Re: Boomers and divorce -- yes, it was the Boomers who led the way in getting divorced on a large scale, but I think the point was that being the *child* of a divorced couple is really rough. Gen X got hit hard by their *Boomer parents* divorcing.
I remember that the first move on this in my (late boomer) lifetime was “it’s bad when parents who hate each other stay married ‘for the sake of the children’. The children are miserable. The parents should just get divorced.” Maybe it turns out that the problem for the kids is that it’s awful when your parents hate each other, in either case.
Speaking to the selfishness part - how much of the psychology is one of social contagion? Were previous generations marriages bad a similar rates? Or does resentment (not in general, but on the margin) extend in part from differences in expectations. A lot of marriage is being willing to live with a non-trivial set of downsides, but making it work regardless for the value of the whole. That takes a certain mentality, as well as a social environment that reinforces and support those norms.
I agree, and also, the divorce rate is falling because people aren’t marrying as much, but I thought the proportion of people with separated/single parents had increased significantly and was continuing to increase
Indeed, it wasn't just divorce for reasons of abuse or affairs that caused the increase; "irreconsilable differences" became the name of the game. The movie Mrs. Doubtfire is an excellent example: Daniel Hillard, played by the late great Robin Williams, is a loving father, faithful husband, doesn't have any addictions, but when he throws a birthday party behind his wife's back, in the heat of their latest argument she calls for a divorce. And the movie tries very hard to make the case that this is a GOOD thing. They'd been arguing for 13 years, supposedly bring out the worst in each other, so it's best they seperate. But reading between the lines, divorce didn't automatically make everything better. Miranda keeps the kids' visits with their father at the barest minimum allowed (another thing for them to fight over), and when Daniel offers to at least come by and help with the housework (so she doesn't have to hire a housekeeper), she turns him down, which inspires him to take up the cross-dressing charade.
My understanding is that while divorce for infidelity, abuse, or addiction may have been too rare in the pre-Boomer generations, divorces where a couple had one fight too many, were virtually unthinkable. And I would argue the culture has suffered by making "irreconsilable differences" a perfectly valid reason to divorce.
There were deleted scenes in Mrs. Doubtfire that show the father behaving badly in a number of ways that he didn't in the final cut, including getting into more arguments with his ex-wife. It's a more enjoyable movie without them (because they make the lead far less sympathetic), but it's interesting to know about.
As a child of one of those couples, I can personally guarantee you that forcing people who bring out the worst in each other to stay married does no one any good, particularly the children.
Sure, but the laxity of divorce requirements and culture also led to a lot of people who, if they'd simply tried harder or been a bit less self centered, could have reconciled those differences. It led to (and from) a culture that sees marriage as purely about the self--if you're not perfectly happy, find someone else.
Love requires hard work to maintain.
Do I want to entirely to back to the fault-only divorce? Probably not. But the current setup isn't sustainable or good either.
Hey, how bout you? Consider the things that make people miserable. Some probably happened to you: Having few or no friends, being bullied, having a coach or teacher that just had it in for you, being bad at some school subject, being great at something and yearning to be the best but never getting as good as the few truly brilliant people you knew, having a crush on someone who turned you down harshly. What do you think of the idea that if you had been less selfish or tried harder you could have fixed these situations enuf that it was no big deal?
Huh? I'm not claiming by any means that *everyone* who divorces could have fixed things. Just that there are *some* who could have, but chose not to because divorce seemed too easy and the downsides/alternatives were culturally hidden. I know this because I've talked to more than one specific individual who said exactly that about their own divorces.
And I certainly don't think it generalizes to *all* interpersonal relationships.
Afaik (I'm not American nor particularly devout) that's what happens in Xtian communities: divorce is basically unthinkable, the prots don't have an equivalent of annulement, so the Pastor and oft the rest of the community tries to mediate and make the couple reconcile.
The people I spoke to from these communities were not huge fans of it and reported it always amounts to one spouse (usually but not necessarily the wife) getting shafted and being told to put up with the other spouse's foibles. but I have no data to back it up.
Yes—the teens riding bikes and playing D&D were often surprised to learn that dad had a girlfriend now, and actually so did mom, and maybe the parents were going to separate and the kids would need to stay with Grandma for a while.
Nobody younger cares about Gen X’s relationship trauma, but I think it’s upstream of all the skepticism about dating and marriage.
This was my immediate reaction too. Normalizing the easy divorce regime was a disaster for their kids and the social fabric generally. Weird that Scott thought it was exonerating.
An interesting question is why the Boomers led the way. They were raised by parents for whom divorce was not an option. I can think of two reasons.
One was the loss of the extended family. Obviously people still had extended families, but only after the war did it become normal for a new married couple to move off to the big city or out to the suburbs - ie, away from their parents and siblings. I would expect that integrating your lives with those of your in-laws and siblings - seeing them weekly, coparenting with them - would make it very difficult to contemplate separation. At the same time, moving away from the extended family to live in the suburbs just made everything harder, as there was less generational wisdom to draw on - all those boomer kids moving to the suburbs had to figure out everything on their own, since there was no older generation around to consult. Made for bad marriages and bad parenting.
The other reason would be that with rise of the abundant post war economy it became less important to marry for financial security and so more common to marry for 'love' (emotional satisfaction). But this is a hard thing to build a marriage on; of course it's good if spouses are emotionally supportive of each other but if you are in it for a particular feeling then when that feeling is gone it's natural to think it's time to move on.
The looking backwards towards Boomers has been fun to read about, but I'd also like to look forward to Gen Z--maybe with quite some anticipation.
My wife taught at some schools and told me about the "Gen Z stare", which seems to be quite common and seems to point towards lack of social skills, for which the easy blame would be placed on social media and always-online lives. Is it really so prevalent? Is it really so bad, or just different? There's been plenty of talk about whether the kids are alright, education-wise. Are they alright, socialization wise?
As a member of Gen Z I'm personally prone to a degree of pessimism, but my inclination when asked "Are [zoomers] alright, socialization wise?" is to respond with a fat NO.
The current situation on my college campus is something like the following: students come to class and sit as far away from each other as possible. Likewise for the dining halls - it's quite common to see people eating, alone, with a space of at least one empty chair between people. I very seldom see anyone striking up a conversation with random classmates. More common is for a group of students to talk to one another extensively, and to other members of the class basically never (I find this more common with women, as compared to men, who mostly just don't talk to each other). This bleeds into actual class performance too: I recently took a discussion-based course on the Reformation in which the classes would consist of the professor asking open-ended questions which we would respond to. Participation was extremely low for the first couple weeks, until said professor ended up staging a sort of collective intervention, explaining to us that the class would only work if we participated and that this was some of the worst participation rates she had ever had in a class... There also seems to be a general reluctance to attend advertised non-academic events around campus unless there is a very clear outline of what to expect; just attending an event and being willing to roll with whatever happens seems vanishingly rare among my age cohort.
I don't mean to doompost. I do find that if I strike up a conversation with one of my classmates, it never feels unwelcome. People generally do seem happy to talk, to socialize, just generally unwilling to initiate these exchanges. So not an anti-social generation, exactly, but definitely an undersocialized one. I try to counteract this by initiating social situations, but honestly it's easy to succumb to the inertia of the norm and just... not talk to anybody, show up to class and go home, particularly when coursework becomes intensive.
Thanks for the personal report. Do you think the problem is a lack of personal initiative (too few able to even) or changing social norms (no talking in person unless you text first!)?
Hmm... hard to say, but I think it's probably more of the former than the latter, judging by the fact that people are generally open to social contact when someone else initiates. I think the latter is a concern to some extent, but not in that it's people's real preference but more in that it's what people assume other people's preference is, if that makes sense? Like, I don't think many zoomers are actually hostile to somebody talking to them in person without texting first, but I think a lot of us imagine that to be the shared norm, and that's one factor that contributes to a hesitancy to initiate things.
As someone who graduated a year ago, I was say it's the former. People generally seemed happy to talk to me when I started the conversation...but nobody else ever seemed to randomly start conversations with me. Which felt really isolating, thinking back on it.
...okay, I'll be here to disagree with the other commenter, as a 23 yo Gen Z: I love my generation.
I have excellent friends from college, and my experience was that people were shockingly kind and social and welcoming (I moved every 1-2 years growing up so was worried, but classmates went out of their way to be warm, and I did my best to pass it on if I saw other people looking lonely in the dining hall, etc). Moved to a small city and had an easy time meeting friends I hang out with multiple times a week to play D&D and board games.
I mean, yes, it's anecdata, but lots of things are.
Though my experience is that outside college friendships get "handed to you" less than ever -- there's fewer reasons than ever to be in shared spaces, fewer fellow young folk as a percentage of attendees to things like improv classes than my older family members remember (YMMV based on location), etc, so you do have to actively go out of your way to find things.
Also every single dating app was designed by the literal biblical devil and is a cesspit of misery, etc etc.
I'd expect that the people on "my group" socially (no social media, half my friends use flip phones, interest in social hobbies like D&D) are just as fine as ever despite being exposed to the same outward environment in most ways as everyone else, but (in the same way some people can do cocaine once and then never again and be fine, and others do cocaine once and have their lives ruined) the people unable to recover from the poisons put in our childhood water supply are having a sucky time of it.
I don't think that's a big disagreement because your group is likely a minority, right? I mean, it sounds not dissimilar to my kids who are as outgoing as can be expected from, well, my kids, but there's lots of talk (admittedly from the outside looking in) of how not giving kids access to phones or social media early basically cripples them socially among their peers.
I mean, maybe? For obvious reasons my social circle is self-selecting, but it's very hard to notice a problem when everyone I know (siblings, friends) experiences the exact same thing. Perhaps we're 1% of the population or something, but it's the only 1% I see.
Although it is jarring to occasionally hit a foreign culture unexpectedly -- I have a small house and host very frequently (if I meet someone fun at an event they very quickly get invited to a board game hangout), which is usually delightful. But recently I had friends of friends over for the first time, and after games during the part where usually you hang out and chat, every single one of them was on TikTok (sound on, no headphones, all playing different videos on my couch) while I was trying to make conversation. Maybe *that's* the normal Gen Z or something, I have no idea.
I guess all I'm willing to confidently say is that it's very easy to make friends even in kind of random locales (currently in Oklahoma, so this isn't a trendy coastal thing) among Gen Z'ers if you're willing to be the one to reach out literally at all. People infrequently take the first step, but my experience is if you show up and say "hey do you want to play board games with some folk I know" an overwhelming majority gets waaay excited.
[Now that I think about it, the lifelong friends I made in college mostly started because my teenage strategy of walking up to strangers and complimenting them on something random like their coat had something like a 10% success rate. And over dozens of trials a 10% stacks up! Maybe I'm more outgoing than I think of myself as, but I was always the "quiet introverted kid" until college when I decided to take the "fuck it" approach.]
Actually, sorry for continually adding anecdotes but just one more: the only continually weird thing about hanging out with my generation compared to other generations is that any non-religious group of Gen Z'ers you hang out with for long enough seem to inevitably start a long conversation about which antidepressants they like the most. Which is cool and I'm glad it works for them, but the *only* Gen Z people I know who aren't on meds for either depression or ADHD are my super religious friends
Is there a general sense that the prevalence of medication is to be expected for gen Z? And if so, are there commonly accepted reasons for why that's the case?
I'm wondering if it's a source of shame or pride or just sort of a fact of life, or something else.
The default assumption is usually that everyone's on something or other, of you're hanging out with leftist Gen Z women, I think. A couple of the depression med discussions were awkward for me because everyone else there (6 other people) could talk about at least one or two antidepressants they've tried, while I've never seen a therapist before or anything so I was just sitting quietly with nothing to add. The people on ADHD meds (that I know of) usually bring it up in the context of either "thank god for adderall" or "oh sorry I made that minor mistake, I forgot my ADHD meds."
I have personal opinions on causes but don't know what the commonly accepted reasons are, if there's any shared narrative around it.
I don't know if pride is the right word for it, but there is some sense of it being a thing that gives you conversation points, if that makes sense. Definitely not shame, but not quite entirely neutral (leans a bit positive in inflection). The only time there's strong emotion expressed with it is when they find something that works really well for them.
Again, I don't know if this is a normal thing or if it's just all the people I know. Sample size is about 25 Gen Zers who I talk to at least a couple times in a normal month. The only group I know that's consistently like me (not in therapy, not on any meds) are my religious friends, most of whom are already married and have or soon expect kids (<= 25 year olds); all but a couple of my fellow nonreligious friends are medicated.
Worth thinking about if the sexual side effects of SSRIs are having a noticeable effect on the rates of relationship formation and fertility in this generation. Although just the fact that they are depressed/anxious to begin with must also have a role.
I'm shocked to see the "phone bad" meme repeated on this forum. I understand there's some evidence social media is bad on a population scale, but I'd expect this community to be primarily made up of people that benefited from early internet access.
Having unrestricted social media access allowed me to develop friendships with people all across the world (every continent besides Antarctica), some which I eventually flew out to meet in person. I had great conversations with people from different social/political/religious backgrounds as me, which I credit for making me much more open-minded and socially competent in college than I otherwise would have been. Had I been forced to socialize only in the narrow cultural bubble I grew up in, I would've been maladjusted, and might've tried to stick to my bubble instead of meeting new people.
I was also able to talk to adult professionals to get career/hobby advice in fields that weren't very popular in my K12. I organized extracurricular activities at my high school based on hobbies I got into online. It helped me get into college.
Surely I cannot be the only person here who feels that having social media access as a child was overwhelmingly positive for them?
I didn't have the internet at all, let alone on a phone, 'til I was already at college (you can "OK Boomer" me if you like) and I don't think I was maladjusted.
As for your generation, even if there's bad effects on net, a social phenomena like this won't be universally experienced the same way, and I'm glad you feel it was positive.
I'm guessing the average ACX commentor had few peers or social opportunities in their school. For the average student, being forced to make in person relationships is better than taking the easy way out with phone addiction. But for people like us here, there often wasn't much opportunity for in person relationships, and social media is far better than nothing.
That's not what I intended to get at. Online relationships didn't substitute in-person relationships for me, nor do I consider them an "easy way out." They were equally meaningful and provided social benefits that in-person relationships couldn't, such as being able to befriend people that lived in other countries, or that had expertise in niche hobbies of mine. I expect ACX readers to be more interested in expanding their horizons in the way I was, and less likely to be affected by the usual risks of social media use.
I think you're underestimating the evolutionary side here. Human beings were born with the desire to talk with other human beings, face to face.
Intellectually, yes, I do love talking with people online. But like, have you ever had a long-distance relationship online? If you haven't...it feels startlingly lonely, nowhere close to how amazing an irl relationship is.
So yes, I do love talking with people from all over the world. But being at college, and pretty much nobody ever talked to me...that sucked.
I guess I can add my own anecdote as a 22 yo Gen Z.
I had a similar experience in college. Although I didn't keep many lifelong friends after graduating, I did feel a fairly strong sense of community -- especially with the other students in my field -- throughout college. Most of my classmates were familiar with one another and very social. Almost every class I attended I would be greeted by many of my classmates as I sat down, and would be included in whatever discussion they were having before class. I'm not kidding when I say that every single person in my program knew each other personally. I remember being excited for exams because it meant all my classmates would be there -- it was a fun social event. All my classmates except one were Gen Z.
I did attend a pretty small college in a not-very-large city, so my experience is probably not representative, but I agree with you that Gen Z is more social than the popular narrative would make you believe.
I like your "poisons in our childhood water supply" metaphor. A lot of Gen Z falls into destructive behaviors in youth and simply don't have the right tools to create an antidote for themselves. There's a lot out there about the evils of social media, so i won't belabor the point, but it seems to be a major issue in Gen Z. I have personally witnessed many of my friends and peers fall into the negative sides of the internet (red pill, antisemitism, neo-Nazism, etc.) and have their lives negatively affected by it. There are other issues, too, but social media is the one that I've personally seen the most negative effects from, especially socially.
My own experience of Gen Z (from the point of view of Gen X) is largely positive, admittedly from a small sample size of extended family and friends. Small but not that small - I have quite a few nephews and nieces besides the immediate family and my house is a local congregation point. I don’t see them as overly woke either.
I think the Gen Z stare is entirely misrepresented. It's not a lack of social skills, it's a refusal to play the game. Millennials were hammered with ideas like the customer is always right, if you smile and participate you'll get ahead, always respect your elders, etc... What did we get for it? We got stagnant wages while we were constantly shit on by people at work, we smiled and participated and watched those with privilege get ahead anyway, and we watched our elders rob us blind and leave the world off far worse than what they inherited. Gen Z isn't stupid, they figured out the game was rigged.
> What did we get for it? We got stagnant wages while we were constantly shit on by people at work, we smiled and participated and watched those with privilege get ahead anyway, and we watched our elders rob us blind and leave the world off far worse than what they inherited. Gen Z isn't stupid
Yes, and I find it entirely misleading. Inflation adjusted dollars doesn't equate to purchasing power when all of the big things increased faster than inflation, by a lot. Sure, they can buy groceries and video games, but good luck buying a house or car. That's not even getting into how productivity has outpaced inflation adjusted dollars 5:1, so Millennials and Gen Z are producing far more and getting even less for it.
The black bar across the page is where total overall inflation is.
The brown line graph that ends at 80% is average hourly wages.
> Sure, they can buy groceries and video games, but good luck buying a house or car.
You are backwards on 3 of 4 categories here. Food and housing have risen just a little more than inflation, and less than average hourly wages. Cars are flat.
I won't give you any grief if you complain about the costs of college or health care. Especially text books, which *should* have fallen in nominal dollars, instead have gone to the moon. What a fucking racket.
The younger generation is usually spared health care costs, at least. My son pays approximately nothing for his nice ACA plan.
IME averages aren't great at expressing this sort of thing. Yeah the average wage has increased. But I would wager that certain narrow areas (tech, medical, a few others) have dramtically outpaced inflation, while most work has lagged far behind.
This leaves most millenials in a position worse than their predecessors, and a small number of them much better off than previous generations. When you look at the average it looks OK. No I don't have data to support this; it's just a hunch.
I would also argue that the 'required spend to participate in society' has shifted. Sure, the overall cost of housing/food hasn't really skyrocketed relative to wages. But in the boomer days, you paid for car/house/groceries, and everything else was a treat. In the modern era, to effectively participate in society, there's a much bigger tech and telephony spend, the cost of auto ownership long term is a lot more (repairs, etc). This has also increased the cost of banking. And while the cost of long term debt (mortgage rates) are largely favourable to younger generations, the cost of short term debt (credit cards) has skyrocketed. Furthermore it's become comically easy to spend money. Everything is engineered to one-tap or one-click-pay. Used to be barriers to spending money: Get dressed. Go to the store. Bring cash, or a chequebook. Carry your stuff home. Now you can order food to your door while bedrotting depressed.
I'm not blaming boomers for this - societal change is societal change. But it certainly seems like society is moving in a direction that directly harms younger generations (which can contribute to hate against older ones, who didn't have the same things weighing on them).
Just scanning comments randomly and saw this. Regarding textbooks, I bet students buy a lot fewer of them than in the past (or get digital versions or second-hand or a PDF...). I know for every class I teach now, we don't have any required textbooks.
(BTW - I think you're absolutely right, and the younger generations whining about how hard they have it is mostly a load of BS.)
My wife has seen it among Gen Alpha as well; are little kids really making conscious decisions like that? It's often in response to a direct question - it feels like they don't understand how to signal to the other speaker the simple fact of "acknowledged, hold on, I'm thinking". Which to me seems to also parallel the trend of "gentle" parenting; kids not giving others respect because it was never trained into them?
"Several people made something like this argument, but I think it’s based on a (understandable) misunderstanding."
My experience is that this is not the case. It's quite common for Boomers to believe that they are in fact entitled to lower or even zero property taxes for various reasons, and the psychopathic homicidal rage that Mariana displays at the prospect of anything changing is a very common reaction. On the show I work for I voiced opposition to proposals that would eliminate the property tax in Florida and Texas, and the wave of outraged emails I got from Boomers outweighed those I had received for any other issue.
My favorite part is his "I will vote for evil totalitarian bastards if they support my property rights"
A mentality like this is worse than anything Scott could possibly have been proposing. I wonder what other things would trigger him to vote for "evil totalitarian bastards" out of spite? What's the minimum threshold for him to want to destroy the country?
I mean, I don't support voting for evil totalitarian bastards in general, but the one thing I retained from Project Lawful is that we probably have good game theoretic reasons to (have an evolutionary predisposition toward) responding "burn it to the ground" to strong defection that makes our lives worse with the expectation that we'll just roll over
[Modern AI capabilities report: still routinely fails on questions like "What's the repeated phrase from Project Lawful (planecrash glowfic) about burning everything in a fire if you're defected against, for game theoretic reasons"]
I would guess deadman switches are like 1000x better for that? In this case something like "without boomers like me this community would go to s***" would be a great card to play. But then a person has to actually explain what they provide for the community, which for most people is ~nothing.
I don't think making vague statements about Kids These Days would actually work as a deadmans switch. For a deadmans switch to have any compulsion power, it needs to have a clear negative event that triggers from a single clear cause, not be... a slow diffuse thing acting over the course of, like, a decade, in response to a slow accumulation of betrayals.
Also, I deeply adore all the boomers in my life and hold the generation (or the subset I've experienced) in extremely high regard as a Gen Z'er, so a) I do not perceive it's "nothing", and b) I'd absolutely politically vote with my grandparents over someone that says their entire generation amounts to nothing and expects them to just take lopsided policies on the chin.
...ideally not by voting in an evil totalitarian bastard, though. Ideally we could just give the whole Abundance Democrat thing a try and see if we can find a way to *all* win rather than turning politics into intergenerational trench warfare.
The instinct to "burn everything to the ground if things don't go exactly my way" becomes really bad when instead of two or three alpha males negotiating somewhere in the jungle it is millions of people living in a civilized country, each of them having an incompatible opinion on what the only possible unburned solution is supposed to look like.
Oh I definitely agree. See also: the cycle of violence writ large.
Imo it should be saved for the most egregious cases where the benefit of the threat outweighs the fact that it's an incredibly shit option for everyone, including yourself, if you're forced to carry it out. I think liberal society has (correctly) largely centralized on not using it just because your preferred candidate didn't win or because a bill you don't like and think is actively bad has passed.
But at the point where you built your own house with your family's work and have lived there for generations, and someone tries to force you out to stick you in some unknown apartment somewhere else so that DINKs can have your house against your will (the extreme version of what's discussed in the Boomer commentary) and/or it becomes financially expedient for people to get you to die so you stop needing medical care (not done anywhere currently, nothing like the Canada MAID system, but hypothetically), in my opinion we're much closer to a system where I'd feel it was justifiable for people to start considering it as an option.
I mean, I'd still prefer it never be used, but there are certainly possible worlds where the decisions made would be so egregious that I'd consider "set myself on fire in the hopes it burns other things down with me" a reasonable answer in the hopes that it keeps those possible-worlds merely possible.
Your rights are a facade and your property will be taken away by ASI once you are no longer useful, try not to have a stroke from anger when it happens.
I feel like to anyone not already worried about ASI it more looks like "AI people will avoid addressing your actual concerns to talk about their Preferred Thing, spend less effort trying to cooperate with them / having meaningful discussions"
I mean, protecting property rights is the main legitimate function of government. We tolerate governments at all so that our property rights can be protected from threats foreign and domestic.
It seems to me that the threat of being incarceated and killed is serving as a much bigger incentive than protection. It's not as if there's anything physically preventing the government from killing you and seizing your property. Murder is one of the easier crimes to get away with, after all, and even more so when you have the system working in your favor.
Where have you been for 10 years? Americans are fairly apathetic about totalitarianism. And I can hardly blame them, the stakes don't seem very high.
If democratic America is going to rain down hellfire and destruction on the rest of the world, we kind of deserve to have our freedoms suspended for the good of humanity. One of many arguments I could list for not caring as much as I used to. I guess the right wing version of this would be "if Americans are going to commit suicide through wokeness, fertility collapse and mass immigration, what good is our democracy, anyway?"
Example one million of the attitude Ross Douthat was getting at in his observation that if liberals refuse to take care of [various problems], the people will eventually vote for fascists who will.
This isn't out of spite, it's a disagreement on principles! Trench (and the Founding Fathers) hold personal property rights to be incredibly important. You, presumably, don't, since you'll call it spite instead. To Trench, destroying property rights *is* destroying the country; your objection makes no sense.
It wasn't "the prospect of anything changing." This was the top of the thread:
> "You can live in a 5-bedroom house, but since you're just a married couple these days, probably it's better if you get by with a 3-bedroom, and probably it doesn't need to be so central to the city, unless you can afford it. We are going to raise taxes higher."
A quick read of the thread shows Mariana is willing to pay equal tax rates to everyone else, but *not* to be targeted for special taxes.
She's right to be suspicious of any scheme to say "*those* kind of people? they pay more taxes." All liberal people should be.
To try to get a feel for what policies you actually support...
Do you agree Prop 13 should be repealed? It allows property to be taxed at a previous lock-in value rather than the current market value.
And would you support (or at least not be murderously angered by) a general increase in property tax or land tax that makes no personal characteristics distinction?
I think Prop 13 has a lot of bad consequences and should be either modified or eliminated. I think some exemption or modification in property taxes for the poor, whatever their age, might be appropriate. To be clear, I am not among the poor, so I'm not advocating for myself here.
I've halfway followed the Georgian land tax stuff but am not sufficiently informed to have an opinion on whether it would be better or worse than the current system.
While I very much hope that Mariana's rage was hyperbolic, I can understand the sentiment. I look at it as a difference between feeling entitled to what you already have, vs. feeling entitled to what you want to acquire. If I want something material, I have to go out and get it, and nobody's obligated to give it to me unless there's a prior agreement. But once I have it, it's my property. I have the right to sell it, keep it, or give it away as I wish, but you do not have the right to take it without my consent. I don't even own a home, but I wouldn't want to own one if it meant somebody else was forced to sell due to property taxes or other factors that they didn't ask for but were imposed upon them by others.
I almost guarantee that anything you buy is being sold because of some real-world constraint. Why is "taxes here got too expensive" a morally worse reason to have to sell than "insurance is too expensive" or "I don't like how they are widening the road nearby" or "I can't find a good company to rent this house while I go live on a cruise ship"?
It was a higher tax rate with the specific goal of forcing her to move, in order to free up housing inventory. Let’s not kid ourselves on what is being proposed: the *intended goal* is to drive her out of her home.
I don't think it actually has much to do with property rights as such. I'd expect people who live in rent-controlled apartments to feel the same kind of entitlement.
That's true for every Generation. Every generation is worse than before. So boomers worse than greatest, x gen worse than boomers, Millennials worse than X-gen.
This is of course on average. The decay is slow and variance is high.
However, because Boomers hold so much power, their harm is greater, and they are worse when compared to greatest.
But just wait until Millennials (my gen) are on charge, That would be a disaster.
The implication is that it's harder for them to afford housing, and the services they get such as schools are worse, because so many people are paying minimal taxes due to Prop 13.
May I again clarify that I am fine with paying market property taxes, and I DO in fact pay a lot of property taxes for the house I own in Santa Cruz, purchased 10 years ago. And if the tax went up *at the market rate* on my house as well as on the houses owned by younger people, that's fine too! It's the way people casually suggest that I can't have a house if I'm past a certain age because young people need them that triggers the rage.
That indeed sounds rage inducing but surely even the (very?) few people who endorse the rage inducing position in the abstract would agree with you about practically every policy question? If you even voted against Prop13 then what’s left to fear? Property tax exemptions that only young people are eligible for? I find it hard to imagine anyone seriously proposing that. (Note: I’ve never lived in California so maybe I’m missing some local context)
I just want to point out that Prop 13 applies to everyone, not just the old. I’m 45 and bought a house in 2017. It’s basically doubled in value since then, to the point that I couldn’t afford to buy it today.
I think there’s an age-related provision that lets you keep your lower property taxes if you sell and move, but I don’t know much about it since it’s not applicable to me just yet.
Remember this in the future, Blake, when the upcoming generations are coming for *YOUR* stuff on the basis "you're too old now, old guy, get out of the way and let us have it".
I follow a Gen X guy on Twitter who is a fairly moderate and level-headed conservative who derides libertarian orthodoxy in all ways but one: he wants to abolish property taxes. I think there's a sizeable constituency for that in the West, proportionally if not in raw numbers.
Blake, I don't think you did a good job understanding Mariana —
When you talk about altering the legal system so that Mariana is evicted from their house, were you imagining a different scenario than "a legal system with armed men evicts him"?
I am reminded of Scott's review of "On the Road", some boomers defected against community ideals which ended up making trust dependent parts of social functioning much harder for the next generation. That is part of why Boomer advice is so grating, they lived in world where dating and employment if not easier was much less frustrating and complicated.
I'm a huge fan of these policies, especially if the tax obligation attaches as a lien to the property not the person. Given tax rates are ~1% there's only very rare circumstances where the proceeds from selling the property won't fully cover the accumulated taxes.
In practice, you'd expect that banks could provide this service as well, through a loan that obligates them to pay all your property taxes until death, then get paid back by whomever next owns the building.
Why are you a fan of a program which only benefits homeowners and thus disproportionately older people? A program which delivers tax money with far less buying power than if it was collected when due?
You can, yes, I've yet to see any proposal or implementation do it. Instead these programs always result in a tax break for wealthy, older, homeowners.
> A tax lien remains on the property and interest continues to accrue during the period collection of taxes is deferred or abated under this section. The annual interest rate during the deferral or abatement period is five percent instead of the rate provided by Section 33.01 (Penalties and Interest).
I also thought that it's a bit strange that it's the first time Scott heard about it since I definitely remember it mentioned here a bit often. At the very least, whenever everyone is discussing Georgism and the inevitable "then what about old people's homes??".
Good points all. If home value goes up so much, one can also take out a mortgage or second mortgage or HELOC to pay the prop taxes. My understanding is that sometimes the interest will be tax-deductible, sometimes not, but I don't think even a first mortgage for purchasing should have tax benefits anyway.
The point is that there either already are or easily can be ways to correctly disincentivize people (of any age) to stay in houses whose value has gone up a lot (or whose household size has gone down) without 'forcing' them to leave. If they want to stay in the house for neighborhood reasons or sentimental reasons or any other reason, and they are willing to give up the opportunity cost of more vacations or fancy jewelry or donating to cost-effective charities or whatever, they should absolutely have that choice. But there should be an opportunity cost.
I don't have a problem with cash-poor and house-rich boomers leaving a portion of their inheritance (acquired via what would otherwise be describe as fortuitous land speculation) to the state rather than their children. This seems fine to me. If they don't like it, they have the option of downsizing and giving a larger inheritance if that's their preference.
It helps remove the financial *penalty* for downsizing. If you bought a 4 bedroom house in 1990 and want to sell it and move into a smaller place now that your kids are long out of the house, then even though you make a profit on the sale that more than covers the new house, you are rewarded with higher taxes since both houses are taxed at the price of last sale, not the current value.
> both houses are taxed at the price of last sale, not the current value.
As far as I know this is only true in CA. In most states valuation of a house based on some formula that presumably tracks local real estate market. It's not perfectly accurate, but for instance my home (in MN) has increased in its tax valuation around 50% over the initial sale price in the 12 years I've owned it.
Other states have something similar, but you don't notice it as much because the increases aren't as crazy. Michigan has Proposition A that limits the rise in the taxable value of a home to the lesser of 5% or the national inflation rate.
In the alternate scenario, wouldn't the taxes due on sale be an even stronger disincentive to selling? Whatever about a higher annual expense as a result of moving, knowing I had to pay $80k or 20% of the value of my home (or whatever basis it's calculated on) would be a huge issue for me in selling. And I am generally supportive of property and inheritance taxes.
People still pay a tax bill yearly, but the compromise is to let the "unexpected" amount that the bill rose over some baseline level of raise go into a lien. The debt is still sitting there and compounding, so it's urging you to sell.
The proposal I always heard was that the amount you *pay* can only go up by a little, but what's left of the full bill gets tacked on as a lien.
They get to make out like bandits both ways: "oh, poor me, my house is so expensive now" so they get a tax break, and then go and sell the place for a crapload of money. Make them choose.
It does make it harder to move out of the big unused house like we want them to.
> " This is an interesting synthesis: most of people’s problems with “the Boomers” are really problems with an inverted demographic pyramid. Since the old outnumber the young, they have “too much” wealth, jobs, etc compared to people’s natural expectation, and previously-solvent benefits programs are falling apart.
Is this right? I actually wasn’t sure where our population pyramid was - I thought maybe the recent wave of immigrants would have righted it - but no, it looks like it’s getting increasingly top-heavy: " <
The Silent Generation birthed the lack of Gen X not the Boomers. The tiny Gen X then birthed a small Gen Z. Boomers actually birthed a relatively large cohort of Millennials who are in turn making more Gen Alphas than there are Zs. Most countries have a population pyramid that inverts, the USA has a saw blade.
It is really fascinating to use a visual graph and scroll through the years to watch it.
This one has an animation where you can see how the waves start and move. This has been both a benefit and a cost over time and we're at one of the increasingly costly phases now. Once Gen X start retiring and Millennials start really heavily investing we'll be in another beneficial phase. That's far off assuming no changes (and there are always changes).
I think we have World War 2 to blame for that sawtooth effect, because the end of the war (and the end of the Great Depression) was what led to the "baby boom"...
Millennials are in their 40s. I (41) have a 401k, a Roth IRA, a few money market accounts, and I own my home. Some of my peers are much more active than that in the stock market and other investments, some less active, but it seems like if “really heavily investing” is gonna happen for any of us it’s happened. Is there some big investment craze you expect we will partake in as we age onward? Just not clear on what you meant.
Generally people lay down the most wealth into investments 40-60. Almost all in pension/retirement savings.
Even if you started putting money away at 30 for retirement (and most don't start until then at the earliest) that is 1 decades worth of invested savings by the time you are 40. Probably accrued at the point where your income was at the lowest it'll be for the next 30 years, particularly when you take into account the "disposable" part of that income was probably a relatively small percentage.
So you'll save more 40-50 than you did 30-40. And probably even more 50-60.
In addition, you start to accumulate the compounded interest/market returns at higher and higher rates on top of the actual savings as well.
To just pull some "indicative" figures out my ass...
Lets say you got to $100k savings by 40. So for the decade 30-40 you averaged having 50k in your account.
Well, you'll probably therefore add another 250k (both as increased savings and compounded interest on that initial 100k) in your 40-50 decade .... as long as you continue saving a similar *percentage* of your disposable income. This will leave you with an average over the decade of 175k in savings (3.5x the previous decade).
Then lets say you add another 350k (as increased savings + compound) in your 50-60 range. averaging 350k over the decade (7x your 30-40 average).
Aged 40 you had 100k, but aged 60 you have 700k. That is a LOT more money!
Its not so much "partaking more than you are now due to an investment craze in the future" as "carrying on as you are now, with this accelerating modestly into your peak earning years as your disposable income grows (even though you save a similar percentage) + compounding interest/returns".
This all means that amount becomes a FAR bigger hunk of money as you age. Millenials are still at the part of that snowball where its, well, snowball sized. By the times the Millenials hit 60 or 65.... (and as long as you keep rolling the snowball around) it's going to be "the big fat part of the snowman" sized.
> The Silent Generation birthed the lack of Gen X not the Boomers. The tiny Gen X then birthed a small Gen Z.
That’s not right, is it. Even as the median age of maternity increases it’s not two generations, by definition each generation should birth the next or the categories are misaligned.
Gen X was badly defined as a mere 15 years so they probably birthed partly Gen Z and millennials, but the silent generation definitely birthed most of the boomers.
Yes it is correct. Each generation is 15-20 years. You have to go back pretty far for the average age of first child to be sub 20. Which means each generation births one two down, not the next one.
In 1960 the average age of first child was 22, in 2022 is was 27. There is, of course, overlap, especially what generational theory calls cuspers (the 3-ish years at the transition between generations) so the younger xs have more boomer parents than the older ones, it increases every year until there is a whole new cohort.
>I can see your side of the argument - but I also can’t blame them for being against some hypothetical policy that would force them to move to a strange apartment in the nearest affordable town 50 miles away far away from their only family/caretakers so that some striver DINK couple could turn their spare bedroom into a gym.
>And I feel nervous because I’m neutralish on something where there’s basically a unanimous consensus of smart people (they all hate Prop 13), but to me it does seem to make sense that rising house values shouldn’t be able to make your current home unaffordable
This is an argument against Georgism, right? I was very skeptical of the Georgism series last year (2021) and would love if you could bring Lars Doucet back to address these concerns which he didn't address to my satisfaction, but presumably has some kind of argument for. I've seen misc. handwaving about supplements or carveouts to patch it up but that falls flat to me; the thesis of Georgism is to simplify the complex tax structure with one simple tax to pay for everything.
"Doesn't Georgism punish people who have below average productivity growth by increasing their land value tax rents beyond their means to pay and eventually force them to move?"
Seems like the main argument against Georgism is that land benefits aren't fungible to each other. Some benefits like proximity to entertainment/workplace isn't exchangeable to nostalgia for the land itself. Thus one can't trade one for the other, and at the end someone have to give.
I guess capitalism is built on the same principle to forcibly charge monetary value to anything, and so far it seems working, but still its flaw seems even clearer here.
Ricardo's Law of Rent (that landlords will charge as much rent as they can, basically until they've absorbed all the surplus productivity between their own properties and the rentees' next best alternative) punishes these people, not Georgism. Or, to put it differently, our collective failure to legally allow sufficient supply of housing to meet demand is what is punishing them.
