A sad fact is that what the neoliberal consensus promised was cheap consumer items. The boomers and Gen X traded job safety, high pay, and affordable housing in return for treats. Now the secure people who benefitted from it tell the young that they can't have the treats either. pic.twitter.com/DpLWIXd8Is
— Dr Eleanor Janega (@GoingMedieval) November 17, 2022
Here's the BBC article, "Cost of Living: 'I've given up booze and Netflix to cut costs, but I've got hope.'"
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52 comments:
It's the truth. It's gonna fall apart.
My cat gets Treats just for being a cat; Gen X-ers do not deserve treats just for being Gen X-ers.
The boomers and Gen X traded job safety, high pay, and affordable housing in return for treats.
After decades of Gen X being the new lost generation, generation malaise, generation reality bites, this brand new take is a bit jarring. I guess we've made it now that the young and stupid are hating us.
All those things Gen Z can't have because of the Boomers and Gen X? The Boomers and Gen X didn't have it either when they were that age.
Young people have always had to scrimp and save. It's part of being young and developing your career.
Reaganism was a mistake. Not the Cold War part, he got that right, that was screwed up by Clinton, but deregulation went too far.
Take Greyhound buses, in the 1970s, you could get on a bus in West Bumfuck, and take it to Paducah, regular service, and you could take a bus from Boston to New York. Now the Greyhounds and Trailways buses are gone from small towns, but you have a whole bunch of options between Boston and New York.
We should have kept our freight rail service up to date, to keep trucks off the highways, it's far more energy efficient.
Airline deregulation was a good thing, it used to be that only the affluent could fly.
401ks were never going to replace pensions for factory workers, the city I grew up in basically got sucked dry of good jobs for people with high-school educations, and those jobs went overseas, the ones that didn't simply disappear.
This is where Trump gets his support. It's like Trump is the only one trying to stop wealthy democrats from drowning the working class in a burlap bag.
If DeSantis ditches the Paul Ryan Republicans, I will give him a look, I think a lot of the things he say, when viewed in context, are exaggerated for clicks, but if he is just one more Mith McConnel "Steelworkers should learn to code, and BTW, send their sons off to another war for the globalists" guy, then count me out.
With tim maguire. Belasco's comment looks a heck of a lot like how I lived when I was 20 - and for the last 6 months.
people Will find..
That two bowls of gruel a day, are Very affordable.
Once you've cut out the luxuries (like a 3rd meal, or sleeping indoors), living is cheap
The boomers and Gen X traded job safety, high pay, and affordable housing in return for treats.
What job safety? What high pay? I'm represented in those generations, and I recall not long ago that a 6-figure income was for C-suite personnel. Now, 6-figures is a starting rate, and for that, I don't think you should consider your job safe at all. What's this about affordable housing? What's that have to do with the former two items? Is Silicon Valley operating Company Towns?
Dr. Eleanor Janega is an "American Medieval Historian". Stay in your lane then, because you suck as this modern-day stuff.
As for the original story, most people of my generation didn't have a budget for "booze" to give up when they were 20. I'm not saying they didn't drink from time to time, but it was after all other expenses including savings was covered.
I am a boomer and have always thought we were a shallow and narcissistic generation. The myth of the 60’s, sexual revolution, civil rights fiction and other tropes have created a culture of self satisfied smugness among many in my generation.
I thought Gen X was the natural next generation response to that, like Alex Keaton in Family Ties was to his liberal parents
But Gen Z has convinced me that the pendulum has swung too far to the silly side to return to normal. Maybe it’s because they are the first truly coddled generation. Maybe it is that they are the first social media generation. Maybe it is the inevitable result of the failure of the educational establishment to educate but the success of the educational establishment to deflect through indoctrination.
And maybe it’s just me yelling to get off my lawn and screaming at clouds but I don’t think so. There is something fundamentally wrong about Gen Z.
Change one letter and it's comedy gold:
""Cost of Living: 'I've given up booze and Netflix to cut costs, but I've got dope.'"
Looks like he gave up grooming as well. Maybe by the time he's 30 he'll have come to the realization that he may be a loser because he acts and dresses like one.
Naw, probably not. He'll always be certain it's "the system" keeping him down.
