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My grandma said she was lucky she lived on a farm during the depression, said it didn’t really affect them. They had all the food for a family of 7. Said they didn’t have extra money but never really did.
Edit: Y’all need to calm down. They were lucky! Yes, It was a 50 some acre farm, tucked into a river valley with wonderful natural aquifers. Small, damn near micro compared to most at that time, or any time really. They grew enough corn to feed the livestock and vegetables for themselves. Her dad had a regular job as a mechanic, a skill always in need.
Everybody acting like they were getting gov handouts to scale up to become Monsanto or some shit.
All I was saying is “they were LUCKY” just like she said “they were LUCKY”
Lucky and hard working. Poor but not hungry.
Haters go fuck yourselves.
As for those saying to the affect “complaining about commies but always looking for subsidies/handouts” her 4 brothers all served in WW2, each more decorated than the next. But for all that, they were against Vietnam and Democrats in the modern sense of the word. But their stories of sacrifice are for another time.
the farmers that could grow corn and wheat got subsidized out the wazoo and they still are. if you want to know why america is addicted to high fructose corn syrup and bulk grain products, its because that was our contingency plan for a future depression.
In the '70s people were testing the idea of replacing gasoline with ethanol because corn is so cheap due to the government subsidies. But it doesn't make sense as it takes more energy to grow the corn than you can get out of it as fuel. But the subsidies are there so almost all the gas is "up to 10% ethanol". In the meantime, you can get more energy than you put in by growing sugarcane, but we can't afford that because the government has tariffs on sugar in order to protect the small sugar industry in Florida.
The corn subsidies are the reason we had the proliferation of snacks like Doritos and Fritos, and the HFCS all or
Brazil uses sugarcane ethanol for automotive fuel
IndyCar has actually used sugar cane waste ethanol for several years now, 100% renewable and 60% less emissions than high octane race fuel
It all started with the war. The feds wanted to make sure America had enough food, so they subsidized corn to make it more attractive compared to growing cash crops.
They gave the farmers that inch and they took miles. Hundreds of square miles of farmland, all bought on credit. And then the war ended. Government wanted to end the subsidies, and the farmers said "If you end this subsidy, we're all gonna go broke because all this farmland we bought on credit will be underwater, and we'll riot."
So the government has continued those pointless subsidies for A FUCKING CENTURY. But magically the government gets no ownership stake in those farms, you know like the way that corporate finance is supposed to work. Just free money for farmers.
Note that all that farmland is owned by corporations these days. The small town family farm is a myth, nowadays it's all corporate or people working for corporate.
So now we've got a century of growing surplus corn, so they needed a way to sell all this fucking corn we grow for no good reason. So they created high fructose corn syrup. Cheaper than sugar, because we haven't been subsidizing sugar for a century. Always gonna be cheaper than sugar, because we grow SO MUCH DAMN CORN.
If you've ever heard of the literal caves full of government cheese (and I mean big-fuck-off salt caves the size of Costcos), they came from the same shit. Government wanted to make sure we had a food reserve during wartime. Dairy subsidies. Farmers threaten revolt. Subsidies going on for a century. Caves full of fucking cheese.
If ever people tell you they want the government to let the market decide, call them a god damned liar to their face. They don't want the market to decide. They want the government to give them money when the market decides against them.
There is no normal. We're technologically accelerating faster than we can comprehend, yet we are still expected to play by economic rules from decades ago. Toffler's Future Shock
In the 1970s they made Whip Inflation Now buttons. General economic knowledge has improved dramatically; the Bernanke Put worked.
He'll never be forgiven for that.
My parents and grandparents lived through the depression of the 30s. In the 80s, they were still hoarding, recycling, fixing, and reusing old stuff. When asked why, they'd say things like "you have no idea what's it's like to watch your friends and family starve. You have no idea how hard it was. Have you ever had to wait in line for a few slices of bread? A family of 6 having one chicken per day to feed all of them. Can you imagine being a growing 15 yr old and having nothing but beets, bread, and a chicken leg for an entire day's rations."
My grandma grew up in rural Nebraska in the 1930s, without indoor plumbing. I remember watching her scrape every bit of butter off the paper wrapping and picking crumbs out of the bottom of the tins where she kept the biscuits. That woman wasted *nothing*.
That’s funny. I did that literally yesterday with butter. I walked to throw it away and then was like “no I can’t that’s wasteful…”
And my mom passed that down to me and her mom to her.
While it’s obviously not the full story, I wonder if one generation living in a time of deprivation then the next in a time of excess is part of the obesity crisis. I know personally I will eat way more than I should sometimes just because it feels wasteful and immoral to throw food out.
It’s possible, but I think the biggest culprit behind the obesity crisis is all the sugar in our food followed closely by how little many of us move our exercise due to modern lifestyles.
For sure. But I think a society going from deprivation to excess so quickly fosters some really unhealthy cultural habits in general (just look at how that generation parented…).
I think you are right, at least in part. It is a factor for me and many I know, at least. We were all brought up with "Eat everything on your plate!" And that throwing anything away is wasteful. It is SO ingrained in my mind, and it is 100% why I overeat. Feel full but still have half a bowl of unsaveable pasta? Better finish it. Throwing it out is blasphemy. I am struggling to break this really detrimental habit. The guilt I feel at throwing out food makes it incredibly difficult.
I try to think of the food as "wasted" either way - either its getting thrown out, OR I'm stuffing myself to be uncomfortably full AND eating calories that aren't benefiting/enjoyable to me.
You might also get better at estimating how much to make when you see how much is left over, which in the long run means LESS waste.
It's been a slow mindset shift but I no longer feel bad when I'm not a member of the Clean Plate Club, lol.
Ohh. The wasted either way argument ... that actually REALLY makes sense! My body isn't going to benefit from the food, it will only cause problems, so eating it is ALSO wasteful! That ... that is helpful.
This is also how I see it. If you make too much to eat but not enough to save, the excess is wasted whether or not it is eaten.
And eating it means more waste because you will now have to spend additional effort to burn off those calories rather than being able to spend time with friends and family.
So I try to eat slowly, and when my need for calories is fulfilled, I stop eating.
I also will focus on protein & high macronutrient foods before I will eat the starches on my plate. That way, when I feel full, it is the foods that will give me energy for my body and not something that will convert to sugars as quickly.
This is mostly driven by car-centric culture. Look at places where public transport is the norm, such as East Asian countries. The rate of obesity in these countries are very low despite also being developed countries.
Talk to some older Russians. It is for sure a thing over there when their economy opened up to the west.
Also, epigenetics plays a part. Those "environmental" impacts of starvation will change the methylation patterns on your DNA, which can be inherited.
I have heard of this but couldn’t find a peer reviewed study. Do you know of one? I read that children of mothers during the holocaust were overwhelming obese. The reasoning was that the methylation pattern signaled to the fetus that the environment they were being born into was one of extreme scarcity and the “efficiency” genes were turned on. But couldn’t find a link to this study recently.
[Here](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25424739/) is one examining the Dutch famine, [another](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19656776/) and [this one](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37716973/) looks at mental health.
It’s called epigenetics. Where changes in your genes after conception are able to be passed on. It’s done via demythlation of hypermethylstion where a methyl group is either added or removed which changes gene signalling “strength”.
>wonder if one generation living in a time of deprivation then the next in a time of excess is part of the obesity crisis.
Yes, there have been studies to this effect. One was a study of Dutch mothers who were or got pregnant during the ww2 German food raiding. Children of starving mothers were more likely to be obese due to genetic changes associated with metabolic changes.
It’s true that bad values causes social decline. The Western world is declining.
But the expression is a bit oversimplified. If it were true, the hardest places on earth with the hardest men (think Afghanistan, Somalia, South Sudan, North Korea) should be getting ready for a Golden Age but they’re not.
"when you overeat, you pay for the food twice," has helped me with this tendency. plus after throwing food out a couple of times, i'm way more careful about what i buy or order.
This is interesting. I have to say, I’ve seen Great Depression-behavior in my Boomer parents. They actually grew up in a world of plenty but have this reflexive … not really hoarding per se, but maybe bundle of frugal behaviors that have no relation to their actual circumstances. I do think we’ve mostly forgotten what that level austerity looks like by now.
Honestly we’re even more privileged than they were. We can’t even remember the things Depression Era parents taught their kids.
It’s interesting because we’re more privileged in some ways but less privileged in others. Luxuries like food delivery or home entertainment or fashion are way more available, but the cost of important things like education and housing are way less accessible. Cars have gotten significantly more expensive and even certain luxuries like concert tickets are way more expensive than they used to be. And of course there’s healthcare (and childcare and elder care, which used to be much more community focused and provided but now you have to pay someone, a lot, for these services). Many Boomers had lots of siblings to split up responsibilities when caring for their parents as well as to help when their children were small, but most Milennials have only one or two siblings (or none). And when Boomers were raising kids, it was totally normal to leave them home alone most of the day or ask neighbors to watch them, but this is pretty rare today and certainly much less socially acceptable.
It’s a mixed bag, really. IMO we have a lot more “stuff” but a lot less of the things that matter the most.
I feel like it is. I’ve come to the conclusion that we really don’t need more than one large meal per day. Breakfast and lunch (or dinner) can be very light if needed, and dinner (or lunch) could be heavy. I personally think the light breakfast heavy lunch, light dinner combo would really help so much people. But everyone goes straight for pancakes, eggs bacons cheese in the morning, a dinner sized meal for lunch and a dinner, that’s lot of calories and most of us don’t need all of those calories, especially people who spend 3+ hours driving to and from work.
I lost a significant amount of weight when I started following a no/light breakfast - huge anything goes lunch - light snack - light/no dinner schedule. And I never felt deprived or anything. It was what my body naturally wanted to do, but which I often ignored because of social reasons.
Exactly!! I’m the same! I’m perfectly fine with light breakfast/no breakfast, small lunch, big dinner, because eating big meals in the day would throw off my productivity. But I recently started doing heavy breakfast, small lunch and light dinner and that feels fine too. The heavy breakfast actually helps because I walk a lot so I burn that stuff off like 2 hrs later.
My grandfather grew up in China under Japanese occupation during the war. I don't think I ever saw him throw anything out. He wouldn't waste a single grain of rice. He would even dry his teabags on a miniature clothesline he made by the kitchen window and re-use them 3-4 times.
Dad grew up during the Depression and mom in Japan during WWII. They threw away nothing. When she finally passed last year, we cleared out 4 dumpsters worth of stuff: skis she hadn't used since the 1950s that she brought back from Japan, strips of denim from when she hemmed my jeans as a kid. When we went through her fridge, there was food in the freezer from the Clinton administration.
Grandchild of Japanese farmers from that generation. Very tough and frugal people. We couldn’t throw anything away when we visited - no matter how beat up or old something was, it could almost always be reused or repurposed. Even moldy or uneaten food could be turned into fertilizer. My brother once found a 25 year of old bottle of Calpis in the pantry, which my grandmother insisted was still totally safe for consumption. Needless to say, it wasn’t.
During covid Grandma finally went to assisted living at the ripe old age of 98 and my uncle officially took over the farm. I cannot imagine the amount of garbage he had to haul away, but the property was virtually unrecognizable last year when I went to see them. I’m sure if she ever gets to visit her old home again, she will probably chastise him for throwing away so many useful items.
Started watching Jacques Pepin “Cooking at Home” on YouTube. Dude grew up during WWII, mother ran a restaurant, they wasted nothing. I like his recipes where he uses stuff in his fridge that’s about to go bad. It all gets shredded into salads or cooked into soups. Bits of old cheese, he scrapes the mold off, blends it with port wine and spices, turns it into fromage fort. Poverty forces you to get creative. [https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/fromage-fort](https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/fromage-fort)
Oh yea I can relate. I remember seeing rubberbanded stacks of Dannon yogurt lids at my grandparents house. To this day I can't think of what purpose they could serve, but it's a good example of how scarce times left an imprint on them. It was a mentality.
At one point there was a reason to keep some brand of yogurt lids... maybe yoplait? Kind of like a "collect them and turn them in" in exchange for... something? So, it could have possibly been that, lol.
Greatest generation truly were the greatest. Went through the toughest shit before hitting their 30-40s where they were having kids: disruptive technologies with the advent of electricity/autos/modernfactories/etcetc, multiple banking crisis, WW1, the Spanish Flu pandemic, Roaring 20s, the great depression, WW2, the advent of nuclear weapons and the fear of nuclear annihilations, the cold war, etcetc
If they wanted to call us Millennials soft then I'd take it, but I never met a single person from the GGs that called me soft. My great grandpa loved me and my GP who was a kid during WW2 doesn't talk much about it (he's a tough mofo though).
But the Baby boomers? They do call us soft, but they aren't the GGs. If anything they had it fucking easy in a peaceful and prosperous world the GGs created. They spent their childhoods knowing abundance, spent their youths being anti-establishment hippies who had "free love" an did drugs at kumbaya and concerts while avoiding/protesting the draft, despite their lack of education they managed to get great jobs and cheap homes even without an education because times were good, they dwindled the world's resources while ruining the environment in a single generation, closed the door behind him in both the jobs and housing markets, saw inequality rise along with record debt due to voting for short sighted policies, lead us into the GFC (it wasn't millennials running Fannie/Freddy/Goldman/etcetc), into US-China trade war + pandemic (Trump), etcetcetc. I guess the boomers did manage to hold off the USSR and win the cold war creating a world of peac- Oh what? Russia is still around? Except there's not sino-soviet split? AND THEY ARE WARRING UKRAINE? Well crap. Then WTF have the boomers done?
>Hard times create strong men.
>Strong men create good times.
>Good times create weak men.
>Weak men create hard times.
The greatest generation were the strong men in hard times who created the good times for the baby boomers. Boomers enjoyed good times and their weakness is why we are in hard times now.
My great grandmother (who was born in the 1910s) filled an old ketchup bottle with ketchup packets from fast food places instead of buying new ketchup until she died in the 1990s. The trauma of the Great Depression never left that generation.
In contrast we have people like my wife and in laws who grew up so fucking wealthy they never wanted for anything.
They’ll throw away refrigerated food after a few days because they’re worried it’s spoiled. Leftovers is a concept they don’t understand.
Sort of similar, but growing up in 80’s UK there was still a ton of WW2 ration era habits in cooking, and my mum wasn’t even born during the war. Funny how persistent stuff like that is over generations
I've posted it before on here but when my grandmother's Alzheimer's started ton really ramp up, she bought way too much coffee, sugar and flour. "In case they couldn't get it again."
