From The Guy Who Hardly Reposts Anything…

[peristaltor]

…Comes this, the most comprehensive and interesting web page news story I've ever read.

If that isn't an endorsement, nothing can be.

h/t to Conuly.

Comments

[armiphlage]

Thank you.

[peristaltor]

You're quite welcome!

[katuah]

Yes, that one really tied in a heck of a lot of stuff. Most articles aren't that comprehensive: they just poke at their One Favorite Cause (student loans! minimum wage! high housing prices! etc) and dont bother trying to weave in much of anything else. But the honest answer is, the "Great Fuckening" (love that term) is absolutely a combination of about a zillion lines of encrapination that are all merging and exploding at once. The Millenials are getting some of the worst of it in the US because they were at such a pivotal life point right around 2008, when the big money jugglers just barely managed to keep the last few plates in the air, but all of us are still feeling the results of the ones that crashed down, and will feel them all together when the final ones hit after the next crisis - which is just a matter of time now.

[peristaltor]

Yup. I'm surprised they didn't go with the Great Enfuckening, but whatever.

[ironphoenix]

Good article about bad things. It's not quite as bad up here in Canada... but the direction is awfully similar.

[peristaltor]

I'm not sure why you guys aren't in it as deep as we are. The forces to enfucken the populace are similar. My first thought is you have a stronger and more socially supported journalism system, though I could be wrong.

[ironphoenix]

History and money play a significant role here; I think we'd be even better off if we didn't have so much cultural bleedover from US media; it's significant that Quebec is more socialist than the Anglophone parts of Canada.

[garote]

That was interesting! And largely spot on. The section about zoning though seems a little conspiracy-theory-esque. I think a better way to frame the situation with housing in cities would be to say that due to changes in technology and geopolitics, jobs that pay a competitive wage have shifted to, and spawned in, the cities, and people who don't have an "in" - e.g. relatives or friends - are slapped with enormous rents that gobble up their wages.

I am absolutely sure that Millennial Fred the new guy in town absolutely loathes Boomer Bill the retired grandpa (who rents out his old condo in the city for $2900 a month while he fishes in Montana), and calls Bill a horrible shiftless leech who needs to curl up and die for the sake of justice and fairness. Especially since Bill isn't contributing to the nearby business environment that has driven wages up and makes his property so valuable; he just reaps the benefits of being there first. But that hard truth is that no one sees this as unjust or a problem except for Millennial Fred. Unless you count the business owners who want to hire him but don't want to have to pay him a huge salary just so he can get by in the city.

That's where the real pressure is going to come from, I think. Forget robots. The big change wrought by the next generation will be telepresence, for all white-collar work. When all it takes to do his job from anywhere in the world is a pair of fancy glasses and a solar-powered brick of sensors the size of a fist, Millennial Fred will bail right the fuck out of Manhattan and move to Toledo instead. Or the middle of the woods. And Boomer Bill will have to sell his house - if he isn't dead by then. :)

[peristaltor]

The section about zoning though seems a little conspiracy-theory-esque.

Where there is money to be made, expect conspiracy. That's the only theory I adhere to.

But that hard truth is that no one sees this as unjust or a problem except for Millennial Fred.

Actually, it has been addressed as a problem… in 1879. It was the main theme of Henry George's Progress & Poverty. Not only is that book well worth reading, it was read quite a bit. Millions of copies were sold. George may have been the second-most well-read American author of the 1800s (behind Mark Twain). I say "may have been" because publishers didn't keep records as well then.

But… the same forces that benefit (like your Boomer Bill, except bigger) rallied to discredit George in a truly spectacular fashion. Familiar with the term "neoclassical economics"? George trashed the classical economists in his book, pointing out their gaping flaws in until then accepted logic. The Neoclassical guys (and they were almost exclusively guys) came in and trashed George's theories, lured to do so by that sweet, sweet Gilded Age cash.

George was largely forgotten after the Bolshevik Revolution, or conflated with Marx, whose theories he detested.

The big change wrought by the next generation will be telepresence, for all white-collar work.

I doubt it. I think robots will do that stuff. They're a lot cheaper. I know a guy whose job was to train algorithms to do architectural and civil engineering, for example.

Which will leave quite unwhite collar work for the rest of us. Hands are, after all, more difficult to automate. Which will lead to evermore falling wages.

But I guess we'll see.