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“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.
Me ex left me about 5 years ago.
Previously we were splitting mortgage and utilities that came out to (for ease of calculation) $2000/month.
When she left, she got an apartment that cost (again, ease of calculation) $1500/month. I kept the house/mortgage/utilities and pay those fully out of pocket.
So I'm spending $1000/month more than I would be in the counterfactual where she stayed (was paying $1000 for housing, now $2000). She'd spending an extra $500/month (and I didn't even count utilities and such for her). We'd cumulatively have $1500/month 'extra' if we stayed together. Over a year that's $18,000. Over 5 years, that's $90,000. So I would, individually, be $45,000 richer (probably more! I could invest more!) in that counterfactual. That's several vacations, a new car, that's a new roof on the house or other major renovations.
I am doing well for myself. Salary is fine, debt is manageable.
I would be doing much better if I could find a reliable partner to shoulder either part of the bills or the housework or, ANYTHING really. Financially the 'hole' I'm in compared to the one where I'm happily married is getting deeper by the month.
And there are millions of people in similar situation, could be partnered but are not. Those folks don't, strictly speaking, show up in the economic stats as 'struggling.'
And that's before we talk covid-induced inflation and the attendant increase in prices of housing, vehicles (and insurance, and repairs), and medical care.
So yeah, there are some feedback loops out there that can make someone doing fine 'economically' still be struggling. Big one: difficulty finding affordable housing means more living with parents which means harder to find a partner, which makes it harder to afford housing, AND means there's more housing demand (if people start moving in together, that reduces demand on housing and lowers prices!).
And being clear, I'm not angry at her about it. I've processed and moved on. But I'm acutely aware of the price of being single, if for no other reason than to help me calibrate how much I should 'compromise' to bring a new woman into my life.
Having a partner can also be very very expensive. I'm easily $500k+ in the hole from paying all my ex-girlfriend's costs, who refused to get a job for 15+ years. (I'm extremely low-status in the dating market. I finally got out of the relationship, so at least I'm alone and miserable rather than paying through the nose and miserable.)
What's funny is that I wouldn't even have minded a trophy-wife situation where I at least got decent sex out of the deal. I know suggesting that makes me the worst kind of misogynist. We're supposed to pretend that relationships aren't transactional. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/communication-2
My ex was not the most frugal person.
Racked up student debt paying OUT-OF-STATE TUITION for reasons that read to me as asinine.
But at least it was a decent major. She had a tendency to just assume if you pay a lot for something it must be the best/high quality. Also had a tendency to throw out old things and buy new when something broke. Which, uhhhhh in hindsight was probably a warning sign.
I've made it a hard limit that the next GF has to be 'financially aware" if not thrifty. i.e. they actually consider the cost of things, consider repair vs. replace, and don't assume the most expensive option is always the best.
This winnows out a LOT of the field very early. I was dating a girl the last few months who apparently liked to select fancy restaurants just to see if I'd blink at paying the bill. At least, that's the game as I interpreted it. She would also cook for me so I was curious to see where things went. A few hundred dollars later and I can't even get a text back now.
Getting $500k in the hole is an outcome I'd truly want to avoid, though. I think I would pull the chute when the costs hit $100k.
Good luck with that. Your best option is to look among new immigrants, preferably from some Asian country, modern US people are raised with attitude of temporarily embarrassed princes and princessess who feel any hint they should count money and consider the costs as mortal insult to their noble status and honor.
Imagine how Marie Antoinette felt when hubby told her: "Honey, you have enough palaces, you do not need another!"
The age of bourgeoisie counting every penny is over, the age of aristocracy is back.
Sadly true. There was some significant reee-ing in the lastest doordash discourse on twitter (which kicked off with some guy saying you shouldn't be eating lunch out every day when you're making 70k in the US) with too many taking the position that taking a lunch to work was living worse than a medieval peasant.
