Old Poverty vs. New Poverty

There is a popular distinction between Old Money and New Money.

Old Money is what everyone is familiar with. It’s what you have when you’re a prince or an aristocrat. It’s when you grow up learning how to manage an estate, rather than learning skills to trade for a wage. Old Money is when you have a pedigree. Most of your ancestors did well and most of your family are doing well. There are monuments/parks/buildings/roads named after your relations.

New Money is what you have when your parents escaped from the working class. Maybe one started a business and got rich, maybe one became a sports star, maybe one won the lottery. Maybe your parents are old enough that they could escape the working class by studying and working hard. Probably the rest of your family is poor, and you might have a lot of criminal cousins.

A behavioural difference is apparent. New Money is much flashier and ostentatious than Old Money. This is a function of New Money’s underlying insecurity – the inescapable suspicion that they achieved their position through luck, and that it won’t last. Being insecure, New Money is more likely to bully. It lacks grace, dignity, gravitas and the other qualities associated with good breeding.

Old Money is secure. Old Money knows that if it fucks up, some uncle or great-aunt will be there to provide a cushy job for a quick rebound. Even in cases where help from close relatives isn’t enough, it can usually rely on the reputation of the family name to seal a good deal. And if that doesn’t work, Old Money can always rely on the qualities of their breeding to see them through.

When the economy expands, the central struggle is Old Money vs. New Money. This occurs when the descending aristocracy, on the way down, meets the ascending merchantry. This is the same as what George Orwell called the High vs. the Middle. It’s a natural historical division that most people know about.

When the economy contracts, however, you have Old Poverty vs. New Poverty.

For example, I’m Old Poverty. I’m used to being poor. I was raised by a single mother on welfare, and although my grandparents were great people they were always broke. These grandparents brought me up on stories about the Great Depression, and how they learned to “make do”. Many of the stories began with “we didn’t have a…”

Old Poverty makes it easy to live on a Student Allowance or other benefit, as it usually isn’t much less money than you grew up on anyway. You naturally know how to make do when you’ve been raised by grandparents who were also poor. Poverty doesn’t cause as much anxiety when it’s the natural state, so is not resented as much. Actually having money, on the other hand, is seen as a bonus and is not taken for granted.

In coming years, we will see a lot more of a phenomenon that has hitherto been rare: New Poverty. This has never previously existed in any large number because the economy has kept expanding. But in coming decades, as we hit the limits of growth, we will have economic contractions.

New Poverty is when your parents were able to buy a house and raise a family on their wages – and you can’t. It’s when your parents keep asking you when you’re going to give them grandchildren, and you have to keep explaining that the maths doesn’t add up. It’s when you hit 40 and still haven’t paid off your student loan. It’s when you’re constantly asking yourself how things turned out so bad.

New Poverty is different to someone born into money who crashes out through their own bad decisions. New Poverty is when you do everything (or almost everything) right and still end up renting. You study hard, you don’t get a criminal record, you don’t do Class As, and you still find yourself making $60,000 a year and needing a $900,000 mortgage.

It remains to be seen how Western society deals with the phenomenon of widespread New Poverty.

One of the features of New Poverty is that it’s likely to lead to a massive increase in dissent. Not having expected to become poor, many of those falling from the middle class into New Poverty will become resentful about their miserable station. Already there is a widespread incel movement in the West comprised of men who demand the very best.

In the past, the coming of New Poverty portended revolution. Old Poverty can handle being poor, but New Poverty tends to become bitter. So in times when middle-class or upper-middle-class people are cast down into the working class, we can expect them to fight to get back to their original position. Here it’s worth recalling that many revolutionaries started out in the minor aristocracy.

If we don’t get revolution, we might get what Aldous Huxley predicted – a world where everyone is zombified by pharmaceuticals. Maybe the vast masses will be paralysed by a matrix of screen propaganda, prescription pills and long working hours, lacking the energy to revolt against the technologically-empowered ruling class.

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What Would Be A Fair Wage Today, In Housing Terms?

A recent post on Plebbit’s r/newzealand subforum involved a Boomer crying about having to pay a farmhand $28 per hour. The Boomer seemed surprised that “a young guy in his late twenties” wasn’t grateful for the opportunity. Simple economic psychology explains why – and everyone younger than Boomers understands it.

If said farmhand works 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year, he’ll earn a gross pay of $56,000. After income tax, that works out to $45,323. After rent is sucked out of him, he’s left with the princely sum of $37,003. Let’s say that he’s capable of living as cheaply as the average beneficiary, on about $350 per week or so. That leaves him with $18,803 in savings per year to go towards owning a house one day.

The average New Zealand house price is now $893,639. This means it would take our farmhand 47.53 years to save up enough money. Assuming he’s now 29, he should have enough money by roughly age 77. And this is assuming that house prices don’t rise in this time.

