All these examples are on timescales of 70+ years. That's kind of meaningless to me, a millenial, looking at all wealth having already been bundled up. Living in cities or owning a house? Barely affordable, even with an average tech salary. I don't even want to assume how shitty things would be if I made below 50k like most of my peers.
You could make a very similar list focusing on income, cost of living and relative buying power on a timescale of 50 years or another on the environment on a scale of 20 years and both would be quite depressing.
It feels very "well actually" wishful thinking by someone well off enough to ignore all the cracks.
At least it doesn't feel quite as deliberately misleading as the Steven Pinker "we redefined the poverty line, look at all the poverty that's going away" slight of hand.
There was a brief time post WW2 in the US where housing was affordable. Prior to WW2 housing was extraordinarily expensive and people saved most their lives to buy a house, then lost it during the Great Depression. Most people lived in generational homes or were largely housing insecure. Most of the world never experienced the home glut we experienced in the US post WW2, that has tapered off in the last 20 years. However to be completely fair, we are only talking about a small number of cities on the coast that are unaffordable.
I also see this complaint from 2nd+ generation Americans. The 1st generation immigrant families I know save their money meticulously and end up buying one, two, three houses and renting them out. They do this amazing feat by saving almost all of their income and forgoing all luxuries for 10 years, then renting the rooms of the house they buy out, using the income to buy the second house that’s rented out, etc. They live a life of wise frugality, never drinking an espresso drink or watching Netflix, and scrupulously managing their income and savings - on accountant and K12 teacher incomes. The truth is you can buy a place for $700k in say Seattle for $140k down payment, which if you save 50% of your net income making a dual income of $120k/year takes less than 10 years.
Read the Jungle for a sense of what housing felt like pre-WW2. Compare it to what I described above happens today. Ask yourself what specifically is challenging you compared to other succeeding at it today and those succeeding at it 100 years ago. Maybe hold the post war era as a blip and outlier, and draw a line between you and the past without letting the outlier dominate your perception of your lot in life. Or move somewhere other than San Francisco.
I don't know, could be all the people seeing housing as an investment rather than a basic nescessity.
Prices literally went up by a cool 100% or so over the past 5 years or so (if you account for the now ludicrous financing rates; 62% in raw prices) in Germany.
Housing in Cologne cost 3451 EUR/m² in 2017. We're currently up to 5508 EUR/m². Morgage rates went from ~1.2% pa to almost 4% pa over the past 3 years.
Housing has always been seen as an investment. Hence the idea of “land lords” and property owners being the wealthy, able to turn dividends from their property ownership. Mark Twain advised “buy real estate, they’re not making any more of it.” (N.b., never take investing advice from mark twain) what has changed is that real estate investing has become an anymans game rather than the elite. But the fact you can take your own capital and buy an asset (investment by definition) and that investment can be turned around and rented out to form a cash flow makes it a legitimate investment. If you think home prices are outrageous, then compare the rent rates vs the monthly mortgage rates for the same property. You should see mortgage rates are slightly higher because housing has an embedded utility as a basic necessity as well as a cash flow, but they shouldn’t be too far off. If mortgage rate >> rent, you’re in a bubble of asset valuation driven by speculation on home price appreciation - what you’re discussing - and you should stay away from buying as either rents will rise or prices will drop. If rent >> mortgage rates, you’re in a home price depression and smart money would be to buy or build houses and rent them out. Regardless, the ability to rent property you own is the fundamental driver of home price appreciation, not speculation that prices will continue to go up. In fact, given it’s a durable basic necessity that can be transferred without impairment after use (unlike food, which turns into poop) and at least retains value if not increase in value, I don’t see how it could help but be an investment.
Ultimately supply is the only way to decrease price.
Supply? Like the thousands of vacant crumbling homes in Germany's most expensive city, Hamburg, that are essentially held by investors for the appreciation of land value alone?
Look, I know the economics. I don't like them. Fundamentally. Housing shouldn't be owned, at least not at scale.
My comment was mostly to point how how asinine your "if you are persistent you can do it" point is, being that both rent and morgages are skyrocketing. My rent got raised by 14 percent (it's coupled to inflation, that used to be a better deal) and you'd need about 200k/yr (pre-tax) household income right now to even get approved for a morgage here. It's essentially impossible for a working class person, unless you're on the top few percent of (labor based) income. And those people tend to have substantial capital too. Tech salaries don't scale this far here.
