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Millennials Set To Earn Less Than Generation X (bbc.com)
Reader AmiMoJo writes: Millennials are set to become the first generation to earn less than their predecessors, new research suggests. The Resolution Foundation found that under-35s earned 8,000 pound ($10,600) less in their twenties than Generation X workers. If wages for millennials follow the same path as Generation X, average career earnings will be about 825,000 pound ($1.1m). That would make them the first generation to earn less than their predecessors over the course of their working lives. Research found that some of the pay squeeze was due to under-35s entering the job market as the recession hit, but it also concluded that generational pay progress had ground to a halt even before the financial crisis struck in 2007/8.
Good!
Strange thing is that the people whom are the most positive to it are the ones with the most to lose and the ones with the most to gain. In the middles is us old folk whom already have a place to live and pension all set to go.
The generation after the long IT boom inaugurated in the early 1980s and finishing off in about 2001 is going to earn less than their predecessors. Color me unsurprised. We squandered the fruits of that on peak socialism. Now the long slide since 2008 will continue until some disruptive element creates economic opportunity. I'm not exactly holding my breath.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
They are bitching and protesting instead of working.
But what really matters is standard of living. Sure, they might make less money, but in the 1980s a cell phone cost thousands and barely worked, compared to what you can get for a few hundred bucks and $30 a month. Earning less money != worse life.
Im not surpriced. We live in a globalized world where the pay is vastly different depending on where you live, and then with the development of better software, AI and robots, you end up with a winner takes all economy. Fortunately if we can keep our democracy function for the next 20 years enough people will lose their job to globalization and automation that we will have a majority of people which will support some kind of UBI or negative income tax. There is no way around it. It has already begun.
...America is in slow economic decline.
payed for by the NON UNION workforce push that most retail and fast food places are for.
Good. It'll be the wakeup call the entitlement generation needs.
Most kids today have few if any marketable skills and are in piss poor physical shape and are unable to keep up with a demanding work environment.
Sad but true... the current generation is fucking worthless.
Time for IT unions!
There is plenty of money to be made if young people would stop squandering their youth.
Generation X had to learn how to make the things that the current generation just consumes today.
Having a computer in the early 90's or late 80's meant you had parents who cared about technology and spent a huge portion of their income to get it.
Despite the amazingly cheap and plentiful access to technology today to learn anything for almost nothing, the current generation spends the majority of their time watching YouTube and Netflix.
And they wonder why their income is low.
Gen X isn't dead yet. If you'd rather watch YouTube and be useless, we'll happily make buckets of money that you could be making as well.
Work Safe Porn
IMHO, these are the big issues causing this"
1) The wealth gap today is close to what it was in the "Roaring Twenties". /rant
2) College is in a bubble due to government subsidies; raising the cost of college for everyone
3) Entire industries are no longer being created like they used to (Railroad, Oil, Automobiles, Planes, Computers, etc...)
4) Technical innovation is just "Uber-izing" everything. Jobs that can be automated, will be. Companies of the future will just be a CEO and a CTO. Everyone else not creating or automating things will earn less and less income.
5) Globalization is feeding the wealth gap more so than ever before. The wealthy ruling class are turning governments into corporate oligarchies.
6) The career ladder is more about where you were born that what you can do. Meritocracy, to a large extent, is becoming more and more of a myth. If you were born in a rich neighborhood and go to a private school.
maybe if they stopped staring at their phones and catching cartoons instead of working, they would earn more
Absolutely agree, if only they used monochrome CRT tubes to stare at usenet they would have made so much more money.
When I grew up in the 80's I seem to recall hearing numerous times that we would be the first generation in history to do worse off than our parents. Perhaps due to gas prices hitting astronomical levels by now.
Far more millennials are going to university than any other generation. Guess what you don't do when you go to university? You don't typically make much money.
We will see what happens in 10 to 20 years, if this was a good or bad choice for them.
The money has been squandered on a perpetual war that began in 2001. As of 2013, the combined costs of the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were estimated at $4 trillion. That money equally divided amongst all Americans amounts to roughly $1000 / person / year.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Now I get why there are so many trolls about how "millenials" [suck/act entitled/can't code/aren't sociable/can't handle their emotions/etc], and also why the definition of "millenials" gradually expanded from people born in the late 90's all the way back to anyone born after 1975.
