I'm not American but I can sense the feeling is the same here in Europe. I wouldn't want to be a younger man right now. I feel like on top of every possible struggles they're facing: low wages, low sense of meaning, social media addiction, scarce opportunities for true connections... we're treating them with very little empathy and consideration, they're just "whining", wish I knew how to help beyond my modest occasional contributions.
If you click through to the breakdowns by gender, you'll see the despair numbers are actually higher in young women than in young men. So this isn't a male-only issue.
I feel like I am constantly reading about the problems facing young men. Every article about loneliness - young men. Every article about political swings - young men. Every article about economic anxiety or wages - young men. Every article about declining birth rates - young men.
It'd make a dangerous drinking game at this point to take a shot any time the top comment on any piece of news is "young men". Moreso if we take another on claims said "young men" aren't being talked about / cared for.
And this bleeds into life. Nearly every discussion on politics or social ideas or religion somehow hones it's focus on young men.
> we're treating them with very little empathy and consideration, they're just "whining"
And to specifically bring up this part, young men are choosing at an alarming rate to follow people like Andrew Tate and Charlie Kirk. They are becoming less compatible with equitable society and, notably, the women in their age bracket.
The complaint often isn't that they're "whining", it's that they push against ideas like equality with women and those are non-negotiable. And, as a result, they're exacerbating the problem, as those women would rather not date anyone than date someone who actively campaigns against their interests.
This, in turn, makes it harder to be empathetic. "Dating is hard" is true in the modern world. But it's even more true when you just posted a joke on social media that blue haired women have mental illness or a "western vs Asian woman" meme or retweeted some hyper-masculinity influencer.
When this gets talked about and women directly state "I don't like how men my age talk to/about me", people often act like the women are being unreasonable and unempathetic - as if the men are owed relationships and women just need to compromise and see things from the other person's shoes.
But rarely is the answer that young men have a crisis of self-selecting bad role models, putting less (or no) effort into their appearance and education, holding gross sociopolitical beliefs, and not developing the emotional and household maturity an adult woman expects. And they simply aren't willing to change that. What is anyone supposed to do about that, exactly?
I don't have a source on me right now, but it's pretty well reported that men Gen-Z and younger are becoming increasingly aligned with alt-right beliefs. That is to say, not fiscal conservativism, but the identity politics of the American right.
I don't mean to say a majority of them are like this, to be clear.
> young men have a crisis of self-selecting bad role models, putting less (or no) effort into their appearance and education, holding gross sociopolitical beliefs, and not developing the emotional and household maturity an adult woman expects.
You're confusing the symptoms for the cause. The question people are asking is what about our society is driving these behaviors. What is making someone like Andrew Tate appealing to a young men? These are young people, why are you blaming them for not knowing better instead asking why they aren't being taught better?
> These are young people, why are you blaming them for not knowing better instead asking why they aren't being taught better?
There's always been an issue with mixed signals when it comes to these topics. Polite society says one thing, but the things you hear from your parents, role models, and jokes between friends are different.
It was true when I was in that age range, and I don't really see what's happening today as an aberration so much as a continuation of trends. The reason things feel materially worse is...because things _are_ materially worse in other aspects of life.
The outlook of young folk in my country is a lot worse than it was in my generation, which was already worse than my parent's generation. On top of that, there's also a sick social media algorithm that rewards controversy and ragebait. I feel like those two things were the ingredients needed to turn the embers of issues I was experiencing first-hand as a teenager into a raging inferno.
> What is making someone like Andrew Tate appealing to a young men?
At the heart of what Tate, Kirk, etc. preach is a story that gives an illusion of control. They oppose the popular "your life sucks because an authority figure in a far away place is keeping you down" with "your life sucks because you suck — but you can change". This can be appealing as it offers a (perhaps false) sense of hope.
> why they aren't being taught better?
Teaching requires understanding. But nobody really knows. Virtually everyone agrees that there is a problem; that young people are truly feeling like their lives suck. The contention is really only centred around what the solution is to improve upon it, and people fall into whatever brand best fits their speculation.
I apologize if I came across as blaming them. When I say "self-selecting", I mean to say that it isn't taught by their parents - it's picked up independently or culturally from their developing peer group.
I'm engaging in a bit of reductionism, but from my personal experience this comes after 2-3 decades of targeted marketing that shifted pretty much all concepts related to femininity or polite society into the lens of "gay and weird" for boys. Then, that lever is applied to push the ideas of a return to a (fake) hyper masculine past, and that women (who are "gay and weird") need us (the hyper masculine men) to survive.
When reality and the progressive values of women meet these beliefs, the figure heads use that conflict itself as a lever: "See? Everyone is against you and preventing your happy life."
Then they try to sell them supplements or religion. Or sometimes just a Nazi / crusader Pepe meme.
And the result of this is crushingly sad. I am empathetic, I have personally experienced the pull of this vortex as a child and young man. It's genuinely hard to swim against it's pull because it offers such easy answers.
But these men are less socially capable people, have worse education outcomes, have to overcome gross beliefs and a sense of entitlement that comes along with them; and, of course, the identity crisis of never meeting such expectations. This has rippling effects for society which are equally upsetting.
Anyway, I'd recommended the video series "The Alt Right Pipeline", which also has some good information and resonated with my experience growing up. They're better at explanations than me anyway.
Moreover... Most young people are indoctrinated extensively in the female-centric view of society deemed acceptable by polite society. When following that program causes them a great deal of misery with the opposite sex, it is natural for them to feel betrayed and to seek a viewpoint from outside. The fact that the mainstream hates Andrew Tate has the perverse effect of making him more credible to the victims of mainstream brainwashing, regardless of the fact that he pushes a bunch of cringe stuff along with some reasonable takes. I think most people who like Tate probably recognize that it's a mixed bag. But they will put up with the nonsense just to hear some kind of pep talk that meshes with their life experiences.
> Most young people are indoctrinated extensively in the female-centric view of society deemed acceptable by polite society.
Which is what exactly?
To be frank, I wouldn't like to be an American young man nowadays, nor would I like to be an American young woman.
Everytime this kind of debate pops up on the internet, you seem to see two very vocal camps, one pushing the most absurd reactionary non sense about what men should be openly exposing the grossest misoginy I have ever had the displeasure to read and the other one barely containing its deep seated misandry. People really like to reduce this topic to a for them or against them position preferably erasing any kind of complexity in the process.
I feel like normal people have exited the discussion on this topic a long time ago and the young who live most of their social life on the internet nowadays are just exposed to what remains.
> young men are choosing at an alarming rate to follow people like Andrew Tate and Charlie Kirk.
The message of Bernue Sanders gained a lot of support in 2016 and 2020 from young men. They were denounced in an Atlantic article as Bernie Btos. A New York Times article painted them as crude. Bernie was asked why his supporters were (supposedly) sexist young men on a debate. He was denounced for being interviewed by Joe Rogan.
Some young men were leaning toward the Democratic party and were denounced by the Democratic establishment and corporate press. Meanwhile Trump and his cadre encouraged such support.
Now the talk in Democratic circles is how to gain back the massive losses they've seen from young men. They've been going out of their way to alienate the support from young men they had over the past nine years. Now their polling numbers are at historic lows.
This type of "bad things men is a personal failure and because the men are bad people" is exactly the problem. Whenever there are problems with women, or Muslims, or trans folks, or whatever then it's defended with "yeah, but there are all these societal factors". Which is all fine. But when it's with men: nope. Men are bad because men are bad. It's the same kind of circular dehumanisation logic you see with e.g. Palestinians.
The reality is that having a shitty rigged system (for everyone, men and women) while also telling men that they're oh-so-privileged and should shut up whenever they complain is going to drive young people towards Andrew Tate, because he's the only one they're hearing that's actually acknowledging their problems. It's easy for me to recognise that guy as an asshole scammer, but I'm also in my 30s and not 15. I don't like that, but that's just the reality of it. And honestly, this is really not that hard to understand.
- Men aren't inherently bad and the majority of men don't fall under this group being discussed.
- Other categories of people can have problems too? Who said they can't?
- Of course the problems facing men have societal factors. Tens of millions of boy's across the world didn't wake up and suddenly decide to be regressive and self destructive.
- The idea that the system is rigged against men is absolutely absurd. In pretty much every metric, men still have a positive bias. From education to healthcare to politics to employment. That does not, to be clear, mean will always succeed or cannot be discriminated against.
- Andrew Tate isn't "acknowledging the problems" at all. He creates a conflict by pushing a worldview incompatible with basically any moral person - sold on easy answers and an idyllic hypermasculine past that did not exist - then leverages the social damage done to the boys who experiment with those ideas to push messages as profound as "it's gay to hang out with women, even your partner". He's already sex trafficker, this is more of the same. It's just this time he's grooming young men for fascist ideology as opposed to grooming women for sex work
I've seen way more people unilaterally accuse young men of automatic misogyny with no evidence or when someone wants to shut down communication, than calls for misogyny and you're just one more datapoint.
It's literally always the stale "You just hate women.", "You just hate women.", "You just hate women" drilled into you over and over again.
If that's what you took from my post, I'm not sure what to say. I never said these boys and men hate women or are "automatically misogyn[istic]". Nor am I attempting to "shut down communication" on an open forum anyone can comment on.
My main point is that they receive lots of attention. And that a perceived lack of empathy comes from many of the conflicts being incapable of compromise, and lead to a reinforcement of beliefs that cause further conflict.
The blue haired woman won’t date the fisherman and the farmer girl won’t date the metrosexual city boy.
Somehow you’re getting stuck on one side being universally correct, which in some extreme cases might be reasonable, but generally you are just looking at a societal split rather than one side moving hard.
IME, as a mid 30’s bloke in the UK in a stable relationship, guys haven’t significantly moved right wing, society as a whole has feminised (mostly in large cities). If anything it’s the women moving away from the previous norms - polling struggles with this because it defines “how the world was 30 years ago” (e.g. the home that almost everyone I know grew up in) as being hard right / conservative.
Conservatives always perceive themselves as simply wanting to return to the past.
