Tim Worstall links to an insane comment on the site of progressive Matthew Yglesias who mulls over Youth Decay:
In general, teenagers are going to be low on the educational attainment scale and also lacking in impressive job qualifications beyond formal education. It’s perhaps a sign of a more efficient, more flexible economy that we’re getting “better” at shifting recession-related burdens onto the low-skill people who are probably worst-positioned (in terms of savings and social capital) to deal with economic distress.
Commenter Hector has the answer:
Just another example of how modern late-capitalist society and its penchant for substituting machines for men, warps human nature and human relations. Man was made to work, and by getting rid of human labor, our late-capitalist civilisation has deformed the meaning of what it is to be human.
Great idea, Hector! Let’s be poorer, so we’ll be richer.
Someone whould write a book about that, called Return of the Primitive or suchlike.
Ooops. Done.
Here in Krakow there is no sign of the overweight, scruffy listless, dull-eyed young people seen trudging in the UK.
Young Polish people are trim, smart, purposeful.
Did Communism in Poland have the perverse result of being so awful that it created a strong capitalist work ethic, as families had to improvise to get round it?
Did it also create an implicit ethical rejection of the very idea of indefinite state funding of young people for doing nothing?
Maybe Hector is right after all.
Young people who won’t work should be forced out on chain-gangs, hacking away at ditches. They’ll be physically and mentally stronger as a result.
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