This article mentions changing demographics, aging population etc.
While the number are out there, I've always found the below story (to the best of my recollection), illustrates what life was like for someone born in the early 1950s:
- "I went to brand new schools built during the start of the baby boom. All of the teachers were excellent b/c this was before women started entering the workforce"
- "I got into an Ivy League school b/c acceptance rates were around 50% due to the Eisenhower funding getting cut so the schools needed more students to cover the lost funds"
- "I got a job from looking in the paper and started a few weeks after graduating from college"
- "Six months after I started, my boss retired at 55. So there I was at age 22 with a management role and a secretary"
I think about this story often whenever someone mentions demographics and/or the economy and why young people are spending more time living at home after college.
I know several people who finished grad school and entered the workforce in the 1960s. Compared to later generations, they do seem to have lived a charmed life.
I think your points dont sound quite right.
* Yes there were lots of new schools in the suburbs but does that make education better? Were men better teachers than women of today?
* Ivy league were much easier to get in if you had the right background, but very few poor/middle class people applied or could afford it.
* The last two years are tough but still most grads work after graduation
* The retirement age was much higher in the old days. https://www.statista.com/statistics/319983/average-retiremen.... People are promoted much more quickly now, in the old days you had to work your way up over time.
The teachers weren't men, they were all women. Back in those days, educated women had only 2 professions available to them: nurse or schoolteacher. Anything else was basically off-limits. So schools were full of very smart women who didn't want to be a nurse and didn't have any other career opportunities.
OP is saying that teaching (at primary / secondary level) was one of the few professional jobs available to women so women teachers in that era were more likely to be overqualified.
I can confirm through my family’s history that coming of age in that era was also life on easy mode for very-poor white men who moved to the city early and were willing to able to show up to work consistently. No degree needed. Everyone who fit that description did really damn well, often despite multiple mistakes the presence of which in a bio would mean fucked finances for life for someone today.
Pensions were magical and housing was cheap. Powerful combo.
> All of the teachers were excellent b/c this was before women started entering the workforce"
Additionally and probably more important it was before the takeover of the teaching academies by political activists who have turned these institutions away from a) teaching and b) subject matter into activist training camps churning out missionaries for the cause. It takes a strong character to survive there without being turned into a minion.
Since this article is just a list of thoughts, a few other ideas:
- Dual incomes. It was easier to move when only the father worked.
- In the 1960s (which this article uses as a baseline) 70% of households had cars and this number was growing. It is 90% now and is stable. Everyone getting a car made previously unlivable spots livable (and cheap), but there haven't been as many innovations since.
- Laws like prop 13 in California gave people incentive to stay in their abode or face rising tax rates. In California that was passed in 1978, but other states have similar laws.
- Measurement error. The stat of Americans "living at home" includes students who live in dorms 6 months a year. 50 years ago these young people maybe moved to a city and waited tables. I'd argue that going to college could at least sorta count as moving. At the very least, more people going to college skews the results.
> Dual incomes. It was easier to move when only the father worked.
This is the biggest one. IBM, for example, used to be a moniker for "I've Been Moved". What the wife did simply wasn't considered.
> In the 1960s (which this article uses as a baseline) 70% of households had cars and this number was growing
70% of households had a single car. People have forgotten what a pain coordinating around that was.
> Laws like prop 13 in California gave people incentive to stay in their abode or face rising tax rates.
Not really. A person only lives so long. In addition, houses were turning over at a decent rate in California as people tended to use the previous house to afford the next house.
The real problem with Prop 13 is on commercial real estate because ownership can outlast human lifespan. When I was in the Bay Area, commercial real estate would have something like 15+ layers of subleases in order to get around Prop 13.
Home prices have almost quadrupled in California since 2000.
If you bought a house in California in 2000 for $250,000 you are only paying taxes on it as if it is worth $360,000, due to prop 13, even though it may be worth closer 1M.
If you want to move to a different equivalent house that is the same market value, your monthly tax payment would triple so you probably just dont move. If you want to downsize your tax rate would still likely go up.
