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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.
Only richer in ways that are shared by the old, namely tech. Housing, food, and culture are all much more expensive / worse than 40 years ago for sure. If you buy into simple supply and demand, it must be immigration to blame. When the population drops, housing demand falls while demand stays fixed. Therefore housing becomes cheaper. Farm land stays fixed while food demand falls. Food becomes cheaper. Culture stays very similar if the gene pool is not being radically flooded with new genotypes. The old people voted for this though so I don't blame the immigrants themselves. They need immigrants so their house appreciates, so getting it reroofed is cheap, etc. They preferred to destroy their homelands than give their children their fair share.
IIRC we have quite a bit less farmland than a couple generations ago, but produce quite a bit more total with it because of efficiency scaling. There is a lot of no-longer-under-plow land out there, although much of it wasn't very good for farming anyway.
Food is still cheaper, although I don't think your point is completely wrong.
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