It's ironic that this report was put out by the AFL-CIO, an organization who has done as much as anyone to preclude the movement of younger workers into the workforce (via union seniority policies, minimum wage laws, etc.).

Let's think logically about this for a second. If the presence of minimum wage laws prevents a young person from moving out, then a young person should be able to move out on a salary less than the present day minimum wage.

Is that true? Not in my hood.

You're not going back far enough.

The problem with minimum wage laws is that they precludes marginal young workers from getting job experience that would help them build the skills and references needed to get better jobs. There is plenty of research showing that every time the minimum wage goes up, teenage unemployment goes up disproportionately.

Well, in that vein you would also have to include child labor laws, compulsory education and all the other ways that 25 has become the new 15. Adulthood came a lot sooner 100 years ago.

But I'm curious, what's wrong with family cohabitation past 18? Its virtues have made it the norm across much of the world and throughout history. Modern America is a but of an outlier here ("in a good way", right? I know I know, please spare the formulaic response).

Riiight. There is always an explanation. So the theory is someone is going to hire a teenager for less than minimum wage to begin with but then will give them wonderful opportunities later on. Or better yet, someone working for less than min wage will use that on their resume to great effect.

It would be great if we all lived in the world of conservative economists.

You may take it for granted, but a major trait that employers look for is simple employability: someone that can show up on time, not cause problems, not throw attitude, and not steal from the company. I'll take someone who spent three summers lifeguarding for the same company over someone with no work experience any day.

Pretend that starting a company wasn't an option for you. I guarantee there is some minimum wage level that would have knocked out the bottom rung in your career ladder.

TBH, my career ladder didn't start until I was offered a part-time credit+pay position by my programming teacher in year 2 of community college.

Before that, I was making 126% minimum wage at my first job (movie theater). So, I suppose if minimum wage had been higher I wouldn't have wasted three years of my life cleaning up used condoms and dirty diapers from the floor of a theater.

But it probably wouldn't have kept me from being offered the (mostly credit) 3-month development project at the school I was going to. And arguably, that set up my career more than anything.

> So the theory is someone is going to hire a teenager for less than minimum wage to begin with but then will give them wonderful opportunities later on.

It's a lot like the "theory" that someone fresh out of college becomes more valuable after a couple of years of experience. Or, at the very least, has demonstrated how she is better than the typical college grad.

Is hristov a counter-example to these theories? Has his/her actual or percieved value been completely constant over time, regardless of how s\he's spent that time?

If it has, why is it absurd to think that time spent working might have some effect on one's value as a worker? Or is it that teenagers are different?

Exactly....it's not like the employer wants to be nice and give you more money, it's that they have to, or someone else will.

Only because,of course, employers would rather build their $300,000 homes than give a young person a break in life. Which wasn't always the case. Greed only took over about 25-30 years ago. Ever since, real wages have stagnated or fallen for the great majority of Americans.

You're blaming the victim.

"Greed only took over about 25-30 years ago."

To which my only response can be, "bwuh?"

What, was there some sort of virus that ran through the population and rewrote all our genomes so that we're suddenly selfish?

Greed predates humanity. I mean that literally. For any definition of "humanity". All life forms are greedy. They have to be, to survive competition with all the other greedy life forms. If something changed 25-30 years ago, it wasn't the amount of greed in the world.

By "took over" of course, I meant "assimilated", not "came into existance." Those of us old enough to remember what this country was like 40 years ago know what I mean. Unless they're in denial about the stagnation of wages and the huge concentration of wealth at the top

The idea of being selfish as something good for society is relatively new, tho.

Are you absolutely confident of that assertion? The AFL-CIO and unions in general have been severely and structurally limited in their impact on industrial policy since the 1980's at least. The impacts of globalisation, deskilling, outsourcing, and the deliberate policy of deindustrialising the american economy have more to do with it.

Your comment comes off as somewhat Dickensian, blaming a man being savaged by thugs for not feeding the starving orphan at the curb.