Georgism suggests a solution to this; it isn't the problem.
Most Georgists understand how politically suicidal it is when your opponents can tell stories about you pushing little old ladies out of their homes, and thus support having the land tax accrue (costlessly to the occupier) until death or sale, at least for owner-occupied housing.
>And I feel nervous because I’m neutralish on something where there’s basically a unanimous consensus of smart people (they all hate Prop 13), but to me it does seem to make sense that rising house values shouldn’t be able to make your current home unaffordable
As I said, the politically viable version wouldn't push anyone out of their home, but would tax the land upon death or sale of the property. Futhermore, depending on the location of the person's home, it's possible that a land value tax would be cheaper for them.
Essentially the point highlighted. Georgism, to my understanding, increases the LVT based on how productively the land can be used, so if you don't increase your personal productivity commensurately (or even worse, retire), your LVT will go up and up and up until you are unable to pay and your land is seized by the state.
This would also be true under conventional property taxes, but they are generally lower and there is a ton of redistribution and exceptions and other complex stuff going on to lessen the impact and stop Grandma from getting evicted. My understanding is that the pitch of Georgism is that it can be objective, even algorithmically driven, because it does away with all of those protections.
If California switched to Georgism, my impression is that Scott's grandparents, who " built significant parts of their house with their own hands, and lived in it for ~50 years. They planted saplings in the garden and lived to see them become trees. They know the neighbors and probably knew the neighbors’ parents before them. Their daughter, my mother-in-law, lives a few blocks away." would face unaffordably high LVT because "Their area has now skyrocketed in cost." and likely be forced to sell and move.
So in California, where you have single family homes sitting on multi-million dollar land, yes, absolutely, if you taxed that at its market value, whether through a land value tax or a conventional property tax, someone would be forced to move. This is not a fundamentally bad thing--it would be much better for society overall in the long term--but it involves a lot of short term pain, and it creates a huge amount of political resistance from those who would bear the brunt of that.
Property tax deferral is a very reasonable compromise to get over that gap. If we have a lot of elderly retirees who just want to live out the rest of their lives in their houses, why not just let them? Let the tax bill attach as a lien, and the estate can pay it off after the occupants die, or when the house is sold. At California prices the eventual sale of the house would absolutely cover years of deferred taxes with tons of money left over for any heirs. This entirely solves the problem of the elderly retiree who just wants to stay put, is genuinely cash-poor, and whose only concern is security of tenure.
Property tax deferral is also the law of the land in many states, in Texas you just file Comptroller's form 10-526 and if you're a qualifying senior you'll never pay another dime of property tax as long as you live.
(I would also like to point out in these discussions that there are many elderly retirees who AREN'T homeowners, who are also cash poor, struggling to pay rent, and they never get brought up much in these discussions. They just get evicted).
That said, California is a downright pathological case that has historically done almost everything exactly wrong when it comes to housing policy, and should not guide your intuitions about what would happen in most other places.
To better illustrate this, go check out this article we wrote on Progress & Poverty substack about our basic political game plan (we've now got active legislation moving in several states):
Specifically, see the slides from our upcoming report on Spokane, Washington, where we're actively working with elected officials on legislation. When you do the math, in non-California situations you find that homeowners don't always pay more after a revenue neutral swap of property tax for land value tax -- often homeowners will actually save money on net. And in cases where they do pay more, often it's a modest increase. And if you're willing to go further and swap e.g. state income taxes for more land tax, you can make the outcomes even more net beneficial for the average person.
Who are the big losers? Parking lots and vacant land, specifically those located downtown. These are extremely valuable locations that are being entirely squandered for no good reason, and the current property tax system -- especially when there's commercial exemptions being handed out on top of it all -- is effectively a tax subsidy to keep these properties vacant.
This is a surprising outcome for some people, and the reason for this surprise is that they just have very bad intuitions about where land value is concentrated. It's entirely concentrated downtown, and the land there is worth exponentially more than residential land located further out. Land value quickly plummets as you move away from the city center.
If you'd like to visualize this, we created a 3D interactive map tool called Civic Mapper that shows the assessed land value/sqft as 3D heightmaps for a number of curated American cities. We're adding more as we're able:
Please let me know if this addresses your concerns and whether you have any follow up questions. You might also consider browsing the archive of posts at https://progressandpoverty.substack.com, in case we've already answered some of your questions there.
Hey Lars, big fan. While you're here I wanted to ask you about how to calculate land rents? Land values seem pretty straightforward and I've enjoyed your writing on the methodology, but if you've written anything about how to calculate the fair market rental income from a property I haven't seen it.
I haven't written as much on land rent calculation, but there is an established appraisal and econ literature on it. Often they work backwards from selling prices using capitalization rates, or directly calculate rental yields by using an income approach, and then decompose the land component in ways similar to how you would do it for selling prices.
That said, most conventional mass appraisal modeling algorithms work just as well with rental values as they do with sale prices, but this is rarely done in practice because sale prices are usually just much more widely available than rental values. If we could get rental values to be published more often, we could start modeling rental values directly, for both improvements and land.
This is one of many reasons that pervasive public rental registries would be good. A "Realpage for the people" would be directly beneficial to tenants because it would improve transparency and combat information asymmetry and increase tenant bargaining power, but it would also provide assessors with fresh and bountiful rental yield data that they could then use to directly model land rental values.
Additionally, governments can and should just lease out more of the land they own, which will help to establish prevailing ground rents. We have a guest article on P&P about this subject today:
How is this not punishing the people who create value? I'm thinking of Walt Disney, he bought a lot of worthless unwanted Florida swampland and built the Magic Kingdom. Years later, they built Epcot, then many years later built the Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios. With a land value tax, wouldn't Disney needed to sell the land the future parks are built on because the closeness of the Magic Kingdom made that property very valuable?
So Disneyworld in specific is an extremely exceptional case, in fact "The Disneyworld Scenario" is an often discussed concept in Georgism.
What's unique about Disneyworld is that one single landowner has acquired so much land that they have effectively internalized all the externalized land value spillover created by their improvements. This is very different from 99.999% of parcels in the US, where essentially all the land value of the landowner's parcel is due not to the individual landowner's efforts, but to that of the community surrounding them.
The key thing to understand is that Disneyworld, economically speaking, effectively *is* its own city.
Do you have any objections that apply to the 99.999% of parcels in the USA that are not Disneyworld type things?
No, not really, though I think there may be other outliers, but you're right Disney is in a league of its own. Stadiums might be a little similar, but with cities subsidizing them I wouldn't object. Any real tourist attraction would be similar on a smaller (much smaller) scale because a hotel or a restaurant near a tourist attraction would always be more valuable than land further away. Still, creating a tourist attraction is raising your own land value tax, but that isn't different from how currently used property taxes operate so I wouldn't have much objection there either.
Cool -- another thing to keep in mind is that under Land Value Tax *the value of your improvement is entirely exempted*. So the stadium's structural value itself is entirely exempted even if the land itself is taxed. Arguably in non-Disneyworld scenario the landowner's chief contribution to their parcel's value comes in the form of the improvement itself.
There are other mini-Disneyworld type scenarios; the most common example would be large land-grant universities. Texas A&M is a particularly salient example.
I simply don't think that voters like tax increases, ever. I see below that you address delaying the tax until the current homeowner moves out, but I think you'd have enough voters angry that the Jones family heirs or whatever can't stay in their parents' home after their death. It's not that a high LVT is a bad idea, I just think it's politically unrealistic- especially in America, the land of angry defiance. I agree that there are (maybe) benefits to be had on a systematic level with an LVT, but I don't think voters' patience extends to that kind of longterm thinking.
I mean who's the political coalition *for* an LVT, besides 'wonky people with globe emojis in their Twitter bio'. No one immediately benefits. Meanwhile you're battling Generic Anti-Tax Sentiment, the final boss of American politics. Even if there are strong benefits to society, our political system just doesn't reward planning ahead by decades. We have the phrase 'great idea, wrong species' for these kinds of situations
You know, you might be surprised if you actually go out there in the political world and try things, which is what my organization is doing. We're actively working with city councils and state legislators throughout the country. We now have active legislation in several states.
Also, if you dig into this stuff you find all sorts of factional fights. Right now there's a lot of energy to "abolish" property taxes, but the measures keep failing because the plans are unworkable. This has actually gotten some republicans to start talking about LVT, not the last of which is Louis Blessing, Republican state senator of Ohio and *chair of the ways and means committee*. He just announced support for a state constitutional amendment enabling LVT.
It's one thing to be financially incentivized to sell your house because of changing development patterns and entirely another to have some hellish housing bureaucracy declare that your home has been reallocated to someone else because they "need" it more than you.
The secret is, it really is better for society if these old people move. Either pay society for the benefit you're taking up or give your land to someone who can.
How are high property taxes on sale going to work? It seems like they’d create a huge perverse incentive where people never downsize. There would be no financial benefit for doing so unless they downsized *dramatically*.
Interesting point! Current policy also has a huge penalty for downsizing too in that you lock in new high valuations on the new place while giving up low valuations on the old place.
There are other ways to downsize. You could put up a wall and rent out the other half of what's now a duplex. You could put an outbuilding on what had been empty yard space.
Current policy also has a huge penalty for this, by triggering a reassessment if you ever make a change to your property. This powerful incentive to refuse to develop your land is a much bigger economic problem than an incentive to continue owning it.
In many cases it would function as an inheritance tax. So if you want to leave money for your kids you should downsize. If you, like many boomers, value your consumption over the wellbeing of your adult children and your grandchildren, you won’t.
The deferred portion of the property taxes keep eating away at the equity, which is what encourages the downsizing.
In an extreme case the taxes could completely empty out the equity and you have someone sitting on a house they'd get $0 from if they moved, but it takes a really long time to get there and a particularly special pattern of changes in home values.
> Someone else commented by saying we could solve all of these problems without inconveniencing either the Boomers or the young by just increasing taxes on a few ultra-rich people.
I'm a social democrat but (unless somebody wants to tell me the specific details to examine) this is generally false. Every time I've run numbers on this it just doesn't work. There are some really rich people but they don't have several trillion dollars a year to spare balancing the budget and paying for social programs and so forth.
I ran the numbers a while back and if we were to fully expropriate 100% of wealth from all the Billionaires in the United States, it would basically pay for one (1) year of federal spending. And that's assuming you could actually liquidate everything they own at face value, which you can't.
Why is Prop 13 bad? Why did it get passed in the first place?
If Prop 13 was repealed in California, who would it affect the most? Not the rich (Boomers or tech millionaires) who could pay without compromising their lifestyles. Other than that, I have a feeling it would hurt non "white males" more than any other group. Since property values have doubled in the last ten years, you don't have to be a Boomer to be dependent on Prop 13.
The property tax bills necessary to keep the local area functioning have had to be stretched out to crazy levels because so many of the houses in the area are pinned down into way below market rates.
Prop 13 makes it *harder* for people to move, since they switch from being on the very good side of the deal to being on the very worst side of it. Whoever moved last is hurt the most.
It was part of a generic anti-tax movement at the time, and it was very stupid and bad.
The answer is to just fight for lower property taxes for everyone. If you're going to have 32 mills, then it's 32 mills for everyone.
"I know, make *other* people pay taxes" always sounds good at first, until everyone ends up as the other people.
Then what taxes will you raise? You can't reduce property taxes across the board without raising other taxes or reducing spending. Texas already tried and failed:
Reduce spending. A lot. On most things. CA takes in buckets of money. And then pisses it away on stuff ranging from silly but neutral to outright awful. And then complains there's not enough money for roads and fire and police... Which are basically the entire reason to have a state government.
Yes, actually, if necessary. Sure, put them at the end of the list of things to cut, but there's plenty of non-functional fat in those areas as well. California schools spend more than the national average, and there's tons of bureaucracy and admin that can just go away before you actually cut any teachers or direct student related funding. The transportation department similarly has useless stuff (high speed rail anyone?).
Yes, if you are out of money, you have to raise taxes or reduce spending. That is completely correct.
Maybe property taxes should go up. But you don't start granting special exemptions to special people. "A big tax, but don't worry, the commissar can grant exemptions" is a shit policy.
I'm fine with putting a cap on how fast the taxes someone must immediately pay must rise, but the difference gets capitalized into the property at a reasonable interest rate, which makes it very legible and financeable.
I'll interpret that as you simply not having any value for the effects it has had. Perhaps that point of view is related to being what Scott calls "rootless cosmopolitans"? (I had to look that up - it seems to be a slur from the Soviet Union? Maybe it's a new part of his coaching the Right.)
It promotes social continuity, favoring the people who are already there. (If only the Native Americans had something in place to favor them when the Europeans came.) It helps prevent people being forced out by gentrification, which will disproportionately affect minorities.
If you believe if makes it harder for people to move, then that shows it's working to promote stability, because Prop 19 lets people move without being punished.
At the time, in the 1970s, inflation was very high and prices for everything were rising rapidly. As a result, the local governments needed more money to pay for all the services, especially education. If you think the current population is upset about inflation, you should have seen the public in the 1970s! So people were angry that their taxes were going up along with everything else, and it was one of the few things that they could actually vote to change. You couldn't change what Safeway was charging for milk, but you could vote against your taxes. The Republicans pushed hard on the line that Democrats were flinging money around irresponsibly and had to be stopped. Hence Prop 13.
I am a young boomer, who would have voted against prop 13 if I was old enough...
A forgotten aspect of prop 13 is that corporations also get reduced property taxes, and have the added benefit of being immortal. I don't have the numbers, but I suspect that holding companies are used by the wealthy to game this system to massive tax advantage.
Yeah. Very weird that no talk of corporate real estate is used here. That was the reason prop 13 was passed to begin with. It was large land owners and corporations who wanted to avoid taxes on their holdings.
To make up for the lost revenue, we’ve pushed insanely high income taxes (taxes the individual not corporation) and sales taxes (regressive and most punishing to the poor).
Scott’s readers seem astutely unaware of the history of prop 13 even though it’s all over everywhere.
Scott said: "The most important thing I got from these interactions was learning about the proposal to keep property taxes high, but delay them until death/sale of property. This relieves some of my tension around Prop 13 and related issues."
Be careful. This proposal can be seen as worse for the younger generation, for they will then be unable to inherit nearly as much of their parents' accumulated wealth as they otherwise would have. In extreme situations, it will leave them with exactly nothing.
California tax rate is 1% of the value. A boomer who bought a house in 1980 under Prop 13 for $100K has been paying $1K in taxes ever since. (As I understand it... although 2 minutes of googling suggests taxes can go up by 2% per year, making my math over-simplified.)
If this house increased in price to $1 mil in 1996, the boomer would have owed $10K/year over 20 years. But let's make it payable on death/sale. That's $200K that the boomer owes in taxes over 20 years.
The boomer dies in 2026 and the kids inherit the property. They still get $800K out of it (or $820K depending on how taxes were structured).
In fact, under the 1% tax rate, it would take 100 years to eat the whole value of the house; and even more, if it appreciated in value towards the latter years.
Well, hang on, there's no interest/fees/inflation included on the unpaid taxes in this model? That seems...unlikely, though I'm not familiar with these programs, all the nonpayment deals I know of tack on a pretty high rate of interest? Also, sorry, why is it 20 years rather than 30? 1996-2026 is 30 years, right?
Okay, and where are you getting 3% for the lien? I'm having a hard time in a quick google finding a straight answer, but the general unpaid tax interest rate is 10%? (https://cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/interest-rates.htm)
That's the punitive rate for non-payment for people who refuse to comply. Presumably we aren't doing that rate for people who are following the guidelines.
I edited my comment to have the CSV so you can plug it into google sheets or whatever and play with the numbers. So anyway at 10% interest, after 30 years, the property is worth 1621K and the cumulative lien is 426K.
That's significantly less bad than I'd expected, though thinking it through, you're growing faster and starting from a higher level, so that's how it has to work out.
The inheritance rules for prop 13 were amended by prop 19 in 2020. Now, only $1 million in tax benefit can be inherited. While this sounds reasonable, given the insane valuation of silicon valley property, it means many young people will be unable to afford to live in their parents over valued homes.
In my case, my parents Palo Alto home has an estimated value of $4M. I will inherit half of the house, so first I need $2M to pay off my sister. Ignoring that, if I chose to live there, my tax bill would be $30,000 per year. While I would be saving $10K/year, I am better off staying in my modest $1M house and selling my parents house.
This is of course a good problem to have. However over time, inflation will make things even worse.
Less inherited wealth might be a benefit, not a problem. Texas got their Form 50-126 for deferring property taxes in 1982. I wonder how much that idea was floating around when Prop 13 came onto the scene.
My personal view tends to be "Why should I pay higher taxes because other people have gone insane?" Let's say Scott has decided that my neighborhood is the perfect place for his free-range-child experiment. In order to get a place quickly, he pays 10x the estimated market value. Would it be fair for the rest of the neighborhood to have their property taxes go up 10x? (My cousin in Texas had a similar tax pressure when a rancher from Utah spent 2x on a neighboring property. They ended up selling, learning in the process that the 2x was an anomaly.)
Some little thoughtlets:
- Aside from bringing in revenue, property taxes create an incentive against doing nothing with land.
- California has sales tax but exempts basic groceries because people need to eat.
- People need to live *somewhere*, but don't require extra properties.
- People also don't require stocks/crypto/art/other forms of stockpiled wealth.
- Taxing property on current market value is a wealth tax on unrealized capital gain.
- Perhaps the spreadsheet Edward Scizorhands made also implies that it would be okay to have an annual wealth tax on everything, not just real estate, at least in a deferable form.
A friend of mine moved into a block in Greenwich Village many years ago that was affordable to the upper middle classes. But over the last decade, many of the lovely Federal-style buildings on her block have been purchased for many millions of dollars by celebrities who moved in, did fancy renovations and moved out, reselling for yet more millions. As a result, she is now spending approx. $100k/year in property tax. She's not really complaining, because she has one or two rental apartments in her building, plus a doctor's office. Into her 80s, she is still working part-time. Still, to me, that is a breathtakingly high amount of property tax to be paying. I don't know whether there is some tax reduction that favors longer-term residents that she is benefiting from. I don't regard living in the place that you have lived in for a long time as an inalienable right, and and if it were me, I could easily imagine moving out and setting up somewhere else, as your cousin did.
You could say, I guess, that she's paying high taxes because her neighbors have gone crazy, but after all, property tax is usually levied against property value, which to me makes sense, and you can always move elsewhere. But of course my friend loves her house and her neighborhood and her nearby friends, and since she can afford it, she's staying.
BTW, NYC also exempts groceries (and not just basic ones) from sales tax. Clothing that costs less than $110 per item is also exempted.
On some of your "thoughtlets," though...
"- People need to live *somewhere*, but don't require extra properties." Who is to decide what is "extra"? I could get by in a smaller apartment (I live in a rental), but I prefer to stay where I am and can afford to, at least right now.
"- People also don't require stocks/crypto/art/other forms of stockpiled wealth." Again, who are you to say? I don't care if they buy those things, if they can afford to and I don't care what their motivation is. I'm for wealth accumulation if you can afford it, and then, if you need to, you can sell that Monet at Sotheby's. Money in the bank or treasure buried somewhere is also accumulated wealth. I don't see what problem you have with these. "Man does not live by bread alone" and by the way, perhaps to a greater extent, neither does Woman. Finding yourself restricted to what you "need" is a reasonably good definition of poverty.
"- Taxing property on current market value is a wealth tax on unrealized capital gain." All property tax is levied on current market value when the property is first purchased. Inflation raises property values but it also raises income, so ability to pay is not always compromised by the tax increase. And in line with your first thoughlet ("- ... property taxes create an incentive against doing nothing with land." ), selling out when the property becomes exorbitantly valuable allows you to monetize your unrealized wealth and allows someone else an opportunity to do something more useful with the property, such as, say, build an apartment building that will house more people at lower per-occupant tax. And if instead a rich guy moves in, the higher taxes he will pay will benefit the community while you get to laugh on the way to the bank.
Oh, the need vs. don't-require was just me thinking about things being taxed vs. being exempt from taxes. From what you are saying, what I wrote could be interpreted as approaching "property is theft". I didn't mean anything like that, and I apologize.
What is left out here is that many Boomers experienced being a "sandwich generation" where they simultaneously were responsible for their children as well as their elderly and increasingly debilitated parents. As a two income professional couple my husband and I paid full freight for 2 kids college tuitions and 2 professional school tuitions and the same time that we were juggling what to do for our parents who all ended up in long term care and three of whom made it - very frail cognitively intact - well into their 90s. I was personally responsible for the housing transitions which were a combination of physically and emotionally draining.
My husband and I both work. I recently went 50% effort (in an area where I have unique expertise and love my job) b/c I want to spend more time with my grandchildren. I think grandparents can make a important contribution to the kids development.
When my husband and I married we had all of 10k which we used as a down payment on a house and there was no other wealth, just significant educational debt.
I think I made more contributions to community and society than I took. I would have no problem means testing social security. As a program it was enacted circa 1935 for 65 year olds when life expectancy was 62 years old so the experience of social security today is a great example of unintended consequences.
However I have no intention of giving up my house. Sure I have 2 extra bedrooms but they are reserved for grandkids sleepovers which I encourage. Why would I give that up?
The boomer cohort I am part of worked hard, stayed married, loved their kids and grandkids. Nothing was handed out to us. Most of us are still doing the best we can.
Hear, hear! I'm the child of boomers, and what you describe is what I've seen in lots of my own boomer relatives. I don't blame them for any of the current economic troubles and wouldn't take away their assets for the world.
Are you under Prop 13 or are you fully exposed to tax hikes like most people in most places? If you are under Prop 13, has your house skyrocketed in price? Can you afford full tax on your house? Would the tax literally force you out of your house? Is your house (close to) being paid off? If so, do you (intend to) carry insurance on your paid-off house? And if you do, then do you see hikes in your insurance as property values rise, differently from hikes in taxes?
I live in the "peoples Republic of Massachusetts." My town has a residential tax rate of just over 1% of value. The town evaluates value annually - very frequently based on neighborhood sales, occasionally by inspections. My tax bill is consistent with the Zestimate assigned by Zillow. This seems to be the case throughout Massachusetts. No such thing as limits to assessed value.
So you're not really at risk for being taxed out of your house because you're already paying full taxes on your house. Removing Prop 13 from California would force California boomers to pay the same tax rate you pay.
I think all the drama surrounding "forcing people out of their houses" is about people whose houses 10x'ed in price but they are still paying the original purchase price tax. I don't think a mechanism to force you to downsize is even considered.
Do you live very close to your grandkids such that you can easily see them several times a week, and do your kids have plenty of housing (own their own large home, like you do)?
If not, those are potential reasons why you might give up your extra bedrooms, depending on what you value.
I live close to my grandkids and see them a few times a week. My youngest grandson does a weekly sleep-over followed by breakfast at the local greasy spoon. When his parents both had Covid he was evacuated to the grand-parental abode for a week Good use of the extra bedrooms.
Why would boomers be specifically more likely to be a 'sandwich generation' than everyone else? Seems like as the number of children drops and the age of having those children increases, each generation becomes more likely to need to do elder care at the same time as child care. On the other hand, it seems to me that boomers are aging better than their parents did and may need less care on average but my sample size is small and aging better may increase the duration of elder care needed.
In previous generations life expectancy was lower. 1935 life expectancy was 62 and major causes of death were acute b/c of lack of treatment. People didn't survive cancer/heart attacks/pneumonia/TB. Increase in life expectancy to late 70s early 80s means more people experiencing chronic disease and frailty. Your average 45 year old in 1935 was unlikely to be caring for an 80 year old frail mom with heart failure. Even 1960 life expectancy only 68. 45 year old boomer in 2000 could easily have elderly parents Last decade of life can be very, very needy.
Your link addresses the sandwich issue but doesn't seem to note that it is the increase in life expectancy that is required.
Right, but that same argument applies even more so to Gen X and millennials. Why do you highlight this for boomers specifically? Just that millennials haven't quite reached that age range yet but will start being 'sandwiched' in the next 5-10 years?
Not really the point, but the very first sentence of the article I linked is "As people are living longer...".
Boomers are the 1st to experience this. Hard to know what the impact of aging, frail Boomers will be on their kids. Boomers "hoarding" assets who have done any decent planning should be able to fund the years of their decrepitude. Kids of Boomers without assets may be in trouble with parents who are living longer without improvements in health span.
No. The rhetoric was about replacing old culture, and therefore old people in positions of power, but it was primarily a political conflict. Approx. 1-2 million died, mostly targeted on class lines, or warfare between different communist factions. A systematic genocide of the elderly would have been far larger and differenly targeted.
...but killing a culture is kinda how genocide works? For example, placing First Nations children in white families or residential schools is considered an act of genocide because the goal is to kill First Nations-ness as a culture. You do not need to systematically kill every member of a group for it to be a genocide. (Setting aside the nonsensicalness of applying "genocide" to an age group.)
That's really just diluting the notion of genocide, frankly. The central example of a genocide is when you cide a geno. That's it, that's why it's called that. Killing a culture can be a step toward the thing, but it's not the thing.
I agree. Same with dilution of fascism. "Official" definition and "official" infamousness of the words has differed quite much that I feel free to ignore one of them.
I was thinking that the covid lockdowns really proved the point that these things generally don't happen. Society/governments chose to sacrifice the freedom of everyone to save (mostly) elderly people.
While I agree with the others that it wasn't overtly a pogrom/genocide targetted at the old ... I think I agree with you *more* that whatever its overt rationale it functionally had that effect.
The extent to which I agree with you is "functionally, if you arm a bunch of 13-23 year olds with weapons and give them societal sanction to eliminate and purge people who don't agree with their worldview" then what you are going to get is a pogrom/purge genocide of the older cohorts with very little, if any, balancing deaths in the younger cohorts.
And in fact, given the historical timeline here and the overt rationale, the older someone was the more likely they were to be a target. The young were very explicitly the "indoctrinated children of the revolution" and were relatively safe unless they explicitly rejected their generational norm. The moderate-to-middle aged may have been safe or not depending on what side of the war/revolution they had come down on when they had been young enough to be involved in that kind of revolutionary/warring action.
But the old were very explicitly the "generation born and raised and educated before the revolution" and excepting a very few who were the leaders of the revolution they were the ones with nowhere to hide when a bunch of 15 years olds with AK's turned up looking for people who "didn't wholly conform to revolutionary thought".
As against the statement "there are never genocides of the old" its a fairly reasonable counter-example. Particularly if you include "pogrom-like" activity alongside "genocide-like" activity.
Yeah, genocide against the old is impossible anyway since genocide is the elimination of a racial, religious, national, or ethnic group and the elderly are not any of those. This isn't just a semantic distinction; because everyone becomes old it's impossible to wipe out old people the way you can wipe out a minority ethnic group, sci fi premises like Logan's Run aside. The Cultural Revolution and Khmer Rouge are pretty much the closest you can practically get.
> if you lived in 1970 then you would have been anti-nuclear too
I thought about this after the OP, and it's not a good take. Partly because generations aren't homogenous on anything other than age, partly because it gives people like the Nazis a free-pass that they do not deserve...
but mostly because we ARE living in a society infested with terrible ideas, with people protesting all the wrong things, and you used to blog about how stupid those were back on SlateStarCodex. You really think "1970's you" would have just rolled-over on whether nuclear energy was going to develop into being safer/cleaner/cheaper over time?
It's a fully generalizable pass for blaming any group for anything. What's the point of even debating this after that sentence?
And anyway the anti-nuclear was part of a larger de-growth movement of stagnating energy production, infrastructure, housing and general pessimism about technology starting in 1970. And yes, the bad ideas have been adopted by future generations, but they came from a segment of boomer elites and we can blame them for that.
Blame isn't that strong of a word. It doesn't really imply these are awful people, at least not on a forum like this. Scott's strawmanning in my opinion: he is equating blaming boomers with claiming boomers are uniquely awful people, and then cutting down the latter to prove the former.
To me blaming the boomers in this context just means that some boomers did some bad things that had bad effects. That is much harder for Scott to disprove and I am disappointed that he'd sidestep it like that.
I don't know, I personally find condemning groups for anything to be strange at this point. Would you condemn a bunch of mosquitoes for sucking your blood? The circumstances involved have made this situation inevitable. That doesn't mean that they aren't a problem to be solved, mind you, but there's no reason to be genuinely mad about them.
Besides, this entire culture war is proof that just getting mad at people is unproductive for bringing about lasting change. If you want to get rid of bad ideas, you need to eliminate the source.
I don't think you can really blame people in the 70's (in general) for being anti-nuclear. They simply didn't have the necessary information readily available to them to make the "correct" judgement that nuclear energy isn't dangerous. It sure seems scary, and it doesn't help that it shares a name with the nuclear bomb (which is really scary, we're talking about the height of the cold war).
I can't really "blame" someone in 1100's England for believing that bloodletting was a useful medical procedure. The same is true for pretty much anything that we once didn't know that we now know. Can you blame a prehistoric human for not knowing that the wheel is a useful technology? That the earth is round? That internal combustion engines are possible? The information was simply not available.
The thing about giving the Nazi's a "free pass" is not equivalent, because that is a moral issue, rather than a practical, amoral issue, like nuclear power safety (which is at best abstractly moral). You could debate moral relativism and presentism all day if you wanted. I don't know enough to have an informed discussion about that.
As a side note, I tried looking for data on nuclear power sentiment over time, and the only data I could find started being collected in the 80's, so I don't know for sure that nuclear sentiment in the 70's was actually poor. I do agree it seems like it was bad.
Proof that I can in fact blame people in the 70's for being anti-nuclear: I blame them right now in this very comment! There was never any good reason to believe such nonsense, and people in the 50s were more optimistic about it.
They already had 3 decades of nuclear reactors being active, and the worst incident was 3 Mile Island, a complete nothingburger.
You know that many people are Q-anon level stupid, or at least MAGA/woke level stupid, stop projecting intelligence on them that isn't there.
Also you wrote what, 12 sentences and couldn't bother to include a single crumb of evidence that they "didn't have the necessary information". Do you not understand how to make arguments? Do you think comparing people to cavemen is good enough to understand how the world works?
> the only data I could find started being collected in the 80's, so I don't know for sure that nuclear sentiment in the 70's was actually poor
There are entire essays written about how sentiment was during the 3 mile island incident in 1979, so you're bad at Googling too. Did you write this whole thing without even knowing about the incident?
Boomers paid less in taxes because they were a larger generation supporting a smaller generation of old people- but they still ran up massive debts, setting very little aside for the future. Now we have a smaller generation supporting a larger generation, and a huge percentage of the budget is the debt they accumulated. Until we start shrinking the deficit, every generation should rightfully hate the one before that saddled it with debt.
What should we do? Means test Medicare and Social Security benefits. Stop having the rest of the healthcare system subsidize Medicare prices (every customer gets the price a provider charges Medicare).
The reason Prop 13 was perceived to be necessary is that California's property taxes are structured in a weird way which leads to painful consequences when there's a large and sustained increase in property values, particularly one that happens unevenly in different parts of the state.
In most places in the US that have property taxes, the normal way that work is that state legislatures and city/county governments approve a certain amount of spending, all of which is supposed to paid for somehow. Other taxes and fees pay for some of the spending, and responsibility for whatever is left over gets apportioned among property owners in proportion to the assessed value of their property. Assuming spending and revenue are relatively stable and predictable except for policy changes, the government sets a property tax amount and the rate is whatever rate produces the number of dollars they need. It's often expressed as a "millage rate", i.e. how many dollars of taxes you owe per $1000 of assessed value (or how many "mills", tenths of cents, you owe per dollar of assessed value).
I think it's mostly local governments that use property taxes in most states, with the state government usually using income tax, sales tax, or both as its main source of revenue.
In California pre-Prop 13, the state government sets a fixed percentage rate for the standard statewide property tax, of which state, county, and city governments (and school and water districts) get their respective cuts. Each level of government can also tack on supplemental rates in addition to the standard rate, but they can't cut the standard rate. So the rate is fixed, is kinda hard to change, and especially hard to change downwards. In the 19th Century, there was an issue with the county-level elected officials who administer the process for determining taxable property values running on platforms of giving their constituents de facto tax cuts by assessing property in their counties at below-market rates, which would have been mostly harmless were they just cutting taxes for their respective counties but was a problem because they were also cutting state taxes but only for residents of their counties. The response at the time was to create a state-level oversight body, the Board of Equalization, to force counties to collect state taxes in a uniform way.
In a normal state, if property values go way up but government expenses don't, then property tax rates automatically get cut to yield the same amount of revenue and a similar tax burden on a typical taxpayer. If the rates are set at city or county level, then property values going way up in just some parts of the state will cut tax rates in just that part, so even within that part of the state the burden on a particular taxpayer stays relatively constant.
In California in the mid-to-late 1970s, property values went way up in big parts of the state (possibly statewide). The tax rate stayed the same, but the dollar amount of taxes went way up in proportion to property values. The state government and local governments got way more revenue from this, and a lot of them just spent the extra money. See the bottom graph on this page (state spending adjusted for inflation) and note the big bump around 1977:
The effect was even bigger for local governments, which got more of their revenue from property taxes while the state got more from sales and income taxes.
So from the perspective of property owners, especially older property owners who often had considerable illiquid assets (house, pensions, long-term investments) but limited cash incomes, their taxes (in dollar terms) went way up in a way that created hardship for many, and the policy was pretty much happening on autopilot rather than being driven by a deliberate decision that the government needed to spend more and needed to raise taxes to pay for it.
Between 1975 (the first year data is available) and June 1978 (when Prop 13 passed), California housing prices increase 85% while cumulative CPI inflation over the same time period increased 24%:
Prop 13 attempted to fix this by directly addressing the complaints rather than the root cause: it overrode the legislature and lowered the statewide standard property tax rate to 1% (a pretty big cut), cancelled all existing local additional property taxes, and imposed big procedural hurdles to impose new local additional property taxes. This part more-or-less rolled back inflation-adjusted revenue to the pre-real-estate-boom levels. The other major part of the measure was to mitigate the effects if property values went up in the future, by basically fixing your taxable property value when you buy the house (or its value when the measure went into effect) so there would be no more big surprise bills.
This was a massive blunt instrument and I agree with many of the criticisms of it, but it needs to be understood in context of the problem it was intended to address, and if we're going to get rid of Prop 13, I would like California to seriously consider adopting the more usual pattern of property tax rates that float to produce relatively constant revenue instead rather than going back to the old system which was severely broken in a different way than the current system is severely broken.
Thank you for writing this. I am amazed that none of the prior discussions of Prop 13 I have read have mentioned this-- and I have lived in CA for 20 years and been interested in housing policy for most of that time.
Note that making that graph per capita would make the change look somewhat less disproportionate since CA population was still growing pretty fast in the 70s-- and per capita real spending seems like the right metric here since lots of government costs scale roughly with population size.
Good point. I played around in FRED a little bit and I think I was able to rig up a graph of total state revenue from property taxes adjusted for inflation and population growth. There wasn't a data series for that, so I had to rig one up by dividing the nominal dollars total revenue by CPI and population. I normalized it to 1970=100.
My first thought is that house price were still going up. This does appear to be the case, but the timing doesn't quite line up: prices did dip during the 1981-2 recession and boomed in the late 90s, but the big inflation-adjusted price boom in the 80s was 1986-9, after inflation and interest rates had both come way down from their peaks in the 70s and early 80s respectively.
Housing prices would still affect revenue post Prop 13 because of new construction and people moving. Lower inflation would also reduce the impact of Prop 13 on inflation-adjusted revenue even for houses that hadn't sold recently, because the Prop 13 cap on assessed value goes up by 2% a year regardless of inflation.
I'm guessing that the 1983-86 spike was some change in policy, probably a combination special assessments passing (still possible under Prop 13, but requires supermajority approval of voters) and perhaps a change in the allocation of revenue between the state and local governments (the data series I used only shows the state government's cut of the property tax; FRED doesn't seem to have data handy for total property tax revenue at all levels of government).
The second to last one is both inflation-adjusted and population-adjusted.
It has vaguely the same landmarks as the state's cut of the revenue-. Big sustained climb 1960-72, dip around the 1974-5 recession, climbing again until 1978, a big drip when Prop 13 passed, and renewed growth afterwards.
But the magnitudes are very different. The pre-72 climb is much bigger, the 74-78 hill is much smaller, the Prop 13 cliff much bigger, and the climb in the 80s much smaller.
The report linked from the article claims (contrary to what I've heard elsewhere) that local governments did cut rates in boom years, and the charts offered in support of that in the report seem to partially support the claim:there does look to be an inverse correlation of rate changes and property values, but a much weaker one than I'd expect from a millage-rate system that mechanically targets a given revenue level. Figure 12 shows, to my eyes, that in the mid-to-late 60s, local governments largely spent the windfall from increased valuations, raised rates for a few years c. 1970 when prices leveled off, cut rates somewhat in 1973, jacked them up again during the 1974 recession to make up for lowered prices, and then cut them again just before Prop 13 passed. This does suggest that local governments did have quite a bit more flexibility to cut tax rates pre-Prop 13 than I had thought, even if they seem to have used it inconsistently.
I'm guessing the cliff from Prop 13 is much sharper and the climb afterwards much shallower in local revenue because the state claimed a bigger share of the remaining revenue, but I'm having trouble finding anything concrete to confirm or contradict that.
“I can’t afford to keep my house. I’ll have to sell it for an ungodly amount of money,” is just not that compelling of a story once the money is taken into account. It’s definitely on the negative side of the ledger that Scott’s grandparents-in-law would have to move. Would this counterbalance $500,000 in profit? If that kind of money is no big deal compared to the sentimental value, then they could probably afford to pay the taxes and stay.
