The story here isn't college grads as much as young people in general. We are eating our young.

We stopped building new housing, which turns housing into a transfer of wealth from those who don't have it (the young) to those who have been holding it (the not young).

We have eliminated entry level positions, saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities, and created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people.

It's not just our young—that just receives disproportionate attention. The entire country is being actively looted under the guise of "economic growth".

Anyway, increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity, but the Ezra Klein dunces aren't ready for that conversation yet.

> increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity

Why not?

(I guess I'm a "dunce", but I'm one that's ready for that conversation)

Being charitable here (though... when called a "dunce" it's hard sometimes to want to be charitable), the statement would be perfectly correct if slightly reworded to:

"increasing supply isn't going to solve many of our problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity"

It would just help with some of them.

But that's a statement that's obvious on the face of it - cheaper housing costs buy time if you lose your job, and makes it easier to have a bigger emergency fund, but it isn't an infinite reprieve. So. The charitable interpretation still hits a wall because that would be acknowledging that supply would help with some of them, and the "dunces" nonsense suggest that they wouldn't agree even with that.

(In some states in particular, though, home ownership is uniquely protected in ways that would help fight homelessness, so increasing supply and incentivizing selling-to-an-owner vs being a landlord could be very helpful too.)

There are many reasons, one of which is certainly supply in some places, but most strongly it's just simply unrealistic that everyone will be able to make enough money to afford the mortgage on any house, let alone renting one, because of disability or age, because the housing isn't where the jobs are, because it's cheaper to import a skilled worker than it is to train one here. we do so many things that are collectively irrational that expecting one variable to unchain the free hand of the market in our lifetime seems simply... naive. And this isn't even touching broader issues about the commodification of housing and the role that real estate plays as a form of both wealth and accessible wealth extraction that make the idea of "affordable housing" downright repugnant to those who have some.

Ezra Klein is an intelligent man, but he has put his intelligence towards selling hopeful visions to professionals who want hope rather than an earnest diagnosis of the dysfunction afflicting our culture, geography, labor market, and welfare system.

Abundance only solves scarcity if scarcity is the problem, but the actual problem is economic exclusion, which will always be able to outpace abundance because abundance has physical limits while exclusion does not.

Scarcity of housing is a severe problem, one that has caused the economic exclusion by preventing new people from entering the locations with lots of jobs.

It really is housing and scarcity at the bottom of all the other symptoms we see.

I think “amount of houses” misses many important parts of how people decide where to live and what they struggle with that results in unaffordable or unavailable housing.

Where do you increase supply? The most desirable places to live like urban centers, or more likely more and wider suburbs. In a vacuum many people will say it doesn’t matter and poor people should move to where they can afford; but many people have strong connections to where they grew up and are not inclined to abandon their lifelong support systems because the pricing in one area has gone up.

How do you increase supply? Ugly 5-over-1s are cheap to make but not desirable, not particularly dense. Single family homes are even less dense. Most supply proponents are talking about these or luxury condos.

How much is the new supply? If we build new homes but they are still unattainable to the people who need them, then we didn’t help much right? Which leads me to

Who gets the new supply? Are they put on the open market for speculators/investors/landlords/private equity to gobble up or are there provisions for ensuring the housing goes to people who don’t already have housing or are physically real people not llcs etc.

Tl;dr we could build a million houses but if they are in undesirable places, unfavorable designs, or allowed to be snatched up and resold at the same high prices we already have, then supply alone wouldn’t fix unaffordability of housing across the nation.

The biggest problem that increasing housing supply can solve is the gap between minimum and median apartment price. In places with very constrained housing markets the cheapest slumlord apartments are very expensive (~70-80%) compared to the price of well maintained apartments. Increasing housing supply doesn't do much to the median housing price (since new houses are expensive), but it lets the price of shitty apartments drop a ton.

This is the problem - not that a brand new McMansion is going for 3,000 square and $900k - it's that the 750 crackshack is going for $500k.

Building adequate housing also brings down the medium cost, by a lot. At worst, it prevents the median house from rising in price.

Prices are set through a combination of supply-demand and cost of providing housing. Almost all increase in housing costs are coming from land price increase, due to land shortage from planning policies that limit land use density.

Housing has been made into an investment first, and a home second, by creating housing austerity and shortage. The only way to prevent housing from being an investment is to stop the artificial shortage of housing.

I lost money on the houses I've bought. This is because I factor in the cost of the mortgage, property taxes, real estate commissions, maintenance, insurance, etc.

Houses are lousy investments.

Are you factoring in the value of a living space in this calculation, the rent that the house generates?

When you live in your own house, it's called "implicit rent" but when you actually rent it out at market rates it's just called "rent."

There are a few housing markets where what you say will be true, but it's not true of most of the US by any means.

You might want to revisit your analysis under more standard accounting guidance.

I also neglected to mention the cost of the house sitting there for months vacant waiting for buyer. I'd always price mine slightly under the market to get them sold.

As for accounting guidance, just what are you driving at? Are those expenses I listed not real? They certainly took real money out of my account!

> You may be the worst real estate investor I've ever heard of.

You may very well be right. However, everyone I hear saying how much money they made off of their house neglects to mention any of the expenses I listed.

Sure, I've seen all manner of goofy talking points (both pro and con) around the financials of home ownership. Conversely everyone I've heard say lost their ass on residential real estate either bought too much house in a market overrun with speculation (Hi Florida) or move frequently.

I sold my previous house in 2000. It was sold last year for 4x what I sold it for. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 has gone up 6.3x.

And I didn't add in any of the expenses I listed earlier if I'd kept it.

There are extractive and inclusive economic institutions. democracies tend to guarantee the latter, we are rapidly pursuing the former.

The mistake you're making here is in the assumption that voters have any meaningful input on policy. Given the overwhelming majority of policy at both the state and federal level is drafted by lobbyists this assumption seems questionable at best.

I think the designation of the US as a flawed democracy is fair. We have free elections, yet (particularly at higher levels of government) rarely see popular mandates translate to governance.

But that's a feature of oligarchies more than it is of democracies.

Evidence suggests the US has been a de facto oligarchy since at least 2014:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Despite however Sam Seder or Hasan are seething about abundance, Ezra is right about needing to build more of everything. Yes there are also large problems around money and power that need to be resolved, but we do physically need more places to live in the areas people want to live.

Isn't basically every decile getting richer (i.e. able to afford more things) thanks to economic growth?

What if I don’t care about affording more things? And instead want to live in an ethical society that prioritizes stability and universal access to housing, healthcare, and education?

It's perfectly legal for you and like-minded people to set up a commune, and create the society you want.

Or join an existing one.

Would you extend that same sentiment to the extremes of the libertarian crowd too?

I can answer that if you can explain what you mean by extreme libertarianism.

I can go into detail, but for the sake of the argument let’s define it in the Norquist fashion: a government small enough that it can be drowned in the bathtub

Same is true for most eco villages, back to the land farms, etc.

It’s a mix of the lifestyle not being exactly what people thought plus them getting culty. In many cases it’s more the latter than the former.

What happens is people get tired of other people not working very diligently, but still getting an equal share.

> And instead want to live in an ethical society that prioritizes stability and universal access to housing, healthcare, and education?

Then talk to your local NIMBY. Housing crisis is not due to capitalism being evil, but due to constraining people from building. Healthcare is getting better all the time, we had MASSIVE breakthroughs this year at ASCO (which were made possible by big pharma!). As for education yeah, it could be better but it's completely tangential to the topic.

I think a lot of these statements are, at best, incomplete. For example, healthcare quality can get better while access gets lower, still resulting in worse outcomes for patients. Or, housing cost should be normalized based on size since until recently, houses have been getting larger on average.

i think the reason for your deluge of downvotes is that a society the promotes more things becoming affordable is one that prioritizes stability. universal access to housing, healthcare, and education that people want is only possible in a society that is immensely productive.

