Really upsetting to see people dismissing or downplaying this article. Not only I resonate personally with every sentence in it, but I also recognise it almost universally among my peers. The radical rejection of any hope in traditional strategies for personal finance (like the belief that learning economically relevant skills is worth it in the long term) is for me the tangible reality and while I don’t see a valid alternative to it, I’m nevertheless concerned about its long term implications. One thing I feel the article has omitted is how the surging popularity of crypto speculation and chatGPT are also symptomatic: they appeal to people lacking technical abilities, who hope that by pulling the gambling lever on a science-fiction blackbox, fortune will provide them with the breakthrough worthy of a genius.
It's getting to the point where every realistic path to success is rooted in gambling/chance. The 1950s "risk free, steady job" at the mill has gone away and in its place we have The Gig Economy where you enter the Thunderdome with everyone else and your success is determined by hustle or chance that you get enough gigs. Interest from saving money in a bank or with a CD has gone away, and instead you're expected to put your money on the stock market roulette wheel and pray. Cheap education and "white collar jobs for just graduating" are gone, now you're expected to make a huge, multi-hundred-thousand dollar financial bet on a particular degree at the age of 18 and hope against hope it translates into a middle class future. No surprise to me that these generations feel it's hopeless and disenfranchised.
If we survive, future generations are going to write about the ills of structuring a society so centered around luck and random chance.
>It's getting to the point where every realistic path to success is rooted in gambling/chance.
I don't see how that's true? If you're well educated in something useful and you're conscientious, there are a lot of corporate jobs that pay more than enough to sock away a good amount of savings, especially if you're willing to stay frugal. And if you're not particularly well educated in the college sense, but are willing to work hard, good tradespeople are in incredibly high demand. But certainly, some sectors have become more difficult to make your way in.
In terms of investing/gambling, the Buffett method of buying solid companies that make things that people need at a reasonable price is still much more reliable than hopping on the latest hype train. The hordes of WSB/GME bagholders would have been much better off just buying into Berkshire and then doing something more productive with their time. But I guess that's less fun than chanting "apes together strong" and imagining that you're sticking it to the hedge funds.
Anyway, I hope we can channel some of this disaffection and anger into getting a carbon tax passed, with a rebate and border adjustment. In addition to being the best hope I see against climate change, it will likely make local manufacturing more competitive, and therefore give people who want to do those kinds of jobs more leverage to demand better pay. And since the rich are responsible for much more carbon generation than the poor, an equal rebate should leave the poor ahead even despite the inflation it would cause, and help reduce wealth inequality.
^ This is real easy to look up. Google "Wealth/social Mobility" and you can find articles about how sticky it is. People who are poor, stay poor. People who are rich, stay rich.
There's a lot of data about this. Taxing people is definitely the way to do this. IDK why you think a carbon tax would have any effect on this (we should absolutely do a carbon tax, just this isn't what it's solving). Wealth tax would be the thing to do for this.
That’s a different type of wealth mobility than I usually see - usually low wealth mobility is saying that if your parents are poor, then you’re unlikely to change that for yourself. But this seems to be saying something much weaker - that the older you are, the less likely you are to change your status. Which, yeah, most peoples’ path gets more and more set over time. I’m not sure that’s something we should be trying hard to change? The goal is usually to make it so people have a shot at determining their own path, which this doesn’t seem to say isn’t the case.
Just saying that a carbon tax would be inherently redistributive, and also give lower income people more negotiating power. And more importantly, short of an energy breakthrough that makes fossil fuel uncompetitive, it’s the best hope we have against climate change.
Most people generally really dislike wealth taxes. They’re inherently intrusive.
I realized that you are assuming we can properly attribute carbon with a carbon tax. I think this would be a hard problem for the IRS and they would be much better able to associate wealth to folks using a wealth tax. You have to directly tax what you want to discourage. Indirect almost never works unless you have a strong understanding of the system.
Well, I don’t want to discourage wealth, I want to discourage carbon emissions. It’s not a tax on people, you attribute carbon by tacking the tax on new carbon entering the carbon cycle (fossil fuels) at the time of extraction or importation. That adds to the inputs cost of everything that’s fossil-fuel intensive, and the price increase should flow through to the end consumer. For things that are manufactured in countries without an equivalent tax, you do what’s called a border adjustment, essentially a carbon-intensity-based tariff, and to encourage countries to jump onboard with their own carbon tax, and not attempt to disadvantage your manufacturing, you make it a pessimistic estimate. And you can make it revenue neutral (and redistributive) by dividending out all revenue equally, to help offset the price increases. If someone’s carbon footprint is lower than average, they end up ahead.
