This seems rather misleadingly stated to me. "Between March 18 and June 17, the total net worth of 643 American billionaires increased…". They've picked "the bottom of the FTSE 100" as their start point, and could well simply have captured "the stock market has rebounded". They'd have a much more compelling argument if they could say something similar starting from 1st Jan.
I came to make this exact point. It is no surprise that billionaires, whose wealth is tied up in the companies they own large shares of, do worse when the stock market falls and better when the stock market rises than people who don't have has much wealth in the stock market.
The worrying part to me of the overall economic situation is that the actions of the Federal Reserve seems to help the stock market much more than the real economy.
"U.S. Billionaire Wealth Surged During the Pandemic" – Misleading? Let's define Pandemic. From the onset of the first official death. That was Feb. 29 according to news sources. So taking a starting point on or around Feb. 29 seems reasonable. Unfortunately deaths start occurring, lockdowns start being put into place, a lot of businesses grind to a halt, stock market begins tanking.
Between the Fed and Congress they deliberately pumped money into the market favoring top-down rather than bottom-up and large corporations over small to medium. Result? Stock market surge while millions (> 40 million?) remain unemployed and lines for free food grow all around the country. Why? Because let's say even if a large amount of pension funds are tied to the stock market that's of no benefit to someone suffering today through no fault of their own. And given that the top 11% (isn't it?) of Americans own 80% of stocks and I presume the tippy top of the 11% own a huge chunk of that in turn then hey presto it all looks a bit too much like a deliberate wealth transfer – crony capitalism taking advantage of a crisis as exhaustively documented by Naomi Klein in Shock Doctrine.
Far from being misleading, these statistics reveal what we all know. The US has turned into a virtual oligarchic kleptocracy.
So what was the $1200 to every American, and Unemployment base-lined to the point that people were making MORE with unemployment compensation than what they made at their normal job?
I’m not a billionaire but I saw my wealth surge shortly after March, so I could only imagine billionaires made even more.
It is a shame that so many people are not financially educated enough to take advantage of moments like this in history. A financial crisis is a time when fortunes are made, and if you properly navigate each one throughout your life you can give yourself a major step up in networth.
> It is a shame that so many people are not financially educated enough to take advantage of moments like this in history
For the vast majority of people the problem is lack of access to capital to invest, not education on how to invest.
I know a lot of blue collar workers, restaurant workers, farmers, truck drivers... their concerns during the pandemic is “how am I going to pay my rent / mortgage / medical / credit card bills next month”... investing in the stock market is not on their radar:
For the upper middle / upper class who do have extra cash to play with, it’s important to realize these specific market conditions are rare and unpredictable (it’s still possible for there to be another major sell off, just because we’re up doesn’t been we’ll stay up). It’s easy to look back and say “oh I could have made 40% in 3 months” after it happened. Yet many of the best money managers missed most of the upswing because no one was expecting a V shape recovery so quickly.
To build wealth, don’t try to time markets or pull crazy stunts like outing cheap OTM options. Just invest a steady percent of your income in index funds every month over a long period of time.
A lot of people don't possess the capital to, well, capitalise on these events. I tried day trading as early as march, but guess how far 100 dollars of starting investment got me?
The shame is not that people don't have financial literacy.
100 dollars for day trading is shit. You should never risk more than 2% of your account in a trade, that means on average you’d have to be satisfied with making a couple bucks of profit per trade.
Please try not to extrapolate all of human existence from your unique circumstances and trajectory through life.
Consider that many suffer from all manners of adversity that are tough to overcome: ill health, bad fortune, financial setbacks, lack of inherited wealth, and so on.
Look around you – becoming successful is like walking on a tightrope, a series of little nudges can easily knock you off and you may never get back up.
Your bio does say "Ethically challenged software engineer working for a major tech company" ! :)
Believe in the narrative of careerism, work at companies until you retire, all that. Lots of young folks are saying "it's all a scam", dropping out, buying RVs, vans, moving to farms, etc.
The number of young farmers entering the field is nowhere near enough to replace the number exiting, according to the USDA: Between 2007 and 2012, agriculture gained 2,384 farmers between ages 25 and 34 — and lost nearly 100,000 between 45 and 54.
I wouldn't say the folks I know who are moving to farms intend to go into the business. More so as a means of seeing it as a way to find solid footing so they can escape many years of landlords having a tight grip on their income.
Never heard one person planning on selling to major food buyers. Everyone knows that's a losing game. Farmers markets and co-ops give much better prices.
It's not about money though. The motivations are to get away from money actually, and to just have your needs met. You can eat like a king for a month just from a single pig slaughter.
This is my plan once I have a sufficient nest egg from my software engineering career. It where I am in my dreams and in my astrological chart working with animals and plants to build permaculture gardens and structures.
I am going to screw up the story. But, there is a fable where a millionaire was talking to a fisherman who lived a relaxing life on island who only owned one boat.
The millionaire asked the fisherman why didn’t he buy more boats so he could become rich?
The fisherman asked the millionaire why would he want to do that?
The millionaire said so the fisherman can work hard and retire to an island and have a relaxing life....
You can pick on examples, and have, without challenging the central point that young people are correctly recognizing the default assumptions of how American lives go as, A, a scam set up to funnel money to people who already have far too much, and B, so utterly rigged that even if that was what you wanted to do, it's next to impossible even to make a decent start.
They see it and they're calling bullshit, as yet not in a very coordinated way, but calling bullshit still.
If that’s true, there would be some type of longitudinal evidence.
I suspect that this is like the “no one use Facebook anymore” meme where statistics show otherwise.
