I 110% disagree. I think that’s jumping to conclusions. The holocaust denier comment was simply used an example to get the point across. I think saying there as any comparison there is stretching or twisting the words that were typed. But regardless, as I said, I apologize for derailment.
We’re all friends here. Let’s try to keep it that way.
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Thank you for clarifying. Glad to hear that wasn’t what you meant to do.
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There were some interesting labor force stats in this summary:
In particular, younger men, especially younger men without advanced education (college+), were having a lot harder time finding jobs than before the recession, while women and older more expereience guys both suffered a smaller drop and had a better recovery during the same time period. Hard to say where the causality lies, but it does seem to indicate the current job market for newer adults is less friendly than it had been.
The unemployment rate for 20-24 year old men is 8% right now. Thats about 1% higher than women that age. However its lower than its been for nearly 20 years. Only about 1% fewer of young men are in the job market now versus pre recession. The % of men in the workforce has been dropping gradually for decades. Yet still ~88-89% of men that age are employed versus 75% of women.
I had the impression that Xerty’s post was more about labor force participation, not unemployment rate.
Both of you could be correct in what you’re quoting about that age group…
Yeah sorry if I conflated the two. And I see that I did incorrectly say taht 88-89% of men and ~75% of women are “employed” but those are actually the labor force participation rates from the article Xerty linked too. Its kind of hard to bemoan how hard men have it when their participation rate is still so much higher than women.
Xerty did say that younger men are “having a lot harder time finding jobs” which I think is really about unemployment rate more than participation rate. Though there is the argument that more people “sit out” when the job market is tough and thats true, but the unemployment rate is the direct measure of how hard a job market is, not the secondary effects on the participation rate.
Anecdotal evidence here, so be wary.
I have been presenting to STEM college students pretty regularly for the past 25+ years. I have seen a very steady increase in the proportion of women in the classes. When I started (and when I graduated), STEM (which wasn’t a thing then) was overwhelmingly male. It is now a LOT closer to 50/50 or MORE than 50/50. I’ve been blessed to be able to do this in a few different places across the country – things are WAAAAY more female STEM in the Midwest and West, less so in the Southeast.
Let’s face it, boys… women are taking over the world.
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I think the overall perception is based on inflated expectations. Millennials have been told that they need to go to school and then they will make a ton of money, not realizing that they need to build up some experience before making real headway. They have grown up in an environment that reduces their attention and patience. I recommend a few books to folks that are really looking to adjust their mindset: “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” and “Deep Work” by Cal Newport. The basic premise is that to develop a good career, you need to build up a rare and valuable skill and grow career capital; the career capital gives you the ability to bargain for more desirable working terms (all from the first book) that you can use to have a lifestyle that you prefer and the ability to develop focus and attention (from the second book). I have them on Audible and try to listen to them quarterly just to refocus. I have developed my own routines that help me get to this area.
According to the generation bands, I am on the border of Gen X and Millenial and have nearly 20 years of experience now (having graduated high school early and immediately starting in my field). I think that my personality and experience place me more in the Gen X camp along with those who are my peers.
Another good listen is the Cortex podcast that has CGP Grey as one of the hosts, a Youtuber that has built up a good following and talks a lot about his work and tech. I try to re-listen to the first 10 episodes that were really just more of an interview style where the other host queried Grey; later episodes are more of a back and forth, which are also great, but the first 10 are very repeatable.
Financial prospects and optimism rise based on the economy, including among younger adults.
Amusingly, despite most people expecting next year will see their personal finances in a better place than now, those identifying as Democrats view themselves as “worse off” than before the last election. Seems like some odd political thinking getting mixed up in these various polls. Not surprising perhaps, since logical consistency is pretty rare.
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Being “broke” today is a completely different standard than being broke 30 years ago, or just a few years ago.
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What do you base this on?
The fact we all have bigger TVs and better phones?
As the article mentions, same idea applied for previous presidents. My guess is because the terms “better off” and “worse off” are not quantified. For example, one may be more wealthy or have higher income now than before, implying they’re “better off” under that definition, but with an uncertain political and trade climate, higher inflation, higher expectation of inflation, dissatisfaction with the direction the government may be considering (regulation vs deregulation, entitlement reform, retirement privatization, universal healthcare, etc), one could expect their financial luck to turn around and their wealth to evaporate quicker, so they really are worse off.
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Yeah, that statement conveniently forgets that those huge bag cell phones were still $1500 back in the day, where $1500 was a LOT more spending power than it is today. It’s funny to see people complain about Apple charging $1k for a phone, yet they buy it anyway. Such is life, I suppose.
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The “universal basic income” idealists aren’t going to like this study’s results. Free money didn’t help financially and did hurt on various happiness, mental health, etc, metrics. Did increase laziness tho.
Liberals argue that no-strings-attached handouts encourage better financial decisions and healthier lifestyles. The theory is that low-income folks become more future-oriented if they’re less stressed about making ends meet. The Harvard study put this hypothesis to the test and found the opposite.
