One of my recent reads was Scars of Independence: America’s Violent
Birth by Holger Hoock. The focus of most histories of the War of
Independence is on military engagements and high level politics in Congress and
in London. But of course it also was a civil war, and a brutal one at that. Hoock's
focus is largely on the civil war. The populace was more closely divided than
is generally remembered. According to Benjamin Franklin a third of the
population was Loyalist (openly or quietly) including his own son who was Royal
Governor of New Jersey. Another third was for Independence. The remainder bent
whichever direction the wind blew in their particular locale in hopes of
avoiding targeting by either side. It didn’t always work: “You’re either with us
or against us” is a common sentiment in these situations to justify actions
against neutrals. (“Silence is violence” would be the modern counterpart.) Self-styled
Committees of Safety and their Loyalist counterparts often called at the homes
of people who seemed suspiciously neutral and demanded loyalty oaths under
threat of life and limb. Attacks on civilians with opposing views and reprisals
for them ranged from property confiscation to tar-and-feather assaults to
murder by ad hoc militias. Although a general amnesty was declared for
participants in civil violence (on either side) as part of the final peace
settlement, in practice the Loyalists who remained in the United States had a
hard time of it for years after the war.
What is it about civil wars that makes them particularly savage? Perhaps an answer can be found in the writings of Harvard
anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Richard Wrangham, in particular The Goodness Paradox: The Strange
Relationship between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution published in
2019. Humans differ from other primates in our capacities for both kindness and
violence. There is a classic dispute between followers of Rousseau and Hobbes:
the former regard people as naturally kind and generous unless corrupted by
social structures while the latter regard people as naturally rapacious unless
restrained by social structures. Both are half-right and half-wrong. We are
naturally both regardless of social structures; whether we express kindness or
aggression at any given moment depends on the circumstances. Wrangham distinguishes between reactive
violence and proactive violence. Reactive violence is spontaneous, as when
tempers flare when someone bumps into someone else at a bar. Proactive violence
is planned such as a raid against an enemy or a bank robbery. Reactive violence
does happen of course, but it is rare by the standards not only of primates but
of other mammals other than domesticated ones among which aggression has
deliberately been bred out. Most people are remarkably tolerant of minor
transgressions that would start fights even among wild herbivores. Meantime,
the capacity for proactive violence has not diminished at all. Many
anthropologists have argued that humans somehow self-domesticated; the signs of
it are not just behavioral but involve physical changes similar to those we see
in domestic animals compared to their wild ancestors. Wrangham argues that this
happened when early humans developed sufficient communication skills to form coalitions
against dominant males. In all other primates (even bonobos) a single bullying
alpha male through aggression and physical prowess dominates a group and gets
most of the mating opportunities. At some point early humans could conspire to
take this guy out by forming an alpha coalition to overwhelm him. The
unintended effect over generations was self-domestication: a reduction of personal
in-group reactive violence. These coups or revolutions (if we may
call them that) are proactive violence. It is no wonder that they are
especially vicious compared to clashes with true outsiders since the penalties
for losing a civil war to the alpha male and his allies (his communication
skills advanced too, so he probably has some) is likely to be fatal. Humans being great rationalizers, we are
likely to invent competing moralities and ideologies to justify why our
coalition should prevail against that coalition. Some of them are even
convincing. But at bottom they may be little different from the motivations of some gang that rid the
clan of a bullying jerk 200,000 years ago.
