Those 60-year-olds existed in a brief and exceptional moment of wealth creation brought about by factors that are unlikely to happen again in ours or our children's lifetime. The problem being that the American ethos decided to pretend that brief moment was normal and sustainable.
The factors of millions of men (workers) dying in war while the country itself was untouched, and all of Europe being bombed, leading to cheap land, increased demand for labor, and a powerful dollar. We just have to nuke Europe and cull a bit of our own people too and we'll be in the golden age again. Or we have to get used to it.
> The factors of millions of men (workers) dying in war while the country itself was untouched,
Less than half a million Americans died in WW2. For American demographics, the war was a footnote, unlike the utter devastation it inflicted on Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia, the USSR.
They burned non-renewable resources at an unsustainable pace, like nothing ever seen before in history, resources that took millions of years for the Earth to produce, gone in a century, to make themselves wealthy - among other things.
But a huge portion of what they burned those resources to produce was energy—both to generate electricity, and to power their vehicles.
We now have renewable energy sources for both of these things spinning up faster than ever. It won't be all that long before we can generate a majority of our energy with clean power that doesn't require consuming any non-renewable resources.
No; much more important differences between then and now are the top marginal tax rates and the labor power.
You might want to qualify this with start to buy a house and get a mortgage and then pay off when older than 20s-30s.
I think some people in the comments are thinking you are saying they could outright buy a house straight out of school! (Which in a way might be a symptom explained in the article!
It should be noted the house my parents bought in their early 40s was a 3 bedroom, 1 bath, with no air conditioning. The school district was so-so, the lot wasn't very big, and the economy in that city at the time was declining. Most young people wouldn't be too interested in that today.
(Interestingly the cost of housing in the Bay Area back then - late 1980s - was the same as that Rust Belt city; we almost ended up there.)
My parents bought their house cash. No they were not high earners and not even median income earners. Yes the house is now worth close to a million dollars.
Buying a house in their 20s... are you serious? If true and not just an urban myth, that must have been a US specific thing, maybe caused by the exceptional situation of the US coming out as the biggest winner of WW2. Anywhere else in the world you could be lucky to even move out of your parent's rented flat in your 20s ;)
PS: also, what's the obsession of young people with home ownership
It was a US-specific thing created by massive post-war infrastructure investment (read: suburban sprawl) and cheap automobiles.
This entire problem more or less resolves to the cost of land. It became effectively super-cheap post-WW2 for the aforementioned reasons. Now we've run out that runway and will face rolling bankruptcies across all sorts of municipalities due to infra maintenance costs.
Working class parents in their 20s in the USA could afford to buy their own homes well into the 2000s. Some got burned by cyclical factors, high interest, etc...; but many still achieved sustained lifetime home ownership.
China is arguably currently also in an exceptional situation though. The question is how long that lasts. The next generation or the one after will most likely also complain that their parents were much better off when they were young ;)
The German equivalent is that everybody is complaining about rising rents in city centers because everybody wants to live in city centers. Home ownership in Germany basically means that you'll have to pay it off for the rest of your life anyway (and that's not a new phenomenon) so in the end there isn't all that much difference to renting finance-wise, except that renting is usually much less hassle.
The usual distinction between rent and mortgage is that your housing costs build equity when you are paying off your mortgage. Either way, your salary vanishes, but if you pay off the mortgage then you own a six-figure asset.
What the calculation looks like is extremely dependent on local constants, of course. I'm some countries, housing depreciates.
I purchased a house within commuting distance of Boston in my mid 20s, back in 2022. Didn't need PMI, the mortgage terms weren't unreasonable to me (fixed 5% interest), and the monthly payments for utilities plus the loan are still well within my means. It's even got an attached garage.
I don't want to get too specific here for privacy reasons, but I believe the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out and getting an apartment right away during/after college. With almost zero real expenses outside my student loans, and the median software engineer salary for the region, I was able to save enough for a down payment after just a couple years. I did this because I disliked the idea of having no equity and paying rent to offset someone else's mortgage instead of saving for my own. My parents really liked that reasoning.
In many respects I'm fundamentally an outlier, yet once I bought mine, my peers with much lower incomes started doing the same after I explained the financials. When they actually sat down and calculated the mortgage payments, they realized it wasn't that bad, as long as they got something on the smaller side, which is still bigger than an apartment anyway.
To be clear, housing costs were crazy and still are. But I sense "crazy" is pretty relative when talking to people online from other countries. Housing in the US is expensive, especially compared to various convenient periods within the last 100 years. But even now, it's not the unrealistic back-breaking dream it seems to be when I talk to Europeans about it, and I suspect that's why so many Americans on social media overestimate the costs.
According to census bureau data, 1 in 3 people aged 18-34 now live with parents, a huge change from past generations. So you're hardly an outlier in that respect.
> the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out
It was very clever of you to choose to be born to tolerable parents with enough spare cash to let you live with them and save up, rather than jerks or even just poor parents that needed your help as soon as you got a job.
> the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out
That is 'small' cheat code if parents tolerable. I have multiple peers which got much better life and places to live because lived with parents in their 20s.
It just doing napkin math and even if you live 5 years with parents and doing minimal savings (saving rent and part of food) you already poses good chunk of deposit when comes to buying property.
I reject your characterization of my comment. I explicitly called myself an outlier and said I didn't want to get too specific, so I'm not sure where you're getting "clever" from. I wasn't claiming credit for my circumstances. I was identifying the actual variable that separated my outcome from peers in similar circumstances, because that's useful information for anyone who does have that option available.
And plenty of people do. I know people who could live at home rent-free and chose apartments anyway because they wanted independence sooner. That's a legitimate preference, but it's still a tradeoff, and pretending the tradeoff doesn't exist because some people don't get the choice at all helps nobody. "Not everyone can do X" is true of literally every piece of financial advice ever given. It doesn't make X bad advice for the people who can.