Explore how people in the U.S. aged 18 to 34 have changed over four decades

http://census.socialexplorer.com/young-adults/

by adnanh • 12 years ago

95 80 12 years ago

census.socialexplorer.com

debacle• 12 years ago

The Median Earnings for Full Time Workers page was quite sad for America.

Language Other than English Spoken at Home was quite surprising for me. I had no idea it was that high.

I don't understand how the employment numbers can be that bad. 35% unemployment - that is mostly impacted by people rearing children and college age folk, I hope.

zhemao• 12 years ago

A significant portion of that age group is still in school, hence not employed nor unemployed. They should really just show the unemployment rate, not the employment rate.

But yeah, the median income drop and poverty rate increase is pretty sad.

svachalek• 12 years ago

True. But another significant portion is considered "unemployable" or "disheartened" which makes unemployment numbers misleading as well.

microtonal• 12 years ago

I wonder about the median income. Another statistic says that more people have at least a Bachelor degree. Consequently, more people start working at a later age, reducing the median income. On the other hand, new employees with a degree should earn more. It would be interesting to know the interaction between the two.

VLM2• 12 years ago

Engineering estimate of college age folk is 20% have a degree and a degree (optimistically) takes 4 years out of the 16 year interval is a quarter, so the contribution due to school is about 5% not employed.

The stats really are that bad.

azurezyq• 12 years ago

I'm living in California. California has a considerable amount of Spanish speaking hispanics for historic reasons. For greater SF/LA areas, actually non-native English speakers communities are growing very fast due to hi-techs and relatives immigrants.

Just to mention a few: Monterey Park, 20% whites, 66.9% asians (50% Chinese). Milpitas, 20% whites, 62.2% asians. Cupertino, 30% whites, 63.3% asians (20% Chinese, 20% Indians)

Just been to Monterey Park in LA area two weeks ago, and found I can live there naturally even if I can not speak an English word. At the contrast, I think that city would be a bit harsh for non-Chinese speakers...

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

I'm living in California. California has a considerable amount of Spanish speaking hispanics for historic reasons.

More for geographic reasons. The Hispanics that are here for historic reasons (e.g., descendants of Californios) largely speak English.

jdmichal• 12 years ago

As another point of reference, one could live in certain parts of Miami their entire life without speaking a word of English, and have minimal (if any) friction. Forget about "spoken at home", we're talking "spoken everywhere" here.

tsunamifury• 12 years ago

These numbers are really grim, and considering the job market only gets more cruel a few years after the top end of this age bracket, it makes it hard for young people to have a lot of hope for the future.

Granted, maybe some of them are reflective of age-agnostic trends but still! Start in higher debt then make less than ever! As a young person looking at these numbers I realize I am squandering my blessings as a high paid tech worker.

We are setting up our future for failure while claiming we needed to make these sacrifices for today.

angersock• 12 years ago

It's pretty great--all the while, even in tech we're watching fewer IPOs (and thus good exits for non-founders), companies whose business proposition is often literally "We externalize our costs by ignoring local laws and screwing our emplo^Hcontractors", and all the while pissing off everyone else in the economy by telling them how awesome the future is going to be.

And we still haven't managed to engage (politically or otherwise) the folks actually running the government. Things aren't looking good.

kaoD6• 12 years ago

Welcome to "staying competitive".

Here at Spain (and generally Southern Europe) we've been told over and over again that we have to stay competitive, which is just an euphemism for working more and earning less (i.e. becoming Europe's China).

In a globalized market with a (still) steadily growing population, competition is growing and therefore salaries are shrinking.

It's happening in all industries (e.g. tech firms offshoring) but also at homes. I don't know about the USA but here in Spain housewives love hunting for sales, buying as cheap as they can, and proud about it. Why are they surprised later when their children can't find a decent salary? Buying Perú's asparagus cheaper than in our home country (including transportation across the Atlantic!) is only driving prices lower and lower, which hinders the whole economy in the long term.

And now the USA is going to sign a trade agreement with Europe which will further increase competition and will drive wages even lower than they're now for both parties.

