Yup, at UK minimum wage 17 year olds would have to work 9 hours a week just to pay for car insurance. Then there is road tax, fuel, MOT, repairs, and buying the car in the first place.
Yes. Owning a car is a constant expense. For something that gets used a small percent of the day.
I rent if I ever need a car. The rent by-the-minute schemes near me include charging or fuel, insurance and everything for ~25ct/minute. Ideal for local trips with passengers. Otherwise I bike everywhere in Munich.
Agreed. Moreover, I’d like some more insight in the consumer patterns of Gen Z. A pie chart would be nice including groups like eduction, healthcare, subscription services, entertainment, etc.
I have a feeling, without the data, that a lot of young people are spending way more on novelty and entertainment things than ever before while they’re complaining about not being able to afford things.
IDK why, but this reads like just about what every generation says about a younger generation: bad decisions, worse with money etc.
Even if Gen z were spending a larger percent of their income on luxury items, I’m certain it pales in comparison so their lower average income and higher average housing costs.
Your previous comment really reads as “Kids these days can’t afford housing, too busy with their avocado toasts and Netflixes” which is the likely reason for all the downvotes.
I can’t fix people’s narratives. I’m asking for data to illustrate the measurable impact of the economy on people’s personal finance and leisure over the decades.
For one example, to compare 2020 to 1960, what is considered “leisure”, what does that cost, and what percentage of a person’s income is spent on it. I’m not really interested in polls where “Gen Z says they’re struggling to afford a car” because that’s subjective and relative. It’s not at all about questioning their anecdotes; I’m curious what the graph or pie chart looks like over the decades.
I think, and am asking for something to prove me right or wrong simply because I’m curious, that there’s more leisure and luxury available to all people today than ever before. And I feel pretty strongly that the culture of consumerism has grown much stronger over the past 30-50 years making everyone feel like they need to spend more than they were in the first half of the last century.
Productivity Purchasing Power in The United States peaked in the '70s late '60s. The country’s overall productivity sucks today [see below comments]. I believe the numbers show that we’re all spending more of our income than we ever have before. And for those “earning” a salary based on archaic values set decades ago, it’s certainly logical they’d be most hurt by the culture of consumerism that’s so rampant today.
Also, I’d be very interested to compare the graphs to credit card debt over time. It’s too easy to click a button on our phones now to have something charged to a card without the stress of seeing it coming directly out of our checking account. This use of technology, I think, is a real factory for younger people who haven’t grown up learning how to balance a checkbook or the need to save real cash money to make major purchases. The success of services like Mint and Acorn and Chime indicate this isn’t my imagination.
No one likes when someone says your opinion is irrelevant when they’re asking for tangible numbers. I’m well aware that the economy is harder for young adults today. I’m also well aware that most people on the internet are ultra-sensitive and lack reading comprehension. There’s a large segment of the internet that can’t be bothered to read more than headlines and watch ten second TikTok videos. I know younger people aren’t the only ones guilty of this, but I have doubts they’re not the primary culprits.
I really did want to take your comments in good faith but asking for data and then turning around to say something completely and blatantly false (and easily verifiable) is making that hard.
Yeah sure, there’s more leisure-type purchases available to us than ever before, and technology does make transactions ridiculously easy. However, the current economic situation for young adults is much too dire to attribute entirely to individual factors when clearly this is an issue on a societal scale.
“Purchasing power” is the metric I’ve been thinking about.
This decline in purchasing power means low-wage workers have to work longer hours now just to achieve the standard of living that was considered the bare minimum half a century ago. epi.org/…/raising-the-federal-minimum-wage-to-15-…
Here specifically is the web page I’ve kept in mind when referring to productivity (and I admit that off the top of my head “the 70s” was a bit off).
In fact, had the federal minimum wage kept pace with workers’ productivity since 1968 the inflation-adjusted minimum wage would be $24 an hour. aflcio.org/what-unions-do/…/minimum-wage
I concede that “young adults” and “low wage workers” shouldn’t be confused.
I’ve edited my previous comment. Thank you for the point.
I have a hard time understanding how you can present this information (people working harder and longer for less purchasing power than before) and arrive at the conclusion that young adults’ personal spending habits are to blame. The system is clearly engineered to keep the majority poor and enrich a tiny minority.
Want to know where the profits from the increase in productivity went instead of worker’s wages? I suggest looking up CEO wages from the '50s to the present day, and compare with the chart from my previous comment.
the conclusion that young adults’ personal spending habits are to blame.
