The biggest purchase the typical worker will make is a house purchase. Assuming "typical" means median, and assuming (big assumption) that the median worker buys a median house on a married two-income household, the median household is losing around $200,000. The median house price in the United States is $220,000.
The median college graduate family for the class of 2009, when they hit their forties, will be behind their expectations by about a house. Ouch.
That is not at all a frightening statistic.
Generationalism is just like every other -ism. Not that you are being explicitly generationalist, you just give that impression.
I didn't mean to be a generationalist, but after having taught these kids in grad school, I don't have the highest opinion of them, to be frank. And, indeed, the baby-boomers f*cked up big time... and it sucks that everyone has to pay for the mistakes of a few.
While there may be a lot not to like about the US, it's still one of the best places to be if you want to make money.
Suppose you have a decade of fellows who, due to bad luck, are on a low-earning streak compared to those in the preceding years. Would this add incentive for the women of the right age, from the current decade, to marry men from the preceding "block"?
Alternatively, suppose all earnings are down, which means that relatively everybody is still about the same, within the current decade "block". Then women won't have much incentive to marry the older men.
But I think the previous case is more likely. Then we will have some kind of a gap in M/F distributions among the age groups. How would the current decade block's males adapt? When the women of the subsequent decade block enter the workforce, the males from the current block will have to compete with the males in the next block as well, but won't have much advantage from greater salary.
So it looks like a slow correction, a loss, to me, i.e. there will simply be an increased number of bachelors in this block.
