Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
One of the reasons it’s difficult to compare generations is that life arcs have changed so much.
My parent’s generation (Silent Generation) grew up poor by our standards. Each in a family of five in a small house with 1 and 1/2 bathrooms and siblings sharing bedrooms. Hand me down clothes. Meat and potatoes meals. Vacation was camping. Jobs by 14 if you wanted to have any spending money. While housing was cheap, one salary from the mill/railroad didn’t pay enough to keep five people in anything close to the material standards we consider middle-class today.
Then out of the house at 18 and working full-time. Married at 20-21. First kid at 23-24, and two more in succession after that. Sure, the economy is growing but if you’re 26 or 28 years old and new in your field, you’re not making much. Those are lean years. The living standards of a typical middle-class family in 1975 would look pretty dire from our vantage.
So it’s not hard to see why older generations look at the childhood and early adulthood of younger generations and regard them as privileged. Boomers and the Silent Generation had much poorer childhoods and youths than Millennials and Gen-Z (as in most things, Gen X are in the middle).
For the last 30 or 40 years, kids and young adults have had way more space, way better clothes, way better food, more stuff. They travel more, dine out more, and have big money lavished on their sports and activities. And the mains reasons are that couples today have children later in life when they’re earning more money, and two working parents provides a huge boost to household income. Especially in the new and unprecedented category of family - two professional parents.
The Silent Generation and Boomers were able to generate more wealth in their working lives than younger generations, and have been able to retire young and well. Younger generations aren’t wrong to envy them paying off mortgages by 50 and retiring to fully-funded pensions at 62.
Tldr: Ages 0-30 have been way better for younger generations than in previous generations. Ages 30-? are shaping up to be worse going forward.
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I think you've made a good point here, but have glossed over two things:
1) the standard of living of kids is a direct result of the fiscal capacity of their parents and grandparents, and,
2) the number of kids is shrinking, so per-capita spending on them can quite easily go up.
Between my four grandparents (Silent Generation) they had 11 siblings (who survived into adulthood...): an average of 2.75 per. My parents (Baby Boomers) have seven siblings: an average of 3.5 per. I have one sibling: an average of 1. I have 0 kids; my sister has 1. My nephew has an average 0 siblings.
Younger generations have "had it way better" as children because their parents and grandparents have had much more disposable income to shower on them, and fewer siblings to spread that disposable income across. As adults I made a lot less money than my parents' did until I was into my mid-30s (I have a professional degree, while neither of them completed any post-secondary as explained in the post above). My sister still makes a lot less inflation-adjusted money than our parents did. My nephew faces a far bleaker job market when he's old enough to work.