I have trouble predicting how public sentiment will evolve over time.
I'm not that young, and still and the last 10 years have left me with an absolutely blistering distrust of the 70+ crowd on any matter pertaining to positions of authority. I'd like to see ~67 and ~72 become the other 18 and 21: hard lines beyond which the law progressively rescinds the presumption of total competence.
It's not a pretty solution. There are certainly some 14 year olds who are more deserving of a drivers license than many of legal age. I would welcome a world where we can actually establish and enforce criteria that allow us to move beyond such crude numeric thresholds. But in the meantime, the bulk of us need protection from statistics. Desperately.
Hey, I hear you, but the age cutoff could also be on holding office.
As someone just hitting the 60 yr old mark, and looking at my parents who are still pretty sharp in their late 80s, -- so definitely talking about myself and my capacity here,
No-one over 70 has any business in a high ranking government office. The mental flexibility isn't there.
Which means no one over 66 should be allowed to run office (yes, I know this puts senators in office until 72, and kicks out representatives at 68, but it also gives a single number which is easier to understand).
It's also a question of accountability. A 40 year old politician will expect/have to live with their choices for another 40 years.
It’s not just mental ability it’s a set of perverse incentives: the old robbing the future of the young, instead of planting trees whose shade the old will never personally enjoy.
That's a response to an opinion I don't hold, but I could have been more clear. The claim I'm making is about the fitness to hold office. Specifically: septo/octogenarians belong at the ballot box, but not on the ballot. If you'd like to dissuade me of something, that's the meat of it.
> My observation living in an area that has a mix of 70+ WASPs and younger black and hispanic people is that the WASPs are the ones who are by far the most incensed by Trump. They don't just dislike his policies. They hate the way he talks.
A lot of minorities in America like the tough on crime talk because they're often the ones most affected by it.
I think that's exactly what OP meant? While Trump's policies take the long term gerontocratic/anarcho-capitalist dynamics strangling of our society and crank them to 11, a lot of younger people ended up buying into his "burn it all down" messaging imagining it would result in some principled evenly-applied reform that might get the boot off their own necks. And that level of foolishness seems straight from the naive rashness of youth.
There is too much to unpack here. Perhaps you'd like to make your point in something other than identity politics anecdotes and personal attacks?
If you don't like my phrasing of "boot on their necks", feel free to substitute your own when constructively responding to the point. The frustrations that have led to Trumpism are certainly palpable and understandable, so don't feign like I'm using hyperbolic language out of nowhere.
But no, in general I am comfortable modeling Trump's second term as a complete self-own on the part of voters - regardless of whether they've realized it yet, or ever will. As a libertarian who partook in both red and blue tribe media and was both sidesing through 2020, I have not come to this conclusion lightly. There has simply been no way I've been able to steelman it.
> through the perspective of some 1930s West Virginia mine worker like you do.
That was the personal attack I was referring to. I was referring to the dynamic of the obvious frustrations seemingly driving much of Trumpism, and yet you're imparting that back onto me. That's called shooting the messenger.
> You’re starting from the values that you think should matter to people, then faulting them for not making decisions you think are rational according to those assumed values.
No, you're assuming here. As I said, I've been trying to steelman Trumpism in terms of any kind of constructive policy for some time and I can no longer find anything that fits.
> Your dismissal of “identity politics” is a good illustration of that
No, that dismissal is based on the red tribe making a good show of dismissing identity politics for the past ~16 years - aka stated preferences. Would you say that my assertion that people should be honest about their preferences is imparting too much of my own opinion about what should matter? The alternative of course, which seems to have good predictive power, is straight up hypocrisy.
> value different ends than what you think they should value
Solving for these values is exactly what I have been doing, as I have been saying. For example in 2016, I was the weirdo telling my blue tribe friends that Trump was likely to win as he was resonating with a lot of frustrations people have that the blue tribe just did not understand. Maybe from that you can see that I am capable of seeing, respecting, and even sympathizing with others' values even if there may be other values I prioritize instead?
Or alternatively you could just come out and state those values! This should be easy right? Rather than beating around the bush?
I would only insist that they be constructive values that aim to be beneficial rather than merely making some spectacle of hurting others. So for example "deport illegal immigrants" doesn't qualify as it's a destructive framing - the constructive framing would be something like "fix the labor market for blue collar citizens". But if this movement truly has some substance making our country better and is not merely just lashing out about our problems, this should be easy.
And of course since we're talking about continued support for Trump, those values should be congruent to the policies he is actually enacting.
You keep attributing straw man points to me, and then dutifully knocking them down.
A recognition that many people feel disenfranchised and preyed upon by our system, which is why they turn to [what I consider] extremist fantasies like communism or Trumpism, does not represent "my analytical perspective".
More germane to our "conversation", I merely threw out "fix the labor market for blue collar citizens" as an example, reflecting a context of arguments that most people make.
So no, I am not "taking cultural relativism as axiomatic" - that's merely your strawman pigeonholing of my position. An example of constructively stating your point about culture could be something like "re-popularize values that made our culture successful".
Of course culture in the abstract has the same vague generality as "values" or "policy", and so I would ask the analogous thing about which specific constructive aspects of culture you see Trump and Trumpism as improving. For example simply "deport people from other cultures" is not constructive as it's framed on the negative dynamic rather than as a constructive outcome to be achieved. I'm not going to give a constructive example this time lest you make another straw man out of my attempting to fill in the blanks of your argument. Rather as it's your argument, you should make it!
Also note that it is necessary to talk in terms of objective cultural values rather than handwaving about a previously dominant culture because, love it or hate it, our society is intrinsically multicultural. And I know that M-word can be triggering for a whole host of negative talking points, hence the need to focus on the positive/constructive.
> You're overlooking that the geriatric people are carrying on the traditional liberal/conservative debate on both sides of the aisle.
Workers skew young, capital skews old. When politics is money literally the only thing the left / right actually agree on is fucking over young people.
That's what it takes to collectively focus on inflating real-estate / stocks that the youth is locked out of, while ignoring the labor market, and the cost of education, and periodically blowing up the economy on behalf of interest groups, with outsourcing or the like previously, next with AI. We've probably been in a job recession for years, and we only just noticed.
Testing is expensive, subjective and favors people with resources to game the test. When thinking about stuff like this, we should aim for something more universal, with the understanding that this is not a moral judgement on a person.
In the context of the article and of controls, I think we should worry more about controls on those in power (i.e., politicians) than others (i.e., voters).
I completely agree. With so many high profile cases of people suffering from some form of dementia being elected to important offices (McConnell and Feinstein; Biden and Trump), it's clear that the intended electoral mechanism isn't working to replace people who are not fit to serve. Name recognition & incumbency advantage are just too strong to allow the right thing to happen.
The version of the fix that I like is, if you would be 65 or older on the day you would begin holding the office, you are ineligible to be in the election or the appointment process. This gives some room for acknowledging that there isn't a clear cut-off where one immediately becomes unfit to serve. If you're a healthy 64, you can serve all the way to 70 for an office with a lengthy term; but if you're going soft at 65, then you don't need to make the difficult decision of whether or not to run. The decision has been made for you, way ahead of time, and you can make plans to retire and support a successor, avoiding a really nasty, personal primary process.
This would have nicely avoided Biden's awkward "will he, won't he" decision that led to the 2024 disaster we're still suffering from. Feinstein & McConnell would have retired well before their brains transformed into cottage cheese, turning them into jokes and destroying whatever legacies they worked to build. It's better for everyone.
Characterizing the problem as the electoral mechanism, wouldn't it make sense to push for better voting systems that don't empower the two party duopoly (eg Ranked Pairs) ?
It feels that while gerontocracy is a valid critique to illustrate the problem, it doesn't fully capture why our processes actively choose such bad leaders. Rather it kind of papers over the problem assuming that mental faculties mean good policies [0], give us a comforting thought that most of the recent relevant candidates would have been out of the picture, while not actually addressing the "shit sandwich vs turd torta" dynamic.
As for the Senate itself, I'd propose increasing the number of senators to 6 per state to dilute this effect of a strong senator being a boon to state regardless of how bad their politics are. Perhaps straight term limits for the Senate and the House as well.
[0] while it certainly means better policies than what we have now, the bar is currently on the floor.
I don't think a form of RCV would have a terribly significant impact on name recognition and incumbent advantage, which I think the are the main drivers of why we keep reelecting people who are obviously no longer competent. Feinstein's walking corpse being constantly reelected despite California having jungle primaries with many viable alternatives is a good example of how an alternate voting method does not solve this problem. It also wouldn't fix appointed positions, especially judges or filling vacated seats.
There are other great reasons to change our voting system! I just think it doesn't solve this exact problem, while an upper age limit does.
Maybe the problem is structural: there is an absurd amount of power to be gained by seniority in both houses. To a voter there is a significant advantage to choosing an incumbent as their power increase with seniority.
I'd say that a large part of incumbent advantage is directly related to plurality. I don't know the specific details of the elections that have kept Feinstein propped up. But I'd think the primary would revolve around a bunch of challengers that are each really liked by some people, but really hated by others - so Feinstein ends up getting the defensive vote from people who don't want change towards the popular challengers. Then the general election has the same effect, plus all the people that already "made their choice" in the primary.
Old people are organized and more social. I see it in my community. They run the newsletters and they host community events. "Oh that's because they're retired!" No, many of them are not. Many still work.
I want the gerontocracy to end, but I'm also worried what takes its place. Gen Xers like me seem to lack some of the abilities present in our older generations.
We'll probably be more equitable and fair, but will we be as politically effective and organized towards achieving our goals? I sort of doubt it.
They've had decades to save up the money that allows them to do the things alongside work.
They also came up in a time and place that allowed them to build social relationships outside of work. Many Gen Xers and Millennials just... don't have that kind of personal time. I know several people in my circle of friends who don't want to do anything after work because they're exhausted. Bills gotta be paid, and there's more pressure to squeeze more productivity and consumption out of individuals than there was in 1980-1995. A lot of that pressure, oddly enough, comes from the necessity to keep shareholder returns high to keep the retirement accounts of the Boomers flush with cash.
Gen X and Millennials are also less likely to have had kids than the Boomers, so the socialization that came along with having a child (extracurriculars, PTA meetings, etc.) just never happened.
We incentivized, and eventually started requiring, economic output and consumption over building in-person social networks and hosting events outside of work. It was what we considered important.
The US birth rate began to drop in the 1960s. [0] At the time we were a more self-contained economy.
Since then, there are fewer births per capita, and we've opened up global markets for labor and resources.
If you have fewer people aging into markets for goods and services as time goes on, you have to monetize them more intensely in order to maintain revenues. At the same time, other markets (China, India, etc.) offered relatively-high GDP growth (and thus return on investment) compared to the US [1], since their labor costs are lower and the needs of then-developing nations were cheaper to meet.
The result is a worker that's expected to produce more profit to compete with those elsewhere, while also being more intensely monetized through their consumption habits. If they can't produce enough profit to compete with workers elsewhere, they just don't have the income necessary to be more intensely monetized, so their standard of living drops.
Because you can only monetize people so much before they get testy about it.
They get tired of being advertised to. They start complaining about being nickeled and dimed for every single thing they used to get as a part of another purchase. They look at their wages staying flat while costs go up and up.
>A lot of that pressure, oddly enough, comes from the necessity to keep shareholder returns high to keep the retirement accounts of the Boomers flush with cash.
This is it. The American economy has been warped by the interests of older people who are more interested in keeping the wealth that they've accrued safe than in investing in ventures that are riskier but that provide a broader and more diverse base of opportunity. When you ask, "Why are so many young people unemployed or underemployed today?", it's because cash, which could have funded the investments that stupid young people would have made in risky small businesses that employ workers with idiosyncratic or less-than-expert skill sets, were instead placed in the hands of boomers who just bought more FAANG stock.
Suddenly, those huge conglomerates are the only ones with capital, so they bid up wages and costs to keep resources out of the hands of would-be competitors. This creates a cycle of "growth" (or, rather, when the organic growth subsides, government steps in with subsidies because they can't let the largest employers and economic engines in the country do poorly).
Organization is a skill that can be passed on, and to the degree that old people are still doing it themselves they’re depriving us of opportunities to learn and to practice and to benefit from their experience. That’s why we’re not as good at it.
> and to the degree that old people are still doing it themselves they’re depriving us of opportunities to learn and to practice and to benefit from their experience.
Young people’s ability and motivation to organize and communicate is not dependent on anything other than themselves choosing to do it and get involved
> That’s why we’re not as good at it.
If you continue to believe that you’re dependent on older generations to teach you everything you’ll never get anywhere.
What works for older generations isn’t going to be good advice for getting younger generations to organize and communicate. The age differences are large.
> Fueled by AI, prediction markets and online gambling, there are more self-made billionaires under 30 than ever before, 13 up from a previous record of 7.
Two of those examples are online gambling, which is controversial to the extent that it's partly outlawed in the US.
But more importantly, 13 isn't an awful lot. Approximately how many young people today have started successful businesses whose valuation is under $1 billion?
I don't recall any. I remember when people were all agog when Gates became one.
> successful businesses were led by young people across the entirety of human history.
Sure. But billionaires?
> And you should not praise someone for simply being a billionaire.
If they're self-made, they earned the praise.
> That's a bad thing to be.
Creating value is not a bad thing. Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value. They didn't take it from you or anyone else. Creating SpaceX, Starlink, etc., are good things.
> Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value. They didn't take it from you or anyone else.
Nobody is a “self made” billionaire. That value you’re talking about didn’t just spring into existence. It had to come from somewhere. There is always a source.
Who flew the rocket? Who built the rocket? Who built the parts for the rocket? Who mixed the fuel?
Building big ambitious things is a good thing. But consolidating an amount of money that nobody could ever reasonably spend into the hands of one person (especially when that money is just the excess value produced by the workers) is unethical and unneeded.
> That value you’re talking about didn’t just spring into existence. It had to come from somewhere.
Are you arguing that wealth is not created, but is transferred? Where was SpaceX's value transferred from? Where was the current wealth in the United States 250 years ago?
What you're referring to are called "expenses". The value created is what somebody is willing to pay for a piece of that action (i.e. an ownership share). Expenses reduce the value.
For example, if you bake a cake the value you created is what you can sell the cake for minus the cost of the ingredients and the use of an oven. For SpaceX, the money spent to buy materials and pay employees takes away value.
> that nobody could ever reasonably spend into the hands of one person (especially when that money is just the excess value produced by the workers) is unethical and unneeded.
Musk doesn't spend much of his money. He invests it in creating more businesses.
> is unethical and unneeded.
You're arguing that Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, etc., are unethical and unneeded. None of those companies would exist without Musk investing his fortune into them.
BTW, why don't you and your friends get together and start a rocket company and make yourselves billionaires?
This is usually the part of the conversation where someone mentions slave labour in an emerald mine and immigration fraud and then comes the part where you usually say something along the lines like "hasn't been proven in court!"
