I think the younger generation, 22-27, has caught on to what a scam working is. By that, they fully understand that getting an office job and a mortgage means they will be chained to a desk with little chance at getting rich or escaping that life.
I am a bit older, but have been seeing this mentality all over the place on the internet, but also in the real world. Its everywhere, young people trying to hustle money through odd job sales, youtube channels, online ecommerce. Whatever they can do to not get started on a career. And its completely rational, money printing has destroyed the value of the dollar, real estate is too expensive, and corporations extract too much value from their workers.
An even more interesting point is the loss of status of having a good job when young. There is absolutely no shame, and its even cheered on to not be working a serious job. Making 200k at 24 is impressive to no one, and is instead met with disdain, "why spend your life working"
Comments like this are just so far outside the realm of what I am fairly sure is reality.
In the nation called the United States, on the planet Earth, in the prime material plane, the average office worker makes about $40K a year.
And the average rent is about $1100/mo. About a third of the office worker's income. Federal taxes are another 11% or so.
That leaves more than half of an average office worker's income for essentials like food, clothing and utilities. Entertainment is cheap these days. If you budget there's still enough left over for your 401k/IRA/etc. which goes mainly into the stock market and if you stick with that for 40 years you will do pretty well.
Always been the formula, still is.
What is this dimension where 24 year olds are running around earning almost a quarter mil and it's not good enough? Is this Valley talk again? I get that this is HN and rent in the Valley and taxes in Cali are high, but so high that this 24 year old on a quarter mil can't make ends meet? If he can't achieve what the office worker on $40K can, why is he in that job and that city?
It's more likely in my opinion that these people are worth less than they think they are, or don't know how to manage their finances, or both.
Averages lean upwards due to some people making millions.
Federal taxes aren't the only taxes. State and other taxes are factored in.
Rent may average at $1100 in an ideal world, but near cities, $1100 is increasingly rare. Every time this is mentioned someone will chime in and say "yeah but I live in rural Nebraska and pay less than that." Which is fine. But then your employment options are slim, most jobs aren't paying $40k a month, not everyone is a tech contractor making 200k a year from their bedroom on a lakefront, not everyone wants to be or can be a tech contractor, and a lot of jobs performed by "normal" people (people on HN are generally highly paid and anything but typical) will involve long commute times unless they're living in the middle of town... in which case rent prices shoot up fast.
The average person also needs to pay for health care in the US (even if their company provides insurance, they're fucked when they get sick because insurance covers very little for most people not in very expensive programs). They have car loans. They have college loans. They need to pay deposits just to move. 9-5s are being replaced with 9-6s and people have less free time.
When you factor in all of that, the "average office worker" looks like a dream life to a lot of people. What people considered a boring hell of a life in 1965 is a fantasy unobtainable to an increasing number of "average" people. Comments claiming it's "easy" for "average" people here make me think some people live in a bubble detached from all reality.
This most interesting part for me is this "What people considered a boring hell of a life in 1965 is a fantasy unobtainable to an increasing number of >>average<< people". It would be good to analyze what happened between 1965 and 2022, what has changed that instead of progress we see some kind of downward spiral. Or maybe 1965s are idealized? Are there people looking on this? I have zero knowledge to understand all of this, unfortunately.
I don't mean to suggest there are no problems with cost of living. In broad strokes here's what happened since '65, or let's go back a little further to the start of the post-WW2 world.
1. Millions of women entered the workforce (started when all the men were overseas fighting)
2. The government went off the gold standard
3. Millions of people in other countries replaced the workforce via globalization
Those are the three biggies. Expanding the number of available workers kicked off the pressure on wages. Going off the gold standard kicked off massive inflation. Globalization shrunk the number of jobs available and was the nail in the coffin.
So that's why we don't have the same economics as a nuclear family in the 60s.
Now in practice a lot of essentials in the US CPI have stayed pretty cheap. Technology enabled a lot of things to stay or become cheap. But a few big ones are a train wreck. Home ownership, health care, education, all skyrocketed.
So when I see someone on the median income say "Man I'm getting older and I don't know how you can afford to settle down and buy a house and start a family" yeah that's a very real problem which is grounded in facts.
But when someone says "life sucks for the 24 year old who has the resume to work in the Valley and pulls down almost a quarter mil," here's what that is: horse shit.
> 1. Millions of women entered the workforce (started when all the men were overseas fighting)
The rate of women in the workplace ticked up slightly during WW1 and WW2, but by no means was it a sea change. That's a narrative pushed by "traditionalist" thinkers that found a simple thing to pin social upheaval on
The real change was accelerated industrialization during the first half of the 20th century. Millions moved from farms to factories, men and women alike.
> 2. The government went off the gold standard
So what?
> Going off the gold standard kicked off massive inflation.
If you call a steady 1-2%/year "massive".
The real effect has been to stabilize the economy. I guess people who like gold standards don't know their economic history. The 19th century, which is arguably a recognizable modern economy (in the West), was punctuated by panics and strong recessions that made the "Great Depression" look tame. (which itself makes the Great Recession look pretty tame.). Getting of the gold standard was key to fixing that.
> 3. Millions of people in other countries replaced the workforce via globalization
I agree with you here, but again I think you overstate the impact. The US was once in the position of SE Asia today: (relatively) educated workforce, cheap labor, lax standards compared to Europe. In it's time, the American South was the jobs-export market for the North. These trends have been happening basically forever.
More importantly, the remaining manufacturing jobs, and there are many, are high wage and high skill. They're also high productivity, so there are fewer.
That leads to another force at work, which is a bigger threat than exported jobs: automation. Most manufacturing jobs didn't leave, they disappeared.
If it went from 1 provider on 2-3 child care to 1 on 20 daycare, the effect is similar to if it had been counted anyway.
One significant source of uncounted labor was removed with the washing machine. Enormous amounts of time were spent manually washing clothes. But automating this likewise had a similar effect to making child care more efficient and increased downward wage pressure elsewhere by allowing more to enter other parts of the workforce.
The real effect has been to stabilize the economy. I guess people who like gold standards don't know their economic history. The 19th century, which is arguably a recognizable modern economy (in the West), was punctuated by panics and strong recessions that made the "Great Depression" look tame. (which itself makes the Great Recession look pretty tame.). Getting of the gold standard was key to fixing that.
I have literally never seen this argument before, and I've been reading economics books for 10 years.
I'm more curious than anything. Please tell me where I can find more.
The US was never a low-wage economy. Sure, there was crippling poverty in places, like the Dust Bowl, but labor has always been the bottleneck in a nation richly endowed with natural resources, which is why American logging practices are much more wasteful than European ones, they are designed to maximize the productivity of the workforce. When the International Watch Company was set up, it was by an American looking for cheap labor in Switzerland.
> The real effect has been to stabilize the economy.
The economy only needed stabilization because it was running on usury. If you ban usury, as Islam does, then you wouldn't need fake money that can be printed at will, and these crazy periodic cycles won't happen. It's not like today is stable anyway, I've spoken to several people in finance and they admitted to me these things.
Those people are quite wrong. An unstable unit of value like the gold standard makes bans on usury even less meaningful because you can get into deep debt-deflation even with 0% nominal rates (see "liquidity trap" for what that looks like). Investment cycles can be driven purely by equity investment, although there might be an argument that debt-driven cycles are worse. Anyway, the well-known workarounds that spring up when 'usury' is banned - basically ways of rephrasing 'interest-bearing debt' as 'senior equity'- leave you with practically no advantage over simply having well-designed bankruptcy laws.
The fallacy you're committing is not looking at how the Islamic world was run before the Western banks took over post WWI/II, as interest is prohibited in Islam. It is well documented that in Iraq during the Ummayyad period, there were no more people left to accept Zakat because everyone truly paid their fair share (not the trite slogans we hear today).
There can be cycles due to issues beyond our control, however, the cycles we see today are built into the system because of usury and printing fake money to fuel it. As I said, financial folks I spoke with admitted it.
Just to be clear you’re suggesting high/predatory interest rates are the reason that the economy needs stabilization?
If so, my frame of reference for predatory is like 15%, 27%, etc. numbers like that.
Is that what you’re saying? If so can you expand on your thoughts here and link these two elements together better? I generally associate high interest rates with high risk. I’d loan my friend $500 for 0% interest. But some person I’ve never met who is sketchy? That would be a 25% rate with collateral. Ya know?
Are you tying this into the Federal Reserve somehow? Is it interest rates for mortgages that you view as predatory? Small business loans?
I'm suggesting that any non zero rates are predatory. Loans should be reserved as acts of charity, as Islam dictates. Otherwise, it will open up to running the economy on debt, which is exactly what we see today. Debt fuels more debt, more inflation, it's a rolling snowball. It's no wonder we're in the mess we see today. Of course dissociating the currency from gold or other precious metals allows them to print more money to pay off their ever growing debts. This is how all these factors are connected. Not to mention immoral acts like gambling (aka put and call options) and selling what you don't own (shorting), all of which are prohibited in Islam, are contributing causes as well.
Trying to roll back the clock to the golden age of Islam is not something you’d expect to find in HN’s comments section.
Liquidity fits into your world view how? In its most simple form: A business or person needs money to buy resources to make things to earn money. Do they go to the Sultan and beg for a loan based on charity?