At what point did I ever suggest anything close to a conclusion or blame? But since you didn’t ask, I blame Reaganomics, consumerism, and the deregulation of Wall Street. I blame the exportation of jobs for pennies and the mistreatment of workers. I blame disinterest and carelessness and I blame our value and reward of ownership over generosity. I blame “The New American Dream”.
Can’t you stop whining about being a victim for a moment and consider the implications of studying the history of economic and personal finance patterns to plan for the future? I am utterly bored of the repetitive copy/paste talking points and the whining with zero proposals for a solution other than “the boomers did it to us” and we’re all out of ideas.
Look at the real historical data. Present hard evidence and propose how the country is doomed for economic turmoil in ten to twenty years. A couple of charts and anecdotal polls aren’t going to push congress to do anything. No one cares if you can’t afford to buy a car when the economy says people are loaded with money right now. I mean, General Motors just had their best year since 2019 so they don’t care if young people aren’t buying cars. So prove them wrong. I want to prove them wrong - why don’t you?
This is what I mean by you can’t fix people’s narratives. You’re blinded by your grief. No one is saying it’s your fault. You, like the boomers before you, are so self-centered that, unless you get your faces out of your screens and fix this shit, you’ll end up being responsible for a country worse than it’s ever been (slavery aside / if it makes it through this election cycle). I’m absolutely terrified for future generations.
I really don’t get it. I don’t get all the stories and anecdotes and complaining yet no one has provided a full story of the reality of personal finance over the decades. Maybe this does exist and I just don’t know it - it’s probably paywalled. But it seems that without it, this “discussion” exists to divide us and generate clicks and ad revenue and political and corporate control. It’s bullshit.
I have a feeling, without the data, that a lot of young people are spending way more on novelty and entertainment things than ever before while they’re complaining about not being able to afford things.
Here, in that first comment, is where you suggest that young people’s spending habits are to blame for them not being able to afford things.
Can’t you stop whining about being a victim for a moment
I hardly see how I’ve whined during our exchange, it feels to me like you’re having a conversation with someone who exists in your head and not me. We seem to agree on the major parts but I just can’t understand your obsession with tying personal finance into the struggles capitalism is imposing on the current working population. It’s largely irrelevant on a societal scale.
I really don’t understand where you’re coming from and this comment in particular is all over the place. Best wishes, hope the world isn’t too rough on you.
Everything I’ve seen has said that Millenials and younger are spending more on experiences and less on things, but also that their purchasing power is much weaker than their parents’ was at the same age. Millenials, I think, have about half the purchasing power as the Baby Boomers did in their 30s and 40s.
Also of note that I just saw the other day is that the price of cars has jumped up about 30% since 2021.
So, not exactly what you’re looking for, but some of the stuff I’ve seen/heard that probably plays contributing factors to this.
I think being priced out of the housing market influences a lot how likely you are to spend your money on experiences. It seems like that’s all young people can afford, the mortgages these days are daunting even for people much older in good positions.
Good info. Yeah, I’m just curious to see a clear comparison laid out. I think being able to literally visualize it would be more conducive to the ongoing conversation. Tough to trust what one cohort on the internet says about their personal experience. Seems like everyone online is broke yet increasing interest rates tell another story about the market overall.
Yeah, unfortunately, I don’t think one really exists. I’m sure there are people who have done the research, but you’re probably not likely to find the info laid out like that in a major news article or something. There’s also a major generational divide in terms of wealth and a disparity between the rich and poor in the US that’s been described as being comparable to the conditions just before the French Revolution, when a loaf of bread cost the same as the average worker made in a day, so looking at market forces like interest rates and such can paint a very different picture from what the average person is experiencing because of how weighted the averages are by the wealthy.
About a month ago, I watched an unrelated video that happened to have some very well researched info in it on the economic situation of Millenials called The Perpetual Infantilisation of Millennial Women. Great video that I pulled some of the info from for a similar conversation. It’s definitely worth the watch for that info alone. Some of the stuff I remember are things like 43% of Millennials own homes, well below the average of 65% per generation. And of those who don’t own a home, 52% aren’t saving for a house, often citing reasons like poor wages or joblessness, showing that many aren’t buying homes not because they’re buying them later than previous generations, but because for many the idea of owning a home straight up isn’t considered feasible. Another big one is that only 20% of houses are affordable for the average American worker, compared to (I think) 63% in 2016. This kind of stuff has led to Millennials not buying material goods like nice furniture because they’re just going to have to leave it behind when they inevitably move to their next rental.
It’s a really multi-layered issue that definitely goes beyond the “the kids are choosing not to buy cars” or “Millenials could afford a house if they’d stop buying avocado toast or Starbucks!” takes that you often see in the news.
