[alephnerd]

Small anecdote.

In the 1990s and 2000s, it was very rare to travel abroad - a Eurotrip or Japan trip was a once in a lifetime experience. Nowadays, my entire friend group in the mid 20s-early 30s have traveled to Europe and Japan multiple times, as well as further afield, and an Amex Gold or Platinum card or a Chase Sapphire is very common among 20 year olds now.

Travel, quality of housing, etc have all risen among our cohort compared to Gen X or older millennials at a similar age (millenial hipsters were living in Brooklyn in the 2010s because they were broke. Gen X grungeheads were living in CapHill/Mission in the 1990s because they were broke).

Gen Z is at most 25. Give them 5-10 years and they themselves will end up buying property, especially because a lot of Gen X parents and Boomer grandparents do help out.

The article also takes your point into account:

“Some Gen Zers protest, claiming that higher incomes are a mirage since they do not account for the exploding cost of college and housing. After all, global house prices are close to all-time highs, and graduates have more debt than before. In reality, though, Gen Zers are coping because they earn so much. In 2022 Americans under 25 spent 43% of their post-tax income on housing and education, including interest on debt from college—slightly below the average for under-25s from 1989 to 2019.”

[Free-is-Freedom]

This is an important anecdote because it illustrates the stark divide between "making it" and "not making it" in the current era. The people who make it get unprecidented luxury but the people who don't make it live in slums.

People who "make it" often feel like their path was trivial. While people who haven't "made it" often feel like finding the path to success is impossible because it lies in their past or was never accessible to them.

It's easy to maintain your habits and it's extremely hard to change your life's course.

[danjayh]

You're ignoring one of the biggest things in the divide between the 'haves' and the 'broke': many of Gen-Z are deciding not to have kids, despite the negative effects that this profoundly selfish act has on society. Much easier to live a luxury lifestyle if you're not spending $50k/year on childcare, buying an extra 500-900sqft of housing, buying food for an extra 2-3 people, buying a car with a third row, and buying a never-ending stream of car seats, clothes, toys, diapers, shoes, books, gadgets, etc.

These same selfish people will be angry when any break at all is given to a colleague do to family circumstances (daycare closed for the day? kids have the flu?), but will expect to be taken care of just like the rest of us when they get old, despite the fact that they didn't contribute any children into the labor pool to provide for that care.

[capra1]

Very selfless of you to have children you didn't actually want in order to improve the labor pool for society. Do you tell them you only had them to keep the economy running, or do you keep that information to yourself?

[alephnerd]

Exactly.

Expectations of "middle class" life have inflated.

We can afford a single family house with the picket fence - but it won't be in Fillmore or Brooklyn anymore, because they are now luxury neighborhoods.

We can afford multiple vacations, but it needs to be abroad, not the Catskills or Redneck Riviera.

We can afford to eat out, but it's not going to be McDs or fast casual - it has to be fancy and instagram worthy.

> finding the path to success is impossible because it lies in their past or was never accessible to them

Exactly.

A subset of Gen X and Boomers did very well in the 1980s-2010s. Their kids are Gen Zs who rail against boomers but will gladly take their parents help to buy a condo or townhouse in SF or Manhattan.

Intergenerational wealth is now a thing, and isn't going to change.

[sokoloff]

> Intergenerational wealth is now a thing

Hasn't it always been a thing, though?

I'm sorry for people whose family is not in a position to, or chooses not to, help them, but I think it's always been pretty common (albeit not universal) for parents to support their offspring.

[alephnerd]

I agree, but I think a lot of Americans never had that kind of a strong family unit helping each other out.

Until the 2010s, it was fairly socially expected that you'd move out of your parents house at 18 and either find a job or go to college, and do all that on your own dime.

It was always a weird concept for me coming from an immigrant family where we all pitch in together to help each other, but a relatively large minority of Americans (maybe 15-20% actively chose not to) and a large majority (maybe 20-30%) didn't have the means to.

[RestlessMind]

Based on what my American friends told me, I think it was only a couple of generations of Americans where that was true. Before that, Americans too had stronger familial bonds. No first hand knowledge though.

[alephnerd]

Depends on how old you are.

If you're in your 20s-30s, best case your grandparents grew up in the 1950s-60s - which absolutely wasn't a walk in the park, but the average American was miles away the richest person on the planet back then, and the "nuclear" family was the structure of choice (that's why it's called the nuclear family - 1950s techno-optimism a la Fallout)

On the other hand, if your family immigrated then the familial ties based system continued to exist.

