> It's hard for me to even grasp the idea of it.

It's just an arbitrary label for people born in a certain period of history. These people generally have shared experiences that are different from the experiences of other generations.

> Who draws a line between generations and why?

Same people that draw a line between lemons and limes. It's sometimes a useful distinction so people remember it and use it.

> People do not stop being born, nor do they magically change because they supposedly belong to an imaginary generation.

There is no sharp dividing line between lemons and limes, either. Fruits in the citrus family can be crossbred with each other and you will end up with hybrids that cannot easily be classified as lemons or limes. There's no sharp line between "tall" and "short", or "white" and "gray". That's just the way names generally work, outside of fields like mathematics where you can use more precise definitions.

The whole thing was invented by two boomers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...

My personal theory is that it is just an artifact of US boomer navel-gazing and self-exceptionalism.

Also that it fits in nicely with peoples' tendency to want to drop other people into little buckets so that they don't have to think about them too hard. People do the same thing with race, believing these differences between us are discrete and fall into categories that define our essence, rather than continuous multivariate gradations.

A couple things:

1. Age distribution is not uniform: the histogram of people's ages really is multimodal (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/...) so talking about generations is a way to think about the "clusters" of ages.

2. Intuitively there is a certain zeitgeist that comes from being around for certain events or being affected by certain societal or economic forces. What did it mean to be a teenager or a college student in 1968? Do Americans who recall September 11, 2001 versus those too young to remember it think differently about things? How did the recession of 2007 affect those who were starting off their careers versus those who were about to retire? Generations are an attempt to generalize the answers to these questions.

You don't work in marketing/advertising. Companies need to segment populations of consumers with similar characteristics to effectively advertise, tailor products, and sell to them. One of the most common demographic dividers is age. Different "generations" are grouped together because the members of their population exhibit similar income and expenditure patterns on average.

WWII. There was such a large group of people born between 1945 and 1950, after the war ended, that they all push through the system at the same time.

Woodstock music festival happened in 1969 right when everybody was in the their 20s or about to hit 30.

Then they all had kids at roughly the same time, the 1970s and early 80s. Housing boom of the 1980s. Lots of new kids shows that happened in this time period as well.

Now all of those kids are buying houses and having kids. Another housing boom.

No it does not make sense, but I think what you may be missing is that it is not supposed to make logical sense as a concept, it's supposed to appeal to other parts of a person's psyche such as pride and belonging. So this contradiction and confusion that you observe is completely accurate, but that doesn't deteriorate the effectiveness of "generational thinking" at what it does.

I think it's just a part of a bigger pattern that groups of humans tend to fall into where they pick arbitrary lines to divide them into groups so that they can justify condescending the other group.

There is also the other component that people like to tell narratives with history, which is easier when you can condense the actions of millions of people into a number of categories you can count on your hand. Largely speaking, I think the world is just really complex and the ways we try to simplify it and comprehend it break down in some illogical ways because they were never superbly accurate models in the first place.

It's good to know (I wasn't aware before) that this trend isn't present in all groups of humans, it gives me hope that it is able to be overcome collectively.

The main driver of "generations" is mass culture. In most of the world, culture is local, transmitted from parent -> child and from village -> child, based on a relatively stable set of people that the child comes in contact with. As a result, culture doesn't change significantly between children born at different times, though it may differ significantly between children born in different places.

America since roughly the 1920s has been different. The invention of radio and television allowed a small set of companies to dictate culture across the whole nation (and later, the whole English-speaking world). Moreover, their incentive is always to seek the latest hot fad rather than broadcast the same messages over and over; stations that do the latter (eg. public radio, classical music) get eclipsed by ones that don't.

As a result, the cultural experience of people born at the same time will be roughly similar. You can talk to most early Millenials about Transformers and My Little Pony and Voltron and G.I. Joe and Punky Brewster and Full House and they'll know what you're talking about. You can talk to most baby boomers about Beatlemania and the Ed Sullivan Show and the JFK assassination and they'll know what you're talking about. You generally cannot talk to the former about the latter.

