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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 (%)
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.
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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