RE: Student Debt Slows Growth as Young Spend Less — NYTimes

Earlier this year there was a lot of hand wringing about why younger kids aren’t buying cars, or houses etc, and the consensus seemed to be that the financial turmoil of 2007/8, and its cavalcade of side effects was the reason, that as the economy improved, things would go back to normal. The writer, wondered, however …

“But what if these assumptions are simply wrong? What if Millennials’ aversion to car-buying isn’t a temporary side effect of the recession, but part of a permanent generational shift in tastes and spending habits? It’s a question that applies not only to cars, but to several other traditional categories of big spending—most notably, housing. And its answer has large implications for the future shape of the economy—and for the speed of recovery.”

It seems like that is exactly the case, and the big catalyst for this change is crushing Student loan debt, coupled with the credit crunch, and slow job market from the near-financial- apocalypse of 2007/8

“It is a new thing, a big social experiment that we’ve accidentally decided to engage in,” said Kevin Carey, the director of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation, a research group based in Washington. “Let’s send a whole class of people out into their professional lives with a negative net worth. Not starting at zero, but starting at a minus that is often measured in the tens of thousands of dollars. Those minus signs have psychological impact, I suspect. They might have a dollars-and-cents impact in what you can afford, too.”

What trips me out is how because of this … new ways of thinking about ownership have been spawned that have the potential to reshape our world going forward.

Car2go, zipcar, airbnb, uber, Spotify, rdio … millenials aren’t buying to own any more, they’re renting/sharing and the ramifications of this could be massive.

In the end, its really just amazing how the world seems to undergo these seismic changes while nobody is paying attention, and then, just like that … everything changes.

Also Read: The Cheapest Generation 

Watching this 60 minutes episode (scroll to end of post) got my mind running in a hundred different directions. Its clear to me now that the future of software is Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning. In the future, people aren’t going to just want the software we’re churning out right now. They’re going to want software that learns their preferences and adjusts to their needs.

Manually set my alarm before I go to bed? pffft, the ios alarm app in 2020 will monitor the time you went to bed and use your past behavior to know that you need to be up in 4 hours.

The other thing that I realized is that the American economy is slowly moving to a phase where high skilled jobs will make up most of the job market. These jobs will be highly paid, but will also have to be highly taxed to support the rest of the country that simply will not have work.

We live in interesting times

Old but Good

Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the governmentIf you’ve stayed with friends who live in European cities, you’ve probably had an experience like this: You hop onto their WiFi or wired internet connection and realize it’s really fast. Way faster than the one that you have at home.

via Engadget