Yes, household/personal income is up relative to previous generations.
But what else is up?
Homeownership? (That's way down)
Child bearing? (Most people have less children than they want)
Student debt? Yes, a lot.
Speaking of my mom, who was a quintessential boomer. She got divorced from her first husband in 1980ish, drove across the country to a new city, lived in a YMCA type thing for a bit, but nevertheless owned a new home, had a new husband, and had a new child within a year and a half.
That doesn't happen to millennials. We have more "money," but more precarity as well.
Every single time someone points out that, economically, Millenials are doing pretty well, we see a comment like this filled with negative misinformation. I’m getting to the point where I’m sick of it.
Homeownership among millennials is not “way down.” Noah has covered this exact myth before. In fact, the homeownership rate for millennials when they were between 25 and 40 (so fixed-age brackets) was 48%, whereas for Gen X it was 50%. Not exactly a total collapse. The median age of first-time home buyers has remained constant, and Millenials are accelerating to the point where they’re catching up with previous generations. They’re also purchasing larger and newer homes on average.
Obviously housing prices have risen at far higher rates than inflation over the past few decades, and that sucks.
Millenials (and Gen Z) are having fewer children than they report wanting, but this is largely because they are living a far more lavish lifestyle and are unwilling to accept the economic sacrifices previous generations made. See the recent viral NYT story about the couple in Utah that decided not to have kids because they didn’t want to cut back on their golf hobby.
My grandparents (boomers) had six children. They also struggled to afford luxuries like fresh fruit and butter, never ate out, and constantly found ways to scrimp and save and cut back. They would have been astonished at modern couples who frequently rely on DoorDash and spend lavishly on their hobbies while complaining about economic precarity.
Ok, so the rate of homeownsership is roughly at parity. (I'd like to see a source for this, but for the sake of argument, sure.) A home bought in the 1980s cost on average 336,000 USD (in 2025 dollars), in the 2010's when Millennials would have been buying, it cost 469,000 USD (in 2025 dollars)
Or a 175.6% increase since the 1960's in real inflation adjusted prices.
Now, let's do the same for wages. From the abstract of the cited paper, "
We find that Millennials had a real median house hold income that was 20% higher than that of the previous generation, a slow down from the growth rate of the Silent Generation (36%) and Baby Boomers (26%), but similar to that of Generation X (16%)"
You can even see it on the chart. Look at the household income line for the boomers at age 40. (on the post tax, post transfer bottom left chart) It was 30,000$. For Milllenials, it is 45,000$. A 50% Increase! Huzzah! Amazing! People are complaining about nothing! I guess the YIMBY movement is tilting at windmills!
Houses cost over 100% more than they used to. Unfortunately, the need for shelter is pretty inelastic so people buy houses anyway by cutting back on other things that they need.
Luxuries cost a lot less now than they used to, but the necessities cost a lot more.
Yes, as I said, the cost of housing has risen at a significantly higher rate than inflation. That claim is simple, straightforward, and probably correct. We are in agreement on that point.
But now we’re reduced to arguing about the subjective feeling of precarity, when (again) every single economic metric we can measure shows that Millenials and Gen Z are doing fine.
I will reiterate: it sucks that housing is so much more expensive now. I live in a very expensive housing market and I hate it, and I wish rent were cheaper. I’m not saying otherwise.
Nonetheless, I am fully capable of allocating my spending (if I had more financial discipline) such that I can save much more than the average person from a previous generation. Rent being more expensive does not outweigh higher average incomes and cheaper essentials. At some point, precarity becomes a side effect of increasing standards of living.
> In fact, the homeownership rate for millennials when they were between 25 and 40 (so fixed-age brackets) was 48%, whereas for Gen X it was 50%.
On its own not very informative. Gen X might still been able to buy earlier. You can’t reasonably say not buying as late as 40 isn’t affecting family formation. Probably not the golf
50% by age 40 is actually low. For all ages it’s 65%.
