In 2017, Australian multimillionaire and luxury home developer Tim Gurner went viral for some justly mocked comments about his fellow millennials and their penchant for avocado toast. “When I was trying to buy my first home,” remarked Gurner. “I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each.” Absurd and patronizing as the statement so obviously was, it nevertheless reflected a view held by many of society’s most powerful people: that the bleak economic outlook facing many young people today owes itself less to structural impediments than it does to poor personal choices.

Earlier this week, Gurner went viral again — this time for his comments during an onstage appearance at the Australian Financial Review’s Property Summit:

I think the problem that we’ve had is that people have decided they really didn’t want to work so much anymore through COVID, and that has had a massive issue on productivity. . . .  They have been paid a lot to do not too much, and we need to see that change. We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment needs to jump 40-50 percent, in my view. We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. So it’s a dynamic that has to change. We’ve got to kill that attitude, and that has to come through hurt in the economy.