A question left hanging last time was
how adult Boomerang kids – adults who had been on their own but who move back
home for indefinite periods due to divorce or financial strains or other personal
reasons – affect parents’ wellbeing and financial security. Let’s say reports
on the subject are contradictory. A smattering of headlines: MarketWatch: “Boomerang Kids Aren’t a
Burden – and They May Be Good for Your Retirement”; New Retirement: “Boomers Have a Retirement Problem: Boomerang Kids”;
Forbes: “How Can Boomerang Kids Help
You Retire Faster?”; PlanSponsor: “Boomerang
Kids Can Put Parents in a Retirement Jam.” You get the idea. It’s no problem…
unless maybe it is. Looking beneath the headlines, the
reason for the disparity becomes apparent. The upbeat articles all contemplate
scenarios in which the adult kids are contributing substantially to the
household finances with rent or by splitting bills. While this happens enough
to not be rare, it is not the majority experience. The reason most of them
moved back home, after all, is to get a break from bills. According to a
Thrivent study 35% of Boomerang kids pay rent – the percentage is smaller of
those who never moved out at all (and hence are not Boomerang). Only 47% are
expected to pay for their own groceries. As with so much else in modern society,
there is a big divide between the upper 20% of earners and the 80% majority –
not the 1% and 99%. Parents in the upper 20% do just fine when adult kids
return. Further, those kids are likely to join (or re-join) the upper 20%
themselves in due time. Since stories in business news media are overwhelmingly
written by upper 20%-ers with expensive college degrees, it is no wonder so
many of them are sanguine about Boomerangs and their parents. For the 80%
majority things are different. The financial strain is felt by nearly all in
this group, while for some members of it their future financial security is
threatened. Notes PlanSponsor, “The
Thrivent survey found that 35% of parents with boomerang kids have sacrificed
their savings dedicated to long-term goals such as retirement or housing, and
26% of parents are unable to pay off debt or save for short-term goals because
they are supporting an adult child.” Others have to continue working beyond
planned retirement age. The upshot is that it is hard to
generalize beyond a certain point. For some families it is a non-issue financially.
For others it is a real concern. In any case the motives and responses of
parents and their kids are not all about the bottom line. People do things for
their offspring because they want to, even if they stretch the budget. But
Boomerangs would do well not to overestimate their parents’ resources. Perhaps
the most telling discrepancy in the Thrivent study is that “72% of adult
children believe their parents are financially equipped to support them, yet
only 21% of parents said they could provide full financial support if their
child moved back in.” In part this is because Americans in
general (again, aside from the 20%) are bad at saving – besides which, those savings
have taken a hit from inflation lately. My own savings, for example, are
nominally unchanged from what they were two years ago, but thanks to inflation
in real terms they are 14% lower. This is actually better than average: retirees
lost 10% nominally on average in the
past year alone. The percentage of retirees with nothing saved at all is 37%.
Median savings at 67 are $170,726 while the guidelines for average households
according to Fidelity Investments state they should be $541,320. It’s no wonder
parents feel the pinch when 34-y.o. Junior moves back into his old room and
turns up the A/C.
Not everything is about money, it is
true. But some things are.
A meme one still sees pop up on social
media states that in the US an unprecedented 52% of adult children under age 35
are living with one or both parents according to a Pew study. This was true when
the study was done in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, but that was an
anomalous year for a variety of reasons. It is no longer true. Since then the percentage
has fallen back into the mid-40s, though that is still high by historical
standards. 25% of those 25-34 are currently living with one or both parents (compared
to 9% in 1971) as are 58% of those in the 18-24 range. Although the current
numbers are high for both men and women they are higher for men: 40% of men
25-29 live with parents. On average young people start “adulting”
(which has made it into the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb) later than
they did decades ago. Consider my parents’ generation. My parents met in high
school in 1943, married in 1947 at ages 21 and 19, and built their first house
in 1949. Their kids (Boomers) moved slower and stayed single longer, but still
were likely to be married in their mid-20s and to own a first home well before
30. I personally was a laggard Boomer, waiting until past 30 to buy my first
home, so I’m not intending to be judgmental about this. Despite my personal
experience, however, the centerline of the bell curve has shifted significantly
in subsequent generations. The average age of first marriage in the US from its
low point in 1960 has risen more than 8 years and is now 28.6 for women and
30.6 for men… and that is for those who get married at all. Only 45% of
American adults of all ages currently are married, down from 50% as recently as
2015. I’m focusing a bit on marriage because it forces adulting on people
whether they like it or not. Singles do buy properties (as I did) and strike
out on their own, but they don’t feel the same time pressure about it. (I
didn’t.)
My parents working on their house 1949
Unsurprisingly, the primary reason
younger adults give for still living at home is financial. The top 20% of
earners in their 20s are doing spectacularly well – better than in any
generation ever before. Their parents overwhelmingly are in the top 20% of
earners, too. (The 20-percenters also tend to marry each other, and at rates that
look more like the 1960s than the 2020s, which reinforces the income divide.)