I don't dismiss that there are other large forces at work; I simply mean that the AFL-CIO, through the policies they've promoted and their massive lobbying, has done as much as any one other person or group.

And while the impact of private sector unions may have waned a bit after 1980, the growing impact of public employee unions has more than covered the difference.

I know of many people who live at home with their parents out of necessity (I did for a little while after college). I also know people who live at home with their parents with the intention of saving up money to put a down payment on a house (a few have done that). But I also know some people who have spent themselves into debt even while working and living at home, guaranteeing that they won't be leaving any time soon.

I don't think it's possible right now for the average person to do what our parents or grandparents typically did (get married, buy a house, have 2.5 kids, and send them to college) at as early an age as they did.

All of these life events have become insanely expensive by our parents' standards:

Marriage: avg. wedding cost in the US is now about 30k, avg. ring is about 5k. (I'm not saying this makes sense, I'm just saying this is where money is allocated.)

House: avg. housing costs are still up over historical norms and anyone who was able to buy their first house in the last few years is probably upside down on payments.

Kids: More expensive than they used to be. All signs point to dramatically increased costs across the board: health insurance, clothing, education, activities, and food.

College: College prices have bubbled as much as housing and the cost of a degree has nearly doubled in 15 years. By the time your kids take the plunge, it may have doubled again.

And this is on top of individuals carrying higher levels of debt from all of these events later into their lives even while real world wages have stagnated.

All indications point to jobs trickling back into the economy more slowly than they left. My only hope is that a good portion of those who are stuck at home are working on ways to extricate themselves (startups, consulting, freelancing, etc.).

Expense is just an excuse to avoid commitment in most cases.

You think your parents started out with 2 cars, a nice house, and college funds all wrapped up and ready to go? I know mine didn't. In most cases, those people have worked hard for years to earn that kind of lifestyle. A lot of the coming generations are accustomed to it and expect it, without realizing all of the time and work their parents invested to earn that.

My parents moved into a small apartment when they got married. They worked to save up for a down payment on a home. They had bought one by the time I was born (4 years after their marriage), and they continued to save to provide all of the luxuries that my siblings and I enjoyed as we grew up.

But they didn't use it as an excuse to put off the family.

My wife and I shared an apartment with another couple when we first got married. It sucked, but we did what we had to do, and we were happier to be together than to put it off and stay at our parents' houses alone just because we couldn't afford a spacious living condition.

You don't have to spend 30k on a wedding. My wife and I got married for less than $200, and our rings were under $50.

You don't have to have your own house. Apartments work just as well, and have less general expense.

You don't have to send your kids to college. They can work to get there -- there are plenty of options for that, and they may not even have to go to college. I dropped out of high school and my last full-time job paid me a salary of $65,000; not bad for a 21-year-old, imo.

Plenty of people get by with their kids on $10-$15/hr or less. It's possible, you just can't be demanding and you can't nourish entitlement. Accept that you won't be able to buy that $300,000 house right away and move on with your life. Don't put off love for convenience; that trade will rob you blind.

> You think your parents started out with 2 cars, a nice house, and college funds all wrapped up and ready to go? I know mine didn't. In most cases, those people have worked hard for years to earn that kind of lifestyle. A lot of the coming generations are accustomed to it and expect it, without realizing all of the time and work their parents invested to earn that.

It doesn't help if the parents don't really do a good job of instilling in their kids what they have gone through in their life. If all they tell their kids about their life are a few choice bits here and there, then it's little wonder that their kids don't have a clue that their parents were sometimes in dire straits for cash or food before working their way up to where they are today.

> You don't have to spend 30k on a wedding. My wife and I got married for less than $200, and our rings were under $50.

My wife and I were able to do ~$5k for a wedding for ~50 people, which included a banquet at a nice Chinese restaurant (There was so much food that people were taking food home, they added an additional course to the meal at no charge, and let us bring our own alcohol even though we technically needed to get some expensive license to do so). And ~$3k of it was just for the banquet.