Are you working in a technology related field? If so, probably a number of the 70-80% of the people who make less than you do probably think you make too much.
Is this the part where I'm supposed to feel some ethereal kinship with Jeff Bezos and his literal dragon's hoard, because of some theoretical sense in which we work in the same industry? I mean, we really don't, though! I'm in the tech industry, he's in the being a billionaire industry. I see no reason to believe that people wanting to take away his dragon's hoard should make me fear for my salary.
And if it does - well, what the hell? Those people you cite are correct. I do make too much, and so do you. Even an ex-tech-industry billionaire will tell you that, or did you think it was by accident that people feel the need to worry their jobs will get exported to India or somewhere? I know I'm not going to make any friends talking about a salary bubble in tech, but we all know - or we better know - there is one, and sooner or later something is going to pop it.
Is this the part where I'm supposed to feel some ethereal kinship with Jeff Bezos and his literal dragon's hoard, because of some theoretical sense in which we work in the same industry?
Just like becoming a billionaire seems unattainable to you, someone living in the MiddleOfNowhere Omaha probably doesn’t see a way to make $200K in a year that a CS grad working on the west coast can obtain within two years.
When they are talking about “taxing the rich”, it’s going to come as a surprise to a lot of the techie liberals that “they” are talking about them and not just the billionaires.
What a shame for those who haven't been paying attention, then.
It seems like there's an implicit claim here, with which you expect me to implicitly agree, that such taxation would be unjust. The thing is that I don't agree. If you'd like me to, you need to convince me. As long as you don't, I'm going to keep calling out that assumption for what it is, and asking how you justify it.
Yes I now work for $BigTech and make somewhere around the salary of an SDE2. But I work remotely in the burbs of a relatively low cost of living area. I can take a hit.
But how will people feel making the same salary and living on the west coast? A lot of them think they are “barely middle class” because they can’t afford to send Timmy to a private school, have the house, max out their 401K and save for their son to go to a top ten college?
I mean, what do you want me to say? We should keep inflating the bubble forever because not everyone in the blast radius has the wit to get out of it?
Even leaving aside the moral repugnance of making it structurally impossible for almost all young people to build lives in this country, so that a few who already have much more than they need can go on accumulating more still - from a purely utilitarian perspective, in what way does this lend itself to building a strong, stable country, one that isn't both constantly riven with internal strife driven by the results of generational wealth extraction, and ultimately unable to sustain itself because it can't develop enough talent to compete at global scale?
Jeff Bezos being a billionaire doesn’t stop anyone else from buying the house in the burbs with 2.1 kids. Is the tech bubble distorting the real estate market on the west coast - yes. But there is an entire country outside of the west coast where two middle class jobs like a teacher and firefighter can live well.
The pie is not static. How many jobs have the five biggest tech companies created either directly or indirectly?
The average starting salary of a college grad is $51K (https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/compensatio...). Knowing that, the emphasis should be on teaching students not to get tens of thousands in debt to get a degree in Ancient Chinese Art History.
Tell that to the "teach everyone to code" people. You know, the ones who have spent most of the last decade claiming that the way to build a solid life is to mortgage your future to whatever extent necessary to get a STEM credential, and once you have that, you're all set.
I know a lot of people who bought into that, got the credential, and are now learning it isn't worth what they were promised it would be. They're furious, and why shouldn't they be? They didn't expect to find they had been lied to, and they're still holding the bag.
I also know a lot of people who either didn't buy into that, or couldn't, because they weren't born into a situation where even as bad an option as mortgaging their future was available. They don't see any better hope in the "economic system" than to spend their whole lives working three shit jobs, never having time to breathe, and never having even the basic level of "I won't be homeless in a month even if I lose my income today" security that you and I have, and you probably take for granted. (I don't; I've been close enough to homelessness to know better.) Those people are furious, too, and why shouldn't they be?
It's not just the West Coast, either, and it's not just tech. I live in Baltimore, and housing prices in this town have more than doubled in the last twenty years, most of the increase occurring in the last ten. As I alluded to before, I've been fortunate enough to stay ahead of that. Most people aren't. And no one should need to be lucky to have a reliable, healthy place to live.
It's not just the single dimensionless number you cite, either. That doesn't account for regional differences in starting pay, or how your imaginary Omaha kid can't expect to make that kind of money starting out. It doesn't account for how that kind of money barely affords a one-bedroom apartment in my own town, to say nothing of in an actual center of the tech industry. And it doesn't account for all the new college grads for whom that number is meaningless anyway, because they can't get a job at all. The article you linked makes mention of that, but you don't. Why is that?
And it's not just about "job creation". Uber alone could be said to have created tens of thousands of jobs, but that, again, is a dimensionless number that explains nothing. Are those jobs worth having? Do they pay enough to deserve counting one-for-one with others? Hell, given the effort and expense Uber goes to to avoid being required to treat its employees as employees, do those deserve to be counted as jobs at all? And where in the tech industry does anyone deserve more favorable consideration? Amazon, another leading light in this sort of discussion, only gives a damn if its warehouse workers live or die inasmuch as it affects DH production targets. If this is the best we can do, we should at least have enough of a sense of shame not to big ourselves up as "job creators". But maybe you'd like to demonstrate, with cited examples, that we predominantly do better. That's what you seem to want to argue, so, okay, argue it.
I mean, I get that you want to blame all these people for the shitty situation they've found themselves in, but what I don't get is why. Why do you want to make it their fault? It doesn't take much benefit of the doubt to assume that they're no more foolish and no more stupid than you and I were when we were young, and that they can't make it the way we did is for some reason other than their own incompetence. But you won't give them that benefit of the doubt. Why not?