Exactly. Those big ticket items that people are pissed off about are "things" too.

Welcome to the forever dissapointed club.

The society you desire can’t exist unfortunately as much as I’ve thought it could and worked for it

There’s no utopia but that doesn’t mean you can’t bend society in one direction or another.

Nobody is talking about utopia

Society has always (yes always) “bent” toward dominating hierarchies because individuals want the stability of being part of the dominating group.

No. It's a k-type curve where the high deciles are getting higher and the lows are getting lower, so to speak.

There is increasingly becoming more of a divide between haves and have nots, and it has a temporal component because of how equity has appreciated over the last decade or so. Both housing and stocks.

People from a decade ago have seen absolutely unsustainable appreciation in their assets while doing nothing. That is putting them at structural advantages against younger generations that will not see those same appreciations. It's like the bus has left without them. No matter how hard and fast they run, someone asleep on the bus will always be ahead of them.

> No. It's a k-type curve where the high deciles are getting higher and the lows are getting lower, so to speak.

Could you provide source? I don't think that's true.

> It's a k-type curve where the high deciles are getting higher and the lows are getting lower

The lowest quartile of income have had the highest growth the past four years.

That's not true. The highs are getting higher and the lows are getting higher as well.

Looking back in human history, what was the ultimate outcome for similar economic conditions?

A lot of let them eat cake

Increasing housing supply will absolutely decrease housing prices.

That’s so obvious it’s nearly a truism.

Rate of new houses is below the rate of new households, and it’s been that way for years.

> Increasing housing supply will absolutely decrease housing prices.

> That’s so obvious it’s nearly a truism.

And that is why Manhattan, due to having the most housing units per square mile, is one of the cheapest places to live in the US.

Since it's not, it is not a truism that merely increasing the housing supply will decrease prices. It takes more than that.

As long as you have excess people willing and able to buy $1M studios, every new studio will get snapped up. Prices can only begin to drop if you build so many that you exhaust the supply of people willing to pay $1M and the highest bid left is $900K.

Think of it as analogous to bond issuances. Just because the government issues more and more bonds the price won't drop as long as there are buyers to clear the price. Bond price only drops when they run dry of buyers at the higher price and must start accepting lower offers.

Does that hold up per capita? Units per area isn’t super meaningful when comparing housing costs without a sense for the size of the population competing for them.

Where I live has ~21k units for ~45k residents (47%), and a median home price of $440k or so. NYC has about 3.6 M housing units for ~8.5 M people (42%), and a median home price of $870k. For NYC to make up that 5% they would need around 425k housing units.

Obviously these numbers can’t tell the whole story, but it does seem like the supply is fundamentally more constrained in NYC than here, and here is already pretty tight, with very low vacancy rates, high rental prices, and expensive homes.

Anyway NYC plans to build 200k units over the coming decade, increasing the supply in order to reduce the cost. Of course that’s not the only item in the plan to reduce costs, but it’s a major component.

> And that is why Manhattan, due to having the most housing units per square mile, is one of the cheapest places to live in the US.

More housing will not make manhattan cheaper than Charleston, West Virginia, but it will make manhattan cheaper than how manhattan is today. That's the point.

Your argument is like saying obese people should not go on diet because statistically the people who go on diet are more overweight than average.

"Increasing housing supply will absolutely decrease housing prices." True if it's the government building the houses, otherwise you hit a point where construction margins tank well before market saturation is reached. In practice new housing developments have a tendency to drag local real estate prices up (see also: gentrification).

That may be true in a very local area, but if you build something really nice in an area that wasn't very nice, the units that used to be mid are now near the bottom and have to lower their prices.

"the units that used to be mid are now near the bottom and have to lower their prices"

Nah, what actually happens is the lower rung housing is either flipped to capture the increase in area pricing or the lot gets scraped, again to capture the increase in area pricing.

That's not the way it works. The "increase in area pricing" is just the result of adding new units. The older ones don't go up in value, so there's no increase in value to capture.

That's absolutely how it works, I've benefitted from the process several times in some areas and been entirely locked out of the market in others. You might need to closely examine the process (and margins) around house flipping if you're confused on this point.

That's not how it works in my experience. And I'm old.

I've made the bulk of my wealth in residential real estate, and I am likewise old.

> In practice new housing developments have a tendency to drag local real estate prices up (see also: gentrification).

This is absolutely false, not true, disproven, and made up.

Social housing builders are good for many reasons, 1) they provide competition to the public market, and when efficient don't need to return profit to shareholders so provide a very good competitor in places like Finland and Singapore, 2) social housing builders smooth out the business cycle, because new housing is needed just as much when at the downturn of the business cycle as at the top, so it greatly helps provide stable employment and a stable workforce for housing construction, greatly improving housing.

But the idea that new idea drives up housing prices in any way is, at best, a fiction. It's mostly a lie from landlords and homeowners to try to justify their continued extraction of profits from their idleness.

"This is absolutely false, not true, disproven, and made up."

Someone should tell the local housing market that then, because this pattern has consistently manifest over the last 20 years here. Without exception everyone I've seen make this claim isn't invested in residential real estate and hasn't closely watched how prices shift in response to new construction. In any event if you're trying to advance the claim that gentrification is a myth you're going to need to bring some serious proof to back that.

Here's a prior discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44914153

It is rather fascinating that you would bring up a "gentrification is a myth claim," why would you try to insert that into my mouth?

Gentrification happens all throughout the US, but in the current era it's from the under discussed type from the original literature in the 1970s: through lack of construction. When there's not enough housing to go around, prices rise, wealthier people are the only ones who win the bidding war, etc etc. See Boyle Heights in LA for a classic example of this. No new buildings, massive gentrification because there's not enough housing to go around.

See also in LA for the neighborhoods where prices are not rising: the only places they are building lots of apartments.

Perhaps there was some era when the "rent gap" style of gentrification was actually prevalent, but it hasn't been that way for decades. It's all just shortage driven gentrification in every example I have been pointed to in recent times.

"It is rather fascinating that you would bring up a "gentrification is a myth claim," why would you try to insert that into my mouth?"

Probably because the sentence you quoted and responded to points explicitly to gentrification as a primary driver of the phenomenon in question. You know, that thing you said was false, untrue, and entirely made up?

"It's all just shortage driven gentrification in every example I have been pointed to in recent times."

Fair enough, allow me to provide a few counter-examples from the regional housing market:

- three massive mixed-use development projects (in different local cities) each added thousands of rental units and mixed walkable retail to what were aging downtown-adjacent neighborhoods. Demand in this quadrant of the city spiked in response. Home prices (regardless of age or condition) in a 10 block radius tripled over the course of 4 years. Surrounding commercial real estate owners where quick to pick up on the increase in traffic and promptly raised commercial rents, driving the majority of pre-existing businesses out. These were (entirely predictably) replaced by national franchises. Area residential landlords, seeing rising commercial rents and real estate prices promptly increased rents.

- There is a phenomenon in local "blue collar" neighborhoods where developers are buying a handful of adjacent lots, scraping the existing structures, subdividing the parcels, and then putting up these utterly vile two and three story skinny block houses that combine all of the worst aspects of private home ownership and apartment living. These new units are generally priced between 175% and 500% of the pre-existing average of similarly sized houses in these neighborhoods. In every neighborhood I've bothered to watch where these things have gone up the sell price of for housing in these neighborhoods has gone up between roughly 75% to 200% over a ~4 year period following. During the same time period cost of similarly sized houses in similar neighborhoods in the area has increased by maybe a 3rd, which suggests that blanket demand for the area isn't the primary driver of the increase.

