Fewer young adults are achieving economic and family milestones typically associated with adulthood, according to a recent working paper from the U.S. Census Bureau.
According to the working paper, “Changes in Milestones of Adulthood,” almost half of all young adults in 1975 had reached four milestones associated with adulthood: moving out of one’s parents’ home, getting a job, getting married and having a child.
Five decades on, that progression has changed dramatically. The share of young adults that have followed the traditional pathway to adulthood has dropped to less than a quarter, according to the paper.
“Boomers brag that standards set in 1960 unreachable by anyone today because Boomers ruined everything after they got theirs.”
Which generation gets the blame for the utter failure to address climate change and the rise of global fascism? Oh and theres this stuff too: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/20/microplastics-human-testicles-study-sperm-counts
Well, if the fucking silent generation would retire from congress already, god damn it
They get the blame because they caused this. If anyone also deserves blame, Millennials do as well. We’re just Boomers II: Electric Boogalo, setting up entire ecosystems and telling everyone that everything is great now, not realizing or accepting responsibility for the adverse effects, just moving on the next grift.
Why are millennials getting blamed for what boomers has caused? They suffered a lot after boomers and gen xers pulled the the rug from under them. We did not benefit at all from the fruits of labor from the last 2 gen.
Every generation after Adam Smith has had a hand in the destruction of the next. Every generation after Marx and Engels has had both hands in that destruction.
Maybe because cunts fucked the world?
As far as having children goes, I think it’s more than an economic effect. We also just have a change in personal goals, supported by a change in social expectation.
Choosing to start families at a later stage or just plain choosing not to at all, is sometimes a personal choice independently of economic pressures.
It should be noted that the article title is actually “Fewer young people are meeting these 5 milestones typically associated with adulthood”, and even it’s first sentence acknowledge these milestones as a mix of economic and family milestones - “Fewer young adults are achieving economic and family milestones typically associated with adulthood…”
Last I looked, we weren’t running out of humans, so the drop-off in breeding is mostly a capitalist concern, or a bigoted concern that the wrong humans are breeding.
This is just a case where the metrics are utterly flawed.
At least a couple of those supposed “milestones” have nothing to do with a person’s maturity, and I even know a few people who’s immaturity helped them hit those milestones earlier than most.
This article is not particularly well written, but the four milestones they mention are: 1) moving out of one’s parents’ home, 2) getting a job, 3) getting married and 4) having a child. The fifth one seems to be the completion of education.
Thank you! Headline said 5, took to the end of the post to only show 4 with no mention of the 5th one. I almost thought it was written by AI.
1 it was too expensive to move out and honestly without the added income I provided my parents would have lost their house on multiple occasions
2 I got one the fall after I graduated
3 this one took awhile
4 lol no. Never. Children are the worst. I should know, I used to be one.
Yes, money is important and salaries aren’t enough.
In 1960 the US minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the price of a home averaged $11,000.00
Two kids could graduate high school and move into their own home the next day, and have the place paid off in less than a decade.
To ouf I. Perspective in 1968. A person made about 6 grand a year houses were 12k. So twice the income. Now? Mean houses prices are around 400k. Income is around 66k.
There is no comparison. Today’s kids are financially MUCH worse off than we genxers
Effectively, someone would have to be earning over a million dollars a year in literal wages (which virtually no one is) in order to have the equivalent buying power that someone earning a couple bucks an hour did in the 50s/60s. And that level of buying power was considered an appropriate wage for literal child workers…
And yet old folks complain “no one wants to work anymore”. Yeah, maybe thats because were grown adults with a tiny fraction of the buying power you had when you were 12 and bread cost a nickel
Old folks don’t complain and say that.
Conservatives do
Back when I was a wee lad growing uo in the mean fields of rural new england, the conservatives in power were loud and powerful. And older. Boomers and the their parents.
But they were also richer, and like any other rich powerful elitists, they blamed the poor people for their greed and unwillingness to pay
So of course old people were demonized for saying it was the kids not wanting to work. Wasn’t. It was the elite.
There’s more to it. Including the pretty standard past fact that people usually become more conservative as they age ( though i see that shifting as I age),
Buts its not old people its the musk and trump and Zuckerberg, etc…
That’s why these people need distractions, culture wars , so they don’t realize it’s class warfare
There’s more to it. Including the pretty standard past fact that people usually become more conservative as they age ( though i see that shifting as I age)
This one is absolutely bullshit tied to the accrual of wealth. People don’t become more conservative as they get older, they become more conservative as they start to benefit more and more from the system, as was the norm up until about Gen X. People being worse off than their parents were at the same age absolutely has shifted the political leanings of generations (there’s also the fact that each successive generation leans more leftist than the previous due to simple exposure to people and ideas that are different from you, but that’s another topic).