That isn't a rhetorical question, either. I really want an answer, because I really don't understand where you're coming from with this stuff. Like, when we were kids the joke was about "underwater basket-weaving", now you're making it about ancient Chinese art history, but it's still basically the same joke, and it already wasn't a good joke even when it still had the virtue of novelty.
So, what? Is it that you think nothing has changed in the decades between our own youth and today? I have a hard time imagining anyone could actually think that, but you're not really giving me a lot to work with here. Will you please explain your thinking, so I can at least understand where you're coming from on this?
Tell that to the "teach everyone to code" people. You know, the ones who have spent most of the last decade claiming that the way to build a solid life is to mortgage your future to whatever extent necessary to get a STEM credential, and once you have that, you're all set.
“teach yourself to code” is about not going to college to learn how to code. It says that right there on the tin. You don’t have to get tens of thousands worth of debt. Go to a local state school.
I also know a lot of people who either didn't buy into that, or couldn't, because they weren't born into a situation where even as bad an option as mortgaging their future was available. They don't see any better hope in the "economic system" than to spend their whole lives working three shit jobs, never having time to breathe, and never having even the basic level of "I won't be homeless in a month even if I lose my income today" security that you and I have, and you probably take for granted. (I don't; I've been close enough to homelessness to know better.) Those people are furious, too, and why shouldn't they be?
Name a scenario where someone can’t go to some college somewhere because of affordability between government grants and loans?
It's not just the West Coast, either, and it's not just tech. I live in Baltimore, and housing prices in this town have more than doubled in the last twenty years, most of the increase occurring in the last ten. As I alluded to before, I've been fortunate enough to stay ahead of that. Most people aren't. And no one should need to be lucky to have a reliable, healthy place to live.
Going by the 30% rule of thumb, that should be affordable by someone making $24K a year. Yeah that’s about how much I was paying when I was making that much.
I mean, I get that you want to blame all these people for the shitty situation they've found themselves in, but what I don't get is why. Why do you want to make it their fault? It doesn't take much benefit of the doubt to assume that they're no more foolish and no more stupid than you and I were when we were young
Unless you are emancipated, you can’t sign up for FAFSA unless your legal guardian sign with you. Yes I was dumb, that’s what adults are for. I told my son that he would have to go to a two year college at first and then he could transfer to a four year local college and stay at home. I also told him that we wouldn’t pay for a degree where the return wasn’t worth it.
Like, when we were kids the joke was about "underwater basket-weaving", now you're making it about ancient Chinese art history, but it's still basically the same joke, and it already wasn't a good joke even when it still had the virtue of novelty.
It’s not a joke. It’s the job of parents to help their children make good decisions. We have the internet now. It’s not hard to research potential salaries based on major.
So, what? Is it that you think nothing has changed in the decades between our own youth and today? I have a hard time imagining anyone could actually think that, but you're not really giving me a lot to work with here. Will you please explain your thinking, so I can at least understand where you're coming from on this?
Yes things have changed. I have children that I have had to guide through the process. It’s called being a responsible adult as a parent.
Okay, so, first off, you're looking at the homeownership rate as a dimensionless number, without any regard for how it's composed. And that, again, is a problem, because if you look at how it is composed, what you very quickly see is that homeownership is strongly concentrated among older people and among married couples, and not among young people just starting out in life. [1] If you want to argue that homeownership as opposed to rentership is significant here, in the context of a discussion around whether young people's prospects and chances are worthy of their outrage, then you need to demonstrate that homeownership is as accessible to that cohort as to any other. Which you can't do, because it isn't.
Second, I didn't say "teach yourself to code", because that isn't what has largely been pushed. Yes, if you're plugged into the tech industry zeitgeist, that's what you tend to hear. But most people aren't, and the people who have primarily been targeted by the "learn to code" marketing extremely aren't. Mostly they've been targeted by bootcamps selling snake oil and pricing it as if it were gold. Even TechCrunch sees this, and has seen it for years. [2] Why don't you see it now?
Third, you're talking out both sides of your mouth when it comes to affordability. You ask me to cite a situation in which someone can't afford to go to college based on grants and loans et cetera, and then you spend a lot of time talking about how it takes a lot of parental support to get access to those programs. As you accurately note, you can't sign on your own for grants or loans; you need a parent to do it for you, or you need to be emancipated, which is itself a complex and often quite expensive process.
It's nice to assume, based anecdotally on the circumstances of your own life, that everyone trying to make a start in life has parents with the requisite knowledge, free time, and goodwill to provide this kind of support. Unfortunately, that assumption isn't very well borne out by reality. A lot of potentially eligible students don't understand the process well enough to get through it [3], and if you don't have the good luck to be white, your odds get a lot worse. [also 3]
Beyond that, FAFSA application rates appear to have dropped significantly [4, "2017-18 Application Cycle"], well before the additional decline in both new applications [5] and renewals [6] apparently caused by the COVID-19 pandemic - both of which also appear to affect primarily students from low-income families, who are most in need of aid. And, in general, the complexity and difficulty of applying for federal student aid, and the consequent difficulty of getting the benefits you so casually assume based on personal experience must be equally available to everyone regardless of circumstance, is well acknowledged in the academic industry and has been for quite some time. [7], [8]
All of that is before we even start to get to the question of whether, and which, college degrees have value as job-getting credentials. You haven't shown anything to suggest I'm wrong in saying, or that the people I'm hearing it from are wrong in saying, that that credential doesn't have the same value it once did. Certainly in the present moment it doesn't seem to be doing a lot of good [9].
