Where are OUR allies?

I'll be the first to admit it. I come from the most over-privileged "class" on earth: the white, Christian (or at least Agnostic), heterosexual male. So much like the Alberta oil workers questioning where Alberta's allies are, I might not get more than a "oh boo-hoo" for questioning where all the allies of today's youth and of the "Millennial" generation are. We are too often called "entitled", "lazy", or "narcissistic", the fact of the matter is that we have different values than the generation before us. The problem is that the world we are inheriting was built by the generations before us, and truthfully, they didn't do a very good job...

But unlike (some of) the Alberta oil workers, I haven't had a chance yet. It's not that I am having something taken away from me, I'm not losing my job, it's that frankly, I never really had the same opportunities to begin with. Don't get me wrong, I've been given "opportunities" aplenty--as I said as a white male I am probably given more opportunities than many of my peers--but at the same time I think I (and many of my peers) have earned the right to look at my position with the same righteous outrage as the oil workers who suddenly find themselves out of work.

I grew up in Squamish, a small town about 45 minutes north of Vancouver. I was always a smart kid, and I took an interest in science at a fairly young age. I remember when I was probably around 7 or 8 one of my daycare providers took us to the public library. Making my way over to the reference section I grabbed the big "C" volume of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (for you kids, its basically a big, non-digital version of Wikipedia. This was before people really had the internet...) and flipped it open to "Cancer" and eagerly began reading convinced that one day I would be a famous scientist or doctor that would cure cancer. This stayed with me as I moved off to Victoria for my bachelors in biochemistry, and I even got my chance to be a real life scientist when I studied Lyme Disease during my masters degree in Calgary. Surely a smart, well educated kid from a privileged class should have nothing to complain about; the stereotypical view of this time of your life is that it should be fun, partying, enjoying life before kids and the greater responsibilities of life come your way.

I don't think that my own "vision" of how my life should be is unreasonable either. Sure I have expectations for my life, someday I'd like to own a home, I'd like to be able to pursue my hobbies, and I do drive a nice car, even if it is a Hyundai. But, I never thought that as a "Master of Science" working in the biotech industry (an industry that is growing at a projected CAGR of 12%, one of the fastest of any industry) I would be living in a dark, poorly maintained basement suite. And NEVER in my wildest dreams did I ever think that as a "professional" in the biotech industry I would be moving out of said basement suite into a house with 7 roommates because I couldn't afford to keep the basement. After 17 years of school and 7 years of paying tuition I am finally earning an income, I have relatively little debt, how is it that I am finding it so hard to live?

There are a couple factors that I think are contributing here. The first, and I know it has been beaten to death, is that unfortunately (and at the same time very, very fortunately) I live in Vancouver. For anyone that has been in a coma for the last year and only just came out of it: First, what the hell are you doing reading a stupid blog by some twenty-something kid? Get out there and enjoy the world again! Second, affordability in Vancouver has been one of the biggest discussions of the last year (which is why I won't talk about it more than this, many more people have written about this in far greater depth with better analysis and discussion than I could). Suffice to say, as a "local" it almost feels like my home has turned its back on me, that factors I couldn't control and could never control have made it so I have to choose between my home, where my family is, and fulfilling my life "goals" (which really, is having a place to live and enough means to support myself really a "goal"?).

The second factor (which I think definitely contributes to the first factor) is basic human greed. Let's get one thing straight right off the bat: Trickle down economics, while a great idea in principle, does not exist. As revenues increase, as profit increases, as corporations are given tax breaks and exploit tax loopholes, all of that money does NOT make its way down to the employees in the mail-room. In every company I've ever worked for it barely makes it out of the executive office, in fact most of it probably makes its way out of the country...

To illustrate the elaborate scam of trickle down economics (without disclosing confidential information), my company made enough PROFIT last year that if it were shared evenly among the employees everyone would get around an extra $100,000; do you think any of us saw a single cent (in the form of a raise, bonus, etc.)? Out of interest we dug out one of my dad's old tax returns from when he was my age. He made the exact same salary in 1986 as I do now.

Over-educated and under-paid seems like an all too common saying these days when referring to our young people. Do you have any idea how many "Dr. So-and-so, PhD"s I know that are not working in their field and making WAYY less than you'd expect? Would you believe me if I told you I know PhD's that make roughly the same as a teenager working at McDonalds? Well it's true... And I'm not even talking about a PhD in philosophy (sorry philosophists...), I am talking about microbiology, neurobiology, biochemistry, the type of people that you'd think should be saving the world from Ebola, Zika virus, or the next super bug that emerges (NDM-1 scares the SHITE outta me).

