"When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn't buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each," Gurner told the Australian news show 60 Minutes.
"We are coming into a new reality where … a lot of people won’t own a house in their lifetime. That is just the reality," Gurner said. “We’re at a point now where the expectations of younger people are very, very high.”
When asked if he thought that young people may never own a home, he said, "Absolutely, when you’re spending $40 a day on smashed avocados and coffees and not working. Of course."
Gunner started his first business at age 19-- with a $34,000 loan from his grandfather.
The genre also includes all those articles about how to live frugally written by trust fund babies.
Joel Kotkin writes about urban affairs for right-tilted outfits like The Daily Beast and The Spectator as well as being connected to the Civitas Institute and the Manhattan Institute. He's also a 73-year-old boomer. In 2012, he wrote an almost-reasonable piece for Newsweek about millennials calling them Generation Screwed and explaining the many ways in which boomers had messed things up for them.
But last month he dropped a sort of sequel for The Telegraph entitled "The young would be less screwed if they started making better choices," and Golly Bob Howdy but it is a piece of work. It's worth a look because as long as the youngs are getting this kind of advice (what in the pontificating biz we call "bad" or "silly") we can expect their generational stress level to stay high. Kotkin starts out well enough:
In the United States, the basics have been evident for some time – low rates of marriage and property ownership, and diminishing demand even for educated workers. Overall, notes the Financial Times, under-40s are less conscientious, more neurotic and less agreeable than previous generations. The political ramifications can already be seen, from the swelling numbers of socialist hipsters in New York’s “commie belt” to the angry, alienated incels living in parental basements, mostly in suburban and exurban areas.
We should sympathize with this crowd, he advises, but hey-- every generation deals with Stuff (and he offers a list that includes Depression and World Wars alongside the Civil Rights movement and sexual revolution). So-- "if millennials and their successors, the so-called Gen-Zs, want to get ahead, maybe it's time to stop complaining and start changing." I get that up to a point-- if the world is covered in crap, you can complain or you can get a pair of hip boots. You could also work to make the world less craptastic. Maybe you would be a bit testy about getting advice about how to deal with the crap from boomers who didn't have to deal with any such crap at all.
But what is his advice? Well...
First, move. If only he had just stopped there--
The first step is to move. People have been gravitating away from expensive, elite-controlled areas throughout history; the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are all products of this kind of aspirational movement. Indeed, America’s great national myth, Manifest Destiny, was shaped by people who left the East Coast for the opportunities west of the Appalachians.
The United States was settled by people trying to get away from expensive elites? "Expensive" is doing a lot of work here for a period in human history in which the gap between rich and poor was way narrower than it is today. But Australia??!! Australia was a penal colony that criminals were sentenced to colonize. I don't think they were getting away from expensive elites.
"Go where the jobs are" is not a hot new idea, but Kotkin seems to be suggesting that the youngs make a cultural move and get away from "hipster socialists backing Zohran Mamdani" and "various left-wingers on the Pacific Coast." Are small towns a good alternative to pricey cities? It certainly is my preference, but as a long time small town resident, I can tell you that life is great here-- if you can find work that pays well enough to support you.
Next, Kotkin plugs his own version of the success sequence.
As numerous studies have found, both homeownership and marriage are key elements for success in life, leading to higher incomes, less child poverty and probably higher fertility rates.
"Are key elements" is doing a lot of work here, as we are reminded for the gazillionth time that correlation does not equal causation. The notion that homeownership leads to higher incomes is just bizarre. If there is one thing buying a house does not do, it does not lead to increased income.
Finally, Kotkin suggests making better career choices. He suggests that "follow your passion" is bad advice. Maybe skip the college route and go to a trade school.
So, millennials, move to a small town, become a plumber, buy a house, get married, and you will become wealthy, your life will be great, and we won't have to listen to you bitch any more.
If all of this does not make clear Kotkin's dismissal of harsh realities and his general contempt for millennials, check the final paragraph, where he explains what he thinks millennials are doing instead of bootstrapping and right-thinking their way out of despair:
Taking these steps may not be as appealing as living by the beach, indulging in singular fantasies, accessing pornography, or working in a protected job in government or a non-profit. But if attitudes don’t adjust to reality, the next generation will be forced to depend on the generosity of our increasingly parlous state for their sustenance. Then they really will be permanently screwed.
Yup. It's not that we've priced a huge chunk of the population out of the housing market, or that jobs don't pay well enough to build a life (just ask all those folks saying we shouldn't raise the minimum wage because it's not supposed to support a person), or that our systems are increasingly hostile to young parents trying to raise a family. It's because Kids These Days are a bunch of porn-watching slackers who won't face reality. I agree that someone here seems detached from reality, but I'm not sure it's the porn-watching slackers.
What I do know is that K-12 education needs to be talking about a variety of ways for students to make their ways in the world, because "work hard, get good grades, and things will fall into place" doesn't ring quite as true as it used to. We can argue about how true it really is, but to newer generations it doesn't feel true.
And perhaps more disheartening is the underlying message of the attitude typified by this piece. We've gone past the good old American "If you work hard, you'll be able to get ahead in this world" and onto something darker, something along the lines of "You are living on the narrow edge of disaster and failure and one wrong move will tip you over the edge, and managing that balancing act is all on you and you alone." It fits in a culture that is currently being reorganized around the idea that freedom means never having to care about or concern yourself with any other human beings, but it's rather scary and alienating for some of the youngs.
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