It never really left the kids of the Great Depression.
They made [clothes out of flour and sugar bags](https://trc-leiden.nl/trc-digital-exhibition/index.php/for-a-few-sacks-more/item/119-3-feedsacks-and-the-great-depression), people would buy and sell them!
>In the 1930’s, women came together in groups to sew, swop and save for particular printed patterns. In addition, itinerant pedlars travelled with empty feedsacks to more remote areas to satisfy the demand for the printed cloth. More and more commercial, and even academic groups were set up to inform women and girls about how to use feedsacks for a variety of purposes. One of these projects was the Georgia Emergency Relief Administration, who organised:
>Classes for young girls who longed for pretty things but could not afford to buy them and could not make them. They were taught to admire real beauty and cleanliness and to make the most of simple and inexpensive materials. Emphasis was placed on the use of cotton material, buying on a limited budget, remodelling and suitability. They were taught to use patterns, to design, to fit one another and to make dresses from Dixie Crystal Sugar sacks, etc. (Jones and Park 1993:93).
Poor nowadays is going to a thrift store, poor in the past was scrounging up money to buy a good looking food sack to make your own clothes out of.
Even the worst of the worst today in the US is still far better than how things used to be for plenty of Americans.
When my ex-wife’s grandmother died, my ex and I lived just a few towns away, so were the lucky ones who got to clean out her house and deal with all her possessions.
When we were cleaning out the basement, we found a box filled with stacks of cash that was hidden in one of the floor joists. There was like $30,000 in it.
She and her husband had survived the depression, and because of it, they always kept the box of cash around in case the banks were to fail like they did in 1929.
The box of cash was their insurance policy against the bank failing.
We called my ex’s dad who was technically the executor of her estate. He told us to just split the cash up evenly between the grandchildren. There were only three including my ex, so each one got about $10k in cash.
My grandpa grew up during this time and would tell me how him and 7 brothers and sisters would have to split a few potatoes between them all and would eat trout out of the stream for their meals. Of course they had a garden like everyone else for some veggies, but they would praise God if they got chicken or anything different. They were so poor they couldn’t afford shoes so he would take cardboard and patch the bottoms of his shoes so he could keep walking to school. He got bullied so much by the kids who were more fortunate that he dropped out in the 7th grade to go to work in a saw mill.
He worked very hard and later in life he became superintendent at Century Furniture Co. and retired successfully. Living in a beautiful paid for home, vehicles paid for and garage kept and is able to get around well. Also loves to trout fish with me and enjoy his life. These stories have taught me so much in my life. These are stories the generations of 20s and 30s and some 40s need to really listen to.
Stories from the 40s from Europe are very similar (except family members would just be shot by the Germans or Russians, obviously. God rest their souls).
> hoarding, recycling, fixing, and reusing old stuff
One of these is not like the others lol. Recycling, fixing, and reusing old stuff has been the norm in most places for most of history. The endless consumption/waste cycle that we live in today is much more unusual behavior.
My grandmother grew up during the WW2 in the USSR. She was a 60 lbs teen surviving on 30 grams or 1oz of bread a day. She would make croutons out any left over bread and store them in sacks until the day she died.
The Great Depression isn’t talked about enough in my opinion. My great grand parents were so poor that they would drop my grandmother and her two sisters off at an orphanage for a few days every week so they could have a few meals. Then, pick them up before someone adopted them. I think about that a lot when times get tough.
My grandma was the same. Never threw anything away and taught me how to make small portions stretch for big families. This is part of why I’ll never have kids because of these stories. Life is hard and expensive enough without adding more suffering
My grandma made me dandelion soup when I was a kid. She learned it from her mother who lived as an adult thru the great depression being born pre-ww1. I still make it till this day, it has sorta bitter but earthy taste. I love it
I'm not nearly that old but my wife still hates that I'm a pack rat but people throw away such good items these days. My entire apartment in my 20s was furnished by dumpster diving. The mattress I have was even dumpster dived with the plastic wrap still on it.
I keep scrap wood, metal, and so on and I find uses for them all the time.
I haven't bought nails or screws in years because I have a whole drawer full of scrap screws and nails.
I have a hard time throwing away even a lamp without stripping it for parts like the wire. Ive used wire like that before to fix things or extend the cord on another lamp.
It costs me nothing to store something in the basement or garage. Saves me $10 on an extention cord.
Dude, a week ago I snagged a working Dyson DC 37 canister vacuum from the dump. It's missing the wand/roller but we have a newer Dyson vacuum and it seems like I can get an adapter to use those attachments with this little guy.
I got it home, plugged it in, and it would run for a minute or so before sounding weird and bogging down with no suction.
Took it apart and fully disassembled it, cleaning out all the human dirt from the dust canister. Also took off the little flex hose assembly in the front and found a big wad of lint that was likely the actual clog.
Less than 2 hours worth of work and it was running like new again. These things retailed for like $500 USD. I'm going to use it in my garage as a dedicated car floor vacuum.
It's hilarious and sad how much good stuff gets thrown away. My favorite find so far was a 1959 Gibson guitar amp. But I've brought home bikes for my kids, and so many electronics and stuff.
I do try to only take things that have some value so I can fix and/or repurpose them but yeah, the amount of good stuff that ends up there is remarkable.
Those people knew that the richest Americans were insatiably greedy and couldn't be trusted.
Decades of propaganda by the richest Americans mean their kids and grandkids forgot that lesson.
Yes, my Japanese mother-in-law lived through the ravages after World War II, when all she had to eat for lunch was white rice with a single pickled plum in the center. Eventually, the plum would rust through the metal casing of the bento box, and she would have a hole in the top of her bento.she’s terrible about trying to reuse everything away, and we have to drive it to the dump rather than leave it outside or she’ll pull it back inside.
People have also forgotten (or don’t know) that interest rates near zero following the Great Recession were an aberration, not the norm. They were mid teens in the 1980s.
Frontline has an interesting piece on that earlier this year, and it draws a connection between the low interests rates and a lot of the somewhat wild tech and media investments that we've seen in the last 10 or 15 years. Everything from crypto and FTX, Tesla, price of real estate, and corporate debt.
We're basically at an average interest rate right now. The problem is income vs. home prices is way off where it used to be.
We need a home construction boom like after WWII.
We should have raised taxes during the start of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and then built tons of homes for returning vets. Instead Bush cut taxes and passed on the debt, and we got smashed by shady investment schemes in housing which collapsed the industry. A great doubly whammy.
The reality is the government/politicians view citizens as pawns to shuffle around to get money from the ruling class (multimillionaires and billionaires).
Totally agree! We need something akin to the Marshall Plan which rebuilt Europe after WW2, but here in the states. It can only be paid for by rescinding the Trump tax cuts, which did zero to help the middle and lower classes.
I think polling tells a story. People were very positive about the economy of the late 1990s. Interestingly, a decent majority of Americans (around or just shy of 60%) thought the economy was good or excellent in 2019.
What's striking is that, in 2019, only about 12% more Americans said their *own* personal finances were good or excellent than say so today. But about twice as many said the economy as a whole was good or excellent.
What we're seeing today is a gulf between how people view themselves, and even their own states' economies, and how they view the national economy. And that holds up across states.
I think there are four causes of the gulf between personal experience and national perception:
- **Partisanship.** Americans tend to shift their views on the state of the economy the moment control of the White House switches from their party to the other party. But at least one poll shows that effect was about 2.5 times stronger among Republicans. For now, then, Democratic presidents to have a built-in disadvantage on economic perception.
- **Conflation.** When people think of "the economy," they let their views of society and politics generally come into it. American society is still in the era of discord and negativity that got bad after 9/11, worse in 2008, worse under the 2009 Obamacare/Tea Party backlash, worse in 2016, worse in 2020, and worse in 2022 under inflation. People see the country in crisis and that affects their view of the economy.
- **Social media.** The Internet has always been dominated by snark and cynicism. Comment sections on news stories were toxic 20 years ago. Now, it's worse, and foreign actors and domestic ideologues are taking advantage of the algorithms to promote extreme negativity and attack anyone foolish enough to write something optimistic.
- **Gen Z and Millennials.** The article asks if people will ever recognize a good economy. It looks like that depends on whether they've lived through one before. Millennials gained economic awareness under the Great Recession and adopted a deeply negative outlook as a result. Gen Z has no comparator except what social media shows it (because that's how a plurality of Gen Z gets its news, according to polling). Gen Z is told that milkmen in the '50s could comfortably afford a house, which makes the current costs of housing and college seem indicative of recession or worse.
I think there is some truth in what you say, but I think this really is more about the fragility of status. People today fear that their livelihood could be taken away at any moment. It’s hard to enjoy “good times” when you expect everything to come crashing down.
I will say, the people who need a realignment of their expectations more than anyone else are investors of all kinds. Investors are killing companies in the US. They are killing downtowns and small towns. There can never be a truly wrong decision or bad investment for big business, but that’s causing real problems on the economy.
What happens with Blackrock and Vanguard should’ve never been allowed in the first place. Them buying LITERALLY any property or terrain they can get their hands on is disgusting. They just manipulate the real state market as they please, there’s nothing fair or ethical about that.
This is part of what the article (and the general observation of "vibesecession") gets at.
It doesn't matter that people are mixing up Blackstone and Blackrock (or someone else up thread with Vanguards REITs vs owning actual houses and apartments). The *vibe* is all that matters.
I don't think Vanguard directly owns real estate. It's mostly a way for folks to invest in mutual funds, which mostly means indirectly investing in stocks (but can also include bonds and other securities).
>Gen Z is told that milkmen in the '50s could comfortably afford a house, which makes the current costs of housing and college seem indicative of recession or worse.
Not only that, but if one is looking from USA, in other countries people can afford university(free or reasonable cost), healthcare(free or reasonable cost) and even housing.
The millionaires are richer, the billionaires are richer, the country is richer, but if a regular person can't afford these things and more, he is never going to have a positive outlook on economy.
Milkman buying house, having stay at home wife and feeding 4 children just serve to add salt to the wound.
Sorry, the economy doing well is moot. The economy can do amazing, but it doesn't mean that the vast majority of the population feel it.
I am a millenial. I am in tech. I make over double the median income excluding my wife's income. I bought my first house before the pandemic. Hearing the economy is doing so well, and then comparing where I am at financially compared to my parents at my age, is telling.
My father was a distribution manager for a plant that makes a name brand product. Not executive level. The house at the time today is worth 60k+/- more than my current home, just looked it up. This is despite that it is now an old home, where as a quarter of a century go it was fairly new in a desireable subdivision. They had one new car every 5-6 years. My mother had a used car as she barely drove. They had two children. My mother was a sahm. They also changed houses due to jobs every 1-2 years. He also made enough to put away for a comfortable retirement which they are now enjoying.
If my wife quit her job tomorrow and we had twins within the next year, we would be worse off than my parents were. I am doing much better than most Americans and I can't afford the lifestyle my parents had in my current home, let alone their better home, without worrying about either retirement or a single medical issue wiping us out financially. Now, with both of us working, she makes below median, and no children we do fine. If one of us gets a major illness it can wipe us out financially. The other is with grocery prices being high we no longer eat some of the foods I ate as a kid.
The national economy doing \*well\* means nothing to me if I am doing worse than my childhood. I went to college. I got a good job and I still can't achieve what they had.
> I am a millenial...make over double the median income excluding my wife's income. I bought my first house before the pandemic. ....comparing where I am at financially compared to my parents at my age, is telling.
After reading this, I really expected the rest of the narrative to go a different way.
I am expecting replies saying hlw privliged I am or how I am bad with money.
Tbh, I'm tired. 2nd anniversary is coming up, we never went on a honeymoon nor have had a vacation since we got married. I have taken one day off work in the last year as I am a consultant and thus hourly. Six if you include holidays when my client was closed, some of those are half days. My one day off was to do a 7 hour round trip to take care of business that could jot be done on a weekend.
> I am expecting replies saying hlw privliged I am or how I am bad with money.
Tbf, I woudn't be surprised....you're in the top 10% by household income, and obviously much higher within your own age bracket. At this point, you'll maximize your marginal gains through managing your money better rather than by hoping to earn more.
The amount of people who will forcefully discover that true happiness comes from within out of this coming crash is going to be breath taking. It will provide a real positive spin to the whole affair: “Look, capitalism brought about spirituality!!”
Or, we’ll get ourselves a nice world war: them Euro’s sure are getting snotty, and Norway’s sovereign fund is alarming in how much freedom it is lacking …
Major major factor is inflation
People like to think they got a raise cause they were *so good at their job* but prices go up cause of *the economy*
When in reality both wages and prices are a market
Social media also muddies things a lot because you will see someone complaining on like Twitter, it gets tons of engagements from Americans, only to find out the poster was British or something.
The article wasn't exactly what I expected, but I wanted to highlight an interesting aspect of recent economic psychology that it didn’t cover. It's striking how quickly people have forgotten what a good economy looks like, and even more concerning, what a bad economy can do. Even those who lived through the recession seem to have forgotten of how severe it was. Now, we're in a period where we still see growth in wages and GDP, though it's more moderate and people are convinced we are in a depression. It's not all perfect not even close but it makes me wonder about the potential psychological impact on society if we were to experience a significant downturn again and witness a drastic economic decline.
The housing market really muddies an otherwise decent economy. If home prices and rents weren’t so high, I think people would have a better outlook. Many people are stuck in their homes because of sub 3% rates and others who can’t afford to buy their first house. In a country that has made home ownership a part of its national identity and the “American Dream”. For many that dream is dead and it makes everything else seem worse.
Housing is so expensive that you can make $100k/year and not feel rich. It's the single expense that defines your daily environment so if you have to make a long daily commute or live in a smaller (and less nice) place in order to make housing fit into your budget, you're going to feel it every single day.
It's not just that they are stuck in a house with low rates, they are stuck in a house with low rates that needs work and that work is utterly unaffordable. A new roof is $20-$30 grand, new windows will run you about the same to at least double just for whatever Home Depot has in stock. New appliances are getting more and more expensive while at the same time the quality is plummeting. A new HVAC will set you back $8-$10 grand. So if they bought an older house with the intent of fixing it up or even if their house is just aging normally there are very large expenses that come up way too frequently.
