Young 'to be poorer than parents at every stage of life'

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34858997

by kevindeasis • 11 years ago

129 215 11 years ago

bbc.com

carsongross• 11 years ago

The Great Intergenerational War has been a one-way fight thus far.

How do you do, fellow kids?

https://media4.giphy.com/media/ifxLK48cnyDDi/200_s.gif

Gen X stands ready to assume out natural leadership position in the counterrevolution. Our cynicism coupled with your enthusiasm...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBQVrCflZ_E

rayiner2• 11 years ago

The caveat is that it's only true in certain developed nations. Maybe real life proof that free trade is not Pareto optimal.

pasiaj• 11 years ago

How do you reach that conclusion? Doesn't it seem more likely, that rapidly expanding population in the face of scarce resources leaves a decreasing share of a smaller pie for the newcomers?

rglullis• 11 years ago

Not really. The developed nations do not have increasing population. Aging, yes. But population is not really growing.

evanpw2• 11 years ago

Population growth is slowing, and previous generations in developed countries have been richer than their parents, so the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction.

RobertoG• 11 years ago

If the problem is that the pie is smaller, shouldn't we see how the GDP per capita goes down?

https://www.google.fr/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&m...

harryh5• 11 years ago

https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/668196138332327936

You should look at this too rayiner. It's my new favorite chart. It explains so so much.

laotzu3• 11 years ago

The concept of "free trade" has been obfuscated to the point of being a mythological idol.

rayiner2• 11 years ago

Hard to really make a case for that considering almost everything you buy is made in China.

untog4• 11 years ago

This is interesting to me because (as a 30 year old) it never occurred to me that I would be more prosperous than my parents. I'd like to be, of course, but it seems alien to me that there was an era where that was all but guaranteed. It doesn't matter, except that it explains where a lot of this older generation's resentment of "the youth" comes from - they haven't faced the situation we face, so the only way they can make sense of us not succeeding is that we're simply not trying. When that generation is a large voting bloc, that poses a problem.

(That said, I suspect most of us HN readers will not be poorer than their parents. Tech is an area of boom in an economy of bust, after all, so factor that in when reading responses on here)

Scarblac7• 11 years ago

I'm 40 and way poorer than my babyboomer parents. My savings got wiped out in a housing market crash in 2008, they have made over half a million euro in their lives just from their houses becoming worth more over time.

They've also both had work most of their adult life, and their pensions funds have always done well on the stock market, whereas my wife has been without a job since the financial crisis hit and government in the Netherlands went in austerity mode.

laotzu3• 11 years ago

May I ask what your savings were in that caused them to be be wiped out in 2008? I would have to guess retirement funds invested in mutual funds which were invested in the housing bubble?

adventured3• 11 years ago

Isn't the Netherlands government spending higher as a portion of GDP today than it was ten years ago?

Is it primarily an issue of where they're spending the money?

logfromblammo4• 11 years ago

Similar story here. I cashed out a lot of stocks to make a down payment on a house. Then I had to move to a different city to find work, and lost everything I ever put into the house. I timed the market just right to lose everything, because my other options were to lose more than that.

I have had more employers in 15 years of work than both of my parents accumulated over a combined total of nearly 80 years. I have never, ever been promoted within the same company, but I have been summarily tossed to the curb for no individually-attributable reason--along with several of my office-mates--a total of four times.

I have a lot of envy for what the Baby Boomer generation already got, and in combination with the condescending attitude they have (in aggregate) towards the younger generations, it fuels a lot of resentment.

Their formula of education plus hard work equals success has not been even remotely accurate for me. Education plus hard work equals screw you, buddy, because I already got mine. Enjoy your layoffs and unaffordable housing and tuition increases well in excess of inflation and slashed employer-granted benefits and mountains of political debt, because your parents have decided to sell their house at 20x what they paid for it, buy a plush RV, and split their well-funded retirement between any convenient US state and Snowbirdland, Mexico.

And what really kills me is that I have never seen anyone from my parents' generation working particularly hard. Maybe they did all that before I was born, and just coasted along afterward? Maybe I don't really know what hard work looks like?

Well, anyway, thanks for all the inter-generational tension, Boomers. We'll air it out by having Thanksgiving dinner at your house again this year, because none of your kids can afford homes big enough to hold everyone.

Nimeo• 11 years ago

Tech is an area of boom in an economy of bust.