- Then there's the time two county planning boards colluded with the largest developer in the state to conjure a medium sized bedroom community from thin fucking air (well a swamp actually but you get the idea). ~1k new units added to the market a year for the last decade, targeting the entire spectrum from "affordable" apartments to two golf course communities. The price of housing and lots have skyrocketed in the surrounding area, to the point that section 8 landlords in neighborhoods 10 miles away are backing out of their agreements so they can capitalize on the increase in local rents.

The one thing all of these instances have in common is new capacity was added to an area and local rents and real estate prices increased rapidly.

You’re saying that prices are bounded by construction costs.

Sure, as with every other good.

But there’s a long way to go between current property prices and raw construction costs.

> But there’s a long way to go between current property prices and raw construction costs.

How much? Searching a bit suggests that net profit margin in housing industry is about 8.7%

Consindering an investor can get ~3.75% in zero risk T-bills without lifting a shovel, that's about an extra 5% net profit to get involved in building housing.

Which isn't nothing, it's a decent profit. But I also wouldn't call extra 5% a huge difference.

From GPT-5.5 via mostly FRED (e.g. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXUTOTALEXPLB1510M):

  Group   Wealth    Income/yr  Spending/yr
  50–95%  ~$75–80T  ~$11–13T   ~$9–11T
  95%+    ~$95–105T ~$7–9T     ~$5–7T
  75–85%  ~$18–22T  ~$2.5–3.0T ~$1.4–1.8T

I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality.

It creates austerity which means the wealthy do just fine while those with less suffer and overpay and transfer what little they do have to the wealthy.

Degrowth is a fundamentally unequal program which causes massive inequality and suffering. Only with growth does power lessen for those with the most.

> I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality.

What is this supposed to be implying and how do you square it with the massive amount of money being poured into "disruption" and VC investment, etc, in the US?

Where is degrowth being practiced at scale, and how has that caused more of a divergence between the wealthy and the rest than the opposite pro-economic-growth, pro-efficiency policies that brought us Walmart, Amazon, etc and happily shit-canned all the displaced workers from the less-efficient-but-more-evenly-distributed businesses they replaced?

A bit more specifics, to follow up:

GDP growth rate, for instance, in the US doesn't have a significant inflection point around Reaganomics and its increases in deficit spending + "pro-growth" lowering of tax rates on the wealthy. We've never really gone away from that philosophy despite not seeing increases in growth + seeing a LOT of increases in inequality and the elites thriving while everyone else gets squeezed.

Perhaps "growth" is driven primarily by cultural and technological factors (especially the latter!) and inequality is driven primarily by whether or not a population has the balls to say "even if economies of scale suggest that wealth will concentrate in big mega-players, we want to fight that"? And the US had the will to do that 90 years ago, but was successfully brainwashed into giving up on it *despite the 50s in particular being still seen even by those on the right as a "golden age" of both growth and "everyman" quality of life?

If the PC revolution had started seven years earlier and the Iranian revolution had occurred seven years later how would our views of Carter vs Reagan (or some other Republican in 1984 instead) change? But which of those things did they actually cause personally?

I don't see aversion to growth. I see aversion to filling to pockets of the top 0.1% at the expense of the bottom 90%.

A rising tide raising all ships sounds great and all, until you notice the tide seems to only be rising on one side.

I see people who are comfortable and prioritize their needs, and ignore those with less, as if they don't matter and don't affect them. They cover up this disdain for those with less by trying to focus on the 0.1%, but stopping that apartment building doesn't stop the 0.1% from making money, they just invest in something else, so any concern about trying to stop the 0.1% is clearly fake.

Whose pockets did Musk loot in order to amass $1 trillion?

Growth only lessens their power if it benefits those without, which, even by the most optimistic takes, hasn't really happened since at least the 80s.

> aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality.

Inequality is the result of allowing economic growth, i.e. freedom.

>I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality.

People say that right up until someone wants to do something and then it's all "not in my back yard" and "won't somebody think of Alex Jones and his gay frogs" or whatever their line is.

I'd say nobody is willing to put their money where their mouth is but it's not money. They'd made more money with growth. It's speculative bullshit "what ifs" that could be mopped up easily if they happened. The problem is people's beliefs, ideology, religion, whatever you want to call it.

I think the direction goes the other way, people are NIMBYs so they come up with reasons to justify why it's OK to block other people from living close to them.

The idea "oh but a richer person than me benefits" becomes the reason for blocking housing, eliding the fact that a poorer person benefits, the true thing the NIMBYs try to prevent.

At least, that's true in my area. People that already have housing, are comfortable, start to rail against all this economic growth and say that we should block all change to buildings to prevent it.

Anybody who is actually serious about providing more opportunity to those with less realized that we need more housing, where the jobs are. It's the homeowners and well-established that pursue degrowth and austerity.

When they build apartments to increase the density the prices don't go down on the dense units. The builder sets the price and he is his own competition because an appraisal requires just 3 comps. He has 250 comps in his pocket because he built and set their price.

The only thing it does to be anti "NIMBY" is aid in unchecked price hikes on "low cost" high density housing that none of us can afford.

Everywhere I look in my area we are building new housing. But more people keep moving to the desirable locations with jobs etc.

EDIT: I live in one of the 10 fastest growing metro areas of the US. In the last 4 years my county added over 60,000 homes but about 130,000 new people moved here. I drive around and see new development after new development. But more people move here because of the good jobs, schools, etc.

I can drive 2 hours away to some economically depressed areas. Houses are a lot cheaper because the population moves away to the bigger cities for jobs, education, etc. So sure you can have a cheap house in an undesirable location.

There's a huge disconnect between perceived amount of building and actual need for housing, in my experience. People are used to seeing nothing, so when even a single building goes up they think it seems like a lot.

In my downtown area, there has been a trickle of a new building with a few hundred apartments per year for the past four years, and people are freaked out at that tiny amount of new housing in a city of 50,000 people. in reality we need at least double that amount of housing per year, but that small amount has people shocked and thinking we're building way too much.

It's been far too normalized that we shouldn't build housing, and it's hurting society at a very deep level and causing massive inequality while blocking access to opportunity.

This is also the cause of the gentrification anger and resulting NIMBYism.

If you build some, but not enough vs what's actually needed, you get both:

- expensive new market-rate construction that most people can't afford

- localized bumps in rent for increased relative desirability

- overall prices that continue to rise across the city because the new construction was just a drop in the bucket compared to the need

And then it's easy to point to "they built that building AND our rent went up!" as a reason to oppose construction, even though in the long run they'd go up even more if that building wasn't built.

In a free market, the builders would just build to demand better because they’re incentivized to

I don't know where you live but if you look at the statistics this is very clearly a regionalized problem in the US. Big coastal cities like SF, NYC, etc are building almost nothing but Texas is cranking out new suburbs by the square mile.

"We" in GP was the previous generation, not a nefarious evil cadre. The prior generations followed jobs to highly desireable areas, affordable only because they had the expertise and education to get the high paying job in the first place. Every person that moves there lifts the ladder a little higher behind them just due to market factors.

I feel that only works so long. Without new emerging areas offering high wages and decent cost of living, the new grads look at the old areas like SF (no hate just e.g.) and see a financial bridge too far and a tight job market anyway.

The only reason SF seems inaccessible is that the prior generation down zoned and said "no more housing here, we don't want growth." Which worked out well for them but robs young people and immigrants of climbing the same ladder they climbed.

Building new clusters of expertise and economic opportunity is extremely hard, nearly impossible, everybody has been trying to replicate the Bay Area's tech success for decades and even with the housing problems it simply hasn't happened anywhere else.

It's far easier to remove the law on the books banning housing than it is to build an ecosystem of any economy from scratch in a new area.

We don't need any new cities, we need to allow existing areas to grow. If every city blocks housing, then even that new area is going to be blocked from growing as it grows.

We must stop everybody in their tracks that thinks it says "I don't want new housing or neighbors near me" because that is the literally robbing of our young people and of society of opportunity.

