> 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.
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.
The factors of millions of men (workers) dying in war while the country itself was untouched, and all of Europe being bombed, leading to cheap land, increased demand for labor, and a powerful dollar. We just have to nuke Europe and cull a bit of our own people too and we'll be in the golden age again. Or we have to get used to it.
> The factors of millions of men (workers) dying in war while the country itself was untouched,
Less than half a million Americans died in WW2. For American demographics, the war was a footnote, unlike the utter devastation it inflicted on Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia, the USSR.
They burned non-renewable resources at an unsustainable pace, like nothing ever seen before in history, resources that took millions of years for the Earth to produce, gone in a century, to make themselves wealthy - among other things.
But a huge portion of what they burned those resources to produce was energy—both to generate electricity, and to power their vehicles.
We now have renewable energy sources for both of these things spinning up faster than ever. It won't be all that long before we can generate a majority of our energy with clean power that doesn't require consuming any non-renewable resources.
No; much more important differences between then and now are the top marginal tax rates and the labor power.
Buying a house in their 20s... are you serious? If true and not just an urban myth, that must have been a US specific thing, maybe caused by the exceptional situation of the US coming out as the biggest winner of WW2. Anywhere else in the world you could be lucky to even move out of your parent's rented flat in your 20s ;)
PS: also, what's the obsession of young people with home ownership
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I reject your characterization of my comment. I explicitly called myself an outlier and said I didn't want to get too specific, so I'm not sure where you're getting "clever" from. I wasn't claiming credit for my circumstances. I was identifying the actual variable that separated my outcome from peers in similar circumstances, because that's useful information for anyone who does have that option available.
And plenty of people do. I know people who could live at home rent-free and chose apartments anyway because they wanted independence sooner. That's a legitimate preference, but it's still a tradeoff, and pretending the tradeoff doesn't exist because some people don't get the choice at all helps nobody. "Not everyone can do X" is true of literally every piece of financial advice ever given. It doesn't make X bad advice for the people who can.
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 70 year olds are now.
I'd definitely take the other side of that bet. Xennials are significantly richer today than boomers were 25 years ago, generally own their house and have a 401K or similar.
Xennials have benefitted from the same forces that made the boomers rich. They're not young adults.
Xennials were at prime house buying age when houses were really cheap after the 2008 housing crash.
Mortgage rates in the late 80s were well over double what they were post-crash. For a 25 year mortgage, twice the mortgage rate means about double the payments.
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.
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.
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.
This would be accurate if remuneration were proportionate to how much you struggle, but from my observation of life, it really is not. There's no shortage of people who bust their asses for wages that I wouldn't be getting out of bed for.
"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.
> 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.
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.
Idk the numbers on this but I much more often hear "It's hard to see my parents living so lavishly while they're struggling." Apparently boomers are not big on saving for retirement or living within their means.
> The over-priced neighborhood is perversely desirable when pricing is the only legal means of discrimination in an increasingly dysfunctional society.
Excellent explanation of why, despite the hollowed out middle class, we see a surge of developer housing marketed to those who wish to retain the pretense of class status.
I was aware that all these changes reduce to the fact that half society’s brainpower used to come cheap, but hadn’t registered this very pure expression of it
“The cheap and effective Catholic school system of old has largely collapsed due to the dearth of nuns“
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.
happened to me when scraping together a down payment for a house offer during the low interest rates 5 years back. parents completely understood the interest rates were basically a winning lotto ticket that would never come again in our lifetime and refused to help back a competitive down payment with any money at all
their logic was that theyd given my sisters tens of thousands of dollars over the years and my sisters remained dependent, but ive been financially independent since college. they never gave me money and id never asked
according to them: they perceived they had made me tougher when reality is that i simply never asked for money when my sisters did, because i assumed that would mean if i ever asked they would respect the request
fucked me up to the point where they noticed how annoyed i was and have offered money since, when i didnt need it, and ive pretty much made a point i hope theyre buried with it
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.