> Trying to roll back the clock to the golden age of Islam is not something you’d expect to find in HN’s comments section.
Why, because most people are not familiar with Islamic history? :)
> A business or person needs money to buy resources to make things to earn money.
Engage in a fundrise not dissimilar to what people do today with VCs and startups. The investor(s) contribute money in exchange for a portion of the business. If it succeeds, both parties make money, if it doesn't, the investor loses money, and the business owner loses money and effort he put into it. It's true risk sharing.
I'd add that the decades after WW2 were boom times for the Unites States. So many other industrialized nations were reduced to rubble. The effects of having to rebuild lasted decades. Post-WW2 the U.S. made up about half the world's GDP - equal to all other countries and the planet combined.
Things are quite different now. The Unites States makes up less than a quarter of the world's GDP. Those great factory jobs with pensions and benefits are long gone. That dovetails with your #3, globalization.
The apparent "pressure on wages" is broadly a matter of technical change favoring highly skilled occupations over lower-skilled ones. Wages for the former are still comparatively quite high, as we ought to know well here at HN. Of course this is a major source of income inequality, and arguably a social problem because retraining people for these newer jobs only gets harder and harder. UBI can be an elegant approach.
I was born in '65. My dad had a regular job, mum didn't work and I have 3 siblings. We lived, what would be classed today as, a lower middle-class lifestyle.
Aside from earnings and cost of living, the one thing I believe that has changed is that I don't remember knowing of many people living a much better life than I was at the time.
Now it seems everyone is, even those earning much less than I do. Driving a car you could never be able to buy outright, multiple foreign holidays, fine dining and designer clothing are pretty much the norm these days because, somehow, people feel entitled to such a lifestyle regardless of their ability to finance it.
> somehow, people feel entitled to such a lifestyle regardless of their ability to finance it.
How do you think Google and Facebook are trillion $ companies? They run targeted advertising to induce consumer demand via manipulation-as-a-service ("Hey advertisers, not enough people willingly going out to buy your $70 clothes made for $1? Here's the people susceptible to feeling inadequate when you show them how much sexier they'll be after their purchase). The $ they skim has to come from someone's pockets at the end of the day.
>some people live in a bubble detached from all reality.
It would be helpful (and I think recommended in the HN guidelines) to provide some relatable basis for your opinions from your life experience.
Like for example, your context for normal rents, normal cities, normal commutes, normal states, normal experience with health insurance when you can't get it from your employer, what you think a normal car & car loan is, why "boring" is relevant to "hell" and struggling in life, whether and why rental deposits are an abnormal hardship to you, if you have ever had a proverbial 9-5 job...
I'm not demanding an answer to each specific item above.
But when you casually accuse people of living in a bubble, you should show them a different one even if you only have one or two real data points from experience.
If I could rewind things to when I was 18, and go to community college for two years, transfer to the university for the last two, and live at home, it would be extremely cost-efficient, but we all have to make decisions without hindsight, with perhaps the advice of our elders who grew up in a completely different world.
Eh, last place I rented in Portland was $1300. I can hit the gas pedal and make $250k a year if I want, but last year I laid low and tucked in under $100k, took time off, still managed to save a bunch of cash. My GF is a massage therapist and makes $50-60k a year. We've got multiple cars and houses. We're both self-employed so we each pay for our own health insurance out of pocket.
This is the dream to a lot of people... in the third world. The truth is we're both relatively lazy and could easily double our income in this country, tomorrow, if we wanted to.
Cool. Most people aren't given a life that allows them to just make 250k if they want to. As a programmer, tech workers are the laziest people around but incredibly overpaid. The people making 1/4 your pay are busting their asses harder than we can imagine.
I know exactly how hard they're busting ass - I was a cab driver, bus boy, waiter, bartender and minimum-wage graphic designer before I was a coder.
It's not those people I'm worried about. They're all learning more as they go along. It's the ones who disdain work. And use incoherent political talking points to justify laziness and being supported by their parents. They have no pride.
[edit] It's also absolutely natural to me, and a sign of vigor in America, that I should have started at minimum wage in the service industry and now command $200/hr. in my 40s. And it's natural to me that other people should go through the same process. It's good for them. It was good for me. It teaches you hard work and humility; being poor teaches you the value of a dollar. This is the only country in the world where that has been possible for generation after generation. My grandparents were immigrants who came to the US with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Most of my colleagues are of other races, and their parents and grandparents were immigrants too. My grandpa died with $1M or so in savings. This was not a green light to fuck off and not work. It was a dire warning that I had to get a job at 14. So it's not like "some people" auto-magically have this incredible privilege of making $250k a year, you have to work for it, and that's what's expected of you in this country. People everywhere else in the world desperately want the chance to do the shit jobs that our kids think they're too good to do. That's a parenting problem. A messaging problem. A civilizational problem.
[edit2]
>> most people aren't given a life
This is an incredibly offensive thing to say to someone if you don't know the specifics of their life. I kind of ignored it, but I shouldn't have. It betrays a very specific flaw in your thinking. You assume that everyone who has things must have had those things given to them. Is that what your parents told you? Is that what you tell yourself when you don't feel like working harder? That everyone else was just given what they have? That just means you were brought up with a poor work ethic. Blaming people who work harder than you or even people who were lucky and born rich doesn't get you anywhere. Good; stay in a gutter, but don't pretend to preach to people who put in the time.
Agreed with most of your post until the end - was being American not given?
Surely your ancestors worked for it, but most jobs you are not even qualified for if you are not American (what you get for granted)
I think you are falling into the fallacy of hard work (which is a responsibility and a must), failing to recognize that these opportunities were given to you in the 1st place, which you rightfully justified with a good work ethic after the fact.
The point is a lot of people will not get a chance, even if they busted their asses. With this said, laziness is not an excuse either so I agree that the anti-work youth sentiment is a virus for economy and the entire country.
>The people making 1/4 your pay are busting their asses harder than we can imagine.
I obviously haven't worked in every job there is but in my twenties up to early 30s I worked as:
busboy
dishwasher
painter
janitor
day laborer
construction worker
Now it's true this was not all the time, I had significant breaks for school etc. and obviously my body today could not handle what it handled then, but still my experience is that programming when it is going bad is much worse than anything I had with those jobs.
Things going bad as programmer can just be when you are dealing with a hard to solve problem and it grinds you down over days, but also you can end up in places that for some reason everything goes worse (sure I had bosses who were jerks when I was working, especially as a day laborer, but I never had jobs where the whole processes of the company seemed geared to making everything harder like you can sometimes encounter programming)
The physical work made me tired, but never affected me mentally. Mean bosses didn't matter too much, just keep the head down do the work and get out of there at the same hour every day. And sometimes programming can also be tiring, sitting down all day at the computer.
So I mean I believe that I can imagine to some reasonable degree of accuracy how hard people making 1/4 what I do are busting their asses, but it seems that what I imagine must be significantly less than what you imagine?
on edit: obviously my imagining here is limited to the U.S and Western Europe.
He said he DOESN'T make 250k. He said he and his non-programmer gf make much less than that combined.
And yet they're still doing just fine.
My post has numbers. So does his. They're earnest attempts to show that the numbers can and do work.
You on the other hand, are spitting out one exaggeration after another in bad faith. No, you don't need to move to rural Nebraska to find cheap rent. No, not all tech workers are lazy. Some of them settle for that shitty commute which you call a dealbreaker. Take a hard look at your attitude.
>> Some of them settle for that shitty commute which you call a dealbreaker
Appreciate the support. Also, I did my time as a junior code-monkey in an office with a miserable commute and a tiny half cubicle, and I learned a ton from it. Taking that job didn't stop me from becoming independent later; I just watched what my bosses were doing very carefully when they interacted with clients and realized I could do it at least as well as they did, and that propelled me to doing my own things. It was actually a necessary experience.
My little brother disdained hard work most of his life. He dragged through college for six years to get an undergrad degree (I dropped out after year one). He just got a real estate license. That was the hardest he's worked ever; and I think he's grown because of it. He still has no real work, but he's got two kids now to support. His life has grown a lot harder than mine now; but mine was a lot harder than his for the first 30 years or so. No bad blood or anything. But I do see how funny it is when people call something "privilege" when really, they're privileged to think they don't have to do the hard part themselves.
Doing the hard part is actually the good part of life. The saddest thing about the anti-work movement is that they're missing the experiences that come with committing to something shitty and moving up. Maybe my gen puts too much emphasis on work as a marker of identity; I'm not immune to that criticism. But if you don't even try or you truly believe that the fact that the whole thing being rigged gives you cover to tune out (and yes, it was always rigged) then on what grounds can you lodge a serious complaint against the rest of us?
No need to be so angry. I said people can’t just choose to make 250k, unlike privileged folks here. No need to rage about the reality.
I was paying far more than 1200 for a spot in Portland a good 30+ minutes from downtown. A friend was paying around that and having to commute an hour. Not everyone is as lucky as you. Countless Americans are struggling yet people here say “I’m rich so I don’t see the problem.” Cool. You’re rich and privileged. Most people aren’t.
I moved to another country. I pay less and get a higher quality of life. It’s wild seeing the frogs being boiled and getting louder than ever about how there’s no problem because they’re not feeling it yet.
