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Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer
- burlesona 8y agoFrom the article: “What’s old is new again. The paper observes that some of the millennials’ parents were subject to similar baseless grumbles of "kids these days" from their elders.” I don’t know though. Seems like part of the nastiness of the times is the baby boomers constantly taking jabs at millennials. Perhaps the silent generation complained the boomers weren’t “frugal enough” but I have a hard time believing they had such widespread disdain for their kids as the boomers do. Anyone seen any research that quantifies that?
- AllegedAlec 8y agoI don't think that was any less in previous generations. I seem to recall hearing about a lot of grumbling about people protesting the Vietnam war, for example.
- blakesterz 8y agoThis sort of covers that: "Older people love to gripe about the entitled, lazy millennial generation. But it's nothing new – by delving into the archives, we found plenty of parallels stretching back 2,000 years." http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20171003-proof-that-people-have-always-complained-about-young-adults http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20171003-proof-that-people-...
- SaltyBackendGuy 8y ago> I have a hard time believing they had such widespread disdain for their kids as the boomers do It's always interesting when I hear boomers complain about millennials. Didn't they have an influence on raising the same generation they complain about?
- InitialLastName 8y agoIf you pay attention you'll note that it's always other peoples' kids who are the problem.
- burlesona 8y agoYeah this has become my standard reply when a boomer makes a stink about Millenials to me. “Sounds like they didn’t have very good parents.”
- icebraining 8y agoOnly the positive part :)
- sdegutis 8y agoThere was an article the other day that said divorce rates for millennials is down a notable amount from baby boomers, but without the marriage rate lowering. One way of interpreting this is that baby boomers have more selfish tendencies than other generations, and millennials are realizing that their parents' ways (including divorce) are selfish, and learning from their parents mistakes. If this is true, then it's perfectly in character for a stereotypical boomer to complain about millennials more than their parents complained about them.
- ev0lhanson 8y agoOr it says that people can't afford to get divorced. In dense urban areas the cost of housing/rent has gone way up and the incomes for younger people have not kept up. I don't think "millennials" are really all that different from the previous generation. However they do have very different forces pushing them in different directions.
- tssva 8y agoDivorce rates also decline when the economy declines. When the economy is booming people feel more confident in their potential future economic security post divorce and are more willing to roll the divorce dice. I would guess that has more to do with the rates than any moral superiority between generations.
- burlesona 8y agoI saw that study and it matched what I observe anecdotally around me. Millenials mostly have divorced parents and mostly feel that was a terrible way to grow up. So they’re waiting until they’re ready to have kids to get married to their long-term partner, and they’re approaching it with more of a sober commitment to stay together for the kids. At the end of the day, marriage is a choice you make every day. Different cultures have higher and lower divorce rates largely based on how seriously they take that commitment.
- logosmonkey 8y agoI think that, like most stats now, it's inflated by the bullhorn of the internet. Basically it probably happened but the world at large didn't have the ability to hear about it. Sort of like crime rates, even though they are lower than nearly any other time in the US the fact that the internet and 24 hour news cycle constantly talk about crimes the population as a whole feels its a bigger problem than it used to be.
- phalangion 8y agoI think it's largely that bullhorn. Before the Internet, you might read a magazine article or hear a news story once in while, but now that (almost) everybody can have a global voice, there are a lot more voices complaining about everything.
- drb91 8y agoThis has been a common meme forever. See: Fathers and Sons by Turgenev.
- eyeinthepyramid 8y agoBoomers were disdained as the "me generation" by their parents. Freaks, geeks, and long-haired hippies. It seems like the kids are always maligned by the olds, and vice versa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_generation
- tssva 8y agoBaby boomers were teenagers and young adults from the late 50s through the 80s. So the birth of rock-n-roll, the protest movements of the 60s and 70s, emergence of drug culture, the sexual revolution, disco, the crack epidemic, and the birth of rap. As a Gen X'er I can personally remember the mid-70s to the late 80s and the hate spewed out at baby boomers by previous generations. I don't think the Millennials have it any worse or better. Those who are currently going through it always see it as the worse. I think out of everyone my generation had it the easiest. We were teenagers and young adults during a time of general peace and prosperity.
