Here's an interesting substack that discusses one big issue - home ownership.
Interesting article, and notwithstanding the articles valid points, 40 years ago was also the rise of
DINK's, which created other gaps (primarily in the West) during this early period against other boomers in kind, who did not follow that lifestyle choice. That name's meaning also seems to have transcended boomer times (by necessity?), as it is pretty common state today, except that it is also common that it is SINK's (single income no kids) who are also not homeowners, too, according to the chart in the substack article. Much harder still, is the state of single income with kids and no home (divorce rates et cetera).
Some boomers caused much future hardship, but they were not necessarily at the helm of war, commerce and politics that then shaped (that would cycle later as they grew up), it was indeed their parents helmsmen who steered the societal ship, which the some of the boomers inherited. Thus, greed knows no age, and with the singleness of the way things now are, backdropped against the socioeconomic conditions of our current times, it seems there is also more singular greed and a type of viciousness by individuals without a moral code, or a moral code that was never crystalized. With the rise of social activists, in the way that it seems to be today, things will not end well, or so it seems.
A footnote on the age of the boomers that is perhaps under appreciated, by the time many of them came of age, work was hard to find, wages were super low, interest rates were a killer and inflation started to grow. Unlike today, most people drove old cars and had to fix them themselves. When and if they purchased a house, often it was the cheapest they could find and they worked day and night to renovate if it could be afforded, as they were old to begin with. Purchasing food was not so simple starting out either, even though it seems cheap by comparison. There was no credit, to even get a loan was not at all easy. To afford a higher education was no walk in the park, and one could go on. Conversely, one can easily find many today starting out who somehow have much that would have been impossible before, I don't even know how they do it. At the same time, one can see many who opted out of uni and found a carrier/trade where they work really hard, i mean really hard, where they are also raising a family and doing quite well by comparison to boomers at the time.
At the end of the day, all the demographic age class-fair that exists (boomers, x, y, z or what have you), are on the same societal train, a runaway train where the view outside looks to be sometimes serine enough, and moving slowly, where people together are watching the clowns and circuses' go by. However, it is just not so, the wheels of the train are falling off and the ptb know it. They have made strides to shape it, to count on it happening, even pulling up tracks ahead while quickly transferring wealth. So, (IMO) it does no single group any good to point fingers at the other, when from the get-go a ponerogenic system took over the controls.
Looking into equivalencies in history, and there is bound to be some, yet on a different scale of contrasts, came across
this on singleness:
Von
Sabine R. Huebner
Singleness is not only a new and rapidly increasing lifestyle of the present day. It has also become a fashionable field of research in social history. During a series of sessions at the European Social Science History Conference (Glasgow, 2012), questions were raised about the structural and cultural particularities of ‘single life’ in cities. A conference at the University of Antwerp (Singles in the Cities of North-West Europe, c. 1000–2000) in March 2013 further expanded upon the insights from the Glasgow conference.
In this new field of research the silence of ancient historians is striking. This may be partly explained by the lack of demographical data: there are virtually no statistics or censuses to indicate how many men or women were single in the towns and villages of the Roman Empire. But far more problematic is the definition of singleness. In a society which did not yet know the Christian concept of marriage, in an environment where both the contracting of a marriage and divorce were quick and easy, the lines between married and unmarried were somewhat vague. This may explain why there is no proper or much-used Latin or ancient Greek word to denote the status of a bachelor or spinster. We might even raise the question whether singleness for the ancient period could possible be defined as being unmarried. But even without the criterion of marriage, other approaches towards singleness in antiquity are possible.
Could not find early Roman statistics on marriage (let alone home ownership), although some interesting things came up in the following, which has contradictions:
ROMAN CENSUS STATISTICS FROM 225 TO 28 B.C. (JSOR pdf on Beloch's interpretations)
On home ownership, was reading in one of the Romance novels, don't know which one, that discussed French home ownership vs English back when, and although conditions were very hard, the French citizens across the channel did own homes, where couples talked about its care and realities, even political realities that impacted them. At the same time across the channel in England, it was the elites who owned (
proprietas) with tenants who simply had no ownership or say. Society seems to be moving back into that English script of old - the own nothing and be happy screed.
