Well, you can definitely sense it if you browse Reddit. Young people are freaking out about the job market, the house market, and the dating market. I don't mean to dismiss their concerns, far from it. It does seem like we've been making it harder and harder for anyone to become an adult over the past few decades.
Here's the quote I found most relevant to my own experience of work. It really does come down to autonomy. I could be writing the exact same code and feel awful about it, if it were done in an office with a guy looking over my shoulder. If you're young, you're more likely to have this problem.
> More broadly, employers are successfully deploying new technologies to minimize ‘break’ times, and exert greater control over production processes, often aided by close technological monitoring of work processes, which limit worker control and autonomy over ever-more-demanding processes, all of which – based on Karasek’s (1979) theory regarding the importance of worker control and autonomy for wellbeing – should result in a decline in the wellbeing of workers. Evidence from task-based studies of work, and social surveys in which workers report on the nature of job tasks, indicates there has been a growth in job demands and a reduction in worker job control in the United Kingdom (Green et al., 2022) which, presumably, is mirrored in the United States. During COVID, the shift to home and hybrid working, whilst beneficial in some respects, may have exacerbated feelings of social isolation experienced by the young in particular as they missed out on the social component of the workplace. The demise of collective bargaining and trade union presence in the workplace implies a diminution in workers’ bargaining power, making it even more difficult for workers to resist such changes and to alter their terms and conditions of employment (Feiveson, 2023).
> Young people are freaking out about the job market, the house market, and the dating market.
If we're going to discuss this problem honestly we need to admit the elephant in the room: it is much, much worse for young men than young women.
In jobs, from FT[0]:
"The unemployment rate for recent male graduates has risen steeply from less than 5 per cent to 7 per cent over the past 12 months. For young female graduates in the US, joblessness is unchanged over the same period, if not falling slightly."
"Most striking of all, recently graduated young men are now unemployed at the same rate as their non-graduate counterparts, completely erasing the college employability premium."
In dating, despite being much more selective, women match with around 40% of men they like, while for men it's more like 2%. Anecdotally I know many women in metropolitan areas can receive hundreds or thousands of likes in a week, while even a hundred is more than many (pretty average) men will receive in a lifetime. The number is zero, very often.
In housing it's more equal, but of course safety nets for young women exist through dating. Living in a HCOL metro area it's not uncommon for younger women to move in with their partners, and not have to pay much or any rent. That option is much, much rarer for young men, so if you don't have parents to save you, no one's coming.
[0]:https://archive.is/D2cBy
> If we're going to discuss this problem honestly we need to admit the elephant in the room: it is much, much worse for young men than young women.
I empathize with my fellow young men, and sadly I don’t think most of my fellow progressives care about young men. It’s certainly not a platform that will get you votes if you run for office.
If I were born post-2005 I doubt that I have been given any major advantage over women yet the messaging is all about how bad it is for the other side. At the same time it’s hard to argue otherwise because the GOP is actively eroding women’s rights.
Young men are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I do feel like gen x was the last generation to be given any significant autonomy in the workplace. I'm a millennial and I feel like I've always been 10 years away from autonomy. It seems the tide recedes as I go out.
I'm not sure it's generational, it may be more about finding a good niche. Or perhaps something like this:
- For previous generations, for most jobs (but not all), you had an informal contract: work will be boring, but dependable. You can work through having a young family without fear of getting dumped out. You don't get surveilled, you can deliver on your own terms.
- Since Neutron Jack and others of his era, this has become less and less true. Large corporations in particular no longer really hold up their end of the contract, and now workers see that and are happy to jump ship, for which the response is to prefer already-trained young workers along with keeping a close eye. So it gets very competitive to get a first job, and you aren't going to get the slack you need to live your life.
- If you want autonomy, you can start your own business. Either a little one like a restaurant where you are a very small boat in a very large ocean, or a startup, where you are going to need the help of venture capital, who are going to be wanting their money back. Pick your poison.
Was Gen X ever given significant autonomy? I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space and the start of Dilbert both date to when Gen X were the newbies to the wold of work, and Dilbert in particular kept on going.
I'm just on the borderline of Millennial myself, and people older than me have expressed similar frustrations at various workplaces.
It's funny actually, I totally get that Office Space and Dilbert are pisstakes of office culture, but it has never really worked on me because I'm actively envious of their work arrangements. I work in an open plan office where, everyone can see everyone's screen, you can see who is at their desk. I would die for a cubicle. Every job I've had my line manager sits next to me, and their boss sits nearby, etc. Work seems to end when they clock off. They seem to have time for sit down out of office lunches. Their work hours seem shorter.
