Getting started in life after school or university has never been easy. Most young people don’t know much about practical aspects of life (even if they’ve had a rough upbringing, which can teach bad lessons as well as good ones), they don’t have many resources, if any, to fall back on, and they’re forced to plunge into new areas of life, often away from what they grew up with.
So a recent post at Not PC took as its starting point a TikTok video that recently went viral in the USA, and asserted that, The Right Is Scaring Young People Away from Capitalism. Below is the video and it’s cringe-inducing, as a zoomer tears up about her nine-to-five job and complains that she has to take a long commute to work since she can’t afford to live in the city. With an early rise and a late return, she explains that she doesn’t have time to do anything else.
Older folk, including the Boomers that Gen-Z so hate, could also talk about tough times as youth even in the supposed halcyon days of NZ or the USA circa 1950’s-60’s (as well as having second mortgages with double digit interest rates in the 1970’s). Hell, even as a Gen-Xr facing the tumult of Rogernomics and more than one recession, I shrugged my shoulders and did the hours she complains about, including having no social life for a while (I just figured it was a fair exchange for having perhaps too much of a social life at varsity).
But just because there are elements of the protected snowflake culture coming through, you should not dismiss it, as some of the things she talks about are a common Gen-Z complaints across the Western world and if they’re not addressed by current politics these people will find other ways of doing so – via socialism as the article points out.
Add to that this chart from a recent survey:
The Not PC article raises some sympathetic points:
The housing crisis has a big role to play in this. Due to red tape and planning regulations, the supply of housing is severely limited. This is especially true in cities, where the demand greatly outweighs the supply. It might seem as though there is an easy solution: just build more housing. But expanding housing in cities is unpopular.
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On top of this, young people also face other financial challenges that boomers did not at their age. When it comes to saving up for rent or a mortgage, the government’s policies, including inflation and taxation, are eating into our incomes more than in the past. In addition, young people have fallen into the trap of predatory student loans—a trap which has been getting worse in recent decades—which means that graduates have less money in their pocket at the end of the month.
But it may well be that the Gen Z problem is much more broad than just worrying about socialism. It may be that Gen Z is turning against the West in general. The article points out some scary facts:
A worrying proportion of the young sympathises with those who launch terror attacks against Israel, supports the immediate elimination of fossil fuels or demands the wiping out of gender distinctions. All these positions are troubling in themselves, but they also reflect a deeper malady – a mostly apolitical breakdown of social norms, personal interaction, literacy and logical thinking.
That article points out that while the Boomers may have rebelled against their parent’s generation and institutions, via things like the Vietnam War, drugs and sex, they had a fairly confident view of the future, especially their own future. Gen Z seems downcast across the board – and in some cases they have good reasons as they look at what is already hitting the generation ahead of them, the Millennials:
This negative take on the future shows that the young are being poorly served in numerous ways, notably by the economy. Only 36 per cent of voters in a new Wall Street Journal / NORC survey say the American Dream still holds true, a feeling that is even more pronounced among younger people. Currently, less than half of millennials are doing better financially than their parents were at the same stage in life. This is the first time a generation has fallen behind its elders in recent history.
Fact, not feelz, as the following points demonstrate:
According to US Census Bureau data, the rate of homeownership among young adults at ages 25 to 34 was 45 per cent for Generation X. This has dropped to 37 per cent for millennials, the generation that should now be starting to have families. In the UK, house prices hit a record high last year, while the rate of homeownership among people under 35 halved between 1997 and 2017.
A couple of my kids friends, all now working, have joked that if they’re at a party and don’t know anybody, a surefire conversation starter is to ask whether any of them will ever own a home.
The trends are similarly worrying in the world of work. Despite labour shortages that are likely to get worse, real wages have not surpassed costs for most people living in the US, the EU, Japan and the UK. In the US, men’s labour participation is now lower than in 1940, when unemployment was three times higher.
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These conditions demonstrate the erosion of ambition throughout the West and even in East Asia. Fewer millennials and Gen Zers seem to take work seriously.
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In the UK, employers fret about a diminishing millennial work ethic. Nearly 10 per cent of young Brits who are currently studying or out of work say they have no intention of ever starting work, while roughly a third doubt they will reach their career goals.
It’s not just the West. The same trends are also seen in China (the ‘lying flat’ culture). Japan (hikikomori) and elsewhere in Asia. If you think our declining birth rates are bad now, with all that implies for our pay-as-you-go health and social welfare systems, then imagine forward ten or twenty years with Gen Z who can’t see how they can afford a home or marriage, let alone kids. The impact of technology is not great on that front either:
A recent AEI survey found that Gen Zers are far lonelier and are less likely to have had strong romantic relationships or even just strong friendships than previous generations.
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The ultimate effect of excessive social-media use is that it severely reduces genuine human interaction with people from different classes and backgrounds. The popularity of social media has also been closely tied to rises in personal anxiety, particularly among young women.
Having said that, I’m amazed at the number of genuine online friendships my kids have – and by genuine I mean that they have eventually met up for overseas trips. It’s as if at least some Gen Zrs have actively and carefully selected the social media they will use (Facebook – NO) and then used that to carefully screen their friends over several years.
The rest of the article talks about the impact that A.I. might make, looking at both the pessimists and the optimists, but judging it as a wash overall in whether it will change the prospects of Gen Z. One thing it is pessimistic about is that education will do so:
Youngsters know increasingly little about the world. American school children are remarkably ignorant of US history – only 13 per cent of eighth graders achieve proficiency in the subject. Whole centuries, notably the 19th century, seem to be vanishing from European classrooms in the drive to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum… In today’s educational environment, where woke ideology reigns, promoting basic literacy and cognitive skills is increasingly passé. According to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, two thirds of American fourth graders lack basic proficiency in reading. A full 86 per cent of 15-year-olds are unable to tell the difference between opinion and fact.
Judging from recent reports it’s not much different here in NZ, and that raises concerns a lot deeper than employers finding less capable young people:
With their ideas facing little pushback in this environment, young people are increasingly Manichean and authoritarian in their worldview. Pollster Nate Silver has found that support for free speech is all but disappearing among the young, especially among those who identify as liberal or left-wing. Similarly, a major survey covering 160 countries from the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Future of Democracy found that support for democracy to be lowest among 18- to 34-year-olds.
For decades now Progressives have quietly boasted (and sometimes not so quietly) that they would “educate” youth to be progressive themselves, effectively creating not educated people but cadres of political activists who would then enable Left Wing triumph on things like Climate Change, Racism, and ultimately Capitalism.
The Climate Change issue is a special case; maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to scare the living daylights out of the young and convince them that the planet is doomed, especially when it turns into the practical misery of unaffordable housing, energy and good food.
But what if these dashed hopes for the future result in “reactionary” forces? It pays to remember that the Fascists as much as Communists, were enabled by people feeling screwed over by the status quo and wanted capitalism to be controlled better by the State – and much else besides:
But many young people are also turning to the right. This is true particularly for male, working-class voters, from the US to Europe and Latin America, as epitomised by the success of the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, France’s Marine Le Pen or Germany’s AfD.
As both that article and the Not PC post point out, we can’t just dismiss the worries and concerns of Gen Z (and the Millennials) – and we’re doing a piss-poor job of it so far.
But we must also focus on restoring economic mobility, entrepreneurial opportunity and, most of all, faith in the essential values and worth of our civilisation. If we fail in this, we will leave behind a world that is far darker and uglier than any of us have known.
No Minister 