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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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I work with college students and unfortunately regardless of the cause this seems to be true. Capitalism finally got its perfect consumer.
I have been reading the "children are getting dumber" article since grade school.
It is the Shepherd's Tone of news coverage, right up there with "rising crime rates in urban centers" and "migrant caravans are crossing the border", that reports the same tired set of manufactured concerns paired with a call to ramp up funding for profitable interventions.
The consumer with no disposable income? FFS, these toss off lines don't even make any fucking sense. You could earn more as a blue-collar day laborer 40 years ago than as an entry-level college grade today.
Why do you think so much of corporate industry has pivoted from retail sales to B2B SaaS as a profit center? Consumerism is dying. Six mega-corps passing each other the same dollar in an investor circle jerk is the future of the economy.
This generation of children are also dealing with some unprecedented events that we know are pretty bad for cognitive development. Both the advent of Covid and the regular use of certain technology in children are relatively new, and we have plenty of studies telling us they are actually delaying cognitive development.
Consumer spending has increased year over year since the 70s, just since 2020 it's increased by over 30%.
Consumer spending isn't just the stuff you want, it's also the stuff you need. Disposable income is the surplus after your mandatory deductions, like state and federal taxes. So things like groceries, rent, utilities, and your phones are all spent with "disposable income".
Secondly, more people have more access to acquire debt than ever before. The total household debt in the US is now 18.2 trillion dollars. Consumerism is not dying, it's just being funded by debt, which in late stage capitalism is the perfect consumer.
I don't want to play the "who had it harder?" game, because that's always just a war of the sob stories. But COVID is competing with Vietnam enlistment and lead/asbestos poisoning, when it comes to generational intellectual speedbumps. Nevermind the sheer dearth of educational establishments prior to the Boomer-Era buildout of high school and college campuses. I lived through the era when everyone and their kid brother was being diagnosed with a learning disability. And when weed was supposed to obliterated cognition in young people. And when video games were rotting brains. And when Cliff's Notes was destroying academia. There's always something.
I see so many "My 16-year-old is a drooling idiot" hysterical denouncements of modern education. And it's all couched in this insufferable nostolgia for a past that never existed. Long-form Op-Ed articles about how not wearing a bike helmet built character or why Montessori School turned our kids queer. Screaming tirades about the poor quality of STEM and the insidious nature of liberal arts education, combined with jerk-off sessions over Classical Education and the endless need for Teaching The Controversy and in-class debates.
Fucking awful people pushing bullshit lines that get gobbled up by whatever audience is being told "You're the smart ones, every other generation else is worthless trash".
That's. Not. Actually. True.
Fewer people have access to consumer credit today. A select subset have access to higher debt limits in an inflationary economy. And most of that debt is housing debt, not retail consumer debt, anyway.
The $18.2 trillion isn't distributed equitably. It's also overstated, given that a bunch of it is bad medical and housing debt that debt-holders refuse to write down.
I mean, Vietnam didn't happen to children...... But I get that's not your point. However, just because this generation is seeing cognitive development hurdles, does not mean others didn't face their version as well. The largest difference is things like lead have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. Their reduction marks an improvement to a situation that had been endemic for generations.
Something like COVID or the introduction of screens marks a new impediment that is being laid on top of residual ones that people in the past also dealt with.
Yes, but children had always had those impairment, diagnosis have just been better at catching disabilities.
Yes, based on the hysterics of the news, not scientific consensus.
Again, you are arguing against a straw man of your own making. My examples were based on scientific studies, not news reports.
That's not true according to the latest SCE CREDIT ACCESS SURVEY
Reported application rates for any kind of credit over the past twelve months increased in February to the highest level since October 2022, driven by an increase in credit card applications. The overall rejection rate for any kind of credit over the past twelve months decreased to 15.9 percent, the lowest level since June 2021. Rejection rates fell across all credit types.
That's always been true? Consumer credit card debt is also near an all time high, especially with how popular buyitnow pay later plans have gotten.
Never said it wasn't?
Which still counts as disposable income spending.
US soldiers killed in Vietnam were as young as 16. The average age was 23, so assume roughly half under that. The human brain isn't fully developed until 25. FFS, we didn't let people vote until 21 when the war started. And we only passed the 26th amendment in '71, directly in response to the contradiction between enlistment and elections.
I'll spot you COVID, at least for the specific cohort that hit their prime learning years during the shutdown.
But the introduction of screens? We've had screens since the 1950s. And, I gotta throw back to XKCD on this one...
The introduction of keyboards has been an enormous boon for education.
And in a largely agricultural or early industrial economy, it hasn't been a serious issue. These only truly become classified as "impairments" when they interfere with a very specific kind of intellectual labor.
So we had a four year long dip and we're finally caught back up?
There is no elasticity in these budget items.
Yes, but you aren't interfering with a child's ability to learn which is what we were discussing. At that age cognitive function that is typically affected by PTSD and high levels of stress is impulse control and rational control over your emotions.
If you cared to read the study you would have learned that they are specifying passive activities. Playing games that actively have the user engage with thought is fine, what is harmful and is a growing problem is passive participation. Where the only thing you do is just swipe to the next piece of entertainment .
If you would have bothered to read the source you would have known that this comic doesn't have anything to do what we were talking about.
Again, what does this have to do with your argument..... We do not live in an agrarian society.