Though with all the money printing, it should be closer to $35/hr to maintain the same buying power as $5 around year 2000
Make no mistake, this didn't start with the Millennials. We started firmly down this path in the 1930s; WWII saved our grandparents, the cold war saved our parents, and the advent of the "Computer Age" saved Gen-X.
Unless the Millennials can pull a similar rabbit out of their hats, should it really surprise us that FDR's pyramid schemes (yes, plural) have finally run out of new suckers and can only head one way from here?
We not only earning less, we are being taxed up to two times more
This is the exact reason Brexit happened and why Trump will probably win. Living-wage jobs have been methodically destroyed on both sides of the pond by the greed-pig class. The result has been both the Oxbridge toffs and the Koch Brothers have completely lost control of the rabble they so easily roused over the last decade, paving the way for unhinged pricks like Farage and Trump.
To protect their ill-gotten gains, the neo-cons have also prevented natural inflation from occurring at the rates required to maintain that progression in earnings; since the recession a decade ago there has been an effective deflation of the USD.
The Resolution Foundation found that under-35s earned 8,000 pound ($10,600) less in their twenties than Generation X workers. If wages for millennials follow the same path as Generation X...
It sucks to reach adulthood during a deep recession. Not sure it makes sense to use that as a predictor of the future though.
Hopefully future administrations will realize that an economic boom is always followed by a bust. You aren't helping the country with bubbles like the stock market and housing ones that were set off in the 1990s.
...your music sucks and you dress like idiots!
Now get off my lawn!
All those jobs will be automated.
The real minimum wage is $0.
Yeah, why is the American media talking about a British study? (I've seen it in other media). Doesn't Britain have a different economy, taxes, health care, education, etc. than the United States? I would think this study to be of little relevance to the United States.
It's time to stop blaming this directly on politics and realize the nature of the economy is evolving, and that past economic patterns are probably dying.
Earning and employment problems are plaguing almost ALL "mature" (industrialized) nations, not just the socialistic or capitalistic nations. Switching to be more socialistic or more capitalistic is not solving it, at least not in terms of wages and job growth.
I believe a combination of automation, and easy access to cheap educated 3rd-world labor via the internet is the main culprit.
We may have to experiment to find solutions rather than keep fighting over doctrine. These experiments include but are not limited to:
1. Tariffs on "lopsided trade" countries to encourage them to normalize their currency and/or allow more local consumption. Dictatorial countries favor employing their population (so they don't riot) and disfavor consumption and/or outside products. We gotta push them harder, or they won't budge. Tariffs are not to start trade wars, but encourage balanced trade. Crank the tariffs up slowly, if they don't comply, to avoid market shocks.
2. Tax the rich to either provide subsistence for those without good jobs, and/or to stimulate the economy by putting more cash in consumer pockets.
3. "Helicopter Money", which is essentially printing more money and giving it to regular folks and/or spending it on infrastructure. Inflation has been lower than expected, suggesting there is enough spare capacity in the global economy to absorb more cash in an orderly fashion. (QE, a cousin of HM, mostly trickled into the rich, not down.)
4. "Make work" programs, such as cleaning up trash, landscaping, day-care, etc. Make-work programs, in part because of inefficient/outmoded office practices, have kept Japan's employment rate high, although arguably have stagnated economic growth: people in Japan can buy less, but at least have jobs. There may be a trade-off between jobs and stuff.
Most conservatives say that "less regulation" is the key. That's doubtful.
States that have tried it, such as Texas and Kansas have had very questionable results. While their unemployment rate has remained relatively strong; wages, infrastructure, medical, pollution, and education have suffered. They get slightly more employment but gut their state in exchange.
They are essentially competing with the 3rd world by becoming more like the 3rd world. I hope that's not our only option.
The problem is that calling something an "experiment" is political suicide. Voters want "decisive" leaders, not tinkerers; it's one reason why Trump has risen: "Mr. Do-it". But sometimes the right solution involves first admitting you have no ready answer.
