The article is oddly passive aggressive about the topic. Instead of going into the nuances of why this occurs and what might be expected if this trend continues (which is what an unbiased reader might expect from the title), the author instead veers a sharp left turn and starts ranting about how the newer generation is too dependent on their parents for monetary support and how the parents need to stop supporting their children.

I also find the data to be oddly presented, since the data lumps all people between ages 18 to 30 together. People in their teens and early 20’s have a high chance of living with their parents due to studying in college. It makes me wonder if the author specifically lumped these people into a single group to try to skew the data in favor of their awkwardly anti-millenial stance.

“Different” meaning collapsing.

Capitalism was always a con-game. Infinite growth on a finite world with finite resources was always a scam. With no meaningful virgin markets to exploit and no meaningful new economic sectors in which to grow/metastasize, the whole scam is falling apart and the market capitalists are eating each other’s empire’s whole, destroying entire economic sector’s ability to produce the goods/services they used to in the process. HBODiscoveryTimeWarnerParamountSoon dispensing garbage shadows of what its former swallowed and destroyed competition used to produce is happening everywhere in every sector, from healthcare to food production. The enshittification of end stage market capitalism.

The snake is choking on its own fucking tail. The people can either be punished for it by the desperate owners going insane demanding ever mooaaaar from their failing scheme and suffer that pointless pain into collapse, or we can revolt and suffer the useful pain of building an equitable society from the ashes.

I have no real hope for the second one, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

Thank god my kid makes more money than I do. He’s even on track to pay me back for college.

I wonder how much of this can be traced back to unrealistic expectations caused by the post-WWII boom in the US.

The US and Canada were the only 2 major developed countries that came out of WWII essentially unscathed. The economy was doing incredibly well. Not only was it possible for a family to survive when only the father was working, they could make it work while buying a big home in a suburb with a new car, a radio, a TV, etc.

The generation before that was the one that went through the great depression which led immediately into WWII, so they didn’t have a solid basis for what was normal. Before that was the “roaring 20s”, which we know was unusual because you don’t call a period “roaring” if things were normal.

Before that was the 1910s, maybe the last “normal” period before 1950 or so. At that time, things were very different. For example, there was no old age security, and it was mostly the children who took care of their elderly parents. When those elderly parents had been having kids (say the 1860s) the norm was about 5 kids per couple. That meant that only one of the kids had to take care of their elderly parents, living in a household with 3 generations. The other kids were able to live in a nuclear family household with just the kids.

So, while things are getting worse now, it may be that we have an unrealistic idea of what’s normal. Instead of the period starting in the 1950s as being the period where things were “normal”, maybe it was a period where things were unusually good. That would mean that at least some of the “things are getting worse” is just things regressing toward the mean.

Young adults face myriad economic challenges in 2024 America. College costs and student debt loads are rising. House prices have soared. Mercurial inflation and interest rates have vexed consumers.

Parents, for their part, seem ever more inclined to carry on with parenting well past the age a child exits childhood, removing every obstacle in their path. Some researchers call it “snowplow” parenting.