Sure, and if I was so inclined I could go rub noses with them. They're eager to find young folks who are community minded. But I don't want that. I'm gen x and full of cynicism and antisocial attitudes. The only people I know who aren't that way in my generation are churchgoing types and a few influencers.
What I’ve seen where I’m at is many of the old people who organize don’t want to give anything up to a next generation. They want all the accolades for themselves. So they’re happy to have young people do the work but aren’t comfortable letting them lead while teaching them the skills.
equity as written. Ownership. Thus fairness means all have a share in responsibility for success and rewards for that success. Yeah, I agree. Note that I include responsibility as the core part of ownership. I think our society could have more of that.
equality (assumes you made a typo). Do you mean equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? These require different things to remedy.
Equality: starting out at the same position, for example we have equal rights under the law
Equity: winding up at the same position, for example when everybody in a race wins the same medal, regardless of how hard they trained or how talented they are.
The extent to which equality of outcome is pursued and for which groups are traditionally factors, but the overarching idea is in pursuit of equality of outcome.
I think we're talking about different things then.
Nobody is asking for equal result. Equity means sharing the rewards of productivity, instead of allowing a group of people who do nothing get rich off of other people's hard work. That's fair.
> Nobody is asking for equal result. Equity means sharing the rewards of productivity, instead of allowing a group of people who do nothing get rich off of other people's hard work.
Social equality is focused around equality of opportunity. Social equity is about pursuing equality of outcome, generally by allocating resources and services unequally to give groups perceived as having historical disadvantages an extra boost.
Oh I see. I guess that's one way of looking at it. I tend to favor appropriation because it simplifies the accounting. You don't need equal outcomes exactly, you just ensure that everyone has their basic needs met and the ability to improve themselves. Historical context matters, but the issue tends to boil down social instability due to repeated displacement (redlining, gentrification). Allow people get rooted into a place and they'll build whatever they need to flourish.
Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.
Venice was the longest lasting, most stable state in Europe.
That might have as much to do with their insane system for choosing a Doge, which many historians think did a lot to force compromise and reduce corruption.
They took the full council, selected a random subset, had that group choose another group from the full council by voting, then repeat that random selection followed by voting another few times ending with a final group who voted to select a Doge.
It may have been stable and dominant in spite of that, like America, currently being run by senile old men. The human mind is a biological computer and it isn’t pretty the older it gets.
Average is probably not what you need to worry about: I'd bet David Attenborough and Mel Brooks still have IQs considerably higher than the average 25-year old. And I'm not convinced IQ is as important as that elusive factor called character.
But you may be right. Maybe what the US really needs is a lagoon.
>Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.
But those kings were (legally) absolute monarchs, while Venice was (somewhat) a republic. This isn't a trivial distinction. The young kings of the various Carolignian successors also tended to inherit their titles when their fathers were killed, while Venice occupied a highly defensible geographic location (a swamp) which supported institutional continuity.
Well at the times of Doges the world hardly revolutionized. Nowadays a person in their 80s has lived through the rise of at least three different medias (radio, TV, internet) and the world has never changed so fast.
Welcome to my rathole: Venetian history. To expand on your thesis, the Council of Ten was the executive power in Venice, but the Doge and minor council attended the Council of Ten meetings and the Doge often chaired those meetings. And even if he was powerless, the Council was made up of other old men. I don't want to push this whole argument, I'm not recommending we adopt the Venetian constitution. But I don't think you can blame current chaos on age.
Can you explain how is the example of Venetian republic relevant for something like a massive multi-cultural, multi-racial federation in 21st century? One that's led by 100s of old people not just ten rich family heads?
This is likely the worst issue humanity will be facing over the next 50 years, even more than climate change.
An increasingly old demographic will sabatoge the future of humanity as they drain enormous resources and abuse democratic processes to reroute resources to their preservation of life over young people and familes.
Young people and families will choke to death under the strain of elders who demand unlimited services, money, support while outvoting them, staying in jobs and houses and giving little to nothing back to society.
Innovation will grind to a halt, families will continue to shrink, work hours will get longer and longer as taxes get higher and higher to pay for and increasingly super old leadership and voting base.
Society will begin to lose hope to solve problems like going into space or fixing climate change as increasingly the elderly population will obsess over themselves and continued life.
It is one of the hardest moral problems we will face in our era.
>This is likely the worst issue humanity will be facing over the next 50 years, even more than climate change.
Tangent, I know, but the climate change horizon is very long, much longer than 50 years. For example, a common projection is that the sea level will rise by almost one meter by 2100. This is already an unpleasant forecast. But it will continue to rise: under a 2 C warming scenario, sea levels reach (median prediction) 2.7 meters above the 2000 levels in 2300, which would be catastrophic. 2300 may seem far away, but it will come.
The current estimate is that we need to eliminate emissions this century and we will thereafter still need to do mitigation and removal to undo the damage, or extant coastal settlements will be destroyed. It is a very long process. See e.g.:
Do you know what the timelines are for demographic collapse? Similar and much worse, who will need the coastal cities if our trends continue. AND they have NO way have being undone AT ALL after the previous hundred years of trends set in.
I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money, which in this case is the boomers votes with the younger generations money. This will continue until nothing is left.
This already happened with the triple pension lock in GB, mathematically ensuring the bankruptcy of the state.
I know of a senior couple where the husband recently retired after forty years of working in a professional field. They live in a house worth over $750k that is paid off. They have three new or late-model vehicles. Both the husband and wife could, if necessary, work for an income.
They also collect Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance checks after enrolling for them. The common name for this is Social Security.
Why the hell are they able to collect on that? They have the ability to work and assets that could readily be made liquid to fund living expenses.
They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect.
Social Security as an insurance product is fiction, but playing into the fiction helps it survive to do the thing it was built for: keep the elderly out of the poor houses / off the street.
Payout rates drop at higher income, and portions of the payout are taxable at higher income, so it's not like it's completely income/wealth blind.
> They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect.
That's just it: they're not old. Not in the way a 65-year-old was old in the 1930s.
If they had to farm, mine, log, or work in a factory, yeah, they'd be too old to work. That was most of the work available when OASDI was created, and that's what it's for: to keep you from becoming destitute as an elderly person when there is no ability to work.
But they don't have to do those things. We're a service economy now and most of that involves sitting at a desk or very light office labor. They can still do that to sustain their lifestyle. Failing that, they could liquidate assets.
We're handing out money to people as a treat for their 65th b-day while the national debt is continuing to rise and their kids are crushed under loan debt, medical debt, and further revenue extraction to keep the shares backing retirement accounts increasing in value.
Bollocks. We complain because jobs are being occupied by the oldsters, and now you want them to stay in their jobs even longer?
If the couple you're pillorying is so wealthy, then most of their Social Security is being taxed, and they're paying higher Medicare premiums as well. And their house? As they get older and require nursing care, they'll end up liquidating it (or Medicaid will take it).
The average retiree receives around $25k per year in SS benefits. That's not a ton of money. In most studies, retirees receive less in benefits than if they had been able to invest their Social Security contributions. But that's fine, SS really has two main goals: a forced savings towards retirement, and as a social safety net for those who would otherwise be impoverished in old age.
> Bollocks. We complain because jobs are being occupied by the oldsters, and now you want them to stay in their jobs even longer?
I'd just tax it at 100% unless they declare bankruptcy. The US national debt skyrocketed during their lifetimes. Mathematically speaking, they did not pay enough in tax to support the spending that their duly-elected officials enacted. They also didn't, mathematically speaking, have enough children to make up the difference in future taxpayers, either. The American birth rate never recovered after 1970. Someone's got to pay off those bills, and if the numbers comparing the Boomers to Millennials at the same age say anything, they say "the Millennials will not have the money to pay off their parents' government debt."
Is that harsh? I don't know. I do know that your children's generation is supposed to have it better than you, and by pretty much every objective measure, the Boomers did not do that for their children, at least not economically. So it's time for them to put up.
> If the couple you're pillorying is so wealthy, then most of their Social Security is being taxed, and they're paying higher Medicare premiums as well. And their house? As they get older and require nursing care, they'll end up liquidating it (or Medicaid will take it).
Why should they be receiving Social Security at all? Same with Medicare. This is the demographic that has more collected wealth than any other age cohort. If they do, in fact, need government help, they can prove their need, like you have to with unemployment insurance or Medicaid.
> The average retiree receives around $25k per year in SS benefits. That's not a ton of money.
Then those who don't really need it won't miss it. Those who do will have a more sustainable program to support them.
So why did we make them pay Social Security taxes for the entirety of their 40-year careers? They could've invested the money at a better return than Treasury bills and had way more liquid assets.
Why do you pay insurance for anything? So the funds are there if you need them.
The goal is not to maximize return, it's to guarantee a check that keeps you from being destitute. That's it. That's the whole point. Not limitless growth, not a nice bit of sugar from Uncle Sam every month to supplement millions of dollars in assets. To keep you from being dying in the street as an elderly person.
If we're going to call the current abuse of OASDI a legitimate use of insurance, then I want to be able to get my home protection policy company to
help me out on a down payment for a house. I've paid in, after all. It's the least they can do.
> If we're going to call the current abuse of OASDI a legitimate use of insurance
It's called "insurance" but it isn't really insurance like your home insurance. It's a mandatory pension plan. Everyone who pays into a pension is entitled to get it. It may well be a bad plan with a bad implementation. But those are the rules nonetheless.
If Social Security wasn't universal I guarantee voters would've gotten rid of it a long time ago. Then nobody would have it - neither the rich nor the poor.
Because they were promised it - fundamentally leaving the rich out of the social safety net doesn't even get us much and administrating the distinction costs money, and I am no fan of the wealthiest get additional benefits.
I think solving inequality will not be about reducing access to said safety nets but increasing them for all.
No, they weren't. They were promised a monthly check that, should they become absolutely devoid of marketable skills and liquid assets in their old age, would prevent them from dying in a gutter.
They're nowhere near dying in a gutter.
If you want to solve inequality, stop giving checks to people who spend it on golf trips to retirement villages in Arizona, and give it to people who have 84-month car notes and whose student loans are in forbearance. You only have enough money for one of those two groups, not both, so use utilitarianism to decide who to give it to.
The problem with "solving inequality" is there is no incentive for one to do better. If one can live as well as everyone else, with no effort, why should one make the effort?
True, but I dont think any UBI scheme says "everyone live at the same level" more like "everyone gets enough to not die" which is a very different framing.
Having been welfare adjacent more than once, getting food stamps is difficult and many legislatures have spent the last few years making it way more difficult, adding job requirements and the like. Ideologically you are probably fine with that, but it has consequences that you seemingly do not perceive.
The article is about old people having malnutrition due to poor eating habits and Covid disruption and the general ineptness of the government, and does not support your thesis.
Perhaps -- "the baseline is a decent life". Lots of people are willing to work really hard for perks and glory -- honestly, you can even take more risks if you're young and you know your life's not on the line
The trouble with that is the same reason communism fails - too many people decide to just live off of the work of others, and play video games all day.
Also, who is going to work as a janitor? Most jobs are not filled with glory. They're tedious - that's why they are called "work".
Kind of a strawman though, innit? If "civilization will stagnate and humans will be unmotivated blobs" is one extreme, then the other is something like "condoning economic genocide".
In reality, few are concerned that Alice has a much nicer car than Bob, compared to concerns that Bob will die without insulin. Get Bob his insulin, and he will still be motivated to have a nicer car.
There are points in history where the productivity increases were more equitably spread, and we still got lasers, microwaves, MRI, mRNA, microchips, the internet, etc, etc, from national funding no less.
A milder version would be: People are paid based on the marginal cost of replacing them. But still, either of those is a far cry from claiming it's "the value they create".
It's not hard to show either. Imagine you're on an island and have been gored in the stomach by a wild animal, and a skilled surgeon can save your life. Most people would instantly agree that continued existence is of immense "value".
However after making that decision, you discover that you're on an island where almost everyone is a surgeon and the going-rate is much lower than you expected. Are we supposed to believe that your new knowledge somehow reaches backwards in time and retroactively changes the "value" of Not Dying? No, that'd be crazy. Valuation is never the same as price-point.
Elon Musk stopped producing value quite a while ago, nowadays all he does is tweet stupid stuff. Meanwhile his net worth has skyrocketed.
Everyone who's ever spent 6 months in big tech knows how easily compensation is divorced from value. Plenty of net-negative, work-creating behavior gets rewarded with big raises.
> Elon Musk stopped producing value quite a while ago
No evidence of that.
> Everyone who's ever spent 6 months in big tech knows how easily compensation is divorced from value.
You could always sell your yourself to a big tech company with your expertise in who are the value ones. A person with that skill would be very valuable to a company.
Sir, I understand that you did some cool, useful stuff in your career and got rewarded for it and that's a case of the system working, but if you can't see various sycophants and crooks getting just as rich or richer, while contributing nothing, then I can't see it for you.
Count his tweets over the last few years, WaPo did a big story on it recently, its like 70 tweets/day. Then divide his remaining attention over the number of companies he's running. Or look at the effectiveness of his management of DOGE which is the most public/transparent example we have.
I do think up until 2020 he was useful, there's a reason nobody else made electric cars or self landing rockets work. But most of his wealth accumulation has been since then.
Brother, both Twitter and Grok had to be folded into SpaceX to hide their abject failure while he was spending all day on social media. People change, he's not the same guy as the 2010s Elon.
And people demand the maximum pay they can get. It's the Law of Supply and Demand.
Consider this. You hire Bob for $10/hr, and he produces $100/hr in value. What's going to happen? Your competitor hires him away from for $20/hr. Then another competitor hires Bob away for $30/hr. This proceeds until Bob gets paid about $85/hr. The ROI of hiring Bob is somewhere around 15%.
There's a good reason why the vast bulk of the American workforce is paid much more than minimum wage.
You are correct that there is no friction-less market.
However, lack of information is called "risk", and risk strongly affects what you will pay for something. A low risk deal will cost you more than a high risk deal.
Risk is part of every transaction in a market economy, and is priced in.
The article starts out being wrong by using wages rather than total compensation. The latter is the complete pay package, which includes paid time off, health insurance benefits, retirement benefits, etc. These typically add about 40% to the wages/salaries.
If you work for 40 years, chances are you will have accumulated some assets. I'm not sure that "sell your house and cars to pay for food" is a policy that will be popular.
Equally those same people have paid taxes for 40 years, paid into social security (to the benefit of their elders) and so on.
Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable. A job occupied by a 70 year old is a job not occupied by someone younger. If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math).
Look, most all of us will get old and eventually claim on social security or whatever. Politically just "ending that" is pretty much a non-starter to anyone who has been contributing for any length of time. Even fiddling with the edges of it (raising the retirement age) will get you voted out of office.
More seriously though, it's not as simple as 25% fewer jobs, or an economy that grows 25%. For example the number of elected positions is pretty fixed, and all those octogenarians in the senate are certainly blocking younger talent.
Politics may be an extreme example, but lots of other jobs are "proportional". There's a fixed number of plumbing jobs (per million head of population) so adding 25% more plumbers dilutes the plumbing pool. A boon in construction would drive up the demand for plumbers, but construction booms come and go.
