearing a lot of weight there. The window of "getting it right" has shrunk over the last 40 years and it's delusional to argue otherwise. People like myself are comparing themselves to their parents at the same age. My dad had me at my exact age now, had bought a house, could raise a family on his singular wage. That is non-existent now in my part of the country.
I’m the only person in my friend group able to afford a house in the foreseeable future and that’s been because of various strokes of luck (and some hard work of course).
My wife’s situation is the same. We’re all in our 30s.
And we’re talking any house here. Not the ridiculously expensive ones in major cities.
Som have confided in me that this feels hopeless, things keep getting more expensive, money keeps feeling like it’s worth less etc.
The general feeling at this point is past resentment with them. It’s more of accepted hopelessness.
Denying your own child a $15K business loan just to placate your sadistic delusions perfectly describes the mindset of aging boomers. They're happy to watch their own children struggle for the opportunity to validate their ideology. They don't have enough empathy to help their own children, so it's futile expecting them to care about anyone else in society. They use tragedy of the commons situations to justify endless gluttony, and will act surprised when the next generation pisses on their graves.
Without knowing the personality of the child and the history of behavior, it is rather hard to determine whether the parent made the correct decision or not. The article provides very little context. Sometimes this may be the correct decision based on the individual. Every child is different and requires different approaches to discipline and support.
I guess nobody can know anything and there is no point in trying to look at the typical experiences of generations, since we can never know if someone is just making up a sob story about what are actually their just deserts. (/s)
>For example: an American family in 1975 could send their children to public school on the assumption that the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families, communities like their own, and would speak English as a first language. Now, realistically, many parents must turn to private schooling for the same reassurances.
It was hard to take the rest of the article seriously after reading this.
In a piece that is making a persuasive argument facts are usually included to back up the argument. So I think it is fair to assume the author of the piece believes this is a key part of their argument, which they seem to also think given that it’s listed one of their two main points. The problem with that is it marks the rest of the article as clearly motivated. The claim that the rise in single parent households and those who do not speak English as a first is a _primary_ cause in lack of wealth amongst millennials and Gen Z is a wild one and difficult to back up.
Another comment shows how private school enrollment has held steady or declined since ‘75. However it is true that public school enrollment has partly been eaten away by charter schools. However charter schools are the most diverse as they are most likely to be found in larger cities. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/06/us-public...
So like the op commenter I too found it hard to trust the rest of the article. I’m deeply inclined to agree with the conclusions however such a clearly motivated list of statistics, regardless of truth, as the #2 factor turned me off of the rest of the piece.
Sure, it's just such an odd bundle of claims that were not fully interrogated in the essay. 1. That these things have changed from "small minority" to "significant minority" in public school populations, 2. they haven't changed similarly in private school populations 3. these things increasing are bad and undesirable for you and your child, and 4. there are not cheaper ways to fix this than sending your child to public school (the obvious point to me is if you don't like that there's a significant ESL population, or your community, move somewhere else!).
Language is an absolutely critical part of community, identity, socialization, and connection. Even just not sharing the same first language as another person begins to chip away at these metrics. Much moreso if you share no language in which you are both thoroughly fluent. It's not either person's fault, and it's true even if both parties have absolutely no racism or xenophobia or whatever in their hearts (though isms multiply the effect - even the unconscious isms that most people supposedly harbor).
That is a point that could be made in the essay! I don't think it's a given, but it's treated as one. My experience is that children who are ESL assimilate pretty heavily.
To clarify, I object that any of these things matter much for general outcomes. If the article had immediately supported these claims, maybe I'd be more accepting, but as is it appears I'm supposed to have taken it as a given.
Every time I think I have money I get massive insurance bills, massive property tax bills that increase seemingly every year, a fence I had to install so my kids don't get mangled by the pitbull 2 doors down that was $12k that was $4k 10 years ago. I know because my parents installed the same fence at their house. I'm paying a not insignificant portion of my income into a social security program that I'll never see a dime of. And I'm in my 30's. I can't imagine what kids in their 20's are going through.
When I was a kid I used to think that theives would break through my windows and steal my TV. Now that I'm an adult, I realize I'm being robbed daily through legal channels.
I feel you. My property tax has gone up more in the past decade than it did during the previous 3 decades.
Cost and necessity of permits for renovations plus re-asessment of property after renovation for tax increase means every path forward is much more expensive than it would have been in decades past.
FWIW the traditional path for renovations was to add "sweat equity" by doing the work yourself, slowly and without permits. You can still do this today, perhaps even more effectively than previously with Youtube videos/LLMs. Although you might need to hire more "handymen" to replace what would have been bartered labor with friends/family (tying back to the social capital concept of the article).
(I'm not trying to detract from the thrust of your comment though! I'm describing a dynamic of coping rather than sustaining)
The flipside is a lot of municipalities have become a lot more aggressive about enforcement, and changing regulations (especially regarding gas and electric) and manditory inspections mean that there's less that you can get away with.
1. corporate consolodation - the only promise of capitalism is that competition lowers prices. Competition is at an all time low.
