generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

As for economics, well, perhaps Abe doesn't want too many people familiar with that quote Keynes attributed to Lenin: “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.”

http://nytimes.com/2015/09/14/upshot/gaps-in-alumni-earnings-stand-out-in-release-of-college-data.html

a strong contender for the worst thing i've read all week

http://www.vox.com/2015/9/8/9261531/professor-quitting-job

Critiques of my teaching and debate team coaching, often made through backchannels and delivered to me secondhand or not at all, centered on my easygoing personal style (He doesn't use the title "doctor!" He teaches in T-shirts!), my effusive student evaluations (If he's pleasing them, he must be doing something wrong!), and my relatively calm demeanor (If a young academic doesn't seem stressed beyond capacity, he's not working hard enough!).

yes these were definitely the critiques made

hmm looking at his previous work, I am sure you could top that pretty easily xp

"Why I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Clickbait" in The Good Men Project Magazine, February 2014

"Masculinity and Competitiveness: Why I Quit Playing Video Games" in The Good Men Project Magazine, February 2014

"Rick Rude: The Loneliness of the Above Average Man" in The Good Men Project Magazine, December 2013

"So What if Barack Obama is Gay?*" in The Good Men Project Magazine, November 2013

what's your biggest weakness?

that's a difficult question, but i suppose that if i had to, i'd say that i can sometimes care TOO much about this company.

http://thebaffler.com/salvos/study-total-depravity

But Veblen did not call Veblen goods “me goods”

heheheh

Mission creep is driven by student demand (the terrible reality that America has no use for non-degreed workers any more)

This isn't necessarily true. Iirc, college enrolment has declined for three consecutive years and isn't predicted to grow again until 2017 at the earliest. The next ten years of growth are predicted to be relatively modest. When the economy is reasonably robust, a lot of people go straight into employment. The big growth years tend to coincide with recessions. For-profit colleges have been the worst hit due to a (necessary) increase in regulatory scrutiny and questions over vfm.

The economic analysis in that article sounds pretty questionable in places.

Also, the word "loan" is conspicuously absent from the article although it's probably the main driver of college cost. Veblen good or no, a 120k "discount" price would appeal to far fewer status chasers if there weren't a virtually bottomless well of credit available with few of the limitations affecting other forms of credit.

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/

The biggest problem we face is not financial illiteracy. It is compound interest.

In the coming decades, the returns on 401(k) plans are expected to fall by half. According to an analysis by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a drop in stock market returns of just 2 percentage points means a 25-year-old would have to contribute more than double the amount to her retirement savings that a boomer did. Oh, and she’ll have to do it on lower wages.

I am 35 years old—the oldest millennial, the first millennial—and for a decade now, I’ve been waiting for adulthood to kick in. My rent consumes nearly half my income, I haven’t had a steady job since Pluto was a planet and my savings are dwindling faster than the ice caps the baby boomers melted.

I don't understand this. I've recently begun working at a Portuguese callcenter. This is not the best job in the world, it's probably pretty low in the hierarchy of jobs in Europe, wage is lower than any job in Denmark, but it's steady, and I'd never think to spend half my income on rent. This guy has enough experience and network to get a "highline" article on huffpost but he's unable to land a steady job?

Dunno, maybe things are just terrible in the US.

The rent situation here depends very much on where you live. Even the outskirts of popular cities can be expensive.

I'd never think to spend half my income on rent.

congratulations?

Average take-home pay in the UK is something like £1700. Average rent is something like £850-£900. In London that is £2200 and £1600 respectively.

Obvs that includes rent on multi-occupier properties as well but I’d be surprised if anyone other than the fairly wealthy renting in the south of England is living on their own and spending much less than half their income on accommodation.

Twenty years ago I was living on $18K a year but my rent (apartment with a couple of roommates, suburb of a popular city) was just under $300 a month, so $800 a month for the whole place. Just looked on Zillow and apartments of similar size in my old neighborhood are now renting for $2500 and up. So yeah, people who live there are spending half their income on rent unless they've got a lot of income for a young person.

if i were paying the rent on the one bedroom apartment i share with my wife by myself i would be paying 50 percent of my wages on rent + utilities. my apartment is a coupe of hundred dollars cheaper than the average one bedroom in the city, i have a 9-5 office job at a university.

good story, thanks whenuweremine.

This guy has enough experience and network to get a "highline" article on huffpost but he's unable to land a steady job?

yup!

lol yes exactly

nothing matters

with a little luck tho the huffpo check'll come by easter

Dunno, maybe things are just terrible in the US.

Wait til you hear about our healthcare system...

sry to hear about crazy rent everybody, that's terrible!

just to clarify I rent a very small room and spend about 25% of my income on this - renting an apartment on my own would easily cost 50% of my income (so I don't, would be nice tho)

btw I know it's hard to come by steady jobs in journalism, I was suggesting that with the author's skillset it would seem he'd be able to land a different kind of job, pretty sure he could have my job if he applied

anyway, I don't mean to dismiss issues of poverty in the US, just found the author's tone... a bit much. Iirc pay gap and poverty issues have a terrible racial and gender slant, something about his apocalyptical victim narrative abt college educated millenials seems off to me. Not sure how trustworthy the US Census Bureau is but general outline in this article seems realistic to me https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493751949/census-bureau-poverty-rate-down-median-incomes-up

Hobbes is from Seattle where the average rent in commuting distance on a 1br apartment is $2000. To hit the 25% mark, after federal taxes, etc, you’d need to earn $120k - of course he would still need to pay for healthcare, etc, which we do not. idk what the ratio of millennials to $120k jobs in Seattle is.