> New and often controversial lifestyles are proliferating on platforms like TikTok, such as “bimbo culture” and “stay-at-home girlfriends.” The hashtag “#Bimbofication” has garnered over 275 million views on TikTok. Meanwhile “sugar daddy dating” reportedly spiked 74% on the platform SeekingArrangement during the pandemic.
Is the article seriously, unironically talking about view counts on fetish hashtags as a sort of evidence point?
I think this small section of the article is what resonated with me the least, but then they could use the "delusional" headline.
Almost everything else in the article either matches my own outlook or at least makes a lot of sense to me. And I'm not gen Z, I'm just a frustrated guy in my 30s.
I am also very tired with parsing of social media trends to prove a point. These are a subset of a subset of the population and don't mean much when we account for curious viewers, casual viewers, ironic viewers. Also, the subset of the population perusing social media is low. Even lower when we divide this subset by social media platform. The trends and fleeting passions of the ultra young do not reflect 100% of the population at all.
Ironic that nearly all the problems listed in the article are due to there being literally too much money in the system. That's what 3 rounds of massive stimulus, absurdly low interest rates, unnaturally low upper income tax rates, and persistent deficit spending will get you. One generation absolutely hammering the next with debt and no onramp to prosperity.
And yet youth perpetually don’t show up to vote. I am frustrated by millennial and Gen-Z’s willingness to roll over without putting up a fight. We’ll turn out to protest against police brutality or for #MeToo but any form of protest related to the economy ceased with Occupy Wall Street, which was pretty tepid.
So you are saying that younger people in USA should vote for a party not currently involved in the sketchy monetary policies and lawmaking? How do you expected their vote matter in the first past the post system?
In my country I've been voting since 16, because my vote actually counts. But if I were a citizen of the USA/UK or other similar countries, maybe I wouldn't bother too. What's the point?..
Occupy Wall Street was movement that scared the hell out of elites, and tracking of what happened with the movement and afterwards shows how it was dismantled and suppressed afterwards.
At later stages the Occupy movement was infiltrated by 'other' causes camps. The 'identity' focus causes became vocal within - the early days of social justice causes. That is something you need to avoid like plague to run successful movement - lack of direction, due to multiple divergent goals. It caused people to loose interest as movement was going everywhere and nowhere. Lets bring up Solidarity, they had leaders and quickly drafted what they want and did not stray from that path. If solidarity wanted democratic poland and strengthening ties with catholic church and establishment of diplomatic ties with africa and banning of military production... it would be hard to get all people behind all of the goals and it would be hard to achieve all those goals. I digress... back to occupy.
Since then media created new fault lines for populous to fight over. Straight man vs the world, men vs women, whites oppressing non-whites, police vs blacks, can trans people use toilets and so on and on. We are bombarded by those narratives constantly. The moment one fades next one takes place.
Those are very easy to instigate as all of them are based primary on emotions - whatever the factual background of the issue is.
Occupy Wall Street and future movements like that need to be based on facts and logic to expose all of the systems that siphon wealth up into unproductive upper class. It takes effort to expose those complex systems and educate people about it to the point where they want to change it.
In contrast to: police kills people, here is a video example, now come protest against injustice. Nothing really changes as nobody is doing anything about the underlying systems that create those outcomes... and look new injustice... we need to protest that now.
I don't have any evidence but I find it very coincidental what happened with Occupy and thereafter, to not be suspicious if people targeted by Occupy did not do anything about it.
I agree overall with your post, especially about the various distractions they have us all protesting over. But, I don't really think OWS had them particularly scared. It was just yet another ineffective protest by powerless people.
What boggles my mind is how so many still think "protesting" makes any kind of difference at all. Talk about doing nothing about the underlying systems. Standing out on the street impotently yelling about something is pretty much one notch above "impotently posting to the internet about something". You think anyone in charge looks at a 100K person protest and says "Ohmygosh, they're really angry about this! Maybe I should change the status quo!" Hahaha never. You might as well pray--in both cases, nobody is listening.
Occupy had exactly zero chance of changing anything, because in order to actually change things, you need to be in the rich club or one of their bought-and-paid-for politicians. And all of those people are already on the gravy train--they have no incentive to change anything.
I disagree. Protests DO change things, just not as much or as instantaneous as people want it to be now that people are so accustomed to "instant gratification" due to social media and the like.