I’m reminded of the wonderful video that the beautiful talking skull Shaun did about Harry Potter and JK Rowling a few years back. Specifically, the part about how you can watch her political stance change practically in real time as the books go on. The books start out raging against the machine, but as she began to gain wealth and benefit from that machine, it shifts towards supporting the machine until at the end Harry becomes a magic cop defending all the issues that were criticized in the early books and nothing fundamentally changes in society.
You’re young. You also can’t read. Because I also said that’s changing.
Now continue feeling good about not knowing what yoyr talking about.
Most Conservatives aren’t wealthy. Go ahead. Look.
The older people I know who vote Democrat complain all the time about how expensive everything is these days and nobody can afford anything.
The bullshit “Nobody wants to work” narrative is absolutely pushed by conservatives.
Thank you friend. Your are seeing truth.
Its class warfare at its most insidious
While I get the sentiment, this is serious hyperbole
Its really not hyperbolic at all.
In 1958 child laborers were paid $1 per hour, the minimum wage at the time. Assuming that child worked 40 hours in a week, they would have made a little over $2k in the year. Relative to the GDP of the united states at the time (about $480B) that would equate to making over $1M per year today. Therefore, everyone currently making less than $1M per year (pretty much everybody) has less buying power than the average 10 year old child laborer in 1958.
With this in mind, its easier to see how inflation doesnt tell the whole story. That $1 minimum wage might equate to $12 today, which is higher than the federal minimum wage and the state minimum in about 25 states. But even if the minimum wage were brought on par with that base metric (which again was considered the appropriate wage for literal children), a person making $12/hr would have absolutely no buying power relative to a minimum wage earner back then. To be precise, it would be less than 2.5% of it.
It’s not just Gen Xers, speaking as a millennial, I bought a house with my wife in 2015 that was just over 2x our combined income at the time, which was not very high as we were both recently out of school, and we refinanced in '21 for a 2.7% interest rate. Out of control home prices nationwide coupled with high interest rates only hit after covid
I appreciate the insight as I’m a bit older and can’t look at it from that vantage. , but I’d ask if it wasn’t always going to go up again after the 08 bubble.
But I’m not economist. Just going off memory, so file this under “could be?”
I’m a millennial. Bought my house in a rural location for $70k at 3% interest in 2018
Due to the out of control housing market, it’s now “worth” $150k
This market makes it impossible for younger generation to have a chance.
Anyone buying a home in 1968 is not an Xer. That’s a birth year.
Ate you just trying to be rude?
The poingvisbits the elites. Thats facts. Its not an age thing. Hell it ain’t even really a poliyics thing. Is the elite holding you down and keeping you arguing with other poor people. If is what it is
The economics of it have shifted over time. If you were born in 1968 you might have graduated university into Black Monday, and finished grad school in time for the dot.com meltdown. I did. Those are far from the boomer like conditions of the 1960s and 70s.
Graduated university? Dude. I was waaaay too poor for that.
Why are we calling these “milestones?” These are economic choices that were once expectations. Expectations that are no longer realistic, and can no longer be expected. These are NOT indicators of someone’s “success” at life.
No children here with how fucked up things are. Only downside is no clue who will take care of us when we get too old. Maybe Winchester or Smith and Wesson…
I don’t need anyone to take care of me when I’m older. I decided that my retirement plan will be extreme sports. Base jumping? Wing suit? Steel toeing cops in the nuts? So many thrilling choices! Whatever happens, happens.
Gotta be thorough about it. Full body paralysis would be a suboptimal outcome.
Yeah, I’ll just chase the dragon off into the sunset when it’s my time
At least I’m 2 for 4, thats slightly comforting
- Having a child
Oh fuck off, I have very consciously decided NOT to have a child. In my own lifetime, I will see the agrinomic sector completely fail due to runaway climate change. I will see actual resource wars. Why the fuck would I have a kid
Oh you know, proliferation of the species etc.
I’m sure you’ll be annoyed at this answer but I mean ask stupid questions, get stupid answers. You are well within your rights to believe it but not to push it as fact.
Fuck off
Can’t handle the truth huh? Who would’ve guessed it.
Why the fuck would I have a kid
To help pay for your retirement.
I know that was a rhetorical question, but regardless, here’s the answer. Eventually people get old, and it’s generally good if there are enough younger folks to pick up the slack when older folks really can’t anymore.
