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“People like me have a good chance of improving our standard of living” From 75% to 25% in just 20 years
This chart is currently making rounds. I'd like to give a little more insights into the topic by looking at a similar study by pewresearch which looked at many countries from january.
Do you think your children will be better/worse off financially?
My conclusion here is that these kinds of opinion polls are pretty meaningless. They're just a snapshot of how fast the economy grew in the the recent past. The past. Not the future. Poland, Bangladesh, India ... just the fast growers of the last decade.
If your hypothesis is correct, then I'd expect the first chart to be correlated with lagged economic growth (which it is), but not to such an extent that the data from '22-'25 would be as low as it is. Definitely seems that something else is factoring in for the numbers to be that low.
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Something about our cultural optimism/pessimism changed after the pandemic. Unsure what did.
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My hypothesis is that young people feel (even if they can't articulate), that any time there's a crisis---which would be the most natural times in which value switches hands from entrenched power---the government simply papers it over with printed money that further entrenches existing wealth. Thus never giving wealth an opportunity to change hands. We saw it with the 2008 GCF, and again with the 2020 pandemic.
Case in point: Despite a global recession due to pandemic, housing values went up because of the policy driven monetary easing all over the world. As an existing homeowner, I took advantage and refinanced down to a sub-3% mortgage interest rate. I was only able to do that because I was lucky enough to buy my home at a time when real estate was cheaper. The younger generations that don't have family wealth have no such luck.
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