We haven't seen change on the economic front, because as the OP who you responded to is all the "distractions" people got them outraged upon. Black Lives Matter for instance was doomed to fail because of it's dubious origins, and lack of clear objectives. But media promoted it because it doesn't hurt the rich and corporate folks at all and serves as a distraction away from the root of the issues. People nowadays are just WAY too susceptible of getting their attention distracted away from the most IMPORTANT subjects.
What I find the most irritating is the people who talk about "nothing can be done now" or "we are powerless", are many of the same people who I have had to argue against a while back who never once cared about political lobbying or corporate monoliths and in some cases argued against me. Now those same people who once said that are no longer to be found.
Protests and majority opinion do matter. In fact most of these corporations attained this level of power in government because majority of people LET IT HAPPEN. For example until covid, the majority sentiment of people were "Business = good no matter what" camp, and political lobbying was barely talked about. In fact, I've had the wonderful experience of being the minority being vocal on wonderful online forums getting pushback saying I'm an idiot about businesses becoming that large is not a bad thing (thanks libertarians). Opinions do matter, and if majority of people were against the consolidation of corporate power, it wouldn't have gotten this bad. Corporate power is susceptible to shareholder sentiment, and shareholder sentiment is whether you like to believe it or not, dictated by regular people. But corporate power is consolidating more and more and used it's power through regulation so it's less dictated by regular people.
Now the same people who called me the idiot are the same people saying "its hopeless", or "we are powerless" or "we have to find a completely new system" instead of thinking that they were a huge part of the problem. We can still turn things around through protests and constant and persistent pushback however, it will just be harder and require more drastic measures. emphasis on "constant", which will be very difficult considering how people nowadays want "instant gratification" and want things to change "instantly". The biggest hurdle is the belief we can't change things. All you have to do is hurt their bottom line (FOR LONG ENOUGH, very important) and all the rich greedy numbnuts will fall in line easily considering if other greedy numbnuts will do the same thing, but the powerless people don't believe anything affects rich people.
Oh they vote… just against their own interests. Gen-Z is a captured demographic that will vote against themselves while blaming others right into the pauper lines.
I would love to see candidates addressing the needs/wants of Gen-Z... But uhh, I don't know anyone who is actually appealing to them. The only 2 parties I see (in the us) are:
Republicans: Actively trying to harm them.
Democrats: Actively trying to maintain the status quo.
Neither of these groups are interested in Gen-Z issues. The Democrats pay lip-service, but don't actually want to shake up the social hierarchy. So instead they mostly try and move to the center for the more regular turnout they know how to ask for.
Gen-Z is not stupid. And I believe they demonstrate good turnout for the candidates they like... Maybe Politicians should be doing more to appeal to them instead of older generations that they claim are who they need to appeal to.
Unfortunately the level of knowledge on the subject is quite apparent when somebody speaks about "the" European healthcare. I'm sure the doctors spoke European too.
Unfortunately, European is not a language. But the mindset of socialist healthcare is distinctly European. That’s what this discussion is about, all pedantry aside.
The “European” model varies from country to country, sure. But the overall mindset behind it does not.
Did you have to schedule a visit 2 weeks out just to get some medicine for a minor sinus infection? (Medicine you could've gotten in the US for a $15-dollar copay and a 30 minute wait in a urgent care clinic)
Because I did. Belgium's healthcare was no bueno for a foreign exchange student just looking to kick a cold.
I have been living in Brussels for last 10 years and have had no such issues.
Au contraire, I go to the doctor and get medication so easily prescribed that I'm afraid the doctor is to nonchalant ... (and always without an appointment, maybe sometimes 20 min wait)
Edit: regarding Sinus infections,
quick google search shows that the "apotheek" carries and sells medicine for this.. so maybe you just had bad luck/was misunderstood?
Lmao. I'm in the US, and I'm waiting to see a doctor because the earliest someone could see me was 2 months is away (and that was checking across several nearby towns, not being picky about one particular doctor's schedule).
I thought that was pretty good, because scheduling our last an annual check up was much further out.
Let's just say that Belgium, collectively as a nation, needs a hug.
I hail from a country with the lowest number of practicing physicians per 1000 inhabitants in the EU and I still can get an appointment with a general practitioner on the same day.
Specialists are of course a different matter but again - lowest number of doctors in the EU. They're all in Norway now.
> Who is "having to do without" because they can't pay?