If you were paying beyond $1200/mo for a place in PDX a few years ago, 30 minutes away from downtown, that would certainly be either a freestanding house with at least 2BR/2BA, or a newly constructed amazon box off the MAX line near Hillsboro. I know people here who still pay $700/mo for an apartment and when I was paying $1300 it seemed ridiculous, but it was a furnished ADU off Hawthorne, utilities included.
I hear ya about watching from outside. I left the US in 2006 and ended up sort of stuck back here in 2016 when my dad got sick. There's a twofold great thing when you're outside. You don't have to give a fuck about the internal politics in America, and everyone looks ridiculous (believe me - the shock of coming back and turning on TV here takes years to get over); and also, wherever you're living now, their problems aren't your problems. Even if they're rioting against their government every day. You can stand aloof.
No argument from me. I wish we could get all the other people to experience life outside their little bubbles. They wouldn't act so petty and stupid.
Perhaps some people don't think a 10 minute commute is possible either because they don't think that a city with a 10 minute radius is a real city, or they think living close to a highway implies an undesirable neighborhood.
Also, there is the option to commute out to the suburbs in a major metro area where the commute inward is hell. Plenty of office parks and such that people work at.
> And the average rent is about $1100/mo. About a third of the office worker's income. Federal taxes are another 11% or so. That leaves more than half of an average office worker's income for essentials like food, clothing and utilities.
This sounds like math done by someone who has never earned an income as low as $40k.
Some slightly more realistic numbers (rounding to nearest hundred):
Income - $40,000
Federal - $3100
State (variable, this is for CA) - $1000
Social security - $2500
Medicare - $600
Disability (again, CA) - $500
Total tax - $6700 in CA, maybe $5200 in a lower tax state
$13k annually for rent (in CA, that’s very cheap).
How much for health insurance? Probably $1k-$2k.
How much for transportation? That’s car payment/repairs, insurance, and gas in most places. This eats up a lot of disposable income for people.
Cable tv, cell phone, etc. also adds up quickly.
Oh, you better not have student loans. That will eat up more of your disposable income.
I have given some budgeting tips to people who make ~$50k working in California. At best, they can contribute the 5% for matching, but it’s tough. Things like increased gas prices, unexpected car repairs, medical issues, etc. are a huge fear and a major concern.
Sure, $40k is very livable in provincial parts of the US, but there are many many people who do not live in those areas but make that income.
Yours is the best rebuttal by far, but I think your reference to "provincial" parts of the US reveals why we arrived at very different conclusions.
My #1 non-negotiable for my first job after college was very contrarian at the time, less so now. I've never budged on it. This is it: "Not in California."
If you're making $40k in a dense urban area you're probably sharing rent with someone. It's still tight but that gives you an extra $100-$200/wk in disposable income (or for necessities, as the case may be.)
The biggest difference from when I was in my early 20s is that I didn't know Mark Zuckerberg's real time net worth loss and it be a constant news story for that day in the news cycle. I knew Bill Gates was the richest man in the world but I couldn't care less.
Actually, I don't think my friends or I even paid attention to the "news" at all in my early 20s. I even worked at an investment firm in college but didn't care at all about investing, the stock market or getting rich.
Ultimately, there was so much going on culturally that I knew I was in the prime of my life and the richest old guy in the world couldn't buy what I had.
Before 2000, everyone wanted to be in the music industry. Whatever business you ran or how much money you had it wasn't as cool as being in the music industry. Now everyone in the music industry wants to be in business.
We have surrendered so much culture to technology that there is just not that much going on at this point besides net worth tracking. There is nothing cool about art besides the net worth value added when it is sold as a NFT or how many views on youtube the piece gets because you know a lot of views add to the person's net worth.
When the culture is mostly net worth tracking then of course working a job is not going to make you happy. You can either be a crypto speculator or youtube celebrity. What matters though is net worth number go up. Net worth number go up is the point of existing as a human. That is a brutal situation as a broke college kid when starting life with a net worth of like -$100k at interest from student loans.
I think you have to expect some kind of hippie dropout thing . Especially if you picture 5 years forward the 18-23 year old generation covid kids are going to reject the system at mass scale.
Edit: I didn't even notice the article is on a site called Making a Millionaire lol. Of course it is.
I think you're misreading the parent, I read it as more like if you're 24 and make 200K whilst being chained to an office 5 or more days a week, your peers who make 40k doing odd jobs at their own convenience and enjoy a larger portion of their time in freedom will pity you, not look up to you.
Best hope you don't get sick. And nobody in your family gets sick or dies.
That was my plan until I got MS at 26.
Oh, and hopefully everything progresses as you foresee. For example, I chose a college (back in 2006) and borrowed 2k my freshman year. Senior year I ended up having to take out 30k because 2008 wiped out my dad (who was helping) + his wife cheated on him and froze all their assets while they had a messy divorce.
Or how I went to grad school in Canada because it was cheaper and I calculated whether I should cash out my retirement accounts or borrow more, planned, and managed to live, pay tuition, and save on ~25k/yr in Vancouver, BC. When I was planning my move back, the Canadian dollar crashed literally the week I made the conversion and I ended up 2k short of what I expected (after about a decade of holding steady).
Then throw in kids and spouses and hopefully nothing happens to any of them.
Better hope you accurately predict the rising costs of healthcare, childcare, etc. too, and hope that nothing else pops up and becomes unaffordable. (College used to be affordable, I wonder what's next?)
The idea that you can plan a life out is a nice idea, but things happen, and it's not people's fault.
I am part of this younger generation, turning 29 this year (Jesus Christ!).
Hustle culture is definitely a thing - I personally quit a career in software 2 years ago to sell second-hand video games on eBay (making about double now what I was then, and with the high likelihood that it will increase another 30-50% over the coming 12 months), but based on the people I know IRL I'd suspect it's less than 10% of us that are doing any sort of "hustle" at all seriously.
Earning 200k a year is absolutely not something that people scoff at, either. The "why spend your life working" meme is more about people dedicating a huge part of their week to their work only to barely get ahead. If you're getting a large wage, you can invest a huge amount of what you earn without having to go without anything materially.
The anti-work attitudes and hustle culture that you talk about are definitely there, but exaggerated hugely by reddit and other online forums.
What sucks about hustle culture is that 90% don't make it and they waste valuable time.
When there is an alternative that's been around for decades (centuries?) and it works.
Build skills, work hard, live frugally, invest whatever you can for 40 years, you will end up just fine.
Heck you don't even need to get all of those right, the only mandatory one is the last one, the other three just make it easier.
But this strategy is slow and nobody wants to hear it, it's preached by lame boomers like Warren Buffet and Robert Kiyosaki.
People would rather scroll through the Instagrams of a couple hustlers who are living large and dream. I get it on some level, there's never been a better time in history to get lost in fantasy.
Unfortunately, there are millions and millions of people who build skills, work hard, and live frugally, and still aren't left with enough to invest anything, because the world has shifted in ways that make it impossible.
The idea that this is open to everyone—that working hard will guarantee you a decent income—is the big lie that's being increasingly recognized by young people today.
Not quite. As I said, it is possible to avoid the working hard part. The part you can't avoid is investing for the long term.
So they don't want to do that, or they don't realize how important it is.
On one hand I identify with a lot of the criticisms of "Generation Tiktok" and the anti-work movement and so on.
On the other hand, I didn't appreciate the significance of long-term investing as much in my 20s as I do now, either. And I know plenty of people in their 30s and 40s who still don't.
The only real mistake we make imho is telling these people they're right when they're not.
>so is part of your business model buying games from charity shops that were donated by the propertied class, for working class people, and selling those on eBay?
No I don't, because this is a very labour-intensive way of sourcing stock.
Mostly we'll buy bulk lots (some working, some faulty, some untested), refurb what needs refurbing, bundle to create greater-than-sum-of-parts listings and sell individually through custom scripts what can be sold efficiently this way.
>finding ever-newer ways of cheating each other and gaining an 'advantage' on others.
I don't spend a single second of my day thinking about how to fuck over my customers. On the flip side, I am ears-to-the-fucking-ground aware of what they want and constantly trying to come up with more efficient ways to deliver this.
>fuck capitalism
I'm not going to say it has its flaws, but a business that creates zero externalities, spends $0 on lobbying, creates well-paid jobs (OK, just one right now, but we're looking to hire another couple of people this year) and makes thousands of customers happy every year doesn't seem like a good example of why the system doesn't work.
> No I don't, because this is a very labour-intensive way of sourcing stock.
fair enough. i recently saw some TV program where an 'entrepreneur' did stuff like that and it annoyed the heck out of me.
ah there's a bit of miscommunication on my part; that second part of my comment was and less about you and more me ranting about what i'm seeing in the system as a whole.
>ah there's a bit of miscommunication on my part; that second part of my comment was and less about you and more me ranting about what i'm seeing in the system as a whole.
I understand that, but I don't think this was the right time launch into such a rant.
(Also, just as a general rebuttal, I think many modern Marxists fail to acknowledge how class dynamics have changed since the 1800s.
There's no acknowledgement of the tension between the managerial classes and the people doing the actual labour - something which David Graeber explains brilliantly - and instead an immense focus on control of the worker via control of the means of production.
Access to the means of production is ridiculously democratised now. You can look at my HN profile for a concrete example, but I, as a single 22 year-old from Australia, was able to design, manufacture and distribute a product globally, through cutting-edge logistics networks, without putting a cent of my own capital on the line.
