Generation Squeeze has a wealth of practical policy proposals for right now. I am asking if Squeeze members are familiar with Helena Norberg- Hodges ideas- works. If corporate Growth does not wipe out our future , then our Future is Local- decentralized and less materialistic. In OUR Future is Local she argues that this is happening around the world...maybe so but I don't see much evidence of it in Ontario.
BUT it's not the sort of thing corporate media would report on.
Not familiar with Norberg-Hodges work Glen! Sounds like some good reading ahead of me. Thanks! I got a taste of the local and decentralized/less materialistic life when I lived in Africa. Sure I had less but me and the people around me sure were MUCH happier!
To me, (I am a very young boomer or very old GenXer) the problem is one of wealth redistribution in a just society.
In a just society we should care about the whole of our community and ensure everyone has opportunity and is sufficiently supported. Part of that caring involves sharing the wealth. Income/wealth redistribution via taxation and equitable redistribution is critical in order to assure health, happiness and a secure future for all of us and our children.
We have a few glaring issues in Canada that need to be addressed one way or another.
For example:
We have insufficient income/asset-testing for tax supported programs in Canada.
We treat individuals differently based on age (favouring seniors) which is flat out policy discrimination which we wouldn’t tolerate if were based on race/religion/sexual orientation etc.
Our governments use tax dollars to support public sector pensions and benefits and early retirement in the public sector that the private sector and small business can only dream about.
Why should a teacher retire in their early to mid-50’s with an indexed (and very generous) pension for the rest of their life? If the government is matching pension contributions (or more) for government workers why do they not offer this same benefit to other citizens to ensure their securely funded retirements too?They don’t match CPP contributions for example. They don’t provide citizens with gold-plated medical/dental benefits funded 94% by government with tiny co-pays such as teachers in Ontario enjoy for example.
Government workers are not keen to give up their unfair share of tax revenue supported benefits/pensions any more than seniors appear to be. These two voting blocks alone almost guarantee nothing will change.
Ultimately, if everyone has to give a little bit more and no one is happy - that’s the sign of a good compromise that is fair and just.
I often hear people blame private enterprise - ie ‘corporate raiders’ are making huge profits and not providing equivalent pensions/benefits to their employees, ie greedy capitalists are to blame.
But the reality is that most people working in the private sector are employed by small and medium sized businesses (88% of private sector in 2021) which cannot begin to provide what government does for their workers. Sure, make Google and Tesla etc. fund better pensions and benefits out of their profits - but this represents a very small percentage of folks working in the ‘corporate’ world. (Better to make large corporate players pay their fair share of corporate tax, and prevent offshoring of head offices to tax havens.)
Government also allows seniors to income split but not working families. How is this fair or equitable?
I think we should encourage seniors entitled to OAS who don’t need it to redirect those funds to social causes (food banks and subsidized housing come to mind) or at least towards a down payment on housing for their children/grandchildren.
If government isn’t willing to address these glaring inequities to create a more just society then citizens should begin doing it themselves and maybe that would help draw attention to the issue and help sway opinion.
We can try, I just hope that everyone who is privileged is willing to give up a little of what they have to achieve a more just society.
OAS should not exist. CPP should be enhanced to make up the gap. Other countries like the US, Norway and The Netherlands have retirement systems totally funded by contributions.
They responded with publicly funded medical care back when seniors were struggling. I'm still hoping for this kind of BIG level courage from our politicians but a whole lot us need to let them know that we WANT and support that kind of bravery in politics!
Feel you about the set of 'affordable' places getting smaller and smaller, and the adaptations needed more and more constraining, from the point when people would (short-shortsightedly) act like people should 'just' leave Toronto and Vancouver to avoid problems that are now widespread. I know so many people (admittedly in a field where some have always left for better wages) giving up and moving to the US even though they didn't otherwise want to because they just see no path to things getting better here. But every way people make it work ('just' go to school longer despite maybe having to give a location-specific career up later, or 'just' delay starting a family, or 'just' move away from everyone you know) seems to become the new baseline until everyone acts surprised there's no more room to adapt for many. I feel like a larger number of older people have recently admitted there's a problem, but not necessarily that this rising bar to adapt (like people suggesting multi-generational-by-necessity households as a *solution* rather than a symptom of policy failure) is part of the problem even if people are technically adequately housed.
