The grievances of the young
It's a mixed verdict
Now is the autumn of our discontent. Recently, we have discussed my take and Rod Dreher's take on the fascist infiltration of the conservative movement, emboldened by the murder of Charlie Kirk.
But wait, some say. You cannot simply dismiss the grievances of the young, particularly young heterosexual white men. Let us examine the claimed grievances one at a time, as well as the proposed remedy.
In fact, let us begin with the remedy: fascism. All would be well, the groypers claim, if only we instituted Nazism in America and other Western nations.
I am a heterosexual white man who used to be young. I was a graduate student surviving in large part on ramen noodles for several years: thus experiencing a measure of the poverty which is one of the claimed grievances of the present generation. At no point was I ever tempted to consider communism or fascism as a solution for my problems or society’s problems.
Many conservatives today demand that we “stop the infighting” and “unite to stop the left”. This demand, of course, goes in only one direction; those who object to anti-Semitism need to just shut up, while the anti-Semites are free to provoke.
The hypocrisy of these conservatives runs even farther. They are outraged by young adults joining left-wing extremist movements; they say there is never an excuse for communism. But they excuse the fascism of other young adults. Why do we expect adults to be responsible enough to condemn communism, as they should, and not fascism as well? One is international socialism; the other is national socialism.
There is a cultural component to the grievances. Heterosexual white men have been attacked in their classrooms, growing up, by socialist-communist teachers who blamed those particular unfortunate children for all the world’s ills. I do not exaggerate in my description of those teachers, some of whom were former colleagues of mine.
Those young people could raise as their champion a Biblical figure, like Moses, David, or Jesus, or perhaps a historical king or saint, or a character from a great epic, like Aragorn in Lord of the Rings. Instead, many of these lost souls idolize people like Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin, imagining them to be champions of white people. Of course, both are responsible for killing millions of white people in their authoritarian empires.
Let us acknowledge that the culture in the West is hostile to heterosexual white men, of whom I am one, while acknowledging that the destruction of one’s own soul by turning to hatred and genocide does not solve one’s problems. If every Jew on earth were killed, 0.2% of the world’s population, you would still have to deal with the mental and behavioral problems afflicting many of the remaining 99.8%.
Now let us look at the economic grievances of the young. Here the verdict is mixed. In some ways the deck is stacked against them; in other ways they have very comfortable lives.
The graph below displays federal debt (red) and money supply (green) as percentages of GDP.
Money supply remained below 60% of GDP for decades until just after the financial crisis, jumping substantially during the pandemic to around 70% today.
Federal debt, however, is in much worse shape. It remained below 40% of GDP for decades until the Reagan tax cuts kicked in. It stayed below the low 60s until the financial crisis, when it exploded, exceeding 100% under Obama, and then over 120% under Trump and Biden. Essentially, we borrowed trillions of dollars to fund our current spending habits, leaving the bills to our children and grandchildren.
The solution is a contentious topic. Are we spending too much, or taxing too little? I think the honest answer is: both. The groypers focus on American aid to Israel, which costs about 0.01% of GDP; and by the way, many Israelis want to eliminate that aid as well. The big spending occurs in the entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid), and any politician naive enough to suggest their elimination will find his political career eliminated quickly. It is plain reality. For better or for worse, the people demand a certain level of spending, and it must be funded by the current generation, not the next.
Housing costs are out of control. The next graph shows the ratio of the house price index to median household income.
A significant fraction of housing is occupied by illegal aliens, more than 2 million of whom have left America so far, voluntarily or involuntarily. Also, the Baby Boom generation is in their 60s and 70s, with the oldest turning 80 next year. They will move out of their current homes, to a retirement community or to the next world, freeing up even more housing stock. There is reason to be optimistic about house prices over the next 10 years.
The AI and robotics revolution is another legitimate source of angst for the young. I am relieved to be retiring soon. I cannot imagine what it would be like to look for work as a young college graduate these days.
On the other hand, the CEO of Ford Motor Company said a few days ago that his company was unable to fill about five thousand auto mechanic positions, even at a starting salary of $120 thousand. Without a doubt, the life and career paths of many young people have been destroyed by predatory colleges and universities.
There is encouraging economic news, however, to whatever degree we can trust government data. The following graph depicts my version of the misery index (inflation plus unemployment). In my version, I use alternate larger versions of both metrics to acknowledge the much larger impact inflation and unemployment have compared to official numbers.
The current misery index is low by historical standards.
The next graph depicts disposable personal income per person, adjusted for inflation. Again, I use my alternate larger version of inflation so as not to understate the impact of inflation as the government would prefer.
Even in my more robustly inflation-adjusted dollars, the standard of living is still about double what it was in 1968. This leads me to wonder what young people expect, and what I lived growing up.
