John, Umair concludes…
“America is the world’s first poor rich country. And millennials are the first generation of new poor in it, the first full generation to experience the terrible, swift, shocking decline from prosperity to precarity. Young people without opportunities, chances, savings, incomes, safety nets, relationships, a future, the dream. They don’t know it perhaps, and no one seems to talk about — but they are learning what it means to live in poverty.”
This is crazy…
My father was born the son of a millionaire… like many of his generation his parents lost everything in the Great Depression. Arguably, his generation was the “first poor rich country”, since the US remained rich by world’s standards, but millions were poor. He spent a life time and eventually went from earning 19 cents an hour as a stock boy at Woolworth’s to a millionaire again.
Furthermore, I do not think we will lose our safety net, if anything it has become more robust over time. Furthermore, since no one lives forever, the millennials will inherit more money than any generation before it. In the mean time unemployment is at the lowest level in 50 years and the lifestyle available to full time workers is higher than ever before.
The median household income is around $62K which still goes pretty far in most of the country (though not in the big cities of the east and west coast). Income levels for lower income individuals understates that actual income since it excludes entitlements which push the median numbers higher. Living standards in the US continue to advance about 1% a year and have for more than 30 years.
“The median U.S. household income was $63,179, according to the Census Bureau, up 0.9% on an inflation-adjusted basis from the $61,372 midpoint in 2017.”
I started out life living in a poorly furnished studio apartment in Maine that I rented weekly. Working hard I also became a millionaire before I retired. My son started out eating food off the plates that people left behind in restaurants while he ordered a cup of coffee. Today he is a millionaire.
Perhaps my parents could have helped me more at the beginning and perhaps I could have helped my son more. But I wonder if either of us would have been as successful if they had. Perhaps the most important life lesson one can learn is what poverty is about, the second most important lesson is the compound power of interest on savings. It causes one to both work hard not to remain poor and save. But having lived poor, one develops compassion to help those that need help escaping poverty or have tragic circumstances that prevent them from doing so.
Life starts out tough for nearly every generation, but Umair has no perspective from history, he is to young to have lived life. He despairs the future, when the future has never been so bright. The truth is that the millennial generation will be the wealthiest (not the poorest) and most educated generation (as a result of the massive increase in women completing college) in the history of the country. He is such a whiner. With more higher educated women, more couples will earn combined incomes that far exceed those of previous generations.
Umair was speaking of millennials as “a generation”. If you want to argue that some millenials will be poor, you will get no argument from me on that. While poverty has declined (not increased) since the 60s and the standard of living of the poor have gone up (not down), it remains true that 13% or so of Americans live in poverty. But for those with full time jobs, that number drops to around 6% and for those with full time jobs and adjusted for non cash entitlements that number drops to around 3–4%… still that is 10–12 million people… but not confined to millennials…
My point is every generation believed what Umair believes. They were wrong… and he is wrong… He has no perspective because he is not at the tail end of life looking back…
I don’t really blame him for his lack of perspective, social scientists have concluded our ability as humans to see the future is limited (except for rare individuals) to projecting the present into the future which is what Umair is doing. The “millenials” are like every generation before them starting out poor… buried in debt… and trying to dig out… but we did and they will…