Even if you bought a house five or ten years ago the same general pattern disincentivizes moving quite a bit.
This lock in effect was not present in California in the 1960s.
Another big thing was "industry towns" - if you wanted to build cars, you moved to Detroit. If you wanted to do "that computer thing" you moved to silly valley, etc.
There's still some of that, but everything is much more mixed - you can get a quite decent "tech job" in almost any city now, and that's not even counting remote work.
> In California that was passed in 1978, but other states have similar laws.
California is pretty unique with prop 13. No other state will as drastically limit property tax increases except maybe in very niche cases (eg elderly who are not rich).
The working couple makes a big difference. If you have the traditional stay-at-home wife a family can much more easily move with a job or for a new job. With two jobs involved its nearly impossible. Also a reason why so many people want to live in bigger cities rather than small places.
I bet mobility is part of why nursing and teaching remain ultra-popular for women. They offer more flexibility than normal for time off for raising a family, and both are remarkably good as a supplementary job to a higher-earning spouse, because of their relatively high mobility—every place has schools and hospitals, more or less, and if they don’t there are no other jobs there anyway. Good options for the do-both-career-and-semi-traditional-family-thing set, which is probably a pretty large proportion of preferences (not saying a majority, but enough to explain the high interest in those careers)
Nursing’s the better of the two from that perspective, but re-licensing as a teacher in a new state is usually not that bad, and once you’ve got that you will find a job if you’re anything but terrible at it.
My wife teaches Chinese, and this is spot on our situation. Schools and language centers are always hiring. She usually has 1-2 private online students she tutors (generally adults who are learning Chinese for fun). As long as she commits to a semester at a time and doesn't leave in the middle of her semester, she can always return to her job. If we have kids, she can go part-time or be a full-time mom for a few years. Every school teaches the same stuff, so it's not like she has to "keep up" like I do as an engineer and learn new things every few years.
Her income is a lot less than mine, but the extra cash is nice. We've set up our life so we don't NEED the money she brings in so if it ever goes away we'll never panic.
Demographics aside, there’s lots of intertwined things mentioned here but the strongest thing is the mortgage.
As soon as your house becomes too precious to simply leave behind without thinking much of it, mobility is lost.
Cheap housing and the resulting mobility was the key difference between fast growing US and stagnant Europe.
Now that advantage is gone and it looks pretty impossible to go back to it.
The solutions there are extremely straightforward and uncomplicated in a technical sense (such as overriding local zoning and permitting to allow hihg-density construction everywhere). The barriers to it are purely political.
As an EU citizen I suggest a note: some EU countries have HIGH succession taxes, some have NONE. Those with high succession taxes historically have a much moving population than those who have none, historically, not anymore.
The world change and it's not taxes making people move, I think it was Churchill who say taxing is like putting feet in a bucket and trying lifting alone pulling the handle, that true. To have a dynamic economy we need an evolutionary mood. We need tech changes, and INDIVIDUAL ability to change.
In a world where few big actors own anything and all others essentially conform to their offer or die they can't be no mobility, the economy can't work for long.
I've moved because I've look for something else, in a world where anything is the same and from Tokyo to New York you see the same buildings, brands etc, why moving? In a world where anything is decided by giants why moving, I can't create anything or at least creating small things that work demand much effort for little results with a looming Damocles sword of some big who might want to erase or not my creation.
Without a middle class, rich enough to have margin to move autonomously experimenting, falling and still being afloat without having water up to the throat there is no dynamism. It's the very opposite of the current economic vision, people do not move effectively because they are forced by the economy, people move because they want. Forcing means just trying to replicate a phenomenon without having a clue about it's nature.
the rise of remote working might be one reason. The commute to work is one less thing remote workers and hybrid-workers have to worry about.
personally, the amount of quality and human-friendly housing is getting more rare than I'd like. Newer apartments feel cold and unnatural, it almost feels like paying a lot of money to rent a prison cell. Renovated or flipped houses also seem to use the same material: lots of grey and white, and that infamous grey-ish/black-ish vinyl faux-wood flooring. No trees. What vegetation I see is well kept grass.