But I've known people that go overboard with weddings. One wedding we were invited to was in the Caribbean on a cruise. If we wanted to attend we would have had to purchase our own way on a 7-day cruise. (Apparently the service was going to be on some small island in the middle of the cruise) I can't imagine how much that must have cost. My wife also had a co-worker whose fiance broke up with him because they weren't going to be able to immediately move into a nice house/picket fence/etc when they were married because he ended up losing his job. People put too much relevance on money and possessions.

I think that might end up being good advice for many people. I, however, am not ready to embark on that journey just yet. :-)

I think one of the reasons the current situation bothers me so much is that it violates a basic sense of fairness. I cofounded a startup so I'm used to risk and uncertainty, but most of the people I know wouldn't be cut out for it. They play by the rules and expect to have the modest upward trajectory that a life like that would bring.

I know a young couple like you and your wife who have gone into debt to go to college, gone further into debt to go to grad school, and then gone into more modest debt to get married because of the expectation that there would be upward mobility from these expenditures. Now between the two of them, they're 400k in debt and living at home. That wasn't really something that came in the brochure. Now of course that always was a real possibility, and past performance doesn't guarantee future returns, but it was supposed to be different.

I truly feel bad for the average "play by the rules" types who have been raised with the expectation that if you do the right things, the right things will happen. Many of them now are saddled with the debt levels that demand that they put off the choices you were luckily able to make.

"...34 percent of workers under 35 live with their parents for financial reasons"

I'd like to see "workers under 35" defined a bit more precisely. Is it literally "anyone under the age of 35 who holds a job", which would include teenagers working at McDonald's and (quite unsurprisingly) living with their parents?

This is exactly what I was thinking. 23-30 would be a much more appropriate percentage. Many students would even still call their parent's house "home" until they graduate and move on to "real" jobs.

I am considering moving back in with my parents right now, but it'll be a two or three month transitory stay until we can establish a regular cashflow (I quit my job recently and am starting my own business ... it's gaining clients, but they take a while to pay, and my wife is applying for part-time jobs). I don't see a problem with this. I don't think there's necessarily an issue with living with your parents after 18 or 21 or whatever (I'm 21).

I think it's kind of a wasteful philosophy to assume that everyone should have their own independent piece of land. If both parties are content to stay under the same roof, what's the problem?

I do think that we should think about other ways to compel maturity, though. For at least the last twenty years, college has been a means of extending adolescence. We need to address the problems there that teach kids to fear love and commitment (a symptom of the high divorce rate and perverted concepts on the family).

The marriage age needs to come back down to ~21-25, kids in college shouldn't be given a pass to party or live recklessly. People do what's expected of them.

"I think it's kind of a wasteful philosophy to assume that everyone should have their own independent piece of land. If both parties are content to stay under the same roof, what's the problem?"

I think that for the majority, living with parents when you are adult is a huge psychological burden. Not only the society that does not approve such lifestyle, but also the fact that an adult person must have their own personal area to which their parents do not belong (sexual life is one example).

This is possible when you live in the same space as your parents. I think it's just about keeping the relationship age appropriate.

When one is a baby, they need everything taken care of for them. Once you become a toddler, you can probably eat by yourself if someone puts it down in front of you. By the time you're 6 or 8, you can usually do fine in the house all on your own for a few hours at a time, and so on.

The main problem is when you're a teenager, I think, because you think you know everything and your parents can realize all of the stupid crap you're doing, so there's a big clash there, but once you progress through that stage, things are easier again, as long as your parents are willing to give you an appropriate amount of space.

I think moving out _can_ be important and helpful. I just think that our society is too judgmental of some who've chosen that they prefer to be under the same roof as their parents. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, as long as both parties are sensible regarding it.

>"I think that for the majority, living with parents when you are adult is a huge psychological burden."

I don't think it's universal at all. I grew up in the US with grandparents and uncle and even great-grand parents at home, and it was great.