Renting a room, sharing a house, etc are all solutions to existing in a big city but the broader point about living in those conditions being a bar on a transition to doing ‘adult’ things like getting married, having a family...buying a table?…, etc is true. Living a perpetual student lifestyle is great if you enjoy it but generational expectations are being radically redefined.

Whiny millennials have access to the public ear in a much more obvious way than the people who bear the greatest burden of poverty but the contraction of the traditional middle class and expansion of paycheque-to-paycheque living aren’t things that we should be glossing over because other people have it worse.

French owners are allowed by law to avoid renting to you unless the rent is at most 1/3 of your income, and in practice they take advantage of this, because French law makes it hard to kick someone out when they can't pay. so when we moved here we had to live 1h20 by train from the city. granted, we are a family of 5, and so need a bit of space (~70 m^2 works) but yeah, living in the city was impossible then.

now we live in the city because we got social housing (being gov employee with a long commute & big family got us priority). but to qualify for this *highly* subsidized apartment my salary still had to meet the 1/3 threshold and my starting salary did not, so we had to wait a year and a half to be eligible for social housing.

living in the countryside & commuting wasn't that bad because I picked a town where I could commute by train (we didn't need a car bc French villages are compact for daily life)(and half my transport costs were paid by my employer, by law). USA countryside doesn't permit this, so you're talking long car commutes there if you're not in the city.

Accounting for inflation, I spend twice as much a year on a train ticket as my (poor, immigrant) father spent on renting a two bedroom Victorian flat with a huge garden in central London in the eighties. The flat would rent for a minimum of £36k-£40k a year now. And I’m lucky! I own a house!

What was his internet speeds like

those are very good points ShariVari, thanks

The ratio of Millennials to $120k salaries in Seattle is heavily influenced by the proliferation of software developers working for Amazon et alia. Which is to say there’s a sizable supply of kids willing to rent a studio for $2000.

every generation has seemed to rationalize selling out their potential and playing dumb in exchange for hypothetical material security, not just millenials, the poor kids

When you say something like that

Do you ever I mean ask

Assuming it even makes any sense as a statement never mind that it's accurate let's just assume in your head this is a coherent sentence and also a fact

Assuming that and don't forget you just made an ass out of u and ming then do you ever ask yourself why each generation does this thing you think they do

U ok hun

I feel like that highline article dilutes its own argument by ultimately turning out to be about every bunch of Americans who ever graduated college during a major recession.

eh i'll take it, all that damn "milleniums are the worst" clickbait trash needs to be countered a little bit

U ok hun

― But doctor, I am Camille Paglia (Bananaman Begins), Monday, 18 December 2017 01:21 (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Read it aloud babes it might make more sense if it doesn't that's cool too x

yeah average rent is like 2 K in vancouver now, it's fucking bunk. also same as jim i'm in a decent rent sitch but it's easy to put half the cheque towards rent

I live in a pretty small basement apt in Toronto and I spend about 40% of my take-home on rent.

ah, here, this is the thread

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/us/college-admissions-cheating-scandal.html

Ray Liotta [V/O]: https://t.co/LR71RqUMIx

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) March 12, 2019

https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-millennialgen-z-strategy

I’ve written extensively about student loans, and the broken state of the student loan forgiveness program, here. That piece was the first thing I wrote after the original millennial burnout article, because it was the most tangible expression of the gap between what millennials were told their future would look like, if only they worked hard enough, and the lived, post-Recession reality. To understand millennial burnout, you can’t just understand the amount of student loans we’re carrying; you have to understand what they feel like. And if and when you understand that, it’s incredibly straightforward to see why so many support Sanders and Warren.

Back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, middle-class boomers and young Gen-Xers were faced with the reality that their parents’ broadly stable middle-class existence would not necessarily pass down to them. The so-called Golden Age of American Capitalism had lasted just long enough that those who grew up under it could believe that it might last forever. They responded to the decline in stable middle class jobs in a number of ways: many of them, too, went to college, but because public institution funding had yet to be gutted by tax cuts, it cost much, much, much less. (Cue: your boomer uncle who loves to tell you he worked his way through college and graduated without loans).

But as Barbara Ehrenreich persuasively argues in Fear of Falling, they responded by turning decisively inward: how can I do whatever is possible to help me and mine?

in hindsight, this was all very predictable. if the capitalist class wanted to keep the american population on board with their system, they should have allowed them to be part of it, not puffed them up with expectations and then let out the air.

it doesn't seem like they ever act in their long term class interests, honestly. their whole model relies on the american consumer, yet they are always trying to chip away at people's power to buy and invest.

Introspective Twitter thread untangling conflicted feelings about financial dependence on his parents:

a few days ago i took a medium dose of acid and wrote for several hours straight and admitted some things to myself, mostly about money

let's start here: last august my mom gave me $100,000 for my birthday. i resented her for this and also suppressed the resentment

— Magnificent Adult Baby (@QiaochuYuan) July 15, 2021

My heart breaks for him for receiving a gift of $32k more than the median household income of an American family.

“A few days ago I took a medium dose of acid and wrote for several hours…” pic.twitter.com/jKRUx9bC1c

— Bimböcalan (@baddielaire) July 16, 2021

let's start here: ask your mom for another $100K, then donate it all directly to people via mutual aid. then christ will come back and you will reign for 100,000 money years

http://files.pensadorcristao.webnode.com.br/system_preview_detail_200000056-6a2606a9fc/mike-murdock.jpg