I've done reasonably well as a developer, having been an architect at several large enterprises. I consider myself a pretty good developer. My kid followed in my footsteps and also became a developer. He is objectively ridiculously good at it. And far faster than I ever was. But it took solid 9 months before he found a job. A one month contract. Which he then parlayed into a full time job, once they saw how good he was.
Compare this with when I graduated. I had a full time job before I received a diploma. It never even occurred to me to worry about finding work.
If the rate of TOTAL debt was accumulating at the same rate now as it was then, there would be jobs aplenty.
Debts are still rising, but at slower rates.
It's no wonder Gen Z is so cynical. People are talking about how good things are and they can't even get a human to respond to them for their first step in.
I grew up wildly excited about the capitalist world of promise and meritocracy in which I was going to grow to be a man. I never had grand ambitions of becoming wealthy, but wanted to work hard so that I coulod have a nice life and build a family. Now that im an adult, I cant think of a single reason to be proud of the current system. Ive worked incredibly hard for a life of 'getting by'. Im incredibly privileged where my friends and family are not, and cannot imagine the struggle and hardship of those with less prospects than me.
I cannot in good conscience witness the world in which I am now an adult and say that this capitalism is a good thing. The people around me are suffering and I firmly believe that it is every man's duty to fight for their family and community. Nothing about fighting for community here involves supporting capitalism as it stands today.
They actually aren't. Median income is measured as a median for a reason. Poverty line statistics are taken at the low end. Local CPI and price data is taken and reported. And all of those numbers are, indeed, getting better and not worse.
I repeat this everywhere this subject comes up, but the real reason things look like they're getting worse is unsavory. More than two generations back, people were on balance poorer but they were black, so they didn't matter. Or they were immigrant, or single mothers, or institutionalized, or otherwise invisible to the white-picket-fence set who were all buying their family homes on one income.
Well, all those other demographics have done super well in the last half century, reaching parity with white men at the low end of the spectrum.
And those white men are the pissed off groypers detailed in the article. Not "Americans" in the abstract.
I mean, it's true they can't afford homes easily! Neither could minorities in the sixties, but we don't talk about that part.
We live in a banana republic.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-seeks-to-fire-bu...
https://www.science.org/content/article/republican-push-make...
https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/federal...
https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-administration-disbands-2-ex...
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-us-government-data-pu...
I think the article has the nugget of some good ideas and would love to hear them explored a little more rigorously and with more critical thinking.
https://1940census.com/Img/1940_census_map_usa.jpg vs zoom in a little here: https://maps.geo.census.gov/ddmv/map.html
LA and New Orleans should have made the list, after that it’s more questionable.
It’s the silent suck on the wallets that get you. Everyone budgets for food, shelter, but very little attention is paid to the dailies, the subs, the fees, the lattes.
It's the sectors of the economy that have become consolidated. Food, insurance, banking, healthcare. There is very little competition in those markets and prices are artificially high because huge conglomerates manage to siphon off a larger and larger stake, while preventing small players from offering an alternative either through market power or regulation.
Unlike subscriptions, it does not show up on your credit or debit card statement because the price of everything just goes up by a little percentage here and there.
All of these things are true.
I saved $300/month at best. Rent is 2200 a month. Yes, clearly that stabucks latte is what's doing me in.
Largest household expense after housing is usually (sometimes indirect) health insurance premiums. For a family of 4, this is running on the order of $30k annually now. That's creeping up on half the median household income (which often requires two workers).
Hiding this very real expense in tax deductions for employers obscures the fact of just how large it is.
If yes, then conceptually we're on the same page, if no, then I think this is wildly off base.
If rent is not a subscription fee, then you're probably talking about virtual goods like entertainment and games. I think consumers get a ton of value from digital entertainment and media, the problem is that literally everything else in the physical world feels like it's getting more expensive and falling apart.
Young people have virtually limitless virtual entertainment and media options. But they have almost no options when it comes to affordable housing or transportation.
The cost of housing has outpaced inflation every year for 2 decades (basically the entire lifetime of Gen-Z) and owning a home feels more and more out of reach every year. The average age of first time homebuyers is now over 40 years old, and the average age of all homebuyers is over 50.
The average cost of a new car in the US is now over $50,000. Public transit projects if they're being built at all are years behind schedule and billions over budget, and existing infrastructure is falling apart. This is in a time where wage growth has stagnated.
It's completely understandable why young people feel they're getting a raw deal, and wealthier and older people seem more out of touch every year. Actual physical needs : housing, transportation, healthcare and food feel viscerally more expensive every year.
Capitalism seems to only want to address these needs by pushing more and more substitution of virtual entertainment: Have more games, more apps, more stuff on social media, more cat videos, AI generated content in endless quantity.