Well, you sell your house and then what? Every other house in the area has gotten way more expensive, too. You can move somewhere with a lower cost of living, but that's likely a fairly substantial hardship if you're only doing it because your taxes went up and you can't afford to pay them without selling your house. It means moving away from all your friends, family who live nearby but not with you, and any clubs and activities you're part of. If you aren't retired yet, then it also means leaving your job and having to find a new one.
If we're looking at the context of Prop 13 being passed specifically, rather than considering what tax policy should be in 2026, the profit then is going to be quite a bit smaller in absolute terms than the profit now. Taking a look at the house I lived in in Sunnyvale, CA from 2009-2017, it sold for $25k in 1973 ($190k adjusted for inflation). At the time, it was 3br, 1ba, a little under 1000 square feet, on a 5000 square foot lot. A $190k house going up 50-100% in price is still a heft profit, but not life-changing money on the same scale as a $1-2 million dollar house appreciating by the same amount.
Or you could stay in the same area and downsize. Since the smaller house went up in value, too, a lot of your profit is going to go into buying the smaller house, so you're probably left with a lower standard of living for about the same expenses and not much new cash left in your pocket, and you're probably afraid you might going to have to go through the same process again in a few years.
The time scale is also an issue in how much hardship is involved in selling and moving. In California, you get a notice of your house's assessed value in August, a tax bill in October, and then then taxes are due in two installments, half in December and half in April. If you aren't paying attention to housing prices until your notice of assessment comes in the mail, you've got four months to scrape together money to pay a tax bill that's much more than you were expecting or else to sell your house and move out.
There are solutions to this besides Prop 13, of course. My point is to try to explain the context of Prop 13, not to defend it as anywhere near an optimal policy.
Kevin Munger: "they have dominated the presidency (look up the birthdate of every major party candidate since the 2000 presidential election...)"
Wait, whut? Is there some sensible reason you picked *that* year?
There have been four Boomer Presidents total. Before that there were seven GI-generation, four Missionary-generation, four Progressive-generation, and seven Gilded-generation Presidents. The Lost generation was significantly short-changed, with only Truman and Eisenhower, and the Silent generation with only Biden. But the Boomers have been just about what you'd expect with generations lately being about 30 years and two-term Presidencies (when they happen) about eight. The GI generation got more, but only because JFK/LBJ together had only two terms, as did Nixon/Ford, and both Carter and Bush Sr only one each.
Yes, Gen-X, which started in 1965, would have first become eligible in 2000. But we just don't do things that way. The President is supposed to have gravitas. (Yeah, don't throw Trump in my face.) The youngest President ever elected was JFK, the "boy king", and *he* was 43.
I'll be very surprised if the next POTUS is a Boomer. Vance and DeSantis are both GenX, as is Newsom. Harris is a Boomer, but I'll join you in hoping *that* doesn't happen. If you're worried about GenX not getting their shot, I'd worry more about getting sidestepped by Millennials like Ramaswamy and AOC, but don't blame the Boomers for that.
Mm shouldn't you count per term instead of per president itself? Like you mentioned how GI got more and Lost generation got less because of this anomaly.
Sure, but Kevin pointed at "candidates", and I happened to already have a breakdown of Presidents on hand. The Boomers had eight terms and the GIs had eight terms. Lost got shortchanged but I think the main reason was just that nobody could convince FDR to retire. There's nothing particular unusual about the Boomers on that score.
(Kevin also pointed to Congressional representation but I don't have data at hand to argue with that. It may well be true, but it doesn't extend to the Presidency.)
"Wait, whut? Is there some sensible reason you picked *that* year?"
Especially since Clinton (1992) was born the same time as GWB and Trump. (Anyone who doesn't know: Bill C, GWB, and Trump were all born within the same 3-month period in 1946.)
> Federal deficit spending is the clearest possible example of trading off long-term prosperity for short-term gain
This is incorrect (although also a common misconception). Federal deficit spending enables other sectors of economy (workers, firms, banks) to stay in positive equity. Without perpetual deficit spending, some of these sectors eventually would end up with zero or negative equity, triggering wide-spread social consequences (e.g. see Great Depression and what happened with gold standard, in US and other countries). Federal government is the only sector of economy that can go into negative equity without anything seriously bad happening (and hence the current policy equilibrium).
Also, fact check - US is running a deficit since WWII (100% if you also count entitlements, ~80% of years if you don't), so, for +/- 80 years. How did the economy do (compared with other major economies)? Is 80 years long enough for the long-term consequences to kick-in?
Generally, new money (coming from both private banks and government) can be used for investment (good) or asset speculation (bad). So with less new money created, there would be fewer Silicon Valley startups but also fewer subprime housing bubbles, so right amount of money creation (and whether the government should create more money directly vs. private banks doing that) would be an interesting policy debate.
But care must be taken. It's bad when you get into a situation where too much of the budget is needed for interest on the national debt. Still, everyone who voted in this century has to share responsibility for the huge post-Clinton run-up in debt, so I don't see that "the Boomers" are somehow the problem.
> But care must be taken. It's bad when you get into a situation where too much of the budget is needed for interest on the national debt.
I agree that care should be taken; but interest on the debt is not that different from the debt itself (both are just ways to create money for the economy). Currently, all government-created debt (~= money) flows through big banks ('primary dealers'), and they benefit from that disproportionally; one possible policy tweak is to pay less interest on government bonds (banks would still buy and hold them, due to legal reserve requirements).
Yeah, but that guy isn't saying it's a income vs expenses issue. He's saying that fundamentally the private sector has to have a negative net worth of the government runs surpluses. So the Norway example is the perfect case to disprove his voodoo economics.
Well, no, Norway doesn't disprove anything - with international trade (and very significant international trade, as in Norway's case), you can effectively outsource money creation (i.e. some other country runs a deficit, and then buys stuff from your country, and then that money percolates through both your private and public sectors).
I again suggest checking out models by Steve Keen - they cover export/import (and this is where he doesn't agree with MMT folks).
And instead of calling things 'voodoo' - can you maybe suggest alternative explanation how government debt seems to grow and grow and grow, and nothing catastrophic happening for 50+ years, in multiple countries?
I can't provide an explanation for something that didn't happen. The fact that Wikipedia has a page called "List of Sovereign Debt Crises" alone should tell you that your account of the last 50 year in sovereign debt is fatally flawed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_debt_crises
Ok, important detail - government can accumulate virtually unlimited debt in a currency it controls (was assumed since we started talking about US and also stands for Japan).
If government has debt in _foreign_ currency (as in Russian default of 1998, Greece problems in 2015, and probably all other post WW2 cases in that list), or if currency is tied to gold, then defaults on such debts are possible and indeed happened.
The Great Depression was caused by monetary policy, not an absence of deficits. Steve Keen's "Modern Monetary Theory" is regarded like astrology by mainstream economists.
- Steve Keen's theories and MMT have similarities (both start from a premise 'let's get accounting right'), but are not the same (most notably - in how export/import flows are treated)
- Mainstream economists don't have a good explanation for Great Depression / 2008 crisis / Japan lost decades, because mainstream economics mostly ignores debt. Remember, Bernanke (then a Fed chair) in July 2007 told Congress that economy will strengthen - but in August 2007, the worst crisis since Great Depression started.
- Steve Keen, on the other hand, _predicted_ the 2008 crisis in advance, and has built models that show exactly how economy can get into the state it went into.
So astrology or not, seems worth paying attention to...
Mainstream economist like Scott Sumner CAN explain all those things. I'm assuming you just haven't read him. You can go through old posts at https://www.themoneyillusion.com/
The EMH says you generally can't predict movements of speculative markets. If Steve Keen actually did place bets on the timing of the crash and made money off it, I'd be impressed. If he's like Nouriel Roubini or Peter Schiff and just predicts crashes regularly then claims to be right after the fact, that's less impressive.
Can mainstream economists explain after the fact or _predict_ a crisis?
The blog you linked was started in 2009, so Scott Sumner could not have predicted the 2008 crisis (at least on that blog; I'll try to read some of it anyway, time permitting).
On the other hand, Steve Keen actually predicted the 2008 crisis back in 2006 (as far as I remember) and he is not / was not making constant alarmist predictions.
He did actually bet on his predictions (about Australian housing prices), but lost that bet (and hiked to the top of Mt Kosciuszko as result); however, that bet IMHO was poorly structured (not accounting for possible actions by multiple actors), and essentially Steve was correct in his analysis of what was happening (and what would transpire if things would be mostly left as is).
That blog does indeed not predict any future movement in speculative markets. Scott relies heavily on the EMH and thus doesn't normally attempt to do so.
Betting in 2006 that a crash would eventually happen is not that impressive if it happened in 2008 UNLESS the prediction was that it would happen in 2008 specifically.
If the one time Keen actually made a bet based on his prediction he got it wrong, then I'm not impressive by his supposed predictive abilities.
So much of this anti-Boomer discourse is people wanting to think in terms of cohorts instead of age groups. Ironically, I think this happened recently because millennials were another big enough generation to get a label and a huge amount of discourse about us, and now we are stuck seeing things in cohort terms.
Also, it’s funny that no one even agrees precisely where the cutoffs are for the cohorts. Does the Baby Boom start with babies born on V-J day? Ironically, if you delay the start by even a year, you end up with the strange conclusion that Boomers have been drastically *under*represented in the presidency.
This is a more analytical response than my more sanctimonious comment, but I think it points in the same direction.
Although I think this practice of naming every n-year cohort started earlier than the arrival of Millennials since people were so used to Boomers being treated as a group they wanted names for the next cohort. The novel *Generation X* really was meant to refer to a subset of people born during the baby boom who the author felt did not face the same challenges that the classical flower children Boomers faced. But immediately the name got applied to the next cohort and was associated to early-90s trends in music.
But that also should not be socially acceptable. "Fuck the X's" is a terrible mode of discourse. (I'm not assuming you would disagree with me on this. Just adding commentary.)
It's sort of weird that we have these "generation" labels at all. People are continuously being born, so it's totally arbitrary where you draw the lines and labels.
However boomers *are* an exception to that rule. There really was a *dramatic* spike in birth rates right at the end of WW2. In that sense, they're sort of unique in being the only generation that you can clearly define.
I sort of agree with your first statement, except that technology can have dramatic effects on culture, so that the social differences between people born in Year 1 and Year 10 can be far less than between people born in Year 11 and Year 15 even though less time has elapsed between those birth years. This happens if some new technology starts to affect culture at the moment when people born in Year 12 came of age. This gives a broad sense of the generational divide. It’s still true that this is gradual and not all-inclusive (e.g. there are always people who defy stereotypes based on age) but the sense is still there, shared by many and widely agreed upon.
I think the important thing is to keep modes of discourse straight: don’t jump willy-nilly from talking in generalities to talking about individuals, and keep it clear what mode you’re in. Stereotypes and statistics work for high-level theoretical discourse, but they are inappropriate for determining actions on an interpersonal level.
It makes sense to think that might be true, but I feel like it requires empirical evidence. Also then you should get generations of varying sizes based on when abrupt changes happened. A lot of people just cut off 18-year cohorts since the baby boom lasted 18 years. Or alternatively they make GenX short and cut off 20-year cohorts starting in 2000. Is there a bigger difference between people born in 1963 and 1968 than those born in 1953 and 1963?
I don't know about the years you mention, but Millennials are only about a decade long, maybe less (early 80s to very early 90s if not late 80s...basically the last generation to grow up without high speed internet at home); Gen Z is about a decade as well (from "we had high speed internet at home when I was in elementary school" to "I graduated high school as the iPhone was coming out"). Contrast with the range of Boomers which, as you say, is almost twice that long.
You are trying to do something that makes sense from a cultural analysis point of view, but you are not using the definitions most people use. Sources disagree, but they all use cohort sizes of at least 15 years. For instance, this is a list from the USC libraries:
The Greatest Generation – born 1901-1924.
The Silent Generation – born 1925-1945.
The Baby Boomer Generation – born 1946-1964.
Generation X – born 1965-1979.
Millennials – born 1980-1994.
Generation Z – born 1995-2012.
Gen Alpha – born 2013 – 2025.
The Pew Research Center uses similar dates with slightly longer cohorts. Cohorts of 5-10 year sizes have more coherence, but they're too short to fit most people's intuition about what a generation is. Even 15-year cohorts are arguably half-generation.
What commentators tend to do is associate each long cohort with the most interesting 5-year period. All Boomers came of age in the late 60s, all GenXers were into grunge in college, all Millennials graduated into the dotcom bust. Of course that's nonsense, but if you want to label each 8-year cohort separately you should make up your own names.
I was trying to answer the other commenter’s question based on my understanding, which I admit was intuitive rather than researched through USC libraries. ;-) I wasn’t trying to just make things up though, I was trying to reproduce what I’d always heard about where each generation started, and then fill in an explanation that seemed sensible to me—as sensible as these arbitrary divisions can be, antway.
But I yield to your official definitions and the (less satisfying) reasoning behind them.
Thing is, the definition is kind of wrong, socially speaking -- IME people born 1940-45 are pretty boomer-adjacent, at least.
20 year generations actually line up pretty well with 20th century social trends, with the caveat that the central ten birth-years tend to be the peak of each generation; the first five are sort of the "elder sibling/cool kids" that the rest look up to, and the last five tend to get a bit screwed.
So "core boomer" is 1945-55 (eg my parents), "cool kids" are 1940-45 (Bob Dylan, most of the musicians/cultural forces of the 60s), and 1955-60 get their asses reamed by the economy of the late 70s/early 80s and never quite find the comfort/success of their older siblings.
Cultural genX from 1960-80 works a lot better than various shrunken definitions in current use (which would notably exclude Douglas Copeland!), and I think it's fair to say that 1985-95 was "peak Millenial", with 1980-85 being "Millenial with genX overtones" and 1995-2000 sharing some characteristics with the Zoomers.
Well, they're literally adjacent to the beginning of the conventional Boomer generation. And the vanguard of any generation will always mainly be entertained by members of the previous one. It's interesting that you're making GenX longer, rather than shorter, than other generations as people sometimes do.
>the vanguard of any generation will always mainly be entertained by members of the previous one.
I don't think it makes sense -- we are talking about the literal core identity of these generations; why would it be defined by the one before?
This is particularly prominent for the boomers -- I think if you start looking at birthdays you will struggle to name very many prominent musicians of the late sixties born much after 1945 -- some cursory looking has Dylan, all the Beatles, most of CCR, both of Simon & Garfunkel, not to mention Hendrix and Joplin all born between 1940 and 1945. (Neil Young does squeak in there in Nov 45; that's all I tried)
If the early 90s are the late 60s of GenX, a 1965 start is not *so* egregious -- Kurt Cobain wasn't born until 1967. However this makes Eddie Vedder, Flea, Les Claypool, Kim Deal (plus Kurt's old lady!) a bunch of Boomers -- in addition to (as I mentioned) the guy who coined the damn term as reflective of his own experience *during the 90s*.
>you're making GenX longer, rather than shorter, than other generations as people sometimes do.
No? Done my way, all the generations of the 20th century are 20 years (+/- around the edges, of course).
It would be a deeper cultural dive to fill out the earlier ones, but seems to fit pretty well with what I know of my grandparents, older relatives, and famous people:
1900-1920: Greatest -- (largely) missed the first war, in charge of the second one
1920-1940: Silent -- Kerouac, Plath, Elvis, Monroe -- Depression/war children
It wasn't Boomers who "suffered" a high divorce rate, it was their kids. I'm an old Boomer (Trump's age) who didn't divorce (didn't marry till we'd been together 21 years) and doesn't have kids (I married an older, Soviet labor camp survivor who was afraid to have kids because he thought humanity would go crazy again ... and whaddaya know!) but I watched what some of my siblings' kids went through, and I have many GenX friends, who could be my kids, who suffered greatly from the self-fulfillment quest of their boomer parents.
I am a young boomer who "suffered" my "silent generation" parents divorcing. More like I suffered the consequences, since I was too young to remember them ever having lived together.
Ironically I am in a stable marriage and will probably never divorce. But I am glad that Americans have the right to no-fault divorce, the alternative is far worse.
The right is important. Many older boomers, though, tended to marry in a 1950s way (convention, romance, not really knowing themselves or each other), have kids, and then start “finding themselves,” highly prioritized then, and the kids were collateral damage.
My millennial nieces and nephews have pretty much spent their twenties “finding themselves” personally and professionally and living in one or more relationships, ending up in one that proved to have legs after several years. Around 30 this extended adolescence glided to an end and they got married and started having kids. (We are overrun with toddlers.) They don’t want to put their kids through what they went through, and they appear to have high intentions and odds of staying married. This life pattern makes a lot of sense to me, though it isn’t biologically optimal.
If you want to encourage old people in California to move down to smaller homes, being punitive with the property tax wouldn't be nearly as effective as getting rid of the capital gains tax on home sales. (Yes, I know that's Federal, so there's zero chance of that.)
You buy a house as a young person for 300K-500K, live in it for forty or fifty years, and magically it's worth 4.5M. Jackpot! At this point you might be inclined to sell it and move someplace smaller. But that gives you a cap gain of, say 4 *million* dollars. If you're married you get an exemption of 500K, but that still gives you a cap gain of 3.5M, on which you pay 25% Federally and (since California humorously calls that "income") something like 11% in state tax, for a total of 1.26M.
So you net something like 3.24M. The smaller house next door to you, which is run-down and cramped, is nevertheless on the same size lot as yours and cannot be purchased for 3.24M. So you're not just losing your house, you're losing your neighborhood, your city, your friends, your doctors, and moving to Stockton or something. My father-in-law did that after my mother-in-law passed, and he was dead not long after. Probably unrelated...
Capital gains, on houses at least, should be indexed to inflation.
If I buy my house for 200K and generic inflation over 40 years takes it up to 1.6 million, I haven't really had a gain of 1.4 million. I may even have *lost* money if it's only worth 1.1 million now.
Personally I think it's shameful that we don't index *all* capital gains. The tax brackets rise every year so you aren't punished for getting an inflation adjustment in your salary.
But then I think taxing cap gains is a bad idea anyway.
Why do think it is a bad idea to tax capital gains? I'm a firm believer that there should be no distinction whatsover between types of income in terms of taxation.
Consider looking at it as being penalized for working. Tax deferment into retirement accounts encourages saving. That works. But why should someone owning stocks or crypto, simply sitting on a gamble that wins, pay a lower rate than someone working? If the bulk of passive income was taxed to the same degree as wages, then it's a level playing field. At the very least, set limits. There are no capital gains on primary residence, unless profit is greater than $250K -- but what's the logic of allowing that every two years (or doubling it for filing jointly)? Roth IRA gains are tax free, but why was Peter Thiel allowed billions tax free? Incentives with limits. My bottom line is that it's nuts to have workers foot the entire bill for Social Security when there's loads of income generated other ways.
My parents bought a run down home in Palo Alto in the late 70s, it is now worth $4M+. They thought about cashing out, but then would have to buy another house somewhere, and the math didn't work out.
Of course, if they were forced to pay the full property tax rate, they might have moved out long ago.
I don’t think the young person should be entitled to a home and should be fine renting, just like I don’t think the old person should be entitled to artificially low property taxes
They’re not artificially low. Everybody else’s are artificially high. Unless you think the state’s per capita need for funds has quadrupled in real dollars in the last thirty years.
I’m open to hearing the argument for that position, but it needs to be made before any other argument is productive.
I think that California is on track for a budget deficit, so they definitely need to find a way to increase tax revenue. Of course property taxes go to local governments, but if those revenues are increased, it lowers the amount of money the state needs to spend from its general fund to supplement local services.
The state probably also needs to cut some services, but I think an easy place to start on revenue generation is to make endemic home owners pay the same property taxes as newer home owners.
...I think you and Hanania are a bit too quick to discount the likelihood of 'genocide' as a cure for old people holding up the recycling/redistribution of assets. One metric attracting increasing attention amongst us Boomers, is the escalation of the overall euthanasia numbers in Canada and elsewhere.
Maybe it's different over in Canada, but in France I have the feeling that it is the boomers that are pushing towards legalizing it, looking at the average age of people talking about it. Polls are still Assad-tier for every age group but the only age group where support is under 90% is the less than 35 years old! It would be the first genocide where the victims would actively campaign for.
...Boomer support for euthanasia seems to be strong everywhere. Partly perhaps from the 'it's my choice' attitude which we've had about everything, but also from having to deal with our own aged parents, where the choice wasn't ours.
Being forced to go on when life is not worth living, not for your own sake and not for the sake of anyone you care about either, is a special kind of horror that has been greatly enabled by recent technological advances. Support for MAID tracks strongly with people's exposure to the cruel reality of the situation.
...but it is also true that people get pushed into it sometimes, and I expect this to increase as the population share of people no longer capable of productivity increases. Thorny issue, really.
...I've seen the tragedy of a painful life without relief, and an end to an elder because of convenience to a family member. It's a thorny issue alright. Best handled by doctors case by case, in terms of their hippocratic oath. When the state sets the rules, the convenience consideration, especially regarding the indigent who are a state burden, is liable to become dominant.
"Hanania argues that nobody will genocide the old"
Aren't they already doing that in Canada, where 5% of deaths are by MAID? (I presume the vast majority of these are the elderly, but I haven't been able to dig up proof.)
> The median age [for MAiD under Track 1, for terminal illness] was 77.7 years and 59.7% were over 75 years of age.
> The median age [under Track 2, for chronic conditions where death is not "reasonably foreseeable" but the patient reports an intolerable quality of life] was 75.0 years and 50.2% were over 75 years of age.
In 2023, a majority of MAiD requests (64.1%) listed "cancer" on the request paperwork.
Meanwhile, in the same year, ~26% of Canadian deaths overall were from malignant cancer.
Comparing the number of cancer-related MAiD provisions to the total number of cancer-related deaths, we can estimate that about 11% of terminal cancer patients in 2023 chose MAiD instead of hospice. If, hypothetically, every Canadian who died from cancer used MAiD, the crude "MAiD usage rate" would be over 25%. And that's just for cancer, and not every other possible illness out there.
The publicly-available death statistics don't go into enough detail to show exactly how many overall Canadian deaths were from "any terminal illness"/dying while on hospice. However, if *every* person who died while on hospice chose MAiD instead, I wouldn't be surprised if that covered >50% of deaths.
I feel the need to bang the drum for a bit of liberal orthodoxy here. I think it is almost always bad to seek out ways that one broad group is worse than other broad groups. It's bad for human cohesion and it leads to unfairness when people are judged by the purported properties of their group. With "generations" it's particularly silly because the divisions are completely arbitrary.
It's fine to criticize policies for favoring people at one stage of life over people at another. But I would encourage people not to treat those at that one stage as a group that has accumulated collective guilt.
I completely agree but I don't think the divisions being arbitrary is very relevant. The clearest reason we shouldn't judge someone for being of a certain generation is that they never had a choice in the matter and so it reflects nothing about their character. Even when divisions are based off choices and not circumstances, I think we should be doing less judging than we currently are (for "walk a mile in their shoes" type reasons of not really understanding their choices as well as social cohesion reasons).
I think it got harder to keep up the social compact of taking care of elderly needs-care dad when elderly needs-care dad lived at most 1 or 2 years. When they can live for 20 or 30 years it involves someone else sacrificing their life for decades.
I've missed the boat but bugger it, I'll throw my hat in.
I think the boomer meme is a messy composite of issues, and it has a million ways to bolster itself as a memetic complex. An interesting aspect you touched on is conflating the experience in different countries.
In Australia housing is an overwhelming factor in boomer hate, inasmuch as it is their only real wealth vehicle and housing value has overwhelming political protection. It's the entire political reason behind mass immigration, tamping back is openly equivocated with crashing the housing market. We have no manufacturing or like to justify immigrants on productive grounds, we have a surplus of nurses. Mining pays the national bill with relatively little labour. It is literally discussed in Parliament how retirees savings have to come ahead of the prosperity of young people, therefore we need to bring in millions of people to suppress any market correction. Politicians also notoriously own multiple investment properties themselves.
I think Australia has this problem in an especially acute form, and we're disproportionately present in online discourse, so I can easily see us adding undue weight to analysis in other countries. Australians have a very limited number of viable population centres for simple reasons of water scarcity, bushfire risk, and a low population. That every state has a dominant city that won't allow challengers seals the deal. This means in practice most people who want to achieve anything, be near any cultural generation, enjoy the fruits of a city, are utterly trapped and extraction has no natural limit.
I don't think this is nearly as true in America, you have so many cities that young people can run ahead of gentrification, exploit more opportunities. In Europe there's deeper culture and history, so the hinterlands aren't so barron, and there's simply more people more densely packed and more places to go. Australia is at the far end of the world.
I think this is especially distorting to global western discourse because an Australian's complaint resembles and gives weight to complaints about not being able to afford NYC, London, etc. I don't think the two issues are the same, the boomers aren't obviously responsible for the rise of metropols. I think that stuff is cope.
I think your rebuttal of my comment is overcomplicated and in some places directly incorrect.
"Federal deficit spending is the clearest possible example" - I cannot find the words to express my disagreement sufficiently.
Voters do NOT reason about deficits at any level of macroeconomic coherence. "Deficit" is an abstraction that maps to political identity, not time-horizon reasoning. When people answer "should government spend more on X," they're answering "am I a Democrat" not "am I willing to mortgage the future."
Your climate spending argument is no better. The question "should we spend on climate" maps to tribal identity (like you yourself argue!) so cleanly that it swamps (heh) any underlying time-preference signal. Nobody's computing their personal exposure to 2065 sea levels.
if boomers (or anyone) were voting with long-run fiscal optimization in mind, you’d expect willingness to cut their own benefits, support for binding fiscal rules, acceptance of near-term pain. We observe none of that at scale. Instead we see “yes deficit and big government bad, no don’t touch my program.”
Confounding the obvious by wrapping it in illegible and moralized and uncertain downstream effects does let us stick the whole discussion in the framing of your conflict theory post, yes, but the underlying truth is still correct.
I don't understand RH's comment. Can anyone help shed light?
"My SS tax rate went up itself, and has been well over 15% since the changes took effect"
There is no "SS tax rate" but maybe they meant FICA? But that's not "well over 15%"? So I'm a bit lost on this one.
"and the cap on earned income subject to that went up a lot. And I voted to accept all that because it was projected to be sufficient."
I assume this is referring to the 1977 Amendments to Social Security? But RH didn't "vote" on that in 1977, obviously, since we don't vote on any legislation. The most recent election was 1976 when Boomers were aged 14-30 years old and made up 18% of the electorate. And I'm pretty dubious that Social Security reform was a big issue in that election -- if RH's Senator was even up for election and if his incumbent didn't just win by a landslide like they usually do regardless of issues -- but I'm not going to bother looking it up.
And also...complaining that a legislative fix from 1977 ran out of steam in 2026 -- 50 years later -- does not feel like a good faith effort. Especially when the official Social Security Administration bulletin from 1978 says "with the signing of the Social Security Amendments of 1977 into law, the Congress and the President have assured the financial soundness of the social security program for the next 50 years".
Nobody was promising it was fixed forever. It's been 50 years. Sounds like we got exactly what was promised?
Between SS and Medicare, the employer pays 7.65% and the employee pays 7.65%. Economists largely say this is tax is paid by the employee since it affects what the employer can offer in wages. Added together is 15.3%.
I guess you could do that but then your argument looks either histrionic or sloppy when we can actually look up the Social Security tax rate, which is something different from Medicare. The Social Security portion of FICA is 12.4%, which is over 20% off from "over 15%". Over 20% is not a small error.
Thinking of FICA as just being for Social Security is a fairly common mistake and one which I find fairly understandable.
Adding together the employer and employee portion of the payroll tax might be a symptom of being self-employed or working as a 1099 contractor, since in those cases you pay the entire 15.3% yourself.
I want to point out that property tax deferral until death/sale is already the law of the land in at least some US states, such as Texas. Comptroller's form 50-126, if you're a qualifying senior, will defer your property taxes:
Whenever someone in Texas says "property taxes will force Grannie out of her home and that's the main objection I have, I just want her to be able to stay in her home," it's really interesting to point out Comptroller's form 50-126, and see what their response is and whether this satisfies them or not.
When someone says this about their granny, are they just not aware of Comptroller's form 10-526? Or are they jealousy eyeing the government's share of granny's inheritance?
Most people are indeed not aware of Comptroller's form 10-526! It's easily available but uptake is not huge. The two responses I usually get when I tell people about it are either:
1. Scott's response in the article -- "Oh cool! Looks like that solves the problem, how elegant."
2. Brief silence, then immediate goal post shifting: "Look, granny should be able to build generational wealth for her family."
I totally get the desire to pass on valuable assets to your kids, but the problem with that line of thinking is it's a fundamentally zero sum game to expect house prices to go up forever. House prices can only keep going as long as there's someone on the other side willing to take the deal. And if we just exempt large portions of property from taxation, that immediately capitalizes into their selling price. A huge windfall for those who already own property, and a massive barrier to getting on the housing ladder for everybody else.
I think Scott is largely right in his comment on Vijla Kainu's comment on eldercare (ie, a major boomer transition point was the emergence of nursing homes vs family care), but I think that both Scott and Vijla miss some important aspects. I'm millennial and spent 2025 with a sister-in-law attempting in-home care for a loved one with dementia for as long as possible, and we had to give up about 4 months ago. After talking things over with older boomer and greatest-gen relatives, here are my thoughts:
1. Historically, nursing homes pre-date the boomers. My greatest-gen father-in-law and his brothers/sisters had to put *their* mom into a nursing home (despite there being 7 of them) because none of them could accommodate her needs in their homes. My boomer mother remembers her grandmother being sad when she and her sister had to put *their* mother into a home (my mom's great-grandmother) because no one could leave her alone around a stove. I don't know the history, but I'm guessing that nursing homes branched out of the 19th-century idea of sanitoriums and/or poorhouses for those who couldn't pay for care. Even if I'm wrong there, the idea for them (and the perceived need!) is definitely pre-boomer.
2. If anything changed with the boomers, it was the idea of women working outside the home -- which impacts eldercare as well as childcare. This was the thing that eventually tanked my sister-in-law and myself. We have to work. We have numerous other friends who are millennial / gen-x women, and it's the same complaint everywhere: we HAVE to work. What might have begun as a glamorous womens' lib flashpoint is now just a soul-grinding reality. We can't do homecare while working most types of professions. Nearly every woman I know would rather be at home with her family (whether her parents or children), but most of us have no choice: we have to work. For some reason, gen-x and millennial husbands really struggle to support their families alone in the same way that greatest-gen husbands did (and even many boomer husbands did). I think this is a more fundamental cultural change than just the eldercare issue, and I think most people who are not women-facing-childcare-and-eldercare haven't cottoned on to how frustrating it is.
3. The solution to the eldercare problem is not to tax the elderly. That just translates directly into a tax on their younger families, who often need their elders' resources to help provide care. In-home daycare with a professional nurse is at least $30/hr, and that adds up quickly if you need it every two hours for personal care and/or overnight so family members can sleep. (One agency quoted me $15,000 per month. Lol, we were already struggling to pay even 20% of that.) Financially punishing the elderly is like lopping a branch out from under your own feet. Thank God for our elders. I just wish we had better ways of keeping them with us for longer!
Another (possible) reason for divorce rates jumping in the 1970s is the rise of no-fault divorce. It was first legalized in California in 1970, signed into law by none other than Ronald Reagan. With it, either party could file to dissolve the marriage, with no requirement of proving infidelity, abandonment, etc. This is why conservatives complained about "drive-thru divorces" and the like in the 1970s and 80s.
I say (possible) because I have no statistics in hand to prove the correlation, but it seems pretty persuasive to me.
I don't think those categories are meaningfully distinct, but if you do, the people who got the divorces.
The laws there are only reflecting the practice.
Really, though, I'm talking about the people who see other people getting no-fault divorces and fail to apply social sanctions. This is what allowed the practice to exist.
> I can see your side of the argument - but I also can’t blame them for being against some hypothetical policy that would force them to move to a strange apartment in the nearest affordable town 50 miles away far away from their only family/caretakers so that some striver DINK couple could turn their spare bedroom into a gym.
This seems like entirely a false dichotomy. Why should the nearest smaller housing unit be far away? Most neighborhoods built before WW2 had a mix of housing at different sizes, styles, and price points. Most towns in the US have since banned doing so, through exactly the sort of NIMBY bullshit that most boomers support. And we especially don't need to *subsidize* "non-downsizing", especially at the cost of the next generation having the same opportunity. Actually, I think boomers tend to support immigration restrictions too, so in the previous paragraph, they're *also* the source of the problem.
In fact, there's a 3rd sense in which this is their fault (ok, we can blame prior generations for this too, since they were in charge when it started). You write, "but to me it does seem to make sense that rising house values shouldn’t be able to make your current home unaffordable." But single-family only, low density, car-dependent development is fundamentally expensive. There's no reason that property taxes would have to be so high, but everyone wants the government to provide lots of services in the most expensive possible manner and then acts shocked-pikachu-face when taxes are high.
Anyway, as angry as someone like Mariana Trench gets when they say " telling me to move on because I suddenly don’t have a right to my own house, because some younger person suddenly wants it.", well, my actual response might get me banned, but basically comes down to "right back at you." (Ok, I will feel bad if Trench is actually a YIMBY. But I do maintain that residential property rights have effectively not existed for many decades, and prop 13 is at best some people stealing others' property rights, and while I won't actively support infringements of rights, I am certainly less sympathetic of tyrants who complain about being oppressed). And yeah, saying that you're going to actively vote for "evil tyrants" to keep your house is, uh, pretty sociopathic and narcissistic (and short-sighted).
I'm very confused by a bunch of the "Boomers stopped doing social thing X" arguments. I've literally never heard anyone claim that Boomers are bad because they introduced free love and then settled down, or because they stopped taking care of their parents. It's almost exclusively economic (like the complaints about housing), personal (retail workers saying Boomers are the rudest), and political (Boomers staying in leadership positions). I do think that Boomers helped to create a world where it's not legal to raise children the way they were raised, with independence, but I rarely see complaints about that (or they're tangential, by people who don't even realize how fucked up modern child-rearing is, but just know that they're expected to spend more time and money on their kids than Boomers' parents were).
> Why is it bad that the Boomers won’t collapse the Ponzi? Because then we, the Millennials and Zoomers, will soon be in the unfair position of having paid into it, but not receiving benefits!
I think there has to be something in between "Boomers get nothing" and "Millenials and Zoomers get nothing" but most Boomers don't seem interested in any sort of compromise.
> Nor would a capitalist ideologue initiate even a one-time redistribution, or admit that the benefits of such a program would outweigh its moral hazards.
I guess I'll bite the bullet and say it was probably ok in colony-ending situations, where the previous "distribution" of land was the result of a military invasion (not that this being possibly justified means it will work out--see South Africa--but I'll give it a pass, once).
"Ok, I will feel bad if Trench is actually a YIMBY"
I am! You can usually find me over on Slow Boring nodding along with the rest of the technocrats. But no worries, I acknowledge my initial comment a few weeks ago was intemperate.
I think that people who are mad about the Boomers are committing an off-by-one error, and they should be mad at the Greatest Generation instead. I'm aware that this is heresy, but I'm sticking with it.
The Greatest lived lives of traditional virtue, because that's how they had been raised. (Also they had lived through a world war and a great depression, so they were pretty tough about it.) However, they failed to pass this on to their children, so their children, upon reaching young adulthood, decided that virtue was bullshit and they were going to do something else instead. Thus, the 60s and the 70s. The Millenials, as the generation born to the Boomers, were the first generation to never know the old world of traditional virtue at all. They correctly identify their parents as the ones who went through the phase change, but they incorrectly assume that this is should be blamed on the Boomers themselves and not on the ones who raised them.
If you want to chase causality you can go even further back and point out that the anti-virtuous ideology (under various euphemisms like "progress" and "liberation") had been percolating through prestige institutions for a very long time, but without seriously disrupting things at a mass level. The Boomers unfortunately seem to have been the generation at which the anti-virtuous forces achieved critical mass, and intergenerational transmission of virtue actually collapsed.
By the same token I guess you can pin the blame on the parents of the Greatest Generation, who taught their kids to live virtuously, but didn't teach them to teach their kids to live virtuously...
Ultimately it is incoherent to transfer blame from kids to parents, since the parents are also themselves kids. Blame for generational moral failings isn't zero-sum.
The Boomers are like Walt Whitman—we contain multitudes. We have old hippies, old Dead Heads, old good 'ole boys. We have those who were sexually liberated in their youth who became disapproving deacons in their maturity. We have the culturally anarchic among the rigidly conformist. Our multitudes makes generalizing about us hazardous, and you've explored some of the reasons.
Even the class economic conflicts are nuanced. Yes, many Boomers are living in houses they bought when they were affordable long ago that are now worth a million bucks (sometimes literally). Some of that increase is due to general inflation (although there are markets in deteriorating neighborhoods where that didn't work) and some of it to market forces that changed the value placed on specific locations, such as in your grandparent's experience. But the unsung villain is the American Dream™️.
Economists the U.S. has over-concentrated middle-class wealth in a single, leveraged, illiquid asset compared with peer economies. This is due to tax subsidies (interest rate deductibility), policy favoring real estate as "savings" in substitution for pensions (either public or the almost extinct private variety). This is due to the socialization of default risk through FanFred and Ginnie Mae. This is due to refusal better to regulate the rental housing market. And this is due to a tolerance for the periodic bubble bust that goes along with financialized assets that become detached from the real economy.