> It’s not that I can’t afford to help him,” Steve told me. “I just have a real problem with handouts. And I want him to have the satisfaction of knowing he’s built something himself, with his own hard work. That’s how I was raised, too.
So it has nothing to with the son, Steve is just looking to validate his world view. The reality of the situation is that the boomer generation was provided with an immense amount of social assistance, affordability, and opportunity. Yet these are the same benefits they deny even their own children in favor of sadistic fantasies.
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)
If a bank has determined the venture is probably doomed and won't loan the money, why should the parent support this doomed venture? People have idiotic business ideas constantly, way more frequently than they have good ones. On average denying such a loan is correct.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
This may be localized. I live in a LCOL area, my oldest son is 27. He and his wife have modest salaries ( teacher and clerical ), own 2 newish cars and a midsized house. They eat out a lot, subscribe to streaming services, etc.
"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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
Progressives talk about simple real world fact that rape exists and is bad. Rape predates Tate.
But when there is sexual avuse or rape scandal, conservatives effectively argue that rape is normal and real victim is the rapist. They are the ones who push them towards Tate, by making his argument.
It is all older generation who see raping as positive thing for hard profile position. Who enabled and helped abusers for decades. Young just learned from them.
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.
I'm not certain what falling behind culturally means, but it has been my heavily-validated experience that the culture of man women actually date and have sex with is an unabashedly masculine type. The further from engaging in feminine culture and thought patterns, the better for the man. But I am getting the feeling that is not what you meant.
Fwiw I am 5'8" with an average face and I've had sex with over 40 women, none from clubs or bars, and am married. So I am doing something right. And it's been my wide experience that you really want to be a traditionally masculine guy. I have no social media and I engage in no modern cultural trends, music, media etc. Whatever mainstream culture is trying to do to men, drift away from that at top speed.
And yes I am right wing, and no the leftist women in Seattle did not actually care. They just say they care to signal something. So that aspect of cultural drift is also not really a problem.
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.
Mandatory inspections? Like the city insists on periodically inspecting the inside of your home?
I have no desire to deal with gas in my home, and my state exempts homeowner electrical.
I think the bigger issue is that the market doesn't really value renovation much any more - it's quite content with beige and builders' grade! And the low-effort fashions change so often you're never going to win that game on DIY timescales. So it's not so much sweat equity any more, but rather sweat comfort and convenience.
IMHO, municipalities are much more serious about these permits and, at the same time, neighbors seem even more sensitive to any kind of noise or even a visual disturbance. If your house is close to the street, good luck keeping any kind of renovation off your town's radar.
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.
People have owned property, and worked since the dawn of time, the core original idea in the wealth of nations is that competition lowers prices... thats where the idea of markets come from.
The only real "benefit" come from competition through lower prices, the rest of the factors ie property and labor in a free exchange are the requirements to reach the optimal outcome.
Have what backwards? Capitalism and markets are clearly different concepts. Consider the single company town. The capital is privately owned but the economy is centrally planned. There is no competition lowering prices, but there is capitalism. The capital is most definitely not communally owned.
There is another concept, market capitalism, which describes where markets and capitalism come together. That may be what you are thinking of, but that isn't what we are talking about in the discussion. The original comment clearly wrote "capitalism" and not "market capitalism". What was said about markets in that comment holds true even without capitalism, so we have logical confirmation that it wasn't a case of accidentally leaving out "market" in front of "capitalism".
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.
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.
>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.
> In 1970, the US was 83.5% non-Hispanic White. In 2020 it was 57.8%
The claim was that in 1070 the vast majority of students in a public school were from the same community, and that this is not true now. The data you cite does nothing whatsoever to support (or to refute) that claim.
It just supports the claim that communities today probably have a different makeup than communities in 1970.