The "economy" is (again simplistically) a measure of money flow. It doesn't really measure "production" as much as it measures "cash velocity". As such having a retired tranche spending all day long is a good thing.
And yes, more labor would lead to a growing economy. But a lot of that growth is in "poor quality" jobs (aka service level jobs) not "new production".
In other words the economy "grows" if money changes hands quickly. The standard of living though is more tied to "production".
Take, for example, health care. The sector can grow 25% by adding more admin staff, claims evaluators etc. None of which results in better health outcomes. Or it can grow by building hospitals, training doctors and nurses. Both increase the economy, both offer more jobs, but only one leads to a higher standard of health.
In truth the current economy is built around the customers free time. From music, movies and tv, to sports, travel, phones, social media, online advertising and sales, deliveries (of goods or people), restaurants (fast or slow), home improvement, it's all about monetizing free time.
Having a large customer base with nothing but free time is what makes it all work.
> Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable.
That presumes there are a fixed number of jobs. Anyone can create a job, even doing simple things like going door to door and offering to mow the lawn.
People do it all the time. One man companies are commonplace. They come to my door now and then, selling magazine subscriptions, offering to clean my driveway, do yard work, tree trimming, exterminating, carry off junk, do estate sales for you, and so forth.
I remember one guy who had a one man outfit that replaced broken garage door springs. It was all he did. He had a trunk full of springs.
Any decent real estate agent has a rolodex of these people, who are hired to do what is necessary to prep a house for sale.
I think it's important to emphasize that much of the in/out money asymmetry in SS is not rich versus poor ... but old versus dead.
Which, incidentally, is good and proper! OASDI is an insurance policy to cover an (alive) person faced with starvation or living in a ditch. That's a very different set of tradeoffs from an investment account that can pass to children who don't need it.
Like all insurance, it depends on a portion of people who pay in and then don't need it, even if sometimes that's because they've, er, passed beyond all material needs.
It's insurance. It's there in the name. Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance.
I get far less value back than I pay into my property insurance, unless, of course, I've had a fire or a disaster. That means I've presented a need for the insurance. A casualty has occurred. I have a claim. I can then access the value that I paid into the insurance fund.
I don't write the insurance company and upbraid them for not helping me out on the down payment for a house, because I understand the meaning of the word "insurance".
We essentially have a bunch of people writing exactly that letter.
It's a taxpayer-funded insurance policy, where the risk is you being alive without a way to earn a living. We have effectively managed that risk for a very large portion of the people who are collecting on that insurance policy by switching over to a service economy where most jobs do not require the physical labor that an elderly person cannot safely do. Furthermore, they're also the portion of the population with the longest time to have accumulated assets.
If you want to keep the insurance policy sustainable for the next generation - who is also paying into it - you need to treat it like an insurance policy. If you allow people to make any and all claims against the funds backing an insurance policy, the funds will eventually be depleted as there will be more people withdrawing from it than paying in. You also have to account for the opportunity cost of the people paying into that system not paying into something else, like our ballooning national debt, or the debts that many Americans of working age have to take on to maintain a decent standard of living.
Go to bogleheads and read for awhile - you get an amazing view into the “rich” in various stages and it’s eye-opening in a number of ways.
You find those who have saved so much they have no hope of spending it all and yet are still scared to spend. Those who spend months worrying if they can buy a new car to replace their 25 year old Camry and yet they live on social security alone while having mandatory IRA disbursements in the thousands.
Social security et al should never have been sold as “savings for the future” and just been another tax.
Depends on geography of course, but it's not rare at all for boomers to have this many houses as a normal part of how they experienced middle-class life. As a group they are not only more likely to have rental/investment property, but also more likely to have multiple such properties. Why would they sell? They can get you to pay for all their services, and vote as a block to deny and remove services elsewhere.
Because that cannot continue in perpetuity. The cracks are already starting to show. If I were in my 60s faced with the real possibility of living another 15-30 years I'd want the younger people to feel like they had something to look forward to. Many young and middle-aged people in the US don't feel that way. What they can't get through the ballot box, they'll get other ways, ways that will cause others to say "I'm not saying I agree, I'm saying I understand."
It's the job of government to make sure that doesn't happen, not cater to it.
They're not thinking that far ahead. Their response to the first waves of discontent - Occupy Wall Street, Trayvon Martin Protests, Michael Brown Protests, Charlottesville, Freddie Gray Protests, George Floyd Protests, January 6th - was either to mock or chide the aggrieved, or to cast them as unprecedented threats to the nation's security (but then not actually do anything to address grievances or even punish transgressions). So much stuff has burned in the past 1.5 decades, there's still not a wealth-adjusted plurality of Boomers who want to fix anything. Their tacit rallying cry came from Biden: "Nothing fundamentally will change."
The B-word - boomer - is what it is about. The government has always been about them, well, at least since WW2, or WW Eleven as one of the few youthful members of Congress would have it.
In the UK and elsewhere in Europe we had free education for the boomers, with benefits for them in the holidays. But they hoisted the ladder up after them. Final salary pensions, boomers had that, but they deprived others of getting the same perk. The same with healthcare and everything the state does, it was all designed for boomers.
The boomers once had people waving CND and Peace signs in their midst, however, after 9/11 the boomers found themselves back in their happy space of having an external enemy, the semi-fictional 'al-qaeda' mercenaries that none of them ever met. Their younger selves would not have been clamouring for war, but, after the planes hit the towers, they were just gagging to support more and more bombing, all in their name.
The boomers paid for the nukes, the planes to deliver them and the entire war machine, whilst pricing their kids out of the housing market whilst chastising their own kids with 'back in our day we had nothing and had to work harder than you with your latte and iphone'. We all know the deal.
The problem is not just a few geriatrics in power, which societies have had problems with ever since the first king, it is bigger than that, it is the boomers that do not care about anything other than their selfish world view, that can't be argued with because you can't 'cheek your elders'.
The problem with the boomers is that many of their children honestly believe they can mimic the boomer life, where you knuckle down and pay for that mortgage like they did and where you spew toxic emissions everywhere you go, because boomers are entirely car dependent.
>...I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money,
In the last few decades both political parties in the USA have tried to outdo each other in reckless over-spending, but for the first couple hundred years that wasn't the case. Something changed.
Well the problem is much more pronounced as people live longer and longer. I think this will all come to a head soon. Social security, for one, is going to exceedingly get strained as people draw on it for longer. Being alive also doesn’t mean you’re competent.
Problem is, Social Security will be solvent until 2037 at current prediction which means it goes insolvent when youngest boomer is 73. So basically most of them will get all their Social Security, die and leave Gen X to get fucked.
Fortunately insolvency in this scenario mean that they will only be able to afford to pay around 3/4 of promised benefits.
Closing that budget gap is a problem that will need to be dealt with, but it's not impossible to fix and it's a fairly long way away. There are a lot of proposals going around for how to fix it and those will become more politically palatable as it gets closer.
This article touches on the fact that old folks have much more money accumulated than younger people, and this causes a large social disconnect. Maybe if we put a cap on the age for voting (i.e. no voting once you retire) then older people would be incentivized to spend their wealth, time, and energy on young people in the hopes that they would carry the torch politically. Regardless, it's obvious by current inflation of assets that these folks don't mind pulling the ladder up if it benefits them, and something should be done about that.
I retired last year, lead software engineer, never got into management as a civilian, did software for over 3 decades. My salary was lower than it was as a mid level 20 years ago.
What old people have "much more money", maybe they can send some my way.
I thank God for Social Security and hope and pray it remains well into the future, even for the 99% of the people who are saying bigoted, dumb shit on this page.
> Our gerontocracy is not the result of a malevolent plan, .. Boomers aren't distinctively evil.. The fact that they are so numerous and the fact that they are aging in era when life has been extended make the syndrome endemic. .. America faces a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of society itself. The melodrama of succession—waiting for the old to make way for the new—defines not only our politics but also our economy and our culture writ large.
I'll be honest, everyone I know thinks cordial relations between the generations are over. Seems like the author knows it too but wants to be gentle. Let's just say it. America straight up looks Saturn devouring his children. Is he horrified? Sure, but mostly just horrified to be caught in the act. And now that he thinks about it, kind of disgusted with you that you'd want to be so judgemental about the whole thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son
We may continue to see generational wealth-pumps installed by the elderly to destroy the youth, but at some point soon it will be a kind of survival cannibalism. Boomers did it for fun and are still doubling down every chance they get.
First, young people didn't choose this. It's been coming from the other direction and out in the open for a very long time. Why not make it official that it's mutual? Past time this was acknowledged, expected, and planned for. Second, I don't dislike all old people in all cultures or anything like that. We're talking about a specific cohort that shares the same experiences and most of the same perspectives. This isn't about who they are anyway, or about what they are like in some abstract sense. It's about what they've done as group and continue to do.
Boomers wrecked the veritable paradise that their own parents built with unforced errors and some combination of greed, stupidity, and malice. Then they blew up the lives of their children, and have moved on towards wrecking the rest of the country and indeed the whole world as much as possible before they check out. They did that, not some impersonal forces of history.
America IS boomers. That's the whole point of the article. Are things going well? America may not actually survive boomers. There's no point in a long list of their crimes, it's in TFA too, and everyone knows the inheritance. Housing crisis, national debt, and climate change alone would be a crippling blow for posterity, but now that's just a few of the disasters ahead, and we're in a much worse position to meet any of it. The first generation that was actually selfish and stupid enough to piss away so much prosperity that they've very likely ruined things for several generations. Boomers can't even disagree with this, because who would they blame? They'd have to sit down, shut up, and let someone else steer.
By law is how we got to where we currently are. There's no reason to think that would change. You'd have to trick all the people who are old (plus all the people who realize they will get old too) to vote away their assets, income, and power.
Unrest will just harden the people who see your cause as unjust against it. That will be a strong majority of people, so will go no where.
Revolution seems highly unlikely to succeed -- it would be unpopular and you'd have to turn much of the military/police to your side.
Frankly, I think the push of the idea of the intergenerational conflict is a con. It will not lead to anything getting better, but when people are angry and scared, they become vulnerable.
Be wary of anyone offering big, impossible promises. They'll be sticking their hands into your wallet soon enough.
If most people were fed up I think you'd see it in voting patterns.
Instead, a substantial fraction of the population don't care enough to vote one way or the other. Those that do vote have been pushing us toward the system we have now.
It's going to be hard to sell policies that disenfranchise old people...
There are a lot of people who don't want to be penniless and homeless with a diminished capacity to work. That includes people who are old already and people who realize they will become old.
That's why I think this is all a scam. We are, almost all of us, old people or people who hope to get old. This is an effort to get us all upset enough at each other that we don't stop to realize we're fighting ourselves.
It you want to unravel the scam, follow the money.
>It's going to be hard to sell policies that disenfranchise old people...
Not at all. Remember how before he got dementia the president ran on an antidementia platform?
> That's why I think this is all a scam. We are, almost all of us, old people or people who hope to get old. This is an effort to get us all upset enough at each other that we don't stop to realize we're fighting ourselves.
Not at all, it's just a fact that old people have arranged things so that old/young is simply more important than left/right. Old people are absolutely committed to protecting and boosting the stock/real-estate markets that young people are locked out of. The market is not the economy.. except that actually for old people with assets, it basically is. Youth may have left/right preferences, but establishment Left/Right are really just Old, and both have clear and stable intent to inflict economic violence on everyone else.
> It you want to unravel the scam, follow the money.
You're suggesting I'm a shil? The money trail is simple.. people don't have much and things are getting worse. Who's in charge now? Who was in charge before that? And who was in charge before that? Who paid off the people in charge? Who continuously benefits and who suffers?
> In his book, “A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America,” Bruce Gibney argued that “generational plunder” was their economic legacy. Through tax cuts and deficit financing of several wars, the Boomers left America in shock. “Plunder” is a strong word. In the corporate legal world, it is enough to justify a clawback of the plunderers’ assets.
IMHO if we don't use it to settle the debt, it won't be inherited by people anyway, it will simply be deleted during end-of-life care, where the oldest boomers pay the youngest boomers that are still in charge of whatever insane private-equity healthcare mess we land on, thus making the "greatest generational transfer of wealth" directly to the 1%.
That article is calling for an additional estate tax. That's sounds reasonable to me.
But you seem to be talking about taking the retirement savings and homes of people who are using them to live.
You find different numbers in different places, but the median retirement savings for boomers is under $200,000. That's a lot of money, but it needs to last ~15 years or so, years where they're likely to have reduced or no capacity to work.
A lot of old people have paid-off houses, which is a major asset. You could take those (e.g., by taxing them out), but then where do the old people on a small, fixed income live?
The attitude seems to be, "to hell with them, who cares?"
But I think a lot of people care: the old people themselves, of course. The people who love them. And everyone self-aware enough to realize they too hope to become old.
> Greene desires something that has long been forecast but that has not happened: “more generational conflict.” However, “the boomers are organized,” and there has not been “a broader political awakening among younger generations.” So, boomers are serenely unthreatened as some of their households receive almost $117,000 annually from Social Security, and some Medicare programs cover “golf balls, greens fees, social clubs, ski trips, and horseback riding.”
Indeed, so serenely unthreatened that they are very actively threatening to everyone else. These are the same people that are forever using hunger as a bargaining chip with snap, school lunches, and policing what other people can and cannot get.
> The attitude seems to be, "to hell with them, who cares?"
The attitude is just that they were the primary beneficiaries of the spending. They presided over the debt growth to ~40 trillion and if they did not approve they also did not stop it. They still will not let anyone else stop it! If the generational conflict were literally a war with a truce, one might expect significant reparations, or at least acknowledgement and apology? Far from it. Older folks gouged out 10x profit selling crappy houses, and while young people are delaying life milestones for decades to try to buy that house, boomer landlords charged them rent to stay at their third investment property and mocked legitimate hardship with latte and avocado toast bullshit.
For whoever needs to hear this, that 'ok boomer' reply feels less and less adequate. It's actually deadly serious and a very bloody business to just doom millions of people. Data will be clear about this one day and you already see all the trends.. deaths of despair up, life expectancy down, births down, conflict up, climate crisis closer, all with zero resources to pick up the slack. Boomers have even begun destroying international standing and friendships that might have helped us negotiate the national debt situation later. While they're working to pull the ladder up for the improvements they made to civil liberties and women's lib. On the whole they'll have lived longer, happier lives in better conditions than their kids, and they did it by stealing the future.
> everyone self-aware enough to realize they too hope to become old.
That's exactly what I'm getting it. Again not so much for you but for whoever needs to hear it.. Prospects on HN are better than average, ok? And Gen-Z looks to be childless, which may be painful, but is rational and avoids drama. Listening to average Gen-X / Millennials though.. many obviously don't plan to be old. They know they can't afford to be old. So they are taking care of their elders, they are taking care of their kids, and when that tapers off they're planning to just die quickly themselves if/when they get sick. The worst nightmare of what must never happen to the elderly in civilized society is just another awkward future that boomers may have already caused and will not have to face, but posterity will.
