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Notes -
“Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise” link
This is trending on Twitter so might as well discuss it here anonymously.
I know more than a few people say it’s just vibes and the data is good but I think this article makes a strong point that a real loss of social capital has actually made younger people poorer. And I believe this links into the fertility debate because the goods that you could buy before with social capital are especially needed with children. Having kids has gotten very expensive. I think everyone knows education, housing, and health care have boomed in costs. Being single means you don’t need to take on these costs. You can have kids if you are poor and live off government resources or you can have kids if you are rich but it’s a financial disaster for the upper middle class.
I largely come down to diversity (mass migration) and the Great Migration killing American social capital that the boomers had. Before these things occurred we had cheap urban housing because people weren’t afraid of their neighbors and cheap public schools. And homogenous urban environments have a lot of social capital for their residents. Also you had cheap babysitters because your neighbors were like you and you trusted them. Your kids could just go to the park alone. So childcare was free. I feel comfortable blaming diversity on rising housing costs (zoning the poor away from good communities) and for rising educational costs (falling public school quality).
So yes I think today’s generation is poorer in a lot of ways that really matter due to less social capital (but richer in other ways). And I do think the ways we are poorer today are especially bad for fertility where you now need to buy those goods in the market but they were free before.
The Funko Pop economy is booming.
They rattled off some stats on the radio about young people's spending habits. Spending over half their food costs on eating out, etc. Don't have money to save for a mortgage but instead spend profligately in ways gen x and boomers did not.
Source
For consumer units of one person in 2023–2024:
income before taxes (%)
food (%)
There is nothing more pathetic or soul crushing than cooking for one. For two is better but not by much. With childlessness and loneliness epidemic it is no wonder that people order so much food.
As a person that knows what is it to put a big Christmas dinner because this is our tradition and sit on it alone - at some point you really want to go full Kurt Kobain.
I miss cooking for one. I could make something nutritious but not amazing, like lentil and onion stew, and I would eat it for two meals, and it would be fine. Now I get to say things like "you can't have a snack because you didn't eat your mashed potatoes and fried chicken strips!"
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It's hard to get much out of one snapshot like this compared to, say, comparing this against the stats from 2013-2014 and shifting the age groups by 1. 0-24 is one I'd like to see broken up further, since that includes every child but also people up to 6 years into adulthood.
It's certainly interesting that eating out as a proportion of eating in general keeps going down almost monotonically as the age group goes up. I can see the point that older people tend to spend less time socializing at bars and restaurants and more time at their homes which also tend to be more comfortable. But also, older people tend to be more wealthy, and restaurant food is much more expensive than home-cooked ones, and so it's not a priori obvious that this is the force that would have won out.
It's also almost shocking to me that a whopping 50% of 25-34 and pretty close to it of 35-44 food-eating is done away from home. That's likely around 10 meals a week, which is 2x per weekday. Lunch at work accounting for 5 of those makes sense, and then perhaps another 2-3 for an occasional dinner, but the median or mean person in these age groups hitting 5+ extra dinners/breakfasts/brunches (on top of assuming eating lunch at work all 5 days) when, among adults, these are likely the lowest-paid, least-wealthy groups (discounting the child-including 0-24 for now) is somewhat surprising to me. It indicates to me that there's a lot of fat to be cut (no pun intended) in a median/mean 25-44 year-old's food budget.
For consumer units of one person in 2013–2014:
income before taxes (%)
food (%)
These statistics look at consumer units, which are basically the same as households. The definition of "consumer unit" doesn't have an explicit minimum age, which is why I didn't put one here—but you probably can assume that a consumer unit is unlikely to be led by a person younger than 18.
Thanks, the shift from 2013-2014 to 2023-2024 does indicate that young adults are being more disciplined in terms of eating out compared to to 10 years ago. To be fair, the whole "Avocado toast" argument is like 10 years old as well, so the same sort of phenomenon could have been happening 10 years ago. But it certainly seems that gen Zs do have grounds to complain to millennials that their relative financial struggles aren't due to relative food irresponsibility.
And if we presume 0-24 is mostly reflective of 18-24, that's actually a really striking outlier. Perhaps the youngest adults have trouble adapting to being responsible for their own food and make large mistakes in their first 6 years which they learn from fairly quickly.
Speaking as a millennial who was out and about in the mid 2010s I ate out more then because I had a lot more free cash. I was kind of a loser and kind of broke but my base expenses were low.
Gen Zs today have a right to complain because in my experience a lot of base cost of living stuff is more expensive. I make more money than I did back then but I shop for groceries at Walmart now and mostly only eat out if the boss is paying for it because I'm somehow still broke.
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Between 18-20 a large portion of my meals came from a dining plan that was a mandatory part of my mandatory dorm housing.
Between 20-23 I ate "out" but it wasn't expensive stuff. I'd pick up a slice of pizza for 2 dollars or a pastry from a coffee shop for around the same. Costco hot dogs were great.
I don't know how much college and graduate studies is impacting this.
Also, dating. When people go on dates it means they eat out usually, especially at first. After you're married and settled down maybe you make a nice dinner at home.
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It's been a while, but when I was single it was far more common for me to work an extra hour or two on a hard project then pick up dinner on the way home. Also, when cooking for 1 there tends to be more wasted food unless you're very vigilant about meal prepping or freezing ingredients. So eating out is relatively less costly than the alternative.
Eating out is egregiously more expensive than cooking at home.
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Doesn't look like the youths are spending so much more on eating out that it is a big factor, the way I read this.
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Ah, the ol' "Avocado Toast" argument again?
If they are spending over half their their total food costs, then it could well be valid. Many times per week splurging, yet somehow too poor to save money.
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Now the "Doordash" argument. You can disparage it, but the math still maths.
I liked the "Sex in the City" version; it turns out Carrie Bradshaw had spent enough on shoes that if she hadn't, she would have had a down payment for her apartment. Doordash is cheaper than designer shoes, but bought more often so it's the same order of magnitude.
In all fairness who shoes based on her writing career were from semi-escorting….the milder version of gifts from guys. But of course NY TV shows always have unrealistic spending by there characters. In real life her background would be rich girl from midwest or boyfriends are paying for it. Boyfriends don’t normally give down payment money.
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The underclass is gonna underclass. As if they didn't blow all their money on gambling, alcohol, and clothes back in the 1980s. The fact remains that at the mean, young people are poorer for BS reasons.
It's not the underclass using Doordash.
Using doordash is strongly anti-correlated with income, actually.
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Who do you think is taking out Klarna loans to get Taco Bell delivered? Upper middle class people?
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And that's why the entire planet and every major religion has imposed strict social conditions on our sovereignty everywhere people have lived. Plenty of people ruined their lives via drugs, gambling and so on, but there was enough friction and existing social structures to save the rest. If it was only that you had to go somewhere and do something, that saved a lot of lazy, scared people.
People are actively destroying those speedbumps in the name of an absurd, bankrupt idea that's basically "well, they'd do it anyway"
I have low impulse control. But I watch TV and see the gambling ads and just thank my lucky stars my addictive personality is seemingly too busy gorging on other things to care. It's obscene that someone with a problem is incapable of following major sports without immediately being told how much they could be winning or losing if they just jumped off the wagon.
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