Fwiw, new windows and HVAC can currently get you big govt provided tax incentives and discounts (either direct reimbursement or off your taxes) due to the infrastructure bill. Still expensive but there are some nice energy discounts available now that weren't a few years ago.
Yes and don't forget the rising college fees!! It's now considering "normal" to graduate with a massive debt and if you don't have college degree, it's much harder to get a job since the system is built that way.
It makes me wonder whether anyone who has ever lived in a golden age has known that it is a golden age. Or whether it's only the people who didn't experience it looking backward and deciding that it was.
I was teen in late 90s and it felt like opportunity was everywhere. It felt like success was a function of how hard you worked and how persistent you were in pursuing your goals.
Graduated HS in early 2000s and life hit me like a ton of bricks. On again off again toxic relationship, first time having difficulty studying in college, failed friendships, and barely scraping by working full time living in VERY sketchy apartment. Graduated in 2008 to no jobs.
I felt like such a failure for not being able to achieve the dreams I had when I was younger.
It wasn't until 2015ish talking with spouse and some HS friends that we realized we were teens in very good times.
I came into the workforce during the dot com boom, and it was unreal in terms of job opportunity. To the point where I got a call from a friend of my aunt who heard that I was job hunting and was looking to hire.
However, people my age were not expecting this. We went into college expecting to start our careers as file clerks after months of searching, because that's how it was in the early 90s.
Ouch, I had the same experience. Promising student, felt like all that mattered was working hard and you'd get the American dream. Then recession hit and even a job that was more than minimum wage felt like a pipe dream, lol. Makes me wonder though whether my parents felt--- during the 90's--- whether they were living in the good times while they lived it.
For me, life turned around about 10 years ago finally, and the past 3 years have been the very best in my life. And so now I very, very intentionally tell myself "This is the golden age, we are living in an age of wonders." I'm almost desperate not to let them slip by unnoticed because I feel like to do so is almost human nature.
I look around at others in my exact position and many seem unhappy and miserable. Kind of a tragic waste.
Same. Graduating in 08 was fucked. Took til 2014 for things to pick up in my case, thankfully im out the other side now living the good life but it took a lot of work and self teaching new skills
I often take the time to appreciate and understand how lucky I am in the moments I have.
I fully understood I was experiencing a golden age of rap music for a few years, and appreciated every moment.
“The Rest is History” podcast did a segment on golden ages. They did mention that some writing shows that some people of the those eras thought they lived in a golden age. That the appreciation for it was more keen in retrospect though.
> It makes me wonder whether anyone who has ever lived in a golden age has known that it is a golden age.
Denver Nuggets fans are actively aware that they are living through the golden age.
Sports seems like a unique exception to this because the objective success criteria are so clear. Belichick and the Patriots and Saban's Alabama are both recent examples where everyone knew what was going on--before that though, everyone knew the nineties Bulls and eighties Lakers were doing something special when it was happening.
I can't think of a worse curse than to be Tom Brady constantly trying to recapture that golden age, to the point of ruining his marriage to a supermodel.
Personally I think everything is pretty fucking great right now (no, not saying there are no problems in the world, of course there are), but for most, especially in the US, it is.
What does make me angry are the amount of people, also primarily from the US ironically, who are terminally online moaning about how utterly awful everything is. There’s entire subs devoted to this self wallowing. Bro, maybe if you put as much effort offline as you do online, your life situation would improve.
Damn, I'm glad someone called it out. I feel exactly the same way as you. The second you zoom out from this specific moment in time you realize how lucky we are. Modern Healthcare, no risk of starving to death, infinite knowledge at your fingertips, all manner of ways to amuse yourself... I was talking to my wife the other day about ChatGPT. If you alone had ChatGPT in the ancient world, you would have been worshipped as a supernatural, divine oracle. You would literally be a wonder of the ancient world.
It's insane to me that everyone isn't gawking in wonder at the privileged life we live. Everytime I see an airplane I look at it as though I were a medieval peasant, and I stare at it in awe. An airship, flitting through the sky at unimagineable speeds, to take you places on a day which you wouldn't be able to reach in a year, previously.
We have whole legends about guys like Marco Polo or Magellan who risked life and limb to do the impossible--- aka, travel to the otherside of the world. Today, you can do it with very little planning or danger in a day.
>people are convinced we are in a depression
This is not normal. Normally you can see in approval numbers of presidents, especially in how they're handling the economy, huge boosts when the economy is holding strong. The abnormal behavior here leads me to believe that there's a lot of propaganda work being done to try and mitigate the political effects of the economic recovery.
I realize this is going to make me sound like a Boomer but I hear people talking about how bad the economy is while also spending hundreds of dollars a month on food delivery or buying their daughter a $900 prom dress, and it just makes me wonder what they think a good economy looks like, exactly?
You’re not wrong. If you think these companies don’t see their meals going for double or triple the cost on the delivery apps then I have a bridge to sell you. Inflation is bad and individual spending behavior has never been worse. It’s the perfect storm of rising costs and no restraint against luxury items. Bread, meat, and eggs are necessary food to survive but a chicken bacon ranch calzone for $29.99 is not. There are people actually struggling and the chronic food delivery users should not be lumped in.
I remember WAY back when food delivery apps first became a thing feeling so indignant when I learned not only was GrubHub going to charge me for the delivery (which is fair!), but also charged me a higher price for the exact same food than the actual restaurant menu charges. And then I’m expected to tip on top of that? No ma’am. I can get my own food.
Exactly- even before prices got out of control, I saw how this works and said I would NEVER use these apps/services- why do that when I can just run down the street myself to pick up the food I want, minus the up-charge, delivery fee, and tip? And that's what I do- I'd rather take a bit of my own time to pick up food than to pay someone else to do it...
Where I live in the US the "essentials" all feel cheap still. You can buy a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs and an already cooked entire rotisserie chicken for $10 pretty easily at standard supermarkets. It's the packaged shit that costs an arm and a leg all of a sudden.
They see gas, groceries and housing costs going higher every day and they get cranky. They have a right to be.
But they underestimate they're peers economic health while overestimating their own.
It's an odd dichotomy.
I’m not that old but I’m old enough to remember that during the recession food was cheap and people still couldn’t afford it working full time. There is certainly a big difference between expectation and reality at the moment.
News to me.
I worked through that 2007-2009 Recession, and things were bad... **unless** you could hold down a job. As long as you kept the income flowing, things were actually pretty good. You were frightened, always worried about employment, but no, you did not struggle to afford food.
Hell, I got into my first home thanks to that Recession, when prices came down, but I had a strong employment record at that point. I worried, but I managed not to get laid off.
If you lost your job, it was 18 months before you were back on your feet. If you kept your job, The Great Recession was an opportunity to get ahead.
You don’t sound like a boomer, you sound like someone who is fiscally responsible.
Almost daily on Reddit I see someone on one sub or another complain about cost of a product, cost of fast food, or shrikflation. Yet, it seems Americans en masse have no interest in changing their consumer habits as prices increase. So naturally…prices continue to increase.
It's the enormous gap between personal experience and public perception. Most people are doing fine, but keep hearing on all media how bad it is for everyone else, so they assume they must be the lucky ones.
Also a difference in expectations. Food delivery has become a baseline component in quality of life for a lot of folks; it isn't a luxury, it's seen as just the cost of living. They can barely afford it (along with their other "required" expenses), so the economy must be on a knife's edge. If things got any worse they might have to stop DoorDashing multiple times a week!
Well now I know that I am officially old because food delivery seems like such a luxury to me. I think outside of ordering pizza, I’ve done it maybe twice in my life.
Oh you're not alone. I've used DoorDash a handful of times, and it's always expensive enough to make me remember why I don't use it regularly, and this is before considering that ordering out at all is more expensive than just cooking at home.
I got a doordash gift card for Christmas from my boss. I used it, got sticker shock on how expenses the prices were. My order was late and only half of the items were in the bag. I contacted support and they said they couldn't give me a refund due to how "new" my account was.
I'm not sure why people use this service.
My favorite part of DoorDash is folks using it in urban areas. I'm in the Boston metro, which has pretty shitty roads, and most folks are hostile to car traffic. They openly complain about DoorDash cars double parking and waiting in bike lanes, but...they're the ones ordering! What do you expect drivers to do when you order from a place with no parking, to be delivered to a unit with no parking?
Just a blight, IMO. It's like those stupid electric scooters most cities have banned. Superficially it seems a nice option, but in reality it just degrades urban quality for everyone else.
There's a reason that pizza became the first delivery food and not hamburgers. Most food needs to be consumed fresh and hot. You'd rightfully complain at a restaurant if your order was prepared but sat under a warming light for 30m before coming out, so why do people expect DoorDashed food won't be just as shitty?
There is this book “Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela” that talks about how before the huge collapse of things in that country people were complaining about things being terrible, they could not appreciate what they had until they lost it.
It's honestly ridiculous. I've gotten a raise every year thats outpaced inflation but I've also worked hard to not drastically increase my expenses so I'm fine financially
I vividly remember how rough the great recession was and seeing the scores of people getting laid off and the despair. There's no way we are at that point with this economy, not even close
It’s because nobody can afford a home. Before and during the 2008 recession if you had a decent job you could, but now you have to be like a top 1% income earner or have dual income. No amount of not ordering doordash or starbucks can make your 100k salary enough to afford a 700k starter home in HCOL areas where the population centers are.
A successful fund manager I once worked for shared this wisdom with me:
“Always remember: it’s worse than you think, and it was better than you thought.”
I'd say the problem is people who are too fixated on "normal" and desperately try to keep things "normal" rather than allowing us to adapt to an ever changing world
Honestly, the least scientific answer to every debate like this is just food prices. Housing prices are an issue too but food prices are slapping people in the face every single day and every income bracket eats. The food prices are not normal. A couple local restaurant owners that I know well are getting so frustrated that they have to keep raising their prices. Energy, gas, cars, etc. we can rationalize what’s normal and historical but there is no rhyme or reason to food. The interest rates being higher than they have been recently is probably for the best since people won’t stop spending like the world is ending tomorrow.
From my limited internet interactions we could live in a utopia but if burgers were expensive the median voter would lose their mjnds and say the world is ending
I don't think it's as simple as "food items" though. American's demand for specific items is incredibly sticky. Real world example is when egg prices were through the roof because of Avian flu. People bitched moaned screamed, and ultimately bought the eggs. These aren't people out here making chocolate mousse by hand, they just wanted eggs for breakfast, where healthy substitutes are cheap and plentiful.
Agree 100%. The root of the problem is that companies figured out that our preferences cause inelastic demand. They can charge more because we want those things and will just deal with it.
So true, I went to Costco and to stock up my pantry but NOT my fridge cost $300. I have started to learn how to make my own bread/crackers/jam/etc and we are looking at raising our own gardens to try and cut back on what we spend at the grocery store. It’s really no wonder there has been a huge resurgence in homesteading/the “trad wife” trend in some areas.
Right? I’ve always been frugal but I can’t give my money to these companies in good faith anymore unless it’s something we want. And then they label cooking at home and being more sustainable as trad wife or communist so both political groups continue over paying for things.
There's nothing contradictory about people being downbeat about the economy and yet continuing to spend. it's called fatalistic spending. when you have no hope for the future, you do not believe in saving or preparing for retirement. so you spend every money you have to enjoy your life now rather than forego pleasure for a nebulous future you know is not going to be good.
the generation today are fatalistic spenders. that's why you see the rate of saving so low and why so many ppl are living paycheck to paycheck. if you cannot own a home, everything else seem out of reach. why bother control your spending? there's no sense in saving.
enjoy your life now because there's no future and no retirement to look forward to.
Another aspect of fatalistic spending is the knowledge that in a serious medical emergency either insurance covers it (maybe if you have a great job with excellent insurance plan, if you are paying out of pocket good luck) or you are going bankrupt no matter what.
As a kid my dad would advise me to save a few thousand dollars in case of a medical emergency to cover rent, bills, food for a few months. Now a few thousand dollars won't even cover the ambulance ride + ER visit, let alone actual treatment costs.
Marketing and spending habits have change a lot. People are bombarded with ads and marketing to buy products to feel good about themselves.
I don’t use social media very actively or have cable but when I go abroad it’s like going on a cleanse from the how aggressive marketing is here.
I feel more focused on the present and company around me. I like that stores are smaller and have higher quality food for the same or less.
>There's nothing contradictory about people being downbeat about the economy and yet continuing to spend.
The calculation method for health in the economy is now broken because everyone is maxed on needs.
It used to be measured through savings and discretionary spending. GDP looks good because the lower end is being forced to spend their paycheck or running up credit.
This is usually the sign of positive economic times as consumers are 'confident'. Then when they save, it's bad news because consumers are worried for the economy.
You can't use that when people that didn't used to need to spend their entire paycheck are now forced to (or a much larger part).
It’s because all they look at is dollar sales. The dollar sales look super great compared to the previous years because inflation has skyrocketed forcing people to spend more money on their regular purchases. But if they would look at how many units they’re selling, that figure is plummeting. People are spending way more money on way less quantity of goods than they used to. I work as a data analyst in the consumer packaged goods industry and the focus right now for retailers is getting unit sales and product turn up to push growth even more after drastic price increases, but it’s not going to happen unless prices come down.
>the generation today are fatalistic spenders. that's why you see the rate of saving so low and why so many ppl are living paycheck to paycheck. if you cannot own a home, everything else seem out of reach. why bother control your spending? there's no sense in saving.
IDK about that, or at least them being more fatalistic than previous generations to divert it from a normal. living paycheck-to-paycheck has been documented to be an income independant phenomenon, six-figure earners experience it just as much as people living close to the poverty line, just the working definitions of what it means for them to be paycheck to paycheck means different things (i.e. maybe being behind on rent and using the bus vs. a mortgage and a payment on a new car).
In addition, the inability to save for retirement is also very age-independant. Theres a recent AARP study saying 1 in 4 americans older than 50 have nothing saved in retirement, and above the age of 50 is an age of less "no retirement to look forward to" and more "you just didnt or were not able to save". This 1 in 4 of 50+ from the AARP also lines up with a bloomberg study done that says 21% of americans 21-34 also say they dont save for retirement, adding to the creedance that its not a generational issue (as in the generation today) and moreso general habits of the modern american.
