Who Will Buy?
Our grandparents in their youth lived a very different life from the one being lived by young people today and made very different decisions as a result. Even as recently as the 1990s, you could find pinned to a cork notice board in staff cafeterias a handwritten plea for anyone who might’ve taped onto VHS last Thursday’s episode of Coronation Street.
These days you’re more likely to receive a MySpace bulletin (along with 12,934 others) announcing that your nephew has no recollection of what he did at any stage last Thursday and if anyone caught any of that day on their videophones, then he’d appreciate it being beamed to him at their earliest convenience. Given that young people seem to need to have eighty five percent of their waking hours recorded for posterity in some way in digital video or blog form then it’s highly likely that your nephew should have his memories vicariously restored in short order.
New Zealand was a very different place in the past. In the 1970s adultery was almost non-existent and wouldn’t have existed at all if it wasn’t for people having to sleep with their bank managers in return for mortgage approval. Research has shown that, on average, bank managers back then died six months after retirement. I guess life after that just wasn’t worth living? Credit was a lot harder to come by is basically what I’m saying. These days credit by the bucketful is almost forced upon us. I think if you place a child’s tooth under a pillow they’ll wake up the next morning with a two dollar coin and a gold card with a starting eight thousand dollar limit. (Five dollars cash if it’s an incisor. Molars are worth less – this is how we teach kids about supply and demand.) A man with a gun accosted me at my local ATM last week. I walked away with a ten thousand dollar overdraft at a rate of 15.6 per cent. Where is that money created?
Our grandparents’ generation considered being in debt to be shameful. These days nothing is shameful, everyone is the same and no one is ever to blame. Freely available credit minus the societal shame gives us what we have today, which in my case is a TV screen the same dimensions as my Great Aunt’s waterbed but a lot more entertaining. A friend of mine was so distraught at their children’s inability to save that they established a scheme where they would double their children’s savings at the end of the year. Her theory was that the overwhelmingly attractive incentive of an annual interest rate of one hundred percent would overcome today’s kids’ seemingly perpetual need for instant and significant material gratification. This scheme is in its third year of operation and the upside is that her scheme hasn’t cost her a cent. The downside is that she can’t move in her house as the floor is knee-deep in gaming consoles and half-finished transformers. Imagine these rugrats signing up for their pressure-free online loans as soon as they’re old enough.
I don’t mean to be disrespectful of the younger generation. They’re descended from generations of non-savers - us. They’re genetically predisposed to consumption. And the younger generation have the added difficulty in that the only thing worth consuming that almost doubles for saving in this country is housing. And they can’t afford it. Even with oodles of credit.
Shame!
Written By:
Neville Aitchison
Party President
Published: July 2007