2. economics and the fallacy of unlimited growth. We live on a finite size planet, and every company is acting as though it expects 10% growth to increase forever. If demand increases and supplies dwindle thats one large prevailing force that would mask as inflation.
The establishment and universities are failing us as they refuse to critically study and address these major conceptual issues.
You can call these transactions "voluntary", but when a huge percentage of the people in America do not make enough money to save, period, that means that all their income is going to necessities (with "a few small luxuries" also being a necessity for any human being).
Many of the companies making the biggest profits are also the companies that own the highest percentage of their respective markets.
The reason people can't save is almost entirely due to the cost of rent/mortgage, which is overwhelmingly driven by the cost of land, especially since the cost of land is modulated directly by the local wages (so there's no such thing as high-income, low-cost areas).
Has nothing to do with "the biggest corporations" reaping "the biggest profits". The largest companies that sell basic needs to Americans make like 10% overall profit.
> Women now substantially outnumber men on university campuses and outpace them in degrees earned, yet the preference for husbands who match or exceed a wife’s income and education has not correspondingly relaxed. The result is a radical market mismatch.
College educated women marry at the same rate they used to. They marry similarly earning men without collage degrees, who exist.
Marriage rates collapsed among non educated women/men. Complete collapse is among previously incarcerated men who are largely out of marriage market. And generally among poor.
But like, college educates women are the demographic that do marry.
This means that when marriages implode women are the ones that call in the accident after the car has already crashed rolled over and caught fire. It tells you nothing about what killed the marriage
Fun fact too: college educated women divorce less then others. So, their behavior does in fact leads to stability, their partners are happy or at least choosing to stay.
What seems to happen is that if the marriage does not work, they tend to ve at the loosing side of it and have real option to leave.
I don’t even think there can be an agreed upon metric for life satisfaction, let alone what an ideal “middle class existence” looks like. It’s going to be different for everyone.
For me, home ownership nor children would be part of my “ideal middle-class existence” quite the opposite. I want stable housing, I don’t necessarily want to own it and all the burden that comes with ownership, and I definitely did not and still do not want responsibility over bring a child into the world. Thankfully, my wife agrees.
If we were to even approach a definition it might be something like “Do you have stable housing, access to nutrition, hygiene, transportation, etc. while also having enough capital resources and time to achieve your personal goals?” And that’s going to look different for everyone.
These are not mere personal goals, they provide value back to society, which in turn helps others to achieve these goals. That's why we are concerned with them. We have a generation of leeches and losers that are only concerned with maximizing their consumption, not leaving behind a legacy.
I looked up the author, Johann Kurtz. I'm not sure of Kurtz's background otherwise - any economics? Kurtz has a position at the C.S. Lewis Institute, which describes its mission, "we develop wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ who articulate, defend, share, and live their faith in personal and public life." That website describes him thusly:
"Johann Kurtz is a legacy adviser and succession strategist, helping individuals and families to arrange their affairs towards lasting good. He is a Substack bestseller, and his blog Becoming Noble – on philosophy, theology, and history – is read by tens of thousands each week. He recently published a book titled Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity & Thousand-Year Families which reveals that true charity is a multi-generational project—and that virtuous family dynasties are its indispensable guardians. It equips leaders to embrace this sacred duty and forge a legacy they will be forever proud of."
"Build family, resources, and security as the West declines. Get the weekly email to join the new elite." and "Our old ways have been forgotten. Subscribe to learn them again."
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I think the OP is to a significant degree an intellectual rationalization (and application) of some standard politics, stopping just short explicitly saying it:
> For example: an American family in 1975 could send their children to public school on the assumption that the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families, communities like their own, and would speak English as a first language.
I've read about family decline going back decades, maybe forever. I strongly doubt the first language of children affects other kids' educations - except maybe exposing other kids to new languages and perspectives. Kurtz includes no specific claim about and no basis for the state of these issues or their impacts. It's all just implied, a dog whistle: Who are these other people?
> My argument is that previous generations received an enormous stock of social capital: trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam and adults could be relied upon
In the latter, I think a lot of those things would be news to prior generations, and of course you can read people in any generation in history decrying current failure of morals (which I think means, it's not like the idealistic views I formed in my childhood).
And he even cites fictional, rose-colored nostalgia as evidence (quoting Scott Alexander):
> The childhood depicted in nostalgic media rested on a dense web of adults who knew each other, shared a rough moral sense, and could be relied upon to mind each other’s children. That web is now a feature of particular places (often expensive places) rather than a general inheritance, and discerning which places have kept it is of key importance for families hoping to raise agentic children with deep networks of trusted friends.
And there are things that rest on speculation:
> The socializing that happened in parks, neighborhoods, boy scouts, etc. now must happen in the private domain.
Why? I see plenty of kids in parks and neighborhoods, in all sorts of neighborhoods in cities. It also ignores where much childhood socialising takes place now: Online.
And he also seems to verge into incel territory, again without saying the quiet part out loud:
> Women now substantially outnumber men on university campuses and outpace them in degrees earned, yet the preference for husbands who match or exceed a wife’s income and education has not correspondingly relaxed. ... For a regular man, this implies that becoming marriageable now requires clearing exceptional bars: a degree (with the debt that comes attached) and an income well above the male median (also — 6ft, muscular physique, etc. etc.).