Here in Taiwan, tons of people live in extended family homes, too. For the most part, it seems good for everyone involved. Grandma and grandpa can help watch the kids until the parents get home, so the parents don't feel so overwhelmed, the grandparents feel useful and get to enjoy family life, and the kids get more support... especially if there's also a younger auntie or uncle (with or without a live-in gf) there, too.

It's a good system.

I think it depends on the parents. I know people that have parents that get drunk with them/smoke weed with them. On the other hand, there are parents that feel the need to treat their 30-year old children like 3-year-olds and second-guess every move that they make; ready to talk down at them with 'advice.'

If your parents are going to treat you like a child and/or you don't have an open enough relationship with them to feel comfortable bring home a girlfriend / having sex with your wife, then there will be inevitable conflicts.

I agree that it depends, however I don't think that it is that easy. Even if you have a good, open relationship with your parents what about your wife/girlfriend or friends? Will they be comfortable to get drunk at your place with your mom around or to have sex with you when your mom is sleeping in the next room?

My wife and did the same thing last year; we're both in our thirties. We moved in with my mom in order to save money for a down-payment on a new house. We both worked our tails off, saved the needed cash in 4 months, and then moved out.

We're an easy-going bunch, but those were a challenging four months. I want to believe that our problems had cultural causes-- that we would have been less tense if we were a bunch of Italians who had grown up living with extended family. I'd like that.

If you can do it without incurring too much friction between family members, then I heartily recommend it. There's simply no other way to save so much money in so little time.

In many countries other than the US (Japan for instance), there is no such compulsion for young adults to move out of their family homes. Indeed, in some cultures moving out of ones family home as a young adult is as taboo as not moving out is here.

A lower marriage age means people will have fewer relationships before marriage, which in my opinion, would lead to more unhappy marriages. Less data usually leads to less sound decisions, and I don't see why marriage would be an exception.

On the other hand, it seems that limiting choices limits buyer's remorse.

I think it depends on your personality type. For me, it'd be more like buying some gadget, then seeing the parade of possibly nicer alternatives that come out in the months that follow...

I get along great with my family, and love them very much. However I moved out when I was 16 and have lived on my own since. I have an independent nature and it's important to me to support myself and provide for myself as much as I'm able. If I had to, I could and would move home, but if there was an option to be supporting myself, I'd take it.

You know, that isn't a problem. My dad and my mum lived at home in Europe for quite a while, while they were finishing degrees and all that. It seems to be a North American thing to move out when you're not even finished university.

The U.S. is slowly (and inevitably) becoming Europe, where living with parents while in your 30s is not abnormal.

That's a pretty broad generalization of a continent with a lot of variation in cultural patterns, economics of housing markets, structure of workforces, etc. Here are some numbers, from 1994, but should give an illustration of the range:

    Share of those at age 25-29 still living in parent's home, %
                      Men   Women
    France            22.5  10.3 
    Germany           28.8  12.7 
    Great Britain     20.8  10.8 
    Spain             64.8  47.6 
    Greece            62.6  32.1 
    Italy             66.0  44.1

Source: http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/spru/research/nordic/gerdem.pdf - it quotes source as EUROSTAT Data by Fernandez-Cordon 1997, itself quoted by Lauterbach and Lüscher 1999, p.430:

Lauterbach, Wolfgang and Kurt Lüscher (1999), ’Wer sind die Spätauszieher? Oder: Herkunftsfamilie, Wohnumfeld und die Gründung eines eigenen Haushalts. Eine empirische Untersuchung über das Alter bei der Haushaltsgründung’, in Zeitschrift für Bevölkerungswissenschaft 24 (4), 425-448.

This is fascinating, thank you. I've been told a lot of the issues surrounding the boomerang generation in Italy has to do with policies that are defensive of older employees, thus making it more difficult for young adults to find jobs.

