Another WSJ banger about why the poors aren't doing more
Another WSJ banger about why the poors aren't doing more
132 comments
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lol. buying a house? having kids? I can barely afford to EAT, let alone bring another person into the world.
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And yet both legacy and new media unironically tells you to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps
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like the rich dude who said he could make $1M in one year, starting from homelessness. He cheated, and he still only made $60K
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Many couples are putting off marriage because they both have student loans, and they don't want to make their credit even worse.
Worse, one might have loans, but not the other. Would you want to marry someone knowing you have to take on $100K in debt?
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The WSJ is a right wing rag, unfit for toilet paper. No one should be surprised they publish half wit musings.
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Have you thought about buying a house instead of an avocado???
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Hey, they aren't so tone deaf as to think avocado toast is all that stands between this generation and home ownership.
It's actually starbucks coffee: https://fortune.com/2025/10/22/corcoran-group-ceo-says-just-as-tough-to-get-on-the-property-ladder-today-as-it-was-30-years-ago-stop-buying-starbucks-coffee-gen-z-millennials-real-esate-advice/
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And if they stopped, some shitty writer will write an article whining about gen evil killing the hot served coffee industry.
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That is based and factual. Everyone needs to boycott Starbucks.
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The only growing emotionally that needs to happen is for the American people to grow some class consciousness.
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It’s because we’re all accepting this unfair system even though the social contract has been broken. The first step is to stop accepting this system.
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Most of us are preoccupied with survival.
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Imagine renting or getting a mortgage in this shitty society with no job security.
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I've been laid off four times in my adult life.
I had a mortgage, I couldn't keep it. See above.
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Fucking hell that's rough
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Imagine?
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A murdoch tabloid says as much. its for boomer/older gen x consumption.
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I wasn’t going to have kids and become poor just to feed some stupid orphan-crushing machine.
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Pretty funny that the article and the reply both implicitly assume adulthood is owning things or doing certain activities. Adulthood is being able to navigate life through adversity. Every young person I know treading water with unstable income and no support is way more 'grown up' than boomers complaining about having to cut back on retirement cruises.
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And anyone with the potential for a future, destroyed it all as soon as they became an adult by taking on a mountain of student loan debt, only to be told that the career they paid a fortune for is being largely replaced by AI.
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I think they feel the AI and Planitr (I don't care if I've got the spelling wrong) with ICE will keep people in line
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Are we having a deep dive into Elon and Trump's life?
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Hola
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"In many ways, this age group is in a better place financially, on average, than their parents were at this age. The problem is that they don’t seem to know it."
Yeah? What ways are those?
Is this one?
“Our expectations are so much higher today,” says Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland whose research focuses on children and family. “Generations before us didn’t expect to have large houses where every kid had a bedroom and there were multiple vacations.”
We just shouldn't expect to have mansions for our many many kids? Fuck you. I don't have kids, am experienced in a well paying career and I can't afford a house at all unless I go somewhere that I can't find the kind of work I do in. That's not even considering the lack of kids many of us have, because we can't afford them.
Fuck this out of touch shit. I'm so sick of these people who already got theirs telling the people who can't do the same that it's their own fault. This fucking article goes further than that suggesting it's worse than our own fault because we're better situated somehow.
Avocado toast ass argument. This country needs more guillotines.
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I can't afford a house at all unless I go somewhere that I can't find the kind of work I do
I think this is a key point.
The average house prices in major cities has gone up ridiculous amounts. But, if you look at the average national house prices it isn't as dramatic. The problem is, that there are a lot of jobs that only exist in those expensive, major cities. It doesn't much matter if a house in the suburbs of Detroit is dirt cheap if your job doesn't exist anywhere near Detroit.
So, you have places where the housing prices are reasonable, but nobody earns a really high wage because it isn't one of the major metro areas in the country. Then you have places where the jobs exist but housing is completely out of reach.
Also, it seems to me like the big issue is that while some goods have become cheaper and cheaper over the years, the ones that have become prohibitively expensive are the important ones. Like, look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Food price inflation and overall price inflation have been about the same since the 80s, but since 2020 that's not true. Since then food has become much more expensive relative to the inflating dollar. Then there's housing (a.k.a. "shelter") that has been outpacing inflation by a massive amount since Reagan's time, but even worse since 2020. The only thing that has become cheaper in at the bottom of Maslow's pyramid is clothing. But, the kind of clothing that's cheap is "fast fashion". It's not basic "shelter" type clothing. Maybe that has become cheaper, but enough clothing to survive was never a major expense.