In other areas where mass-culture has been exported and widely adopted, you see generations arise as well. People have spoken about generations in Japan since the 1980s, and people are starting to talk about generations in China.

There's some evidence that the Internet is actually destroying mass culture and the concept of generations with it. Notice that the generation after Millenials hasn't even been named, and they also seem a lot more diverse in their cultural & musical tastes and a lot more accepting of diversity in general. But it'll take a while (a few generations, at least) before this really takes hold, assuming we don't get a major event that reverses it.

It's a very American thing. They like to categorize people and then assign attributes to that group. "Conservative", "Liberal", "Gen X", ""Millenial", "Baby Boomers" and so on. I also find it pretty unhelpful to think about society that way. I think Clinton for example thought that "women" would vote for her because they are "women" and all "women" have the same opinions.

I am from India and I practically grew up listening how unfortunate my elders were. Every time I complained of the cable TV not working, the standard reply was - “When I was of your age, I had to look out a window”.

Ergo, the generation thing is always there, just that it takes a different form in different countries.

> It's funny how this "generation" thing only quite exists (as far as I know) in the English-speaking world.

Not really, am from a Slavic country and we definitely speak of generations as well.

It's kind of like separating the 19th century from the 20th century at WW1. Millenials are separated from Gen X by having computers and the internet introduced at some point while they were growing up. Whereas Gen Z are the kids who have had iPads since they were babies.

> Who draws a line between generations and why?

Market research organizations I think.

They segment people into generations (and smaller subcategories) in order to better understand how to sell them products and services.

They are marketing buckets.

The corporate mindset is so pervasive in north america, that we take on their concepts and discuss them even outside of their area of application.

This is why we talk about which movie 'grossed' the most on the weekend, instead of comparing movies on their artistic or cultural merits.

I was born in 1984. I had a curious upbringing, true, but I find I have very little in common with "kids" born in 1997, the last year of my "generation". In 1997, I was a freshman in highschool. Things changed dramatically between '97 and '10. For instance, kids my age didn't grow up with social media, we had land lines and dial up internet, and none of us had cell phones.

It's easier to make clickbait headlines when you pigeonhole people into a "generation."

It's a convenient shorthand for talking about and summarizing continuous statistical distributions. Shorthands are okay. As to your question, if you draw the lines between differently, you only get slightly different results, because it's fundamentally measuring the dependence of various factors on age, and the exact way you draw those lines isn't important.

Generations are a bullshit idea from the marketing/advertisement cesspool to give themselves makework. The idea that demographic trends are descrete or have some sort of constant period is ludicrous, but this stuff has so pervaded pseudo-intellectional relms of media that, yes, real scientists at the real US government have stooped to using them.

Are they the original "fake news"?

*I should point out that the "boomers" are real insofar that birthrates did rise and fall. The rest is bullshit. There's no "boomlet" caused by them. "Greatest" is more senial Regan shit still haunting us. X, Y, is being too lazy to even find a bullshit name, and millennial is believing that the way we count years somehow matters—actually probably does in a bunch of ways completely unrelated to the things marketing cares about.

In Czech Republic, this "generation of something" is also sometimes used, because of two reasons:

First, there were actual population boom waves - one peaked after WW2, another peaked in the late 70s, another roughly after 2000. Also there was birth rate decline as an after shock from the transformation to the market economy. These waves seem to get generated by strong historical events or inadequate access to housing. In general, thanks to immigration and larger differences in the age of motherhood, these waves slowly disperse.

Second, because there was a lot of politically different historical periods in Czech Republic in the past 100 years, people born around the same time tend to have quite different experiences. So you have generation which was born in democratic Czechoslovakia after WW1, generation that grew up under Nazism, generation that grew during Communist purges in the 50s, generation that grew during a period of cultural renaissance in the 60s, generation that grew during a period of political tightening (normalization) in the 70s and 80s and generations born after the democratic revolution of 1989.

These different generations were largely learning a different language (German, Russian, English) and each was under influence of quite different culture than others.

