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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 triumvirate of childcare, housing, and healthcare is the problem. This is pretty clear to me. These are all affected by genuine Baumol effects, but they are also severely compounded by government intervention.
Welfare makes everything more expensive for everyone who isn't getting welfare. Not only do we pay taxes (or inflation) for it, but also people who previously wouldnt have competed for a good, mainly those three + food, now compete and bid up the price of those goods. Heck, unemployed people now often have new SUVs via some magic. The working poor is basically extinct. They simply dont work. The stockers at my local grocery store make enough money to afford everything a person needs. A trustable babysitter for me to go see a movie with my wife is either several hundred dollars or its my in laws doing a favor. People who should be doing childcare and other trusty work now do crappy work because the crappy people just leech off the system and dont work at all. And we subsidize that, heavily.
Immigration also changed housing, of course. Along with your social trust points.
Crime changed things. Crime is now statistically quite low, but its more random. I have had my car burgled twice for, in absolute terms, basically nothing. They stole my quarters and my kids car candy. But, it feels unsafe to have kids in a place where people break into cars. So I had to move. Now my housing is more expensive and all my neighbors have ring cameras, I might pony up for one if it happens in the new place.
And I think affirmative action (and related, student VISAs/H1B) changed a lot of this too. In a world prior to it, me and all my siblings probably all get good deals to go to local universities. I certainly should have been offered a full ride scholarship to the flagship state school instead of having to forum shop the whole country given the fact I had a crazy good ACT and SAT and won the state chemistry competition. Instead they insisted I pay full freight. Same happened to my siblings, so now we live in 3 different states, because we went to schools in 3 separate states. My parents moved to where my sister lives(did she is moving). In a less manipulated world we probably stay together, at least in part. Perhaps one of us gets into an Ivy and takes a decade to move back to the area, or maybe never, but its still probably the one who left staying where their partner's home base is. A familial home base is awesome and now increasingly rare.
Lastly, for me, for now, is the just dumb things. I can populate this section with many things I think are just dumb, like most humanitarian aid (which I feel many people here are in favor of and will defend my position if questioned). But again its a tax. I will respond to any random program you think is good and tell you if I think it is also good or why I think it is not.
What about WIC?
Opposed, assuming it's the formula program I'm thinking of. While every welfare program will have success story outliers, one can not support self licking ice cream cones as a general principle.
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