[annabellish]

What the linked article is trying to explain is that the opposite is true. It isn't that everyone wants to live in the trendiest areas, it's that they _have_ to in order to find a job that has any hope of paying off their debts fast enough for them to save up enough so that when the next huge expense comes through they can afford it... likely taking on more debt even so.

It isn't that everyone wants a degree - certainly not, given the price - but if you don't have one then you don't even have a chance of making enough savings to afford housing, healthcare, education for your children, et cetera.

People _can't_ "set their expectations a bit lower". Your options are to have no expectations, and accept that you're not going to be able to provide for your children, or to join the same rat race as everybody else and get locked into this cycle of wildly increasing prices. There isn't a middle ground for people to aim at any more.

[Raidion]

I disagree. I think it would be interesting to do that same article, but replace the MIT tuition with that of a decent in state school, and replace the housing prices with those of a medium/large midwest city like Omaha, Cleveland, or Pittsburg.

Salaries don't scale like rent does. In Cleveland, you can get a 1 bedroom for around 900 dollars, in SF, that's 3.5k+. That means to maintain the same purchasing power and keeping monthly rent at 1/40th of salary, you'd need to earn 36k in CLE, but 140k in SF. 140k isn't out of reach in the Bay Area at all, but usually requires a college degree, while 36k in CLE is in reach of those without a college degree, and numbers twice that high are in reach of those with a STEM degree.

This means you're going to have more disposable income, not having to deal with 5%+ rent increases every year, pay less in the higher tax brackets, and be able to buy a house without paying nearly as much interest. All just because you stop trying to be the top 1% and live in some place that isn't NYC or SF, but is still in the top 50 largest cities in the US.

[annabellish]

It's possible that if you did that you might be okay _today_, if your kids are also gonna go to a "decent" school instead of a better school, if you're also gonna get a "decent" house, et cetera, and you happen to live in the right place to enable all of this. The trend lines are strongly suggesting that everywhere is going down similar paths, though. There's no indication there's anywhere specific they're going to -stop-.

The problem here is the trends, not today, because those big expenses are in the future and we need to worry about what they'll be then, not what they are today. The trends are happening just about everywhere, just to different degrees.

[cjmb]

Hi, OP of the actual article here!

Thanks for summarizing this here. This is spot on. And of course I'm being a bit hyperbolic -- like I said, the median American still gets to build wealth. Just not as much as their parents. Or their parents' parents.

The only "expectation" I took as a granted was that a given person not-so-far-from-the-median can build Wealth in America. If you're willing to set THAT one lower, then perhaps there is no problem now or on the horizon...

I commented elsewhere that it doesn't seem to me that "Economic Surplus" / "Building Wealth" is an axiom of any system. So perhaps that expectation should in fact be lowered. But that's certainly not something my peers or I are willing to do. Thus the race.

[randomdata]

> but if you don't have one then you don't even have a chance of making enough savings to afford housing, healthcare, education for your children, et cetera.

Where does this idea come from?

According to the OECD, only 48% of American adults have a post-secondary education. I find it hard to believe that 52% of Americans truly cannot afford housing, healthcare, education for children, etc. I might even bet that the 52% have an easier time (especially with shelter), as there seems to be a correlation between the desire to live in an expensive city and having post-secondary attainment.

Additionally, wages are stagnant. The rapid rise in post-secondary attainment mentioned by the parent has done nothing to increase incomes among the workforce. The article points out that incomes have been on the decline for those without a post-secondary education. But misses the obvious: As colleges select for the most successful people, the most successful people without a degree who brought up the average in previous years now belong to the college group.

People can't set their expectations lower, but they can set them higher by not falling prey to misleading interpretations of the data surrounding college. The data is abundantly clear that there has been no advantage in the significant rise in post-secondary attainment. If anything, people are worse off now because of it.

[InclinedPlane]

The median age in the US is 38. Half of the population is older than that, since 27% of the population is under 18 that means nearly 70% of the adult population is over 38, about 45% is over 50, and about a quarter is over 60. Those older folks had the benefit of higher wage jobs in their early careers, and were able to build their careers, job experience histories, and income levels much faster than later generations. Additionally, because of the much lower costs of housing they were able to build their wealth at a much faster rate.

Someone who is 60 years old or older today (which again makes up fully 1/4 of the adults in the US) would have seen average (nominal) wages of about 12k/yr and would have been able to jump into a mortgage only a few years after entering the job market, on a home price of just 60-100k. With a 30 year mortgage they would today be living with a fully paid off house worth easily half a million dollars, and would have had one to two decades of being able to plow their former mortgage payments into investments. Those people have no problem paying for housing, healthcare, children, etc.

It's folks who were born after 1980 who face lower wage jobs with higher requirements, higher costs of education, higher housing costs, higher medical costs, etc. And face an uphill battle in terms of building their careers, increasing their income, and building their wealth.

As to your point about college educations, it is much more difficult to obtain a high paying job without college. And study after study show that college educations result in higher incomes. You might claim that colleges select for the most successful people, which skews the results, but that doesn't change the fact that most desirable and well paying jobs still list college educations as requirements.

[afpx]

Those seem to be two very extreme options. I’m certain that there are hundreds of other options available. I mean I can think of more than a dozen just off the top of my head.

In this case, the author appears to have a degree from MIT and a background in finance and engineering. Out of curiousity, I did a job search (outside the trendy areas), and there are plenty of high-paying jobs available to them. A person would just have to live in a boring area or take on a boring job, or live a boring lifestyle. I guess I’m not understanding why seemingly few people seem to accept trade offs these days.