Table-ized A.I.
The economy has been growing quite steadily over this period, including since 2008. If that new wealth was divided up among American workers in the same way it was in the 1980s, then millennials would be better of than previous generations.
So the problem is not that we need a disruptive source of economic opportunity, it is that the existing disruptive sources of economic opportunity are generating wealth that is simply accumulating among current holders of wealth, to the exclusion of new workers.
Incidentally, such an in-equal wealth distribution could not - by definition - occur if the USA was the socialist country you seem to think it is.
It really is not KSP. It is easy shit to understand.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Corrections:
Re: Most conservatives say that "less regulation" is the key.
Should be: "Most conservatives say that less regulation and smaller gov't are the key."
Re: "While their unemployment rate has remained relatively strong..."
Should be: "While their employment rate has remained relatively strong..."
Table-ized A.I.
I see a lot of "grumpy old man" posts (I'm 40 for context...) on this subject blaming entitlement and other reasons for this. I don't see it that way...I haven't run into any of the stereotypical Millennials with a capital M that the media describes -- remember, Generation X were supposed to be "slackers" in the 90s also. So, I don't think it's the people. I think it's the work environment. Work is very different from the golden age of the 50s through the 70s in the US...
- After WW II, a family could live comfortably on a single income, and there was a reasonably good chance someone could keep their job for life and/or be promoted from within and gain success that way. And this is any family -- from the janitor to the CEO (relatively speaking of course.)
- After the great corporate downsizing wave of the 90s, it was still possible to graduate from any college, with any degree in any field, and still find entry-level work. While it was less possible to do the single-income thing and required lots of sacrifice to do so, the opportunity existed.
- Now, entry level tech jobs don't exist or are done offshore or by H-1B labor. The economy has fully adjusted to two-earner families, so it's basically impossible to be a single-earner family unless you live in a really cheap part of the country (where, consequently, there are no jobs anymore.)
So, don't blame the Millennials. They're in a tough spot. I was very lucky in my early career to be able to work my way up from an entry-level support job to where I am now...that opportunity is much harder to come by now.
That means that less money can be made by businesses doing sales in the US. Now combine lower wages with a persistent inflation that is high enough that the public never gets a real number on the rate of inflation and in effect they are saying this new crop of workers will live and die in poverty. Are we having fun yet? Is the US the new Mexico?
Be warned, this is LONG, but it's not a rant, it's a summation. I've tried to edit it down, but I'm my own worst editor, I tend to write (and speak) long. So please bear with me.
OK, here's the deal: Some of you will think this belongs on infowars, or breitbart, or whatever the paranoid-consipiracist right-wingnut site du jour is. Others will think this belongs in motherjones, or huffpost, or whatever the paranoid-conspiracist left wingnut site du jour is. And I'm sure there's people who wrote "WHY IS THIS HERE?!@?!!", I just can't see them since I have no mod points today I'm reading at threshold=1.
Sad truth is both sides are playing us. This story is so whack it could pass for a legit Onion story!
The short of it: This guy Powell -- a Democrat, who served on the boards of 11 big companies wrote a memo in 1971 basically saying Academia was mounting an attack on Free Enterprise. This memo was sent to his buddy, the Director of the US Chamber of Commerce, Eugene Sydnor. Then Powell gets put in the Supreme Court by Nixon.
The result of the memo - which was kept secret from The People for a while - was the rise of Neo-Liberalism, that is, de-regulation, free-trade, and turning our economy from a production economy to a "services" economy - which really means "Financial" economy. Yeah. Banks rule us, and they crashed mightily in 2007-2008, and are still trying to put the pieces back together.
So this Powell memo becomes one of the factors that created the corporate culture we have today. Republicans and Conservatives get the blame, when the idea and first motions were from a Liberal Democrat.
Essentially, the result was the manipulation of media and Academia - through grants, through favors, through good old-fashioned cocksuckery - to shift the thinking of the People to thinking that Free Enterprise was a good thing, that Government shouldn't meddle with business (de-regulation). A number of think-tanks were established, that were pro-business and anti-socialist.
