This is cultural bias spoken as though it’s universal
Plenty of fulfilling lives out there that don’t include home ownership, being a parent, having secondary schooling or being partnered with offspring.
Plenty of fulfilling lives out there for any conceivable metric, it doesn't mean that the article is incorrect.
For me, home ownership nor children would be part of my “ideal middle-class existence” quite the opposite. I want stable housing, I don’t necessarily want to own it and all the burden that comes with ownership, and I definitely did not and still do not want responsibility over bring a child into the world. Thankfully, my wife agrees.
If we were to even approach a definition it might be something like “Do you have stable housing, access to nutrition, hygiene, transportation, etc. while also having enough capital resources and time to achieve your personal goals?” And that’s going to look different for everyone.
While I won't deny there are some problems currently, I think people comparing where they start to where others end is a huge mistake and leads to a lot of unnecessary anguish.
Someone in their 60s is supposed to be doing better than someone in their 20s. They had 40+ years to work and save. If they did it right, that will put them in a better position than a 20 year old... just like that 20 years old should be in a better position when they are in their 60s. It would be pretty disheartening if people in their 20s saw that it just gets worse.
I think some people in the comments are thinking you are saying they could outright buy a house straight out of school! (Which in a way might be a symptom explained in the article!
College educated women marry at the same rate they used to. They marry similarly earning men without collage degrees, who exist.
Marriage rates collapsed among non educated women/men. Complete collapse is among previously incarcerated men who are largely out of marriage market. And generally among poor.
But like, college educates women are the demographic that do marry.
What seems to happen is that if the marriage does not work, they tend to ve at the loosing side of it and have real option to leave.
When I was a kid I used to think that theives would break through my windows and steal my TV. Now that I'm an adult, I realize I'm being robbed daily through legal channels.
> Half of recent US inflation due to high corporate profits, report finds
2. None of the examples GP listed has anything to do with high corporate profits
I read a lot on this particular topic and this is a little too narrow of a reading. There is a more dominant trend - women and men are drifting apart culturally faster than they are economically. Men who keep pace culturally can get away with falling behind economically, and, to a lesser degree, vice versa. But you can't fall behind on both and expect to find a lot of women interested in dating or marrying you.
All three are dangerous partners to have. Simple rationality implies avoiding them.
If kids flock to Andrew Tate, the problem are not the kids, nor their gender, but society as a whole must have fucked up enormously and failed 50% of the human population.
Generalising comments like yours ruin lives and you should feel ashamed about it. Sadly, you can find them on the front page of any left-of-centre newspaper.
It was hard to take the rest of the article seriously after reading this.
In 1975, the single motherhood rate was 15%. In 2015, it was 40%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_parents_in_the_United_S...
"communities like their own,"
In 1970, the US was 83.5% non-Hispanic White. In 2020 it was 57.8%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
"and would speak English as a first language"
In 1980, Spanish speakers were 5% of the US. In 2024, it was 13.9%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States...
So the claims are factual. Do you just object to pointing it out?
https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/?speaker=johann-kurtz
"Johann Kurtz is a legacy adviser and succession strategist, helping individuals and families to arrange their affairs towards lasting good. He is a Substack bestseller, and his blog Becoming Noble – on philosophy, theology, and history – is read by tens of thousands each week. He recently published a book titled Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity & Thousand-Year Families which reveals that true charity is a multi-generational project—and that virtuous family dynasties are its indispensable guardians. It equips leaders to embrace this sacred duty and forge a legacy they will be forever proud of."
Here is the substack, Becoming Noble:
https://becomingnoble.substack.com/
"Build family, resources, and security as the West declines. Get the weekly email to join the new elite." and "Our old ways have been forgotten. Subscribe to learn them again."
* * * *
> For example: an American family in 1975 could send their children to public school on the assumption that the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families, communities like their own, and would speak English as a first language.
I've read about family decline going back decades, maybe forever. I strongly doubt the first language of children affects other kids' educations - except maybe exposing other kids to new languages and perspectives. Kurtz includes no specific claim about and no basis for the state of these issues or their impacts. It's all just implied, a dog whistle: Who are these other people?