A very large segment of the poor and even middle class in the US who work jobs that don't provide insurance.
> In the US you can't be refused life-saving healthcare.
You're probably thinking of emergency room care for immediately life-threatening accidents. For those yes, the emergency room is required to stabilize you in the short term. You'll be billed for it of course, causing bankrupcy if you had any money.
But if you have advanced diabetes or cancer or any other life-ending conditions that aren't going to kill you right now, you will not get any treatment in the US if you can't pay for it so you can be left to die.
Some states are better than others with options for the poor, but many are atrocious.
A country where people die because they ration things like insulin, with a life expectancy a decade lower than Europe, an infant mortality rate higher than Cuba, and the largest amount of bankruptcies over medical debt...
You can absolutely be refused care until you die in the USA. Sure at the very end if you stumble to a hospital they'll put on a good show as they find out you're uninsured and you didn't take an ambulance because it was on average thousands of dollars, and you didn't go to a doctor because you knew you couldn't afford it...
People die here all the time from lack of care. Our systems suck and are way broken.
Just as an aside, Cuba's healthcare system kind of rules, especially given their place in the world.
It's so good they practically have a surplus they use in trade. Like, they'll send doctors or medicines to other third world countries the US hates or ignores in exchange for oil or whatever. People tout how amazing it was USA could make covid vaccines so quickly, but Cuba did that too (while under trade embargos from the USA). It's impressive.
Right, which means perfectly preventable problems just plague you until they become catastrophic enough that they require life-saving care. The bare minimum of course.
Income tax isn't going to solve this, and I think it's unfortunate Europe tends to very myopically focus on income differences. Progressive income tax does little other than to widen the gap between wage slaves and the rich.
The wealthiest don't have an absurdly high income, they own enough assets to live off dividends and wealth appreciation, which typically gets taxed 20-30%. If they even have an income to be taxed, it's basically symbolic.
This is where the real inequality exists, and it's unfortunately not part of the discussion at all. Instead wagies with slightly higher than average income get portrayed as 18th century mustache twisting top-hat capitalist factory owners.
agree with everything you said. I absolutely despise the income tax.
You literally have no path to wealth in Europe by being an employee, in fact if you are a top performer as an employee you are most likely carrying a huge load of the rest of society on your back.
Meanwhile wealth gets taxed much lower (when it gets taxed at all)
I cannot picture having a path to wealth as an employee. I mean I'm struggling to even conceptualize this. Do you have actual expectations to get on this path? Or maybe we define differently "wealth"... You can definitely have a fine life as an employee (although that gets eroded too, inequality growing everywhere and former middle class gets pushed down), but to be wealthy that was always another category altogether.
There is a viable path from (upper?)-middle class to early retirement that is built mostly out of hardcore discipline, willingness to delay gratification, and some luck. The idea is to live well below your means, be "frugal", and pound every spare dollar into tax advantaged retirement accounts (first) then your own aggressive growth equities. Get a bonus? The whole thing goes to your brokerage, have a stock plan at work? Max it. Since this mild form of FIRE may take 30+ years, you should invest aggressively in equities (risk decreases with longer time horizon) and possibly buy some rental properties along the way. IMO this gives the best probability (though no guarantee) of retiring financially independent before age 60.
I'm not in that movement and also not in the US, but is that movement anything more than some tech bros and a couple of life coaches? I mean, is it statistically significant?
I earned $1 in 2018. That dollar had the buying power of $1.21 today.
Now imagine, I worked hard to save $30K. That $30K is now worth just under $24K now because I didn’t spend it immediately.
Tell me - why would I save my $30K? There’s a 4% wealth tax per year on unspent money. I paid over $6,000 in unofficial taxes for the crime of saving money - I could literally have been reinstated from a DUI almost 8 times for the crime of trying to save for a mortgage down payment. I don’t think you want to know what happened to housing affordability since 2018, making a $30K down payment feel more like $10K-$15K in usefulness.
Saving money is quite literally for people who like seeing money lit on fire.
You are not supposed to keep it in the bank, unless you are keeping it in a high-yield account (NOT even a CD, an account you can still use), which will get you 4% on $25,000+ such as US Bank.
You could also have it in the market. Neither will dramatically beat inflation, but they will beat it.
The debatable part here is the merits of pretty much having to understand finance to not lose money all the time is a separate topic. I am in IT and always thought my finance/stats degrees were a complete joke, but it helps to have an intuitive understanding of this stuff not to get **ed by the basics.