I guess you can check the median age of people getting their driving license first time. If is getting higher, is probably because younger people don’t care enough to get it, because past generations couldn’t afford cars ar 16 neither.
Ok, I get you. I love in latinamerica and was using my experience as the standard, when here is a more American/European centric site where experience may vary.
My wife purchased a Subaru Legacy Premium new in 2018 with a MSRP of $23,000 and we looked at the exact same model but in 2024 because they added some safety features. The exact trim Premium for 2024 has a MSRP of $31,000k. That’s a 39% increase in 6 years. Same motor, looks nearly identical, just has collision detection and a better center console screen. We could have got those in the top trim in 2018 for $5k more.
You don’t really have to buy a new car though, do you? Especially not using a loan. Nearly everyone I know, young or old, poor or well-off has a second hand car.
Didn’t really have to but it was at sweet spot for trade in, $15k, was at the point it need new tires and registration. Tires $600+ and registration in Washington $300.
It was actually seeing $15k trade in that got me thinking about it since it was pretty close to our purchase price. Stupid MSRP went way up.
“When I was their age, a car meant freedom. It meant you could take yourself to a place your friends were and your parents weren’t, anytime you wanted. To them, the Internet means freedom, and they don’t really see the point.”
You know what true freedom is? Not requiring a car to get to places by having decently designed neighbourhoods where people can walk or cycle. For longer distances good quality transit could be available. No massive investment or lisence needed to travel.
For real, the amount of freedom I get here without a driver’s license in the Netherlands is insane. I walk to the train station and can get anywhere in the country and even to a lot of other places in Europe.
Then I can just decide on a whim to walk to the grocery store, take a bike ride to visit my parents, go to a movie theater, whatever you can think of.
If there’s one thing I have pride in with my country, it’s the infrastructure we have. I find it very hard to imagine moving out of this country because of it.
I don’t know how old your dad is, but when I was a teenager 25 years ago, I could pick up a car for under $500, and it ran. Now, if it runs and drives it’s automatically $2500. It’s also probably beat to hell.
I can’t really blame kids today for not being interested in that.
~ 12 years ago I got an 04 rodeo for $1k and kept it running for a decade until it died over covid. That same $1k 2004 clunker that’ll still be in the shop for something every couple of months (even more so now 12 years later) is going to be 3-4k.
No thanks 🤷my bus system sucks but it works and I can just grab an Amtrak somewhere if I wanna travel.
I really don’t agree. Young people still like to be able to move around freely and “the internet” is not the same as phisically going to bar, roadtrip, etc. In my opinion, nowadays people mostly don’t buy cars because A) they can’t afford it and B) we’re more nevorinmentally conscious.
If you’re working from home then ubering everywhere is cheaper than insurance for a new driver and once you put gas plus the cost of the car into the equation I totally understand this.
Insurance rates vary greatly with zip code in Canada. I moved just before I was going to buy a car and when I got quoted over $700 CAD per month to insure a Fiat 500 (new driver over 30) I quickly calculated that taking Uber to and from work daily is going to be much cheaper than insurance alone…
This is an easy thing to say, but ride-sharing apps price gouge ridiculously. Have you done the math on this for the average person’s annual needs, or does it just “feel” true? Also I assume your groceries and other regular shopping needs are all getting delivered in this scenario, so need to work all the delivery overhead in annual costs as well. I wish we could get rid of individual cars, but not sure this adds up…
Also, curious on the reality of this in big cities versus more rural areas
If you live within 1 mile of a grocery store you could easily walk, and you don’t need anything else on a regular basis. Use a bicycle and 5 miles becomes just as easy. People lived thousands of years without cars. The problem is our cities are built around cars, and they’re built poorly because of it.
The fact that it feels tiresome is worrying me. That should feel like nothing. 15 kg is not all that much (initially wrote “a joke”, didn’t realize that might sound disrespectful to some), unless you are either 12, 92, or really out of shape.
Have you tried carrying what equates to a toddler by one hand for 3km? Them plastic bag carrying handle bits are going to be digging into your fingers, friend. These days it won’t matter so much of course because the fingers will be frozen anyhow.
Frankly I haven’t used a shopping bag for years because I prefer collapsible cases (approx 40x60 cm) but economically those are even worse to carry farth than, say, 50m.
I might be a bad example indeed. I carry a lot of things in often quite unusual ways. As a male Paramedic working inner-hospital shifts in a 3000 bed hospital complex, well, there is a lot to carry around. And most things don’t have handles either; some resist.