> meaningless to me, a millenial, looking at all wealth having already been bundled up. Living in cities or owning a house? Barely affordable, even with an average tech salary
Well, you’re living. Without disease, war or famine. The world’s knowledge at your fingertips.
I’m about your age, and while there is a lot of work to be done, one of the most difficult hurdles to solving them is the nihilism and civic disengagement in our generation and industry. We’re sitting in a golden age of human achievement at the centre of the first world.
> could make a very similar list focusing on income, cost of living and relative buying power on a timescale of 50 years or another on the environment on a scale of 20 years and both would be quite depressing
Real wages have gone up over the last fifty and twenty years. Living in cities has become less affordable. But that you’re citing that as a standard of wellbeing, it’s a massive improvement from the post-War era.
What good is it when you have to perform one or multiple menial jobs every day just to exist. That lifestyle doesn't leave you with much mental energy at the end of a long work day to absorb and learn from the world's knowledge at your fingertips. Yes, some folks are probably able to pull themselves out of that situation - but those are edge cases.
On top of that the added anxiety people experience because of living paycheck to paycheck.
It's becoming more and more like in the movie Elysium - all the technological wonders are there - just not accessible to the poor.
Keep in mind that the mentioned "social housing factor" does exist, but it is also almost entirely in the hands of Gen X and older because building social housing had already stalled by that time.
It's not an "unfortunately", the U.S. population has increased 50% since 1980, using US census markers ~226m in 1980 to ~331m in 2020. It's an amazing benchmark to be at the same ownership rate despite growing this much in such a short time frame.
Further, ownership going beyond certain numbers does not necessarily mean good either.
This is all a function of supply in a market. Harvard and more have done studies. The govt making loans basically free crushed the market, the solution is more housing.
K12 teacher should easily afford housing. Especially with a spouse and summer job, for crying out loud!
"Have some imagination" or some perspective is exactly what I'd tell anyone telling me the same.
Finding a song was just different and a leisure commodity, people are still buying records. Directions were a similar task 50+ years ago as they were in the 90s, not that challenging to live day to day without Google Maps.
I think those are all pretty lazy, very fathomable examples.
"Remember buying music on discs! So hard". No. No it wasn't.
I agree on a longer time scale, but my life and the lives of many I know is markedly worse than 5 years ago. Crime is up a LOT in NYC, and the subway for the first time in my lifetime feels sketchy during the day. Inflation has really hurt a lot of my lower SES friends, and there's a general nihilism that's pretty unpleasant.
Also, the mass shooting thing has gotten much worse in the last 30 years.
I hope your comment is being sarcastic, because if not, it really highlights how completely and utterly bonkers the discourse on school shootings has become in the USA. Your numbers do not take into account the thousands of students at each school (and surrounding schools), and their parents, that experience horrific trauma from shootings, which is simply not comparable to an accidental pool or car death.
I'm living with a disabled father from a car accident. Decades to go caring for a completely disabled person. Many thousands of people every year are in pain from car accidents. Or medical malpractice which takes like a quarter million lives yearly.
No need to go on about extremely rare insane people that are almost all medicated. They would drive a truck through a crowd if not gun them down.
The numbers don't make sense, 200 vs millions impacted by other real problems
With the lack of unified empathy surrounding school shootings, it’s not surprising that millions of people are impacted by things like shitty healthcare, dangerous driving, relentless marketing for unhealthy lifestyles, etc. The shootings and its highly toxic discourse are symptoms of something very rotten.
School shootings in the USA absolutely eclipse every other first world nation combined. Also, 200 deaths equates to potentially hundreds of thousands of traumatised kids. With such fear permeating it’s not surprising that the system produces mentally unstable people that can’t access treatment.
Could you please stop posting slurs about my home town? You can make the point you're trying to make without inventing nonsense numbers for the murder rate in Chicago, which is a tragedy worth taking seriously rather than snarking about. Thanks.
The actual numbers for what's going on in Chicago are remarkably easy to get.
A society/group that entertains the idea that teachers should carry deadly weapons, to combat students carrying deadly weapons, is very warped, and an indication that something has gone very wrong for so many people to consider that as a viable solution. It is the “necessity” to carry weapons which is the problem in the first place.
I am sorry that one of your loved ones was involved in an accident and I am sure that is extremely painful to experience.