For me tech will make you either much poorer or much richer than your parents.

untog4• 11 years ago

If you don't spend your time working for risky startups you can pretty much guarantee it'll make you rich. Google isn't going to be able to take back that large salary they pay you.

dkonofalski8• 11 years ago

Keep in mind, though, that tech also has a much faster life-cycle than most professions of the day. We're already seeing large drops in average salary for many tech positions. The average developer salary today is not even close to what a similarly "skilled" profession was even 20 years ago. Now, obviously developers didn't exist 20 years ago, but that's taken from a study that compared population sizes in the US to job percentages in the population. Yesterday's electrician is today's developer and they're not paid similarly at all.

beachstartup2• 11 years ago

Now, obviously developers didn't exist 20 years ago

i've got some perhaps surprising news for you, my young friend... 20 years ago was 1995.

sure we didn't have broadband and fancypants angular.js but i'm pretty certain developers were around waaaay back during web 1.0 (to use a turn of phrase).

untog4• 11 years ago

We're already seeing large drops in average salary for many tech positions.

Are we?

6stringmerc4• 11 years ago

Not kidding here, but one of the most helpful things my Dad ever told me as a teenager was "You probably won't have the same standard of living as we've had while you were growing up" because he made good money in a specialized, unionized profession. He saw, first-hand, how his employment and skills were being cheapened not by competition, but by globalization mentalities, which, in his words (paraphrased) "Isn't about bringing them up, but bringing our standard of living down." Oh, and his ever present suspicion of "management" which, history eventually proved true, wanted to take money from his profession and give it to themselves and "investors" - which did happen (I won't go into details but it was staggering).

It was through these discussions and sharing of perspective - just one man's view of the world - that I was taught to value health, happiness, and appreciate a life not defined by the materialism that could've been a real sink-hole for me if I'd tried to achieve even greater "status" than he did.

Just to put a last bit of context on it, every five years of so my parents would think about getting a used Corvette convertible, but they could never justify what seemed like such a wasteful purchase...by comparison, my Dad drove a 1991 Ford Ranger pickup, purchased new, babied as a second vehicle, until eventually selling it with 80,000 miles on it for 3x the book value sometime around 2010.

I'm a big-time car guy and have dreamed of a Lamborghini Countach since forever. But now, having lived in the "real world" for over a decade, I'm just happy to have a nice 4-banger Toyota with good air conidtioning, tinted windows that gets 30 mpg when I keep my foot out of it. Looking at 2008, all I can think about is how greed is a terrible, toxic basis for a value system.

harryh5• 11 years ago

The earning power of the emerging asian middle class has doubled in the last 20 years. If that's not "bringing them up" then what is?

jbssm• 11 years ago

There is very little to think about here. World GDP/World population is ever increasing. As such it should be obvious that sons have a better life than parents except in the presence of: 1- local conflict or 2- in the presence of a class that amasses of an unfair amount of resources.

We are clearly in situation no. 2 and these are exactly the periods in history where revolutions start. When the rich get so greedy they make people's quality of life decrease in a broad scale they invariably are tamed by violent uprisings.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+gdp+%2F+world+pop...

cafard• 11 years ago

Boomer here.

1. I was not particularly well off in my 20s, nor were quite a few of my friends. Yes, the ones who went to law school did pretty well. To be sure, student debt was a vastly smaller problem them.

2. A large number of the people I deal with, and who are within five years of my age either way, are parents of young adults in the work force. There may be occasional bemusement by the younger generation's expectations, but I don't see much resentment.

3. Most of the boomers barely made it into the long economic expansion that followed WW II (though on the other hand you can say we owe our existence to it). You could see things getting tighter and tougher by the beginning of the 1970s. The consumer goods we could afford were a lot shinier and nicer than what our parents had, but the economic security was harder to come by.

cryoshon8• 11 years ago

The article mentions pensions at the end... what's a pension?

Joking aside, I haven't seen outward bitterness regarding their poor lot from the current young generation so much as doubling-down on the rat race in an attempt to still top their parents somehow. It's pretty bad for their mental health, and not very effective so far, but may pay off in the long run.

JustSomeNobody• 11 years ago

A pension is something companies used to provide to their employees. Employees used to be able to stay their entire career with one company and amass a pretty decent retirement pension with said company.

