Growing exploitation will lead to chaos

THE prospect of improving your lot or at least maintaining your place on life’s greasy pole is one of the motivating factors in people’s lives. 

The idea that if you play it more or less by the rules that you’ll get your slice of cake underpins stable societies. Or at least it did but that contract is being whittled away. A report from the Bank of England last week warned that middle class families are giving up the idea of home ownership as soaring costs and inadequate supply push millions out of Britain’s property market. The bank revealed that just under half of all families who don’t own their own home believe they will never get on the housing ladder. The families surveyed took home almost €100,000 a year after income taxes were paid.

This seems a mirror image of what is happening here and suggests that buying into the age-old idea that sacrifice and a stiff mortgage stretching over a working life might help create the kind of personal wealth that might ease the path of those who come after you is, like romantic Ireland, dead and gone. Rather, far too many of today’s families are expected to be life-long tenants enriching an investor’s portfolio. They are expected to be rent-payers rather than wealth accumulators, digital age serfs rather than stakeholders in society.

That this shifting of the goal posts has a profoundly negative impact on generations already suffering more than their share because of economic maladministration would encourage perceptive governments to confront the issue in a way that protects social justice, equity and the escalating concentration of wealth — if only to avert the chaos that history shows inevitably follows this kind of exploitation.