It'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.<p>Am I missing something?
I think the term "poorer", and the monetary analysis done here, is too high level to extract real meaning.<p>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, ...).<p>They just don't own property and have no path that leads there.<p>In some sense you could say that they have higher incomes whilst having lower wealth, but that doesn't really capture it.<p>Housing just went bonkers which makes retirement impossible.
This 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:<p>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.
From the article:<p>“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.”<p>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?
I 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.<p>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.
Baby 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.<p>What a revelation.<p>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.<p>Wow next thing we will hear is millennials are not choosing to be uninsured, but they can’t afford healthcare insurance.<p>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”
It'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 <i>better</i> life? How did we become so narcissistic that we don't even want to make future generations better off?
I 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".<p>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?<p>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.
While the article itself is talking specifically about spending habits on physical goods vs 'experiences', the subject line could be better worded.<p>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.
> As a caveat, spending on avocado toast wasn’t specifically tracked for this analysis.<p>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.
But isn't the fact that they are just like their parents <i>exactly</i> 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 ?
"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?
I 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.
It'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.<p>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.
Compulsory xkdc on the concept of jouvenoya: <a href="https://xkcd.com/1227/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1227/</a>
Average expenditure at 30: $45,000<p>That's strange to me - is everyone living on debt? Factor in median household income for a fam with Bachelors degrees: $68,728<i>, which is $52,000ish net of tax.<p>How are people spending that much?<p></i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States#Education_and_gender" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...</a>
Sorry 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.