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

Easy solution we should vote for Democrats so 30 million more illegals can come here to take our jobs and bid down our wages!!

 

A lot of that income increase at the top is simply in the form of capital gains. Companies are more profitable now because they don't have to pay their workers as much, and can make four employees do the job five employees used to do. I think the average employee is having to work a lot harder than they were working 30 years ago, and I started another thread and posted some videos on that.


(some of it's covered here Harsh work conditions in Amazon workplaces )

 

totally absurd of course employees do 1000 times more work they did 100 years ago yet they are far richer than they were 100 years ago and still 97% are employed. Do you just say whatever pops into your head?

 

That's a fallacy of irrelevance. You are trying to compare something different, and over a different time period too I might add.

 

you said increased productivity makes wages go down when the opposite is true.

 

That, to me, is much more worrying.

 

Well it's hardly surprising if they're only earning $20,000 a year. And the ones earning a lot more than that often have very high rents to pay.

A city where a young professional can earn $70,000 a few years out of school is also likely going to be a city where they are paying $25-35,000 in rent every year for a low-end apartment. There aren't that many areas in the U.S. with high salaries and low costs of housing.

To be fair, a few of them might not have any savings because it's all going to make the payments on a mortgage, but that's not most of them.

Probably at least a third of Millennials live in a part of the country where the price of modest 3-bedroom middle class house costs somewhere around $600,000. That's something a lot of you may not realize. The distribution of people (in both the U.S. and Canada) is spread out very unevenly, with most of the population squeezed into a smaller number of higher population areas.
When a modest home costs $600,000, that's going to be consuming all your money, not leaving much left over for a standard savings account.
Although, in one sense, the equity in the overpriced house could constitute a form of savings account. It's not uncommon these days for people to borrow equity out of their house, even if they haven't finished paying off the primary mortgage on it.

 

What percentage of college graduates are Doctors and Engineers?

 

I'm not sure where I said that. But I do believe it is true to some extent. Increased productivity can mean the employers do not have to hire as many workers, increasing the unemployment rate, and ultimately driving down wages.

 

Every one of you pseudoscientists missed 2008.

 

what does it matter really...there's an idiotic demonizing of college grads being elites and useless, where does that idiocy arise, from the high school drop outs who lost their low skill jobs?...all degrees have value, universities are economic engines that churn out the grads of all sorts who produce the jobs and inovations that drive our economies ...

 

Fallacy of composition. Value for the individual does not necessarily translate into value for society.

Of course universities create some value for society, but the question is do we need more grads? It's a lot easier to simply just mint out more grads than it is to actually allocate funds and grant money for more scientific research. More science PhDs isn't automatically going to translate into more scientists doing research if there isn't the money for it.

 

MASLOW'S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS

The "fluff" you probably think is unnecessary is, essentially, Civics. Of which, most agree, Americans' are pathetically naive. You (plural) are fixated/mesmerized by a "good job". Fine, yes, it is essential.

Ask any black/spique/chinq who has difficulty finding a job because of his colour or the slant of his eyes. How to live with mutual respect for common rights/liberties but also common legal restraints is key to "functional governance of the nation".

The worst of all in the US is its acute Income Disparity that imprisons 14% of its population below the poverty threshold (less than $25K/year income for a family of four).

That should be inadmissible, which is why (at the bottom) the Minimum Wage must rise to at the very least $12/hour throughout the US. The issue of "states' rights" as regards work-regulation is antiquated. The same rules for minimum income and work-standards should exist commonly throughout as a National Standard guaranteed by law.

Raising the Minimum Wage will mean your BigMac will cost 20/30/40 cents more. So what!?!

HUMAN DIGNITY

Income is basic to a standard-of-living, BUT it is NOT all that is necessary. And we fought a revolution to free ourselves from the hegemony of a British Monarchy. Fast forward 200 years, and we are facing today the very same economic hegemony as then by a select group of families who benefit from inordinately low Income Taxation!

The issue here is the dignity of mankind and the endemic right to at least a minimum level of acceptable existence. Which opens another subject that is less economic, except at the very lowest levels of the ladder.