These problems won't die with the Boomers. We didn't invent them. That was due to 15 years loss of new construction during the Depression and World War II that resulted in a housing unit deficit of 6 million units at the end of the war for a population of 134 million. That was due to our parents being able to leverage the United States' unique economic strength in the 50s to allow single-income families. It was due to the extension of the Interstate Highway System to become local freeways. It was due to white flight.
Finally, at least for the leading edge Boomers like me, there are contrasts in what could be considered a "good life" in, say, the 70s, than today. I didn't feel impoverished because I lived in a house with only one bath and no granite surfaces anywhere. I didn't feel impoverished because I didn't have cable or streaming or have a phone in my pocket that allowed me to call anyone in the country and talk as long as I liked. I didn't feel impoverished because I couldn't buy a car with air bags, antilock brakes that would reliably operate for 100,000 miles. I didn't feel inconvenienced by having to leave home to shop for most of what I needed. I didn't know what I was missing by able to catch a cheap flight at the last minute for a long weekend getaway. I didn't know that clothes and many, many other products were disposable. A nice Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand wasn't a frequent dinner wine. Beer was beer and there wasn't much to choose from among them.
I _would_ feel that way today. My needs for food and shelter—the necessities—haven't. But my wants have expanded. The closest equivalents to the common expenditures of today were out of reach, far out of reach, in the 70s. Fortunately, I didn't know what I was missing.
Finally, the thing about the past is that it's a package deal. If, generationally, it were possible to book a Boomer retirement, how many would be willing to have a 70s lifestyle as part of the deal?
Wouldn't reverse mortgages solve the general problem of house rich cash poor people being forced out of their homes? If the polity accepts thats its fair that more of the upside on housing/land gets taxed, the market does have a solution to the liquidity constraints
They would, but they weren't much of a thing yet in 1978 when Prop 13 passed. They apparently existed as bespoke one-off arrangements in the 60s and 70s, but didn't become a regular bank offering until the 80s and I think they only really became widely known in the 90s.
Deferral by the taxing authority is probably more efficient than having property owners take out reverse mortgages, since the latter come with fairly steep transaction costs especially if the amount borrowed is relatively small.
Thanks, that would explain the history. I agree that relative efficiencies should be considered. Another consideration is the cognitive capacity of the elderly in particular to navigate a complex financial product. I am open to tax solutions but wanted to point out its not absolutely necessary, though I do have some skepticism of it actually being more efficient in implementation.
Efficiency also depends on how many ppl actually need to do something here. If its a small minority who would actually get squeezed out, then its probably better to rely on reverse mortgage financing for those individuals, than introducing some tax complexity for everyone. Overall I would lean into the benefits of federalism here.
Good news. You wouldnt be in debt. Basically you sell your house but continue to live in it. I can understand why you might not want to do that. But if you think its everyone elses duty to pay more taxes than you, you can imagine why some consider you the enemy even if our beloved blogger comes to your defense.
I was dissatisfied with Scott's response to my post.
On the substantive point… I dunno man, my argument is that sex (3), love, and babies are good and we have a wide variety of statistics showing those all declining in the generations after the Baby Boomers. I can buy an argument that the Baby Boomers weren’t responsible but the idea that it’s good or not that bad and probably inevitable anyway is…not terribly emotionally appealing.
Is the idea that a modern incel is actually happier than someone in a mediocre 1950s marriage? ‘Cuz…‘cuz it doesn’t seem like it. And there’s been something like a 40% decrease in the number of households headed by married couples (2), sure a few of those were probably abusive but the overwhelming majority were probably just mediocre and dull.
Like, ‘no spouse, no kid, no sex’ == people angy is just the most basic take ever.
Second, a technical quibble, which seemed more like an afterthought in your response.. Divorce rates did peak in 1980 but the overall decline of marriage continued and the divorce peak is a statistical artifact because declining marriage rates "artificially" decrease as the number of marriages decline, which they did, and the divorce rate is per 1000 people.
Toy example using "Share of households headed by married couples, 1940–2024" (1) (2) and 1000 imaginary people.
In 1980, out of 1000 people, 608 of them are married and ~50 of them get divorced.
~8% of marriages terminate in divorce that year.
In 2020, out of 1000 people, 485 of them are married and ~35 of them get divorced.
~7.2% of marriages terminate in divorce that year.
Yeah, the "real" divorce rate did decline slightly but there was not, really, a sharp decline following the 1980s, just a decline in marriage as well.
TFR declined below replacement across most of the OECD around the mid-80s, which was about the same time that the boomers moved out of college and into the workforce. (Yes, the same generation who overran the fence at Woodstock voted for Reagan's greed-is-good conservatism in the 80s and yes, this says something about their priorities in life.)
In other words, the boomers came into their financial and institutional prime at the precise moment that the western world began lurching into a demographic suicide spiral and sat on their hands and did nothing about it for around 40 years. We are living in the world that they created, and younger people are appropriately furious that the generation which should have been our wise and generous elders turned out to be so incredibly blinkered and stupid.
(There are, obviously, honourable exceptions to this prevailing stereotype, but stereotypes usually have a statistical basis, and this is no different.)
There's also like...if the Boomers were going to be so goddamn stupid about things they could've just left the Greatest Generation in charge. While they were certainly not perfect, beating Hitler and experiencing the Great Depression are a better entitlement to near-eternal power than your parents doing that and deciding to celebrate by banging a lot.
Well, I think the Greatest Generation would be pretty-much phased out by now, but I get the sentiment.
I know, consciously, in the abstract that it's not like the boomers were genetically sociopathic (if anything subsequent generations have been a little worse-endowed by nature), so presumably later generations would have done the same in their position. But the fact remains that the demographic jenga stack is what it is, and that has implications for how sustainable the welfare state will be, and if no-one is held to account for poor decision-making then poor decision-making will continue indefinitely.
I'm not ideologically opposed to taxing the wealthy to subsidise pro-natal policies either, but if you tax wealthy DINKs then in practice that's going to hit the boomers hardest anyway.
> Is the idea that a modern incel is actually happier than someone in a mediocre 1950s marriage?
I'm sure the answer to that will change a lot depending on the sex of the subject. Not that it's relevant, seeing as men will get what they want in the end.
The median woman has certainly gotten less happy over the past fifty years, whereas men's happiness has been relatively stable. According to self-report at least.
I agree, Scott didn't really address the substance of your comment. Very dodge-y, unlike him. Particularly odd to claim that GenX didn't "suffer from" divorce when they're the children of the divorcing cohort. That's almost the whole ballgame! That's a big part of why people say looser divorce culture is bad. And I took your comment to stand in for all sorts of high-trust cultural habits and institutions that Boomers generally tanked, most of which weren't addressed by Scott. Boomers ate the institutional seed corn.
It is always interesting how younger generations interpret how older generations functioned and what life was like before they were born as it obviously is directly responsible for all the maladies they have to endure. I have to smile at the discussions of what marriage and divorce was like (or what caused it to explode in the 70s-I was there and a product of it) and how their opinions were formed by media, whether TV, movies, or, one hopes, through literature. There seems to be little discussion about why the sexual revolution happened in the first place and the social repression and isolation that divorce created-to those divorced and their children-before it became more acceptable.
The irony within this is that all successive generations will, at some point, face the same problems boomers faced once they aged out of their willful youth. And while I know nothing I say about how little I had in my early 20s will matter, it doesn't change that I inevitably faced the same challenges my parents, grandparents, et all, and that my children will face. All problems have solutions. Housing? Build more. Taxes? Work out a better system, whether based on usage, value, service, etc. They do not need to be remain some rigid, unchangeable monster. Politics? Get involved and run and elect people you feel better represent your generation.
Whining and lecturing me about the moral failures of my generation is as affective as my doing the same to my depression era grandparents, or my silent generation parents (who are the progenitors of the divorce age), or my hectoring Xers, millennials, Zers about how they should save more and live more frugally like people did back in the day (I hear this a lot from my mother!)
I've lived long enough to know it's a waste of time and effort.
I'll never afford that $2 million house if you tax the boomer out of it. And you'll never tax a boomer out of a $200K house I want. It costs them $167/month fully paid off. If you tax a boomer out of the $2 mil house, they'll try to buy the $200K house I want.
The net number of people buying homes would remain the same so it seems unlikely that boomers would outcompete you for a 200k house. More likely is that the people who are currently high income low assets who would be looking to buy those houses now are buying the more valuable houses the boomers vacate and it evens out. You'd also expect the overall cost of property relative to income to go down as of becomes less a good investment vehicle.
People who buy $2 mil houses can satisfy that demand by buying a third yacht, or undeveloped property in Alaska, or by living in an STR if they need to be local. They are not desperately looking to get out of renting, and they don't have to be within walking distance to the bus.
If you create new demand at the $200K level, those people don't have a wealth of choices. Price will go up, availability down.
And you're right in theory about expecting property values to go down. However, prices are sticky. People choose to rent out, STR, or not move, rather than take a numerical loss. Few places are seeing slight decreases in property values, driven by higher interest rates, but nowhere near 2019 price levels. Market softness seems to be absorbed by not increasing supply (or even decreasing supply) rather than by prices going down.
There are many portions of this article that I find tooth-grindingly frustrating, but let's open with the worst passage:
> "So do we want affirmative action for the young? Why is this better than other forms of affirmative action? .... Why is this a more natural way to think of things than white people being evil and selfish by not voluntarily underemploying themselves so black people can get more of the good jobs... I think there are some weak arguments for why it’s better for young people to have resources than old people, but these don’t seem strong enough to justify the level of Boomer hatred, and I’d like to see people make them explicit."
I think people haven't made these reasons explicit because they're blindingly obvious and I'm frankly stunned that the very big-brained Scott Alexander needs this explained to him:
Parenting literally consists of transferring resources from older generations to younger generations. It's necessary for the youngest generations to exist and survive at all, and if they don't, then your civilisation simply dies. (Guess which generation/s are currently raising young kids? Not-the-boomers.)
Blacks also do not, generally speaking, deserve the high-paying jobs in our society, because their comparative mental incompetence would make them quite bad at running elite institutions or performing complex labour, which means that affirmative action in their favour is (A) totally non-essential to maintaining your civilisation and (B) actually makes your civilisation function *worse*. Scott knows more than enough about race and IQ that this should also not have to be pointed out. What a ludicrous analogy.
> "I kind of want to disagree with this by reiterating the graph showing that Millennials are richer than Boomers (at the same age)"
If you paid four times more for a house, on paper you will be four times richer because of it, but this doesn't mean you weren't fleeced.
> "It’s pretty funny that a gigantic boom in robots is about to save us from this right when it starts becoming a noticeable problem"
Presumably this economic miracle occurs after the AI bubble collapsing wipes the stock exchange and forces a decade-long global recession, so I don't know why Scott is talking this up as some perfectly-timed deus ex machina. (There's also the minor problem that robots don't create consumption, and that none of this intrinsically fixes the birthrates situation. Sam Altman is Not A Blithering Idiot might be worth looking at here.)
The strange thing about much of this discussion for me is the attribution to “boomers“ as if cultural and socio-economic distinctions played no role, and that all boomers were equally empowered to make these societal changes.
It seems to me that much of what a tribute to “boomers“ is actually more a consequence of large economic changes, which shifted the tendency of people to stay in the same location where they grew up. The other big piece is that it was an error that was, in my opinion, the first huge social hinge to a more open society, probably is a consequence of mass media and ownership of automobiles, along with wide described above.
I think this is a fairly balanced take, while I found the previous post to feel quite biased in boomers' favor.
However, I still feel emotionally completely unpersuaded, and I don't think further discussion in this style is likely to change my mind. Ultimately it always ends up sounding like "Things are basically already as good as we can make them, and at best we can slowly do some small tweaks".
This kind of message tends to lose elections. If we really want to improve things, I think we need to consider what would be more effective.
In regards to older leaders having more experience, there is probably an age at which cognitive decline matters more than experience.
It is possible that with better healthcare that age is reached more often nowadays, so there is a world in which a rule that says that the 60 year old boomers who preside universities should be encouraged to retire is perfectly fair even though the previous generation of 50 year old people who presided universities were not encouraged to retire.
We already saw a catastrophically senile US president, in the sense that he was either awful himself or caused an awful successor to be elected after him. There are probably lots of old people like him who are fucking things up in a more subtle way, away from public scrutiny.
1) It is stupid, irrational and just plain ugly to hate ANY group whose members did not choose to join that group and cannot opt out of it.
2) It is stupid and irrational to make an enemy of any group that has, by your own argument, more people AND more power AND more money than you do. Put yourself in the boomers shoes - Why would they care for people who hate them? You are just going to make them want to keep MORE for themselves. Peoples natural reaction to being attacked by people weaker than themselves is to fight back. Boomers may want to keep stuff for themselves but, it's better for you if they think "I want to be comfortable" than "F*** you, you ungrateful Sh**s"
What part of Boomers having more power did you not get? Boomers control the police and the armed forces. They won't have a physical fight with you because they don't have to.
Boomers are of retirement age now. The current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was born in 1968, when the Boomers were adults. The NYPD's commissioner was born in 1981.
Maybe I missed something but didn't your president, the commander in chief of your armed forces just order an act of war against Venezuela and isn't he 79?
The conversation is about the present not the future and, in any case, in the real world there is no hard cut-off between boomers and the next generation
> don’t think it’s especially worth “blaming” the Boomers for this. If you look at the secular trend …it long predates them, and they’re just reverting to the pre-Baby-Boom mean.
First google result suggests a child mortality rate as high as 40% at the left-hand side of that graph, so this chart exaggerates the effect of TFR on population pyramid dynamics over time.
(eg, a TFR of 4 with 50% mortality and a TFR of 2 with 1% mortality produce the same number young adults)
Strikes me that much of anti-Boomer anger has been essentially the same in Boomer-bashing for the entire duration of Boomers as an teenage-adult-senior generation. "Boomers are arrogant and entitled" was what the generations preceeding the Boomers said about them in the 60s and is now what their children and grandchildren have been saying about them. I don't think it's an imported European meme as such, might be a temporally imported meme though.
>Does Little Ephraim Robin John have the right to hate the hand that holds the whip?
Well, yes.
We as anachronistic outside observers might not take his plight as seriously as the plight of other slaves who were not themselves slave traders. We might even smugly consider it a fitting punishment for his own crimes.
But I think that's more an evolutionary adaptation towards enjoying fitting revenge narratives, than it is a principled moral stance.
For being a slave trader, he deserves whatever punishment we would legislate for all slave traders, including the due process we would place in front of such punishment.
From being a slave, he deserves the same protections we would apply to any slave, and has the same right to anger at his circumstances and captors.
I understand the intuition to let these 'cancel each other out', or to say that as a slaver he waives all rights to human dignity and deserves whatever happens. But I think this is mostly moral laziness, a convenient excuse to call the situation 'just' and wash our hands of any duty to change it. I think we need to actually judge the two situations separately, and act appropriately in each case.
Focusing more on the question of counterfactual evil versions of current victims: I think this does let you undermine the claim that the oppressed are a genetically morally superior type of person to their oppressors, and I agree that some people make arguments that sound like that, but I think those arguments are generally stupid to begin with and not very important to how we judge the situation.
Yes, if the older and younger generations counterfactually swapped places, the younger generation would commit the same crimes the older are now. Yes, we counterfactually expect the younger generation to commit those same crimes when they become the older generation in the future, if nothing is done to change the situation into something better before then.
But the point of discussing problems and crimes isn't to determine which set of people is innately superior across all possible counterfactuals.
The point is to gather the will and the urgency necessary to *change the situation into something better*.
I don't think you gather that will by saying 'The victim is hypocritical to admonish her rapist, since if they counterfactually swapped bodies and upbringings she might have done the same to him.'
I think you focus on 'this is monstrous, and we need to change it'.
(That's the utilitarian part, I suppose. The non-utilitarian part is, I guess, saying that the standard of 'add up all of a person's expected behaviors under every imaginable counterfactual and compare their score to other people to see who is morally better' is a standard that's not only impossible to calculate, but would also be likely to dismiss the majority of atrocities and crimes that we think of as 'bad' and don't want to happen to us. I think this brushes up against 'the universe is probably deterministic so there's no free will so no one is morally culpable for anything they do ever', to which my response is 'you could come up with a definition of moral culpability by which that is true, and that definition would communicate zero information because it would have zero discriminatory power to judge people in reality, so instead I think I'll use a more common-sense morality where I can make useful moral judgements and I get to be mad at rapists.)
> I can make useful moral judgements and I get to be mad at rapists.
Is... having a personal vendetta against rapists really useful? Seems like a waste of energy for something that doesn't really affect you. You can say that rapists deserve to get shot without actually having a grudge against them. At the very least, it seems no more productive than saying that the morally bankrupt deserve to be victims. That at least serves the purpose of making sure resources don't get allocated towards helping liabilities.
>Federal deficit spending is the clearest possible example of trading off long-term prosperity for short-term gain,
Strong disagree, this is only true if you think all federal spending is by definition valueless.
When successful businesses take out big loans, it's usually to fuel expansion and growth. They believe they can invest that money in themselves and realize a higher return than the interest payments. This is reasonable and rational and normal.
Ideally, governments do the same thing. Spending today doesn't disappear into the void, you are investing in human capital, infrastructure, research, security, networking, marketing, and etc. to fuel long-term growth and prosperity.
Whether the next marginal dollar of deficit spending creates more or less economic growth than the interest that will ultimately be paid on it is a difficult question to answer, and I won't claim that politicians are always consciously and carefully weighing this calculation when they pass a new bill.
But in principle that's what is supposed to be happening, and I think the system by-and-large trends towards that arrangement as a general principle. Even if it's far from perfect and we're not in the ideal equilibrium, it's certainly not 'the clearest possible example'.
Actually existing governments don't match that ideal at all. Most of the federal budget goes to the elderly these days, which is the opposite of an investment!
First of all, eh. Having professionals care for the elderly and having the government pay for it means the young don't have to do it themselves and can invest those resources in themselves and their children instead.
Second of all, even if the government wasted half it's budget, that doesn't mean the next marginal dollar couldn't be spent on a good investment. The waste is suggestive of what we can expect from them, but it's not actually dispositive here.
Having government spend money at all rather than consumers directing funds toward their most valued ends is generally wasteful. Social Security is a pure transfer of money, but Medicare is devoting healthcare resources toward those with the least in the way of QALYs to be saved.
You can make an argument for Logan's Run if you think that's the proper way to run a society, but until you convince enough people, we're going to spend money on old people's healthcare one way or another. The government can use its power and centralization to do it cheaper and more efficiently than every individual old person or their child trying to arrange care for them individually.
If the government stopped allocating all that money to elderly healthcare, people would individually spend less. The elderly themselves might prioritize their own healthcare, but the children will have other options for that money and would try to minimize how much they have to spend on that. I am not trying to claim the total amount of services would be the same at lower prices, I am claiming less healthcare would be consumed.
Sure, there will be some marginal effect towards less healthcare with less government funding. Just like there will be some marginal effect towards cheaper healthcare with a single-buyer government program.
And there will be a hundred other marginal effects in either direction, which are hard for us to predict ahead of time. Very difficult to know which way it trends when you add everything up. especially when you start considering different levels of funding and different implementations of the program.
I'm not the one claiming that one method is obviously massively better than the other. I'm the one objecting to somebody making a one-sided blanket claim like that.
I'm perfectly happy to say it's complicated and contingent and hard to say how it shakes out.
> Federal deficit spending is the clearest possible example of trading off long-term prosperity for short-term gain, but the young are more likely to support it than the old.
The purpose of deficit spending is to make investments that pay off in the long term (e.g. we borrow $1m today to build a bridge, we get $100m increased economic growth and $10m tax revenue over the next 10 years). So it makes perfect sense for young people, who are likely to benefit from those investments, to support it.
>Climate change is another place where people are being asked to sacrifice now to prevent future disaster, and the generation gap is miniscule.
But the younger generation has much less wealth at the moment, as we've seen, so it's not really apples to apples.
Saying 'I asked a rich man and a poor man each to give $1000 to charity, and they both refused' doesn't necessarily imply that they are both equally greedy.
> I find this pretty interesting. We all know stories of American opinions infecting Europeans, like how they’re obsessed about anti-black racism, but rarely worry about anti-Roma racism which is much more prevalent there. I’d never heard anyone argue the opposite - that the European discourse is infecting Americans with ideas that don’t apply to our context - but it makes sense that this should happen. I might write a post on this.
It wouldn't be the first, I've seen the idea that the American right's current (not 9/11 era, the two are distinct) dislike of Muslim immigration and integration is mostly an import from Europe which faces far higher amounts of immigration from the Islamic world.
Yes, but it is worth noticing when the first examples that come to your mind are all from other places. Because in theory, people should be *more* sensitive about things that happen closer to home. So, the question (for Americans, I am not one) is, are they?
My impression from internet is that the typical online complaints about Muslims were previously about Sweden, and more recently about Rotherham. Can you give me similarly known examples from USA?
Thanks to all the dynamics outlined in this post, we live in a world, by your own example, designed by and for people who would be able to buy "literal farmland" in their 20s at neglible costs and effortlessly become inflation adjusted multi-millionaires in their old age.
Of course there are details omitted from this broad strokes narrative.
In any case, that is not a particularly nice world to live in, if step one "buy literal farmland cheap" is no longer available. And my generation (Millenials) feel that it is indeed no longer available.
Again, details omitted.
---
Covid disproportionally killed old people. Negative implications of various degrees of "social distancing" disproportionally affected young people. Young people correctly feel they got the short end of this deal.
We're discussing farmland that can plausibly turn into valuable housing, which was available to boomers, but such "equivalents" like you post are almost certainly not going to be equivalent at all, as the economic trends and tailwinds (pop growth, two income transition, globalization) are no longer there.
It's a very typical boomer response to say "just buy a house like I did, and you can also expect it to 10x in 30 years" but I question whether this is made in good faith. Is this the honest advice you will give to your kids?
No, because my kids aren't angry about how Boomers could buy farmland and they can't.
Why do you think that there was a trend of farmland turning into valuable housing in Boomer times, but not now?
My guess is that you're thinking of some specific case of this happening, but that most of the farmland stayed farmland and a few people got lucky and bought farmland which was underpriced because it happened to be where new towns would get built, and that the same is true now (but you can't directly select into being one of the few people who gets lucky).
The housing values are based on the value of the economies powering them. The modern economy gained massive value from globalization (sending jobs to other countries) and the two income transition. Workers (of all ages) are making lots of money and so they drive up prices. Boomers are part of this, they also worked, and deserve "credit" for improving the economy. But as for the increase in land prices, they didn't work for that, it was a free windfall that cannot be expected for future generations. The workers of today (largely not boomers) are paying for that gain.
We can have genuine hope for AI to perhaps deliver a similar windfall, but this is far from a sure thing.
Thanks for engaging. To clarify, I am not "angry" that boomer could win the farmland lottery and I can't, I am observing that I live in a world shaped by and optimised for people who have won the farmland lottery and since I can't plausibly do that, this world is not optimised for me.
>No Marxist ideologue would admit that a one-time redistribution was the only necessary Marxist policy.
Oh, it's not one time. I mean, yeah, there's a period of time over which markets just work as advertised - precisely when actors participating in them are relatively equal and own their, ahem, means of production (not sure how well this translates to post-agrarian societies, but giving people control over their plots of land has always worked wonders for productivity). This is how rich developed societies historically tend to arise - before squandering their wealth by letting capitalist rent-seekers capture their institutions. And capital concentration is a core feature of a market property system, preventing it is a hard problem, impossible to solve with market mechanism alone - especially if you believe there must be a better way than repeatedly resetting society with wars (including revolutions) or plagues.
But I've got to appreciate how easy it is to sell radical socialist ideas by framing them as anti-Marxist. Supercapitalism, ahoy!
Only, well, we've had a natural experiment in the last 30-something years and it turned out there was in fact plenty to squander in the USSR, and its newly liberal elite has demonstrated exactly how it's done.
Well, sure, instead of wasting petrodollars on nukes they transitioned to wasting them on other nonsense. Just because Marxism sucks, getting rid of it doesn't guarantee substantial improvement.
I kind of agree with this , without being a Marxist
I agree that a.one-off forced leveling followed by free market forever doesn't work, because the free market forever will amplify differences untill it reproduces the degree of inequality that you were trying to solve with the first levelling.
I notice that some ancient societies built in regular levelings in the form of jubilees..not just a celebration, but mandatory release of prisoners and forgiveness of debts. A built in, predictable sawtooth.
I notice that others attempt a steady state with stringent ongoing redistribution, the northwestern European model.
I notice that others still do neither and are shocked when the revolution happens.
> Old people staying in their old house and neighborhood is good for their health.
Not always. And giving them a tax break if-and-only-if they stay put is as unfair to them as the rest of us. Let them take their tax break to their new house if they downsize, or convert it into an annual check from the state. Or ban tax shelters in the state constitution while paying off the current beneficiaries with the value of their tax shelter. Then they can decide if they'd rather keep the house or the money. Their discount rate is high. A windfall doesn't have to be that many years' worth of tax shelter to be worth it to them. A deal's waiting to be struck.
The Ethiopian "smash the landowners then have capitalism" is actually a repeatedly successful formula. It worked in South Korea (with the Japanese instead of the Marxists) and in Europe (places that had the landed gentry dispossessed and replaced with the Napoleonic code civil grew faster for a century afterwards than closely comparable places in e.g. Germany). Adam Smith was right, landlords are the bad guys!
If even Adam Smith doesn't like landlords, then one could argue that land redistribution is perfectly capitalistic. How nice of his manifesto to include an actual roadmap.
I'd argue technology did most of the work here; in most aboriginal societies in Canada there wasn't an individual/familial concept of land ownership (there are exceptions on the north west coast of canada where sufficient natural wealth allowed the emergence of pseudo feudalism
Agreed. Also add Japan, post WW2, and Taiwan when the Chinese government in exile settled there and enforced land reform on the locals. Interestingly, the Philippines tried it, but for political reasons they weren't able to make it stick, so we didn't see similar gains there as you might expect.
Of note, many revolutionary movements don't begin by demanding socialism/communism. They begin with the peasantry demanding land reform and socialist/communist movements signal-boosting those demands to coopt the broader movement toward their wider message. E.g. the Russian revolution. There is also a rich history of anger throughout Central America against outside fruit companies with large land holdings, etc.
Meanwhile, the USA dispossessed large numbers of people (and buffalo) to allow radical land distribution - often to newly-arrived immigrants. Contrast this with the Coal Wars in West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, where large landholders effectively reinvented serfdom inside the USA itself as recently as a century ago. This doesn't exactly satisfy Koch's postulates, but it rhymes with them.
> This hasn’t been my experience; I’m curious whether it’s Charles or I who is the atypical one. I don’t know how you’d even start investigating this though.
fwiw this is also how I interpret all the rhetoric
it's not the stats, it's that boomers are very often assholes in an especially status/wealth-obsessed "new rich" way.
> Suppose RH is right (I haven’t checked), and that Social Security would be sustainable with lots of immigration.
If so it would only be sustainable with infinite immigration, increasing with every generation. The other way of maintaining the dependency ratio - absent higher fertility - is increasing the retirement age. That’s the one I support, and I speak as someone who will hopefully get to be retired. To be honest RH is coming across as an entitled boomer there.
And when it comes to the cost of someone to the state across his life, in European countries at least, low paid workers and even median income workers are a lifetime tax loss to the state. Many low paid workers are a cost to the state even when working (think rent subsidies and free health care in Europe).
The economic argument for immigrants as tax sources breaks down there, if you waned an economic argument then migrants could be on temporary visas - like the H1B - with no tax benefits or pension rights.
You might not know this, but we effectively have affirmative action for old people. Age Discrimination is illegal, but only for people over 40. It’s perfectly legal to discriminate against young people, but you can be sued for discriminating against the elderly.
The most significant result of this law is that it outlawed mandatory retirement ages. Organizations knew it was suboptimal to have old people in high level positions but that individual managers suck at firing people, especially ones that have been there longer than you have. So they had mandatory retiring ages to force the better talent to replace them.
Without mandatory retirement ages, you have to individually get evidence that the person who has doing the job the longest, has all the connections, and knows how the system works, is doing slight worse than the 55 year old you want to replace him in. And if you ever said something bad about being old in an email or even a social media post, you can be sued that the firing was a pretext for discrimination.
I’ve walked managers through this, and the uniform response I get is, “well I’ll just wait until they retire. In the meantime their lowered level subordinate can just do all the work that requires a computer while never getting promoted. That person is worse off, but at least I won’t get sued.” I don’t want affirmative action for young people, I want to go back to the state of nature without this artificial protection.
I mentioned mandatory retirements as an organizational policy. I would not support them as a regulation imposed by the government. Honestly, with good HR and a managers, they are not necessary, but repealing age discrimination laws would help a lot with making them freer to act.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but this doesn’t make sense. If the older person can’t even use a computer and needs a younger person to do all the computer stuff, would it not be a valid justification to fire them for not being able to use one?
It is, but you have to be careful. The way the legal test is, management can articulate a legitimate, no discriminatory reason. But then the employee is allowed to present evidence that this reason is a pretext for discrimination. What kind of evidence? Well if I posted this under my own name, it could be used as evidence. If a manager ever used an aged based slur at work or on social media, such as boomer, that is evidence of age discrimination. If the person that replaces them is younger, that is evidence. If your staff is disproportionately younger than the qualified population in your city, that is evidence.
At the end of the day, it is up to a jury of 12 people too stupid to get out of jury duty to decide whether you discriminated against age, and how much money they should award the former employee. Because of this uncertainty, lawyers will always recommend either a severance package or just waiting until they voluntarily retire. And as I said elsewhere, losing one of these cases is a career killer for managers. Any future employee is allowed to use the fact that you previously discriminated based on age as evidence that you are currently discriminating based on age. People often get demoted after a lose on discrimination.
> The ultra-rich could reasonably say they didn’t create this problem and it’s unfair to tax them for it. But so could the Boomers and the young! So whose “fair share” is it?
The Boomers most, then slightly less for the younger generations, and the ultra-rich last, because they are fewest! Greatest good for the greatest number!
(Extremely oversimplified, obviously. We do need the potential to get rich as an incentive to spur economic growth. But iirc the main practical application of utilitarianism is tax policy. I've lost track of a paper I read from the 1950s-60s arguing that we should redistribute using utilitarian calculus - maybe it was Harsanyi? Will see if I can dig it up later)
edit: The paper I read was Vickrey (1945), "Measuring Marginal Utility by Reactions to Risk".
Naturally, the field has developed considerably since then; Claude pointed me to Mirrlees (1971), "An Exploration in the Theory of Optimal Income Taxation", which takes into account effects of redistribution on production (but is also extremely dense; on a limited time budget, I've only been able to get through simplified secondary sources, in particular: https://stantcheva.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum7746/files/stantcheva/files/section_3-4.pdf). The end result incorporating follow-up work by Diamond (1998) is apparently a U-shaped tax curve, but with a 0 marginal rate for the single richest person(!).
Regarding nuclear, I didn't realize until fairly recently how much of a generational divide there is around thinking of "fallout" as something that causes you to vomit and die (as would happen if you're a hundred miles downwind of a few megaton range ground bursts) versus something that might slightly increases your lifetime cancer risk (as I grew up understanding it). I wrote more here: https://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2019/06/sometimes-you-need-new-word.html
Disparate incidence of property taxes seems like one of the more legitimate intergenerational disputes. One aspect that I don't see getting enough discussion though is what is happening with property tax revenue in areas where house prices have skyrocketed. Just because housing prices 10x, it's not clear that the municipality's expenses for services must increase 10x. As a small example, my home in Tennessee is worth double what I bought it for in 2019 -- there is no way the county's marginal expenditures for my property have doubled (although I assume they have gone up due to inflation).
In somewhere like the Bay Area, I can see why Boomers wouldn't want to pay the new sticker price for property taxes -- but if Prop 13 were repealed, the rate for property taxes could go down and keep overall revenue constant. If that amount is still much higher than seniors/Boomers/long-time-residents find tractable, are the property taxes just generally too high? Is it that there are more services provided by government than when they bought their house? Is it that property taxes were too low for a long time and debts or lack of infrastructure investments are becoming a problem? Is it that people are bad with inflation math and misjudge how much their property taxes should have increased in nominal terms for constant real value?
Property taxes with fixed rates seem to be an issue when house price increases are decoupled from inflation in service expenses. Here in Tennessee the law automatically shifts the rates people pay based on total property tax revenue. Changes in property value may rebalance where taxes come from, but without a separate vote to increase property tax revenue average rates shift down as property values increase. Is there a reason this isn't more common?
A lot of places have to publish a "no new revenue rate," and voters are getting increasingly conscious of what that is. The real danger with rising property values and tax revolts is if people pick *appraisal caps* as the solution rather than *revenue caps*. With a revenue cap, all property is still treated equally, you just set limits on how much the budget can increase year over year. If property values go up by 10x in one year, the budget is still only allowed to grow Y%. I think both are suboptimal policies, but revenue caps are the least worst solution of the two by far.
But they wouldn't. Prop 13 was a black swan event. Eliminate it and California would drool over the new revenue so much it would slip and break its jaw.
>We all know stories of American opinions infecting Europeans, like how they’re obsessed about anti-black racism, but rarely worry about anti-Roma racism which is much more prevalent there.
Thats because we dont worry about it either. Roma and racism against them arent really a prominent political topic anywhere outside the eastern block from what I can tell, and no surprise those dont diffuse into the US.
In Slovakia, all woke companies and organizations would be happy to hire any of the dozen black people who live in this country... but although Roma are maybe 10% of the population, the middle-class jobs are simply not offered to them. (Unless it is an organization specifically fighting against the discrimination of the Roma, in which case they might get 1 token job.)
In response to my earlier comment, Scott gently pointed out "But Proposition 13 was only passed in 1978."
I know! I was there! It was my first election after turning 18 and I voted AGAINST it! So did my parents, though they were more conflicted and their Palo Alto house ultimately benefitted enormously from Prop 13. But we all wanted more money for education. I had a screaming fight in AP English with a girl who was triumphantly yelling "The people have spoken!!" "Yeah, we've said we don't care about education or public services!!"
I'm not at all married to Prop 13. My most recent home purchase in California was in 2016, so I'm paying what feels like a lot of property taxes, and I'm okay with that.
The Boomers were the generation that gave you all the things you like about life today: free love, contraception, co-habitation was normalised, Fight Da Man, legalise drugs, and of course rock'n'roll. So it's a little ungrateful to accuse them of selfishness; without their selfishness as young adults (we want fun, high-paying jobs, and no commitments!) you all would probably be living in the conservative, traditional society of we right-wingers 😁
"Repealing it, and making everyone pay property taxes based on the current price of their house, would incentivize (in some cases, force) old people to move to cheaper houses."
The problem there is yeah, this frees up housing. For those who can afford to pay the new, market-rate, higher property taxes. For the generations groaning under the vibecession about how they can't afford anything, this doesn't help. Either those houses will be empty, or bought up by commercial management companies to rent out at the high market rates, or they'll be bought by individuals who can afford those property taxes, and the "married with one kid" Millennial couple who can't afford those taxes are left still looking for somewhere to live.
What I took away from this was "The Boomers are paying artificially low taxes. Repeal the law which gives them that and charge what are market rates. Those market rates would be higher, which means people who can't pay them will have to sell their houses and thus free up housing for younger couples with kids".
But if the taxes are high enough that you can't pay them and have to sell up, that affects what new people come in: the incomers have to be able to afford those taxes. If you can't afford them, then you can't move in. And if the taxes then go down *after* making people sell up, isn't that also unfairly low property tax?
I get what you're saying: Grampa Boomer is only paying 200 instead of what would be the fair rate of 500. Meanwhile Kid Millie or Grandkid Zooey have to pay 700 to make up for Grampa. If he had to pay his fair share, everyone would be paying 500 and that would be a *decrease* for Millie and Zooey.
But what about Billie and Zeke who can only afford to pay 400? They can't move into Grampa's newly-vacated house because they can't afford the 500, so they're still stuck living in rented accommodation or somewhere smaller than they'd like, particularly if they want to have kids.
Making new supply available lowers prices for all.
If my budget is 500 in a tight market, and someone builds or otherwise puts onto the market a whole bunch of units selling for 550, that will reduce prices for me, because it's reduced competition from all the people with 550+ budgets.
> The Boomers were the generation that gave you all the things you like about life today: free love, contraception, co-habitation was normalised, Fight Da Man, legalise drugs, and of course rock'n'roll. So it's a little ungrateful to accuse them of selfishness; without their selfishness as young adults (we want fun, high-paying jobs, and no commitments!) you all would probably be living in the conservative, traditional society of we right-wingers 😁
I think you're assuming a lot about the audience here. I've already read a lot of comments saying that boomers are terrible specifically because they normalized those things.
"Drugs" have not been legalized. One drug, the one that was already least enforced, the one that anyone could already grow in their basement, has finally in the past decade or so been legalized in about half the US (but is still illegal in Holland and the UK), and I bet it was mainly the Millennials who've pushed for that anyway.
All the other drugs are still illegal and we are still destroying our society keeping it that way.
Arguing anecdotes seems fairly pointless, but I will chime in to say that my GenX experience is pretty much the exact opposite of Charles UF's.
My boomer parents had a fraught relationship with their greatest generation parents (my grandparents), who embodied many of the emotionally distant, socially climbing, materialistic stereotypes of the 1950s. My grandparents absolutely did move away (to Florida), and I don't recall them offering tons of help to my parents. They were very passionate about golf. (In fairness, they were affectionate grandparents to their grandkids, and they did help financially with certain expenses. I don't think they were monsters or anything, but they were hardly a kindly neighborhood presence either.)