Hope this helps someone, really. Boomers need to be able to hear it. This is a bit like being an American abroad.. you expect to be a bit of punching bag on occasion. It doesn't actually matter if you're personally complicit, you kind of need to acknowledge you're a member of a group that has been up to no good. It's not a shame ritual, or bitter ranting, or just provocative. It's a calculated test that's probing for ignorance or understanding, character, empathy, and solidarity. Most boomers don't pass, and don't pass, and don't pass, and make things worse. => End of patience, end of cordial relations, end of respect, end of trust, end of relationships.
This is really obviously not true. The Democrats' preferred candidate for Maine's US Senate seat, Janet Mills, was 78 years old. She had never served in congress. (she dropped out of the primary when her impending loss became obvious)
> she dropped out of the primary when her impending loss became obvious
That is how voting and elections is supposed to work, not by saying people of a certain age, color, race or creed can't hold office because young people today are bigoted and feel they deserve more than all generations that ever preceded them throughout all of history.
I'd say party leadership endorsing a 78 year old candidate for US Senate is not how voting and elections ought to work - I'd say it's a pretty big problem. You're welcome to agree or disagree with that, but more relevant to the context of this comment thread, it is not a problem that would be solved by congressional term limits.
> young people today are bigoted and feel they deserve more than all generations that ever preceded them throughout all of history.
Each generation doing materially better than the previous one used to be a widely agreed upon goal in the United States. Perhaps not really relevant to this comment thread.
She was the logical choice and a good candidate. Government is not a job anyone can step into and be sucessful. Look at the difference in effectiveness of career politicians vs populists outsiders. Its like 100s of meaningful bills passed compared to single digit.
Term limits are perhaps the dumbest idea that ever plagued democracy. The idea of mandatory firing your most qualified, experienced employees in an incredibly difficult job that can only be learned with on-the-job experience is literally insane. If not for term limits, the US would have had Obama in the presidency this entire time instead of the absolute garbage scraps that were left over when they fired the only person remotely competent enough to lead them.
> If not for term limits, the US would have had Obama in the presidency this entire time
I like Obama as much as anyone else. But that would've been bad for democracy. Not to mention the man himself. He looked absolutely shattered by the end of his second term. Executives need term limits. And possibly judges too; albeit much longer terms than the legislatures or executives that appoint them.
I agree with you that term limits for legislators are a dumb idea.
Term limits encourage the development of robust laws, systems and institutions which provide a far more stable basis for running a society than having power structures that rely on the brilliance of an individual or individuals. Without terms limits or the like (and there are countless examples not just in history but currently around the world), individuals in power are motivated mostly to preserve that power and have less incentive to work on improvements that will outlast them.
"institutions" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. This often means bloated bureaucracy. I'm not against big government in any way or form, but inefficient, bloated bureaucracy with a bunch of mandarins doing the real governing since all the office holders get rotated out after their term limits hit, doesn't seem like a good solution.
There are just too many examples of political leaders who achieved beneficial results initially but as their reign extended into decades, things went sour. Putin, Mugabe, Erdogan, Ferdinand Marcos, Mubarak, Hugo Chavez, Castro and even the likes of Gaddafi are commonly viewed as having improved conditions for the citizens initially but eventually left a legacy of degraded legal systems, weak civil services, rotten institutions in general, weakened or non-existent independent media and busted economies. It just doesn't work in practice which why nearly all countries have switched to term-limits.
Nah you are wrong, and I will provide as much evidence for my position as you. It should be even stronger, every politician should have hard cap on how long they can serve for. Even just a congress seat and such.
No. Term limits have no bearing on the skill floor, only the skill ceiling. By capping employment at 8 years, you place a hard limit on how good your employees can become. However, removing that limit does not magically make all of your employees good. You are still responsible for choosing to employ competent employees. If, after 8 years, an employee is still not good at their job, you have the option to fire them. That American voters are currently not exercising the option to fire bad employees is its own problem, and not a problem that is reasonably solved by mandatory firings, because the underlying cause is still there and voters who are inclined to vote for bad employees will simply choose to employ new bad employees.
Back when USSR was a global superpower there was a trend in sci-fi to describe the communist societies of the future.
One of the distinctive features of such societies was the ability to switch jobs every few years, including changes from leadership positions to menial jobs, from engineering to humanities.
At that point, the blame lies with the electorate for choosing to re-elect somebody who has a proven track record of harming them. You can't realistically prevent people from making bad choices in a democracy, at some point the voters have to have accountability for who they choose to vote for. Restricting who they are allowed to vote for is liable to backfire if you're arbitrarily removing the best candidates from the pool, especially out of a misguided belief that term limits prevent elderly politicians from taking power (yet Trump was elected for his first term at 70, his second term at 78, and Biden for his first term at 78... because, allegedly, disqualifying 55-year-old Obama in 2016 was somehow meant to help prevent geriatric politicians from being in power).
How else would you deal with people who are too old to do the job, and too senile to realize they can no longer perform and should abdicate?
Because we have politicians who can barely walk and talk on their own they're so goddamn old. These aren't the best and brightest of our country, these are old people who can no longer string together enough thoughts to understand their mere presence is hurting the entire country.
> How else would you deal with people who are too old to do the job, and too senile to realize they can no longer perform and should abdicate?
Mandatory retirement age? Voters being adults and fucking paying attention, instead of acting like children and believing everything they see on TV and social media?
"Building a fairer system—with the elderly divested of political power, wealth, and property, but guaranteed dignity and state support at the end of their lives—would help everyone, including most of the aged."
So, we just have to take all the wealth and property
Commentators: "America's young are addicted to their phones, hopelessly politically polarized, and socially illiterate. Test scores are dropping and critical thinking skills are at an all-time low. They hate and fear the other gender, mainline conspiracy theory podcasts, struggle with anxiety, were coddled from birth, etc. etc."
Also commentators: "The elderly have to go. We need fresh blood."
(Yes I acknowledge there is a middle position where you elect 45-year-olds who came of age before the internet yet are still reasonably sharp mentally. I just think it's interesting that the two narratives above seem to coexist so easily.)
Ah yes, the squeeze in the middle. My default assumption is that people outside ~35-45 range are often impatient to the point that they are, for practical purposes, functionally illiterate
Older side has those who invented and lived by powerpoints / the executive summary, and they are more executive than ever, preferring to leave early or not show up at all because it's time for golf. On the younger side, people who grew up on social media and twitter, very media literate in some respects but also often stuck at high-school level reading / writing at best. They are leaving early too, because it's not like staying will help them get ahead!
You know what these very diverse groups have in common? Shared disinterest in nuance, and the idea that no matter how subtle something is, 280 chars or 2 slides should just about cover it.
The first commentators are talking mostly about gen-z and gen-alpha nowadays while the second group of commentators wants gen-x or millennials to have power finally. These aren't really opposite takes at all (and if you're talking about test scores and conspiratorial thinking boomers seem to be worse than gen-x and millennials in my experience so in many ways these commentaries are not only not oppositional but actually compatible).
In Australia, mandatory voting is compelled real or virtual attendance.
You are required to cast or mail in an anonymous response, that response can be blank, a vote for someone not listed, a regular vote, a donkey vote, paper with many pictures of various genitalia, etc.
No speech is compelled, no pen to paper is compelled, just that registered voters are ticked off the rolls and those registered that don't respond provide at least a weak excuse (my grandmother was sick that day) or face a nominal fine (eventually).
Think of it a citizens part to play in a democracy, the commitment to at least pay attention to the government hired by and paid for by citizens.
Yeah, I've lived in Australia and the US. The fine isn't big, the attempts at suppressing voter turnout or inconvenience aren't there, and the privacy of the ballot box means that even if you turn up, and put a ballot in the box, no-one's stopping you writing "You all suck" and not casting any preferences.
But at that point you are choosing to explicitly express your non-support of the candidates. That is still more meaningful than simply not showing up IMO
The Australian system is certainly not perfect, but I think the indirection of the "leader of the party" choice and Prime Minister is helpful - it promotes a greater willingness of the party members to say "Okay, you're hurting -my- re-election chances now", with the result being, whether the ultimate motivation is self-interest, you often (or much more when I was younger) would see no-confidence votes and leadership changes, certainly far more than in the US, where I am now. And signals like you mention, "explicit non-support" seem to carry greater weight.
Here’s a better proposal: add none of the above to every ballot. If a super majority (say 80%) pick that the election is an automatic do-over and the people on the ballot can’t run for a period of say five years.
A couple cycles of this will flush the crap out of the system.
9 hours, 5 serious HN users replying...and nobody noting that "A Modest Proposal" might flag satire.*
Or that my "proposed" solution, in many ways, describes the current status quo. Tricks like California's Prop. 13 have created enormous gaps between the taxes paid by the old and the young. Warren Buffet has criticized how much lower his own (income) tax rates are than his secretary's rates.
We could pay people to vote. Many states have unemployment insurance and that system could be repurposed to give people a wage for election day without making it political.
This would mostly end up punishing people who live in places where voting is deliberately made difficult due to having to skip an entire workday (and its pay, if you're paid hourly instead of salaried) to go to some out-of-the-way location to vote.
People in America die from preventable illnesses constantly because they cannot afford access to care but I guess they forgot to protect the ability to not die or whatever.
No, they're already being suppressed. They'll take the easiest action possible to ease the pain, which means voting for whoever does away with the fines.
The interactive challenges and the step-by-step mental models for recursive types and distributive conditionals are incredibly well-structured. It's cool to transform type gymnastics into a systematic engineering discipline.
I have trouble predicting how public sentiment will evolve over time.
I'm not that young, and still and the last 10 years have left me with an absolutely blistering distrust of the 70+ crowd on any matter pertaining to positions of authority. I'd like to see ~67 and ~72 become the other 18 and 21: hard lines beyond which the law progressively rescinds the presumption of total competence.
It's not a pretty solution. There are certainly some 14 year olds who are more deserving of a drivers license than many of legal age. I would welcome a world where we can actually establish and enforce criteria that allow us to move beyond such crude numeric thresholds. But in the meantime, the bulk of us need protection from statistics. Desperately.
Go look at the demographics of the last election and then tell me which groups shouldn't be allowed to vote.
Hey, I hear you, but the age cutoff could also be on holding office.
As someone just hitting the 60 yr old mark, and looking at my parents who are still pretty sharp in their late 80s, -- so definitely talking about myself and my capacity here,
No-one over 70 has any business in a high ranking government office. The mental flexibility isn't there.
Which means no one over 66 should be allowed to run office (yes, I know this puts senators in office until 72, and kicks out representatives at 68, but it also gives a single number which is easier to understand).
It's also a question of accountability. A 40 year old politician will expect/have to live with their choices for another 40 years.
It’s not just mental ability it’s a set of perverse incentives: the old robbing the future of the young, instead of planting trees whose shade the old will never personally enjoy.
That's a response to an opinion I don't hold, but I could have been more clear. The claim I'm making is about the fitness to hold office. Specifically: septo/octogenarians belong at the ballot box, but not on the ballot. If you'd like to dissuade me of something, that's the meat of it.
What is the justification? Why can someone vote for a future they're not likely have to endure?
We don't allow under 18s to vote, so clearly some age restrictions are legitimate.
> Go look at the demographics of the last election and then tell me which groups shouldn't be allowed to vote
The group that uses the rhetoric like "which groups shouldn't be allowed to vote". You tell me which one that is.
Of course, when I go to my local city planning meetings and see the demographics shouting down any new housing my feelings are different.
Go look at recent changes to how young men vote and tell me which groups shouldn't be allowed to vote in the future.
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> My observation living in an area that has a mix of 70+ WASPs and younger black and hispanic people is that the WASPs are the ones who are by far the most incensed by Trump. They don't just dislike his policies. They hate the way he talks.
A lot of minorities in America like the tough on crime talk because they're often the ones most affected by it.
I think that's exactly what OP meant? While Trump's policies take the long term gerontocratic/anarcho-capitalist dynamics strangling of our society and crank them to 11, a lot of younger people ended up buying into his "burn it all down" messaging imagining it would result in some principled evenly-applied reform that might get the boot off their own necks. And that level of foolishness seems straight from the naive rashness of youth.
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There is too much to unpack here. Perhaps you'd like to make your point in something other than identity politics anecdotes and personal attacks?
If you don't like my phrasing of "boot on their necks", feel free to substitute your own when constructively responding to the point. The frustrations that have led to Trumpism are certainly palpable and understandable, so don't feign like I'm using hyperbolic language out of nowhere.
But no, in general I am comfortable modeling Trump's second term as a complete self-own on the part of voters - regardless of whether they've realized it yet, or ever will. As a libertarian who partook in both red and blue tribe media and was both sidesing through 2020, I have not come to this conclusion lightly. There has simply been no way I've been able to steelman it.
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> through the perspective of some 1930s West Virginia mine worker like you do.
That was the personal attack I was referring to. I was referring to the dynamic of the obvious frustrations seemingly driving much of Trumpism, and yet you're imparting that back onto me. That's called shooting the messenger.
> You’re starting from the values that you think should matter to people, then faulting them for not making decisions you think are rational according to those assumed values.
No, you're assuming here. As I said, I've been trying to steelman Trumpism in terms of any kind of constructive policy for some time and I can no longer find anything that fits.
> Your dismissal of “identity politics” is a good illustration of that
No, that dismissal is based on the red tribe making a good show of dismissing identity politics for the past ~16 years - aka stated preferences. Would you say that my assertion that people should be honest about their preferences is imparting too much of my own opinion about what should matter? The alternative of course, which seems to have good predictive power, is straight up hypocrisy.
> value different ends than what you think they should value
Solving for these values is exactly what I have been doing, as I have been saying. For example in 2016, I was the weirdo telling my blue tribe friends that Trump was likely to win as he was resonating with a lot of frustrations people have that the blue tribe just did not understand. Maybe from that you can see that I am capable of seeing, respecting, and even sympathizing with others' values even if there may be other values I prioritize instead?
Or alternatively you could just come out and state those values! This should be easy right? Rather than beating around the bush?
I would only insist that they be constructive values that aim to be beneficial rather than merely making some spectacle of hurting others. So for example "deport illegal immigrants" doesn't qualify as it's a destructive framing - the constructive framing would be something like "fix the labor market for blue collar citizens". But if this movement truly has some substance making our country better and is not merely just lashing out about our problems, this should be easy.
And of course since we're talking about continued support for Trump, those values should be congruent to the policies he is actually enacting.
@rayiner, responding to your [dead] comment -
You keep attributing straw man points to me, and then dutifully knocking them down.
A recognition that many people feel disenfranchised and preyed upon by our system, which is why they turn to [what I consider] extremist fantasies like communism or Trumpism, does not represent "my analytical perspective".
More germane to our "conversation", I merely threw out "fix the labor market for blue collar citizens" as an example, reflecting a context of arguments that most people make.
So no, I am not "taking cultural relativism as axiomatic" - that's merely your strawman pigeonholing of my position. An example of constructively stating your point about culture could be something like "re-popularize values that made our culture successful".