Unfortunately, their perception of "what was normal 30 years ago" is generally inaccurate as well as biased by their own personal experience, because it's hard to get an objective picture of their society as an 8 year old. You're growing up raised by a particular family (who, statistically, shares your tendency for conservativism) in a particular community, watching media made a decade ago by people who formed their values two decades previously.
At least half of the articles I see about young man problems says essentially, "Men creating their own problems/women most affected" and this has ALWAYS been the case for my entire life. If you accurately diagnose problems, such as a bad economy, divorce laws, outsourcing, immigration, cultural decay, inflation, fat acceptance, a blatant anti-male bias in every part of life, etc., then you are labelled toxic, a sore loser, incel, misogynist, probably a Nazi, so on and so forth.
>When this gets talked about and women directly state "I don't like how men my age talk to/about me", people often act like the women are being unreasonable and unempathetic - as if the men are owed relationships and women just need to compromise and see things from the other person's shoes.
Every time men talk about their problems, I have to hear about how it affects women while they have essentially zero interest in how it affects men. That includes your whole comment. You piped up just to say men cause their own problems. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe women don't know more about what men think or experience than they do? I will admit that some of the figureheads of the manosphere are bad influences and not likeable. But nobody else more reasonable tends to get mindshare with the mainstream media. The mainstream is all about blaming men and pushing its agenda, and showing the most awful view from the other side is basically setting up a straw man.
>But rarely is the answer that young men have a crisis of self-selecting bad role models, putting less (or no) effort into their appearance and education, holding gross sociopolitical beliefs, and not developing the emotional and household maturity an adult woman expects. And they simply aren't willing to change that.
The only role models put forward by "polite society" are absolutely terrible in other ways. As far as attention to appearance, a 7 out of 10 man has about the same amount of options to get sex as a 4 out of 10 woman. They get endlessly lectured about emotional maturity by women who can't figure out (or don't care) that the hot guys they can sleep with will NEVER settle for them. They are expected to be on the same level of "emotional maturity" as women who have easily 10x as much romantic experience as them on average. Men are blamed for everything wrong with women's lives. As for education, college increasingly costs more and pays off less, especially in the DEI era where men (especially white ones) are actively and blatantly being discriminated against.
You actually have it backwards with colleges: women apply, and meet the necessary academic standards, at a much higher rate than men. To prevent their ratios from getting completely out of whack it’s actually easier to get accepted as a man (assuming equal scorings)
Alice, 29 years old, magistrate, 3,400 euros per month: "I'll never be able to buy an apartment in Paris even though I'm among the best-paid people in France"
Old people in their 50s who no longer need to get bailed out by an inheritance from their parents, but they will get it anyway, making the (at that time) young generation after them eagerly waiting for their demise, until they come to the same sad realization that someone will be waiting for theirs.
> But there's no huge corporate health insurance tax, and she won't be spending as much on commuting.
... and on housing. Even Europe's most nuts markets aka London, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and Freakfurt don't come anywhere close to the situation in the US.
Sure, but there are different things that tend to drive up demand, such as immigration and an increase in lifespan (or whatever happened that made the population increase despite below-replacement fertility [0]), fewer people living together, and people using homes as an investment/store of value without actually living there.
Although for the specific case of Paris proper (not the whole region), population has actually decreased in recent years. But there also seem to be fewer people per dwelling. See [1] for some interesting graphs. Unfortunately it's French, but Google Translate should do a good enough job.
The problem is rural flight, across the Western societies. Rural areas have a lot of empty housing, urban areas have a severe shortage that sends purchase and rental prices through the roof.
Defenders of urbanism and dense settlements in general love to point out that it is more efficient to serve urban populations with infrastructure, which is true, but completely neglecting the fact that it creates an insane wealth disparity in these urban areas (aka, those who have housing and those who have not), a corresponding death of rental markets (old people can't move out to smaller dwellings because an apartment half the size costs thrice the money or more, and young people with families can't afford sizing up either), and a massive financial pressure on local governments to build out all the infrastructure that dense settlement needs.
I think that part of the problem is that life in rural areas tends to be worse than life in cities. Rural communities tend to be intollerant of people who don't match their ideal of acceptable humanity. Even if that could be fixed, you have the problem that rural areas simply can't have the concentration of amenities that cities do.
Certainly there will always be a certain percentage of the population that likes living in rural areas, but all things being equal I think that most people would rather live in cities.
It's not just Western societies, it's an issue across the globe.
But then it does not begin with rural flight, that's only the consequence of.. I don't know, there is not enough opportunity/resources for people on the land. And that's happenning since the start of industrialisation, as Marx noticed, and then he wrote Communist Manifesto when he wanted to build industry outside of the cities but that was tried and didn't work, some communist leaders even sent people from cities into the countryside to 'reeducate', that didn't work either. So everyone is moving into the cities (or to the nearby suburbia) and there is no remedy, even WFH doesn't really solve this.
Anyway just wanted to note there is no known policy that would stop rural flight.
I'm convinced that it could help, but at least here in France this is half-assed, and many companies are even looking to end it altogether. I would definitely move to a smaller town if I didn't have to come in to the city a set number of days a week. But there's no way I'll endure a multiple-hour commute, so I'll just keep bidding on the limited amount of housing and take up space in the metro, just so I can sit on a worse chair to take my video calls.
Of course you won't just up and leave your city apartment if you're not sure how long you'll be able to WFH.
Now I don't think it will actually fully solve all our housing woes, but even if it helped a bit it would still be better.
> Anyway just wanted to note there is no known policy that would stop rural flight.
Actually, there is. Industry steering politics...
Look at Eastern Germany for example. After the 90s people fled in droves (and neo-Nazis moved in to pursue their dreams of "national befreite Zonen" settlements that they couldn't have in Western Germany), but "Silicon Saxony" is a lighthouse that attracts industries and talent from all over the world, even if Intel's fab plans shattered due to Intel's often-described internal issues.
The thing is, for this to work, governments and especially their politicians have to be willing to think decades in the future - and they have to put money where their mouth is, and build the surrounding infrastructure as well: roads, rail, high speed internet, schools and universities.
That, however, is where many Western governments utterly and completely failed ever since Thatcher and the emergence of rabid unchecked capitalism, tax races to the bottom, "trickle down" and "small state" ideology. When the government doesn't have funds to invest into developing the industries of the future, you'll get the issues that almost all Western societies have.
China in contrast has used the shitload of money they got from the Western countries over the last quarter century (when they joined the WTO) to do exactly this. For all that I hate the CCP for various reasons, their way of thinking in five-year plans plus even longer macroeconomic planning has proven to be incredibly successful.
There is something off with that number. I am not from France (but from a neighboring country), but with 3.400 euros per month you are not among the best paid people in France.
According to that, she's definitely in the top 20%. Of course "among the best paid people" is ambiguous depending on how much "top" you consider, but I think being in the top 20% it makes sense to say that.
PS: and I suppose (although it's hard to find data) that if we look at people in her age bracket, she will be in a higher percentile.
Not the best paid, but unless you want to live within Paris, it becomes a confortable revenue.
In France, you are considered rich when your net revenue is twice the median. That is to say, if you get more than ~4000 € of _net_ monthly salary (around 61k gross/year), you are rich. This was very easy to reach in the IT industry, especially in the Paris area, after 15 years at most.
The 1% richest (based on salary) start from 7500 € net/month (115k gross/year).
Wait until you hear how much people in less developed countries are paid.
The outlier in the world is the USA (and perhaps Switzerland), and even in the USA if you account for cost of living it's a minority of professions that are "well paid".
Right, but Europe’s been making a lot of noise around digital sovereignty, etc. Lately and it’s hard to see how that gets better while the wage to COL ratio stays so bad.
I don't understand the relationship between those, the wage to COL is not "so bad" comparatively to the majority of the rest of the world, it's a rich continent, and Western Europe is by any metric one of the richest places in the world while Eastern/Southern Europe is comparatively rich if you measure against most other countries outside of Europe, Oceania, and North America.
You are again comparing it against the USA, the very outlier, and in specific places of the whole country even, of course then everything else will be "so bad" except for very few places on the whole Earth...
Society is failing these people. In some ways, they’re given the most advanced amenities humanity has ever been able to offer: fastest internet, the nicest cars, affordable global travel. In other areas, society is completely failing them. Connection, meaning, career prospects.
They’re spoiled in some ways, completely lost in others. It’s important we don’t ignore that.
Advanced amenities honestly is a very bad excuse for lack of empathy towards the younger generations.
I was born in 82 so I had the experience of life without mobile phones, cheap travel, Netflix, etc. Life wasn't harder in practice, because you don't miss things that aren't basic needs and that no one has or don't even exist. We had plenty of fun with what we had, we weren't thinking "oh, my life is so hard because I can't choose what I see on the TV or book a plane ticket from a tiny device in my pocket". If I went back in time and had all those things, I don't think my life would have been happier or easier.
(As an aside, the exception to this is medicine. For example, many cancers that could kill you easily back then have now a much better survival rate. That of course does make life much better for people who have such problems. But for those of us that are/were healthy, life wasn't worse back then).
You know what you do miss if you don't have it, and can make your life more miserable? Not being able to afford a home, raise a family, etc. Basic needs, and things that your parents and other people that you know had. That's a real problem. Not having Netflix or a smartphone when it wasn't even a thing is just not a real problem, it was a non-issue, and using it as an argument to minimize young people's complaints is dishonest.
I can't wrap my head around "society failing people" - society is people. Average person has no influence, not even a little bit, on any of those things. Meanwhile, a small subset of the people have all the influence and they mostly operate in their own self-interest.
I disagree, everyone operates in their own short term self-interest, leading to a massive scale prisoners dilemma and crab bucket mentality.
The vast majority on this planet believe in a perverse expected value calculation:
probability of becoming a billionaire * billion dollars > assets in fair society
where "assets in fair society" is higher than it currently is, maybe 2x or 3x, but it pales in comparison to the chance at 10000x and the optimism that distorts the "probability of becoming a billionaire" to be higher than it really is.