My boomer parents, on the other hand, are kind, generous, and extremely devoted to their grandchildren. In general they are as supportive of me as they reasonably can be. I don't live in the same city as them (my choice) and they are much older than my grandparents were (because I had kids so late), so there are limits on exactly how involved they can be.
But, no, boomers are not assholes. Not all of them, anyway.
I think you're dismissing the Social Security angle a little too easily. Yes, fixing the unsustainable growth in Social Security spending would require the Boomers voting for lower benefits for themselves, but the longer the trend goes unfixed, the larger the eventual drop in benefits will have to be for future generations. So the choice was "should I take a worse deal than my parents so the next generation can get ~the same deal as me, or should I take the same/better deal than my parents and leave the next generation with an even worse deal than the one I'd get otherwise?" Obviously humans are imperfect and I don't expect any set of voters to vote for the former, but it is still a bad choice.
I spent most of my young life begging for SS to be modified, even if it meant that benefit reductions would kick in decades later. Decades later is now and nothing has happened.
The 1977 deal was fine -- I have issues with the SSTF but whatever, it got everyone on the same page and knowing what the future would be.
This whole discussion seems to boil down to: Individual boomers don't necessarily suck, it's society, our governmental structure, financial incentives and capitalism that sucks. Agreed.
To say 'none' is a fascinating take given that 'financial incentives' were explicitly listed as the driver. Capitalism is literally the structure of those incentives.
If you agree that rational market behaviors (like protecting asset values through scarcity or prioritizing short-term yields) are causing the friction described above, you are criticizing the specific mechanism capitalism uses to allocate resources. Claiming the economic engine has zero attribution to the exhaust it produces is the ultimate 'No True Scotsman' fallacy—accepting all the credit for growth while insisting every negative externality is just 'government' or 'society' getting in the way.
With higher property taxes on older people, a 'compromise' solution is normalize tenants and/or make it easier to add separate entrances to properties. Then for older people who really wanted to stay for sentimental reasons, they could afford to do so if they rented out one of their spare rooms... of course, this market solution would probably happen naturally if you just raised property taxes and housing regulation permitted adding second entrances without requiring kitchenettes in them.
Homeownership in the 19th century used to mean 'you turn the place into rental accommodations as your retirement plan' for a pretty large chunk of people. Renters got food and lodging, people kept their houses. While obviously nowhere near a perfect system, every time I cook a meal for one I reflect that it was probably more efficient in a lot of ways.
> So do we want affirmative action for the young? Why is this better than other forms of affirmative action?
I think the argument is utilitarian: allowing the old to accumulate and retain power indefinitely causes societal stagnation and resistance to new ideas.
But, to be clear, we are asking for affirmative action specifically for millennials. Definitely not for zoomers.
> if someone upzones your area, that increases the value of your land, and therefore your property taxes
Is this true?
I understand if a neighborhood becomes high density and desirable for its amenities that it will have higher land costs. But in a neighborhood full of single family homes I'd guess that the immediate effect of adding a single 4 plex would actually lower nearby costs, because part of what is desirable about the neighborhood is the charm of a single family home neighborhood.
When I think of neighborhoods that are mixed single family and multifamily I mostly think of them as being lower value areas.
Admittedly this is all vibes, but I'd guess that the relationship between small increases in density and land prices are not linear.
Let me make an assertion that I don't know if I actually believe, but might be fruitful:
Isn't it relatively easy to distinguish between the marked and unmarked policy preference? The option that involves somebody leaving their house and doing something to somebody else is the marked option. The one that involves leaving each other alone is the unmarked option.
Government does concrete things; people generally don't like those things. Decent, empathetic people don't enjoy arresting their neighbors or taking their money against their will. People often like the abstract ideas government hides their concrete actions behind: "borders", "Social Security", "laws", "courts" etc. These ideas can be extremely abstract, but if they're not enforced by concrete police officers, who could stay home if they wanted, the ideas are nothing.
Another way to put it is: whoever's advocating for something to be done to somebody non-consensually has the burden of proof. Advocating for a higher cigarette tax is advocating for some police officers to leave their houses and go and confront Eric Garner. You didn't know it was going to be Eric Garner specifically when you voted for Spitzer in 2006, but you knew it would be somebody; so it's your job to make the case why the cigarette tax is worth it. The default is, let the dude buy and sell what he wants, leave him alone.
On the other side of the aisle, closing the US border is obviously the marked option. The default is to leave people alone, let them come and go as they please. The ICE agents can just stay home. That's totally possible. So it's the job of Republicans to make the case why they should be out there arresting people. It's emphatically not the job of Democrats to make the case why people should be left alone.
You can set up a lot of tricky abstract illusions about what the law used to be, or what it is elsewhere, or which policy treats which identity group as an enemy... but at the end of the day, you're either advocating for somebody to do something non-consensual to somebody else, or against it. The boomers who don't want to be forced out of their houses can just say, "I don't want to pay this tax, I would have to live in a crappy apartment" and that's already, by itself, a strong argument; they don't need statistics and projections and economic theories for us to take that seriously. The people who want to repeal Prop 13 are the ones who we should require to produce rigorous statistics and projections and economic theories; their arguments should start at "must I believe this?" and they have to drag us to their conclusion, resisting every step of the way.
Disproportionate boomers, in addition to longer useful lifespan, must also be attributed to the fact that "boomers" are a 20 year span (sometimes split into Boomers I and Boomers II), whereas the following generations are 15 year spans.
> like how they’re obsessed about anti-black racism, but rarely worry about anti-Roma racism which is much more prevalent there
It's precisely because they don't like the Roma that they don't "worry" about other Europeans also disliking the Roma.
> to a new regime of unromantically optimizing for a compatible partner no matter how long it takes
There's a lower percentage being partnered at all, and below-replacement fertility rates so there aren't kids to stick it out for.
> So do we want affirmative action for the young? Why is this better than other forms of affirmative action?
It's recognizing that certain kinds of institutions (non-profits/government) don't act as efficiently as others (profit-maximizing corporations).
> It doesn’t seem like a mystery why institutions would hire older leaders: they have more experience. Probably in the past this was kept in check by the tendency of old people to die (or forcibly retire due to poor health) at a young age, plus a shortage of old people since each generation was larger than the last.
Joe Biden wasn't benefiting from his great amount of experience. He had diminished capacity, which others around him were trying to hide. The same thing is happening with Trump now, and in the Senate.
> Why is this a more natural way to think of things than white people being evil and selfish by not voluntarily underemploying themselves so black people can get more of the good jobs?
Younger white people don't have the diminished capacity of elderly Boomers.
> I’m not sure who invented it. I just think this seems like a good time to stop.
Who has ever claimed any other generation invented it?
> The most important thing I got from these interactions was learning about the proposal to keep property taxes high, but delay them until death/sale of property. This relieves some of my tension around Prop 13 and related issues.
That's basically supporting high inheritance tax (except inheritance tax is better as it affects other forms of inheritance).
This is something that I see as obviously good, but has very poor support in most places on earth. In the same way that Scott here talks about how his grandparents built their homes and should be allowed to live there, both such parents and their children see it as fair that homes, businesses and other wealth built by the parents will pass to the children.
Which should be taxed in exactly same way, and is opposed in exactly same way (or stronger).
Technicalities obviously matter in tax policy for this exact reason.
I guess therefore the suggested property tax is a good realistic proposition as it has higher chances of passing than some taxes that are more general.
My boomer parents were great parents to me - I can only muster the most minor of complaints. But they're really not great grandparents. They moved to the sunbelt once I had kids myself. I recently brought my kids to visit them there for the first time this year, and once I arrived, they let me know that they'd arranged an Airbnb for us to stay in.
On the other hand, my wife's boomer parents were not very good to her when she was growing up. But they have turned into wonderful, helpful, doting grandparents.
My synthesis is: as a millennial, it's annoying that the Boomers in my life lectured me about how things were in their day, but I'm too much of an individualist to paint the whole generation with a broad brush. We should praise individual Boomers when they behave well and condemn them when they behave badly.
The biggest issue with boomers being uniquely powerful and influential for a long time is just that they're inevitably going to overcorrect in whatever direction they're biased in. For example, social security is a tradeoff between spending public money and making sure old people don't starve. If when boomers were young the problem was old people starving, they'd be pro more social security, and (because of inertia) keep being pro social security even when the tradeoff starts getting bad. This isn't an issue of boomers being motivated by selfishness: even a boomer who doesn't himself benefit from social security is going to be biased in its favor, because that bias was reasonable when he was young and forming his opinions about it.
(Similar for e.g. nuclear power, housing policy or sexual mores).
So it's mostly just a special case of the principle that you don't want any one group/bias to have too much power, because of the tendency to overcorrect. If zoomers got the kind of power boomers have now we'd see similar (or worse) issues overall, but the specific complaints would be pretty different.
(I wrote something on this principle a few months ago here
"Ethiopia was an economic basket case in the early 80s. Thanks to warfare, their economy is again doing poorly. But in between, they had a miraculous recovery."
That it's going so poorly for them now suggests that the recovery was not too miraculous and that past performance is no guarantee of future success. I for one do not wish to try that here.
I think the reason why people say the old should give up resources for the young, rather than vice versa, is because the current old were able to start accumulating resources in their youth, as this was the norm in their time. The norm then shifted to less accumulation in youth and more accumulation later on, and so they are now able to continue accumulating resources throughout their entire lifespan, which disproportionately advantages them and disadvantages everyone else, who has to wait until they die but won't live longer in compensation. So the Boomers are getting a longer span of accumulative years than anyone else, therefore ending up more powerful and richer, and this causes resentment. They lived through a norm shift about accumulation and therefore reaped the benefits of both sides with the drawbacks of neither, in contrast to all other generations.
It also doesn't help that the common attitude among the Boomer generation and those near to it in age is that their children, grandchildren, etc. should accumulate resources themselves as the Boomers did, and that everything the Boomers have acquired rightly belongs to them and they have no responsibility to pass it down, so we see a lot of spending on luxurious retirements, elder care that extends lifespans far beyond what makes sense or is even good for the person in question (though I would argue this is more a combination of the social norm that it is noble to do everything possible to extend your lifespan and almost unthinkable not to, and regulations that make assisted suicide difficult and illegal and require high personal agency to either not enter the healthcare system or leave it once you have entered it, and not really the Boomers' fault), etc.- that is, forms of spending that concentrate wealth at the very top of society and leave younger generations with both little to no inheritance and (because of the accumulation pattern shift) much less of an avenue to accumulate wealth themselves.
Further, I think a lot of the frustration is that the pattern of accumulating wealth when old is dysfunctional compared to the pattern of accumulating wealth when young, because it means that people have to put off marriage, family, stability, and many things that are enjoyable in life until they are old enough that having or enjoying these things becomes much more difficult.
These things are not necessarily directly the fault of the Boomers, nor is it the Boomers' fault that even were things more fair, the Boomers would be better off for having been born into the post-WW2 boom and golden age, but put together they produce for a lot of people the impression and practical effects of selfishness and not caring about the welfare of their children and grandchildren.
What's the average lifespan of the boomer compared to previous generations? Is this intergenerational conflict just a natural response to boomers being the first generation with long lifespans and relative good health and functioning well into those long lifespans?
This seems obvious and intuitively correct to me. However, I'm Canadian and observing our roll out of 'MAID' (Medical Assistance in Dying) has given me a massive dose of pause on that intuition.
In Ireland under the British. Quite radical reform that - changing the nature of land ownership from the 3% to 97%. From wiki “in 1870 3% of Irish farmers owned their own land while 97% were tenants. By 1929, this ratio had been reversed with 97.4% of farmers holding their farms in freehold.”
What was once a revolutionary class of landless peasants became the backbone of one of the most conservative democracies in Europe.
I live in the ""peoples Republic of Massachusetts." My towns residential tax rate is just over 1% and the town adjusts property values annually - based in part on neighborhood sales. The taxes I pay are consistent with how Zillow evaluates my house (Zestimate).
Are the long time housing owners that primarily profit from prop 13 usually living in neighbourhoods that contain a lot of the same people or are they more interwoven in the landscape? If it is the former you might should handle any infrastructure improvements and repair priorities based on how much that area pays in property taxes. Afterall arent they collected for that? Meaning if the neighbourhood only pays 1/6th of the usual property taxes they have to wait longer for repairs and improvements in a corresponding fashion - a bit of mercy such that they dont fall in utter disrepair. Or is this already the case? I dont know how much money gets shufted around to compensate for this if it is an issue
This is more a reference to the economic post that the Boomers aren't actually that different from previous generations in terms of income. Would be interested to see if anyone has studied pricing model evolution across the generations. I'm not sure the vibe economy debate is looking at things correctly... have companies over time perfected the art of "how much you got" vs sustainable margins? For example, is cell phone plan pricing based on what they think they average household can reasonably be expected to scrape together or priced based covering cost + profit? If the former, was this true in the 1950's? I think the concern isn't income, it's that it takes over 100% of your income to get the basics needed in modern life.
It seems that you correctly identified much of the perceived/real injustice as being caused by the boomers just happening to be the right age as longevity increased. Given that most of us here are highly hopeful of an imminent longevity explosion, there's probably lessons learned about the need to structure institutions such that being slightly older doesn't create near-permanent first-mover power imbalance that will otherwise come from being the first immortal generation.
Most obvious would be finally getting around to term limits for public office... but it wouldn't surprise me if there's agitation to extend that to private offices like CEOs as well. Land ownership that's never diluted by multiple inheritances will start feeling unfair, much like primogeniture at first increased the power of aristocracy as it concentrated power... until that concentrated power eventually birthed liberalism and democratic reforms that ended the aristocracy; we may need to find a (hopefully in the spirit of liberalism) solution. Although some would probably say a land tax would fix this :D
Regarding space colonization, I think that sadly that boat had sailed, regardless of whether or not AI improves dramatically -- unless of course it improves all the way to the science-fictional Singularity, in which case you'd have Von Neumann probes made out of computronium powered by nano-pixies or whatever so all bets are off.
But assuming we stick to the laws of physics, it looks to me like colonizing even the Solar System -- indeed, even one planet such as e.g. Mars -- would take the resources of the entire planet Earth. Granted, the actual rockets and supply caches and genetic engineering and whatnot will be cheaper in absolute terms, but it will still take the entire planet to sustain the effort (similarly to how it takes the resources of an entire state or even a small country to keep a modern chip fab working, even though the fab itself employs mere thousands of workers at most).
But at present no organization exists that would be willing and able to afford such expenditures, and I see none developing in the near to medium future. China is perhaps the closest candidate, but they've got their own problems. Once they finally take over the West (assuming they manage to pull this off), they will have no more targets for their one-upmanship and thus no need to launch deep-space missions; and until then, there are cheaper ways for them to signal their superiority.
AI is not going to help much, because you can't just think and/or wish your way to Mars. The AI can come up with a brilliant plan for space colonization, guaranteed to work and even yield profits in the next 50 years... And this plan will sit on the shelf somewhere, while the people in charge ask for more attractive plans such as "increase our corporate profits another 5% next year" or "dominate Canada already" or whatever. And if the AI goes rogue and starts building rockets instead of maximizing shareholder value, then it will be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch, like any other malfunctioning machine.
> But assuming we stick to the laws of physics, it looks to me like colonizing even the Solar System -- indeed, even one planet such as e.g. Mars -- would take the resources of the entire planet Earth.
A consistent and predictable budget of $100 B per year would be more than enough to colonize Mars, unless you have some extreme definition of colonization.
I guess that perhaps I do; when I say "colonize", I don't mean just "establish a small research outpost a la the ISS". Rather, I mean a sizeable colony, housing at least as many people as a small town (so, around 100,000). That is enough to produce something useful (including the product of "more people"), and thus to make the colony economically viable if not entirely self-sustaining.
And when I say "people" I do mean "humans", and physical ones at that. A fully automated robotic or teleoperated factory that stripmines Mars for resources (or whatever) would not count as a "colony" in my book.
P.S. I should also point out that I don't know of any organization presently operating on Earth that is ready, willing, and able to commit even $100B/year to Mars colonization, for decades if not for longer. Of course the gross incomes of governments and mega-corporations dwarf this expenditure, but there's a difference between raw income, and money one can afford to spend on long-term projects that involve high risk and no immediate reward.
That someone was me ! And I stand by my statement. As I'd said in my comment above, even assuming that Mars colonization would only cost $100B/year (for however many years), no organization on Earth can currently afford it. As I'd also said, having a $200B budget does *not* mean that you can afford to spend half of it on speculative projects like colonizing Mars.
Of course, if we wanted to colonize Mars in a reasonable amount of time (e.g. a few decades), it would take a lot more than $100B/year, but that's another story...
At $100B we are talking at least net 100 Starship launches per year. This is a massive amount of stuff. The first year of such a program, by itself, would get more payload to the surface of Mars than all the payload SpaceX has launched into LEO, to date. You can even save up your pennies and roll some nuclear reactors into your initial launches.
The ISS needs constant energy to not burn up in orbit. It's a really bad model for anything in space. Launch 100T of material to the ISS, wait 20 years, and it will all be gone. Launch 100T of material onto the surface of Mars, wait 20 years, and more-or-less it will all still be there.
Every molecule of matter on the ISS has to be launched from Earth. Mars is full of molecules. As the joke goes, people can be made there using local resources and unskilled labor.
There are valid questions about 3/8 g and long-term radiation, but those wouldn't matter even if it was the entire planet Earth behind it.
> if not entirely self-sustaining
Even the United States of America isn't an autarky. Fortunately, we're talking about $100B a year, which is easily enough to keep launching whatever
advanced computer chips and precision scientific instruments Mars needs, but the planet has the resources needed to produce plastic and glass and steel and concrete.
This program keeps 100 people alive for 10 years as a bunch of things are tested out and we keep on dumping in habs and quonsets and digging machinery and food and farm equipment and solar panel and computers and chemical reactors. It supports 1000 in the next decade, some of them produced locally, and 10,000 by the end of the third. Growth will slow for a while here, because we are past the point where a wave of immigrants could double your population, and we fall to the task of exponential growth from the locals. It's possible that after 50 years we'd hit your 100K number, but maybe 60 or 70 years.
SpaceX Starships can barely get to low Earth orbit. They cannot get to Mars. And the "stuff" they can get to LEO is all robotic, with no life support and much higher acceleration tolerance than live humans. Realistically, getting even a handful of humans to Mars would require at least a year in transit, which in turn necessitates seeding supply caches along the way. Once the first handful of humans get to Mars, they will require continuous additional deliveries of supplies (notably air and water) just to survive -- and that's assuming that everything goes swimmingly with no complications. Yes, Mars has lots of "molecules", but these molecules are presently being used to form rocks. There's a lot you can do with rocks, but not enough to sustain a colony.
Note that SpaceX has a budget of about $15B, and they cannot afford to spend any of it on Mars, lest they go out of business pretty much immediately. NASA has a budget of about $25B, and since they are not expected to make any revenue, they are capable of launching relatively small robotic probes to Mars about once a decade. They are no longer capable of launching live humans to the Moon. They are barely capable of launching humans to the ISS (with outside help). China's space program has a comparable budget, and while they talk a big game about Moon colonies etc., they haven't done much on that front thus far.
At present, even your relatively modest plan of keeping 100 people alive on Mars for 10 years is simply unachievable, as no country nor corporation on Earth is capable of launching even a single human to Mars. As if that wasn't bad enough, your plan calls for sustained expenditures of $100B for *several decades*. No organization on Earth -- not even China ! -- is capable of making that kind of commitment.
You also bring up a good point:
> There are valid questions about 3/8 g and long-term radiation...
Thus far I've been focusing on budgetary constraints, but low gravity and high radiation are physical constraints that cannot be solved merely by flipping an org chart. I don't see how you can handwave it away by simply stating that it "doesn't matter". You can't solve challenges by ignoring them. Space is unforgiving.
> Realistically, getting even a handful of humans to Mars would require at least a year in transit, which in turn necessitates seeding supply caches along the way.
WTF.
This isn't a thing.
You don't know what you're talking about.
> they will require continuous additional deliveries of supplies (notably air and water) just to survive
Oxygen can be manufactured locally using solar power.
This is really really trivial knowledge. Like if you audited a college seminar about living on Mars they would cover this on the very first day, and probably in less than 10 minutes. High-school chemistry is sufficient to explain it. They might even have a high-school student demonstrate it.
It has already been done. Not just on Earth, but on Mars.
Sorry-not-sorry. But you truly don't know what you're talking about. Like, the absolute most basic parts.
> your plan calls for sustained expenditures of $100B for *several decades*. No organization on Earth -- not even China ! -- is capable of making that kind of commitment.
Hey.
Hey.
Listen.
You keep on trying to say I'm claiming that people would do this.
But it was never my claim that people *would* spend $100B/year to fund a colony.
It was my claim that a $100B budget is **WAY LESS** than the "total resources of earth."
It is indeed a fuckton of money. One reason I chose the number was because it was, both, a fuckton of money, **AND** a few orders of magnitude below the resources of the entire planet earth.
> Oxygen can be manufactured locally using solar power.
From what ? Water ? Which comes from where ? Or regolith, maybe ? How much solar power will you need, and where are you getting it, on a planet significantly farther away from the Sun ?
> It was my claim that a $100B budget is **WAY LESS** than the "total resources of earth."
Agreed, and I addressed this point explicitly in my original comment. Once again, imagine a modern chip fab. It employs about 100K people, with the annual budget of about $10B. But the actual cost and manpower needed to operate the fab is significantly larger. All those 100K workers need a place to live. They need food to eat, and air to breathe (fortunately air is free on Earth, for now). All the trucks bringing in supplies need fuel, and roads, and porta-potties, etc. etc. On Earth, we take all of this infrastructure for granted; none of it exists on Mars.
Also, not to put too fine of a point on it, but you kind of pulled that $100B figure out of your, ah, imagination. $100B is only about 4x larger than NASA's annual budget, and 6x (to be generous) larger than SpaceX. But Mars is much, much, much farther away than LEO -- about 180K times farther away -- and that's not even counting the fact that we want to ship humans, not machinery.
Having the theoretical knowledge is one thing, having the actual on the ground resources to do it is another.
Theoretically, if I dumped your college students into the middle of the Borneo jungle with a Swiss army knife, they would be able to get, from a standing start, from 'construct someplace to live' to 'get a solar plant up and running' to manufacture the glass, plastics and so on that you so blithely hand wave the Martian colony could do.
The Martian colony starts off with the advantage that we could send all the parts to construct factories to them over time, but that still means going from "arrived here with nothing but the clothes on my back, and some Quonset huts" to "now we have the cement factory up and running" in a relatively short period of time.
Theory is great, right until it runs up against "damn, the sandstorm wiped out all our housing and we died" or "we got sick in the jungle and died" or "we ran out of food and starved to death".
Scott of the Antarctic had it all worked out in theory, but it didn't work out in practice. And Mars is a hell of a lot more unreachable than the Antarctic.
"Every molecule of matter on the ISS has to be launched from Earth. Mars is full of molecules. As the joke goes, people can be made there using local resources and unskilled labor."
People are imagining the Martian colony will have the same living conditions as a large city on Earth, complete with maternity hospitals.
No. Any early Martian colony is going to be like living in the wilderness of North America or in the newly discovered by Europeans parts of Africa. You're on your own in a hut with no midwives or the likes. Except even on Earth in those conditions, you're not also having to deal with "the atmosphere is unbreathable, the temperatures are extreme, there's high radiation, and the merest leak in our habitat is going to be fatal".
You won't make very many babies if the mothers are all dying in childbirth.
We think because this is a SF idea, it will be the shiny SF TV show version of what living there is like. Think rather of going back to "Little House on the Prairie" novels for early colonisation/settlement conditions.
OK, sorry, I leave the group for a couple days (to practice launching spacecraft and to resolve production issues with spacecraft parts), and I find that Edward Scizorhands has had to tackle all this on his own. So, kudos to ES for that, but to add a few points:
Based on some back-of-the-envelope calculations I did a few years ago, establishing a no-frills but economically self-sufficient civilization of 10,000 people at a suitable location in Near-Earth Space should be possible for about $400 billion spent over twenty years or $600 billion over ten years. That could be the surface of Mars, Luna, Phobos, Deimos, a suitable asteroid, or in high Earth orbit; one of the early steps would be spamming the area with probes to figure out which gets the colony and which just get mining/logistics outposts.
This assumes billionaire money spent by entrepreneurial corporations like SpaceX; there will be a substantial multiplier if it's government money spent by traditional government contractors. It also assumes SpaceX gets Starship working at ~$20 million per launch, or the equivalent in smaller chunks from other contenders. If you want 100,000 people instead of 10,000, it will cost more but not ten times more because a lot of the cost is technology and infrastructure development.
SpaceX's Starship can barely get to LEO *without refueling*. It is specifically designed to be refueled in LEO, by other Starships, and a refueled Starship in LEO does have the performance to take ~100 tons of payload to Mars. It's not the most efficient way to do the job, and I'd rather use Starship itself as just a LEO ferry, but it is designed to go to Mars itself and that design is credible. Starship does not presently have a life-support system, but SpaceX has built life support systems for Dragon and others are working on systems better suited for long-duration missions.
It doesn't take a year to get to Mars. It basically *can't* take a year unless you're being really perverse about it. The easiest, minimum-energy trajectories to Mars take 6-9 months depending on which launch window you use, and we can get that down to 4 months if you're willing to accept reduced payload. Note that the effective mass of one person in a modest habitat with long-duration life support and 9 months of supplies is ~3.5 tons. We don't need "supply caches" along the way, and as Edward has already explained, the concept is astrodynamically nonsensical.
Mars has polar ice caps with more water ice than Greenland, and has an unknown but substantial permafrost layer at lower latitudes. There is plenty of water. Luna has only a few large lakes' worth, but still enough for a colony. Deimos and Phobos are unknown, asteroids are varied but some are quite water-rich. And turning Martian permafrost + atmosphere into breathable air, potable water, high-grade rocket fuel, and a decent assortment of plastics, is basic chemical engineering that we've been doing on an industrial scale for a century or more.
Low gravity is something you can probably mitigate by living on anything resembling a planet and doing some extra exercise, and definitely something you can mitigate by spinning your habitat. High radiation can be effectively mitigated by bulldozing a few meters of dirt over your habitat.
Anything more I should talk about?
It's a big project. Almost certainly too big for Elon Musk alone. But Musk, and Bezos, and a couple dozen smaller players, and latecomers joining the bandwagon when it begins to roll might well be enough. And we do know how to do this. We can't order all the specific hardware we'd need from a catalog tomorrow, but only in the sense that we couldn't order a Saturn V in 1961. We have the technology, and we have the resources, and we might have the will.
When we get a lunar base going (if we get a lunar base going), I'll be a lot more sanguine about Martian colonies. If we can't even manage getting to the Moon and establishing something there, with a regular schedule of deliveries to the Moon and rockets taking off from there for the return journey to Earth, then we can't manage something on Mars.
Fortunately, sensible proposals for settling Mars (or anyplace else) generally have a moon base fairly early in the plan, to provide the rocket fuel you'll need to go anywhere else. So we should have the moonbase experience before we commit to Mars in a big way.
Not if we let Elon Musk run the whole show, but as noted he can't afford that. And AFIK he's the only major player with a "launch everything from Earth in Ginormous Rocket Ships" fetish. Still, if we're in a tearing hurry, we might let him send a few Starships to Mars to set up the advance camp. I won't be volunteering for that part.
We don't have the lunar bases (though allegedly the new Artemis mission will start this). We're certainly a good way away from having Martian colonies. To settle Mars, this will take, basically, throwing money down a well that you will never get back, as we would need to keep sending people, matériel, and support on a one-way trip until any colony is established, successful, and people can survive.
Getting the colonists to the point of "now we can send rocket ships back to Earth so it's a two-way trip" will be the big obstacle after that. Even for things like "we're mining Mars and here are the useful minerals we can sell to Earth to pay for our keep", well - how are they going to build a launch facility given that they're still on the level of "get a roof over our heads that won't fall down"?
The brave new "AI will help us colonise the light cone" fantasy is just that. It's SF dreams still being dreamed. The hope and hype of the 60s was "hey, we got to the Moon, now surely the lunar bases and space exploration can't be far behind! we've done the hard part!"
Well, our moon bases didn't happen. The space shuttle seems to have been a dead end. We're only now talking about going back to the moon. Now that we have people in space (e.g. on the space station), we're discovering the problems and difficulties associated with that. It won't even be like being on a ship going to Australia in the 18th century where that really was pretty much one-way and never return, because space is not the same thing as being on Earth in an environment we evolved in and that won't kill us just by being in it.
Same with all the "whee, we can colonise the planets and then move on to other star systems and be like all the great stuff in the SF novels!" hopes and dreams here about AI and the Singularity.
> The brave new "AI will help us colonise the light cone" fantasy is just that
I know you love to find people discussing technical topics, jump in the middle, and then laugh at them for being oh-so-dumb with their technical degrees while you oh-shucks, I'm-just-a-simple-Irish-girl, even-I-can-see-the-flaws takes.
But I made no comments whatsoever about AI or colonizing the light cone.
You should at least find people making those comments to make your non-sequitur responses to.
Yes, exactly. Space colonization is the kind of project that would consume tremendous amounts of resources for absolutely zero short-to-medium term gain. There's nothing useful on the Moon or on Mars that anyone on Earth would want; sure, there are some minerals, but you can get them cheaper on Earth. In the long term, colonizing other planets would yield tremendous benefits -- of having an entirely new *world* to live on ! -- but I don't think humanity is capable of such long-term endeavours. It's much more likely that we'll remain a one-planet species until we finally destroy ourselves.
Yeah. Even with magic AI, physical reality remains. Radiation, vacuum, human limitations, speed of light, it takes time to get from A to B and things like the communications gap between Earth and whatever spaceship we send out will all still remain.
But shucks, what do I know, I'm only old enough to remember the Moon landing and all the optimism about "now space colonisation!" and how that never happened in the fifty-plus years of my life between then and now. Edward Scizorhands has pwned me good, right?
No, Edward. I'm not technically educated. I just lived the time to see all the shiny optimism having the chrome wear off and how it never happened like expected. That's why I don't have shiny optimism about "but we won't even need fifty years, if AI goes ZOOM! in the next five years, the Fairy Godmother will solve all those pesky reality problems for us and magic pixie dust will get us to Mars and mushrooming colonies there, just like we saw the settled, industrial Mars on Babylon 5!"
“People have this sense that Boomers are being evil and selfish by not retiring so that young people can get more of the good jobs. Why is this a more natural way to think of things than white people being evil and selfish by not voluntarily underemploying themselves so black people can get more of the good jobs?”
But what if they are keeping jobs and staying in power when they don’t actually need to financially? I think that’s the argument about congress and university presidents. These people can retire. They have plenty to live on. But their sense of worth or their greed keeps them from doing so and holds back younger people from progressing.
Just to be clear, I don’t blame Boomers. I agree with Scott’s original article. But it felt like a hole in his response I quoted.
You can blame voters for Congress composition kind of. But mostly the people that fund their campaigns I think. I don’t really feel like I have a lot of options when I vote that would turn over Congress. Not sure the pool of people to blame for uni presidents is a big enough one for me to say much on.
Thing is, if you're a university president (say) and you hit seventy years of age. Your physical health is probably still pretty good (yes, you're slowing down, less active, all the rest of it, but you're in much better shape than a fifty year old in 1930) and you feel that you are still well able to do the job.
In fact, you've got all this experience, these connections, this knowledge. You're not losing your mental faculties (yet). Why quit just on an arbitrary date on the calendar? You can still do the job tomorrow that you were doing yesterday. You have another, say, ten years of life (at a minimum). You can surely be capable for another five years.
"Quit because dead men's shoes isn't working fast enough for the fifty-five year old guys coming up behind you" isn't a convincing message.
Besides, we're already complaining about pensions and social security for retirees who are living longer, would pushing out someone who can expect to claim a hefty pension really be a better swap than keeping them working in the job?
Yeah absolutely. I could see myself in that same situation. I’m 51 now and could see not wanting to leave a job you love and stimulates you and you feel you still have a lot to contribute. But if there’s truly an argument to be made about not doing that I’d be open to it.
Do many states have the property tax locked in at time of purchase? I live in PA, and that seems crazy to me. I’ve owned my home since 1993 and have been reassessed every 10 years. I hate it, and I can contest or negotiate the value, but it seems like a fact of life. Maybe the boomer-hatred on housing is a CA-specific thing?
"I’d never heard anyone argue the opposite - that the European discourse is infecting Americans with ideas that don’t apply to our context "
Just as an aside I'd like to point out that this is also the case with immigration and culture. The entire notion of "failure to assimilate" as a widespread social problem is rhetorically borrowed wholesale from the Europeans.
I'm sympathetic to the Boomers that want to keep their houses. Apart from all the reasons mentioned in the article, people gotta live somewhere, and have a place to call their own. I think it's a fundamental value that no one is truly free without their own land, and the ability to say "git off mah land" to a hostile intruder, ideally thru clenched teeth while pointing a firearm at them.
To this end, the idea of deferring property taxes until death is very intriguing. I also want to ban REITs and heavily tax people's houses after the second house.
‘Despite some very intriguing information that it contains and some helpful information as it pertains to the history of Calabar, the Efiks and some of their institutions like the Ekpe, the book has minor and major faults. In the book, there are typos, for instance, he spells efik as ekif in some paragraphs. Additionally, he keeps flirting with the idea that after the two princes returned to Calabar, "evidence suggests, resumed their business of slave trading." However, the so-called evidence is not presented in the body of the book, except I missed or maybe it is presented in the notes section I need to thoroughly read through. Furthermore, it would be surprising if the evidence Sparks has in mind is the question Little Ephraim asked Charles Wesley as it pertains to how he is going to pay back Thomas Jones, since that is surely not some positive evidence for the claim that they "resumed their business of slave trading."‘
> I’m saying there’s no way my retired and slightly-demented grandfather-in-law could afford normal property taxes on his house he bought in what was basically farmland in 1970 but which has now grown into a desirable California college town.
The way property taxes work in New Jersey, and I assume in most other places, is that the tax rate is computed by dividing the desired revenue by the tax base. If a township performs a reassessment and determines that property values have doubled, the tax rate is automatically cut in half in order to keep the tax revenue the same.
So if your grandfather in law couldn’t afford normal property taxes, it wasn’t due to rising property values per se; there would have to be some other mechanism at work. I’m not questioning whether such a mechanism exists, just saying I don’t know what it is. Perhaps if you live in the middle of nowhere your municipal government doesn’t do much of anything, but when it sees the opportunity to become a nice college town, it starts providing, and raising taxes to pay for, the municipal services that a nice college town typically provides.
California is one of the oddball jurisdictions where the rate is fixed rather than the target revenue. Before Prop 13, if property values doubled, then the dollars you own in property taxes doubled unless the city/county/state actively cut the tax rate. Sometime they did, but in the years leading up to Prop 13 they mostly collected and spent the extra money instead of cutting the rate.
Key point: That Prop 13 applies to primary residences is suboptimal, but not exceptional. Florida has a similar policy, and the strategy of deferring taxation until death is applied in Texas if I’m not mistaken. The reason every right minded person hates Prop 13 is that it applies to commercial and rental properties as well. For this there is truly no justification, especially since property sales can be structured to avoid resetting tax rates. This is the version that absolutely must be abolished for California to thrive.
Anecdote: a boomer friend of my dad was complaining about his directionless kid who just wants to play in bands and work at Trader Joe’s instead of finding a career. This is the same person who tells every single person he ever meets about how cool his high school band was, and how big of a deal they were. I asked him if he saw the connection. He’d never considered it. I think about this often.
Boomer generation's lack of ambition and risk-aversion stifled innovation and destroyed the promise of nuclear energy; they took the flying car away from us and gave us global warming. And they did not start a nuclear war*. The smartest people on earth (von Neumann, Einstein, Feynman) expected eminent nuclear war and it didn't happen. I do not know how much in social security benefits this is worth. But the fact is that humanity was on a default trajectory to have thermonuclear ww3 and they skirted it. There is nothing I want more than for my kids to be able to say something like that about my generation.
* with a small caveat that two of them still might.
[“Well, their actions were just the inevitable product of the social/cultural/economic stresses they were under”. Even if this is true, it’s probably true of everyone, including slaveowners and Nazis. It doesn’t seem entirely correct either to blame them or to not blame them under these circumstances...]
Maybe the answer is to bite the bullet and radically forgive all of the worst people in history? Who knows, maybe if we get in the habit of forgiving the dead, we can eventually learn not to hate and kill the living.
"Suppose RH is right (I haven’t checked), and that Social Security would be sustainable with lots of immigration."
This is almost certainly false for immigration from areas with higher-than-replacement birthrates. The Danish study back in 2018 showed that immigrants from the MENAPT countries were a net financial cost (as were their children) due to high welfare costs.
Prop 13 caps the property tax increase to 2% per year. Average inflation is 2.6% so the real tax rate actually goes down, even as property values skyrocket!
Straight up repealing Prop 13 would be a huge shock to the system. Many would have 10x higher taxes. This can't happen.
But changing it to cap at "inflation + 2%" should be perfectly doable. This would shrink the problem each year instead of growing it, and no one would get a sudden equivalent of an eviction notice from the property taxman.
Is it weird that the idea of a elderly couple living alone in a large house strikes me as weird?
Anecdote: My parents were born in 42(father) and 48(mother), my siblings in 68(older brother), and 72(sister) and myself in 86... I understand this makes my father a young silent generation member, my mother an old boomer, my brother a young boomer, Joneser, or old gen Xer depending on where you put the fuzzy boundaries and whether you consider Generation Jones distinct from Boomers, my sister a mid to old Gen Xer and myself a very young Xer or an old millenial...