Also, in the 1970 I don't believe that most students in a typical public school were from the same community, unless we consider "white people" to be a community. Most people consider themselves to be part of several communities, and identify more strongly with those communities than with a broad racial community.
At my school in the '70s for example even though it was maybe 85+% white most of the white students would more strongly associate with communities based on something other than being white. One big group was the military kids from families stationed at the nearby major air force base. That community was majority white but had a fair number of black kids. Another was the kids from the farms from the vast agricultural areas that surrounded our town. That community was majority white but had a pretty substantial number of hispanic kids (the farms had more hispanics than whites because the farm laborers were mostly hispanic, but a lot of their kids went to the high school in a different town). There was also a Mormon community, which was very white, and a Catholic community which was more mixed.
A white Catholic air force kid would be more likely to identify with an hispanic Catholic aggie kid than with a white Mormon kid, because the Catholic community is probably a bigger part of their identity than the generic white community.
> In 1975, the single motherhood rate was 15%. In 2015, it was 40%
The questionable part of the article was the implication that it matters if your child goes to a school with a higher percentage of single mothers than schools in the '70s had, leading parents to send their kids to private schools to avoid such children.
There is research that children of single mothers have a harder time in school. But does having such children in the same school as your child cause your child to have a harder time?
> In 1980, Spanish speakers were 5% of the US. In 2024, it was 13.9%
This actually suggests the article's claim is wrong. The claim was that a "vast majority" in the '70s spoke English and now that is not the case. But by the most commonly accepted ranges to count as a "vast majority" that would still be vast majority speaking English.
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.
It's a pretty well-established fact that children of two-parent families have significantly better outcomes than those of single-parent families.
However, I'll concede its juxtaposition with overall whiteness and Spanish language fluency as additional metrics of population-level success are highly suspect, even if we grant that being a white, English-first speaker may contribute significantly to an individual's success (for reasons which include the unsavory).
> It's a pretty well-established fact that children of two-parent families have significantly better outcomes than those of single-parent families
Does there being children from single-parent families in the same school as your child lead to your child having significantly worse outcomes?
Recall the context from the article:
>> 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 is listing things about other children that it implies drag down your child and so leads parents to turn to private schooling.
Has it declined as much as we would expect, given the decrease in religiosity in the US over that time period? I've only found data going back to 1995,[0] which shows relatively flat numbers for the past 15 years or so.
(And the amount of parents which are interested in their children attending private schools vs those who have access to and can afford them is an entirely different discussion.)
> given the decrease in religiosity in the US over that time period?
Has religiosity actually decreased? Christianity certainly has, maybe even all god-based religions, but the religion of formal education seems to have fully picked up the slack. There are a shocking number of people who believe that you will be stricken to the hell of flipping burgers at McDonalds if you don't praise the institution and attend college worship. And it seems likely that anyone who buys into that religion is prone to want to send their kids to private schools given the prevailing ideas about what private school offers.
> And the amount of parents which are interested in their children attending private schools vs those who have access to and can afford them is an entirely different discussion.
It is, indeed. There is a huge chasm between wants and musts. It would require an entirely different discussion to turn us towards wants. Although it is not clear what purpose that discussion would serve? What were you hoping to add by mentioning this?
This is fair* (and I expect many Christians would agree with you in generalities of "everyone worships something"); what I was getting at here was that (by the first numbers I found) those who regularly attend organized "god-based" worship has dropped by ~1/3 over the past 20 years or so, and so I would expect roughly a corresponding drop in attendance in parochial schools. If the drop is less than that,** that would seem to support the author's hypothesis.
> What were you hoping to add by mentioning this?
Along the same lines as the previous: even if more families aren't able to send their kids to private schools, but desire to do this, the could support two parts of his narrative: (1) decrease in social capital (of which he defines part as, to paraphrase, schools that people trust); and (2) that more essential parts of life (such as education, as opposed to television) are becoming rapidly more expensive.