- joncrane 8y agoNow it's our job to bring peace and prosperity to the next ones.
- brokenmachine 8y agoThe boomers have made it so difficult to buy a house that I chose to not have kids so I have a chance at having some peace and prosperity myself. Sucks but true.
- burlesona 8y agoThat’s helpful perspective, thanks for sharing :)
- jedberg 8y agoYeah, we were lucky. War was mostly over and all the debt hadn’t caused any problems yet when we were teens in the 80s and 90s.
- tubbs 8y agoThe greatest takeaway from this is that we [millenials] ought to make an effort to treat Generation Z with a respect that we are often not given. Let's not propagate that nastiness down the line.
- brokenmachine 8y agoI'm not having kids largely as a result of the mismanagement of the boomers. I'm holding on to my nastiness.
- Buldak 8y agoThe culture wars have enveloped everything nowadays, from #MeToo to GamerGate to Trump. I wonder if gripes between boomers and millennial are just another facet of that upward trend in polarization.
- rland 8y agoBoomers originally earned the label of "the 'me' generation."
- LiterallyDoge 8y agoMillenials are killing everything. Except the economy. Boomers killed that.
- czechdeveloper 8y agoDon't forget environment. But they leave very nice government debt behind, so millenials have something to solve after they pay out their student ones and pay boomers pensions.
- eecc 8y agoOr perhaps the Neoliberal policies that are hard at work dismantling all the social safety nets that gave people hope and encouraged them to take risk without fearing that failure implies total ruin.
- philodough 8y agoBoomers made the economy grow incredibly and had some busts along the way. They got up and kept going. The boomers are the most creative and productive American generation period. Millenials are still living with their (wealthy) boomer parents, delaying marriage and waiting for their boomer parents to die, whereupon the millenials will inherit their boomer parents' wealth. Unfortunately this will fail, b/c millenials have neither a work ethic nor a saving ethic. In the end, they'll spend their parents money and the US economy will flat-line.
- fetus8 8y agoIt's a real shame that boomers weren't creative or intelligent enough to prevent issues related to automobiles and climate change. It's also a shame they didn't come up with a decent fix for Social Security that will only benefit their generation and no one after.
- deadmetheny 8y agoDon't forget to go take your meds, Grandpa.
- LiterallyDoge 8y ago
- iagooar 8y agoIt's funny how this "generation" thing only quite exists (as far as I know) in the English-speaking world. There is no such idea of generations of people where I come from. It's hard for me to even grasp the idea of it. Who draws a line between generations and why? People do not stop being born, nor do they magically change because they supposedly belong to an imaginary generation. Am I missing something?
- klodolph 8y ago> It's hard for me to even grasp the idea of it. It's just an arbitrary label for people born in a certain period of history. These people generally have shared experiences that are different from the experiences of other generations. > Who draws a line between generations and why? Same people that draw a line between lemons and limes. It's sometimes a useful distinction so people remember it and use it. > People do not stop being born, nor do they magically change because they supposedly belong to an imaginary generation. There is no sharp dividing line between lemons and limes, either. Fruits in the citrus family can be crossbred with each other and you will end up with hybrids that cannot easily be classified as lemons or limes. There's no sharp line between "tall" and "short", or "white" and "gray". That's just the way names generally work, outside of fields like mathematics where you can use more precise definitions.
- lucisferre 8y ago> > Who draws a line between generations and why? > Same people that draw a line between lemons and limes I mean, I doubt it is really the exact same people who do this. At the very least it is a separate department that does the lemon-lime distincting.
- klodolph 8y agoYou might be surprised. Ernest Hemingway, an avid drinker, coined the term "lime" so he could distinguish it from other types of citrus in the Daiquiri, one of his favorite drinks. He also popularized the term Lost Generation, generally regarded as the first generational cohort with a name, although the term was originally coined by Gertrude Stein. (Ohyyfuvg.)