For the rest, however, getting a footing can be a struggle. Even if they
somehow avoid debt (few do), housing costs, auto costs, and insurance costs are
daunting. The sense of independence that comes from renting or owning one's own
space has to be balanced against the expenses that might keep you from ever accumulating
any savings at all. How does this compare to, say, 1949 or
even 1969? In so many ways the country was economically a freer place then.
Zoning laws were lenient. Many codes encouraged what we now would call low to
moderate income housing – the classic postwar modest ranches and Cape Cods.
Occupational licensing, where it existed, was not there to create a barrier to
entry but simply to have something that could be suspended if someone
misbehaved – most were available just by paying a fee. Professions that now
require a college degree (before 1950 only 5% of Americans went to college)
required only a high school diploma, if that. What Millennials and Zoomers lack
most of all is that kind of freedom. It is harder to enter or change careers,
harder to open businesses, and harder to buy a home. Younger people really do
need more time and money to emulate what earlier generations did. Housing in
particular in real terms is far more expensive. Even if one thinks these
sclerotic current economic conditions are good for other social reasons, one
has to acknowledge they exist and have consequences. As for putting off marriage or forgoing
it altogether, that is much more than an economic choice. The reasons for this
trend are many, but the unintended effect is to delay the average age for a first
home purchase (for those who purchase instead of rent), which has lifestyle
consequences. A delay is not necessarily a mistake. The financially sensible
thing may well be to delay rather than rush into an investment you really can’t
afford. If that also means delaying fully growing up, at least by the judgment
of elders, so be it. You’ll be forced to adult soon enough, one way or another. A less commonly explored topic is how
the presence of adult children affects the parents, personally and in terms of
financial security. I don’t really know the answer, but suddenly I feel the
urge to search the subject.
This week’s recreational reading was The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette.
Seven people in and around an otherwise completely depopulated Boston manage to
find each other. They speculate they were alien abductees, though they
don’t remember the experience, because they woke up 100 years after their last
memories only to find a city overgrown by nature and with a mixed breed of wolf-coyotes
roaming the streets. It is not bad, by the standard of such novels but is not
destined to be a classic. It is more snack food of the type mentioned in last
week’s blog.
It brought to mind however just how much
fiction of this type there is. The post-apocalyptic novel is a genre with so
many entries that one has to assume the prospect of ending civilization is a rampantly
common fantasy. (It is not the same as dystopian fiction. They can in principle
be both but usually are not. JG Ballard’s dystopias, for example, typically are
over-civilized.) The earliest examples are thousands of years old, are found
all over the world, and are (hence the very name) religious. The elements are
the same as later secular fiction though: human farms and cities are destroyed
but for a handful of survivors. The prototype modern scifi version is probably
Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,
published in 1826 but set in the 21st century; in it, a man with
natural immunity to a devastating plague may be the last human alive. What is the appeal of the genre? Whatever
it is, I’m not immune to it, not only reading such books but having written a short storyand a novella of my own. The answer
may lie with Freud and Jung. In Civilization
and Its Discontents Freud argues that the cost of civilization is
unhappiness. He says it is a trade-off worth making, but that there is no doubt
much thwarting of the id is unavoidable. Jung similarly spoke of the shadow
self: the dark side of one’s character that each of us has. (Integrating the
shadow self into one’s complete personality without actually handing it the
chainsaw is a key to Jungian psychic health.) Our shadow selves chuckle at
shedding civilization’s chains. The out-there author who goes by the penname
Delicious Tacos went so far as to title his post-apocalyptic novel Finally, Some Good News. In Tacos’ book
roving gangs of survivors are plainly having destructive fun, but just as
plainly their victims are not. Doucette’s survivors are a kinder bunch, but
perhaps that is because there are only seven of them. As a practical matter
they need each other. What if there were seventy? Would Lord of the Flies style divisions then happen? I’ll leave any
answer to the reader. To be sure, civilization is annoying.
Sigmund had that right. There are jobs, electric bills, taxes, busybody
neighbors, hostile coworkers, regulators, and speed traps. It is fun to
contemplate disposing of them. It is one way to get rid of credit card debt. However,
on a cold night like tonight (5 degrees F [-15 C] outside my window) it is also
very nice indeed to have a working furnace and electric lights. So, if the
proverbial red button ever is left in my care for some bizarre reason, there is
no risk I will push it. The cat (who knocked over a fern just a moment ago) might
step on it though, so there is that.