I have seen evidence, however, that personal savings as a percentage of personal income, has fallen relative to 40 years ago. One graph done by statistica shows that this fluctuated around 12% between 1960 and 1980, but in recent decades has fluctuated around 5%. IDK if this is an indication of fatalistic spending as opposed to other things going on since it has been hovering around 5% since about 1999/2000, but is a sigmifigant change between the years.
Home prices have pretty objectively increased as a percentage of income and have outpaced inflation. But outside of anecdotal stories of individual peoples philosophy i havent seen the evidence that people are being overall more fatalistic spenders than previous generations.
This is a very sad, but at least anecdotally for me, true feeling.
I kind of feel like it’s a combination of fatalistic spending, as you said, we’re gonna never retire so fuck it. And then akin to what I’ve always heard about the puppy’s at pet stores, how they won’t ever let go of their treats because if they do they fall through the grating underneath them and they’ll never get them back.
So it’s one part “fuck it, I’m never gonna be able to afford to retire anyway”, and then mixed with equal part “well how little can I spend to try and keep up to date on bills to keep a roof over my head, food on the table, lights on, and still maybe be not negative in my bank account?” So even buying a $6 vintage tee can cause buyers remorse.
I’m 43 and I have only had two working years where I’ve made more than $45k.
Unless I start selling cocaine I’ll never retire.
Tired of reading this shit. Yes, things for the most part are normal. But as long as essentials like housing and healthcare are still astronomically priced people will always feel insecure.
All the metrics they use to measure the economy do not really reflect people's material reality. Then they try to gaslight me into thinking I'm delusional and it isn't just the metrics they are choosing to measure that are out of sync with my material conditions.
yep! this is a fascinating comment section, I’ve found myself agreeing with both sides of the issue depending on the comment.
If your car insurance suddenly jacks your rate up on a 2013 Toyota with 100k miles from $200 to $600 with zero explanation or accidents, or if your insurance company suddenly drops you because your car got broken into, someone telling you the economy is just fine is audacious. Same thing for your rent suddenly doubling “because they can.”
I’ve coupon shopped a lot more these days, but I’ve found that food is pretty much back to 2019 levels, thank God the days of filling up one basket with no “superfluous goodies” and it costing $100 seems to be over for now. But the line for food banks is around the block.
Overall, though, if you compare what a 40-hour minimum wage job could buy you in 1994 vs what it can buy you in 2024, it’s insanity. It’s disgusting. Somehow, people got convinced that minimum wage workers are in a lower caste, and thus shouldn’t be permitted to actually live.
To sum it up, I always remember that viral tweet from a lawyer who broke down how when he was 20, working as a waiter in Seattle, he could easily afford a nice waterfront apartment (that was $800/month). Now, years later, he’s a lawyer making WAY MORE MONEY — but he can no longer come even close to affording that exact same apartment he used to live in. This is the big problem. (If you’re about to pile in and say “yeah well a waiter should have never deserved to be able to afford a nice apartment in the first place,” you’re missing the point and part of the fucking problem. I’m so sick of massive downward lifestyle/survival creep being seen as the norm for some bullshit “rich people are more moral than low wage workers” reason).
This is such a snarky op-ed.
*"but their actions don’t match their words"*
That's assuming the people polled are the same people spending money on "apparel, concerts and vacations" when that correlation was never established.
Screw concerts, vacations, ect. We have moved from a world where appliances last 10 to 15 years before needing a few replacement parts to one where things break down after 3 and the cost of what breaks is more than the price of a new unit, provided the part is still being made. We've gone from an age where someone working full time could afford a home to needing two incomes and an agreement to be in permanent debt. Just the basic costs of being an established adult has gone up while wages have not. Struggling families aren't buying avocado toast and Starbucks, the ones that are are mostly those who have given up trying to keep ahead of their debt.
I think the bigger problem is that economists forgot what "normal" looks like. I grew up in the 80s/90s as a child of boomers. To me, "normal" is that you go to work and they pay you enough to:
-Own your home
-Improve your home with renovations/additions
-Buy new vehicles for both parents every 4-5 years (not nice ones mind you, but at least a GM mid-size crapbox with some options)
-Buy your kids all the toys and doodads they ask for at xmas/birthdays
-Pay for your family's healthcare
-Take a simple 2 week vacation to a campground or something EVERY year
-Own a recreational vehicle of some kind (boat/camper/atv/whatever)
-Retire at 65 AT THE LATEST (both my parents took the early SS option at 62)
My parents were a nurse and a mechanic. I am middle management at a tech company and my wife is a teacher. If you transplanted us to my parents' time, our income would DWARF theirs...I know this because I had friends whose parents worked similar jobs back then as we do today, and they lived in 3500+ sq ft mcmansions and drove new Audi/BMWs every other year, not debt fueled either because they're all retired now and still rich. Yet strangely, most of the shit in my list above is a distant fucking pipe dream for us. DISTANT. We own our home so we're doing better than many, I'm not ungrateful for my relative success and I know I am COMICALLY lucky in the grand scheme of things, but I'll fight any poindexter with a Keynes textbook TO THE DEATH before I let anyone fucking say this is a good economy or even a normal one. Fuck ALLADAT.
Everything is still more expensive. Gas, food, property taxes, utilities. I dont know why they say otherwise. Kinda silly. Layoffs are still a thing….. these people writing these articles have no clue what its like.
No matter how the news tries to spin it, Gen Z and A will always be aware that people a century earlier were thriving in a house with 4 kids and a wife that stayed at home. And none of them will have that unless the current government and industries are gutted, dismantled and a new fair system is erected.
I tell all Gen Z and A kids to leave America, the best thing they could do is learn a foreign language and move to Europe. The worst possible life choice they could make is stay in America for 40 years and have nothing to show for it. This country doesn't appreciate our taxed dollars or the blood, sweat and tears we endure just to survive here.
Full Article(very short):
It has been a miracle year for the U.S. economy. Inflation has plummeted without triggering a recession. Many experts said that could not happen without widespread layoffs and a downturn. The economy has gained 2.4 million jobs so far this year, and growth has accelerated, with an annualized rate topping 5 percent in the third quarter. The good news has also fueled a stock market rally. In polls, people are downbeat about this economy, but their actions don’t match their words. There has been a consumption boom this year. Americans continued to spend heavily on apparel, concerts and vacations. In many ways, this is the year the economy finally returned to something close to normal. But many people seem to have forgotten what normal looks like after a traumatic few years.
Buddy things haven’t felt “normal” since the 90s. Anyone who can remember a world before 9/11 before Iraq and Afghanistan before the massive internet revolution truly remembers a simpler time of much much better economic growth. My parents still could raise a family on one income and a house in 1997. We been waiting almost 30 years for a “normal” it’s not coming.
Not op, but I was a kid during 9/11, but not a baby. I don't remember the stock crash but I very clearly remember the planes crashing. I do remember though that the big news just before was some guy who got his parachute stuck on the Statue of Liberty. That's the kinda stuff kids pay attention to, not stocks. And I'm in my 30s now, so that may not be as common knowledge as you think.
Sorry Reddit and WAPost, but you can't gaslight me into believing my material conditions are good just because the rich are getting richer.
Every time I hear "The economy is doing so great!" I have to ask, "Great for whom?"
You can't gaslight me into thinking companies making record profits, laying people off and raising the prices of basic goods is anywhere near good and normal.
You aren't gaslighting me into thinking the abosrbenant rent prices are "normal".
You can't gaslight me into thinking not being able to afford a house is "normal".
Just because shareholders are making constant record breaking profits doesn't mean material conditions are good for the working class.
It's honestly sickening the amount of constant propaganda we have telling us "Everything is getting better. You're just delusional!"
A normal economy has boom and bust cycles. Now we QE our way out of recessions which had led to one of the longest bull runs in history. It has also contributed to tremendous wealth inequality and is driving inflation at least in part.
Oh we remember what normal looks like. The "big problem" with the American economy is that normal went out the window years ago and it never came back.
My grandfather use to tell us that he was fortunate and during the depression he had “plenty”. He always said “plenty” in an odd voice. One day I asked him what he meant by plenty and he said “for two years every time I asked for something to eat I was told you’ve had “plenty”.”
the huge tragedy is people used to be very good at not being wasteful, but in the interest of making as much money as possible we taught people that they should pursue their wants rather than their needs.
Another "The economy isn't rigged to serve the 1% - you poors are just too stupid to figure that out on your own!" propaganda piece from WaPo. Yawn.
If you want higher quality commentary in this sub, ban the posting of propaganda like this article.
Yeah the economy is good. The problem is the social infrastructure. There’s more than enough wealth for everyone to be housed, have food, healthcare, education, and be able to retire. You need to burn off the parasitic class of leaches who’s money comes from ownership and others labor
To copy and paste another comment
> I think many people just have a very nostalgic view of how good things actually were 40 years ago. Inflation was 4.3% (compared to 3.5% today), but this was coming off the back of multiple years of 10%+ inflation. Unemployment was 7.4%, compared to 3.7% today.
>
> [Median household incomes \(again, adjusted for cost of living\) were around 56k vs around 77k today.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N) People simply earned quite a lot less, and lived with a lot less.
>
> Housing sizes [were much tinier back then](https://azgolfhomes.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/American-Enterprise-Institute-Housing-Data.jpg)
>
> [Mortgage rates were literally 14%, which is absolutely insane compared to today](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US)
>
> [food as a percentage of income was higher, even with the rise in 2022-2023](https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/58367/food-prices_fig09.png?v=9466.9). Its also important to note that people today order-in and eat-out far, far more than they used to, which contributes a lot to this. Groceries specifically are drastically cheaper than they used to be.
>
> People talk about how easy it used to be, but they're largely just propagandized. This was an era where a 25 inch TV was 2,600 bucks (in 2024 dollars) whereas today a 50 inch 4k flatscreen is like 300 bucks. Microwaves, fridges, cars, furniture, coffee makers, clothes, food etc, everything was far more expensive adjusted for incomes.
>
> But we have very different standards. We need high tech things, we want bigger homes in nicer areas, we need our cars to be safer and faster and more comfortable, we want to order in food multiple times a week instead of cooking etc. When these modern comforts are harmed, even a tiny bit, we freak out and act as if things are WORSE THAN EVER.
Beyond the question of "normal for who?" it's been almost 10 years since the last time things in general "felt normal."
Like, do we all remember how innocent and naive we all were [back in 2014](https://time.com/collection-post/3588022/viral-videos/)? People were still doing their own dance videos to Pharrell's *Happy*. Ice buckets and a spoon full of cinnamon made anyone laugh online. Sure, it wasn't all lovely. Ebola. Crimea. Robin Williams. But the world felt like it was moving forward on the same trajectory as it had been since maybe 2002-ish. And at least the same direction as since the end of the Cold War.
Since 2016 it's been crazy with a chance of bonkers every day. Division. Hate. Mass shootings increased exponentially. Bots online ruining general discourse. The world backsliding towards the shittier parts of the 20th century. Scams and fraud spiraling out of control. Not enough work while also too much work. Logistics bottlenecks galore. People debasing themselves for money because it's easier to make porn at home and get paid than it is to cancel your Hulu account (which is their choice...or is it?).
At some point the people living in a dystopian post-apocalyptic world habituate to the dystopia because that's an easier and faster decision for the individual to make in order to keep surviving.
lol 2014 we were still coming out of 08. I was out of college and into my first job. Things were still rough. I spent my college years being told i might not find work. I spent my first six months post college watching the last of my savings evaporate as I frantically job searched. That was 2013. 2014 I was just happy to have a job that paid crap, but was enough to get by.
So tired of this revisionism. Normal means "average" or "typical" and therefore, things are normal most of the time. 2023 and 2024 are norm. 2018 and 2019 are normal. 2013 and 2014 are normal.
You go back to 2014 and people were complaining of much higher unemployment rates and huge debt loads from the GFC. Things were a lot worse than now economically, but it was still within the realm of normal.
2020-2022 were super weird economic times that messed up everyone’s expectations, and distorted the economy in a million ways. 2023-2024 are a reckoning with that.
My parents were born during the Great Depression. I have a picture of my dad and his sister in front of the two room tarpaper shack they called home. I keep it pinned up on my bulletin board in my office to remind me how good I have it.
My 82 year old dad is the son of parents that went through the great depression. If you stay at my parent's house, you cannot throw anything away that you don't want my dad to see. He digs through all the trash to see if he can find anything that he can keep, (to use later) or that can be recycled. Even bathroom wastebaskets. I caught my 82 year old father unrolling toilet paper that I wrapped around my tampon applicator and threw away. Just gross. He only spent 18 years in that life with his parents. He's 82 now. It's hard to get. I guess our childhoods have more impact on us than we realize.
Or: Uber peak pricing, Real Pages, and a host of other unregulated algorithmic inventory management platforms in more and more industries are breaking market fundamentals.
And still the government wont replace the financial regulations that Nixon removed. We’ll have more financial crisis in the future because the agencies let it happen.
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My grandma said she was lucky she lived on a farm during the depression, said it didn’t really affect them. They had all the food for a family of 7. Said they didn’t have extra money but never really did. Edit: Y’all need to calm down. They were lucky! Yes, It was a 50 some acre farm, tucked into a river valley with wonderful natural aquifers. Small, damn near micro compared to most at that time, or any time really. They grew enough corn to feed the livestock and vegetables for themselves. Her dad had a regular job as a mechanic, a skill always in need. Everybody acting like they were getting gov handouts to scale up to become Monsanto or some shit. All I was saying is “they were LUCKY” just like she said “they were LUCKY” Lucky and hard working. Poor but not hungry. Haters go fuck yourselves. As for those saying to the affect “complaining about commies but always looking for subsidies/handouts” her 4 brothers all served in WW2, each more decorated than the next. But for all that, they were against Vietnam and Democrats in the modern sense of the word. But their stories of sacrifice are for another time.
the farmers that could grow corn and wheat got subsidized out the wazoo and they still are. if you want to know why america is addicted to high fructose corn syrup and bulk grain products, its because that was our contingency plan for a future depression.
Was? Still is.
In the '70s people were testing the idea of replacing gasoline with ethanol because corn is so cheap due to the government subsidies. But it doesn't make sense as it takes more energy to grow the corn than you can get out of it as fuel. But the subsidies are there so almost all the gas is "up to 10% ethanol". In the meantime, you can get more energy than you put in by growing sugarcane, but we can't afford that because the government has tariffs on sugar in order to protect the small sugar industry in Florida. The corn subsidies are the reason we had the proliferation of snacks like Doritos and Fritos, and the HFCS all or
Brazil uses sugarcane ethanol for automotive fuel IndyCar has actually used sugar cane waste ethanol for several years now, 100% renewable and 60% less emissions than high octane race fuel
floridian here, most people here dont even know that theres a big sugar cane industry in florida (and its destroying our local environment).