I never knew my grandparents, my paternal grandparents dying well before I was born, my maternal grandmother dying while my mom was pregnant with me and my maternal grandfather dying when I was around 2.
I've lived most of my life in a 3 generation household and at one point, 4 generations, and if not for death leaving me as the eldest of my non-estranged family, I'd probably still be living in a 4 generation household and find the fact I currently live with only one other family member unsettling when I think about it too much even though this has been the case for nearly 9 years.
My mother took care of her parents in their twilight years, my sister never really moved out, my brother did move out, though my parents would have never begrudged him coming home and I'm sure my mother would have preferred having all of her children at home. My sister had two children, born in 92 and 94, and my parents practically raised their grandchildren as none of my sister's marriges ever worked out and work never really left her with the energy to be an attentive mother. My brother never saw any great success and died in a car crash in 2002, a lost my mother never really recovered from... she spent the last few years of her life wheelchair bound, but was fortunate enough to be mostly there until the end(she had some memory issues attributed to a series of strokes, but could do mental arithmetic faster than I could type things into a calculator) and even helped prepare supper for the family the night before the heart attack that took her in 08 or 09... my father welcomed his first, and so far only, great grand child in 2013, and even when my nibling was being absolutely insufferable, my father wouldn't kick the nibling out of the house for the sake of the great grandchild. My parents never asked me, my siblings, or my niblings for rent as adults and we all had a live in significant other at one point or another... lost my sister to drunk driving in 2014, and lost my father in 2017... While my father was alive, all of his descendants enjoyed a fairly comfortable lifestyle under his roof and he never asked for anything in return beyond a basic level of respect. Because of his support, I was able to complete Associates and Bachelor's degrees without going into massive debt or have to work full time on top of going to class, and for the parts of my college years spent at home, he never took issue with driving me to and from campus since I've never been able to drive due to visual impairment(and went fully blind around 2012)... Sadly, his death came just months after graduation from a Bachelor's program and in the process of me and his other survivors adapting to no longer having the safety net he provided, I went from debt free to 5 digit debt... and just as things where stablizing and it seemed like division of service for the blind was making progress in helping me find employment, the pandemic hit... today, I, one of my niblings, and a friend we met through the niblign's ex-spouse are barely making ends meet on my SSDI and their food service wages living in a in a trailer park and I'm pretty much homebound becasue there's no pedestrian access, no mass transit, the local para-transit is borderline useless, and the only days of the week my housemates could possibly give me a ride anywhere are Sunday(when a lot of places are closed) and Monday(also their only day to run errands to places closed on Sunday that can't be done quickly before their evening shifts at the closest thing this small town has to fine dining... and its a struggle just to stand still on the debt I've been carrying since my father's death... and even if I were debt free, I couldn't afford to move somewhere with better prospects even if my housemates where willing to come with(even if we could find somewhere local with affordable rent and better amendities, we couldn't afford any of the extra charges beyond the first month's rent to move into a better place.
So yeah, at least in my case, I had a good life thanks to parents born a few years either side of when the Baby Boom began and have been struggling since they died. Oh, and my father was fully independant up to the very end(He went to his 3 times a week cardiac rehab Monday morning, went to the bingo game he help run Monday night, left Bingo early to go to the ER, was admitted, died in hospital Thursday, not as sudden as my Mother dying of a heart attack on the way to a regular doctor's appointment, but by all appearances, he was about as functional as a 75 year old with his health issues could be.
I don’t have strong feelings about the boomer theory of everything but I have very strong feelings about the Housing Theory of Everything and I blame the boomers for that 110%.
My grandparents bought their house in SoCal in 1965 and it cost about 3x the median income. My parents bought their house in 1996 for about 5x the median income. Their home today is worth about 10x the median income. This could be at least partially mitigated through building more housing. Guess who opposes that? Oh I’m sorry, they don’t oppose building more housing. Just building more housing *here.* It’s okay to build more housing “over there.” Where “over there” is and why the people over there wouldn’t also oppose housing is just silently ignored.
Whether it results in delayed home purchasing/delayed family formation, living in lower quality housing, or the financial strain of paying an outsized amount of one’s income in housing costs, this lack of construction has many negative consequences on non-Boomers. This is quite aside from them benefiting from things like Prop 13. That the single most expensive thing in the average person’s life has gotten 3x more expensive relative to income in 70 years is a big problem. That it also comes alongside massive increases in things like education and healthcare costs just makes it even worse.
| Much of anti-Boomerism seems to be about how Boomers are selfish because they’re taking up resources, and those resources could go to young people instead. But every group is taking up resources that could go to other groups! This only justifies anti-Boomerism if you start with the assumption that old people are less worthy of having good things than young people, and so if you can’t redistribute old people’s resources to young people, then this is prima facie unfair. |
I will make the explicit argument that it is better for society to redistribute old people's resources to young people.
1) Young people (especially those in their 20s) have less financial resources to start off with, having not had the chance to work much and accumulate wealth. Even if they've started saving and investing compound interest is unlikely to have had enough time to generate benefits. They are more likely to be in debt due to student loans. They usually only have access to entry-level jobs which are lower-paying.
2) At the same time, young people have the most dependents. If they start families, they have very young children who are wholly dependent on them. As their parents retire, they may also have to start supporting their parents in both financial and non-financial ways. In contrast, old people generally have no dependents as their children are grown.
3) The young are more likely to use their financial resources in productive ways, like making investments and raising children, and are also more likely to be engaging in economically productive activities. They also have the highest need to make major purchases like houses, cars, and household goods. In contrast, old people have generally made all their major life purchases. Their expenditure generally goes towards non-productive goods like tourism and healthcare (note that this is not the same as saying that healthcare is unimportant).
4) The goal of society should be to *help young people thrive*. We should want young people to establish independent households, have children, and be the least stressed about finances so that they can focus on starting out their life. Or put another way, society is great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. What we have today is a society where old people insist on sitting under the shade and refuse to plant trees for the next generation.
I accept that elder poverty is bad and should be addressed, but it can be addressed through welfare schemes that aim to alleviate all poverty. But to me this idea that we should be taxing the young to provide benefits specifically to the old is absurd. Taxation is good when it supports the provision of public goods. What is happening now is the robbing of the productive members of our society to support the unproductive.
My anti-boomerism also stems from my observation of city council meetings. Its always the boomers who show up to whine about retail stores in neighbourhoods or a 4-storey apartment next to their house that they bought in 1975 for $10,000. Their entitlement and selfishness directly make my life and that of the city worse.
> Federal deficit spending is the clearest possible example of trading off long-term prosperity for short-term gain, but the young are more likely to support it than the old.
Old people are more likely to oppose deficits in theory, but on the issue that matters most to the deficit - entitlements - they're overwhelmingly in favor of increased spending.
> > Another transformation that hurt people who weren’t able to plan for it nor did they have time to pivot: the boomers shipped their parents off to old people’s homes and defected from the compact where your parents take care of you when you’re young and you do the same when they get old and frail.
> So . . . since you’re so against this, you’re going to reverse it by taking great care of your own elderly parents, in your house, attending to their every need, right?
Scott's counterargument here is bad. Even if post-boomer generations don't fix the issue and restart the tradition of caring for their parents, this complaint (assuming the historical description is correct) is rightly pointing out somewhere that the Boomers were exceptionally bad.
Generations long ago: took care of their parents, and were cared for by their children
Generation right before the Boomers: took care of their parents, were abandoned by the Boomers
Boomers: raised by their parents who paid it forward, then abandoned them
Post-boomer generations: won't care for their parents and won't receive care from their children
So the long-ago generations and the post-boomer generations are neutral, giving and receiving the same amount of care. The Boomers were exceptionally bad, benefiting from the system while not paying it back. (However, if this is true, it's different from most anti-boomer complaints, which usually allege that Boomers screwed over younger generations, whereas the people most hurt here are *parents* of Boomers.)
Additionally, if you think that caring for your parents is less costly than being cared for by your children is beneficial, you can further blame the Boomers for shifting society to a worse equilibrium where no one cares for anyone. (I don't think this is correct due to the issue of increasing lifespans pointed out later, but the complaint makes sense if you believe this.)
>I don’t think it’s especially worth “blaming” the Boomers for this. If you look at the secular trend . . .
>…it long predates them, and they’re just reverting to the pre-Baby-Boom mean.
...is very load-bearing. For much of the rest of the post, I noticed that I kept thinking "except it is their fault if you think the inverted population pyramid is itself their fault".
"it to me it does seem to make sense that rising house values shouldn’t be able to make your current home unaffordable"
This is precisely the reason that I support some form of rent regulation/stabilization. It seems that YIMBY's and conservatives have decided that rent control is evil. But it is conservative in the same sense that you have explained - eliminating rent stabilization is a "recipe for constant forced upheaval, stress, and destruction of families/community".
Do you understand that policy choices often have both positive and negative effects and that an important component of political choice is determining the appropriate balance between those effects?
I am a bit suspicious of much of the class based analysis I am reading here. Many comments read as if the boomers as a class were agents of history. Individual boomers made individual decisions. What is the evidence that they did not optimize their lives according to the same utility maximizing criteria that were used before and after? Shouldn't we focus on the changing economic parameters instead of inventing an imaginary agent, the Boomer class?
> Even if this is true, it’s probably true of everyone, including slaveowners and Nazis.
It was true for them as well and it doesn't make sense to hate them but you can kill without hate or anger. And the hate or anger might stop one from finding the same faults in oneself etc...
> The man came to the Samurai and once again spit in his face.
The Samurai drew his blade, took position to strike, and the man threw up his arms in fear of being cut down and said, “Why today do you not turn around and leave like before?”
The Samurai replied, “Yesterday I was angry,” and cut the thief’s head off.
"Why is it bad that the Boomers won’t collapse the Ponzi? Because then we, the Millennials and Zoomers, will soon be in the unfair position of having paid into it, but not receiving benefits!"
Literally this, actually. Either we ease it now while Boomers are rich or it ends instantly in three decades when we run out of money.
It's been pointed out that there's a problem where when retired people can't pay their property taxes anymore due to their home value skyrocketing, they are forced to sell and leave their neighborhood. Why do they have to leave? Well, because surrounding homes have also massively increased in value. So whatever cushion they have left over from the home sale also wouldn't be able to cover the new house, even if they are downsizing.
In this situation, wouldn't the solution be to just ... rent? I mean, I know that a lot of Americans have a complex around owning a home, but it isn't actually necessary to own a home to live in a community. And the cushion that they built from selling their very expensive home should allow them to live in that neighborhood for a while.
Boomers were handed the greatest set of economic circumstances known to the human race and they still managed to screw it up for the rest of us. But was drives the rest of us insane is the fact they’re willfully blind to their schizophrenic reasoning.
They engineered a housing bubble through decades of inappropriately low Fed rates and increasingly onerous zoning laws….yet they emerged wealthier and now refuse to downsize like normal person…and for some godforsaken reason they’re reeeeeeally into the concept of HOAs.
They pushed a generation of CHILDREN into college while voting away state tax support for tuition AND federalized student loans THAT CAN’T BE DISCHARGED IF YOU HAVE A PULSE.
They pissed away $1T leveling the Middle East and voted for Medicare Part D specifically *without* granting CMS the ability to negotiate drug prices. And then they had a little Tea Party because “socialism is bad”.
They are either too stubborn or dumb to realize the governments and policies they’ve supported their entire adult lives are, in fact, socialist. Only instead of taxing themselves to pay for all this shit, they elected to run the government on a credit card.
Western Boomers, particularly those in the US, are the most entitled humans to have ever walked the earth.
As people pointed out, but apparently not here (I could not find it in the comments), the California tax system differs from most other states. Usually, the tax rate is set to create a specific amount of tax. If everyone's property rises in value, the tax rate decreases correspondingly, so taxes don't go up. California doesn't work that way; if everyone's property value goes up, everyone's taxes go up. That was why Proposition 13 became a thing.
(Of course, if an individual's property goes up but everyone else's doesn't, he's screwed under either system.)
If I were a boomer who left this economic mess to younger generations while enriching myself and staying silent—never advocating for saving or reform—I would be deeply ashamed.
Some actions are hindsight, yes, but much was obvious all along.
The difference is that half the people who knew better simply cashed in, and there was no incentive to change course.
Over the next 20 years, as boomers die out, they'll attempt to preserve their legacy, insisting "things aren't so bad," dismissing concerns, questioning whether young people's struggles are even real, claiming "things are better than they've ever been."
But increasingly, that legacy is one of cashing out and staying silent as this country enters deep, real decline—moving faster, becoming more obvious each year. It's shameful.
Change is coming because younger generations have experienced the harshest forces of capitalism in full force. Whether boomers decide to do anything bold and brave before they die of old age is their choice, but as a whole I have little respect or admiration for the generation. A generation that leaves things much worse for the young is a terrible generation.
"Much of anti-Boomerism seems to be about how Boomers are selfish because they’re taking up resources, and those resources could go to young people instead. But every group is taking up resources that could go to other groups!"
I think there's a pro-social reason that we should prefer resources directed to the young: they are the ones having and raising and educating kids. I think Marx almost had it right, the purpose of society is to reproduce itself. (Not create the conditions of it's reproduction, he was still dancing around child raising being real labor. Too much a bachelor.)
So we do want resources to flow towards making families easier and better for both kids and parents, in preference to those in supporting roles. (The childless and the empty nesters, basically. I say this as a childless lefty queer: A bunch of my long term friends are a few years into having families and it's scary from the outside how high the expectations are and how low the infrastructural/financial support is. More please.)
Oh, forget to mention: I think you might be able to correlate the relative wealth concentration into the older generation with the fall in fertility rates. Fit could be used to judge potential benefits to moving backwards?
Re: Boomers and divorce -- yes, it was the Boomers who led the way in getting divorced on a large scale, but I think the point was that being the *child* of a divorced couple is really rough. Gen X got hit hard by their *Boomer parents* divorcing.
I remember that the first move on this in my (late boomer) lifetime was “it’s bad when parents who hate each other stay married ‘for the sake of the children’. The children are miserable. The parents should just get divorced.” Maybe it turns out that the problem for the kids is that it’s awful when your parents hate each other, in either case.
But is it more awful than when hardly anybody has kids at all? Guess we're on track to find out...
Speaking to the selfishness part - how much of the psychology is one of social contagion? Were previous generations marriages bad a similar rates? Or does resentment (not in general, but on the margin) extend in part from differences in expectations. A lot of marriage is being willing to live with a non-trivial set of downsides, but making it work regardless for the value of the whole. That takes a certain mentality, as well as a social environment that reinforces and support those norms.
I agree, and also, the divorce rate is falling because people aren’t marrying as much, but I thought the proportion of people with separated/single parents had increased significantly and was continuing to increase
Indeed, it wasn't just divorce for reasons of abuse or affairs that caused the increase; "irreconsilable differences" became the name of the game. The movie Mrs. Doubtfire is an excellent example: Daniel Hillard, played by the late great Robin Williams, is a loving father, faithful husband, doesn't have any addictions, but when he throws a birthday party behind his wife's back, in the heat of their latest argument she calls for a divorce. And the movie tries very hard to make the case that this is a GOOD thing. They'd been arguing for 13 years, supposedly bring out the worst in each other, so it's best they seperate. But reading between the lines, divorce didn't automatically make everything better. Miranda keeps the kids' visits with their father at the barest minimum allowed (another thing for them to fight over), and when Daniel offers to at least come by and help with the housework (so she doesn't have to hire a housekeeper), she turns him down, which inspires him to take up the cross-dressing charade.
My understanding is that while divorce for infidelity, abuse, or addiction may have been too rare in the pre-Boomer generations, divorces where a couple had one fight too many, were virtually unthinkable. And I would argue the culture has suffered by making "irreconsilable differences" a perfectly valid reason to divorce.
There were deleted scenes in Mrs. Doubtfire that show the father behaving badly in a number of ways that he didn't in the final cut, including getting into more arguments with his ex-wife. It's a more enjoyable movie without them (because they make the lead far less sympathetic), but it's interesting to know about.
As a child of one of those couples, I can personally guarantee you that forcing people who bring out the worst in each other to stay married does no one any good, particularly the children.
Agreed, it was a relief when my parents finally got divorced.
Sure, but the laxity of divorce requirements and culture also led to a lot of people who, if they'd simply tried harder or been a bit less self centered, could have reconciled those differences. It led to (and from) a culture that sees marriage as purely about the self--if you're not perfectly happy, find someone else.
Love requires hard work to maintain.
Do I want to entirely to back to the fault-only divorce? Probably not. But the current setup isn't sustainable or good either.
Hey, how bout you? Consider the things that make people miserable. Some probably happened to you: Having few or no friends, being bullied, having a coach or teacher that just had it in for you, being bad at some school subject, being great at something and yearning to be the best but never getting as good as the few truly brilliant people you knew, having a crush on someone who turned you down harshly. What do you think of the idea that if you had been less selfish or tried harder you could have fixed these situations enuf that it was no big deal?
Huh? I'm not claiming by any means that *everyone* who divorces could have fixed things. Just that there are *some* who could have, but chose not to because divorce seemed too easy and the downsides/alternatives were culturally hidden. I know this because I've talked to more than one specific individual who said exactly that about their own divorces.
And I certainly don't think it generalizes to *all* interpersonal relationships.
Afaik (I'm not American nor particularly devout) that's what happens in Xtian communities: divorce is basically unthinkable, the prots don't have an equivalent of annulement, so the Pastor and oft the rest of the community tries to mediate and make the couple reconcile.
The people I spoke to from these communities were not huge fans of it and reported it always amounts to one spouse (usually but not necessarily the wife) getting shafted and being told to put up with the other spouse's foibles. but I have no data to back it up.
Yes—the teens riding bikes and playing D&D were often surprised to learn that dad had a girlfriend now, and actually so did mom, and maybe the parents were going to separate and the kids would need to stay with Grandma for a while.
Nobody younger cares about Gen X’s relationship trauma, but I think it’s upstream of all the skepticism about dating and marriage.
This was my immediate reaction too. Normalizing the easy divorce regime was a disaster for their kids and the social fabric generally. Weird that Scott thought it was exonerating.
An interesting question is why the Boomers led the way. They were raised by parents for whom divorce was not an option. I can think of two reasons.
One was the loss of the extended family. Obviously people still had extended families, but only after the war did it become normal for a new married couple to move off to the big city or out to the suburbs - ie, away from their parents and siblings. I would expect that integrating your lives with those of your in-laws and siblings - seeing them weekly, coparenting with them - would make it very difficult to contemplate separation. At the same time, moving away from the extended family to live in the suburbs just made everything harder, as there was less generational wisdom to draw on - all those boomer kids moving to the suburbs had to figure out everything on their own, since there was no older generation around to consult. Made for bad marriages and bad parenting.
The other reason would be that with rise of the abundant post war economy it became less important to marry for financial security and so more common to marry for 'love' (emotional satisfaction). But this is a hard thing to build a marriage on; of course it's good if spouses are emotionally supportive of each other but if you are in it for a particular feeling then when that feeling is gone it's natural to think it's time to move on.
Women entering workforce. Women’s lib. Also big drivers.
The looking backwards towards Boomers has been fun to read about, but I'd also like to look forward to Gen Z--maybe with quite some anticipation.
My wife taught at some schools and told me about the "Gen Z stare", which seems to be quite common and seems to point towards lack of social skills, for which the easy blame would be placed on social media and always-online lives. Is it really so prevalent? Is it really so bad, or just different? There's been plenty of talk about whether the kids are alright, education-wise. Are they alright, socialization wise?
As a member of Gen Z I'm personally prone to a degree of pessimism, but my inclination when asked "Are [zoomers] alright, socialization wise?" is to respond with a fat NO.
The current situation on my college campus is something like the following: students come to class and sit as far away from each other as possible. Likewise for the dining halls - it's quite common to see people eating, alone, with a space of at least one empty chair between people. I very seldom see anyone striking up a conversation with random classmates. More common is for a group of students to talk to one another extensively, and to other members of the class basically never (I find this more common with women, as compared to men, who mostly just don't talk to each other). This bleeds into actual class performance too: I recently took a discussion-based course on the Reformation in which the classes would consist of the professor asking open-ended questions which we would respond to. Participation was extremely low for the first couple weeks, until said professor ended up staging a sort of collective intervention, explaining to us that the class would only work if we participated and that this was some of the worst participation rates she had ever had in a class... There also seems to be a general reluctance to attend advertised non-academic events around campus unless there is a very clear outline of what to expect; just attending an event and being willing to roll with whatever happens seems vanishingly rare among my age cohort.
I don't mean to doompost. I do find that if I strike up a conversation with one of my classmates, it never feels unwelcome. People generally do seem happy to talk, to socialize, just generally unwilling to initiate these exchanges. So not an anti-social generation, exactly, but definitely an undersocialized one. I try to counteract this by initiating social situations, but honestly it's easy to succumb to the inertia of the norm and just... not talk to anybody, show up to class and go home, particularly when coursework becomes intensive.
Thanks for the personal report. Do you think the problem is a lack of personal initiative (too few able to even) or changing social norms (no talking in person unless you text first!)?
Hmm... hard to say, but I think it's probably more of the former than the latter, judging by the fact that people are generally open to social contact when someone else initiates. I think the latter is a concern to some extent, but not in that it's people's real preference but more in that it's what people assume other people's preference is, if that makes sense? Like, I don't think many zoomers are actually hostile to somebody talking to them in person without texting first, but I think a lot of us imagine that to be the shared norm, and that's one factor that contributes to a hesitancy to initiate things.
As someone who graduated a year ago, I was say it's the former. People generally seemed happy to talk to me when I started the conversation...but nobody else ever seemed to randomly start conversations with me. Which felt really isolating, thinking back on it.
That's pretty depressing to read. The double whammy of covid lockdowns and smartphone-based social life *really* fucked things up.
...okay, I'll be here to disagree with the other commenter, as a 23 yo Gen Z: I love my generation.
I have excellent friends from college, and my experience was that people were shockingly kind and social and welcoming (I moved every 1-2 years growing up so was worried, but classmates went out of their way to be warm, and I did my best to pass it on if I saw other people looking lonely in the dining hall, etc). Moved to a small city and had an easy time meeting friends I hang out with multiple times a week to play D&D and board games.
I mean, yes, it's anecdata, but lots of things are.
Though my experience is that outside college friendships get "handed to you" less than ever -- there's fewer reasons than ever to be in shared spaces, fewer fellow young folk as a percentage of attendees to things like improv classes than my older family members remember (YMMV based on location), etc, so you do have to actively go out of your way to find things.
Also every single dating app was designed by the literal biblical devil and is a cesspit of misery, etc etc.
I'd expect that the people on "my group" socially (no social media, half my friends use flip phones, interest in social hobbies like D&D) are just as fine as ever despite being exposed to the same outward environment in most ways as everyone else, but (in the same way some people can do cocaine once and then never again and be fine, and others do cocaine once and have their lives ruined) the people unable to recover from the poisons put in our childhood water supply are having a sucky time of it.
I don't think that's a big disagreement because your group is likely a minority, right? I mean, it sounds not dissimilar to my kids who are as outgoing as can be expected from, well, my kids, but there's lots of talk (admittedly from the outside looking in) of how not giving kids access to phones or social media early basically cripples them socially among their peers.
Which is sadly ironic in retrospect.
I mean, maybe? For obvious reasons my social circle is self-selecting, but it's very hard to notice a problem when everyone I know (siblings, friends) experiences the exact same thing. Perhaps we're 1% of the population or something, but it's the only 1% I see.
Although it is jarring to occasionally hit a foreign culture unexpectedly -- I have a small house and host very frequently (if I meet someone fun at an event they very quickly get invited to a board game hangout), which is usually delightful. But recently I had friends of friends over for the first time, and after games during the part where usually you hang out and chat, every single one of them was on TikTok (sound on, no headphones, all playing different videos on my couch) while I was trying to make conversation. Maybe *that's* the normal Gen Z or something, I have no idea.
I guess all I'm willing to confidently say is that it's very easy to make friends even in kind of random locales (currently in Oklahoma, so this isn't a trendy coastal thing) among Gen Z'ers if you're willing to be the one to reach out literally at all. People infrequently take the first step, but my experience is if you show up and say "hey do you want to play board games with some folk I know" an overwhelming majority gets waaay excited.
[Now that I think about it, the lifelong friends I made in college mostly started because my teenage strategy of walking up to strangers and complimenting them on something random like their coat had something like a 10% success rate. And over dozens of trials a 10% stacks up! Maybe I'm more outgoing than I think of myself as, but I was always the "quiet introverted kid" until college when I decided to take the "fuck it" approach.]
Actually, sorry for continually adding anecdotes but just one more: the only continually weird thing about hanging out with my generation compared to other generations is that any non-religious group of Gen Z'ers you hang out with for long enough seem to inevitably start a long conversation about which antidepressants they like the most. Which is cool and I'm glad it works for them, but the *only* Gen Z people I know who aren't on meds for either depression or ADHD are my super religious friends
Is there a general sense that the prevalence of medication is to be expected for gen Z? And if so, are there commonly accepted reasons for why that's the case?
I'm wondering if it's a source of shame or pride or just sort of a fact of life, or something else.
The default assumption is usually that everyone's on something or other, of you're hanging out with leftist Gen Z women, I think. A couple of the depression med discussions were awkward for me because everyone else there (6 other people) could talk about at least one or two antidepressants they've tried, while I've never seen a therapist before or anything so I was just sitting quietly with nothing to add. The people on ADHD meds (that I know of) usually bring it up in the context of either "thank god for adderall" or "oh sorry I made that minor mistake, I forgot my ADHD meds."
I have personal opinions on causes but don't know what the commonly accepted reasons are, if there's any shared narrative around it.
I don't know if pride is the right word for it, but there is some sense of it being a thing that gives you conversation points, if that makes sense. Definitely not shame, but not quite entirely neutral (leans a bit positive in inflection). The only time there's strong emotion expressed with it is when they find something that works really well for them.
Again, I don't know if this is a normal thing or if it's just all the people I know. Sample size is about 25 Gen Zers who I talk to at least a couple times in a normal month. The only group I know that's consistently like me (not in therapy, not on any meds) are my religious friends, most of whom are already married and have or soon expect kids (<= 25 year olds); all but a couple of my fellow nonreligious friends are medicated.
The figures I'm seeing online suggest about 60% of Gen Z is medicated for mental health or ADHD etc, which tracks with what you're seeing.
Worth thinking about if the sexual side effects of SSRIs are having a noticeable effect on the rates of relationship formation and fertility in this generation. Although just the fact that they are depressed/anxious to begin with must also have a role.
I'm shocked to see the "phone bad" meme repeated on this forum. I understand there's some evidence social media is bad on a population scale, but I'd expect this community to be primarily made up of people that benefited from early internet access.
Having unrestricted social media access allowed me to develop friendships with people all across the world (every continent besides Antarctica), some which I eventually flew out to meet in person. I had great conversations with people from different social/political/religious backgrounds as me, which I credit for making me much more open-minded and socially competent in college than I otherwise would have been. Had I been forced to socialize only in the narrow cultural bubble I grew up in, I would've been maladjusted, and might've tried to stick to my bubble instead of meeting new people.
I was also able to talk to adult professionals to get career/hobby advice in fields that weren't very popular in my K12. I organized extracurricular activities at my high school based on hobbies I got into online. It helped me get into college.
Surely I cannot be the only person here who feels that having social media access as a child was overwhelmingly positive for them?
I didn't have the internet at all, let alone on a phone, 'til I was already at college (you can "OK Boomer" me if you like) and I don't think I was maladjusted.
As for your generation, even if there's bad effects on net, a social phenomena like this won't be universally experienced the same way, and I'm glad you feel it was positive.
Phone bad.
I'm guessing the average ACX commentor had few peers or social opportunities in their school. For the average student, being forced to make in person relationships is better than taking the easy way out with phone addiction. But for people like us here, there often wasn't much opportunity for in person relationships, and social media is far better than nothing.
That's not what I intended to get at. Online relationships didn't substitute in-person relationships for me, nor do I consider them an "easy way out." They were equally meaningful and provided social benefits that in-person relationships couldn't, such as being able to befriend people that lived in other countries, or that had expertise in niche hobbies of mine. I expect ACX readers to be more interested in expanding their horizons in the way I was, and less likely to be affected by the usual risks of social media use.
I think you're underestimating the evolutionary side here. Human beings were born with the desire to talk with other human beings, face to face.
Intellectually, yes, I do love talking with people online. But like, have you ever had a long-distance relationship online? If you haven't...it feels startlingly lonely, nowhere close to how amazing an irl relationship is.
So yes, I do love talking with people from all over the world. But being at college, and pretty much nobody ever talked to me...that sucked.
I for one can attest to these groups being more common than you think.
Happy to be wrong!
I guess I can add my own anecdote as a 22 yo Gen Z.
I had a similar experience in college. Although I didn't keep many lifelong friends after graduating, I did feel a fairly strong sense of community -- especially with the other students in my field -- throughout college. Most of my classmates were familiar with one another and very social. Almost every class I attended I would be greeted by many of my classmates as I sat down, and would be included in whatever discussion they were having before class. I'm not kidding when I say that every single person in my program knew each other personally. I remember being excited for exams because it meant all my classmates would be there -- it was a fun social event. All my classmates except one were Gen Z.
I did attend a pretty small college in a not-very-large city, so my experience is probably not representative, but I agree with you that Gen Z is more social than the popular narrative would make you believe.
I like your "poisons in our childhood water supply" metaphor. A lot of Gen Z falls into destructive behaviors in youth and simply don't have the right tools to create an antidote for themselves. There's a lot out there about the evils of social media, so i won't belabor the point, but it seems to be a major issue in Gen Z. I have personally witnessed many of my friends and peers fall into the negative sides of the internet (red pill, antisemitism, neo-Nazism, etc.) and have their lives negatively affected by it. There are other issues, too, but social media is the one that I've personally seen the most negative effects from, especially socially.
I'm a Boomer and I didn't make any lifelong friends in college, though I did make a few in grad school.
My own experience of Gen Z (from the point of view of Gen X) is largely positive, admittedly from a small sample size of extended family and friends. Small but not that small - I have quite a few nephews and nieces besides the immediate family and my house is a local congregation point. I don’t see them as overly woke either.
I think the Gen Z stare is entirely misrepresented. It's not a lack of social skills, it's a refusal to play the game. Millennials were hammered with ideas like the customer is always right, if you smile and participate you'll get ahead, always respect your elders, etc... What did we get for it? We got stagnant wages while we were constantly shit on by people at work, we smiled and participated and watched those with privilege get ahead anyway, and we watched our elders rob us blind and leave the world off far worse than what they inherited. Gen Z isn't stupid, they figured out the game was rigged.
> What did we get for it? We got stagnant wages while we were constantly shit on by people at work, we smiled and participated and watched those with privilege get ahead anyway, and we watched our elders rob us blind and leave the world off far worse than what they inherited. Gen Z isn't stupid
Have you seen the first graph here?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-against-boomers
Yes, and I find it entirely misleading. Inflation adjusted dollars doesn't equate to purchasing power when all of the big things increased faster than inflation, by a lot. Sure, they can buy groceries and video games, but good luck buying a house or car. That's not even getting into how productivity has outpaced inflation adjusted dollars 5:1, so Millennials and Gen Z are producing far more and getting even less for it.
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cpichart2019.png?x14194
Through 2018, so caveat emptor.
The black bar across the page is where total overall inflation is.
The brown line graph that ends at 80% is average hourly wages.
> Sure, they can buy groceries and video games, but good luck buying a house or car.
You are backwards on 3 of 4 categories here. Food and housing have risen just a little more than inflation, and less than average hourly wages. Cars are flat.
I won't give you any grief if you complain about the costs of college or health care. Especially text books, which *should* have fallen in nominal dollars, instead have gone to the moon. What a fucking racket.
The younger generation is usually spared health care costs, at least. My son pays approximately nothing for his nice ACA plan.
IME averages aren't great at expressing this sort of thing. Yeah the average wage has increased. But I would wager that certain narrow areas (tech, medical, a few others) have dramtically outpaced inflation, while most work has lagged far behind.
This leaves most millenials in a position worse than their predecessors, and a small number of them much better off than previous generations. When you look at the average it looks OK. No I don't have data to support this; it's just a hunch.
I would also argue that the 'required spend to participate in society' has shifted. Sure, the overall cost of housing/food hasn't really skyrocketed relative to wages. But in the boomer days, you paid for car/house/groceries, and everything else was a treat. In the modern era, to effectively participate in society, there's a much bigger tech and telephony spend, the cost of auto ownership long term is a lot more (repairs, etc). This has also increased the cost of banking. And while the cost of long term debt (mortgage rates) are largely favourable to younger generations, the cost of short term debt (credit cards) has skyrocketed. Furthermore it's become comically easy to spend money. Everything is engineered to one-tap or one-click-pay. Used to be barriers to spending money: Get dressed. Go to the store. Bring cash, or a chequebook. Carry your stuff home. Now you can order food to your door while bedrotting depressed.
I'm not blaming boomers for this - societal change is societal change. But it certainly seems like society is moving in a direction that directly harms younger generations (which can contribute to hate against older ones, who didn't have the same things weighing on them).
Just scanning comments randomly and saw this. Regarding textbooks, I bet students buy a lot fewer of them than in the past (or get digital versions or second-hand or a PDF...). I know for every class I teach now, we don't have any required textbooks.
(BTW - I think you're absolutely right, and the younger generations whining about how hard they have it is mostly a load of BS.)
The "Gen Z Stare" is more of a conscious rejection of social norms than a lack of them.
My wife has seen it among Gen Alpha as well; are little kids really making conscious decisions like that? It's often in response to a direct question - it feels like they don't understand how to signal to the other speaker the simple fact of "acknowledged, hold on, I'm thinking". Which to me seems to also parallel the trend of "gentle" parenting; kids not giving others respect because it was never trained into them?
"Several people made something like this argument, but I think it’s based on a (understandable) misunderstanding."
My experience is that this is not the case. It's quite common for Boomers to believe that they are in fact entitled to lower or even zero property taxes for various reasons, and the psychopathic homicidal rage that Mariana displays at the prospect of anything changing is a very common reaction. On the show I work for I voiced opposition to proposals that would eliminate the property tax in Florida and Texas, and the wave of outraged emails I got from Boomers outweighed those I had received for any other issue.
I want Saagar Enjeti to interview Mariana Trench
What would he ask me? How do you think I would answer?
My favorite part is his "I will vote for evil totalitarian bastards if they support my property rights"
A mentality like this is worse than anything Scott could possibly have been proposing. I wonder what other things would trigger him to vote for "evil totalitarian bastards" out of spite? What's the minimum threshold for him to want to destroy the country?
I mean, I don't support voting for evil totalitarian bastards in general, but the one thing I retained from Project Lawful is that we probably have good game theoretic reasons to (have an evolutionary predisposition toward) responding "burn it to the ground" to strong defection that makes our lives worse with the expectation that we'll just roll over
[Modern AI capabilities report: still routinely fails on questions like "What's the repeated phrase from Project Lawful (planecrash glowfic) about burning everything in a fire if you're defected against, for game theoretic reasons"]
I would guess deadman switches are like 1000x better for that? In this case something like "without boomers like me this community would go to s***" would be a great card to play. But then a person has to actually explain what they provide for the community, which for most people is ~nothing.
I don't think making vague statements about Kids These Days would actually work as a deadmans switch. For a deadmans switch to have any compulsion power, it needs to have a clear negative event that triggers from a single clear cause, not be... a slow diffuse thing acting over the course of, like, a decade, in response to a slow accumulation of betrayals.
Also, I deeply adore all the boomers in my life and hold the generation (or the subset I've experienced) in extremely high regard as a Gen Z'er, so a) I do not perceive it's "nothing", and b) I'd absolutely politically vote with my grandparents over someone that says their entire generation amounts to nothing and expects them to just take lopsided policies on the chin.
...ideally not by voting in an evil totalitarian bastard, though. Ideally we could just give the whole Abundance Democrat thing a try and see if we can find a way to *all* win rather than turning politics into intergenerational trench warfare.
> someone that says their entire generation amounts to nothing
That's not what I said, and if you misinterpret it that way, it's absolutely your own fault
See also: https://www.readthesequences.com/Why-Our-Kind-Cant-Cooperate
The instinct to "burn everything to the ground if things don't go exactly my way" becomes really bad when instead of two or three alpha males negotiating somewhere in the jungle it is millions of people living in a civilized country, each of them having an incompatible opinion on what the only possible unburned solution is supposed to look like.
Oh I definitely agree. See also: the cycle of violence writ large.
Imo it should be saved for the most egregious cases where the benefit of the threat outweighs the fact that it's an incredibly shit option for everyone, including yourself, if you're forced to carry it out. I think liberal society has (correctly) largely centralized on not using it just because your preferred candidate didn't win or because a bill you don't like and think is actively bad has passed.
But at the point where you built your own house with your family's work and have lived there for generations, and someone tries to force you out to stick you in some unknown apartment somewhere else so that DINKs can have your house against your will (the extreme version of what's discussed in the Boomer commentary) and/or it becomes financially expedient for people to get you to die so you stop needing medical care (not done anywhere currently, nothing like the Canada MAID system, but hypothetically), in my opinion we're much closer to a system where I'd feel it was justifiable for people to start considering it as an option.
I mean, I'd still prefer it never be used, but there are certainly possible worlds where the decisions made would be so egregious that I'd consider "set myself on fire in the hopes it burns other things down with me" a reasonable answer in the hopes that it keeps those possible-worlds merely possible.