It looks like Gen X managed to benefit from out a fall in house prices in 2008 if they hadn’t bought already. This probably explains the rise from that 50% at 40 to 72% for 45-55 year olds. Which is mid Gen X. Without a fall in prices that won’t happen again.
Millennial homeownership by age is closely tracking Gen X, although on average 1-2 years behind. This isn’t nothing, but it isn’t the massive gap that you often see insinuated.
I know. You said that. So let me explain why this is partially an artefact of the year we are in and how we divide into generations.
Home ownership at age 55 in the US is 75%. I don’t have the exact figure to hand but I bet at age 40 the home ownership of this exact age group was higher than 50%.
The relatively low overall ownership of Gen X is driven down, therefore, by recent high house prices. The youngest Gen X hit 40 just a few years ago.
Since all of Gen X have already passed age 40, so their ownership rate at that age is fully observed. Millennials haven’t. If homeownership is shifting later, each successive year will show lower ownership at 40—so the apparent generational gap at that age will widen over time
The reason the release of GPT-5.5 didn't cause widespread cyberattacks isn't because the defenders have won cybersecurity. (Anyone working in cybersecurity right now would find that claim laughable.) It's because GPT-5.5 is nowhere near as good at hacking as Mythos, and the people saying otherwise are wrong.
"GPT-5.5 did a bunch of things, but did not ‘independently produce a functional full chain exploit against real world targets.’
Exploit development judgment was the bottleneck. For any given isolated and specified task, GPT-5.5 is damn good, but it can’t synthesize and plan like Mythos."
"This reinforces that even very strong performance in narrow cyber tasks is not that dangerous, the same way that AI being able to do any particular narrow job task does not automatically mean you’re about to be fired. They can’t fire (all of) you until the AI knows which narrow job task to do next, and which way to do it."
We know Mythos was a big deal because it found real serious vulnerabilities in real widely-deployed software. If GPT-5.5 could do that, OpenAI would have demonstrated it. They didn't.
Your comments on the national debt are if anything understated. You mention debt as 8 x revenue then change your word to "income" and say the debt has a call on 8 years of the governments "income". But. Revenue is not income. While there are differences between countries and companies, finance is finance. The USG has negative free cash flow. you can only pay down debt with free cash flow. We have none of this. the national debt plummeted at one point under Clinton and now we are were we are. You can print money and deflate the currency and the debt. You can try to issue more bonds but we have alienated most foreign buyers or we could have more than a balanced budget ie revenues exceed expenses. This will never happen. We are in analogous situation as Japan with its massive debt and weakening currency. If it raised rates to defend the currency its debt service will go up so they are trapped.
Basically, this is one of those cases where democracy is not well setup to offer a solution. Too many incentives for the opposite party to promise the public that they'll reverse cuts and kick the can down the road.
Your father so obviously raised a balanced honest decent open minded human being. It’s so clear in the years I’ve been reading you. I am sorry for your loss.
I get the sense that California YIMBY is turning around an aircraft carrier. The left-NIMBY mentality was so entrenched in CA, and the thicket of rules blocking construction so thick, that turning the ship around was inevitably going to take decades. The ship is turning slowly, but it’s turning!
Public opinion has shifted, bills are passing the legislature and getting signed by the governor, and while the number of actual housing starts is not enough yet, they can clearly win this fight if they keep at it.
The 2022 drop in coder employment/hiring had little to do with ChatGPT. It certainly wasn't good enough in 2022 to do the job of even the most junior engineer, and despite the layoffs, hyperscalers have continued to grow their workforce on net since then.
It had much more to do with:
a) the end of ZIRP, spiking interest rates and making speculative hires of engineers much more expensive, and
b) the tax law change ("section 174") that came into effect in 2022 that required amortizing R&D expenses (including coder salaries) over 5 years instead of being fully deductible in the year they occurred. This hit eng firms hard, particularly startups and smaller companies: instead of being able to deduct 100% of their engineering expenses, suddenly they could only deduct 20%. This was reversed in the OBBB. See e.g. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/
I thought all the pessimism is downstream of the housing market. What do statistics like rent burdened households look like?
