Oh great most depressing thread ever. By any measure, professional, financial, personal, I'm way worse off than my parents at this stage of life, and almost certainly permanently.
Really? Did you have a flashy childhood?
By any reasonable measure I'm materially far better off than my parents. I grew up with lots of second hand clothes, few toys, and no TV. We only had a telephone for part of my childhood. I was happy as a clam with what I had, though - lots of exploring outdoors and hanging out with a gaggle of semi-feral kids, and lots of books to read when I got older.
@1
Is this bitterness over the fact that you don't have your submarine yet?
On topic, I consider my circumstances comfortable but I'm definitely below where my parents were at this stage.
Materially ahead of my parents, but that's been true since roughly my first job out of college. I own a house, which my dad didn't until he was about 50, and my mom didn't until last year.
Personally is harder to judge. I vaguely feel like my real social network isn't as robust as theirs was at this point in their lives (whether measured by age or life stage, since they don't quite match up).
I am much better off than my parents were. We grew up on benefits as my Dad was largely unemployed from when I was about 5 until I was 15 or so, and my mum only did part-time cash work (as a cleaner). So, real material poverty.
My mum has a reasonable job now, and a council house, so she probably* has more disposable income than I do as her rent is low, and her commuting costs small. But she's not exactly living in luxury.
* certainly. I had more disposable income when I was 18 than I have now.
No-one in our family (excepting one uncle who bought my grandparents' 'tied' house) owns a house, though. And I/we certainly won't at any point in the foreseeable future, either, I don't expect.
I have my low moments, but I am in no way as materially or emotionally miserable as my parents were when I was a child and they were locked in a marriage of hatred and contempt that wasn't much improved by being broke all the time.
In purely financial terms, my childhood household may have had less means than my dad's (bigger house, private schools), though not my mom's.
I think the material advantages far outweigh any of that, though: much better food (my mother's household cycled through a limited number of different dinners), computers and gadgets, air conditioning, etc. There are also negative material advantages: we didn't take up smoking in the early teens.
Not even close. Which is especially obvious where I am right now in the arc: retirement for me will be very different than for my parents. I made very different choices in my 20s than they did, and while I might would definitely do some things differently if I had those years to do again, I wouldn't trade my 20s for theirs.
My parents were arguably worse of than their parents -- ignoring things like technology and sending a spouse off to fight in a big war (and early death from now curable conditions) -- who were in turn worse off than their parents. My kids show every sign of being worse off than we are. So, well more than a century of downward progress.
I'm way worse off than my parents. At my age, my dad had a steady job and had just bought the house that they're still living in. The only reason I might be living a little better than them is because I don't have kids, which just means that I'll be lonely when I'm old.
Very hard to say. I'd say fairly similar, maybe I'm a bit better off than my parents were at my age, except that I think my earning potential is better in the long run (at least until the learning robots put us out of business). Hard to say in part because they had four kids at this point and I have 2/3rds of one, and there's also been different choices: I have a smaller house, but I don't want a bigger one; we have one car, but largely because we haven't seen a pressing need for a second one yet. So I have more disposable income but I also have less stuff.
Interesting that the two examples Heebie chooses both reflect general economic trends: private education has been getting steadily more expensive in the past few decades, and food, both in restaurants and out, has been getting steadily cheaper adn more available. Confirming that " mostly at the same level" fits.
Me, I'm much better off. My father was dying of kidney failure at my age, and I'm fairly healthy with my transplant.
In material term, they were comfortable and I am too, so no difference worth noting. I make more money but they benefited hugely from holding a fixed rate mortgage during the 1970 - 1990 period of high inflation, and from building up their retirement accounts during the 1980 - 2000 stock market run.
At my age, my father was long dead and my mother desperately needed a liver.
It's a close call.
I earn roughly the same as my parents did at my age, but they didn't have student loans, and I have a lot of those and will for a long time.
Through a combination of bad luck and worse choices, or vice versa, I'm in JM's boat at @#12.
Really? Did you have a flashy childhood?
ttaM isn't a child?
Rand Paul is reading this while pondering his presidential runs. He only needs to come in third in a Republican primary.
15 was a bad joke
As I have said before, my grandparents born 1900 had what I consider a near-perfect life for 60+ years. One factory union income for forty years, half of the rest of time spent with side-work (expanding house, growing vegetables for sale during the depression) by the time I knew them in the fifties they had it all by blue collar standards. By 1965 they were parking their trailer at Glacier National Park and Brownsville for months and kept that up into the 1980s.
Bad luck and bad choices and my father was a mess. We were broke after the divorce in the 60s but after that maintained a lower-middle to middling lifestyle.
The kids have houses cars vacations toys and no security worth a damn. I don't think we work as hard as my grandparents but have a little less stress than our parents.
It is difficult to compare. My father's parents died when he was about 14 and he inherited some money but he didn't feel good about it. In career terms my jobs were similar to his. Neither of us were ever under any financial strain. So roughly the same level.
There has been some overall technological progress but a lot of it is marginal. Cars today are a lot better in many ways than cars 50 years ago but compared to no car at all a 50 year old car (when new) wasn't that bad.
When my dad was 30 he was a graduate student in the humanities, so yes. However he then easily found a tenured faculty position, so that "yes" is temporary.
The generations I know of my family go like this:
1) Flee pogroms. Get here. Cobble together existence.
2) Dad's side is lower middle class, mom's is upper middle class, both perfectly stable and there's never any question the kids are going to college.
3) My folks had the luxury of aiming somewhere in the middle, like: teach English on the college level. Were thrifty when I was growing up, leading to very easy times for us and a surprisingly cushy retirement for them.
4) Hard to compare because I have this weird NYC lifestyle and no kids. Adjusting for time, I assume I make about what they did. I feel squarely middle class and deny myself very little but I have debt and no real savings.
At my age... my dad was still in the process of transforming from a humanities bachelor to an employable professional. I started climbing the career ladder rather faster, so I'm probably better off financially. But then my parents were also just getting married after almost 10 years together, and I'm way behind on that.
At this time in my Dad's life, he was a homeowner and had a steady job for 8 years or so. I rent, and have had my not-immediately-moving-on job for almost 2 years.