> The only reason SF seems inaccessible is that the prior generation down zoned and said "no more housing here, we don't want growth." Which worked out well for them but robs young people and immigrants of climbing the same ladder they climbed.

I'd add more nuance here, SF and many of the surrounding areas said we don't want population growth but they didn't say they didn't want economic growth. And that's a nasty combination for cost-of-living because if you have new higher-grossing, higher-paying businesses displace older ones, you're going to see a crapload of residential displacement and housing inflation.

SF didn't want to be Manhattan residentially, but they didn't do much to try to avoid being Manhattan industrially.

People who rented in SF got screwed because of that.

People who owned property didn't. They made out wonderfully. They kept their property, with the existing characteristics in many places so that they still had a nice big SFH instead of living in a condo like in Manhattan. And the fact that it's worth ten times as much is hardly a downside to them!

Sure, that plot of land would be worth even more if you could build a giant tower on it, but that increase in value is much less marginally useful or desirable to them than their home and neighborhood staying more or less the same shape.

If you want to change that, you have to be really specific about the incentives and the motivations of the current players. "Economic growth" as a sales-pitch alone doesn't resonate against entrenched non-financial NIMBY interests. Or necessarily promise anything to change the property-owner-vs-renter power imbalance.

The problem (edit: "a problem") is that this down zoning is basically state and federally enforced.

Temecula would happily grow but they can't just repeal their laws and say "go for it" because in order to get their citizens tax money back in the form of grant money (with strings of course, because that's how grants work) they have to have these laws because these "we will mandate parking, and then we will create beurocratic hell for anyone who wants to pave anything" in order to check some sort of "municipalities shall implement..." type law.

And it's not just the clean this or that act, it's every goddamn issue and area of regulation.

So basically SF not only gets to eat its cake, but it gets to prevent every other city in the state from doing something drastically different from what they're doing.

And you can run this example in any state, just change the cities. And it happens federally too.

> Temecula would happily grow but they can't just repeal their laws and say "go for it" because in order to get their citizens tax money back in the form of grant money (with strings of course, because that's how grants work) they have to have these laws because these "we will mandate parking, and then we will create beurocratic hell for anyone who wants to pave anything" in order to check some sort of "municipalities shall implement..." type law.

> And it's not just the clean this or that act, it's every goddamn issue and area of regulation.

> So basically SF not only gets to eat its cake, but it gets to prevent every other city in the state from doing something drastically different from what they're doing.

> And you can run this example in any state, just change the cities. And it happens federally too.

I don't think you can run this example in any state.

Maybe Mansfield, TX; or Waxahachie, TX (both south of the DFW metroplex) would love to grow. And there's not much stopping them regulatory-wise there. Yeah, car infrastructure and parking is necessary, but that's literally true everywhere within a few hundreds of miles, and isn't really restricted at the state level or by geography anywhere in the area, including the places like Frisco or The Colony on the north side of the Metroplex that have grown like crazy in the last 30 years.

But the Metroplex "proper" - which now includes the popular new surrounding cities - has gotten a lot more expensive over the same time frame.

There's a demand aspect that means some places can build into the growth, and others can't. What's the old saw? Location, location, location. There's all the land in the world to grow outwardly in the area, but it doesn't happen uniformly in every direction, and it hasn't prevented rising costs in the popular areas. It's less acute than SF because the raging single-family-zoning NIMBYism isn't accompanied by being landlocked, but the combo of NIMBYism + popularity/demand constraining where new construction happens mean that supply hasn't kept up with demand. And the money you'd save by living somewhere else, for many, doesn't justify giving up the location they want, so those other areas don't have a strong economic case for growth (why invest in a project there instead of a project on the north side?).

(THAT part is universal, and part of why I wonder just how much Temecula would actually want to grow: would growth just look like Riverside or San Bernadino? Folks with means aren't choosing the inland locations first... and unlike in TX, the weather is enormously different.)

> Maybe Mansfield, TX; or Waxahachie, TX (both south of the DFW metroplex) would love to grow. And there's not much stopping them regulatory-wise there. Yeah, car infrastructure and parking is necessary, but that's literally true everywhere within a few hundreds of miles, and isn't really restricted at the state level or by geography anywhere in the area, including the places like Frisco or The Colony on the north side of the Metroplex that have grown like crazy in the last 30 years.

I still think the solution involves rapid transit (which could be cars maybe) - you need the outlying towns where there is space and room to be directly connected to the economic centers in a way that makes them practical.

Then the area that is low density can grow - connected to the city center but not contributing significantly to vehicle traffic.

> Building new clusters of expertise and economic opportunity is extremely hard, nearly impossible, everybody has been trying to replicate the Bay Area's tech success for decades and even with the housing problems it simply hasn't happened anywhere else.

Sure it did. And Silicon Valley is just the current nexus.

In the mid 1800s, Pittsburgh was the startup technological nexus for chemistry and engineering around steel. In the early 1900s, Detroit was the startup technological nexus for car and machine manufacturing. In the 1960s, Silicon Valley became the startup technological nexus due to Fairchild and the Traitorous Eight.

The "trick" to creating a startup technological nexus is for the price of a startup to be in the range that experienced, generally young (roughly 25-35), mid-level technical professionals can fund.

Yeah.. In Texas, there is loads of housing, and loads of affordable housing.

In Canada - not so much

So there’s tons of empty housing? Why are people building new housing then, is it just that much better quality that the empty housing is the old crap?

All the empty housing is not near where jobs are, you could make the houses dirt cheap and if there are few jobs then they're actually relatively expensive to the population.

Also, yes lots of housing has unbelievably expensive deferred maintenance and many sellers are trying to act like their homes aren't huge money pits.

> defunding universities

No, the problem is that the universities are too bloated, not that we need to take even more in taxes from working people to feed the bloat

The bloat was a result of withdrawing government funding / oversight and replacing them with student loans.

Looking like the DMV was no longer accepted as you needed to actually attract students, which means supporting an ever wider array of different things. Daycare, job placement, etc etc individually get tacked on and before you know it administrative overhead has gone wild.

You see similar effects with housing where people buying stuff with major loans are simply less cost conscious. Saving even 1,000$ on a kitchen is a big deal for most people if you need to write a check for it today, split it over 30 years and suddenly it seems largely irrelevant.

Universities administrators, yes. Funding for basic research, no.

I believe we have a competitive construction market, but anti-urbanization zoning regulations, overzealous bespoke building codes and inflation in construction material prices has made construction relatively more expensive than in previous eras in the US.

Aside from housing, every professional sector has been taken over and hollowed out by private equity or big tech. My grocery store, vet, plumber and doctors are all PE.

> We stopped building new housing

The current rate of new build construction is the highest it has been since 2007, ignoring the spike during late COVID-era zero interest rates. Also: US population is growing slower than anytime in modern history, again excluding COVID (though, a few more years and we'll be down at that level again all naturally).

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST?utm_source=chatgpt....

[2] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population...

20 years of under building from the last housing crisis.

But more importantly, the most economically vibrant areas, with the most ability to provide economic opportunity, have been stunted by lack of housing: NYC, SF Bay Area, Boston, San Diego, etc. This transfers wealth to current landowners in those regions, but let's only the highest income job professions move in, and overall slows the ability of those with less to access economic opportunity.

And those areas down zones half a century ago, capping out their housing ages ago. That's the true lack of housing, and it's all locational. The only thing you can't build more of is land, and it's not fungible. Best we can do is build up in those special areas where there's the magic combination of people to allow for more productivity and more jobs. (Which also happens to be far more ecologically friendly too, but I'm aware not everybody cares about the environment these days).

Yeah I ran some numbers in another comment on this post, and I was a bit surprised to see that NYC’s units per capita number is about 42%, 5% fewer than my much smaller (but also plagued by lack of housing and lack of affordability) city at 47%. They’re planning to add 200k units over the next ten years, which is a start, but even if we assume no population growth, that still only gets them an additional 2.3% more units per capita. They’re also trying to spur more private development.