Then Wall Street got corrupt. They demanded ever more from companies. Each quarter had to show more profit from the last otherwise they punished the company. Wall Street found ways of funneling any profits directly to investors instead of investing in the company (and, more importantly, it's employees). Pensions took a hit. Companies stopped offering them. Some companies 'borrowed' from pensions and lost it all. The employees did suffer. Employee loyalty dropped. Companies took that as an opportunity to treat employees as temporary; replacing them regularly with cheaper ones.

You'll have to wait until tomorrow night to hear the rest of the story. G'Night.

ionised• 11 years ago

This is a BBC article and in the UK, pensions are still very much alive.

We receive a state pension at retirement that is dependent on national insurance contributions over the course of your working life.

You can also contribute to (and have recently probably been automatically opted into) private workplace pensions that your employer will probably match (up to a point).

raverbashing• 11 years ago

Oh how funny

You just forgot to mention how pensions funds invest heavily in 'evil' Wall Street

And how Wall Street has not been invented in the last couple of years.

And how people happily wound a rope on their necks for a bigger house.

6stringmerc4• 11 years ago

I know this sounds terribly cynical but I'm very, very curious to see how the "Give us all our entitlements!" generation of elderly folks are going to convince the middle-aged and younger working class to support their desires and expectations when, practically speaking, that's the same generation who collectively broke the system. My sense is that domestic issues - healthcare, housing, and entitlements - are going to be a lot more pressing subjects than global affairs within 10 years. It's a little "out of sight out of mind" right now, but it will hit all political affiliated middle and younger aged cohorts right in the paycheck...

I could be wrong, but the ridiculous income inequality overlaid with generational power broking for the past 20-30 years could really set off another "great awakening" type of social upheaval. 70 million Baby Boomers. 70 million Millenials. 30 million Gen-X in the middle to take sides.

dkonofalski8• 11 years ago

What do they mean by "to be poorer"? The current generation already is poorer than previous generations. Income has not kept up with inflation and the income gap has widened tremendously. That previous generations could afford a single-family house with 1 person working and with multiple kids. Now, a double income is almost required, even with renting and not owning, and the rate of couples without children is rising too.

How can anyone be surprised that a candidate who decries all these things is having such success? Everyone in the newer generations know that they're getting the short stick and that we gave it to them. Bernie Sanders is just pointing out the obvious.

http://www.dol.gov/wb/factsheets/Qf-ESWM07.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm

enlightenedfool• 11 years ago

With two programmer incomes we can't buy a home 35 miles away from Boston. So pathetic.

dkonofalski8• 11 years ago

Sadly it's not surprising. As it was said once on The Wire, "We used to make things in this country, build things. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket." That's the economy that the previous generations left us and that we're perpetuating for our children.

ryanSrich3• 11 years ago

You wouldn't be better off in the Valley either. With home prices topping $1m/1000sqft, only the elite of the elite can afford to buy now.

laotzu3• 11 years ago

Amazing how artificially inflated the housing/real estate market is considering the surplus that exists due to overproduction. Last I checked there are around 5 vacant homes for every homeless person in the US. Playing the game of Monopoly as a kid was just getting us ready for reality.

phillmv• 11 years ago

The lack of affordable housing is an intentional policy. Take https://twitter.com/bryan_kirschner/status/66776075183092940...

ecopoesis4• 11 years ago

Then you're looking in the wrong place or you are both underpaid, because with two programmer incomes, we bought 8.5 miles from Boston.

didgeoridoo• 11 years ago

Curious, what towns are you looking in and what prices are you seeing? We're about to go through that process too (similar income situation), and were thinking we could afford to live within 5-10 miles (e.g. Medford, Malden, Waltham, Allston/Brighton). Not possible?

harryh5• 11 years ago

Then buy a smaller home. Homes have increased in size by 50% since the 1970s and more than doubled in size since the 19050s while people per household have decreased.

You aren't poorer than your parents. It's just that your expectations are bigger.

tomp5• 11 years ago

That previous generations could afford a single-family house with 1 person working and with multiple kids. Now, a double income is almost required, even with renting and not owning, and the rate of couples without children is rising too.