Office Space seems like a pretty amazing work environment compared to a lot of what I've had to deal with. I mean how insane is it that everyone gets their own cubicles? I'd kill for that.
That whole "Yeah, I'm gonna need you to complete that TPS report" bit is tame compared to Agile.
Reddit is a dumping ground for venting just like LinkedIn is a dumping ground for bragging. You are going to get skewed perspectives.
You will see skewed perspectives but the reality is somewhere in the middle. Yes it’s incredibly hard to find a job, let alone a high paying one to keep up with the rising costs of living. And more recently we are seeing an uptick in new grad unemployment. Which is a great indicator of where in the business cycle we are at the moment.
However, there is also an element of unrealistic expectations coming to a head. New grads historically rarely got extremely high paying jobs, which seems to be an expectation especially in the tech sector. There are also a lot of people complaining about not being able to find a job with their degree that is not that in demand. A lot of people want an easy life in their 20s because they are comparing it with their parents lives in 30s and 40s.
You can only learn from normally distributed data?
It's easy to over index on data when it's the bubble you're in. I know it happens to me on Reddit. Since I see so many different subs it makes it seem like you're getting a well-rounded view of things but that can be an illusion.
I work in immigration and I akways say somewhat jokingly that if you want to make it in Berlin, you need 3 things: a job, a flat and a date. All of those markets are brutal, but if you have one of those things, it keeps you searching for the other two. Searching for all 3 at once is depressing and if people are unsuccessful for too long, they usually leave Germany altogether.
It does seem like more and more people are giving up on those basic goals. Each of those markets is now controlled by monopolistic platforms, and they're tightening their grip.
Good news, AI monitoring is coming!
Maximum corporate dystopia as a training bed for overall societal totalitarianism.
Unions are the only counter to this, as depressing as that is. Possibly overreach by corporations combined with the collapse of globalism will reempower workers.
But robotics and AI may completely undercut that.
Calling it globalism in place of globalization or just capitalism is so cringe
Capitalism is the problem and the reason for everything you decry. Until we actually start naming it as such instead of using distractions like globalism, there's no chance at improving things.
To be honest, the term "capitalism" has accumulated a lot of baggage and people don't always have a clear understanding of what is meant by it so it might be helpful to use a different term with a clear definition.
While that is true, I believe part of trying to establish a better system is spreading an understanding that the current system is broken - you do that by naming it as such and not leaving the field to competing definitions.
Wait so, the thing that is broken is capitalism, and capitalism is the thing that's broken? Doesn't this seem a little circular?
No, you just restated the premise. If I said like Yoda, "capitalism broken is" doesn't make it spherical.
Globalization is a good thing. We can't have polluted the earth and gotten ours, and then pull up the ladder on the rest of humanity. It's an immoral position to take.
Capitalism is orthogonal. Perhaps we can replace it with whatever..
Don't count me among the people that eagerly defend capitalism, but totalitarianism in the workplace is a function of regulation and a legal system that isn't owned by corporations and the elite.
We can have human rights and capitalism to some functional degree, at least domestically. Okay, okay, IF we had a functioning government and elections systems.
> Young people are freaking out about the job market, the house market
Maybe it's finally time we admit markets are a horrible way of allocating resources unless you want to create a system in which some have endless riches without effort and others have endless effort without riches?
Meritocracy claims have always been propaganda to distract from this simple fact.
free markets are just fine. The problem is the housing market in the US isn’t a proper free market AT ALL. The housing “market” here has a long history of problems.
- strict zoning laws (and nimby attitudes) prevent the free market from functioning as intended. Housing is expensive because we make it hard to build more housing.
- Read up on RealPage, software for landlords thats been accused of inflating rents. There’s a major lawsuit underway, focusing on the issues with its algorithmic pricing. Is that a free market? When the majority of landlords are (effectively) using the same 3rd party software to price-fix?
- the US had a few decades of very racist housing policy, which made it difficult for blacks to get housing. I say this as a white man that’s studied this. Fun fact - the US govt used to mark black neighborhoods as “high risk”, meaning banks wouldn’t loan money money to blacks for buying a house. At one point in US history it was also legal to have HOA’s with bylaws preventing blacks from buying property in the neighborhood. I could continue to list many examples of how blacks got screwed, but that’s not the point. The point is whites had a HUGE advantage for decades, even after slavery was abolished. The government made sure blacks couldn’t compete for the desirable homes, for decades. So whites got nice cheap housing. Today the children of those white families enjoy the benefits their parents received, via unethical housing policy. Me included. Is that how a free market is supposed to work? Temporarily reducing competition in desirable communities, letting whites buy, and then reverting the law decades later after prices doubled? Definition of pulling the ladder up behind you if you ask me.