Ya that’s a lot of catching up to do. And location matters. Humans are more mobile than housing.

We build new housing, but it just isn’t keeping up with demand in those few hot cities where young people want to live. Yes, Toledo and Buffalo (in the USA) have cheap housing to get, but those aren’t where people want to live.

This is a big part of the problem; in the past when you had these situations the "kids" would move to new cities where new activities were happening and build them up (hell, Silicon Valley is basically an example of this).

That seems to have dried up, nobody is building massive employment centers far from the existing major cities.

There is a reverse migration of sorts back to the rust belt and Deep South (well, Georgia and Tennessee at least), and most of that migration is driven by cheaper housing and cheaper cost of living. And this is really how it should be, we will never be able to build past demand here in Seattle without Chinese construction powress, and the unions and residents would never allow for that anyways. However, Toledo has plenty of nice places to live in (my dad was in nuclear power, so I got to live in a lot of these places also). Jobs are kind of moving with the lower COL flow, it’s just too bad the tech companies chickened out on WFH or we could have solved so many problems.

> without Chinese construction powress

We need to be honest in calling this what it is: yes the Chinese have incredible construction capacity, but the far bigger reason why their cities are growing so fast is because: they essentially have zero personal or corporate property rights in urban zones.

That really isn’t true though, nail house term was invented in China after all. The only real magic is simply their ability to get sh*t done on time and on budget, which doesn’t exist in the USA anymore.

> nail house term was invented in China after all

I do not see how this is related to property rights? In urban China you do not own your home, it is a 70yr right to use the land.

Some of their construction is good, but not private homes. Because you do not own the land, the quality of your home is up to the developer, who basically follows no code and cheapens out on everything. Also the Chinese code is very loosely implemented, for it lacks basic insulation and ventilation to start with, let alone modern airtightness.

Anyone grew up in sfh like those in the US will not like to live in Chinese nail houses.

First, property rights are a thing in China, early on local governments ignored them and the central government came down hard on that (hence nails houses that wouldn’t exist in the USA because we have eminent domain here). Second, the leases are assumed to be renewed, and there are many different lengths from 30-40 years to older ones to 99 years for the ones today (not sure wheee you get 70 years, I’m sure thats a duration that was used in some city as well). When the shorter Wenzhou leases came due, the local government planned to just seize the property but the central government again came down hard on that, forcing them to do small renewal fees instead.

I’m sure China will eventually replaces leases with a property tax that would do the deprecation gradually and continuously like in the west rather than all at once.

I’ve lived in Chinese flats for 9 years and had no problem with them. Sure the nail houses are older less dense constructions that were decrease before local governments built roads around them, but absolutely nothing changed for the residents except for the road.

> transfer of wealth from those who don't have it

How can you transfer wealth from people who don't have it?

> saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities

The debt came from rising tuitions due to the government making it too easy to get loans.

> created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people.

???

> ???

Worth expanding on these ??? I think - old people have less security if young people have less opportunities. The opportunities of the young is the surplus generation that creates the resources to support free riders (like old people).

In the extreme case, if the young literally don't have any opportunities at all, eventually they're going to have to just let the old people die off horribly because there aren't enough resources for everyone to make it to the end of the year.

It's nuts that people can retire with full pensions after working for 30 years. A more appropriate number would be 45.

Why? The average life expectancy is ~76 for men, ~81 for women. You’re saying you shouldn’t be able to pull a full pension unless you have devoted ~half of your entire life to a company?

45 years doesn’t even seem feasible if you want to retire at 65, since most people graduate college at around 22. Add in a masters or a doctorate and 45 years of work would bring you into your 70s.

A pension is for when you're too old to work. Of course, you can always save/invest your earnings and then retire when you have enough.

We've spend the last fifty years shipping every job and industry overseas. What did we expect to happen?

It's true in some very important ways. Manufacturing employment is something like 15% of what it was fifty years ago. We only do manufacturing for things that require a lot of technology and a sophisticated skill set.

But not everyone in society is cut out to manufacture integrated circuits. It used to be that a person on the left half of the IQ bell curve could go out and get a job making brooms, or plumbing fixtures, or toys, or any number of things that are only manufactured in China now.

USA had low unemployemnt prior Trump ... and still has.

You can worry about manufacturing in the national security sense, but it is not missing in jobs.

Sure. Because people who can't find jobs go on disability. That's why we have record low labor force participation rate.

We're building like mad in our town. Have been for years. Thousands and thousands of new units. Prices ain't budging. It's odd.

That just shows how little housing there is out there.

Real estate pricing is far stickier than, say, stock prices. But that's also why it's super important to build before prices rise, because prices are probably not going to fall, they will at best stay sub inflationary.

Additionally, in the US many many people are locked in to their current mortgage. They have a super low interest rate on a 30 year mortgage, but interest rates are many points higher now, so if they switch to a new mortgage the can no longer afford as much house as they price they could sell their current house for.

That lock in and lack of places to live and move to also creates a higher demand when there are a few places that are built. "Thousands" doesn't mean much to me without comparing to the total number of existing houses, but there should be a minimum of 1% and maybe 2-3% of existing houses being built all throughout the nation. Yet most areas are not building that much if at all.

Prevailing wisdom is that we need to increase supply.

my point is who is going to provide that supply sufficient to drive prices down. Builders - wouldn't. Government? I don't see it, at least not in US. In USSR we had government provided housing, and still there was shortage and a lot of other drawbacks to such an approach.

The transfer of wealth is diminishing also as older generations didn’t save as much, are unable to retire, or are spending through most of their retirement

College graduates have been saddled with debt for a few decades now. Universities know that most of the student base gets a federal loan and once the money changes hands, don't care if it can ever get paid back.

This has led to administration bloat and majors that are completely useless when you graduate. Federal loans should be eliminated and universities should back the loans themselves.

That would unfairly couple the success of their students with their own success /sarc.

The government has a history of inflating anything they offer cheap money for. Housing, healthcare, education.

In our area parents can get several thousand for opting out of public school. That can be used to offset private school tuition. What happened? Private school tuition rose by about the amount the government was giving. It’s no more affordable, the government is on the hook for money, and the private schools have less incentive to compete since they got a 50% bump for doing nothing.

Any time the government offers handouts fraud, waste, and inflation will follow.

Couldn't agree more. Completely aligned. Quote I refer to for this:

"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."

Young people always had higher unemployment.

Could be just that USA is trying to reindustrialize and need more people that can do stuff with hands?

- the smallest population cohort is entering workforce - Trump and Covid slowed down immigration - high interest rate slows down R&D

Biden tried to reindustrialize and was doing a great job of it, but that was all cancelled.

I don't see a single effort to reindustrialize now, and in fact the tariffing of equipment and chaotic signaling of policy has been a major impediment to any reindustrialization.

And finally there have been several efforts to specifically discourage the sort of information sharing from highly industrial countries such as the Georgia Hyundai raid that was meant to stop knowledge transfer for manufacturing. The world is getting the message:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Georgia_Hyundai_plant_imm...

Universities are not angels in this. MIT can fund all of their other classes with just what the Freshmen pay. 91/92 Supreme court ruled that if they give enough charity in the form of tuition reduction, they wouldn't be taxed. And so they kept raising prices and so did all the other schools. Terrible decision and schools should be on the hook for any defaulted student loans.

We haven’t eliminated entry level positions, we decided it was better to import foreign labor than to train up new grads. Because we’re dumb, and in some cases tribal.

That's the opposite of tribal. If we were tribal we wouldn't be importing low skill people from India to fill our entry level positions.

Perhaps they should vote, unfortunately they don't. They are unreliable as a base so politicians ignore them and their needs.

