OP: It’s awful the direction income inequality has taken in recent decades. Productivity is up, the stock market is up, the money is there, but working-class wages haven’t risen to match. Our generation is poorer than our parents, and many of us will never be able to buy homes, help our children pay for college, or retire.
Commenters: Sounds like someone needs a Personal Finance Lesson!!!! Try putting away just a few dollars at a time and you’ll be amazed how it adds up, sweaty :))))
Also: it’s frustrating how often the Personal Finance Lesson comes out to “have you tried living desperately?”
It’s understandable, if someone is in a jam or saving up for a major expense, that they might have to spend a few years living in a cramped and/or far-flung place, eating cheaply, thrifting clothes, and so forth.
It is not okay if this is the lifelong condition of people who are working full-time.
I don’t blame the personal-finance-advice people, nothing they say is technically wrong, but it’s frustrating and exhausting that this is where our society is at. Where “tighten your belt and live without any luxuries” is advice not for students or people recovering from financial catastrophe, but for adult professionals.
Sure, if all you can afford is rice and beans, then it’s helpful to get some recipes for spicing up rice and beans. But it shouldn’t fool you into thinking that spicy beans is all you deserve, that there’s nothing wrong with a world where CEOs have scientific-notation amounts of money and the working class is scolding each other not to waste money on name-brand beans.
Though what they are saying actually is wrong, because individual solutions to systemic problems don’t really work. They don’t scale, they perpetuate the problem—@pervocracy is right on that one—they aren’t sustainable individually or systemically.
a pattern I have seen a few times
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Thoughtfulfangirling 