That said, at this point, he was divorced and had a 8-year-boy (me.) I'm happily (I think) married and have 2 small kids. He has a MS, I have my doctorate though.
So it's a wash? Assets wise, I'll bet we're right
I'm somewhat worse off than my parents at my age, particularly in job security. I think the 1945-75 period was the golden age of the true middle class. Then the financialization period of about 1980-200? had much narrower prosperity but was a great period to get rich if you had some money to start with and were opportunistic and lucky. I regret I wasn't the type to take advantage of that.
I don't see much if any improvement since the 70s in the core of ordinary life -- job quality and security, housing quality and security. Possibly regression. However there are obviously massive improvements in consumer electronics, media, and IT that have transformed entertainment. So we may be more stressed and in some ways poorer than before but we have waaaay better entertainment to distract ourselves from that fact.
Medicine has also improved significantly, although chronic diseases are rising as well as our stressed, unhealthy lifestyles take a toll.
Actually, I guess that I should adjust my parents lifestyle for the fact that they live in the provinces and I'm in the big city...not sure how much of a real quality of life advantage that is though.
In other news, NMM to Sacramento basketball...
Hmm. I think I am about the same as my parents were - even slightly better off, materially speaking - but considerably less married. The private school thing would make a big difference unless I can manage to have gifted kids who can get scholarships. Travel and holidays are a massive difference in my favour, though.
My parents traveled a fair bit before I was born. My Mum's dad worked for British Airways as an aircraft mechanic, so cheap/free flights when she was growing up. And my Dad was in the Army. I'd guess I only became better traveled than them in the past 5 or 10 years.
When my parents were the age I am now, I was a toddler, my mom had quit her job to take care of me for several years, and my dad had the solid job (boring, but with a pretty good income) that he worked for nearly 30 years. They probably had more savings than I have now, and they owned a house. My income now is a fair amount higher than theirs was, but I pay way more than they did for housing. Still, it all seems kind of hard to compare, since they had a kid and I live alone. Completely different lifestyles, settings, attitudes toward work....
Much better off than my mother, who at my age had been dead for a couple years. Sort of sobering that, despite the fact that at my age my dad was about halfway through nearly eight years as a guest of the NJ department of corrections, in cumulative terms I'm almost certainly worse off financially and that's likely to be true for the long haul. Dad and especially mom made out considerably better than their parents, and before that we're into pogrom-fleeing (or attempted pogrom-fleeing) territory. So I guess my clan has seen a peak, unless my brothers pull off a late upset.
I guess the main difference is that my parent's lives seem to have been more stable: they were planning to live in that house for a good long time, they were married, they had no particular ambition about finding a more exciting or rewarding job. Work was something they did in order to support themselves, and they looked forward to a week or two of vacation travel every year. Whereas I'm not sure I'll be living in this city for more than a few years, I don't know if my current relationship will last beyond the next year, work isn't just something I do for money but kind of consumes me, and I travel so much I kind of dread it. I'm way more ambitious than they were-- as ambitious as someone who spends this much time commenting on a blog can be, I guess-- and it probably doesn't make me any happier.
At this stage of life:
Parents: 3 kids
Me: No kids
Parents: Crumbling late-Victorian house in S. Mpls.
Me: Crumbling late-Victorian house in S. Mpls.
Parents: One iron rice bowl fed job, one marginal university job
Me: Marginal non-profit job
Parents: Late '70s Ford LTD inherited from my grandparents
Me: Cash bus card
Parents: Alcoholism & untreated depression
Me: Treated depression
Parents: Decent start on retirement savings, but a lot of debt
Me: Liquidated retirement account, minimal debt (compared to a lot of people)
Also, my parents had worked WAY harder by this point in their lives.
I have more money than my parents did at my age but they had two kids, age 7 and 13. I suddenly feel very old.
I also feel like there's more risk in my life (a la The Great Risk Shift), but that may be incorrect.
It boggles my mind that, when they were 28 they moved to a new town with no job and a small child (and bought a house for $20K) and were able to more or less literally invent work for themselves. I'm sure it felt risky at the time but, in hindsight, I know it went smoothly.
31: thinking about it, quite a few of the exotic places that my father had been to by my age are now too dangerous for me to visit (Kano, northern Pakistan) but on the other hand he couldn't have gone on holiday to Vietnam at the age I went, due to a slight outbreak of Tet Offensive.
I knew the responses would make the thread even more depressing. I mean, I'm plenty comfortable, but its definitely been a marked professional and financial decline, even if one into fairly soft pillows. At this point I'm pretty much just hoping to give the kid enough material and psychological support to climb back up the ladder (in whatever way) if she's so inclined, and writing off generation me.
When my dad was my age, Greatest Love of All was charting. I may be better off after all.
When my Mum was my age, I'd already been to university, dropped out, worked for a few years, and then gone back to college. And my brother was just first learning to walk.
re: 37
Yeah, my grandfather went to northern Pakistan, too. But he was mostly shooting at people when he was there, I think. 1920s.
No, when my grandfather was my age, (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction was charting. Generations of decline.
I think the 1945-75 period was the golden age of the true middle class.
For white people, maybe.
I have more money than my parents did at my age but they had two kids, age 7 and 13. I suddenly feel very old.
When my dad was the age I am now, I was 9 years old and my parents were just about to get divorced. That so dominates any comparison I could make between our lives that the material aspects seem irrelevant.
1: My parents were the same or worse, but they had the prospect of inheriting money and had well-off parents. In that respect I'm worse off. Without kids I've got more disposable income
When my dad was my age, the Billboard Top Ten consisted of Foreigner, Captain & Tennille, Gino Vannelli, Kenny Loggins, Anne Murray, "How Much I Feel", "Kiss You All Over", "Hot Child In The City", "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", and Donna Summer's version of "MacArthur Park". Foreigner is pretty good but today's chart is certainly no worse than that.
11: I keep thinking (in my more reactionary, rightist moments) that I should be on the hunt for a really well off guy so that I could return to a faded glory.
Interesting thread.
My family model is much different from my dad's. We are both divorced.