The obvious objection here is that our farmhand would get a mortgage. So let’s do the maths on that.

The WestPac mortgage calculator suggests that a person on a wage of $56,000 p.a. should be able to afford a mortgage of $249,360. If they already had a 20% deposit saved, they could potentially buy a house worth $311,700.

A TradeMe Property search reveals that there is almost nowhere that you can buy a house in New Zealand for $311,700. For reference, even leasehold land in Hokitika, a town more remote than 99% of New Zealand, is going for $249,000 right now. Almost everything else at that price is a bare section.

So with a 30-year mortgage, our farmhand could potentially aim to own enough land to pitch a tent on by the time he was 60. Finding a fertile woman as a 60-year old man living in a tent would no doubt prove an absurd challenge.

Buying an actual home is simply impossible on $28/hour. Homeownership and raising a family are unachievable dreams on such a wage. Ergo, it isn’t a fair wage, it’s exploitation. Which raises an obvious question: what would be a fair wage for a full-time worker today?

The first assumption is that the most accurate measure of a fair wage is the extent to which it provides for a decent (not luxurious) lifestyle, and this primarily means homeownership. People are not happy making high wages if all they can afford is televisions and takeaways and the money doesn’t stretch to establishing a home.

The second assumption is that the Boomers themselves got a fair deal. Thus, I will assume that the housing situation in 1992 (when the average Boomer would have been about 36-37) is representative of the Boomer life experience. This certainly meant homeownership; for many Boomers, it meant owning so many homes that they could live off the rents of the young for life.

In 1992 the average New Zealand house price was $109,000. Also in 1992, the average hourly wage was about $15. This works out to 7,266 hours of saved labour to own the average house.

If the average house price now is $893,639, we can divide that by 7,266 hours of labour, and then multiply the resulting hourly wage by 2,000 hours in the year, to find the annual wage that would give a late-20s farmhand today the same chance of owning a home that a late-20s Boomer had in 1992 (this is the youngest possible Boomer, and all older ones will have had an even easier time).

Therefore, a fair wage today, per annum, would be about $245,978. Only a wage of no less than $245,978 would allow today’s worker to own a home with the same ease that the Boomers enjoyed. Any less than that, and today’s worker is forced to work hours that Boomers were not forced to, in order to enjoy the same standard of living.

Note that this figure implies absolutely zero standard of living increase from all the technological advancement of the last 31 years. Let’s just assume (for the sake of humility, perhaps) that the corporates deserve all of the profits from all of that advancement, which includes the advent of the personal computer, the Internet, the cellphone etc. Let’s assume that our farmhand deserves a zero share of this bounty.

That still leaves us with a wage of $245,978 (some $123 per hour) minimum for today’s farmhand to have the same standard of living as a farmhand in 1992. Such a wage is necessary if he wants to buy today’s $893,639 average house with 7,266 hours of saved labour, as the average Boomer was privileged enough to do.

Of course, the average farmer or business owner would rather go out of business than pay a wage anywhere near that. Which leaves many people asking honestly where the New Zealand economy can possibly go from here.

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Racism Of The Gaps

The phrase “God of the gaps” is used to mock a particular kind of religious fundamentalist – the type who leaps on every gap in scientific explanation of natural phenomena, and declares it proof of God’s existence. Were the gap not proof of God’s existence, so the argument goes, then the materialist scientist ought to be able to explain it.

Thus, phenomena like the existence of the cosmos, the origin of life, the cause of diversity in animals and plants and the existence of consciousness are regularly attributed to the workings of God. If a scientist can’t explain them, then Goddidit.

The mockery is motivated by the fact that fanatics view the entire world through the lens of their obsession, and so they find that obsession everywhere, in every nook and cranny of reality. Hence, the religious fanatic sees their god hiding in every gap of the natural world, which seems ridiculous to others.

Today, in the Clown World of 2023, those who want to get a big dopamine hit from feeling morally superior to other people don’t use God. They use race. No-one cares about God any more. But race is everywhere and everything in the multicultural West. It’s rare now to find one street, one workplace or one television show without prominent virtue-signalling.

As such, there now exists a phenomenon that can be referred to as “the racism of the gaps”. This is when differences in outcome between any two human populations is ascribed to racism before any other explanation is considered, or when more plausible but non-race-based explanations are rejected. If a person from Race A has any kind of advantage over, or better outcome than, a person from Race B, then the gap is best explained by racism.

The most common example of the racism of the gaps fallacy relates to the so-called “wage gap”. The logic is that non-whites earn less money than whites because institutional racism discriminates against non-whites. This racism means that non-whites are passed over for promotions, or not hired in the first place, thereby giving them fewer opportunities to make money.