> which will get you 4% on $25,000+ such as US Bank
Now it will. During the pandemic and earlier? Getting a 1% CD was tough. There was almost no insured way to protect yourself before it happened. My 4.15% high yield bank account was paying about 0.4% until last year.
> You could also have it in the market. Neither will dramatically beat inflation, but they will beat it.
Yay, invest myself to the stock market which, to me, reeks of overinvestment and too much money in it. Do you actually believe Apple is worth $3 trillion?
No, but that's the game, right? Index funds or adjust for the times, e.g. dividend mining stocks for income and value preservation were undervalued at the time. That's the part I am talking about with there being standard strategies depending on the stage of the economy. It's almost a job on top of your job though, which is the issue I am calling out.
How is it the system's fault if you handle your money wrong? Saving does not mean to let it sit around on your table (or bank), doing nothing. The problem is more that the system is build for smart and educated, those who know how to handle money and life. Bringing everyone on this same side is the crucial part of a fair society, and most societies today seem to fail to some degree with this.
> How is it the system's fault if you handle your money wrong?
For 90% of people that is code for: Put it in the stock market you idiot.
Maybe I’m a rebel, but I don’t think a sane society should all but require investing for people who want to do something as basic as getting a mortgage down payment without exposing themselves to risk.
The stock market has been the solution to most people’s inflation problems, and in my mind, it’s a central point of failure. Central points of failure have Black Swans. A sane society would have inflation low enough that people wouldn’t feel like idiots for saving money and wouldn’t feel the need to rush into a centralized failure method.
> getting a mortgage down payment without exposing themselves to risk.
You can't live life without risk. Your parents try to make your life relatively risk free until you are 18, but then hopefully you've learned enough life lessons to be able to see which risks are worth taking and which ones aren't.
But there's never going to be a risk-free or tradeoff-free way to live through 60+ years of your adult life, including something like getting a mortgage. It's amazing how many Gen Zs and Millenials are struggling with this concept.
> A sane society would have inflation low enough that people wouldn’t feel like idiots for saving money
Another poster pointed out how every other non-gambling path to wealth is slowly being shut down (or to put it positively, optimized away), so the new generations are leaning on things like crypto and online poker and chatGPT startups as their only shot at the middle class. Society have set up our economic structures so they are all based on risk-reward, so it's no surprise that risk and gambling are slowly becoming the only viable path to wealth creation.
An unfortunate but not unforeseeable consequence of the ultra-capitalists' common talking point that people who take "risks" should be rewarded. That has always been the lamest excuse for why people with money deserve more money for doing no work.
It seems not very sane to do it wrong, and then complain that the others are at fault. Money always has risk, be it stock market or just let it sitting on the table, there is no perfect security. Knowing the risks and prices of each method is always relevant. The only fault with society I see, is not teaching their citizen well enough about those risks.
It's not the only factor. Millennials and Gen-Z are unable to buy homes because of housing scarcity created by Boomer NIMBYs and the politicians who pander to them.
"Gen Zers are tracking ahead of their parents’ homeownership rate: 30% of 25-year olds owned their home in 2022, higher than the 27% rate for Gen Xers when they were the same age. But the Gen Zers who didn’t take advantage of the pandemic-era’s low mortgage rates could be left behind."[0]
This argument is so lazy. Simply levy a tax on them each year that is their net worth multiplied by the risk-free rate. That takes care of most people with money in publicly traded companies. If people with more "diversified" portfolios try to move their money elsewhere, penalize them for it. Revoke their citizenship, make it harder for them to do business without a majority percentage of their wealth in the US. It's not "hard" to do, we just lack the political will.
In your system, are regular people allowed to save up enough so they no longer have to work? Or must their savings erode continually so that they're forced to work forever?
This is the problem of a globalized free world. Where there are loops, people abuse them. But this is worked on, it just takes time. And saying that because the loops exist at the moment, it's impossible to fix them at all, is indeed a lazy argument. This is the toxic mindset which brings down all efforts.
I've never seen any wealth tax proposal that would raise any significant amount of money. That's ignoring the glaring issues of most wealth being illiquid, the capital flight/brain drain that's happened every time it's been tried, and the complete lack of faith anyone has that these taxes would be put to any better use.
Unused property and land is already taxed through property taxes. Regardless, unused property is an easy scapegoat but not a significant problem (similar to the foreign investor bogeyman) when the real problems are loose monetary policy, speculation, NIMBY zoning, and real supply/demand imbalances.