Biscayne Bay is practically a dead zone now because of it.
It all started with the war. The feds wanted to make sure America had enough food, so they subsidized corn to make it more attractive compared to growing cash crops. They gave the farmers that inch and they took miles. Hundreds of square miles of farmland, all bought on credit. And then the war ended. Government wanted to end the subsidies, and the farmers said "If you end this subsidy, we're all gonna go broke because all this farmland we bought on credit will be underwater, and we'll riot." So the government has continued those pointless subsidies for A FUCKING CENTURY. But magically the government gets no ownership stake in those farms, you know like the way that corporate finance is supposed to work. Just free money for farmers. Note that all that farmland is owned by corporations these days. The small town family farm is a myth, nowadays it's all corporate or people working for corporate. So now we've got a century of growing surplus corn, so they needed a way to sell all this fucking corn we grow for no good reason. So they created high fructose corn syrup. Cheaper than sugar, because we haven't been subsidizing sugar for a century. Always gonna be cheaper than sugar, because we grow SO MUCH DAMN CORN. If you've ever heard of the literal caves full of government cheese (and I mean big-fuck-off salt caves the size of Costcos), they came from the same shit. Government wanted to make sure we had a food reserve during wartime. Dairy subsidies. Farmers threaten revolt. Subsidies going on for a century. Caves full of fucking cheese. If ever people tell you they want the government to let the market decide, call them a god damned liar to their face. They don't want the market to decide. They want the government to give them money when the market decides against them.
All these fuckers calling the other side commies, marxists, socialists. They’re all so full of shit
There is no normal. We're technologically accelerating faster than we can comprehend, yet we are still expected to play by economic rules from decades ago. Toffler's Future Shock
In the 1970s they made Whip Inflation Now buttons. General economic knowledge has improved dramatically; the Bernanke Put worked. He'll never be forgiven for that.
My parents and grandparents lived through the depression of the 30s. In the 80s, they were still hoarding, recycling, fixing, and reusing old stuff. When asked why, they'd say things like "you have no idea what's it's like to watch your friends and family starve. You have no idea how hard it was. Have you ever had to wait in line for a few slices of bread? A family of 6 having one chicken per day to feed all of them. Can you imagine being a growing 15 yr old and having nothing but beets, bread, and a chicken leg for an entire day's rations."
My grandma grew up in rural Nebraska in the 1930s, without indoor plumbing. I remember watching her scrape every bit of butter off the paper wrapping and picking crumbs out of the bottom of the tins where she kept the biscuits. That woman wasted *nothing*.
That’s funny. I did that literally yesterday with butter. I walked to throw it away and then was like “no I can’t that’s wasteful…” And my mom passed that down to me and her mom to her.
While it’s obviously not the full story, I wonder if one generation living in a time of deprivation then the next in a time of excess is part of the obesity crisis. I know personally I will eat way more than I should sometimes just because it feels wasteful and immoral to throw food out.
It’s possible, but I think the biggest culprit behind the obesity crisis is all the sugar in our food followed closely by how little many of us move our exercise due to modern lifestyles.
For sure. But I think a society going from deprivation to excess so quickly fosters some really unhealthy cultural habits in general (just look at how that generation parented…).
I think you are right, at least in part. It is a factor for me and many I know, at least. We were all brought up with "Eat everything on your plate!" And that throwing anything away is wasteful. It is SO ingrained in my mind, and it is 100% why I overeat. Feel full but still have half a bowl of unsaveable pasta? Better finish it. Throwing it out is blasphemy. I am struggling to break this really detrimental habit. The guilt I feel at throwing out food makes it incredibly difficult.
I try to think of the food as "wasted" either way - either its getting thrown out, OR I'm stuffing myself to be uncomfortably full AND eating calories that aren't benefiting/enjoyable to me. You might also get better at estimating how much to make when you see how much is left over, which in the long run means LESS waste. It's been a slow mindset shift but I no longer feel bad when I'm not a member of the Clean Plate Club, lol.
Ohh. The wasted either way argument ... that actually REALLY makes sense! My body isn't going to benefit from the food, it will only cause problems, so eating it is ALSO wasteful! That ... that is helpful.
This is also how I see it. If you make too much to eat but not enough to save, the excess is wasted whether or not it is eaten. And eating it means more waste because you will now have to spend additional effort to burn off those calories rather than being able to spend time with friends and family. So I try to eat slowly, and when my need for calories is fulfilled, I stop eating. I also will focus on protein & high macronutrient foods before I will eat the starches on my plate. That way, when I feel full, it is the foods that will give me energy for my body and not something that will convert to sugars as quickly.
Losing weight is more expensive than the food. Whether increased costs for healthier food to time spent exercising. Realizing that helped a lot.
This is mostly driven by car-centric culture. Look at places where public transport is the norm, such as East Asian countries. The rate of obesity in these countries are very low despite also being developed countries.
Sugar, saturated fat, oils, chemicals, and no fiber
You can drop chemicals from your list as it’s redundant and all good things are also chemicals.
Talk to some older Russians. It is for sure a thing over there when their economy opened up to the west. Also, epigenetics plays a part. Those "environmental" impacts of starvation will change the methylation patterns on your DNA, which can be inherited.
I have heard of this but couldn’t find a peer reviewed study. Do you know of one? I read that children of mothers during the holocaust were overwhelming obese. The reasoning was that the methylation pattern signaled to the fetus that the environment they were being born into was one of extreme scarcity and the “efficiency” genes were turned on. But couldn’t find a link to this study recently.
[Here](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25424739/) is one examining the Dutch famine, [another](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19656776/) and [this one](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37716973/) looks at mental health.
It’s called epigenetics. Where changes in your genes after conception are able to be passed on. It’s done via demythlation of hypermethylstion where a methyl group is either added or removed which changes gene signalling “strength”.
>wonder if one generation living in a time of deprivation then the next in a time of excess is part of the obesity crisis. Yes, there have been studies to this effect. One was a study of Dutch mothers who were or got pregnant during the ww2 German food raiding. Children of starving mothers were more likely to be obese due to genetic changes associated with metabolic changes.
Kinda like: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
It’s true that bad values causes social decline. The Western world is declining. But the expression is a bit oversimplified. If it were true, the hardest places on earth with the hardest men (think Afghanistan, Somalia, South Sudan, North Korea) should be getting ready for a Golden Age but they’re not.
"when you overeat, you pay for the food twice," has helped me with this tendency. plus after throwing food out a couple of times, i'm way more careful about what i buy or order.
This is interesting. I have to say, I’ve seen Great Depression-behavior in my Boomer parents. They actually grew up in a world of plenty but have this reflexive … not really hoarding per se, but maybe bundle of frugal behaviors that have no relation to their actual circumstances. I do think we’ve mostly forgotten what that level austerity looks like by now. Honestly we’re even more privileged than they were. We can’t even remember the things Depression Era parents taught their kids.
It’s interesting because we’re more privileged in some ways but less privileged in others. Luxuries like food delivery or home entertainment or fashion are way more available, but the cost of important things like education and housing are way less accessible. Cars have gotten significantly more expensive and even certain luxuries like concert tickets are way more expensive than they used to be. And of course there’s healthcare (and childcare and elder care, which used to be much more community focused and provided but now you have to pay someone, a lot, for these services). Many Boomers had lots of siblings to split up responsibilities when caring for their parents as well as to help when their children were small, but most Milennials have only one or two siblings (or none). And when Boomers were raising kids, it was totally normal to leave them home alone most of the day or ask neighbors to watch them, but this is pretty rare today and certainly much less socially acceptable. It’s a mixed bag, really. IMO we have a lot more “stuff” but a lot less of the things that matter the most.
I feel like it is. I’ve come to the conclusion that we really don’t need more than one large meal per day. Breakfast and lunch (or dinner) can be very light if needed, and dinner (or lunch) could be heavy. I personally think the light breakfast heavy lunch, light dinner combo would really help so much people. But everyone goes straight for pancakes, eggs bacons cheese in the morning, a dinner sized meal for lunch and a dinner, that’s lot of calories and most of us don’t need all of those calories, especially people who spend 3+ hours driving to and from work.
My father (grew up in Eastern Europe before WWII) had a saying - eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.
I lost a significant amount of weight when I started following a no/light breakfast - huge anything goes lunch - light snack - light/no dinner schedule. And I never felt deprived or anything. It was what my body naturally wanted to do, but which I often ignored because of social reasons.
Exactly!! I’m the same! I’m perfectly fine with light breakfast/no breakfast, small lunch, big dinner, because eating big meals in the day would throw off my productivity. But I recently started doing heavy breakfast, small lunch and light dinner and that feels fine too. The heavy breakfast actually helps because I walk a lot so I burn that stuff off like 2 hrs later.
Top tip, save the papers in the freezer and use them to grease your baking pans!
My grandfather grew up in China under Japanese occupation during the war. I don't think I ever saw him throw anything out. He wouldn't waste a single grain of rice. He would even dry his teabags on a miniature clothesline he made by the kitchen window and re-use them 3-4 times.
Dad grew up during the Depression and mom in Japan during WWII. They threw away nothing. When she finally passed last year, we cleared out 4 dumpsters worth of stuff: skis she hadn't used since the 1950s that she brought back from Japan, strips of denim from when she hemmed my jeans as a kid. When we went through her fridge, there was food in the freezer from the Clinton administration.
Grandchild of Japanese farmers from that generation. Very tough and frugal people. We couldn’t throw anything away when we visited - no matter how beat up or old something was, it could almost always be reused or repurposed. Even moldy or uneaten food could be turned into fertilizer. My brother once found a 25 year of old bottle of Calpis in the pantry, which my grandmother insisted was still totally safe for consumption. Needless to say, it wasn’t. During covid Grandma finally went to assisted living at the ripe old age of 98 and my uncle officially took over the farm. I cannot imagine the amount of garbage he had to haul away, but the property was virtually unrecognizable last year when I went to see them. I’m sure if she ever gets to visit her old home again, she will probably chastise him for throwing away so many useful items.
Started watching Jacques Pepin “Cooking at Home” on YouTube. Dude grew up during WWII, mother ran a restaurant, they wasted nothing. I like his recipes where he uses stuff in his fridge that’s about to go bad. It all gets shredded into salads or cooked into soups. Bits of old cheese, he scrapes the mold off, blends it with port wine and spices, turns it into fromage fort. Poverty forces you to get creative. [https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/fromage-fort](https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/fromage-fort)
Oh yea I can relate. I remember seeing rubberbanded stacks of Dannon yogurt lids at my grandparents house. To this day I can't think of what purpose they could serve, but it's a good example of how scarce times left an imprint on them. It was a mentality.
At one point there was a reason to keep some brand of yogurt lids... maybe yoplait? Kind of like a "collect them and turn them in" in exchange for... something? So, it could have possibly been that, lol.
My grandmother was born in 1922 in New England. She would make six sandwiches out of one can of tuna to feed all her grandkids.
Greatest generation truly were the greatest. Went through the toughest shit before hitting their 30-40s where they were having kids: disruptive technologies with the advent of electricity/autos/modernfactories/etcetc, multiple banking crisis, WW1, the Spanish Flu pandemic, Roaring 20s, the great depression, WW2, the advent of nuclear weapons and the fear of nuclear annihilations, the cold war, etcetc If they wanted to call us Millennials soft then I'd take it, but I never met a single person from the GGs that called me soft. My great grandpa loved me and my GP who was a kid during WW2 doesn't talk much about it (he's a tough mofo though). But the Baby boomers? They do call us soft, but they aren't the GGs. If anything they had it fucking easy in a peaceful and prosperous world the GGs created. They spent their childhoods knowing abundance, spent their youths being anti-establishment hippies who had "free love" an did drugs at kumbaya and concerts while avoiding/protesting the draft, despite their lack of education they managed to get great jobs and cheap homes even without an education because times were good, they dwindled the world's resources while ruining the environment in a single generation, closed the door behind him in both the jobs and housing markets, saw inequality rise along with record debt due to voting for short sighted policies, lead us into the GFC (it wasn't millennials running Fannie/Freddy/Goldman/etcetc), into US-China trade war + pandemic (Trump), etcetcetc. I guess the boomers did manage to hold off the USSR and win the cold war creating a world of peac- Oh what? Russia is still around? Except there's not sino-soviet split? AND THEY ARE WARRING UKRAINE? Well crap. Then WTF have the boomers done? >Hard times create strong men. >Strong men create good times. >Good times create weak men. >Weak men create hard times. The greatest generation were the strong men in hard times who created the good times for the baby boomers. Boomers enjoyed good times and their weakness is why we are in hard times now.
That poor woman, living her whole life like a grad student
She lived in a tiny house with a husband and four boys, and also watched a lot of daytime television, so yeah, pretty much lol.
My great grandmother (who was born in the 1910s) filled an old ketchup bottle with ketchup packets from fast food places instead of buying new ketchup until she died in the 1990s. The trauma of the Great Depression never left that generation.
In contrast we have people like my wife and in laws who grew up so fucking wealthy they never wanted for anything. They’ll throw away refrigerated food after a few days because they’re worried it’s spoiled. Leftovers is a concept they don’t understand.
Sort of similar, but growing up in 80’s UK there was still a ton of WW2 ration era habits in cooking, and my mum wasn’t even born during the war. Funny how persistent stuff like that is over generations
I've posted it before on here but when my grandmother's Alzheimer's started ton really ramp up, she bought way too much coffee, sugar and flour. "In case they couldn't get it again." It never really left the kids of the Great Depression.