On the other hand, isn't this just leveling the playing field for developing countries? After all, for them to grow, we have to shrink.

disputin7• 12 years ago

Seems to me it's the government which needs to stay competitive, not the workers, ie regulation and bureaucracy.

wavefunction2• 12 years ago

The wealthy in the United States have been extracting wealth from the middle-class and capturing more of the annually generated income for some time. This isn't about being competitive, it's about robber-barons actually robbing others through political capture.

Florin_Andrei2• 12 years ago

competition is growing and therefore salaries are shrinking

I'm a fan of asking naive questions, so here's one:

If salaries are shrinking everywhere, then where is all the money?

logfromblammo2• 12 years ago

Careful with your use of the word "we".

What is happening is that between 1974 and 1994, the generation that was then in power decided to stop paying off their own debts, and started deferring payment to future generations. The effect is similar to being forced to cosign a mortgage before you are even born, then when you turn 18, your parents kick you out of their house and stop making the payments. You then have to pay for two houses, and can probably only live in the worst one.

It's a really nasty thing for your elder generation to do, but all your life, they have taught you that you aren't allowed to murder all of them and sell off the assets they purchased with your labor as collateral. So it becomes somewhat of a tradition for each generation to refinance the debts of the previous with the labor of the next as security. But at some point, a generation realizes that the only way they can afford the same lifestyle as their parents is by having two incomes and fewer children.

"Our" grandparents needed to make the sacrifice back before they died. But they didn't, and now they can't. So I prefer to let their creditors go find them in Hell if they want their money back. I am perfectly willing to be responsible for my own financial decisions, but rolling over the debts of the fathers unto the fourth generation seems more than a little bit unfair.

And that is justified in large part by use of the pronoun "we". I, specifically, am being taxed to pay for the economic benefits enjoyed by entire generations of older people who reaped more than they ever sowed. And my gruel, along with that of younger generations, has become thinner ever since.

I even get angry when my spouse says "we need to do X" and really means "I want you to do X, and expect nothing--even gratitude or acknowledgement--in exchange", so I can't imagine how politicians can so easily get away with doing the same thing to entire nations. What "we" need to be doing is demanding that some specific people be held individually responsible for their own bad behavior.

Florin_Andrei2• 12 years ago

So, for everything you said above, how do you define the pronoun "we"? People in the USA who entered the workforce in the 90s/00s?

aw3c2• 12 years ago

*in the USA

wernercd• 12 years ago

Not needed... USA is the only place worth reporting on so it's implied.

lentil_soup• 12 years ago

Shouldn't the title say something like "in the USA"?

dang2• 12 years ago

We put that in.

kleer001• 12 years ago

35+ y/o here.

Every time I hear things like this I call up my mother and thank her for having me earlier than later. Also, I did not like the interface. I'd rather all the data was just <schplat!> there in one map.

adnanh• 12 years ago

Something like this? http://www.socialexplorer.com/

aswanson• 12 years ago

35+ here as well. We still feel the effects of lower opportunity for youth; our entire system (I assume you are based in the US) is based on 7 percent growth in perpetuity for our standard of life to continue. This growth, in turn, is based on younger workers contributing to the system as old farts like us age out. What hurts them will definitely hurt us.

robodale• 12 years ago

I'm 41. My years of experience and getting two degrees when I was young and ambitious has helped greatly. I would NOT want to be 18-24 right now.

yuncun2• 12 years ago

I'm 23, it's meh. I think most 18-24 kids browsing hackernews will be ok, but I have a lot of smarter classmates who are having trouble in other-than-CS fields.

hnriot2• 12 years ago

I was surprised at the number who had a degree was less than the national average for California. I guess there's a lot of immigrant workers who don't achieve higher education levels which skews the perception living and working in the valley. States like Virginia and Kansas beat the national average, yet not california, that's really sad.

jboggan• 12 years ago

I almost guarantee that any HN reader lives in a section of California that is radically unrepresentative of the state as a whole.

cwang912• 12 years ago

i.e. San Francisco != California

zackify• 12 years ago

I live in Fresno County, it's very representative sadly

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

As there is pretty much no regional section of California that is representative of the State as a whole, that's a fairly easy guarantee to make.

bpodgursky• 12 years ago

Someone has to be below average. Dunno why it's sadder to have unemployed Californians than unemployed Virginians.