> My argument is that previous generations received an enormous stock of social capital: trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam and adults could be relied upon
In the latter, I think a lot of those things would be news to prior generations, and of course you can read people in any generation in history decrying current failure of morals (which I think means, it's not like the idealistic views I formed in my childhood).
And he even cites fictional, rose-colored nostalgia as evidence (quoting Scott Alexander):
> The childhood depicted in nostalgic media rested on a dense web of adults who knew each other, shared a rough moral sense, and could be relied upon to mind each other’s children. That web is now a feature of particular places (often expensive places) rather than a general inheritance, and discerning which places have kept it is of key importance for families hoping to raise agentic children with deep networks of trusted friends.
And there are things that rest on speculation:
> The socializing that happened in parks, neighborhoods, boy scouts, etc. now must happen in the private domain.
Why? I see plenty of kids in parks and neighborhoods, in all sorts of neighborhoods in cities. It also ignores where much childhood socialising takes place now: Online.
And he also seems to verge into incel territory, again without saying the quiet part out loud:
> Women now substantially outnumber men on university campuses and outpace them in degrees earned, yet the preference for husbands who match or exceed a wife’s income and education has not correspondingly relaxed. ... For a regular man, this implies that becoming marriageable now requires clearing exceptional bars: a degree (with the debt that comes attached) and an income well above the male median (also — 6ft, muscular physique, etc. etc.).
I read: those women ruining everything by getting educations and careers, and declining to do free menial labor for men!
> Move the at-home spouse into the labor market and every service she provided must be repurchased from the latest private equity roll-up (nursery, takeaway, cleaner, security system…).
Second and more fundamentally, most people know neoliberalism fucked us. Like, not just that we're at the end of a typical cycle, but that what predated it was better. That's why the middle is falling out of western politics and populism is rising: voters are bitter, angry, and looking for the next thing. It turns out you can't turn everything--romance, friendships, caring for children, education, health care, free time--into a (preferably unregulated) market and still have a functioning society.
Third, we have to ban social media, and here I mean any communications platform where you can farm engagement and virality (Reddit is social media because there's a feed and engagement metrics; Usenet and forums are not). This seems like a wildly hot take, but the truth is we should ban video news; only banning social media is a huge concession.
Fourth and finally, don't fall into the "make America great again" trap. Pick a decade and I'll point out some insane awfulness: Jim Crow, marital rape wasn't a concept until the 80s, homophobia, OPEC, Vietnam, the Cold War, unbelievable pollution, smoking literally fuckin everywhere, etc etc. Going back isn't an option.
It's hard, but we can do hard things. I actually think we're in a really exciting time. We've never had more resources, we've never been better at making decisions (honestly just read about Robert McNamara), and we're newly unburdened by a prevailing orthodoxy. If we do it right, the next era could be really incredible.
(Interestingly the cost of housing in the Bay Area back then - late 1980s - was the same as that Rust Belt city; we almost ended up there.)
You realize that your comment reads like "well, actually things shouldn't be getting better over time"
I, for one, completely disagree.
I don't want to get too specific here for privacy reasons, but I believe the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out and getting an apartment right away during/after college. With almost zero real expenses outside my student loans, and the median software engineer salary for the region, I was able to save enough for a down payment after just a couple years. I did this because I disliked the idea of having no equity and paying rent to offset someone else's mortgage instead of saving for my own. My parents really liked that reasoning.
In many respects I'm fundamentally an outlier, yet once I bought mine, my peers with much lower incomes started doing the same after I explained the financials. When they actually sat down and calculated the mortgage payments, they realized it wasn't that bad, as long as they got something on the smaller side, which is still bigger than an apartment anyway.
To be clear, housing costs were crazy and still are. But I sense "crazy" is pretty relative when talking to people online from other countries. Housing in the US is expensive, especially compared to various convenient periods within the last 100 years. But even now, it's not the unrealistic back-breaking dream it seems to be when I talk to Europeans about it, and I suspect that's why so many Americans on social media overestimate the costs.
It was very clever of you to choose to be born to tolerable parents with enough spare cash to let you live with them and save up, rather than jerks or even just poor parents that needed your help as soon as you got a job.
Isn't this exactly "spend the youthful years struggling and get to enjoy the fruits when you are older"? ;)
I’m the only person in my friend group able to afford a house in the foreseeable future and that’s been because of various strokes of luck (and some hard work of course).