For the average worker, who is more often than not employed in a service role, a similar dynamic applied. All a skilled plumber, electrician or cleaner needs to start their own business now is a Facebook account, some tools and a van.)
>Making $200k is completely out of reach for almost all Americans of all ages.
Even ignoring urban areas that run on monopoly money (SF) a heck of a lot of professions will surpass 200k somewhere in middle age if you don't make a career change that sets you back. Not just doctors and lawyers but all sorts of white collar technical professions, managers of those types of workers and people who are the head administrators (but not owners) of all sorts of medium sized businesses will make that kind of money.
Heck, state police officers who are savvy enough to milk the overtime system routinely surpass that.
You can explain all you want, but if you're pretending we live in a country where earning $200k is common and achievable for most people, you're living in a fantasy land. No wonder people don't support more efforts to address income inequality if they don't even understand what realistic income is for most people.
Even in software, $200k at 24 is pretty impressive. The lucky grinders in America are making less than half that, and most grinders are in the Philippines and Indonesia making $2k a month and able to feed a family on that. I think the word to describe the parent post is "privilege", but I'm not comfortable slinging that around since they're declaiming that $200k/yr is meaningless. (Ostensibly because intangibles like experience are cooler than making enough money to feed several families).
> young people trying to hustle money through odd job sales, youtube channels, online ecommerce. Whatever they can do to not get started on a career. And its completely rational, money printing has destroyed the value of the dollar, real estate is too expensive, and corporations extract too much value from their workers.
But how are the two fundamentally different? It's not clear to me that it's comparatively "easier to make a good living" (by whatever metric) doing YT videos or odd jobs than working a corporate job or similar.
I may be wrong since I've never actually tried it nor do I personally know people who do it, but it seems to me there still is a grind in producing content. Sure, you don't do it sitting on a chair in someone else's office, but you still have to "work" at it. And there's also value extraction done by the "platforms", just as there's value extracted by corporate employers.
> There is absolutely no shame, and its even cheered on to not be working a serious job. Making 200k at 24 is impressive to no one, and is instead met with disdain, "why spend your life working"
I'd say this may be more related to "success porn", where people talk about the long hours they work for their money. But I think there's a huge difference between making 200k and having trouble making ends meet.
There's also the fact that the various content that works never shows people hanging around complaining about being poor and having a hard time making rent for a shoebox. Instead, they're having a good time, filming in picturesque locations, etc. So the perception may be skewed as to what's actually possible for the majority of the people.
This is my opinion as well, only you presented it a lot more clearly and simply. Hustling is now not only socially acceptable, it is an ideal. Children grow up dreaming of this.
It does bring a few questions. Was the previous economy vaporous and thus this hustling as valuable or is the new economy just a temporary parasite leaving on top of "real-er" work. I'm asking semi honestly. I see a lot of fake work in traditional jobs, but I fail to see what value a lot of internet activities are bringing. Reactto videos, influencing..
You're seeing decentralisation at play driven by new technology.
People are tired of making someone's else millions and they want in, risk and money wise.
Especially because with digital media the cost/risk to start a business and enter the creator economy is way lower.
There's abundance of information that could potentially help people to be more independent and rely less on apprenticeship to learn a trade.
I think there's a lot of waste in companies, the bigger the company the bigger the waste, so I think this trend is positive.
What we need to fight is the belief that picking a major you like is more important than picking a career the market wants.
Yes. It makes knowledge available cheaply. Someone who works out of a van detailing cars can start doing basic PDR with nothing but YouTube and practice.
Everyone has to start somewhere. Even if 1/X people take it far enough to create value that's still more net value being created than before.
Pretty much every product and service has tons of content out there on how to do it and the economics of doing it for money. This is a massive net plus for people who are looking to grow their side gigs or businesses by adding related products/services or going upscale/downscale (e.g. our hypothetical detailer)
> People are tired of making someone's else millions
It's not just that. People could start a small enterprise that is not geared towards hustling but they don't want to. That was the point of the original article.
>> Whatever they can do to not get started on a career. And its completely rational
That was completely rational for me when I was a good enough coder in 2004 to leave America and get on the road. I had a career. It's not rational for them. They don't want to be chained to a desk but they aren't actually qualified to do anything.
Money printing had already destroyed the currency. That started in the 70s. Having value in the workplace lets you stay even with inflation.
You just have to actually work or do something, not sit around "not getting a career" while you wait for one to magically come along because you're so fucking special.
>> Making 200k at 24 is impressive to no one
Really? It's very impressive to me. I think outside of SFBA it would be impressive to almost anyone in America, and certainly anyone outside the first world.
Just wanna point out that you're making points about "the younger generation, 22-27," but the article is lamenting a decline in the workforce participation of millennials. That's 27-41 year olds.
While some points are valid, most are just excuses. You are seeing the manifestation of about a decade of brainwashing by social media, there is no better way to say it.
The article is basically a rah-rah piece for working in the trades (electrician, general laborer, etc.). It complains that the author’s fellow millennials went for college education and white collar jobs rather than blue collar, and now the workers are disproportionally old on average.
The author is in construction management, so I take their comments with a grain of salt. Some people in the trades do well for themselves, but my understanding is that it’s also very hard on your body. It may be needed, but I’ll be encouraging my kids to pursue white-collar STEM jobs nonetheless.
Do trades even pay that well, or is it just selection bias making them seem like they do?
According to BLS, median annual income for plumbers, electricians, and welders are respectively 56k, 57k, and 44k. Meanwhile, the median kindergarten and elementary school teacher—a famously non-lucrative career among those requiring university education—earns 60k according to the same resource.
In my experience (I grew up spending a lot of time on building sites, family business was property development) the guys in the trades who set up businesses that employ other trade guys do really well. For example plumber / electrician guy had his own business, he was really wealthy. Big house, multiple cars etc.
On the other hand, the guys who never set up on their own and just worked for wages ended up poor. I could give specific stories , but even 15 year old me could see the difference.
If you need to employ N other tradespeople to earn a high income, that means that the ratio of high-income to low-income tradespeople is semi-fixed. If you need to have 9 employees to get 100k income, that means only 10% of the people entering the field will have a chance to earn 100k. In addition, unless N is 2 or 3, it cannot be the case everyone gets a chance at higher incomes in their life; that they will earn lower salaries the first few years but then start earning high salaries when they move up.
So, what is N? Unless it is a low number and almost everyone earns high salaries after a couple of short years, we are doing the next generation a great disservice by encouraging them to get into careers where they destroy their bodies for the benefit of the boss, not themselves.
Also I'd say that it starts out pretty well and your earning potential increases quickly, which for a lot of people matters a lot.
I'd echo what you say and say the trades can be great if you also have a talent for the business side. Otherwise, you plateau pretty quickly and your body starts giving out.
> Also I'd say that it starts out pretty well and your earning potential increases quickly, which for a lot of people matters a lot.
I don't understand how that can be the case. Let's say you work as a plumber. The median income is 56k, meaning half the workforce earns less than 56k. There are two ways this can be the case: (1) the field is rapidly expanding and the median is thus artificially low by all the new entrants; (2) the salary of a mid-career plumber is 56k.
You cannot have high salaries over the board (save for the few percent new entrants who have not yet paid their dues) and 56k median income at the same time. Either the public perception about trade salaries is wrong or the BLS is wrong. I don't know which one is the case, but in the absence of better heuristics, I trust BLS more than anecdotes.
I'm speaking from the POV of those who go into the trades. I'm from a very working-class/blue collar background, and most people who choose to be plumbers aren't choosing that over being a lawyer, doctor, or even a grocery store regional manager. They're choosing it over the service and hospitality industries or basic white collar work.
Prior to the pandemic, most of those career paths/jobs were only getting you like 10/hr and raises are either non-existent or at the whim of your manager (and still small). The trades usually have defined pay scales and increase to a basic standard of living pretty quickly. It's easier to support a family as a 25-year old plumber than a 25-year old Walmart employee or a 25-year old bank teller, for example.
I wasn't looking at all jobs, only the set of jobs that would be competing for the career decisions of future plumbers.
That makes perfect sense. My comment was more pointed at those who believe people who have the option to get university degrees and enter white collar careers should instead go into trades, because they would make more money that way. I have seen it often that engineers making 100k are lamenting on HN about studying engineering, saying that if they had gone the trades route they would have earned the same or more from an earlier age and be better off financially. Every thread about university education is full of people advocating steering young people to choose trades over university, because instead of starting their life with a load of debt, they can start earning a good salary at a young age.
And I am sure the above are true for some people going to trades. But unless the average tradesperson's earnings improve significantly, I wouldn't recommend it as a general advice.
I don't know how these stats are made, but I know in later years I've had consistent problem booking good tradesmen, and several of the good ones I knew basically told me they are booked months in advance and refuse all but the most lucrative jobs. And basically getting anything - even the smallest of jobs - done at below $200-300 is out of the question. Larger jobs get into four and five figures really fast. So I think these numbers may not reflect the real picture.
OTOH, I see a lot of (relatively) young people on these jobs, so I think the newer generations get the idea, or at least some of them do.
I don't know if it's the same in the US but here, in the UK, there is a similar issue except that there is also a sub-domain of partially skilled tradesman fighting over the scraps and this group is growing fast because of the surge in demand.
