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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.
I'm almost afraid to jinx myself, because I have such a good thing going, but I'm eternally grateful my wife and I made it through so many trials and tribulations. We survived losing jobs, lockdowns, health issues, values drift, relocating. Then the usual things like having kids, buying a house, etc. I truly don't know what I'd be doing with my life without her and the life we've built together.
All that said, somehow, I'm making 50% more in take home pay than my last job, and yet with a stay at home mom and two kids, my budget is stretched thinner than it's ever been stretched before. I heard some random anecdote/joke on a woodworking channel. Dude knew some guy who had 6 kids, and he asks how he can afford so many. Guy says "Well 6 kids costs the same as 3 kids". Dude just goes "WTF?!" and guy responds "No matter how many kids you have, they cost everything". And that's about right. No matter how much money you make, there always seems to be something the kids "need", or in many cases need. Like being kept out of public schools run by fucking machines.
It’s because there’s a lot of talk about the devaluation of the dollar, and everything’s more expensive, etc., which is all true to some degree. I’ve continued noticed the cost of food prices steadily creeping up in ways that have caught me by surprise; because they haven’t plateaued yet; and likely won’t come down in the future. Input prices are becoming more expensive. What’s almost never acknowledged though is lifestyle inflation. Just consider the way people live today and what they expect from the world.
When I reflect on my life growing up, my sibling and I were spoiled pretty rotten early on by our extended family and especially grandparents. My father did quite well and made enough money for my mother to stay at home. She never had a job in her entire life. Taken care of by dad and then by husband. But my father was pretty tight with money and what he considered a “necessity.” Not really when it came to his own personal habits the way I saw it, but definitely where it concerned my sibling and I. Car needs to be fixed? Did it himself. Including changing the head gasket by himself. Home cooked meals every night. No eating out. I went to public school (hated it). We can get by without a fancy private school. Networking to move us into a place leased by a family friend. Rent was lower than the market rate. Across the board. How many people would you say on average operate with that kind of mentality today?
Lots about that life is now illegal or made impossible. Car needs to be fixed? Modern cars now transmit real-time diagnostic data wirelessly directly to the manufacturer. If you have an issue that needs to be fixed, you need to take it to an official shop because the manufacturer will not tell you what the diagnostic data says. Also, car electronics and machinery have been intentionally made difficult to repair without highly specialized knowledge.
How many fights broke out at your public school a week? My high school had about 3-5 fights a week in in the hallways and cafeteria. From my understanding, that number only goes up depending on where you live. And that was actually a pretty good school, where I was able to attend mostly AP classes and learn real things (though the graduating senior class was 2/3 the size of the freshman class due to dropouts.) A decent public school where your kids actually learn to read beyond a third grade level without being in physical danger is expensive. It costs a house that might be 2x the median home. Private school or homeschool is often cheaper these days.
It is hard to overstate the effects of enshittification on everything over the past 20 years. Would people have put up with a car that couldn't be repaired at home when you were a kid? But somehow today there are few options for cars without these electronic contraptions intentionally designed to make it hard to repair.
I think you either have a definition of 'modern' that's like ten years in the future, or are just wrong -- the newest car in my stable (wife's) is three years old and I can work on it just fine. In particular, engine-related jobs (eg. head gasket) are basically no different than they were in the sixties. (or the Grapes of Wrath, for that matter)
On-board diagnostic computers, while not without their foibles, actually tend to make life easier than in the past so long as you are prepared to spend fifty bucks on a scan-tool; furthermore Youtube + brand specific forums mean that the chances that someone somewhere has done the exact job you are contemplating and documented it in detail online are very near to 100%. (unless you are driving something really weird or it's been altered from the factory state previously)
On the whole, fixing your own car has never been easier -- and I've been doing that since high school in the 90s, dealing with vehicles produced ~1969-2023 and resources ranging from dusty manuals in the physical library to youtube and pirated factory literature from shady Russian sites. (most recently a full engine-out rebuild on my kid's 2016 -- precipitated by enshittification of engine design due to EPA fuel-efficiency standards, but I digress)
If you can get a scan tool it's not the same situation I'm describing. Lots of auto manufacturers now send data to their own servers instead of keep diagnostic information on the car. Then if an auto-repair shop wants to access it, they can't just scan the car, they need the auto manufacturer to provide it. EV manufacturers do not even have OBD ports. Other manufacturers like Nissan have blockers that keep you from clearing codes or running bi-directional tests. https://dobkinlaw.com/trapped-by-the-tech-why-congress-is-battling-automakers-over-your-right-to-self-repair/
I've also had a car where everything is poorly accessible, and that accessing certain parts of the engine require specialized tools or taking the whole thing apart. Increased safety measures have made crumple zones bigger and bigger, which means the engine, transmission, turbochargers, and emissions equipment need to be packed into a tinier and tinier footprint. The smaller the footprint becomes, the more things you have to remove between you and the alternator you're trying to replace. Audi designed many of its vehicles so that the entire front clip of the car must be unbolted and slid forward into a special "service position" before anything could be replaced up there.
"it’s the fast-approaching reality of vehicle ownership" (from the article) -- maybe, but I can't see anybody saying that this is happening now? (A quick google on "nissan blocks clearing codes" doesn't turn anything up, for instance)
A standard OBDC tool will still do most reasonable things on most cars -- whatsmore, it's actually way easier to get a factory-equivalent bidirectional tool than it used to be due to bootleg Chinese stuff that plugs into a laptop. For GM, you've needed a Tech2 for bidirectional communication for about 30 years -- these used to cost $10k, now you can get a $100 dongle from China.
Not sure this is true (a light googling seems to suggest that North American manufacturers use a standard port), but if so it's another good reason not to buy an EV (or that EV, if it's limited to (say) Tesla)!
This has been a common bitching point since sub-compact Japanese cars started replacing enormous American boats -- I don't love it, but the existence of drawling hillbillies on Youtube who show you the real way to do these jobs (as opposed to what the service manual tells you) has improved the situation immensely.
I'm going to display my ignorance for all to see but it serves a point. If this is so difficult for someone with the intellectual curiosity of the average Motte-goer, imagine how much harder it is for the the average schmuck.
About a year ago my 2017 Chrysler Pacifica started overheating after about 15 minutes of driving . We took an overheating problem pretty seriously so my husband brought it into the local mechanic. He's good, the best in my small town as far as everyone is concerned. He went over it, used a diagnostic thingy, did a couple tests, said it was one thing. Ok, he replaced that one thing and my husband drove it home. It worked ok for a while.
After about a week, it started overheating again. We took it back, mechanic did another look around, said something else needed to be replaced. That probably both things needed to be replaced to start, but the second thing didn't show up on the diagnostic tool until after the first one was replaced and the error cleared. Ok, we let him replace the second thing, all we had to pay was parts, he did the labor for free since he didn't get it right the first time. A week later, it started heating up again. We took it into the official dealership and a couple days later received back a car that hasn't acted up since.
Maybe we were taken for suckers by the most trusted and competent mechanic in town. That's a possibility. But the thing that seems more likely given the close-knit nature of our community is that the problem was too opaque and difficult to diagnose for someone in the top 1% of car mechanics in my town. And if that's the case, average schmucks have very little hope. Why should I bother trying to learning how to work on my car when someone who works on cars full time couldn't figure it out?
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