At least in the US, tech is currently in a wage supression war, and I’m afraid this will ripple out all the world.
But for “a lot of people live with their parents” that’s actually a sign that things are not going well at all. This can be seen all over Europe, and just means that people cannot afford to move out, not that they like living with their parents. If/when they inherit their parent’s house they might be in their fifties or sixties, and most of their prime life is gone by then.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- the last sentence brings this up: "What all of these shifting dynamics mean for the future of housing, families, and work has yet to fully emerge."
Just look at other developed countries where living with parents is normal. Could this just be the US lifestyle evolving? It looks like a pretty regular trend over the last ~50 years.
I can relate to this. My parents are baby boomers and not in the best of health or in a good financial situation. Being privileged enough to be in the tech industry and doing relatively well financially, I can foresee my parents moving in and living with me to help with costs and assistance. As this generation continues to age, I suspect multi-generational households will become more common.
I see. I used to look askance at stories of living with parents from a place like Italy back in the early 2000s, but in retrospect they were the canary in the coal mine. This is becoming a global phenomenon. It's hiding standards of living that are falling fast for younger generations. It's easier to keep people off the poverty rolls when they can move back in with parents and forgo starting families of their own.
It's actually the opposite, we are at an all time high for young people living with their parents, for longer.
Approximately 50 percent of young adults 18 - 29 live with their family now[0].
Initially that was thought to be a transient externality of the pandemic but it seems to be sticking[1] thanks to the outfall of the bull market crashing.
In cases it's not smart to live with parents for financial benefit.
Society could become worse depending on the culture adapting to this if it becomes the forced norm.
Interesting to watch...
Over here you can't afford rent if both parents don't work, so that can't be it. Maybe the non-multi-generational homes, but not many couples stay with their parents, so that's probably not it either.
The young and less well off can just move back in with their parents. Most engineers I know come from relative wealth (parents are lawyers/real estate investors/company owners), so a lot of my peers are doing exactly that.
I think it's mostly HackerNews types who believe that losing free meal service and providing their employer with free office space makes them truly free.
> This because they're either with families, or they're with people whom take care of them.
This was a big reason why things got very ugly in Italy, and to a lesser degree Spain -- a lot of working adults live with their (older) parents. They pick it up and might be able to shake it off or call out of work for a week, but they end up bringing it home to their elderly parents.
The US has this too, doubly so since the millennial generation is more likely to live at home than ever, but compared to places like Italy there are far fewer people living with their 60 year old mother and 80 year old grandpa, all in the same house.
While I agree that there are many parts of our society that are broken, I don’t think that living with parents (or grandparents) is part of that. If anything, I think the constant pressure to be fully independent by the time you’re in your early 20s is the indicator. In much of the world, it’s very common and even encouraged to live with previous generations, sometimes after marriage. There are a ton of benefits from this arrangement, including built-in care for younger and older folks, better ability to save, etc. I’ve seen more and more successful tech folks building multi-generation homes here in America to try to move towards this model for the future. I think the brokenness of the system is the degree to which we shame people that are diverging from the older American model.
I'm Italian, we're one of the countries in Europe that have been hit the hardest by the economic downturn. Staying at home with your parents in your early 20s has always been the norm here (mostly because you don't have to move to go to college, the local university is usually as good as any other). The problem is, even if it's generally acceptable to say that you still live with your parents, there are literally no jobs, not even low-wage, menial jobs. There is no hope for things improving in the long term and there's the lingering suspicion that this whole staying at home with your parents is more than a temporary situation. The only option seems to be moving to another country, but it's not as simple as it sounds. First of all, if you're unemployed, you don't have the money to move to another place, let alone stay there until you find a job. Secondly, you can't move to another country if you don't know someone who's already there and can help you out. And lastly, there's no reason for an employer to pick you (a foreigner) over some local guy. So the outlook is really grim and there's not even an inkling of hope on the horizon.
> What the author does not say is that a lot of those people live with their parents - and their whole income is expendible. I don't know if this phenomeneon started after the bubble economy, but it is quite shocking.
In many cultures, it's customary, even expected to live with one's parents at least until marriage, and possibly longer. Extended families are an important social resource, and the American model of immediate familial alienation upon reaching age 18 followed by a detached nuclear family is in many ways weaker.
I won't argue with your other points, though at the very least, a forum like Hacker News should have skeptical attitudes about such ideas as "permanent employment".
I wonder how this ties in with the increasing trend of young people living with their parents. In 1999, a quarter of all 25-year-olds lived with their parents. By 2013 this number has doubled, and currently half of young adults live in their parents home. [1]
This smells like selection bias. The people who aren't struggling that badly aren't complaining about it!
32% of americans 18-35 live at home [0], but that isn't an all-time high -- in 1940, for instance, approximately 35 percent of people in that age range lived at home.
But for “a lot of people live with their parents” that’s actually a sign that things are not going well at all. This can be seen all over Europe, and just means that people cannot afford to move out, not that they like living with their parents. If/when they inherit their parent’s house they might be in their fifties or sixties, and most of their prime life is gone by then.
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