Our society is essentially a house of cards. If there suddenly aren’t enough supports remaining at the base, those higher levels might start to collapse, and that tends to take the rest of the structure down too.
retirement
That is the most selfish and hateful reason to have a child. Your children are their own person, not your retirement insurance. If this is the typical breeder line of thought, no wonder there are so many abandoned elderly folk.
Ok, so first off, I was really talking about social security here, (though it really doesn’t matter either way). You can call it hateful or selfish, but it’s really just a mathematical issue, morality doesn’t factor in. The fact is for Social Security to work at a national level, you need people paying into it for people to be drawing out of it, that’s the whole system, that’s all it is.
You may have heard that people are growing increasingly worried about social security, as birth rates are down and there’s a growing fear that we could end up without enough people paying into it for the system to remain viable. So what’s the solution to the problem? How do you balance that equation? You have more babies, that’s the entire solution; it’s not rocket science, it’s arithmetic.
But hey, besides social security, there’s the personal angle too. This is probably what you were thinking about. Some people might expect their kids to help support them in their old age. Is this line of thought immoral and selfish? [Spoiler] Of course it fucking isn’t! Caring for each other is just what a loving family does. You do realize that the whole “help support me in my old age” request is a request, right? Your children are much more likely to do that if they feel that they’ve been loved and cared for and supported over the course of their lives. Just to say this again, this plan relies on caring for someone for an entire lifetime, not a small commitment, that’s a necessary condition for your kids to care for you in your old age. Meaning, nobody is trapping children into being their retirement plan, this isn’t like “one simple trick to guarantee an early retirement”. Honestly though, having children is an excellent way to acquire reliable insurance, as the best insurance a person can have is having other people who love you who can help you, after all, that’s the only reason any of us survived childhood in the first place.
TLDR: If you want retirement insurance, have a kid. It’s the loving thing to do and it can support others as well as yourself.
Yeah, so. Here’s the thing. I lived through a social security collapse in a country (not the US, obvs) with a youth boom. Trust me, having lots of bodies around did not help when the oligarchs horded all the wealth to escape hyperinflation and there was no work to go around.
It is of no use to have over half of the population in productive ages (19 - 45) if more than half of them are unemployed. And guess what, it didn’t help the elder either as they were the first casualties of a collapsed healthcare system. We had an abandoned elders crisis, along with several other crises, admittedly.
But I guess my point is, not even at a macroeconomic scale is having children any form of insurance. I know myself, as the cousin who have had to provide end of life care for more than one elder relative. Whom, I should point out, had way more children than my mom and dad, yet I was the only one with enough compassion left to care for distant relatives when their own children wouldn’t even shell out spare change to pay for food.
having lots of bodies around did not help when the oligarchs horded all the wealth to escape hyperinflation and there was no work to go around.
Ok, but corruption is a different issue. I don’t disagree that corruption and hyperinflation can make a social security system collapse. But simply not having enough money will also do that. So, either of these conditions would be enough to break the system, which means you do need both of these things under control to make it work. And it seems that we agree that letting that system collapse is a bad thing. With that in mind, I maintain that having kids is still a necessary condition to make the system work.
Of course, the orphan crushing machine needs more children to keep working.
It’s also outright counterproductive if we see large increases in unemployment due to automation (including, but not limited to AI).
I’ve consciously decided to let my siblings have all the kids for me. It’s going great! Lol
It’s called kin selection, basically you help your related’s offspring and to pass on similar related genes, assuming you are also helping them
Instead of having kids I have decided to go on good vacations every year.
AND I don’t have a bunch of grey hair. It’s great!
I honestly couldn’t imagine having a child or owning a home unless I had a job that paid at least 50k/year ($25/hr). -That’s while living in this part of the country. If I were in a coastal state I wouldn’t consider it for less than 75k/year. Unfortunately, that’s not in the cards.
They dont mention the 5th milestone but I imagine its buying a home.
Completing education is the 5th. From the census study linked in the article
…reaching five milestones of adulthood: living away from their parents, completing their education, labor force participation, marrying, and living with a child.
They also mention it later in the article:
The completion of education, another marker of adulthood, has overshadowed other milestones over the years as an increasing number of young adults enroll in college, according to the paper.
ah good catch.
It’s finishing Elden Ring actually.
I imagine it’s buying a home, buying a car, having kids, getting a job (99% of people are actually getting this one, but it’s among the milestones I consider)#
Yeah, well most young adults wouldn’t make the mistake of cancelling the Late Show with Colbert Colbert.