I agree! It has finally come to the point where older Canadians are starting to "get it" when it comes to the struggles of younger Canadians but most that I run into think we should all just put our heads down and continue to "work hard" because they had to work hard too. This isn't a competition. We all need to work together to solve this. I'm frustrated by younger generations having to make the lions share of the adaptations and do the lions share of the advocacy work in an effort to address the new Canadian reality of increasing unaffordabilities. The multi-generational household I now live in is DEFINITELY a symptom of policy failure, and you're right, it risks being seen as a solution, much like the "solution" of the recent tiny home trend. Try raising even 1 child in a tiny home! LOL
Yes! Jennifer! That was my point. The younger generation must be less materialist than the previous generations. If we/they are to survive climate change. Replacing gasoline cars with electric cars won't do it. You can't solve a growth problem with green growth. The squeeze your generation is feeling is also an opportunity to develop other values that older generations falsely believed that they could afford not to. Norberg Hodge also writes the introduction to a very short book by Rupert Read titled This Civilization Is Finished. David Suzuki and Naomi Klein endorses Helena and Rupert' works. I was floored when I read Rupert's so concise-short book it was if he had read my mind!
In many cultures generations live together not as punishment but as choice. My forty-year-old Neighbour lives in his parents' basement. I felt sorry for him until he told me that he does not want to live alone, and he enjoys helping his parents. But no doubt our culture tends to say he is a loser.
As a young political science/philosophy grad I made the decision I would not marry or have kids because I figured that our civilization was finishing-sickly materialist and unnecessarily bureaucratic and complex moving further and further away from the pace or scale to be human. Now retired from teaching I am a full- time journalist- journaling on how we can get out of the wreckage-ways forward.
Out of the journals eventually a book will come. The purpose of my post-of my mention of Helena and now Rupert is getting young people not to focus on past generations measures-they are all screwed up. I went against the grains when I did not have to. Your generation now has to. That can be a damn good thing in the right state of mind.
For clarity-When I say I went against the grains. I mean that I never had a consumer's mentality. I bought a smaller house than all of my teacher friends. I bought it in a neighborhood where I could walk to the grocery store gym and a park with a track and tennis courts, and I bicycled to school. I lived this very local low footprint...and paid attention to all the things people were doing to attain the stuff of status-to get the advertised package- extrinsic rewards that ultimately left them empty or barely conscious-with a consumer conscious always wanting more. I was/am fit handsome personable and popular with staff and students. I used humor to make my points about our unthinking ways what we were taking for granted in all our strivings. Schooling had become so far removed from its original purposes so big, so bureaucratic and corporate in structure that had become mostly about management. Students has been turned into consumers of facts to get extrinsic rewards. We had managed to kill the fact that children were natural born learners-full of questions wonder that was turned off in a the business of schooling. In short we had moved so far away from Socrates asking questions under a tree. This was not education this was closing down minds so the they become specialized producers and consumers- stopping to think about the big picture with big questions was served no purpose in our definition of education or success. In fact, stopping to think widely and deeply was in the way of success. Success was the accumulation of more. When I retired at age 53 my friends threw me a party and said “Glen, you’ve got to buy a new car-get rid of that old entry level vehicle and buy a house that you can afford” I smiled and saved my response for my journal. My friends are not superficial or stupid. (They will thank me for saying that) They have just stayed so busy in our fast-paced world where there is little time, opportunity, inclination or skills or habits of stopping to think outside of what they stay busy in. I joked in the staff room- “the ministry-the board-the administration keeps us teachers so busy we have no time to think, and we keep the students well managed and out of trouble by keeping them too busy to think. Humor saved the day for me but there is nothing funny about. I was deadly serious.
500 years ago, we began our current ever expansionist material growth ethic- model. We wiped out the Indigenous peoples and justified it as we were bringing them progress. We stole their land and destroyed their cultures. Cultures which were not materialist, or growth based but with the very ways and thinkings we need know in order to survive as a species. I still have that very old car and live in that modest house. But when I die, I am leaving my millions to Canadian native restoration projects. As a kid and adult, I never let myself get over the fact we stole their land and diminished their culture. Some Canadian natives still lack running drinking water. This is bigger than Generation Squeeze and Global Warming is bigger than Generation Squeeze. All generations are feeling the squeeze of cancerous corporate growth, of concentration of wealth... of gross inequities of unbalance. Younger generations will have to return to native ways and ethics...ways of paying attention to the natural world if we are to have future generations with a higher quality of life.