I think it's based on the trope that teenagers rebel against their parents' beliefs, mixed with the idea of generational progress. So each generation of teenagers rebels against their parents' ideas that they believe are "outdated", and then supposedly grow up retaining this new framework of belief. So what was cool becomes uncool, what was progressive becomes conservative, etc etc.

I think it's mostly nonsense though. I think the underlying grouping that generation is a proxy for, is age group. 18-25 year olds behave differently from 25-35 or 35-50 (with some fuzziness at the edges). In other words it's loose grouping based on age/maturity.

> There is no such idea of generations of people where I come from. It's hard for me to even grasp the idea of it. Who draws a line between generations and why?

Not sure if with "comming from" you are referring to Poland or Germany but regarding the latter I have to answer with a confident "Stimmt nicht!".

There is a big discussion in Germany regarding the so called "Generationenvertrag" which is about the young generation financing the older generation's retirement. Which is working worse every year.

Also there are public discussions about social injustice particularly impacting the current generation and with regard to retirement a bleak outlook compared to the previous generation (not really the current) of retired citizens.

"Am I missing something?"

Yes - you're missing the detail of the first of these generations - those returning to the United States from having served in World War 2, took full advantage of the economic preeminence of the US, and begat the "baby boom generation".

So of course you are correct - births happen continuously and there is not an obvious "banding" of "generations" ... but in this case there was a very clear and pronounced age band, and all of the subsequent "generations" (baby boomers, gen X, gen Y, Millenials, etc.) proceeded from there.

I think I've only heard generations specifically named in our North American English-speaking culture, but I think it is a very useful idea anywhere in the modern world where everything is completely different every 20 years. One very obvious generational divide that applies to much of the world is between those that remember WWII and those that don't. Those involved in the Vietnam War (or the American War, as it is known in Vietnam) also share a (horrifying but bonding) experience that they do not share with later generations.

It is not just the English-speaking world. Most of Europe experienced a baby-boom in the years after WWII (Germany a decade later). This had very real social consequences, for example the impact of the youth culture in the late 60's. So at least the baby-boom generation is not an arbitrary distinction but a very real social phenomenon.

That said, I think "milleanials", "gen-X" etc. are arbitrary divisions - just a shorthand for talking about a specific age group.

It’s not set in stone but these generations exist everywhere. Say one generation had to fight in war and one didn’t. You’ll see major differences in their personalities.

I think it is useful to group people by age. But yeah I'm not sure if the 'generation' distinction is helpful. I was born in the early 80s so apparently am a millenial. (although I was gen Y before someone coined the term). I'm not sure that my life thus far has been closer to someone born in the 90s versus the 70s. I grew up without the internet or mobile phones which are supposed millenial things.

"Am I missing something?"

Not really. People like to categorize things in attempt to draw any kind of conclusions from it. Sometimes it can be helpful and sometimes not.

The trends they are describing were most likely occurring consistently over time and not at any particular point, but if you take two points in time 30 years apart and compare them it might look like a drastic change.

America does have a notable weakness for pop demography. However termed, though, I do think the phenomenon has been seen elsewhere. Google for "Young Ireland" or "Young Italy"--those go back a long way, even if the expression "generation" wasn't used in them.

Assuming you're in Europe, we go by decades. Ex., we say "in the 60s", "in the 90s", etc.

In the States they use "baby boomers", "generation x", "millennials" more, but it's the same thing.

It's all based on the postwar period (WWII, generally).

There concept is widely used in Japan as well fwiw. "The sexless generation" etc.

America as a whole is obsessed with labels and categorization, and an obsession with making things fit neatly in buckets, which is ridiculous. The media especially loves it, look at all the new acronyms they concoct on a daily basis.

Chinese talk about generations classified in decades by when they were born too.

The large scale of deaths and later births that came from WWII affected age demographics in western countries enough that we have identifable "waves" in age groups and thus generations.

Exactly. And thats largely because the boomers pulled up the ladder behind them via zoning rules to greatly restrict redevelopment and density of new development, thus denying adequate housing supply to their kids.

There could be lots of reasons for that, however. Since you have not provided enough information to make speculation possible, I will mention my own to illustrate my point:

My parents bought their house in 1970, when my dad was making about 15K. The house was about 30K. To buy that same house today you would need to make about 150K. Inflation adjusted, my dad's income then would only be about 100K now or maybe a little less.