Housing in general, while it maybe a good investment if you own it. To live in a rented or owned house alike feels like entering into a long term contract with low return on investment.
I fear this would get only worse, because the government will build lots of new apartments and incentivize builders to build lots of cookie-cutter houses.
If you have safe and secure housing and you're ok with your commute and job-search situation, there isn't much reason to move unless you're building a house or you're lucky enough to find an HOA-free community.
Doing genealogy I've seen a pattern (my own relatives) of moving, post Civil War, to the midwest where I think there was plenty of land to farm.
Then they moved from rural communities to cities around the beginning of the 20th Century. Jobs were plenty in the cities and perhaps they had no desire to continue farming like their parents.
Post-WWII there was some migration westward (California, etc.). Perhaps the jobs and lifestyle appealed to my midwestern relatives. No doubt the interstates and car proliferation contributed.
But college, jobs, and opportunity have continued to send myself, my father, mother, sister to the four corners of the U.S.
Recently I am aware of relatives moving from places like California to places with more affordable housing.
> perhaps they had no desire to continue farming like their parents.
I think it is also that making a living in farming became harder. I had an ancestor who was a small farmer in the 1880s-90s, and his career was one of increasing prosperity. His son worked just as hard but it was a struggle, and he eventually lost the farm in the late 1920s and went to work at a factory.
It might be as simple as the regional options that middle-American households can afford have decreased. For example, in 1990, the median home price in California was 10x the median household income in West Virginia. Today, the gap has increased to 16x. Meaning that even fewer West Virginian households can include California as an option to move to as 25 years ago.
These people you propose are renters, not buyers. I don't entirely discount the impact of CoL differences (moving to California is pretty annoying from that perspective, and I've done it twice), but it's not the barrier you're suggesting.
Readit News
While the number are out there, I've always found the below story (to the best of my recollection), illustrates what life was like for someone born in the early 1950s:
- "I went to brand new schools built during the start of the baby boom. All of the teachers were excellent b/c this was before women started entering the workforce"
- "I got into an Ivy League school b/c acceptance rates were around 50% due to the Eisenhower funding getting cut so the schools needed more students to cover the lost funds"
- "I got a job from looking in the paper and started a few weeks after graduating from college"
- "Six months after I started, my boss retired at 55. So there I was at age 22 with a management role and a secretary"
I think about this story often whenever someone mentions demographics and/or the economy and why young people are spending more time living at home after college.
The teachers weren't men, they were all women. Back in those days, educated women had only 2 professions available to them: nurse or schoolteacher. Anything else was basically off-limits. So schools were full of very smart women who didn't want to be a nurse and didn't have any other career opportunities.
OP is saying that teaching (at primary / secondary level) was one of the few professional jobs available to women so women teachers in that era were more likely to be overqualified.
This is what life was like for privileged white men born in the early 1950s.
Pensions were magical and housing was cheap. Powerful combo.
Additionally and probably more important it was before the takeover of the teaching academies by political activists who have turned these institutions away from a) teaching and b) subject matter into activist training camps churning out missionaries for the cause. It takes a strong character to survive there without being turned into a minion.
- Dual incomes. It was easier to move when only the father worked.
- In the 1960s (which this article uses as a baseline) 70% of households had cars and this number was growing. It is 90% now and is stable. Everyone getting a car made previously unlivable spots livable (and cheap), but there haven't been as many innovations since.
- Laws like prop 13 in California gave people incentive to stay in their abode or face rising tax rates. In California that was passed in 1978, but other states have similar laws.
- Measurement error. The stat of Americans "living at home" includes students who live in dorms 6 months a year. 50 years ago these young people maybe moved to a city and waited tables. I'd argue that going to college could at least sorta count as moving. At the very least, more people going to college skews the results.
This is the biggest one. IBM, for example, used to be a moniker for "I've Been Moved". What the wife did simply wasn't considered.
> In the 1960s (which this article uses as a baseline) 70% of households had cars and this number was growing
70% of households had a single car. People have forgotten what a pain coordinating around that was.
