The Fun of Low Bars

We are often exhorted to challenge ourselves – to seek new heights. That is all well and good for some single facet (or handful of facets) of our lives where doing that is actually fun in its own way: some hobby or sport, say, or even something more remunerative such as securities trading. Maybe you’ll one-up Albert with a successful Unified Field Theory. (I doubt it, but give it a shot.) But as a general way of life it has its drawbacks. Happiness sometimes is defined as reality divided by expectations when the quotient is greater than 1. (Since we’re talking about lowering the bar, one might prefer the even simpler reality-minus-expectations with the answer a positive number.) This is because we irrational humans judge success in relative terms. We’re giddy when things go better than expected and upset when they go worse.
 
We all see this every day. For years I was a real estate broker, and customers, especially when unaccompanied by spouse, often were surprisingly (and unsolicitedly) open about their disappointments in life. I remember showing one woman, who drove a $65,000 Mercedes, an $800,000 suburban house. (Both items would cost perhaps 25% more today.) “I can’t believe this is my life,” she said despondently. She was serious. I’m aware that there is more to life than material well-being, and that there are many legitimate reasons why moneyed people nonetheless might be unhappy. Maybe she had them, but I couldn’t help (unnoticed I hope) raising an eyebrow. If her material expectations had been even grander however (e.g. French villas and private jets) maybe the shortfall in that area alone was the disappointment.
 
Self-reported happiness in the US has been declining since the 1950s. Analysts have blamed everything from obesity rates to social media addiction for the trend. At bottom, though, it seems our expectations have changed. After a desperate Depression and a brutal war, those who in the 1950s achieved the dream of a little ranch house with a Chevy in the driveway thought they were in pig heaven – it was more than for which they could have hoped a decade earlier. They were happy days. Compare that to the previous story.
 
If we consider only the material portion of life, how much money would it take today for Americans to be happy by their own reckoning? The numbers vary significantly by generation. According to a survey by the financial services company Empower, the median minimum net worth it would take are as follows:
 
Zoomers:         $487,000
Millennials    $1,700,000
Gen X             $1,200,000
Boomers        $1,000,000
 
Annual salaries would have to be
 
Zoomers:       $128,084
Millennials:   $525,947
Gen X:            $130,344
Boomers:       $124,165
 
Zoomers actually have more realistic goals than Millennials, though it may just be that that they haven’t yet learned how much a dollar is really worth (or, more importantly, isn’t). All of these numbers are high, of course. The median household income according to the Census Bureau is $74,580. (The median household size in 2023 was 2.51; for a single-person-household the median income for a full-time employed worker was $57,200.)
 
A little greater pessimism about goals and expectations might cheer the whole lot of them up in the long run. They can get some surprises on the upside.
 
The power of lowering the expectations bar is evident in the counter-intuitive finding that seniors are the happiest age group. They don’t expect much anymore and so are not much disappointed. I can relate. If I wake up in the morning feeling hale, that is enough. It’s a good day.

 

The Doors – Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

Updike Redux

The discount bookseller Hamilton is one of my go-to sites for perusing titles for possible purchase. More often than not I’ll toss something in the virtual shopping cart. Recently two by John Updike (1932-2009) caught my eye: his 1992 Memories of the Ford Administration and 1994 Brazil. I wasn’t looking for (or expecting) signed hardcover private editions but those are what arrived – apparently publisher’s surplus.
 
I first read Updike in high school in the 1968-69 school year. The English teacher Mr. Drew (a former monk and well-educated eccentric) mixed books by contemporary authors in with classics on the class reading list just to make the point that literature was still a flourishing art form. John Updike was youngish (36) and still considered up-and-coming at the time. So, for one of our assignments, Mr. Drew chose Updikes’s Rabbit Run, a novel about 26-y.o. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom whose dull marriage and duller job don’t measure up to his glory days as a high school athlete. As a student I found the book painless enough that I bought and read the sequel Rabbit Redux (1971) just for recreational reading despite my already hefty reading list at college. The four Rabbit novels written between 1960 and 1990 capture their times consummately as well as one man’s stages of life. Yet, in a general way they made me not so much an avid fan of Updike as a lukewarm fan – but a fan nonetheless. I fully understand Gore Vidal's remarks that Updike is an accomplished writer but that he wasn’t particularly interested in the man’s preferred subject matters and suburban protagonists. Updike does get more adventurous in his plots occasionally, as in The Witches of Eastwick and The Coup, but suburbs in his native Pennsylvania or adopted New England are indeed his most likely settings. The two books from Hamilton, however, were a step up from an already pretty high level.

In PA just west of Delaware River. I'm guessing
the novel by native son Updike came first and
the street second, but maybe not.

 

By fits and starts from the mid-1950s Updike worked on a historical novel about James Buchanan, the only President from Pennsylvania. Buchanan is also, by most historians’ reckoning, the worst President ever for failing to avoid the Civil War when a show of force might have prevented it, since even in South Carolina there was at the outset substantial Unionist sentiment. He took the curious view that states had no authority to secede but that the federal government had no authority to stop them, so he just wagged a finger and let secession happen. Most of today’s general public have forgotten Buchanan altogether. The novel didn’t come together for Updike for more than three decades. At last he hit on the solution of removing himself a couple steps from the subject matter by making the novel about a Professor Alf Clayton writing about the Ford Administration (another widely forgotten Presidency) while simultaneously writing a biography of Buchanan. This also allowed Updike to use a more deeply literary style than he usually employs since we expect a professor to write in professor-ese. Accordingly, the novel is every bit as much about the 1970s as the 1850s – as well as life as a New Hampshire college professor. It is worth a read on all three of its levels.
 