It's almost like the internet is the Heroin of our age, a drug that keeps both the stock market and individual consumers high so they're less conscious of how much everything in the physical world sucks more every day.
TLDR; if you're founding a company do a hardware startup. We're maxxed out in how much our digital services can improve our lives.
http://kilkennycity.ie/Your_Council/The_History_of_Kilkenny_...
When I was young, you could live off the wage you made in retail.
I had uncles who worked in retail and where able to buy a nice house and raise a family. Now, you need snap to live if working retail. Buying a home, out of the question.
We need to go back to the tax rate we had in tge 1950s and force companies to pay a living wage as they did back then
First we must stipulate that the price you pay is not the tuition price. I went to a school that was #1 in tuition when I attended and I paid less than state school -- not because of loans but because of grants the school gave me.
Look at the history: in the 20th century, there was a general understanding that public education was a good thing. My grandmother born in the 20s only graduated middle school. My parents born in the 50s graduated high school and went to a little community college. By the time I was in school in the 90s, it was expected that pretty much everyone who could, should go to college. All of my peers went to college. None of my parents' peers did.
What happened due to this was there were too many students and not enough schools. This caused tuitions to rise. So they built more schools, but that doesn't really solve the problem because as the schools become more popular, the land they are built on and housing around them starts to increase in cost. Schools can't do much about this, but they do have to raise their tuition in response. Schools are in nice areas and attract a lot of high-net-worth professionals. You build a school somewhere and soon you need a hospital, some high tech jobs, a sports team, music venues, public transportation, lawyers, patent attorneys, day cares, and then eventually even more schools. So there's a pretty normal supply/demand issue going on that causes tuition to rise naturally before we even talk about student loans. See: Merced CA over the last 10 years after UC Merced was built there. It went from a Central Valley backwater to a really nice place to live and raise a family. So schools aren't really even schools anymore, they are more like small cities.
What about those sky high sticker prices? Are they that high because schools are confident the government will foot the bill? At the middle tier, yes. These are the schools that are not getting the best students, or the richest students, but they still have to pay competitive salaries for teachers, they still have to pay market rate for land, they have to pay for all the site licenses to Google and Microsoft and Mathworks and Elsevier and Jstor etc... and they still have to deal with the economic reality of being a non profit entity with a public service mission. But not for student loans, those schools would not exist, which would mean higher tuition at the remaining schools.
But, loans to mid tier schools are not the reason Stanford can charge $60k a year. Elite school can charge that, because plenty of rich people are willing to pay full sticker price to send their little bundle of joy to those brand name schools. So that's what elite schools do, they set their price at the level those rich people are willing to pay, and that sticker price keeps going up and up because that elite population keeps getting richer and richer.
The elite institutions set the ceiling, the community colleges set the floor, and then all the in-between state schools, private SLACS, off-ivies, price themselves in the middle. If student loans went away tomorrow, the lower tier schools would suffer most, but the upper tier schools would just admit more rich families and charge them more. Maybe there's not enough to spread between them, maybe they have to close some departments and hire fewer professors, but you wouldn't see tuition fall unless the rich couldn't pay it anymore.
Billionaires did not build any operating systems or computers or launch any satellites or write any web pages you are using. Workers built those things while billionaires watched.
Linux is a testament to how much we don't need billionaires to organize ourselves to create these things.
Wow, you know a person who can mine, smelt, and forge steel into a computer case... While still having time to mine, process, purify, reprocess, and design the whole die process not just for a CPU but GPU's and all matter of electronic components!?!!??!
Holy shit, you know someone who can design, assemble, and launch not one comm sat...but dozen?!?! And he builds the rockets all by himself as well?!?!? And he built the ground stations and infrastructure required to power and connect to them?!!?!
Oh you know a guy who can write a forum.... Yeah that's kind of neat I guess...
But let's be real here. These single individuals did not produce Thousands upon thousands of life times worth of value by their lonesomes. It required standing upon the shoulders of countless individuals, not even taking into account the organizational structures of governments, their utilities, and people long dead who built the world they used to make their billions.
How many of the billionaires you mention are themselves the proginy of previously wealthy parents?
In a way, I see this as our unwillingness to invest back into society. It very much is the fault of our wealthiest who have alienated themselves from anything resembling the everyday people and created themselves walled off enclaves where they no longer need to face the degredation. Wealth isnt visible anymore because its being hoarded, walled off, and turned into bits that can be easily moved from one place to another, allowing them to invest it only in the things they care about. I promise you, any time spent around the wealthy will show you their worlds are not decaying, its just that you dont get to live in it yourself.
A prime example of this being many cryptocurrencies which can be argued are a means of making large sums of wealth more portable.
Yes they can get at that wealth, tax free at that!