Data point from outside the USA: Auckland has a median wage of appx. NZD70,000. Take home pay would be 55,000. Median house price is just over a million NZD.
Renting is cheaper but comes with *severe* compromises, as in, whatever house you live in now is only ever be temporarily and may go away with a 42 day notice.
You will find 6 months to 1 year fixed term rental contracts over here. Not totally sure how common that is. More predictable but the landlord is still under no obligation to renew the contract when that term is up.
And why would they be? It's a fixed term contract. I was just surprised by your statement that renting typically entails the risk of being kicked out at any time. In the US a fixed term lease is by far the most common way that rental is structured, but I guess NZ usually just does a month by month arrangement.
But I'm also surprised that even though that is true, being kicked out of your rental would be a common occurrence. In the US having a landlord kick you out or not offer you a new lease when your old one is up is just not a common thing to happen even if they have the right to (unless you are a problem tenant). It's never happened to me or anyone I know.
Yeah getting kicked out is a thing in NZ, and having to worry about it seems to be a normal part of renting. It has happened that someone had to move more than once in a single year. So-called 'periodic' tenancies are weirdly common, they can be terminated with 90 day notice without giving a reason, and 42 days if a family member of the owner moves in or if the property is sold.
It is hard to find out exactly how common this is though. You can find statistics like 'a quarter of primary school aged kids in rentals moved in this year, vs. 1 in 10 for owner occupiers', but there are selection effects in play, people who want to live somewhere long term will buy their home if at all possible.
On the topic of fare evasion. When recently in Rome, I noticed two flaws in the tap-an-go systems on their tram and bus lines. The first is, for some reason I cannot fathom, when there's 3 doors, they place 2 readers, one at the front, one at the back. If you board in the middle, and it's very crowded, it's very hard to scan. The middle is usually the easiest place to board since the front is very restrictive (I think they redesigned the openings to protect drivers better), and who waits at the back of a bus stop? I recall Barcelona being much better in making it easy to scan from any entry point (plus they were a bit less overcrowded). But something any operator should think about.. make scanning easy.
The second part, maybe there is a fix already for, but not sure. Because when you use the tap-and-go there you don't get anything like a receipt. On some other systems, when using Wallet, I've been able to see the scan immediately, but here it wasn't until the next day. I suppose the fix for that might be that if you scan the same card on a device that fare evasion collectors have, it would be able to connect it to a record (a system that would be necessary for anyone using a credit card directly). Still was a bit disappointed with that one when I reflected and something Google should work with transit systems to improve.
I feel like there were a lot of people not scanning on these buses/trams. There was one time I wasn't able to, though I felt a bit better about it because it was only a transfer. I looked it up later and in Rome the way transfers work is all tickets are 1-hour tickets.. so basically once you pay once, for the next hour all transfers are free, so really I wasn't freeloading in any way. I somewhat wonder if my perception of the pervasiveness of people not scanning stems from some awareness of this, or maybe monthly passes. I found a year old estimate that evasion on buses/trams is about 7% in Rome.
I think the basic summary here is that a simple thing like an extra reader is an oversight that shouldn't be missed. If it's hard to scan, some people won't do it out of frustration, not as an attempt to avoid charges. And when more do that, it starts to look more normal, which enables others who have other motivations. And then you get stuck with trying to fix it via enforcement which is not cheap to do. Much better to just make it easy, so the norm isn't undermined.
Strange that they apparently don’t think it’s cost effective to add a reader on middle doors, they don’t seem expensive especially if they share communications. In Japan the front door of all buses is exit only, so the driver can verify or collect payment, and all other doors have both tap card readers and paper ticket dispensers if the bus still accepts cash, which most do.
