The high home prices, inflated away wages, and poor quality of life for long hours worked, plus no fault divorce, the family court system, etc, may be contributing to the demographic issue.
The price of property in Australia has increased so much but the demographics aren’t there to support continued growth. Yes immigration is a thing but most immigrants don't move to Australia with $4 million(AUD) in the bank to continue fueling the boom.
There’s plenty of growth, it just isn’t going to the people who work for a living, even if they’re highly educated, highly skilled, and working long hours.
Back in the day on would get into the top 1% by getting a good degree and working hard. And getting a good degree and job was a function of who and where you were born.
Now that is even more amplified.
Most young people will become rich by inheritance in US.
Yeah, to be clear, I don’t mean that as a “them damned boomers!” post. They’re not to blame for circumstances conspiring to put life on (relatively) easy mode for them. If they’re guilty of anything (at least, many of them) it’s failing to appreciate how much harder it’s gotten to achieve what they’d consider a basic, unremarkable, ordinary, comfortable middle-class life.
Locally though there are areas that have grown quite a bit compared to others, the average misses nuance. LA has grown by a million people since 1970, while chicago has lost almost as much in that time. Are things more affordable than Chicago in Southern California? Certainly not, even if economically speaking the region is "more productive" by whatever measure.
Really what makes things cheap is a simple formulaic application of supply and demand to things like housing, which takes up the bulk of the American take home pay bar almost nothing else in comparison. Boomers had things cheap not because of riding off a population boom, but a home building boom, that zoning changes in the decades since have made impossible to replicate.
Same sentiment, closer to the actual concept of a nation state.
Or maybe, “my kids can’t have grandkids, so I’ll just adopt myself some.” The reasonable question you have to ask isn’t “how do I adopt more grandkids?” It’s “Why can’t MY kids have their own kids?”