I read: those women ruining everything by getting educations and careers, and declining to do free menial labor for men!
> Move the at-home spouse into the labor market and every service she provided must be repurchased from the latest private equity roll-up (nursery, takeaway, cleaner, security system…).
Second and more fundamentally, most people know neoliberalism fucked us. Like, not just that we're at the end of a typical cycle, but that what predated it was better. That's why the middle is falling out of western politics and populism is rising: voters are bitter, angry, and looking for the next thing. It turns out you can't turn everything--romance, friendships, caring for children, education, health care, free time--into a (preferably unregulated) market and still have a functioning society.
Third, we have to ban social media, and here I mean any communications platform where you can farm engagement and virality (Reddit is social media because there's a feed and engagement metrics; Usenet and forums are not). This seems like a wildly hot take, but the truth is we should ban video news; only banning social media is a huge concession.
Fourth and finally, don't fall into the "make America great again" trap. Pick a decade and I'll point out some insane awfulness: Jim Crow, marital rape wasn't a concept until the 80s, homophobia, OPEC, Vietnam, the Cold War, unbelievable pollution, smoking literally fuckin everywhere, etc etc. Going back isn't an option.
It's hard, but we can do hard things. I actually think we're in a really exciting time. We've never had more resources, we've never been better at making decisions (honestly just read about Robert McNamara), and we're newly unburdened by a prevailing orthodoxy. If we do it right, the next era could be really incredible.
"Marriage follows the same pattern. Women now substantially outnumber men on university campuses and outpace them in degrees earned, yet the preference for husbands who match or exceed a wife’s income and education has not correspondingly relaxed. The result is a radical market mismatch."
I read a lot on this particular topic and this is a little too narrow of a reading. There is a more dominant trend - women and men are drifting apart culturally faster than they are economically. Men who keep pace culturally can get away with falling behind economically, and, to a lesser degree, vice versa. But you can't fall behind on both and expect to find a lot of women interested in dating or marrying you.
> Men who keep pace culturally can get away with falling behind economically, and, to a lesser degree, vice versa.
Do you have a citation for this?
A lot of studies find evidence of the need for men to have a suitable income to be marriageable. I haven't seen evidence that just being culturally aligned is equally effective.
I think it also depends on where you live and the political sphere you spend your time in. Broadly speaking I believe men and women are spending less time with each other but I think it’s less about gender war nonsense and more the destruction of third spaces, cost of going out, social media pseudoaddiction, etc.
I find it interesting how you frame the cultural drift as men falling "behind". I assume you're speaking about politics? I don't know what other aspects of culture that have the genders diverging.
A growing segment of young men increasingly embrace violence, conspiracy theories, far-right politics and machismo in general. Women can tolerate and even embrace a lot of male-coded things, like sports and cars and video games, but do you really expect them to embrace the manosphere or Trumpism? Not to say that this is universal - but there is a clear trajectory and we see it throughout the developed world (see: South Korea).
South Korea seems like a bit of an outlier, in the other countries it’s the women who are strongly moving left while the men show a weaker drift towards the right. So it doesn’t seem accurate to frame the divergence as men becoming far-right fascists. Would you take offence if I said women are becoming Stalinist communists? Neither framing seems accurate to me.
What I think is happening is that women are broadly swayed by social issues and men are more likely to be against mass immigration and focus more attention on the economy. At least that seems to be the case in my country (which isn’t on the graph). A small minority of men buy into the Tate far-right manosphere but I don’t think that’s responsible for the entirety of the shift, let alone the entirety of the shift on the men’s side.
Young men would not feel so alienated if progressives and social media didn’t keep telling them they are violent rapist scum too dumb to think for themselves. Their choice for role model is a society that despises and blames them, or hucksters despising and blaming the other side. Who is young Timmy gonna listen to?
If kids flock to Andrew Tate, the problem are not the kids, nor their gender, but society as a whole must have fucked up enormously and failed 50% of the human population.
Generalising comments like yours ruin lives and you should feel ashamed about it. Sadly, you can find them on the front page of any left-of-centre newspaper.
> It’s Hard to See My Parents Live So Lavishly While We’re Struggling
While I won't deny there are some problems currently, I think people comparing where they start to where others end is a huge mistake and leads to a lot of unnecessary anguish.
Someone in their 60s is supposed to be doing better than someone in their 20s. They had 40+ years to work and save. If they did it right, that will put them in a better position than a 20 year old... just like that 20 years old should be in a better position when they are in their 60s. It would be pretty disheartening if people in their 20s saw that it just gets worse.
Sure. But my excuse for denying my children would be that I also struggled at their age—zero handouts from either parent.
But I also think that attitude is a load of shit.
Early on in the 1980's I went to a community college to get the first couple of years of college out of the way. I sublet a room from a single woman (probably her landlord had no idea) and I rode a 10-speed bike between a pizza restaurant I worked at and the community college (yeah, sucked in the Kansas winter-time).
