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.
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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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.
Poetic
“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?
It was far more of a religious war than anything else. You had aristocracy and rich capitalists on both sides. More so, the birth of nationwide capitalism had already taken place in the UK and joint venture stock companies were around long before the civil war too.
But catholic and protestant was a line you could always 100% accurately draw between the two sides. In fact, the only thing that really changed was that the monarch having to be church of England was made into law. The rest of British history makes infinitely more sense when the civil war is looked at through that lense.
I feel there is a misunderstanding of what a bourgeois revolution is. Sure, soon before the English Revolution, there was the institution of stock markets and corporations. But bourgeois revolutions don’t “make” capitalism. They institute capitalism as the main power and system.
Before the English Revolution, nobility and owning land was the real power. After it it was owning capital. That’s what makes it a bourgeois revolution.
And sure? There were “capitalists” fighting to maintain the existing power structures, just like there were workers fighting against the bolsheviks in the Russian revolution, right? That’s not a very compelling argument.
The capitalists could, through ideology and propaganda, be working against their own interests. Or they as individuals actually benefitted from the system as it was, despite not being the class in power.
In any case, revolutions happen when the existing dominant class is abruptly removed in favour of another. You can’t say this happened in England before the English Revolution.
Also, if you think Protestantism vs Catholicism has nothing to do with the power structures of late medieval and early modern Europe… idk what to tell you man. Religion is never just religion.
I understand it just fine and no, the first joint stock company was nearly 100 years before the civil war. Thats not soon before at all. It just really kills the narrative being spun.
Capitalism was nationwide here long before the civil war. Not only in the form of joint stock companies, ending merchantilism, but in the acts of enclosure forcing the yeomanry into the factories and workhouses (capital not land). Again, nearly 100 years before the civil war.
It was a war of religion and wherever you got this alternative narrative from is completely wrong. It was literally just fanatics killing each other over liking the wrong flavour of Jesus. Nothing meaningful changed after the war. Capitalism wasn't ushered in, as it was already here. Capital didn't become the dominant power due to it, as it already was the dominant power. CoE was already the dominant religion too. So, it wasn't changing the power structure of the existing dominant religion. So, wrong on every account that could make it what you claim.
Specifically in the UK, the Catholic/protestant power structure change was that the monarch decided to, essentially, make themselves both monarch and pope. I think you're confusing it with the German wars of religion and they weren't the same.
You talking about Cromwell or William and Mary?
The whole period from the Wars of the Three Kingdoms until the Glorious Revolution.
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?
That's an edge case, but if you'd count those parliamentary nobles as burgoise then that's fair. Thanks
It’s not an edge case, it was arguably the first bourgeois revolution, and without it we wouldn’t have the Dutch, French and yes, American revolutions. I don’t like linking to Wikipedia, but the article is not terrible: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeois_revolution
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.