The graphs on income wouldn’t pass a decent high school class and are meaningless without specifying if it is real or nominal income. They appear to be nominal which does make them useless. Although anecdotal I calculated my real income at 18yr cleaning condos as piecework pay in Aspen in 1978 as a ski bum, and my father’s income the same year as a pediatrician in the SF Bay Area in 2025 dollars, and they aren’t even on the chart ($85,000, $700,000). My kids income in 2025 (23, high school degree, apprentice electrician; 25, BS, hospitality lowest level manager) are both above median for these charts at their age as individuals ($62k, $53k) so the numbers appear to be something like nominal 2025 dollars. Neither son in real dollars makes what we considered the minimum acceptable piece work rate, $10/hr nominal 1978 = $49/hr 2025. In 1977 we got $6/hr = $29/hr 2025 for shoveling snow, chopping ice, doing hotel laundry, just slightly below the $30/hr 2025 the apprentice makes. Granted they have health coverage and I had none from work. If the graphs aren’t labeled with required units they wouldn’t pass high school in my era, and it takes only high school level back of the envelope analysis to show they don’t reflect reality.
Commiserations Noah on the loss of your father and I hope you are ok. When you are ready it would be wonderful to read your post on him.
The one about millenials is misguided.
Yes, household/personal income is up relative to previous generations.
But what else is up?
Homeownership? (That's way down)
Child bearing? (Most people have less children than they want)
Student debt? Yes, a lot.
Speaking of my mom, who was a quintessential boomer. She got divorced from her first husband in 1980ish, drove across the country to a new city, lived in a YMCA type thing for a bit, but nevertheless owned a new home, had a new husband, and had a new child within a year and a half.
That doesn't happen to millennials. We have more "money," but more precarity as well.
Every single time someone points out that, economically, Millenials are doing pretty well, we see a comment like this filled with negative misinformation. I’m getting to the point where I’m sick of it.
Homeownership among millennials is not “way down.” Noah has covered this exact myth before. In fact, the homeownership rate for millennials when they were between 25 and 40 (so fixed-age brackets) was 48%, whereas for Gen X it was 50%. Not exactly a total collapse. The median age of first-time home buyers has remained constant, and Millenials are accelerating to the point where they’re catching up with previous generations. They’re also purchasing larger and newer homes on average.
Obviously housing prices have risen at far higher rates than inflation over the past few decades, and that sucks.
Millenials (and Gen Z) are having fewer children than they report wanting, but this is largely because they are living a far more lavish lifestyle and are unwilling to accept the economic sacrifices previous generations made. See the recent viral NYT story about the couple in Utah that decided not to have kids because they didn’t want to cut back on their golf hobby.
My grandparents (boomers) had six children. They also struggled to afford luxuries like fresh fruit and butter, never ate out, and constantly found ways to scrimp and save and cut back. They would have been astonished at modern couples who frequently rely on DoorDash and spend lavishly on their hobbies while complaining about economic precarity.
Ok, so the rate of homeownsership is roughly at parity. (I'd like to see a source for this, but for the sake of argument, sure.) A home bought in the 1980s cost on average 336,000 USD (in 2025 dollars), in the 2010's when Millennials would have been buying, it cost 469,000 USD (in 2025 dollars)
That's a price increase of just shy of 40%.
(See here for the source: https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/visualizations/how-much-an-average-home-has-cost-in-the-united-states-over-time/)
1960s: 236,000
+ 18.9%
1970s: 280,000
+ 20%
1980s: 336,000
+5.6%
1990s: 355,000
+25.6%
2000s: 446,000
+5.6%
2010s: 469,000
+38.9%
2020s: 651,000
Or a 175.6% increase since the 1960's in real inflation adjusted prices.
Now, let's do the same for wages. From the abstract of the cited paper, "
We find that Millennials had a real median house hold income that was 20% higher than that of the previous generation, a slow down from the growth rate of the Silent Generation (36%) and Baby Boomers (26%), but similar to that of Generation X (16%)"
You can even see it on the chart. Look at the household income line for the boomers at age 40. (on the post tax, post transfer bottom left chart) It was 30,000$. For Milllenials, it is 45,000$. A 50% Increase! Huzzah! Amazing! People are complaining about nothing! I guess the YIMBY movement is tilting at windmills!
Houses cost over 100% more than they used to. Unfortunately, the need for shelter is pretty inelastic so people buy houses anyway by cutting back on other things that they need.