(Not stating which of his points I agree with, but I think that "private school enrollment is declining" does not necessarily rebut the core of his arguments.)
* Though I think my meaning was clear
** Though of course this becomes more complicated when you look at figures for all private schools
> I would expect roughly a corresponding drop in attendance in parochial schools.
Why's that? Around here the parochial schools are fuller than ever. Not because people have taken a greater interest in the religion — the local data shows the same decline in god-based religious observance that you spoke of — but because they are the schools which have gained a reputation for providing a better education, which strikes a chord with those fearing the fiery hell of the McDonald's grill.
Heck, even if we assume for the sake of discussion that the original claim is the truth and that parents must turn to private schools, why does that preclude parochial schools? On the premise given, if that's where the "desirables" are found that is where the students needs to go, even if one doesn't buy into the religious foundation of the school.
> the could support two parts of his narrative
If it had said that parents want to turn to private schools then you'd have a point, but it says they must. "I cannot afford it" doesn't fly for things you must do. Since it is something they have no choice in now, that they didn't do decades ago, where is it showing up in the data? Another comment indicated that charter school growth is where the data suggests there is a clear growing trend. We could accept the premise that parents actually see those features in charter schools instead, but then that same comment pointed out that charter schools are often the most diverse, which contradicts the original premise.
> 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.
Well a lot of those now 60 year olds were buying houses and land in their 20s-30s..
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.
The factors of millions of men (workers) dying in war while the country itself was untouched, and all of Europe being bombed, leading to cheap land, increased demand for labor, and a powerful dollar. We just have to nuke Europe and cull a bit of our own people too and we'll be in the golden age again. Or we have to get used to it.
> The factors of millions of men (workers) dying in war while the country itself was untouched,
Less than half a million Americans died in WW2. For American demographics, the war was a footnote, unlike the utter devastation it inflicted on Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia, the USSR.
They burned non-renewable resources at an unsustainable pace, like nothing ever seen before in history, resources that took millions of years for the Earth to produce, gone in a century, to make themselves wealthy - among other things.
But a huge portion of what they burned those resources to produce was energy—both to generate electricity, and to power their vehicles.
We now have renewable energy sources for both of these things spinning up faster than ever. It won't be all that long before we can generate a majority of our energy with clean power that doesn't require consuming any non-renewable resources.
No; much more important differences between then and now are the top marginal tax rates and the labor power.
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Buying a house in their 20s... are you serious? If true and not just an urban myth, that must have been a US specific thing, maybe caused by the exceptional situation of the US coming out as the biggest winner of WW2. Anywhere else in the world you could be lucky to even move out of your parent's rented flat in your 20s ;)
PS: also, what's the obsession of young people with home ownership
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.
We bought our house in 1982 with a 15.5% mortgage rate, refinanced to 11.25 in 1985, then 8.5 in 1987.
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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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.
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.
> 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.
I reject your characterization of my comment. I explicitly called myself an outlier and said I didn't want to get too specific, so I'm not sure where you're getting "clever" from. I wasn't claiming credit for my circumstances. I was identifying the actual variable that separated my outcome from peers in similar circumstances, because that's useful information for anyone who does have that option available.
And plenty of people do. I know people who could live at home rent-free and chose apartments anyway because they wanted independence sooner. That's a legitimate preference, but it's still a tradeoff, and pretending the tradeoff doesn't exist because some people don't get the choice at all helps nobody. "Not everyone can do X" is true of literally every piece of financial advice ever given. It doesn't make X bad advice for the people who can.
> 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 70 year olds are now.
I'd definitely take the other side of that bet. Xennials are significantly richer today than boomers were 25 years ago, generally own their house and have a 401K or similar.
Xennials have benefitted from the same forces that made the boomers rich. They're not young adults.
Xennials were at prime house buying age when houses were really cheap after the 2008 housing crash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-Shiller_index#/media/File...