There is a perceived equilibrium between the remote possibility of undoing all the bad things that happened during the course of your life instantly and a more just society that merely gives you a little bit more money, but otherwise keeps most things the same, but with less stress and conflict.
> I can't wrap my head around "society failing people" - society is people.
Effectively, societies are Boomers and older generations. These form the majority of the population that is of voting age and they hold most of the financial (in stocks and real estate ownership) and executive power.
So yes, it can be said that society fails the younger generation.
> And they keep whining without realizing how spoiled they are.
I think two things can be true at once: that there are many good things to appreciate about the modern world, and that the concerns they are raising are legitimate. There is room to have a bit of empathy here.
Happiness is more complex than your comment would make it seem. There is no absolute bar you can pass after which you habe to be happy. Happieness is fundamentally relative, since happiness is the gap between where you want to be and where you are.
So one part of this generation being unhappy is thst their life on average got objectively harder than those of their parents. Who hasn't heard the story of a boomer who as a 20-something bought a house from the money made in a job that wouldn't even pay rent these days.
But that isn't all, since happiness is relative the youth today sees a fictional image of what they are supposed to live like every day in the internet and most of them are nowhere close to that. So it both became objectibely harder and the bar moved up at the same time, so if more people whine, it is because they have reason to.
I don't say life wasn't hard in the past decades, but people had the sense that if they worked hard, they could potentially reach a state that felt good to them. This is less true today. Even in my generation (Millenials) many have given up even considering the image of retirement, because our retirement is a value that we know will be sacrificed to the capitalist gods, like the whole damn planet.
Well, you can definitely sense it if you browse Reddit. Young people are freaking out about the job market, the house market, and the dating market. I don't mean to dismiss their concerns, far from it. It does seem like we've been making it harder and harder for anyone to become an adult over the past few decades.
Here's the quote I found most relevant to my own experience of work. It really does come down to autonomy. I could be writing the exact same code and feel awful about it, if it were done in an office with a guy looking over my shoulder. If you're young, you're more likely to have this problem.
> More broadly, employers are successfully deploying new technologies to minimize ‘break’ times,
and exert greater control over production processes, often aided by close technological monitoring
of work processes, which limit worker control and autonomy over ever-more-demanding
processes, all of which – based on Karasek’s (1979) theory regarding the importance of worker
control and autonomy for wellbeing – should result in a decline in the wellbeing of workers.
Evidence from task-based studies of work, and social surveys in which workers report on the nature
of job tasks, indicates there has been a growth in job demands and a reduction in worker job control
in the United Kingdom (Green et al., 2022) which, presumably, is mirrored in the United States.
During COVID, the shift to home and hybrid working, whilst beneficial in some respects, may
have exacerbated feelings of social isolation experienced by the young in particular as they missed
out on the social component of the workplace. The demise of collective bargaining and trade union
presence in the workplace implies a diminution in workers’ bargaining power, making it even more
difficult for workers to resist such changes and to alter their terms and conditions of employment
(Feiveson, 2023).
I do feel like gen x was the last generation to be given any significant autonomy in the workplace. I'm a millennial and I feel like I've always been 10 years away from autonomy. It seems the tide recedes as I go out.
I'm not sure it's generational, it may be more about finding a good niche. Or perhaps something like this:
- For previous generations, for most jobs (but not all), you had an informal contract: work will be boring, but dependable. You can work through having a young family without fear of getting dumped out. You don't get surveilled, you can deliver on your own terms.
- Since Neutron Jack and others of his era, this has become less and less true. Large corporations in particular no longer really hold up their end of the contract, and now workers see that and are happy to jump ship, for which the response is to prefer already-trained young workers along with keeping a close eye. So it gets very competitive to get a first job, and you aren't going to get the slack you need to live your life.
- If you want autonomy, you can start your own business. Either a little one like a restaurant where you are a very small boat in a very large ocean, or a startup, where you are going to need the help of venture capital, who are going to be wanting their money back. Pick your poison.
Was Gen X ever given significant autonomy? I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space and the start of Dilbert both date to when Gen X were the newbies to the wold of work, and Dilbert in particular kept on going.
I'm just on the borderline of Millennial myself, and people older than me have expressed similar frustrations at various workplaces.
Office Space seems like a pretty amazing work environment compared to a lot of what I've had to deal with. I mean how insane is it that everyone gets their own cubicles? I'd kill for that.
That whole "Yeah, I'm gonna need you to complete that TPS report" bit is tame compared to Agile.
It's funny actually, I totally get that Office Space and Dilbert are pisstakes of office culture, but it has never really worked on me because I'm actively envious of their work arrangements. I work in an open plan office where, everyone can see everyone's screen, you can see who is at their desk. I would die for a cubicle. Every job I've had my line manager sits next to me, and their boss sits nearby, etc. Work seems to end when they clock off. They seem to have time for sit down out of office lunches. Their work hours seem shorter.
Maximum corporate dystopia as a training bed for overall societal totalitarianism.
Unions are the only counter to this, as depressing as that is. Possibly overreach by corporations combined with the collapse of globalism will reempower workers.
Capitalism is the problem and the reason for everything you decry. Until we actually start naming it as such instead of using distractions like globalism, there's no chance at improving things.
To be honest, the term "capitalism" has accumulated a lot of baggage and people don't always have a clear understanding of what is meant by it so it might be helpful to use a different term with a clear definition.
While that is true, I believe part of trying to establish a better system is spreading an understanding that the current system is broken - you do that by naming it as such and not leaving the field to competing definitions.
> Young people are freaking out about the job market, the house market
Maybe it's finally time we admit markets are a horrible way of allocating resources unless you want to create a system in which some have endless riches without effort and others have endless effort without riches?
Meritocracy claims have always been propaganda to distract from this simple fact.
free markets are just fine. The problem is the housing market in the US isn’t a proper free market AT ALL. The housing “market” here has a long history of problems.
- strict zoning laws (and nimby attitudes) prevent the free market from functioning as intended. Housing is expensive because we make it hard to build more housing.
- Read up on RealPage, software for landlords thats been accused of inflating rents. There’s a major lawsuit underway, focusing on the issues with its algorithmic pricing. Is that a free market? When the majority of landlords are (effectively) using the same 3rd party software to price-fix?
- the US had a few decades of very racist housing policy, which made it difficult for blacks to get housing. I say this as a white man that’s studied this. Fun fact - the US govt used to mark black neighborhoods as “high risk”, meaning banks wouldn’t loan money money to blacks for buying a house. At one point in US history it was also legal to have HOA’s with bylaws preventing blacks from buying property in the neighborhood. I could continue to list many examples of how blacks got screwed, but that’s not the point. The point is whites had a HUGE advantage for decades, even after slavery was abolished. The government made sure blacks couldn’t compete for the desirable homes, for decades. So whites got nice cheap housing. Today the children of those white families enjoy the benefits their parents received, via unethical housing policy. Me included. Is that how a free market is supposed to work? Temporarily reducing competition in desirable communities, letting whites buy, and then reverting the law decades later after prices doubled? Definition of pulling the ladder up behind you if you ask me.
When free-market housing have to compete with non-market housing (public or associative) in multiple segments (not only social housing), it works really well as a free market. For that, you need between 20 and 40% of the available housing to be non-market though.
> strict zoning laws (and nimby attitudes) prevent the free market from functioning as intended. Housing is expensive because we make it hard to build more housing.
The fundamental thing is, housing is expensive because the space in the highly wanted urban areas is scarce. Plots suitable for development of any kind of (dense) housing are expensive, so that alone drives up unit prices massively. And once you have the plot of land, the cost of actually building a building are enormous - the higher you want to go, the more deep you have to go so that the building doesn't tip over like the Tower of Pisa, which is even more expensive when the building is in a region that is sensitive to earthquakes, doesn't have bedrock but sand, a bunch of subterranean tunnels or nearby buildings that might settle as a result of digging the hole for the foundations.
And that's just the cost that the developers have to bear. The local government and utilities have to expend a lot of money for all the infrastructure: roads, public transport, water/sewage, electricity (the electricity demand of even a "small" dense housing unit are pretty massive), internet, schools, higher education, general amenities (e.g. parks), planning for shopping and other venues... that's where all the NIMBYism is coming from because that shit ain't cheap.
Most of the country isn't Seattle or Hong Kong or SF, hemmed in on all sides by mountains and bays. In most of the country, the city could just choose to build more city. All it needs is infrastructure, rezoning, planning permission. And the ability to forgo treating single-family-home subdivisions as immortal, inviolate monuments to the American Way.
The megacity of >10M people is the basic functional economic unit in 2025, the minimum healthy employment market, the level at which we can provide a reasonable opportunity for productive jobs in a specialized role and a reasonable opportunity to hire someone in a specialized role*; Their largesse is taxed or remitted to cover the cities of ~1M, the cities of ~100k, and especially the towns of ~1k-10k.
...
*The example a number of economists like to bring up is: If I'm a skilled sushi chef, how long would it take to replace this employer with a better one? How long would it take them to replace me? A thriving economy is an economy that ensures lots of mutually beneficial employment arrangements, in which no one feels trapped, and in which bad management or bad work is punished with replacement, but also which has the slack to absorb random things like interpersonal conflicts or an employee that needs to move for family reasons.
If there are a hundred sushi places within commuting distance, probably at least one of them is hiring. If one chef gets hit by a bus, the business can be back in operation the next day by poaching an apprentice a few blocks away for higher pay. There is always reserve capacity waiting in the wings, as a megacity encourages economic resiliency.
If there are only two sushi places within commuting distance, and I sever my relationship with this one, the other one is probably not hiring, so I am a slave to their bad management and conversely they are a slave to my bad work because it would be so difficult to find another person like me. The quality of goods and services provided to the general consumer suffers significantly, the material precarity of my life suffers significantly. Things become brittle - if the business goes under for random reasons, odds are pretty good that my town becomes a town without sushi. Even if everything is working perfectly... what's my leverage as far as pay raises? What's their leverage as far as work output/quality? We're stuck with each other.