[drewcoo]

>> Intergenerational wealth is now a thing

>Hasn't it always been a thing, though?

Family size is a factor.

[Free-is-Freedom]

Indeed. I would even go so far as to say that we're Min-Maxing society, and through this process we're eliminating the middle class

[alephnerd]

Pretty much.

American society now has the same kind of "me-me-me" mentality I see in Asia (both developed like Japan or Singapore, or developing like China and India), the Americas (Mexico, Brazil, Colombia), or Eastern Europe (Israel, Ukraine, Russia, Romania, etc).

The only way to succeed in this kind of a society is to be ruthless. Most Americans are NOT. You even see that here on HN, with people complaining about educated Immigrants doing better than educated Americans.

You need to be ruthless in a low trust society, and it's the same now in the US.

[wumeow]

Was this mentality imported by said immigrants or home-grown?

[alephnerd]

It's home grown.

People like to blame immigrants or the "other" but at the end of the day, society has specialized.

Either you build the skills to specialize, or you don't and wither away.

This has happened in every country from Japan to Jordan.

The difference is, lots of people in countries like Japan or Jordan still remember how actual poverty feels like, and will work their hardest to prevent something like that.

Most Americans have now grown up with 3 generations of surplus.

It was always the immigrants that did the dirty work and eventually assimilated - look at anti-Italian, anti-Mexican, anti-Japanese, anti-Armenian, anti-Jewish, anti-Slavic .... sentinment in the US.

Their kids eventually assimilate and also lose that ruthlessness.

[pcthrowaway]

Traveling abroad can be cheaper than traveling in the U.S. Sure, you spend more money on flights than you might on gas, but you can afford to stay for a month in, say, Thailand for what you might spend on 3 nights of accommodation in the U.S, and you can eat out for all your meals on $30/day if you're savvy

That, and people in their 20s and 30s are much less likely to have kids than people of the same age group in the '90s, so the logistics around traveling abroad can be much easier. The increasing interconnectedness of the world has similarly provided much more exposure to the international world, while technology (including things like airbnb and google translate) have removed many of the barriers.

I don't think more "elder gen z" and millenials are traveling abroad because they're overall more well-off. Housing is much less affordable and I think this is part of the reason we're seeing a decline in birth rates.

[alephnerd]

> you can afford to stay for a month in, say, Thailand

That's why I gave examples of Western Europe (London, Paris) and Japan (Tokyo).

The prices on arrival are the same as traveling to Austin or Dallas.

I love traveling to Thailand or Vietnam, but most American travelers aren't going there.

> That, and people in their 20s and 30s are much less likely to have kids than people of the same age group in the '90s

Aka, higher disposable income compared to their peers in past cohorts.

This is actually a good point and something I don't think was brought up in the article - my parents had me in their 20s. I probably won't have kids til my late 30s.

Kids are very expensive.

[pcthrowaway]

London and Paris are two of the most expensive cities in Europe (maybe the top 2 if you ignore Switzerland) so I agree if you're talking about people going there.

But the majority of Europe is cheaper than the majority of the U.S. (think Greece or Spain or Portugal or even most of Germany)

Japan also is much cheaper to travel in than the U.S.

Personally most people I know who do international traveling have avoided London and Paris due to the high cost of travel.

[mattpallissard]

> Kids are very expensive.

I have five. They don't have to be.

[alephnerd]

True! And don't take my statement as an assumption against parenthood. It just requires good planning and maturity, and some people (rightfully) recognize they don't have the maturity needed yet.

[mattpallissard]

> don't take my statement as an assumption against parenthood

No worries, I didn't.

[toshinoriyagi]

“Some Gen Zers protest, claiming that higher incomes are a mirage since they do not account for the exploding cost of college and housing. After all, global house prices are close to all-time highs, and graduates have more debt than before. In reality, though, Gen Zers are coping because they earn so much. In 2022 Americans under 25 spent 43% of their post-tax income on housing and education, including interest on debt from college—slightly below the average for under-25s from 1989 to 2019.”

The author is using a poor metric to compare. It is not the % of income spent on housing that matters, but the % spent per unit housing quality. If you compare a boomer and a gen Zer, both spending X% of their income on housing, what quality housing is that getting them in comparable areas?

My girlfriend's parents could each afford their rent on two shifts of waiting tables when they were young, and they lived in nice areas of San Diego. Trying that today will have you living in a bad area with roommates.