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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.
That's ok...as long as everyone gets a trophy for trying....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
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.
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.
That "reform" you and your parents pulled off of Social Security in the mid-80s was a nice trick. Create a "trust fund" and then spend the trust fund on regular expenses, making sure future generations get to pay for your day-to-day. Also, thanks for all of the free trade deals that don't take into account the warping of the free market due to the inability of labor to freely move around. You even have "free market" people believing that free trade == free market. I bought it hook, line, and sinker in my teens and 20s. Nice job.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
What? You mean that degree in gender studies and female studies is worthless? How can you say that? That only means more companies sorely need a Chief Diversity Officer and a Diversity Department!!!1111
#bullshitdegreesmatter
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Cause and effect: they only sound entitled to assholes like you because they're actually getting screwed and complaining about it! Jeez, it's like Oliver fucking Twist around here!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I think I should point out how addicted to TV Generation X is/was. I think your backwards-vision is rose tinted.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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?
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.
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.
Just think: all those people with worthless degrees probably would have gone straight to work after high school or learned a trade, if it weren't for dumbass Boomer and Gen-X parents and guidance counselors blatantly lying to them about how "necessary" a college degree (any college degree) was!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
All those jobs will be automated.
The real minimum wage is $0.
But why are you getting less? Too many Grievance Studies majors? Companies seeking skilled labor, from developers to the skilled trades, are still see labor shortages, so why the disparity? Too few skilled workers? Too much immigration?
The UK in particular had a huge wave of immigration, which may have destroyed the ability to make a living wage from unskilled labor, and put a lot of pressure on semi-skilled workers. Is that the problem?
Or maybe we have a generation that never learned to stick it out through adversity to get to the goal? Maybe. Point is, everyone thinks they're getting screwed, but only losers rest behind "the man is keeping me down, and there's nothing I can do".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Top Marginal Income Tax Rate, 1950: 90%
Top Marginal Income Tax Rate, 1970: 70%
Top Marginal Income Tax Rate, 1990: 29%
Top Marginal Income Tax Rate, 2000: 39%
Top Marginal Income Tax Rate, 2010: 35%
Top Marginal Income Tax Rate, Today: 39%
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Citation on the "two times more" bit, please.
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.
But why are you getting less? Too many Grievance Studies majors? Companies seeking skilled labor, from developers to the skilled trades, are still see labor shortages, so why the disparity? Too few skilled workers? Too much immigration?
Another term for 'labor shortage' is 'salary increase', and nobody's seeing that happen.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Translation: "I got mine, so fuck you!"
Well, fuck you too!
You goddamned Boomers and Gen-Xers didn't "work;" the Boomers got paid fat union wages for doing jack shit and then the Gen-Xers got paid corporate-raider bonuses for dismantling the unions and outsourcing the jobs! The older generations have executed scorched-earth economic policy, then hypocritically blame the Millennials when they complain that there's nothing left.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
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.
Just think: all those people with worthless degrees probably would have gone straight to work after high school or learned a trade
Unless you're going to be a plumber, there aren't many of those jobs left. The US has exported most of its low-skill manufacturing, and the low-skill construction and agricultural and custodial jobs tend to go to illegal immigrants because permanent residents want a higher salary. Go figure.
What we have, despite you feeling entitled and being the special snowflake and superior to everyone coming after you (typical for people of the current generation), is for the first time, the next generation (which will also think that the generation after her will be lazy, whiney, overconfident and not knowing what hard work is) will be earning less than you.
SS was never meant to be a savings plan, more like a pyramid scheme where you collected something from everyone working and divvied it up among those that weren't. Which worked well as long as each generation did better than the last. The problem was that the baby boomers were a bubble in the pipeline and the prediction was that those of us working when they retired would get screwed. The Regan fix would have actually fixed it, if congress could have actually balanced the budget between ~85-15 rather than just deficit spending more than the trust fund took in. So taken at a face value the fact that the government continues to spend more than it takes in has little to do with SS, which is a separate tax with a separate funding model.
Again by itself, SS is fine, the trust fund is ok too from the perspective of it having a lot of spare cash, and with just minor tweaks (removal of the SS wage cap for starters) fixes it for another generation or two. Not paying people with a net worth > $1 million is another tweak, things that are all fairly pedestrian but for some reason can't get any traction in congress. I leave you to reason about that....
Top Marginal Income Tax Rate...
Top marginal rates really aren't that informative, because relatively few pay them... and when they were really high almost no one paid them.
For a better comparison, look at the middle quintile (or median, but middle quintile works). Unfortunately the source I found only has data from 1979-2011:
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 1980: 18.9%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 1985: 18.0%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 1990: 17.7%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 1995: 17.1%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 2000: 16.5%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 2005: 13.8%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 2010: 11.5%
Of course, that's federal only. I should say that the trend there is the opposite of what I thought it was, since my tax rates have been steadily increasing over that time range, but that's clearly because my income has been steadily increasing.
The trend of all quintiles is pretty steadily downward. Here's a chart I threw together: https://docs.google.com/spread...
So I'd have to say the claim that we're being taxed twice as much is blatantly false, at least in terms of federal taxes. And I don't think state taxes have gone up much, but I'll let someone else find that data.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Sure, let's take a look at how "fine" salaries are today. Here's some numbers.
So, over the last 47 years, we've got a whopping 21% growth in the median salary. That's a roughly 0.4% annual growth rate, on average. That's all we've gotten from widespread automation, swapping out typists for software engineers, etc.
If these remarkable advancements in technology are only giving us 0.4% annual growth in salaries, is it even worth it? Society sure seems to get more than 0.4% more complicated every year. Work seems to get a lot more than 0.4% demanding every year.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
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.