Paul Lindwall has a very interesting Quadrant piece on an Australian problem we also see here in the UK - the rise of comfortable generations, insufficiently tested by adversity.
The Comfortable Road to Ruin
Freya Leach’s article in the December Quadrant, “How Conservatives Can Win the Youth Vote”, argues that young Australians “may be the first generation in our nation’s history to be worse off than their parents”. It is a striking claim, and one that resonates deeply in an era of surging housing costs, stagnant productivity and pervasive anxiety about the future. Leach identifies genuine problems: delayed family formation, insecure work, declining educational standards and a fracturing tax-transfer system. These pressures are real and deserve serious attention.
But the conclusion drawn from them, that today’s young are materially worse off than earlier generations, is far less secure. It rests on a narrow reading of relative income and asset distribution while ignoring the extraordinary expansion of absolute living standards that now defines Australian life. The deeper danger facing young Australians is not material impoverishment, but something more insidious: the erosion of agency and resilience born of unprecedented comfort.
We are not producing a generation deprived of opportunity. We are producing a generation untested by it. And that is the true comfortable road to ruin.
It's a deep and subtle problem of human behaviour, not unfamiliar, but the whole piece is well worth reading as an issue which isn't raised often enough. It's a problem of what we are, a problem the usual political nostrums can't touch.
If the intergenerational contract is to be restored, it will require more than tax adjustments or housing supply reforms, though both are essential. It will require a cultural recovery of responsibility, resilience and the dignity of difficulty.
We must pass on not only wealth, but wisdom. And wisdom begins with expecting something of the young.
Australia still has time. Rome lingered for centuries after its virtues had decayed. The question is whether we choose renewal now, or whether we continue comfortably, complacently and confidently down the road to ruin.
8 comments:
What an excellent article. Every word of it applies, in spades, to Britain.
What I always say, much of modern trend is down to prosperity.
"The question is . . . whether we continue comfortably, complacently and confidently down the road to ruin".
. . . . or whether we recognise those traitors within - of all colours - who have sneaked the tenets of frankfurt marxism past a comfortable population into every corner of this once proud country.
Peter - I agree, we see it everywhere from weak consequences to situations where there are no significant consequences at all.
Tammly - yes it is, it dissolves old ties to home, land, culture, traditions and so on.
Jannie - it may not be possible to expunge harmful ideologies when so many of the people in a position to do that are themselves insufficiently grounded.
One of my pet peeves (I have many) is how new legislation or new financial limits are usually grandfathered in so that people with earlier circumstances don't suffer from the change.
It's a nice idea that you shouldn't be insensitive to suffering but the grandfathering of earlier rights seems to automatically generate another team of bureaucrats to manage the interface.
Whatever you think about the Women Against State Pension Inequality (Waspi) group claim it's another example of how difficult it is to implement change because of 'expectations'.
If we all had to 'just get on with it' life might be simpler, if less comfortable.
DJ - yes, in too many cases expectations have become 'rights', much of it down to the usual problems of political caution, bureaucratic willingness, victim culture, ideology and so on. We probably won't see the politics of personal resilience emerge though, those days are gone.
Very difficult to do when the Fabian destruction continues so maniacally. Gen Z and Alpha look as if they'll have to do it themselves but how? So poorly educated, so brainwashed?
James - yes, the old show is over and other generations will have to adapt to whatever emerges.
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