Even before COVID-19, the chances for a fresh college grad looked less than rosy, and those numbers probably don't mean a hell of a lot in light of the pandemic, when there's suddenly a glut in the job market of people who already have, not only training, but also the kind of experience that employers preferentially look for. It'd surprise me very much if we didn't, over the next few months to a couple of years, see those people tend much more to get hired back, than see people who as yet have no job experience get hired to fill the roles that do open up. And it would surprise me very much if we don't also see fewer roles open back up, even by comparison with the situation before the pandemic.
And, although I'm aware I risk cliché by saying it, the pandemic changes everything. We're probably all tired of hearing that said, but that doesn't give us a free pass to ignore its effects on our economy, and on the prospects of people who have to start out making their lives in a post-COVID world. (Not that we're anywhere near a post-COVID world here in the US, judging by the latest case rates.) Making favorable assumptions based on last year's situation is dangerously likely to lead to massive error, the way things have gone, to say nothing of making favorable assumptions based on situations a quarter century gone.
Unfortunately, you don't seem to have changed your perspective at all, whether because of the pandemic or for any other reason. You're still doing what you started out doing, namely, blaming young people today for failures that they haven't committed and that are not their fault. Asked to explain yourself, you've narrowed your focus to implicitly blaming young people who fail to launch today for the failures of their parents, in being unable or unwilling to provide the massive amount of support required to ensure they get a good start, from federal aid to college choice to guidance on how to make a reasonably remunerative career.
And that's something I do know a fair bit about, albeit not quite firsthand. As I mentioned, I didn't go to college myself, but I came up among a cohort many of whom did, and I saw how it consumed much of their, and their parents', time and effort during our senior year of high school. And that's for people who already know how to do it - and, on top of that, in a school that at least tried to do a halfway decent job of providing career counseling and support, which isn't something that can be expected of a lot of schools today. [10] dates from 2015, the most recent I could find - what do you have to show that situation has improved at all since then? What do you have to show that any of this has improved since then, or that it will do so in the wake of the worst economic injury our country has suffered within living memory?
I have to admit, I appreciate the effort you've put in to try to clarify your position here. I wish I could say I was less disappointed in the result.
what you very quickly see is that homeownership is strongly concentrated among older people and among married couples, and not among young people just starting out in life.
If you are young and single, it’s dumb to buy a home. You limit your mobility and optionality to move to where the jobs are.
You ask me to cite a situation in which someone can't afford to go to college based on grants and loans et cetera, and then you spend a lot of time talking about how it takes a lot of parental support to get access to those programs.
Have you filled out a FAFSA recently? The only support it takes from parents is filling out their tax information. It’s pushed by every school counselor.
You're still doing what you started out doing, namely, blaming young people today for failures that they haven't committed and that are not their fault
I’m blaming parents. And what massive amounts of support? Filling out a form and actually doing research? The FAFSA process goes out of its way to inform parents.
And that's something I do know a fair bit about, albeit not quite firsthand. As I mentioned, I didn't go to college myself, but I came up among a cohort many of whom did
So you didn’t go to college yourself nor have you recently gone through the process as a parent recently. I have gone through the process as a parent within the last four years.
Everything is crazy now with Covid, we are giving our younger son a year off. But we will be doing the song and dance again.
What do you propose the government do differently?
I see you have taken my advice about how you might argue differently! [1] Granted, it's odd to see you double down on anecdotes in the wake of a comment that gave you the citations you were asking for earlier. But it's not up to me to tell you how, or how effectively, you should support your thesis, whatever that actually is.
If you are young and single, it’s dumb to buy a home.
Yes, I'd agree. So why'd you bring up homeownership as though it mattered? I mean, you did that, and I took it on faith that you had some kind of point to make with that, and I examined it on that basis. Now you're saying you had no point in bringing it up in the first place. So, why did you?
I’m blaming parents.
Are you, though? You haven't explicitly assigned blame to anyone until now, and it's interesting to me that you've waited so long. It's also interesting that you didn't do that in all the time you spent talking about people's Reddit posts about how they feel like they've been screwed and they don't know what to do about it. You seemed very happy then with whatever assumption people made, and you didn't see a need to get specific until somebody gave you real pushback. Why is that?
What do you propose the government do differently?
Solve the problem? Do the job its members, official and otherwise, are collectively paid, forcibly and with remarkable exorbitance, to do? I mean, you're asking a software engineer a question that's far outside his competence, and unlike some, I have the good sense to know it's a question I'm not able to answer in detail. One wonders why you'd ask such a person such a question at all.
But I also know there are people whose profession it is to be able to answer that kind of question. Quite a lot of them, actually, between government service proper, the similarly vast NGO industry, and various policy posts in industries other than that one. If you want a detailed answer for how a problem like this gets solved, ask some of those experts, and I'm sure they'll be able to provide. But I don't have to be one of those experts to recognize that a problem exists and badly needs solving.
Anyway, isn't all of this, that a government exists to identify and solve this sort of problem in order to maintain a stable, livable society for everyone, more or less the basic deal implicit in a phrase like "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"? I don't know, that's just something I remember hearing once somewhere. It's probably not very important.
I mean, you're asking a software engineer a question that's far outside his competence, and unlike some, I have the good sense to know it's a question I'm not able to answer in detail. One wonders why you'd ask such a person such a question at all.
I’m a software engineer. But, I’m also a parent. It’s my responsibility to be informed and give my children advice.
Were my parents better informed than average - especially my mom who was teacher at the time and helped plenty of low income and minority students work their way through the school system - yes. No, this isn’t a “white savior complex”. My mom is Black.