I believe this is a no true scotsman fallacy, the very same that people make when claiming Stalin wasn't a communist.
I would posit that truly free markets only exist on paper, in the real world the people that acquire enough capital will always use said capital to distort markets in their favor. Why wouldn't you?
>Maybe it's finally time we admit markets are a horrible way of allocating resources
We need to distribute fish from fishermen and potatoes from potato farmers to hairdressers and carpenters and so on. What mechanism do you suggest we use instead of markets?
Most ongoing social trends in the United States can be traced back to this. When foreigners are puzzled and ask me why is X or Y happening in America, this is usually the best answer. The majority of young people, but not the majority of the electorate, are in a tough or even dire situation, and so they do not have much interest in maintaining the status quo. The result is social upheaval, the varieties of which I'm sure we're all familiar with by now, and need not be repeated.
As the parent of two mid-20's adults (one thriving, the other not so much) I actually downloaded the paper and read it out of curiosity (shocking, I know.)
They asked people how many days last month they had "bad mental health days" ("Q1".) The measure of Despair in the graphs is constructed as: "by setting the Q1 variable to one when an individual gave the answer 30 and zero otherwise." So if you had a continuous month of "bad mental health days" you are in despair. The fraction of those months is y-axis in the graphs (typically around 0-10%)
This is all US data BTW.
Anyway, the abstract and title oversimplify the data in my opinion. Across the board (even up to 60+ years of age) the surveyed report overall 2x more "despair" than in the 1990's. Yes, it is worse amongst under 40 workers, as shown in Figure 4. Despair used to be pretty flat by age for workers, now it it highest for young workers, with linear-ish decrease until about 60 where the value hasn't really changed over time.
But the graph in Figure 8 shows that "despair" hasn't really moved much for any age group of college educated workers since the 1990's. And their mention of the change in the "hump" shaped in the abstract doesn't account for the fact that in absolute terms, unsurprisingly, the unemployed have a lot more despair overall than workers.
So the "young workers" in the title are those without a college education in the US - that's probably a very different demographic than the average HN participant...
I'll defend that variable selection a little bit, as I feel that the measure they use to capture 'despair' is actually binary in reality. I'd categorize a handful of young men around my age as being in this category. What they seem to have in common with each other is a consistent downtrodden-ness that doesn't fluctuate much from day to day; it's pervasive to their entire personality, it's who they are.
I imagine if you studied this is a less discrete, non-binomial method you'd see even sharper trends. I don't know a single person my age who feels the future has anything for them.
I am also there. Geographically I am in Germany. It’s a bit scary to think, that the same motherboard I design right now can be designed in other country 6 hours by car away for the half the price. And there is nothing special about me. The guy elsewhere will have similar education, same skills, same software and probably will be more hungry to work hard.
The inherent contradictions of capitalism are coming to a breaking point.
The constant drive for profit forces capital to exploit workers more and more, creating a growing class of alienated, unhappy, and impoverished laborers.
This increasing misery, coupled with the inability of the system to provide for the basic needs of the majority, will inevitably lead to systemic change. The only question left is, which direction will this revolutionary potential go?
Only through class consciousness can we build a new society in which the fruits of labor are enjoyed by us all.
Absolutely. As history shows though, you can't keep that last state particularly stable, so we will always have times of equality, times of oppression/exploitation and times of killing today's flavour of nobility, ad infinitum.
> Only through class consciousness can we build a new society in which the fruits of labor are enjoyed by us all.
They've done this a few times already, and it's very violent each time.
And this isn't an inherent contradiction of capidalism. Capitalism only makes people rich if they provide loads of value to others. Lower prices are good for every one. Raising everyone's wages out of proportion to the value they create only raises all the prices.
> They've done this a few times already, and it's very violent each time.
It's very violent because it gets violently repressed by capitalist forces. See the democratically elected Allende being couped by the CIA.
> Capitalism only makes people rich if they provide loads of value to others.
That is straight up not true. What value do people inheriting wealth provide? What value do high frequency traders provide? What value do speculators of all sorts provide? It's a casino that's rigged for the already rich, on the back of the poor.
another side to this is how it's encouraging people to believe that the only way to get ahead is by more or less scamming. you can easily look at the world as a youngish person and see that getting ahead means affiliate marketing, or NFT scams, or crypto nonsense, or being Andrew Tate, or an "influencer" hawking crap on social media etc.
it's not just a lack of role models, it's also the way current governments in the west are setting policies - extreme care for older more established people or the already rich, while the young being thrown to the wolves with idiotic LLM/AI policies sabotaging their lives and careers, future pension likely clearly going down, the ultrawealthy having increasingly literal impunity, policies designed to keep housing unaffordable, etc
The way I think about this is if you split the money-making opportunities into two pools; one is rent-seeking/grifting/outright-scamming/beating greater-fool fallacy, the other is learning some sort of skill/trade and developing a career on that. At some point the perceived opportunity cost for the first eclipsed the latter, and now that's sort of where we're at.
Certain characters love to say things like "no one wants to work anymore." I think the rise of certain scamminess in our culture actually flies in the face of that; people will work insanely hard at whatever their thing is, be it an MLM or a crypto-grift. But they work hard because _they think that's where they can get the most value._ What's the value in going to school for 4, 6, 8, 10 years when you can make it big in the next big thing?
The only thing missing is replacing the head of the federal reserve bank with a mindless puppet so they stop standing in the way of success (inflation).
If you are in a balanced budget or continued deficit situation, then, yes, increased rates will eventually be a factor (but that's a lagging effect, even then) if you have a sufficient surplus that with the effect of inflation increasing its nominal size with the same real revenue and spending you can pay down debt at least as fast as it comes due, so you aren't going back to do new net borrowing, increase cost of borrowing doesn't matter much.
We're already at the point where participating doesn't make sense for a lot of workers, that's why tax increases (which must happen if we don't aggressively cut spending and even with the minor cuts we've had there's been incredible wailing) are coming from tariffs instead.
It's very unlikely the federal governments future obligations will be met in real dollars. I've said before "at the end of the day all retirement plans are effectively market driven." I wouldn't want to be depending on social security right now.
As in all things, there will be winners and those who fail to try with sufficient determination :)
For those with the means to do so, try hire the Gen-Zs out there who want to succeed despite the circumstances - especially the ones skipping college. They’re some of the most capable, self-motivated people you will ever have the chance to work with!
Some people are too absorbed in their own selfishness to see this. But as an individual you can do all the "right" things and still be casually steamrollered by larger social trends and pressures.
Of course - but all things being equal, your odds will certainly be better if you give it your best shot!
I'd intended my message to be one of actual hope and optimism - that those in the position to do so may affect a small positive change in the world at the individual level. This might be myopic by ivory-tower standards, but the intention was to empower and encourage people not to give up, and that their actions do have a measurable effect on their destiny.
We might not be able to change the circumstances easily (We certainly should be trying to do so), but parallel to this we can support and encourage those going through the tough times.
Many Gen-Zs are demonstrating remarkable resilience - this post was intended as a celebration of that, not to downplay the severity of the society-wide issues at play.
I'm not American but I can sense the feeling is the same here in Europe. I wouldn't want to be a younger man right now. I feel like on top of every possible struggles they're facing: low wages, low sense of meaning, social media addiction, scarce opportunities for true connections... we're treating them with very little empathy and consideration, they're just "whining", wish I knew how to help beyond my modest occasional contributions.
If you click through to the breakdowns by gender, you'll see the despair numbers are actually higher in young women than in young men. So this isn't a male-only issue.
I'm not sure this is true.
I feel like I am constantly reading about the problems facing young men. Every article about loneliness - young men. Every article about political swings - young men. Every article about economic anxiety or wages - young men. Every article about declining birth rates - young men.
It'd make a dangerous drinking game at this point to take a shot any time the top comment on any piece of news is "young men". Moreso if we take another on claims said "young men" aren't being talked about / cared for.
And this bleeds into life. Nearly every discussion on politics or social ideas or religion somehow hones it's focus on young men.
> we're treating them with very little empathy and consideration, they're just "whining"
And to specifically bring up this part, young men are choosing at an alarming rate to follow people like Andrew Tate and Charlie Kirk. They are becoming less compatible with equitable society and, notably, the women in their age bracket.
The complaint often isn't that they're "whining", it's that they push against ideas like equality with women and those are non-negotiable. And, as a result, they're exacerbating the problem, as those women would rather not date anyone than date someone who actively campaigns against their interests.
This, in turn, makes it harder to be empathetic. "Dating is hard" is true in the modern world. But it's even more true when you just posted a joke on social media that blue haired women have mental illness or a "western vs Asian woman" meme or retweeted some hyper-masculinity influencer.
When this gets talked about and women directly state "I don't like how men my age talk to/about me", people often act like the women are being unreasonable and unempathetic - as if the men are owed relationships and women just need to compromise and see things from the other person's shoes.
But rarely is the answer that young men have a crisis of self-selecting bad role models, putting less (or no) effort into their appearance and education, holding gross sociopolitical beliefs, and not developing the emotional and household maturity an adult woman expects. And they simply aren't willing to change that. What is anyone supposed to do about that, exactly?
> young men are choosing at an alarming rate to follow people like Andrew Tate and Charlie Kirk.
Are they though? This sounds like a huge blanket statement.
I don't have a source on me right now, but it's pretty well reported that men Gen-Z and younger are becoming increasingly aligned with alt-right beliefs. That is to say, not fiscal conservativism, but the identity politics of the American right.
I don't mean to say a majority of them are like this, to be clear.
> young men have a crisis of self-selecting bad role models, putting less (or no) effort into their appearance and education, holding gross sociopolitical beliefs, and not developing the emotional and household maturity an adult woman expects.
You're confusing the symptoms for the cause. The question people are asking is what about our society is driving these behaviors. What is making someone like Andrew Tate appealing to a young men? These are young people, why are you blaming them for not knowing better instead asking why they aren't being taught better?
> These are young people, why are you blaming them for not knowing better instead asking why they aren't being taught better?
There's always been an issue with mixed signals when it comes to these topics. Polite society says one thing, but the things you hear from your parents, role models, and jokes between friends are different.