But ... what changed? In 1970, we lived in a remote area, where it took close to an hour to get there from the nearest city of any size. But about 10 years later the freeway was built and the nearest city expanded, now the property is still technically rural but it's 15 minutes from the city. It would be hard to argue that the value of the property hasn't been significantly increased as a result. Not many people wanted to live that far out in 1970; my dad's coworkers at IBM all told him he was crazy. Today that area is very popular.

Isn't that an argument that the inflation adjustment isn't suitable for this comparison?

Arguably, Boomer style retirement based on being independently wealthy was/is a fleeting historical oddity. Historically people died young or moved in with family.

A lot of older people had stable retirement pulled out from underneath them with pension cuts

People are much more specialized in their professions now as well. I might be able to find a relevant job in every city, but in some cities that might be the only employer, and there is no incentive for loyalty toward your employer, and you make much more leveraging your existing salary for a better job at another company than waiting for a raise or title change at your present one. You are so much better off living in a place where you can easily get a new job under a different employer in your field without having to find a new apartment and plan a relocation as well, not to mention being in a larger network and the innumerable opportunities that gives you.

Thinking that entire generations of people are really different at their core is fallacious, but looking at their behaviors and indications of differences in the system they operate inside seems valid to me.

Wages/GDP Graph may have something to do with it. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=2Xa

People aren't paid according to the GDP of the United States.

Guesswork here, but it might be possible due to a selection effect.

If you can obtain a mortgage, you are more likely to (be willing to) spend more on that mortgage than you would on the rent for a number of reasons.

Anecdotally, I see people attempting to spend as little as possible on flatshares because they don't think they'll ever have a high enough income to bother with that, so they don't save either, and just enjoy themselves with the money left over (spending as little time at home as possible).

I don't have a reference, but it doesn't sound far-fetched to me. Student loans eat a lot of money that could be spent on housing, and also lots of people have roommates to lower their housing cost.

Or on average they stayed in school longer than their parents, which tends to delay everything, including high earnings years.

> who now have to live with, and pay, their debt.

No you don’t. You don’t have to pay your parents debts. Not sure what “debt” you are referring to?

They reference this paper: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2018080pap...

"Millennials spend huge amounts on rent, using up 45% of income made by age 30"

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/real-es...

The majority of individuals and households spend all of their money. That's the 'how'.

The more salient question is 'why'.

I'm guessing it's mean average, so probably being skewed by higher spenders. It's also household numbers, so even more skewed if you have two high income people living together vs two low income living together.

That may be the spending on education. That is mostly debt.

Where do you live? Here in Chicago that's a pretty reasonable amount of spending for my family of 2.

You're comparing average expenditure with people with a bachelor's degree - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_... indicates only about a quarter of people have that (it's a bit hard to read).

People are in debt yeah. I lucked out but I know a lot of people with student debt.

I feel like that is a given based on what I have been seeing right now. If people are already redlining spending/debt without savings any financial leg up that they can provide their children is that much less. If anything I am anticipating a decline in people pursuing college as those children who see lives defined by student debt as just not worth it, but the current jobs market does not have a ton of high paying positions for high school educated workers. In a sense because I have education and specialist skills I feel like I am part of the group pulling up the ladder behind me when it comes to knowledge work.

If the next generation is even net poorer the property asset appreciation train might finally crash though, and I'm of mixed opinion if that is going to have a net good outcome, or if the front is going to fall off two generations from now.

That's really our only hope at this point.

Please keep tedious generational flamewars off HN.

Don't forget environment. But they leave very nice government debt behind, so millenials have something to solve after they pay out their student ones and pay boomers pensions.

Or perhaps the Neoliberal policies that are hard at work dismantling all the social safety nets that gave people hope and encouraged them to take risk without fearing that failure implies total ruin.

Boomers made the economy grow incredibly and had some busts along the way. They got up and kept going. The boomers are the most creative and productive American generation period.