I find the guy's point regarding eating out to be so trivially correct as to be unobjectionable, which proves I'm old and out of touch.
I mean, it is Twitter. Bringing lunch to work is extremely normal in the USA.
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These people, of course, were overwhelmingly self identifying as left, with bios full of symbols of correct current year, month and day causes.
Black lives matter! Trans women are women! Free Palestine! Cooking your own food is ableist, Doordash is human right!
But America is still land of opportunity, just follow teachings of the great guru Shagbark the Hobo King, and you too can find true frugal wife happy to live in shack and eat roadkill.
True trad Christian one, ofc, the atheist would want to do ..umm... nasty things to the roadkill, see the other current xitterstorm.
Usual example in "no god no morals, atheists owned!" eternal discourse is rape and murder, the xitter apologists recently upped the ante.
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I realized a while back that a lot of women were raised in McMansions with parents who basically paid for everything, from cars to clothes to fancy knick knacks, and of course university education, from the time she could walk.
And inherently, they will expect the same from their spouse. But that's impossible for a normal guy in early-adult stages to procure.
By becoming as wealthy as we have, we've now made it so that the general norm of "you, a dirt poor peon, marry another dirt poor peon, and gradually build your life up to a higher standard" a thing of the past.
Women who came up in prosperity would inherently have to accept a (temporary!) standard of living hit to marry a guy in his early-mid twenties, unless his family is massively wealthy. Women are generally wired to never, EVER accept a loss in status and standing and so this thought is probably vomit-inducing.
And there's now ample evidence that women, when given economic/financial advantages, tend to opt against having families/kids.
Again the solution is to economically boost men, or at least, stop the policies that are economically de-boosting them.
If only such support ended at HS or college. One occasionally meets a girlboss in their 30s who spends every dime on travel and clothing and eating out because her parents are still providing the apartment, car, and maybe even spending money. And she expects the future husband to be able to provide that level of living. Made for some entertaining first dates.
"Oh, I love Paris. I try to visit twice a year. How often do you travel abroad?"
"I've never left the US. My idea of travel is hiking and camping for 10 days without a shower."
Some Noticing from Capital One supports the online wrongthinker hypothesis that young women are racking up debt and/or are getting subsidized by boyfriends/parents so they can have the rightful FUN they deserve.
Before taxes!
I can only imagine the spending to income ratio would be even higher for young attractive women, all else equal. Like Daniel Tosh remarked, being an ugly chick is like being a man: you’re going to have to work.
From what I’ve seen of a lot of young women, stuff like make-up, nails, new clothes are non-negotiable monthly expenses like food or rent, in addition to other FUN expenses like restaurants, festivals, and traveling.
Tiresome status: It’s all so.
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On the one hand its a natural thing. If the parents are doing really well, making sure their kids are comfortable (and, more directly, making sure their beloved Katie never has to do porn or shack up with a drug dealer) is what they would do as an extension of their established role.
The second/third order effect of "Katie now expects to live in a 5000 square foot house and drive a late-model SUV and will reject anyone who can't offer that" is a little harder to see.
The very SECOND I hear that a woman has left the country on vacation more than once (with the exception of Mexico travel, I guess), I pretty much know my chances have dropped to negligible.
I guess maybe this is another thing where my background influences what I've seen, but as far as I can tell I've never been on a date with a woman who had this kind of lifestyle. Especially the "looking for a man to offer that almost seems like looking not only for a provider who can add meaningfully to the dual household income, but looking for a man who can bankroll an entire lifestyle, and I've genuinely never encountered that. Together we can afford these lifestyle choices is familiar to me; marriage after all has financial advantages. But this is the sort of thing that appears deep into a relationship, not up front.
Is this a lower-middle-class/upper-middle-class split thing? Regional? I've tended to date people who come from modest households.
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Marie Antoinette was not responsible for the opulence of Versailles, and probably hated it. Her palace at Petit Trianon is the least blinged-out part of the whole complex.
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