If you bought at exactly the right second of the crash, houses were where they were at the peak of the late 80s bubble.
Mortgage rates in the late 80s were well over double what they were post-crash. For a 25 year mortgage, twice the mortgage rate means about double the payments.
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.
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.
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"? ;)
> spend the youthful years struggling
This would be accurate if remuneration were proportionate to how much you struggle, but from my observation of life, it really is not. There's no shortage of people who bust their asses for wages that I wouldn't be getting out of bed for.
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.”
"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
> 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
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.
Idk the numbers on this but I much more often hear "It's hard to see my parents living so lavishly while they're struggling." Apparently boomers are not big on saving for retirement or living within their means.
> The over-priced neighborhood is perversely desirable when pricing is the only legal means of discrimination in an increasingly dysfunctional society.
Excellent explanation of why, despite the hollowed out middle class, we see a surge of developer housing marketed to those who wish to retain the pretense of class status.
I was aware that all these changes reduce to the fact that half society’s brainpower used to come cheap, but hadn’t registered this very pure expression of it
“The cheap and effective Catholic school system of old has largely collapsed due to the dearth of nuns“
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.
happened to me when scraping together a down payment for a house offer during the low interest rates 5 years back. parents completely understood the interest rates were basically a winning lotto ticket that would never come again in our lifetime and refused to help back a competitive down payment with any money at all
their logic was that theyd given my sisters tens of thousands of dollars over the years and my sisters remained dependent, but ive been financially independent since college. they never gave me money and id never asked
according to them: they perceived they had made me tougher when reality is that i simply never asked for money when my sisters did, because i assumed that would mean if i ever asked they would respect the request
fucked me up to the point where they noticed how annoyed i was and have offered money since, when i didnt need it, and ive pretty much made a point i hope theyre buried with it
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.
The article makes it pretty clear
> It’s not that I can’t afford to help him,” Steve told me. “I just have a real problem with handouts. And I want him to have the satisfaction of knowing he’s built something himself, with his own hard work. That’s how I was raised, too.
So it has nothing to with the son, Steve is just looking to validate his world view. The reality of the situation is that the boomer generation was provided with an immense amount of social assistance, affordability, and opportunity. Yet these are the same benefits they deny even their own children in favor of sadistic fantasies.
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)
If a bank has determined the venture is probably doomed and won't loan the money, why should the parent support this doomed venture? People have idiotic business ideas constantly, way more frequently than they have good ones. On average denying such a loan is correct.
Difficult to falsify.
> 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.
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.
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
>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.
I’d wager for the majority of human population, present & past, that the opposite is largely true.
Most people are not well off and anecdotally I also don’t know many happily married couples nor happily married parents.
You’re saying one can be happy without being bourgeois. I think that’s self-evident.
This may be localized. I live in a LCOL area, my oldest son is 27. He and his wife have modest salaries ( teacher and clerical ), own 2 newish cars and a midsized house. They eat out a lot, subscribe to streaming services, etc.
They’ve got it better than I did at their age.
Maybe it’s worse elsewhere.
"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.
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.
> 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 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.
Men drift toward violent, toward far right and toward disdain of women.
All three are dangerous partners to have. Simple rationality implies avoiding them.
Seems like a massive generalization.
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.
Progressives talk about simple real world fact that rape exists and is bad. Rape predates Tate.
But when there is sexual avuse or rape scandal, conservatives effectively argue that rape is normal and real victim is the rapist. They are the ones who push them towards Tate, by making his argument.
It is all older generation who see raping as positive thing for hard profile position. Who enabled and helped abusers for decades. Young just learned from them.
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.
I'm not certain what falling behind culturally means, but it has been my heavily-validated experience that the culture of man women actually date and have sex with is an unabashedly masculine type. The further from engaging in feminine culture and thought patterns, the better for the man. But I am getting the feeling that is not what you meant.