At the same time while all those pieces were put together, Nixon un-hitched the dollar from the gold standard, the 1973 and 1979 energy crisis happened, the economy tanked, and the rest of the 20th century was spent in a downard slope.
This neo-liberal foundation helped shape the Reagan economic policies, the whole trickle-down thing, the reduction of corporate taxes, etc.
By the 90's it looked like the slope had stopped, but in the early 00's it fell off a cliff and it's still doing so.
So yes, people - we got robbed by liberals, democrats, conservatives and republicans combined. But somehow the blame has been shifted to the conservatives, as if it is their fault for breaking the US.
Sources? Citations? Do your own reading. Start with the Powell Memo itself, then some Chomsky, and your own examination of the event past half century. Find out what think-tanks were created and what the spout. Find out what rules were taken out to let business "flourish." This is all out there, in the open, from sites and books that are both conservative and liberal. This is not a one-sided thing, folks.
It'll turn your stomach, it will, doing that kind of reading.
We got played, by both sides, but the foundation was a liberal foundation, upon which most of the economic policies of today were built on.
I don't believe any of these people. Not a one. Especially not Billary, and especially not Trump.
What do we do? Suffer quietly, England-style? Revolution? We're trapped, folks. And what happened here spread to other countries, so emigration to say, England, is not an option, things over there and in Europe are also whacked.
I think we're going to have to let this take its course. Let it burn, stand back and just let it burn. People already are hurting. People already have lost jobs and are having no luck in getting something like what they lost. And we're going to have to let it burn, and once it's all ashes, we'll build it again. But
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
but that at least looked like work.
Time to offend someone
In 1980 the long standing social contract in both the U.K. and U.S.A. was torn up. -- News at 11.
Debt is at the heart of it all.
Costs are usually determined (housing included) by "whatever the market will bare".
That "market" has been steadily corrupted by easy to get large loans people can't afford. As a result, prices for things (like houses) go up. Because most money is made off debt, the incentive is to continue down this path. However sooner or later... Stagnant wages, increasing cost of living, debt growing. Well, something will eventually give.
They will also have some of the highest costs for food essentials, property/housing etc in generations (outside of a war or the great recession).
Oh, and by "we", I mean "baby boomers". I'm gen X and wasn't old enough to vote when all this shit really started in the 80s.
I'm a boomer - but I voted against pretty much all of this stuff. And campaigned against it, too. Virtually nobody I ever voted for was elected.
As for the political institutions: The generations before ours held onto power until quite recently (and have bequeathed it to individuals who are their ideological colleagues among later generations). Their crooked lock on the voting process has kept them in power. Look at the ages of the congresscritters and presidents. Even Bill Clinton was a pre-boomer - conceived DURING WWII, and growing up in a cohort where children were scarce and pampered, rather than a flood to be "channelled" into government-approved career paths (by threat of the draft during the Vietnam adventure).
Don't fall for the "blame the boomers" line: It's another instance of the power elite playing divide-and-conquer, to cut you off from potential allies.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Must be magic. Older moderators moderating out millennials in a thread about millennials. Classic. I suspect, you will not miss millennials on this website as we will just move to our own blogs... but it was nice attempting to have a discussion here for the last 3-5 years. I am done.
The same thing has been said every time a new generation enters the workforce. It's complete BS and just scare tactics by some stupid reporter
It would have been more surprising if an growing population had an unlimited growth of wealth in a finite environment...
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Worth mentioning that the economy should be looked at as a global whole, not one country in isolation.....the global reduction in poverty and inequality has been dramatic. It's true that some industries in the US and England have suffered (textiles, for example), but overall the world has benefited tremendously.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Technical innovation is just "Uber-izing" everything. Jobs that can be automated, will be. Jobs that can't will be outsourced to contractors.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Indeed it could be the case that the gap between "industrialized" countries and "3rd-world" countries is narrowing due to communication technology evening out the playing field: we are stagnant while they grow.
But, rather than being a zero-sum game, I feel that with more stimulation of some sort, the tide will rise for both boats (rich and poor nations). Now that machines and 3rd-world labor are able and willing (at least able) to make more stuff, if we collective pour more cash and/or stimulus into the economy, then our natural desire for more stuff and services will juice the world economy as a whole.