Millenials are still living with their (wealthy) boomer parents, delaying marriage and waiting for their boomer parents to die, whereupon the millenials will inherit their boomer parents' wealth. Unfortunately this will fail, b/c millenials have neither a work ethic nor a saving ethic. In the end, they'll spend their parents money and the US economy will flat-line.

If you're doing anything related to software for a living and live in the US, you're not representative of the average American.

I'm not making anywhere near as much as I could be in software development right now and yet I'm making significantly more than the average household income in the US, just by myself (not including my girlfriend that lives and shares bills with me).

Also it's all relative. The types of jobs my parents worked were both middle-lower class jobs and we struggled at times to make ends meet. I ended up in one of the higher paying fields out there, so it makes sense that I make more than they did.

Comparatively, a good friend of mine's dad is a lawyer, but my friend is a teacher in the Pacific Islands (he studied for and tried being a lawyer for awhile, but his wanderlust got the better of him). He's making significantly less than his family did.

Welcome to statics. You are a tail.

Not to mention articles that use an average instead of median. Millennials can seem rich on average, but poor on median, because of the growing wealth disparity.

Maybe 30-50 years ago having 15K saved up was rich.

What can 15K get you today? An OK used car, maybe, and it's like 1/10th of the down-payment that's expected on a house that's still too far away from work, which you can't expect to stay at because no one has a stable career anymore.

Thank you. The narrative is wack and stats are cherry picked for headlines.

My parents had four kids when they were my age with a combined income likely less than mine (inflation adjusted). I don't know how they did it.

I think it's worth noting that having a family is a "life experience" and a home is a "material possession". Many would argue that travel, dining out, bars... are shallow and hedonistic experiences while cultivating a family and community are enriching and rewarding.

You could move, right?

Sure.

In the UK it's not about saving, it's about income multipliers, which don't really involve financial discipline beyond the basic level of "have an emergency fund so you can interview properly".

In a silly limiting example, imagine you earn 40K. It's not intractable to save enough to hit a 5%, 10%, or whatever deposit on a 1 million property.

What is intractable is ever earning enough that 4x your income is equal to the remaining ~800-900K mortgage.

There really is no pressing need to ever own a house. What do I get with ownership over renting? Sure, the mortgage payments might be cheaper than a given rent, and perhaps the local housing market might work in my favor, but perhaps it won't!

I might one day own a house, but that's not going to happen for at least a decade or more until my position rises from entry level to middle to a high-enough level where I actually have the liquid capital for a down payment on something worth dealing with a long term mortgage for, and have enough money set aside to deal with potential catastrophic repair or even just regular maintenance. Right now, if I come home and my roof is caved in, the floor is flooded, or my PSU explodes away half the house, I'm gonna shrug and call my landlord and renters insurance agency, and let them solve all these catastrophic problems on their time and their dime/

I'm in no hurry to get one, so I don't see a point to save specifically for a house at the expense of efficiency (spending 15 minutes to order and eat a meal vs. 1hr+ cooking one), or other more fruitful investment opportunities than home ownership. Not to mention, it would make moving around for better employment much more involved and stressful if I had a house I needed to sell or rent out in order to leave the city.

A friend of mine complains about the young SV crowd that decry unaffordable real estate but also drive expensive cars. I think this is the same motivation that you describe, but on a grander scale. In this case, they're playing the startup lottery, and if they win it won't matter if they drove a Honda or an Audi. And if they lose, they'll have to leave SV when it comes time to buy a house.

I don't personally subscribe to this mentality — I've seen other friends save up $50k, double it with patient investing, and then scrape together a down payment. Even if you end up leaving SV, having had property here can be a good investment.

and have less time to cook at home and need both parents working full time instead of one. etc.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy.

This has been on my mind for some time. Coming from a lower middle-class background in the midwest, and currently working for low wages, I use HN comments to get a feel for how 'the other side' thinks.

It's surreal to how alien a lot of the perspectives on HN are, even though many people here come from a similar background to mine.