The next tier up in Maslow's hierarchy is safety needs: personal security, health and wellbeing, financial security, safety nets. This is probably the area that has been hit the hardest. Because of America's messed up healthcare system healthcare costs are getting more and more expensive. Financial security is also a joke for most non-boomers. The US has no safety net to speak of. And personal security, in the era of Trump, I think a lot of people feel much less secure.
There are things that are part of the consumer price calculation that have been getting cheaper. But, if you can't meet your basic needs, that really doesn't matter. Sure, my grandpa would have been absolutely amazed with the entertainment I can get on a screen. Compared to a black and white TV a modern TV is incredibly cheap, amazingly high quality, the selection of things to watch is astounding, etc. But gramps had a steady job, a guaranteed pension, reasonable medical costs, a house that could be bought for a couple of years of salary, etc.
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remove all speculation incentives from housing, fuck remove all speculation incentives full-stop, and maybe all these rich cunts will actually do something with their $ (like pay for housing to be built, since there is such a massive market for it) instead of jerk themselves off while watching lines go up.
the reason the US is falling is because we've built a nation of gamblers that would rather watch lines go up, and and then argue/gamble on why those lines are/arent going up, than do any actual work
the real fucked irony here is that, as a nobody working up from nothing, if you actually want to change this fucked up system and need capital to do it... by far the most time-effecient method to get it is to just syphon it out of the casino, cause all these degenerate gamblers jerking themselves off to their lines going up haven't figured out that everybody knows the rules now...and they're getting/going to be absolutely fleeced out of every $ they put into this bubble.
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Well said. I would add to the healthcare point that the system for providing insurance through an employer is a way to tether people to a job without having to offer benefits like pensions. Why would a company need to entice a person to stay with a strong benefits package that includes the possibility of being able to retire of they can be either crippled with medical debt, chained to a job to reduce the chance of being crippled by medical debt, or both?
I am under no illusion that things were utopian for previous generations, but the idea that things are better for people broadly, and not worse in insidious ways through continual assaults on working conditions, workers rights, and ability to generate net worth is... frustrating.
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Yeah, they cherry-pick that average income is up vs previous generations, adjusted for inflation.
Okay, but… cost of living has gone up.
Not just for the things that existed 40 years ago, but also from the new things that are necessary for maintaining a career, like broadband internet and a smartphone.
Needing a fucking subscription for your toaster or hair dryer or stairs or whatever. Having to tip your landlord.
They had a guy in the article that owes 200k in student loans! This is not apples-to-apples.
And also, so what if it’s up in average? Inequality is the worst it’s ever been. They barely sneak an asterisk in to address that, too.
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They had a guy in the article that owes 200k in student loans!
Everything else can be argued when it comes to growth/wages, but by far the single most crippling issue we have in the US is massive debt to survive, and once you're in debt, you often never get out.
We had a term for this in the middle-ages.
History repeats over and over.
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Average income isn't even useful because the only salaries that have gone up are CEOs.
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Average real income (adjusted for inflation) has been pretty steady in the last 50 years for the bottom 50% bracket. The higher up you go in the income bracket the higher the growth becomes. The real income of the top 0.01% has grown by 670% in that same time. So you can see where all that extra wealth generated from 2x productivity boost has gone. Trickle up economics.
*This is for the USA, but if you look at data for other countries the tendency is the same.
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Your parents had one dollar, you have three. Much rich. Nevermind the fact that your parents one dollar was the down payment on a car and you cant afford a bowl of lettuce.
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I remember reading this in an Uncle Scrooge comic when I was a kid. For context, Uncle Scrooge was explaining how money works to his nephews. The gist was "it's not how much money, but how much it will buy that counts".
I learned that lesson from a Scottish cartoon duck.
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They had $1.00, but the bread was 50 cents. The 30-somethings have $3.00, but bread is now $5.00, just saying how many slips of green paper a has compared to b is useless when those slips buy less and less.
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Aaaaah nooooo they actually used the words "arrested development" which is the name of the show that this quote comes from:
It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?
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These days that's not far off the truth.
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It's not out of touch, its deliberate gaslighting.
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It would be gaslighting if the intended audience was the young people it was talking about. But they aren't the ones reading the Wall Street Journal.
It's right-wing propaganda designed to confirm the existing biases of boomer haves (their real audience) toward gen-z have-nots (the smeared out-group)
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Are those smaller houses in the room with us?
Lmao, like in 95% of the US people can't build anything but single family houses.
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I don't know about the entirety of the country, but I do know that around me, the only affordable homes being built or sold are for people 55 years and older. It's like a slap in the face when you're looking for somewhere to live and oh, whoops, you're 20 years too young!
