Median income for Millennials across the U.S. - this may surprise you

Discussion in 'Economics & Trade' started by kazenatsu, May 21, 2018.

  1. Lil Mike

    Lil Mike Well-Known Member

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    In most EU countries, don't you have to pass some standardized tests to go to college?
     
  2. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    In the U.S., probably 95% of the new homes being built look like that, some even squeezed into smaller lots and worse.
    What is shown in your picture would probably be considered "lower middle class" housing, although slightly above the lowest level of the "middle class". Maybe even solid middle level of the middle class in some high cost of living areas.
     
  3. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    you might see this thread which will cast more light on the situation in the U.S. : Percent of Americans who actually have a college degree
     
    Last edited: Dec 13, 2022
  4. crank

    crank Well-Known Member

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    It's an interesting difference. While we recognise that the inhabitants of these new builds are not necessarily poor in terms of net worth, we associate the desire to live in such housing with poverty. It's about the aesthetic, mostly .. as trite as that might seem. It's hard to get past the trash factor of houses so badly designed. EG zero thought given to architectural merit, longevity, solar orientation, use of space, natural light, eave depth, thermal mass, cross ventilation, balance, flow, etc etc. They're just such overt disasters that you can't help wondering what people were thinking in buying them. Worse still, they're often in locations bereft of public transport. There's almost nothing worth paying for, other than 'newness' - and if newness is your motivator, the assumptions about your class are probably correct.

    What we think of as middle class (in the strictly class sense, rather than the net worth sense) is something like this:

    [​IMG]

    This house sold last year for over $1.7m, for the record.
     
    Last edited: Dec 13, 2022
  5. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    You may be correct. 34,240 United States dollars is equivalent to 50,000 Australian dollars.

    Still, I suspect that getting a good job in many parts of America, with minimal skills or experience, is a little more difficult than getting a good job in Australia. What you have to realize is America has more of an excess supply of labor than Australia, so many positions are more competitive.
    (In contrast, there are high skilled people who relocate from Australia to the U.S. because better job opportunities exist for them)
     
    Last edited: Dec 13, 2022
  6. crank

    crank Well-Known Member

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    It's not easy to get a 'good' job here, but it's easy to get a job. We have a labour shortage.
     
  7. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    It's the same thing in the U.S., except most of the labour shortage is in the very low paying jobs; or in jobs that require a lot of expensive training but do not pay very well. (For example nurses in areas where people would struggle to be able to afford to rent a small house on a nurse's salary)
    It's probably a worse situation than Australia.

    For most of the very low paying jobs, it is nearly impossible to be able to afford an apartment, or at least it would be a very untenable situation.
    Maybe someone could manage to make it work if they put in a lot of overtime, working 50 or 60 hours a week, but that would not be very sustainable long-term.
    Even for some of the low paying jobs, in many areas businesses are reluctant to hire younger workers since there are so many older workers available to fill these jobs. (These are typically the parts of the U.S. that have had higher levels of foreign immigration)

    So a young person may be able to easily get a low paying job, but they will not have their choice pick of the low paying jobs. So they will be forced to take the less pleasant ones, that the older workers have passed up. For example, valet driver or working in the produce section at a supermarket may be beyond their reach. Even working as a cashier or fuel station clerk may be beyond their reach, in many areas, even though those jobs pay minimum wage.
     
    Last edited: Dec 13, 2022
  8. crank

    crank Well-Known Member

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    I think that's probably the important difference between the countries. Here, a full time job even on a lower hourly rate (nursing or teaching, for example) is definitely enough to buy a modest property in a capital city. Even below that .. as in minimum wage low skill jobs, as long as they're full time it can be enough for big city rents or smaller city mortgages.

    As a percentage though, our home ownership is lower than yours - just because our housing is so darned expensive. Even in dead country towns, a modest house is probably going to set you back a few hundred thousand bucks. So those not in least a full time minimum wage job, are not going to be buying anything.
     
    Last edited: Dec 13, 2022
  9. Lil Mike

    Lil Mike Well-Known Member

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    Well you're lucky. A labor shortage is generally good news for the working class since they have jobs and competition pushes wages upward. In our country, the government is frantic to "solve" the labor shortage to avoid those pesky working class wage increases.
     
  10. crank

    crank Well-Known Member

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    It's not raising wages though. It's just sitting there, being a shortage.
     
  11. cristiansoldier

    cristiansoldier Well-Known Member

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    What is the point you are trying to make? The median income for all Americans in 2016 was $27,419. Millennials are, as expected, lower than the average since they are at an earlier stage of their career.
     
  12. Lil Mike

    Lil Mike Well-Known Member

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    That's interesting. I'm curious as to the mechanism of stagnate wages and a labor shortage.
     
  13. ToughTalk

    ToughTalk Well-Known Member

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    No wonder these fools are bitching for McDonald's to pay more.

    That's all they can do.
     
  14. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    But that includes children and retired people (who make up 40% of the total population).
     
  15. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    It has to do with quality of demand. "Demand" does not exist as a simple linear metric.

    It is a little bit complicated, we have discussed this in other threads in the Economic section.

    You are partially right of course.

    There are different types of demand curves. Sometimes a large quantity of something is demanded but only at a lower price. Then once the price increases, the quantity demanded suddenly quickly decreases.

    This is the type of labour demand curve that commonly exists in Third World countries and is not a good thing.

    Lots of poor people all "demanding" something, but they each do not have a lot of money to pay per unit price.

    The reverse of that would be CEO salaries, as one example. Lots of "demand" in terms of price per unit, but not very many units demanded.
     
    Last edited: Dec 14, 2022
  16. Lil Mike

    Lil Mike Well-Known Member

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    Well the term "labor shortage" is generic. That doesn't tell me if it's a shortage of IT people who are competent with a particular type of software or a guy who can learn to be a fry cook. There isn't just one labor market, there are thousands, but the comment I was replying to was generic and so was my answer.
     
  17. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Yes, that is totally true.

    In logic, this type of simplistic reasoning would be known as an "equivocation fallacy".
    Trying to oversimplify something that is actually a little more complicated, using the same description for two different things, and then using that word or concept to try to connect two different lines of reasoning which should not logically connect.
     
  18. cristiansoldier

    cristiansoldier Well-Known Member

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    I think according to the US census bureau it only includes people with part-time and full-time jobs. I think that is how your figure is calculated too. I don't think it included millennials that were not working.
     
  19. crank

    crank Well-Known Member

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    Me too! I guess businesses are just making do with less warm bodies?
     
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  20. crank

    crank Well-Known Member

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    Here, it's all the above. Fry cooks and software boffins. I believe the professional jobs are paying slightly more to attract applicants, but not so much at the fry cook end. Minimum wage jobs are still minimum wage .. despite not being filled anywhere near as easily as they once were.
     
  21. Lil Mike

    Lil Mike Well-Known Member

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    That may be true in Australia, but in the US the post Covid labor shortage was specifically in restaurant type businesses which have dramatically increased wages in the past 2 years. There are other shortage industries like Truck drivers that are hiring, but I can't speak to their wages since they've been paid well for a while.
     
  22. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    The last I read, wages for truck drivers spiked in the wake of the end of the pandemic, to really high levels that someone could make a good career out of, but now about a year afterwards they have become depressed going down to low levels.
     
    Last edited: Dec 15, 2022
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