Were her parents who didn’t have even a high school education and grew up in the segregated south “privileged”. Heck no, out of their five kids, two went to college and became teachers, one became a nurse, and one has owned his own car repair shop for over 30 years.
Myself, I went to a local state college that no one had ever heard of and within three years I was making the same amount as people who graduated from college with tens of thousands in debt.
It’s not the government’s job to help young people make good decisions - it’s the parents.
I put the blame and responsibility on parents to comments up.
Unless you are emancipated, you can’t sign up for FAFSA unless your legal guardian sign with you. Yes I was dumb, that’s what adults are for.
I’ve been talking about home ownership and renting since the very beginning.
I’ve also spoken about the other alternative - staying with your parents as part of a multigenerational home until you can afford to move out like much of the rest of the world.
Go out on the street and talk to some young folks in Oakland, Richmond, Los Angeles... You won't find their story in some academic journal or news article.
I could read posts on r/cscareerquestions where the attitude is “I must work for a FAANG or my life is over” and come to a completely different conclusion.
Yeah, no, I get that. Student debt doesn't care how much you're making; if you're making anything, it belongs to a bank before it belongs to you. If that doesn't leave you enough to live on, the bank doesn't give a shit. And it was already hard to make a start without taking on decades of debt when I did it twenty years ago. It hasn't gotten easier in the interim.
I mean, I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people, and here's pretty much where I give up trying. But in a time when more and more people are saying that all the old advice on how to build a good life in America has stopped working and they can find nothing left for them but to barely scrape by or just outright fail entirely, you should maybe consider the possibility that they are not wrong about that. You probably won't. But you should.
I’m not arguing from a value judgment stance. I’m saying your anecdotal experience doesn’t jibe with reality that today’s youth is less materialistic or focus on consumerism.
BTW, I graduated 24 years ago from a state college and stayed at home. My total college cost was less than $10 grand.
Of course my living cost were subsidized. But how many students think they are too good to go to a local state school or go to a two year program locally and then transfer?
The same school I went to is now about $7K year including books. If you live in the state and graduate with at least a 3.0, that costs goes down by 80% automatically because you qualify for a state (lottery) sponsored scholarship.
Yes a better college can get you more connections. But if I could get noticed in the mid 90s by uploading my own freeware via ftp to the info-Mac archives, how hard would it be today?
I don't know anything about any of that; I never went to college, and made my start with what was effectively an apprenticeship and a hell of a lot of good fortune.
I don't know anything about what it's like to be young and trying to make a start today, either, because I haven't done it. Neither have you. So I don't really see much reason to weight your totally unsupported, entirely anecdotal just-so story, about how all the kids today want is to get rich in five minutes, more heavily than I weight the things people actually living in that situation say about what it's like. They at least have a firsthand perspective to speak from, which is more than what you do.
I don't know. Maybe spend less time on Reddit? Or consider that like, it's not the 90s any more and you need to market the hell out of yourself to get noticed from scratch at all? I mean, my first post-apprenticeship job I got 100% thanks to connections of the sort that a random kid at a random state or community school would never get the chance to make. Since then I've leaned on third-party recruiters which, again, how do you even do that if you aren't in a city big enough to have a real industry scene? And how do you afford to live in a city like that, these days, if you aren't already making tech money?
The ladder I climbed isn't there any more. I know you want to believe the ladder you climbed still is. But have you checked any time lately?
My "anecdotal experience" comes from comparing the circumstances of my own youth with those of the young people I know today, and who tell me about the options they see for themselves, or more accurately the options they mostly don't. Most of them aren't local, and the sense I strongly get is that it's pretty much the same all over.
But, sure, tell me again about all the Reddit posts you read.
...says the dude arguing from some Reddit posts he read. Claiming my arguments are invalid because they're anecdotal, in between making anecdotal arguments of your own, is a hell of a flex.
You might have better luck arguing that your anecdotes outweigh mine. That way, you at least wouldn't be making yourself look like a hypocrite.
I mean, if you'd rather point to the vaguely relevant and not really dispositive citations you gave to someone else's arguments than respond to anything I'm saying, then I guess we're done here? I'll admit I was hoping for better, but if you don't want to go to the trouble, then I suppose that's your lookout.
Hey, you're the one claiming you aren't arguing anecdotally. I never said I wasn't, and I can't say I'm much concerned now with you trying to call me on not doing something I never pretended to be trying to do.
It's not that I mind an anecdotal discussion. Most people live anecdotal lives in an anecdotal world, and that's very easy to lose track of when you try to reason out everything from first principles and raw data. For one thing, it's very easy to assume that a given number has weight independent of its sources or its context, as you seem to have done throughout this conversation. But of greater import is the ease with which one loses track of the fact that these matters, which we so easily discuss entirely in the abstract, determine the course of real people's real lives, and those lives are of greater import than any conclusions we might find comfortable to draw in an environment of security and comfort.
If you're not comfortable with an anecdotal discussion, that's fine too; as my rather longer comment in the other subthread demonstrates, I'm as willing to engage on that field as on this one - especially with an interlocutor who does such a poor job supporting his claims, having apparently chosen a few sources which even then only support his arguments if they're not examined in the slightest degree. But if you're going to claim that anecdotal commentary is a problem when I engage in it, I'd expect to see some behavior on your part other than yourself engaging in it, too.
Especially in the tech field, it’s just the opposite. When I graduated in the mid 90s, computer science was just another career field that afforded a middle class life.
Now, if you graduate from a decent college and don’t get to “work for a FAANG” and start off making six figures your life is over as far as they are concerned. Take a peek over at r/cscareerquestions
CS career questions is an odd ball though. Internet isn't a reliable way to assess what young people actually think especially in geek or programming circles.