Vote for whom? The political establishment is locking out an entire generation of younger politicians too.

Asking those who have only been able to vote for a few years to have solved the problems, in a system where power is gained only through the accumulation of decades of experience, is, well blaming the victims.

The greed of older generations, their lack of compassion and understanding, and their narcissism are all to blame.

Young people are entering a system built by others with the ladders already pulled up. Violent revolution is the only way they could have changed the system in a short time, and nobody wants that.

Yes. A lot of this is down to environmental restrictions and building codes. Every rule a good idea in isolation, but taken together they mean you can no longer build an inexpensive house.

I have a builder friend who told me in the SF East Bay he can't make money building houses except for 4000 sq ft luxury homes on tiny lots.

That's not environmental regulation that's just regular NIMBYism.

Nope. It's a lot of stuff like insulation regulations that require exterior walls that use 2x6s instead of 2x4s. That's not NIMBYism. Nor are all the taxes and fees.

This is the easiest niche to pick on but I am mid career for cybersecurity. I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable. Really I'm not sure how new people to tech could even enter the industry, it seems like at the lower levels the entire industry is essentially closed.

However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market. Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site. A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.

> I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable.

My spouse knows a recent grad who took this path through an undergraduate program at the University of Maine (https://www.uma.edu/academics/programs/cybersecurity/cyberse...). As you said, he was unhirable in this field and now works in a completely unrelated job in a hospital.

Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault. The apocalyptic narrative warning of a dire skills shortage are still being pushed out by industry:

Cybersecurity workforce shortage reaches 4 million despite significant recruitment drive (2023) https://www.csoonline.com/article/657598/cybersecurity-workf...

It's led to an expensive, unforgivable mess for a lot of young people and their families.

Anytime you see a lot of media claiming there is a shortage of some career it's a negative signal. The field will shortly be flooded

Same for the retiring cobol programmer myth. All those jobs were offshored years ago.

Not being directly in cybersecurity, is the situation there different from, say, CS grads as a whole? That is, not sure if the point is that hiring for entry-level tech is a disaster across the board and cybersecurity is one particular manifestation of that dynamic, or if cybersecurity is for some reason specifically worse than overall new grad employment in tech.

Big tech companies use their influence to push the "shortage" narrative in the media, because it gives Congress political cover to increase the H-1(b) cap.

I had a tech career spanning from the late '80s until the 2020s, and I read articles in major media outlets about a shortage every single year. In all that time we had a actual, bona fide shortage for about two years in the late '90s.

> Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault.

It’s an industrial complex that uses students as fuel and when the winds shift, they get left holding the bag. Schools want revenue from student loans, employers want the best talent at the lowest cost without expending any resources to train and develop talent. Colleges are also desperate for students due to structural demographics and an ever shrinking pool of potential student customers, so they’ll sell whatever dream students want to buy. Cybersecurity? Sure. AI? Sure. Whatever gets you into the pipeline. Give us your money and we’ll give you a piece of paper of little to no value.

Edit: If you need a sure thing, go into healthcare. The world is going to keep getting older, and the demand for care will not end in our lifetime.

(day job is cybersecurity and risk)

I personally as a general rule don’t hire people who work in cybersecurity if they were not traditional developers first. The chances of you understanding “cybersecurity” without also understanding how general software works is extremely low.

This is broadly true for all concentrations in cyber. There is no entry level. Your first job should be learning how what you want to focus on works… be it networking, sysadmin, devops, vendor risk management, etc.

Unfortunately, cybersecurity was a hot topic in the education market and people got sold on the idea that they could get a six figure job with nothing but some theory and an entry level certification.

> Your first job should be learning how what you want to focus on works.

Then what was the purpose of sitting for a degree?

There is theory to learn and it is important, but it is all for naught if you don’t understand how what you are protecting works. You need both for an entry level position - there is a reason those positions pay as well as they do.

This is true for most sub-fields. The average person in them is either a failed dev or more of a pencil pushing box checker. The quality employees are devs with extra specialized expsrtise

Security, qa, devops, data emgonerkng, the list goes on and on.

Infosec also adds the angle that you want someone with actual grey or black hat hands on experience

I'm actually pretty good at data emgonering, one time I accidentally wiped our production db.

You too?

That was one long ass day!

Absolutely. Cybersecurity is not a field you can (well of course you can, but not with legitimate effectiveness) approach as an isolated field of study. To be effective you must have a reasonable experience and skill in programming, and in operating system internals, and in the network stack from the highest to the lowest level. You'd do well to also have experience in hardware and QA and you really need aptitude and hands-on experience actually breaking into things, not just in making things work. The last one is often hardest, plenty of brilliant people know how to build things but lack the mindset to break them.

So in this sense it is true there is a significant shortage of qualified cybersecurity people to fill the roles.

The mistake is that institutions try to fill that shortage with some undergrad program (or worse, certification) which of course can't build expertise in all the above fields in a few years. So that graduate is nearly as unqualified after graduation as before.

Kind of funny, my cousin studied software development, then she pivoted to cyber security last minute because she was uncomfortable about finding work, she's been through a few different companies so far, so I guess it worked out for her.

100%. I started out in cybersecurity and was complete shit. I gave up and went into software engineering and devops instead. Now returning to cybersecurity again and things finally make sense

> A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.

I graduated with an AS in programming in the mid-late 1990s. I continually sent resumes for 18mos and got back 2 replies.

I had 2 major strikes against me. I was a new coder. I worked in a region that was reluctant to consider new hires (even for no-skill jobs) w/o an introduction.

My scholarship came with job placement but the entire program was axed by the Contract With America prior to me graduating. Apparently the animosity toward helping folks off the bottom rung outweighed any platitudes about jobs.

I eventually eked out a living doing local IT work but I never did reach a living wage.

The Contract On America as many of us called it. And Newt's legacy has metastasized into even more virulent forms.

Zoe Chase did a great background on Newt. It's from some years ago and she notes how he generated animosity on a national scale and leveraged it raise Republican voting numbers.

It's quite good. Zoe is really interested in this stuff. The reporting isn't confrontational, it's just how things unrolled.

ref: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/662/transcript

> However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market.

The problem isn't necessarily with job _experience_. It's the acronym. Most employers seem to believe that YOE stands for years of _employment_, which has effectively cut off anyone who wasn't previously employed at a relevant position. You can gain experience in almost anything by working hard at home (and 90% of that would absolutely carry over to a FT position), but you can't do the same for employment (unless you accept fabricating your job history). Cybersecurity is actually a field where hacking away at home, messing around with codebases, doing ctfs can actually give you TONS of experience, but barring you coming up with major zerodays, no one cares.

Have a friend just graduated in cybersecurity. He’s going into the military with it.

Poverty to poverty + disability given time

The absolute wild opposite (for cybersecurity) to this is that higher level individuals are in such insane demand that if you are underpaid even during the current wage suppression, going to over market should be almost completely trivial.

Of course, people actually good at security are rare and in high demand. This is totally aligned with OP’s statement. IMO you shouldn’t even be thinking of going into cybersecurity straight out of college. There’s just too much you have to learn about how software works for it to be a reasonable first job out of university. There will always be exceptional people, of course, but as a general rule I’m not hiring new grad cyber folks. Seems dumb

Cybersecurity seems to be either working to fill out forms to satisfy some requirement of some company/government office, or being akin to an exhacker actually trying to improve security.

Colleges seem to be producing tons of the first, hardly any of the second.

Are the companies hiring fewer people than they need? If not then perhaps the fault is not with their standards but with an oversupply of applicants.

> Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site

It certainly can, companies just don't want to pay for that training. That's really where the "maniacal obsession" with job experience comes from. Companies just want to save money on training.

I’m just a swe, but I kinda thought cyber is a good place to be, since the proliferation of insecure vibecoded apps.