It was true when I was in that age range, and I don't really see what's happening today as an aberration so much as a continuation of trends. The reason things feel materially worse is...because things _are_ materially worse in other aspects of life.
The outlook of young folk in my country is a lot worse than it was in my generation, which was already worse than my parent's generation. On top of that, there's also a sick social media algorithm that rewards controversy and ragebait. I feel like those two things were the ingredients needed to turn the embers of issues I was experiencing first-hand as a teenager into a raging inferno.
> What is making someone like Andrew Tate appealing to a young men?
At the heart of what Tate, Kirk, etc. preach is a story that gives an illusion of control. They oppose the popular "your life sucks because an authority figure in a far away place is keeping you down" with "your life sucks because you suck — but you can change". This can be appealing as it offers a (perhaps false) sense of hope.
> why they aren't being taught better?
Teaching requires understanding. But nobody really knows. Virtually everyone agrees that there is a problem; that young people are truly feeling like their lives suck. The contention is really only centred around what the solution is to improve upon it, and people fall into whatever brand best fits their speculation.
I apologize if I came across as blaming them. When I say "self-selecting", I mean to say that it isn't taught by their parents - it's picked up independently or culturally from their developing peer group.
I'm engaging in a bit of reductionism, but from my personal experience this comes after 2-3 decades of targeted marketing that shifted pretty much all concepts related to femininity or polite society into the lens of "gay and weird" for boys. Then, that lever is applied to push the ideas of a return to a (fake) hyper masculine past, and that women (who are "gay and weird") need us (the hyper masculine men) to survive.
When reality and the progressive values of women meet these beliefs, the figure heads use that conflict itself as a lever: "See? Everyone is against you and preventing your happy life."
Then they try to sell them supplements or religion. Or sometimes just a Nazi / crusader Pepe meme.
And the result of this is crushingly sad. I am empathetic, I have personally experienced the pull of this vortex as a child and young man. It's genuinely hard to swim against it's pull because it offers such easy answers.
But these men are less socially capable people, have worse education outcomes, have to overcome gross beliefs and a sense of entitlement that comes along with them; and, of course, the identity crisis of never meeting such expectations. This has rippling effects for society which are equally upsetting.
Anyway, I'd recommended the video series "The Alt Right Pipeline", which also has some good information and resonated with my experience growing up. They're better at explanations than me anyway.
Moreover... Most young people are indoctrinated extensively in the female-centric view of society deemed acceptable by polite society. When following that program causes them a great deal of misery with the opposite sex, it is natural for them to feel betrayed and to seek a viewpoint from outside. The fact that the mainstream hates Andrew Tate has the perverse effect of making him more credible to the victims of mainstream brainwashing, regardless of the fact that he pushes a bunch of cringe stuff along with some reasonable takes. I think most people who like Tate probably recognize that it's a mixed bag. But they will put up with the nonsense just to hear some kind of pep talk that meshes with their life experiences.
> Most young people are indoctrinated extensively in the female-centric view of society deemed acceptable by polite society.
Which is what exactly?
To be frank, I wouldn't like to be an American young man nowadays, nor would I like to be an American young woman.
Everytime this kind of debate pops up on the internet, you seem to see two very vocal camps, one pushing the most absurd reactionary non sense about what men should be openly exposing the grossest misoginy I have ever had the displeasure to read and the other one barely containing its deep seated misandry. People really like to reduce this topic to a for them or against them position preferably erasing any kind of complexity in the process.
I feel like normal people have exited the discussion on this topic a long time ago and the young who live most of their social life on the internet nowadays are just exposed to what remains.
> young men are choosing at an alarming rate to follow people like Andrew Tate and Charlie Kirk.
The message of Bernue Sanders gained a lot of support in 2016 and 2020 from young men. They were denounced in an Atlantic article as Bernie Btos. A New York Times article painted them as crude. Bernie was asked why his supporters were (supposedly) sexist young men on a debate. He was denounced for being interviewed by Joe Rogan.
Some young men were leaning toward the Democratic party and were denounced by the Democratic establishment and corporate press. Meanwhile Trump and his cadre encouraged such support.
Now the talk in Democratic circles is how to gain back the massive losses they've seen from young men. They've been going out of their way to alienate the support from young men they had over the past nine years. Now their polling numbers are at historic lows.
This type of "bad things men is a personal failure and because the men are bad people" is exactly the problem. Whenever there are problems with women, or Muslims, or trans folks, or whatever then it's defended with "yeah, but there are all these societal factors". Which is all fine. But when it's with men: nope. Men are bad because men are bad. It's the same kind of circular dehumanisation logic you see with e.g. Palestinians.
The reality is that having a shitty rigged system (for everyone, men and women) while also telling men that they're oh-so-privileged and should shut up whenever they complain is going to drive young people towards Andrew Tate, because he's the only one they're hearing that's actually acknowledging their problems. It's easy for me to recognise that guy as an asshole scammer, but I'm also in my 30s and not 15. I don't like that, but that's just the reality of it. And honestly, this is really not that hard to understand.
I never said any of those things?
- Men aren't inherently bad and the majority of men don't fall under this group being discussed.
- Other categories of people can have problems too? Who said they can't?
- Of course the problems facing men have societal factors. Tens of millions of boy's across the world didn't wake up and suddenly decide to be regressive and self destructive.
- The idea that the system is rigged against men is absolutely absurd. In pretty much every metric, men still have a positive bias. From education to healthcare to politics to employment. That does not, to be clear, mean will always succeed or cannot be discriminated against.
- Andrew Tate isn't "acknowledging the problems" at all. He creates a conflict by pushing a worldview incompatible with basically any moral person - sold on easy answers and an idyllic hypermasculine past that did not exist - then leverages the social damage done to the boys who experiment with those ideas to push messages as profound as "it's gay to hang out with women, even your partner". He's already sex trafficker, this is more of the same. It's just this time he's grooming young men for fascist ideology as opposed to grooming women for sex work
I've seen way more people unilaterally accuse young men of automatic misogyny with no evidence or when someone wants to shut down communication, than calls for misogyny and you're just one more datapoint.
It's literally always the stale "You just hate women.", "You just hate women.", "You just hate women" drilled into you over and over again.
If that's what you took from my post, I'm not sure what to say. I never said these boys and men hate women or are "automatically misogyn[istic]". Nor am I attempting to "shut down communication" on an open forum anyone can comment on.
My main point is that they receive lots of attention. And that a perceived lack of empathy comes from many of the conflicts being incapable of compromise, and lead to a reinforcement of beliefs that cause further conflict.
Wow, your post really got a lot of people upset and reacting without introspection. Which is a shame, because you raise a lot of good points.
You’re just seeing division.
The blue haired woman won’t date the fisherman and the farmer girl won’t date the metrosexual city boy.
Somehow you’re getting stuck on one side being universally correct, which in some extreme cases might be reasonable, but generally you are just looking at a societal split rather than one side moving hard.
IME, as a mid 30’s bloke in the UK in a stable relationship, guys haven’t significantly moved right wing, society as a whole has feminised (mostly in large cities). If anything it’s the women moving away from the previous norms - polling struggles with this because it defines “how the world was 30 years ago” (e.g. the home that almost everyone I know grew up in) as being hard right / conservative.
Conservatives always perceive themselves as simply wanting to return to the past.
Unfortunately, their perception of "what was normal 30 years ago" is generally inaccurate as well as biased by their own personal experience, because it's hard to get an objective picture of their society as an 8 year old. You're growing up raised by a particular family (who, statistically, shares your tendency for conservativism) in a particular community, watching media made a decade ago by people who formed their values two decades previously.
At least half of the articles I see about young man problems says essentially, "Men creating their own problems/women most affected" and this has ALWAYS been the case for my entire life. If you accurately diagnose problems, such as a bad economy, divorce laws, outsourcing, immigration, cultural decay, inflation, fat acceptance, a blatant anti-male bias in every part of life, etc., then you are labelled toxic, a sore loser, incel, misogynist, probably a Nazi, so on and so forth.
>When this gets talked about and women directly state "I don't like how men my age talk to/about me", people often act like the women are being unreasonable and unempathetic - as if the men are owed relationships and women just need to compromise and see things from the other person's shoes.
Every time men talk about their problems, I have to hear about how it affects women while they have essentially zero interest in how it affects men. That includes your whole comment. You piped up just to say men cause their own problems. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe women don't know more about what men think or experience than they do? I will admit that some of the figureheads of the manosphere are bad influences and not likeable. But nobody else more reasonable tends to get mindshare with the mainstream media. The mainstream is all about blaming men and pushing its agenda, and showing the most awful view from the other side is basically setting up a straw man.
>But rarely is the answer that young men have a crisis of self-selecting bad role models, putting less (or no) effort into their appearance and education, holding gross sociopolitical beliefs, and not developing the emotional and household maturity an adult woman expects. And they simply aren't willing to change that.
The only role models put forward by "polite society" are absolutely terrible in other ways. As far as attention to appearance, a 7 out of 10 man has about the same amount of options to get sex as a 4 out of 10 woman. They get endlessly lectured about emotional maturity by women who can't figure out (or don't care) that the hot guys they can sleep with will NEVER settle for them. They are expected to be on the same level of "emotional maturity" as women who have easily 10x as much romantic experience as them on average. Men are blamed for everything wrong with women's lives. As for education, college increasingly costs more and pays off less, especially in the DEI era where men (especially white ones) are actively and blatantly being discriminated against.
You actually have it backwards with colleges: women apply, and meet the necessary academic standards, at a much higher rate than men. To prevent their ratios from getting completely out of whack it’s actually easier to get accepted as a man (assuming equal scorings)
> they're just "whining"
Many of them, indeed, are just whining. And they keep whining without realizing how spoiled they are.
But (at least) a few of them are having good ideas and, especially, implementing them with professionalism and passion.
Alice, 29 years old, magistrate, 3,400 euros per month: "I'll never be able to buy an apartment in Paris even though I'm among the best-paid people in France"
(https://www.lemonde.fr/campus/article/2025/07/28/alice-29-an...)