Luxuries cost a lot less now than they used to, but the necessities cost a lot more.
Yes, as I said, the cost of housing has risen at a significantly higher rate than inflation. That claim is simple, straightforward, and probably correct. We are in agreement on that point.
But that is the point that you're missing with the precarity.
Because home ownership is pretty inelastic as a demand, people who own homes now are doing some pretty drastic cuts to get themselves there.
Luxuries are cheaper. Essentials are more expensive. You don't feel precarious because you can't afford a TV. You do when you can't afford rent.
But now we’re reduced to arguing about the subjective feeling of precarity, when (again) every single economic metric we can measure shows that Millenials and Gen Z are doing fine.
I will reiterate: it sucks that housing is so much more expensive now. I live in a very expensive housing market and I hate it, and I wish rent were cheaper. I’m not saying otherwise.
Nonetheless, I am fully capable of allocating my spending (if I had more financial discipline) such that I can save much more than the average person from a previous generation. Rent being more expensive does not outweigh higher average incomes and cheaper essentials. At some point, precarity becomes a side effect of increasing standards of living.
> Rent being more expensive does not outweigh higher average incomes and cheaper essentials.
This is a numerical question. At some point, more expensive housing literally does outweigh those things.
Thanks for saving me the trouble of posting this! Excellently elucidated.
> In fact, the homeownership rate for millennials when they were between 25 and 40 (so fixed-age brackets) was 48%, whereas for Gen X it was 50%.
On its own not very informative. Gen X might still been able to buy earlier. You can’t reasonably say not buying as late as 40 isn’t affecting family formation. Probably not the golf
50% by age 40 is actually low. For all ages it’s 65%.
It looks like Gen X managed to benefit from out a fall in house prices in 2008 if they hadn’t bought already. This probably explains the rise from that 50% at 40 to 72% for 45-55 year olds. Which is mid Gen X. Without a fall in prices that won’t happen again.
Millennial homeownership by age is closely tracking Gen X, although on average 1-2 years behind. This isn’t nothing, but it isn’t the massive gap that you often see insinuated.
I know. You said that. So let me explain why this is partially an artefact of the year we are in and how we divide into generations.
Home ownership at age 55 in the US is 75%. I don’t have the exact figure to hand but I bet at age 40 the home ownership of this exact age group was higher than 50%.
The relatively low overall ownership of Gen X is driven down, therefore, by recent high house prices. The youngest Gen X hit 40 just a few years ago.
Since all of Gen X have already passed age 40, so their ownership rate at that age is fully observed. Millennials haven’t. If homeownership is shifting later, each successive year will show lower ownership at 40—so the apparent generational gap at that age will widen over time
Neither statistic is great for family formation.
Whether Millennials are 2% or 10% worse off than Gen X, I think we can say for sure that they complain at least 100% more.
The reason the release of GPT-5.5 didn't cause widespread cyberattacks isn't because the defenders have won cybersecurity. (Anyone working in cybersecurity right now would find that claim laughable.) It's because GPT-5.5 is nowhere near as good at hacking as Mythos, and the people saying otherwise are wrong.
That chart from the AI Security Institute keeps getting taken out of context. Zvi Mowshowitz explains, albeit somewhat tersely (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/86zcwvuBpE4vxAeQz/gpt-5-5-the-system-card#Cybersecurity__9_1_2_):
"GPT-5.5 did a bunch of things, but did not ‘independently produce a functional full chain exploit against real world targets.’
Exploit development judgment was the bottleneck. For any given isolated and specified task, GPT-5.5 is damn good, but it can’t synthesize and plan like Mythos."
"This reinforces that even very strong performance in narrow cyber tasks is not that dangerous, the same way that AI being able to do any particular narrow job task does not automatically mean you’re about to be fired. They can’t fire (all of) you until the AI knows which narrow job task to do next, and which way to do it."
We know Mythos was a big deal because it found real serious vulnerabilities in real widely-deployed software. If GPT-5.5 could do that, OpenAI would have demonstrated it. They didn't.