Fwiw I am 5'8" with an average face and I've had sex with over 40 women, none from clubs or bars, and am married. So I am doing something right. And it's been my wide experience that you really want to be a traditionally masculine guy. I have no social media and I engage in no modern cultural trends, music, media etc. Whatever mainstream culture is trying to do to men, drift away from that at top speed.
And yes I am right wing, and no the leftist women in Seattle did not actually care. They just say they care to signal something. So that aspect of cultural drift is also not really a problem.
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.
Mandatory inspections? Like the city insists on periodically inspecting the inside of your home?
I have no desire to deal with gas in my home, and my state exempts homeowner electrical.
I think the bigger issue is that the market doesn't really value renovation much any more - it's quite content with beige and builders' grade! And the low-effort fashions change so often you're never going to win that game on DIY timescales. So it's not so much sweat equity any more, but rather sweat comfort and convenience.
IMHO, municipalities are much more serious about these permits and, at the same time, neighbors seem even more sensitive to any kind of noise or even a visual disturbance. If your house is close to the street, good luck keeping any kind of renovation off your town's radar.
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.
You have it backwards.
People have owned property, and worked since the dawn of time, the core original idea in the wealth of nations is that competition lowers prices... thats where the idea of markets come from.
The only real "benefit" come from competition through lower prices, the rest of the factors ie property and labor in a free exchange are the requirements to reach the optimal outcome.
Have what backwards? Capitalism and markets are clearly different concepts. Consider the single company town. The capital is privately owned but the economy is centrally planned. There is no competition lowering prices, but there is capitalism. The capital is most definitely not communally owned.
There is another concept, market capitalism, which describes where markets and capitalism come together. That may be what you are thinking of, but that isn't what we are talking about in the discussion. The original comment clearly wrote "capitalism" and not "market capitalism". What was said about markets in that comment holds true even without capitalism, so we have logical confirmation that it wasn't a case of accidentally leaving out "market" in front of "capitalism".
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"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.
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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every gen z i know has many, many tattoos. and tattoos are not cheap.
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.
Original behind login-wall: https://x.com/JohannKurtz/article/2077113148524417439
>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.
> In 1970, the US was 83.5% non-Hispanic White. In 2020 it was 57.8%
The claim was that in 1070 the vast majority of students in a public school were from the same community, and that this is not true now. The data you cite does nothing whatsoever to support (or to refute) that claim.
It just supports the claim that communities today probably have a different makeup than communities in 1970.
Also, in the 1970 I don't believe that most students in a typical public school were from the same community, unless we consider "white people" to be a community. Most people consider themselves to be part of several communities, and identify more strongly with those communities than with a broad racial community.
At my school in the '70s for example even though it was maybe 85+% white most of the white students would more strongly associate with communities based on something other than being white. One big group was the military kids from families stationed at the nearby major air force base. That community was majority white but had a fair number of black kids. Another was the kids from the farms from the vast agricultural areas that surrounded our town. That community was majority white but had a pretty substantial number of hispanic kids (the farms had more hispanics than whites because the farm laborers were mostly hispanic, but a lot of their kids went to the high school in a different town). There was also a Mormon community, which was very white, and a Catholic community which was more mixed.
A white Catholic air force kid would be more likely to identify with an hispanic Catholic aggie kid than with a white Mormon kid, because the Catholic community is probably a bigger part of their identity than the generic white community.
> In 1975, the single motherhood rate was 15%. In 2015, it was 40%
The questionable part of the article was the implication that it matters if your child goes to a school with a higher percentage of single mothers than schools in the '70s had, leading parents to send their kids to private schools to avoid such children.
There is research that children of single mothers have a harder time in school. But does having such children in the same school as your child cause your child to have a harder time?
> In 1980, Spanish speakers were 5% of the US. In 2024, it was 13.9%
This actually suggests the article's claim is wrong. The claim was that a "vast majority" in the '70s spoke English and now that is not the case. But by the most commonly accepted ranges to count as a "vast majority" that would still be vast majority speaking English.