I find it highly ironic that while feminists wanted to enable women to have jobs, capitalism intervened and forced women to have jobs. So we have a reserse, but equally bad situation (earlier women had to be home, now they have to work).

dkonofalski8• 11 years ago

I once read on a crazy dude's website that corporations did exactly this to take advantage of feminism. They saw that women wanted to work so they dropped wages for men and then, on top of that, paid women less for the same jobs so that they could further undercut those looking for work. I thought that was crazy talk but maybe it's not too far off. That may not have been their motivation, but that's the situation that's happened anyways.

adventured3• 11 years ago

So you're claiming that it wasn't Capitalism that existed from 1950-1980, that enabled families to make it on one income? And further, I can only guess you're implying that Capitalism is a recent phenomenon from the last 30 years, rather than the reason the US was able to become the wealthiest nation with the highest median income and most productive economy by ~1890?

ako2• 11 years ago

As you say, it's easily explainable by capitalism, supply and demand: * People want the nicest house they can buy, there is a shortage of houses in nice neighborhoods * Women start working, families have more income * supply is still short, demand has more money * price of housing goes up, in addition to the fact that families need child-care * gone is the extra income, cost of housing has increased, no way to turn back. Now everybody needs a double income to afford a nice home.

cryoshon8• 11 years ago

Income from jobs is less and jobs are less stable, most stuff is more expensive (especially rent!), and the younger generation is suffocated by high-interest high-principal student loans which get paid out even if it means wage garnishing. To be explicit, the bandwith of money inflow has decreased, and the bandwith of money outflow have increased. The big-picture money outflow from rent and student loans go more or less directly to the richest.

WalterBright8• 11 years ago

Don't overlook the increasing share of the GDP that the government consumes. See chart S.03t:

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/total_spending_chart

That more than explains the lower amount left for people.

curun1r• 11 years ago

most stuff is more expensive

On the contrary, I think the thing that has deceived us about how much poorer we've become is cheap stuff. TVs are cheaper than ever. We spend less as a percentage of income on food than we've ever done in the past. Even automobiles and computers are more affordable than they've ever been. To a superficial viewpoint, we have more purchasing power than we've ever had (and the CPI includes many of these items which give that superficial viewpoint).

But we see the true regression in purchasing power once we look at things that haven't benefitted from lowered manufacturing costs. Housing, education, health care and the like are showing the true nature of the situation of how poor we've become.

P.S. Yes, I know I took the quote out of context and I'm more agreeing with you than disagreeing with you. But there is a distinction to be made that it's not all stuff that's more expensive, just the important stuff.

yummyfajitas9• 11 years ago

Real income per hour has increased.

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/COMPRNFB

A double income is not required to keep up with your parents, it is only required to keep up with the (much richer) Joneses.

If we aren't richer than our parents, it should be easy to name a good or service that we consume less of than them. Anyone care to do that?

woodman6• 11 years ago

... it should be easy to name a good or service that we consume less of than them. Anyone care to do that?

Social Security and health care come to mind.

cryoshon8• 11 years ago

The chart is ultra-deceptive because it isolates one variable and ignores all the other attendant charts which indicate massive generational loss of wealth. If real income per hour has actually increased, the marginal lifestyle gain from that increase is beyond a doubt, zero.

Millenials own far fewer cars and homes than their parents ever did, in addition to having less (typically negative, due to debt) net worth. To reiterate, if millenials were to liquidate all of their assets (of which they have none anyway), they would still be in the hole for huge sums. I am fairly certain that my parents never had negative net worth; I know for a fact that they also had much more substantial savings and spending ability in their 20s despite coming from humble backgrounds and working menial jobs.

This isn't about keeping up with the Joneses, it's about reaching zero rather than being in the negative.

EDIT: And, as the other replier so far mentioned, millenials consume very little healthcare while being forced by law to spend vast sums to merely have the ability to spend more money (via high deductible plans) to get shitty quality care. For a time in the previous generation's course, it was normal to have mental health care as part of the standard of care, which has slipped away from us-- now, mental healthcare is barely consumed, and is ludicrously expensive when it is covered under the paltry plans at all.

roymurdock4• 11 years ago

This argument doesn't make sense...people's consumption patterns for various goods fluctuate over time. You want to compare your 20,30,40,50 year old father with your 20,30,40,50 year old self in order to determine relative wealth.

My parents both consumed more education (much cheaper, less supply of students), earned relatively higher wages (inflation-adjusted) in a better job market (less unemployment, more aggregate demand, higher LFP rate), bought into the housing market with an affordable mortgage in a nice area, and are now expecting to collect a decent revenue of social security and health benefits on top of their pension funds.

If this holds true across the population on average, we will consume less education, housing, social security, and medical benefits than our parents. Not to mention have a poorer quality of life. On average. There will most certainly be exceptions.

