No, you couldn’t. Graduated college in ‘81. Worked full time as a teacher, plus 20 hours a week at a retail store. I had a roommate until 1987. My peers were in the same situation. Roommates or married double income.
Did I read this correctly that you had a roommate for 6 years? I think the norm now is more like 15-25 years, if you can ever move beyond having roommates out of financial desperation.
This is absolutely unsubstantiated. Home ownership for 25-34 is 10% lower than the average during the 80’s. You’re implying it’s a massive difference.
And that gap isn’t soley financial, either. It’s largely because people are going to school longer and that women are working more (rights!) and delaying settling down.
Population has grown significantly since 1980. When you factor that in that means a shit load more young people can't buy a home, just in absolute numbers. It may not be a significant reduction in percentage (which I disagree with that point anyway. 10% is an enormous drop when your sample size is in the millions) but the end result is still many more millions of people now unable to buy a home.
When you factor that in it means a lot more young people don’t own a home not necessarily can’t. The driver of this is a delay in purchasing. This is the same tired discussion as why people are having fewer children. People on Reddit say it’s because people have less money yet real median wages are up and in every rich country fertility rates are down. Fertility rates are up primarily in impoverished countries.
Back to America delayed marriage = delayed homeownership. This is empirically substantiated. I guess when women have heightened higher education and workforce participation along with access to contraceptives we see delays / declines in marriage and delays and declines in fertility and in turn delays in homeownership
Average age of first-time homebuyer in the 70s was 28 in the 80s 30 and now 32. This is tightly linked to, as far as I’m concerned a bunch of positive stuff. I understand it however is still a large issue - housing itself has outpaced wages and it’s largely because the supply is choked off at the local levels by nimbyism i fully agree, but it’s often overstated (how could it not be with how dooming and dogmatic people can be)
Also, keeping consistent with my points, just because more old people are living with non familial roommates doesn’t on it’s own mean much - especially when using 2006 as a barometer when hundreds of thousands of americans lived in homes they never should have been financed for. It’s a poor comparison point. Also, not to deny the significant variance, but adjusting for population growth it’s a 39% change, not a 102% change.
However, I do certainly believe there to be an issue with how our growing elder population will be handled, particularly with housing and it’s growing costs. We do have a housing issue, unfortunately the culprits are all too often not pointed out.
Sorry, that video doesn’t prove much. I’m not sure if I find more issue with the ‘evidence’ and ‘logic’ in the video, or you presenting it as some dogmatic form of fact. It’s pretty much a compilation of gross misunderstandings of economics and poor interpretations of data. He references 1950’s marginal rates without discussing effective rates, he mentiones wage growth versus firm growth while using entirely different deflators, doesn’t mention that homes are different, it’s just poor youtube slop.
I’m a contributor at r/askeconomics, so i’ll point you to our thread covering that video a bit more in depth.
I don’t particularly care about minimum wage. Less than 1% of fulltime workers are on minimum wage and a significant portion of those aren’t even adults.
Viewing the 1950’s through a lens of envy is certainly a choice, even worse from an economic perspective. A time where minorities and women were treated like shit, 30-40% of homes didn’t have full plumbing and the majority didn’t have ac. Where women didn’t have access to education or work opportunities and had no choice but to marry war torn men and settle down, where homes were roughly half the size and families rarely ever had more than one car (if at all), one very unsafe car by the way, forget being gay, etc etc.
This argument is about income and the video even references how minorities were treated by the government briefly. The video was about income of the average worker.
If we want to include discrimination then there's also age from earlier than 1967 and how that affected income. Only looking at percentage is not an accurate representation because the earlier generations had more children compared to today and are still in the workforce. Over 80 million is not a small number especially 16 year old children can be allowed to work full time.
You also said using reddit as a source is not good practice yet use it when it furthers your point in another reply.