I don't think it's useful to conflate 'materialism' with people wanting choices about their lives, like where to live or who with. There's no way around a future with less 'stuff', but I don't think that inherently means accepting the loss of independence that comes with relying on someone else to stay housed. People don't think enough about power dynamics, and plenty of cultures with mutli-generational households are not especially egalitarian. This is especially true in a situation where it's less that people need to pool resources and more that an older generation has made sure they are the ones with all the resources. (I even saw a bunch of articles recently framing it as a 'win-win' situation to have a program where students helped seniors at home in exchange for reduced rent, as if that is not both a little bit Victorian and a wildly different arrangement for the person who owns the home and has the choice than for the student who has few enough affordable housing choices that it might seem like a good deal to effectively be live-in help.) People being able--even if they decide they don't want to--live alone is important, not a luxury we should decide we've outgrown.
I was abrupt with my reply, sorry for that Valerie. I had just posted a long explanation for the nature of our world. Basically, it's the fact we make consumers out of students. We do not teach civics and we only give lip service to independent thinking. As Consumers rather than engaged concerned citizens we allowed Corporations to grow to the point that they control our politics. We did not set limits. We did not develop truly progressive taxation that would have shared the wealth more, we did not develop a wealth tax....The list of things that we did not do because we were mostly passive consumers and not engaged citizens is huge. Now it's so late in the game. Corporate growth, concentration of wealth, poverty inequity is so grotesque, the destruction of our life support system is not slowing down. There is little good news to share. BUT. The COVID stimulus packages worked. They saved Canada and America from a depression. The corporate world supported that because they wanted the masses to buy their products. So, we are likely to get a UBI to keep the poor buying corporate products.
This falls under the SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE category. There will be more affordable housing available in Canada. But not what is needed. Affordable housing is a problem around the world-Canada sits at the bottom in Western nations on this. So even if we move from the bottom we still won't come anywhere near our needs. Meanwhile corporate growth cancerous to our environment will continue. Climate change is still far less important than increasing the GDP. Growth for profits-growth with the false belief that we can grow our way out of a growth problem. Most people avoid thinking about it hoping science will solve it. When science and technology caused it. We are not a humble people. Arrogantly we thought we could master nature, unlike our native peoples who knew deep humility. I believe that this civilization is ending. If the forces of nature bring us to our knees... that's where we should have been all along. We needed to go at a slower pace with different values and far more inclusive careful thinking and far less siloed specialized thinking.
Generation Squeeze has a wealth of practical policy proposals for right now. I am asking if Squeeze members are familiar with Helena Norberg- Hodges ideas- works. If corporate Growth does not wipe out our future , then our Future is Local- decentralized and less materialistic. In OUR Future is Local she argues that this is happening around the world...maybe so but I don't see much evidence of it in Ontario.
BUT it's not the sort of thing corporate media would report on.
Not familiar with Norberg-Hodges work Glen! Sounds like some good reading ahead of me. Thanks! I got a taste of the local and decentralized/less materialistic life when I lived in Africa. Sure I had less but me and the people around me sure were MUCH happier!
Thanks for your article Jennifer. Very well said.
To me, (I am a very young boomer or very old GenXer) the problem is one of wealth redistribution in a just society.
In a just society we should care about the whole of our community and ensure everyone has opportunity and is sufficiently supported. Part of that caring involves sharing the wealth. Income/wealth redistribution via taxation and equitable redistribution is critical in order to assure health, happiness and a secure future for all of us and our children.
We have a few glaring issues in Canada that need to be addressed one way or another.
For example:
We have insufficient income/asset-testing for tax supported programs in Canada.
We treat individuals differently based on age (favouring seniors) which is flat out policy discrimination which we wouldn’t tolerate if were based on race/religion/sexual orientation etc.
Our governments use tax dollars to support public sector pensions and benefits and early retirement in the public sector that the private sector and small business can only dream about.
Why should a teacher retire in their early to mid-50’s with an indexed (and very generous) pension for the rest of their life? If the government is matching pension contributions (or more) for government workers why do they not offer this same benefit to other citizens to ensure their securely funded retirements too?They don’t match CPP contributions for example. They don’t provide citizens with gold-plated medical/dental benefits funded 94% by government with tiny co-pays such as teachers in Ontario enjoy for example.
Government workers are not keen to give up their unfair share of tax revenue supported benefits/pensions any more than seniors appear to be. These two voting blocks alone almost guarantee nothing will change.
Ultimately, if everyone has to give a little bit more and no one is happy - that’s the sign of a good compromise that is fair and just.
I often hear people blame private enterprise - ie ‘corporate raiders’ are making huge profits and not providing equivalent pensions/benefits to their employees, ie greedy capitalists are to blame.
But the reality is that most people working in the private sector are employed by small and medium sized businesses (88% of private sector in 2021) which cannot begin to provide what government does for their workers. Sure, make Google and Tesla etc. fund better pensions and benefits out of their profits - but this represents a very small percentage of folks working in the ‘corporate’ world. (Better to make large corporate players pay their fair share of corporate tax, and prevent offshoring of head offices to tax havens.)