Is the baby boomer generation even buying those places? My experience is only anecdotal, but I don't know a single baby boomer who's moved to a seniors-only community. It's something my grandma did, but my parents? They're moving to a state with a lower cost of living and getting a bigger house than the one I grew up in. 😑
Meanwhile, my best chance of having an affordable apartment requires winning a low income housing lottery. Yes, a literal lottery. That's what decides if I'll be living in my car or not next year (or, dread of dreads, doing what my mom keeps telling me to do and uprooting my entire life to move to a southern state like she's doing. I told her that if I have to move, I'd rather move out of the country. I also told her that I don't want to live anywhere where I may be left to die if I end up with an ectopic pregnancy. She's too detached from reality to understand.)
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Just more propaganda from the haves to the have-nots. Everything that sucks about your life is directly related to your personal lack of willpower, your unwillingness to hustle, your inability to see the ways the market moves and pivot in just the right way and at just the right moment. No, don't look at your neighbors, stop noticing all the other crabs in the bucket, this is your shortcoming. This is because you suck. Work more hours, sacrifice more of your connection to nature and friends and family, stop asking questions. What is life if not servitude? What is existence if not submission? Stop thinking and start doing what you're told. Don't look up. Don't you EVER look up.
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I just want to explain that the author did NOT say that. This was a quote from a University of Maryland professor. The very next paragraph of the article starts with:
"To be sure, financial averages are just that. A sizable share of this generation is worse-off than their parents were. Young men in particular are struggling in the labor market. And some of the traditional goals of adulthood really have become more difficult to achieve. "
And the part about "they just don't seem to know it" was followed by an explanation that the economy looks good, but it's not good for the middle class.
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I have a burning hatred for this article, and you get to be the recipient of my rant about it, but I don't mean any of this as an attack on you. I don't think it will read that way, but I want to say it ahead of time, because I am inspired to do a much more full analysis of why this article, and its author, are bullshit.
I do not think it’s accurate to say the author is not arguing that this generation is at fault. The quotes that were chosen, the data that was emphasized, and the piece's structures all point toward a kind of "soft-blame" thesis. That thesis being that thirty-somethings could have reached traditional milestones but didn’t, mostly because of their own choices and/or unrealistic expectations. The author never seriously pushes back on that implication.
Let’s look at what she actually includes and what she doesn’t challenge. Here are some examples of implied agency (“it’s their choice”):
1. Choosing high-cost cities despite better options.
“He’s paying $1,700 in monthly rent to live with roommates in Brooklyn.”
“When it became clear his dreams of homeownership were not achievable in New York, he recently got help from his parents to close on a fixer-upper in his hometown of Easton, Pa.”
“She knows her salary would go farther in her hometown of Philadelphia, but she prefers to stay in L.A.”
These aren’t framed as traps. They’re framed as conscious choices. The author could have emphasized the structural necessity of clustering near job opportunities or family networks, but she doesn’t. Instead, she highlights that both subjects prefer expensive metros, implying that their cost-of-living struggles are at least partly self-inflicted. It also implies they could move to lower cost of living areas and not suffer a wage decrease as well - it's not so straightforward as is strongly implied.
2. Refusing to downsize or cut luxuries.
“Inflation has raised the price of small luxuries, such as her Spotify subscription, but she doesn’t want to give them up.”
The “small luxuries” quote feels deliberately included to make readers think, so you can afford Spotify but not a mortgage? Avocado toast. The author does not counter that framing by mentioning that skipping a subscription will do next to nothing to make home ownership feasible; she leaves the quote to speak for itself, which effectively endorses the idea that younger adults’ priorities are the real issue.
3. Idealistic standards in relationships.
“He’d also rather stay single than compromise on the wrong fit.”
Again, the author does not provide commentary pushing back on this. There’s no line like, “This desire for compatibility reflects how the marriage market itself has changed.” Instead, she lets the reader infer that they’re single because they’re picky.
4. Framing “freedom from old pressures” as the problem.
“Growing up with less pressure to follow the same narrow route to adulthood… has raised the bar for what these milestones look like.”
This line subtly redefines the freedom to choose different life paths as the reason people are stuck. It is not framed as an adaptation to changing circumstances, but rather as an indulgence that prevents commitment. It comes across as an inversion of sympathy: what sounds like neutral observation actually functions as a subtle criticism.
5. Self-focus over family formation.
“Motherhood, she says, is a ‘nonstarter.’ ‘Kids become the first priority,’ says Fuller. ‘I’m still figuring myself out as a priority.’”