Later, at a university, I was able to work as a dishwasher at a dorm and pay my way through college.
But there's probably no way my kids can do the same 40 years later.
It would be, to me, a tragedy if our kids only finally "make it" when their parents die and all our assets are cashed in and divided among them. For myself, this would have come at a time when I didn't need the windfall.
I'd rather help them out now as they are trying to climb the ladder to homeowner, etc.
(It sure would have been nice if one of my parents could have forked over the cash to buy me that Macintosh Plus back in 1986. Alas, a student loan I was nervous to apply for did the trick.)
In the early 2000s I saw a gubernatorial candidate talking to an audience of over achieving high school students and when asked about what he would do to make college more affordable. He told a story about how he waited tables to pay for college.
Totally not on his radar: changes in tuition over time, portion of budgets of public colleges that were coming from state funds (his tuition wasn't free but was close), vs changes in median hourly wages over the same period.
Very clearly on his radar: those students were not gonna donate to anyone's campaign regardless of what he said.
The problem is that someone in their 20s can't even envision a realistic path to where people in their 60s are. And for me personally, being somewhere between the two, I think I'm mostly doing things "right" and still am not optimistic I'll get to where my parents are. I don't even think I'll see all of the money I've paid into Social Security back, given the political rumblings about "reforming" that program. Which is to say that I can see why younger people might feel hard done by.
Well a lot of those now 60 year olds were buying houses and land in their 20s-30s..
I purchased a house within commuting distance of Boston in my mid 20s, back in 2022. Didn't need PMI, the mortgage terms weren't unreasonable to me (fixed 5% interest), and the monthly payments for utilities plus the loan are still well within my means. It's even got an attached garage.
I don't want to get too specific here for privacy reasons, but I believe the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out and getting an apartment right away during/after college. With almost zero real expenses outside my student loans, and the median software engineer salary for the region, I was able to save enough for a down payment after just a couple years. I did this because I disliked the idea of having no equity and paying rent to offset someone else's mortgage instead of saving for my own. My parents really liked that reasoning.
In many respects I'm fundamentally an outlier, yet once I bought mine, my peers with much lower incomes started doing the same after I explained the financials. When they actually sat down and calculated the mortgage payments, they realized it wasn't that bad, as long as they got something on the smaller side, which is still bigger than an apartment anyway.
To be clear, housing costs were crazy and still are. But I sense "crazy" is pretty relative when talking to people online from other countries. Housing in the US is expensive, especially compared to various convenient periods within the last 100 years. But even now, it's not the unrealistic back-breaking dream it seems to be when I talk to Europeans about it, and I suspect that's why so many Americans on social media overestimate the costs.
> the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out
It was very clever of you to choose to be born to tolerable parents with enough spare cash to let you live with them and save up, rather than jerks or even just poor parents that needed your help as soon as you got a job.
> the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out
That is 'small' cheat code if parents tolerable. I have multiple peers which got much better life and places to live because lived with parents in their 20s.
It just doing napkin math and even if you live 5 years with parents and doing minimal savings (saving rent and part of food) you already poses good chunk of deposit when comes to buying property.
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According to census bureau data, 1 in 3 people aged 18-34 now live with parents, a huge change from past generations. So you're hardly an outlier in that respect.
You might want to qualify this with start to buy a house and get a mortgage and then pay off when older than 20s-30s.
I think some people in the comments are thinking you are saying they could outright buy a house straight out of school! (Which in a way might be a symptom explained in the article!
It should be noted the house my parents bought in their early 40s was a 3 bedroom, 1 bath, with no air conditioning. The school district was so-so, the lot wasn't very big, and the economy in that city at the time was declining. Most young people wouldn't be too interested in that today.
(Interestingly the cost of housing in the Bay Area back then - late 1980s - was the same as that Rust Belt city; we almost ended up there.)
So many comments eager to dismiss the message with the same old refrains. Refrains that were directly addressed in the article.
My parents bought their house cash. No they were not high earners and not even median income earners. Yes the house is now worth close to a million dollars.
What the house is worth today is a lot of luck. I just looked at the house my parents built in 1978. It last sold for $225k in 2019.
Those 60-year-olds existed in a brief and exceptional moment of wealth creation brought about by factors that are unlikely to happen again in ours or our children's lifetime. The problem being that the American ethos decided to pretend that brief moment was normal and sustainable.
What factors? Why are they unlikely to come about again? How do we make them come about again?
You realize that your comment reads like "well, actually things shouldn't be getting better over time"
I, for one, completely disagree.
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It was a US-specific thing created by massive post-war infrastructure investment (read: suburban sprawl) and cheap automobiles.
This entire problem more or less resolves to the cost of land. It became effectively super-cheap post-WW2 for the aforementioned reasons. Now we've run out that runway and will face rolling bankruptcies across all sorts of municipalities due to infra maintenance costs.
Working class parents in their 20s in the USA could afford to buy their own homes well into the 2000s. Some got burned by cyclical factors, high interest, etc...; but many still achieved sustained lifetime home ownership.
