Fewer young adults are achieving economic and family milestones typically associated with adulthood, according to a recent working paper from the U.S. Census Bureau.
According to the working paper, “Changes in Milestones of Adulthood,” almost half of all young adults in 1975 had reached four milestones associated with adulthood: moving out of one’s parents’ home, getting a job, getting married and having a child.
Five decades on, that progression has changed dramatically. The share of young adults that have followed the traditional pathway to adulthood has dropped to less than a quarter, according to the paper.
This one is absolutely bullshit tied to the accrual of wealth. People don’t become more conservative as they get older, they become more conservative as they start to benefit more and more from the system, as was the norm up until about Gen X. People being worse off than their parents were at the same age absolutely has shifted the political leanings of generations (there’s also the fact that each successive generation leans more leftist than the previous due to simple exposure to people and ideas that are different from you, but that’s another topic).
I’m reminded of the wonderful video that the beautiful talking skull Shaun did about Harry Potter and JK Rowling a few years back. Specifically, the part about how you can watch her political stance change practically in real time as the books go on. The books start out raging against the machine, but as she began to gain wealth and benefit from that machine, it shifts towards supporting the machine until at the end Harry becomes a magic cop defending all the issues that were criticized in the early books and nothing fundamentally changes in society.
You’re young. You also can’t read. Because I also said that’s changing.
Now continue feeling good about not knowing what yoyr talking about.
Most Conservatives aren’t wealthy. Go ahead. Look.
It probably wasn’t clear, but I was agreeing with you but expanding on the point. Because the science says that there’s no correlation between age and leftists becoming more conservative and never has been, but there absolutely is with accrual of wealth. In the past, these were largely the same thing. That’s why it seems like people aren’t becoming more conservative as they get older anymore. Because the paths to wealth have largely disappeared.
And of course most conservatives aren’t wealthy, but if you look at them for just a short time (especially in the US), you’ll see that they don’t think of themselves as poor - they’re just “temporarily displaced billionaires” who will make it big any day now and then they’ll own the boot rather than be squashed under its heel. Or they’re just bigots. There’s always that option.