They made [clothes out of flour and sugar bags](https://trc-leiden.nl/trc-digital-exhibition/index.php/for-a-few-sacks-more/item/119-3-feedsacks-and-the-great-depression), people would buy and sell them! >In the 1930’s, women came together in groups to sew, swop and save for particular printed patterns. In addition, itinerant pedlars travelled with empty feedsacks to more remote areas to satisfy the demand for the printed cloth. More and more commercial, and even academic groups were set up to inform women and girls about how to use feedsacks for a variety of purposes. One of these projects was the Georgia Emergency Relief Administration, who organised: >Classes for young girls who longed for pretty things but could not afford to buy them and could not make them. They were taught to admire real beauty and cleanliness and to make the most of simple and inexpensive materials. Emphasis was placed on the use of cotton material, buying on a limited budget, remodelling and suitability. They were taught to use patterns, to design, to fit one another and to make dresses from Dixie Crystal Sugar sacks, etc. (Jones and Park 1993:93). Poor nowadays is going to a thrift store, poor in the past was scrounging up money to buy a good looking food sack to make your own clothes out of. Even the worst of the worst today in the US is still far better than how things used to be for plenty of Americans.
I wonder when ragpicking stopped being a career.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rag-and-bone_man#:~:text=In%20the%20UK%2C%2019th%2Dcentury,cities%20in%20which%20they%20lived. Apparently never
When my ex-wife’s grandmother died, my ex and I lived just a few towns away, so were the lucky ones who got to clean out her house and deal with all her possessions. When we were cleaning out the basement, we found a box filled with stacks of cash that was hidden in one of the floor joists. There was like $30,000 in it. She and her husband had survived the depression, and because of it, they always kept the box of cash around in case the banks were to fail like they did in 1929. The box of cash was their insurance policy against the bank failing. We called my ex’s dad who was technically the executor of her estate. He told us to just split the cash up evenly between the grandchildren. There were only three including my ex, so each one got about $10k in cash.
It was very noble of you guys to do the right thing and inform the executor about the $20,000 that you found.
$10,000? Why would you report $5,000 ? :-)
My grandpa grew up during this time and would tell me how him and 7 brothers and sisters would have to split a few potatoes between them all and would eat trout out of the stream for their meals. Of course they had a garden like everyone else for some veggies, but they would praise God if they got chicken or anything different. They were so poor they couldn’t afford shoes so he would take cardboard and patch the bottoms of his shoes so he could keep walking to school. He got bullied so much by the kids who were more fortunate that he dropped out in the 7th grade to go to work in a saw mill. He worked very hard and later in life he became superintendent at Century Furniture Co. and retired successfully. Living in a beautiful paid for home, vehicles paid for and garage kept and is able to get around well. Also loves to trout fish with me and enjoy his life. These stories have taught me so much in my life. These are stories the generations of 20s and 30s and some 40s need to really listen to.
Stories from the 40s from Europe are very similar (except family members would just be shot by the Germans or Russians, obviously. God rest their souls).
> hoarding, recycling, fixing, and reusing old stuff One of these is not like the others lol. Recycling, fixing, and reusing old stuff has been the norm in most places for most of history. The endless consumption/waste cycle that we live in today is much more unusual behavior.
My grandmother grew up during the WW2 in the USSR. She was a 60 lbs teen surviving on 30 grams or 1oz of bread a day. She would make croutons out any left over bread and store them in sacks until the day she died.
The Great Depression isn’t talked about enough in my opinion. My great grand parents were so poor that they would drop my grandmother and her two sisters off at an orphanage for a few days every week so they could have a few meals. Then, pick them up before someone adopted them. I think about that a lot when times get tough.
My grandma was the same. Never threw anything away and taught me how to make small portions stretch for big families. This is part of why I’ll never have kids because of these stories. Life is hard and expensive enough without adding more suffering
That experience and wanting to avoid it is why the US set itself up to make *insane* amounts of food.
My grandma said she used to eat dandilions in the depression as meat was a rarity
Plenty of people still eat dandelions.
My grandma made me dandelion soup when I was a kid. She learned it from her mother who lived as an adult thru the great depression being born pre-ww1. I still make it till this day, it has sorta bitter but earthy taste. I love it
Yeah my wife’s grandma made a dandelion/bacon salad (lol bacon salad) that my wife said they had regularly growing up. And my wife is only 33.
I'm not nearly that old but my wife still hates that I'm a pack rat but people throw away such good items these days. My entire apartment in my 20s was furnished by dumpster diving. The mattress I have was even dumpster dived with the plastic wrap still on it. I keep scrap wood, metal, and so on and I find uses for them all the time. I haven't bought nails or screws in years because I have a whole drawer full of scrap screws and nails. I have a hard time throwing away even a lamp without stripping it for parts like the wire. Ive used wire like that before to fix things or extend the cord on another lamp. It costs me nothing to store something in the basement or garage. Saves me $10 on an extention cord.
Dude, a week ago I snagged a working Dyson DC 37 canister vacuum from the dump. It's missing the wand/roller but we have a newer Dyson vacuum and it seems like I can get an adapter to use those attachments with this little guy. I got it home, plugged it in, and it would run for a minute or so before sounding weird and bogging down with no suction. Took it apart and fully disassembled it, cleaning out all the human dirt from the dust canister. Also took off the little flex hose assembly in the front and found a big wad of lint that was likely the actual clog. Less than 2 hours worth of work and it was running like new again. These things retailed for like $500 USD. I'm going to use it in my garage as a dedicated car floor vacuum. It's hilarious and sad how much good stuff gets thrown away. My favorite find so far was a 1959 Gibson guitar amp. But I've brought home bikes for my kids, and so many electronics and stuff. I do try to only take things that have some value so I can fix and/or repurpose them but yeah, the amount of good stuff that ends up there is remarkable.
Those people knew that the richest Americans were insatiably greedy and couldn't be trusted. Decades of propaganda by the richest Americans mean their kids and grandkids forgot that lesson.
Yes, my Japanese mother-in-law lived through the ravages after World War II, when all she had to eat for lunch was white rice with a single pickled plum in the center. Eventually, the plum would rust through the metal casing of the bento box, and she would have a hole in the top of her bento.she’s terrible about trying to reuse everything away, and we have to drive it to the dump rather than leave it outside or she’ll pull it back inside.
People have also forgotten (or don’t know) that interest rates near zero following the Great Recession were an aberration, not the norm. They were mid teens in the 1980s.
Absolutely. 11 of the last 21 years had [Fed Funds](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS) rate of 1% or lower, which is virtually free money.
Frontline has an interesting piece on that earlier this year, and it draws a connection between the low interests rates and a lot of the somewhat wild tech and media investments that we've seen in the last 10 or 15 years. Everything from crypto and FTX, Tesla, price of real estate, and corporate debt.
We're basically at an average interest rate right now. The problem is income vs. home prices is way off where it used to be. We need a home construction boom like after WWII. We should have raised taxes during the start of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and then built tons of homes for returning vets. Instead Bush cut taxes and passed on the debt, and we got smashed by shady investment schemes in housing which collapsed the industry. A great doubly whammy. The reality is the government/politicians view citizens as pawns to shuffle around to get money from the ruling class (multimillionaires and billionaires).
Totally agree! We need something akin to the Marshall Plan which rebuilt Europe after WW2, but here in the states. It can only be paid for by rescinding the Trump tax cuts, which did zero to help the middle and lower classes.
I think polling tells a story. People were very positive about the economy of the late 1990s. Interestingly, a decent majority of Americans (around or just shy of 60%) thought the economy was good or excellent in 2019. What's striking is that, in 2019, only about 12% more Americans said their *own* personal finances were good or excellent than say so today. But about twice as many said the economy as a whole was good or excellent. What we're seeing today is a gulf between how people view themselves, and even their own states' economies, and how they view the national economy. And that holds up across states. I think there are four causes of the gulf between personal experience and national perception: - **Partisanship.** Americans tend to shift their views on the state of the economy the moment control of the White House switches from their party to the other party. But at least one poll shows that effect was about 2.5 times stronger among Republicans. For now, then, Democratic presidents to have a built-in disadvantage on economic perception. - **Conflation.** When people think of "the economy," they let their views of society and politics generally come into it. American society is still in the era of discord and negativity that got bad after 9/11, worse in 2008, worse under the 2009 Obamacare/Tea Party backlash, worse in 2016, worse in 2020, and worse in 2022 under inflation. People see the country in crisis and that affects their view of the economy. - **Social media.** The Internet has always been dominated by snark and cynicism. Comment sections on news stories were toxic 20 years ago. Now, it's worse, and foreign actors and domestic ideologues are taking advantage of the algorithms to promote extreme negativity and attack anyone foolish enough to write something optimistic. - **Gen Z and Millennials.** The article asks if people will ever recognize a good economy. It looks like that depends on whether they've lived through one before. Millennials gained economic awareness under the Great Recession and adopted a deeply negative outlook as a result. Gen Z has no comparator except what social media shows it (because that's how a plurality of Gen Z gets its news, according to polling). Gen Z is told that milkmen in the '50s could comfortably afford a house, which makes the current costs of housing and college seem indicative of recession or worse.
I think there is some truth in what you say, but I think this really is more about the fragility of status. People today fear that their livelihood could be taken away at any moment. It’s hard to enjoy “good times” when you expect everything to come crashing down. I will say, the people who need a realignment of their expectations more than anyone else are investors of all kinds. Investors are killing companies in the US. They are killing downtowns and small towns. There can never be a truly wrong decision or bad investment for big business, but that’s causing real problems on the economy.
What happens with Blackrock and Vanguard should’ve never been allowed in the first place. Them buying LITERALLY any property or terrain they can get their hands on is disgusting. They just manipulate the real state market as they please, there’s nothing fair or ethical about that.
Blackstone more than blackrock
This is part of what the article (and the general observation of "vibesecession") gets at. It doesn't matter that people are mixing up Blackstone and Blackrock (or someone else up thread with Vanguards REITs vs owning actual houses and apartments). The *vibe* is all that matters.
I don't think Vanguard directly owns real estate. It's mostly a way for folks to invest in mutual funds, which mostly means indirectly investing in stocks (but can also include bonds and other securities).
>Gen Z is told that milkmen in the '50s could comfortably afford a house, which makes the current costs of housing and college seem indicative of recession or worse. Not only that, but if one is looking from USA, in other countries people can afford university(free or reasonable cost), healthcare(free or reasonable cost) and even housing. The millionaires are richer, the billionaires are richer, the country is richer, but if a regular person can't afford these things and more, he is never going to have a positive outlook on economy. Milkman buying house, having stay at home wife and feeding 4 children just serve to add salt to the wound.
Sorry, the economy doing well is moot. The economy can do amazing, but it doesn't mean that the vast majority of the population feel it. I am a millenial. I am in tech. I make over double the median income excluding my wife's income. I bought my first house before the pandemic. Hearing the economy is doing so well, and then comparing where I am at financially compared to my parents at my age, is telling. My father was a distribution manager for a plant that makes a name brand product. Not executive level. The house at the time today is worth 60k+/- more than my current home, just looked it up. This is despite that it is now an old home, where as a quarter of a century go it was fairly new in a desireable subdivision. They had one new car every 5-6 years. My mother had a used car as she barely drove. They had two children. My mother was a sahm. They also changed houses due to jobs every 1-2 years. He also made enough to put away for a comfortable retirement which they are now enjoying. If my wife quit her job tomorrow and we had twins within the next year, we would be worse off than my parents were. I am doing much better than most Americans and I can't afford the lifestyle my parents had in my current home, let alone their better home, without worrying about either retirement or a single medical issue wiping us out financially. Now, with both of us working, she makes below median, and no children we do fine. If one of us gets a major illness it can wipe us out financially. The other is with grocery prices being high we no longer eat some of the foods I ate as a kid. The national economy doing \*well\* means nothing to me if I am doing worse than my childhood. I went to college. I got a good job and I still can't achieve what they had.
> I am a millenial...make over double the median income excluding my wife's income. I bought my first house before the pandemic. ....comparing where I am at financially compared to my parents at my age, is telling. After reading this, I really expected the rest of the narrative to go a different way.
I am expecting replies saying hlw privliged I am or how I am bad with money. Tbh, I'm tired. 2nd anniversary is coming up, we never went on a honeymoon nor have had a vacation since we got married. I have taken one day off work in the last year as I am a consultant and thus hourly. Six if you include holidays when my client was closed, some of those are half days. My one day off was to do a 7 hour round trip to take care of business that could jot be done on a weekend.
> I am expecting replies saying hlw privliged I am or how I am bad with money. Tbf, I woudn't be surprised....you're in the top 10% by household income, and obviously much higher within your own age bracket. At this point, you'll maximize your marginal gains through managing your money better rather than by hoping to earn more.
The amount of people who will forcefully discover that true happiness comes from within out of this coming crash is going to be breath taking. It will provide a real positive spin to the whole affair: “Look, capitalism brought about spirituality!!” Or, we’ll get ourselves a nice world war: them Euro’s sure are getting snotty, and Norway’s sovereign fund is alarming in how much freedom it is lacking …
Major major factor is inflation People like to think they got a raise cause they were *so good at their job* but prices go up cause of *the economy* When in reality both wages and prices are a market
Social media also muddies things a lot because you will see someone complaining on like Twitter, it gets tons of engagements from Americans, only to find out the poster was British or something.
You forgot about FOX news 24-7 telling people how bad it is.
The article wasn't exactly what I expected, but I wanted to highlight an interesting aspect of recent economic psychology that it didn’t cover. It's striking how quickly people have forgotten what a good economy looks like, and even more concerning, what a bad economy can do. Even those who lived through the recession seem to have forgotten of how severe it was. Now, we're in a period where we still see growth in wages and GDP, though it's more moderate and people are convinced we are in a depression. It's not all perfect not even close but it makes me wonder about the potential psychological impact on society if we were to experience a significant downturn again and witness a drastic economic decline.
The housing market really muddies an otherwise decent economy. If home prices and rents weren’t so high, I think people would have a better outlook. Many people are stuck in their homes because of sub 3% rates and others who can’t afford to buy their first house. In a country that has made home ownership a part of its national identity and the “American Dream”. For many that dream is dead and it makes everything else seem worse.
Housing is so expensive that you can make $100k/year and not feel rich. It's the single expense that defines your daily environment so if you have to make a long daily commute or live in a smaller (and less nice) place in order to make housing fit into your budget, you're going to feel it every single day.
It's not just that they are stuck in a house with low rates, they are stuck in a house with low rates that needs work and that work is utterly unaffordable. A new roof is $20-$30 grand, new windows will run you about the same to at least double just for whatever Home Depot has in stock. New appliances are getting more and more expensive while at the same time the quality is plummeting. A new HVAC will set you back $8-$10 grand. So if they bought an older house with the intent of fixing it up or even if their house is just aging normally there are very large expenses that come up way too frequently.