Also, it's not just young people. If you tell someone ignoring the age that you are a plumber or farmer, they aren't going to look at you nicely even if you earn more than the engineer next door. Social media has changed perception of people regarding work. It is a primary means of keeping up with the world for younger gen and targeted advertisements make it worse. Instagram feeds have a happy skin-showing bias. Tiktok removes anything too sad or ugly.
I expressed in my earlier comment that expectations for young people now are different. They think they should be able to live better than their parents do now or did on the same folds the productivity has increased.
Compare 2000 to now and how work has been automated or made easier. Why not 5x-10x improvement in the living condition? That is why they want to get into FAANG.
> CS career questions is an odd ball though. Internet isn't a reliable way to assess what young people actually think especially in geek or programming circles.
Just look at the two emphasized parts of your statement.
There's also the environmental issue. If you're environmentally conscious you can't work for a lot of companies, commuting becomes a problem etc. I don't know how much of a factor it is but I believe for some people it is.
Definitely the case for some people but I don't think it's driving force for a large percentage (yet). Maybe a few more droughts and food shortages would change that though.
The young folk who say this are often ones who were sold on a lie that getting massive student loan debt for a degree from a university was a ticket to the good life and the right thing to do.
Unfortunately that’s not really true and they find they wasted a lot of time and money and have no prospects and mounting debt.
After person spends 12 years in the public schooling system being educated and after tax payers have invested hundreds of thousands into that person the result should produce a functional adult capable of filling more than 50% if not closer to 70% of middle class jobs in a given nation.
Instead for the last 30+ years we have pushed more and more jobs out of reach for a person with a standard public education largely do to decreasing standards in that public education combined with the self reinforcing feedback loop up university funding.
This is the true cause of the erosion of the middle class that is perceived to be happening. 20-30 years ago most jobs on the market did not have a degree requirement, and there were many middle class jobs that people with out degree's could fill. As we pushed the jobs more and more to have a degree (any degree not even a degree in the field just any random degree will do), with it means many people are starting their adult life in massive debt, where before the it would have been a home, or something like that.
If we want to fix the nation, the solution is not free College for everyone (like many young people and social democrats want to propose) the solution is to make a standard K-12 Education applicable again for most middle class jobs
>If we want to fix the nation, the solution is not free College for everyone (like many young people and social democrats want to propose) the solution is to make a standard K-12 Education applicable again for most middle class jobs.
Interesting thing is, a bachelor's degree in Europe is basically that advanced K-12 you're suggesting. The main difference is that it's way cheaper, and occasionally faster (2-3 year programmes are not rare, certain countries have a degree between high school and research universities).
Absolutely agreed. The K-12 problem seems to be one exacerbated by school leaders optimizing for things that can be graded and "tested" in the name of "standardization and fairness". But when it comes to fostering discovery, like science education should, it doesn't always fit that "standard model" if you will...
According to Reddit and Twitter, we're going to tax over half of it back once the Democrats take power. At least this was the rhetoric when Bernie was still in the running.
I try explaining non-liquid assets and how selling all of that stock would change control structures and sink the stock price, but it doesn't resonate.
A lot of them also hate the stock market outright and don't know (or care) that stocks comprise retirement funds.
Really surprised to hear that you condescending on young people about the stock market and retirement funds (which they tend to feel should never have been tied to the stock market) isn't resonating with em.
Retirement funds are something a lot of young people expect to never see if current trends of debt and healthcare prices keep up. I'm quite young (<25), we're not stupid and a lot of us understand basic economics, but rhetoric is important in these times because a candidate trying to tax the rich is better than one that doesn't try at all.
Future generations will be burned once they realise living like the baby boomers did is unsustainable, hence a lot of us have given up on the economy, whatever that means.
If the world doesn't end, and it usually doesn't, you'll wish you had put something into your 401k.
Please view your own pessimism with a bit of skepticism. Pessimism tends to betray people who buy into it too much.
I heard very similar things 30 years ago when I was <25 and in part I bought into it. And buying into it did me damage because none of it came to pass. Society continued to muddled along.
It's possible that the system will suffer a disorderly collapse, or maybe it will be uprooted and replaced with something more progressive. Just don't bet your future on either outcome.
I think I am qualified to answer this. It's harder to fool people when you can look at metrics compared to before. Information is widely available so adults can't make up rainbows to make me wage away for something that has no clear chance of a healthy life. Expectations are different for younger generation precisely because human productivity increased many folds but yet we have to grind more or less the same amount of time + spend more time in institutions which are not funded well except for the rich folks. Overall, world is getting better but that doesn't mean it is getting better relative to the effort everyone has put in for majority.
I support equal opportunity rather than bandids. The system is rigged and harm some people more than others. We need to find the core problems and fix them but I have no political power. By the time I do, I may become a grumpy old man who thinks people deserve what they got and it's their fault. Education system normalize this. Punishments are applied fairly but students are not equal and don't have the same situation at home or outside school. We need to stop punishing people in ways that only drag them behind. Be it students or petty criminals. Dragging people behind is never a good way to achieve progress and our society is riddled with it. Living is a zero-sum game for many.
Yes, I include myself in that. The system doesn't work, and it needs to be reconfigured. We've listened to decades of BS from politicians and rich people on TV telling us we just need to work harder, but the truth.
The more I learn about the financial system and how it works with government, the more I have become convinced that the whole thing is a scam, robbing the working class in a way that only benefits the very wealthy.
