Is there a common resentment of young and old?

I've just watched the Archbishop of Canterbury's New Year's message and something struck me that has struck me over and again this past few months....and no it wasn't a desire for atheism.

Dr Williams' example of good young people were those working for the benefit of others – without wages, all very noble, though not universally practical. The point was, they were working for others. Then I started to think about the recent reports of spiralling care for the elderly. The Human Rights Commission and the Care Quality Commission have recently and correctly given damning reports on the state of social care. Last week a collaborative letter headed by Age UK has been written to MPs asking them to save the care sector. Words in the letter include, 'lonely, isolated, at risk, neglected' – that list could go on. The thing is, so many of these words were used by Dr Williams referring to young people. It begs the question, what underlying attribute do both the elderly and so many of these young people have in common? What is making this an issue right now? The answer, I believe is all about (un)employment and contribution. I have worked in the social care industry and I have worked for social security. One of the phrases for your tax or social security is 'contribution' ('Stamp' went out some time ago). The epistemology of the word is telling, you are paying towards society so it can help those who cannot feed or care for themselves (usually both) and society contributes back to them. This is done in the hope that when the time comes, society will protect you in turn. Its a wonderful system – in theory. The dark side to this is it propagates the emotional response that those who are not currently contributing never will or perhaps never have. They are lazy, louts, scroungers...or students. They spend their money on booze and drugs and have children to get a council flat...to take more. The problem is this flawed reasoning is bleeding over to include all the unemployed, all the elderly, all young people and this has huge ramifications. The sleaziest result perhaps, perpetuation of a belief that the more money you earn, the better you are and if you are out of that fiscal race you are nothing but a burden.

People often create difference by forming boundaries between 'us' and 'them' the most obvious difference is signs of affluence. These are usually material goods and the argument goes that the more people spend on them, the more employment is created and thus it is morally acceptable. Do the labourers making luxury goods get paid enough to pay for their own long term health care? Often not. Do their employers invest enough for their staff's long term needs? Often not. The problem is there are people out there helping the affluent (including the employers of said labourers) avoid paying their fair 'contribution' so that they might purchase more signs of affluence instead. Cheating the tax system is another industry, and it skews the contribution system against the poor. This means cheating the elderly, the unemployed, the young and the sick is also, by association, an industry because it drains the capital pool shared by everyone for the sake of consumption and production.

Now I have to talk about Adam Smith and I'm sorry about that because he's boring and something of a product of his age. In fact if he were alive now I think most people would think of him as a bit of a twat. He compares the work of labourers to the work of slaves...in terms of potential productivity...he does the same for children and by proxy, women. This he does in a cold economic way. To be fair to Adam Smith, he was writing in another age and sometimes we do have to get down to cold hard economics. The problem with this though is that we are currently enjoying the fruits of his thinking. He is a darling of right wing economics who espoused the idea of continual growth, without it being at the expense of anybody.....(did someone mention slaves earlier...?). This is the dream of the 'Free Market', but it only works if you are manning your market stall at all times and always buying to sell on. We have gotten to the point where constant wealth creation (and tax evasion) are ideals to be emulated. The moment you leave your stall, for what ever reason, your products, your past contributions or future return mean nothing. (The welfare state was supposed to plug this gap). The capitalist idea of drip down wealth consistently fails to reach the poorest and most vulnerable because the wealthy strip savings possibilities from the poor and seek to pay less and less to social assistance, even turning charity into industry. Well, the market is far from 'free', it does negatively impact those who begin their lives at a disadvantage and it seems its very ethos poisons attitudes to those out of the rat race.

Well Adam, fellow rich bastards, I've lost confidence. The cold hard economic facts are that perpetual profit is not possible for individuals. We live in a finite world and are finite beings. In order to ensure people get some semblance of decency when they are out of the market you need capital to circulate in a way that includes those no longer directly contributing through employment. I may sound like I'm teaching your grandmother to suck eggs here, but bear with me. Stock held indefinitely as bonds and shares is not 'stock' at all, like all commodities it should have a use by date. What would happen if all stock held unmoved, un-traded, not used as insurance (for over a certain period of time) was reinvested in the elderly, young people, education, health? How much money is out there simply for the sake of pixels on a computer screen and ink on a page? Stock is an investment, the hope of future consumption and the future ability to 'contribute'. The opportunity to grow old with dignity or believe in yourself enough to get a job, to have health insurance, to have an education.... This stock, these commodities, they take time to mature and we get them back in money eventually, in love and gratitude more immediately. Apparently these commodities aren't worth paying for though.

This is the attitude we are facing when we look at the state of marginalised young people and older people. They have been ripped from the circulation of capital as a mechanism for social gain because it has been replaced by an ideology of capital as individual gain – all too often those who are working are not working for the benefit of others. The fact that the government wants to privatise education and the health service reflects this selfish ideal. Add to that the wages given to those who do actually help others – carers, social workers, youth workers, who receive barely minimum wage. These examples and ideals will lead only to greater numbers of disenfranchised young people as they learn not kindness but structural brutality...and they will take it out on their parents and grandparents in turn.

Rather than displaying the virtues of some young people caring for others Dr Williams should have forced bankers into doing some charity work for a day, 'contributing' back and filmed them. Such 'Big Society' gestures need to include active economic support and pretending otherwise is a gross distortion of the connectedness of social relations. The economy itself is a social relation and it needs to be given back to society not ripped away piece by piece. Has it failed to be noticed by economists that older people, if they had a fair return on their investments, would have more money to spend, thus driving economic forces? In cheating the tax system and contributions, business not only helps to rob the elderly of dignified retirement, but the young of the potential employment that could bring. I am making a very simplistic argument here, but the over emphasis on individual profit is perverting what economics is – a system of communal and social exchange. The sad result is the derided, 'lonely, isolated, at risk and neglected' state of any people(s) who do not or cannot freely pursue individual profit at the expense of others.