There’s no attempt to contextualize Fuller’s choice within the structural realities that make parenthood materially and logistically prohibitive. No weight given to things like the extreme cost of childcare, stagnant wages relative to housing, inadequate parental leave, limited healthcare coverage, and the lack of systemic support for working families. The author’s choice to close the entire article on this quote gives it enormous rhetorical weight. The final word is that adulthood is being deferred because people are self-absorbed or uncertain, not because society made parenthood impossible. Remember the power given to the final word here, because I'm going to do it too - partially as an example supporting this point.
What you pointed out were the author’s attempts to hedge around that main argument, and here’s why I find those hedges disingenuous. While the author does acknowledge economic hardship a few times, those moments feel more like token gestures than genuine balance. The references are brief, mostly numerical, and each one is immediately undercut by a counterpoint that shifts attention back to personal attitudes and choices.
1. “The conventional explanation… is that they can’t afford to grow up… Yet this doesn’t quite explain what’s going on.”
This sentence dismisses affordability as the dominant factor before showing any serious data that it might be. It sets up the rest of the article to downplay structural forces.
2. “It’s true that 30-somethings have had a run of tough economic luck… But the numbers paint a more complicated picture.”
That “but” flips sympathy into skepticism. The article follows that turn by citing Labor Department data claiming that median wages for full-time workers ages 35-44 have risen 16% since 2000 (from about $58,500 to $67,600, adjusted for inflation) and Federal Reserve data showing a 66% rise in wealth for 30-somethings between 1989 and 2022 (from roughly $62,000 to $103,000). Those figures are plausible but not clearly sourced, and they rely on broad aggregates rather than detailed, verifiable cohort data. More importantly, the article treats these averages as evidence of improved financial footing without accounting for inflation in housing, childcare, healthcare, tuition, debt, transportation, or general cost of living which are the real choke points for this generation. In that context, the interpretation is under-contextualized at best and misleading at worst: aggregate gains say little about actual affordability or distributional reality.
3. “To be sure, financial averages are just that.”
That’s a classic hedge. It is a single sentence acknowledging inequality, that is immediately followed by more emphasis on choice and mindset. It exists to claim objectivity but doesn’t alter the argument or really acknowledge factors that do not support the thesis I suggested above.
4. “A sizable share of this generation is worse-off than their parents were.”
True, but she immediately pivots back to “still, growing up with less pressure…” This concession is rhetorical cover. It gives the appearance of balance while keeping the causal blame with the subjects’ attitudes.
The reason that all feels so disingenuous to me is that the issue isn’t just what the author says, but how the piece is built. Every quote chosen blames individuals (high expectations, luxuries, refusal to compromise) and is left unchallenged. She gives experts who blame attitude (Reeves, Kearney) far more space than anyone who would highlight structural barriers. When she finally acknowledges real problems she calls them “complicated,” softens them with “averages,” then shifts back to “expectations.”
If she truly disagreed with the “it’s their fault” narrative, she could have included economists who emphasize wage stagnation relative to cost of living, systemic childcare shortages, or the collapse of affordable housing. She didn’t. That omission is itself an argument. So yes, technically the article hedges against my initial read of it, but I think it is fair to suggest that those hedges are thin disclaimers attached to a piece that, in practice, amplifies the exact worldview it pretends to interrogate:
“Young people say they can’t afford to grow up, but actually they can; they’re just pickier, more self-focused, and less willing to sacrifice.”
That’s the message readers are left with, because that’s where the author ends the story and anchors every example. The quotes weren’t balanced. They were curated to support a moral narrative of generational fault, and they are never truly refuted, which is functionally the same as agreeing with them.
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My partner and I thrive in a two bedroom. One room for sleep, and one studio/guest room (we're both artists). Apparently that's too much to ask.
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You have access to more things, but less means to actually access them. These people are way out of touch. Heck, most of them think illegal immigrants actually get a free ride while they have e to pay for everything. Can you be more obtuse?
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we are rich but we don't know it. we'll that's... rich.
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How are so many people still on Xitter?
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People are fine with nazis as long as it benefits them or they don’t have to change.
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Dude its terrible. I tell my friends they need to get off and theyre like " but why doh? Me like it. " Ugh.
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Especially when the entire experience can be recreated in any rudimentary AI chatbot. It's not like there are any human users left on Twitter anyway.
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A chunk of people still use it to provide a counter narrative to the right wing propagandists. Kind of like when Buttigieg or Newsom go on Fox News.
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Do we though? It's on a platform owned by an autistic fascist, racist, and supremacist. There's no other content that will really be allowed there.
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God dammit, Sarah
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Most of us just realized long ago the game is fucking rigged so what's the fuckin point.
