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.
“Capture”. Did no one study the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries?
The capitalist class revolted against the aristocracy and built new systems of government to benefit them. That is the origin of the modern state and capitalism.
The state as we know it has always been just a tool of the capitalist class to control all other classes. That’s what the state is, a tool of class control.
I’m from the UK. We still have a monarch and an aristocracy, as well as a capitalist class. Even worse: they interbreed.
You’re from the UK and you don’t know about the English Revolution…? Where a constitutional monarchy was instituted, and the capitalists came into power?
Forgive my ignorance, but which event of the 17th century would you classify as a burgeois revolution? Late 18th century of course, even many during the 19th century, but i just can’t remember any such event from the 1600s
The first one, the English Revolution from around the 1640s to the 1660s?
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’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.