For example, custom cars, landscaping, and interior decorating are in demand in "mature" nations. If the economy gets strong enough, more people will have money to purchase such local services. We'll be analysts, coordinators, and liaisons; while machines and the 3rd world labor do most of the repetitive and grunt work (perhaps remotely).
Table-ized A.I.
That study was done in Britain. I'm guessing the same study done in other parts of the planet would yield different results.
Globalization evens things out -- some go up, some go down.
No we didn't. We squandered it on a completely fabricated "War on terror", in which 9/11 was an inside job between The Bush Family, Saudis, and the MOSSAD. Later on we squandered it on a completely fabricated and false war in Iraq, and later moved on to various midddle eastern countries with impunity, killing state leaders, with this cartel desperately trying to take over the middle east and islam.
Fast forward, and the Muslim hating psy-op is failing. When their muslim psyop failed, the racist older generation in cartel began a psy-op to target Blacks in America. Their owned and mind controlling media, which mind control you every single day, is now on full blast, desperately trying for the last vestages of a new civil war in american, with blacks Vs whites.
If you ignored mainstream media for the last 16 years, congratulations! You we'rent mind controlled!
If you have watched the 'news' or visited a 'news site' in the last 16 years, I'm sorry, you've been mind controlled fully :( and will believe anything the cartel controlled media tells you, unquestionably.
I didn't say "stagnated" for TX and KS. Being "gutted" is not necessarily "stagnated". An extreme example would be a bustling 3rd-world town that has a lot of economic activity and jobs, but full of dirt roads, leaky infrastructure, bad schools, and is highly polluted. "Bustling" and "good" are not entirely the same thing.
But there could be tricky trade-offs between employment rate, infrastructure, and the ability to afford consumer goods. It may not be possible to optimize all 3 at the same time. Politics is the art of trade-off management.
However, the Japan suggestion was one of multiple. The other suggestions could perhaps reduce the down-sides of that one. It's like having several slider knobs: by setting the right level for each of the sliders, we could come reasonably close to optimizing all the typical metrics.
(Please note my nearby "corrections" reply.)
Table-ized A.I.
And yet houses are more and more expensive.
Oh, and by "we", I mean "baby boomers". I'm gen X and wasn't old enough to vote when all this shit really started in the 80s.
Its ok man. We will get those boomers back by putting them in shitty elderly care facilities and never going to visit them.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The billionaire ranks are swelling by the day. The Apples of the world hoard hundreds of billions. They just don't know what to do with that much money. It is unspendable.
One "study" from the Resolution Foundation established in 2005 which "aim is to improve the standard of living of low- and middle-income families."
These were the lunatics who voted for Obama despite all the warnings that the basic laws of economics meant the rest of their lives would be made miserable by it.
Obama racked up more national debt than all presidents before him COMBINED, and millenials cheered and hashtagged support for him as he did it. Debts must be repaid, and millenials will be paying interest of Obama's debt for the rest of their lives.
The people who deserve the sympathy are the minority of millenials who did not support Obama, but will be saddled by all that debt anyway.
Oh, and for the morons who never pay attention to facts: Obama's debts do NOT include the debts racked-up by Bush during the meltdown - Obama and the bookkeeping blame those on Bush who left Obama with a national debt of between 9 and 10 trillion depending on the exact accounting. Obama will leave Trump or Clinton about $20,000,000,000,000 of debt. Obama campaigned against Bush's record in 2008 saying that Bush's adding $4 trillion to the debt was "irresponsible and unpatriotic" and in the process made all his current supporters who claim Obama is being Blamed for Bush's debts into liars - Bush was blamed for Bush's debts during the 2008 campaign while they were already being accounted for and would continue to be accounted for as Bush debts until Obama took over. Bush is to blame for the debts racked up BEFORE Obama took over, not for the $10 trillion added by Obama.
