Italians live with their parents until they can buy their own house in cash. It’s safer and more secure that way, unless domestic violence is an issue.

I prefer the days of the middle to rich families living in villas or controlling hundreds of acres of a village and befriending the kings to not pay property taxes (or give up their daughters!). Funny how not much has changed, except now the low people can’t simply assasinate a king to gain a new perspective, they have to rebel to hundreds of thousands, and that still doesn’t do anything against cruise missles. Society has gradually lost it’s freedom to the top 1% of evil dictators and mega-corporations/mega-banks of the world.

I think most people could learn to live more simply and frugally – without being extremely bright. They may need some sort of general principles – Avoid debt whenever possible. Things like that.

Critical thinking skills do help.

Their parents won their war.
Their parents ran budget surpluses.
Their parents retired and lived in modest houses.
Their parents are the greatest generation.

Boomers lost their war.
Boomers ran huge budget deficits.
Boomers retired and live in mcmansions.
They are the most horrid generation.

I believe Jacob is largely right in his philosophy tho. If you have kids, you can’t follow it exactly as he does (but there is much you can still take from it).

Someone who took out a reasonable home loan based on what their career could earn and was earning that has yet to find a job would disagree too.

There are two problems people who did not have kids in the baby boom generation led to a following generation that was smaller in size. So there is less demand in most areas that do not have to do with the baby boomers. They are also working longer rather than retiring hogging positions that there are less of while living longer.

Frankly it’s people like you Jacob who discourage children that led to a smaller population. Unless everyone is going to work all their lives universal healthcare and other social programs cannot work unless more money is coming in than going out by having more people paying in than receiving.

The old solution was without antibiotics you could die from a cut in your arm. You could die from cancer. The odds of you living to 70 were like the odds of living past 100 today.

Maybe those cures were a bad thing. Maybe birth control was a bad idea too. Maybe we need to be less efficient with treatments and labor to allow for a proper distribution of the pie when the global demand decreases, instead of paying people to not work or forcing them to starve to death.

Give us universal care and we’re done working (2 jobs instantly open for unhappily unemployed to fill).

Millions would retire if we had universal care imho.

@Jacob: both me and my wife work full time and the kids are at daycare, for me that is a good trade off as non of us would really like to quit working all together and currently it is hard for us to find meaningful part time jobs. However we maximize our vacations and time of for parental leave (we live in Sweden so this is about 16 months for each kid) and we are looking forward to early (maybe partial) retirement in the future.

So perhaps you need 8-9k a year to retire if you're not male and incredibly genetically lucky. If I were living on 9k/year now I'd be able to retire at 31 easily (using the 400 multiplier to be safe. Using the 300 multiplier I should retire now.) So it's still doable….

If I were only spending 9k/year.

In other words, when someone has children, life takes a totally different turn. You have to have a job (or huge inheritance) in order to feed the kids and support the family. Yes, I can probably live on $6K / year by myself. But there is no way to raise the kids on that income.

I’m not saying the fear is justified or unjustified and it really doesn’t matter. The fact is, millions of people are working only because they’re afraid of not having company sponsored health care.

Continuing further down the path of allowing the machines to work and finding things for the unemployed to do would mean providing universal health care to allow those working only for healthcare to quit.

Seems to me that the ranks of unhappily unemployed would decline and the ranks of happily retired would climb with universal healthcare.

Increased further and higher education admissions have also been used to massage the unemployment figures in the United Kingdom. It appears it’s a fairly common trend.

What we actually have is an artificially low demand for domestic labor because our tax system artificially increases the price of domestic labor. More than half of payroll costs are taxes when you include the employer side. Many states have even increased payroll taxes during this period of record unemployment.

Such ignorant tax policy punishes domestic production and rewards importers. We should immediately move all payroll taxes to consumption taxes and focus on things we tend to import like oil. 2/3 of the US trade deficit is the direct cost of oil.

You almost make this recession seem like a natural thing and aren’t so down about it. Nice! hahahah