Compared to my dad, I am worse off, financially. But, better off in terms of relationships with my children.
My parents were divorced. He worked (and still works 24/7). Time with children was limited. Vacations together, but not much regular time together. HE worked hard. My mom did almost all of the child-rearing.
So he had earned a lot more than me, but had a lot less time with family.
I'm comfortably ahead of my parents in pet ownership. The rest, not so much.
I think when my dad was my age he had three kids and a recently acquired job at the plywood mill. Mom had stopped w-orking to have number three. We'd all just moved from a rented trailer into a rented house.
During that period we mostly ate rice, bean soup, oatmeal, and sad baloney or pbj sandwiches.
I've got the two kids, a reasonably remunerative job (plus: indoor work, no heavy lifting), and just moved into a house we bought.
During this period we haven't had baloney in years, never eat rice without something else delicious, and still like bean soups.
My grandma cooked the pet duck and chicken my mom and siblings had.
In addition to the kids vs. no kids, it's impossible to compare my parents' rural life (with a house across the field from my grandparents) to my urban life. My extended time abroad is also impossible to compare.
I'm trying to figure out how to sell out for reals, so the kids can experience privilege in much greater quantities. Any bidders?
@52
I'm trying to figure out how to sell out for reals, so the kids can experience privilege in much greater quantities.
A standard route for years was to work briefly for the Democratic party and then convert to wingnuttery and start hawking your wares on the "I used to be a liberal but then..." circuit.
I think that niche may be too crowded by now.
I am a little hysterical about my financial situation, which is much worse than my parents' at this or any age (taking myself separately from my husband, as I usually do for financial purposes). I'm better educated, better traveled, and I think I've had more stimulation and joy in my life than my father did (although, sadly, much more acute depression than his moderate levels too). But I've worked far less hard than either of them to secure my own future, and I can't compare myself to my incredibly hard-working, self-denying mother without shame and regret. Still, the fact is that they've given me a lot of material support over the years, and my husband's family is also generous and well-off, so our plan to support only one child with everything we've collectively got will probably work out all right.
I did just spend fifteen minutes staring at a couple of local condo listings, wondering if they were the last affordable real estate I was going to see for at least five years, and if they were only pseudo-affordable and even now in the process of being bid up to laugh-out-loud prices. (I unexpectedly got a bunch of money for a down payment, or for slowly frittering away on takeout and chai lattes, and it has served as a tormenting demon since August because of all the different varieties of unaffordability in my life. I wish I could make this a slightly better Faustian story...)
I can barely make the comparison - not because my life and my parents' loves are incommensurable, but because both my parents have scarcely shared their honest judgments of their late twenties and early thirties.
One factor that strikes me is the draft - I can't remember today which route my father took to the Army, but either way it's a contingency that's very far from any I faced (or failed to face, passive soul that I am).
My parents were never able to fritter away countless hours on Unfogged.
56 -- I figure my dad's golf habit makes this one a wash.
My parents were never able to fritter away countless hours on Unfogged.
See, this is what clubs were for. Unfogged-analogue of our grandparents' generation was some sort of eccentric and slightly down at heel club where the club raconteur would tell long stories and the rest of us would interject with "Great Scott! Tell us more!" So I guess that's an improvement, in that on the Internet no one knows you are not quite a gentleman.
So I guess that's an improvement, in that on the Internet no one knows you are not quite a gentleman.
Do you at least wear a smoking jacket when reading unfogged?
22: There has been some overall technological progress but a lot of it is marginal would be a more persuasive claim if you typed it on an IBM Selectic and snail-mailed it to each of us.
58: I'm not sure that such clubs existed when and where my grandparents were. But on one side of the family the analogue was probably church.
Oh, I'm forgetting, that grandfather was a Freemason. Whatever that means.
I'm really not sure. My parents traveled with us much more than we have, but of course it was mostly free because of Mom's job. I think we're pretty comparable, but my family doesn't talk money, so it's hard to tell how much slack there was behind the scenes compared to how much we have, which is where the difference is if anything.
We work longer hours, though, which is a big lifestyle hit -- we do less recreational stuff because it's hard to get both of us free at once. My parents, Mom worked full-time, but in a very flexibly scheduled way, so she had a lot of the freedoms of being stay at home, and Dad worked a pretty reliably forty hour week.
62: The ran the world until the Jews took over.
on the Internet no one knows you are not quite a gentleman.
Trust me, it shows.
When my parents were in their early 30s, they owned a home and had two young daughters. They were active in their church, active in the anti-war and nukes movements, and had an active social life. None of that applies to me now.
On the other hand, over the next seven years, they would experience a bitter divorce, job losses that would never again result in full-time employment, alcoholism, severe bipolar disorder, periods of institutionalization, deep fractures in their relationships with their daughters, divorce from second spouses, etc.
I'm doing a lot better than that, thank gods.
By the time my parents were my age, they had children of 9 and 6 years of age, my dad had established a thriving legal practice with two partners, and my mom was going stir crazy (as best I can gather).
I am much less established in my professional life than my dad was -- I have a consulting practice that could blow away at any minute and a screenwriting practice that has yet to result in payment. Flipping the sexes, though, and setting aside the reproductive progress, Mrs. K-sky is probably much more established in her career than my dad was at my age, and I am one life-improving divorce ahead of where my mom was. (And didn't even have to do est to get there.)
Instead of est, maybe you could just go to a hotel conference room forbid yourself from going to the bathroom.
Just to state the obvious: You have a blog, Google, Wikipedia, etc. and in general access to a lot more information and computing power than the previous generation.
My parents were immigrants, so it's hard to make a simple comparison between me and them. In material terms, I'm doing better than they were, but I think it's simply because I had a better starting point; my mother and father had to overcome pretty significant obstacles (lack of education and poverty, respectively).
In non-material terms, I feel more comfortable living in the US than they did, but I also have far fewer connections to our extended family, and have led a pretty dull life compared to theirs. I think, for my parents, leaving their home countries was basically a leap of faith, which is pretty far outside my own experience.