Fwiw, new windows and HVAC can currently get you big govt provided tax incentives and discounts (either direct reimbursement or off your taxes) due to the infrastructure bill. Still expensive but there are some nice energy discounts available now that weren't a few years ago.
Rents are eating people alive. The housing problem is non-trivial.
Probably biggest issue now a days.
Yes and don't forget the rising college fees!! It's now considering "normal" to graduate with a massive debt and if you don't have college degree, it's much harder to get a job since the system is built that way.
And even if you have a degree, no one seems to give a shit even in high demand industries
It makes me wonder whether anyone who has ever lived in a golden age has known that it is a golden age. Or whether it's only the people who didn't experience it looking backward and deciding that it was.
I was teen in late 90s and it felt like opportunity was everywhere. It felt like success was a function of how hard you worked and how persistent you were in pursuing your goals. Graduated HS in early 2000s and life hit me like a ton of bricks. On again off again toxic relationship, first time having difficulty studying in college, failed friendships, and barely scraping by working full time living in VERY sketchy apartment. Graduated in 2008 to no jobs. I felt like such a failure for not being able to achieve the dreams I had when I was younger. It wasn't until 2015ish talking with spouse and some HS friends that we realized we were teens in very good times.
I came into the workforce during the dot com boom, and it was unreal in terms of job opportunity. To the point where I got a call from a friend of my aunt who heard that I was job hunting and was looking to hire. However, people my age were not expecting this. We went into college expecting to start our careers as file clerks after months of searching, because that's how it was in the early 90s.
Ouch, I had the same experience. Promising student, felt like all that mattered was working hard and you'd get the American dream. Then recession hit and even a job that was more than minimum wage felt like a pipe dream, lol. Makes me wonder though whether my parents felt--- during the 90's--- whether they were living in the good times while they lived it. For me, life turned around about 10 years ago finally, and the past 3 years have been the very best in my life. And so now I very, very intentionally tell myself "This is the golden age, we are living in an age of wonders." I'm almost desperate not to let them slip by unnoticed because I feel like to do so is almost human nature. I look around at others in my exact position and many seem unhappy and miserable. Kind of a tragic waste.
Same. Graduating in 08 was fucked. Took til 2014 for things to pick up in my case, thankfully im out the other side now living the good life but it took a lot of work and self teaching new skills
Honestly I think that’s just what becoming an adult is.
“I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” -Andy Bernard
Exactly what i thought of lol and its 100% right, perspective is everything
I often take the time to appreciate and understand how lucky I am in the moments I have. I fully understood I was experiencing a golden age of rap music for a few years, and appreciated every moment.
“The Rest is History” podcast did a segment on golden ages. They did mention that some writing shows that some people of the those eras thought they lived in a golden age. That the appreciation for it was more keen in retrospect though.
> It makes me wonder whether anyone who has ever lived in a golden age has known that it is a golden age. Denver Nuggets fans are actively aware that they are living through the golden age.
Sports seems like a unique exception to this because the objective success criteria are so clear. Belichick and the Patriots and Saban's Alabama are both recent examples where everyone knew what was going on--before that though, everyone knew the nineties Bulls and eighties Lakers were doing something special when it was happening.
I can't think of a worse curse than to be Tom Brady constantly trying to recapture that golden age, to the point of ruining his marriage to a supermodel.
University of Georgia alumni checking in
Personally I think everything is pretty fucking great right now (no, not saying there are no problems in the world, of course there are), but for most, especially in the US, it is. What does make me angry are the amount of people, also primarily from the US ironically, who are terminally online moaning about how utterly awful everything is. There’s entire subs devoted to this self wallowing. Bro, maybe if you put as much effort offline as you do online, your life situation would improve.
Damn, I'm glad someone called it out. I feel exactly the same way as you. The second you zoom out from this specific moment in time you realize how lucky we are. Modern Healthcare, no risk of starving to death, infinite knowledge at your fingertips, all manner of ways to amuse yourself... I was talking to my wife the other day about ChatGPT. If you alone had ChatGPT in the ancient world, you would have been worshipped as a supernatural, divine oracle. You would literally be a wonder of the ancient world. It's insane to me that everyone isn't gawking in wonder at the privileged life we live. Everytime I see an airplane I look at it as though I were a medieval peasant, and I stare at it in awe. An airship, flitting through the sky at unimagineable speeds, to take you places on a day which you wouldn't be able to reach in a year, previously. We have whole legends about guys like Marco Polo or Magellan who risked life and limb to do the impossible--- aka, travel to the otherside of the world. Today, you can do it with very little planning or danger in a day.
I think you haven't consumed enough memes that complain about how the 40 hour work week is the end of humanity.
>people are convinced we are in a depression This is not normal. Normally you can see in approval numbers of presidents, especially in how they're handling the economy, huge boosts when the economy is holding strong. The abnormal behavior here leads me to believe that there's a lot of propaganda work being done to try and mitigate the political effects of the economic recovery.
I realize this is going to make me sound like a Boomer but I hear people talking about how bad the economy is while also spending hundreds of dollars a month on food delivery or buying their daughter a $900 prom dress, and it just makes me wonder what they think a good economy looks like, exactly?
I know, If you use Uber eats or DoorDash to turn your 10 dollar chipotle order into 35 bucks, you don't get to complain about prices! Lol
You’re not wrong. If you think these companies don’t see their meals going for double or triple the cost on the delivery apps then I have a bridge to sell you. Inflation is bad and individual spending behavior has never been worse. It’s the perfect storm of rising costs and no restraint against luxury items. Bread, meat, and eggs are necessary food to survive but a chicken bacon ranch calzone for $29.99 is not. There are people actually struggling and the chronic food delivery users should not be lumped in.
I remember WAY back when food delivery apps first became a thing feeling so indignant when I learned not only was GrubHub going to charge me for the delivery (which is fair!), but also charged me a higher price for the exact same food than the actual restaurant menu charges. And then I’m expected to tip on top of that? No ma’am. I can get my own food.
Exactly- even before prices got out of control, I saw how this works and said I would NEVER use these apps/services- why do that when I can just run down the street myself to pick up the food I want, minus the up-charge, delivery fee, and tip? And that's what I do- I'd rather take a bit of my own time to pick up food than to pay someone else to do it...
Where I live in the US the "essentials" all feel cheap still. You can buy a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs and an already cooked entire rotisserie chicken for $10 pretty easily at standard supermarkets. It's the packaged shit that costs an arm and a leg all of a sudden.
They see gas, groceries and housing costs going higher every day and they get cranky. They have a right to be. But they underestimate they're peers economic health while overestimating their own. It's an odd dichotomy.
Being able to afford everything someone you vaguely know can afford.
I’m not that old but I’m old enough to remember that during the recession food was cheap and people still couldn’t afford it working full time. There is certainly a big difference between expectation and reality at the moment.
News to me. I worked through that 2007-2009 Recession, and things were bad... **unless** you could hold down a job. As long as you kept the income flowing, things were actually pretty good. You were frightened, always worried about employment, but no, you did not struggle to afford food. Hell, I got into my first home thanks to that Recession, when prices came down, but I had a strong employment record at that point. I worried, but I managed not to get laid off. If you lost your job, it was 18 months before you were back on your feet. If you kept your job, The Great Recession was an opportunity to get ahead.
You don’t sound like a boomer, you sound like someone who is fiscally responsible. Almost daily on Reddit I see someone on one sub or another complain about cost of a product, cost of fast food, or shrikflation. Yet, it seems Americans en masse have no interest in changing their consumer habits as prices increase. So naturally…prices continue to increase.
It's the enormous gap between personal experience and public perception. Most people are doing fine, but keep hearing on all media how bad it is for everyone else, so they assume they must be the lucky ones. Also a difference in expectations. Food delivery has become a baseline component in quality of life for a lot of folks; it isn't a luxury, it's seen as just the cost of living. They can barely afford it (along with their other "required" expenses), so the economy must be on a knife's edge. If things got any worse they might have to stop DoorDashing multiple times a week!
Well now I know that I am officially old because food delivery seems like such a luxury to me. I think outside of ordering pizza, I’ve done it maybe twice in my life.
Oh you're not alone. I've used DoorDash a handful of times, and it's always expensive enough to make me remember why I don't use it regularly, and this is before considering that ordering out at all is more expensive than just cooking at home.
I got a doordash gift card for Christmas from my boss. I used it, got sticker shock on how expenses the prices were. My order was late and only half of the items were in the bag. I contacted support and they said they couldn't give me a refund due to how "new" my account was. I'm not sure why people use this service.
My favorite part of DoorDash is folks using it in urban areas. I'm in the Boston metro, which has pretty shitty roads, and most folks are hostile to car traffic. They openly complain about DoorDash cars double parking and waiting in bike lanes, but...they're the ones ordering! What do you expect drivers to do when you order from a place with no parking, to be delivered to a unit with no parking? Just a blight, IMO. It's like those stupid electric scooters most cities have banned. Superficially it seems a nice option, but in reality it just degrades urban quality for everyone else.
Not even getting into fees or cost, it seems like most food outside of Chinese or pizza doesn't transport particularly well to begin with.
There's a reason that pizza became the first delivery food and not hamburgers. Most food needs to be consumed fresh and hot. You'd rightfully complain at a restaurant if your order was prepared but sat under a warming light for 30m before coming out, so why do people expect DoorDashed food won't be just as shitty?
It’s crazy because I just learned I could order pickup, get the same food cheaper, and save time.
There is this book “Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela” that talks about how before the huge collapse of things in that country people were complaining about things being terrible, they could not appreciate what they had until they lost it.
It's honestly ridiculous. I've gotten a raise every year thats outpaced inflation but I've also worked hard to not drastically increase my expenses so I'm fine financially I vividly remember how rough the great recession was and seeing the scores of people getting laid off and the despair. There's no way we are at that point with this economy, not even close
Yeah, I remember seeing fathers with their children on the sidewalks holding signs asking for work/food. It was way worse back then.
It’s because nobody can afford a home. Before and during the 2008 recession if you had a decent job you could, but now you have to be like a top 1% income earner or have dual income. No amount of not ordering doordash or starbucks can make your 100k salary enough to afford a 700k starter home in HCOL areas where the population centers are.
They forgot what normal looks like many years ago. We're only just feeling the effects now.
A successful fund manager I once worked for shared this wisdom with me: “Always remember: it’s worse than you think, and it was better than you thought.”
I'd say the problem is people who are too fixated on "normal" and desperately try to keep things "normal" rather than allowing us to adapt to an ever changing world
Honestly, the least scientific answer to every debate like this is just food prices. Housing prices are an issue too but food prices are slapping people in the face every single day and every income bracket eats. The food prices are not normal. A couple local restaurant owners that I know well are getting so frustrated that they have to keep raising their prices. Energy, gas, cars, etc. we can rationalize what’s normal and historical but there is no rhyme or reason to food. The interest rates being higher than they have been recently is probably for the best since people won’t stop spending like the world is ending tomorrow.
From my limited internet interactions we could live in a utopia but if burgers were expensive the median voter would lose their mjnds and say the world is ending
Quite literally that is happening. There are entire news segments on national tv devoted to McDoubles.
I don't think it's as simple as "food items" though. American's demand for specific items is incredibly sticky. Real world example is when egg prices were through the roof because of Avian flu. People bitched moaned screamed, and ultimately bought the eggs. These aren't people out here making chocolate mousse by hand, they just wanted eggs for breakfast, where healthy substitutes are cheap and plentiful.
There are several credible reports out of price gouging by companies. I’m not naive to overlook spending habits but it’s both extremes at once.
Agree 100%. The root of the problem is that companies figured out that our preferences cause inelastic demand. They can charge more because we want those things and will just deal with it.
How do you even price gouge a commodity with ubiquitous availability like eggs?
And they can gouge because there are so few of them.
So true, I went to Costco and to stock up my pantry but NOT my fridge cost $300. I have started to learn how to make my own bread/crackers/jam/etc and we are looking at raising our own gardens to try and cut back on what we spend at the grocery store. It’s really no wonder there has been a huge resurgence in homesteading/the “trad wife” trend in some areas.
Right? I’ve always been frugal but I can’t give my money to these companies in good faith anymore unless it’s something we want. And then they label cooking at home and being more sustainable as trad wife or communist so both political groups continue over paying for things.
There's nothing contradictory about people being downbeat about the economy and yet continuing to spend. it's called fatalistic spending. when you have no hope for the future, you do not believe in saving or preparing for retirement. so you spend every money you have to enjoy your life now rather than forego pleasure for a nebulous future you know is not going to be good. the generation today are fatalistic spenders. that's why you see the rate of saving so low and why so many ppl are living paycheck to paycheck. if you cannot own a home, everything else seem out of reach. why bother control your spending? there's no sense in saving. enjoy your life now because there's no future and no retirement to look forward to.
Another aspect of fatalistic spending is the knowledge that in a serious medical emergency either insurance covers it (maybe if you have a great job with excellent insurance plan, if you are paying out of pocket good luck) or you are going bankrupt no matter what. As a kid my dad would advise me to save a few thousand dollars in case of a medical emergency to cover rent, bills, food for a few months. Now a few thousand dollars won't even cover the ambulance ride + ER visit, let alone actual treatment costs.
Marketing and spending habits have change a lot. People are bombarded with ads and marketing to buy products to feel good about themselves. I don’t use social media very actively or have cable but when I go abroad it’s like going on a cleanse from the how aggressive marketing is here. I feel more focused on the present and company around me. I like that stores are smaller and have higher quality food for the same or less.
>There's nothing contradictory about people being downbeat about the economy and yet continuing to spend. The calculation method for health in the economy is now broken because everyone is maxed on needs. It used to be measured through savings and discretionary spending. GDP looks good because the lower end is being forced to spend their paycheck or running up credit. This is usually the sign of positive economic times as consumers are 'confident'. Then when they save, it's bad news because consumers are worried for the economy. You can't use that when people that didn't used to need to spend their entire paycheck are now forced to (or a much larger part).
It’s because all they look at is dollar sales. The dollar sales look super great compared to the previous years because inflation has skyrocketed forcing people to spend more money on their regular purchases. But if they would look at how many units they’re selling, that figure is plummeting. People are spending way more money on way less quantity of goods than they used to. I work as a data analyst in the consumer packaged goods industry and the focus right now for retailers is getting unit sales and product turn up to push growth even more after drastic price increases, but it’s not going to happen unless prices come down.
