I feel very bad for young people. They are stuck growing up in a world that has been destroyed by the older generations that came before them.
A lot of entry level jobs are really just dead-end jobs. You start at the bottom, and you stay at the bottom. It’s hard to start a “career” when the work that is available is too often simply a “job”.
And middle management at corporations has been hollowed out. Middle managers? They were just a waste of space, right? With automation, you don’t need a team leader for 5 - 10 people. One guy with a snazzy spreadsheet can manage 100 or more people. So, the poor schlubs who start at the bottom don’t have a ladder to the top because the middle is pretty much non-existent.
And the people at the top? They leave their Ivy League school with their brand new MBA and they start at the top. They shift from this company to that company. Always at the top. They sell insurance, then they sell beer, then they manufacturer airplanes. They don’t understand any of it, but that doesn’t matter — they have pull in the right places.
How are young people supposed to earn $100,000 so they can afford a $500,000 house? That deck is very much stacked against them. And who did it to them? We did.
I agree. I’d love to know the average age of a CEO. I bet it’s in the ballpark of 70. Retire please.
I've seen it done with young people in their mid-late 20s who are top-notch workers. I hear stories from these same people about how others their own age, maybe a bit younger, maybe a bit older, who want titles and salary raises just handed to them merely for showing up for work (never mind actual work performance). Companies have been bleeding out workers in their 50s and early 60s for the past two decades. Either the avenues for advancement are there, or they don't exist.
I don’t know that older generations destroyed the world for younger people; we are living through the inevitable consequences of globalization. Americans are competing with workers in dire situations around the world, and now due to technology, the skilled foreigners are getting jobs from American companies offshoring them - or trafficking the foreigners here to do them.
If more young people voted in their own economic self-interests, I’d be more sympathetic; in the meantime, if they are convinced its hopeless, expect to see many of the maladies afflicting the inner city permanent underclass move up the economic ladder. Legalizing weed was just one obvious example; they’ll self-medicate themselves into passive acceptance...
The Boomers had a ready supply of entry-level housing available to them as cities in the largely empty USA expanded out into new suburbs.
Today, communities discourage new entry-level housing because it generates lower tax revenues, lowers property values in existing areas, and can't be developed and sold 'affordably' except in ultra-dense high-rise condominium formats. And local zoning and planning regulations make it a decade-long process for developers just to get a project through to the finish line.
Far easier and more profitable just to throw up another 100 McMansions - everybody is happy with that.
I paid for college as a certified structural welder in the 90s. For fun I browse job sites and the same jobs pay the same in dollars now as back then. Same for most trades. Illegal immigration has destroyed the trades pay.