My parents are more compatible to me than a lot of my friends parents* - they met when they were 29 and 34 after working for years as a teacher and an engineer, quickly married, bought a house and had three kids. Age-wise, I'm about even with my dad (married at 34-35?) but I 'exchanged' working for 8 years for going to grad school for 8 years so I'm pretty far behind career and money-wise. I'm also much less travelled than either of them - my mom spent years teaching in Australia (and working in NZ and Scotland) and my dad had been all over Europe. I've been to Mexico and the US. They didn't have any debt except once they bought the house, and I have well more than zero.
There is no way the next part of my life is going to match-up at all. No way will I have time to be pregnant with three kids (before I reach some magical 'too old'). There is no awesome job waiting for me with life-time guaranteed** employment and high wages.
On the positive side, both my parents have some untreated mental health issues but mine is treated. Also, my palate is way ahead of theirs at the same age so you know - I'll be poor and unemployed but I can sleep at night and be sad about all the great food I can't afford. Oh, also I have a dog now so my pet ownership is also way ahead of theirs at the same age. My sister and I are at similar stages but my younger brother is way ahead of my parents (married, house, 1.5 kids, cat at 28).
*My best friend's parents were high school sweethearts who got married, took jobs as a nurse and a butcher, bought a house and had two kids who the mother quit her job to stay home with by 23-24.
**As it turned out, subject to CEO stupidity and the economy, not so much.
42: disagree. You have to look at the trajectory of change and not just the starting level, and the 1945-75 period saw by far the most far reaching and profound improvements in quality of life for black Americans in any period before or since. Also, while there has probably been no better time than today to be among the top 10-20 percent of the black community, the comparison between 1975 and today for the median black household or (certainly) the bottom half is far less clear-cut. There is of course the general rise in inequality and deindustrialization, which hit blacks even harder than whites. But you really have to also include the brutal devastating impact of mass incarceration on the black community. Petit and Western's work shows about a ten percentage point increase in the risk of death or prison incarceration between black men born 1945-49 (growing up in what I called the 'golden age') and black men born 1965-69. So one in ten black males is directly impacted by the change in mass incarceration policies between 1945-75 and 1975-2005. That's a lot.
Not too dissimilar here. My parents did better education wise with Dad getting a PhD and Mom having a masters but going to UC schools was a tad more affordable in the 60's. But luckily we've both gotten into similarly stable jobs with fixed pensions. Our house isn't going to do the kind of ridiculous appreciation theirs did but we only have two kids where they had five and we had ours much younger (at my age my dad had just had me and then had three more). We'll probably be able to travel more at a younger age but dad had definitely done more international by the time he was my age for ichthyology work. Add me to the list of "dad went to Pakistan by I likely won't".
the 1945-75 period saw by far the most far reaching and profound improvements in quality of life for black Americans in any period before or since.
1845-75 seems to have been a period with at least arguably as far reaching and profound improvements in quality of life for black Americans.
This whole thread shows how hard it is to compare these things, since life changes across so many dimensions simultaneously. I remember talking to my stepmother's parents (Depression veterans) about being a young adult today vs. their experience, and they expressed huge sympathy for 'how hard you have it today'. I was like, 'come on, when you were my age it was the Depression!'. I can't remember exactly what they said but it was basically that 'we all helped each other and we knew things were going to get better, we grew a vegetable garden with our neighbors and built our own house and we knew FDR was improving things, we didn't have too much but it was still a good time, now no one works together'.
Add me to the list of not likely to travel as much as my dad. He has been to Yemen, Iran, Mongolia, Philippines, Uganda, and a ton of other countries that I am unlikely to ever see.
Most of the places my dad went that I am unlikely to go were visited while he was helping win a big war. (I mean, I dunno, is Iwo Jima nice? Should I try to make it?)
68 is a little Ice Storm -- I'm glad k-sky stayed away from [spoiler alert].
My dad also has a longer list of travel feats than I do. The international stuff makes sense - the U.S. Army brought him to Oberammergau, and he went to (yes!) Pakistan with a dam-builder uncle, and I don't have those - but I don't totally understand why I haven't done as much domestic travel as my father had by my age.
My Dad also went to Pakistan, working for -- wait for it -- an Icelandic fish company. They apparently spent the afternoons when it was too hot to work, that is every afternoon, reading the sagas.
So I guess that's an improvement, in that on the Internet no one knows you are not quite a gentleman.
That's no lady, that's my anonymous and gender indeterminate internet friend HelloKitteh76!
74: I wasn't talking only about white and black people. But even then, it was my impression that the black middle class enjoyed relatively quick growth through the end of the Clinton years and then, along with the middle class more broadly, began to decline increasingly rapidly.
Ratio of Black & Hispanic to White Median Family Income 1947-2010
Looks like 11 points from 1958-73 and 7 points 1989-2000, but as PGD says, the latter numbers are screwed by increased incarceration rates.
I have had a lot more fun than my parents, but on the other hand I will have a very poor old age and my mother has two pensions to support her in her widowhood. So far as I can tell, the economic prospects of my children are even worse than mine.
What a depressing thread. Let's all remind ourselves that the Mineshaft, while not quite an AA meeting, is not exactly a random sample, in ways that are particularly relevant to this question. (By which I mean: that you're the sort of person who enjoys commenting here suggests the sort of enriched, book-filled childhood indicative of high social/human capital, at least, parents; that you *are* commenting here suggests that something has gone awry.)
I'm closest to comment 12, I suppose. Married with two young kids vs. single & not dating makes an immense difference. As for career and, hmm, the social bases of self-respect... my mother had a secure and reasonably well-paying job as a teacher in an increasingly affluent suburb, but she'd given up her dreams of being an artist, and I think that was the source of resentment that would to a certain degree poison the marriage. I think my father was working at two different software startups, both of which would eventually fail, which was stressful and not very well-paying, and I suspect from what he told me recently that he was feeling a real sense of being trapped in suburbia before his time, but it seems like his work and family gave him some sense of purpose, which I certainly lack.
