I’m sure this whole article comes as a shock to nobody, but it’s nice to see it recognised like this.
caught in an economic perfect storm
It’s nobody’s fault, just economic weather. Just bad luck. Nothing to do with corporate capture of the political process whatsoever.
The phrase “perfect storm” doesn’t necessarily relate to luck, it just means many bad things have happened or are happening at the same time. Which pretty accurately describes the era millennials are living in.
The bad things did not just happen, they were conscious choices or the inevitable consequences of those choices. I’m criticising the framing of this situation by the use of the passive voice in this subhead.
The bad things did not just happen, they were conscious choices or the inevitable consequences of those choices.
Which the authors then go on to explain in further detail, following the introduction. It’s right there in the sentence you cherrypicked that phrase out from:
An analysis of five factors — housing, healthcare, debt, tax, and income — reveals the age group is caught in a perfect economic storm.
Here’s my improved version:
An analysis of policy, formed by corporate interests and pushed upon the public in the 1980s, shows how it deprived the current crop of young adults of social housing, under-invested in public healthcare, enabled predatory lending practices, distorted the tax system so that a disproportionate amount fell upon the lowest three deciles of tax payers and hobbled unions while outsourcing manufacturing to the developing world causing earnings to plummet.
Aaaaaaaaand breathe!
Yeah, I know, wrong meeting.
Nah good on you, fight the good fight. It wasn’t series of mistakes it was deliberate policy choices. Policy choices that show no sign of being changed. Capitalism has eaten democracy from the inside out, it will continue dancing around inside is skin till we see it for what it is.
Fuck this was depressing to read. Validating though.
Ya wanna know what’s even better? Most of the stats in this piece use averages. Averages are basically fake news when wealth inequality explodes, which it has over the last 30 years — if the top 1 million Australians have $1M, but the other 23 million Australians have $0, the “average Australian” has approx $42k — the situation is significantly more dire than this analysis makes it appear.
Take this article that focuses on the growth in the top 5-20%, even though the richest 1%, 0.1%, and 0.01% have made much larger gains relative to each other.
Yep. Lays it out pretty clearly.
30 years ago was 1994, I was 25, 2 years into moving to a new city with a job but no place to live. I was making $8.60 an hour and paid $300 a month in rent. had a room-mate in a 2 bedroom apartment.
Given that I was making more than that as a teenager earlier than this, I assume you are not in Australia. I was still living with my parents 30 years ago. When I moved out in 1996, I was making $405 per week and my rent for a basic fully-furnished two bedroom apartment was $105/week.
There’s an apartment in the same building for rent right now (not furnished) at $550/week.
I was 19, 5.25 an hour. Roomed with two family members and all of it went to rent. Also, 99. Whoppers, and gas was 1.19 at Arco.
“I’m not even close … and it sort of feels like I’m trapped there.”
You and me both, buddy. I don’t even know what I’m working towards anymore, because everything seems so far out of reach. I’m to the point that I don’t let the gov’t automatically take anything from my paycheck, so come tax time I can wait until the last minute to pay, because who knows when the revolution will happen? I’m not trying to pay taxes to some bloated bureaucracy on deaths door. I’ll wait to see if it’s even still around first.
Unless you have children, my take is that you shouldn’t be “working towards” anything. The best years of your life are frontloaded, when you are healthy and can actually do and see things. This whole concept of slaving away in a 9 to 5 until your 60s so you can own a house you die in a decade or two later just seems completely the wrong way to go about life.
That’s not to say the situation isn’t difficult for younger generations but I think a big part of that difficulty comes from trying to live the same life as our parents and grandparents did. Maybe we should just reject that altogether and reframe our understanding of what life is supposed to be.
It’s enough to make you begin to wonder if accelerationism is a viable strategy - things don’t seem set to meaningfully improve any time soon…
Spoken like someone who is certain that they won’t be the first to suffer and die.
Accelerationism leads to a bunch of good people dying, when we need all hands on deck to fix this broken mess. Especially the people who have the most experience with making something work from almost nothing, and experience in being part of a community. Accelerationism also only keeps around those who are willing to exploit others to get ahead. And then humanity starts the next dark age with neo-feudal warlords and the people who survived as their pawns.
Humans don’t even have collectively long enough memory to not repeat the evils of the Holocaust within living memory of its victims, let alone maintain any theoretical level of post-collapse enlightenment. Good thing I’ll be one of the first to die!
Accelerationist don’t have the monopoly on good people dying. Good people are dying now. The question is this; given our current back side of all aspects of life, is the current path more or less harmful than radical change? Do you see the current system as capable of the necessary systemic change needed to prevent the furtherance of harm in the future, let alone the current rate of attrition? If not then what else could be proposed? I would prefer to be able to vote solutions into existence.
Good people are indeed dying now, which begs the question of why we would double down on it with accelerationism in the hope that the remaining humans have a change of heart somewhere along the way. That’s the stuff of movie plot lines, not reality.
Some form of radical change is necessary, definitely. But doing more of the current system isn’t going to lead to better outcomes. It leads to the same outcome, just faster.
What else do we have? There have been multiple revolutions and regime changes in human history of varying success and violence. We could learn from some of those what makes a revolution more helpful or harmful and attempt to replicate that. It’s worth a shot before we just accept the sacrifice of society’s most vulnerable in the hopes it somehow increases empathy among those who were always fine with those people suffering.
Revolution is what i see in the future as well. Accelerationists’s goal seems to be to put pressure on the situation. This pressure would force unrest that either results in large systemic change wile the population has at least a little sway left over the government, or failing that, a Revolution. The whole point is to attempt to boil the frog too fast and to get it to jump out of the pot.
The main fear is that with our current rate of decline, the push to Revolution would take so long that by the time people realize what is happening, they will have no say in the political process, and Revolution is that much harder.
But either way it seems there is no escape from the harm to the world’s most vulnerable, i just want to minimize it as much as possible. And i don’t trust the process to enact needed change.
Though i still vote democrat because this thought saddens me and i still have a little hope left.