They aren't whining. They have it objectively and measurably worse than previous generations, by a huge margin.
Ehm... which previous generation was born and bred in such a rich world? And who's going to inherit the wealth previous generations have created?
Old people in their 50s who no longer need to get bailed out by an inheritance from their parents, but they will get it anyway, making the (at that time) young generation after them eagerly waiting for their demise, until they come to the same sad realization that someone will be waiting for theirs.
That ~€41k is "among the best paid people in France" is a stunning illustration of just how incredibly low pay in Europe is.
Of course, even increasing salaries ten-fold wouldn't help if they don't actually build enough homes.
€41k is around average for France. Median is €23k. Median for tech is around €45k. Of course some people earn a lot more.
She certainly isn't "among the best paid people."
But there's no huge corporate health insurance tax, and she won't be spending as much on commuting.
> But there's no huge corporate health insurance tax, and she won't be spending as much on commuting.
... and on housing. Even Europe's most nuts markets aka London, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and Freakfurt don't come anywhere close to the situation in the US.
> they don't actually build enough homes.
France hasn't had above-replacement fertility since 1980 [1], so it seems strange their housing supply would be stressed.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033137/fertility-rate-f...
Sure, but there are different things that tend to drive up demand, such as immigration and an increase in lifespan (or whatever happened that made the population increase despite below-replacement fertility [0]), fewer people living together, and people using homes as an investment/store of value without actually living there.
Although for the specific case of Paris proper (not the whole region), population has actually decreased in recent years. But there also seem to be fewer people per dwelling. See [1] for some interesting graphs. Unfortunately it's French, but Google Translate should do a good enough job.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/459939/population-france...
[1] https://www.paris.fr/pages/le-boom-des-logements-vacants-acc...
The problem is rural flight, across the Western societies. Rural areas have a lot of empty housing, urban areas have a severe shortage that sends purchase and rental prices through the roof.
Defenders of urbanism and dense settlements in general love to point out that it is more efficient to serve urban populations with infrastructure, which is true, but completely neglecting the fact that it creates an insane wealth disparity in these urban areas (aka, those who have housing and those who have not), a corresponding death of rental markets (old people can't move out to smaller dwellings because an apartment half the size costs thrice the money or more, and young people with families can't afford sizing up either), and a massive financial pressure on local governments to build out all the infrastructure that dense settlement needs.
I think that part of the problem is that life in rural areas tends to be worse than life in cities. Rural communities tend to be intollerant of people who don't match their ideal of acceptable humanity. Even if that could be fixed, you have the problem that rural areas simply can't have the concentration of amenities that cities do.
Certainly there will always be a certain percentage of the population that likes living in rural areas, but all things being equal I think that most people would rather live in cities.
It's not just Western societies, it's an issue across the globe.
But then it does not begin with rural flight, that's only the consequence of.. I don't know, there is not enough opportunity/resources for people on the land. And that's happenning since the start of industrialisation, as Marx noticed, and then he wrote Communist Manifesto when he wanted to build industry outside of the cities but that was tried and didn't work, some communist leaders even sent people from cities into the countryside to 'reeducate', that didn't work either. So everyone is moving into the cities (or to the nearby suburbia) and there is no remedy, even WFH doesn't really solve this.
Anyway just wanted to note there is no known policy that would stop rural flight.
> even WFH doesn't really solve this
I'm convinced that it could help, but at least here in France this is half-assed, and many companies are even looking to end it altogether. I would definitely move to a smaller town if I didn't have to come in to the city a set number of days a week. But there's no way I'll endure a multiple-hour commute, so I'll just keep bidding on the limited amount of housing and take up space in the metro, just so I can sit on a worse chair to take my video calls.
Of course you won't just up and leave your city apartment if you're not sure how long you'll be able to WFH.
Now I don't think it will actually fully solve all our housing woes, but even if it helped a bit it would still be better.
> Anyway just wanted to note there is no known policy that would stop rural flight.
Actually, there is. Industry steering politics...
Look at Eastern Germany for example. After the 90s people fled in droves (and neo-Nazis moved in to pursue their dreams of "national befreite Zonen" settlements that they couldn't have in Western Germany), but "Silicon Saxony" is a lighthouse that attracts industries and talent from all over the world, even if Intel's fab plans shattered due to Intel's often-described internal issues.
The thing is, for this to work, governments and especially their politicians have to be willing to think decades in the future - and they have to put money where their mouth is, and build the surrounding infrastructure as well: roads, rail, high speed internet, schools and universities.
That, however, is where many Western governments utterly and completely failed ever since Thatcher and the emergence of rabid unchecked capitalism, tax races to the bottom, "trickle down" and "small state" ideology. When the government doesn't have funds to invest into developing the industries of the future, you'll get the issues that almost all Western societies have.
China in contrast has used the shitload of money they got from the Western countries over the last quarter century (when they joined the WTO) to do exactly this. For all that I hate the CCP for various reasons, their way of thinking in five-year plans plus even longer macroeconomic planning has proven to be incredibly successful.
There is something off with that number. I am not from France (but from a neighboring country), but with 3.400 euros per month you are not among the best paid people in France.
I suppose she's talking about net salary. Here is a histogram for France:
https://fr.statista.com/infographie/25111/distribution-des-s...
According to that, she's definitely in the top 20%. Of course "among the best paid people" is ambiguous depending on how much "top" you consider, but I think being in the top 20% it makes sense to say that.
PS: and I suppose (although it's hard to find data) that if we look at people in her age bracket, she will be in a higher percentile.
Those 3400 net monthly are likely around 60K annually gross.
Not the best paid, but unless you want to live within Paris, it becomes a confortable revenue.
In France, you are considered rich when your net revenue is twice the median. That is to say, if you get more than ~4000 € of _net_ monthly salary (around 61k gross/year), you are rich. This was very easy to reach in the IT industry, especially in the Paris area, after 15 years at most.
The 1% richest (based on salary) start from 7500 € net/month (115k gross/year).
Wait until you hear how much people in less developed countries are paid.
The outlier in the world is the USA (and perhaps Switzerland), and even in the USA if you account for cost of living it's a minority of professions that are "well paid".
Right, but Europe’s been making a lot of noise around digital sovereignty, etc. Lately and it’s hard to see how that gets better while the wage to COL ratio stays so bad.
I don't understand the relationship between those, the wage to COL is not "so bad" comparatively to the majority of the rest of the world, it's a rich continent, and Western Europe is by any metric one of the richest places in the world while Eastern/Southern Europe is comparatively rich if you measure against most other countries outside of Europe, Oceania, and North America.
You are again comparing it against the USA, the very outlier, and in specific places of the whole country even, of course then everything else will be "so bad" except for very few places on the whole Earth...
Society is failing these people. In some ways, they’re given the most advanced amenities humanity has ever been able to offer: fastest internet, the nicest cars, affordable global travel. In other areas, society is completely failing them. Connection, meaning, career prospects.
They’re spoiled in some ways, completely lost in others. It’s important we don’t ignore that.
Advanced amenities honestly is a very bad excuse for lack of empathy towards the younger generations.
I was born in 82 so I had the experience of life without mobile phones, cheap travel, Netflix, etc. Life wasn't harder in practice, because you don't miss things that aren't basic needs and that no one has or don't even exist. We had plenty of fun with what we had, we weren't thinking "oh, my life is so hard because I can't choose what I see on the TV or book a plane ticket from a tiny device in my pocket". If I went back in time and had all those things, I don't think my life would have been happier or easier.
(As an aside, the exception to this is medicine. For example, many cancers that could kill you easily back then have now a much better survival rate. That of course does make life much better for people who have such problems. But for those of us that are/were healthy, life wasn't worse back then).
You know what you do miss if you don't have it, and can make your life more miserable? Not being able to afford a home, raise a family, etc. Basic needs, and things that your parents and other people that you know had. That's a real problem. Not having Netflix or a smartphone when it wasn't even a thing is just not a real problem, it was a non-issue, and using it as an argument to minimize young people's complaints is dishonest.
I can't wrap my head around "society failing people" - society is people. Average person has no influence, not even a little bit, on any of those things. Meanwhile, a small subset of the people have all the influence and they mostly operate in their own self-interest.
I don’t mean to discharge responsibility. We are society, and the onus is on us to push for a better way of doing things.
I disagree, everyone operates in their own short term self-interest, leading to a massive scale prisoners dilemma and crab bucket mentality.
The vast majority on this planet believe in a perverse expected value calculation:
probability of becoming a billionaire * billion dollars > assets in fair society
where "assets in fair society" is higher than it currently is, maybe 2x or 3x, but it pales in comparison to the chance at 10000x and the optimism that distorts the "probability of becoming a billionaire" to be higher than it really is.
There is a perceived equilibrium between the remote possibility of undoing all the bad things that happened during the course of your life instantly and a more just society that merely gives you a little bit more money, but otherwise keeps most things the same, but with less stress and conflict.
> I can't wrap my head around "society failing people" - society is people.
Effectively, societies are Boomers and older generations. These form the majority of the population that is of voting age and they hold most of the financial (in stocks and real estate ownership) and executive power.
So yes, it can be said that society fails the younger generation.
> And they keep whining without realizing how spoiled they are.
I think two things can be true at once: that there are many good things to appreciate about the modern world, and that the concerns they are raising are legitimate. There is room to have a bit of empathy here.
Happiness is more complex than your comment would make it seem. There is no absolute bar you can pass after which you habe to be happy. Happieness is fundamentally relative, since happiness is the gap between where you want to be and where you are.
So one part of this generation being unhappy is thst their life on average got objectively harder than those of their parents. Who hasn't heard the story of a boomer who as a 20-something bought a house from the money made in a job that wouldn't even pay rent these days.
But that isn't all, since happiness is relative the youth today sees a fictional image of what they are supposed to live like every day in the internet and most of them are nowhere close to that. So it both became objectibely harder and the bar moved up at the same time, so if more people whine, it is because they have reason to.