The solution? Go back to a top 10 school and get that law/medical degree, then spend a decade or so paying off the loans (or have parents pay for it). Or go the high risk/high reward route of a startup and live/work like a college student for 1/20 chance to hit it big and become an angel/VC. Or network your way into finance/consulting/tech management.

SamReidHughes5• 11 years ago

Houses with big lawns in the SF Bay Area. (Per capita.)

I mean, land is a finite resource, and what with population growth that's happened in heat-riddled places like Phoenix, I think the overall per capita quality-adjusted land ownership has declined.

This is more of an orthogonal population matter, though.

austenallred4• 11 years ago

I'm probably only slightly less "poor" than my parents were at my age, but I'm vastly more wealthy.

roymurdock4• 11 years ago

Interested to hear what you mean by this...

"Wealth" in economics is the sum total of all of your physical and intangible assets, including a calculation of discounted future earnings.

So being rich and being wealthy are very similar concepts in economics - large NPV of assets and income. But in normal parlance, rich and poor can also refer to standard of living/quality of life/happiness.

So are you wealthier? Happier? Earning less?

jp5558• 11 years ago

Oh, did your parents have faster internet, bigger TVs, and better cars than you?

Richness, wealth, is not money. It's the things we want. My parents never had $2/lb strawberries in February, or MRI machines, HIV drugs, discount airlines, etc, etc.

We are insanely more wealthy than our parents.

merpnderp5• 11 years ago

This is a tough one for economists. While a Roman emperor had far more gold than any of us could ever buy, he couldn't get clean water, clean sanitation, a tetanus shot, fly in an airplane, etc etc. Regardless of purchasing power, what we can purchase today is much better and more useful than what could be purchased before. Thank you capitalism.

jes51992• 11 years ago

Faster internet, bigger TVs, better cars, and fancier produce have very little influence on your actual quality of life.

Better medical care does, but it's expensive medical interventions that bankrupts middle class families. Also: Real estate - much further out of reach. Education - much deeper in debt. These are the things that really matter.

I'll give you cheap air travel, though. That stuff is great. Hooray for cheap jet fuel.

wfo6• 11 years ago

It depends really on how you measure wealth. For me a bigger TV or better car truly doesn't matter.

Could our parents afford to own a home, have children, live comfortably off one income? Can we? I guess we have plenty of fun cheap toys made by slave labor that we can't play with because we're always working so if that's how you measure richness then sure.

cableshaft• 11 years ago

Except in the basics, like housing costs, health costs, and tuition, which have been more or less skyrocketing, and job security and pensions have pretty much gone out the window.

Sure, we have cooler, cheaper toys and food is easier to get, but the rest of it makes it much harder to get by, in general.

pitt1980• 11 years ago

this is so dependent on the macro economy in which you live, its almost completely independent of you

http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2013/08/26-years-of-growth-...

can you imagine having been a 10 year old in Shanghai in 1987?

jusssi2• 11 years ago

Makes sense. More people fighting over the same finite amount of resources, leads to less per person.

Eventually, no matter how imaginary money is, it's used to buy non-imaginary resources.

refurb2• 11 years ago

That makes no sense. Resources are fixed but incomes have grow by what? 5 fold in the last 100 years? Lots more people now than then!

jusssi2• 11 years ago

In the last 100 years, the advance of science and technology has enabled us to make better use of those resources, making people wealthier. Population growth seems to be catching up with the advance now, leaving less resources per capita.

Or maybe it's just slower times before the next big breakthrough. Infinite energy from fusion, and AI doing all our work would certainly allow us to truly fill up the world.

fatpenguin20152• 11 years ago

How does one define poorer?

If you were given the choice to go back in time and live in your parents generation INSTEAD of the present, your life expectancy is lower, you dont have the Internet for information.

Overseas Phone Calls were a luxury back then, so was airplane travel. It seems to me inn absolute terms, the vast majority is better off vs if they were the same age in the 1980's

WalterBright8• 11 years ago

I remember when traveling to Europe was a huge luxury that you'd be lucky to do once in a lifetime. Now I fly to Europe, give an hour presentation, and fly home again. It's unbelievable.

rm_-rf_slash3• 11 years ago

I think a lot of us would trade long distance calling and Internet access for the ability to go to college without being indebted for life, find a job that didn't make you work at home after hours or on the weekends, and be able to afford a house to maintain and leave for their children.