RadioAndrea• 12 years ago

Even within the state of Virginia, look at the difference between Fairfax County and Portsmouth. It's comforting to think that your peers are "beating" the national average, and I think that something we miss when we read these graphs. A reminder about both ends of an average is something we need more in life.

hnriot2• 12 years ago

because Silicon Valley is in California, it's supposed to be the world's hub of tech leaders. If we have a candidate pool that is so poorly educated it doesn't bode well for sustaining that technology lead.

pcthrowaway• 12 years ago

52% of San Franciscans aged 25+ have Bachelors degrees or higher, which is much better than the state average of 30.5%

ryanhuff• 12 years ago

While interesting, it leaves me wanting to filter down and isolate different categories to see how they may impact other numbers. Its difficult to really understand what is driving these trends on its own.

humanrebar• 12 years ago

Aside from the economic indicators, which are already being discussed here, the numbers for "never married" (up), "veteran" (way down), and "foreign born" (up) really jump out as trends. "Living with a parent" (up) is also a trend, but perhaps one more directly tied to the employment economy.

For better or worse, all these trends have had and will have important societal impacts. Why don't we see more discussions on this sort of thing? Other issues, like who's paying what in taxes, seem less important by comparison.

Note that I'm not making qualitative judgments on the people that fall into different categories. The numbers just jump out to me and I wonder why they aren't discussed more in conversations about who millenials are, what they think, and how they will approach the society, culture, and government.

wavefunction2• 12 years ago

>Other issues, like who's paying what in taxes, seem less important by comparison.

There are many people who think this is exactly what the source of many of these trends. People have been ignoring "who is paying what" for far too long as the burden gets shifted from the wealthy who benefit disproportionately from our civil society to the middle and working classes.

stronglikedan• 12 years ago

I would imagine that the "living with a parent" trend correlates with the "foreign born" trend. From what I've heard about other cultures outside of the US, it's common for a child to live with a parent up until they get married.

r00fus• 12 years ago

A lot of these are indicators of a perverse economy. Living with Parents, Living in Poverty, Never Married are all up, while Employed Population is way down.

Meanwhile the security/prison industrial complex and financial sector are essentially unregulated (total regulatory capture).

kilroy123• 12 years ago

As a millennial these trends are frighting to see.

It's frustrating when I chat with friends who are a few years older than me about this (mid 30s), and they blame all of this on millennials just being lazy. Or stupid, for picking bad degrees. I think the issues are larger and more systemic than that.

colmvp• 12 years ago

What we're experiencing in Canada is pretty similar to the U.S.

Perhaps your friends should listen to this specific podcast regarding 'lazy millenials': http://canadalandshow.com/podcast/geritocracy

dredmorbius2• 12 years ago

Gen-Xers were "lazy do-nothings" for a few years in the early 1990s, also a recession (though not as bad as what's come since). Until the Clinton Expansion took off and they turned into the Dot Commies.

I see opprobrium heaped on generations broadly as hugely inaccurate and misplaced.

jamesli• 12 years ago

Considering there has been an increasing larger percentage of the population going to college, the statistics might somehow get skewed by the population between age 18~23.

If one is in college, it is natural to assume that she or he is not fully employed, has low income, mostly not married, etc.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

Interesting how 'living in poverty' and 'not married' track.

cryoshon2• 12 years ago

Relative to the year 2000 is the part that scares me the most. It seems that largely things have changed for the worse over the last decade.

For Massachusetts:

Lower employment by an entire %4. Lower wages by 4k/year (%10 less!!!), adjusted for inflation. More people living with parents, fewer people living alone (read: piled into group houses with their former college roommates/friends). More people in poverty. More people never married (can't afford a real wedding, or ring). More people with higher education, likely not being put to use. Student loan debt and credit card debt aren't even listed on here as statistics.