I don't say life wasn't hard in the past decades, but people had the sense that if they worked hard, they could potentially reach a state that felt good to them. This is less true today. Even in my generation (Millenials) many have given up even considering the image of retirement, because our retirement is a value that we know will be sacrificed to the capitalist gods, like the whole damn planet.
> Who hasn't heard the story of a boomer who as a 20-something bought a house ...
Too bad today's 20-something people would just scoff at the house the boomer grew his family in!
I don't think that's actually the case. People are more than happy to pack into tiny urban studio apartments and live in "bad neighborhoods".
Well, you can definitely sense it if you browse Reddit. Young people are freaking out about the job market, the house market, and the dating market. I don't mean to dismiss their concerns, far from it. It does seem like we've been making it harder and harder for anyone to become an adult over the past few decades.
Here's the quote I found most relevant to my own experience of work. It really does come down to autonomy. I could be writing the exact same code and feel awful about it, if it were done in an office with a guy looking over my shoulder. If you're young, you're more likely to have this problem.
> More broadly, employers are successfully deploying new technologies to minimize ‘break’ times, and exert greater control over production processes, often aided by close technological monitoring of work processes, which limit worker control and autonomy over ever-more-demanding processes, all of which – based on Karasek’s (1979) theory regarding the importance of worker control and autonomy for wellbeing – should result in a decline in the wellbeing of workers. Evidence from task-based studies of work, and social surveys in which workers report on the nature of job tasks, indicates there has been a growth in job demands and a reduction in worker job control in the United Kingdom (Green et al., 2022) which, presumably, is mirrored in the United States. During COVID, the shift to home and hybrid working, whilst beneficial in some respects, may have exacerbated feelings of social isolation experienced by the young in particular as they missed out on the social component of the workplace. The demise of collective bargaining and trade union presence in the workplace implies a diminution in workers’ bargaining power, making it even more difficult for workers to resist such changes and to alter their terms and conditions of employment (Feiveson, 2023).
I do feel like gen x was the last generation to be given any significant autonomy in the workplace. I'm a millennial and I feel like I've always been 10 years away from autonomy. It seems the tide recedes as I go out.
I'm not sure it's generational, it may be more about finding a good niche. Or perhaps something like this:
- For previous generations, for most jobs (but not all), you had an informal contract: work will be boring, but dependable. You can work through having a young family without fear of getting dumped out. You don't get surveilled, you can deliver on your own terms.
- Since Neutron Jack and others of his era, this has become less and less true. Large corporations in particular no longer really hold up their end of the contract, and now workers see that and are happy to jump ship, for which the response is to prefer already-trained young workers along with keeping a close eye. So it gets very competitive to get a first job, and you aren't going to get the slack you need to live your life.
- If you want autonomy, you can start your own business. Either a little one like a restaurant where you are a very small boat in a very large ocean, or a startup, where you are going to need the help of venture capital, who are going to be wanting their money back. Pick your poison.
Was Gen X ever given significant autonomy? I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space and the start of Dilbert both date to when Gen X were the newbies to the wold of work, and Dilbert in particular kept on going.
I'm just on the borderline of Millennial myself, and people older than me have expressed similar frustrations at various workplaces.
Office Space seems like a pretty amazing work environment compared to a lot of what I've had to deal with. I mean how insane is it that everyone gets their own cubicles? I'd kill for that.
That whole "Yeah, I'm gonna need you to complete that TPS report" bit is tame compared to Agile.
It's funny actually, I totally get that Office Space and Dilbert are pisstakes of office culture, but it has never really worked on me because I'm actively envious of their work arrangements. I work in an open plan office where, everyone can see everyone's screen, you can see who is at their desk. I would die for a cubicle. Every job I've had my line manager sits next to me, and their boss sits nearby, etc. Work seems to end when they clock off. They seem to have time for sit down out of office lunches. Their work hours seem shorter.
Reddit is a dumping ground for venting just like LinkedIn is a dumping ground for bragging. You are going to get skewed perspectives.
Good news, AI monitoring is coming!
Maximum corporate dystopia as a training bed for overall societal totalitarianism.
Unions are the only counter to this, as depressing as that is. Possibly overreach by corporations combined with the collapse of globalism will reempower workers.
But robotics and AI may completely undercut that.
Capitalism is the problem and the reason for everything you decry. Until we actually start naming it as such instead of using distractions like globalism, there's no chance at improving things.
To be honest, the term "capitalism" has accumulated a lot of baggage and people don't always have a clear understanding of what is meant by it so it might be helpful to use a different term with a clear definition.
While that is true, I believe part of trying to establish a better system is spreading an understanding that the current system is broken - you do that by naming it as such and not leaving the field to competing definitions.
Calling it globalism in place of globalization or just capitalism is so cringe
> Young people are freaking out about the job market, the house market
Maybe it's finally time we admit markets are a horrible way of allocating resources unless you want to create a system in which some have endless riches without effort and others have endless effort without riches?
Meritocracy claims have always been propaganda to distract from this simple fact.
free markets are just fine. The problem is the housing market in the US isn’t a proper free market AT ALL. The housing “market” here has a long history of problems.
- strict zoning laws (and nimby attitudes) prevent the free market from functioning as intended. Housing is expensive because we make it hard to build more housing.
- Read up on RealPage, software for landlords thats been accused of inflating rents. There’s a major lawsuit underway, focusing on the issues with its algorithmic pricing. Is that a free market? When the majority of landlords are (effectively) using the same 3rd party software to price-fix?
- the US had a few decades of very racist housing policy, which made it difficult for blacks to get housing. I say this as a white man that’s studied this. Fun fact - the US govt used to mark black neighborhoods as “high risk”, meaning banks wouldn’t loan money money to blacks for buying a house. At one point in US history it was also legal to have HOA’s with bylaws preventing blacks from buying property in the neighborhood. I could continue to list many examples of how blacks got screwed, but that’s not the point. The point is whites had a HUGE advantage for decades, even after slavery was abolished. The government made sure blacks couldn’t compete for the desirable homes, for decades. So whites got nice cheap housing. Today the children of those white families enjoy the benefits their parents received, via unethical housing policy. Me included. Is that how a free market is supposed to work? Temporarily reducing competition in desirable communities, letting whites buy, and then reverting the law decades later after prices doubled? Definition of pulling the ladder up behind you if you ask me.
I could go on, but i’ll spare you. :)
I have receipts:
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
https://longislandadvocate.com/decades-after-redlining-l-i-s...
When free-market housing have to compete with non-market housing (public or associative) in multiple segments (not only social housing), it works really well as a free market. For that, you need between 20 and 40% of the available housing to be non-market though.
> strict zoning laws (and nimby attitudes) prevent the free market from functioning as intended. Housing is expensive because we make it hard to build more housing.
The fundamental thing is, housing is expensive because the space in the highly wanted urban areas is scarce. Plots suitable for development of any kind of (dense) housing are expensive, so that alone drives up unit prices massively. And once you have the plot of land, the cost of actually building a building are enormous - the higher you want to go, the more deep you have to go so that the building doesn't tip over like the Tower of Pisa, which is even more expensive when the building is in a region that is sensitive to earthquakes, doesn't have bedrock but sand, a bunch of subterranean tunnels or nearby buildings that might settle as a result of digging the hole for the foundations.
And that's just the cost that the developers have to bear. The local government and utilities have to expend a lot of money for all the infrastructure: roads, public transport, water/sewage, electricity (the electricity demand of even a "small" dense housing unit are pretty massive), internet, schools, higher education, general amenities (e.g. parks), planning for shopping and other venues... that's where all the NIMBYism is coming from because that shit ain't cheap.
Most of the country isn't Seattle or Hong Kong or SF, hemmed in on all sides by mountains and bays. In most of the country, the city could just choose to build more city. All it needs is infrastructure, rezoning, planning permission. And the ability to forgo treating single-family-home subdivisions as immortal, inviolate monuments to the American Way.
The megacity of >10M people is the basic functional economic unit in 2025, the minimum healthy employment market, the level at which we can provide a reasonable opportunity for productive jobs in a specialized role and a reasonable opportunity to hire someone in a specialized role*; Their largesse is taxed or remitted to cover the cities of ~1M, the cities of ~100k, and especially the towns of ~1k-10k.
...
*The example a number of economists like to bring up is: If I'm a skilled sushi chef, how long would it take to replace this employer with a better one? How long would it take them to replace me? A thriving economy is an economy that ensures lots of mutually beneficial employment arrangements, in which no one feels trapped, and in which bad management or bad work is punished with replacement, but also which has the slack to absorb random things like interpersonal conflicts or an employee that needs to move for family reasons.
If there are a hundred sushi places within commuting distance, probably at least one of them is hiring. If one chef gets hit by a bus, the business can be back in operation the next day by poaching an apprentice a few blocks away for higher pay. There is always reserve capacity waiting in the wings, as a megacity encourages economic resiliency.
If there are only two sushi places within commuting distance, and I sever my relationship with this one, the other one is probably not hiring, so I am a slave to their bad management and conversely they are a slave to my bad work because it would be so difficult to find another person like me. The quality of goods and services provided to the general consumer suffers significantly, the material precarity of my life suffers significantly. Things become brittle - if the business goes under for random reasons, odds are pretty good that my town becomes a town without sushi. Even if everything is working perfectly... what's my leverage as far as pay raises? What's their leverage as far as work output/quality? We're stuck with each other.
I believe this is a no true scotsman fallacy, the very same that people make when claiming Stalin wasn't a communist.
I would posit that truly free markets only exist on paper, in the real world the people that acquire enough capital will always use said capital to distort markets in their favor. Why wouldn't you?
It is the inevitable outcome of the system.
>Maybe it's finally time we admit markets are a horrible way of allocating resources
We need to distribute fish from fishermen and potatoes from potato farmers to hairdressers and carpenters and so on. What mechanism do you suggest we use instead of markets?
Most ongoing social trends in the United States can be traced back to this. When foreigners are puzzled and ask me why is X or Y happening in America, this is usually the best answer. The majority of young people, but not the majority of the electorate, are in a tough or even dire situation, and so they do not have much interest in maintaining the status quo. The result is social upheaval, the varieties of which I'm sure we're all familiar with by now, and need not be repeated.