Your comments on the national debt are if anything understated. You mention debt as 8 x revenue then change your word to "income" and say the debt has a call on 8 years of the governments "income". But. Revenue is not income. While there are differences between countries and companies, finance is finance. The USG has negative free cash flow. you can only pay down debt with free cash flow. We have none of this. the national debt plummeted at one point under Clinton and now we are were we are. You can print money and deflate the currency and the debt. You can try to issue more bonds but we have alienated most foreign buyers or we could have more than a balanced budget ie revenues exceed expenses. This will never happen. We are in analogous situation as Japan with its massive debt and weakening currency. If it raised rates to defend the currency its debt service will go up so they are trapped.
Basically we are doomed.
Basically, this is one of those cases where democracy is not well setup to offer a solution. Too many incentives for the opposite party to promise the public that they'll reverse cuts and kick the can down the road.
The road ends somewhere
Often it loops around in circles rather than hitting a wall or cliff, particularly if a country doesn’t have a lot of foreign debt
Agreed. I very much think we will get a HUGE fiscal crisis probably within the next 10 years that will make 2008 look like a walk in the park.
We need to be making big changes now, but neither party is interested, because voters aren't interested.
Because what we will need to do is cut spending including entitlements AND raise taxes.
Your father so obviously raised a balanced honest decent open minded human being. It’s so clear in the years I’ve been reading you. I am sorry for your loss.
I get the sense that California YIMBY is turning around an aircraft carrier. The left-NIMBY mentality was so entrenched in CA, and the thicket of rules blocking construction so thick, that turning the ship around was inevitably going to take decades. The ship is turning slowly, but it’s turning!
Public opinion has shifted, bills are passing the legislature and getting signed by the governor, and while the number of actual housing starts is not enough yet, they can clearly win this fight if they keep at it.
So sorry to hear about your dad’s passing. Hang in there.
The 2022 drop in coder employment/hiring had little to do with ChatGPT. It certainly wasn't good enough in 2022 to do the job of even the most junior engineer, and despite the layoffs, hyperscalers have continued to grow their workforce on net since then.
It had much more to do with:
a) the end of ZIRP, spiking interest rates and making speculative hires of engineers much more expensive, and
b) the tax law change ("section 174") that came into effect in 2022 that required amortizing R&D expenses (including coder salaries) over 5 years instead of being fully deductible in the year they occurred. This hit eng firms hard, particularly startups and smaller companies: instead of being able to deduct 100% of their engineering expenses, suddenly they could only deduct 20%. This was reversed in the OBBB. See e.g. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/
I thought all the pessimism is downstream of the housing market. What do statistics like rent burdened households look like?
Data point from outside the USA: Auckland has a median wage of appx. NZD70,000. Take home pay would be 55,000. Median house price is just over a million NZD.
Renting is cheaper but comes with *severe* compromises, as in, whatever house you live in now is only ever be temporarily and may go away with a 42 day notice.
Do they not do leases in NZ?
Is that like a rental but with a very long contract? In that case, no I haven't heard of it.
There's a leasehold where you own the building and lease the land under it, but I guess that isn't what you meant.
Normally in the US you rent an apartment by signing a 12 month lease on the property.
You will find 6 months to 1 year fixed term rental contracts over here. Not totally sure how common that is. More predictable but the landlord is still under no obligation to renew the contract when that term is up.
And why would they be? It's a fixed term contract. I was just surprised by your statement that renting typically entails the risk of being kicked out at any time. In the US a fixed term lease is by far the most common way that rental is structured, but I guess NZ usually just does a month by month arrangement.
But I'm also surprised that even though that is true, being kicked out of your rental would be a common occurrence. In the US having a landlord kick you out or not offer you a new lease when your old one is up is just not a common thing to happen even if they have the right to (unless you are a problem tenant). It's never happened to me or anyone I know.
Yeah getting kicked out is a thing in NZ, and having to worry about it seems to be a normal part of renting. It has happened that someone had to move more than once in a single year. So-called 'periodic' tenancies are weirdly common, they can be terminated with 90 day notice without giving a reason, and 42 days if a family member of the owner moves in or if the property is sold.