- Multicomp 8y agoWhile the article itself is talking specifically about spending habits on physical goods vs 'experiences', the subject line could be better worded. IMHO Millenials tend to be more aware of their financial weakness at a younger age relative to their older cohorts, thus resulting in more risk adverse behavior.
- madeuptempacct 8y agoAverage expenditure at 30: $45,000 That's strange to me - is everyone living on debt? Factor in median household income for a fam with Bachelors degrees: $68,728, which is $52,000ish net of tax. How are people spending that much? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States#Education_and_gender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
- adamnemecek 8y agoPeople are in debt yeah. I lucked out but I know a lot of people with student debt.
- brixon 8y agoThat may be the spending on education. That is mostly debt.
- esotericn 8y agoThe majority of individuals and households spend all of their money. That's the 'how'. The more salient question is 'why'.
- ryanmetz 8y agoWhere do you live? Here in Chicago that's a pretty reasonable amount of spending for my family of 2.
- lotsofpulp 8y agoI'm guessing it's mean average, so probably being skewed by higher spenders. It's also household numbers, so even more skewed if you have two high income people living together vs two low income living together.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoYou're comparing average expenditure with people with a bachelor's degree - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_... indicates only about a quarter of people have that (it's a bit hard to read).
- esotericn 8y agoI think the term "poorer", and the monetary analysis done here, is too high level to extract real meaning. The average young person/couple that I know are able to do and buy far more than their parents (e.g. eat out, order takeaway, take holidays, go to bars, buy things for hobbies, buy clothes, ...). They just don't own property and have no path that leads there. In some sense you could say that they have higher incomes whilst having lower wealth, but that doesn't really capture it. Housing just went bonkers which makes retirement impossible.
- enraged_camel 8y agoWhat you are talking about is having higher quality of life, despite having lower wealth. But that's a separate subject in my opinion.
- esotericn 8y ago"Quality of life" is a problematic term in that context. Within bounds it's possible to compare. Two families living on the same street, one has $10k higher income than the other, the higher income family has (at least the potential for) a higher QoL. But comparing someone with a high income in a downtown flatshare who has an ~infinite entertainment budget to someone who is well on the way to owning a home outright in the suburbs is really hard (e.g. a 30yo in London, vs their parents at 30yo). The former doesn't have a higher or lower QoL than the latter because you can't define a benchmark without it being opinionated.
- Vraxx 8y agoI'll start by saying that I agree with your assessment of the underlying issue here, I just have a slight nitpick with your comparison. Other areas do exist that could allow people to move out of the city to a cheaper owned home in the suburbs. Personally I don't think that's a good solution though because suburbs are pretty inefficient and seem likely to exacerbate the climate problem we're running full speed into. I just wanted to point out that you can form some comparison because they are both still relatively attainable. (I might be mistaken on the real estate landscape in the UK since I'm from the US, if so just disregard this comment) My other comment is mostly aimed at GP, but it seems that it has persisted down the comment chain, which is that from everything I've heard and read, "Higher income, lower wealth" is not an accurate assessment of what is happening when you factor in inflation. It's more of "The same/lower income, lower wealth" on average. Even still though, given the ideals of a capitalist system saying that owning capital is literally worth capital itself, lower long term wealth is most definitely a long term problem because this is a runaway feedback loop of capital concentrating in the top and the lower non capital owning members of society are slaves to capital. You might be technically earning a wage and thus not fit the technical definition of slavery, but if you have less and less freedom (defined as less freedom through lack of actual choice) because of it, I see very little difference.
- acconrad 8y agoIt's painful to see that younger people are worse off - poorer and life expectancy I see is down again. I thought we were trying to give our children a better life? How did we become so narcissistic that we don't even want to make future generations better off?
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoWho is "we"? "we" do, but the people in power - the government, the big corporations, shareholders - don't have those priorities. And I won't claim to be better than them, because I don't have their perspective on the world.