One other inconvenient fact: in 2007 (the year before the meltdown) then-Senator Barack Obama and then-Senator Hillary Clinton both voted with all other senate Democrats (who controlled the senate) to not allow the Bush administration to do anything to prevent the reckless financial activities at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the two deceptively-named federal government home loan quasi-companies). A year later these entities (which have no legal government guarantees, but which were telling everybody they DID have a taxpayer-provided "safety net") were ground-zero of the meltdown. Obama and hillary both had a chance to vote on the meltdown and they both effectively voted to allow it. Bush had no legal authority to stop it and was blocked from getting the authority by Obama, Hillary and the other Democrats in the Senate. These are very inconvenient facts. You can look up the legislation at thomas.gov the open-government portal that Newt Gingrich created for congressional activity when he was Speaker of the House (so much for the lie that Republicans are technophobes).
Whilst it is true that WESTERN millennials are getting paid less than than parents generation, across the whole world, the opposite is the case. The raising of hundreds of millions from poverty in Asia and to a lesser extent Africa and Latin America means that the truth is far more complex. And this helps reveal the problem; given that increased competition from these areas exists, it is not a surprise if workers who are, in effect, in competition with these masses get to be paid less.
Which doesn't mean that our own people don't have a problem, but any explanation which focuses on it as an unalloyed BAD THING is defective. Yet that is the message that is being presented by Trump and echoed to a lesser extent by Hilary. The result could be nasty.
plus automation. That really is all there is to it. The Baby boomers had the advantage of the cold war keeping factories from moving overseas. I can't compete with Cancer Villages and people who lack food security. When I try my wages go down. Who know?
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This "The problem with Millennials is they're not constantly being berated for every failure" narrative that the right wing think tanks love so much? Educators. Real Educators who have studied how to improve people independent of whether the improvement increases some companies bottom line have found that children need lots and lots of positive reinforcement. In the absence of that they get conditioned to failure and start making unconscious decisions to sabotage themselves in order to bring their perception of themselves as failures with reality.
This encouragement (everybody gets a good star) is expensive and difficult, so you're run of the mill right wing think tank doesn't like it so much (since they're primary goal is to cut taxes, and most of this sorta thing goes on at public schools). But the outcome, while not as beneficial for the ruling class is _very_ beneficial for the working class.
Probably without realizing it (and probably completely in jest ) you're repeating a right wing talking point that's part of a larger conversation aimed at defunding public schools. Please, think before you post. The spread of this sort of uninformed nonsense is tearing down some of our most valuable institutions and puts guys like Trump in the forefront of our national politics...
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"Starve the Beast". It's part of a larger right wing conspiracy to defund public programs so that taxes can be cut. They're not even hiding it. I do wish crazy people hadn't cooped the word "conspiracy" because when a real conspiracy is going on (two or more people working together to do something bad) nobody will believe you. You don't even need to make a straw man. It's like there's one for you already...
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right here.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
if I could be guaranteed a job. A Buddy of mine once moved to one of those cheap places with lots of jobs (redacted for privacy reasons). He came with a job lined up. That job went away. No harm, no foul. He just grabbed the paper to get another job. Turns out all those job offers were different listings for the same few jobs (most were gov't contract jobs that were basically social programs, and after 30 years of tax cuts were few and far between).
Places like that are fly paper. You come in, put down a few roots and blamo, you're trapped. Now you've got a house a mortgage and kids in school. You can't just up and move. You try to sell that house but find out it's basically worthless because there's lots of folks with the same idea as you.
So if by "where it's at" you mean "reliable gainful employment" then yeah, everybody wants to live there.
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it's not even the boomers buying up the housing (not that it helps). The reason housing prices are skyrocketing is we're out of cheap, already developed land. You see, house builders don't run water lines, power lines, phone lines roads and Internet lines. That's all been paid for by that Tax Payer. Then they swoop in, use cheap Mexican labor to throw up a few houses and net a massive payday.
Well we've been cutting taxes and infra structure spending for decades. Since Reagan and that damn Laffer Curve crap with his voodoo economics. We're out of cheap land. The home builders aren't going to develop that land without the taxpayer footing the bill. So nobody's building (hardly anyway).
Behind every billionaire in the world is a whole mess 'o socialism. Dog eat dog capitalism for the poor, socialism for the rich.
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But don't be fooled into think gov't subsidies are what's making college a bubble. It's how the subsides are awarded. Instead of directly funding public Universities we guarantee expensive loans issued by the 1%.