It is hard to find out exactly how common this is though. You can find statistics like 'a quarter of primary school aged kids in rentals moved in this year, vs. 1 in 10 for owner occupiers', but there are selection effects in play, people who want to live somewhere long term will buy their home if at all possible.
On the topic of fare evasion. When recently in Rome, I noticed two flaws in the tap-an-go systems on their tram and bus lines. The first is, for some reason I cannot fathom, when there's 3 doors, they place 2 readers, one at the front, one at the back. If you board in the middle, and it's very crowded, it's very hard to scan. The middle is usually the easiest place to board since the front is very restrictive (I think they redesigned the openings to protect drivers better), and who waits at the back of a bus stop? I recall Barcelona being much better in making it easy to scan from any entry point (plus they were a bit less overcrowded). But something any operator should think about.. make scanning easy.
The second part, maybe there is a fix already for, but not sure. Because when you use the tap-and-go there you don't get anything like a receipt. On some other systems, when using Wallet, I've been able to see the scan immediately, but here it wasn't until the next day. I suppose the fix for that might be that if you scan the same card on a device that fare evasion collectors have, it would be able to connect it to a record (a system that would be necessary for anyone using a credit card directly). Still was a bit disappointed with that one when I reflected and something Google should work with transit systems to improve.
I feel like there were a lot of people not scanning on these buses/trams. There was one time I wasn't able to, though I felt a bit better about it because it was only a transfer. I looked it up later and in Rome the way transfers work is all tickets are 1-hour tickets.. so basically once you pay once, for the next hour all transfers are free, so really I wasn't freeloading in any way. I somewhat wonder if my perception of the pervasiveness of people not scanning stems from some awareness of this, or maybe monthly passes. I found a year old estimate that evasion on buses/trams is about 7% in Rome.
I think the basic summary here is that a simple thing like an extra reader is an oversight that shouldn't be missed. If it's hard to scan, some people won't do it out of frustration, not as an attempt to avoid charges. And when more do that, it starts to look more normal, which enables others who have other motivations. And then you get stuck with trying to fix it via enforcement which is not cheap to do. Much better to just make it easy, so the norm isn't undermined.
Strange that they apparently don’t think it’s cost effective to add a reader on middle doors, they don’t seem expensive especially if they share communications. In Japan the front door of all buses is exit only, so the driver can verify or collect payment, and all other doors have both tap card readers and paper ticket dispensers if the bus still accepts cash, which most do.
So sorry for your loss Noah, praying for you
I am sorry for the passing of your dad. I have bern through that too.
So sorry to hear about the loss of your dad. I look forward to your post about him.
My condolences on your father's passing, Noah.
Kind regards, Kazimir
Condolences, Noah. Very hard to say goodbye to a parent. Don't apologize for that.
The graphs on income wouldn’t pass a decent high school class and are meaningless without specifying if it is real or nominal income. They appear to be nominal which does make them useless. Although anecdotal I calculated my real income at 18yr cleaning condos as piecework pay in Aspen in 1978 as a ski bum, and my father’s income the same year as a pediatrician in the SF Bay Area in 2025 dollars, and they aren’t even on the chart ($85,000, $700,000). My kids income in 2025 (23, high school degree, apprentice electrician; 25, BS, hospitality lowest level manager) are both above median for these charts at their age as individuals ($62k, $53k) so the numbers appear to be something like nominal 2025 dollars. Neither son in real dollars makes what we considered the minimum acceptable piece work rate, $10/hr nominal 1978 = $49/hr 2025. In 1977 we got $6/hr = $29/hr 2025 for shoveling snow, chopping ice, doing hotel laundry, just slightly below the $30/hr 2025 the apprentice makes. Granted they have health coverage and I had none from work. If the graphs aren’t labeled with required units they wouldn’t pass high school in my era, and it takes only high school level back of the envelope analysis to show they don’t reflect reality.