That’s the title on the cover. The title of the article inside the magazine is
How to fight back against Gen-Z socialism
The me-first doctrine is a threat to prosperity
Link to article; link to archived article.
The core of their argument seems to be:
they broadly agree on three core principles. First, that growth does little to help ordinary people. Theirs is a zero-sum mindset, where a better outcome comes not from creating but from taking—as they fear ai barons will soon do on a vast scale. Second, that spending can be paid for by the richest. Once the left wanted higher taxes for everyone; Gen-Z socialists demand handouts funded by billionaires. The third tenet is a remarkable hostility to private enterprise. Gen-Z socialists are uninterested in letting the market rip and redistributing the proceeds. They would have chunks of everyday life, from housing to groceries, governed by state diktat.
Once the left wanted higher taxes for everyone; Gen-Z socialists demand handouts funded by billionaires
Fucking crazy take. Billionaires have been paying far less than their share for decades. A regular person might pay 33% on their annual wealth gains while billionaire accounting and tax dodging leaves them near 0%.
People “demand handouts from billionaires” because 31.7% OF ALL WEALTH IN THE USA is tied up in the personal assets of 1% of the population. There is quite literally nowhere else to get the money.
Gen-Z socialists demand handouts funded by billionaires.
Billionaires and big corporations have been stealing their wealth by underpaying workers, enshitificating their products with ads, creating subscription based services with unreasonable price hikes for what should be a single purchase, corruption and financial fraud.
Nobody earns a billion dollars by working. The wealth they are hoarding was never theirs to take.
Wow, how (expectedly) out of touch.
Gen-Z socialists are uninterested in letting the market rip and redistributing the proceeds.
Because they’ve seen how well that has worked for their peers and parents.
What did you expect? It’s called the Economist.
Better newspapers and magazines are Jacobin, die Tageszeitung, Il Manifesto, and Voxeurop. Oh and locally there’s the West Highland Free Press.
What did you expect? It’s called the Economist.
That’s why I literally wrote “(expectedly)” in my comment, but thanks for the recommendations.
It’s actually really funny that they mention US T-bonds as a time bomb in small print at the top then try to get boomers scared about Gen Z.
Whats out of touch is that I am not sure Gen Z is explicitly against the concept of “rip and redistribute”.
Because that is not what is happening. What is happening is “Rip and hoard”.
THAT is what Gen Z is against.
There is also the weird line OP quoted that suggests Gen Z is “against creating but prefers taking” and that they are just upset with AI because its doing that at scale.
Like I guess they are trying to compare the desire for “taking” profits from Billionaires to AI taking everything humans have created? Its so stupid.
Unsurprisingly, their arguments are just a warmed over version of the same ones they published when they decried millenial socialism a few years back:
It is wrong to think that inequality must go on rising inexorably. American income inequality fell between 2005 and 2015, after adjusting for taxes and transfers. Median household income rose by 10% in real terms in the three years to 2017. A common refrain is that jobs are precarious. But in 2017 there were 97 traditional full-time employees for every 100 Americans aged 25-54, compared with only 89 in 2005. The biggest source of precariousness is not a lack of steady jobs but the economic risk of another downturn.
I’m not entirely sure the intervening years have done much to dispel worries amongst millennial socialists that jobs are precarious, despite the Economists’ scolding.
Just FYI, archive[.]ph links are banned on feddit, due to that site (and its other flavors like .today etc) using its visitors as a botnet for DDOS attacks.
That’s them summing this version of socialism.
They then go on to argue it is dangerous because:
Rent controls would worsen housing shortages by crushing the incentive to build. The profit margins of big supermarket chains, demonised by Gen-Z socialists, are already wafer-thin after years of ruthless competition—a miracle of modern capitalism. Wealth taxes would become confiscatory and deter innovation. Do not assume that the failure of these policies, if implemented, would bring about an automatic course correction. Europe has struggled for decades to escape the low-growth funk left by its own over-regulation; the rise of statist “Peronists” in Argentina helps explain its century of relative decline.
Personally, I do find a lot of the modern progressive discourse about this to be pretty facile. When confronted with wealth flight, common answers tend to be “let 'em leave” (a mind bogglingly dumb take if these are the people you need to fund everything) to “well they won’t leave” despite evidence to the contrary.
It’s like these folks think they’ve stumbled onto an infinite money glitch and I’ve yet to see a serious discussion that weighs any cons or possible dangers. It’s dumb when trump can’t admit there might be costs or downsides to his ideas, the same is true of us.
If only. What USians call socialism would probably be center left at best in Europe.
Just as a piece of context: the economist is an English newspaper.
I am actually a subscriber and was quite irritated by that front page, to say the least.
You should not subscribe to the Economist, it’s consistently awful.
the economist has been a nazi rag for decades, you’ve been helping pay for all kinds of shit like this. cancel.
Ah dang. Thanks for the info. After posting my comment I actually thought what if it’s not even an US magazine, but I thought given that there’s Mamdani on it, it might just be.
Isn’t Mamdani a millennial though? Or is it saying Gen Z delivered for him in the election?
From what I’ve seen GenZ is ideologically ambitious, but mostly for things that are available by clicking on menus. The thrust is a little bit of, “We’re building the future we want,” and a lot more, “We deserve having better options presented to us.”
And Millennials are like “well, there’s this shit sandwich, and we got here when a good amount of it was built, but then it kept getting bigger while the people making it were telling us that the shit sandwich could go away if we used brown bread instead of white, but then when we went to brown bread, we were told that now they had the space to add even more shit, and now the people who stuffed all the shit into the shit sandwich are upset because people are unwilling to put more shit in the sandwich, which means that they may end up needing to eat some of it”