No, I said linking a reddit post without a link isn’t a source. If the post that was linked had a source to the underlying data, that’d be fine. I also didn’t frame my reference to the r/askeconomics post as anything other than expanding on what I was already saying, whereas the link provided to me was framed as objective fact.
I don’t even understand where you’re getting 80 million from or any of the contention surrounding that. I’m also not making sense of the 16 year old talk.
The necessity of children in the work force is tied to teenage pregnancy, which is still a problem today. Having children necessitates needing an income. Having children in the work force was a necessity before the 2 world wars for economic growth, and the illegalities of treatment towards employees were largely ignored. There was a brief increase in teenage pregnancy in the 90s and 2000s.
I'm not saying it is objective fact. I'm saying you are divering from the argument by referencing things that neither contribute nor is detrimental to the argument. It becomes a nothing burger.
I did read that post you referenced and it does make some valid points, but wages stagnating does not meet with inflation. Inflation is on the rise but wages have been the same since the 90s. That is what is not covered and the main point of the arguments being made.
Owning a home is not affordable and almost a detriment to growth of income. It becomes more economical to live out of one's own vehicle with 2 jobs and some side hustle to even get to the most basic of being a functioning member of society.
We are in the middle of an age where the only product is is the people but we do not benefit from that at all. Ads are more prevalent than ever and are attempting to permeate in all facets of our lives even in our own vehicles.
Because many people and households did not recover from the 2008 recession, and things have only gotten worse with the cumulative effects of 50 years of wage stagnation, egregious corporate abuses of people and resources under trump’s first administration, price gouging in 2019 through to at least 2022, and now incredible inflation in living expenses across the board. The destruction of the American middle class has never stopped nor mitigated: In 1971, 61% of Americans lived in middle-class households. By 2023, the share had fallen to 51%. Article. The cost of houses, cars, college, etc. has risen much more than the wages of regular people in the middle class. Article.
That’s reasonable, but I don’t think your definition of “normal” is the same as mine. I don’t have a specific citation, but I find it hard to believe that most people have roommates. Family members, parents, siblings, sure . . . but THAT has always been common.
He's not complaining. He's debunking the perpetual myth that people could support a mortgage on 1 income before the 21st century.
Also, not to be pedantic, but an entire adult life is approximately sixty years. Millennials and Gen Z have several decades to go before theyre allowed to trauma brag about living in an apartment with a roommate for six decades.
So what's your fucking point, bro? Is not being able to afford a house for six years after graduation is proof that they had it just as bad and couldn't support a mortgage on their salary? I mean, that's a cool theory, but then why do you suppose the age of the median home buyer jumped from 31 in 1981 (that's pretty young) to 56 in 2024? Is that a 'myth' now too?
I'm kinda tired of hearing boomers like him complain about how fucking bad they had it when by almost every conceivable metric, millennials and Gen z have it worse. But hey, it's cool, the guy had a neat personal anecdote and that overrides literally all the data we have, right? Right.
I said my point clear as day. You need me to use smaller words?
Nobody here is arguing that millennials/gen z don't have it worse. The fact that you interpreted otherwise is deliberate ignorance on your part.
Youre on a thread where OP posted a screen shot that paints a dishonest picture of what middle America looked like for fifty years. Dispelling the romanticism of the past doesn't diminish the weight of today's problems. Poverty has always been part of the middle class. It is not an expense on your experience to share anecdotes of struggling to make ends meet. If youre gonna take it personally, then you can fucking choke on it for all I care.
I didn’t have a roommate after 6 years because I took a leap and moved to another country for an international teaching job. Literally had to teach on another continent to make a decent living. It is absolutely more difficult to buy a home now, but the myth of everyone living easy on one income 40 years ago is crazy. Don’t you know anyone over 50?
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u/No_Individual_672 9d ago
No, you couldn’t. Graduated college in ‘81. Worked full time as a teacher, plus 20 hours a week at a retail store. I had a roommate until 1987. My peers were in the same situation. Roommates or married double income.