As a fun exercise one day I sat down and thought about how much I would need to live the rest of my life without working. I decided that I'll probably live until I'm around 80, and $100,000 a year from now to then (~50 years) would likely give me a fairly extravagant lifestyle; at the very least I would be extremely comfortable. Add on top of that a house (lets call that a cool $1M), and maybe a little extra for some toys and fun stuff... It's not unreasonable to say that a person could live extremely comfortably without working a single day in their life with $10M. The fact that some people have accrued orders of magnitude more than this (or that Kanye has lost more than this) is staggering.

When you think about it, what is "wealth"? For the sake of this conversation let's view it like this: Tim chops down a tree, Bob needs some wood so he trades Tim for the wood, but because Bob doesn't have anything that Tim wants they trade "money" so that Tim can go exchange the money in town for a service that he needs or maybe that nice new pair of long underwear with the fancy butt flap that he's had his eye on (run on sentence much? Ha! I'm leaving it.).

In short, we take something from the earth, convert it to "wealth", and spend that wealth on our needs. The oil company takes the oil from the ground and trades it for money which it uses to pay its workers, open more wells, buy excessive amounts of Dove dish detergent to clean up oil soaked wildlife, etc... When you boil down to the very bottom, money is a measure of the resources extracted from the earth and the effort to obtain it. Every dollar in your bank account is a measure of some resource extracted from the earth whether it was here in Canada or in another country (after all, commodities make the world go round).

If we accept that the earth belongs to no one, that it is shared by us all and therefore MUST belong to us all and to future generations as well, this system seems to be unfair. If we consider that taking $10M from the earth seems to be more than enough to live an enviable lifestyle for your entire life and that some people have taken MORE than this we start to get angry. When we realize that the "extra" amount that these people took comes from our share, our children's share, our grand children's share, that the earth won't heal itself unless WE take less (cause we can't really expect those greedy ass-wipes to take less), we start to get furious. Did you read the one about the Chinese billionaire that bought a $170 M painting at auction on his AmEx black card and now has enough points to fly his family first class for free for the rest of their lives (and that's the reason he did it)? Yeah, fuck that guy.

I bet right now the oil workers are sick of hearing "well you should have saved when times were good". That is a pretty uninformed statement. Do you know why a lot of the oil workers are broke right now? Yes, some of them did go buy fancy new trucks, however, when I lived in Calgary it was well known that rent in Fort McMurray was astronomical. Yes, these men and women may have earned a lot of money, but they were squeezed for as much of it as possible. This is why I have sympathy for them, much like them I have a "good" job, but I'm not exactly getting anywhere in my life and I accredit it largely to the "greed" of the people above me (bosses, landlords, etc...).

Over the years what we've basically done is created a great machine where a few people can get to the top and accumulate vast amounts of wealth. The rest of us are given just enough of a taste of the good life. We buy a nice car, or a nice house because that's a reasonable thing to want in your life, and then you're trapped. You can't quit your job where they treat you like shit because you'd lose your income, and they don't pay you enough that you can save anything to do something drastic in your life like changing careers while balancing that mortgage and car payments. So you're (seemingly) stuck.

The sad truth is employers treat employees like shit largely because employees let employers treat them like shit, but that's kinda part of the system. This is akin to hiring a "nanny" and paying them a wage then deducting the entire wage in room and board. People have been arrested for that, seriously, go read the news. And yet we do it to ourselves, and we let our employers do it to us too. (OK, I admit that was an EXTREMELY hyperbolic comparison and there were many other factors in the case I was referring to, but damn who doesn't like a good hyperbole? Anything with the prefix "hyper" is ok in my books: hyperspeed, hyperspace....)

So I ask: where are OUR allies? It seems like every other day I see another blog or news article about the "Millennial Exodus" from Vancouver. With a little searching you can find statements and analyses from politicians, academics, "business people", and while everyone seems to be concerned, no one seems to be able or willing to do anything about it. Thanks Christy, for giving me a tax break on a housing market I can't afford to get into anyways... We acknowledge that wage stagnation and a hot housing market is a serious problem, but what are we actually doing about it?

And when referring to the housing crisis, yes, I agree that it would be unfortunate to wipe out billions of dollars of private capital through policy changes. But what about someone who bought into the stock market just before the recession hit? How much of that sweet, sweet bail-out money went to recovering the money lost in private portfolios? How much are we willing to trade our future to pad the pockets of Vancouver's wealthy "investors"?

Buying into a fluctuating market (stock, housing) at any time is a risk; when it is inflated it is an even bigger risk. An inflated stock market deflates, an inflated housing market deflates or collapses. If the housing market in Vancouver did collapse, I bet we'd figure out really quickly who the real "Vancouverites" are and how much speculation and foreign money parking there is in the market.

I'm no expert, I have no idea what to do. I'm just another twenty-something year old who feels like their home has turned its back on them. I'm frustrated and I'm starting to wonder, like many others my age, if I shouldn't just leave for the US, for Europe, for anywhere but here. And while I feel sympathy for Alberta, a place I called home for almost 5 years, please don't look west thinking that we can help you. I assure you, we've got problems of our own.