If you want someone on the job tomorrow morning you can still find people. You will very likely regret it though.
Yep, that's what I've heard from friends who have tried to do even decent-sized projects on their houses. And I've personally taught myself to do things like patch and paint-match drywall because I know it'll be near impossible to get someone out to do jobs like that.
Depends if they are in a boom bust area. If they are, then they can be really lucrative during a boom and disappear during a bust. Construction is one area where lots of people wash out during housing busts, creating shortages when the next boom comes (and the cycle repeats). Natural resource extraction is similar. Kindergarten teachers have fairly stable careers in comparison.
> Meanwhile, the median kindergarten and elementary school teacher—a famously non-lucrative career among those requiring university education—earns 60k according to the same resource.
It's only famously "non-lucrative" because it is to the benefit of those in that profession to say so.
When it costs >$15K a year to send a kid to public school, which is more than the average private school, and this cost has tripled since the 1960s [1], public school teachers have to lean on something. That "something" clearly is not competence, so martyrdom and lies about "budget cuts" will have to do.
Median household income in the U.S. is $67K, so jobs that pay 56K are very good.
> It's only famously "non-lucrative" because it is to the benefit of those in that profession to say so.
I have several teachers in my extended family and circle of friends, and they would definitely disagree with that statement.
> Median household income in the U.S. is $67K, so jobs that pay 56K are very good.
Only if you have more than one person in the household working. I know that's a lot more common than it was 50 years ago, but is it a majority these days? If not, I would not consider making below median to be "very good".
Of course, picking teachers as the poster child for this argument that university-educated jobs don't pay that much is a bit silly; there are plenty of jobs that required a degree that pay much better than a teaching job.
The proportion of dual earner married couples more than doubled between 1960 and 2000, increasing from 25 percent to 60 percent (Pew Research Center, 2015)
So, not only is this close to median income, but 60% of workers have to have two people to achieve it. And teachers work 3/4 of the year (annual amortized salary would be much higher), and have unassailable pensions.
The reasons for this, of course, are that 3% of all workers are teachers, school board elections are held on odd (or off) years with low turnout, and controversial legislation is put in the docket on those elections. It is money for votes and it has been for a long time.
Teachers teach students in the classroom as part of regular instruction for 3/4 of the year. The vast, vast majority of teachers do a lot of work both during the summer and on evenings and weekends to prepare for that teaching, including lesson planning, grading, teaching summer school, supervising extracurriculars, and even coaching school sports in many cases.
And any teacher getting hired now (or, in fact, within the last few decades) doesn't get what you'd think of as an "unassailable pension", at least not in most places. I think that NY State would generally be considered to be one of the more teacher-friendly places, and the last of the "Tier I" retirees here—those whose pensions cover basically their full final salary—are already either retiring or on their way to it.
The idea that teachers are overpaid is bullshit propaganda.
Teachers may not be overpaid on average, but there's way too many of them that are badly underqualified, do not have a proper education in their specific subjects (and let's face it, it's not like a degree in "Education" has much useful content, either) and just do a very poor job of supporting their students. I'm quite willing to believe that the very best teachers should be paid no less than any highly-skilled STEM professional, but the institutional arrangements in K12 education make it unfeasible to spot these effective teachers and pay them what they're truly worth.
It seems to be a huge problem in Germany as well – I had several different trades working at my house over the past few month, and every single one lamented about how there is so much work to do and they can’t find the workers to handle it.
I really wonder what the results will be in the coming 5-10 years in a country whose infrastructure has already begun to crumble at the seams.
It’s somehow perverse with all these trades in Germany (Munich area). They charge 100€ per hour!!!! Just got my gas burner inspected. 150€ for parts, 150€ for work. The guy was here for a bit more than 1 hour and company’s office is few hundred meters away. Same 100€ per hour as freelancer software developer colleagues. While their employees work for peanuts, earning very close to a rent of 3 room apartment plus food, the owners print money and complain about not finding people who want to work for poor salary. With this salary you are really slave, no income to save, not much other options either. Single option to open your own shop and find somebody to exploit.
>They charge 100€ per hour!!!! Just got my gas burner inspected. 150€ for parts, 150€ for work.
Because while, "thanks" to globalization and everyone speaking English, you can offshore the manufacturing of your iPhone to China, your HDD to Thailand, your chips to Taiwan, your Mercedes to Poland, your Nikes, jeans and t-shirts to Bangladesh, or the SW dev work of your website to Ukraine, but you can't offshore a government mandated and strictly regulated gas boiler inspection, which if fucked up, could get you and your neighbors blown up. On the same note, you can't offshore medical care, education, police, fire fighting, lawyers, real-estate, etc.
>[...]Same 100€ per hour as freelancer software developer colleagues. While their employees work for peanuts[...]
Are you talking about the trades people earning peanuts or freelance SW devs?
Trades people employed for some unscrupulous business owner don't earn much indeed, but their employer is basically shoveling piles of money.
Independent contractors who own their own business are making bank. Source: my uncle is a self employed plumber. He can't even reply to all the calls he's getting and has to turn many down despite asking for a lot of money. The fact that he's not paying much in income taxes, doing most jobs on a handshake deal and cash payments helps a lot too.
That’s weird. I would say, that plumber’s clients might require official pay documents for insurance reasons.
Sometimes I am thinking, that I need to open my own shop as electrician and work as electrical engineer part time. I really hate sitting all day and electrician’s tasks are not too hard on the body. Dust can be dealt with using modern equipment attached to decent vacuum.
It will be the same as it's currently in post-covid bar and restaurant business. Nobody wanted to work the shitty 24/7 jobs after being out of the trade during the lockdowns so they had to increase salaries.
Problem is not yet big enough and the hurdle of getting into construction is not so high that it's impossible to learn the trade in 6 months.
On the other hand if that would mean that construction industry is not competitive, then well, I see a lot of Turkish and Chinese companies getting deals in EU.
> not so high that it's impossible to learn the trade in 6 months.
In Germany, with its apprenticeship system, it is. Typically it takes three years. In some trades you can work without the official license, but in many you are not allowed to. The whole apprenticeship system is so fundamental in Germany that I think it would be very difficult to get rid of it.
And really, would we want that? I’m not saying that it’s a perfect system on every dimension, but it makes for insanely high quality work on average. And it’s easy to get used to it and take it as granted. Being married to a Hungarian wife and seeing the quality of work in the trades in Hungary first hand really made me appreciate the German system.
As stupid as “am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen” is in general – for the trades it might actually make sense.
I guess the trades are very tightly coupled with the construction industry, which is very volatile, so there's always going to be labour over/undersupply problems.
I personally wouldn't encourage people to think of the trades as a stable income, especially in Germany. A new technology (say, PVC pipes) can be extremely disruptive, and these technologies come out all the time, rendering entire skills and categories of skilled workers invalid as they enter the workplace. In Germany, techniques and materials are very archaic (flax for pipe-seals, etc) so I suspect there's even more risk of disruption there than elsewhere.
The basic problem is that capitalism tends to replace skilled trades with unskilled ones - the classic example is the weavers put out of work by looms. As such, getting a stable income from a skill is always a risky proposition, even if it's the only game in town.
>I personally wouldn't encourage people to think of the trades as a stable income, especially in Germany. A new technology (say, PVC pipes) can be extremely disruptive, and these technologies come out all the time, rendering entire skills and categories of skilled workers invalid as they enter the workplace.
Funny example you chose. How is that different than SW devs? Actually, I think tech makes you obsolete way faster if you don't actively keep up. What you get taught in university is mostly obsolete from what's hot in the filed by the time you join the labor market so it's mostly up to the workers to keep up with the latest trend if they want to be employed long term.
I met way more unemployed old-aged former sys-admins and DBAs in Germany that couldn't find work because their obsolete skills weren't needed anymore in any private company who instead proffered to hire youngsters for the new tech or has offshored their jobs to a sweatshop callcenter in Eastern Europe, yet I have never met an older plumber who can't find work regardless of his grasp of new plumbing tech. In fact, the older the buildings are, the more maintenance they need, and the more archaic the technology they used is. It's a win for the gray beards.
>In Germany, techniques and materials are very archaic (flax for pipe-seals, etc) so I suspect there's even more risk of disruption there than elsewhere.
Knowing Germany, the archaic things are usually in most demand and Germany in generals is skeptical to new technologies and processes that do any disruption of the status quo. Like I said, the older the building, the higher the maintenance work they need, and the more archaic the plumbing is, the more value people familiar with the older tech have.
I'm not saying plumbing is better than SW dev, I'm pointing out job security for those who aren't up to date on latest tech.
That’s surprising- I thought the apprenticeship programs in Germany were supposed to be very good, and the trades more respected there than in the U.S.?
At least where I live that has not been the case, at least until a while ago. I would guess the ratio is higher than in office jobs, but not like you make it sound. Might be a bit dependent on city vs rural as well.
Author claims to be a "Professional lender and banker" in the sidebar. Why do you think he is in construction management?
Anyway, the major problem is his whole setup:
> When looking at our workforce figures, we need to keep that figure in mind. The population under 16 (not working) and population over 65 (more likely to be retired) are roughly equivalent right now, which means our workforce age should hew pretty close to our overall median age
No, we wouldn't expect that.
He then goes on to list median working age for select jobs, as if 16 year olds could be working as electricians.