Possibly. I bought my first house in my 20s in the US, this would have been in 1980s. I remember the 12.5% interest on the mortgage.
I don't buy that because China has very high home ownership rates.
So it can be done. Even today.
China is arguably currently also in an exceptional situation though. The question is how long that lasts. The next generation or the one after will most likely also complain that their parents were much better off when they were young ;)
I guess you’re not British either then?
German, of course ;)
The German equivalent is that everybody is complaining about rising rents in city centers because everybody wants to live in city centers. Home ownership in Germany basically means that you'll have to pay it off for the rest of your life anyway (and that's not a new phenomenon) so in the end there isn't all that much difference to renting finance-wise, except that renting is usually much less hassle.
Not just US - UK, Canada, Australia, etc.
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> Someone in their 60s is supposed to be doing better than someone in their 20s.
That’s an incredibly new, and probably temporary, phenomenon.
Across the vast majority of space-time the non-working elderly are poorer than their still working children and rely on them.
As late as the Greatest Generation senior discounts weren’t a sick joke.
The barrier to entry for investments used to be pretty high. Most people felt limited to what their employers offered. Even as access started getting easier, the knowledge was still difficult to get.
Currently, the barrier to entry has never been lower, and the access to information has never been better. I don't see either of those things changing any time soon.
Of course, even with that, basic financial literacy with younger generations seems to be at an all time low. The finger pointing on that could go in many directions.
Yes, the finger pointing can and does go in many directions. Meanwhile the observed pattern is the boomers (actual boomers) get the golden path and every other generation doesn’t. Maybe they were uniquely virtuous and wise.
Strongly doubt the xennials will be as rich in twenty five years as 79 year olds are now.
Yes but the article also cites that the average age for home ownership has gone way up, houses cost far more relative to median income than before, rent is more expensive, and cultural changes requiring two income families and paid childcare have driven up child care costs.
It’s not hard to see why people find that unfair or whatever though. It’s complete disillusionment with the “dream.” Why is our society/economy structured in such a way that we spend our youthful years struggling and only get to enjoy the fruits when we are older? It’s why FIRE is so appealing to some, you get to get out early.
> It’s why FIRE is so appealing to some, you get to get out early.
Isn't this exactly "spend the youthful years struggling and get to enjoy the fruits when you are older"? ;)
Yes, but at a much younger "older." Just working within the broken system for a potentially less-bad outcome.
Funny. The FIRE people I’ve spoken to have an attitude of “if I’m going to do it, I may as well go all-in.”
> While I won't deny there are some problems currently, I think people comparing where they start to where others end is a huge mistake and leads to a lot of unnecessary anguish.
That an ungenerous and frankly dismissive reading of the article.
Joe asked his dad for the $15k loan to start a business, not go on vacations. He used his dad's retirement lifestyle as a goal for his future retirement. He used his dad's historical entrepreneurship as his current goal of starting a modest small business. Nobody of sound mind would even think you could live like a retiree on $15k.
Joe's own dad wasn't even as dismissive as you're being. He denied the loan because he considered it a form of coddling his son. There's no evidence in the article he thought his son would use it to attempt to live his retirement lifestyle.
Edit: clarifications
"If they did it right" is a bearing a lot of weight there. The window of "getting it right" has shrunk over the last 40 years and it's delusional to argue otherwise. People like myself are comparing themselves to their parents at the same age. My dad had me at my exact age now, had bought a house, could raise a family on his singular wage. That is non-existent now in my part of the country.
This article isn't about 20 year olds. Millennials are 30 to 40s
Well, anecdote, but I’ll chime in.
I’m the only person in my friend group able to afford a house in the foreseeable future and that’s been because of various strokes of luck (and some hard work of course).
My wife’s situation is the same. We’re all in our 30s.
And we’re talking any house here. Not the ridiculously expensive ones in major cities.
Som have confided in me that this feels hopeless, things keep getting more expensive, money keeps feeling like it’s worth less etc.
The general feeling at this point is past resentment with them. It’s more of accepted hopelessness.
Denying your own child a $15K business loan just to placate your sadistic delusions perfectly describes the mindset of aging boomers. They're happy to watch their own children struggle for the opportunity to validate their ideology. They don't have enough empathy to help their own children, so it's futile expecting them to care about anyone else in society. They use tragedy of the commons situations to justify endless gluttony, and will act surprised when the next generation pisses on their graves.
Without knowing the personality of the child and the history of behavior, it is rather hard to determine whether the parent made the correct decision or not. The article provides very little context. Sometimes this may be the correct decision based on the individual. Every child is different and requires different approaches to discipline and support.
I guess nobody can know anything and there is no point in trying to look at the typical experiences of generations, since we can never know if someone is just making up a sob story about what are actually their just deserts. (/s)
>For example: an American family in 1975 could send their children to public school on the assumption that the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families, communities like their own, and would speak English as a first language. Now, realistically, many parents must turn to private schooling for the same reassurances.
It was hard to take the rest of the article seriously after reading this.
Let's look at those claims: "the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families"
In 1975, the single motherhood rate was 15%. In 2015, it was 40%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_parents_in_the_United_S...