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I think I figured out I was never going to make it back in 2015 - 2017. When I was in my mid twenties. I rented shitty shared flats with tenants I didn't like (one even stole property from me) and I also lived in a crack den, a place they sent people to, after they served their prison sentence. Meth and whores from time to time. Lots of passive-aggressive crap in the TV room that tenants obviously learned from prison. I heard that in prison people fight over what to watch on TV, so people were anal about rules in that crack den. They lived like they were still locked up.
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I didn't skip my loan payment, I bypassed it. You've made me bypass numerous meals over the years.
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Or better yet .... more and more people will start to realize that it's cheaper in the long run to just skip your loan payments. Even if you lose everything, how much more can you lose?
And when enough people lose, the banks and corporations start losing as well. So it's in the best interest of the banks to keep everyone afloat as long as possible to keep up the illusion that the system is still working.
It's a precarious balance between making people believe that they need to stay in the game and stopping them from thinking that the game is rigged.
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In Capitalist America, milestones bypass you!
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The answer is so easy:: make doing things affordable, and people will do things... anything, it doesn't matter. Do you want people to have kids? Make having kids affordable. This is unregulated capitalists' fault. Plain and simple.
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The milestones have become outcroppings on a sheer rock face. Gripping like hell to one while searching for the next one. Stretching, grasping, searching, missing.
No rope.
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Oh I'm gonna involve a rope
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no man. that shit is easier. I love climbing too. I can't do it as much any more though. have to work...
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This image popped into my mind upon reading the headline; I hope my meaning comes across:
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Tax those bourgeois shits into the ground. Tax their wealth. All of it.
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WSJ motto: always be punching down.
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Speaking of never being an adult, what about addressing the nazi trolls in politics?
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Nazis pay them, so why address them except by "my king"?
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Let me guess: the article doesn't mention how the CEO-to-worker pay ratio has grown like cancer over the years.
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I just enjoy doing fun things and enjoying life so ill never grow up. I'll be playing video games, playing music, and breaking rc cars when im 90.
Still enjoy cartoons too. I guess I really had no siblings growing up so I like to entertain myself. Why do people get old and boring? Never understood it myself. Get old, not boring.
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Growing old is compulsory; growing up is optional. My
boomer parent besties(Edit to clarify: the best friends of my lame-ass boomer parents) taught me that. They were awesome, hard-partying, and so full of life. They would take me for long weekends and vacations with them, doing fun shit including breaking his RC cars doing ill-advised shit. He was an EE for Phillips NA and she was an EE for IBM. We stayed in close touch until they died.If my own parents are what adulthood looks like, nah, I'm good, thanks.
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Like it's been a choice whether to grow up or not.
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Here's a link to the article: https://archive.ph/oM5UV
I don't take issue with any of the points presented, but the tone and content fall short. As one from the Oregon-Trail generation, I fit the profile, and am amongst the set who have opted out of chasing milestones. To me, chasing always seemed rather tone deaf. You see, I grew up in a pseudo-religious household, one that replaced "god" with "family" but also pushed opaque ideals and wore similar horse blinders. As such, I set out to learn about the world. By college age, I came to see that, well, it appears that we are rather fucked. If the Earth is in a state of overshoot, then it's only a matter of time before the wheels fall off. And, with each new data point, it's looked increasingly like a number of the effects would come to fruition in my lifetime. I'm not anti-natalist, but I've not been confident that I could create a life for children that protects them. I do want the human race to survive, and I'll strive to help my community in the ways that I can, but I'm not one to don earmuffs and make low probability decisions. "Don't look up" is not an option for me, as I've been looking throughout my life.
We are experiencing the effects of overshoot, so it's reasonable, in my opinion, to opt out and live in full awareness. Yes that spells the end of human systems as they currently exist, but that's how it goes. We've fucked around, and now we shall find out.
edit: I wanted to add, that repeating the same behaviors, e.g. chasing milestones, is what got us into this mess. I think it a mistake to become salty, pining for the lives of our forefathers. If we want to survive, we need to adapt to the reality of our situation. To expand upon why I say the tone of this article is lacking: it seems to suggest that breaking from the status quo is problematic when it's the first step toward finding a REAL solution.
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Which economists warn? What are they warning about? I'm really getting tired of this.
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These bastards, man.
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Don't worry. All the WSJ writers have been let go long ago. This article was written by an AI
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132 comments
Whoa, I feel like I jumped back in time 10 years when these corporate meat-riders were blaming us for their beer businesses failing while simultaneously telling us the reason we're struggling is that we're being irresponsible with our money. The "arrested development" is the USA's disillusionment with capitalism.
I think lack of accountability is a common trait among americans in general though. Everything is someone else's fault. The individual is sacrosanct. They can do no wrong.