Of course culture in the abstract has the same vague generality as "values" or "policy", and so I would ask the analogous thing about which specific constructive aspects of culture you see Trump and Trumpism as improving. For example simply "deport people from other cultures" is not constructive as it's framed on the negative dynamic rather than as a constructive outcome to be achieved. I'm not going to give a constructive example this time lest you make another straw man out of my attempting to fill in the blanks of your argument. Rather as it's your argument, you should make it!
Also note that it is necessary to talk in terms of objective cultural values rather than handwaving about a previously dominant culture because, love it or hate it, our society is intrinsically multicultural. And I know that M-word can be triggering for a whole host of negative talking points, hence the need to focus on the positive/constructive.
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> You're overlooking that the geriatric people are carrying on the traditional liberal/conservative debate on both sides of the aisle.
Workers skew young, capital skews old. When politics is money literally the only thing the left / right actually agree on is fucking over young people. That's what it takes to collectively focus on inflating real-estate / stocks that the youth is locked out of, while ignoring the labor market, and the cost of education, and periodically blowing up the economy on behalf of interest groups, with outsourcing or the like previously, next with AI. We've probably been in a job recession for years, and we only just noticed.
Testing is expensive, subjective and favors people with resources to game the test. When thinking about stuff like this, we should aim for something more universal, with the understanding that this is not a moral judgement on a person.
In the context of the article and of controls, I think we should worry more about controls on those in power (i.e., politicians) than others (i.e., voters).
I completely agree. With so many high profile cases of people suffering from some form of dementia being elected to important offices (McConnell and Feinstein; Biden and Trump), it's clear that the intended electoral mechanism isn't working to replace people who are not fit to serve. Name recognition & incumbency advantage are just too strong to allow the right thing to happen.
The version of the fix that I like is, if you would be 65 or older on the day you would begin holding the office, you are ineligible to be in the election or the appointment process. This gives some room for acknowledging that there isn't a clear cut-off where one immediately becomes unfit to serve. If you're a healthy 64, you can serve all the way to 70 for an office with a lengthy term; but if you're going soft at 65, then you don't need to make the difficult decision of whether or not to run. The decision has been made for you, way ahead of time, and you can make plans to retire and support a successor, avoiding a really nasty, personal primary process.
This would have nicely avoided Biden's awkward "will he, won't he" decision that led to the 2024 disaster we're still suffering from. Feinstein & McConnell would have retired well before their brains transformed into cottage cheese, turning them into jokes and destroying whatever legacies they worked to build. It's better for everyone.
Characterizing the problem as the electoral mechanism, wouldn't it make sense to push for better voting systems that don't empower the two party duopoly (eg Ranked Pairs) ?
It feels that while gerontocracy is a valid critique to illustrate the problem, it doesn't fully capture why our processes actively choose such bad leaders. Rather it kind of papers over the problem assuming that mental faculties mean good policies [0], give us a comforting thought that most of the recent relevant candidates would have been out of the picture, while not actually addressing the "shit sandwich vs turd torta" dynamic.
As for the Senate itself, I'd propose increasing the number of senators to 6 per state to dilute this effect of a strong senator being a boon to state regardless of how bad their politics are. Perhaps straight term limits for the Senate and the House as well.
[0] while it certainly means better policies than what we have now, the bar is currently on the floor.
I don't think a form of RCV would have a terribly significant impact on name recognition and incumbent advantage, which I think the are the main drivers of why we keep reelecting people who are obviously no longer competent. Feinstein's walking corpse being constantly reelected despite California having jungle primaries with many viable alternatives is a good example of how an alternate voting method does not solve this problem. It also wouldn't fix appointed positions, especially judges or filling vacated seats.
There are other great reasons to change our voting system! I just think it doesn't solve this exact problem, while an upper age limit does.
Maybe the problem is structural: there is an absurd amount of power to be gained by seniority in both houses. To a voter there is a significant advantage to choosing an incumbent as their power increase with seniority.
I'd say that a large part of incumbent advantage is directly related to plurality. I don't know the specific details of the elections that have kept Feinstein propped up. But I'd think the primary would revolve around a bunch of challengers that are each really liked by some people, but really hated by others - so Feinstein ends up getting the defensive vote from people who don't want change towards the popular challengers. Then the general election has the same effect, plus all the people that already "made their choice" in the primary.
Old people are organized and more social. I see it in my community. They run the newsletters and they host community events. "Oh that's because they're retired!" No, many of them are not. Many still work.
I want the gerontocracy to end, but I'm also worried what takes its place. Gen Xers like me seem to lack some of the abilities present in our older generations.
We'll probably be more equitable and fair, but will we be as politically effective and organized towards achieving our goals? I sort of doubt it.
They've had decades to save up the money that allows them to do the things alongside work.
They also came up in a time and place that allowed them to build social relationships outside of work. Many Gen Xers and Millennials just... don't have that kind of personal time. I know several people in my circle of friends who don't want to do anything after work because they're exhausted. Bills gotta be paid, and there's more pressure to squeeze more productivity and consumption out of individuals than there was in 1980-1995. A lot of that pressure, oddly enough, comes from the necessity to keep shareholder returns high to keep the retirement accounts of the Boomers flush with cash.
Gen X and Millennials are also less likely to have had kids than the Boomers, so the socialization that came along with having a child (extracurriculars, PTA meetings, etc.) just never happened.
We incentivized, and eventually started requiring, economic output and consumption over building in-person social networks and hosting events outside of work. It was what we considered important.
I'm curious how you figure that pressure to increase profits has increased?
The US birth rate began to drop in the 1960s. [0] At the time we were a more self-contained economy.
Since then, there are fewer births per capita, and we've opened up global markets for labor and resources.
If you have fewer people aging into markets for goods and services as time goes on, you have to monetize them more intensely in order to maintain revenues. At the same time, other markets (China, India, etc.) offered relatively-high GDP growth (and thus return on investment) compared to the US [1], since their labor costs are lower and the needs of then-developing nations were cheaper to meet.
The result is a worker that's expected to produce more profit to compete with those elsewhere, while also being more intensely monetized through their consumption habits. If they can't produce enough profit to compete with workers elsewhere, they just don't have the income necessary to be more intensely monetized, so their standard of living drops.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/datasets/global-metrics/countrie...
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?name_...
Why wouldn't people "monetize" things before?
Because you can only monetize people so much before they get testy about it.
They get tired of being advertised to. They start complaining about being nickeled and dimed for every single thing they used to get as a part of another purchase. They look at their wages staying flat while costs go up and up.
So why is it different now? Costs go up because of inflation (government deficit spending) and the ever-greater burden of government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Criticism
>A lot of that pressure, oddly enough, comes from the necessity to keep shareholder returns high to keep the retirement accounts of the Boomers flush with cash.
This is it. The American economy has been warped by the interests of older people who are more interested in keeping the wealth that they've accrued safe than in investing in ventures that are riskier but that provide a broader and more diverse base of opportunity. When you ask, "Why are so many young people unemployed or underemployed today?", it's because cash, which could have funded the investments that stupid young people would have made in risky small businesses that employ workers with idiosyncratic or less-than-expert skill sets, were instead placed in the hands of boomers who just bought more FAANG stock.
Suddenly, those huge conglomerates are the only ones with capital, so they bid up wages and costs to keep resources out of the hands of would-be competitors. This creates a cycle of "growth" (or, rather, when the organic growth subsides, government steps in with subsidies because they can't let the largest employers and economic engines in the country do poorly).
And here we are.
Organization is a skill that can be passed on, and to the degree that old people are still doing it themselves they’re depriving us of opportunities to learn and to practice and to benefit from their experience. That’s why we’re not as good at it.
> and to the degree that old people are still doing it themselves they’re depriving us of opportunities to learn and to practice and to benefit from their experience.
Young people’s ability and motivation to organize and communicate is not dependent on anything other than themselves choosing to do it and get involved
> That’s why we’re not as good at it.
If you continue to believe that you’re dependent on older generations to teach you everything you’ll never get anywhere.
What works for older generations isn’t going to be good advice for getting younger generations to organize and communicate. The age differences are large.
Relatedly, it's a skill that goes with positions that are clung to such that nobody else gets to practice and learn said skill.
An awful lot of young people are starting businesses. Look at all the people under 30 becoming billionaires. This just didn't happen when I was young.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2025/12/22/why-there-...
> Fueled by AI, prediction markets and online gambling, there are more self-made billionaires under 30 than ever before, 13 up from a previous record of 7.
Two of those examples are online gambling, which is controversial to the extent that it's partly outlawed in the US.
But more importantly, 13 isn't an awful lot. Approximately how many young people today have started successful businesses whose valuation is under $1 billion?
> Approximately how many young people today have started successful businesses whose valuation is under $1 billion?
You can type such questions into google as well as I can.
> 13 isn't an awful lot
There aren't that many self-made billionaires of any age.
Yes it did. Billionaires are a relatively new thing, but successful businesses were led by young people across the entirety of human history.
And you should not praise someone for simply being a billionaire. That's a bad thing to be.
> Yes it did.
I don't recall any. I remember when people were all agog when Gates became one.
> successful businesses were led by young people across the entirety of human history.
Sure. But billionaires?
> And you should not praise someone for simply being a billionaire.
If they're self-made, they earned the praise.
> That's a bad thing to be.
Creating value is not a bad thing. Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value. They didn't take it from you or anyone else. Creating SpaceX, Starlink, etc., are good things.
> If they're self-made, they earned the praise.
They aren’t and they didn’t.
> Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value. They didn't take it from you or anyone else.
Nobody is a “self made” billionaire. That value you’re talking about didn’t just spring into existence. It had to come from somewhere. There is always a source.
Who flew the rocket? Who built the rocket? Who built the parts for the rocket? Who mixed the fuel?
Building big ambitious things is a good thing. But consolidating an amount of money that nobody could ever reasonably spend into the hands of one person (especially when that money is just the excess value produced by the workers) is unethical and unneeded.
> That value you’re talking about didn’t just spring into existence. It had to come from somewhere.
Are you arguing that wealth is not created, but is transferred? Where was SpaceX's value transferred from? Where was the current wealth in the United States 250 years ago?
What you're referring to are called "expenses". The value created is what somebody is willing to pay for a piece of that action (i.e. an ownership share). Expenses reduce the value.
For example, if you bake a cake the value you created is what you can sell the cake for minus the cost of the ingredients and the use of an oven. For SpaceX, the money spent to buy materials and pay employees takes away value.
> that nobody could ever reasonably spend into the hands of one person (especially when that money is just the excess value produced by the workers) is unethical and unneeded.
Musk doesn't spend much of his money. He invests it in creating more businesses.
> is unethical and unneeded.
You're arguing that Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, etc., are unethical and unneeded. None of those companies would exist without Musk investing his fortune into them.
BTW, why don't you and your friends get together and start a rocket company and make yourselves billionaires?
This is usually the part of the conversation where someone mentions slave labour in an emerald mine and immigration fraud and then comes the part where you usually say something along the lines like "hasn't been proven in court!"
Musk started with a $20,000 loan from his family. You could buy a used car for $20,000, no emerald mine and slaves required.
Musk parlayed the loan into $trillions.
It would have been so cool if you didn't derail this conversation about 'Confronting America’s gerontocratic crisis' with your Elon Musk fanboy-ism.
So cool.
I am indeed an unapologetic Musk fanboy. For good reason.
> Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value.
two of the people on the list did it via online gambling. Which is by definition a zero-sum game. No value was created.
Need more information.
Sure, and if I was so inclined I could go rub noses with them. They're eager to find young folks who are community minded. But I don't want that. I'm gen x and full of cynicism and antisocial attitudes. The only people I know who aren't that way in my generation are churchgoing types and a few influencers.
What I’ve seen where I’m at is many of the old people who organize don’t want to give anything up to a next generation. They want all the accolades for themselves. So they’re happy to have young people do the work but aren’t comfortable letting them lead while teaching them the skills.
Mixing work and hobbies is easy. Mixing kids and hobbies is not.
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Could you expand on that? My concept of fairness is pretty congruent with equity.
two ways to take it:
equity as written. Ownership. Thus fairness means all have a share in responsibility for success and rewards for that success. Yeah, I agree. Note that I include responsibility as the core part of ownership. I think our society could have more of that.
equality (assumes you made a typo). Do you mean equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? These require different things to remedy.
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Equity? You mean equality (and that's still about rights, not pay.) Equity is just a stake in the outcome at all.
Equality: starting out at the same position, for example we have equal rights under the law
Equity: winding up at the same position, for example when everybody in a race wins the same medal, regardless of how hard they trained or how talented they are.
An apocryphal story about equity:
https://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
There's no definition of equity that I can find that returns that result so we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Equity in this context usually refers to the concept of Social Equity, which is interested in equality of outcome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_equity
The extent to which equality of outcome is pursued and for which groups are traditionally factors, but the overarching idea is in pursuit of equality of outcome.
I think we're talking about different things then.
Nobody is asking for equal result. Equity means sharing the rewards of productivity, instead of allowing a group of people who do nothing get rich off of other people's hard work. That's fair.
Doing good work should be rewarded!
> Nobody is asking for equal result. Equity means sharing the rewards of productivity, instead of allowing a group of people who do nothing get rich off of other people's hard work.
Your two sentences contradict each other.
Yeah I guess we're talking about different things. Thanks for clarifying.
> Nobody is asking for equal result.
Pursuing some level of equality of outcomes has been a core concept in social equity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_equity
Social equality is focused around equality of opportunity. Social equity is about pursuing equality of outcome, generally by allocating resources and services unequally to give groups perceived as having historical disadvantages an extra boost.
Oh I see. I guess that's one way of looking at it. I tend to favor appropriation because it simplifies the accounting. You don't need equal outcomes exactly, you just ensure that everyone has their basic needs met and the ability to improve themselves. Historical context matters, but the issue tends to boil down social instability due to repeated displacement (redlining, gentrification). Allow people get rooted into a place and they'll build whatever they need to flourish.
While I mostly agree...
Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.
Venice was the longest lasting, most stable state in Europe.
That might have as much to do with their insane system for choosing a Doge, which many historians think did a lot to force compromise and reduce corruption.
They took the full council, selected a random subset, had that group choose another group from the full council by voting, then repeat that random selection followed by voting another few times ending with a final group who voted to select a Doge.
It may have been stable and dominant in spite of that, like America, currently being run by senile old men. The human mind is a biological computer and it isn’t pretty the older it gets.
https://medium.com/psyc-406-2015/how-fast-does-iq-decline-ca...
Average is probably not what you need to worry about: I'd bet David Attenborough and Mel Brooks still have IQs considerably higher than the average 25-year old. And I'm not convinced IQ is as important as that elusive factor called character.
But you may be right. Maybe what the US really needs is a lagoon.
There's multiple states in Europe that lasted longer (and they are still lasting to this day) than Venice.
>Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.
But those kings were (legally) absolute monarchs, while Venice was (somewhat) a republic. This isn't a trivial distinction. The young kings of the various Carolignian successors also tended to inherit their titles when their fathers were killed, while Venice occupied a highly defensible geographic location (a swamp) which supported institutional continuity.