I could go on, but i’ll spare you. :)
I have receipts:
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
https://longislandadvocate.com/decades-after-redlining-l-i-s...
> the US had a few decades of very racist housing policy….
The surprise on Bay Areans’ faces when I explain to them that this is why Blacks have such a low population presence and homeownership in the most wealth-producing region of the country.
> strict zoning laws (and nimby attitudes) prevent the free market from functioning as intended. Housing is expensive because we make it hard to build more housing.
The fundamental thing is, housing is expensive because the space in the highly wanted urban areas is scarce. Plots suitable for development of any kind of (dense) housing are expensive, so that alone drives up unit prices massively. And once you have the plot of land, the cost of actually building a building are enormous - the higher you want to go, the more deep you have to go so that the building doesn't tip over like the Tower of Pisa, which is even more expensive when the building is in a region that is sensitive to earthquakes, doesn't have bedrock but sand, a bunch of subterranean tunnels or nearby buildings that might settle as a result of digging the hole for the foundations.
And that's just the cost that the developers have to bear. The local government and utilities have to expend a lot of money for all the infrastructure: roads, public transport, water/sewage, electricity (the electricity demand of even a "small" dense housing unit are pretty massive), internet, schools, higher education, general amenities (e.g. parks), planning for shopping and other venues... that's where all the NIMBYism is coming from because that shit ain't cheap.
> And that's just the cost that the developers have to bear. The local government and utilities have to expend a lot of money for all the infrastructure: roads, public transport, water/sewage, electricity (the electricity demand of even a "small" dense housing unit are pretty massive), internet, schools, higher education, general amenities (e.g. parks), planning for shopping and other venues... that's where all the NIMBYism is coming from because that shit ain't cheap.
Shopping centers don’t need to be added in most cases. Existing shops can just get more business, no? And if new shopping centers are needed, _developers_ can bear the construction cost, not you the taxpayer. Don’t forget that more residents means more taxpayer money for the city long term.
If you want to talk “expensive”, i think suburbia is a better example. Most of suburbia has a negative ROI when you factor in roads and other utilities. And so few taxpayers, compared to a city. Suburbia has some pros though, i won’t deny that.
People don’t like change, period. It’s fine to admit it, really. But we can’t have no change AND housing for our young adults at the same time. US population is still growing last i checked.
> Existing shops can just get more business, no? And if new shopping centers are needed, _developers_ can bear the construction cost, not you the taxpayer.
Thing is, that's not enough. Developers won't touch that shit with a ten foot pole if they can avoid it, too much risk in shopping centers with the "mall death" plague, and too much work compared to just building crap houses out of broken wood and cardboard - look at CyFy on Youtube and the amount of piss poor workmanship he routinely documents. It's bad enough for a house worth half a million dollars, but an actual mall requires much more solid construction.
Besides, it's not just about shops, it's about creating "third spaces" in general where the cost is.
> But we can’t have no change AND housing for our young adults at the same time
Invest into at least semi-rural areas again? There's no hard requirement trying to force everyone to live in SF, LA, NYC or, here in Germany, the unholy quadruple of Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and Freakfurt. The government could at least try to get fast Internet access outside of the urban centers, that alone would go a long long way in helping out these areas.
Most of the country isn't Seattle or Hong Kong or SF, hemmed in on all sides by mountains and bays. In most of the country, the city could just choose to build more city. All it needs is infrastructure, rezoning, planning permission. And the ability to forgo treating single-family-home subdivisions as immortal, inviolate monuments to the American Way.
The megacity of >10M people is the basic functional economic unit in 2025, the minimum healthy employment market, the level at which we can provide a reasonable opportunity for productive jobs in a specialized role and a reasonable opportunity to hire someone in a specialized role*; Their largesse is taxed or remitted to cover the cities of ~1M, the cities of ~100k, and especially the towns of ~1k-10k.
...
*The example a number of economists like to bring up is: If I'm a skilled sushi chef, how long would it take to replace this employer with a better one? How long would it take them to replace me? A thriving economy is an economy that ensures lots of mutually beneficial employment arrangements, in which no one feels trapped, and in which bad management or bad work is punished with replacement, but also which has the slack to absorb random things like interpersonal conflicts or an employee that needs to move for family reasons.