The bleakest part is that the damage has mostly already been done to this cohort of people who I am a part of. The low wages now cripple wage growth in the future, which is bound to be bearish for people who aren't already rich. The race to the bottom is a real thing.

Thankfully, many people are starting to refer to our period of time as "late capitalism" for increasingly obvious reasons. Things will have to bottom out and improve at some point.

existencebox• 12 years ago

While I agree with your takeaway, I think you have to be careful which of those points you bucket under the same influence.

Take Marriage, for instance. There's a lot that suggests that the newer generations simply put less stead in traditional institutions; not as a sign of wealth. Anecdotally, I was "half engaged" ('we're going to get married eventually, right?' 'yup.') but sans the ring/formality part for nearly a decade before we started settling things down. It just doesn't have the same meaning to us as to my parents, and although I can say my financial future seems a lot less stable than my parents's at my age, despite a _better_ employment position, that's not why I've avoided the ring song and dance.

That turned into a bit of a ramble, but you get my gist, I hope. I think we'd agree that having a broader sampling of metrics (including more hand wavy sociological ones) that might try and explain not only the statistics but whether we should be trying to correlate them at all would be valuable.

ProAm• 12 years ago

More people never married (can't afford a real wedding, or ring).

You cannot leap to the conclusion that people are not getting married because they cannot afford it. I seriously doubt that is correlated (of course I have no proof either).

ams6110• 12 years ago

Agree, there have always been courthouse weddings that are very inexpensive. If your SO is holding out for a $1,000 (or more) piece of carbon, might be good to have a chat about that before going any further.

Kluny2• 12 years ago

It's not that they can't afford the wedding. I think it's more of a refusal to settle down and commit with someone who doesn't have a stable career/future, or the inflexibility of a spouse whom you'll have to convince to move when the only job options you can find are in a different state.

IndianAstronaut• 12 years ago

The next obvious thing that will start to happen is higher crime. Lots of unemployed, lots of time on hands, and no future.

Kluny2• 12 years ago

I've actually seen more than one article commenting about how strange it is that there hasn't been a rise in crime yet.

logicallee• 12 years ago

This is nice but I'm surprised at the bracket 18-34? (at least separating 18-24 and 25-34 would have been better.) The listed bracket 18-34 covers young adulthood where most eventual high earners would be earning near 0 in college, to late twenties with some people pursuing masters but most joining workforce, to mid-thirties with some people fully educated and having 10-12 years of experience in their field. (e.g. a programmer graduating at 24 and earning $90K ($120K bay area) by 34 is not in any way unusual, but here gets averaged with others, maybe including his future peer, who are just starting college and are showing very low earnings for a few years.)

Likewise, "living with a parent (18-34)"... "Bachelor's degree (18-34)"... Quite the bracket!

Spectral• 12 years ago

The age bracket doesn't really work out for certain categories, as for the below example it automatically excludes most people age 18-21 as with a standard 4 year degree will land you around the age of 22 minimum.

Bachelor's Degree or Higher, Age 18 to 34 Percent of total population age 18 to 34 years with bachelor's degree or higher

tswartz• 12 years ago

Interesting to see how even though % with bachelor degrees has grown since 1980, salaries have decreased and poverty has increased. Obviously, not all correlated, but still interesting.

dredmorbius2• 12 years ago

As I've been saying for some time regarding the current employment / opportunity situation: we're not going to educate our way out of this mess.

ryanSrich• 12 years ago

Time for some personal experience.

Both my fiancé and I are employed. Most would consider our combined income to be very good. Considering the economic climate we are both doing well.

The problem here, and why I think trends like "never married" and "living at home" are up, is that even though we make a very good wage we still aren't middle class due to student debt. So instead of buying a house we pay over $3k each month on our student debt. Instead of purchasing new cars and a house (thus pumping money back into the economy) we have to pay rent.

The point of this post is that even if you are one of the lucky ones to get a well paying job right out of college you'll most likely have to put off purchases that used to be the norm for middle class.

Explore how people in the U.S. aged 18 to 34 have changed over four decades

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