"communities like their own,"
In 1970, the US was 83.5% non-Hispanic White. In 2020 it was 57.8%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
"and would speak English as a first language"
In 1980, Spanish speakers were 5% of the US. In 2024, it was 13.9%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States...
So the claims are factual. Do you just object to pointing it out?
In a piece that is making a persuasive argument facts are usually included to back up the argument. So I think it is fair to assume the author of the piece believes this is a key part of their argument, which they seem to also think given that it’s listed one of their two main points. The problem with that is it marks the rest of the article as clearly motivated. The claim that the rise in single parent households and those who do not speak English as a first is a _primary_ cause in lack of wealth amongst millennials and Gen Z is a wild one and difficult to back up.
Another comment shows how private school enrollment has held steady or declined since ‘75. However it is true that public school enrollment has partly been eaten away by charter schools. However charter schools are the most diverse as they are most likely to be found in larger cities. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/06/us-public...
So like the op commenter I too found it hard to trust the rest of the article. I’m deeply inclined to agree with the conclusions however such a clearly motivated list of statistics, regardless of truth, as the #2 factor turned me off of the rest of the piece.
Sure, it's just such an odd bundle of claims that were not fully interrogated in the essay. 1. That these things have changed from "small minority" to "significant minority" in public school populations, 2. they haven't changed similarly in private school populations 3. these things increasing are bad and undesirable for you and your child, and 4. there are not cheaper ways to fix this than sending your child to public school (the obvious point to me is if you don't like that there's a significant ESL population, or your community, move somewhere else!).
Language is an absolutely critical part of community, identity, socialization, and connection. Even just not sharing the same first language as another person begins to chip away at these metrics. Much moreso if you share no language in which you are both thoroughly fluent. It's not either person's fault, and it's true even if both parties have absolutely no racism or xenophobia or whatever in their hearts (though isms multiply the effect - even the unconscious isms that most people supposedly harbor).
That is a point that could be made in the essay! I don't think it's a given, but it's treated as one. My experience is that children who are ESL assimilate pretty heavily.
To clarify, I object that any of these things matter much for general outcomes. If the article had immediately supported these claims, maybe I'd be more accepting, but as is it appears I'm supposed to have taken it as a given.
Except the claim that many parents must now to turn to private schools. Private school enrolment has declined since 1975.
Every time I think I have money I get massive insurance bills, massive property tax bills that increase seemingly every year, a fence I had to install so my kids don't get mangled by the pitbull 2 doors down that was $12k that was $4k 10 years ago. I know because my parents installed the same fence at their house. I'm paying a not insignificant portion of my income into a social security program that I'll never see a dime of. And I'm in my 30's. I can't imagine what kids in their 20's are going through.
When I was a kid I used to think that theives would break through my windows and steal my TV. Now that I'm an adult, I realize I'm being robbed daily through legal channels.
I feel you. My property tax has gone up more in the past decade than it did during the previous 3 decades.
Cost and necessity of permits for renovations plus re-asessment of property after renovation for tax increase means every path forward is much more expensive than it would have been in decades past.
FWIW the traditional path for renovations was to add "sweat equity" by doing the work yourself, slowly and without permits. You can still do this today, perhaps even more effectively than previously with Youtube videos/LLMs. Although you might need to hire more "handymen" to replace what would have been bartered labor with friends/family (tying back to the social capital concept of the article).
(I'm not trying to detract from the thrust of your comment though! I'm describing a dynamic of coping rather than sustaining)
The flipside is a lot of municipalities have become a lot more aggressive about enforcement, and changing regulations (especially regarding gas and electric) and manditory inspections mean that there's less that you can get away with.
I think a couple of things are play here
1. corporate consolodation - the only promise of capitalism is that competition lowers prices. Competition is at an all time low.
2. economics and the fallacy of unlimited growth. We live on a finite size planet, and every company is acting as though it expects 10% growth to increase forever. If demand increases and supplies dwindle thats one large prevailing force that would mask as inflation.
The establishment and universities are failing us as they refuse to critically study and address these major conceptual issues.
> the only promise of capitalism is that competition lowers prices.
The only promise of capitalism is that you are allowed to own capital. Competition and prices come from markets, not capitalism.
"Robbery" is a very immature and totally counterproductive way to think about rising costs.
When you are captive to the system, the costs changes are not external to you.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/19/us-inflatio...
> Half of recent US inflation due to high corporate profits, report finds
1. Voluntary transactions (even if high-margin for one side) is not "robbery"
2. None of the examples GP listed has anything to do with high corporate profits
"Voluntary" is bullshit.
You can call these transactions "voluntary", but when a huge percentage of the people in America do not make enough money to save, period, that means that all their income is going to necessities (with "a few small luxuries" also being a necessity for any human being).
Many of the companies making the biggest profits are also the companies that own the highest percentage of their respective markets.
People don't have a choice.
The reason people can't save is almost entirely due to the cost of rent/mortgage, which is overwhelmingly driven by the cost of land, especially since the cost of land is modulated directly by the local wages (so there's no such thing as high-income, low-cost areas).