But he never mentions the mean working age, which is what his entire setup is about.
Yes, his premise seemed off to me, too, but I *didn’t think about it deeply.
Regarding “construction management,” that may not be the right term. “Construction financing and oversight,” maybe. This is what he says in the article:
> For the record, I’ve gone on to finance and supervise the funding and progress of large construction projects across the U.S.
I can’t help but think that the article is a bit self-serving.
It seems whenever I've had to hire someone to do electrical work, roofing work, water heater replacement, etc., the bill is fantastic. I watch them work, and it doesn't take that long or seem so difficult. Someone is making pots of money off of it.
(I've watched the cable guy, the plumber, etc., at work. Next time I needed a similar job done, I did it myself. I even bought the same tools the cable guy was using. The guy replacing the water heater noted that it had a new pressure relief valve in it. I said yeah, it started leaking a month prior and I replaced it. He was shocked, and I said all it was was unscrewing the old one and putting it a new one with a bit of teflon tape. The whole job was $27, for the new valve from Amazon. I'm pretty good at sweating pipes, too!)
A friend of mine who has done well for himself in retail and later real estate said at one point that if he were to start over he'd consider plumbing:
Getting a good plumber in his area was hard so those who were could both be picky and expensive.
Of my other close friends friends those who did best so far did by doing well in sales (graduating to running their own), blue collar mechanic (team lead -> manager -> get some spre time, starts investing and building his own) and a number of people going the carpentry to real estate route.
One of those who has done well has gone via college/university.
Not really. I've never had plumber training, and yet figured out how to do it by watching them.
Writing software isn't learned that way.
I've also never met an electrician who knew what inductive coupling was. They just followed the building code. They had no idea why. The roofers didn't know what galvanic corrosion was, either, and I had them pull all the nails out that were incompatible with the flashing material and redo it. (I talked to the contractor in advance about this, and he ignored me and use the wrong nails anyway.)
There's also elasticity of prices. There's a limit of how much people would pay for a job. I.e. if you have a washing machine repair technician, you can't charge as much as a new washing machine costs for repair, because then people would just go and buy a new one instead. There's some point for many jobs where it's better to not do the job or find some alternative way of achieving the same. Of course, if your roof is collapsing, you don't have a choice, but in many cases you do. So you would either not do it, or postpone it as long as you can - thus reducing the income of the job supplier.
That depends on how much the buyers can bear. If we had a serious shortage of cooks and waiters, we wouldn’t all have $50 dollar lunches to cover their wages, we’d rather collectively just eat out less often.
Wages are high. Infrastructure costs more to build in this country than it ever has before because of labor shortages in the trades. There are literally only a handful of companies in the country who can do things like construct a light rail line, something that used to be routine a century ago.
>There are literally only a handful of companies in the country who can do things like construct a light rail line, something that used to be routine a century ago.
I'm guessing there are vested corporate interests and lobbying in keeping things like this (basically, the status quo), as it means those few companies get to charge the state however much they want, while paying their workers peanuts as there's nearly no competition for the workers to jump ship to. Ah, the "benefits" of consolidation.
The funny thing is, in Europe we have bridges built by the Romans that still stand, and 30 year old bridges that need to be rebuilt because the contractor cut way too many corners to squeeze a buck here and there.
As well as better working conditions. Young people aren't stupid. They can see how older people have just become accustomed to an insufferable grind. Sure, you can not go full-blown consumerist and then you only have to endure 30 years of it rather than 40+. But to many, that is still a shit deal. How about a decent work-life balance? Young people look around and it is seldom to be seen in the US.
I remember being told a lot when I was younger how good it was to get into trades, how well they pay and how easy it was to get into. I might be an edge case, but I tried getting into both trade jobs and dev and found the latter far easier (I didn't go to university, or even finish my A-levels). I'm no hotshot programmer either, I've done a few hobby projects but nothing that'd blow your mind. As for pay, its hard to say for sure but I'm doing alright for myself and my prospects are only looking better. I have friends who are in trades (all around the same age), some are paid more and some less than me so it doesnt appear to be that much different.
Don't have any particular problem with trade jobs either, but they seem to be a bit overhyped and no more worthy of respect than anything else
Worse than that is the mention of Housekeeping/Janitorial which in high demand areas pays around $40/hour and might even fill a schedule. At these typical rates that means something like $30k-$50k/year which is not enough to live well in areas with demand for these services and is also around that level where taxes begin to sharply increase and take a large part of any extra that is earned. So why aren't people choosing to be badly compensated for demeaning low status work? It is a bizarre mystery to be sure.
I swear every instance of “you can make a lot of money in the trades” seems to selectively focus on workers in states with a heavy union culture, or people who run their own business, the latter of which I wouldn’t simply reduce to “working in the trades”. It may involve that or a history of that, but there’s entirely new and additional skill sets required.
For my current state of residence, Florida, BLS lists the mean salary of the parent category “ Office and Administrative Support Occupations” as $39,300. Not great sure the averages for more specific categories under that parent run from anywhere from the low 30s to low 50s. I’ve picked this category specifically since it’s the lower tier of “white collar work”, i.e. stuff a relatively unskilled college grad my find themselves doing.
Now some blue collar categories:
“Construction and Extraction Occupations” - $42,930
“Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations”
- $46,560
“Production Occupations” - $37,700
I don’t want to add noise by listing a ton of specific careers under these categories (and obviously the mean salary within categories can vary a lot). It does seem like the first two categories pay marginally better, but not by a lot. Various other white collar categories have better pay, even ones that people traditionally considered woefully underpaid, such as teaching professions and science ones.
I understand there’s still a benefit for trade careers in that education doesn’t set you back nearly as much, but I also don’t want to equate white collar and educated. Plenty of sales people and software devs without a formal education.
Just for kicks, I’ll look at some Glassdoor salary data for some trade related jobs near me, particularly the ones that people rave on and on about. Not a particularly good source, but there’s some ok self reported data.
“Electrician” - range goes from $32k-$81k, with an average around $51k
“Plumber” - $26k-$86k with an average $47k
“Welder” (this one is interesting, because from what I hear you can make really good money, in specific niches under more dangerous circumstances) - $28k-$56k with an average close to $40k.
Not going to say these are particularly worse than the wide net of “white collar” jobs, but they’re certainly a far cry from the “I know a guy who makes six figures as a tradesmen” anecdotes that get passed around oh so often in these types of discussions.
Of course this is an extremely superficial look at some data I did at 2am. I’m sure, drilling down, you’ll find many blue collar and white collar careers that pay better than the overall category averages, and I am not a “go to college or risk your future” nor a “go into the trades, you can make a ton of money” type person. I just think both attitudes are memes and way overstated.
There's a long line of young people who would love to get into the trades or other professions mentioned in the article. What the author didn't mention is that all of them also have a huge amount of gatekeeping that keeps younger workers either miserable or out entirely. All the money in these seemingly lucrative professions is going to older workers with seniority while young people who join are doing the toughest, shittiest jobs and still struggling to survive. Licensing organizations have become cartels that artificially restrict supply to increase profits for existing members. There's no wonder young people are choosing to look elsewhere.
> Now once you’ve blown $100,000 or more on your education, it’s only natural to feel that you shouldn’t have to work a “manual” job.
People who have sunk 100k into their education feel they need a job that pays well enough to pay down their debt. After four years of school and 100k debt what are you supposed to do, borrow another 30k and go back to school to get a plumbing certificate? Manual jobs that pay well also need years of school or apprenticing.
I tuned out after that… if you don’t understand people well enough to see that I don’t think your opinion counts for much.
> After four years of school and 100k debt what are you supposed to do, borrow another 30k and go back to school to get a plumbing certificate?
No point going to extremes. It's not unhinged, and plumber wasn't the only job listed.
Imagine instead of being told you should go to uni, and feel like a failure if you didn't get in/couldn't afford it, you were also told that at 16 becoming a plumber is a great career and you started an apprenticeship at 16 and were fully qualified with no debt by 25.
That's the idea behind the article (although with various jobs). Not exactly unhinged.
I have no problem with more respect being paid to trades. I have a problem with blaming people for doing the thing you’re supposed to do to succeed. Until good jobs stop generally requiring a degree, college will always be an enticing gamble on your future - one that from an individual standpoint makes sense to go for (for most people). On a societal level, it’d be great to offer people other bets they can make, like apprenticeship programs, and make those bets more appealing (both financially and in their societal respectability)
This problem _is_ a result of central planning. Government backed loans have over inflated the price of degrees and created an oversupply of graduates with little attention paid to the skills employers actually want. In a free market kids would have to finance their careers with bank loans, and I can guarantee they would not lend you 6 figures to study Fine Arts.
This is a very good take. If the government or some non-profit entity wants to fund fine arts, they should do it through scholarships. They are not professions for which they should expect repayment of loans...
Listen to yourself. Government back loans inflate price of degrees? Is that some sort of unescapable physics here or do the corporate parasites increase the price of degrees because their friends in government are backing up the loans? Dont distort reallity
Also, the current form of government is in no shape or form "central planning".
What model are you trying to talk about? What "central planning" do you think would improve society, somehow magically without any central corruption that comes with said central planning...
Title is clickbait. Article is about the aging of the American labor force, which is worth talking about, but has nothing to do with the present phenomenon of the Great Resignation.