It's the forward-looking part that's rough. My mother's job was very secure; she's retired now, with a fantastic pension, and she could count on that happening. My father had no such security, but he did have a master's in EE (I believe this was before it became EECS) from MIT, and so I doubt he ever felt the sort of hopelessness one might feel when the factory that provides 30% of a town's jobs closes. They bought into a very desirable suburb when it was still quite affordable, and never had to worry about their kids' schools or crime rates. All of that seems like some Onion report about enlightened topless Europe, these days. (And yes, I know this doesn't necessarily match up with the facts; the point is perceptions.)
It's pretty hard to compare the situations, but I think materially I'm in a pretty comparable place to where my parents were at my place (although that's a very recent development in my life; a year or two ago the answer would have been very different). They got married at around the same age I am now, so that's different, obviously.
I was thinking about the multi-generational aspect of this question on the way to work: 5/8 of my great-grandparents* were immigrants, at least 6/8 of them grew up on farms, one went to college, one scarpered and no one's seen him since, and 3 of them died within a few miles of where they were born. 3/4 of my grandparents grew up on farms, but of their many** grandchildren and great-grandchildren only a couple grew up on anything like a farm -- and that not really a working farm by most people's definition. Really, looking at my parents' lives compared to mine, once you allow for the no-children-havingness of mine, we're virtually identical compared to the contrast between them and my grandparents.
*Top 5/8 or bottom 5/8?
**10 grand, 15 great-grand at last count
I was thinking about the multi-generational aspect too. My life is pretty comparable to my parents' lives at this age, but it you go back more generations things start to look pretty different. Various branches of the family have moved up and down from generation to generation in complicated ways.
We immigrated when I was a young child. Given that, I don't think it's surprising that at least financially I'm much better off. My first job after college I probably made about as much as they ever had, combined.
I don't think the comparison would be as clear with at least one set of my grandparents.
My grandparents were all urban that I know of. Same with great-grandparents on my father's side. Not sure about my mother's side, who were Central European Jewish.
Speaking of generational:
All of us old people feel like we are behind our parents. All of you young people dont feel as far behind. You still have the dewy-eyed hopes of youth. Just wait.
"Kiss You All Over"
I love this song so, so much.
88: For many of us that's true. Some people are doing quite well which makes it even more depressing.
Mom had stopped w-orking
The hyphen made me chuckle.
97: I wish I could find the clip from Metropolitan where the older UHB tells the earnest protagonists, "No, I'm afraid you're going to have to accept that most of us fail without being doomed."
By the time my dad was my age, he had, I believe, just purchased a new Supra to replace the '73 Mercury that had been our first second car (necessitated when we relocated from a short bike ride from a Metro North station to unincorporated Dade County). It was also a couple years since modest luxuries became a regular occurrence (e.g. a VCR, an Atari). My mom was SAH, while AB works roughly half time (probably a bit more), which is of course indicative of how hard we and they worked for the money. My parents were infinitely more secure, and of course were not 2 years removed from food stamps. They were quite hand-to-mouth in the years before and shortly after my birth, however - I'm not sure that, using kids' ages as a baseline rather than parents' ages, things are all that different.
Bottom line: my kids are roughly where my sister and I were, but AB & I are behind where our respective folks were. OTOH, our kids are well ahead of where young AB was: her dad was still in the Germany army until she was 3, and was a poor college student (in the US) until she was 7 or so. I don't think they even owned a TV* until she was 8 or 10. But by the time he was 40, he had his first Mercedes.
* believe me, not a cultural statement; her dad loves TV, and had a similar relationship to it as DeLong had to Civilization: it was college degree or TV, but not both.
85-86: yes the later Clinton years were particularly good for minorities but then they got extra hammered over the last decade or so of crappiness. More of their wealth was in housing. (Edward Wolff has an encyclopedic breakout of wealth trends from 1983 to the present -- he finds that the ratio of black to white wealth is lower now than in 1983, and Hispanics were hit even harder).
I think Becky Pettit's new book, Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress argues that essentially all of the progress in closing aggregate black/white earning and education gaps since the 1970s has been illusory, the result of selection bias due to excluding prisoners and likely ex-cons who have dropped from visibility as well.
Not only am I essentially even with my parents, I'm also essentially even with my grandparents. (Academics on one side, business/Wall street something and SAHM on the other). The generation before that was the pogrom-flee-ers, or at least 6/8.
the ratio of black to white wealth
Is this how you're measuring the size of the middle class? That seems like an odd measure, for all the obvious reasons. But if that's how it's done, fair enough.
There's nothing like a divorce (or two) to knock you back down a few rungs.
10 years ago I was on track to do moderately better than my parents. Since then though my income has stagnated (stood still until 2008, took a dive that year and back to previous 2009 onwards) and I also don't have the pension rights they did or any proper private provision either.
I'm less interested in whether I'm better off than my parents were at this age than whether I'll be as well off as they are right now in retirement. The answer to that question currently seems to be "not a chance."
106: Secret-family bigamy works also, but that is just too much work at my age.
I've said before (before impending Jan Žižka nattarGcM, anyway), that my families experiment with education as a way 'up' was me, and me alone. None of my younger relatives went to university, none of them (with the possible exception of my niece) are likely to. None of them have decent jobs, for even modest levels of decent, and none of them have any kind of prospect for a prosperous or even poor-but-safe future. It's a decline of sorts, I suppose, because council house and benefits in the 70s and early 80s was a better (relative) standard of living than the equivalent now and in the immediate future.
110: Yes, the biggest gap is between me and my cousins. My mother and father are among the best educated in their respective families (mom best; dad's sister is a prof). My cousins are in blue/pink collar jobs mostly although most of them have BAs.
In both NS and NL, government loans were easy enough to come by that pretty much everyone at least attempted university. Most of my graduating class in undergrad were first generation university students. Their parents often worked in industries that had either recently closed (fishing) or everyone had no future (pulp and paper). The oil boom hadn't started yet. Now there are too many teachers in these areas and nurses are having a hard time getting positions in places where they want to live. But we all knew we had to leave. Our place has always been dying.
/stereotypical east coast talk
Seconding 108, though as my parents have only just reached 65, we none of us know if their retirements will last.
Other than that, a cultural narrative of genteel decline on both sides has served me well. If you take the magnificent Ambersons as a warning, you don't spend the windfalls very fast.