No, we've been growing in debt and access to debt since the crash in 08, in 20-21 we saw a two year lull due to the pandemic. Since the end of the pandemic we have seen the most aggressive rebound in history, largely spurred by inflation and post pandemic spending.
That is not relevant to the current argument.
Drafting a kid out of high school and putting them on a 12-month tour of duty absolutely interfered with their education. Even if they never see a day of combat, they're still doing some menial work that allows their accrued educational experience to atrophy. Same as what happened during COVID.
They are specifying interpersonal communications through text.
How is this "passive"? None of it involves "swiping".
That public reporting on learning difficulties only became interesting when students were educated to the level at which the difficulty was relevant? It goes directly against the notion that the current generation is in a unique situation.
It is extremely relevant.
They never drafted anyone out of highschool. Less than 2k people either illegally volunteered to deploy or deployed with their parents permission. Which means they were choosing to end their education. It's not great either way great, but it wasn't event that happened to them, nor does it match with any sort of scale we've been discussing.
I was talking about the study I linked, not yours.
During the transition from agriculture to industry of course there weren't any interest in studies about learning difficulties, there weren't even studies..... I never claimed that idea of cognitive imparments is new, just that it was a new event that caused imparments.
Care to extrapolate?
Plenty of 18-year-olds were drafted during both Korea and Vietnam. Since deferment expired once you were no longer enrolled, this meant anyone who couldn't get into college was fair game.
And I rebutted it with my own.
So it would not be interfering with their education......as you would be out of highschool and not in college.
That had nothing to do with my claim..... Do you understand how arguments work? Or is your reading comprehension just that bad?
My claim was based on screen time with passive engagement was bad for children. Your rebuttal was a source concluding active engagement was beneficial. Those two statements do not conflict with each other.
Education doesn't end the moment you step out of school. Anyone who has held a job knows this
Childhood education does...... Which is what this conversation was about.
Do you often interact with young people?
For there to be no disposable income these corporations are somehow making money hand over fist at every level of commerce.
As a relatively younger guy (26) I do suspect that a lot of that comes from whales and whatnot IE the richer subsect. At least amongst my friends we have all started to approach old man thinks 20 bucks is a lot of money levels of stingy.
What do you spend your money on? I hear this kind of thing from lots of kids and then discover that they've normalized spending on things like door dash and subscription services as being essential.
Ignoring essentials like groceries then it's mostly random shit and games. Going over me buying antique surplus and retrotech from various sources would be kinda pointless. Though I will say I'm the least profligate of my friends since as I get older the Scottish and Autistic frugality increases.
I mean, I have a toddler, just for starters. Also, a bunch of nieces and nephews and friends with kids of various ages. Then I do some of the professional onboarding for interns and college new hires at my company.
So, Idk, for some definition of "young people", yes.
The big winners of the post-COVID economy have been B2B companies - enterprise level software firms, data center firms, government contractors, and corporate supply chain companies. Your grocery store chains and big box retailers have been comparatively flat. Car companies have underperformed. Even real estate has been anemic, at least by comparison.
To call this a consumer economy, you really have to point to the consumer end of the equation and show some kind of growth. Inflation might be rising, but retail consumption certainly hasn't.
I'm unsure of what you're arguing here. Walmart continues to grow, Doordash has healthy growth, McDonald's is still growing despite price increases, subscriptions are growing, micro transactions, cbd companies... I can literally keep going. The need to scroll and consume has hit gen Z hard and despite no "disposable income" they're somehow pushing profits up along with any other struggling person. These minor comforts are big business.
Retail consumption isn't growing? Buddy...
They like to confidently make a lot of bold claims that are very easy to refute by looking at a simple chart.
These are a handful of exceptions to a sweeping 15 year trend.
The following retailers in the United States and Canada have all either closed or announced plans to close large numbers of retail locations, since 2010, deemed a "retail apocalypse" by media, accelerated by both the increase in online shopping and by the COVID-19 pandemic.
So brick and mortar consumer retail is being killed off by online consumer retail......and you are interpreting this as all consumer retail is failing? Are you just not arguing in good faith, or are you that donkey brained?
Online shopping is retail but semantics... I guess the businesses that aren't on your list are showing profits made by ghosts then.
Amazon’s data center revenue — primarily from its Amazon Web Services (AWS) business — has grown faster than its retail sales in recent years, reflecting a strategic shift toward high-margin cloud infrastructure.
Some of this is governmental. But a big chunk is functionally a circular network of business spending. Microsoft pays Amazon a dollar. Amazon pays NVIDIA a dollar. NVIDIA pays Microsoft a dollar. Ad Infinium.
And yet their retail sales are still growing year over year at nearly 10%.
Except for at the retail venues that failed, of course.
Lol, it's like someone built an AI powered by the brains of goldfish. We were talking about Amazon. Which has been growing around 10% year over year, taking over the business of retail venues that have failed.
Yes it has. Where are you pulling this information from? The only times in the last 30 years where real retail consumption hasn't raised is after 08 and during COVID.
Virtually flat for five straight years.
Only because that short of a period does not account for the giant spike we had due to post-pandemic spending. If you took out the period of time during and directly after the pandemic the growth curve would look completely normal.
Trying to explain to a corpse that, on average, it's still got a heartbeat.
You are really bad at analogies....