- beaconstudios 8y agoI think it's largely related to the housing bubble. House prices have risen sharply in the last few decades and more people buy houses as investment.
- asdff 8y agoWhy would you not buy a house as an investment? If you aren't looking to get a return you might as well rent and have your hands away from the duties and risks of property ownership.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> If you aren't looking to get a return you might as well rent and have your hands away from the duties and risks of property ownership. A couple moves forced by landlords deciding to move in or sell the property to people looking to remodel and flip and you might discover non-investment value to owning your residence. (Renting comes with those and many other risks; essentially all the duties of ownership are risks—risk that the landlord will fail the duty—for renters. Unless the lease terms transferred to the duty to the renter, then they are just duties.)
- asdff 8y ago
- refurb 8y agoIs it just me or does the article provide zero evidence that Millennials are poorer? The graph is just spending, not income.
- quaunaut 8y agoThey reference this paper: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2018080pap.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2018080pap...
- enraged_camel 8y agoIt's good to see a study that quantifies what we have suspected for a while now: millennials aren't doing as well as their parents were at any given age. This is why certain "life thresholds" such as getting married or buying a house are delayed, sometimes significantly. The annoying thing is that this is typically blamed on imaginary negative traits that millennials possess, such as laziness or spite borne out of feelings of entitlement. Whereas the fact is that Boomers had it really, really good, having grown up during an age of unprecedented growth, especially in contrast to the rest of the developed world, which was recovering from World War 2. That's the main reason they have done so well economically: America's rising tide has lifted all their boats. Unfortunately, this has come at the expense of subsequent generations, who now have to live with, and pay, their debt.
- twoodfin 8y agoOr on average they stayed in school longer than their parents, which tends to delay everything, including high earnings years.
- enraged_camel 8y agoMaybe, but it's worth noting that college is tremendously more expensive today than it was back when Boomers were attending it. We're talking an order of magnitude or more. edit: not multiple orders of magnitude
- beaconstudios 8y agoalso, more people are attending college. College didn't used to be something everyone went to. With the proliferation of student loans, universities have no reason to keep fees down.
- asdff 8y agoLiving wage jobs are much harder to secure without a college degree, full stop. I read a headline today that in the Inland Empire, 50% of jobs do not pay a living wage.
- hulton 8y agoIronic coming from the Fed.
- Moodles 8y agoCompulsory xkdc on the concept of jouvenoya: https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/
- couldbewrong113 8y ago"Housing and food are two areas where millennials have spent less than previous generations." Spending less on food I would believe; we have tremendous abundance and it's inexpensive relative to everything else. Housing, though? That...doesn't seem correct, unless they're including in the calculation millennials who live with their family and pay nothing for housing. Can anyone point to a reference that backs up the claim that millennials are paying less for housing than the prior generation?
- esotericn 8y agoGuesswork here, but it might be possible due to a selection effect. If you can obtain a mortgage, you are more likely to (be willing to) spend more on that mortgage than you would on the rent for a number of reasons. Anecdotally, I see people attempting to spend as little as possible on flatshares because they don't think they'll ever have a high enough income to bother with that, so they don't save either, and just enjoy themselves with the money left over (spending as little time at home as possible).
- claudiulodro 8y agoI don't have a reference, but it doesn't sound far-fetched to me. Student loans eat a lot of money that could be spent on housing, and also lots of people have roommates to lower their housing cost.
- ikeyany 8y agoThat's not true--millennials are also far more depressed.
- nkg 8y agoBut isn't the fact that they are just like their parents exactly the problem ? The GDP of the United States has more than doubled since the 80's, so how is it that millenials are as "poor" as their parents ?
- uncoder0 8y agoWages/GDP Graph may have something to do with it. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=2Xa https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=2Xa
- asdff 8y agoPeople aren't paid according to the GDP of the United States.
- nkg 8y agoThe GDP was just an indicator to highlight the fact that the country got richer, but the relative wealth of the people did not grow at the same pace.
