Saturday, November 08, 2025
Comeback
In an online argument I read last night a young man was furious at how difficult the economy is for young people now, citing familiar statistics about housing costs (new houses were 1/3 the size in the 1960s) and wages (exclusive of benefits, the much smaller percentage of people working at that level, and more) and college costs.
He fell into a trap laid by an older person who partly agreed with him, stressing deterioration of services by cheap bastard companies trying to gouge us. He described the amazing meals and service in airplanes compared to what they served now, and how little space we have. There was an exchange of agreement.
"So how was your last flight?"
The boy bit, and complained about a transatlantic flight last year.
The older man: "I didn't even go up in a plane until I was 41, and not to another country for ten years after that. Yeah, life is tough for young people now."
7 comments:
Rather than the sneer it might have been a bit better to point out that part of the reason this young man can fly internationally with ease is *because* of all the reductions in the amenities that used to differentiate airlines rather than competition on fares.
I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the complaints about college costs. I was in the early wave of 'everybody needs to go to college' pressure. I was lucky that my parents had both attended post-secondary schooling and started preparing to pay for ours early. All three of us kids also made fairly judicious choices to attend good but not extravagant institutions that were happy to have us matriculate. We all got out with little to no debt. Given a slight change in circumstances, we might not have been so lucky. My wife started her college education about a decade after me and by then tuition and supporting expenses, even with relatively generous financial aid packages, put her several thousands of dollars in debt.
Eh, I get the impulse to be snippy. There’s a huge ecosystem of YouTubers and TikTokers focused on telling kids how easy everything was up until five minutes ago, and it’s really pumped up the rhetoric on this. I keep thinking my next blog series might be something along the lines of “You wouldn’t have liked the past actually”.
Yeah, I get it and actually agree with you to a degree. I grew up in small farming town in north central Iowa in the 1970s, and as an example I remember the food we had during the winter when 'fresh fruit' was limited to apples, oranges, and bananas, and 'seafood' was frozen fish sticks. My wife and I bought our first house (built in the 19-teens) about 1985 and considered ourselves lucky to have a mortgage with a single digit interest rate. On the other hand, I paid more for my new-to-me truck this spring than we paid for that house so comparisons are tricky.
Yeah, I not only wasted my time following the conversation, but indulged in the triumphalism of it.
To expand on my comment, by tricky I mean that you're not only dealing with verifiable changes in price and in many cases quality but also perceived value. In the air travel example, it not only was a luxury back in the day, it was often a luxurious experience. That's tough to compare on a purely economic level to what is now a relatively common mode of travel because of price, but without the former amenities.
Agreed. It's actually one of my pet theories that most of what has changed for the worse for "kids these days" is not easily measured, so they are over-relying on financial complaints.
For quality of services, Megan McArdle just wrote an interesting piece for the WaPo about this. I don't have a subscription but the example that got posted on Twitter was that a cross country flight used to take 11 hours and be much noisier, which is part of why they had to provide better meals etc. Hard to truly compare the two fairly: https://x.com/scottlincicome/status/1985013284806823961?s=20
One of my favorite recent books that I stumbled across: The Good Old Days - They Were Terrible! by Otto Bettmann. 50 hour work weeks with no breakroom climbing wall or Foosball table? Smokestacks belching soot info the urban air? Sounds great!
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