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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.
You also have to consider that boomers were insane.
I was listening to some older female comedian talk about her experiences going to a school that underwent busing during integration. And the raw facts of it were a wave of violence was imported into her otherwise peaceful school, and she and many of the other white kids spent the next few years getting the shit kicked out of them. But her parents, teachers, and most of the other adults turned a blind eye towards it for "the cause". And she ends on a positive note about becoming more ghetto herself and getting along with her abusers by her senior year. The story is supposed to be some feelgood bit of "See, we can all get along" that, in my eyes, did not remotely tell the story she was trying to tell.
Most boomers fed their kids to the jungle, outcomes be damned. A brave few protested, and they've gone down as history's villains. So now the rest of us have to pay thousands per child on private education that has no obligation to accept antisocial behavior, "desperate impact" be damned.
Boomers were the kids being bussed, (and those being bussed to) not the parents. Who was, like, 8-17 years old in the early-mid 1970s? Boomers, obviously.
Whatever your views on integration and the civil rights movement, it was clearly a product of the ‘Greatest Generation’ and to a lesser extent the older members of the ‘Silent Generation’ that came after them (I think MLK himself, who was younger than a lot of the politicians, was on the border between the two).
1968 and the sexual / cultural revolution was more organically boomer - it still had much older proponents like Hefner, but a lot of student activists and Woodstock types were the very oldest boomers born 1945-1948. The anti-Vietnam movement was more boomer. Certainly the anti-nuclear movements were boomer. You really have to go through to the WTO stuff to find the first Gen X heavy protest movements (and those still had a LOT of boomers).
By current Z and Alpha standards, yes. By standard nomenclature, no, those were mostly X.
Boomers were born 1945-1964, Gen X from 1965-1981, millennials 1982-1997, zoomers from 1998-2009, alpha from 2010-present ish. The main bussing crises / conflicts were in the early-mid 70s so mainly affected boomers as kids. Bussing nominally existed through the early 80s but it was largely intra district and voluntary, white flight was mostly complete by then beyond a few holdout communities.
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