Are you a Dink, Alice or Henry? How social mobility is different for today’s young people
When your parents were in their 20s and 30s, they probably had a job, a house and financial security. A generation later, you get a variety of food they could not have imagined, low-cost air travel and a smartphone more powerful than the fastest supercomputers of the 1990s.
This new reality is leading to the resurgence of a different kind of class identification for young people. Middle class doesn’t look like it used to. Instead, you may consider yourself a “Dink” or a “Henry”.
Standing for “dual income and no kids”, Dink was coined in the 1980s to reflect the lifestyle of couples who chose the joys of technology, travel and restaurants over raising a family. As fertility rates fall worldwide, the term is making a comeback, with TikTok users showing off a life of boutique workouts, fancy brunches and wanderlust.
A woman born in England or Wales in 2007 is projected to have her first child at age 35 and to have an average of 1.52 children, compared with 2.04 for her mother’s generation.
The Dink lifestyle is attractive to some: more money and time for yourselves. But on the salary of an average UK household, you still won’t be able to buy an average house.
Why does it seem so much harder now? It’s not that this generation is poorer: on average, full-time employees between 18 and 21 years old make £499 a week. It rises fast: for those aged 22-29 the figure is £648, and £805 for 30-39.
For all age groups, salaries have barely increased since 2008, once you control for the fact that prices have risen by a lot. Still, compared with someone who entered the workforce 25 years ago, you will earn, on average, about 15% more even when adjusting for prices.
The key is that, while you earn more than your parents and grandparents, what’s cheap and what’s expensive has completely flipped.
No one’s 20s and 30s look the same. You might be saving for a mortgage or just struggling to pay rent. You could be swiping dating apps, or trying to understand childcare. No matter your current challenges, our Quarter Life series has articles to share in the group chat, or just to remind you that you’re not alone.
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There are two kinds of things money can buy. There are things available only in fixed quantities – housing in a desirable location, a person’s time or social status. Then, there are things that technology can now produce in near-infinite quantities – a huge TV set, high-speed internet on a phone, or fresh fruits and vegetables from the other side of the world.
Compared with previous generations, you’re only richer in the latter. Since 2000, UK house prices have increased twice as fast as everything else. The share of young Brits who own their homes is 25% lower than in 1990. This might partly explain Dink logic – if you don’t have hope of affording a home, why not spend more on your lifestyle?
The tax brackets that define you
In this world where buying a house without family help has become the new luxury, the British tax system provides a handy guide of where you belong. Here’s how the figures break down.
You might not be a Dink, but an “Alice” – “asset-limited, income-constrained, employed” – part of the working poor who can’t even dream of saving for a deposit. Nearly 3 million people in the UK are working and receiving Universal Credit.
But once you start earning more than £684 a month, you hit the first trap of the tax system. For every additional £1 you earn from working, you lose 55p from the benefits you receive – so in effect, you only keep 45p up to the point where the amount of benefit you receive is zero.
If you escape this first trap and earn more, you may be able to afford a small house, or one in a cheaper region. Just not the same kind of place someone doing your job could buy 30 years ago.
If you climb up the income ladder, you’ll likely hit the second trap and become a Henry – “high earner, not rich yet”.
The moment you become part of the roughly 2 million taxpayers who earn £100,000 a year, your marginal tax rate becomes 60% – which means for each additional £1 you get, you only keep 40p. If you are young and went to university, you also pay an extra 9% on student loan repayment, meaning you only keep 31p for each additional £1.
And that’s only if you stay a Dink (or the single-equivalent Sink). If you have kids, you may actually lose money when you earn more, because you will lose the right to free childcare (you lost your child benefits back at £60,000). You may prefer to be a Dinkwad – a “Dink with a dog”.
The traditional middle class was defined by homeownership and financial security, both things you could achieve through professional work. What unites today’s Henrys, Alices and Dinks is they can enjoy consumption levels their parents in the same social class would never have imagined, but can’t buy the same house as them.
The solution to this is simple economics, but complex politics: if you want cheaper houses, you must build more of them. That means building in less desirable locations, turning individual houses into flats, or overcoming opposition from older homeowners who often resist new housing developments in their neighbourhoods.
So, when your judgmental uncle remarks that “if you ate fewer avocados and lattes, you’d be able to buy a house just like I did”, you may want to explain how the relative prices of an avocado and a house have changed over time. If you’re not saving for a deposit, buying avocados may simply be the most rational thing to do.
Renaud Foucart does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.