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Generation Less: How Australia is Cheating the Young
(Redback Quarterly #9)
by
A country that makes no room for the young is a country that will forfeit a fair future. This must not become Australia.
Today's young Australians are the first generation since the Great Depression to be worse off than their parents. And so, just as we have seen the gap between rich and poor widen over recent decades, we're beginning to see young and old pull apart in ways ...more
Today's young Australians are the first generation since the Great Depression to be worse off than their parents. And so, just as we have seen the gap between rich and poor widen over recent decades, we're beginning to see young and old pull apart in ways ...more
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Start your review of Generation Less: How Australia is Cheating the Young (Redback Quarterly #9)
A white spoiled child has a good life. An fairy tale life compared with most of the world around. But the rich white spoiled child has discovered that the whole generation might not be able to be even richer than the previous generation of rich white spoiled children. This is not a book about reason, it is practically a tantrum throwing numbers and quotes. And the solution? Vote Jennifer Rayner! Now with your wallet. But given the rise in populism, who knows, a political career is quite natural
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Some elements could be more fleshed out, and while I appreciated the accessibility, I think better judgment could be used for the choice of colloquial tone in some parts. Nonetheless, this is an important book, and a great overview and starting point for taking seriously the concerns of young Australians.
Anyone who talks to young Australians knows that they're incandescent with barely contained rage about woes like climate change and housing unaffordability – issues largely exacerbated by previous generations.
Here, Rayner compiles the data that supports the case for that sense of injustice. And yes, I've no doubt there are people queuing up to pooh-pooh the facts.
But surely a normal human being in possession of a shred of empathy can remember how difficult it was to be a broke student or a ...more
Here, Rayner compiles the data that supports the case for that sense of injustice. And yes, I've no doubt there are people queuing up to pooh-pooh the facts.
But surely a normal human being in possession of a shred of empathy can remember how difficult it was to be a broke student or a ...more
I can't help but compare Generation Less to Adult Fantasy because they both tread similar ground in charting how screwed we as millennials are due to a combination of increasingly unaffordable housing prices, escalating job insecurity and casualisation of labour, and a political process that actively excludes us. Generation Less is more heavily researched than Adult Fantasy and reads less like memoir, but while Briohny Doyle was able to capture the shifting goalposts of adulthood with anecdotal
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Oh what a bitter young woman the author is. The language used towards our elderly is quite horrid. It assumes the premise that all older people are loaded with money, own multiple houses and have stacks of super with well paying stable and secure jobs. It assumes all young people have casual low paying jobs with huge university fees and no chance of ever getting their own homes. This is not what I see in my circle of people. I would only agree with her on one point being the high cost of
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Fascinating book. I liked the writing style, and the premise seemed fair and supported by evidence.
Pretty bog standard book about inter generational income inequality written with young people in mind. Not that exciting or nuanced.
3.8 stars
3.5 stars. It's not just happening in Australia, sadly, but all over the world too.
Mar 23, 2017
Sarah Nosworthy
added it
It's a short book, and very self deprecating. I don't think there were any revelations but it was researched to explain things.
I came away more interested in how she's (personally) financially struggling after being married with a mortgage and now being separated with a child, and how her income has changed in that period and impacted her choices or decisions in housing.
I came away more interested in how she's (personally) financially struggling after being married with a mortgage and now being separated with a child, and how her income has changed in that period and impacted her choices or decisions in housing.
Jennifer Rayner is an Australian woman under 30 who is angry about how the older generations (of which I am a part) have cheated and are cheating her age group and those younger and presents a cavalcade of evidence to back up her contention from various statistical and research sources, to personal experience, as well as the situations of friends and colleagues. Her intellectual background is economics, in which she has a PhD and she writes incisively and intelligently with sharp wit and
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A thoroughly enraging read, Jennifer Rayner's "Generation Less" picks apart the lazy rhetoric criticising 'kidults' to examine the very real structural and demographic changes that make it so very much harder for anyone in Australia born after about 1965 to obtain the house, the family, the job, and so on - all those markers of adulthood that they are so roundly criticised for not having. It ends with some ideas about fixing the issues it raises, but notes that even these fixes will likely be
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An excellent analysis of the current state of wealth, work and wellbeing of young Australians. Written in a very approachable style with facts and figures utilised to drive home the author's arguments clearly and without any wonkish waffling on. Actually very entertaining! And the author is obviously highly intelligent - she really gets policy and politics and explains them in a way that any layperson can understand. More from Jennifer Rayner please!
Relevant, insightful and at time humorous.
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Jennifer Rayner was born into the aspirational suburbia of the Hawke years, and came of age in the long boom of the Howard era. Her lifetime has tracked alongside the yawning inequalities that have opened up across the Australian community in the past 30 years. She has worked as a federal political adviser, an international youth ambassador in Indonesia and a private sector consultant, and holds a
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