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.
It's a pretty well-established fact that children of two-parent families have significantly better outcomes than those of single-parent families.
However, I'll concede its juxtaposition with overall whiteness and Spanish language fluency as additional metrics of population-level success are highly suspect, even if we grant that being a white, English-first speaker may contribute significantly to an individual's success (for reasons which include the unsavory).
> It's a pretty well-established fact that children of two-parent families have significantly better outcomes than those of single-parent families
Does there being children from single-parent families in the same school as your child lead to your child having significantly worse outcomes?
Recall the context from the article:
>> 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 is listing things about other children that it implies drag down your child and so leads parents to turn to private schooling.
Except the claim that many parents must now to turn to private schools. Private school enrolment has declined since 1975.
Has it declined as much as we would expect, given the decrease in religiosity in the US over that time period? I've only found data going back to 1995,[0] which shows relatively flat numbers for the past 15 years or so.
(And the amount of parents which are interested in their children attending private schools vs those who have access to and can afford them is an entirely different discussion.)
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_205.10.a...
> given the decrease in religiosity in the US over that time period?
Has religiosity actually decreased? Christianity certainly has, maybe even all god-based religions, but the religion of formal education seems to have fully picked up the slack. There are a shocking number of people who believe that you will be stricken to the hell of flipping burgers at McDonalds if you don't praise the institution and attend college worship. And it seems likely that anyone who buys into that religion is prone to want to send their kids to private schools given the prevailing ideas about what private school offers.
> And the amount of parents which are interested in their children attending private schools vs those who have access to and can afford them is an entirely different discussion.
It is, indeed. There is a huge chasm between wants and musts. It would require an entirely different discussion to turn us towards wants. Although it is not clear what purpose that discussion would serve? What were you hoping to add by mentioning this?
> Has religiosity actually decreased?
This is fair* (and I expect many Christians would agree with you in generalities of "everyone worships something"); what I was getting at here was that (by the first numbers I found) those who regularly attend organized "god-based" worship has dropped by ~1/3 over the past 20 years or so, and so I would expect roughly a corresponding drop in attendance in parochial schools. If the drop is less than that,** that would seem to support the author's hypothesis.
> What were you hoping to add by mentioning this?
Along the same lines as the previous: even if more families aren't able to send their kids to private schools, but desire to do this, the could support two parts of his narrative: (1) decrease in social capital (of which he defines part as, to paraphrase, schools that people trust); and (2) that more essential parts of life (such as education, as opposed to television) are becoming rapidly more expensive.
(Not stating which of his points I agree with, but I think that "private school enrollment is declining" does not necessarily rebut the core of his arguments.)
* Though I think my meaning was clear
** Though of course this becomes more complicated when you look at figures for all private schools
> I would expect roughly a corresponding drop in attendance in parochial schools.
Why's that? Around here the parochial schools are fuller than ever. Not because people have taken a greater interest in the religion — the local data shows the same decline in god-based religious observance that you spoke of — but because they are the schools which have gained a reputation for providing a better education, which strikes a chord with those fearing the fiery hell of the McDonald's grill.
Heck, even if we assume for the sake of discussion that the original claim is the truth and that parents must turn to private schools, why does that preclude parochial schools? On the premise given, if that's where the "desirables" are found that is where the students needs to go, even if one doesn't buy into the religious foundation of the school.
> the could support two parts of his narrative
If it had said that parents want to turn to private schools then you'd have a point, but it says they must. "I cannot afford it" doesn't fly for things you must do. Since it is something they have no choice in now, that they didn't do decades ago, where is it showing up in the data? Another comment indicated that charter school growth is where the data suggests there is a clear growing trend. We could accept the premise that parents actually see those features in charter schools instead, but then that same comment pointed out that charter schools are often the most diverse, which contradicts the original premise.