Has nothing to do with "the biggest corporations" reaping "the biggest profits". The largest companies that sell basic needs to Americans make like 10% overall profit.
> Women now substantially outnumber men on university campuses and outpace them in degrees earned, yet the preference for husbands who match or exceed a wife’s income and education has not correspondingly relaxed. The result is a radical market mismatch.
College educated women marry at the same rate they used to. They marry similarly earning men without collage degrees, who exist.
Marriage rates collapsed among non educated women/men. Complete collapse is among previously incarcerated men who are largely out of marriage market. And generally among poor.
But like, college educates women are the demographic that do marry.
In divorces involving college educated women, they initiate 90% of them. It’s bad news all round.
Thank the gods that women aren't trapped in failing marriages anymore. At least some things are getting better.
This means that when marriages implode women are the ones that call in the accident after the car has already crashed rolled over and caught fire. It tells you nothing about what killed the marriage
Fun fact too: college educated women divorce less then others. So, their behavior does in fact leads to stability, their partners are happy or at least choosing to stay.
What seems to happen is that if the marriage does not work, they tend to ve at the loosing side of it and have real option to leave.
>five pillars of a stable middle-class existence: education, stable employment, marriage, homeownership, children.
This is cultural bias spoken as though it’s universal
Plenty of fulfilling lives out there that don’t include home ownership, being a parent, having secondary schooling or being partnered with offspring.
This is sort of orthogonal to the point though, people who want those things (the author being one of them) aren't able to achieve them.
Plenty of fulfilling lives out there for any conceivable metric, it doesn't mean that the article is incorrect.
I don’t even think there can be an agreed upon metric for life satisfaction, let alone what an ideal “middle class existence” looks like. It’s going to be different for everyone.
For me, home ownership nor children would be part of my “ideal middle-class existence” quite the opposite. I want stable housing, I don’t necessarily want to own it and all the burden that comes with ownership, and I definitely did not and still do not want responsibility over bring a child into the world. Thankfully, my wife agrees.
If we were to even approach a definition it might be something like “Do you have stable housing, access to nutrition, hygiene, transportation, etc. while also having enough capital resources and time to achieve your personal goals?” And that’s going to look different for everyone.
These are not mere personal goals, they provide value back to society, which in turn helps others to achieve these goals. That's why we are concerned with them. We have a generation of leeches and losers that are only concerned with maximizing their consumption, not leaving behind a legacy.
Regardless of the path you have chosen for yourself, your existence is owed to your parents having had at least some, if not most, of those things.
You’re saying one can be happy without being bourgeois. I think that’s self-evident.
I looked up the author, Johann Kurtz. I'm not sure of Kurtz's background otherwise - any economics? Kurtz has a position at the C.S. Lewis Institute, which describes its mission, "we develop wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ who articulate, defend, share, and live their faith in personal and public life." That website describes him thusly:
https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/?speaker=johann-kurtz
"Johann Kurtz is a legacy adviser and succession strategist, helping individuals and families to arrange their affairs towards lasting good. He is a Substack bestseller, and his blog Becoming Noble – on philosophy, theology, and history – is read by tens of thousands each week. He recently published a book titled Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity & Thousand-Year Families which reveals that true charity is a multi-generational project—and that virtuous family dynasties are its indispensable guardians. It equips leaders to embrace this sacred duty and forge a legacy they will be forever proud of."
Here is the substack, Becoming Noble:
https://becomingnoble.substack.com/
"Build family, resources, and security as the West declines. Get the weekly email to join the new elite." and "Our old ways have been forgotten. Subscribe to learn them again."
I think the OP is to a significant degree an intellectual rationalization (and application) of some standard politics, stopping just short explicitly saying it:> For example: an American family in 1975 could send their children to public school on the assumption that the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families, communities like their own, and would speak English as a first language.
I've read about family decline going back decades, maybe forever. I strongly doubt the first language of children affects other kids' educations - except maybe exposing other kids to new languages and perspectives. Kurtz includes no specific claim about and no basis for the state of these issues or their impacts. It's all just implied, a dog whistle: Who are these other people?
> My argument is that previous generations received an enormous stock of social capital: trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam and adults could be relied upon
In the latter, I think a lot of those things would be news to prior generations, and of course you can read people in any generation in history decrying current failure of morals (which I think means, it's not like the idealistic views I formed in my childhood).
And he even cites fictional, rose-colored nostalgia as evidence (quoting Scott Alexander):
> The childhood depicted in nostalgic media rested on a dense web of adults who knew each other, shared a rough moral sense, and could be relied upon to mind each other’s children. That web is now a feature of particular places (often expensive places) rather than a general inheritance, and discerning which places have kept it is of key importance for families hoping to raise agentic children with deep networks of trusted friends.
And there are things that rest on speculation:
> The socializing that happened in parks, neighborhoods, boy scouts, etc. now must happen in the private domain.
Why? I see plenty of kids in parks and neighborhoods, in all sorts of neighborhoods in cities. It also ignores where much childhood socialising takes place now: Online.
