Posts by Marcus Neiman
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James: When I wrote that Post-Grads with margin accounts were middle-class I did not have your personal experience in mind, although despite your protests I feel your seemingly exceptional experience reinforces my point.
Aside from those with lumps of capital, the sort of product you are advocating are only really open to persons such as yourself - ie. apparently highly educated in the field or with time to spare.
These sort of products are not accessible as a means to financially get ahead to the vast majority of the population who are time and capital poor or lacking in formal advanced financial education.
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James: I would suspect that your post-grad students with margin accounts are precisely the upper middle-class minority I mentioned earlier, who have probably benefitted from an inheritance at some point.
There may be exceptions, but I very much doubt their capital was raised through working at $12/hour while paying rent/buying food/and so on.
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Stephen: I take your point - I realise that the 70s and 80s weren't necessarily a financial golden age for twenty-somethings.
However, I do think that the "average punter" in their mid-20s now faces a very different situation to the "average punter" in their 40s-60s now did when they were in their twenties. Real estate assets/places to live are genuinely more expensive now than they were 5/10/ 20/30 years ago.
Increasingly, young people are being priced out of the markets for these places to live/assets as the incomes of young people have not caught up with the imperatives of desposit saving and interest repayment.
Generally, the" blindness" of boomers is produced through their lack of personal experiences of the student loan program and these low incomes. This is further obscured by the wider availabiliy of consumer credit to young people and the falling costs of status goods that older people still percieve as relatively expensive.
I also suspect that much of young people's spending is being displaced to status goods giving that saving for asset accumulation in the form of real estate is increasingly percieved as impossible.
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I'm sorry James, Stephen and your fellow bourgeois-boomer fellow travellers - I really do not believe that anyone is going to be lending sizeable amounts money for securities to twenty-somethings with pre-existing minimal net worths and salaries well below the $70-$90k numbers you are throwing around.
As if any more reinforcement was needed, this thread shows there is enormous generational blindness and apathy about the massive age and class based redistribution going on.
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I'm just under the half-way point between 20 and 40 and would love to imagine myself earning $70,000 a year in the near future in NZ in my line of work. Except that I can't.
This is just jealousy from old, overweight boomers who have lost their looks. Deep down they know that only a small minority of upper-middle class kids can put together the sort of cash being asked these days.
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Jonty: The interesting thing though is that the Right's wedge doesn't seem to be working in this case.
Sure they've managed to mobilise their usual fellow-travellers, and maybe I don't know enough socially conservative Labour-voters, but I don't think that this will be a long-term problem for Labour vis-a-vis its constituency, and it will certainly not be one for the Greens.
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Merce, have you been skim reading Deleuze recently?
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Don: The Greens know that they are not in a position to force Labour to take on all the other parties in parliament, the business community, and most NZers habits and aspirations to own bigger cars, houses, have cheap holidays overseas.
They also know that Labour, National, and the business community are not going to do anything until either the big players in the international community - ie. the largest national governments and media firms make it an imperative. All they can do is keep the issue on the agenda and hope for little wins until a crisis moment comes along or the US or China or Mudoch etc. shift their position.
Until that time they may as well go for little wins that can be achieved with the current parliament and political environment.
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Don: I do think it is a bit of a stretch to imply that Labour has made climate change a major area of substantive policy change as opposed to rhetoric.
Furthermore, the odds are so stacked against a substantive policy change it might make more strategic sense to go after Section 59 where a win does seem possible.
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Penguin's collection of Bruce Jesson's essays - To Build a Nation.
I am too young to have appreciated him first time round - I was so glad in reading that book to have found that NZ had produced a truly erudite, accessible, stylish writer on NZ political economy.
And from the left, Matt McCarten is a poor substitute.