Companies have never cared about security, because there are almost no consequences to data breaches. A hospital network could get ransomwared for 48 hours, and no one cares. Critical data gets leaked? So what, pay a fine. You either pay a fine to the hackers, or you pay a fine to the government, or you pay a fine to customers, but no matter what its substantially less than a fully staffed security team, not just because security professionals are expensive, but because security professionals slow everything else down, they'll spend all day telling everyone what they can't do, which == lost revenue growth.

The only thing keeping security companies in the business is compliance/certification. If you've been around these compliance programs for long enough you know: they're box-checkers. But, sometimes you need to check that box, begrudgingly, annoyingly, so most companies will prefer to just outsource that security work to some managed security services provider, then think about it once a year when audit time comes around.

What is a cybersecurity professional going to do about a bunch of vulnerabilities in an app that someone else decided to deploy on a network they are responsible for?

99% of cybersecurity in the commercial sector is a box checking compliance exercise.

Most companies sadly don't care about security whatsoever.

Yep, I think my megacorp's cybersecurity department is just a bunch of checklist punchers that now just copy and paste any of our technical writeups into ChatGPT, and I am not even joking. Fucking infuriating.

They are doing the bare minimum for cybersecurity insurance requirements, thats it.

I know _for a fact_ that most companies don't care. There might be a select few out there that genuinely do, but most don't. I've literally reported numerous GLARING vulnerabilities to companies in various different industries, only for the vulnerabilities to remain unpatched for MONTHS. Few of the most comical examples, one major game studio was compiling their Linux binaries with FULL DEBUG SYMBOLS AND INFO plus they were shipping a 600M .sym file with practically full paths and all source info. Literally all the paths and function signatures to every single one of their functions was in there. I had to submit FOUR bug reports before they patched it (didn't even receive a bug bounty). The second one was with a major multinational telecom that was distributing routers that _had an open telnet port to the wide internet_ ... with a default password. And there were countless more. The telecom one I had to BEG them to ship me a new router, or to at least do an over the air update, because "they didn't understand what the problem was".

Shipping debug symbols isn't a security vulnerability. It might be sloppy, but we all know that security through obscurity doesn't work. Especially not with modern analysis tools and access to the executable code.

That's what it means to be a cost center. Anything over the minimum translates to wasted effort and inefficiency.

There would not be such a proliferation if cybersecurity were a well-respected field.

what about oscp certification?

I think the article is correct to point out remote work as a big culprit, but for the wrong reasons. The article says "Employers, the Fed argues, are wary of hiring inexperienced people into remote roles, where the on-the-job mentorship that turns a new grad into a productive worker is hard to deliver." And I agree that's a factor, but I really think that what changed in the late teens is that remote software and networks finally got good enough so that the hit you got to productivity from employing people in low cost of living areas really went away.

I lived through lots of "offshoring frenzies" that never went very far in the past, but things are different this time. Like in the fallout from the .com bust in the early 00s, there was all this talk about how we'd ship all software development to India, and a lot of companies did try to do that, and it was kind of a disaster. And top companies were still paying crazy high salaries for entry level top talent in the Bay Area because they knew it was worth it.

Now, though, I feel like companies are smarter. They know time zone overlap is key, so I've seen a lot more offshoring to Latin America, Canada and Europe where there is sufficient overlap with US time zones. Since even US folks spend so much of their time on Zoom etc. anyway, it doesn't really matter if your Zoom colleague is in your same city or thousands of miles away. I've worked with excellent colleagues from Argentina, Costa Rica, Poland etc. before, and the network speed was good enough so that videoconferencing quality was great. And this is a far cry from the early 00s when I was on choppy voice-only conference calls with a team in India.

So new grads are not only competing with other new grads, they're competing with highly competent, experienced grads from all over the world, most of whom have salary expectations much lower than US new grads.

So what are remaining high-paying white collar jobs which aren't exposed to this type of foreign competition?

I'm thinking lawyer, since legal skills aren't as portable across international borders?

Forget white collar. Figure out a career that makes use of your hands.

Or make enough money to retire in the next couple years.

Unironically the most simple (note; not easy) way to become a multi-millionaire. Do a trade in your 20s, leverage that into running your own trades business in your 30s, and have a >10m valuation business by your 40s.

Really regret not doing that myself.

I know enough of trade business owners to know that a business worth $10 million is rare.

Just using some back of the envelope math from numbers I found. On the high end a plumbing company is valued at 5x EBITA. A very very good plumbing company has a 20% net profit margin (and no debt, no corporate taxes or anything so that net income and EBITA are essentially the same), and a good plumbing company makes $350k in revenue per truck.

So a $10 million plumbing company would need to have 30 trucks, all with high performing employees. They’d need to bring in $10 million in revenue at best in class profit margins.

That’s a huge operation. Very few plumbing businesses owners will ever get to that level. There are 3 times as many doctors in the US as there are business owners with business that do the kind of revenue in the above example. If you’re capable of running an operation like that you can probably succeed at plenty of other things.

I am not in the business of valuing small businesses, but one thing that seems off to me is that an EBITDA multiple is usually also dependent on the overall size of the business. That is, a business with only $1 million in EBITDA may only be worth 3-4x that, while a business with $10 million in EBITDA might be worth 8-10x EBITDA, on the theory that larger businesses will be more stable and less likely to have key person or large customer risk (some examples, https://raincatcher.com/ebitda-valuation-multiples-by-indust...)

That said, I agree with your overall assessment that $10 million single-owner plumbing businesses are rare, for the simple reason that $10 million single owner anything is rare. If it were not rare, by definition you'd have a lot more folks worth $10 million (and, in this case, a lot more people lining up to be plumbers), and then $10 million would probably not be worth very much.

I’m not a plumber but from spending 20 minutes looking into it, it looks like the primary thing that changes the value multiple is how involved the owner is in the business (your key person risk). 5x was also on the high side of the multiples I saw.

The thing to keep in mind though is we’re talking small business, once you get to $10 million EBITA, you’re probably talking $50-$200 million in revenue and 200-500 employees. Thats firmly into mid sized business territory and I think revenue growth would be the or primary driver of the multiple.

From your source a 10x multiple would require very high revenue growth. That makes sense because you can get 10% average return with index funds, so you need to significantly beat that ROI.

How is this different than telling people to do a PhD, then run your own research group as a professor, get tenure and get lifetime job security?

Or work in start up, get acquired, and chill after ?

AI’s coming for them. It’s impossible to predict what lawyering will look like in four years.

It’s impossible to predict what jobs in the trades would look like either if AI eats all the high salary white collar jobs.

Oh, but they already have that figured out.

You can't become a licensed electrician without doing x hours of apprenticeship under licensed electrician. And each licensed electrician doesn't need more than one or two helpers at a time, so...

Hollywood is the same. Want to join SAG? You need to get cast in 5 SAG productions. Oh, but SAG productions only cast SAG actors? Oh well...

Meanwhile, all us nerds were trying to teach anyone interested how to write software. Look where that got us.

I think they meant what will trade jobs look like when there are half as many highly paid knowledge workers able to fork out for their services?

Yeah that’s what I meant. White collar jobs are 45% of all jobs, and they are much more than 45% of all work income because they pay better on average.

If AI really does come in and destroy all that no job is safe. Blue collar households don’t hire tradesman at anywhere near the rate that white collar households do.

In a major economic downturn like that new construction dries up. The commercial work will dry up to as all those white collar companies close their offices.

The end result is that existing tradesman will be fighting over a much smaller pie. Plus they’ll be dealing with competition from all the unemployed knowledge workers trying to change careers. In some states and some trades new entrants will be less of an issue, but most trades in most states aren’t supply restricted like the above poster’s electrician example.

My point is getting to the trades isn’t going to protect you from AI taking your job unless AI takes over a small percent of jobs and stops. I don’t actually think AI is going to take all that many jobs myself, but if I’m wrong we’re going to have to completely rework our economy.