I was interested in correlating these numbers with birth rates, as I knew Italy had among Europe's lowest and France had among the highest. But the results are disappointing (or maybe not, I'm not a statistician). FWIW, the amended table is below, using numbers from the CIA World Factbook.

    Share of those at age 25-29 still living in parent's home, %;
    birth rate per thousand
                      Men   Women Birth Rate
    France            22.5  10.3  12.57
    Germany           28.8  12.7  8.18
    Great Britain     20.8  10.8  10.65 (for the UK)
    Spain             64.8  47.6  9.72
    Greece            62.6  32.1  9.45
    Italy             66.0  44.1  8.18

Interesting, the countries in the sun belt of Europe: Spain, Greece and Italy have the highest live at home rates, they also have some pretty pricey real estate due to demand from Germany, the UK, and other northern Europeans.

I guess it's more likely about the culture and family values rather than the economic facts when it comes to countries those called to have meditterenean culture (Spain, Greece, Italy and a bunch more). ie. in Turkey a guy is simply not expected to move out until marriage.

Do you have any statistics of how many European young people live with their parents? I am interested in 20-25 years age range.

I am asking because I have a bunch of friends in Europe and none of them lives with parents. As far as I can tell, their social programs make it much easier to live on their own than, for example, in my home country (Uzbekistan).

"I am asking because I have a bunch of friends in Europe and none of them lives with parents. As far as I can tell, their social programs make it much easier to live on their own than, for example, in my home country (Uzbekistan)."

Why do we need social programs to live on our own? I am 28 and have been on my own since I got out of college. I was able to find a job within 6 months of graduating that paid me enough to move out (which isn't that expensive in most parts of the US).

I think the reason many people in their 20s can't move out is because of credit card debt. I have so many friends that are thousands of dollars in debt..because they decided they needed the latest gadgets.

What we need is for more people to take personal responsibility.

Because it is really helpful for a young person to know that you are protected in case of serious illness, that if you want to have kids, they will be socially protected which means that they will be able to get good education, health care, educational trips and so on without you paying ridiculous premiums, fees and getting into huge debt.

It is also really nice to know that the government will take good care of your parents after their retirement. That they will be able to pay bills, travel, get medicare, etc.

When this basic stuff figured out, young people feel safe.

That said, there is another interesting problem here: when young people feel safe they may become too lazy. And when people get too lazy, society starts to stagnate which is, as far as I understand, a huge problem in some european countries. But that's a completely different thing to discuss.

It's nice when you are born on second base... Unfortunately, you think it means you hit a double.

I have a friend who lived off of pell grants and loans to make it through a degree. He did not have the aptitude for math or science, and came from a very poor family (his father, at 80, still works at a Burger King.) He did not have connections from his family. He did not have any of the life lessons on how to survive in a middle class system.

He ended up graduating, and could not find a job of any sort. It's quite possible, had he grown up white, straight, and middle class, that he would have been fine.

He tried to go back to school, thinking that this would be the answer. (After all, it delayed loan payback.) In the meantime, he did what he was able to do: sell drugs. He went to graduate school and sold drugs because he couldn't gather the money to move, he couldn't get a job, and he didn't have options that we with privilege do.

It's fun to laugh at the whiny white kids who rack up college credit cards and have to stay at home, but personal responsibility only goes so far.

(PS -- my friend now has a drug conviction, a risk he ran because of one of the choices he made to survive. He now has even fewer choices.)

> I have a friend who lived off of pell grants and loans to make it through a degree. He did not have the aptitude for math or science

Then why did he go to college? Why didn't he work and go to a community college?

Making excuses for him only allows him a pass for personal responsibility, as if selling drugs was his only option -- ha!

Considering that he was unable to get a job after a full college degree, how much do you think a community college would have helped?

He Couldn't Get A Job. The path that he had been told was that education was the key to getting out of the ghetto. He Still Couldn't Get A Job and now he is in a worse position than when he started.

