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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.
I will say this as a man, it really sucks ass having to compete with other men for stuff like good jobs, girls, etc. I'm in the gym 4 days out of the week, calorie deficit, I just got out of another 2nd round job interview, gonna do another tomorrow, hoping to get something high paying with the degree i got (in my lucky case, for free) and the certs. I've done damn near 4 -5 internships and a part time job. Thankfully i live in a city that actually builds housing so its not horribly bad, but I'm not anywhere near where I'd like to be in my life. I got lucky with a girl Im seeing by complete accident. Its just better to date as a man when you have your own place and a decent paying job, and those things are insane amounts of work to get your hands on. Im glad someone's validating my (and others) experience, instead being told about how "good" we have it now compared to the past.
Boomers didn't have to do any of this. You probably have to to the extent you live around strivers and immigrants from India and China. I didn't have to do much of this because I don't live very close to those places, and neither have my similar aged family. But the consequence is no flashy Silicon valley wage or job. I have come and gone from striver dominated places and every time I felt I was pushed to behave like this. They had dry dating pools, I ended up feeling pushed to lose tons of weight just to get matches that I could have easily gotten at home, the jobs were cutthroat but not very important, just like you experience.
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