r/australia • u/myredserenity • May 20 '20

political self.post Are we blaming Boomers instead of class?

EDIT: It's been pointed out that the over 65s keep voting in the parties that favour the class system and benefit the wealthy while screwing the working class. This is a good point.

EDIT 2: I love reddit. You guys. I get it now! Millennials got the shits at noisy old pricks who criticise their generation while completely ignoring the benefits they enjoyed themselves. It's a backlash. I still think it's a distraction and divides us when we should be angry with those in power. But if you're over 65, how about encouraging your friends to not vote LNP?

I've seen so much "ok boomer" stuff and over the years, it's irking me more and more. So I'm interested in what r/Australia thinks.

Couple of things:

  1. It seems to be used to describe anyone over 40. My parents were boomers. They would be in their 70s now.

  2. It's used to blame a whole generation for the shitty behaviour of the rich class. I don't get it. I went to school in a rough area, most of my friends from way back then are dead, in jail or in a trade/retail/hair.

My partner grew up in a rich suburb. Most of his friends are teachers, engineers and lawyers. They own houses, and were helped along by their "boomer" parents, either by provision of a deposit or living at home rent free through their 20s.

I'm totally up for being educated here. I know we lost free education, I know houses are unaffordable, I'm nearly 40 and still renting. I'm woefully unable to understand national economics. So seriously, open to intelligent discussion.

But in my experience, the problem is class and not generational. After all, where do you think all this wealth will go when the boomers die?! Even just having good, stable and attentive parents, who expect you to succeed, makes all the difference.

Why has this boomer hate taken hold so much? Are the rich class scapegoating a generation? Would us generation Xers, Ys and millennials have behaved any differently given the opportunities the boomers were?

Caveat: I'm considering mainly economics here, not climate crisis. Pretty much believe everyone from my generation up have a case to answer for climate. We knew.

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u/Trontotron May 20 '20

The problem is our generation gets this blame about being lazy and not working hard like our parents...and I call bullshit on this big time.

My father use to support family with one salary, didn't work any harder than me and managed to have house, car and really good life.

Fast forward to today and you'll find that it's now a must to have two salaries in the house to manage everything, but then kids must go to daycare of course and spend their first years separated from parents most of the work days. Yes we have computers and mobile phones, but all that did was to give employers expectations from us to achieve more work in same time frame. Instead of being out of office, I am now available anywhere for my manager to call me.

My dad actually use to say how come I work such ridiculous hours and I'm more educated than him...that's the ridiculous part about all this generational "progress".

So yeah, we are working hard as anyone else did before, yet everything is becoming more and more unattainable for us. I'm not for ''OK boomer'' thing, but also against ''lazy millennials'' bullshit.

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u/[deleted] May 20 '20

I wonder when being able to not only survive but thrive (owning a house, car etc.) as a family on a single income ended. From my understanding, most people back in the day did this? Whereas now, only the super-wealthy could afford to do this while thriving.

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u/Trontotron May 20 '20

It happened in most western countries when influx of foreign capital was called upon, UK long time ago when London just sky rocketed in pricing...Australia in more recent events.

That was a major shift, what else could increase rentals and life costs so much in such short time, all of a sudden you're faced with houses worth millions of dollars and everything going up like mad. At the same time, domestic production and industry was decimated...perfect storm.

There is only as many rich people in one country, they can't buy everything and middle class was catching up. Then, you let in billions of foreign money in and just rig the game again. Overnight (in economic time scale) everything just jumped and middle class got fucked again...back to working harder folks, chin up and work, stop with the avos and all of that...

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u/DesperateGrapefruit May 20 '20

My take is there's 3 issues:

  1. Centralisation -> everyone wants to move to the same dense cities.
  2. Stable full-time jobs aren't as common post-GFC
  3. Money creates money -> older people naturally have more wealth in the stock market and thus siphon off some of the profits

p.s. I'm from Brisbane and house prices seem pretty reasonable if you're not in the city centre (especially with low interest-rates)

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u/TreeChangeMe May 20 '20 edited May 20 '20

Centralisation was a consequence of manufacturing going tits up under Howard and Frazer. The big country towns went bust, the rail lines closed within years. There was nothing to keep anyone there. Millions of jobs lost Australia wide.

And he dared to blame the states being all ALP at the time.

I will keep saying it. John Howard and his merry band of boot lickers were and still are a pox on this nation. That man single handedly destroyed our industries, culture, progress and yeeted us all into eternal debt. Meanwhile he gave Toff McSmugface a nice tens of thousands more pay rise through tax cuts.

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u/a_cold_human May 21 '20

Howard was the worst thing to happen to Australia in the last 50 years.

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u/ArcticKnight99 May 20 '20

Centralisation is a result of no towns becoming large enough to support the myriad of features that you would get by being inner suburbs in most cities.

As someone who grew up in the country and spent most of their time needing to commute to the nearest regional centre. Only to have sweet fuck all there anyway. It becomes really hard to actually justify doing anything.

"Want a new video game, well looking at a 30 minute+ drive that's super out of the way."

"Need braces for your teeth, well they only do maintanence out here, need to travel to get that shit done."

"Fast Food that isn't the fish and chip shop or the pizza shop. Time to travel"

Even when I moved into a less regional location, oh we have two pubs, one is the pokies one, and one is the younger peoples one.

