[hotnfresh]

My dad (high school diploma) blundered through his 20s with a series of gigs and barely-paying-the-bills solo businesses, had an expensive divorce (kids in the mix, too), a kid out of wedlock, then finally got his career going as he approached 35. Worked for a railroad. Started at the bottom, worked his way to upper-middle-management before the railroad sold, MBAs took over from career railroad guys in upper management, and they ruined his work-life with constant pointless meetings and having to put up with idiots who didn’t know how anything worked calling the shots, before ultimately “encouraging” him and a bunch of the other expensive career guys into somewhat-early retirement. FFS, he was literally raised in a barn—and not a nice one, and not one attached to hundreds of acres of valuable paid-off farmland or anything like that—they were a kind of poor that barely exists outside the homeless, these days.

My mom was about 30 when they got married. Junior college stenography degree. Never worked for pay again after getting married. Dad was a railroad man (working class, nothing fancy) and mom a homemaker.

They followed a playbook that’d spell doom today, but rode rising real estate prices and real honest-to-god pensions to a couple million dollars invested plus social security. We did a couple weeks of driving or (sometimes) air travel vacation every year. All the usual American Dream stuff.

Shit was simply different for the Boomers. Almost every plausible life-path got downgraded a couple notches since then, in terms of quality of life and retirement outcomes. Except now everyone gets a shiny gee-whiz slate in their pocket. Hooray.

[lotsofpulp]

Perhaps this is what reaching the top of an S curve looks like. There is no economic growth wave due to population growth wave to surf.

[alangibson]

This is a huge component of the answer. No one wants to hear it because of what implies for their agency, but demographics is destiny.

[ChatGTP]

I think this about property too.

The price of property in Australia has increased so much but the demographics aren’t there to support continued growth. Yes immigration is a thing but most immigrants don't move to Australia with $4 million(AUD) in the bank to continue fueling the boom.

What happens when demand falls ?

[epicureanideal]

There’s plenty of growth, it just isn’t going to the people who work for a living, even if they’re highly educated, highly skilled, and working long hours.

[hotnfresh]

Yeah, to be clear, I don’t mean that as a “them damned boomers!” post. They’re not to blame for circumstances conspiring to put life on (relatively) easy mode for them. If they’re guilty of anything (at least, many of them) it’s failing to appreciate how much harder it’s gotten to achieve what they’d consider a basic, unremarkable, ordinary, comfortable middle-class life.

[asdff]

Locally though there are areas that have grown quite a bit compared to others, the average misses nuance. LA has grown by a million people since 1970, while chicago has lost almost as much in that time. Are things more affordable than Chicago in Southern California? Certainly not, even if economically speaking the region is "more productive" by whatever measure.

Really what makes things cheap is a simple formulaic application of supply and demand to things like housing, which takes up the bulk of the American take home pay bar almost nothing else in comparison. Boomers had things cheap not because of riding off a population boom, but a home building boom, that zoning changes in the decades since have made impossible to replicate.

[amanaplanacanal]

Population is still growing just fine, due to immigration. Not sure what you are saying here.

[laidoffamazon]

You’re aware these people dealt with the draft, significantly higher crime, high inflation, 14% mortgage rates and the continuing tide of automation too right? Watch “Falling Down” to see what the silent generation thought of no fault divorce, computerization and the iron curtain falling down (yes, one of the reasons for the title…)

People of my generational cohort have it easy by comparison. The unemployment rate was < 4.5% when I graduated college. SPX (a big chunk of my own retirement) is up 65% in the last four years.

Do people not have any sense of history?!

[lacrimacida]

If it was worse during the great depression we’re having it good? Maybe it’s not that bad yet but it looks like it’s coming fast

[acdha]

> Shit was simply different for the Boomers. Almost every plausible life-path got downgraded a couple notches since then, in terms of quality of life and retirement outcomes. Except now everyone gets a shiny gee-whiz slate in their pocket. Hooray.

My father-in-law didn’t do quite as well but had the same kind of easy mode experience – working as a letter carrier for years was enough to support a stay-at-home wife, kids, house, pension, etc. He upgraded towards the end by moving into being a supervisor and then the IT group - by virtue of having bought a PC in the late 80s, the regional postmaster knew him as one of the most experienced - and retired at 60.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but I feel it’s constantly hard for most people of that generation to understand how much different things are now.

[rufus_foreman]

You live on a different planet than me.

None of what you are saying is supportable by any data or statistics.

The boomers had everything worse. When they were born, something like two thirds of them had indoor plumbing. And a third of them did not.

My parents, my grandparents, they grew up the same way everybody else did back then. They worked on a farm from the age of like 5 doing manual labor.

When you are talking about your parents, you are talking about the luckiest people in the country. Nobody got a pension back then. Maybe if you worked for IBM, but that was not the norm.

What you are saying, "every plausible life-path got downgraded a couple notches since then" is completely false. Every plausible life-path has been upgraded since then, the things you are saying just aren't true.

[hotnfresh]

> The boomers had everything worse. When they were born, something like two thirds of them had indoor plumbing. And a third of them did not.

Yeah, I know, I’ve hand-pumped water at the well my dad used growing up. The ‘40s and ‘50s were rough for a lot of families—but their kids basically just had to not constantly fuck up for multiple decades to be on track for at least moderate success.

I think it’s why a lot of that generation (my parents included) assume anyone who’s not doing at least decent is basically not trying at all, or is astonishingly useless. For their relatives who didn’t climb out of poverty with the rest of the wave, that’s mostly true.

(YMMV for minorities over the same time span, of course—racist FHA policy and other measures meant e.g. black folks didn’t get such an easy on-ramp to the postwar-success highway, to put it mildly)