I believe this is a generation thing. Generation Y grew up with so many crisis and terror attacks, its just naturally everyone is hording their cash. Also a lot of people want to stay independent and mobile so they are not (yet) settling down.
Uh, historically the last 40 years have been pretty good. Sure it is worse than some of the years before that (but we did not have to go to 'nam so there is that). But historically you can't say Generation Y have had many crisis and terror attacks. Think about people born 1900-1910, they had two world wars to survive!
Honestly, please find me a generation that hasn't had to hear about one crisis after another. First world Gen Y'ers haven't seen nothing when you really look at it.
I think this is easily explained by economics alone: We're "printing money", only for the bulk of it to end up in fewer hands. Gen Y has no sense of future solvency based upon the miserly behavior of their parents and grandparents. Who basically were handed everything and decided really it was all theirs and no one else's. That their offspring should go out and rebuild the world again, while they hang onto all the useful capital. It's theirs, they did it on their own!
It makes sense for Gen Y to hang onto everything, cause really they have very little. At least, much less than their parents did. I don't have the link, but a study recently suggested Gen Y is going to make nearly $100k less over their lives than Gen X.
A ridiculous sense of entitlement is the problem when you're talking about the problems with our economy. Some how providing basic broadband service to everyone is not a right, never mind the real value it would bring to people that need it most (with bullshit arguments about how it's hard to run wires across the country. Was easy enough to build these giant concrete freeways though!). But being wealthy enough to own 7 homes and two dozen exotic cars is. Somehow, releasing a new iPhone every 12 months is a necessity (and all the efforts that make it happen). But the much smaller chore of proper mental health services are not. Somehow releasing a barely improved fleet of modern cars every year is a necessity. Basic healthcare is not.
We keep seeing bubbles because we keep putting tons of effort into ventures that benefit fewer and fewer people. We "fixed" things after the last bubble, but people are still becoming more and more disenfranchised. There's less buy-in, so a new bubble comes along of hype, the economy is getting better.... Oh wait nope cause we're letting too many people fall beside the wayside. They lose interest, quit investing, stop caring. Whatever it is.
The economy as a whole is only going to remain stable once we act more inclusively. Or we'll just keep seeing these financial bubbles, that are, IMO, really caused more by quickly getting buy in and turning things around, only for our shitty attention spans to kick in and realize 5-10 years later things are still shit in the real world.
All this extravagant bullshit we're told will improve us! Staring at this shit is important! Get pissed over headphone jacks! So we keep pushing for these bullshit things, and protecting that pipeline, which I think people are maybe realizing is just a sick joke.