The oldest members of Gen Z are 22 right now. They just graduated college into this inflation/recession after having most of their college years wrecked by the idiotic response to the pandemic. What people have been calling Gen Z, especially since the election, is entirely the youngest millennials. All of my students right now are Gen Z, and although they have major gaps in their knowledge (thanks to the pandemic and the collapse of the K-12 learning caused by Bill Gates' idiotic Common Core Crapola Curriculum--remember that?) they are, character-wise, the dead opposite of the pathetic millennials they are getting lumped in with. Like Gen X, Gen Z students are the opposite of entitled: they fully expect everything to be worse for them than it was for their immediate predecessors because, for most of their lives, it always has been.
As a starving young person, I gave up drinking and had no TV, or any other entertainment device. 1978.
The boomers and Gen X traded job safety, high pay, and affordable housing in return for treats
Nonsense. Not my wife and me (very late boomer/early Gen-X) or our adult (millennial) kids. Or their (millennial) partners. Or their various friends. People who went into journalism may be struggling though -- if so, it was a really bad career choice.
I used to subscribe to Netflix
Then one day I got 2 emails
One said that Netflix had hired Obama at some obscene salary to be in charge of damn-all.
The other said Netflix was raising the rate by 20-30 percent.
I canceled the same day.
Last year t-mobile took over sprint and I got a new cheaper plan. It includes free Netflix.
I certainly won't pay for it even though I can afford Netflix.
John Henry
The federal government seems to have become a strange hybrid of big business libertarianism and a CCP style central planning police state.
@tim in vermont: The freight rail system IS up to date. By the early 70s, the freight railroads were headed for bankruptcy. Their rates were highly regulated. They had to go through lengthy proceedings to get government permission to abandon unprofitable lines. Congress greatly deregulated the industry in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Since then, efficiency has soared, working conditions have become much safer, and rates have fallen in real terms. The industry has some problems. The carriers cut too many jobs when the pandemic hit. Now they are having trouble hiring enough workers. But overall, the industry is the best in the world.
"It's like Trump is the only one trying to stop wealthy democrats from drowning the working class in a burlap bag."
Awesome! I'm stealing that.
Remember "Tune in, turn on, and drop out?" All that took was a small amount of LSD and a huge amount of gullibility.
Beans & rice are staple foods for several reasons, one of which is that people can afford them.
Reject consumerism, live frugally, eat the bugs, stay in your pod and take your drugs.
I'm not a member of a political party, so I really don't care, but... while Gen Z isn't in any way "Republican," it is in temperament potentially the most anti-Democrat generation ever*: they know who was responsible for the lockdowns, the ineffectual masking, the riots, the canceling of 2.5 years of their lives in exchange for, well, actually noting, but at least in intent to "protect" the entitled geriatrics. They are the regular victims of the Karens (whom they LOATHE). Attacking Gen Z for things they haven't done will drive them into the arms of the Democrats, so it's exactly the kind of idiotic self-own that appeals to Republicans.
*Though the younger ones, middle-school and below, have been horribly damaged by the "1000-genders" ideology, which works by tricking them into thinking that a personality = a "gender". You have no idea how many parents are in torment right now about this--many, many more than feel able to speak up because they fear losing their children (both metaphorically and literally).
My favorite was the guy who said he was asked to speak at conferences and to write articles, but still couldn't make ends meet. Duh! Get over yourself. What you speak/write on isn't worth much! Become an expert in plumbing and get asked to visit a house at $180 an hour.
TANSTAAFL. Seems that lesson needs to be relearned periodically.
Excerpts of two comments that were handily one after the other:
The Boomers and Gen X didn't have it either when they were that age.
....
Young people have always had to scrimp and save. It's part of being young and developing your career.
Exactly. I lived in Seattle at that age. My husband and I budgeted $200 a month for dining out because it was almost literally the only fun we paid for - the rest of our entertainment was hiking and camping. We kept $200 of Monopoly money in a "Dining" envelope and transferred it to a "Spent" envelope as the month went on, and when it was all transferred, we were done eating out for the month. We cooked every meal except for whatever we could squeeze out of that $200, so we learned how to make the food we enjoyed out.
We brewed beer because we wanted better beer than we could afford to buy, but we didn't drink every day. We made lattes at home every morning so we wouldn't be tempted by the dozens of espresso joints and coffee trucks we'd pass on the way to work. There we were, in the Promised Land of Beer and Coffee in the Age of Grunge, in a 2-(starter-)income household, drinking our homemade beer and coffee and going out to the joint-cover bars for music in Pioneer Square maybe once every couple of months, when we hadn't run out of budgeted money yet.