If there are a hundred sushi places within commuting distance, probably at least one of them is hiring. If one chef gets hit by a bus, the business can be back in operation the next day by poaching an apprentice a few blocks away for higher pay. There is always reserve capacity waiting in the wings, as a megacity encourages economic resiliency.
If there are only two sushi places within commuting distance, and I sever my relationship with this one, the other one is probably not hiring, so I am a slave to their bad management and conversely they are a slave to my bad work because it would be so difficult to find another person like me. The quality of goods and services provided to the general consumer suffers significantly, the material precarity of my life suffers significantly. Things become brittle - if the business goes under for random reasons, odds are pretty good that my town becomes a town without sushi. Even if everything is working perfectly... what's my leverage as far as pay raises? What's their leverage as far as work output/quality? We're stuck with each other.
Outside of a city the sushi chef could own the restaurant themselves, including the building itself free and clear. There's less resilience in the labor market, but more resilience from things like recessions cutting the restaurant's revenue (it's much easier to come up with property taxes than rent). There is a virtue in the more responsive economy where a downturn in the demand for sushi results in a portion of the restaurants closing, but there is also a virtue in the less responsive economy where the sushi chef stays being a sushi chef.
> The megacity of >10M people is the basic functional economic unit in 2025, the minimum healthy employment market, the level at which we can provide a reasonable opportunity for productive jobs in a specialized role and a reasonable opportunity to hire someone in a specialized role
Sorry, that's nonsense. Smaller cities like Nuremberg, Ingolstadt, Augsburg etc. are perfectly viable on their own. And frankly, I can't imagine that the numbers are that much different in America.
The key thing is, the rents and housing costs in general in hyper-urban areas need to be paid for by the inhabitants, which means that their labor costs have a certain floor (ignoring assistance programs). That in turn makes hyper-urban areas less competitive in a global market. You can't really compete with Romania for developers when German developers cost twice as much or more than Romanian developers (which are equally capable), and a lot of that price difference goes to the greedy German landlord caste.
When free-market housing have to compete with non-market housing (public or associative) in multiple segments (not only social housing), it works really well as a free market. For that, you need between 20 and 40% of the available housing to be non-market though.
That seems like a general thing, not specific to housing. Having the government provide some kind of basic service in all essential areas would do wonders to provide a baseline for the market. Private businesses usually complain about "unfair competition", but if you can't provide the service that is either better or cheaper than government does, why should we care about your business at all?
i’d like to learn more about this specifically. Can you recommend reading material on this? Or do you have any specific countries or cities in mind?
Look at the Vienna model! https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...
thank you, added to my reading list.
Singapore, especially, has very intentionally set many laws and regulations, specifically to promote the idea that their people have a place to live, with the vast majority of people living in government provided housing.
> with the vast majority of people living in government provided housing.
Citizens you mean. If you are an expat or migrant worker, your choices are a lot different. 3.64 million citizens in Singapore vs a population of 6 million.
If you think American housing market is hard, try finding a place to live in Switzerland. Rent control means the rents aren’t bad, but each available place has 40 people waiting in line to take a look on the first day it’s available. Affordable but out of reach.
Free markets are great, for price discovery.
Thats about it.
Now, that goes a very long way in many many aspects of life, but not all of them.
The insistence on using markets as the only tool to determine everything is just as mistaken as throwing out free markets as a useful tool because it’s used in places it never should be.
The two main theorems of welfare economics show why free markets are great: a market equilibrium is pareto-optimal and vice versa.
The problem is that the conditions under which these theorems holds are completely unrealistic: perfect competition (which is predicated on decreasing economies of scale), so no monopolies, perfect information, no externalities, no public goods, etc.
Given that, it is imperative to regulate markets, and provide some goods through the public sector.
It seems plausable to me that those could be natural outcomes of markets. I.e. by encouraging competition they encourage legislative gamesmanship to give oneself a competitive edge.
I believe this is a no true scotsman fallacy, the very same that people make when claiming Stalin wasn't a communist.
I would posit that truly free markets only exist on paper, in the real world the people that acquire enough capital will always use said capital to distort markets in their favor. Why wouldn't you?
It is the inevitable outcome of the system.
It's only an inevitable outcome if you enable people to acquire enough capital to distort markets in their favor. But this is not something inherent in the notion of the free market itself - rather, it is driven by the property rights arrangement, which is actually somewhat orthogonal to free markets. Where government exists in the first place, its monopoly on violence essentially means that property rights are that which said government recognizes as such and uses force to protect, if necessary. It doesn't have to protect arbitrary accumulation of capital, though.
i guess in my mind, the less a government meddles with the market, the better. Unless it’s with the intention of eliminating scams and enforcing fairness in the buying and selling process - regardless of race or your status.