Where did the prosperity go? Into the pockets of property owners in large cities. Runaway urbanism made large cities practically the _only_ place where people can get ahead. If you want to achieve something, you have to leave your nice spacious house in Ohio and go and live in a tiny closet in New York City.
So we have a paradoxical picture. The number of housing units per capita, or per family is near the record high levels. Yet we're somehow in the middle of a "housing crisis".
Moreover, this migration into large cities creates a whole slew of low-paying dead-end jobs. This is also how generational Black poverty in the inner cities keeps perpetuating itself.
But it keeps getting worse. In the US not just the people, but the _land_ also votes. And all these dying smaller cities keep getting radicalized, pulling the entire country rightward. They are an easy target for populists, who always have an easy answer like "it's all the immigrants' fault".
In L.A.. Don't worry, you can't get ahead here anymore either. It's all coming unraveled.
>This is also how generational Black poverty in the inner cities keeps perpetuating itself.
Yeah, the infamous White Flight. It's always been an issue, but if we're being frank: it's affecting whites now too so now we're starting to seriously talk about it.
Still, bad for everyone overall.
People WITH ASSETS (real estate, stocks, businesses, etc) have done incredibly well since Obama. Real estate has skyrocketed and mortgage rates dropped to 2%. The stock market has gone up 10x, but some stocks like nVidia has gone up 100x.
People WITHOUT ASSETS have been fucked. The prices have all inflated, rents have skyrocketed and food has skyrocketed but they have nothing except their paychecks to help pay for living. They need 2 jobs just to stay afloat and there is no way they will ever afford a house. They are fucked.
The people with assets have an inordinate amount of money such that they can do extremely sociopathic things that people shouldn't be able to do. Hedge funds are buying hundreds of thousands of the single family homes and turning the next generation into permanent renters. Mark Zuckerberg is so rich he bought an entire neighborhood in Palo Alto (guarded with a bunch of security guards) so that his family could have a fake semblance of normalcy, but then he buys an entire island in Hawaii as well.
The rich are inordinately rich and doing sociopathic things, meanwhile the lower and middle income people with no assets can't participate in the upside and have no power to fight against these sociopaths.
And you wonder why Mamdani was voted in? It's clear as day to me.
https://joshworth.com/dev/wealthgap/
The bottom 90% of Americans only have 32% of the wealth.
It’s easier to downplay inflation so people think they’re doing better.
In 12 years, my salary is up about 50%, most of the change since Covid. Sure, sounds amazing… However, home prices doubled. Consequently auto, home, and flood insurance has at least doubled. Prices on even raw food has gotten crazy, restaurants are also 50-100% increase in prices. Health insurance is about 4x what it used to be for me. Tax bracket is higher.
So aside from the huge luck of low interest loan at a smaller principal, it doesn’t feel like anything amazing has happened.
On the flip side, I feel the plight of those looking at a 30yr loan at 5-6% on $500k. I can’t stomach it today and certainly not 12 years ago either.
By normal inflation rates, feels like I’ve seen maybe a 15% “raise” for over a decade extra of specialized experience —- before considering increased costs. Of course that was from changing jobs twice…
And quite frankly, property ownership is somewhat a poor investment, just better than renting. The S&P 500 has nearly tripled over the same time period. Of course, taking a 15 or 30 year loan for stock market investment would be insane (aside from impossible).
I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard to reconcile.
having 50 different flavours of ice cream and a big TV available is a fifteen year olds idea of paradise, but what people actually care about is infrastructure, public health, safety, childcare and progress in the material world.
The US has the problem that the commons and the physical world have been run into the ground, the country has effectively become the Wall-E future.
This is what I mean by unrelentingly negative. The world today is way better than the world I was born into.
You might start to understand the negativity some people have if you could understand the economic struggles they have.
Personally I'm doing something that brings me more happiness than most of my activities for the last twenty years - I'm providing direct aid for the unhoused and the impoverished. And I'm know there are people who are doing things that are their passion unrelated to that.
But I have to say, your list for is remarkable for being about things, not people. You amazed by the cool stuff available for some people for a lot of money and some things that are pretty cheap. But X percent of the population can't pay their rent with their income, cool stuff for sale is hardly going to help them. And indeed that statement itself is a strong illustration of how self-insulating people are from the conditions people live with.
Then there's the job aspect. I guess Hacker News is more older millenial/Gen X, so they are on the sticky side of this "sticky job market". If they are done job hopping, they won't feel how bad it is out there.
I feel like it's such a cultural thing here in the US. There is a pervasive culture of individualism and operating wholly within ones own means. Need help? Don't ask your neighbor for help, ask Our LLM (tm) for only $9.99 a month! I'm being hyperbolic of course.
None of these have anything to do with the prosperity - or lack of it - of the average American.