My wife’s situation is the same. We’re all in our 30s.
And we’re talking any house here. Not the ridiculously expensive ones in major cities.
Som have confided in me that this feels hopeless, things keep getting more expensive, money keeps feeling like it’s worth less etc.
The general feeling at this point is past resentment with them. It’s more of accepted hopelessness.
That’s an incredibly new, and probably temporary, phenomenon.
Across the vast majority of space-time the non-working elderly are poorer than their still working children and rely on them.
As late as the Greatest Generation senior discounts weren’t a sick joke.
Currently, the barrier to entry has never been lower, and the access to information has never been better. I don't see either of those things changing any time soon.
Of course, even with that, basic financial literacy with younger generations seems to be at an all time low. The finger pointing on that could go in many directions.
Strongly doubt the xennials will be as rich in twenty five years as 79 year olds are now.
That an ungenerous and frankly dismissive reading of the article.
Joe asked his dad for the $15k loan to start a business, not go on vacations. He used his dad's retirement lifestyle as a goal for his future retirement. He used his dad's historical entrepreneurship as his current goal of starting a modest small business. Nobody of sound mind would even think you could live like a retiree on $15k.
Joe's own dad wasn't even as dismissive as you're being. He denied the loan because he considered it a form of coddling his son. There's no evidence in the article he thought his son would use it to attempt to live his retirement lifestyle.
Edit: clarifications
But I also think that attitude is a load of shit.
Early on in the 1980's I went to a community college to get the first couple of years of college out of the way. I sublet a room from a single woman (probably her landlord had no idea) and I rode a 10-speed bike between a pizza restaurant I worked at and the community college (yeah, sucked in the Kansas winter-time).
Later, at a university, I was able to work as a dishwasher at a dorm and pay my way through college.
But there's probably no way my kids can do the same 40 years later.
It would be, to me, a tragedy if our kids only finally "make it" when their parents die and all our assets are cashed in and divided among them. For myself, this would have come at a time when I didn't need the windfall.
I'd rather help them out now as they are trying to climb the ladder to homeowner, etc.
(It sure would have been nice if one of my parents could have forked over the cash to buy me that Macintosh Plus back in 1986. Alas, a student loan I was nervous to apply for did the trick.)
Cost and necessity of permits for renovations plus re-asessment of property after renovation for tax increase means every path forward is much more expensive than it would have been in decades past.
(I'm not trying to detract from the thrust of your comment though! I'm describing a dynamic of coping rather than sustaining)
1. corporate consolodation - the only promise of capitalism is that competition lowers prices. Competition is at an all time low.
2. economics and the fallacy of unlimited growth. We live on a finite size planet, and every company is acting as though it expects 10% growth to increase forever. If demand increases and supplies dwindle thats one large prevailing force that would mask as inflation.
The establishment and universities are failing us as they refuse to critically study and address these major conceptual issues.
The only promise of capitalism is that you are allowed to own capital. Competition and prices come from markets, not capitalism.
https://xcancel.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1750849189834022932
South Korea seems like a bit of an outlier, in the other countries it’s the women who are strongly moving left while the men show a weaker drift towards the right. So it doesn’t seem accurate to frame the divergence as men becoming far-right fascists. Would you take offence if I said women are becoming Stalinist communists? Neither framing seems accurate to me.
What I think is happening is that women are broadly swayed by social issues and men are more likely to be against mass immigration and focus more attention on the economy. At least that seems to be the case in my country (which isn’t on the graph). A small minority of men buy into the Tate far-right manosphere but I don’t think that’s responsible for the entirety of the shift, let alone the entirety of the shift on the men’s side.
Do you have a citation for this?
A lot of studies find evidence of the need for men to have a suitable income to be marriageable. I haven't seen evidence that just being culturally aligned is equally effective.
Another comment shows how private school enrollment has held steady or declined since ‘75. However it is true that public school enrollment has partly been eaten away by charter schools. However charter schools are the most diverse as they are most likely to be found in larger cities. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/06/us-public...
So like the op commenter I too found it hard to trust the rest of the article. I’m deeply inclined to agree with the conclusions however such a clearly motivated list of statistics, regardless of truth, as the #2 factor turned me off of the rest of the piece.
like_any_other•2h ago