"What’s more, Gen Z’s older friends and colleagues, the millennials, do not bring with them the messages of hope they inherited from their Gen X forebears"
Messages of hope from Gen X? What is this author smoking?
Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
11–20 of 61 posts
Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#12I find it quite ironic that the author cares so much about housing costs and presumably money, but at the same time she chose a profession that has a low average salary.
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.
Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#13"What’s more, Gen Z’s older friends and colleagues, the millennials, do not bring with them the messages of hope they inherited from their Gen X forebears" Messages of hope from Gen X? What is this author smoking?
For real. I’m Gen X and don’t know anyone my age into their career at all, let alone foolish enough to worry about being productive for someone else.
Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#14"Bare Minimum Mondays" sounds exactly like the kind of thing a "gospel of productivity" would promote. 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'…
The ill effects of poor housing policy are deep and insidious
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
Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#15"What’s more, Gen Z’s older friends and colleagues, the millennials, do not bring with them the messages of hope they inherited from their Gen X forebears" Messages of hope from Gen X? What is this author smoking?
For real. I’m Gen X and don’t know anyone my age into their career at all, let alone foolish enough to worry about being productive for someone else.
While I wouldn't go that far myself, as a fellow GenXer I remember it was us in the early 1990s who were viewed as the generation that was uninspired by work or the prospect of a career. Like Linklater's 1990 film "Slacker". Or Smith's 1994 film "Clerks". I think a lot of things that are assigned to "generations" are really just due to age. Younger people aren't that into work, often because the intro-level jobs they have aren't that exciting or lucrative. But that's fine because they don't have much in the way of expenses or dependents. As people get older they get more into work both because the work is more engaging and that they actually have expenses and responsibilities.
Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pay them more. Otherwise the work goes undone. Civilization is not entitled to cheap, disposable labor.
>Otherwise the work goes undone. Or migrants get imported to do the work that goes undone, see EU.
You can import them, but you can't force them to work - see Germany, Sweden, etc. ;)
Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#17Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#18"What’s more, Gen Z’s older friends and colleagues, the millennials, do not bring with them the messages of hope they inherited from their Gen X forebears" Messages of hope from Gen X? What is this author smoking?
Although Gen X is categorises by apathy and cynicism, subsequent generations still feel that Gen X just managed to squeeze in with the boomers before the door narrowed. Especially regarding property prices.
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.
Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
For real. I’m Gen X and don’t know anyone my age into their career at all, let alone foolish enough to worry about being productive for someone else.
While I wouldn't go that far myself, as a fellow GenXer I remember it was us in the early 1990s who were viewed as the generation that was uninspired by work or the prospect of a career. Like Linklater's 1990 film "Slacker". Or Smith's 1994 film "Clerks". I think a lot of things that are assigned to "generations" are really just due to age. Younger people aren't that into work, often because the intro-level jobs they…
> I think a lot of things that are assigned to "generations" are really just due to age.
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.
Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#20"Bare Minimum Mondays" sounds exactly like the kind of thing a "gospel of productivity" would promote. 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'…
The ill effects of poor housing policy are deep and insidious 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 busine…
I agree and it actually gets worse…
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.