Meritocracy has always been a myth. The fact is very few poor kids can make it without a _lot_ of outside help. Poverty doesn't motivate to escape, it crushes all in it's wake. Don't let the occasional genius freak of nature of random success story fool you there...
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You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
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More like generation lazy.
Welcome to the desert of lowered expectations!
Less economic opportunity == worse life. All the trinkets in the world mean nothing if you can't buy anything.
In that regard, less money does mean a worse life.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
If they could form plurals correctly perhaps they might get paid more.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So anyone talking about dollars or the labor (not labour) market probably hasn't read TFA.
They sewed everything up for themselves nicely. Get the next lot to come along and work for fuck all. Smart. Well done.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
By your own logic, this will be you in 20 years. Bookmarked.
What do you think caused the crisis?
I mean how far are all those idiotic liberal arts degrees going to take you? Anyone been able to get a job, outside of Starbucks, with that Womyn's Studies degree?
And it will only get worse. Our society is slowly moving to a slave labor scenario where the little people work just to barely survive while the executives rape the corporations with their exorbitant salaries and obscene bonuses and perks. Capitalism is a good thing, but Vampire Capitalism will ruin this country and reduce us to a third-world state.
From my experience and observation, Generation X-ers work Harder than Millennials. Millennials will settle for less. Maybe that focus, or dysfunction, or desire, or "self-esteem", or health, or greed, or something else.
Note to Millennials: a degree in Bio - Engineering may give you more return on investment than a Biology degree.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
GenX were first generation to not do better than parents:
http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2007/05/25/is-the-american-dream-alive-and-well
This was hidden by the fact that women were doing better than their moms, so from 2008 on, businesses started focusing all their marketing on selling things to women....
Look anybody that had a job in the '60s can tell about good times. In fact you had to run fast to keep a job from catching you. Along came the 70s and the fed started playing hard with the idea that fiat money is good thing. That's when it was trumpeted that the unions caused the inflation related problems. Enough people bought that and Saint Ronnie and friends fired PATCO. What that really was all about was the Teamsters Union retirement fund was larger than that of the favored Wall Street investment houses. That was something that had to be changed. So that money has been whittled away and with it the base pay of the average American worker. And the white collar workers rejoiced. Funny how the greatest generation understood (the 20 somethings that fought in WWII) knew what was going on. Having lived through the most drastic wage adjustment period.
When I 1st entered into the job market, a foreman I had would tell his workers (always in a one on one situation) to go on strike so he could get a raise. This guy was well qualified for upper management except for one thing, he was not related to anyone in upper management. Since then and prior to that time the best way to become upper management was to own the company you started or married into the the family that owned it. The odds of becoming a self sustaining millionaire are about the same as hitting a large powerball jackpot if your dad did not 'loan' a million in the 70s to get your business started. There has been change, but it has not been a good change for all .
That others have benefited is a reality that should be talked about appropriately. In a Christian influenced country, presenting this as a moral challenge to which we should all rise is valid. The problem is finding people who've been hurt by the economy to preach it; those of us who are comfortable will struggle to be credible. Yet the reality that both parties platforms are based on what they will do for those voting for them is, ultimately, unhealthy. It should be better than that.
Income and wealth inequality are non-trivial. The danger is that you kill the goose that lays the gold eggs of growing prosperity in much of the world. And certainly some income differentials are valid. If I'm someone who does earn my employer 5 figure sums, expecting me to accept five figure pay packets is unreasonable. Similarly it is the prospect of birthing a unicorn that makes people take the risk of setting up a new enterprise. Those unicorns are of real value to the wider world; however much we may disdain Microsoft, HP, Facebook and Google, they have objectively improved the world by the things they offer which weren't there before. OTOH destroying monopolies and taxing LAND - as opposed to buildings - as something that individuals shouldn't be able to bid up the price of, is a strategy we should recommend more.
Maybe the union you knew did but my union, AEMTC, does not have such a thing. We agree upon yearly wages for the length of the contract and that's it. I'm guessing you just wanna shit on unions so please don't let my facts adjust your narrative.