> "The population under 16 (not working) and population over 65 (more likely to be retired) are roughly equivalent right now, which means our workforce age should hew pretty close to our overall median age."
Yeah, except:
1. Many in the 65+ group are working. So you can't cancel that out with the under-16 crowd where basically none work (and it is—with a few exceptions—illegal for them to work, especially the younger ones).
2. Many in the 16–24 range aren't working, because they're full-time students. Especially the 16–18 crowd.
So you'd expect the median worker to be older than the median person.
Agreed, looking at https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/civilian-labor-force-particip... it seems like it's just the media age of workers. There are almost as high a % of 65+ workers as 16-19 and more 45-54 year olds than 20-24. And 10% of the 75+ year olds are working, I sincerely doubt we have 10%+ participation in the <6 year old bracket.
Overall it looks like a demographic shift of more people going to school for longer (which is well known) and fewer students working.
I'd like to point out that the problem is being discussed, and the problem isn't unique to the USA; but I'll agree that the discussion is mostly on the fringes of academia and the more esoteric geeky channels on YouTube.
Anyhow, have a look at a number of mini documentaries on it:
So sad this has all come to prevail as it seems like all businesses are cast in the mold developed my Walmart and Milton Friedman, obsessed with maximizing stock price, minimizing costs, and forever squeezing their own workers when they cannot be jettisoned. The ironic reason it is sad is that just as most workers and potential workers are now way below average in income and upward mobility, inequality between businesses is similarly casting a dismal shadow on the prospect of prosperity for most enterprises. The single-winner phenomenon and the emergence of dominant firms in so many sectors has led to a situation where the typical start-up or median mature firm now looks forward to going out of business (being acquired) on terms of its own choosing; the mortality rate among venerable but average firms is high, and these regrettable conditions convince firms to follow the very strategies that cause the conditions.
> Mechanics, electricians, stonemasons, general laborers: these are all trades that allow the world to keep on humming. We can’t rely on the older half of Gen X and the younger half of the boomers to build everything for everyone in perpetuity.
Another thing Gen Y got handed to them: the removal of shop classes.
The real 'problem' is the economy. Young folks are fed up of working 60 hour work weeks while their wages decrease (compared to inflation) and their rent increase (thanks to inflation). Any sensible young adult realizes that owning a home is impossible and affording children is improbable.
The stuff in the beginning of the article, is rather glossed over. Stuff like the bubbles and the economy, and the crippling national debt, you can't just ignore that and then wonder why kids have been told that we need a college degree (and then we believe it).
The reality is that between our deficit spending and the various bubbles in the economy, our younger generations (i.e. most of us 45 and under) will not have an easy path to retirement, if we ever can at all, and that's even assuming that you get a nice FANG job (unless both partners have one). There is simply no easy way through e.g. homeownership that doesn't seriously mess with our economic mobility, for the vast majority of us. There isn't really a way to financial security.
And that is why most folks aren't opting for trade jobs.
In the end, the folks with the trade jobs probably don't end up worse off than the folks with the college degrees, simply because college was so expensive. Or at least that's my take living in the Bay Area where e.g. construction workers get paid decently. So, everyone's kind of a little screwed, no matter what they did. Some of us who were lucky enough to e.g. get into tech before it got big are at least comfortable, but that's not that many of us.
I don't think that e.g. going back to a gold standard would necessarily fix the problem of deficit spending. There've been many rulers in past history who inflated their currencies even though they were ostensibly fixed to some standard. If we want change, we need to start caring about economics – progressives including. And not just the populist stuff. In some other countries (like cough Germany cough) they are terrified of things like inflation, and for good reason. It's not to say that the German model would work for the U.S., but some of those sensibilities would at least have mitigated the asset bubbles that we're in in the U.S.
In some ways we're victims of our own success. If the U.S. weren't successful in the past, then there wouldn't have been this idea that we could deficit spend to wage wars, and then deficit spend to cover the infrastructure gaps that we should've been paying attention to instead of bombing places that probably would've been better taken care of with more peaceful means. The countries in Europe didn't have the luxury of spending so big in these last few generations. The Euro still isn't quite the reserve currency the dollar is. But that's also probably why the rent in Paris or Berlin is less than the rent in New York or San Francisco. You pump all that money out over so many years, and it's going to have to end up somewhere. And that's why e.g. stuff like trade jobs don't look attractive enough.
>But that's also probably why the rent in Paris or Berlin is less than the rent in New York or San Francisco.
Rent price in absolute terms is meaningless. You should look relative as in at the local rent/income ratios. Parisians and Berliners do pay less rent than New Yorkers but they earn way less too.
Also poor and dirty Berlin is not comparable to NY, SF or even Paris, even though some techies make good money there.
I was thinking the latter: I know a lot of people whose parents are older than 65 and are still working. Some of them even by choice, not financial necessity.
Seriously. The world needs mechanics, electricians, etc. We need people who perform these valuable jobs. They don't need degrees.
The problem is that too many people take the loans and go to college, when they really aren't going to find a degree-requiring job after. This is the problem-- unmet expectations after graduation. These poor folks have borrowed and spent, then won't get the jobs to pay off the loans.
It's not your fault, and not mine. Taxpayers shouldn't bail them out. There needs to be more warning about the risks/reward.
If only there was some way for markets to attract more suppliers when demand outstrips supply. But alas, short of increasing the price of scarce resources, I don't see any way to avoid catastrophe.
Is the USAs debt really “crippling”? It’s enormous and looks dangerous on a graph, but if the country wanted to, it could pay it off in a couple of hard years considering it’s “only” around 100% of its GDP. Hardly crippling in any real economic sense when you zoom out to the nationwide macro level.
Are millennials less productive than previous generations? In my country, we sure aren’t. We’re building more things and we’re building them faster, more efficient and with higher profits than ever before. Not just “creator” businesses, in my city alone we have torn down and build new buildings at such a pace that the previous two years of covid alone have seen more “work building houses” jobs (sorry my English isn’t up to task, construction jobs?” than we did in the entirety of the 80-90’s combined… take that gen X! (Or something).
A lot of millennials went and got themselves a higher education in my country. Probably even more so than in the USA because in Denmark you can get any university degree you qualify for while being paid to study, since we handle that stuff collectively and through taxes to give everyone equal opportunity. Has the fact that we too scorned craftsmanship professions throughout the 90ies and 00s has a negative impact? Sure. Are millennials who went to university migrating to become plumbers; electricians and so on? Absolutely.
The real difference between my millennial generation and my parents generation is what we are paid for our efforts. I work a high paying job, I work a second job as an external examiner for CS students which twice-four times a year pays me an extra months worth of my primary job as salary. Yet to see the same wealth increase my parents saw from simply owning a house, I’ll need to do some hardcore investment and saving, or hope that real estate continues rising (which it won’t).
My parents saw their house increase from 200k to 4 million Danish KR. I do own my own apartment, and it is in an area that’s fairly sure to increase in value, but to see the same increase, it would need to go from 3 million to around 50 million. Adjusting for inflation, a realistic estimate will be that I can sell it for maybe 6 million if I’m lucky.
So despite being more productive, more efficient and more financially great for the over all economy, I will benefit less than my parents did. Not only that, but they got to retire at 60, I currently get to do so at 73 unless I pay for all of the pre-73 years myself.
Should you loathe your own generation like the author does? Fuck no. Try to understand them instead and you may just realise why people are fed up with wages that haven’t increased without getting eaten by inflation for 30 some years.
I’m lucky enough that I can chose and pick where I work, I can’t image how not being able to do so as a millennial or below must frustrate.
It's the same problem in EU as well. But it's a lot more complicated than "everybody wants to go to college". That's just an effect of economic and social causes. Money being thrown in ridiculous amounts in the tech bubble makes the choice seem like a no-brainer. Media aggressively pushes the narrative that digital is the future and we'll all eat bits and put a roof over our head with bytes in the near future. People believe AI and robots taking over physical jobs is just around the corner. And the financial digital bureaucrats who do the sharing take the lions share for themselves so of course everybody wants to join that league.
Unless governments intervene to stop this sick trends the west will end up even more unable to provide its basic physical needs - food, shelter, energy, clothes, etc. But the governments are made up of bureaucrats who live in a bubble isolated from physical trades which they think are to be performed exclusively by low class slave-like individuals. And it works for a while, first with local poor classes, then with immigrants, but it crashes at some point, or at least it did historically. Could last centuries, decades or years.
I am sure someone already said it but, bus driver / janitor? The age can’t be higher bc they CAN’T AFFORD to retire or leave their jobs. They have been doing it forever and likely depend on more years to solidify a pension.
i was asked by my parents, “do you want to dig ditches or collect garbage? no? go to college.”
so i did, majored in whatever, had a career in tech doing whatever, and ever since the pandemic i’ve found a lot of fulfillment helping drive trucks filled with construction debris to the transfer station.
Supply and demand will easily solve this problem once demand for those trades increases. Eventually the pay will rise to a level that makes the physical trade-off of working those professions worth it for more people.
I fully agree that the author of the piece should volunteer for a low paid job of a janitor. They are becoming the elderly population, if somebody doesn't sacrifice themselves what oh what will happen?
Sure, there is a lack of young workers for janitorial positions, but not everybody is a boomer with a home and family that can afford (let alone thrive) to be janitor.
