The Comfortable Road to Ruin

Paul Lindwall has a very interesting Quadrant piece on an Australian problem we also see here in the UK – the rise of comfortable generations, insufficiently tested by adversity.

The Comfortable Road to Ruin

Freya Leach’s article in the December Quadrant, “How Conservatives Can Win the Youth Vote”, argues that young Australians “may be the first generation in our nation’s history to be worse off than their parents”. It is a striking claim, and one that resonates deeply in an era of surging housing costs, stagnant productivity and pervasive anxiety about the future. Leach identifies genuine problems: delayed family formation, insecure work, declining educational standards and a fracturing tax-transfer system. These pressures are real and deserve serious attention.

But the conclusion drawn from them, that today’s young are materially worse off than earlier generations, is far less secure. It rests on a narrow reading of relative income and asset distribution while ignoring the extraordinary expansion of absolute living standards that now defines Australian life. The deeper danger facing young Australians is not material impoverishment, but something more insidious: the erosion of agency and resilience born of unprecedented comfort.

We are not producing a generation deprived of opportunity. We are producing a generation untested by it. And that is the true comfortable road to ruin.

It’s a deep and subtle problem of human behaviour, not unfamiliar, but the whole piece is well worth reading as an issue which isn’t raised often enough. It’s a problem of what we are, a problem the usual political nostrums can’t touch.

If the intergenerational contract is to be restored, it will require more than tax adjustments or housing supply reforms, though both are essential. It will require a cultural recovery of responsibility, resilience and the dignity of difficulty.

We must pass on not only wealth, but wisdom. And wisdom begins with expecting something of the young.

Australia still has time. Rome lingered for centuries after its virtues had decayed. The question is whether we choose renewal now, or whether we continue comfortably, complacently and confidently down the road to ruin.