Well at the times of Doges the world hardly revolutionized. Nowadays a person in their 80s has lived through the rise of at least three different medias (radio, TV, internet) and the world has never changed so fast.
The Doge had no power.
Welcome to my rathole: Venetian history. To expand on your thesis, the Council of Ten was the executive power in Venice, but the Doge and minor council attended the Council of Ten meetings and the Doge often chaired those meetings. And even if he was powerless, the Council was made up of other old men. I don't want to push this whole argument, I'm not recommending we adopt the Venetian constitution. But I don't think you can blame current chaos on age.
Can you explain how is the example of Venetian republic relevant for something like a massive multi-cultural, multi-racial federation in 21st century? One that's led by 100s of old people not just ten rich family heads?
There is another variable, the rate of change. When a Venetian Doge was 80 years old, the world was.. more or less the same as when he was 20.
Contrast that to now, where an 80 year old in his twenties likely did not even have colour TV.
We're talking about democratic republics. How does the one map to the other?
This is likely the worst issue humanity will be facing over the next 50 years, even more than climate change.
An increasingly old demographic will sabatoge the future of humanity as they drain enormous resources and abuse democratic processes to reroute resources to their preservation of life over young people and familes.
Young people and families will choke to death under the strain of elders who demand unlimited services, money, support while outvoting them, staying in jobs and houses and giving little to nothing back to society.
Innovation will grind to a halt, families will continue to shrink, work hours will get longer and longer as taxes get higher and higher to pay for and increasingly super old leadership and voting base.
Society will begin to lose hope to solve problems like going into space or fixing climate change as increasingly the elderly population will obsess over themselves and continued life.
It is one of the hardest moral problems we will face in our era.
>This is likely the worst issue humanity will be facing over the next 50 years, even more than climate change.
Tangent, I know, but the climate change horizon is very long, much longer than 50 years. For example, a common projection is that the sea level will rise by almost one meter by 2100. This is already an unpleasant forecast. But it will continue to rise: under a 2 C warming scenario, sea levels reach (median prediction) 2.7 meters above the 2000 levels in 2300, which would be catastrophic. 2300 may seem far away, but it will come.
The current estimate is that we need to eliminate emissions this century and we will thereafter still need to do mitigation and removal to undo the damage, or extant coastal settlements will be destroyed. It is a very long process. See e.g.:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1584
Do you know what the timelines are for demographic collapse? Similar and much worse, who will need the coastal cities if our trends continue. AND they have NO way have being undone AT ALL after the previous hundred years of trends set in.
When 250 years old you reach, look as good, you will not!
I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money, which in this case is the boomers votes with the younger generations money. This will continue until nothing is left.
This already happened with the triple pension lock in GB, mathematically ensuring the bankruptcy of the state.
It's happening in the US, too.
I know of a senior couple where the husband recently retired after forty years of working in a professional field. They live in a house worth over $750k that is paid off. They have three new or late-model vehicles. Both the husband and wife could, if necessary, work for an income.
They also collect Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance checks after enrolling for them. The common name for this is Social Security.
Why the hell are they able to collect on that? They have the ability to work and assets that could readily be made liquid to fund living expenses.
They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect.
Social Security as an insurance product is fiction, but playing into the fiction helps it survive to do the thing it was built for: keep the elderly out of the poor houses / off the street.
Payout rates drop at higher income, and portions of the payout are taxable at higher income, so it's not like it's completely income/wealth blind.
> They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect.
That's just it: they're not old. Not in the way a 65-year-old was old in the 1930s.
If they had to farm, mine, log, or work in a factory, yeah, they'd be too old to work. That was most of the work available when OASDI was created, and that's what it's for: to keep you from becoming destitute as an elderly person when there is no ability to work.
But they don't have to do those things. We're a service economy now and most of that involves sitting at a desk or very light office labor. They can still do that to sustain their lifestyle. Failing that, they could liquidate assets.
We're handing out money to people as a treat for their 65th b-day while the national debt is continuing to rise and their kids are crushed under loan debt, medical debt, and further revenue extraction to keep the shares backing retirement accounts increasing in value.
Bollocks. We complain because jobs are being occupied by the oldsters, and now you want them to stay in their jobs even longer?
If the couple you're pillorying is so wealthy, then most of their Social Security is being taxed, and they're paying higher Medicare premiums as well. And their house? As they get older and require nursing care, they'll end up liquidating it (or Medicaid will take it).
The average retiree receives around $25k per year in SS benefits. That's not a ton of money. In most studies, retirees receive less in benefits than if they had been able to invest their Social Security contributions. But that's fine, SS really has two main goals: a forced savings towards retirement, and as a social safety net for those who would otherwise be impoverished in old age.
> Bollocks. We complain because jobs are being occupied by the oldsters, and now you want them to stay in their jobs even longer?
I'd just tax it at 100% unless they declare bankruptcy. The US national debt skyrocketed during their lifetimes. Mathematically speaking, they did not pay enough in tax to support the spending that their duly-elected officials enacted. They also didn't, mathematically speaking, have enough children to make up the difference in future taxpayers, either. The American birth rate never recovered after 1970. Someone's got to pay off those bills, and if the numbers comparing the Boomers to Millennials at the same age say anything, they say "the Millennials will not have the money to pay off their parents' government debt."
Is that harsh? I don't know. I do know that your children's generation is supposed to have it better than you, and by pretty much every objective measure, the Boomers did not do that for their children, at least not economically. So it's time for them to put up.
> If the couple you're pillorying is so wealthy, then most of their Social Security is being taxed, and they're paying higher Medicare premiums as well. And their house? As they get older and require nursing care, they'll end up liquidating it (or Medicaid will take it).
Why should they be receiving Social Security at all? Same with Medicare. This is the demographic that has more collected wealth than any other age cohort. If they do, in fact, need government help, they can prove their need, like you have to with unemployment insurance or Medicaid.
> The average retiree receives around $25k per year in SS benefits. That's not a ton of money.
Then those who don't really need it won't miss it. Those who do will have a more sustainable program to support them.
So why did we make them pay Social Security taxes for the entirety of their 40-year careers? They could've invested the money at a better return than Treasury bills and had way more liquid assets.
Why do you pay insurance for anything? So the funds are there if you need them.
The goal is not to maximize return, it's to guarantee a check that keeps you from being destitute. That's it. That's the whole point. Not limitless growth, not a nice bit of sugar from Uncle Sam every month to supplement millions of dollars in assets. To keep you from being dying in the street as an elderly person.
If we're going to call the current abuse of OASDI a legitimate use of insurance, then I want to be able to get my home protection policy company to help me out on a down payment for a house. I've paid in, after all. It's the least they can do.
> If we're going to call the current abuse of OASDI a legitimate use of insurance
It's called "insurance" but it isn't really insurance like your home insurance. It's a mandatory pension plan. Everyone who pays into a pension is entitled to get it. It may well be a bad plan with a bad implementation. But those are the rules nonetheless.
If Social Security wasn't universal I guarantee voters would've gotten rid of it a long time ago. Then nobody would have it - neither the rich nor the poor.
They get much more out of it than they paid in. The younger cohorts get much less out of it than they paid in.
Thats not insurance, that’s generational fraud. It’s a ponzi scheme.
That's highly dependent upon the individual and their earning status, but the majority of people receive less than they contribute.
https://freefacts.org/resources/how-much-money-will-i-pay-in...
Because they were promised it - fundamentally leaving the rich out of the social safety net doesn't even get us much and administrating the distinction costs money, and I am no fan of the wealthiest get additional benefits.
I think solving inequality will not be about reducing access to said safety nets but increasing them for all.
> Because they were promised it
No, they weren't. They were promised a monthly check that, should they become absolutely devoid of marketable skills and liquid assets in their old age, would prevent them from dying in a gutter.
They're nowhere near dying in a gutter.
If you want to solve inequality, stop giving checks to people who spend it on golf trips to retirement villages in Arizona, and give it to people who have 84-month car notes and whose student loans are in forbearance. You only have enough money for one of those two groups, not both, so use utilitarianism to decide who to give it to.
The problem with "solving inequality" is there is no incentive for one to do better. If one can live as well as everyone else, with no effort, why should one make the effort?
True, but I dont think any UBI scheme says "everyone live at the same level" more like "everyone gets enough to not die" which is a very different framing.
Work or die vs Work to gain additional benefits.
We already have welfare programs. Nobody is starving to death in the US.
That's just incorrect.
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-04-13/...
Having been welfare adjacent more than once, getting food stamps is difficult and many legislatures have spent the last few years making it way more difficult, adding job requirements and the like. Ideologically you are probably fine with that, but it has consequences that you seemingly do not perceive.
The article is about old people having malnutrition due to poor eating habits and Covid disruption and the general ineptness of the government, and does not support your thesis.
Perhaps -- "the baseline is a decent life". Lots of people are willing to work really hard for perks and glory -- honestly, you can even take more risks if you're young and you know your life's not on the line
> the baseline is a decent life
The trouble with that is the same reason communism fails - too many people decide to just live off of the work of others, and play video games all day.
Also, who is going to work as a janitor? Most jobs are not filled with glory. They're tedious - that's why they are called "work".
Kind of a strawman though, innit? If "civilization will stagnate and humans will be unmotivated blobs" is one extreme, then the other is something like "condoning economic genocide".
In reality, few are concerned that Alice has a much nicer car than Bob, compared to concerns that Bob will die without insulin. Get Bob his insulin, and he will still be motivated to have a nicer car.
> Kind of a strawman though, innit?
Not at all. It's the primary reason why communes fail.
I think there's likely a steel man version of "solving inequality" that's a little less radical than "establish a commune".
Something like "arrest the trend towards upward accumulation which also reduces incentives to excel", maybe.
If we did that, we wouldn't have SpaceX, Nvidia, AI, etc.
There are points in history where the productivity increases were more equitably spread, and we still got lasers, microwaves, MRI, mRNA, microchips, the internet, etc, etc, from national funding no less.
People are paid according to the value they produce - equity has nothing to do with it.
This is painfully naive. People are paid by the value they produce minus the maximum extraction ownership can get.
A milder version would be: People are paid based on the marginal cost of replacing them. But still, either of those is a far cry from claiming it's "the value they create".
It's not hard to show either. Imagine you're on an island and have been gored in the stomach by a wild animal, and a skilled surgeon can save your life. Most people would instantly agree that continued existence is of immense "value".
However after making that decision, you discover that you're on an island where almost everyone is a surgeon and the going-rate is much lower than you expected. Are we supposed to believe that your new knowledge somehow reaches backwards in time and retroactively changes the "value" of Not Dying? No, that'd be crazy. Valuation is never the same as price-point.
The value of something is what the buyer is willing to pay for it and the seller is willing to sell at.
There is no other meaningful definition of the value of an item or service.
> either of those is a far cry from claiming it's "the value they create".
Nobody is going to hire someone who produces less value than their pay.
Elon Musk stopped producing value quite a while ago, nowadays all he does is tweet stupid stuff. Meanwhile his net worth has skyrocketed.
Everyone who's ever spent 6 months in big tech knows how easily compensation is divorced from value. Plenty of net-negative, work-creating behavior gets rewarded with big raises.
> Elon Musk stopped producing value quite a while ago
No evidence of that.
> Everyone who's ever spent 6 months in big tech knows how easily compensation is divorced from value.
You could always sell your yourself to a big tech company with your expertise in who are the value ones. A person with that skill would be very valuable to a company.
Sir, I understand that you did some cool, useful stuff in your career and got rewarded for it and that's a case of the system working, but if you can't see various sycophants and crooks getting just as rich or richer, while contributing nothing, then I can't see it for you.
I need to see some evidence that Musk contributes nothing.
Count his tweets over the last few years, WaPo did a big story on it recently, its like 70 tweets/day. Then divide his remaining attention over the number of companies he's running. Or look at the effectiveness of his management of DOGE which is the most public/transparent example we have.
I do think up until 2020 he was useful, there's a reason nobody else made electric cars or self landing rockets work. But most of his wealth accumulation has been since then.
1. I follow Musk on twitter, and most of them consist of a single emoji and retweet of some other post.
2. What better way to keep an eye on how things are working on twitter by dogfooding the platform?
3. An effective manager does not micromanage a company. He finds competent people and delegates the authority.
4. Most of his tweets are advocacy of the products of his various companies. A major part of being a CEO is being the top salesman for the company.
5. WaPo is owned by Bezos, who competes directly with SpaceX.
6. His companies seem to be doing quite well. Why mess with success?
Brother, both Twitter and Grok had to be folded into SpaceX to hide their abject failure while he was spending all day on social media. People change, he's not the same guy as the 2010s Elon.
> the maximum extraction ownership can get
And people demand the maximum pay they can get. It's the Law of Supply and Demand.
Consider this. You hire Bob for $10/hr, and he produces $100/hr in value. What's going to happen? Your competitor hires him away from for $20/hr. Then another competitor hires Bob away for $30/hr. This proceeds until Bob gets paid about $85/hr. The ROI of hiring Bob is somewhere around 15%.
There's a good reason why the vast bulk of the American workforce is paid much more than minimum wage.
This is true in a friction-less market with total information symmetry. No such market has ever existed.
You are correct that there is no friction-less market.
However, lack of information is called "risk", and risk strongly affects what you will pay for something. A low risk deal will cost you more than a high risk deal.
Risk is part of every transaction in a market economy, and is priced in.
Ok, branching from your previous post again, why isn't what you're describing happening?
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages...
The article starts out being wrong by using wages rather than total compensation. The latter is the complete pay package, which includes paid time off, health insurance benefits, retirement benefits, etc. These typically add about 40% to the wages/salaries.
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If you work for 40 years, chances are you will have accumulated some assets. I'm not sure that "sell your house and cars to pay for food" is a policy that will be popular.
Equally those same people have paid taxes for 40 years, paid into social security (to the benefit of their elders) and so on.
Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable. A job occupied by a 70 year old is a job not occupied by someone younger. If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math).
Look, most all of us will get old and eventually claim on social security or whatever. Politically just "ending that" is pretty much a non-starter to anyone who has been contributing for any length of time. Even fiddling with the edges of it (raising the retirement age) will get you voted out of office.
>... If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math).
Economists refer to this idea as the lump of labour fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
If economists believe it, it must be true:).
More seriously though, it's not as simple as 25% fewer jobs, or an economy that grows 25%. For example the number of elected positions is pretty fixed, and all those octogenarians in the senate are certainly blocking younger talent.
Politics may be an extreme example, but lots of other jobs are "proportional". There's a fixed number of plumbing jobs (per million head of population) so adding 25% more plumbers dilutes the plumbing pool. A boon in construction would drive up the demand for plumbers, but construction booms come and go.
The "economy" is (again simplistically) a measure of money flow. It doesn't really measure "production" as much as it measures "cash velocity". As such having a retired tranche spending all day long is a good thing.
And yes, more labor would lead to a growing economy. But a lot of that growth is in "poor quality" jobs (aka service level jobs) not "new production".