Being able to afford a new iPhone every other year is not prosperity.

modoc• 11 years ago

Obviously just one anecdote but my parents both had work/on-call in the evenings and weekends, always had a substantial mortgage on the house which they had to sell when they split up. I will get zero inheritance. They are both college educated, smart, hard working people. I made more at 20 years old, then they both made put together at that same time.

yummyfajitas9• 11 years ago

I wouldn't trade an MRI and micro-lumbar discectomy for a house. Would you give up all medicine invented since 1970 if you could pay 1970 prices?

Also, the average price of college is <1 year of an average college grad earnings (according to a quick Google search). If you are indebted for life because of this, its your own fault.

More people than ever before own houses, and much larger ones than in the past. Your complaints don't seem to fit reality.

nocman3• 11 years ago

And the US wasn't 19 Trillion dollars in debt either.

pnut• 11 years ago

Your statement presumes a lot, for instance that sovereign debt under all circumstances, is an existential threat.

The United States has been in deeper debt (as a percentage of GDP) before.

lumberjack• 11 years ago

Education, healthcare and housing were more accessible though. But who cares about those things? As long as I have Wikipedia on my smartphone I'm blessed.

pravda• 11 years ago

Overseas Phone Calls were a luxury back then

Forget about overseas, INTERSTATE phone calls were a luxury!

The 1980s were a nightmare -- no GPS, no cell phones, no digital cameras.

WalterBright8• 11 years ago

We had cooler clothing styles in the 80s, though.

atinybitanon• 11 years ago

I make more than my parents combined ever did, even if you count for inflation. Though they seemed to have a higher quality of life. I suspect this has to do with other factors, mostly my own short commings.

merpnderp5• 11 years ago

People eat out quite a bit more than their parents did. This is probably the single biggest cost difference between this generation and their parents. $20 a plate at Applebees versus $3 a plate at home.

zbyte642• 11 years ago

Factor in time spent cooking. $3 a plate would either mean cooking up a large batch or eating mac&cheese. You couldn't drag me into an Applebees...

mc32• 11 years ago

It's probably related to the relative maturity of an economy.

In a growing economy, the odds of offspring doing better than parents is a function of the economy as many new avenues to prosperity open up. On the one hand is China where children have more opportunity than parents, on the other hand is Japan, a mature economy where growth has plateaued so there aren't massive opportunities for newer generations.

Also, after a certain level of achievement, there isn't much more to be had. So the progress would be incremental, on average, rather than tectonic, after the plateauing.

In other words, it's not expected that in large diversified economies there is the possibility for everyone to become a magnate.

irox859• 11 years ago

My grandfather was a carpenter working in a factory that made piano benches. He worked there his entire career.

He was in his early fifties when he retired and was actually retired longer than he worked in terms of time, and when he died he still had 6 digits in assets (not including his house.) He didn't do anything special except live modestly, save, and buy stocks.

Who can say they'll have the same experience working a blue collar job today?

austenallred4• 11 years ago

I think as a rule of thumb anybody working a blue collar job today is in trouble.

fatpenguin20152• 11 years ago

Just a quick informal poll if its allowed.

For users/people who think you are "worse off" vs back then, could you let us know which country you are in?

For users who grew up in Asia/developing countries, I would think the young nowadays have a lot more opportunities/chances to strike it rich.

What seems to be occurring at this stage = there used to be a income/price discrepancy for work done, solely because most work had to be performed by locals. The main change now is a lot more of this work can be given/outsourced to employees who have lower wages in developing countries.

It would be interesting to see the results of the poll.

rwallace• 11 years ago

Ireland here. Peaked maybe two or three decades later than the US did, but yes, my countrymen seem determined to import all the systemic corruption and waste and follow the Americans on their downward spiral, so unless that changes, we are now at the stage where each generation is fewer and in real terms poorer than the last.

evanpw2• 11 years ago

Here's a post with some actual charts and numbers: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleaebeling/2013/03/15/gen-x-a.... The conclusions looks like:

1) People in the age range 29-37 (cherry-picked?) are less wealthy than the previous generation. The Great Recession explains a lot of the difference.

2) All other age groups are wealthier than the previous generation, but the gain is much smaller than it has been in the past.

johngalt• 11 years ago

Houses are bigger, cars are safer, faster and more efficient, medicines are more prevalent, entertainment options have increased incalculably.

I guess I don't feel poorer.

Young 'to be poorer than parents at every stage of life'

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