I'm in total support of killing people who want to take away property rights and I'm a millennial.
Your rights are a facade and your property will be taken away by ASI once you are no longer useful, try not to have a stroke from anger when it happens.
Does it really matter if he dies of a stroke, or a few seconds later from the robots killing him? What is even the point of your comment?
It gets him to be more worried about the rise of AI than whatever other noisy but relatively trivial political issues might occupy him.
I feel like to anyone not already worried about ASI it more looks like "AI people will avoid addressing your actual concerns to talk about their Preferred Thing, spend less effort trying to cooperate with them / having meaningful discussions"
> your property will be taken away by ASI once you are no longer useful
Not if they're aligned specifically to protect their property rights. More reason to hold on to political and financial power, eh?
I mean, protecting property rights is the main legitimate function of government. We tolerate governments at all so that our property rights can be protected from threats foreign and domestic.
It seems to me that the threat of being incarceated and killed is serving as a much bigger incentive than protection. It's not as if there's anything physically preventing the government from killing you and seizing your property. Murder is one of the easier crimes to get away with, after all, and even more so when you have the system working in your favor.
Where have you been for 10 years? Americans are fairly apathetic about totalitarianism. And I can hardly blame them, the stakes don't seem very high.
If democratic America is going to rain down hellfire and destruction on the rest of the world, we kind of deserve to have our freedoms suspended for the good of humanity. One of many arguments I could list for not caring as much as I used to. I guess the right wing version of this would be "if Americans are going to commit suicide through wokeness, fertility collapse and mass immigration, what good is our democracy, anyway?"
Example one million of the attitude Ross Douthat was getting at in his observation that if liberals refuse to take care of [various problems], the people will eventually vote for fascists who will.
This isn't out of spite, it's a disagreement on principles! Trench (and the Founding Fathers) hold personal property rights to be incredibly important. You, presumably, don't, since you'll call it spite instead. To Trench, destroying property rights *is* destroying the country; your objection makes no sense.
It wasn't "the prospect of anything changing." This was the top of the thread:
> "You can live in a 5-bedroom house, but since you're just a married couple these days, probably it's better if you get by with a 3-bedroom, and probably it doesn't need to be so central to the city, unless you can afford it. We are going to raise taxes higher."
A quick read of the thread shows Mariana is willing to pay equal tax rates to everyone else, but *not* to be targeted for special taxes.
She's right to be suspicious of any scheme to say "*those* kind of people? they pay more taxes." All liberal people should be.
Yes, that's correct.
What is more taxes? What is fair? Is repeal of prop 13 fair?
What about tax deductions for kids? What about inverse prop 13, where property taxes raise faster than the prices?
Taxes should be based on the market value of the property and not on the personal characteristics of the taxpayer.
If you're going to have a property tax, which you shouldn't, then it should be a flat amount unrelated to the value of anything.
So like $12.95?
Like $x per acre, or $x per parcel, or $x per property owner? none of those sound like great ideas to me.
To try to get a feel for what policies you actually support...
Do you agree Prop 13 should be repealed? It allows property to be taxed at a previous lock-in value rather than the current market value.
And would you support (or at least not be murderously angered by) a general increase in property tax or land tax that makes no personal characteristics distinction?
I think Prop 13 has a lot of bad consequences and should be either modified or eliminated. I think some exemption or modification in property taxes for the poor, whatever their age, might be appropriate. To be clear, I am not among the poor, so I'm not advocating for myself here.
I've halfway followed the Georgian land tax stuff but am not sufficiently informed to have an opinion on whether it would be better or worse than the current system.
Repeal of Prop 13 may have been what he was thinking...but it wasn't what he actually said, unless I'm misremembering?
While I very much hope that Mariana's rage was hyperbolic, I can understand the sentiment. I look at it as a difference between feeling entitled to what you already have, vs. feeling entitled to what you want to acquire. If I want something material, I have to go out and get it, and nobody's obligated to give it to me unless there's a prior agreement. But once I have it, it's my property. I have the right to sell it, keep it, or give it away as I wish, but you do not have the right to take it without my consent. I don't even own a home, but I wouldn't want to own one if it meant somebody else was forced to sell due to property taxes or other factors that they didn't ask for but were imposed upon them by others.
I almost guarantee that anything you buy is being sold because of some real-world constraint. Why is "taxes here got too expensive" a morally worse reason to have to sell than "insurance is too expensive" or "I don't like how they are widening the road nearby" or "I can't find a good company to rent this house while I go live on a cruise ship"?
How can a particular tax rate be an entitlement?
Tax rates, zoning etc are political matters but some people think a part of their property rights.
It was a higher tax rate with the specific goal of forcing her to move, in order to free up housing inventory. Let’s not kid ourselves on what is being proposed: the *intended goal* is to drive her out of her home.
How does "a progressive tax on real estate, the proceeds to go to subsidizing more housing construction" sound to anyone?
I don't think it actually has much to do with property rights as such. I'd expect people who live in rent-controlled apartments to feel the same kind of entitlement.
Such common reaction definitely supports the “they are just assholes compared to their grandparents” reading.
You never met my grandparents. They were massive assholes. (Not even Greatest Gen -- they were Victorians.)
That's true for every Generation. Every generation is worse than before. So boomers worse than greatest, x gen worse than boomers, Millennials worse than X-gen.
This is of course on average. The decay is slow and variance is high.
However, because Boomers hold so much power, their harm is greater, and they are worse when compared to greatest.
But just wait until Millennials (my gen) are on charge, That would be a disaster.
Almost certainly the reverse is true.
Unless he's talking about intergenerational perceptions, not the reality. Everyone always thinks that the past was better.
I agree with Nir Rosen and I think the most well-crafted arguments to the contrary (e.g. Mastroianni) are unconvincing.
I'm right here. What would you like to know? As I mentioned earlier, I voted against Prop 13 in 1978.
My rage might have been homicidal but I don't think it was psychopathic.
How many children and grandchildren do you have?
One and two. Why?
The implication is that it's harder for them to afford housing, and the services they get such as schools are worse, because so many people are paying minimal taxes due to Prop 13.
May I again clarify that I am fine with paying market property taxes, and I DO in fact pay a lot of property taxes for the house I own in Santa Cruz, purchased 10 years ago. And if the tax went up *at the market rate* on my house as well as on the houses owned by younger people, that's fine too! It's the way people casually suggest that I can't have a house if I'm past a certain age because young people need them that triggers the rage.
That indeed sounds rage inducing but surely even the (very?) few people who endorse the rage inducing position in the abstract would agree with you about practically every policy question? If you even voted against Prop13 then what’s left to fear? Property tax exemptions that only young people are eligible for? I find it hard to imagine anyone seriously proposing that. (Note: I’ve never lived in California so maybe I’m missing some local context)
I just want to point out that Prop 13 applies to everyone, not just the old. I’m 45 and bought a house in 2017. It’s basically doubled in value since then, to the point that I couldn’t afford to buy it today.
I think there’s an age-related provision that lets you keep your lower property taxes if you sell and move, but I don’t know much about it since it’s not applicable to me just yet.
Yeah I actually feel like a lot of people interpreted you as supporting Prop 13, which really isn't a great reading of your original comment.
I think your sentiment is very fair, less the murder.
Remember this in the future, Blake, when the upcoming generations are coming for *YOUR* stuff on the basis "you're too old now, old guy, get out of the way and let us have it".
I follow a Gen X guy on Twitter who is a fairly moderate and level-headed conservative who derides libertarian orthodoxy in all ways but one: he wants to abolish property taxes. I think there's a sizeable constituency for that in the West, proportionally if not in raw numbers.
Blake, I don't think you did a good job understanding Mariana —
When you talk about altering the legal system so that Mariana is evicted from their house, were you imagining a different scenario than "a legal system with armed men evicts him"?
I am reminded of Scott's review of "On the Road", some boomers defected against community ideals which ended up making trust dependent parts of social functioning much harder for the next generation. That is part of why Boomer advice is so grating, they lived in world where dating and employment if not easier was much less frustrating and complicated.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/
Odd that Scott himself didn't reference it here.
Delaying property taxes until death isn't just a proposal, it's already a California program: https://www.sco.ca.gov/ardtax_prop_tax_postponement.html
And in Washington State
https://dor.wa.gov/taxes-rates/property-tax/property-tax-exemptions-and-deferrals#:~:text=The%20interest%20rate%20varies%20and,Program%20benefits:
And Texas.
I'm a huge fan of these policies, especially if the tax obligation attaches as a lien to the property not the person. Given tax rates are ~1% there's only very rare circumstances where the proceeds from selling the property won't fully cover the accumulated taxes.
In practice, you'd expect that banks could provide this service as well, through a loan that obligates them to pay all your property taxes until death, then get paid back by whomever next owns the building.
Comptroller's Form 10-526 stays winning!
https://comptroller.texas.gov/forms/50-126.pdf
Why are you a fan of a program which only benefits homeowners and thus disproportionately older people? A program which delivers tax money with far less buying power than if it was collected when due?
You can change interest and it is securitizible.
You can, yes, I've yet to see any proposal or implementation do it. Instead these programs always result in a tax break for wealthy, older, homeowners.
Fortunately someone else told me about Texas: https://texas.public.law/statutes/tex._tax_code_section_33.06
> A tax lien remains on the property and interest continues to accrue during the period collection of taxes is deferred or abated under this section. The annual interest rate during the deferral or abatement period is five percent instead of the rate provided by Section 33.01 (Penalties and Interest).
I also thought that it's a bit strange that it's the first time Scott heard about it since I definitely remember it mentioned here a bit often. At the very least, whenever everyone is discussing Georgism and the inevitable "then what about old people's homes??".
I try to make the proposal every time!
And Michigan.
Good points all. If home value goes up so much, one can also take out a mortgage or second mortgage or HELOC to pay the prop taxes. My understanding is that sometimes the interest will be tax-deductible, sometimes not, but I don't think even a first mortgage for purchasing should have tax benefits anyway.
The point is that there either already are or easily can be ways to correctly disincentivize people (of any age) to stay in houses whose value has gone up a lot (or whose household size has gone down) without 'forcing' them to leave. If they want to stay in the house for neighborhood reasons or sentimental reasons or any other reason, and they are willing to give up the opportunity cost of more vacations or fancy jewelry or donating to cost-effective charities or whatever, they should absolutely have that choice. But there should be an opportunity cost.
Increased property tax payable on sale wouldn't help in the US.
Property taxes fund local governments in the US, and wouldn't really work as a vehicle to redistribute generational wealth.
I don't have a problem with cash-poor and house-rich boomers leaving a portion of their inheritance (acquired via what would otherwise be describe as fortuitous land speculation) to the state rather than their children. This seems fine to me. If they don't like it, they have the option of downsizing and giving a larger inheritance if that's their preference.
It helps remove the financial *penalty* for downsizing. If you bought a 4 bedroom house in 1990 and want to sell it and move into a smaller place now that your kids are long out of the house, then even though you make a profit on the sale that more than covers the new house, you are rewarded with higher taxes since both houses are taxed at the price of last sale, not the current value.
> both houses are taxed at the price of last sale, not the current value.
As far as I know this is only true in CA. In most states valuation of a house based on some formula that presumably tracks local real estate market. It's not perfectly accurate, but for instance my home (in MN) has increased in its tax valuation around 50% over the initial sale price in the 12 years I've owned it.
Yeah, this is only Prop 13 California, as far as I know.
Other states have something similar, but you don't notice it as much because the increases aren't as crazy. Michigan has Proposition A that limits the rise in the taxable value of a home to the lesser of 5% or the national inflation rate.
In the alternate scenario, wouldn't the taxes due on sale be an even stronger disincentive to selling? Whatever about a higher annual expense as a result of moving, knowing I had to pay $80k or 20% of the value of my home (or whatever basis it's calculated on) would be a huge issue for me in selling. And I am generally supportive of property and inheritance taxes.
People still pay a tax bill yearly, but the compromise is to let the "unexpected" amount that the bill rose over some baseline level of raise go into a lien. The debt is still sitting there and compounding, so it's urging you to sell.
The proposal I always heard was that the amount you *pay* can only go up by a little, but what's left of the full bill gets tacked on as a lien.
They get to make out like bandits both ways: "oh, poor me, my house is so expensive now" so they get a tax break, and then go and sell the place for a crapload of money. Make them choose.
It does make it harder to move out of the big unused house like we want them to.
You can make up the difference with state-wide revenue sharing, and many states do.
> " This is an interesting synthesis: most of people’s problems with “the Boomers” are really problems with an inverted demographic pyramid. Since the old outnumber the young, they have “too much” wealth, jobs, etc compared to people’s natural expectation, and previously-solvent benefits programs are falling apart.
Is this right? I actually wasn’t sure where our population pyramid was - I thought maybe the recent wave of immigrants would have righted it - but no, it looks like it’s getting increasingly top-heavy: " <
The Silent Generation birthed the lack of Gen X not the Boomers. The tiny Gen X then birthed a small Gen Z. Boomers actually birthed a relatively large cohort of Millennials who are in turn making more Gen Alphas than there are Zs. Most countries have a population pyramid that inverts, the USA has a saw blade.
It is really fascinating to use a visual graph and scroll through the years to watch it.
https://www.populationpyramids.org/united-states
This one has an animation where you can see how the waves start and move. This has been both a benefit and a cost over time and we're at one of the increasingly costly phases now. Once Gen X start retiring and Millennials start really heavily investing we'll be in another beneficial phase. That's far off assuming no changes (and there are always changes).
I like that animation!
I think we have World War 2 to blame for that sawtooth effect, because the end of the war (and the end of the Great Depression) was what led to the "baby boom"...
Millennials are in their 40s. I (41) have a 401k, a Roth IRA, a few money market accounts, and I own my home. Some of my peers are much more active than that in the stock market and other investments, some less active, but it seems like if “really heavily investing” is gonna happen for any of us it’s happened. Is there some big investment craze you expect we will partake in as we age onward? Just not clear on what you meant.
Not the original commentor but....
Generally people lay down the most wealth into investments 40-60. Almost all in pension/retirement savings.
Even if you started putting money away at 30 for retirement (and most don't start until then at the earliest) that is 1 decades worth of invested savings by the time you are 40. Probably accrued at the point where your income was at the lowest it'll be for the next 30 years, particularly when you take into account the "disposable" part of that income was probably a relatively small percentage.
So you'll save more 40-50 than you did 30-40. And probably even more 50-60.
In addition, you start to accumulate the compounded interest/market returns at higher and higher rates on top of the actual savings as well.
To just pull some "indicative" figures out my ass...
Lets say you got to $100k savings by 40. So for the decade 30-40 you averaged having 50k in your account.
Well, you'll probably therefore add another 250k (both as increased savings and compounded interest on that initial 100k) in your 40-50 decade .... as long as you continue saving a similar *percentage* of your disposable income. This will leave you with an average over the decade of 175k in savings (3.5x the previous decade).
Then lets say you add another 350k (as increased savings + compound) in your 50-60 range. averaging 350k over the decade (7x your 30-40 average).
Aged 40 you had 100k, but aged 60 you have 700k. That is a LOT more money!
Its not so much "partaking more than you are now due to an investment craze in the future" as "carrying on as you are now, with this accelerating modestly into your peak earning years as your disposable income grows (even though you save a similar percentage) + compounding interest/returns".
This all means that amount becomes a FAR bigger hunk of money as you age. Millenials are still at the part of that snowball where its, well, snowball sized. By the times the Millenials hit 60 or 65.... (and as long as you keep rolling the snowball around) it's going to be "the big fat part of the snowman" sized.
Ah, okay that makes sense. Thanks for explaining. (Also that is exciting to hear!)
> The Silent Generation birthed the lack of Gen X not the Boomers. The tiny Gen X then birthed a small Gen Z.
That’s not right, is it. Even as the median age of maternity increases it’s not two generations, by definition each generation should birth the next or the categories are misaligned.
Gen X was badly defined as a mere 15 years so they probably birthed partly Gen Z and millennials, but the silent generation definitely birthed most of the boomers.
Yes it is correct. Each generation is 15-20 years. You have to go back pretty far for the average age of first child to be sub 20. Which means each generation births one two down, not the next one.
https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/FP-25-28.html
In 1960 the average age of first child was 22, in 2022 is was 27. There is, of course, overlap, especially what generational theory calls cuspers (the 3-ish years at the transition between generations) so the younger xs have more boomer parents than the older ones, it increases every year until there is a whole new cohort.
>I can see your side of the argument - but I also can’t blame them for being against some hypothetical policy that would force them to move to a strange apartment in the nearest affordable town 50 miles away far away from their only family/caretakers so that some striver DINK couple could turn their spare bedroom into a gym.
>And I feel nervous because I’m neutralish on something where there’s basically a unanimous consensus of smart people (they all hate Prop 13), but to me it does seem to make sense that rising house values shouldn’t be able to make your current home unaffordable
This is an argument against Georgism, right? I was very skeptical of the Georgism series last year (2021) and would love if you could bring Lars Doucet back to address these concerns which he didn't address to my satisfaction, but presumably has some kind of argument for. I've seen misc. handwaving about supplements or carveouts to patch it up but that falls flat to me; the thesis of Georgism is to simplify the complex tax structure with one simple tax to pay for everything.
"Doesn't Georgism punish people who have below average productivity growth by increasing their land value tax rents beyond their means to pay and eventually force them to move?"
Seems like the main argument against Georgism is that land benefits aren't fungible to each other. Some benefits like proximity to entertainment/workplace isn't exchangeable to nostalgia for the land itself. Thus one can't trade one for the other, and at the end someone have to give.
I guess capitalism is built on the same principle to forcibly charge monetary value to anything, and so far it seems working, but still its flaw seems even clearer here.
Ricardo's Law of Rent (that landlords will charge as much rent as they can, basically until they've absorbed all the surplus productivity between their own properties and the rentees' next best alternative) punishes these people, not Georgism. Or, to put it differently, our collective failure to legally allow sufficient supply of housing to meet demand is what is punishing them.
Georgism suggests a solution to this; it isn't the problem.
Most Georgists understand how politically suicidal it is when your opponents can tell stories about you pushing little old ladies out of their homes, and thus support having the land tax accrue (costlessly to the occupier) until death or sale, at least for owner-occupied housing.
>And I feel nervous because I’m neutralish on something where there’s basically a unanimous consensus of smart people (they all hate Prop 13), but to me it does seem to make sense that rising house values shouldn’t be able to make your current home unaffordable
As I said, the politically viable version wouldn't push anyone out of their home, but would tax the land upon death or sale of the property. Futhermore, depending on the location of the person's home, it's possible that a land value tax would be cheaper for them.
Yo. List all your objections and I'll address them!
Essentially the point highlighted. Georgism, to my understanding, increases the LVT based on how productively the land can be used, so if you don't increase your personal productivity commensurately (or even worse, retire), your LVT will go up and up and up until you are unable to pay and your land is seized by the state.
This would also be true under conventional property taxes, but they are generally lower and there is a ton of redistribution and exceptions and other complex stuff going on to lessen the impact and stop Grandma from getting evicted. My understanding is that the pitch of Georgism is that it can be objective, even algorithmically driven, because it does away with all of those protections.
If California switched to Georgism, my impression is that Scott's grandparents, who " built significant parts of their house with their own hands, and lived in it for ~50 years. They planted saplings in the garden and lived to see them become trees. They know the neighbors and probably knew the neighbors’ parents before them. Their daughter, my mother-in-law, lives a few blocks away." would face unaffordably high LVT because "Their area has now skyrocketed in cost." and likely be forced to sell and move.
Is that not the case?
So in California, where you have single family homes sitting on multi-million dollar land, yes, absolutely, if you taxed that at its market value, whether through a land value tax or a conventional property tax, someone would be forced to move. This is not a fundamentally bad thing--it would be much better for society overall in the long term--but it involves a lot of short term pain, and it creates a huge amount of political resistance from those who would bear the brunt of that.
Property tax deferral is a very reasonable compromise to get over that gap. If we have a lot of elderly retirees who just want to live out the rest of their lives in their houses, why not just let them? Let the tax bill attach as a lien, and the estate can pay it off after the occupants die, or when the house is sold. At California prices the eventual sale of the house would absolutely cover years of deferred taxes with tons of money left over for any heirs. This entirely solves the problem of the elderly retiree who just wants to stay put, is genuinely cash-poor, and whose only concern is security of tenure.
Property tax deferral is also the law of the land in many states, in Texas you just file Comptroller's form 10-526 and if you're a qualifying senior you'll never pay another dime of property tax as long as you live.
(I would also like to point out in these discussions that there are many elderly retirees who AREN'T homeowners, who are also cash poor, struggling to pay rent, and they never get brought up much in these discussions. They just get evicted).
That said, California is a downright pathological case that has historically done almost everything exactly wrong when it comes to housing policy, and should not guide your intuitions about what would happen in most other places.
To better illustrate this, go check out this article we wrote on Progress & Poverty substack about our basic political game plan (we've now got active legislation moving in several states):
https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/enacting-land-value-return-in-your
Specifically, see the slides from our upcoming report on Spokane, Washington, where we're actively working with elected officials on legislation. When you do the math, in non-California situations you find that homeowners don't always pay more after a revenue neutral swap of property tax for land value tax -- often homeowners will actually save money on net. And in cases where they do pay more, often it's a modest increase. And if you're willing to go further and swap e.g. state income taxes for more land tax, you can make the outcomes even more net beneficial for the average person.
Who are the big losers? Parking lots and vacant land, specifically those located downtown. These are extremely valuable locations that are being entirely squandered for no good reason, and the current property tax system -- especially when there's commercial exemptions being handed out on top of it all -- is effectively a tax subsidy to keep these properties vacant.
This is a surprising outcome for some people, and the reason for this surprise is that they just have very bad intuitions about where land value is concentrated. It's entirely concentrated downtown, and the land there is worth exponentially more than residential land located further out. Land value quickly plummets as you move away from the city center.
If you'd like to visualize this, we created a 3D interactive map tool called Civic Mapper that shows the assessed land value/sqft as 3D heightmaps for a number of curated American cities. We're adding more as we're able:
https://www.civicmapper.org
Please let me know if this addresses your concerns and whether you have any follow up questions. You might also consider browsing the archive of posts at https://progressandpoverty.substack.com, in case we've already answered some of your questions there.
Fascinating, thank you. I'll read through your posts
Hey Lars, big fan. While you're here I wanted to ask you about how to calculate land rents? Land values seem pretty straightforward and I've enjoyed your writing on the methodology, but if you've written anything about how to calculate the fair market rental income from a property I haven't seen it.
I haven't written as much on land rent calculation, but there is an established appraisal and econ literature on it. Often they work backwards from selling prices using capitalization rates, or directly calculate rental yields by using an income approach, and then decompose the land component in ways similar to how you would do it for selling prices.
That said, most conventional mass appraisal modeling algorithms work just as well with rental values as they do with sale prices, but this is rarely done in practice because sale prices are usually just much more widely available than rental values. If we could get rental values to be published more often, we could start modeling rental values directly, for both improvements and land.
This is one of many reasons that pervasive public rental registries would be good. A "Realpage for the people" would be directly beneficial to tenants because it would improve transparency and combat information asymmetry and increase tenant bargaining power, but it would also provide assessors with fresh and bountiful rental yield data that they could then use to directly model land rental values.
Additionally, governments can and should just lease out more of the land they own, which will help to establish prevailing ground rents. We have a guest article on P&P about this subject today:
https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/georgism-through-land-leasing
How is this not punishing the people who create value? I'm thinking of Walt Disney, he bought a lot of worthless unwanted Florida swampland and built the Magic Kingdom. Years later, they built Epcot, then many years later built the Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios. With a land value tax, wouldn't Disney needed to sell the land the future parks are built on because the closeness of the Magic Kingdom made that property very valuable?
So Disneyworld in specific is an extremely exceptional case, in fact "The Disneyworld Scenario" is an often discussed concept in Georgism.
What's unique about Disneyworld is that one single landowner has acquired so much land that they have effectively internalized all the externalized land value spillover created by their improvements. This is very different from 99.999% of parcels in the US, where essentially all the land value of the landowner's parcel is due not to the individual landowner's efforts, but to that of the community surrounding them.
The key thing to understand is that Disneyworld, economically speaking, effectively *is* its own city.
Do you have any objections that apply to the 99.999% of parcels in the USA that are not Disneyworld type things?
No, not really, though I think there may be other outliers, but you're right Disney is in a league of its own. Stadiums might be a little similar, but with cities subsidizing them I wouldn't object. Any real tourist attraction would be similar on a smaller (much smaller) scale because a hotel or a restaurant near a tourist attraction would always be more valuable than land further away. Still, creating a tourist attraction is raising your own land value tax, but that isn't different from how currently used property taxes operate so I wouldn't have much objection there either.
Cool -- another thing to keep in mind is that under Land Value Tax *the value of your improvement is entirely exempted*. So the stadium's structural value itself is entirely exempted even if the land itself is taxed. Arguably in non-Disneyworld scenario the landowner's chief contribution to their parcel's value comes in the form of the improvement itself.
There are other mini-Disneyworld type scenarios; the most common example would be large land-grant universities. Texas A&M is a particularly salient example.
I simply don't think that voters like tax increases, ever. I see below that you address delaying the tax until the current homeowner moves out, but I think you'd have enough voters angry that the Jones family heirs or whatever can't stay in their parents' home after their death. It's not that a high LVT is a bad idea, I just think it's politically unrealistic- especially in America, the land of angry defiance. I agree that there are (maybe) benefits to be had on a systematic level with an LVT, but I don't think voters' patience extends to that kind of longterm thinking.
I mean who's the political coalition *for* an LVT, besides 'wonky people with globe emojis in their Twitter bio'. No one immediately benefits. Meanwhile you're battling Generic Anti-Tax Sentiment, the final boss of American politics. Even if there are strong benefits to society, our political system just doesn't reward planning ahead by decades. We have the phrase 'great idea, wrong species' for these kinds of situations
You know, you might be surprised if you actually go out there in the political world and try things, which is what my organization is doing. We're actively working with city councils and state legislators throughout the country. We now have active legislation in several states.
https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/land-value-return-is-needed-pragmatic
Also, if you dig into this stuff you find all sorts of factional fights. Right now there's a lot of energy to "abolish" property taxes, but the measures keep failing because the plans are unworkable. This has actually gotten some republicans to start talking about LVT, not the last of which is Louis Blessing, Republican state senator of Ohio and *chair of the ways and means committee*. He just announced support for a state constitutional amendment enabling LVT.
https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/the-right-wing-schism-over-property
It's one thing to be financially incentivized to sell your house because of changing development patterns and entirely another to have some hellish housing bureaucracy declare that your home has been reallocated to someone else because they "need" it more than you.
The secret is, it really is better for society if these old people move. Either pay society for the benefit you're taking up or give your land to someone who can.
How are high property taxes on sale going to work? It seems like they’d create a huge perverse incentive where people never downsize. There would be no financial benefit for doing so unless they downsized *dramatically*.
Interesting point! Current policy also has a huge penalty for downsizing too in that you lock in new high valuations on the new place while giving up low valuations on the old place.
There are other ways to downsize. You could put up a wall and rent out the other half of what's now a duplex. You could put an outbuilding on what had been empty yard space.
Current policy also has a huge penalty for this, by triggering a reassessment if you ever make a change to your property. This powerful incentive to refuse to develop your land is a much bigger economic problem than an incentive to continue owning it.
In many cases it would function as an inheritance tax. So if you want to leave money for your kids you should downsize. If you, like many boomers, value your consumption over the wellbeing of your adult children and your grandchildren, you won’t.
The deferred portion of the property taxes keep eating away at the equity, which is what encourages the downsizing.
In an extreme case the taxes could completely empty out the equity and you have someone sitting on a house they'd get $0 from if they moved, but it takes a really long time to get there and a particularly special pattern of changes in home values.
> Someone else commented by saying we could solve all of these problems without inconveniencing either the Boomers or the young by just increasing taxes on a few ultra-rich people.
I'm a social democrat but (unless somebody wants to tell me the specific details to examine) this is generally false. Every time I've run numbers on this it just doesn't work. There are some really rich people but they don't have several trillion dollars a year to spare balancing the budget and paying for social programs and so forth.
I ran the numbers a while back and if we were to fully expropriate 100% of wealth from all the Billionaires in the United States, it would basically pay for one (1) year of federal spending. And that's assuming you could actually liquidate everything they own at face value, which you can't.
Why is Prop 13 bad? Why did it get passed in the first place?
If Prop 13 was repealed in California, who would it affect the most? Not the rich (Boomers or tech millionaires) who could pay without compromising their lifestyles. Other than that, I have a feeling it would hurt non "white males" more than any other group. Since property values have doubled in the last ten years, you don't have to be a Boomer to be dependent on Prop 13.
The property tax bills necessary to keep the local area functioning have had to be stretched out to crazy levels because so many of the houses in the area are pinned down into way below market rates.
Prop 13 makes it *harder* for people to move, since they switch from being on the very good side of the deal to being on the very worst side of it. Whoever moved last is hurt the most.
It was part of a generic anti-tax movement at the time, and it was very stupid and bad.
The answer is to just fight for lower property taxes for everyone. If you're going to have 32 mills, then it's 32 mills for everyone.
"I know, make *other* people pay taxes" always sounds good at first, until everyone ends up as the other people.
Then what taxes will you raise? You can't reduce property taxes across the board without raising other taxes or reducing spending. Texas already tried and failed:
https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-abolish-property-taxes
Reduce spending. A lot. On most things. CA takes in buckets of money. And then pisses it away on stuff ranging from silly but neutral to outright awful. And then complains there's not enough money for roads and fire and police... Which are basically the entire reason to have a state government.
Does "most things" in fact include roads, fire, police, and local public schools too?
Yes, actually, if necessary. Sure, put them at the end of the list of things to cut, but there's plenty of non-functional fat in those areas as well. California schools spend more than the national average, and there's tons of bureaucracy and admin that can just go away before you actually cut any teachers or direct student related funding. The transportation department similarly has useless stuff (high speed rail anyone?).
Fire departments rarely fight fire, but their numbers haven't gone down. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/09/firefighter-hysteresis.html
Yes, if you are out of money, you have to raise taxes or reduce spending. That is completely correct.
Maybe property taxes should go up. But you don't start granting special exemptions to special people. "A big tax, but don't worry, the commissar can grant exemptions" is a shit policy.
I'm fine with putting a cap on how fast the taxes someone must immediately pay must rise, but the difference gets capitalized into the property at a reasonable interest rate, which makes it very legible and financeable.
Well, you can borrow against a better day.
"it was very stupid and bad"
I'll interpret that as you simply not having any value for the effects it has had. Perhaps that point of view is related to being what Scott calls "rootless cosmopolitans"? (I had to look that up - it seems to be a slur from the Soviet Union? Maybe it's a new part of his coaching the Right.)
It promotes social continuity, favoring the people who are already there. (If only the Native Americans had something in place to favor them when the Europeans came.) It helps prevent people being forced out by gentrification, which will disproportionately affect minorities.
If you believe if makes it harder for people to move, then that shows it's working to promote stability, because Prop 19 lets people move without being punished.
> It helps prevent people being forced out by gentrification, which will disproportionately affect minorities.
It helps racist white people keep out the uppity Negroes. The white people have their low rates grandfathered[1] in.
And it stops the racist nativists from keeping out the immigrants.
[1] "Grandfathering" was a form of systemic racism where new restrictive laws were made but one group was exempted from them.
> And it stops the racist nativists from keeping out the immigrants.
I am not parsing that sentence. Could you rephrase?
"Why did it get passed in the first place?"
At the time, in the 1970s, inflation was very high and prices for everything were rising rapidly. As a result, the local governments needed more money to pay for all the services, especially education. If you think the current population is upset about inflation, you should have seen the public in the 1970s! So people were angry that their taxes were going up along with everything else, and it was one of the few things that they could actually vote to change. You couldn't change what Safeway was charging for milk, but you could vote against your taxes. The Republicans pushed hard on the line that Democrats were flinging money around irresponsibly and had to be stopped. Hence Prop 13.
(for the umpteenth time, I voted against it.)
And for younger people who think that all the Boomers got their houses for a song: the average mortgage rate peaked in 1981 at 18%.
I am a young boomer, who would have voted against prop 13 if I was old enough...
A forgotten aspect of prop 13 is that corporations also get reduced property taxes, and have the added benefit of being immortal. I don't have the numbers, but I suspect that holding companies are used by the wealthy to game this system to massive tax advantage.
Yeah. Very weird that no talk of corporate real estate is used here. That was the reason prop 13 was passed to begin with. It was large land owners and corporations who wanted to avoid taxes on their holdings.
To make up for the lost revenue, we’ve pushed insanely high income taxes (taxes the individual not corporation) and sales taxes (regressive and most punishing to the poor).
Scott’s readers seem astutely unaware of the history of prop 13 even though it’s all over everywhere.
This is the most abhorrent part of the law, though the effects on the home market is significantly negative.
Scott said: "The most important thing I got from these interactions was learning about the proposal to keep property taxes high, but delay them until death/sale of property. This relieves some of my tension around Prop 13 and related issues."
Be careful. This proposal can be seen as worse for the younger generation, for they will then be unable to inherit nearly as much of their parents' accumulated wealth as they otherwise would have. In extreme situations, it will leave them with exactly nothing.
California tax rate is 1% of the value. A boomer who bought a house in 1980 under Prop 13 for $100K has been paying $1K in taxes ever since. (As I understand it... although 2 minutes of googling suggests taxes can go up by 2% per year, making my math over-simplified.)
If this house increased in price to $1 mil in 1996, the boomer would have owed $10K/year over 20 years. But let's make it payable on death/sale. That's $200K that the boomer owes in taxes over 20 years.
The boomer dies in 2026 and the kids inherit the property. They still get $800K out of it (or $820K depending on how taxes were structured).
In fact, under the 1% tax rate, it would take 100 years to eat the whole value of the house; and even more, if it appreciated in value towards the latter years.
Thanks for adding numbers!
Thanks for doing the math. I've found that people's intuitions that they're scared of are generally wildly off from actual reality.
Well, hang on, there's no interest/fees/inflation included on the unpaid taxes in this model? That seems...unlikely, though I'm not familiar with these programs, all the nonpayment deals I know of tack on a pretty high rate of interest? Also, sorry, why is it 20 years rather than 30? 1996-2026 is 30 years, right?
So I just wrote this up in Excel.
1. Property starts at 500K.
2. Property value rises at 4% per year.
3. The property tax is 1.3% (not the highest I found but above average). First year tax bill is $6,500.
4. The amount of property tax that can be collected rises from 6500 by 1% a year, the rest gets put into the lien.
5. The lien compounds at 3%.
After 30 years, the property is worth 1,621K, the tax bill that year is 21K, but only 8K is due now. The cumulative deferred tax bill is 197K.
I even went out another 20 years more with completely flat home prices. The deferred taxes at the end are 725K.
Make the interest rate 5% and the deferred tax bill is still less than the home value, 1145K.
Here are the first few rows of the CSV, you may need to fix the = signs to be formulas.
====
0,4% rise per year,,,6.5 * 1.01^N,,0.05,0
1,=500*1.04^A3,0.013,=B3*C3,"=6.5 * POWER(1.01,A3)","=MAX(D3-E3,0)",=H2*G$2,=H2+F3+G3
=A3+1,=500*1.04^A4,0.013,=B4*C4,"=6.5 * POWER(1.01,A4)","=MAX(D4-E4,0)",=H3*G$2,=H3+F4+G4
=A4+1,=500*1.04^A5,0.013,=B5*C5,"=6.5 * POWER(1.01,A5)","=MAX(D5-E5,0)",=H4*G$2,=H4+F5+G5
Okay, and where are you getting 3% for the lien? I'm having a hard time in a quick google finding a straight answer, but the general unpaid tax interest rate is 10%? (https://cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/interest-rates.htm)
That's the punitive rate for non-payment for people who refuse to comply. Presumably we aren't doing that rate for people who are following the guidelines.
I edited my comment to have the CSV so you can plug it into google sheets or whatever and play with the numbers. So anyway at 10% interest, after 30 years, the property is worth 1621K and the cumulative lien is 426K.
Hmm...that's better than I thought, though I note the actual unpaid delinquent tax rate for property taxes in California is currently 18% (https://sftreasurer.org/property/secured-property-taxes), but as you note, if this was actually a program, presumably it would be more like the Texas program which charges only 5% once you file (https://texas.public.law/statutes/tex._tax_code_section_33.06).
That's significantly less bad than I'd expected, though thinking it through, you're growing faster and starting from a higher level, so that's how it has to work out.
The inheritance rules for prop 13 were amended by prop 19 in 2020. Now, only $1 million in tax benefit can be inherited. While this sounds reasonable, given the insane valuation of silicon valley property, it means many young people will be unable to afford to live in their parents over valued homes.
In my case, my parents Palo Alto home has an estimated value of $4M. I will inherit half of the house, so first I need $2M to pay off my sister. Ignoring that, if I chose to live there, my tax bill would be $30,000 per year. While I would be saving $10K/year, I am better off staying in my modest $1M house and selling my parents house.
This is of course a good problem to have. However over time, inflation will make things even worse.
To be clear, is the $1 million value inflation adjusted?
Reading about it, it is "biannually adjusted", so I guess the answer is yes.
Less inherited wealth might be a benefit, not a problem. Texas got their Form 50-126 for deferring property taxes in 1982. I wonder how much that idea was floating around when Prop 13 came onto the scene.