But i do agree that in practice, we rarely see governments try a truly free market.
I believe corruption is an inherent feature of a system that lets individuals acquire outsized proportions of wealth.
Even if the market was initially completely free, as soon as anybody reaches the threshold of being able to bribe/lobby decision makers to tilt the market in their favor, that's what's gonna happen.
To me, a free market is at best an unstable temporary state - not something you can plan societies around.
The less the government meddles the better – except for at least two very deep classes of meddling? I mean I definitely agree that society should protect what you mention - so maybe the “free market” frame isn’t really useful enough.
I’m mainly against the term because it’s a banner idea of the neoliberal revolutionaries that got us into a lot of these messes, by crushing collective action and giving so much power to capital. Actually existing “free markets” are a big part of the positive feedback system of capital accumulation.
The meddling i suggest is merely to make the market fair. It removes bad actors that are intentionally trying to hurt true price discovery.
Someone selling a home with major issues, and trying to hide those issues for passing inspection, is clearly just a scammer.
So yes - i’m talking about a free market where there are honest actors. Not completely free. I do see the difference, but that’s splitting hairs imo.
It's an outcome of the way money is structured.
Debtors borrow. They get money and spend it. The person holding the money gets paid to not return it (interest). It's like the system is maximally stupid and designed to exacerbate wealth inequality.
The fungibility argument is bullshit here and just serves to obscure. Let's say 10% of money holders refuse to return the money, then 10% of borrowers are screwed. The borrowers can play a game of musical chairs to "decide" who is going to get screwed, but it doesn't change that 10% get screwed.
Oh and the best part? You can't escape money, because it's like a public utility and even if you come up with an alternative, you'll still have to pay taxes, in money. Meaning that money is not just a monopoly, it's inescapable.
>Maybe it's finally time we admit markets are a horrible way of allocating resources
We need to distribute fish from fishermen and potatoes from potato farmers to hairdressers and carpenters and so on. What mechanism do you suggest we use instead of markets?
I think it's likely going to be more complex than a one size fits all solution.
For comodities like potatoes a mixed economy seems to work pretty well.
For healthcare it seems like single payer is the best option.
For housing perhaps we should implement something similar to the Works Progress Administration to massively increase building.
Perhaps internet should be a public utility.
More generally, a combination of private industry and a strong welfare state seems to work well in much of the world.
Maybe so but none of those things replace the concept of a market, they are different ways to control a market, which is absolutely required and woefully neglected in many countries and many areas. But I don't understand the idea that markets themselves are the problem.
If you are a doctor and you want to practice medicine to get money to pay for fish, you are engaging with a market even if that market is single payer (ie the government).
If the single payer pays too little to get fish, you will start fishing instead of practicing medicine. If the single payer pays a lot the fishermen will start wondering why you get so much when they are the ones actually catching the fish. And they will increase the price of fish, forcing your one payer to pay more.
A very simplified view of things of course but my point is that it's still a market. I seriously can't imagine a mechanism better than a market so I was curious what the GP had in mind.
The problem with housing isn't markets, it's the lack of a proper market. The economic system in many countries is tied to mortgages in a way that various cogs in the financial machine can't under any circumstance allow housing to depreciate over time. Homeowners don't own their homes, they pay the banks. And the bank is valued based on the assets it has in the form of home loans.
So the value of homes has to go up. It's important for politicians, it's important for banks, it's important for existing homeowners. Which makes it a massive problem for non-homeowners.
If this was a proper market, houses would be built to meet demand. But as things are now, that would trigger a massive depression. We saw a glimpse of it in 2008.
I also don't think you necessarily have to get rid of a market if you change ownership structures.
Personally, I like the idea of worker's self-management. [0] (tl;dr only legal form for companies with > 5 employees is worker-owned coops with elected board)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_self-management
>markets
You gotta look into Quantitative Easing. We haven't allocated resources with markets for a long long time.
The environment we live in has become disadvantaged to the average person not only in economic terms, but in terms of life goals. The people responsible are, generally speaking, the current leadership in power, and have been holding on to that power despite their increasing age.
They have manipulated the systems to enrich themselves, at the expense of the future, and like all cyclicals in recent history, the economic pieces of it are driven by clever- re-imagingings of money-printing schemes.
Most people are worse off today than they were 20 years ago, and 10 years ago, and its still getting worse. Eventually you have 27 grievances and revolutionary activity when the vast majority of people realize there is no out, there is only through, and that involves chaotically increasing violence which no sane person would wish for, ever.