- elocinstr8t 8y agoSorry but I kinda disagree. I'm a Millennial with Baby Boomer parents and I'm definitely not poorer than them. No, I wasn't born rich, but I'm definitely earning more than my parents. Okay, maybe not as much as my Mom but this article is such BS. It all just depends from person to person you know. I hate it when generations always crap on millennials like we're the worse thing that's happened in the world. Have you met the teenagers? The young millennials? No? Well there you have it.
- virmundi 8y agoWelcome to statics. You are a tail.
- cableshaft 8y agoIf you're doing anything related to software for a living and live in the US, you're not representative of the average American. I'm not making anywhere near as much as I could be in software development right now and yet I'm making significantly more than the average household income in the US, just by myself (not including my girlfriend that lives and shares bills with me). Also it's all relative. The types of jobs my parents worked were both middle-lower class jobs and we struggled at times to make ends meet. I ended up in one of the higher paying fields out there, so it makes sense that I make more than they did. Comparatively, a good friend of mine's dad is a lawyer, but my friend is a teacher in the Pacific Islands (he studied for and tried being a lawyer for awhile, but his wanderlust got the better of him). He's making significantly less than his family did.
- simias 8y agoI always find it a bit strange when people pit generations against one another. It's common to find articles complaining about millennial, I also often see young people online complaining about how "baby boomers ruined everything". I mean, do we seriously believe that if we magically swapped these generations around things would've gone massively differently? I know that Americans put the individual first and foremost but I have absolutely no doubt that the current generation would have done mostly exactly the same mistakes if we had been born a few decades earlier. And similarly I'm pretty sure that my grandmother would be wasting her time on Instagram or playing Fortnite if she was born today. Does anybody really believe otherwise? It's such a ridiculous thing to do. It's not like you can chose when you're born. It's just a way to deflect your own problems onto other people while at the same time not proposing anything constructive to move forward.
- CyberDildonics 8y agoThinking that entire generations of people are really different at their core is fallacious, but looking at their behaviors and indications of differences in the system they operate inside seems valid to me.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- maxxxxx 8y agoI think the big problem is that there are less stable paths now. Previous generations had a clear path to getting a house, affordable education and stable retirement whereas now you have to take on a lot of debt, gamble in the stock market and have to have some level of luck to retire safely. Any major health expense or company layoff may destroy your well laid-out plans and put you back to zero. I think today's life is just more stressful. With some luck you can do incredibly well but it can also go the other way big time.
- piyh 8y agoA lot of older people had stable retirement pulled out from underneath them with pension cuts
- humanrebar 8y agoArguably, Boomer style retirement based on being independently wealthy was/is a fleeting historical oddity. Historically people died young or moved in with family.
- maxxxxx 8y ago"Boomer style retirement based on being independently wealthy was/is a fleeting historical oddity." It was an illusion that never really materialized for most people.
- asdff 8y agoPeople are much more specialized in their professions now as well. I might be able to find a relevant job in every city, but in some cities that might be the only employer, and there is no incentive for loyalty toward your employer, and you make much more leveraging your existing salary for a better job at another company than waiting for a raise or title change at your present one. You are so much better off living in a place where you can easily get a new job under a different employer in your field without having to find a new apartment and plan a relocation as well, not to mention being in a larger network and the innumerable opportunities that gives you.
- Waterluvian 8y agoThis is a very complex subject and I'm not trying to reduce it to something simple. But a big smell to me that something's just plain messed up is this fact: I make more money (inflation adjusted) than my parents did combined when they bought the house I grew up in. I would have to double my salary to afford buying/maintaining that house today.
- humanrebar 8y agoIsn't that an argument that the inflation adjustment isn't suitable for this comparison?
- WhompingWindows 8y agoIt's an argument that vanilla inflation does not capture the changing costs of housing specifically. Considering housing is the #1 expense on most peoples' budgets, then yes, inflation alone is not appropriate. I believe that's the point the parent comment is making, and there is an implicit comparison there to all the economic analyses which compare childrens' incomes to their parents via inflation without accounting for housing.