And he also seems to verge into incel territory, again without saying the quiet part out loud:
> Women now substantially outnumber men on university campuses and outpace them in degrees earned, yet the preference for husbands who match or exceed a wife’s income and education has not correspondingly relaxed. ... For a regular man, this implies that becoming marriageable now requires clearing exceptional bars: a degree (with the debt that comes attached) and an income well above the male median (also — 6ft, muscular physique, etc. etc.).
I read: those women ruining everything by getting educations and careers, and declining to do free menial labor for men!
> Move the at-home spouse into the labor market and every service she provided must be repurchased from the latest private equity roll-up (nursery, takeaway, cleaner, security system…).
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First, I beg people to read Annie Lowrey's "The Great Affordability Crisis" (https://xcancel.com/i/article/2077113148524417439), which is criminally under read.
Second and more fundamentally, most people know neoliberalism fucked us. Like, not just that we're at the end of a typical cycle, but that what predated it was better. That's why the middle is falling out of western politics and populism is rising: voters are bitter, angry, and looking for the next thing. It turns out you can't turn everything--romance, friendships, caring for children, education, health care, free time--into a (preferably unregulated) market and still have a functioning society.
Third, we have to ban social media, and here I mean any communications platform where you can farm engagement and virality (Reddit is social media because there's a feed and engagement metrics; Usenet and forums are not). This seems like a wildly hot take, but the truth is we should ban video news; only banning social media is a huge concession.
Fourth and finally, don't fall into the "make America great again" trap. Pick a decade and I'll point out some insane awfulness: Jim Crow, marital rape wasn't a concept until the 80s, homophobia, OPEC, Vietnam, the Cold War, unbelievable pollution, smoking literally fuckin everywhere, etc etc. Going back isn't an option.
It's hard, but we can do hard things. I actually think we're in a really exciting time. We've never had more resources, we've never been better at making decisions (honestly just read about Robert McNamara), and we're newly unburdened by a prevailing orthodoxy. If we do it right, the next era could be really incredible.
"Marriage follows the same pattern. Women now substantially outnumber men on university campuses and outpace them in degrees earned, yet the preference for husbands who match or exceed a wife’s income and education has not correspondingly relaxed. The result is a radical market mismatch."
I read a lot on this particular topic and this is a little too narrow of a reading. There is a more dominant trend - women and men are drifting apart culturally faster than they are economically. Men who keep pace culturally can get away with falling behind economically, and, to a lesser degree, vice versa. But you can't fall behind on both and expect to find a lot of women interested in dating or marrying you.
> Men who keep pace culturally can get away with falling behind economically, and, to a lesser degree, vice versa.
Do you have a citation for this?
A lot of studies find evidence of the need for men to have a suitable income to be marriageable. I haven't seen evidence that just being culturally aligned is equally effective.
I find all this gender wars crap competely untrue in real life. I wouldn't be surprised if it was all due to sampling errors.
Decline in marriage rates is very true in real life.
I think it also depends on where you live and the political sphere you spend your time in. Broadly speaking I believe men and women are spending less time with each other but I think it’s less about gender war nonsense and more the destruction of third spaces, cost of going out, social media pseudoaddiction, etc.
I find it interesting how you frame the cultural drift as men falling "behind". I assume you're speaking about politics? I don't know what other aspects of culture that have the genders diverging.
A growing segment of young men increasingly embrace violence, conspiracy theories, far-right politics and machismo in general. Women can tolerate and even embrace a lot of male-coded things, like sports and cars and video games, but do you really expect them to embrace the manosphere or Trumpism? Not to say that this is universal - but there is a clear trajectory and we see it throughout the developed world (see: South Korea).
I assume it’s this graph you’re referring to?
https://xcancel.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1750849189834022932
South Korea seems like a bit of an outlier, in the other countries it’s the women who are strongly moving left while the men show a weaker drift towards the right. So it doesn’t seem accurate to frame the divergence as men becoming far-right fascists. Would you take offence if I said women are becoming Stalinist communists? Neither framing seems accurate to me.
What I think is happening is that women are broadly swayed by social issues and men are more likely to be against mass immigration and focus more attention on the economy. At least that seems to be the case in my country (which isn’t on the graph). A small minority of men buy into the Tate far-right manosphere but I don’t think that’s responsible for the entirety of the shift, let alone the entirety of the shift on the men’s side.
Men drift toward violent, toward far right and toward disdain of women.
All three are dangerous partners to have. Simple rationality implies avoiding them.
Young men would not feel so alienated if progressives and social media didn’t keep telling them they are violent rapist scum too dumb to think for themselves. Their choice for role model is a society that despises and blames them, or hucksters despising and blaming the other side. Who is young Timmy gonna listen to?
If kids flock to Andrew Tate, the problem are not the kids, nor their gender, but society as a whole must have fucked up enormously and failed 50% of the human population.
Generalising comments like yours ruin lives and you should feel ashamed about it. Sadly, you can find them on the front page of any left-of-centre newspaper.
Seems like a massive generalization.
Original behind login-wall: https://x.com/JohannKurtz/article/2077113148524417439