There are only three possible scenarios: either the wage goes up, the job gets automated (eg robots) or the job ceases to exist.
Stop making op-ed pieces from your pedestal, screaming there is an issue, when you're directly responsible for the issue, hoping that somebody else will bail out your ass. Op is a lender and a banker, work with the companies you're financing to increase the wages and make the jobs attractive.
What's "up" isn't strictly generational, but a question of who's fallen into a black hole where they waste their time on social media and have no work ethic because they've never felt the slightest need or pressure to scrub toilets or bus tables. I'm thankful to be from a generation where we had to do grunt work, from well before 16, and where friends were people you hung out with in real life when your job was done. What we're really seeing is the halo effect of pampering and coddling of kids - via helicopter parenting in the '00s and then social media complaints about life going forward. This is different in a fundamental way: If anyone had complained they were too good to do hard work in the '90s, you would have risked being seen as an elite rich snob. In fact a lot of my friends rejected college and went into trades or trucking because it was "HONEST WORK"... because they were embarrassed to be the kind of lazy people who would put on a tie and sit at a desk. I always thought that was a little stupid and selling themselves short, but it was at least an honest emotional response to the idea of people who seemed to sit on their ass all day and make money by doing nothing. What's changed here is that the entire basic concept of that - the conceit that led to it - still revolved around an idea that making money was essential to having a complete life. That's been obliterated by a tidal wave of political viewpoints you're supposed to adopt about capitalism and labor, which you can spend your time scrolling through and parroting on Twitter while they sell you ads to spend (presumably your parents') hard-earned cold-eyed capitalist money on toys, instead of facing the reality of showing up for a job that isn't "good enough for you".
The boomers did a real bad job of raising their kids.
> What's "up" isn't strictly generational, but a question of who's fallen into a black hole where they waste their time on social media and have no work ethic because they've never felt the slightest need or pressure to scrub toilets or bus tables. I'm thankful to be from a generation where we had to do grunt work, from well before 16, and where friends were people you hung out with in real life when your job was done. What we're really seeing is the halo effect of pampering and coddling of kids
'rants' like this scare the shit out of me. minimum wages have not kept up with inflation and gig work platforms and zero hour contracts have killed unions. financialization of the housing market means working class people are becoming lifelong renters. you see this and tell me people are lazy and that we are coddling children? huh?
> If anyone had complained they were too good to do hard work in the '90s, you would have risked being seen as an elite rich snob. In fact a lot of my friends rejected college and went into trades or trucking because it was "HONEST WORK"... because they were embarrassed to be the kind of lazy people who would put on a tie and sit at a desk.
> The boomers did a real bad job of raising their kids.
i think you'd benefit from applying a marxist/dialectical materialist lens that recognizes that real power coming from belonging to the propertied class. you seem to be close to it yet you are still using a term like 'boomer', which is in my opinion a useless term as it suggests that all folks from the baby boomer generation have much in common; which is not the case as some are born into the propertied class and have a lot of opportunities and chances to fail and get back up again. most boomers are born working class and thus without those chances (on somewhat of a scale of course, but more often than not it means a much tougher path in life).
Well. I didn't mean to give a scary rant. I really do think people just need to work harder, and their conception of what's too hard now is incredibly weaksauce. Yeah: A lot of boomers ended up propertied without even trying; Yeah: it's somewhat harder to own property now than it was then, but mainly because the boomers are still sitting on it, and in the next 15 years an enormous amount of housing stock is going to be available, possibly so much that we'll have to shrink the suburbs back to the cities, which would be a good thing.
I do think people have become lazy. I don't see the work ethic of my parents or grandparents in anyone anymore. I can't claim I have it either; but at least I'm not hypnotized by social movements (or, for fucksake Marxist dialectics) into thinking I'm a victim of circumstance. My grandparents were victims of circumstance (and they were solid communists from Russia who gave that shit up and became store owners in America). My father was the first person in my family to go to a university. I don't need a fucking marxist lens to explain to me why my friends in PDX going to BLM/anti-cop protests and getting pepper sprayed are doing what they do. I just think they're putting their energy in the wrong place. But at least they actually give a shit about something, unlike most of the rest of their generation in America who sit on their thumb and tweet about it.
Im at an age when people talk of my age group like that, and my age group talk of young adults like that. I started working at 14 carrying furnitures on the weekend and im a pampered millenial :D
In fact, I read a little essay wrote during the 18th century by a grumpy old guy that, if modernized a little bit, could pass for your little essay.
I think your reaction is an effect of aging more than an objective view of the world. It's probably very similar to what a pre WWII adult would say of the pampered boomers born around the 40s: children are treasured by their parents, fathers want their child to surpass them and parents are disappointed by the new path their offsprings carved, on average.
Basically, your comment is as useless to trigger change in the youth as it is interesting to study aging. Instead of wondering how to whip the youth into aging faster, I d ask you: how to comfort the elders into aging slower ?
We can go back much further in time and find the same lamentations:
'The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.' -Socrates
My comments here (or anywhere) don't aim at utility, let alone triggering change. What kind of fool thinks he can change nature by an internet comment? No, friend. This is a simple howl. But I do think we who grew up with rotary phones and building the infrastructure of the shit that's called the internet now should get a little extra weight when we criticize the social media generation than, for instance, old time cowboys should get for criticizing hippies. Their criticism was about style. Mine is about substance. Yes, it's normal to see youth as callow and fickle the older you get, nothing in the whole of human history has prepared us for the utterly vapid emptiness and mindlessness of the current generation.
But I am your future generation, probably: I m 33, so a millenial. I'm starting to feel the same way about my own future generation.
I think it evolves with age and you exaggerate the old time. How many people finish high school in your country, how significantly has this changed ?
In mine,France, it's a bit better, but most people still stop abstract study around 14 and start practical and will never produce a refined thought or have a noble hobby in their life and that's fine. That's always been so and there has always been noble grumpies to somberly bemoan the vapid frivolities of the next generation - but they compare perhaps their fancy upbringing to a base mass that never changed in the first place.
Look take an exemple: I'm the first of all my ancestors to speak and write English, that's a generational progress in a huge sample of my age group they would never judge us on positively.
Old man yells at cloud. Younger people don't want to do jobs their parents/grandparents perceived as lesser and told them to avoid by going to college. Now they make a surprised pikachu face: janitors are generally old! All your own damn fault, boomer. All your own damn fault.
Well, this is when a whole generation develops "Hacker-Mentality". Do not brute force your way into prosperity, instead do it like the upper-crust, by parasiting away on the ever fewer hard-working idiots below.
When even the fleas have fleas and the last dog dies, we will find out whether one can eat business majors. We will also have gone full circle.
automation/online will change it a lot once the older generations of agents and clients leave the scene.
> Automotive mechanics: 47.4 years old
EVs need them less. Also dealership model got to go.
> Bus/Shuttle drivers: 55.6 years old
Autonomous.
> Housekeeping/Janitorial: 50.1 years old
> Home health aides: 47.2 years old
for both - immigration and automation.
>Electrical trades: 46.8 years old
given the low efficiency of the labor here and the high cost of it the area seems to be ready for technological disruption, though honestly i have hard time imagining anything feasible short of human level robot.
>Real estate agents: 49.1 years old
automation/online will change it a lot once the older generations of agents and clients leave the scene.
IDK about that. I'm a pretty online person but I don't think I would have mortgaged roughly half a million dollars in my name on an online ad alone. I distinctly remember being very excited about a house when were looking to buy only to realise it was hobbit sized in real life. It's pretty hard to know that based off photos alone.
> EVs need them less. Also dealership model got to go.
Tesla has notorious build quality. Batteries need replacing.
In my experience, real estate is often a second or third career. The barrier to entry is very low, the potential pay is very high (also potential for very low pay, but the high ceiling attracts those who feel they're playing catch up), and in the job is all about getting strangers to trust you, which is easier if you're older. For all these reasons people seem to like coming to it relatively late in life.
For real estate, don't expect automation change anything for the next couple of decades. Yes, all the goodies like online forms, video tours, etc. are already there and RE agents are using them all the time. But it's not the bulk of the work, it's helping people to find what they need at the price they need, and that's much harder to automate. There's a lot of local and domain specific knowledge there that is very hard to capture.
As for manual trades like electrical or plumbing - there's nothing even close to "technological disruption" happening there, in fact, if anything, it's going backwards - with time, the gadgets we have become more complex, the regulations pile on, the infrastructure ages, and it becomes harder and harder to do those jobs. And there's absolutely no signs any automation is even on the horizon there.
And Technology. Used to be you needed to know how to solder pipe to work on plumbing. Now with the PEX systems, you push on connections and you are done. Gave serious thought to redoing my father's house in PEX. Then I learned that mice love the plastic. For a house in the woods, that made me stay with copper.
I am a bit older, but have been seeing this mentality all over the place on the internet, but also in the real world. Its everywhere, young people trying to hustle money through odd job sales, youtube channels, online ecommerce. Whatever they can do to not get started on a career. And its completely rational, money printing has destroyed the value of the dollar, real estate is too expensive, and corporations extract too much value from their workers.
An even more interesting point is the loss of status of having a good job when young. There is absolutely no shame, and its even cheered on to not be working a serious job. Making 200k at 24 is impressive to no one, and is instead met with disdain, "why spend your life working"