114: Sort of my family's story too. Also, major mental illness is a bitch. I'm not bitter about that or anything.
I've been studying on this one all day. It's hard to deconvolve the generational/societal effects, but I'd say that financially we are somewhat better off than my parents at my age (closing in on retirement), although they certainly have "gained" on us through their mid '50s due in large part* to having had their 3 kids about 5 years earlier than us**. They certainly had more social capital within their community (a lot of it via church). And I have less reason than they to be sanguine about the financial prospects for my children.
In retrospect my father and I ended up on pretty similar career tracks from about age 26 on despite having quite different paths up to that point.
*But also per unimaginative above that was right as their mortgage was being inflated into triviality (My mother in 1990: "We finally got out from under that burden!" after their final $185 mortgage payment.)
**Although conversely I think our 5 years of DINKitude that they did not have helped set us up to generally be more prosperous during the child-rearing years. (Hard to say though as father was tight as a drum when we were kids.)
114: Orson Welles may have appeared in some very low-rent work at the end, but I still think he had money long after that movie.
I now hold a job that is in ways quite similar to the one my father held. My socioeconomic status is quite close to what his was. He had five more kids than I do, and consequently less disposable income.
I stay in decent hotels when I take my family travelling. With him, it was campgrounds. On the other hand, I'll never be able to afford a house as nice as his.
I feel like I'm supporting a rather heavy weight of responsibility on my shoulders these days, but I suspect he felt it worse. Its made me a bit more understanding of why he was such an asshole in his pre-retirement years.
There's nothing like a divorce (or two) to knock you back down a few rungs.
mine did. but other people's helps.
I'm not sure I could compare my "success" in any meaningful way with that of my parents without holding very, very different life-choices and values up against each other and trying to decide which is "better off." I don't think it's possible to compare incomes, jobs, lifestyles, etc. between single people and married people with kids, and say one is "better off" unless one side agrees that the other lifestyle is the one they wish they'd chosen.
I'm having a lot more fun in my 50s than my dad did. It's grasshopper and ant, I'm afraid.
It's hard to deconvolve the generational/societal effects
Presumably we could look at trajectories normed against our whole cohort? Not whether I have more or less money than my parents, but which of us crossed the median -- in which direction?
(On independent axes of, say, income, savings, and free time. Nose-grinding matters, but it's harder to distinguish from preferences, as AWB says.)
My family has been more or less upwardly mobile for the past four or five generations, I guess, ever since fleeing the Famine. Of course, famine-level poverty is a pretty low bar to clear, and the first couple of generations to Canada were scarcely in clover.
We ascended to the ranks of the middle class in the post-World War II era. My parents were dramatically better off than their parents (my grandparents, in other words). We had a modest house (but my parents owned it, they did not rent [but when I was a baby and little kid, we lived in a crummy sort of rental: I truly experienced the upward mobility in my childhood]), and we took car trips to Maine and Pennsylvania and places like that in the summer when I was a teenager.
My paternal grandparents were working class (no real property: they rented, but did not own; when my dad was a little kid, he lived upstairs from his grandparents, who lived in the back rooms of the first floor of the house that they rented, while running a small grocery store at the front of the house; this was next door to the tavern that Uncle Tommy and Aunt Bridget operated, and my dad still refers to Uncle Tommy as a "publican").
My maternal grandparents were maybe lower middle class? maybe upper echelon working class? They owned some property (nothing too grand, but still, they owned it), but then they lost it (no savings; no safety net: a sad tale of downward mobility in the McTragedy family, though they were still better off than their famine-era emigrant grandparents, of course: they couldn't have fallen that far, thanks to the post-World War II Canadian welfare state).
I probably make too much about renting versus owning, but that is the story of my family.
I am better off financially than my parents ever were, to a degree that makes me feel guilty and uncomfortable.
My family has been basically "middle class" for the past 500 years (land owning farmers in a non-feudal society who were neither particularly wealthy nor poor for most of those, and my grandparents made it out of immigrant-induced poverty pretty easily). I've been taught to think of myself as upwardly mobile in the general way Americans do, but it's not actually the case since I'm probably not all that better off than my ancestors, adjusting for vastly different societies, nor am any better off than my parents. It's a very different POV for me to think about my boyfriend's family, which was fabulously wealthy for generations until they lost almost all of it fleeing genocide. My boyfriend grew up middle class, but with family photo albums filled with a life of incredible opulence in the Ottoman Empire. I think it would be weird to realize my great grandparents lived in a 'palace' (palais), had numerous giant homes all over the world, and lived out much of their lives in a hotel in Switzerland, whereas my life was mostly a normal middle class American upbringing in a modest house and with public schools. I suppose this is pretty common, since fortunes are made and lost all the time throughout history, and my family might be more of a global anomaly.
It's strange to think of my mobility relative to my grandparents. One set were German Jews, who lived a very genteel and almost aristocratic existence -- artists on one side (my great-grandfather was friends with Mahler, my grandmother had some parts in movies by Fritz Lang), well-to-do industrialists on the other. They were better off than me. The other side were Polish peasants who were almost unimaginably poor. My mother tells stories that are like dark anecdotes from IB Singer -- eating dirt to fill their stomachs, etc. From what I can tell, they lived an essentially medieval existence. Then the Holocaust hit, led to many near-death experiences, and finally dumped both sides in the US to meet and produce me.
Which is why you named your kid Adolf?
I did, however, have a hard time with IB Singer. "International Baccalaureate Singer? What the hell is that?" I thought to myself. My self is kind of stupid, it turns out.
Seriously? That's a serious hit to your Jew-cred, dude.
Adolf after the *Boston* Hitlers. Totally different family than the Munich side. Speaking of which, I can hear tyrannical little Adolf yelling right now, but we're Ferberizing him....I think I have to just sit here and stay strong in my Unfogged commenting.
(We actually named him after the great-grandfather who was friends with Mahler)
That's a serious hit to your Jew-cred, dude.
You mean because it turns out I'm stupid? Sorry, teo, not all Jews are smart. We do, however, control the banks and the media.
Which is why you named your kid Adolf?
There's a joke with more or less this punchline.