I’m not good with cases, nor shopping bags. I use bags with long handles that I can hang from my shoulders. 12 kg per side won’t even make themselves felt.
Boxes are good to carry to a car.
The talk was about 1 km though, not three I believe? I might be wrong.
Anyhow, a good knapsack with a solid bottom. Two bags with long loops. I can carry 35 kg like that easily. In basic training, we carried that load for 20 km and more.
When I got my new barbells recently, I rented a car. My bench and rack I had delivered.
I don’t work from home but my sister does and yes she did some thorough calculations. And yeah she’s getting her groceries delivered and Ubers/lyfts pretty much everywhere else. There are also local buses that she takes if they’re useful depending on where she’s going. For example there’s a mall that’s about half an hour away but there’s a bus that goes from half a mile down the road to the mall.
We do the same. Having things delivered or using public transport. Takes a bit longer sometimes. Not a problem. Saves us hundreds of bucks per quarter.
Living in a city should mean exactly that. Cars are for place with poorly developed infrastructure. Grossly generalized.
I’m going to download the uber app when I’m not on some miserably slow internet connection and do the math, because I’m curious if it’s cheaper or not.
Right now, worst case scenario is if I have to drive my Samurai to work. It gets ~20 mpg. With insurance and gas and maintainence put together I’m spending about $4.13 to drive to work for one day.
I pay about 12-20 dollars for a trip to or from the airport in my city. Let’s be quite generous and say I only need to take a trip like that once a week, and all my other needs can be met via public transportation.
That’s comically untrue in the Midwest but it holds true in places like Baltimore at least for some.
It would take 9 months of similar rides to equal what I spend on my car in a single month, including the loan, gas, and insurance.
Even if I took an under to and from work every single day which incidentally is about the same as a trip to the airport, it would cost half of what I put in to my car.
That’s true for me, but probably not everyone. I have a newer, upper mid range car that’s not great on gas mileage. And of course, I need my car a lot more frequently than just the ten trips a week. But there’s a string argument to be made in cities where public transit is even halfway decent for ditching a car all together and ubering when you need to get somewhere the bus doesn’t stop.
I dropped driving 20 years ago. Way too expensive if you don’t earn money with it in some fashion. I’m not a home-worker, but I live in a city. Having a car in a city… That just doesn’t feel right. They should be used to bring stuff into a city. Cites should provide their own means of getting around. The few times when I actually needed a car, I rented one. Way cheaper than owning a car.
It’s like owning a golf course to play golf once a week. Well. Something like that.
I’ve been driving 20 years. No points and no recent accidents. I last paid $1300 for 6 months of car insurance on a Hyundai and it’ll probably go up again next time.
That’s $2600 a year or $50 a week and we haven’t spoken about gas, or parking in some locations. Absolutely Uber is an option, or ebike.
Literally same. My entire life has been striving to build a life where I don’t need a car. (mainly out of frustration with NJ’s toxic surcharge program).
Sadly, no one in NY was hiring and my dumbass moved to Austin. Now my drive is to get back to NY where there actually is a hope of using public transit.
Exact same here. The amount of money cars cost is fucking ridiculous. I would pay more and wait longer to not have to deal with the bullshit of owning a car, but I can’t even do that because American public transit is worse than Mordor.
Ebikes will get you a good chunk of the way there in a lot of places. Other than that, if you live in a city then vote like hell and go to city council meeting as often as possible to demand bike lanes. Local voting actually matters and can change (some) things.
If you live in the country… Eh… Start sabotaging gas stations I guess? I don’t even know where to begin with a constructive answer. Rural folks are basically forced in to cars and there isn’t much to do about it without massive changes. In the Netherlands even small towns get train stations, but in the US and Canada and even a lot of Europe rural folks are just screwed.
At least here in Illinois rural towns have okay train access and can easily accommodate bike infrastructure. Many rural towns with a university have decent bike networks already. It’s North American suburbs that are more hopelessly designed around private vehicles.
I lived in rural California and Oregon for a while and there was just nothing. You had a car or you couldn’t live. Wanna get groceries? Drive, because it’s too far to bike and even if you did you’d probably get killed by a car. Wanna get your mail? Drive to the post office. Don’t bike because you’ll get hit by a semi. Wanna go see a movie in a theatre? Yeah, drive for at least half an hour to get to the closest one. But both of the towns I spent the most time in burned to the ground in wildfires so… Yeah…
But it’s good to hear not all of the US is hopeless and some of it is almost functional. I hope at least some parts survive, because there’s a whole lot that just can’t exist without cars and cars can’t exist forever.