In other words the economy "grows" if money changes hands quickly. The standard of living though is more tied to "production".
Take, for example, health care. The sector can grow 25% by adding more admin staff, claims evaluators etc. None of which results in better health outcomes. Or it can grow by building hospitals, training doctors and nurses. Both increase the economy, both offer more jobs, but only one leads to a higher standard of health.
In truth the current economy is built around the customers free time. From music, movies and tv, to sports, travel, phones, social media, online advertising and sales, deliveries (of goods or people), restaurants (fast or slow), home improvement, it's all about monetizing free time.
Having a large customer base with nothing but free time is what makes it all work.
> If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around.
By that logic, when the population was 25% less than it is now (~1980s), there was a job for everyone.
> Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable.
That presumes there are a fixed number of jobs. Anyone can create a job, even doing simple things like going door to door and offering to mow the lawn.
Sure, in theory. But if that was economically viable, why isn’t anyone doing it?
People do it all the time. One man companies are commonplace. They come to my door now and then, selling magazine subscriptions, offering to clean my driveway, do yard work, tree trimming, exterminating, carry off junk, do estate sales for you, and so forth.
I remember one guy who had a one man outfit that replaced broken garage door springs. It was all he did. He had a trunk full of springs.
Any decent real estate agent has a rolodex of these people, who are hired to do what is necessary to prep a house for sale.
> Why the hell are they able to collect on that?
People in the higher income brackets get far less back on SS than they paid in.
I think it's important to emphasize that much of the in/out money asymmetry in SS is not rich versus poor ... but old versus dead.
Which, incidentally, is good and proper! OASDI is an insurance policy to cover an (alive) person faced with starvation or living in a ditch. That's a very different set of tradeoffs from an investment account that can pass to children who don't need it.
Like all insurance, it depends on a portion of people who pay in and then don't need it, even if sometimes that's because they've, er, passed beyond all material needs.
Why should they get back any?
It's insurance. It's there in the name. Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance.
I get far less value back than I pay into my property insurance, unless, of course, I've had a fire or a disaster. That means I've presented a need for the insurance. A casualty has occurred. I have a claim. I can then access the value that I paid into the insurance fund.
I don't write the insurance company and upbraid them for not helping me out on the down payment for a house, because I understand the meaning of the word "insurance".
We essentially have a bunch of people writing exactly that letter.
They shouldn't get any.
This is a fund for widows, orphans, and those who are simply unable to earn any sort of money to fund their survival. They're none of the above.
SS was set up as an annuity, not a charity.
It was set up as neither.
It's a taxpayer-funded insurance policy, where the risk is you being alive without a way to earn a living. We have effectively managed that risk for a very large portion of the people who are collecting on that insurance policy by switching over to a service economy where most jobs do not require the physical labor that an elderly person cannot safely do. Furthermore, they're also the portion of the population with the longest time to have accumulated assets.
If you want to keep the insurance policy sustainable for the next generation - who is also paying into it - you need to treat it like an insurance policy. If you allow people to make any and all claims against the funds backing an insurance policy, the funds will eventually be depleted as there will be more people withdrawing from it than paying in. You also have to account for the opportunity cost of the people paying into that system not paying into something else, like our ballooning national debt, or the debts that many Americans of working age have to take on to maintain a decent standard of living.
Yeah, because they aren’t in need of a social safety net.
Go to bogleheads and read for awhile - you get an amazing view into the “rich” in various stages and it’s eye-opening in a number of ways.
You find those who have saved so much they have no hope of spending it all and yet are still scared to spend. Those who spend months worrying if they can buy a new car to replace their 25 year old Camry and yet they live on social security alone while having mandatory IRA disbursements in the thousands.
Social security et al should never have been sold as “savings for the future” and just been another tax.
SS has to pay everyone to be viable. If you make it more complicated the politics turn into a nightmare.
Social security is already a redistribution scheme, it already is more complicated.
> They have three new or late-model vehicles.
Depends on geography of course, but it's not rare at all for boomers to have this many houses as a normal part of how they experienced middle-class life. As a group they are not only more likely to have rental/investment property, but also more likely to have multiple such properties. Why would they sell? They can get you to pay for all their services, and vote as a block to deny and remove services elsewhere.
Because that cannot continue in perpetuity. The cracks are already starting to show. If I were in my 60s faced with the real possibility of living another 15-30 years I'd want the younger people to feel like they had something to look forward to. Many young and middle-aged people in the US don't feel that way. What they can't get through the ballot box, they'll get other ways, ways that will cause others to say "I'm not saying I agree, I'm saying I understand."
It's the job of government to make sure that doesn't happen, not cater to it.
They're not thinking that far ahead. Their response to the first waves of discontent - Occupy Wall Street, Trayvon Martin Protests, Michael Brown Protests, Charlottesville, Freddie Gray Protests, George Floyd Protests, January 6th - was either to mock or chide the aggrieved, or to cast them as unprecedented threats to the nation's security (but then not actually do anything to address grievances or even punish transgressions). So much stuff has burned in the past 1.5 decades, there's still not a wealth-adjusted plurality of Boomers who want to fix anything. Their tacit rallying cry came from Biden: "Nothing fundamentally will change."
The B-word - boomer - is what it is about. The government has always been about them, well, at least since WW2, or WW Eleven as one of the few youthful members of Congress would have it.
In the UK and elsewhere in Europe we had free education for the boomers, with benefits for them in the holidays. But they hoisted the ladder up after them. Final salary pensions, boomers had that, but they deprived others of getting the same perk. The same with healthcare and everything the state does, it was all designed for boomers.
The boomers once had people waving CND and Peace signs in their midst, however, after 9/11 the boomers found themselves back in their happy space of having an external enemy, the semi-fictional 'al-qaeda' mercenaries that none of them ever met. Their younger selves would not have been clamouring for war, but, after the planes hit the towers, they were just gagging to support more and more bombing, all in their name.
The boomers paid for the nukes, the planes to deliver them and the entire war machine, whilst pricing their kids out of the housing market whilst chastising their own kids with 'back in our day we had nothing and had to work harder than you with your latte and iphone'. We all know the deal.
The problem is not just a few geriatrics in power, which societies have had problems with ever since the first king, it is bigger than that, it is the boomers that do not care about anything other than their selfish world view, that can't be argued with because you can't 'cheek your elders'.
The problem with the boomers is that many of their children honestly believe they can mimic the boomer life, where you knuckle down and pay for that mortgage like they did and where you spew toxic emissions everywhere you go, because boomers are entirely car dependent.
>...I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money,
In the last few decades both political parties in the USA have tried to outdo each other in reckless over-spending, but for the first couple hundred years that wasn't the case. Something changed.
There wasn't a speculative economy based on increasingly distant balance sheets.
The stock market was initially created to crowdfund big investments. It's still that in theory, but in practice it's something very different now.
In a similar manner to bastardizing the stock market, the national budget is run in any way that is short term beneficial and long term nebulous.
You can read this exact criticism of democracy in „Athenaion Politeia“, (The Old Oligarch), 5th century BCE. There is nothing new under the sun.
It always worked like this. Democracy is simply an incredibly destructive form of government.
Democracy hasn’t even been good at its sole point - preventing violent revolution.
To ignore scale differences here is to negate what could have been a great comment into a miss.
Scale is an important aspect. If something doesn’t work in a greek city state, it certainly won’t work in anything larger.
If only the olds would die we could build more datacenters!
More seriously, why wouldn't older, longer-lived people be more likely to address long-term problems like climate change?
> More seriously, why wouldn't older, longer-lived people be more likely to address long-term problems like climate change?
Why would people with a short-term future be likely to address long-term problems?
Why do assume that its young people that want datacenters? Its not zoomers' money being invested into Oracle.
whats wrong with datacenters?
nothing, didn't you read what he wrote? he's advocating to build more of them.
this problem with older people not giving in to younger ones is prevalent everywhere.
professors - with tenure - they can die on the job.
board rooms are visibly older e.g average age of Apple board members 68.
the partners at law firms etc.
now very few companies have very few succession plans.
in other parts of the world even worse e.g in Africa - you have presidents with one foot in the grave tryin' to rule.
Well the problem is much more pronounced as people live longer and longer. I think this will all come to a head soon. Social security, for one, is going to exceedingly get strained as people draw on it for longer. Being alive also doesn’t mean you’re competent.
Problem is, Social Security will be solvent until 2037 at current prediction which means it goes insolvent when youngest boomer is 73. So basically most of them will get all their Social Security, die and leave Gen X to get fucked.
Fortunately insolvency in this scenario mean that they will only be able to afford to pay around 3/4 of promised benefits.
Closing that budget gap is a problem that will need to be dealt with, but it's not impossible to fix and it's a fairly long way away. There are a lot of proposals going around for how to fix it and those will become more politically palatable as it gets closer.
Ha, that's the way to really get Western society to rethink its trajectory. "You know, the things you're doing? Sounds quite African."
The Southern Strategy is underutilized as a tool to rebuild, rather than dismantle, works for the public good. (/s but kind of not?)
if you have ever met the African bureaucrat - typically has a PHD from a high end Western university.
selfish lot - old - would rather spend time playing golf and traveling while doing nothing.
sadly the West is now going through the same thing.
Being ruled by Generation Lead doesn’t seem like a great improvement.
Venetian Republic wasn't big on lead piping. not what you'd expect for an Italian entity..
lead-ership
Its right there in the damn name!
This article touches on the fact that old folks have much more money accumulated than younger people, and this causes a large social disconnect. Maybe if we put a cap on the age for voting (i.e. no voting once you retire) then older people would be incentivized to spend their wealth, time, and energy on young people in the hopes that they would carry the torch politically. Regardless, it's obvious by current inflation of assets that these folks don't mind pulling the ladder up if it benefits them, and something should be done about that.
> old folks have much more money
I retired last year, lead software engineer, never got into management as a civilian, did software for over 3 decades. My salary was lower than it was as a mid level 20 years ago.
What old people have "much more money", maybe they can send some my way.
I thank God for Social Security and hope and pray it remains well into the future, even for the 99% of the people who are saying bigoted, dumb shit on this page.
Pensioners in most western countries are the second most affluent cohort.
“The world is run by old men in a hurry”
https://www.ft.com/content/1d41a591-940d-4936-b79f-4c7857138...
> Our gerontocracy is not the result of a malevolent plan, .. Boomers aren't distinctively evil.. The fact that they are so numerous and the fact that they are aging in era when life has been extended make the syndrome endemic. .. America faces a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of society itself. The melodrama of succession—waiting for the old to make way for the new—defines not only our politics but also our economy and our culture writ large.
I'll be honest, everyone I know thinks cordial relations between the generations are over. Seems like the author knows it too but wants to be gentle. Let's just say it. America straight up looks Saturn devouring his children. Is he horrified? Sure, but mostly just horrified to be caught in the act. And now that he thinks about it, kind of disgusted with you that you'd want to be so judgemental about the whole thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son
We may continue to see generational wealth-pumps installed by the elderly to destroy the youth, but at some point soon it will be a kind of survival cannibalism. Boomers did it for fun and are still doubling down every chance they get.
> cordial relations between the generations are over
Is ageism not like racism, sexism, etc.?
Do you have decent relations with your living parents and grandparents?
A lot of people put their life on hold for the unhealthy and the elderly during a global pandemic that occurred a few years ago.
While many of the people who did so profited handsomely many did not.
There hasn't really been any recognition of this or any sort of plan to provide restitution for this sacrifice.
That isn't ageism. That's reality.
> Is ageism not like racism, sexism, etc.?
First, young people didn't choose this. It's been coming from the other direction and out in the open for a very long time. Why not make it official that it's mutual? Past time this was acknowledged, expected, and planned for. Second, I don't dislike all old people in all cultures or anything like that. We're talking about a specific cohort that shares the same experiences and most of the same perspectives. This isn't about who they are anyway, or about what they are like in some abstract sense. It's about what they've done as group and continue to do.
Boomers wrecked the veritable paradise that their own parents built with unforced errors and some combination of greed, stupidity, and malice. Then they blew up the lives of their children, and have moved on towards wrecking the rest of the country and indeed the whole world as much as possible before they check out. They did that, not some impersonal forces of history.
America IS boomers. That's the whole point of the article. Are things going well? America may not actually survive boomers. There's no point in a long list of their crimes, it's in TFA too, and everyone knows the inheritance. Housing crisis, national debt, and climate change alone would be a crippling blow for posterity, but now that's just a few of the disasters ahead, and we're in a much worse position to meet any of it. The first generation that was actually selfish and stupid enough to piss away so much prosperity that they've very likely ruined things for several generations. Boomers can't even disagree with this, because who would they blame? They'd have to sit down, shut up, and let someone else steer.
Ageism comes for everyone unless they die early. Racism usually only happens to some.
Sounds dramatic, but what are we talking about here?
Are you planning to work through democratic processes or do you mean revolution?
by law, then by unrest, then by revolution.
By law is how we got to where we currently are. There's no reason to think that would change. You'd have to trick all the people who are old (plus all the people who realize they will get old too) to vote away their assets, income, and power.
Unrest will just harden the people who see your cause as unjust against it. That will be a strong majority of people, so will go no where.
Revolution seems highly unlikely to succeed -- it would be unpopular and you'd have to turn much of the military/police to your side.
Frankly, I think the push of the idea of the intergenerational conflict is a con. It will not lead to anything getting better, but when people are angry and scared, they become vulnerable.
Be wary of anyone offering big, impossible promises. They'll be sticking their hands into your wallet soon enough.
> Unrest will just harden the people who see your cause as unjust against it. That will be a strong majority of people, so will go no where.
I think you're wrong here. Most people are pretty fed up right now.
If most people were fed up I think you'd see it in voting patterns.
Instead, a substantial fraction of the population don't care enough to vote one way or the other. Those that do vote have been pushing us toward the system we have now.
It's going to be hard to sell policies that disenfranchise old people...
There are a lot of people who don't want to be penniless and homeless with a diminished capacity to work. That includes people who are old already and people who realize they will become old.
That's why I think this is all a scam. We are, almost all of us, old people or people who hope to get old. This is an effort to get us all upset enough at each other that we don't stop to realize we're fighting ourselves.
It you want to unravel the scam, follow the money.
>It's going to be hard to sell policies that disenfranchise old people...
Not at all. Remember how before he got dementia the president ran on an antidementia platform?
> That's why I think this is all a scam. We are, almost all of us, old people or people who hope to get old. This is an effort to get us all upset enough at each other that we don't stop to realize we're fighting ourselves.
Not at all, it's just a fact that old people have arranged things so that old/young is simply more important than left/right. Old people are absolutely committed to protecting and boosting the stock/real-estate markets that young people are locked out of. The market is not the economy.. except that actually for old people with assets, it basically is. Youth may have left/right preferences, but establishment Left/Right are really just Old, and both have clear and stable intent to inflict economic violence on everyone else.
> It you want to unravel the scam, follow the money.