> Laws like prop 13 in California gave people incentive to stay in their abode or face rising tax rates.
Not really. A person only lives so long. In addition, houses were turning over at a decent rate in California as people tended to use the previous house to afford the next house.
The real problem with Prop 13 is on commercial real estate because ownership can outlast human lifespan. When I was in the Bay Area, commercial real estate would have something like 15+ layers of subleases in order to get around Prop 13.
If you bought a house in California in 2000 for $250,000 you are only paying taxes on it as if it is worth $360,000, due to prop 13, even though it may be worth closer 1M.
If you want to move to a different equivalent house that is the same market value, your monthly tax payment would triple so you probably just dont move. If you want to downsize your tax rate would still likely go up.
Even if you bought a house five or ten years ago the same general pattern disincentivizes moving quite a bit.
This lock in effect was not present in California in the 1960s.
Source:https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CASTHPI
There's still some of that, but everything is much more mixed - you can get a quite decent "tech job" in almost any city now, and that's not even counting remote work.
No, you moved to Boston.
California is pretty unique with prop 13. No other state will as drastically limit property tax increases except maybe in very niche cases (eg elderly who are not rich).
Nursing’s the better of the two from that perspective, but re-licensing as a teacher in a new state is usually not that bad, and once you’ve got that you will find a job if you’re anything but terrible at it.
Her income is a lot less than mine, but the extra cash is nice. We've set up our life so we don't NEED the money she brings in so if it ever goes away we'll never panic.
The solutions there are extremely straightforward and uncomplicated in a technical sense (such as overriding local zoning and permitting to allow hihg-density construction everywhere). The barriers to it are purely political.
The world change and it's not taxes making people move, I think it was Churchill who say taxing is like putting feet in a bucket and trying lifting alone pulling the handle, that true. To have a dynamic economy we need an evolutionary mood. We need tech changes, and INDIVIDUAL ability to change.
In a world where few big actors own anything and all others essentially conform to their offer or die they can't be no mobility, the economy can't work for long.
I've moved because I've look for something else, in a world where anything is the same and from Tokyo to New York you see the same buildings, brands etc, why moving? In a world where anything is decided by giants why moving, I can't create anything or at least creating small things that work demand much effort for little results with a looming Damocles sword of some big who might want to erase or not my creation.
Without a middle class, rich enough to have margin to move autonomously experimenting, falling and still being afloat without having water up to the throat there is no dynamism. It's the very opposite of the current economic vision, people do not move effectively because they are forced by the economy, people move because they want. Forcing means just trying to replicate a phenomenon without having a clue about it's nature.
personally, the amount of quality and human-friendly housing is getting more rare than I'd like. Newer apartments feel cold and unnatural, it almost feels like paying a lot of money to rent a prison cell. Renovated or flipped houses also seem to use the same material: lots of grey and white, and that infamous grey-ish/black-ish vinyl faux-wood flooring. No trees. What vegetation I see is well kept grass.
Housing in general, while it maybe a good investment if you own it. To live in a rented or owned house alike feels like entering into a long term contract with low return on investment.
I fear this would get only worse, because the government will build lots of new apartments and incentivize builders to build lots of cookie-cutter houses.
If you have safe and secure housing and you're ok with your commute and job-search situation, there isn't much reason to move unless you're building a house or you're lucky enough to find an HOA-free community.
Then they moved from rural communities to cities around the beginning of the 20th Century. Jobs were plenty in the cities and perhaps they had no desire to continue farming like their parents.
Post-WWII there was some migration westward (California, etc.). Perhaps the jobs and lifestyle appealed to my midwestern relatives. No doubt the interstates and car proliferation contributed.
But college, jobs, and opportunity have continued to send myself, my father, mother, sister to the four corners of the U.S.
Recently I am aware of relatives moving from places like California to places with more affordable housing.
I think it is also that making a living in farming became harder. I had an ancestor who was a small farmer in the 1880s-90s, and his career was one of increasing prosperity. His son worked just as hard but it was a struggle, and he eventually lost the farm in the late 1920s and went to work at a factory.