But we budgeted our 401(k)s and some savings first, even if only a tiny bit, and in every other way were conservative with our money. We paid our bills, then budgeted pleasures like vacations. We worked hard at our jobs, survived through rounds of layoffs (job security my Gen X butt), undoubtedly caught some breaks because most people catch some breaks, after all, and above all, didn't expect instant gratification.
Don't cry for Z, Argentina!
LOL “No one before us had to make hard choices and act adult at 20!” Except most of us did in fact have to forego “treats” in order to TCOB and pay our bills. But at least my generation didn’t walk uphill to and from school in the snow like my dad did.
And yet as the Fetterdude Fenomenon shows this same generation voted overwhelmingly to support the party that’s all-in on the Great Reset and executing Kraus’s wonderful vision: “You will own nothing. You will have no privacy. And life has never been better!”
"You will own nothing and be happy "
"Lower your expectations."
Imagine thinking that everyone should be living like a Senior Engineer at Google. How did they get the idea that that was reality?
I can't imagine.
We pay for the Netflix; the kids roll in under our umbrella. Our parents (on both sides) helped us when we were young, and now we do the same. It's a pleasure to feel secure and settled enough to offer -- well, I guess it's a treat. For them and for us.
I remember in the 50s many people had two jobs to make ends meet. B&W TVs, one phone etc.
I'm a boomer. High times all right. I was licenced professional engineer my (now ex) wife had a degree in accounting. At age 29 we had one child. That was the age we finally came up with a decent down payment and bought a house.
If Netflix had been available then I can guarentee we would not have fit it into our budget. Instead we did foolish stuff like investing for the future.
Single/central/monopolistic solutions and progressive prices in an Ouroboros trickle-down economic model with diversity [dogma] enchancements. Deja vu.
Tim.
Both business are still in service. Both seem to be doing well. They probably shut down unprofitable routes.
More freight is moved by rail in the US. You see a lot of trucks because once the rail car gets to, say, Danbury it has to distributed further. Hence trucks. Lot's of trucks=booming economy.
401Ks are a pretty good investment if the money is managed right. Pensions were dropped when the company owners became personally responsible for any losses. That could kill a small business.
"This is where Trump gets his support. It's like Trump is the only one trying to stop wealthy democrats from drowning the working class in a burlap bag."
Exactly. And now you know why he's so universally reviled by the left. He pulled down the façade. Her exposed the grifters for who they were.
What counts as treats? We've come to expect a lot of services in this century that Boomers and Xers didn't have in their early days. Plenty of boomers did get high salaries. Would they get more money without "neoliberalism"? Other people lost out. But how sustainable was the post-war boom and the post-war consensus? It wasn't going to last forever. I'm not saying Malthus was right, but human numbers and human desires do give productive capacity a run for the money. Embrace change and dynamism and you'll have problems. Try to permanently fix things as they were and you'll also have problems.
Well, no matter how poor I was in my 20s I always had money for booze. Period. JAYsus, have some priorities, people!
We brewed beer because we wanted better beer than we could afford to buy, but we didn't drink every day.
I brewed my own beer in Medical School. We lived in a little house near Pasadena. Rent was $100/ month so that helped. We were eligible for food stamps and such things but would not apply. Once a month we would have a bottle washing party, when a new batch was ready to bottle.
We got by. Now, the 18 to 30 generation votes for the crazies.
Airer? You mean a drying rack?
Good heavens, read a book, you little twerps
What you see in front of you or what you experienced five minutes ago is not all there is in the world. There are many other possibilities.
Here is one random thing that comes to mind - when the Ingalls family was out on the prairie and it was looking like Santa Claus wasn't going to make it, they received a last minute visit from their Tennessean friend Mr. Edwards, who it turns out ran into Santa on his way. The girls were completely flabbergasted to each receive a peppermint stick, a shiny new tin cup, a heart-shaped cake, and a shiny new penny. They couldn't believe how much amazing loot they had received.
I recently read Ava's Man by Rick Bragg -- highly recommended -- about the author's grandparents' hardscrabble life in the mountains of north Alabama and Georgia.