Absolutely, the restrictions on dense housing development combined with the global hunt for yield caused by low/zero interest rates are the root cause for most of these issues. Policymakers were trying to keep the long term debt cycle alive a bit longer, but that's created its own massive issues.
'late-stage' capitalism is just not working for a large section of society
between the crapification of everything, 'optimization' of working practices, and hunger-games/got-talent tournaments even for that privilege, monopolies sprouting up everywhere, casino stock-markets, arbitrary government rules/enforcement, bylaws, and especially 'private law' (landlord rules, credit requirements, company policies/rules, etc, etc), it's becoming increasingly intolerable to live in the system as it stands
This seems like low quality blogspam composed of a few random anecdotes used to generalize across an entire generation. At the bottom, there’s a big disclaimer about how posts on Fortune don’t reflect the views of Fortune. Guessing this is just some part of their unmoderated/unedited blogging platform.
We created a world where young people feel hopeless. I don't blame them, it truly doesn't look good. I'm a millennial so I can absolutely related to the hustle mentality but it still feels very grim all around. Can't really blame younger people for giving up.
I'm not sure if being born in '86 makes me a geriatric millennial, but I certainly find that I identify far more with the popular notion of Gen Z than the popular notion of millennials -- and I generally find the same is true amongst my fellow millennials, who have no interest in hustle culture, in dedicating their lives to their work, etc.
I think, much as millennials were a decade ago, Gen Z is just a straw man to explain why the world is the way it is. It's the same thing that happens with, for instance, interest rates -- financial reporters always ascribe central interest rates to a particular phenomenon, but as soon as their preferred cause proves unrelated, they find a new certain cause.
> Examples of this “radical” ideology include not getting married, not having children, not buying a house or a car, and refusing to work extra hours or to hold a job at all.
Refusing to work extra hours is an example of a "radical" ideology?
Am I missing something? I'm seriously asking because this sounds like the whole "quiet quitting" thing that highlighted corporations expecting unpaid labor as a given.
None of these sound radical. Maybe not holding a job at all, but at the same time, for a long time, that was the norm for a substantial portion of the population (and frankly, it still is).
You're not missing anything. The entire article is a Gen-Zer complaining about the plight of Gen-Zer's with basically no substance to the article. It's written as if "young people" are the only ones affected by high inflation and expensive housing.
I see this attitude from time-to-time in the younger Gen-Z's. There's this belief that somehow life was supposed to be made "easy" for them, and they are wildly offended that life isn't easy.
>I see this attitude from time-to-time in the younger Gen-Z's. There's this belief that somehow life was supposed to be made "easy" for them, and they are wildly offended that life isn't easy.
To be fair, certain things have been made much easier for them.
Sure, getting a house ie even more difficult for ever new generation, but, as an older millennial, I would have killed to have had access to the same mental, acne and dental treatments, that Gen-Z has access to today, and also, to the vast and easy to access community contributed information pool on the internat on topics like emigration, taxes, jobs, financial investment and career advice, dating advice, that's so easy to get nowadays versus 10-20 years ago. It would have made my teenage and adult life much, much easier on all fronts.
> Mental well-being, personal growth, and fulfillment are being reprioritized ahead of financial gain: 73% of Gen Z would rather have a better quality of life than extra money in the bank, and 66% are only interested in finances as a way to support their other interests in life.
Indeed. I found it surreal that the article implies that it is somehow irrational or shocking to prefer quality of life over money, or to see financial gain as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. The quoted 73%/66% of Gen Z who display these preferences seems low to me!
However, you know what's even more ridiculous about this paragraph? The linked source[0] actually compares Gen Z's preferences with those of the general population... and guess what? For preferring quality of life over money it is 73% Gen Z vs 70% general population, and for valuing finances just as a way to support other interests in life it is 66% Gen Z vs 61% general population! Hardly a monumental shift in attitudes, maybe even within the margin of error.
It looks like this article is a delusional attempt by the author to cope with the fact that people behave as mortal animals with personal lives and individual interests and desires, rather than behaving as an immortal financial maximiser wrapped in a meat sack.
> The traditional markers of financial success—from owning a home to snagging that corner office at work—are becoming not only less attainable but also less valuable for Gen Zers.
To be fair, those corner offices might not even exist anymore depending on the employer. From when I started working part-time in college in the early ’00s through today, those sorts of things have disappeared.