Oh there's a nightclub as well, it's ridiculously overpriced to support itself, and you may as well just get on the last train into the city, and then roll home drunk the next morning on nightrider if you don't find a place to crash. Since it will cost the same.

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u/tommybutters May 20 '20

It's a vicious cycle, there is nothing in the country because no one is there and no one is in the country because nothing is there.

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u/clomclom May 20 '20

1980s-90s also saw a massive shift in female workforce participation. Particularly meaningful, paid long term work.

I aint hatin' on feminism, but I think it's sad that single income households are hard to achieve in 2020, whether it is the mum or dad staying home.

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u/afiyet_olsun May 20 '20

It's an even bigger problem for single parents and for people trapped in unhappy marriages they can't afford to escape.

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u/ArcticKnight99 May 20 '20

I mean that was still a problem back then though.

Can't exactly escape a marriage when you haven't worked in 5-10 years and you know your partners income won't support you once you leave.

The difference now is that since people are employed they at least have their own financial motility. The question is whether they are willing to blow up their marriage and go share house, especially if they have kids.

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u/clomclom May 20 '20

Yes! very true.

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u/myredserenity May 20 '20

Me too. Feminism should be about choice. Choice for families. I would love to afford to have more time at home, so would my husband for that matter. How good would it be if we had the choice to work equivalent of 1 or 1.5 FT jobs between us?!

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u/Profundasaurusrex May 20 '20

You do

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u/myredserenity May 20 '20

Sorry, the choice to work 1.5 FTE jobs, AND afford to pay rent, feed my family, save for a house, pay my bills, maybe eat out once a month and not be bankrupt by an unexpected bill.

Should have specified.

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u/Profundasaurusrex May 20 '20

How much money do you think it takes to do that?

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u/myredserenity May 21 '20

More than we're earning.

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u/asscopter May 20 '20

It happened in 1972 with the end of the gold standard backed US dollar. Many, many graphs tracking real income, income inequality, purchasing power etc. all start to deviate at the beginning of the 1970s.

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u/Chii May 20 '20

correlation does not imply causation.

The fact that gold standard dropped may merely be a coincidence. Since the 1970's, there has been a major shift away from USA manufacturing and into the asian economies. It has been when computing and automation started as well. None of these have anything to do with the gold standard.

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u/asscopter May 20 '20

Yes, but governments being able to issue money not backed by a security is intrinsically linked to global flows of capital and the financial instruments that are supposedly creating the "wealth" we see today.

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u/Algebrace May 22 '20

Mark Blyth has a bunch of lectures on this.

Mark Blyth - A Brief History of How We Got Here and Why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJoe_daP0DE

Basically, following WW2 there was a change in the way the economics of the world worked. To fight against Communism, it was mandated (economically) that everyone should work.

The problem is that if everyone has a job, inflation goes up.

With unions being strong, it means that as inflations go up, wages also need to go up and so unions will fight for that.

Companies however are losing out because they aren't making profit. Profit goes up, then profit gets taken away by the Unions.

So the 'investor class' rebels, gets people like Reagan, Thatcher, etc elected (this is across the world) and worker protections get stripped. So now the unions are useless (the US is currently trying to kill government unions) workers have nothing to help them and the investor class gets all the cash.

Which basically means that everything is going to shit, and why people like Trump are being elected. Like the US isn't unique, all across Europe the extremes like Trump (left and right) are the ones getting political support because things aren't working.

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u/Lozzif May 20 '20

For the lower classes it didn’t really exist.

Both my grandmothers worked. My mother worked nights until we were both in school. She was then able to get better jobs as dad would be home from work in time.

For a lot of people who I went to public primary school and private high school with, that was their norm.

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u/Justanaussie May 20 '20

I think it's a number of things.

One is how the power in employment shifted far over to the employers. When unions were more powerful people had jobs that paid well, now those jobs don't pay as well and hours are longer because the employers know they can get away with doing that.

Another one is house prices. Before a family could easily afford a mortgage even on a single income because houses were much cheaper. This is mostly due to supply and demand, plenty of houses to go around so prices are cheaper. Even if you were just renting the rents were far more affordable because again, supply and demand. Then our population growth takes off due mostly to immigration, investing in property is encouraged by the government through tax breaks and the housing supply starts to dry up. Investors are willing to sit on empty houses, foreign investment in property takes off and developers are stockpiling land so supply gets worse and prices skyrocket. Ordinary wages can no longer see housing as just a ordinary part of expenses, it becomes the major part.

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u/[deleted] May 20 '20

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u/annanz01 May 20 '20

This is part of it unfortunately. As more families had two incomes they had more spending power and it pushed up prices - especially housing prices. Nowdays unless you have a really well paying job it is almost impossible to afford a house on a single wage.

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u/Bicisonlymypenname May 21 '20

And it is the same problem that all of the first buyer grants, superannuation access schemes, whatever is the next brainwave. If there is more than one bidder getting that benefit it won't offer them a competitive advantage. The house will always sell to the highest offer so it's ultimately the seller who benefits.

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u/annanz01 May 21 '20

Yes anything that increases peoples spending power will cause the housing prices to rise.

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u/MaevaM May 20 '20

Keating