A greater departure from Updike’s usual fare is Brazil, which deserves a big thumbs up. Set (mostly) in the 1960s during the era of military rule, the Brazil of Updike’s novel is part starkly realistic and part sensual magical fantasy. The plot is basically Tristan and Isolde featuring wealthy families and slum dwellers instead of courts and commoners. In case there is any doubt about this, the protagonists are named Tristao and Isabel. A country that then (as now) prided itself on being colorblind, Brazil really wasn’t (isn’t) though the more thorough blending of the population makes the matter far more nuanced than in North America. This adds a crucial dimension to class differences in the tale.
 
The millennium-old story of Tristan and Isolde has numerous permutations, blending with Arthurian legends in England while taking other directions on the continent. All of them, though, up to and including Wagner’s over-the-top opera, are about a love supreme that survives suppression, violence, kidnapping, betrayal on various levels (including of each other at least superficially), escape, recapture, romance and bromance. All of that is in Brazil, forcing one to ask, “Why are the two lovers putting themselves through this brutal punishment? It can’t be worth it. Split up already.” The key is in Isabel’s realization during some of the worst of it that she is happy. The mutual willingness to endure punishment proves to her a love that illumines their lives in an otherwise meaningless world.
 
It is a strangely masochistic vision, but one that may be all too relatable. How many of us have experienced a self-destructive relationship and delayed far too long an escape from it? (I’m raising a hand high here.) If that is, we did escape. There is much to be said for being kinder to oneself – for living a calmer life in a softer light. If we don’t get a novel out it, much less an opera, so be it.
 
 

Paul McCartney - Back In Brazil

Intergenerational Money Grumps

Numerous articles in news and commentary sites lately have reported the difficulties Millennials and Zoomers are facing in their attempts to establish independent lives. High rents and college debt are cited as serious drags on them. A minority is very successful indeed almost directly out of college, but the majority struggle. I recall similar articles in past decades about Boomers and Xers, but that is not to deny actual changes in the challenges faced by the young in the 80 years since World War 2. At this stage in my life, the issue in a personal way is largely academic, but I do see friends and relatives affected by it.
 
The immediate post-war period was a remarkable anomaly. After a decade and a half of desperate times, members of the GI and Silent Generations created for themselves a civilian economic boom in the US and most of the rest of the West that set an unprecedented standard of widespread (not universal by any means, but widespread) middle class prosperity. They started adulting (a word that didn’t exist at the time) early; it doesn’t seem to have occurred to them to do anything else. My parents were typical: my dad was discharged from the service in 1946, he and my mom married at ages 21 and 19 in 1947, and they built their first house (a suburban ranch) in 1949. A loose regulatory environment for land development resulted in a construction boom that made housing 1945-65 as affordable as it ever had been or has been since.

My parents at work on their house. 1949.

Each generation since then has launched a little later than the one before. (They are Boomers 1946-64, Xers 1965-79, Millennials 1980-94, and Zoomers 1995-2012; the oldest of the upcoming Alphas won’t be legal adults for another 6 years.) Each generation blames the one before for shutting economic doors on them (e.g. through zoning and licensing) and each in turn blames the one after it for being laggards. There always is some truth in both accusations, but just some: the matter looks more complex, unsurprisingly, in detail.
 
Millennials and Zoomers have had particular trouble affording housing in the 2020s. In consequence, according to RentCafe, 68% of adult Zoomers live with parents or some other relative. 20% of Millennials still do. Of those, nearly half have no plans to move in the next two years. Of those that do move out, roommates are a commonplace way to afford rental units. Some even opt for alternative housing such as RVs. News sites are rife with stories about how most live paycheck to paycheck without so much as $1000 for emergency expenses; they rely on credit card debt for those. Yet, Millennials and Zoomers are not in as bad shape as all the stories suggest. Every generation takes time to build net worth and savings. The current crop of young people are a few years behind, but not by all that much. Housing for purchase was actually less affordable in the early 1980s (when mortgage interest rates were in double digits) than today. To be fair, rents and (especially) education costs really are significantly higher today in inflation adjusted terms than in previous decades. However, a windfall is coming.
 
Baby Boomers have capital – much of it is in home values rather than liquid but it nonetheless adds up to a lot. (To be sure, there are plenty of broke Boomers, especially among those needing long term health care, but we are talking about the center line of the bell curve.) According to the Federal Reserve’s 2023 Survey of Consumer Finances, the median US household net worth (i.e. 50% have more and 50% have less) in 2023 was $409,000 for those aged 65-74 and $335,600 for those over 75. This gives a falsely low impression of how much is in this generation’s hands. Thanks to the millionaires among them, the average (not the median) net worth for Boomers is closer to $2,000,000; most of those wealthy people will have multiple heirs. So, an unprecedented transfer of wealth, mostly to Millennials and Zoomers, is set to take place as the Boomer generation passes: some 84 trillion dollars. Together with their own earnings, the kids should be alright – again, talking about the generation collectively. Individually, every person’s story will be different. At least half of Zoomers shouldn’t count on any rescue by inheritance – especially if health care saps Boomers’ bottom lines in the years ahead – but this was the case for earlier generations too.  
 
The generation in most immediate trouble is X. According to a 1000-person survey by Clever Real Estate, 56% of Xers said they had less than $100,000 in savings and 22% said they had none at all. Two thirds said recent inflation has seriously harmed them financially and 40% don’t think they ever can afford to retire. The windfall from Boomers will largely pass over them. The oldest of the Xers turn 59 this year, so they are not entirely out of time to repair their finances, but it is getting short.
 
No one wants to be old and broke. (No one wants to be young and broke either, but one can recover from that easier.) So, it is natural to worry about these things. But there are limits to the value of worry too. We do what we can with what cards we have at each point in life. We can do no more.

 

Ray Charles – Busted