I remember how the programmers where I first worked in an entry-level position out of college had their own offices. I’m a staff engineer now, and I don’t even have my own desk (because it’s an open office with hoteling). I hate it.
I wonder if population stabilisation will mean there will simply be a lot less demand for new homes. People will mostly live in what they inherit, just like they do in Europe where the same thing happened a generation earlier. With U.S. population set to grow by only 20% by the end of century (same growth as it had from 2000 till now), how many new homes will at all be needed? So i agree that they don't plan to buy real estate. They will not need to. There are as many children 0-5 years old in America today as 50-55 people. By the time the former will need to buy their first home the latter will be dying to leave it to them.
I don't know where in Europe you experienced people mostly living in the homes they inherited. I've lived in Austria and Germany since 2005 and 2013 respectively and I think I know maybe one person who lives in the apartment their grandmother left them after she passed away? That's in no way standard/expected.
Also despite most/all of Europe having had low fertility rate for a long time, there's still a lot of growth in some places and decline in others (mostly people moving from rural areas into the big cities, and from the poorer countries into richer ones). So stuff isn't static even if the total population number didn't change much.
>I don't know where in Europe you experienced people mostly living in the homes they inherited.
In present Austria. The one you lived in till 2013 doesn't exist anymore.
Buying something decent today in one of the "major" cities is impossible even on tech wages.
Just got offered 2600 Euros take home salary for a product owner position while people are asking for 700k Euros for 20 year old houses outside of the city.
So you know many Austrians your age that live in inherited homes? I still visit Vienna 3x a year (my in-laws still live there), nobody I know there lives in inherited homes, they mostly rent (old contract if they're lucky, new one if not). The same is true in Berlin, those that can live in an inherited home are a tiny minority.
>So you know many Austrians your age that live in inherited homes?
Not directly, but in various forms yes, the young can only afford to buy property if helped out with funds from their wealthy parents . It's not directly inheriting, but it's still generational wealth transfer. My ex, her parents bought her an apartment in the city center when she moved to study (not Viena, another big city). When I went to a house visit to see who can afford to pay 700k on a run down old house, it was moistly Zoomers with wealthy parents there to purchase a nest egg for their kids.
And the whole new vs old contract situation is again a generational wealth transfer. Those long ion the market sitting on cheap old contracts are swinging the balance the other direction for those new on the market who must pay exorbitant prices if they enter the market now.
Renting and being dependent on a landlord your whole life is also not ideal, especially if you didn't luck out to get locked into an older rent controlled contract at a good price, which is putting pressure on people wanting to move to a bigger palce and start families. Move to Vienna now and check out the rent prices.
>The same is true in Berlin, those that can live in an inherited home are a tiny minority.
Because Berlin demographics are mostly foreigners, but Germany is a lot bigger than Belrin, and housing there, like in Austria revolves around getting funded by the mom and dad to get intot he market.
I don't refute anything you say, it just sounded like OP thought something like "well in Europe they all just live in their inherited ancestral homes" where as the reality is that people mostly rent, and of those that own a lot of people bought new homes via parental support (which is still not the same as the supposedly hobbit-esque family domicile that passed from one generation to the next for the last 400 years we all supposedly live in).
I'm sure there really are centuries old farmhouses in Tyrol that really work like OP mentioned, but it's not the common way for Europeans to live.
Given that we're already at the limit with regards to housing supply, I'm not sure that demand-side changes will make housing affordable unless the population very actively shrinks. Even in Latvia, a country with one of the fastest declining populations in the world, housing is getting more expensive, and has been getting more expensive basically every year since 2009. Consider also how strong immigration to the US is. How is it not just cope, to have confidence that there will simply be enough housing one day due to only demographic concerns and no other action?
> Given that we're already at the limit with regards to housing supply...
That's a patently false statement.
There is room for exponential growth in housing. There is money for that exponential growth.
Those with the monies to do so simply aren't spending it on housing for median income families, single persons, elderly persons, homeless persons, etc.
Those with the financial ability simply don't spend in that manner.
There is no 'supply shortage' of housing. There are, however, discriminatory housing policies, practices, procedures, and fees.
In a way we are. If you take the satisfaction survey among Americans, while overall life satisfaction numbers today are mediocre (about average or even slightly below average from 1980), among particular categories, satisfaction with housing situation is among the highest ever, much higher than satisfaction with income, family life, health, etc.
Which means, because U.S. is a democratic country, it will be incredibly difficult to build any new housing as most voters are satisfied with theirs so for them, getting more housing is a lot less important than getting more equity on existing - and precondition for that is limiting new supply.