At this point they've been so extremely neglected it probably doesn't make sense for around ~30% of them to even try with life.
That's the real reason for the high number of drug related deaths IMO.
As the parent of two mid-20's adults (one thriving, the other not so much) I actually downloaded the paper and read it out of curiosity (shocking, I know.)
They asked people how many days last month they had "bad mental health days" ("Q1".) The measure of Despair in the graphs is constructed as: "by setting the Q1 variable to one when an individual gave the answer 30 and zero otherwise." So if you had a continuous month of "bad mental health days" you are in despair. The fraction of those months is y-axis in the graphs (typically around 0-10%)
This is all US data BTW.
Anyway, the abstract and title oversimplify the data in my opinion. Across the board (even up to 60+ years of age) the surveyed report overall 2x more "despair" than in the 1990's. Yes, it is worse amongst under 40 workers, as shown in Figure 4. Despair used to be pretty flat by age for workers, now it it highest for young workers, with linear-ish decrease until about 60 where the value hasn't really changed over time.
But the graph in Figure 8 shows that "despair" hasn't really moved much for any age group of college educated workers since the 1990's. And their mention of the change in the "hump" shaped in the abstract doesn't account for the fact that in absolute terms, unsurprisingly, the unemployed have a lot more despair overall than workers.
So the "young workers" in the title are those without a college education in the US - that's probably a very different demographic than the average HN participant...
I'll defend that variable selection a little bit, as I feel that the measure they use to capture 'despair' is actually binary in reality. I'd categorize a handful of young men around my age as being in this category. What they seem to have in common with each other is a consistent downtrodden-ness that doesn't fluctuate much from day to day; it's pervasive to their entire personality, it's who they are.
I imagine if you studied this is a less discrete, non-binomial method you'd see even sharper trends. I don't know a single person my age who feels the future has anything for them.
The actual PDF is at https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34071/w340...
From the conclusion:
(I paraphrase) Mental Health has worsened rapidly in the last decade in the US, especially for young women.
It goes on:
""" It does not appear that the declining mental health of young workers is driven by a decline in the
youth wage compared to the wage of older workers; this ratio has increased. Real wages have also
been on the rise. As Feiveson (2024) has noted the relative prices of housing and childcare have
risen. Student debt is high and expensive. The health of young adults has also deteriorated, as
seen in increases in social isolation and obesity. Suicide rates of the young are rising. Moreover,
Jean Twenge provides evidence that the work ethic itself among the young has plummeted. Some
have even suggested the young are unhappy having BS jobs.
There is a good deal of supporting evidence from a variety of surveys including from Pew, the
Conference Board and Johns Hopkins on the parlous state of young worker well-being in the USA
that we documented here. The concern is that we are observing the consequences of past well-
being shocks. We should note that 10.1% of workers aged 20 in 2023 said they were in despair.
They were aged 17 when COVID lockdowns were implemented in 2020. They were 10 years old
in 2013 as the smartphone and the internet exploded. In addition, of course, they were in high
school ages 14-18 in 2017-2021. We know from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey that the well-
being of high school students deteriorated sharply around that time.15
Jean Twenge suggested to us that an explanation for this, maybe that childhood and teenage years
with low levels of in-person interaction and more time online, such as have occurred since 2014
or so, results in depression and pessimism and dissatisfaction across many domains (including
work). Social media glamorizes others' lives plus online news and social media encourage
pessimism about jobs and the economy in general. This likely results in dissatisfaction across
many domains, perhaps especially work. With an additional side element perhaps of "the whole
system is rigged anyway, so why try?"
This rise in despair/psychological distress of young workers may well be the consequence of the
mental health declines observed when they were high school children going back a decade or more.
Increasing access to the internet and smartphones seem to be the culprits. """
> Some have even suggested the young are unhappy having BS jobs.
That is such crazy level of spin it would make electrons orbiting atoms ashamed.
So the young are expected to be happy to waste their life doing something they know is even less than worthless so that they can afford to survive.
That is pure "let them eat cake", "children yearn for the mines" pure raw unadultered bullshit.
Same thing in Europe, there's a lot of hopelessness.
Terrible to read that young people's despair is now so bad that it's almost as high as mine, a person in my 40s
I also read the paper and thought "how can I make this about me?"
I am also there. Geographically I am in Germany. It’s a bit scary to think, that the same motherboard I design right now can be designed in other country 6 hours by car away for the half the price. And there is nothing special about me. The guy elsewhere will have similar education, same skills, same software and probably will be more hungry to work hard.
The inherent contradictions of capitalism are coming to a breaking point.
The constant drive for profit forces capital to exploit workers more and more, creating a growing class of alienated, unhappy, and impoverished laborers.
This increasing misery, coupled with the inability of the system to provide for the basic needs of the majority, will inevitably lead to systemic change. The only question left is, which direction will this revolutionary potential go?
Only through class consciousness can we build a new society in which the fruits of labor are enjoyed by us all.
Absolutely. As history shows though, you can't keep that last state particularly stable, so we will always have times of equality, times of oppression/exploitation and times of killing today's flavour of nobility, ad infinitum.
> Only through class consciousness can we build a new society in which the fruits of labor are enjoyed by us all.
They've done this a few times already, and it's very violent each time.
And this isn't an inherent contradiction of capidalism. Capitalism only makes people rich if they provide loads of value to others. Lower prices are good for every one. Raising everyone's wages out of proportion to the value they create only raises all the prices.
> Capitalism only makes people rich if they provide loads of value to others.
Heirs are made rich every day by being born.
> They've done this a few times already, and it's very violent each time.
It's very violent because it gets violently repressed by capitalist forces. See the democratically elected Allende being couped by the CIA.
> Capitalism only makes people rich if they provide loads of value to others.
That is straight up not true. What value do people inheriting wealth provide? What value do high frequency traders provide? What value do speculators of all sorts provide? It's a casino that's rigged for the already rich, on the back of the poor.
Has anyone looked up a HNer earning over $1mn posts from 10 years ago to see if they expressed the same despair?
another side to this is how it's encouraging people to believe that the only way to get ahead is by more or less scamming. you can easily look at the world as a youngish person and see that getting ahead means affiliate marketing, or NFT scams, or crypto nonsense, or being Andrew Tate, or an "influencer" hawking crap on social media etc.
it's not just a lack of role models, it's also the way current governments in the west are setting policies - extreme care for older more established people or the already rich, while the young being thrown to the wolves with idiotic LLM/AI policies sabotaging their lives and careers, future pension likely clearly going down, the ultrawealthy having increasingly literal impunity, policies designed to keep housing unaffordable, etc
The way I think about this is if you split the money-making opportunities into two pools; one is rent-seeking/grifting/outright-scamming/beating greater-fool fallacy, the other is learning some sort of skill/trade and developing a career on that. At some point the perceived opportunity cost for the first eclipsed the latter, and now that's sort of where we're at.
Certain characters love to say things like "no one wants to work anymore." I think the rise of certain scamminess in our culture actually flies in the face of that; people will work insanely hard at whatever their thing is, be it an MLM or a crypto-grift. But they work hard because _they think that's where they can get the most value._ What's the value in going to school for 4, 6, 8, 10 years when you can make it big in the next big thing?
Good luck for the fellow Americans that will pay up that 120%+ GDP/debt ratio, with 7% deficits and no spending cuts in sight.
The rich in the US are taking advantage of it, by making the US pay for all welfare while they barely pay any taxes.
If you are an American young professional which needs to work in order to survive, you are being ripped off everyday by just existing.
If you inflate the currency, GDP goes up, and nominal debt stays the same. That’s the government’s current playbook, with its massive fiscal deficits.
This works if all the debt is long term debt (>=10Y), which surely Jellen and Bessent have been selling, right?
Have you considered that maybe lenders might be aware and are therefore not very willing to give long term debt to the USA?
The only thing missing is replacing the head of the federal reserve bank with a mindless puppet so they stop standing in the way of success (inflation).
That only works if rates don’t go up which is probably not a good premise to rely on
If you are in a balanced budget or continued deficit situation, then, yes, increased rates will eventually be a factor (but that's a lagging effect, even then) if you have a sufficient surplus that with the effect of inflation increasing its nominal size with the same real revenue and spending you can pay down debt at least as fast as it comes due, so you aren't going back to do new net borrowing, increase cost of borrowing doesn't matter much.
We're already at the point where participating doesn't make sense for a lot of workers, that's why tax increases (which must happen if we don't aggressively cut spending and even with the minor cuts we've had there's been incredible wailing) are coming from tariffs instead.
It's very unlikely the federal governments future obligations will be met in real dollars. I've said before "at the end of the day all retirement plans are effectively market driven." I wouldn't want to be depending on social security right now.
As in all things, there will be winners and those who fail to try with sufficient determination :)
For those with the means to do so, try hire the Gen-Zs out there who want to succeed despite the circumstances - especially the ones skipping college. They’re some of the most capable, self-motivated people you will ever have the chance to work with!
Societies fail too. Not just individuals.
Some people are too absorbed in their own selfishness to see this. But as an individual you can do all the "right" things and still be casually steamrollered by larger social trends and pressures.
Of course - but all things being equal, your odds will certainly be better if you give it your best shot!
I'd intended my message to be one of actual hope and optimism - that those in the position to do so may affect a small positive change in the world at the individual level. This might be myopic by ivory-tower standards, but the intention was to empower and encourage people not to give up, and that their actions do have a measurable effect on their destiny.
We might not be able to change the circumstances easily (We certainly should be trying to do so), but parallel to this we can support and encourage those going through the tough times.
Many Gen-Zs are demonstrating remarkable resilience - this post was intended as a celebration of that, not to downplay the severity of the society-wide issues at play.
Thanks for the fair critique.
Most "Gen-Zs" want to succeed despite the circumstances. Unfortunately for them, there are the circumstances.
This individualization of systemic failure is not seeing the forest for the trees.
Could the cynicism of some also be a byproduct of the circumstances?