Probably the most obvious place to start would be to end programs like QE by the central bank, and replace it with UBI. Instead of giving free money to big banks and high net worth individuals, put that money directly in the hands of consumers and those who need it most.
QE can be thought of as a tool to accelerate the wealth transfer from poor to rich. Every time we go through one of these cycles the whole thing speeds up.
Additionally, I think we should reconsider the idea of making it easy to acquire debt. An economy based on debt serves only to inflate assets that are easy to acquire debt for (i.e., houses) and prices out everyone who isn't in a position to acquire debt (which is a huge number of people, mostly young and poor people, including myself).
>QE can be thought of as a tool to accelerate the wealth transfer from poor to rich.
This is no true. It’s QE is funded by other rich people who buy bonds. If we do pay off the debt, again it will be rich people paying it off. The top 10% pay 70% of federal taxes.
Also, the megarich don’t lose much when the stock market collapses. Even if they lose 90%, of their wealth, they’ll live comfortably. Meanwhile, millions of working class people will lose their jobs because companies run out of credit to pay them.
Wealth is in owning, not shenanigans of currency. The wealthy hardly lose anything. Meanwhile, people find "wealth" in working longer hours, renting and buying unhealthy food.
Benefits of UBI would immediately disappear. Landlords would know you have more money and they would raise rents the same day. Car mechanics would know you have more money so they would just charge more. Same with hairdressers, painters, restaurants...
Ending QE definitely seems like a step in the right direction. If money is inflated away, what's the point of it really? I don't know enough about UBI to say if it's a good replacement. I am curious to learn more about your reasoning.
The debt thing to me seems like a "band aid" on keeping consumption going. If people have no meaningful money saved, then to keep consumption going cheap credit needs to be made available.
It's a lot more visible on social media; I've no idea how well that translates into real life, and whether it also comes with disengagement from voting.
On the other hand, the Occupy movement appeared and vanished after the 2008 financial crisis without really leaving lasting traces. We've yet to see what post-COVID politics looks like; the US is bracing for the November election, and the UK facing the end of the Brexit transitional arrangements.
An entire generation of young people is going to have a disruption "fossil layer" across their education. If this isn't taken into account and employers expect business as usual, they are going to be really unimpressed.
Occupy definitely didn't vanish. The same people who were protesting then are out protesting now. But now, they're more organized and zealous than before.
It depends who most successfully manages to direct the energy building up behind the demand for some kind, any kind, of substantive change. Historically, that whole process used to typically take a decade or two, maybe more. But we have social media now, so I give it a couple-three years, tops. Maybe a decade if it peters out again this time like it did in 2011. But I don't think that's very likely.
Easy to get the idea that a statue of Lincoln got torn down because protestors are historically illiterate, or there's fascist spoilers in among the crowds, or whatever. No. There are no wrong statues to tear down, because who put those statues up? Rich people. Old people. People who've failed to justify their hold on power. I don't think it's quite too late for them to start to do so. But I do think they're far too stupid to realize and act on the necessity.
Being as the only reason I'm not getting fucked the same way - not quite so hard, at the moment, anyway - is the luck of having had 20 more years to work with and a chance to make a start in a somewhat less viciously extractive time, my sympathies lie with those who say that either that power will be justified or it will be taken from those who have it now and placed in other hands.
Sure, things could end up worse than they are now. But they could also end up better. If anyone could make a convincing case for how they end up better under the status quo, we would not be here. Hell, Bernie Sanders tried twice, and look what happened to him - not that I think he'd have been able to deliver on his promises, but it would've been smart to have given him the chance to try. Could probably have bought a decade or so that way, I suspect, maybe more. But instead, in 2016 the DNC rigged the primary for a candidate decades past electability who ultimately gave us Trump, and in 2020 the boomers just stomped the babies flat and gave us another possibly senile neoliberal has-been for the general, which he may still contrive to lose despite the Republican revolt against Trump - they've made a lot of ads, but we won't really know how it played out until December or maybe January, and no matter which way it goes it'll be the most questionable US presidential election result in living memory. Maybe ever. Even the AOC/Ilhan Omar crew, the best hope of a better future the status quo ante has so far managed to ante up, has started to get some real side-eye: they still have a solid Twitter game, but in policy terms they're moving toward the center, and people have started to suspect, I think rightly, that DC's capturing them. At this point there is basically no credibility left.
So it depends on who manages to direct the energy to make some kind of change. We haven't seen them emerge yet. If history is any guide, we won't see them coming, either. How it plays out in the long run is anyone's guess. How it starts is in large part up to them, whoever they turn out to be.
I've been talking to a decent number of wealthy people about this subject and sometimes their responses are deafening. I don't think it's malice but rather plain ignorance. It's hard to understand the frustrations of the poor when you live in a fancy house and make tech money.
I'll never forget when I was told by one person, "if people are mad that companies are making all this money they should just buy their stock!" Let them eat cake if there ever was a parallel...
I didn't say they were evil, I said they were stupid. I don't know if power does that, but I've spent enough time working around and for rich people that I sure as hell know money does.
I've seen the opposite. I'm 35, but loads of people I know in their 20s are asking how markets work. I think they've seen markets go down and then 40% and thought "i could have made money on that"...
You say cynicism - I say finally recognizing the emperor has no clothes.
The fed now buying junk bonds - directly propping up the LBO/PE industry - crossed a fundamental line for me. Not only is the USG propping up its productive corporations - not great, but excusable, in my view - now it's propping up its worst, too. Why is it doing that? Who is in charge and who are they obeying? Uncomfortable questions all around.
When the USD loses its reserve status - when, not if, and all the sooner given the fed's recent behaviour - we are going to see some serious shit.