We had a really promising, progressive city councillor run for Mayor who basically tanked their campaign by making investment in cycling infrastructure one of their main platforms.
So, instead, we got a business-as-usual developper friendly mayor who will continue to do nothing to address public transit issues, or improvr cycling infrastructure besides painting a few lines on busy roads.
It is sad but many who want this kind of change end up having their careers ruined as it goes against “the status quo” and the “character of the neighbourhood”
I think the major issue is that most people see bike lanes as removing their choice to drive, rather than adding alternatives to make driving easier. These people pushing for change need to look at the MAYA principal principle, meaning they use the Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable vocabulary to ease in the transition.
Anyone who wants to platform for biking and making better urbanism needs to instead focus their campaign on being fiscally responsible and tackling traffic concerns. If pressed, they can say that there are lots of data showing that small, cheap changes to the road infrastructure can make a large impact in both traffics and taxes.
according to McKinsey. “And for those Gen Zers who decide that driving just isn’t for them, they can keep themselves busy with TikTok in the passenger seat—or get behind the wheel in the metaverse.”
Be a good consumer and accept our thought control.
Great question - but semi related, I really enjoy sim racing despite rarely driving a car in real life (maybe once a fortnight).
The metaverse doesn’t appeal to me, or most people, but there’s something to be said about jumping in VR and taking a car to a track virtually with a good force feedback wheel, nice load cell pedals and a H-pattern shifter.
Heck I even enjoy euro truck simulator from time to time.
You could say Gen Z “chooses” a lot of things. Gen Z “chooses” not to buy houses (we can’t afford them) Gen Z “chooses” to be mentally ill (not even 10 years ago, “autism” was just “the weird kid”) Gen Z “chooses” to rent Gen Z “chooses” not to buy food Gen Z “chooses” to let climate change fuck the earth Gen Z “chooses” to not have kids (although here we actually don’t want them, but also couldn’t afford them) and so on.
“Nuclear powered” has no reference to their weapons capabilities, but instead how it generates electricity to run the ship.
Back in the old days, subs had diesel generators that required air to run the generators (like any fossil fuel powered engine) that recharged the batteries that powered the ship while submerged. That means that if the batteries were running low, the sub would need to surface to use the diesel engines to recharge the batteries so they could dive again. With the invention of nuclear powered subs, surfacing wasn’t needed except for replenishing breathing air. Which I think is like a few days or maybe a week or two. Or whatever, I’m not an expert on this.
Now, that’s not saying that a lot of nuclear powered subs don’t also carry nukes (like tridents, for example). But “nuclear powered sub” doesn’t have any bearing on that. It’s purely describing how the sub generates electricity.
I hope that any submariners that read this will correct me if I’m wrong. This is all based on info I read years ago.
I don’t know if this is done in practice, but if you have a nuclear powered sub, implementing a water electrolyzer that makes oxygen is fairly trivial. Then you have air as long as you have power, so they could in principle stay submerged for ≈ 20 years, or however long the nuclear reactors can go without refill.
Technically a Sub can stay underwater forever, it is the crew that is the problem there. If they had Star Trek replicators to make them food with that reactor then boredom becomes the limiting factor.
I just re-watched all the first 14 Bond movies, and there are apparently satellites that can track all the subs, so we’re good 😊👌 Also, you can just reprogram the missiles to blow up the other subs — just steal the launch codes, easy peasy 👍 Check mate, Kim! 💥🚀
Side note: many (or, indeed, most) of the films did not age well 😣 I’m not proud of how little of the misogyny, borderline rape-y, no-consent, belittling of women stuff I failed to notice as a kid (patents’ fault) and adolescent (my fault); it starts to get a bit better around the end of the Moore era, and I’m now getting ready for the Dalton era. It will be interesting to see the newer films with this fresh context of the old ones, and I’ve never seen the two newest ones, which I think were supposed to address all of these issues.
Secondary side note: so far, the best ones (IMHO, YMMV) have been For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, A View To A Kill.
I think it downplayed the importance of CO2 scrubbing, because we can tolerate low O2 a lot easier than high CO2. High CO2 is also what gives us that suffocating feeling.
It briefly touches on rebreathers near the end. The theory behind them is that the difference between the %O2 on the inhale and exhale of our breathing cycle is very little. So if you can get rid of the CO2, you can re-breathe that same air for a “long” time before it starts to get too low in O2 content and it starts to impact your survivability.
I’m sure he just wanted to test all (all) the food first to make sure his population doesn’t get poisoned; very commendable, really. Not everyone is a villain, you know!
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