(Old Jewish man wins the lottery, buys many extravagances (the teller is encouraged to describe them in detail) about which he is questioned by a friend introduced into the joke for expository purposes. ("Why did you get this?", that kind of thing.) Finally the friend says, "ok, I understand all of that, but what in the world possessed you to commission a statue of Hitler?". Old man: "He did give me the numbers, after all".)
I can't remember if I told this story here before, but a couple of years ago I went through some difficult experiences and my mother (who comes from the Polish side) said seeing that was the worst thing she ever went through in her life. I said, 'Mom! You were born fleeing the Germans! You grew up in a Siberian labor camp under Stalin! You had rickets and your growth was stunted because of malnutrition and you almost lost your father multiple times! When you went back to Poland people threw things at you on the street and your parents had to stash you in an orphanage!" etc. etc. She looked confused for a second and said, oh, well, I was a kid and didn't fully understand the danger we were in, I didn't know any better and overall it was kind of fun. We never had to go to school and got to run around outside all day and steal things to help feed the family. In transit after the war we stole actual fruit from the fields and it was the greatest thing I ever tasted. When I got to America [at about 8 years old] and they showed us our apartment and the school I sat down and cried, because I realized I would be stuck inside all day now and the grownups wouldn't let me be free again.
Just another window on comparative generational experiences. She's said other things that make it clear she was afraid at times and did understand the dangers at some level. But knowing her well I can appreciate that at her deepest level she's someone who enjoys the opportunity to live by her wits.
It's funny, my mother's stories of hiding in Warsaw, and even of her time after the war (in Warsaw again and then in Paris and Palestine), are marked by abject terror. As she tells it, she didn't relax until some time in her late teens, by which time she and my grandparents had been living in Montreal for years.
... Boy, that was badly phrased. An anecdote that finds resilience and affection in a story of the hardest times? Now I sound like a bad movie blurb.
In fact, in all the reading I've done on the subject, I've never heard of any stories from a child survivor even remotely like those, PGD. Has your mom done any oral histories? (Don't worry, I'm not asking to conduct them, but there are many organizations that would love to record her stories.)
anecdote that finds resilience and affection in a story of the hardest times
Actually, you should recite the poem at the next inauguration.
I was trying to remember which historical figure I was thinking of, as a precedent for a kid who preferred living by her wits to living in school... oh, Huck Finn.
I'm extra interested in a woman trickster, because it's not unusual for people to claim that there aren't any. (Baubo and Penelope, I think. Don't know whether seductresses count.)
At my age, in the mid-eighties my parents were both working, dad four days a week for the council, mum part time as a carer for mentally disabled children and as a bible study teacher in public school.
They had four children, all then still living at home and throughout that time also at least one foster child they took care off
Dad could afford to take out a mortgage to buy a house big enough for such a family on just his salary, even while taking a loss selling our previous house, just after the housing market collapsed in the early eighties.
Growing up, we were middle class but somewhat on the poor side: no car, a black and white television until long into the eighties, going on holidays by house swapping with other families elsewhere in Holland. A lot of that was presented to us and the outside world as personal choices rather than necessity and we never felt poor, but looking back they must've felt a sting every now and then, though nowhere near real poverty.
Compared to myself, I couldn't affort the same sort of house now that my dad bought on a salary much lower than mine, but then I live in Amsterdam, I got a lot more gadgets but no children to pay for, don't have a car but could probably affort it, but rather spend disposable income on books and shit, so, it's a bit of a wash.
I don't feel poor and I'm rather earning more than a great many people, but I do think looking back that it was easier to raise a family on what my father earned back then than it would be to do the same on mine now.
I think I have said before that my father went from a high degree of material poverty to middle class (and so did the rest of his family). As a child he didn't see it that way since everyone around him was the same. But his father had to spend substantial parts of every year in Britain as a seasonal worker to send money home. The children went barefoot in the summer and were delighted to do so. Shoes (probably boots, really) were bought in the autumn if there were no hand-me-downs to fit. One year the money didn't come from their father until late autumn and he had no shoes until Halloween. That stood out in his memory as usually things weren't so stark.
Housing is roughly equivalent, though my parents' house needed less work. On the other hand, they mostly hated each other, and the house was filled with resentment, vitriol, and yelling most of the time. The value of a divorce cannot be overstated. (Though, in the big picture, better knowing you will die alone or that you will be with someone you can't stand for the rest of your life? Tough call.)
My parents definitely took more vacations with us. Rory comes out even, since her dad takes her on lots of vacations. I have more retirement savings to show for my not traveling as much, though really it's more about time than financial frugality.
I have a better garden.
121's grasshopper/ant reference hits home. At my age, my parents were married and settled with two kids and a house. The house we have is larger and one of the two kids might be temporary, but that's pretty comparable I suppose. I'm doing okay for my age with retirement savings, but as a couple and on the whole our savings are generally not impressive. We also don't have an at-home parent who cooks every day and definitely do eat in restaurants more than once a year and sometimes stay in hotels rather than just crashing at relatives' houses like my family did. But I spent 10 years at this job after college rather than 10 years in grad school like my parents, so we're starting from different baselines.
140: Pippi Longstocking was a trickster, wasn't she? And she certainly doesn't spend much time at school.
rather spend disposable income on books and shit
Ought to be one of the Ur-mouseovers for this site.
143.1: Maybe you could get your ex to agree to a male-suttee clause.
136/138: I actually don't think of my mother as a classic 'Holocaust survivor', in the sense that she was not being hunted by people who wanted to kill her. In this respect, the situation for refugees under Stalin was quite different than those living under German rule. (I actually asked my grandmother how she had known to head East toward the Russian forces, and she answered quite succinctly: 'Hitler hated the Jews, but Stalin hated everybody. Always go where you are not singled out'. Real peasant wisdom there). The labor camps they lived in were not extermination camps, and even the forced labor burden fell heaviest on my grandfather, less on my grandmother, and apparently not at all on the kids. There were threats to life, but they had to do with malnutrition or the possibility of getting shot for stealing food. Even with this latter, they weren't looking for excuses to kill a lot of people. Any food in the garbage dump was fair game (e.g. potato peels), and even if you were caught stealing food designated for the warehouses (a no-no) you could potentially get off. (There is a family story about my grandfather talking to distract the police who caught him stealing and then managing to dump his stash before they got him to a supervisor, so they let him off).
