According to an argument in Woroni’s last issue, young
people are the ‘major domestic players’ in poverty reduction and climate change
activism. This statement is a blatantly false. I’d wager the evaluation budget
for a small AusAid’s project is larger than all the money youth groups have
ever raised for ‘poverty reduction’. And youth groups do not ‘control the
message’ on these issues! For starters, more people read editorials in the
Murdoch press than the Youth Climate Coalition’s blog.
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| Apparently this has something to do with climate change. I just thought it was an advertisement for tight jeans. |
There are two key reasons why young people are a weak
force for social change:
1. Young
people know nothing
Youth barely have any education, so how can we make a
meaningful contribution to the resolution of complex problems?
Perhaps we inform ourselves? Nope. Youth do not ‘ask
questions when we don’t know something’ because we are so certain we know everything. Any tutor can give you a ten
minute rant about how undergraduates have too much conviction and not enough
humility regarding their opinions.
Young people are reluctant to educate themselves when we
can get publicity instead. Despite ‘eating lots of sugar’, youths do not
‘digest vast amounts of information,’ we gloss over it because it is too taxing.
For example, youths campaign for ‘action’ on climate change without first being
familiar with what cost/benefit analyses suggest is the most effective response
to likely threats.
Older people are more likely to have education and
knowledge, and they are not desensitised. Listen to any talk by William
Easterly or Bjorn Lomborg and you’ll instantly see they care passionately about
their fields; they’ve simply recognised that resolving complex issues takes
sustained effort, not a YouTube video.
2. Young
people have no influence
Youth groups have no access to power, and even when their
executive gets a photo opportunity with the PM they cannot arrive with a
convincing articulation of the problem they want tackled or how to resolve it.
This is because such articulations require expertise to create and even more
expertise to see implemented.
But perhaps they can create momentum? Hardly. What was
the impact of the last batch of ‘marginalised’ middle class kids sent to the
3rd world by YGap? What did the people doing Yoga on the opera house actually want?
There is no content to these campaigns. They are so devoid of substance they
fail to even raise awareness.
The enthusiasm of young people to change things for the
better is admirable, but we do not have ‘awesome power’; to suggest so is
disingenuous and misinforms youth about the realities of social change in a
complex world. We need more informed, slow burning, committed champions. Ego
massages don’t help this happen.
In our democracy, influence typically goes to those who
have made the effort to become authorities – like Ross Garnaut. This is a good
thing. It is counterproductive to have discourse controlled by people who know
very little. Becoming an agent for change thus starts with getting educated,
not with ‘activism’.
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