[HN Gopher] Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel o...
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Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
Author : Djonckheere
Score : 39 points
Date : 2023-03-02 17:23 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| jspash wrote:
| I see the media has lost it's fascination with blaming
| millennials for everything that's wrong in the world. Gen Z,
| buckle up!
|
| (I'm just a Gen X-er continually amused by the show)
| [deleted]
| xyzzy4747 wrote:
| I 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.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| "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'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).
| helen___keller wrote:
| 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
| hifromLA wrote:
| 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.
| manv1 wrote:
| "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?
| stcroixx wrote:
| 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.
| euroderf wrote:
| > being productive for someone else.
|
| Marxist alienation is in da house.
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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.
| lapcat wrote:
| > 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.
| pygar wrote:
| 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.
| precompute wrote:
| Well, someone's gonna have to do the slog-worthy work, otherwise
| no one gets civilization. You can whine about it as much as you
| want (who knows whining better than a journalist!?).
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Pay them more. Otherwise the work goes undone. Civilization is
| not entitled to cheap, disposable labor.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Otherwise the work goes undone. _
|
| Or migrants get imported to do the work that goes undone, see
| EU.
| nostromo123 wrote:
| You can import them, but you can't force them to work - see
| Germany, Sweden, etc. ;)
| [deleted]
| klyrs wrote:
| Don't forget, the US allows slavery as a punishment for
| crimes. Criminalize homelessness and you solve your cheap
| disposable labor problem.
| precompute wrote:
| Or maybe it's time to stop missing the forest for the trees.
| Not being paid enough is hardly the primary issue. We
| desperately need a crash.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Asset prices are not wages. The latter is necessary for
| workers to survive, the former are imaginary numbers. One
| would expect the requirement to both cram down asset prices
| and push wages up for a healthy economy. It's pushing
| numbers around on a spreadsheet.
|
| "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.
| precompute wrote:
| The issue is that there's entirely too much "short term
| thinking", which is code for "there is no one to speak
| for the middle class any longer". Yes, it's magic numbers
| and estimations stamped as iron-clad all the way down,
| but notions of a "healthy economy" are strictly
| contextual. "Software is eating the world" (h/t a16z),
| "1bn VR users by 2027" (zuckerberg), "100k starting" --
| there's a clear imbalance, and sometime after '99 the
| economic model clearly shifted from "enable a better
| life" to "controlled demolition". We even saw bankers get
| paid for it!
|
| IMO it doesn't matter if you believe in fire or in ice,
| either will suffice. There's only one way forward.
| aschearer wrote:
| Lol, what?
| ridgered4 wrote:
| The problem around here seems to mostly be there is no housing
| at all for slog-worthy workers. You can con them into taking
| out crazy college loans they'll never pay off and an individual
| can remain in denial about astronomical healthcare and
| nonexistent retirement prospects during their day to day, but
| workers have yet to develop the ability to teleport to and from
| work so that no housing needs to be built near these poorly
| paying jobs.
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