People have retirement accounts. People aren't taking cash out of their 401k early to get drunk with their friends on Friday (I hope). People in their 20s and 30s just aren't seeing much of a need to set aside otherwise disposable or earmarked money to one day use it all on a down payment for something that you don't NEED to ever actually own.

Excluding healthcare and higher education, unfortunately.

When corrected for inflation,I make 30% less than my father did right out of college.

"Quality of life" is a problematic term in that context.

Within bounds it's possible to compare. Two families living on the same street, one has $10k higher income than the other, the higher income family has (at least the potential for) a higher QoL.

But comparing someone with a high income in a downtown flatshare who has an ~infinite entertainment budget to someone who is well on the way to owning a home outright in the suburbs is really hard (e.g. a 30yo in London, vs their parents at 30yo).

The former doesn't have a higher or lower QoL than the latter because you can't define a benchmark without it being opinionated.

I think it's just hard to compare between the generations due to changes in how lifestyles are financed. My parents came out of school with no debt and were able to buy a house way before me. I came out of school with considerable debt and wasn't able to buy a house for a while.

On the flip side, my parents talk about when I was first born and they had to choose between two toys because they couldn't afford both (a mirror and a little bird - maybe $20 each). I have never had an issue with access to money, even when I had nearly nothing in the bank and was paying down my student loans as fast as possible and something came up - a quick call to the bank was all that stood between me and enough to finance a full repair across the next 3 months instead of a bandaid. My parents didn't have that type of access to credit.

Me and my dad worked in a similar role (software development - him for a bank, me for defense) out of college. Granted, even inflation adjusted I made a lot more than him right out of school.

Also, even though my parents had a house way younger than me I wouldn't want a credit card with the interest rate my parents were paying on their house. It was insane.

> When I was a student in the mid-90s students were poor. We wore second-hand clothes because they were cheap, not because they were “vintage fashion” (which costs as much or more than new!), we re-used teabags instead of Starbucks every day, we went to the market at closing time to buy for pennies the produce the stallholders were about to throw away instead of takeaways and eating out, we drank crap beer at the union instead of going to clubs, we used PCs in the library rather than having our own laptops...

Virtually none of the students I knew when I was one I the 1990s did most of those things, more of the people I've known as students recently do them. (Yeah, we didn't have Starbucks per session, but we did have the overpriced trendy on-campus coffee stand with similar choices and, adjusted for inflation, higher prices then Starbucks has today, and it was busy constantly.)

Now it's our job to bring peace and prosperity to the next ones.

Yeah, we were lucky. War was mostly over and all the debt hadn’t caused any problems yet when we were teens in the 80s and 90s.

That’s helpful perspective, thanks for sharing :)

I think it's largely that bullhorn. Before the Internet, you might read a magazine article or hear a news story once in while, but now that (almost) everybody can have a global voice, there are a lot more voices complaining about everything.

Yeah this has become my standard reply when a boomer makes a stink about Millenials to me. “Sounds like they didn’t have very good parents.”

If you pay attention you'll note that it's always other peoples' kids who are the problem.

Only the positive part :)

This sort of covers that:

"Older people love to gripe about the entitled, lazy millennial generation. But it's nothing new – by delving into the archives, we found plenty of parallels stretching back 2,000 years."

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20171003-proof-that-people-...

I saw that study and it matched what I observe anecdotally around me. Millenials mostly have divorced parents and mostly feel that was a terrible way to grow up. So they’re waiting until they’re ready to have kids to get married to their long-term partner, and they’re approaching it with more of a sober commitment to stay together for the kids.

At the end of the day, marriage is a choice you make every day. Different cultures have higher and lower divorce rates largely based on how seriously they take that commitment.

Divorce rates also decline when the economy declines. When the economy is booming people feel more confident in their potential future economic security post divorce and are more willing to roll the divorce dice.

I would guess that has more to do with the rates than any moral superiority between generations.

Or it says that people can't afford to get divorced. In dense urban areas the cost of housing/rent has gone way up and the incomes for younger people have not kept up.

I don't think "millennials" are really all that different from the previous generation. However they do have very different forces pushing them in different directions.

I'm not having kids largely as a result of the mismanagement of the boomers.