If the chances are so low, why is a gunless teacher considered defenceless? Why carry a gun unless you think there is a distinct chance that it will be need to be used? Probably because of the real possibility that there are students walking around with guns?
I went to a school with a bunch of psycho kids who carried knives. No one ever got stabbed, but it creates an emotionally unsafe environment the isn’t conducive of learning, or just being a kid. A feeling of violence and aggression permeates and grants the worst students an unreasonable level of power over everyone else. Do you think in this instance giving the teachers knives would actually make anyone feel at ease?
Schools have fire alarms, fire extinguishers, and regularly practice drills to evacuate in the case of a fire. It doesn't mean we have an crisis of schools catching on fire all the time. It's not unreasonable that one or two adults who are reasonably trained might have a firearm on campus. Firearms already exist in the world. Wishing them away won't make them disappear. Not to mention, shootings are only a fraction of the reasons you might need a firearm.
What if a kid is getting mauled by a dog, or a violent person wanders into the building and starts hurting people? Are you going to wait minutes for the police to show up when seconds count? It seems like all the pragmatic people have left the room whenever any kind of discussion about firearms comes up.
> If the chances are so low, why is a gunless teacher considered defenceless?
b-because your are taking away their gun... huh? Again: every time you go grocery shopping a substantial number of people around you are armed. You wouldn't know it.
> Why carry a gun unless you think there is a distinct chance that it will be need to be used?
You don't carry? You just carry. Do you carry pepper spray?
> Do you think in this instance giving the teachers knives would actually make anyone feel at ease?
I'd rather they have guns ???
Now that we have that solved we can talk about actual issues.
FYI, teachers are disarmed and that is a good thing. This argument just show how manipulative andnutterly lacking brain pro-mass shooting side of debate became.
It is perfectly valid for people to be angry about mass shootings, even if people die more from something else. It even actually rationally does not make sense to act like it is a gotcha.
Moreover, actually in USA deaths on roads went up
Moreover, there is large overlap between those who see mass shooting as issue and those who want walkable streets and the kind of zoning that promotes less driving.
The two tragedies don't have comparable psychological impacts. If all we cared about was minmaxing deaths, we'd work on nothing but CVD and automobile accidents.
And, of course, the number of kids shot in Chicago last month doesn't even resemble 200.
It seems to me that the points mentioned in the article didn't reflect many other ways of how truly better off we are, compared to literally every generation before us.
Also, yeah sure, houses now are more expensive relative to salaries (mostly in cities but it's true generally).
However, in almost any other metric, we own a lot more, and have much more options to thrive, we are safer and healthier, and ultimately we're much much better off.
The world is getting better, and witnessing people deny this fact is depressing.
Meh, shouldn't be so surprising should it? By your own admission, some things get better, but many aren't able to secure things that are deemed significant for a stable and healthy life.
Like woop-dee-doo I can access more information than ever, but it hasn't really helped me stay employed for longer than 1 and a half years, and it's mathematically extremely unlikely I'll ever be able to stop working.
There is some good chance, given potential volumes, you misunderstood for people mistaking aggregates what could be instead people not referring to aggregates but to downfalls of civilization surrounding them.
"Chatgpt, regenerate the same murder rate statistic 10 times. Do that with infant mortality too. Same with education. Now do poverty. Now speed of transportation. Create a similar sounding statistic about lightning strikes."
> In [Henry Kissinger's] concluding chapter, he issues a plea for a return to a broader humanistic education based on an engagement with philosophy, modern languages, history, literature, and classical antiquity. While American secondary schools and universities have become adept at educating, or, to put it more precisely, producing, activists and technicians, they have «wandered from their mission of forming citizens - among them potential statesmen». Whether this development can truly be arrested is an open question. The American mind has been closing for awhile. But in producing Leadership, which is old-fashioned in the best sense of the term, Kissinger has produced a potent reminder that great men and, yes, women can make history rather than remain passive observers helplessly buffeted about by contemporary events
~~~ Jacob Heilbrunn
Decline of the quality of education seen in many already leading Countries is producing weakened «citizens»; the consequences are massive, degrading quality of service and finally making entire classes of critical service fade into unusability.
The rigid consideration of aggregates like "more people in the world can read" reveals a potential of progress in long timespans and hides dire crises of immediate urgency.
--
Edit:
while I had other contexts in mind, it is an interesting coincidence that the current _topmost_ submission in HN is "Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?".
