Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Preethi Lodha mapped out how each generation of Americans spend their money, on average.
Key Takeaways
Last year the average American spent around $60,000. The average member of Gen Z spent the least ($41,636) and the average Gen X-er spent the most ($83,357).
All the generations have one thing in common: they’ve all spent more than 30 percent of their annual spend on housing, whereas no generation has spent more than six percent of its annual spend on entertainment.
If you’re looking for the best place to retire, you might want to break out the atlas: The United States slipped even further down the list in a new ranking.
Four-decade-high inflation, a volatile stock market and ballooning public debt are among the factors threatening the economic security of retirees, according to the 2022 Natixis Investment Managers Global Retirement Index. The index evaluates 18 metrics grouped into four categories: health, finances in retirement, quality of life and material well-being.
What’s the best place to retire?
Norway climbed up from No. 3 to claim the top spot in the analysis of 44 developed economies, although the Scandinavian country is no stranger to the top of this list: When the index was first published in 2012, Norway topped it back then, too. Switzerland retained its second-place spot from 2021, and Iceland rounded out the top three.
The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is often credited with saying that “Paradise is a library.” He must not have meant a downtown public library, circa 8 p.m. Such places, like most communal spheres, can be a challenge to oversee.
Some people treat them like a sort of roomless hotel, sleeping in chairs and bathing in restrooms. I used to watch a man who looked like the famous woodcut of Blackbeard the Pirate ride the escalator of my three-story library up, down, up, down. For hours. Carrying a duffel bag. He never bothered anyone, so our security officers left him alone. (Can’t say the same for the lady of the evening who was meeting clients in the stairwell.)
Then there are the questions from believers in Qanon. Election deniers. Sovereign citizens. The woman who ranted about the “news” that the World Health Organization was going to “force a vote to allow them to take over the U.S. and force a lockdown like China.” (If WHO had that kind of power, why bother with a vote?)
The man who asked me how he and a few of his buddies could get into the governor’s office to “remove him” over pandemic closures. (Would that all insurrectionists did such thorough research!) Declinism is the feeling that everything is getting harder, scarier, and weirder, and a lot of people seem to have it.
Work in a library, I want to tell them, and you’ll learn what weird is.
Tarryn Mento/KPBS Downtown San Diego’s public library is shown in this undated image.
“I should say, it doesn’t stop with just banning books. What we’re seeing across the country is they’re banning voices, modern voices, librarians, teachers,” said Patrick Stewart, CEO of the San Diego Public Library Foundation. “It’s gone beyond just the banning of a book, or a certain piece of literature or textbook.”
Stewart joined San Diego Public Library director Misty Jones on Midday Edition Monday to talk about their reaction to the report’s findings.
“It’s disheartening,” Jones said. “It is seeing just the increase in the number not only of challenges, but the extent and the links to what people are going for, these challenges going before school boards, the personal attacks on librarians and teachers for doing their job.”
Many of the books being targeted involve topics on race and sexuality.
“We’re the only industry where half of the workforce has to rely on a customer’s goodwill”
By Maggie Hennessy, Published September 18, 2022 5:30PM (EDT)
The staff at Lazy Betty at work (Andrew Thomas Lee)
Even though he came up in professional kitchens starting as a line cook, Ron Hsu didn’t internalize the implicit inequity and racism of the tipped wage system until he became a restaurant owner, in 2019. The Atlanta-based chef/owner of award-winning tasting menu restaurant Lazy Betty, along with Asian-Southern Juniper Cafe and the forthcoming chef-driven pizzeria Humble Pie decided instead to institute the federal minimum wage and a service-charge model at his restaurants.
It’s come with pushback — not just from some customers but from waitstaff reluctant to embrace change or loath to face confrontation with skeptical consumers. But he’s determined to be part of the — oft-maddeningly slow — change in what he sees as a deeply problematic system.
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