Blank slate logic only holds if a person believes that all human populations are precisely the same in all intellectual measures. The simple fact that most Asian groups in the West do as well, or better than, white people, despite suffering as much, or more, prejudice than much less successful immigrant groups, is sufficient evidence to disprove blank slate theory.

Moreover, the psychological literature clearly states that the most important factor determining the income of any individual or group is IQ, and the measured IQs of all the various races in the West correlate strongly with their economic outcomes. If the various races are as wealthy as the science predicts they should be, what’s the problem?

The term ‘racism of the gaps’ mocks the fact that no social justice warrior has ever been able to quantify the effect that all the supposed white supremacy has had on the beleaguered non-whites of the world. All the science explaining the differences between races is thrown out the window in preference of a Cultural Marxist narrative about racism – it’s right to mock such low-IQ thought processes.

Racism of the gaps also appears when people ask, for example, why there are so few Maoris or Pacific Islanders in the New Zealand cricket team. The implication is that some nefarious white conspiracy is preventing them from accessing opportunities. The reality, of course, is that Maoris and Pacific Islanders prefer to play other sports.

No-one makes the claim that the NRL is racist in favour of Maoris and Pacific Islanders because they are heavily over-represented in rugby league. The people pushing the racism of the gaps fallacy only care about something if there’s a racial angle that can be exploited, especially an anti-white one.

Much like the term ‘racism’ itself, ‘racism of the gaps’ refers to a deliberate strategy to undermine Western society by setting different racial groups against each other. It’s pushed by the ruling class, particularly the globalist ruling class, who want all the peoples they rule over divided and conquered along every possible fracture line. Thus they claim racism where it doesn’t exist, in order to stoke tensions and mistrust.

The best way to stop this pernicious logic from becoming even more widespread is to mock it at every turn. Any time someone leaps to blame racism for some difference in outcome, on flimsy and unscientific evidence, laugh at them for committing the racism of the gaps fallacy. Make them feel stupid for pushing long-debunked blank slate nonsense.

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How Far Would House Prices Need To Fall For Young People Today To Have It As Good As The Boomers Did?

Boomers have been denying it for years, but young people all over the West have now caught on: the Boomers had it much, much better than young people today do. Measuring exactly how much better is hard, but we can guess by comparing how much saved labour Boomers needed to buy a house to how much saved labour younger generations need. Armed with the Reserve Bank’s Inflation Calculator, we can make some educated guesses.

If the last Boomers were born in 1963, graduated high school, then went to university or did a trade apprenticeship, they would have hit the job market – and started looking for a home to raise a family in – in about 1984. Any Boomers older than this would have had an even easier time. So we will compare the house-buying power of a young adult in 1984 with that of a young adult in 2022.

According to qv.co.nz, the average New Zealand house price in October 2022 was $951,040. The Reserve Bank calculator tells us that housing worth $951,040 in October 2022 would be worth $61,854.79 in the first quarter of 1984.

According to the Government’s NZ History page, the average weekly wage in 1984 was $285. This suggests that the average house price was about 217 times the average weekly wage in 1984. In other words, Boomers had to save about 217 weeks’ worth of wages in order to afford the average house.

According to the wage and salary guide at jobted.nz, the average weekly wage in New Zealand in 2022 was $1,093. So the average house price today is about 870 times the average weekly wage. This means that it’s over four times harder for young people today to buy a home they can raise a family in, when compared to Boomers.

The official narrative is that we need to grow wages if we want to bring back the living standards that our parents enjoyed. But there will never be enough wage inflation to bring today’s worker back to that level of prosperity. Our wages would have to quadruple while house prices remained the same. Therefore, if we are to ever enjoy that standard of living ourselves, we have to hope for a house price collapse.

A return to an average house price that was 217 times the average weekly wage would require a fall of 75.1% from current values. This means a fall from around $951,040 to around $236,809. Note that this would not mean that young people today had a better standard of living than the Boomers – it would merely mean that they would have an equal one.

An average house price of $236,809 seems fantastical to young people today.

It’s incredible how much easier life would be for young people in 2022 if the average house cost less than a quarter of a million. It would mean an end to the mortgage slavery that is strangling the West. It would mean that thousands of hours of labour per mortgage holder, currently getting sucked into bank profits, could be redirected to the benefit of families and communities.

That is also why we can’t expect it to happen – there is nothing more profitable than human misery, and mortgage slavery is one of the prime examples of that in the world today. The more expensive houses are, the more human life energy the owners of those houses can absorb from the lower classes in exchange for them. So the ruling class is not likely to change anything anytime soon.

Therefore, the best young Kiwis can hope for, if they want to ever have the same standard of living that the Boomers had, is a house price collapse of at least 75%. The mainstream media will tell us that we’re not allowed to hope for that, because it would mean the destruction of the New Zealand economy. But the status quo is our effective financial enslavement. Something has to give.

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