But we largely live in a consumer society where we are constantly bombarded with messages to 'buy! buy! buy!' Is it any wonder that lots of people fall for the messages? Especially when you have entire companies full of marketing people all trying to figure out a way to convince you that you need their clients' products.

One can't generalize "European" on this. The difference between, say, Norway and Portugal is colossal.

In the same way that you can't generalize 'US Of A' on anything either. East Coast vs West Coast vs Middle America can vary wildly on different topics.

True, but the USA, unlike Europe, is considered a single nation-state. In European countries there are differences within national borders as well, e.g. northern part of Italy vs Sicily. That said there are definitely great commonalities in Europe that can be generalized, my point was that this metric isn't one of them.

And I am actually surprised with the quoted 1/3rd figure for the USA. Might be true but not what I'd expect from my outsiders insight into American culture.

My bad. I was talking about basically about Germany and Hungary.

Well, social programs can be a factor in that, but IMHO most of the difference is cultural. In Southern Europe, large, multi-generation households are traditional, much less so in the North.

It doesn't make sense to generalize in that way. It may be true for Spain but it is not true for most European nations.

That's the most ignorant comment I have read in a long time. You have never been to Scandinavia, I presume. Newsflash: Europe is more than Italy and Spain. Most people in Germany and Scandinavia, for instance, leave their parents' home at 18.

Intresting note from the study: "...young people with college experience are significantly more likely to have Facebook accounts than non-college respondents, and significantly less likely to have MySpace accounts. It’s also more common for young people with college experience to rely on Web-based media for their news."

> "...young people with college experience are significantly more likely to have Facebook accounts than non-college respondents, and significantly less likely to have MySpace accounts. It’s also more common for young people with college experience to rely on Web-based media for their news."

Why is that interesting? Most people outside of college were introduced to social networking through MySpace. Most people inside of college were introduced to social networking through Facebook (when Facebook started out you needed to have a .edu email address to register; it was for university students only). Most people that have college experience probably lived in a dorm for some length of time, where they had relatively cheap, fast internet service; therefore they are more likely to be using the internet to take care of things like getting their news.

I don't think that you really need a study to get this information, though real-world data never hurts.

It's interesting because it's, as you said, real-world data. Where I live facebook wasn't available nor popular during the ".edu only"-era. Here Internet access is cheap and fast for most people so I would also imagine college attendees get more of their news from newspapers and other non-based source then non-college attendees, because of the academic focus at college.

this is true for I, yes

Where do you live?

It's interesting for me to hear this kind of stuff since I live in Tulsa Oklahoma. Nearly all my friends, single or married, have bought their own homes in the last couple years. My wife and I rent but only because we would rather save up to build our own house outside of the city.

I have a feeling that a lot of this 'lost Generation' stuff stems from people who live on the east and west coasts but that may just be my bias. Anybody else have an insight?

I'm sure that this affects places like Tulsa too. It just happens to a small extent than places with larger populations and/or your group of friends selectively excludes people that are likely to be in this sort of situation.

That's probably true, good observation.

Columbus, Ohio.

22. I lived at home during college to try and save some loot.

I think that's a complete overgeneralization. People who are just starting out didn't cause the current economic crisis or the housing bubble. Neither did they foot the bill for over-consumption for the last twenty years. Some may have been raised with the expectation for nicer things, but I don't actually see how that would be their fault.

One of my favorite things about HN is how often I read a well-articulated and reasonable response to a nutjob rant, rather than a response in kind. Kudos and a vote up to you, sir.

While I don't agree with the way bumbunnies put it (and certainly not with the liberal vs. conservative characterization) I think he has a point in that we let our list of "basic needs" grow to include a lot of overpriced, unnecessary stuff like iPhones and $4 coffee.

A major part of the reason many of us work too much and are in too much debt has to do with consuming crap we don't need. The example brought in another comment here of a $30k wedding & $5k ring demonstrates that perfectly.

This assertion has been made for the past 1000 years, and most likely will continue to be made for the next 1000 as well.