It is described best by Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which is depicted here:


A nation is obliged to assure that the bottom two-levels of "needs" are met by the most people, and if that means "assuring that some needs are made free, gratis and for nothing", then so-be-it. We are talking about at this level of human existence the "very essence of living" and at some base-level it should be guaranteed by the state.

NB: Were that to happen, then we'd see the crime-rate nosedive!

 

If you want to make good money you either get a STEM degree or you go into a trade such as electrician or plumbing. Any other degree pretty much guarantees you a a mediocre outcome.

 

I'm tired of hearing this myth perpetuated, in particular STEM.

If anyone has ever bothered to talk to actual STEM grads, it's a very different picture from the one usually imagined by the public.
Many of them are never able to break into good jobs in the field and end up having to switch to something else.

 

Wrong on two scores. First, heterodox economics builds its approaches on understanding the risk of crisis. Its right wing approaches (such as the macroeconomics spawned by the likes of Friedman) that ignore these issues. Second, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm fully aware of unstable economic environments. I merely see someone here hiding from their inability to refer to economics with any credibility.

 

Which myth? Everyone I know that went into the sciences or medicine had jobs immediately out of college while most of the people that got soft degrees either ended up doing something entirely unrelated to their degree or didn't make nearly as much. If you knew any plumbers or electricians then you know that they make bank.

 

You've assumed that vocational skills are only important. The evidence, into rates of return from degree schemes, suggests otherwise. Take critical thinking skills. They've been highlighted by employers as a core deficiency in more technical degrees (explaining why an arts degree may be preferred). Ultimately tertiary education provides for fungible skills.

 

Do you know any that got out of college after 2005 ?

 

The main thing employers are looking for more than anything else is prior job experience in the field. Now can an education give them that?

I've even heard of anecdotal stories of nurses coming out of 3-year nursing school programs and having an extremely difficult time finding any hospital that will hire them, if they don't already have actual prior nursing job experience. So much for the nursing shortage. (This is the U.S. and I realize you are in a different country)

 

Yes I was in college 3 years ago. If you went into engineering, nursing, bio chemistry or pretty much any science or engineering degree you had a job immediately and you got to choose from several. Meanwhile the people that got JAMS, education and so on degrees are doing something not related or in the case of education degrees every job they apply for they are competing with a hundred other applicants because so many people have them. This country is awash in soft degrees. Go to Starbucks and ask any graduates there what their degree is in and I guarantee you its not going to be science or medical related. The so called increase in STEM unemployment was brief and is over.

 

Not sure where you are getting critical thinking skills from art. Philosophy, poli-sci, history and even law classes will give you that but not art. I could be wrong though as I only took one art class for a requirement.

 

I agree with that entirely. Every job listing today literally states X number of years either required or preferred (which basically means required). This is why its extremely important to take internships. I don't know where you went but at our uni they beat us over the head constantly about taking internships.

 

An example....

https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2016/jun/22/arts-graduates-creativity-humanities-degree-career

 

I aint joking - not even nearly so!

What I am trying to tell you is that after the Great Recession (which should have never happened but did) the recipient PotUS (Obama) - who was handed this economic-mess by his predecessor (Bush2) - had to take some drastic measures. One of them was QE.

Then, he was forced by a Replicant HofR to spend No Funds for stimulus-spending that would have put people back to work. Which is just not a good idea, but a capital idea. Whyzzat?

Because if they were working, they'd spend the damn money earned and help relaunch the economy.

But, no, after the initial ARRA-funding (494B total, 2009 to 2011), Obama's first action in office, the American people at mid-term voted the HofR into the hands of the Replicants. Who refused all further stimulus-spending in an outrageous political tactic to keep employment high in order to destitute Obama in the 2012 election.

The economy created no additional jobs from 2010 to 2014 - four longgg years that Americans out-of-work saw no reprieve from unemployment.

That is how low a political party can stoop in order to obtain its objectives and not give a damn about the American people ... !!!

PS: And then, instead of voting Hillary into the presidency, we voted for el-Jerko who is obsessed with himself. His first and foremost action as PotUS was to lower upper-income Tax Rates, which were already amongst the lowest of any developed nation. Wow! What a country!