Also relevant is that the family were dirt-poor peasants in a state they perceived as hostile even before WWII. I get the vague feeling that Siberia was a change in degree but not in kind. Her parents were already used to scrambling for food and dealing with hostile authorities, and while this was a pretty disastrous set of events it wasn't entirely novel.
I have an interesting natural experiment on this in my own family, since my father was in Nazi Berlin for his childhood and managed to get out just before the war. He had no real material deprivation (they lost money but I get the sense that food/clothing/shelter were always more than adequate). But he *was* being hunted. Pre-war the Nazis were taking out the German Jewish community one by one and they were on lists, and doing political things that certainly would have gotten them killed if caught. His family had to hide at a Christian friend's on Krystallnacht, and his mother had him practice escape drills to get out through a back exit if he was ever woken up by a loud knock on the door at night. They did finally manage to maneuver through the bureaucracy and escape Germany but it was close. Even though he got out before the war started my father had many more classic Holocaust survivor 'symptoms' than my mother -- nightmares, anxiety, etc. Although I wouldn't say my mother views the world as a safe place, it is different.
I really like this thread. PGD (and others): thanks for sharing your stories.
My parents (and I as a child) were immigrants to the US, so economic and probably even emotional comparison with them is inappropriate. I feel much more successful-- their marriage was bad, as were the marriages of both sets of my grandparents. I take a lot of comfort from seeing how both of my parents have become more sensible in their seventies after having very tenuous emotional outlooks in their fifties. Communism and exile really did a number on both of them as well as on their parents.
My marriage is bad, but my son is mostly happy, and I was usually not happy as a kid. He certainly hasn't started working and getting high at 11 to get out of the house, does not have hiding places outdoors.
Both of my parents viewed their parents with respect. It was important to them both to be thought well of. I love my parents and want to keep them as happy as possible, but I do not view either of them as being capable of offering support. Looking back at the generations of my family and also at the families of most of my aunts and uncles, I see interpersonal and societal trainwrecks that produced materially stable family circumstances because someone kept an eye on the ball
To 143.1, definitely alone.
The houses that my parents grew up in, one of which was my birthplace, are inaccessible. My father's house, a lovely huge villa with a view of the castle that once had a tennis court on the grounds, was torn down to make room for a condo two years ago. My grandfather was very cagy to keep the place after he was released from a communist prison. It made sense for my dad to sell a few years back, but still a bit sad that it's gone. It was built to house a big happy family, but contained only strife and misery.
My mom's birthplace belongs to her brother now, who doesn't exactly reject communication but never replies either, and does not respond to her requests that he drive her out there to look around. So I do not see homeowning as an indefinitely lasting arrangement, though the sense of stability and safety that comes with owning is very nice.
I am far better off than my parents, by any measure.
I make approximately three times what my mom does. My father is a welfare case. I have a huge place in San Francisco, and cohabit with not insane people. My job is challenging, and the workplace is actually relatively sane. I can support a bicoastal relationship. Now, because I'm in this role, family draws on me at times. I wish that were more predictable.
I may bitch from time to time, but, yeah, my life doesn't suck.
one of the two kids might be temporary
I read this before realizing who wrote it, and was truly confused.
Talking more broadly about generations, we always had a fairly pat generational arc: immigrants 3-4 generations back (my greats and great-greats), uncolleged but skilled workers* 2 generations back, MBA in a gray suit 1 generation back, then my sister and I getting more artsy degrees (she trained to be a journalist ca. 1990, as the industry began to collapse) with no real prospects for earning as much as our father. I've held roughly true to that, but, after knocking about for 10 years or so, my sister discovered that her skills and interests are in great demand in the (roughly) dot com world, and now she globe trots and earns more money (I think) than our dad did at her age, plus her partner skipped the knocking about stage, and so is a globe trotter earning a shit-ton of money. They've ended up not having kids, so they have, almost literally, more money than they know what to do with (travel, mostly).
* the specifics are much more complicated, but socio-economically that's who/what they were. My mom's side had more of an intellectual family history, apparently with a rich inventor great-uncle who squandered a fortune, but none of that was connected to us in any concrete way - might as well have been a Cherokee princess
Hard to say how my place in life right now compares to my parents. Overall, I'd say I'm slightly better off right now, but have worse prospects for the future, 20 or 30 years down the line.
I have a house that's worth more than theirs, but that's partly an urban vs. rural thing - it also is smaller and is on a plot about 5 percent the area of the land I grew up on. Other than the mortgage, I think I have less debt than they did, but they weren't buried under it either. (At least, not until a later stage of their lives than I'm at now.) My parents are happy and taking care of themselves quite well, while my grandparents were probably already starting to go downhill when my parents were my age. No kids yet, for me now or for them at my age, so that's even. I think I make a little more money than they did at this stage of their lives, even adjusting for inflation, but it's not a huge difference.
The thing is, though, that's just right now. I fully expect things to get worse for us, or not to get better for us as fast as they did for my parents. And I'm not talking about general societal trends, just my own life. I only have a B.A. while they both had doctorates, so I'm probably not as upwardly mobile. If T. and I decide we want kids, that'll be harder for us than for my parents, for several reasons. I'm perfectly happy with my limited social network and distant family relations, but when/if my parents need help taking care of themselves or other things go wrong, I'll have fewer people to lean on than they did.
I love reading these with the names at the end and guessing.
'Hitler hated the Jews, but Stalin hated everybody. Always go where you are not singled out'.
This is actually one of the criteria they use in assessing asylum applications in the UK. If you're being singled out (by reason of religion, ethnicity or whatever) you're more likely to get asylum than if you just live in a crapsack country where the dictator hates everyone.
This is actually one of the criteria they use in assessing asylum applications in the UK. If you're being singled out (by reason of religion, ethnicity or whatever) you're more likely to get asylum than if you just live in a crapsack country where the dictator hates everyone.
That makes sense, I never hear about big emigrant communities from Eritrea or Chad.