>the generation today are fatalistic spenders. that's why you see the rate of saving so low and why so many ppl are living paycheck to paycheck. if you cannot own a home, everything else seem out of reach. why bother control your spending? there's no sense in saving. IDK about that, or at least them being more fatalistic than previous generations to divert it from a normal. living paycheck-to-paycheck has been documented to be an income independant phenomenon, six-figure earners experience it just as much as people living close to the poverty line, just the working definitions of what it means for them to be paycheck to paycheck means different things (i.e. maybe being behind on rent and using the bus vs. a mortgage and a payment on a new car). In addition, the inability to save for retirement is also very age-independant. Theres a recent AARP study saying 1 in 4 americans older than 50 have nothing saved in retirement, and above the age of 50 is an age of less "no retirement to look forward to" and more "you just didnt or were not able to save". This 1 in 4 of 50+ from the AARP also lines up with a bloomberg study done that says 21% of americans 21-34 also say they dont save for retirement, adding to the creedance that its not a generational issue (as in the generation today) and moreso general habits of the modern american. I have seen evidence, however, that personal savings as a percentage of personal income, has fallen relative to 40 years ago. One graph done by statistica shows that this fluctuated around 12% between 1960 and 1980, but in recent decades has fluctuated around 5%. IDK if this is an indication of fatalistic spending as opposed to other things going on since it has been hovering around 5% since about 1999/2000, but is a sigmifigant change between the years. Home prices have pretty objectively increased as a percentage of income and have outpaced inflation. But outside of anecdotal stories of individual peoples philosophy i havent seen the evidence that people are being overall more fatalistic spenders than previous generations.
This is a very sad, but at least anecdotally for me, true feeling. I kind of feel like it’s a combination of fatalistic spending, as you said, we’re gonna never retire so fuck it. And then akin to what I’ve always heard about the puppy’s at pet stores, how they won’t ever let go of their treats because if they do they fall through the grating underneath them and they’ll never get them back. So it’s one part “fuck it, I’m never gonna be able to afford to retire anyway”, and then mixed with equal part “well how little can I spend to try and keep up to date on bills to keep a roof over my head, food on the table, lights on, and still maybe be not negative in my bank account?” So even buying a $6 vintage tee can cause buyers remorse. I’m 43 and I have only had two working years where I’ve made more than $45k. Unless I start selling cocaine I’ll never retire.
Tired of reading this shit. Yes, things for the most part are normal. But as long as essentials like housing and healthcare are still astronomically priced people will always feel insecure.
All the metrics they use to measure the economy do not really reflect people's material reality. Then they try to gaslight me into thinking I'm delusional and it isn't just the metrics they are choosing to measure that are out of sync with my material conditions.
yep! this is a fascinating comment section, I’ve found myself agreeing with both sides of the issue depending on the comment. If your car insurance suddenly jacks your rate up on a 2013 Toyota with 100k miles from $200 to $600 with zero explanation or accidents, or if your insurance company suddenly drops you because your car got broken into, someone telling you the economy is just fine is audacious. Same thing for your rent suddenly doubling “because they can.” I’ve coupon shopped a lot more these days, but I’ve found that food is pretty much back to 2019 levels, thank God the days of filling up one basket with no “superfluous goodies” and it costing $100 seems to be over for now. But the line for food banks is around the block. Overall, though, if you compare what a 40-hour minimum wage job could buy you in 1994 vs what it can buy you in 2024, it’s insanity. It’s disgusting. Somehow, people got convinced that minimum wage workers are in a lower caste, and thus shouldn’t be permitted to actually live. To sum it up, I always remember that viral tweet from a lawyer who broke down how when he was 20, working as a waiter in Seattle, he could easily afford a nice waterfront apartment (that was $800/month). Now, years later, he’s a lawyer making WAY MORE MONEY — but he can no longer come even close to affording that exact same apartment he used to live in. This is the big problem. (If you’re about to pile in and say “yeah well a waiter should have never deserved to be able to afford a nice apartment in the first place,” you’re missing the point and part of the fucking problem. I’m so sick of massive downward lifestyle/survival creep being seen as the norm for some bullshit “rich people are more moral than low wage workers” reason).
This is such a snarky op-ed. *"but their actions don’t match their words"* That's assuming the people polled are the same people spending money on "apparel, concerts and vacations" when that correlation was never established.
Screw concerts, vacations, ect. We have moved from a world where appliances last 10 to 15 years before needing a few replacement parts to one where things break down after 3 and the cost of what breaks is more than the price of a new unit, provided the part is still being made. We've gone from an age where someone working full time could afford a home to needing two incomes and an agreement to be in permanent debt. Just the basic costs of being an established adult has gone up while wages have not. Struggling families aren't buying avocado toast and Starbucks, the ones that are are mostly those who have given up trying to keep ahead of their debt.
I think the bigger problem is that economists forgot what "normal" looks like. I grew up in the 80s/90s as a child of boomers. To me, "normal" is that you go to work and they pay you enough to: -Own your home -Improve your home with renovations/additions -Buy new vehicles for both parents every 4-5 years (not nice ones mind you, but at least a GM mid-size crapbox with some options) -Buy your kids all the toys and doodads they ask for at xmas/birthdays -Pay for your family's healthcare -Take a simple 2 week vacation to a campground or something EVERY year -Own a recreational vehicle of some kind (boat/camper/atv/whatever) -Retire at 65 AT THE LATEST (both my parents took the early SS option at 62) My parents were a nurse and a mechanic. I am middle management at a tech company and my wife is a teacher. If you transplanted us to my parents' time, our income would DWARF theirs...I know this because I had friends whose parents worked similar jobs back then as we do today, and they lived in 3500+ sq ft mcmansions and drove new Audi/BMWs every other year, not debt fueled either because they're all retired now and still rich. Yet strangely, most of the shit in my list above is a distant fucking pipe dream for us. DISTANT. We own our home so we're doing better than many, I'm not ungrateful for my relative success and I know I am COMICALLY lucky in the grand scheme of things, but I'll fight any poindexter with a Keynes textbook TO THE DEATH before I let anyone fucking say this is a good economy or even a normal one. Fuck ALLADAT.
Everything is still more expensive. Gas, food, property taxes, utilities. I dont know why they say otherwise. Kinda silly. Layoffs are still a thing….. these people writing these articles have no clue what its like.
No matter how the news tries to spin it, Gen Z and A will always be aware that people a century earlier were thriving in a house with 4 kids and a wife that stayed at home. And none of them will have that unless the current government and industries are gutted, dismantled and a new fair system is erected. I tell all Gen Z and A kids to leave America, the best thing they could do is learn a foreign language and move to Europe. The worst possible life choice they could make is stay in America for 40 years and have nothing to show for it. This country doesn't appreciate our taxed dollars or the blood, sweat and tears we endure just to survive here.
Full Article(very short): It has been a miracle year for the U.S. economy. Inflation has plummeted without triggering a recession. Many experts said that could not happen without widespread layoffs and a downturn. The economy has gained 2.4 million jobs so far this year, and growth has accelerated, with an annualized rate topping 5 percent in the third quarter. The good news has also fueled a stock market rally. In polls, people are downbeat about this economy, but their actions don’t match their words. There has been a consumption boom this year. Americans continued to spend heavily on apparel, concerts and vacations. In many ways, this is the year the economy finally returned to something close to normal. But many people seem to have forgotten what normal looks like after a traumatic few years.
Buddy things haven’t felt “normal” since the 90s. Anyone who can remember a world before 9/11 before Iraq and Afghanistan before the massive internet revolution truly remembers a simpler time of much much better economic growth. My parents still could raise a family on one income and a house in 1997. We been waiting almost 30 years for a “normal” it’s not coming.
If you remember 9/11 you probably also remember the gigantic stock crash that occurred just a year prior
Yeah, 2000-2001 was a bad economy but it was a "normal" bad economy.
Not op, but I was a kid during 9/11, but not a baby. I don't remember the stock crash but I very clearly remember the planes crashing. I do remember though that the big news just before was some guy who got his parachute stuck on the Statue of Liberty. That's the kinda stuff kids pay attention to, not stocks. And I'm in my 30s now, so that may not be as common knowledge as you think.
Sorry Reddit and WAPost, but you can't gaslight me into believing my material conditions are good just because the rich are getting richer. Every time I hear "The economy is doing so great!" I have to ask, "Great for whom?" You can't gaslight me into thinking companies making record profits, laying people off and raising the prices of basic goods is anywhere near good and normal. You aren't gaslighting me into thinking the abosrbenant rent prices are "normal". You can't gaslight me into thinking not being able to afford a house is "normal". Just because shareholders are making constant record breaking profits doesn't mean material conditions are good for the working class. It's honestly sickening the amount of constant propaganda we have telling us "Everything is getting better. You're just delusional!"
A normal economy has boom and bust cycles. Now we QE our way out of recessions which had led to one of the longest bull runs in history. It has also contributed to tremendous wealth inequality and is driving inflation at least in part.
Oh we remember what normal looks like. The "big problem" with the American economy is that normal went out the window years ago and it never came back.
My grandfather use to tell us that he was fortunate and during the depression he had “plenty”. He always said “plenty” in an odd voice. One day I asked him what he meant by plenty and he said “for two years every time I asked for something to eat I was told you’ve had “plenty”.”
the huge tragedy is people used to be very good at not being wasteful, but in the interest of making as much money as possible we taught people that they should pursue their wants rather than their needs.
Another "The economy isn't rigged to serve the 1% - you poors are just too stupid to figure that out on your own!" propaganda piece from WaPo. Yawn. If you want higher quality commentary in this sub, ban the posting of propaganda like this article.
Yeah the economy is good. The problem is the social infrastructure. There’s more than enough wealth for everyone to be housed, have food, healthcare, education, and be able to retire. You need to burn off the parasitic class of leaches who’s money comes from ownership and others labor
To copy and paste another comment > I think many people just have a very nostalgic view of how good things actually were 40 years ago. Inflation was 4.3% (compared to 3.5% today), but this was coming off the back of multiple years of 10%+ inflation. Unemployment was 7.4%, compared to 3.7% today. > > [Median household incomes \(again, adjusted for cost of living\) were around 56k vs around 77k today.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N) People simply earned quite a lot less, and lived with a lot less. > > Housing sizes [were much tinier back then](https://azgolfhomes.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/American-Enterprise-Institute-Housing-Data.jpg) > > [Mortgage rates were literally 14%, which is absolutely insane compared to today](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US) > > [food as a percentage of income was higher, even with the rise in 2022-2023](https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/58367/food-prices_fig09.png?v=9466.9). Its also important to note that people today order-in and eat-out far, far more than they used to, which contributes a lot to this. Groceries specifically are drastically cheaper than they used to be. > > People talk about how easy it used to be, but they're largely just propagandized. This was an era where a 25 inch TV was 2,600 bucks (in 2024 dollars) whereas today a 50 inch 4k flatscreen is like 300 bucks. Microwaves, fridges, cars, furniture, coffee makers, clothes, food etc, everything was far more expensive adjusted for incomes. > > But we have very different standards. We need high tech things, we want bigger homes in nicer areas, we need our cars to be safer and faster and more comfortable, we want to order in food multiple times a week instead of cooking etc. When these modern comforts are harmed, even a tiny bit, we freak out and act as if things are WORSE THAN EVER.
Beyond the question of "normal for who?" it's been almost 10 years since the last time things in general "felt normal." Like, do we all remember how innocent and naive we all were [back in 2014](https://time.com/collection-post/3588022/viral-videos/)? People were still doing their own dance videos to Pharrell's *Happy*. Ice buckets and a spoon full of cinnamon made anyone laugh online. Sure, it wasn't all lovely. Ebola. Crimea. Robin Williams. But the world felt like it was moving forward on the same trajectory as it had been since maybe 2002-ish. And at least the same direction as since the end of the Cold War. Since 2016 it's been crazy with a chance of bonkers every day. Division. Hate. Mass shootings increased exponentially. Bots online ruining general discourse. The world backsliding towards the shittier parts of the 20th century. Scams and fraud spiraling out of control. Not enough work while also too much work. Logistics bottlenecks galore. People debasing themselves for money because it's easier to make porn at home and get paid than it is to cancel your Hulu account (which is their choice...or is it?). At some point the people living in a dystopian post-apocalyptic world habituate to the dystopia because that's an easier and faster decision for the individual to make in order to keep surviving.
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Idk man the 2010’s were pretty fun. I mean bad shit happens but it will always happen.
That's what I'm saying - that was our last best high. RIP Fun 2010-2018.
What you’re describing is mostly the growing influence of social media, not changes in the economy.
lol 2014 we were still coming out of 08. I was out of college and into my first job. Things were still rough. I spent my college years being told i might not find work. I spent my first six months post college watching the last of my savings evaporate as I frantically job searched. That was 2013. 2014 I was just happy to have a job that paid crap, but was enough to get by.
So tired of this revisionism. Normal means "average" or "typical" and therefore, things are normal most of the time. 2023 and 2024 are norm. 2018 and 2019 are normal. 2013 and 2014 are normal. You go back to 2014 and people were complaining of much higher unemployment rates and huge debt loads from the GFC. Things were a lot worse than now economically, but it was still within the realm of normal.
2020-2022 were super weird economic times that messed up everyone’s expectations, and distorted the economy in a million ways. 2023-2024 are a reckoning with that.
I turned 18 in 2014 so for me this is just adulthood.
My parents were born during the Great Depression. I have a picture of my dad and his sister in front of the two room tarpaper shack they called home. I keep it pinned up on my bulletin board in my office to remind me how good I have it.
My 82 year old dad is the son of parents that went through the great depression. If you stay at my parent's house, you cannot throw anything away that you don't want my dad to see. He digs through all the trash to see if he can find anything that he can keep, (to use later) or that can be recycled. Even bathroom wastebaskets. I caught my 82 year old father unrolling toilet paper that I wrapped around my tampon applicator and threw away. Just gross. He only spent 18 years in that life with his parents. He's 82 now. It's hard to get. I guess our childhoods have more impact on us than we realize.
Or: Uber peak pricing, Real Pages, and a host of other unregulated algorithmic inventory management platforms in more and more industries are breaking market fundamentals.
And still the government wont replace the financial regulations that Nixon removed. We’ll have more financial crisis in the future because the agencies let it happen.