Government also allows seniors to income split but not working families. How is this fair or equitable?
Seniors maximize OAS when they have assets in the millions. See this article from the G&M Dec 30/2023 - https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/personal-finance/financial-facelift/article-can-wilbur-60-and-patsy-55-afford-to-retire-next-year-and-gift-some/
Why is OAS not income/means tested?
I think we should encourage seniors entitled to OAS who don’t need it to redirect those funds to social causes (food banks and subsidized housing come to mind) or at least towards a down payment on housing for their children/grandchildren.
If government isn’t willing to address these glaring inequities to create a more just society then citizens should begin doing it themselves and maybe that would help draw attention to the issue and help sway opinion.
We can try, I just hope that everyone who is privileged is willing to give up a little of what they have to achieve a more just society.
OAS should not exist. CPP should be enhanced to make up the gap. Other countries like the US, Norway and The Netherlands have retirement systems totally funded by contributions.
Sadly, governments wait until the canaries die before acting.
They responded with publicly funded medical care back when seniors were struggling. I'm still hoping for this kind of BIG level courage from our politicians but a whole lot us need to let them know that we WANT and support that kind of bravery in politics!
Feel you about the set of 'affordable' places getting smaller and smaller, and the adaptations needed more and more constraining, from the point when people would (short-shortsightedly) act like people should 'just' leave Toronto and Vancouver to avoid problems that are now widespread. I know so many people (admittedly in a field where some have always left for better wages) giving up and moving to the US even though they didn't otherwise want to because they just see no path to things getting better here. But every way people make it work ('just' go to school longer despite maybe having to give a location-specific career up later, or 'just' delay starting a family, or 'just' move away from everyone you know) seems to become the new baseline until everyone acts surprised there's no more room to adapt for many. I feel like a larger number of older people have recently admitted there's a problem, but not necessarily that this rising bar to adapt (like people suggesting multi-generational-by-necessity households as a *solution* rather than a symptom of policy failure) is part of the problem even if people are technically adequately housed.
I agree! It has finally come to the point where older Canadians are starting to "get it" when it comes to the struggles of younger Canadians but most that I run into think we should all just put our heads down and continue to "work hard" because they had to work hard too. This isn't a competition. We all need to work together to solve this. I'm frustrated by younger generations having to make the lions share of the adaptations and do the lions share of the advocacy work in an effort to address the new Canadian reality of increasing unaffordabilities. The multi-generational household I now live in is DEFINITELY a symptom of policy failure, and you're right, it risks being seen as a solution, much like the "solution" of the recent tiny home trend. Try raising even 1 child in a tiny home! LOL
Yes! Jennifer! That was my point. The younger generation must be less materialist than the previous generations. If we/they are to survive climate change. Replacing gasoline cars with electric cars won't do it. You can't solve a growth problem with green growth. The squeeze your generation is feeling is also an opportunity to develop other values that older generations falsely believed that they could afford not to. Norberg Hodge also writes the introduction to a very short book by Rupert Read titled This Civilization Is Finished. David Suzuki and Naomi Klein endorses Helena and Rupert' works. I was floored when I read Rupert's so concise-short book it was if he had read my mind!
In many cultures generations live together not as punishment but as choice. My forty-year-old Neighbour lives in his parents' basement. I felt sorry for him until he told me that he does not want to live alone, and he enjoys helping his parents. But no doubt our culture tends to say he is a loser.
As a young political science/philosophy grad I made the decision I would not marry or have kids because I figured that our civilization was finishing-sickly materialist and unnecessarily bureaucratic and complex moving further and further away from the pace or scale to be human. Now retired from teaching I am a full- time journalist- journaling on how we can get out of the wreckage-ways forward.
Out of the journals eventually a book will come. The purpose of my post-of my mention of Helena and now Rupert is getting young people not to focus on past generations measures-they are all screwed up. I went against the grains when I did not have to. Your generation now has to. That can be a damn good thing in the right state of mind.