Neverending cheap money to buy a neverending river of treats is just ruining people spiritually. Consider austerity to be a gift. You are not living in reality if your whole life is just lurching from throwing something down the maw of one appetite or the other. Read the church fathers on this.
When I was 20 I lived alone in a shitty apartment someone had built not to code off the back of a house, and I worked seven days a week at two jobs. I walked several miles literally through the woods, on the shoulder of a two lane road, to work because I didn't have a car. I read paperbacks while I did that, and scribbled notes in the margins as I walked. I was more alive, physically, spiritually and intellectually at that time than at any other in my life and to be honest with you I'd recommend it more to my kids than living a fat comfortable sassy life with Netflix and Uber and Door Dash and many other things to keep people lazy, incompetent, overfed and numb to reality. It was dangerous in some ways but it's also dangerous to live like young people seem to want to live now.
Having been a Vietnam-era veteran, the wife and I were able to get into our first house — a quarter century old fixer-upper that was brick and block but needed a Hell of a lot of sweat — through the assistance of my veteran’s benefits. Fixing up the fixer-upper required a lot of learning how to do things like paint, hang wallpaper, saw a mitered corner, clean out stopped up toilets, and fix leaky plumbing.
We postponed having kids until we could afford them. We bought cheap cars and drove them until they were barely fit for the junk yard. I saved money by changing my own oil and doing minor repairs myself. We watched TV using “free antenna.” We saved every penny we could.
If anyone wants to receive veteran’s benefits, I understand that the army, navy, and marines have recruiting offices.
If you’re a Gen-Z who wants to save money by buying a fixer-upper, well, you do need to acquaint yourself with the concept known as “work.” Given my experience with representatives of college-educated Gen-Z individuals, work” is a concept of which they have no previous acquaintance.
Are there no prisons, are there no workhouses?
Marcus B. THEOLDMAN
Wonderful. Those of us who are passionate about ‘finance’ and economics love this type of data. No question there will be Ec profs sharing this in class…
I'm a boomer.
I know that I have been privileged (ugh!) to have lived through the best time, in the best place, under the best circumstances, of any humans in history.
American dream, grandparents came over on the boat with whatever they could carry. My parents had undergrad degrees at state schools. My siblings and I all have graduate/professional degrees, live upper middle class lifestyles.
My kids live way better than wife and I did in our 30s, with our blessings and support.
I still clean out my clogged toilets and fix our cars, despite having several million in the retirement fund that we are just now starting to tap into.
I don't see any pathway for the good times to continue for our grands, though. We coulda kept it going, but leftists.
Having been a Vietnam-era veteran, the wife and I were able to get into our first house — a quarter century old fixer-upper that was brick and block but needed a Hell of a lot of sweat — through the assistance of my veteran’s benefits. Fixing up the fixer-upper required a lot of learning how to do things like paint, hang wallpaper, saw a mitered corner, clean out stopped up toilets, and fix leaky plumbing.
We postponed having kids until we could afford them. We bought cheap cars and drove them until they were barely fit for the junk yard. I saved money by changing my own oil and doing minor repairs myself. We watched TV using “free antenna.” We saved every penny we could.
Cheap fixer-uppers and starter homes are almost impossible to find these days, outside of depressed communities with no job prospects. If you want to build a career, you have to move to larger urban areas, where home prices have skyrocketed over the past twenty years, and where nowadays your options are overpriced apartments or massive single-family homes.
As for kids: the average number of kids has been declining even as the average age of the first kid increases for the past generation. But, this has its own unpleasant second and third-order effects.
"Job safety"? Well, I suppose as a very late Boomer, more like a Gen X, that wasn't something I knew of. When I was looking for what to major in college, in 1980, I knew to avoid the Liberal Arts because being poor, I needed to improve my economic prospects. My brother graduating in 1976 with a history degree, fortunately had an in with a contractor he'd worked for in high school so became a master carpenter. He even had an in a the Phone company due to our father working there when he died, but how well would that have worked out 10 years later when it got broken up?
I remember reading a Time or Newsweek article advising against going into hard science/engineering with the example there were PhDs in astrophysics washing dishes in NYC due to the cutbacks in the Space Program. I started out in engineering but got arrogant so got my BS in Physics. That doesn't shoo you in for a job, it did prove useful. Problem solving is a very good skill to have.
In 1980, who knew Reagan was going to break the American decline into socialism, at least for a couple decades?