Still right though. Too big to fail means too big to be allowed to exist. Either there must be stringent regulation with scale in winner takes all fields or some form of serious punishment if the fed is going to be the saviour of last resort. And I don't mean punishing the corporation itself but the top management.
I am a recent finance graduate and I can attest to this statement: My friends who are not in finance are absolutely garbage in their understanding of savings, interest, wages, taxes, market dynamics (and other realities, like the fact that you're not going to make it big working at a random fashion retailer's corporate offices, earning only a 4% raise annually).
In all fairness, there are just so many people without STEM degrees thinking that they will make 200k a year (in Europe). I'm not saying they can't, but it's honest to God very, very rare, and very, very difficult in their current understanding of labour markets, finance, and investment.
However, I would like to say also that I don't think this is a new phenomenon. I also know an even greater amount of older adults who are fooling, instead of educating, themselves.
I have long been a critic of of the public education system in the US for its failing to teach basic financial literacy in high school. I would be in a much better position today if I would not have screwed up my early 20's due to my ignorance on those topics.
I guess I should have not isolated "young people" more said there is a generally lack of economic education in wider population.
My parents who are just now retiring, bought into the US SocSec promise, so they had every little savings... Now me and my siblings are supporting them as we are more economically secure (and more economically successful).
The US economy is inflated, but US treasuries are still in high demand and we might as well milk it for what its worth. The US is like the lannister’s of the world in that they’re rich because they always pay their debts (historically, their bonds have been the most stable.) Allowing, the economy to collapse basically denies us this otherwise free money and helps no one, besides those who fill the power vacuum, which could very well be big corporations.
You raise a /very/ good point. But I worry that it is not working in a way that's favorable to those who rely on cash holdings (most people) for their budgeting and daily goals.
Poor people, sort of by definition, do not have "cash holdings". They tend to live paycheck to paycheck or are in debt. Inflation helps debtors. And wages do tend to rise with inflation, albeit with a delay.
This should surprise no one, the whole system is designed to move wealth away from poor people working for wages, into the hands of rich people who earn returns on capital. Surely this comment will get downvotes, but it's useful to learn about how the entire financial Rube Goldberg machine works in order to understand this in depth. Ray Dalio's talks (you can find many of them on YouTube) are a good place to start if you want a light introduction.
IMO it's time to rethink the financial system (and I'm a strong proponent of UBI as a way to redistribute wealth). Just because it's been done a certain way for decades doesn't mean it should continue to operate that way.
The financial system as we know it today was designed in an era where information did not flow freely, and we did not walk around with an internet connected computer in our pockets.
The financial system as we know it today wasn't really designed but rather evolved in an era of genuine technical growth. Since we can't deliver the inputs (real innovation), but desperately try to maintain the outputs (economic growth), it has become more and more unstable (bubble prone).
There are people, like Warren Buffet, who do very well riding these waves. What I find weird is that some of them are revered on HN.
The HN community has always been about finding ways to get rich. The startup/VC culture is entirely about getting rich. Pretending it's not is a big lie that SV has always perpetuated.
So, naturally, people admire those rags to riches stories.
For the record, I'm not against people trying to get rich, but I really dislike the fact that so many people try and pretend it's about something other than getting money.
Being a VC is not a charity, it's literally about growing an investment. Starting a company is not about charity, it's about generating revenue and ROI.
There's growth through technical innovation, which has pretty sweet positive externalities, and there's growth through through speculation, which is more like gambling really, looking for an edge in the game. I'm not opposed to the latter but I don't find it very impressive.
It's not correct to think that capitalism is some natural force. We form states to decide on the rules of the game. The fact that some of the rules are made by people like buffet in conversations with public officials and lobbyists is where the whole 'this system was designed' thing comes from.
Billionaires and millionaires speak with presidents all the time and develop strategies publicly with them, it's foolish to think this has no effect on the structure of the capitalistic system at all.
Of course it was designed. The wealthy pay an obscene amount of money on lobbying and political campaign donations, at every level of government from top to bottom. They don't do it out of charity, they expect a nice return on that investment, and they've gotten it. The laws are all in their favor.
Managers are the wealthy. Corporate governance is a joke, and shareholders are only nominally the "owners" of companies. They're not making the day-to-day decisions and have only very coarse influence over how corporations operate. Much like the voters' relationship to politicians.
It's a mistake to look at per-firm performance. To a large extent, the wealthy are cooperative rather than competitive with each other and collaborate on class interests. The goal is to protect their collective power. They often know each other personally, went to the same schools, sit on each other's boards of directors, and bail each other out when things go pear shaped.
Yeah, politicians share a lot of UMC views because they're UMC. That's not really lobbying though.
Either way, we don't need some marginal or even non-marginal improvement in the tax code. We need genuine, honest-to-god inventions moving the world forward.
Meanwhile, we're inventing fewer drugs and they cost more, more and more people in the academia are making slower and slower progress, tens of thousands of programmers are making slightly better IRC, USENET or Jabber programs. Trends that can't continue, won't.
You mean like people who post to HN? If you are a tech worker in the US, it’s more than likely your income is in the top quarter of household income. If you are on the west coast, you’re likely to be in top decile.
They spend all of their time focusing on the billionaires but they don’t see how the rest of the population sees them.
How many are advocating increasing taxes of people making above 200K (putting them in the highest decile)? How many admits that they have benefited from equality between their chase to “work for a FAANG” or get rich from exit?
While I'm not necessarily defending Buffett, he (like everyone else) is playing by the rules. The problem isn't the people playing the game, it's the system itself and the rules of the game.
