Why Old People Think Young People are Spoiled

There is a great series of posts over at A (Budding) Sociologist’s Commonplace Book that attempts to answer the question of why older folks think everyone younger than themselves is spoiled (part 2).

The author, a PhD student and blogger at The Panhandler’s Guide breaks it down into four economic reasons: Inflation ($900 in 1974 is worth $3,892 today), substitution (kids today buy phones, but they also don’t buy records), diffusion (as a technology becomes more mass the inflation-adjusted price declines) and increasing standards (“Increasing standards mean that the utility of many goods and services is constantly decreasing”).

July 1, 2009