There is some issue with the "good jobs" moving offshore, but the real impact on Boomer and later good manufacturing jobs was the development of the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) in 1969. PLCs automated a lot of processes, but more importantly got rid of a lot of factory jobs maintaining and re-"programming" the relay logic. A PLC is a robust "computer" (Dick Morley the father of the PLC refused to let it called a computer) that really pushed forward automation.
But these young people voted for some socialism and now they are getting an economy loaded up with socialist policies good and hard. The 1970s was an s-hole decade. And why? Inflation and interventionist government. It was only by throwing off the creeping interventionism/socialism, that Boomers saw good times.
Temujin said: "Imagine thinking that everyone should be living like a Senior Engineer at Google. How did they get the idea that that was reality?"
THIS is the question that needs to be asked. How did expectations of what life would be like at 20 become so inflated? Inquiring minds want to know.
Hope for change. Monotonic change. Unqualified monotonic change... one step forward, twos steps backward.
"They probably shut down unprofitable routes."
When they were regulated, they were required to run unprofitable routes. Now the only bus service available is the high-profit routes. That was my point.
Freight loses out to trucking because, while cheaper, rail is unreliable, so the carrying cost of the goods for the extra time outweighs the savings, I know this because my brother used to run a factory with a spur, and I asked him if it was still used, and he said "rarely" and gave me that reason. We build interstates through wilderness areas, interstates now clogged with trucks, when updated freight hubs and rail service could have done the same job. Most of the nitrous oxide pollution in cities comes from trucks.
401ks are fine for high-functioning people, but that same brother tells me stories of workers who spent decades at the factory finding out that they were not going to be able to afford retirement, at least not like their dad, no matter how many times they were told about contributing to 401ks.
That wasn't a throwaway comment I made. Sure, the Reagan revolution raised GDP, but it also destroyed a way of life and those people in the path of destruction were not cut in in a meaningful way on the GDP increases. Instead of making things, America started making "deals" and those deals enriched the affluent coasts and didn't care where the work was done.
I used to believe all the same shit about Reaganism, but now the results are in, it was a huge siphoning of money to the top income tiers..
THIS is the question that needs to be asked. How did expectations of what life would be like at 20 become so inflated? Inquiring minds want to know.
They youngest two generations have been indulged and coddled from infancy. They have cell phones, computers, game consoles, large screen TVs with cable. They have been awarded participation trophies and coddled by their parents. The schools fail to hold them accountable and seek only to pass them through the system with as little fuss as possible.
They have never faced adversity or want. They wallow in their own self-importance.
Because I'm not a member of a political party, I don't really care, but attacking Gen Z for things they haven't done, and being all self-righteous about "back when I was a kid" stuff is going to end up being yet another (entirely characteristic) self-own for Republicans. Gen Z knows who is responsible for the lockdowns, etc. that wrecked their lives for 2+ years in exchange for... nothing (purely notional "protection" for geriatrics, which wouldn't have been worth the cost even if it HAD worked, and it didn't). They completely distrust the Powers that Be, admire absolutely no one in political office, and know they've been robbed of their cultural and intellectual heritage. They are primed to become like the young people in China who spit at the words "Cultural Revolution" and despise the people who carried it out (except, sadly, Mao). But go ahead and lump them in with the Millennials and say they are "entitled" when the oldest have just graduated college into the teeth of a recession--you'll push them into the arms of the Democrats (though, in compensation, you can wallow in your self-righteousness--another Boomer/Millennial characteristic that Gen Z loathes).
Well, no matter how poor I was in my 20s I always had money for booze.
Yep. Priorities.
Had to choose between cable and a landline phone. Couldn't afford both.
Easy choice.
But still managed to scrape by when a half rack of Hamm's went on sale for $2.49.
Prof. M. Drout said...
Thank you, thank you! I've been posting on this mislabeling for a while. People keep trying to split the Millennials into an older and younger grouping, and it just ain't so. AOC is just as entitled and whiny as David Hogg.
The break to Gen Z comes a few years later when the kids never knew of a life prior to the Great Recession.
Perhaps if his government didn't insist he pay triple the cost of fuel that we pay here, he could afford a beer and a movie now and then.
Alternatively, he can console himself that he's doing his part to save the planet.
… by the time Winter slushes into Spring, dude will have no hope left.
And no change.
America last.
Who didn’t get the memo?
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