Medicine, if you consider that a white collar job.

Sales

I wonder what the impact of the rising base rate of employees with college degrees is. In 1992, a fresh college graduate had better educational attainment than 42% of the labor force. In 2016 (latest date I found numbers for), that was down to 32%. https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2017/educational-attainment-of...

That shifting distribution would somewhat reduce the advantage of a college degree against the average member of the labor force.

Compare under 27s with a degree vs without and you see the problem is youth unemployment. If you are 25 you’re better off with a degree than without though.

In the U.K. youth unemployment is about 2005-6 levels. It was far higher by 2010.

It seemed like good advice as the manufacturing sector shrank.

Outcome is the same as in the great depression: new people can't get on the ladder and if you fall off the ladder, you'll never get back on.

Ding ding ding!

This also neatly explains why Boomers were able to have a good life with just a high school diploma. Wikipedia has a good chart, but the short version is that having a high school diploma in 1965 meant you were better educated than 50% of the labor force.

PhDs are the new undergraduate degree.

I keep going back to the debate with myself. Do I give my now-young kids 500K in an ETF in 14 years or do I send them to college? And the debate is not about how they will spend it (I can hold on to it too), it’s about whether to spend the money or just pass on the wealth to them. People have given me tons of reasons why college is good for them - independence, etc etc. I can find a way to give them independence without spending 500k. I haven’t settled the debate but articles like this are not helping the college path.

I strongly believe college is oversold but mostly because kids are told they just need to get "any degree", which is a blatant lie. It can totally be worth it if you are objectively looking at what outcomes a specific degree will get you.

Would it make sense to keep that money in a trust and pay a portion of the interest out to them each month/year?

e.g. assuming $500k/yr at 4% interest, that would be $20k/yr which is not enough to live on but is still a nice cushion

I have the same sorts of thoughts rolling around in my head, and also agree that the college path is looking grim right now.

Send them to a country where college is much cheaper and then also be able to give them like $400k ~ $450k

I'm childless, but I go through that with nieces and nephews. I decided to give them a lump sum as a high school graduation gift to do with as they please.

IMO you could learn a lot more, as a young person, starting a small business than you'll ever learn at college, and it'll cost less even if you fail. So I don't want to make it a "college fund" or anything like that.

Trust fund?

My father offered me a similar deal 25 years ago. I chose college, but itsnt clearly correct. 250k (my offer) would be 2 million today, which is more than my savings from 20 years of work. I would have needed a different career, but that could be better or worse. If I had that and was an electrician for example, I would be far better off

Oh, I ended up in a really funny situation. I inherited a 45-square-meter apartment 1/2 portion, while my mother bought another portion from a relative and then sold that part to my wife, who bought it on credit. We were just so happy when we finally paid off all the debts. And then we had to leave the country and become refugees! And now, after five years of living in another country, I realize that even if a country has democratic freedoms, economic life there is far from a bed of roses. This was a very sad and depressing realization this year, since I still haven’t found a full-time job, and naturally, that’s not having a very positive impact on my life.

Isn't getting a college degree actually making you more selective, too, leading graduates to pass on jobs they would otherwise have taken?

I've known a few college graduates who have come up in this market. From what I see, the common pattern is to try and get a position in your field for 3-10 months. Somewhere in that time range, they burn out. Then they apply for something field related for a few months. Then anything. Once they've exhausted all options they usually give up.

We will likely have a similar concept in our country as China's "lying flat" movement unless we make a big shift.

This isn’t really new. When I graduated in 2013 the barista with a college degree was a trope for a reason. Maybe 50% of my graduating CS class had a CS job within 6 months of graduating. Friends with other degrees spent years trying to find something in their field.

"College grads are fully employed" certainly wasn't true in 2013 but the chart ain't that hard to read.

The news here is how much it's changed.

2011 and 2013 were the years most tilted in the other direction since 1991 (unemployment rate 2 percentage points lower among new grads than all others). Only since 2019 have new grad overall had a higher unemployment rate, and it's climbing.

One of the interesting aspects here is that bad economies generally favored new grads because the unemployment baseline was higher and employers were picky and favored "any degree" over "no degree". I wonder how much of the change is from less of a preference for "any degree but not much experience" to "experience regardless of degree" in work that doesn't exactly need a degree. And how much is from job availability shifts eating away at entry level roles combined with the ever-present "get a degree to get a good job" pro-college marketing for most of recent US history.

I was replying to the comment not necessarily the article. The _not new_ was in reference to college grads not always having an easy time. That being said looking at the cited data I don't really know if I agree with the conclusion.

https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...

While it is new, since 1990, that recent college grads are doing worse than all workers it's not the case that the degree is no longer a buffer. If you compare Young Workers(7.5%) to Recent College Grads(5.6%), i.e. the same age range, or All Workers(4.3%) to All College Grads(3.1%) as of today there's still a buffer.

Edit: They point this out later in the piece themselves

Yeah, I also wanted to question the "now" in the headline. But if you can believe the article's data, this is new - new since 2019.

>as China's "lying flat" movement

No, you miss that "lying flat" is only possible when cost of food/living is low and housing is abundant.

I believe the closest US equivalent is to get on disability to subsidize those costs. (Especially effective in cheaper areas.)

Getting on disability is insanely difficult and pays jack shit. That is not a US equivalent by any measure.

Our lying flat is opiods. Generating dark money and killing off the useless, isn't late-stage capitalist empire great?

Opioid overdose in America kills the uneducated, not the college graduates who failed to launch.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10559184/#aoi230067...

Lying flat isn't done only by college graduates, it's a broad youth movement. Uneducated people aren't happy to work soul-destroying jobs with long hours for little pay any more than college graduates, and have less hope for escaping that situation.

Even then, it's only possible when someone is willing to subsidize it, unless both food and housing are free.

American parents on average may be less willing and financially able to support deadbeat adult children than their Chinese peers.

Deadbeat adult children? That’s definitely American thinking.

That’s why I tell people family isn’t #1 in America it’s like #3 or 4

Nonsense. Supporting adult children after they've finished education equates to putting family last, not first. Some youths need a forcing function to reach their full potential.

People in other countries don’t do this. Some live at home until they are married

But they probably work while doing so.

There are massive numbers of unemployed college grads in US that would rather be unemployed than take a job they see as beneath them.

Bonkers to call college graduates deadbeats. These aren’t addicts or slackers. They had to have some level of achievement their whole lives and managed to finish a degree.

It's not bonkers if they refuse to work a job that isn't in their arbitrarily chosen field.

Hah, I speed ran that process when I graduated with a useless degree back in the dotcom days. I graduated and gave up any hope within 3 months. I was working at the shopping mall selling suits after that. I've since told anyone who will listen that college degrees are worthless and school loan debts are the kiss of death. Not many will listen, but I try.

BA/BS in many fields and also depending on the university and social connections are worthless.

Even in STEM, post graduate is the minimum to make the degree count for anything

But note the article also points out "Of the new grads who do have jobs, about 41% are underemployed, working roles that never required a degree in the first place."

So while I'd assume that yes, some graduates are more selective (as they should be, as they usually need to pay off student loans), a huge number of them are taking jobs that don't require their degrees.

Since 2019, although now the gap is higher than ever (1.4%).

College doesn’t prepare you for work as effectively as work, but it also teaches interesting things and prepares for academia (graduate school).

I'd argue the value of college has been steadily declining ever since we tried to push more and more people through it. When it's a filter it's a good signal, when it's a participation trophy far less so.

A bachelor's now is a high school diploma of 70 years ago. It doesn't tell you much and it delays your earning potential four years, and saddles you with debt.

To me the real question is why a new grad would have lower unemployment to begin with compared to the average worker. Presumably the average worker has more on-the-job experience, so it seems like maybe people are weighting that more heavily now compared to before.