Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
cnn.com
cnn.com
If the article had to be boiled down to one thing, it would be the fact that housing is too expensive. Which is frankly a derivative of the fact that for decades the US has promoted wealth building on the backs of real estate, which is unsustainable for obvious reasons.
Also, replacing work, which even if it doesn't pay as well as it did earlier, is shown to largely have a positive impact on the mental health of people, with TikTok is a horrible trade-off.
Building wealth through housing means the cost of your house goes up relative to inflation and for it to be an actual good it has to go up relative to alternative safe investments like investing in an index fund, which obviously means that for people who don't already own homes, housing is now relatively more expensive than it was for people before them...run these obvious choices for half a century and housing will naturally get prohibitively more expensive, especially when you throw in the fact that available land will only get more scarce and therefore more expensive, and zoning, and NIMBYism).
Gentrification, and backlash against it is the most obvious societal outcome of failing to keep prices under control. But it goes further
House prices drive out low income workers(gentrification). Loss of lower income families in turn raises the cost of doing business for any business that deals with unskilled or otherwise cheap labor. In turn these businesses must raise prices, which feeds back into housing prices among just about all other industries.
Meanwhile, poor citizens learn to hate new condo buildings, gnash their teeth at the Starbucks that opened in their neighborhood, and fantasize about shooting guns at nothing in the night to keep the yuppies from moving in. After all, having wealthy neighbors is demonstrably destructive to your way of life.
In fact, having an improved standard of living, can be seen as destructive. After all, if they clean up the local park and add universal pre-K, does that mean the yuppies will move in and drive up rents? These things would be obvious community wins outside the lens of housing prices.
Under the specter of housing as investment, it is in the rational interest of all renters to make their city as least attractive and unpleasant as possible to live in as possible, with as few high paying jobs and businesses, except for ideally one good job for the renter themself.
On the flip side, for homeowners, housing-as-investment incentivizes the kind of exclusivity you might otherwise only find with diehard bitcoiners. Ideally housing production should be 0 or negative. Construction and development is no longer viewed in the lens of whether it is good for the city, nor good for the people involved, but if it is good for my personal investment.
And thus, at a societal level, we have built for the young a culture of loathing wealthy companies that bring high paying jobs and the yuppies who work those job; and for the old, a culture of loathing any change, any construction or development at all, that might interfere with the life built through homeownership
We are truly not in it together, and have not been since exclusive zoning became the norm
The other alternative to gentrifying a neighborhood is moving to a LCOL city and watching prices rise there. So now Americans want to keep other Americans out of their cities.
And on top of that we are so car dependent that we can’t hope to build the kind of infill housing we need because there is literally not enough road capacity and transit options == lol.
Too bad the US has some of the worst transit construction costs in the world and tons of local opposition to boot.
If I was a betting person I would bet against the US figuring this out and guess that renting for your life will increasingly become the norm even in previously LCOL cities.
https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/gmaps_rankings.js...
Messages of hope from Gen X? What is this author smoking?
This. So-called "Generations" are nothing more than marketing names, completely arbitrary slices of time. At this point, the only purpose of generations seems to be to write media stories about generations.
There's actually a great deal of diversity within generations. Demographically speaking, kids mostly end up a lot like their parents. There are trends over time, but those trends tend to move slowly.
Marxist alienation is in da house.
A lot of it is probably just timeless inter-generational resentment but it doesn't help that boomers still haven't retired and caused a logjam.
I'm a millennial that gives their gen X brother a place to live... his life was a continuous reminder that hope [where we grew up] was misplaced.
I succeeded despite everything
(I'm just a Gen X-er continually amused by the show)
It seems like Gen-Z has come up with terms that describe basic human behaviour, and the media is running with it as some shocking new phenomena. Half assing it at your job is not a new thing.
Media propagandists serving the capitalist class invented those terms, not Gen Z. Zoomers are not in power anywhere.
>Half assing it at your job is not a new thing.
It's not "half assing" but rather "acting your wage" aka being aware enough to realize you're not paid enough to put yourself in danger or lose sleep over some bullshit when you're barely paid enough to survive.
My parents and their parents did. Neither were rich. Perhaps not super bougie places but they had various community things nearby like dancing, bowling, bars, gyms, malls, etc. Detroit and detroit metro.
Nevermind that every job is different and the outcomes are measured very differently and sometimes "hustling" or "staying busy" is actually a substandard way of achieving most tasks consistently as the short term benefits of hustling give way to burnout.
Bad managers are asking employees to constantly sprint when business is a marathon. It's a weak form of leadership generally ascribed to the "professional" managers with (only) business school backgrounds who can't understand what their employees actually do nor understand the system of the company as a whole.
It's a classic short term quarterly profits mentality.
Employees have for centuries been doing this sort of thing. Looking busy by optimizing for busyness over actual productivity because they realize managers are only concerned with looking good and skating by, not the actual business outcomes.
Note for those starting a business: design your corporate structure so that middle managers incentives are visibly aligned with the actual success of the company and not with visible working culture. And then set the pace properly.
A motor cannot work at 100% duty cycle and maintain it's longest possible service life before being rebuilt.
If you are worried about costs, do something that pays better.
If everyone picked low-GDP professions like her then in the extreme case you’d have a country like Democratic Republic of Congo with low housing costs but also you’re practically squatting in nature in a hut.
If everyone picked high-GDP professions, society would collapse. Imagine a world where everyone is a CEO and nobody knows how to fix a water main or run a cafeteria.
>If you are worried about costs, do something that pays better.
We should start by paying better for the things people already do. Rewarding those who keep the lights on incentivizes keeping the lights on.
Most productive countries are those who work smarter. See the list for yourself
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_...
Your output is driven by the guy who's gonna eat your lunch otherwise, not by your vibe.
If you are not confident, or perhaps want to make sure your children have a work ethic that is more likely to give them a good life - then it's a big risk to assume you can chill and all will be fine.
https://fox56news.com/news/kentucky/rejected-2022-kentucky-p...
Or migrants get imported to do the work that goes undone, see EU.
“A crash” is just a Rube Goldberg wealth redistribution mechanism (wealthy people own the vast majority of securities and real estate). I argue a crash isn’t what’s needed: much more housing supply, robust antitrust enforcement (to keep monopoly pricing in check), efficient healthcare, living wages, and high progressive tax rates are what is needed to right the ship.
IMO it doesn't matter if you believe in fire or in ice, either will suffice. There's only one way forward.