If the above chart is true and accurate I forsee a movement of the young toward more socialism or even communism.
Post WW2 and expansion in the 1950’s and 1960’s meant plenty of well paid jobs, rising wages, access to homeownership, and upward mobility. A labor based economy. It then shifted to financialization and capital economy. The working class was devastated by automation and shifting manufacturing overseas. They were left with low paid jobs with little health insurance benefits and sky high tuition for higher education.
If significant numbers of the young cannot see a future for themselves. They will make a political way or path. An Occupy Wall Street on steroids in our future? More candidate like Zohran Mamdani?
It just means the “JCs” took their money before they had a chance to spend it on marriage or a house. More efficient that way: all the money being hovered up by those entitled to have it, without the cash taking any side trips.
/sarcasm
Which was quickly crushed.
Last I heard the regime was trying to revoke his citizenship and deport him.
Vietnam protests ultimately succeeded as did Martin Lutur King Jr’s civil disobedience. Will today’s youth realize that they are less than nothing in the eyes of the JCs? Or continue to be distrated by their electronic toys/cell phone?
Yes, we are in a civilizational crisis, meaning that facts external to human existence are no longer rubbing up against human social structures that are well adapted to coping with the world as it was before digital communications and AI.
The graph doesn’t indicate what country it covers. Is it the US? If so, we can compare delayed household between the US and a country with a lower Gini coefficient such as Norway or Sweden. (US = 41, Norway = 28, Sweden = 30).
Google says that in Norway there’s a noticeable trend of delayed marriage and childbearing, with couples increasingly choosing to cohabit and have children before marriage, and women having children at older ages. This is influenced by factors such as increased educational attainment and the availability of effective contraceptive methods.
So, to answer the question: maybe, in part. What is needed is one of those multi-factorial analysis.
I’ve had a hard time tracking down the source of this graph. It has been shared by several people including by Marjorie Taylor Green and on several sites to blame “woke”. It seems to have started with Nathan Halberstadt on Twitter. He is a fellow at something called RedStatesLead. None of the people I’ve seen using it have said where the data the graph is based on originated. It also does not match up with the data at this site which builds its graphs off of publicly available data.
Until someone proves me wrong, I’m calling the graph bogus.
The foundational pillars of the American middle class have been crumbling for decades, crushed under the weight of unaffordable housing, runaway education costs, and the rising price of just about everything. This full-blown affordability crisis is hollowing out the middle class from within.
Halberstadt is correct: Young Americans can’t afford homes, can’t start families, and increasingly see the American Dream as just a dream. This has given rise to socialism and Marxism, spreading across the nation like cancer. It’s as if the globalist elite in Washington deliberately sabotaged the middle class over the years, hollowing it out with decades of destructive policies designed to break those key pillars.
Mortgage rateshave remained stubbornly high: hovering near 7%, well above the sub-3% rates during the pandemic. That makes homeownership increasingly unaffordable for many Americans, as home prices have risen over 50% since 2020.
“stubbornly high” LOL Obviously the writer is too young to remember the mid 1970’s when the prime interest rates was 11 or 12%.
On Tuesday, Zillow economic analyst Anushna Prakash reported mortgage rates would need to drop to 4.43% for a typical home to be affordable to an average buyer. But “that kind of a rate decline is currently unrealistic,” Prakash wrote. Meanwhile, not even a 0% interest rate would make a typical home affordable in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, San Diego, or San Jose, she added.
“Many homeowners are reluctant [to] put their homes on the market and give up the low mortgage rates they already have,” according to Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices. “To them, high price gains won’t mitigate their ability to pay more for another home at significantly higher interest rates.”
This issue is also referred to as golden handcuffs—or the locked-in mortgage rate effect.
wages haven’t grown at the same pace as home appreciation
Many new college graduates cannot afford an apartment let alone a house.
More than half of Gen Z adults say they don’t make enough money to live the life they want due to the high cost of living, according to a 2024 survey from Bank of America.
Likely the young are saddled with large college debt. In the late 1960’s & early 1970’s college tuition was relatively cheap. A guy could pay for their education with a summer job and a part time job while taking classes. That is no longer possible.
Um, I would have cut off an arm before I moved back in with my parents (who I loved, don’t get me wrong.) but times are different now. I have brothers & sisters and nearly every one of their children have moved back in at some time or another. Weird.
For the record, I lived in rooming houses where you paid by the week, I took minimum wage jobs for 10 years because that’s what the business (radio) paid and I loved it, and I bought my first house (condo) at age 33 when interest rates were 13%.
Here’s a real-world, real-time example of something. Good friend of mine for 50 years. Son, 32 years old. Has always lived at home even when he had a good job. He recently moved out (there’s more family intrigue here. Son became “very religious” shall we say.)
Anyway, they are begging him to move back home! I don’t get it. Father is highly upset, angry, confused. Mother is falling apart. I have no idea if this is a one-off “family circus” thing or there’s more of this out there (Hopefully not as much sturm und drang) IOW, I wonder if all these kids “still living in their mom’s basement” that everybody is laughing at and might be victims of over-priced housing, are being subtly psycho-socially-incentivized to stay home…???
Since this thread is currently focusing on housing… I found this. Need to know: The talker is a former FOX News behind-the-scenes operator. He doesn’t seem at all like a BS artist or Fox News type. Just as he admonishes us to think critically I like to examine those who admonish me to “think critically.”
There was a short lived TV series, in the 70s, with Paul Sand and Steve Landesberg, that I really enjoyed. At one point in the series, Paul Sand’s parents moved in with him. iirc, his dad was played by Jack Gilford. At one point, Sand is talking with Landesberg, about his parents. Sand says “somehow, I feel like I let them down”. Landesberg said “you did, you grew up”. Some parents can’t let go, and they manipulate and bully the kids to try and keep themselves as the center of the kid’s universe.
Some thoughtful person uploaded the opening credits of that show to youtube.