On the flip side, it probably suggests that perception of housing problem in the U.S. is mostly because of, just as with many other things, a small but very vocal minority for who it's indeed the case. It doesn't shake the economy nearly as much as it seems to be shaking public perception.
I mean sure, that counts as a limit, as it is something that limits the housing being built. We can probably learn a lot from asking why it's not profitable to build certain kinds of housing. That said, the US is not building zero housing, so some kinds of housing _are_ potentially profitable to build.
While there is population stabilisation, there's also changing demographics. Immigration, more single people (or people waiting until later in life to move in together), and an aging population that prefers to live at home will still put pressure on the housing market even though we are over "peak child" - that was the conclusion I reached when I researched the housing market in my EU country and why I decided to buy an apartment this year, coupled with low mortgage rates.
Almost every generation had problems with future prospects. I understand that GenZ is feeling bad after looking at the 90s and 2000s and thinking that they got a raw deal with the 2020s. But these things are actually cyclical, people who grew up in the 60s, 70s and 80s had the same questioning about jobs (there was major recession in the 70s/80s, not to mention the recent "Great Recession"), nuclear war, communism, AIDS, etc. Just look at the 70s and the hippies, that was a movement against modern lifestyle, Capitalism, consumerism etc. I don't think the problem is in any way related to "late stage" capitalism.
GenZ is feeling the pain of growing up, becoming adults and realizing that "life ain't easy". But what you experience today is actually better than the prospects for many generations of Americans and, even more so, Immigrants. Just hold tight, ride the wave, try to make the best plans you can and easier times will eventually come.
> only 41% expect to own a home one day. This may be because they’re young, and such financial goals seem too far away to properly comprehend
I'm not GenZ, but I can see their point here. Average house prices in and around lover are 520k, the avergae wage for someone in london is <40k. its totally unobtanium
Yes, less than 41% but they are under 25. It's reasonable to believe that many more from their generation will own a place where they live in the next 15 years.
And Timothy Leary said "turn on, tune in, drop out" back in the 1960s.
None of the social phenomena presented here are new, all this has happened before.
And honestly, placing more emphasis on personal well-being and self-interest and less on being a slave to the grind is a good thing. To hell with the Protestant work ethic.
That really depends on what one means by ‘outlook.’ If one means their perception of the present and future, then yeah, it’s bleak. But if one means their actual present and likely future, then my understanding is that Gen Z are wealthier than the Millennials were at their age; the Millennials in turn are wealthier than Gen X were at their age; Gen X are wealthier than the Baby Boomers were at their age; and of course the Baby Boomers are wealthier than preceding generations.
Compounding interest really is a miracle, and it’s not just a financial one.
This is no longer true. Gen Z and late-stage Millenials are the first generation since WWII who are worse off than their parents. Education and housing have become completely unaffordable to them, and wages have been stagnant for decades.
Compounding interest doesn't mean crap when you have no wealth to receive interest from in the first place.
One quote: "But the difference is as much in assets as it is in opportunity. In 1989, Baby Boomers and Generation X under 40 accounted for 13% of household wealth, compared to just 5.9% for Millennials and Generation Z under 40 in 2020."
Thanks for the interesting article on the atlantic, I had to go through google to read it, the usual sites to unlock it didn't work. There may be trouble ahead:
Almost uniquely in the west, American millenials can enjoy fixed interest rates for multi-decade mortgages, so that may soften the blow for current homeowners.
The point is the comparison shows that previous generations were wealthier at a given age, not how much Gen X (<=24 years) or Gen Z(<=24 years) held at that point in time.
>Some young people have adopted a sort of financial nihilism as a response to deteriorating economic conditions, eschewing traditional capitalist norms for ones that are decidedly more self-serving and self-indulgent.
Not at all unexpected reaction to, if you look at it closely, an incredibly depressing present and future- IF the status quo persists.
This level of disaffection is the perfect fuel for a revolution, if young adults choose to make it so. But I don't know how reliable the Gen Z voting tsunami truly is if people escape too far down their fantasy holes.
No, "late-stage capitalism" is pretty mainstream these days. It is getting quite obvious that the current way we are handling the economy isn't working anymore. No need to go full-blown communism, but we do need to do something different pretty soon.
If that something is more regulation, more wealth redistribution, more finger pointing… it’s not gonna have the effect you expect. Delusional is absolutely the correct term for how most gen-z’s think.