I'm holding on to my nastiness.

Upping the contribution limit without upping the benefit would just be a hidden tax on the upper middle class, but not the rich, who do not work for salary. If you want to tax the rich, you need to raise the upper tax rates.

It's disingenuous to say that the government borrows from SS. The SSA needs a savings account for its money and the Treasury offers that, though T-Bonds.

It's two sides of the same coin with totally different implications. It's, "I bought a CD." vs. "The bank keeps borrowing from me."

Sorry Medicare and medicade. It doesn’t matter if similar systems have been around much longer, governments have been around much longer than The US government and none of them are $21T in debt.

Weren't there some expensive wars around that time? I think I'm recalling that correctly.

Seriously, though, a fairer point of comparison might be the late '60s and early '70s - right when Boomers were entering adulthood. National debt as a percentage of GDP was in the 30s around then.

Still, your response to the parent comment is still somewhat justified - yes, national debt is higher now, but it's not like it's orders of magnitude higher, right?

To a first approximation, only foreign-held debt matters

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HBFIGDQ188S

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Composition_of_U.S._Long-...

>but the current situation isn't as dire as you suggest.

But I didn’t say it was dire, that’s you reading “dire” into facts and numbers, which should be telling.

That is absolutely correct, paying back debt has existed nearly as far back as we have recorded history in the form of slavery / indentured servitude.

But, not to put words in OP's mouth, I don't think that's what OP was saying. Baby boomers have normalized the concept of average people using debt to get things they want now but can't afford, and millennials are the first generation that has grown up with it pervasively.

Debt is a powerful tool for enabling opportunities when the decision is highly calculated and considered. For example a business that can directly weigh a break-even point for going into debt to make an investment that would simply have not have been possible otherwise. Or perhaps buying a house (though that is a bit more debatable these days).

When people "just put it on the CC", that debt is not carefully calculated or considered. When people go to college without a path to a career that can pay it back it's also not calculated or considered.

Debt is like a scalpel, but individuals use it like it's a hammer.

Well in My comment I expressly state the US federal debt was at $250B in 1950, so I know debt existed before baby boomers. My comment really set off the pedantics.

Last evening while we were out to beers, a friend recommended me a book apparently reviewing precisely this history: https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290

Yes, but you couldn't spend it like water until the credit card. And that started with the Diner's Club card in 1950: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diners_Club_International

Yes it has existed before but never so readily available. I believe credit card was first introduced in 1950's and modern mortgages in 1930's.

Sure but what's fair in terms of debt was seriously limited. Now with payday loans all bets are off.

Credit card debt is a small percentage of overall household debt.

The argument is that the baby boomers, by being a demographic bulge, have a relatively large electoral influence and so over time government policies have been disproportionately targeted to their changing needs.

While 'directly responsible' is a bit of a stretch, at least in the UK voting preferences are currently quite correlated with age (though this hasn't always been the case). Because the current crop of older people are much more likely to vote than younger people, the political parties have made various commitments to protect and increase social security for pensioners. These pensioners are of the same generation that had free education in the 60/70s and then voted for tax cuts in the 80s when they were earning, of course.

Yes it is a generalisation, it's far from the only factor that determines policies and the demographic bulge isn't as pronounced in the UK as it is in the US but I still think it's interesting to see how government policies have changed to follow the bulge as it ages. Of course, many baby boomers will tell you that they paid taxes all their lives, thank you very much, and had mortgage rates of 25% etc etc etc.

Propping up housing prices and NIMBYism isn't trying to give your offspring a better life.

I guess by some math they would leave the house to the kids, but that will be when the Boomers are ideally 80 and their kids are already grandparents. Assuming the wealth isn't spent on end of life care (it will be).

Yes, many boomers in my family always moan "Why do I have to pay for someone else's kid to go to college? Why do I have to pay for someone else to get health insurance?"

Why would you not buy a house as an investment? If you aren't looking to get a return you might as well rent and have your hands away from the duties and risks of property ownership.

I wouldn't say that. Per TFA on the subject that also reached the front page the decrease is 0.3yr. I wouldn't call that "plagued".