Here as the setup
During a randomized trial conducted from July 2020 to May 2021, researchers assigned 2,073 low-income participants to receive a one-time unconditional cash transfer of either $500 or $2,000. Another 3,170 people with similar financial, demographic and socioeconomic characteristics served as a control group. Participants earned an average of about $950 a month and had $530 in unearned income (e.g., food stamps). About 80% had children, and 55% were unemployed.
The top-line result: Handouts increased spending for a few weeks—on average $26 a day in the $500 group and $82 a day in the $2,000 group—but had no observable positive effect on any individual outcome
So these people were on track to spend all their windfall in 20-25 days. Did this help? Nope, and neither did more cash vs less.
Handout recipients fared worse on most survey outcomes. They reported less earned income and liquidity, lower work performance and satisfaction, more financial stress, sleep quality and physical health, and higher levels of loneliness and anxiety than the control group. There was no difference between the two cash groups.
A reasonable interpretation from the WSJ, not the study itself -
the payments made work less rewarding, which reduced feelings of personal well-being. Cash recipients reported less earned income and felt worse about their work. It’s no surprise that people who received a large percentage of their monthly income for doing nothing were less motivated to work and less satisfied with their work. Earning a paycheck can give workers a sense of personal agency that encourages them to make better financial and health decisions. Receiving a handout may do the opposite.
As for financial outcomes, poor people often struggle to manage money, and this is one reason why many remain poor despite receiving plentiful government assistance. Merely giving people more money won’t make them better stewards of it, as the study showed. In some cases, people spend more than they receive and become overextended.
You might be surprised that Harvard allowed this to be published at all, given their political leanings these days, but I’m sure they all thought the results would be great going in. But they can’t exactly take the donor’s $500k and not write a paper about how it turned out, so we get to find out the truth after all.
These findings contradicted the predictions of 477 social scientists and policy makers the researchers surveyed. That’s not surprising. Most liberal academics and politicians believe government handouts are the solution to all problems. If transfer payments were a ticket to the middle class, the War on Poverty would have succeeded long ago.
The researchers posited that perhaps the cash payments weren’t generous enough to generate a positive result.
Ha! They were liberals, of course. They’ve never seen a failed social policy that they can’t imagine might be fixed by blowing twice as much taxpayer (or in this case donor) money on it.
I can see it increasing stress simply because you know you haven’t done anything to earn the payments - so there is nothing you can do to ensure the handouts continue. That’s something that’ll dissipate over time as the concept becomes more ingrained in our culture as being an entitlement, a short term study cannot account for that effect.
Seems like even this study also ignores how such payments would be inflationary - more money in more hands will cause price increases that negate the benefit of having this extra money in the first place. Much like what we are seeing after so many low wage workers began to receive as much as double their previous hourly wage.
So, this was a random one-time payment? UBI is supposed to be a regular monthly payment.
Did they control for other federal benefits? For example, last I checked food stamps had a hard cut-off, i.e., if you make under a certain amount of money in a month (~$1500?), you get ~$500+ extra in food stamps, but if you make more than that amount, you get nothing. By making $1 more, you lose $499. The same goes for Section 8 and similar federal housing assistance – there’s one where your rent payment is a percentage of income, so if you get a one-time payment, you use part of it to pay rent. Also Supplemental Security Income – it limits your cash “resources” to $2K/person or $3K/couple max, and if you get income from other sources you lose the SSI dollar for dollar. Point being that while a $500 payment is probably fine, a one-time $2000 payment will cause the average participant to lose food stamps, at least.
And it doesn’t surprise me that the recipients spent the money and did it quickly. That’s kind of the point of UBI – you get money so you can spend it and live a better life and make better decisions. But a one-time payment is a joke.
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I don’t think anyone thinks this way. Free money is free money, especially if you don’t have any. But I agree that even if this was the case, it would dissipate over time if this was a guaranteed entitlement.
While I can see that such payments would be inflationary, they wouldn’t necessarily negate the benefit of having this money. Inflation hurts the poor the most, because prices rise faster than income. But if they made or were given enough money to live a decent life in the first place, inflation wouldn’t affect them as much.
Sorry for not reading the rest of your post, but have comments on where it was going … or should have been going. 
Imagine a rat that has had to navigate a maze in order to get 10-year-old cheddar cheese. Now, imagine a rat that has been given universal basic kraft cheese slices, one-half inch from it’s nose. Which rat will you bet your life on surviving adversity (which may be disguised as diversity)?
Isn’t this the reason that we ask, or possibly asked, welfare recipients to do something for the handout that taxpayers provided?
What sense of accomplishment is attained, or even perceived in a drug addled state, by opening an envelope?
I suspect that this is the genesis of the Eloi. Gabe, you were at least as good as Nostradamus,
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What about the stay-at-home parents? That’s an unpaid job that’s more difficult than many paid jobs. There’s plenty of sense of accomplishment in raising children.
I doubt that anyone doing manual or tedious work for money gets much of that sense of accomplishment. I certainly didn’t at my first jobs in high school and college – I did them because I needed money. This is why the free payments make work less rewarding – because the low-wage work sucks, people just never have the time to stop and think about how much it sucks.
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