For clarity-When I say I went against the grains. I mean that I never had a consumer's mentality. I bought a smaller house than all of my teacher friends. I bought it in a neighborhood where I could walk to the grocery store gym and a park with a track and tennis courts, and I bicycled to school. I lived this very local low footprint...and paid attention to all the things people were doing to attain the stuff of status-to get the advertised package- extrinsic rewards that ultimately left them empty or barely conscious-with a consumer conscious always wanting more. I was/am fit handsome personable and popular with staff and students. I used humor to make my points about our unthinking ways what we were taking for granted in all our strivings. Schooling had become so far removed from its original purposes so big, so bureaucratic and corporate in structure that had become mostly about management. Students has been turned into consumers of facts to get extrinsic rewards. We had managed to kill the fact that children were natural born learners-full of questions wonder that was turned off in a the business of schooling. In short we had moved so far away from Socrates asking questions under a tree. This was not education this was closing down minds so the they become specialized producers and consumers- stopping to think about the big picture with big questions was served no purpose in our definition of education or success. In fact, stopping to think widely and deeply was in the way of success. Success was the accumulation of more. When I retired at age 53 my friends threw me a party and said “Glen, you’ve got to buy a new car-get rid of that old entry level vehicle and buy a house that you can afford” I smiled and saved my response for my journal. My friends are not superficial or stupid. (They will thank me for saying that) They have just stayed so busy in our fast-paced world where there is little time, opportunity, inclination or skills or habits of stopping to think outside of what they stay busy in. I joked in the staff room- “the ministry-the board-the administration keeps us teachers so busy we have no time to think, and we keep the students well managed and out of trouble by keeping them too busy to think. Humor saved the day for me but there is nothing funny about. I was deadly serious.
500 years ago, we began our current ever expansionist material growth ethic- model. We wiped out the Indigenous peoples and justified it as we were bringing them progress. We stole their land and destroyed their cultures. Cultures which were not materialist, or growth based but with the very ways and thinkings we need know in order to survive as a species. I still have that very old car and live in that modest house. But when I die, I am leaving my millions to Canadian native restoration projects. As a kid and adult, I never let myself get over the fact we stole their land and diminished their culture. Some Canadian natives still lack running drinking water. This is bigger than Generation Squeeze and Global Warming is bigger than Generation Squeeze. All generations are feeling the squeeze of cancerous corporate growth, of concentration of wealth... of gross inequities of unbalance. Younger generations will have to return to native ways and ethics...ways of paying attention to the natural world if we are to have future generations with a higher quality of life.
I don't think it's useful to conflate 'materialism' with people wanting choices about their lives, like where to live or who with. There's no way around a future with less 'stuff', but I don't think that inherently means accepting the loss of independence that comes with relying on someone else to stay housed. People don't think enough about power dynamics, and plenty of cultures with mutli-generational households are not especially egalitarian. This is especially true in a situation where it's less that people need to pool resources and more that an older generation has made sure they are the ones with all the resources. (I even saw a bunch of articles recently framing it as a 'win-win' situation to have a program where students helped seniors at home in exchange for reduced rent, as if that is not both a little bit Victorian and a wildly different arrangement for the person who owns the home and has the choice than for the student who has few enough affordable housing choices that it might seem like a good deal to effectively be live-in help.) People being able--even if they decide they don't want to--live alone is important, not a luxury we should decide we've outgrown.
I was abrupt with my reply, sorry for that Valerie. I had just posted a long explanation for the nature of our world. Basically, it's the fact we make consumers out of students. We do not teach civics and we only give lip service to independent thinking. As Consumers rather than engaged concerned citizens we allowed Corporations to grow to the point that they control our politics. We did not set limits. We did not develop truly progressive taxation that would have shared the wealth more, we did not develop a wealth tax....The list of things that we did not do because we were mostly passive consumers and not engaged citizens is huge. Now it's so late in the game. Corporate growth, concentration of wealth, poverty inequity is so grotesque, the destruction of our life support system is not slowing down. There is little good news to share. BUT. The COVID stimulus packages worked. They saved Canada and America from a depression. The corporate world supported that because they wanted the masses to buy their products. So, we are likely to get a UBI to keep the poor buying corporate products.
This falls under the SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE category. There will be more affordable housing available in Canada. But not what is needed. Affordable housing is a problem around the world-Canada sits at the bottom in Western nations on this. So even if we move from the bottom we still won't come anywhere near our needs. Meanwhile corporate growth cancerous to our environment will continue. Climate change is still far less important than increasing the GDP. Growth for profits-growth with the false belief that we can grow our way out of a growth problem. Most people avoid thinking about it hoping science will solve it. When science and technology caused it. We are not a humble people. Arrogantly we thought we could master nature, unlike our native peoples who knew deep humility. I believe that this civilization is ending. If the forces of nature bring us to our knees... that's where we should have been all along. We needed to go at a slower pace with different values and far more inclusive careful thinking and far less siloed specialized thinking.
Valerie you should have stopped at "I don't think."