You're suggesting I'm a shil? The money trail is simple.. people don't have much and things are getting worse. Who's in charge now? Who was in charge before that? And who was in charge before that? Who paid off the people in charge? Who continuously benefits and who suffers?
So, what exactly do you think will happen? Nothing? You've ruled out every other alternative.
Yes, nothing. Your intergenerational war isn't even going to start.
The societal problems we face are real. Framing them as young/good vs. old/bad is effectively the same as ignoring them entirely.
You should be looking for a different framing.
> Sounds dramatic, but what are we talking about here?
How about this? https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4633773-eat-the-boomers-...
> In his book, “A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America,” Bruce Gibney argued that “generational plunder” was their economic legacy. Through tax cuts and deficit financing of several wars, the Boomers left America in shock. “Plunder” is a strong word. In the corporate legal world, it is enough to justify a clawback of the plunderers’ assets.
IMHO if we don't use it to settle the debt, it won't be inherited by people anyway, it will simply be deleted during end-of-life care, where the oldest boomers pay the youngest boomers that are still in charge of whatever insane private-equity healthcare mess we land on, thus making the "greatest generational transfer of wealth" directly to the 1%.
That article is calling for an additional estate tax. That's sounds reasonable to me.
But you seem to be talking about taking the retirement savings and homes of people who are using them to live.
You find different numbers in different places, but the median retirement savings for boomers is under $200,000. That's a lot of money, but it needs to last ~15 years or so, years where they're likely to have reduced or no capacity to work.
A lot of old people have paid-off houses, which is a major asset. You could take those (e.g., by taxing them out), but then where do the old people on a small, fixed income live?
The attitude seems to be, "to hell with them, who cares?"
But I think a lot of people care: the old people themselves, of course. The people who love them. And everyone self-aware enough to realize they too hope to become old.
> You find different numbers in different places, but the median retirement savings for boomers is under $200,000.
from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/18/national-...
> Greene desires something that has long been forecast but that has not happened: “more generational conflict.” However, “the boomers are organized,” and there has not been “a broader political awakening among younger generations.” So, boomers are serenely unthreatened as some of their households receive almost $117,000 annually from Social Security, and some Medicare programs cover “golf balls, greens fees, social clubs, ski trips, and horseback riding.”
Indeed, so serenely unthreatened that they are very actively threatening to everyone else. These are the same people that are forever using hunger as a bargaining chip with snap, school lunches, and policing what other people can and cannot get.
> The attitude seems to be, "to hell with them, who cares?"
The attitude is just that they were the primary beneficiaries of the spending. They presided over the debt growth to ~40 trillion and if they did not approve they also did not stop it. They still will not let anyone else stop it! If the generational conflict were literally a war with a truce, one might expect significant reparations, or at least acknowledgement and apology? Far from it. Older folks gouged out 10x profit selling crappy houses, and while young people are delaying life milestones for decades to try to buy that house, boomer landlords charged them rent to stay at their third investment property and mocked legitimate hardship with latte and avocado toast bullshit.
For whoever needs to hear this, that 'ok boomer' reply feels less and less adequate. It's actually deadly serious and a very bloody business to just doom millions of people. Data will be clear about this one day and you already see all the trends.. deaths of despair up, life expectancy down, births down, conflict up, climate crisis closer, all with zero resources to pick up the slack. Boomers have even begun destroying international standing and friendships that might have helped us negotiate the national debt situation later. While they're working to pull the ladder up for the improvements they made to civil liberties and women's lib. On the whole they'll have lived longer, happier lives in better conditions than their kids, and they did it by stealing the future.
> everyone self-aware enough to realize they too hope to become old.
That's exactly what I'm getting it. Again not so much for you but for whoever needs to hear it.. Prospects on HN are better than average, ok? And Gen-Z looks to be childless, which may be painful, but is rational and avoids drama. Listening to average Gen-X / Millennials though.. many obviously don't plan to be old. They know they can't afford to be old. So they are taking care of their elders, they are taking care of their kids, and when that tapers off they're planning to just die quickly themselves if/when they get sick. The worst nightmare of what must never happen to the elderly in civilized society is just another awkward future that boomers may have already caused and will not have to face, but posterity will.
Hope this helps someone, really. Boomers need to be able to hear it. This is a bit like being an American abroad.. you expect to be a bit of punching bag on occasion. It doesn't actually matter if you're personally complicit, you kind of need to acknowledge you're a member of a group that has been up to no good. It's not a shame ritual, or bitter ranting, or just provocative. It's a calculated test that's probing for ignorance or understanding, character, empathy, and solidarity. Most boomers don't pass, and don't pass, and don't pass, and make things worse. => End of patience, end of cordial relations, end of respect, end of trust, end of relationships.
Wait...aren't you quoting the Boomers from the 60s?
Term limits would fix it
Demographics in most developed countries make catering to old people the strategy to win elections.
> Term limits would fix it
This is really obviously not true. The Democrats' preferred candidate for Maine's US Senate seat, Janet Mills, was 78 years old. She had never served in congress. (she dropped out of the primary when her impending loss became obvious)
> she dropped out of the primary when her impending loss became obvious
That is how voting and elections is supposed to work, not by saying people of a certain age, color, race or creed can't hold office because young people today are bigoted and feel they deserve more than all generations that ever preceded them throughout all of history.
I'd say party leadership endorsing a 78 year old candidate for US Senate is not how voting and elections ought to work - I'd say it's a pretty big problem. You're welcome to agree or disagree with that, but more relevant to the context of this comment thread, it is not a problem that would be solved by congressional term limits.
> young people today are bigoted and feel they deserve more than all generations that ever preceded them throughout all of history.
Each generation doing materially better than the previous one used to be a widely agreed upon goal in the United States. Perhaps not really relevant to this comment thread.
She was the logical choice and a good candidate. Government is not a job anyone can step into and be sucessful. Look at the difference in effectiveness of career politicians vs populists outsiders. Its like 100s of meaningful bills passed compared to single digit.
Term limits are perhaps the dumbest idea that ever plagued democracy. The idea of mandatory firing your most qualified, experienced employees in an incredibly difficult job that can only be learned with on-the-job experience is literally insane. If not for term limits, the US would have had Obama in the presidency this entire time instead of the absolute garbage scraps that were left over when they fired the only person remotely competent enough to lead them.
> If not for term limits, the US would have had Obama in the presidency this entire time
I like Obama as much as anyone else. But that would've been bad for democracy. Not to mention the man himself. He looked absolutely shattered by the end of his second term. Executives need term limits. And possibly judges too; albeit much longer terms than the legislatures or executives that appoint them.
I agree with you that term limits for legislators are a dumb idea.
Term limits encourage the development of robust laws, systems and institutions which provide a far more stable basis for running a society than having power structures that rely on the brilliance of an individual or individuals. Without terms limits or the like (and there are countless examples not just in history but currently around the world), individuals in power are motivated mostly to preserve that power and have less incentive to work on improvements that will outlast them.
"institutions" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. This often means bloated bureaucracy. I'm not against big government in any way or form, but inefficient, bloated bureaucracy with a bunch of mandarins doing the real governing since all the office holders get rotated out after their term limits hit, doesn't seem like a good solution.
With term limits individuals in power are motivated to pass laws that help them find their next job.
There are just too many examples of political leaders who achieved beneficial results initially but as their reign extended into decades, things went sour. Putin, Mugabe, Erdogan, Ferdinand Marcos, Mubarak, Hugo Chavez, Castro and even the likes of Gaddafi are commonly viewed as having improved conditions for the citizens initially but eventually left a legacy of degraded legal systems, weak civil services, rotten institutions in general, weakened or non-existent independent media and busted economies. It just doesn't work in practice which why nearly all countries have switched to term-limits.
These are all examples of executives. I agree that term limits on executives are necessary. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48049876 I think they're harmful for legislators.
Nah you are wrong, and I will provide as much evidence for my position as you. It should be even stronger, every politician should have hard cap on how long they can serve for. Even just a congress seat and such.
If your hypothesis had any merit, shouldn’t Congress work far better than it does?
No. Term limits have no bearing on the skill floor, only the skill ceiling. By capping employment at 8 years, you place a hard limit on how good your employees can become. However, removing that limit does not magically make all of your employees good. You are still responsible for choosing to employ competent employees. If, after 8 years, an employee is still not good at their job, you have the option to fire them. That American voters are currently not exercising the option to fire bad employees is its own problem, and not a problem that is reasonably solved by mandatory firings, because the underlying cause is still there and voters who are inclined to vote for bad employees will simply choose to employ new bad employees.
Back when USSR was a global superpower there was a trend in sci-fi to describe the communist societies of the future.
One of the distinctive features of such societies was the ability to switch jobs every few years, including changes from leadership positions to menial jobs, from engineering to humanities.
P.S. See Ivan Yefremov works for instance.
Except in many cases the experience isn't benefiting the electorate.
At that point, the blame lies with the electorate for choosing to re-elect somebody who has a proven track record of harming them. You can't realistically prevent people from making bad choices in a democracy, at some point the voters have to have accountability for who they choose to vote for. Restricting who they are allowed to vote for is liable to backfire if you're arbitrarily removing the best candidates from the pool, especially out of a misguided belief that term limits prevent elderly politicians from taking power (yet Trump was elected for his first term at 70, his second term at 78, and Biden for his first term at 78... because, allegedly, disqualifying 55-year-old Obama in 2016 was somehow meant to help prevent geriatric politicians from being in power).
How else would you deal with people who are too old to do the job, and too senile to realize they can no longer perform and should abdicate?
Because we have politicians who can barely walk and talk on their own they're so goddamn old. These aren't the best and brightest of our country, these are old people who can no longer string together enough thoughts to understand their mere presence is hurting the entire country.
> How else would you deal with people who are too old to do the job, and too senile to realize they can no longer perform and should abdicate?
Mandatory retirement age? Voters being adults and fucking paying attention, instead of acting like children and believing everything they see on TV and social media?
The first is possible; the second, hasn't happened in my lifetime.
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"Building a fairer system—with the elderly divested of political power, wealth, and property, but guaranteed dignity and state support at the end of their lives—would help everyone, including most of the aged."
So, we just have to take all the wealth and property
Commentators: "America's young are addicted to their phones, hopelessly politically polarized, and socially illiterate. Test scores are dropping and critical thinking skills are at an all-time low. They hate and fear the other gender, mainline conspiracy theory podcasts, struggle with anxiety, were coddled from birth, etc. etc."
Also commentators: "The elderly have to go. We need fresh blood."
(Yes I acknowledge there is a middle position where you elect 45-year-olds who came of age before the internet yet are still reasonably sharp mentally. I just think it's interesting that the two narratives above seem to coexist so easily.)
But are they the same commentators each time?
I didn't claim they were. Just claimed that those two narratives have been coexisting for a while and I've never seen them duke it out.
Honestly, 45 year olds will probably have some of the most objective views across that reality.
Ah yes, the squeeze in the middle. My default assumption is that people outside ~35-45 range are often impatient to the point that they are, for practical purposes, functionally illiterate
Older side has those who invented and lived by powerpoints / the executive summary, and they are more executive than ever, preferring to leave early or not show up at all because it's time for golf. On the younger side, people who grew up on social media and twitter, very media literate in some respects but also often stuck at high-school level reading / writing at best. They are leaving early too, because it's not like staying will help them get ahead!
You know what these very diverse groups have in common? Shared disinterest in nuance, and the idea that no matter how subtle something is, 280 chars or 2 slides should just about cover it.
The first commentators are talking mostly about gen-z and gen-alpha nowadays while the second group of commentators wants gen-x or millennials to have power finally. These aren't really opposite takes at all (and if you're talking about test scores and conspiratorial thinking boomers seem to be worse than gen-x and millennials in my experience so in many ways these commentaries are not only not oppositional but actually compatible).
It's almost like there are different people out there with different ideas about things.
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Penalizing people who don't vote will not result in carefully considered votes. Voting rights include the choice to not vote.
Beyond "what superficially sounds best for me", I don't see much evidence of "carefully considered" voting now. :(
Mandatory voting would be nice to have, but it is a form of compelled speech.
Wrong.
In Australia, mandatory voting is compelled real or virtual attendance.
You are required to cast or mail in an anonymous response, that response can be blank, a vote for someone not listed, a regular vote, a donkey vote, paper with many pictures of various genitalia, etc.
No speech is compelled, no pen to paper is compelled, just that registered voters are ticked off the rolls and those registered that don't respond provide at least a weak excuse (my grandmother was sick that day) or face a nominal fine (eventually).
Think of it a citizens part to play in a democracy, the commitment to at least pay attention to the government hired by and paid for by citizens.
That's just mandatory voting.
The fine for not voting in Australia is about $30.
This is...nothing in the grand scheme of things.
But it's enough.
And you don't even have to vote: you have to turn up, that's it.
Yeah, I've lived in Australia and the US. The fine isn't big, the attempts at suppressing voter turnout or inconvenience aren't there, and the privacy of the ballot box means that even if you turn up, and put a ballot in the box, no-one's stopping you writing "You all suck" and not casting any preferences.
But at that point you are choosing to explicitly express your non-support of the candidates. That is still more meaningful than simply not showing up IMO
The Australian system is certainly not perfect, but I think the indirection of the "leader of the party" choice and Prime Minister is helpful - it promotes a greater willingness of the party members to say "Okay, you're hurting -my- re-election chances now", with the result being, whether the ultimate motivation is self-interest, you often (or much more when I was younger) would see no-confidence votes and leadership changes, certainly far more than in the US, where I am now. And signals like you mention, "explicit non-support" seem to carry greater weight.
Does Australia perform better?
Maybe the real secret is the free sausage.
Here’s a better proposal: add none of the above to every ballot. If a super majority (say 80%) pick that the election is an automatic do-over and the people on the ballot can’t run for a period of say five years.
A couple cycles of this will flush the crap out of the system.
Ranked choice voting allows for instant run off elections. Should have a similar effect without requiring a full redo of the election.
"No Confidence" vote option exists in some countries.
9 hours, 5 serious HN users replying...and nobody noting that "A Modest Proposal" might flag satire.*
Or that my "proposed" solution, in many ways, describes the current status quo. Tricks like California's Prop. 13 have created enormous gaps between the taxes paid by the old and the young. Warren Buffet has criticized how much lower his own (income) tax rates are than his secretary's rates.
Some days I feel really, really old.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
We could pay people to vote. Many states have unemployment insurance and that system could be repurposed to give people a wage for election day without making it political.
This would mostly end up punishing people who live in places where voting is deliberately made difficult due to having to skip an entire workday (and its pay, if you're paid hourly instead of salaried) to go to some out-of-the-way location to vote.
A not thoroughly thought out response:
Those people would heavily incentivized to protect their ability to vote.
People in America die from preventable illnesses constantly because they cannot afford access to care but I guess they forgot to protect the ability to not die or whatever.
No, they're already being suppressed. They'll take the easiest action possible to ease the pain, which means voting for whoever does away with the fines.
The interactive challenges and the step-by-step mental models for recursive types and distributive conditionals are incredibly well-structured. It's cool to transform type gymnastics into a systematic engineering discipline.