A difficult job market and rising costs are making it harder for young adults to enter adulthood
Young people are already facing the worst entry-level job market since the start of the pandemic and significant economic instability.
But overall economic conditions are making it more challenging for those just entering adulthood. More than eight in 10 young adults rate the economy as “bad” or “terrible”, according to a recent survey conducted with more than 1,000 18- to 34-year-olds around the US by Generation Lab, a research firm studying young people. While young adulthood is known as a time for establishing independence and responsibility, many are attempting to do so amid cuts to social safety net programs and the ever-increasing costs of basic needs like gas and groceries.
“It’s been rough for a long time,” said Nia West-Bey, executive director of the National Collaborative for Transformative Youth Policy. “But I think we particularly have a confluence of long-term economic challenges on the income side and support side, now coupled with an increase in expenses on everything.”
In 1960, minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the cost of the average house was $11,000.00.
The better metric is number of hours to purchase a house. At that ratio it’d take 11,000 hours, or just over 5.2 years (2080 hours per year is full time).
Currently the average house price in the US is $368,198, and minimum wage is $7.25. At that ratio it’d take 50,785 hours or 24.5 years. That’s almost 5x more. Something is seriously broken, and it’s not just inflation.
Edit: to keep the same 5.2 year timeline, minimum wage would have to be $33/hr. Fairly certain I’ve seen $25-30/hr thrown out for what minimum wage should be, and that tracks with this.
yeah the problem is capitalism. line must go up, forever.
Capitalism is a vehicle. It’s only really a problem when you have aggressive (or drunk) drivers. Would do us wonders if corporations were co’ops, even under capitalism. Because the people driving direction are the same people employed by the company — I.e., the only group that is de-facto simultaneously concerned with both the company’s success and the workers success.
Capitalism as a Political Ideology is the problem, because it sells the swindle and normalizes the sociopathic view that it’s fine to do whatever it takes to improve your personal upsides even at the cost of others.
Capitalist as just a Trade/Resource allocation system under the oversight and control of other ideologies meant the maximize people’s welbeing might be ok, but not as the guide for the highest powers in the land.
Is it a political ideology of capitalism — which honestly sounds quite weird and interesting — or is it political romanticism of capitalistic economics?
“Romanticism by politicians of capitalism economics” is an ideological position.
More broadly, resource distribution is highly political - should everybody get the same (the basis of Communism), should one’s betters control who gets what (Monarchy, Fascism) or should it be a distributed system were being good at acculating trade tokens and assets (or being a descendant from ancestors which were good at it) determines one’s access to resources (Capitalism).
I suppose that one could say that Capitalism has a lot thinner layer of ideological justifications for why that’s the best system for decision making in a country (originally it was pretty much just “trust me, doing what’s better for yourself is better for all”, but one could say that in the present day that more visibly political part is done by Neoliberalism) but in practice Capitalism is none the less how decisions are made in the very much politically important aspect of human society which is “who gets what”.
I suppose we could put it this way: if politicians decided that coin flipping was the way to make politicials decisions, so all decisions were done by coin flipping, would the politicial ideology be just the part were politicians say “we should decide everything by coin flipping” but not the actual coin flipping itself, or is the political ideology the entire thing (so, both the mechanical mechanism for the decision making AND the justification for that being “the best to use”).
I think it’s both, especially because when it comes to Capitalism the “mechanical mechanism” is way more complex and far less mechanical than coin flipping, requiring to operate things like for example Judicial decisions (which in turn are shaped by Laws), Land ownership, Inheritance and so on, which are not the mechanics itself yet have a disproportionate impact in the outcomes of the whole system (for example, without Land Ownership or Inheritance, Capitalist societies would be VERY different).
Interesting. See, I was thinking closer to the mechanistic function of capitalism wherein productive assets (“capital”) are primarily owned and controlled by private individuals/organizations. My brain was thinking, what would a political system look like if you replaced “productive assets” with, instead, “political assets.”
there being money and commer