I live in a comfortable house now, nearing retirement. But my parents’ first house was much smaller, not much bigger than an apartment - and we were living on my father’s salary as a government professional. Vacations were once per year, and did not include airplane flights or cruises. My first two cars were used cars. I lived in an apartment myself before marriage. I survived a lifetime without streaming video services on my phone or my home television; and I have since abandoned the television.
I do not know what the budget of a young person looks like today. I do see students complaining piteously about the horrendously high cost of textbooks (a bit over $100), all while sporting Apple I-Phones. I do not use an I-Phone, just an ordinary Android. It works fine. Why do they think they need an I-Phone? Could they try saving some money and using an Android instead - no streaming? No flights? Share housing with roommates? Eat out less often? Buy a used car?
There is serious cultural and economic uncertainty in our time - as there always has been! JD Vance is going to be very surprised, however, if he thinks he can win the next presidential election by throwing Jews and his wife under the bus to satisfy the groypers, some of whom are either trained or funded by China, Russia, Iran, Qatar, and their allies to cause as much chaos as possible in the West.
Complaining about being impoverished is usually complete garbage. I recently heard a sad tale of woe about someone who supposedly qualified for medicaid. Her mother had looked it up. My only question was whether her father drove her over to her medicaid appointments in his Ferrari, or if they kept a low profile in his Mercedes. I have routinely been called rich and privileged by those who had far more money and opportunities than I ever had. If you have to look up that you're poor then you are not. Same goes if you're giddy about telling everyone about your newly discovered impoverishment.
I was raised middle class. It sounds in many ways similar to Surak's description of his own upbringing. I remember the annual family vacation a drive away. The vacations primarily consisted of going for walks and reading. For many years I could not understand the point of driving somewhere else, since that's exactly what we would have done at home. Then I had to cook for myself (if you could call my sorry experiments cooking) and realized that my mother probably enjoyed vacation much more than the rest of us, since all of the meals were planned and prepared by someone else. I think the drive was just long enough to deter anyone complaining and going home and ruining her kitchen break.
These Woke-right jerks just want to be special in all the wrong ways. I have been dissed plenty of times by plenty of people over the years. Just one example, my nutty extended family, now suffering from TDS, has long since treated me like a 2nd class person. It never made me want to join sicko power hungry movements. I believe those of us with similar gripes, and probably worse than the average woke-jerk gripes, I believe we are the majority. If you have even a modicum of genuine humility, I don't see how you fall for the evil hucksters.
Plus, 120,000 sounds like a dang good salary. If I were young (sigh) and at loose ends and I heard about that, I would be in line at the nearest place that would train me in auto mechanics, and I'd already be paging through any relevant textbooks I could find. When you don't need the latest edition, textbooks are usually cheap. Probably you can even get good free reading material. I sure as heck would not be spending time listening to woke mediagogues. Instead, maybe they should listen to Surak's music suggestions. Although I still like John Field despite the fact that he composed past Surak's preferred final quality approved date, by a whisker.
Working as a mechanic means several things - living in a specific area, showing up to work at a specific time and staying for a certain length of time on certain days of the week (most likely five days per week), every week, all year long, for years. It requires actually DOING something and even - gasp - getting dirty, rather than sitting in a comfortable chair in front of a screen, or working on one’s phone from a fishing boat wherever one chooses to go.
When I was growing up, eating out at a restaurant was a rare and special treat. Most people didn’t fly in an airplane to go anywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of my cousins have never flown. Grabbing a cup of coffee and a snack every day was not the norm, much less doing so several times per day. Picking up meals or having them delivered was unusual, not a weekly or daily occurrence.
When I got my first full time job as a delivery driver for a Honda dealership (September, 1989), I would get my lunch at a drive-through. I now regret how much money I spent during that 16 months. I could have saved a lot by taking my lunch with me. When I finished at my full time job, I would head over to babysit for two kids in the evenings, usually going straight there from my day job (on the days their mom was working as a dispatcher at the police department). During the day, I earned $4.75/hour (up to $5.00/hour after a year). In the evenings, I earned $2/hour.
I have never bought a new car, and actually don’t want a new car. I would be hyper paranoid about scratches and dents, and I also don’t want to be breathing in the toxic chemicals that are present in a new car. I’d rather have someone else break it in and detoxify it. One time, I called a junk yard to see how much they would give me for my old car. After I told them what all was wrong with it, they knew they would have to come pick it up and were surprised when I said, no, I was still driving it and I could drop it off.
I have a really hard time feeling sorry for young people nowadays when they have so much, yet assume that the things they have should be a given. There is a picture of AOC with her items of privilege. Someone pointed out how she doesn’t even realize how ironic and hypocritical her complaints are with what she carries around and wears every day.
Far too many people want as much as possible for as little effort as possible.
I despair of young people today and their expectations of what they deserve. I find it incredible how much people who are computer savvy can charge for their time while people who are willing to do real work and provide fundamentally necessary services (like growing healthy - not toxic - food) must work several hours to pay for an hour of someone tapping buttons on their computer to fix it. It seems to me that values are all mixed up.