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from the would-you-like-fries-with-that? dept.
More than half of American millennials, the generation of people born between 1981 and 1996, believe that they will one day be millionaires; one in five think they will get there by the age of 40. These are the findings from a survey conducted in 2018 by TD Ameritrade, a financial-services company.
But a working paper by the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, offers a sobering antidote to this youthful optimism. It finds that millennials are less wealthy than people of a similar age were in any year from 1989 to 2007. The economic crisis of 2008-09 hit millennials particularly hard. Median household wealth in 2016 for 20- to 35-year-olds was about 25% lower than it was for the similar-aged cohort in 2007.
[...] But all is not lost. Millennials are living longer and are the best-educated generation in history. Taken together, this could yet mean that the youngest millennials, who have been less scarred by the crisis, could contribute towards their retirement pots for longer. Then there is mum and dad: even if they don’t become millionaires, millennials will one day inherit from their parents, and that may help redress their relative poverty.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Tuesday April 23 2019, @02:01PM (7 children)
Isn't that part of the American Dream (TM)? Some belief that you will become RICH RICH RICH beyond your wildest dreams and all the other suckers are there to serve you? In reality tho not so much. It also seem somewhat optimistic that they would be millionaires by age 40 -- sort of like prime in their life when they are no longer new on the job market but they probably still have a family to take care of and their house (if they have one) is not yet paid off but at the same time they want millions in the bank? Back to the dream part -- I guess they all now believe that they will be superstars or celebrities of some sort and that will rake in the cash. Nobody seem to have realistic dreams when younger about what they will actually be or become.
I doubt I'll be a millionaire, even after I inherit my parents properties -- plus if I could chose I would rather have them around then owning what they own. After all if we live in fantasy-land that dream is just as realistic, even when not. If I become one I'm fairly sure a million might just not be that rare anymore but instead fairly common so the goalpost have moved. Now you need several millions to be all fancy. But still being a millionaire at age 40 seem somewhat unrealistic, personally the ship already sailed. But then it was never really a goal of mine.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday April 23 2019, @02:30PM
US government made sure all the country income and revenue for an entire year and then some is in red (public-debt/GDP ratio 105.4% in 2017).
If Xi-the-Pooh gets upset - e,g, over the Iranian oil [nytimes.com]) - and starts trashing US treasury bonds, the "American dream™" ends into an nightmarish awakening. Particularly if the Europeans join in [apnews.com] and arrange for an euro-based petrol market [theguardian.com] and a clearing house [theguardian.com] for the same.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday April 23 2019, @03:22PM (2 children)
Depends on whom you ask. For most Greatest Generation adults/parents who were white, coming out of the depression and World Wars, an American dream was to have a home, a job, and not be in a war zone. Live comfortably (not necessarily "richly" although for those who lived through the depression "rich" might mean one knows one is not going to starve). Have 2.5 kids, educated, whom you know will do better than you did because the opportunities are there. Having the opportunity to fulfill just that was fine. To people of that generation, that dream was achievable.
For minorities, the American dream might have meant equality of property ownership, voting rights, and generally things that white America by and large took as natural rights. Are we there yet? Somewhat, certainly not entirely. But it was possible for some, and it doesn't take an act of absolute bravery for a citizen of color to excercise the franchise today. (Again mostly). I invite correction.
Enter the Boomers, post 70s. Enter Madison Avenue. Enter Wall Street. When the American Dream became entangled with Consumerism, all of a sudden nothing would ever be quite good enough. There was always another rung on the consumerist ladder to try and reach for. Take that down past the X'ers who got cynical about it but nevertheless had both hands out to try and be better than average.
Why should Millennials now not expect the American Dream to mean "we're gonna all be better than average and rich!" It's what makes propaganda like "Make America Great Again" sell - we can't recognize the places we started from were pretty great already because we're afraid that other person who talks funny and doesn't look like us will take our place away from us. We see Greatness as equivalent to fulfilling our Greed, rather than looking at making others satisfied.
Sooner or later, likely sooner, there shall be another worldwide crisis. We barely avoided one recently - which doesn't mean we're free and clear for a few decades but rather that the next crash will likely be harder. The Millenials will repeat the Lost Generation/Greatest Generation, be taken down several pegs, and have to start building again. (And if not Millenials, then post-Millenial).
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday April 23 2019, @03:34PM (1 child)
That's not even dreaming, that's painful stupidity.
And not all millennials are stupid; I'd rather wage the majority are not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday April 24 2019, @08:48PM
No, not all are stupid. Distribution I don't know, as it varies highly on how you qualify "stupid" and how that applies.
But I do think most people accept the world as it is presented to them, and it may well be that a majority is not equipped to understand that one cannot have everybody as "above average". One thing I did miss on, the internalized thought may not be, "we are all going to be better than average and rich!" Rather it is, "I am better than average, and therefore I am going to be rich." The problem occurs when a supermajority starts thinking this way. Unless one has complete equality in such a way that everybody has the same amount... in which case rich and poor loses distinction - but humanity is a long ways from needing to worry about that problem IMNSHO.
It's just Dunning-Kruger writ large. And since I'm susceptible to Dunning-Kruger as well I won't go further with what my opinions are on other generations.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by srobert on Tuesday April 23 2019, @04:25PM
If the "American Dream" is to get obscenely rich while other people starve, then Americans are dreaming about the wrong thing. I'd much rather be merely well-to-do in a nation where no one starves.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 23 2019, @05:44PM (1 child)
I always liked George Carlin's formulation about it: "It's called the American Dream because you have be asleep to believe it."
Even as one of the older Millennials who got his career started before the 2008 crash, with significant inheritance, no student loan debt, an in-demand profession, and no kids to drain my money away, my net worth is about $150K, and I highly doubt it will get above $500K in today's dollars. That puts me far better off than the average American, but I don't expect to be a millionaire.
Another classic quote attributed to John Steinbeck but quite possibly not him: "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." That's how important the myth of the American Dream is to the social control mechanisms in the US.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @12:54AM
> career started before the 2008 crash, with significant inheritance, no student loan debt, an in-demand profession, and no kids to drain my money away, my net worth is about $150K, ...
So in the last 10+ years you've managed to squirrel away something around $10K-15K per year. You couldn't have lost too much in the 2008 crash, since you had just started working at that time. What do you spend all your money on? Hope at least some of it is spent having fun.