- ralmeida 8y agoOr that housing prices are too high.
- burlesona 8y agoExactly. And thats largely because the boomers pulled up the ladder behind them via zoning rules to greatly restrict redevelopment and density of new development, thus denying adequate housing supply to their kids.
- rootusrootus 8y agoThere could be lots of reasons for that, however. Since you have not provided enough information to make speculation possible, I will mention my own to illustrate my point: My parents bought their house in 1970, when my dad was making about 15K. The house was about 30K. To buy that same house today you would need to make about 150K. Inflation adjusted, my dad's income then would only be about 100K now or maybe a little less. But ... what changed? In 1970, we lived in a remote area, where it took close to an hour to get there from the nearest city of any size. But about 10 years later the freeway was built and the nearest city expanded, now the property is still technically rural but it's 15 minutes from the city. It would be hard to argue that the value of the property hasn't been significantly increased as a result. Not many people wanted to live that far out in 1970; my dad's coworkers at IBM all told him he was crazy. Today that area is very popular.
- will_brown 8y agoBaby Boomers are directly responsible for all the debt in the country, they invented it to pay for their lavish life styles they couldn’t afford and so they invented debt to kick the can down the road to future generations, and payment has come due. 1950 federal debt was ~$250B now $21T. Credit cards didn’t exist before baby boomers now $19T in consumer debt. Student loans didn’t exist before the boomers, now it’s more than $1T debt. Medicare/Medicaid didn’t exist before the boomer generation, now that’s >$50T in unfounded debt by all estimates. What a revelation. As it turns out all this bullshit about millennials not wanting to get married, or own houses, or own a car is manufactured news...and people really do want to have families and own things, only they can’t afford any of those things. Wow next thing we will hear is millennials are not choosing to be uninsured, but they can’t afford healthcare insurance. Edit: removed “Medicare/social security” with Medicare/Medicaid...that slip triggered the HN pedantics and in their mind made the remainder of the comment “patently false”
- toomuchtodo 8y agoI agree with most of this except the part about inventing debt; come on now, debt has existed as a concept far back into human history. EDIT: Yes all, I understand credit is now more easily available than ever, and I would argue that ease of credit is a substantial problem allowing for the transfer of responsibility to future generations. @infogulch: I agree with everything you said, but that is not what OP said, and hence, not what I replied to. Internet Talking is hard!
- marviel 8y agoLast evening while we were out to beers, a friend recommended me a book apparently reviewing precisely this history: https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290 https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
- toomuchtodo 8y agoYes, this was the book I was thinking of when I wrote my comment. Do read it, it's fantastic.
- matte_black 8y agoWill the generation that comes after millennials be even poorer?
- dta5003 8y agoThat's really our only hope at this point.
- xemdetia 8y agoI feel like that is a given based on what I have been seeing right now. If people are already redlining spending/debt without savings any financial leg up that they can provide their children is that much less. If anything I am anticipating a decline in people pursuing college as those children who see lives defined by student debt as just not worth it, but the current jobs market does not have a ton of high paying positions for high school educated workers. In a sense because I have education and specialist skills I feel like I am part of the group pulling up the ladder behind me when it comes to knowledge work. If the next generation is even net poorer the property asset appreciation train might finally crash though, and I'm of mixed opinion if that is going to have a net good outcome, or if the front is going to fall off two generations from now.
- chrisco255 8y agoI wonder how much of this is permanent and how much of this is related to the fact that millennials came of age in the worst recession since the Great Depression? Maybe millennials will bounce back over the next 10 years, as boomers retire and assuming the economy doesn't suffer another catastrophe.
- vinceguidry 8y ago> As a caveat, spending on avocado toast wasn’t specifically tracked for this analysis. We need an Avocado Toast Index to track consumption patterns across generations to go along with the Big Mac Index that tracks purchase parity across countries.