During my recovery, I get to chat with my wife a lot. She’s been a tremendous asset to me my whole life but now she is my “nurse”. It’s hard on her but she has been great.
Jeffrey Tucker wrote a piece at the Epoch Times that got me thinking. When you are lying around all day with an ice machine hooked up to your leg, you think a lot.
It makes no sense from the point of view of pretty much any successful 30-year-old in the whole of American history. He is not really in a position of being truly independent, and so is defaulting back to living with his parents like he is 16.
This situation affects millions of young people under the age of 30. They face a situation today that is completely unlike anything I encountered when I graduated from high school. The world in those days, in the mid-1980s, is something unimaginable to young people today.
Friends of mine occasionally chat about this. I had a buddy from kindergarten who bought his first house when he was 19. Most other friends were well on their way to establishing some way of life by the time they were 30.
We were chatting about our life together. We met in college and got married at age 23. I was actually just turning 24. We had no clue about what was ahead of us with no certain plans.
My wife’s aunt had passed away and left her a small amount of money. She used it as a downpayment on a townhouse, so that’s where we lived. We rolled that house into the next house and so on and so on.
That was 1987.
Today, people get married later and instead of having kids in their twenties, they do it in their thirties. We had all our kids by the time we were 30. We are noticing that it is hard for people our children’s age to buy homes and start to stabilize their lives. Many of them are in debt from college. College is significantly more expensive today than when we went to school. Back then, you truly could work your way through school and graduate mostly debt-free just like in our parent’s generation.
When I think about my choices coming out of high school, one reason I didn’t matriculate to Columbia University in NYC was cost. All-in tuition and fees, rent, and food were going to be something like $11-12,0000 per year in 1980 dollars. That’s roughly $44k. Columbia tuition and fees are $68k today. Then you have to eat and sleep somewhere. At the margin, you can see how much things have really gone up in cost.
It’s not just housing and education though. Cars cost significantly more too. It seems as though all long-term durable goods are more expensive on the margin than the rate of inflation.
When you search for answers, it’s hard to tease out one solution.
I think you can blame the fall of the Berlin Wall for a lot of the escalation in college costs along with the opening of China. That increased demand significantly without any corresponding increase in supply. The racial preferences, federal subsidies, and all the other bullshit around college admissions also raised prices.
It’s gotten to the point that the balance for the cost/opportunity cost to college has switched and many aren’t going. Neither of my nephews chose to attend college and are working in occupations that they don’t need to go. One has a nice fitness business. Follow him on Instagram here. The kid is ripped. He’s having tremendous success teaching people how to change their body types and lose weight. I probably will engage his services after I get off crutches since I need to lose about 30 lbs…
My other nephew went into the construction game. I had a lot of friends do that and they were very successful. Didn’t need a college degree.
When it comes to housing, more immigration to the US ramped up demand. The other unsaid point on housing is that many cities passed all kinds of building codes to stop houses from being built. There was the “legend of suburban sprawl” which was supposedly a pox on civilization. Turns out, suburban sprawl allows people to raise their families in a stable environment at a reasonable cost.
In his article, Tucker also cites rent control. He is correct. Rent control drives up rental prices making apartments harder to afford. In Chicago and other cities, there are all kinds of codes around Section 8 housing which make apartments more expensive than they should be too. Add in all the city regulations and unnecessary building codes and it is just layers on layers on layers.
My wife and I were both raised in the suburbs. We lived in the city and certainly enjoyed living there for a variety of reasons. We also own a rural property and understand the challenges that go with the benefits of living rural.
When you are raising kids and building a family, the suburbs are the easiest, cheapest way to do it. Yet, elite urban planners are 100% opposed to the idea of suburbs. Raising kids in the city is expensive as all get out. I am noticing the high cost in my short stay here in Chicago. $30 in cab rides to get to PT and back yesterday. I have about 5 more sessions before I go back to Vegas. Groceries are far more expensive too. Parking, insurance, and other things you might not think about are more expensive in the city than in the suburbs.
The costs to put gas in your vehicle, heat your home, and power your life have gone up significantly. The reason is government policy and regulation. 90% of the cost of nuclear power is due to regulations. 90%. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Over the course of the last twenty years, government apparatchiks have changed their focus from establishing policy so the free market could provide abundance to a policy where everything is restricted. They forget that Julian Simon won the bet.
I do have empathy for the current generation. Things have gotten more expensive through no fault of theirs. Over the last 20-30 years, we have seen people marrying later, and having kids later. I wonder if that will change given the new economic realities any time soon.
The demand for college education while slowing is not going to change. It’s been proven by economist after economist that you tend to do better if you graduate from college, no matter what your degree is and no matter where you go.
I don’t see building codes and housing codes changing anytime soon. It’s too hard to change elite opinions and they are mired in the groupthink of global warming. Instead of single-family homes, they are thinking in terms of multi-family grass huts. This is a great read by
on charts they should be showing the smug class at the latest conference.It’s a lot easier to take on the world as a twosome in your twenties than it is by yourself.
You would think that our stupid politicians would lay out a plan to help the younger generations.
FWIW re your surgery, my wife had a knee replacement a few years back. What I learned from her and others we knew is that you absolutely need to do PT aggressively and ASAP, painful or not. Fail to do that and you're no better off for the surgery.