Rutger Bregman - poster boy for ungrateful spoiled brats everywhere!

Last night a Dutch academic with a book to sell was given a prime slot on a late night politics show, 'This Week'. I gather that the academic in question, Rutger Bregman, was also something of a hit at the annual elitist gathering in Davos. He has, so he tells us, exciting ideas and therefore we "have to agree with him" (pretty much how he started every answer). It turns out that those exciting ideas are:

1. Universal Basic Income

2. Higher taxes

3. Being rude about old people

So we have two ideas that are hardly new - Thomas More's Utopia contained proposals for a universal income and more taxes has been the lazy persons answer to every political problem at least since King John.

The only new idea that Dr Bregman has, therefore, is being rude to old people. And the good doctor demonstrated this during the programme by blaming "your generation" (he was speaking to three older men) for all the ills of the world. It wasn't a great way to win friends or have a substantive discussion of the ideas in the book Dr Bregman wants to flog. And, having had a tough time of it on the show (mostly by being unable to answer simple questions and then being rude), Dr Bregman took to Twitter in a fit of desperate post hoc rationalisation for his flop.

Dr Bregman starts by doubling down on being rude:

"A bit more background on how incredibly stupid the show really is..."

Then moves on to attack the panel:

"...three right-wing dinosaurs - two of them politicians from the Stone Age - start teaming up on you."

Apparently their fault was not to have read Dr Bregman's book (which presumably contains the answers he was unable to give to the simple questions asked by those 'right-wing dinosaurs').

Dr Bregman represents a trend for millennials (or whatever you call people in their 30s these days) to absolve themselves of any responsibility for any problems in their lives, the world and, even, the future by blaming the older generation. Alongside this is a related trend for the same people to blame someone or something else for all their problems - usually a large anonymous thing like 'Big Oil' or 'the rich'.

You're worried about climate change? All down to the "fossil fuels companies" nothing to do with those thirtysomethings wanting convenient supermarkets, nice warm homes, a car, air travel and all the other things that bless their lives but are only made possible by the use of fossil fuels.

You're fat? Not down to eating too much and exercising too little - it's the 'obesogenic environment' mate, nothing we can do about it, look at big food, advertising, fast food restaurants. How can I not be fat?

The same goes for drinking, smoking, betting and a host of other things that people do because they give pleasure - for the Dr Bregman's of this world we are like zombies animated by advertising not humans with agency.

The big problem though, according to Dr Bregman, is old people. And there are plenty of others who share this view - how dare 60 year old baby boomers do this (not entirely clear what we've done by the way but words like 'austerity', 'climate' and 'brexit' crop up a lot). I can lift the gist of this from another Tweet - not from Dr Bregman but it could be:

I’m sick of the boomers, they’ve been one long, self-indulgent midlife crisis.

This rather sums up a particular outlook - millennials of this sort simply deny any responsibility for their own lives, preferring instead to mither about how hard it is for them and how selfish old people are for making this so (they even have a spectacularly 'glass half empty' think tank in the Resolution Foundation to roll out endless graphs confirming just how bad it is for middle class thirty-somethings in good jobs). This is why ideas like universal basic income appeal to these spoiled thirty-somethings - what's not to like about getting money for doing nothing. And it's why they propose high taxes on, I assume, old rich people to pay for it all (plus saving the planet and ending austerity, of course). Someone else's problem, someone else's fault.

What we have is a generation - one that will dominate politics and culture for the next twenty years - that doesn't believe in personal reponsibility, hates capitalism (except when it's their web design business, of course) and, despite growing up in a vastly better world than their parents, believe that the baby boomers' great binge has denied them the chance for a good life.

My generation will bequeath a world that is healthier, wealthier, more fun, safer, cleaner, greener and happier than the one we grew up in. And all millennials like Dr Bregman can do is moan about it while taking full advantage of all the things that the creativity of those rich old people gave them, from central heating and reliable transport through to smart phones and affordable foreign holidays. Ungrateful spoiled brats!

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Millennials are just like their parents and grandparents

Millennials are just like every other generation - here's Wendell Cox:

The research examined consumption patterns by age from 1986, 2001 and 2016. Overall, controlling for age, income, employment and demographic patterns, the researchers found “no evidence that the generation-specific tastes and preferences of millennials favor lower levels of consumption than the tastes and preferences of members of other generations.” Moreover, they found that the changes in consumption shares by category are “very similar to the changes for the entire population,” and that “that there has not been a dramatic taste shift from one cohort to the next with respect to a particular form of consumption.”

Most so-called millennials want what their parents wanted - a decent job, a nice car and a house in the suburbs. Nothing has changed except policy-makers pretending that people want to live in pokey little flats piled on top of each other while travelling about on overcrowded, strike-prone public transport. It ain't so. Nothing has changed.

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Planning makes houses expensive...

...or so it seems - here's Randal O'Tolle in The Antiplanner:

With few exceptions, prices rise above three times incomes only when government policies make it difficult for homebuilders to meet demand.

For example, in 1969 the only places in America where housing cost more than three times incomes were Hawaii and Stamford, Connecticut. I don’t know why Stamford was on the list, but Hawaii had passed legislation strictly regulating where people could build homes in 1961. Other states and urban areas didn’t do so until the 1970s, and as they did so their housing prices rose faster than incomes as well.

Thanks to the urban planning prescriptions, housing is prohibitively expensive in too many areas. While median home prices are more than three times median family incomes in 45 percent of housing, it is more than four times in 24 percent of housing and more than five times in 14 percent of housing.

O'Toole points out that US millennials have low ownership rates (below 30%) in California and New York where there are strict controls on rural housing whereas a swathe of Southern and Mid-west states have millennial ownership above 45% because there aren't significant controls on rural housing development. It's true some millennials want to live all hugger-mugger in pokey city flats but most of them want what their mom and dad had - a family home.

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