My personal view tends to be "Why should I pay higher taxes because other people have gone insane?" Let's say Scott has decided that my neighborhood is the perfect place for his free-range-child experiment. In order to get a place quickly, he pays 10x the estimated market value. Would it be fair for the rest of the neighborhood to have their property taxes go up 10x? (My cousin in Texas had a similar tax pressure when a rancher from Utah spent 2x on a neighboring property. They ended up selling, learning in the process that the 2x was an anomaly.)
Some little thoughtlets:
- Aside from bringing in revenue, property taxes create an incentive against doing nothing with land.
- California has sales tax but exempts basic groceries because people need to eat.
- People need to live *somewhere*, but don't require extra properties.
- People also don't require stocks/crypto/art/other forms of stockpiled wealth.
- Taxing property on current market value is a wealth tax on unrealized capital gain.
- Perhaps the spreadsheet Edward Scizorhands made also implies that it would be okay to have an annual wealth tax on everything, not just real estate, at least in a deferable form.
A friend of mine moved into a block in Greenwich Village many years ago that was affordable to the upper middle classes. But over the last decade, many of the lovely Federal-style buildings on her block have been purchased for many millions of dollars by celebrities who moved in, did fancy renovations and moved out, reselling for yet more millions. As a result, she is now spending approx. $100k/year in property tax. She's not really complaining, because she has one or two rental apartments in her building, plus a doctor's office. Into her 80s, she is still working part-time. Still, to me, that is a breathtakingly high amount of property tax to be paying. I don't know whether there is some tax reduction that favors longer-term residents that she is benefiting from. I don't regard living in the place that you have lived in for a long time as an inalienable right, and and if it were me, I could easily imagine moving out and setting up somewhere else, as your cousin did.
You could say, I guess, that she's paying high taxes because her neighbors have gone crazy, but after all, property tax is usually levied against property value, which to me makes sense, and you can always move elsewhere. But of course my friend loves her house and her neighborhood and her nearby friends, and since she can afford it, she's staying.
BTW, NYC also exempts groceries (and not just basic ones) from sales tax. Clothing that costs less than $110 per item is also exempted.
On some of your "thoughtlets," though...
"- People need to live *somewhere*, but don't require extra properties." Who is to decide what is "extra"? I could get by in a smaller apartment (I live in a rental), but I prefer to stay where I am and can afford to, at least right now.
"- People also don't require stocks/crypto/art/other forms of stockpiled wealth." Again, who are you to say? I don't care if they buy those things, if they can afford to and I don't care what their motivation is. I'm for wealth accumulation if you can afford it, and then, if you need to, you can sell that Monet at Sotheby's. Money in the bank or treasure buried somewhere is also accumulated wealth. I don't see what problem you have with these. "Man does not live by bread alone" and by the way, perhaps to a greater extent, neither does Woman. Finding yourself restricted to what you "need" is a reasonably good definition of poverty.
"- Taxing property on current market value is a wealth tax on unrealized capital gain." All property tax is levied on current market value when the property is first purchased. Inflation raises property values but it also raises income, so ability to pay is not always compromised by the tax increase. And in line with your first thoughlet ("- ... property taxes create an incentive against doing nothing with land." ), selling out when the property becomes exorbitantly valuable allows you to monetize your unrealized wealth and allows someone else an opportunity to do something more useful with the property, such as, say, build an apartment building that will house more people at lower per-occupant tax. And if instead a rich guy moves in, the higher taxes he will pay will benefit the community while you get to laugh on the way to the bank.
Oh, the need vs. don't-require was just me thinking about things being taxed vs. being exempt from taxes. From what you are saying, what I wrote could be interpreted as approaching "property is theft". I didn't mean anything like that, and I apologize.
What is left out here is that many Boomers experienced being a "sandwich generation" where they simultaneously were responsible for their children as well as their elderly and increasingly debilitated parents. As a two income professional couple my husband and I paid full freight for 2 kids college tuitions and 2 professional school tuitions and the same time that we were juggling what to do for our parents who all ended up in long term care and three of whom made it - very frail cognitively intact - well into their 90s. I was personally responsible for the housing transitions which were a combination of physically and emotionally draining.
My husband and I both work. I recently went 50% effort (in an area where I have unique expertise and love my job) b/c I want to spend more time with my grandchildren. I think grandparents can make a important contribution to the kids development.
When my husband and I married we had all of 10k which we used as a down payment on a house and there was no other wealth, just significant educational debt.
I think I made more contributions to community and society than I took. I would have no problem means testing social security. As a program it was enacted circa 1935 for 65 year olds when life expectancy was 62 years old so the experience of social security today is a great example of unintended consequences.
However I have no intention of giving up my house. Sure I have 2 extra bedrooms but they are reserved for grandkids sleepovers which I encourage. Why would I give that up?
The boomer cohort I am part of worked hard, stayed married, loved their kids and grandkids. Nothing was handed out to us. Most of us are still doing the best we can.
Hear, hear! I'm the child of boomers, and what you describe is what I've seen in lots of my own boomer relatives. I don't blame them for any of the current economic troubles and wouldn't take away their assets for the world.
Are you under Prop 13 or are you fully exposed to tax hikes like most people in most places? If you are under Prop 13, has your house skyrocketed in price? Can you afford full tax on your house? Would the tax literally force you out of your house? Is your house (close to) being paid off? If so, do you (intend to) carry insurance on your paid-off house? And if you do, then do you see hikes in your insurance as property values rise, differently from hikes in taxes?
I live in the "peoples Republic of Massachusetts." My town has a residential tax rate of just over 1% of value. The town evaluates value annually - very frequently based on neighborhood sales, occasionally by inspections. My tax bill is consistent with the Zestimate assigned by Zillow. This seems to be the case throughout Massachusetts. No such thing as limits to assessed value.
So you're not really at risk for being taxed out of your house because you're already paying full taxes on your house. Removing Prop 13 from California would force California boomers to pay the same tax rate you pay.
I think all the drama surrounding "forcing people out of their houses" is about people whose houses 10x'ed in price but they are still paying the original purchase price tax. I don't think a mechanism to force you to downsize is even considered.
Do you live very close to your grandkids such that you can easily see them several times a week, and do your kids have plenty of housing (own their own large home, like you do)?
If not, those are potential reasons why you might give up your extra bedrooms, depending on what you value.
I live close to my grandkids and see them a few times a week. My youngest grandson does a weekly sleep-over followed by breakfast at the local greasy spoon. When his parents both had Covid he was evacuated to the grand-parental abode for a week Good use of the extra bedrooms.
That’s great! Sounds very nice.
Why would boomers be specifically more likely to be a 'sandwich generation' than everyone else? Seems like as the number of children drops and the age of having those children increases, each generation becomes more likely to need to do elder care at the same time as child care. On the other hand, it seems to me that boomers are aging better than their parents did and may need less care on average but my sample size is small and aging better may increase the duration of elder care needed.
I couldn't find trend data on prevalence of 'sandwich generation' over time from a quick search, but surprisingly this survey claims that such people report higher satisfaction with their family life than non-sandwichers of the same age group: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/08/more-than-half-of-americans-in-their-40s-are-sandwiched-between-an-aging-parent-and-their-own-children/ Possibly just due to non-sandwichers not having family?
In previous generations life expectancy was lower. 1935 life expectancy was 62 and major causes of death were acute b/c of lack of treatment. People didn't survive cancer/heart attacks/pneumonia/TB. Increase in life expectancy to late 70s early 80s means more people experiencing chronic disease and frailty. Your average 45 year old in 1935 was unlikely to be caring for an 80 year old frail mom with heart failure. Even 1960 life expectancy only 68. 45 year old boomer in 2000 could easily have elderly parents Last decade of life can be very, very needy.
Your link addresses the sandwich issue but doesn't seem to note that it is the increase in life expectancy that is required.
Right, but that same argument applies even more so to Gen X and millennials. Why do you highlight this for boomers specifically? Just that millennials haven't quite reached that age range yet but will start being 'sandwiched' in the next 5-10 years?
Not really the point, but the very first sentence of the article I linked is "As people are living longer...".
Boomers are the 1st to experience this. Hard to know what the impact of aging, frail Boomers will be on their kids. Boomers "hoarding" assets who have done any decent planning should be able to fund the years of their decrepitude. Kids of Boomers without assets may be in trouble with parents who are living longer without improvements in health span.
wasn't the cultural revolution sort of a genocide against the old?
and the trail of tears a forced relocation to be able to put land to better use?
Comparing raising taxes to the Trail of Tears is a classic
No. The rhetoric was about replacing old culture, and therefore old people in positions of power, but it was primarily a political conflict. Approx. 1-2 million died, mostly targeted on class lines, or warfare between different communist factions. A systematic genocide of the elderly would have been far larger and differenly targeted.
...but killing a culture is kinda how genocide works? For example, placing First Nations children in white families or residential schools is considered an act of genocide because the goal is to kill First Nations-ness as a culture. You do not need to systematically kill every member of a group for it to be a genocide. (Setting aside the nonsensicalness of applying "genocide" to an age group.)
That's really just diluting the notion of genocide, frankly. The central example of a genocide is when you cide a geno. That's it, that's why it's called that. Killing a culture can be a step toward the thing, but it's not the thing.
I agree. Same with dilution of fascism. "Official" definition and "official" infamousness of the words has differed quite much that I feel free to ignore one of them.
Agreed. Both "genocide" and "fascism" are swiftly on their way to becoming meaningless. "Gender" also...
I was thinking that the covid lockdowns really proved the point that these things generally don't happen. Society/governments chose to sacrifice the freedom of everyone to save (mostly) elderly people.
While I agree with the others that it wasn't overtly a pogrom/genocide targetted at the old ... I think I agree with you *more* that whatever its overt rationale it functionally had that effect.
The extent to which I agree with you is "functionally, if you arm a bunch of 13-23 year olds with weapons and give them societal sanction to eliminate and purge people who don't agree with their worldview" then what you are going to get is a pogrom/purge genocide of the older cohorts with very little, if any, balancing deaths in the younger cohorts.
And in fact, given the historical timeline here and the overt rationale, the older someone was the more likely they were to be a target. The young were very explicitly the "indoctrinated children of the revolution" and were relatively safe unless they explicitly rejected their generational norm. The moderate-to-middle aged may have been safe or not depending on what side of the war/revolution they had come down on when they had been young enough to be involved in that kind of revolutionary/warring action.
But the old were very explicitly the "generation born and raised and educated before the revolution" and excepting a very few who were the leaders of the revolution they were the ones with nowhere to hide when a bunch of 15 years olds with AK's turned up looking for people who "didn't wholly conform to revolutionary thought".
As against the statement "there are never genocides of the old" its a fairly reasonable counter-example. Particularly if you include "pogrom-like" activity alongside "genocide-like" activity.
Yeah, genocide against the old is impossible anyway since genocide is the elimination of a racial, religious, national, or ethnic group and the elderly are not any of those. This isn't just a semantic distinction; because everyone becomes old it's impossible to wipe out old people the way you can wipe out a minority ethnic group, sci fi premises like Logan's Run aside. The Cultural Revolution and Khmer Rouge are pretty much the closest you can practically get.
> if you lived in 1970 then you would have been anti-nuclear too
I thought about this after the OP, and it's not a good take. Partly because generations aren't homogenous on anything other than age, partly because it gives people like the Nazis a free-pass that they do not deserve...
but mostly because we ARE living in a society infested with terrible ideas, with people protesting all the wrong things, and you used to blog about how stupid those were back on SlateStarCodex. You really think "1970's you" would have just rolled-over on whether nuclear energy was going to develop into being safer/cleaner/cheaper over time?
It's a fully generalizable pass for blaming any group for anything. What's the point of even debating this after that sentence?
And anyway the anti-nuclear was part of a larger de-growth movement of stagnating energy production, infrastructure, housing and general pessimism about technology starting in 1970. And yes, the bad ideas have been adopted by future generations, but they came from a segment of boomer elites and we can blame them for that.
One might argue that it is in fact a bad idea to blame any group for anything. I'm not *sure* I go that far, but I'm certainly not sure I don't.
By all means, track what all 8 billion humans have been doing and blame them individually.
Well, collective hate is certainly more efficient.
I only have 2 minutes so yeah.
Blame isn't that strong of a word. It doesn't really imply these are awful people, at least not on a forum like this. Scott's strawmanning in my opinion: he is equating blaming boomers with claiming boomers are uniquely awful people, and then cutting down the latter to prove the former.
To me blaming the boomers in this context just means that some boomers did some bad things that had bad effects. That is much harder for Scott to disprove and I am disappointed that he'd sidestep it like that.
I don't know, I personally find condemning groups for anything to be strange at this point. Would you condemn a bunch of mosquitoes for sucking your blood? The circumstances involved have made this situation inevitable. That doesn't mean that they aren't a problem to be solved, mind you, but there's no reason to be genuinely mad about them.
Besides, this entire culture war is proof that just getting mad at people is unproductive for bringing about lasting change. If you want to get rid of bad ideas, you need to eliminate the source.
I don't think you can really blame people in the 70's (in general) for being anti-nuclear. They simply didn't have the necessary information readily available to them to make the "correct" judgement that nuclear energy isn't dangerous. It sure seems scary, and it doesn't help that it shares a name with the nuclear bomb (which is really scary, we're talking about the height of the cold war).
I can't really "blame" someone in 1100's England for believing that bloodletting was a useful medical procedure. The same is true for pretty much anything that we once didn't know that we now know. Can you blame a prehistoric human for not knowing that the wheel is a useful technology? That the earth is round? That internal combustion engines are possible? The information was simply not available.
The thing about giving the Nazi's a "free pass" is not equivalent, because that is a moral issue, rather than a practical, amoral issue, like nuclear power safety (which is at best abstractly moral). You could debate moral relativism and presentism all day if you wanted. I don't know enough to have an informed discussion about that.
As a side note, I tried looking for data on nuclear power sentiment over time, and the only data I could find started being collected in the 80's, so I don't know for sure that nuclear sentiment in the 70's was actually poor. I do agree it seems like it was bad.
Proof that I can in fact blame people in the 70's for being anti-nuclear: I blame them right now in this very comment! There was never any good reason to believe such nonsense, and people in the 50s were more optimistic about it.
> The information was simply not available.
They already had 3 decades of nuclear reactors being active, and the worst incident was 3 Mile Island, a complete nothingburger.
You know that many people are Q-anon level stupid, or at least MAGA/woke level stupid, stop projecting intelligence on them that isn't there.
Also you wrote what, 12 sentences and couldn't bother to include a single crumb of evidence that they "didn't have the necessary information". Do you not understand how to make arguments? Do you think comparing people to cavemen is good enough to understand how the world works?
> the only data I could find started being collected in the 80's, so I don't know for sure that nuclear sentiment in the 70's was actually poor
There are entire essays written about how sentiment was during the 3 mile island incident in 1979, so you're bad at Googling too. Did you write this whole thing without even knowing about the incident?
The divorce spike at the end of WW2 is wild. I imagine there were a lot of “Dear John” letters.
Boomers paid less in taxes because they were a larger generation supporting a smaller generation of old people- but they still ran up massive debts, setting very little aside for the future. Now we have a smaller generation supporting a larger generation, and a huge percentage of the budget is the debt they accumulated. Until we start shrinking the deficit, every generation should rightfully hate the one before that saddled it with debt.
What should we do? Means test Medicare and Social Security benefits. Stop having the rest of the healthcare system subsidize Medicare prices (every customer gets the price a provider charges Medicare).
Medicare is means tested; look up IRMAA. Here's the chart showing what you pay based on your income:
https://www.ssa.gov/forms/ssa-44.pdf
The reason Prop 13 was perceived to be necessary is that California's property taxes are structured in a weird way which leads to painful consequences when there's a large and sustained increase in property values, particularly one that happens unevenly in different parts of the state.
In most places in the US that have property taxes, the normal way that work is that state legislatures and city/county governments approve a certain amount of spending, all of which is supposed to paid for somehow. Other taxes and fees pay for some of the spending, and responsibility for whatever is left over gets apportioned among property owners in proportion to the assessed value of their property. Assuming spending and revenue are relatively stable and predictable except for policy changes, the government sets a property tax amount and the rate is whatever rate produces the number of dollars they need. It's often expressed as a "millage rate", i.e. how many dollars of taxes you owe per $1000 of assessed value (or how many "mills", tenths of cents, you owe per dollar of assessed value).
I think it's mostly local governments that use property taxes in most states, with the state government usually using income tax, sales tax, or both as its main source of revenue.
In California pre-Prop 13, the state government sets a fixed percentage rate for the standard statewide property tax, of which state, county, and city governments (and school and water districts) get their respective cuts. Each level of government can also tack on supplemental rates in addition to the standard rate, but they can't cut the standard rate. So the rate is fixed, is kinda hard to change, and especially hard to change downwards. In the 19th Century, there was an issue with the county-level elected officials who administer the process for determining taxable property values running on platforms of giving their constituents de facto tax cuts by assessing property in their counties at below-market rates, which would have been mostly harmless were they just cutting taxes for their respective counties but was a problem because they were also cutting state taxes but only for residents of their counties. The response at the time was to create a state-level oversight body, the Board of Equalization, to force counties to collect state taxes in a uniform way.
In a normal state, if property values go way up but government expenses don't, then property tax rates automatically get cut to yield the same amount of revenue and a similar tax burden on a typical taxpayer. If the rates are set at city or county level, then property values going way up in just some parts of the state will cut tax rates in just that part, so even within that part of the state the burden on a particular taxpayer stays relatively constant.
In California in the mid-to-late 1970s, property values went way up in big parts of the state (possibly statewide). The tax rate stayed the same, but the dollar amount of taxes went way up in proportion to property values. The state government and local governments got way more revenue from this, and a lot of them just spent the extra money. See the bottom graph on this page (state spending adjusted for inflation) and note the big bump around 1977:
https://dof.ca.gov/about-us/history/state-budgets/
The effect was even bigger for local governments, which got more of their revenue from property taxes while the state got more from sales and income taxes.
So from the perspective of property owners, especially older property owners who often had considerable illiquid assets (house, pensions, long-term investments) but limited cash incomes, their taxes (in dollar terms) went way up in a way that created hardship for many, and the policy was pretty much happening on autopilot rather than being driven by a deliberate decision that the government needed to spend more and needed to raise taxes to pay for it.
Between 1975 (the first year data is available) and June 1978 (when Prop 13 passed), California housing prices increase 85% while cumulative CPI inflation over the same time period increased 24%:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Q0Lt
Prop 13 attempted to fix this by directly addressing the complaints rather than the root cause: it overrode the legislature and lowered the statewide standard property tax rate to 1% (a pretty big cut), cancelled all existing local additional property taxes, and imposed big procedural hurdles to impose new local additional property taxes. This part more-or-less rolled back inflation-adjusted revenue to the pre-real-estate-boom levels. The other major part of the measure was to mitigate the effects if property values went up in the future, by basically fixing your taxable property value when you buy the house (or its value when the measure went into effect) so there would be no more big surprise bills.
This was a massive blunt instrument and I agree with many of the criticisms of it, but it needs to be understood in context of the problem it was intended to address, and if we're going to get rid of Prop 13, I would like California to seriously consider adopting the more usual pattern of property tax rates that float to produce relatively constant revenue instead rather than going back to the old system which was severely broken in a different way than the current system is severely broken.
Thank you for writing this. I am amazed that none of the prior discussions of Prop 13 I have read have mentioned this-- and I have lived in CA for 20 years and been interested in housing policy for most of that time.
Note that making that graph per capita would make the change look somewhat less disproportionate since CA population was still growing pretty fast in the 70s-- and per capita real spending seems like the right metric here since lots of government costs scale roughly with population size.
Good point. I played around in FRED a little bit and I think I was able to rig up a graph of total state revenue from property taxes adjusted for inflation and population growth. There wasn't a data series for that, so I had to rig one up by dividing the nominal dollars total revenue by CPI and population. I normalized it to 1970=100.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Q1sm
The vertical green dotted line is when Prop 13 passed.
Wow, cool. Very clear 1975-78 spike-- and an even clearer and larger 1983-86 spike. Any idea why that latter one happened?
My first thought is that house price were still going up. This does appear to be the case, but the timing doesn't quite line up: prices did dip during the 1981-2 recession and boomed in the late 90s, but the big inflation-adjusted price boom in the 80s was 1986-9, after inflation and interest rates had both come way down from their peaks in the 70s and early 80s respectively.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Q4bG
Housing prices would still affect revenue post Prop 13 because of new construction and people moving. Lower inflation would also reduce the impact of Prop 13 on inflation-adjusted revenue even for houses that hadn't sold recently, because the Prop 13 cap on assessed value goes up by 2% a year regardless of inflation.
I'm guessing that the 1983-86 spike was some change in policy, probably a combination special assessments passing (still possible under Prop 13, but requires supermajority approval of voters) and perhaps a change in the allocation of revenue between the state and local governments (the data series I used only shows the state government's cut of the property tax; FRED doesn't seem to have data handy for total property tax revenue at all levels of government).
Found a graph of local government share of property tax revenue here, from the California Legislative Analysts's Office.
https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/article/Detail/209
The second to last one is both inflation-adjusted and population-adjusted.
It has vaguely the same landmarks as the state's cut of the revenue-. Big sustained climb 1960-72, dip around the 1974-5 recession, climbing again until 1978, a big drip when Prop 13 passed, and renewed growth afterwards.
But the magnitudes are very different. The pre-72 climb is much bigger, the 74-78 hill is much smaller, the Prop 13 cliff much bigger, and the climb in the 80s much smaller.
The report linked from the article claims (contrary to what I've heard elsewhere) that local governments did cut rates in boom years, and the charts offered in support of that in the report seem to partially support the claim:there does look to be an inverse correlation of rate changes and property values, but a much weaker one than I'd expect from a millage-rate system that mechanically targets a given revenue level. Figure 12 shows, to my eyes, that in the mid-to-late 60s, local governments largely spent the windfall from increased valuations, raised rates for a few years c. 1970 when prices leveled off, cut rates somewhat in 1973, jacked them up again during the 1974 recession to make up for lowered prices, and then cut them again just before Prop 13 passed. This does suggest that local governments did have quite a bit more flexibility to cut tax rates pre-Prop 13 than I had thought, even if they seem to have used it inconsistently.
https://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3497#How_Does_Proposition.A013_Affect_the_Stability_of_Property_Taxes.3F
I'm guessing the cliff from Prop 13 is much sharper and the climb afterwards much shallower in local revenue because the state claimed a bigger share of the remaining revenue, but I'm having trouble finding anything concrete to confirm or contradict that.
This is a really good explanation.
Okay, why were property values going up so much?
“I can’t afford to keep my house. I’ll have to sell it for an ungodly amount of money,” is just not that compelling of a story once the money is taken into account. It’s definitely on the negative side of the ledger that Scott’s grandparents-in-law would have to move. Would this counterbalance $500,000 in profit? If that kind of money is no big deal compared to the sentimental value, then they could probably afford to pay the taxes and stay.
The places you would move to with your ungodly amount of money have also gone up in price by the ungodly amount.
Well, you sell your house and then what? Every other house in the area has gotten way more expensive, too. You can move somewhere with a lower cost of living, but that's likely a fairly substantial hardship if you're only doing it because your taxes went up and you can't afford to pay them without selling your house. It means moving away from all your friends, family who live nearby but not with you, and any clubs and activities you're part of. If you aren't retired yet, then it also means leaving your job and having to find a new one.
If we're looking at the context of Prop 13 being passed specifically, rather than considering what tax policy should be in 2026, the profit then is going to be quite a bit smaller in absolute terms than the profit now. Taking a look at the house I lived in in Sunnyvale, CA from 2009-2017, it sold for $25k in 1973 ($190k adjusted for inflation). At the time, it was 3br, 1ba, a little under 1000 square feet, on a 5000 square foot lot. A $190k house going up 50-100% in price is still a heft profit, but not life-changing money on the same scale as a $1-2 million dollar house appreciating by the same amount.
Or you could stay in the same area and downsize. Since the smaller house went up in value, too, a lot of your profit is going to go into buying the smaller house, so you're probably left with a lower standard of living for about the same expenses and not much new cash left in your pocket, and you're probably afraid you might going to have to go through the same process again in a few years.
The time scale is also an issue in how much hardship is involved in selling and moving. In California, you get a notice of your house's assessed value in August, a tax bill in October, and then then taxes are due in two installments, half in December and half in April. If you aren't paying attention to housing prices until your notice of assessment comes in the mail, you've got four months to scrape together money to pay a tax bill that's much more than you were expecting or else to sell your house and move out.
There are solutions to this besides Prop 13, of course. My point is to try to explain the context of Prop 13, not to defend it as anywhere near an optimal policy.
It's interesting how this reads as the genteel version of the low-income apartment eviction horror mill.
Kevin Munger: "they have dominated the presidency (look up the birthdate of every major party candidate since the 2000 presidential election...)"
Wait, whut? Is there some sensible reason you picked *that* year?
There have been four Boomer Presidents total. Before that there were seven GI-generation, four Missionary-generation, four Progressive-generation, and seven Gilded-generation Presidents. The Lost generation was significantly short-changed, with only Truman and Eisenhower, and the Silent generation with only Biden. But the Boomers have been just about what you'd expect with generations lately being about 30 years and two-term Presidencies (when they happen) about eight. The GI generation got more, but only because JFK/LBJ together had only two terms, as did Nixon/Ford, and both Carter and Bush Sr only one each.
Yes, Gen-X, which started in 1965, would have first become eligible in 2000. But we just don't do things that way. The President is supposed to have gravitas. (Yeah, don't throw Trump in my face.) The youngest President ever elected was JFK, the "boy king", and *he* was 43.
I'll be very surprised if the next POTUS is a Boomer. Vance and DeSantis are both GenX, as is Newsom. Harris is a Boomer, but I'll join you in hoping *that* doesn't happen. If you're worried about GenX not getting their shot, I'd worry more about getting sidestepped by Millennials like Ramaswamy and AOC, but don't blame the Boomers for that.
Mm shouldn't you count per term instead of per president itself? Like you mentioned how GI got more and Lost generation got less because of this anomaly.
Sure, but Kevin pointed at "candidates", and I happened to already have a breakdown of Presidents on hand. The Boomers had eight terms and the GIs had eight terms. Lost got shortchanged but I think the main reason was just that nobody could convince FDR to retire. There's nothing particular unusual about the Boomers on that score.
(Kevin also pointed to Congressional representation but I don't have data at hand to argue with that. It may well be true, but it doesn't extend to the Presidency.)
> Lost got shortchanged
Nominative determinism wins again!
"Wait, whut? Is there some sensible reason you picked *that* year?"
Especially since Clinton (1992) was born the same time as GWB and Trump. (Anyone who doesn't know: Bill C, GWB, and Trump were all born within the same 3-month period in 1946.)
Vance is technically a Millennial. Born 1984.
You're quite right! I had him down as 1982 for some reason.
> Federal deficit spending is the clearest possible example of trading off long-term prosperity for short-term gain
This is incorrect (although also a common misconception). Federal deficit spending enables other sectors of economy (workers, firms, banks) to stay in positive equity. Without perpetual deficit spending, some of these sectors eventually would end up with zero or negative equity, triggering wide-spread social consequences (e.g. see Great Depression and what happened with gold standard, in US and other countries). Federal government is the only sector of economy that can go into negative equity without anything seriously bad happening (and hence the current policy equilibrium).
A lot more details on how government (and more importantly, private) debt creation works are available on professor Steve Keen's channel - https://www.youtube.com/@profstevekeen (and/or Patreon page, https://www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen).
Also, fact check - US is running a deficit since WWII (100% if you also count entitlements, ~80% of years if you don't), so, for +/- 80 years. How did the economy do (compared with other major economies)? Is 80 years long enough for the long-term consequences to kick-in?
How much deficit spending is necessary for this? Could it be just 20% of what we've done, making sure it's perpetual?
Generally, new money (coming from both private banks and government) can be used for investment (good) or asset speculation (bad). So with less new money created, there would be fewer Silicon Valley startups but also fewer subprime housing bubbles, so right amount of money creation (and whether the government should create more money directly vs. private banks doing that) would be an interesting policy debate.
But care must be taken. It's bad when you get into a situation where too much of the budget is needed for interest on the national debt. Still, everyone who voted in this century has to share responsibility for the huge post-Clinton run-up in debt, so I don't see that "the Boomers" are somehow the problem.
> But care must be taken. It's bad when you get into a situation where too much of the budget is needed for interest on the national debt.
I agree that care should be taken; but interest on the debt is not that different from the debt itself (both are just ways to create money for the economy). Currently, all government-created debt (~= money) flows through big banks ('primary dealers'), and they benefit from that disproportionally; one possible policy tweak is to pay less interest on government bonds (banks would still buy and hold them, due to legal reserve requirements).
This is complete nonsense. Norway runs fiscal surpluses every single year and has none of these problems.
That’s North Sea oil, not Norwegian budget magic.
The assertion is about the need to run budget deficits for accounting reasons.
Yeah, but that guy isn't saying it's a income vs expenses issue. He's saying that fundamentally the private sector has to have a negative net worth of the government runs surpluses. So the Norway example is the perfect case to disprove his voodoo economics.
Well, no, Norway doesn't disprove anything - with international trade (and very significant international trade, as in Norway's case), you can effectively outsource money creation (i.e. some other country runs a deficit, and then buys stuff from your country, and then that money percolates through both your private and public sectors).
I again suggest checking out models by Steve Keen - they cover export/import (and this is where he doesn't agree with MMT folks).
And instead of calling things 'voodoo' - can you maybe suggest alternative explanation how government debt seems to grow and grow and grow, and nothing catastrophic happening for 50+ years, in multiple countries?
I can't provide an explanation for something that didn't happen. The fact that Wikipedia has a page called "List of Sovereign Debt Crises" alone should tell you that your account of the last 50 year in sovereign debt is fatally flawed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_debt_crises
Ok, important detail - government can accumulate virtually unlimited debt in a currency it controls (was assumed since we started talking about US and also stands for Japan).
If government has debt in _foreign_ currency (as in Russian default of 1998, Greece problems in 2015, and probably all other post WW2 cases in that list), or if currency is tied to gold, then defaults on such debts are possible and indeed happened.
One significant change since the 80’s is the expectation in the GOP that taxes only go down, never up. This has changed the calculus completely.
The Great Depression was caused by monetary policy, not an absence of deficits. Steve Keen's "Modern Monetary Theory" is regarded like astrology by mainstream economists.
- Steve Keen's theories and MMT have similarities (both start from a premise 'let's get accounting right'), but are not the same (most notably - in how export/import flows are treated)
- Mainstream economists don't have a good explanation for Great Depression / 2008 crisis / Japan lost decades, because mainstream economics mostly ignores debt. Remember, Bernanke (then a Fed chair) in July 2007 told Congress that economy will strengthen - but in August 2007, the worst crisis since Great Depression started.
- Steve Keen, on the other hand, _predicted_ the 2008 crisis in advance, and has built models that show exactly how economy can get into the state it went into.
So astrology or not, seems worth paying attention to...
Mainstream economist like Scott Sumner CAN explain all those things. I'm assuming you just haven't read him. You can go through old posts at https://www.themoneyillusion.com/
The EMH says you generally can't predict movements of speculative markets. If Steve Keen actually did place bets on the timing of the crash and made money off it, I'd be impressed. If he's like Nouriel Roubini or Peter Schiff and just predicts crashes regularly then claims to be right after the fact, that's less impressive.
Can mainstream economists explain after the fact or _predict_ a crisis?
The blog you linked was started in 2009, so Scott Sumner could not have predicted the 2008 crisis (at least on that blog; I'll try to read some of it anyway, time permitting).
On the other hand, Steve Keen actually predicted the 2008 crisis back in 2006 (as far as I remember) and he is not / was not making constant alarmist predictions.
He did actually bet on his predictions (about Australian housing prices), but lost that bet (and hiked to the top of Mt Kosciuszko as result); however, that bet IMHO was poorly structured (not accounting for possible actions by multiple actors), and essentially Steve was correct in his analysis of what was happening (and what would transpire if things would be mostly left as is).
That blog does indeed not predict any future movement in speculative markets. Scott relies heavily on the EMH and thus doesn't normally attempt to do so.
Betting in 2006 that a crash would eventually happen is not that impressive if it happened in 2008 UNLESS the prediction was that it would happen in 2008 specifically.
If the one time Keen actually made a bet based on his prediction he got it wrong, then I'm not impressive by his supposed predictive abilities.
For anybody interested - step by step modeling of real flows of money in a stand-alone economy (no imports / exports):
https://www.patreon.com/posts/when-experts-are-147893730?utm_campaign=patron_engagement&utm_source=post_link&post_id=147893730&utm_id=855ecba2-af4e-40d5-91bf-3e46923af29e&utm_medium=email
Nothing 'voodoo' or any sleights of hand, feel free to point out any logical mistakes or incorrect assumptions...
So much of this anti-Boomer discourse is people wanting to think in terms of cohorts instead of age groups. Ironically, I think this happened recently because millennials were another big enough generation to get a label and a huge amount of discourse about us, and now we are stuck seeing things in cohort terms.
Also, it’s funny that no one even agrees precisely where the cutoffs are for the cohorts. Does the Baby Boom start with babies born on V-J day? Ironically, if you delay the start by even a year, you end up with the strange conclusion that Boomers have been drastically *under*represented in the presidency.
This is a more analytical response than my more sanctimonious comment, but I think it points in the same direction.
Although I think this practice of naming every n-year cohort started earlier than the arrival of Millennials since people were so used to Boomers being treated as a group they wanted names for the next cohort. The novel *Generation X* really was meant to refer to a subset of people born during the baby boom who the author felt did not face the same challenges that the classical flower children Boomers faced. But immediately the name got applied to the next cohort and was associated to early-90s trends in music.
For some reason it's just more socially acceptable to say "fuck boomers" than "fuck the elderly"
But that also should not be socially acceptable. "Fuck the X's" is a terrible mode of discourse. (I'm not assuming you would disagree with me on this. Just adding commentary.)
The Greatest Generation were too great to have such contempt for them.
It's sort of weird that we have these "generation" labels at all. People are continuously being born, so it's totally arbitrary where you draw the lines and labels.
However boomers *are* an exception to that rule. There really was a *dramatic* spike in birth rates right at the end of WW2. In that sense, they're sort of unique in being the only generation that you can clearly define.
I sort of agree with your first statement, except that technology can have dramatic effects on culture, so that the social differences between people born in Year 1 and Year 10 can be far less than between people born in Year 11 and Year 15 even though less time has elapsed between those birth years. This happens if some new technology starts to affect culture at the moment when people born in Year 12 came of age. This gives a broad sense of the generational divide. It’s still true that this is gradual and not all-inclusive (e.g. there are always people who defy stereotypes based on age) but the sense is still there, shared by many and widely agreed upon.
I think the important thing is to keep modes of discourse straight: don’t jump willy-nilly from talking in generalities to talking about individuals, and keep it clear what mode you’re in. Stereotypes and statistics work for high-level theoretical discourse, but they are inappropriate for determining actions on an interpersonal level.
It makes sense to think that might be true, but I feel like it requires empirical evidence. Also then you should get generations of varying sizes based on when abrupt changes happened. A lot of people just cut off 18-year cohorts since the baby boom lasted 18 years. Or alternatively they make GenX short and cut off 20-year cohorts starting in 2000. Is there a bigger difference between people born in 1963 and 1968 than those born in 1953 and 1963?
I don't know about the years you mention, but Millennials are only about a decade long, maybe less (early 80s to very early 90s if not late 80s...basically the last generation to grow up without high speed internet at home); Gen Z is about a decade as well (from "we had high speed internet at home when I was in elementary school" to "I graduated high school as the iPhone was coming out"). Contrast with the range of Boomers which, as you say, is almost twice that long.
You are trying to do something that makes sense from a cultural analysis point of view, but you are not using the definitions most people use. Sources disagree, but they all use cohort sizes of at least 15 years. For instance, this is a list from the USC libraries:
The Greatest Generation – born 1901-1924.
The Silent Generation – born 1925-1945.
The Baby Boomer Generation – born 1946-1964.
Generation X – born 1965-1979.
Millennials – born 1980-1994.
Generation Z – born 1995-2012.
Gen Alpha – born 2013 – 2025.
The Pew Research Center uses similar dates with slightly longer cohorts. Cohorts of 5-10 year sizes have more coherence, but they're too short to fit most people's intuition about what a generation is. Even 15-year cohorts are arguably half-generation.
What commentators tend to do is associate each long cohort with the most interesting 5-year period. All Boomers came of age in the late 60s, all GenXers were into grunge in college, all Millennials graduated into the dotcom bust. Of course that's nonsense, but if you want to label each 8-year cohort separately you should make up your own names.
Granted, this contradicts my claim about 18-year cohorts, but it is pretty variable. Never as short as 10, though.
I was trying to answer the other commenter’s question based on my understanding, which I admit was intuitive rather than researched through USC libraries. ;-) I wasn’t trying to just make things up though, I was trying to reproduce what I’d always heard about where each generation started, and then fill in an explanation that seemed sensible to me—as sensible as these arbitrary divisions can be, antway.
But I yield to your official definitions and the (less satisfying) reasoning behind them.
Thing is, the definition is kind of wrong, socially speaking -- IME people born 1940-45 are pretty boomer-adjacent, at least.
20 year generations actually line up pretty well with 20th century social trends, with the caveat that the central ten birth-years tend to be the peak of each generation; the first five are sort of the "elder sibling/cool kids" that the rest look up to, and the last five tend to get a bit screwed.
So "core boomer" is 1945-55 (eg my parents), "cool kids" are 1940-45 (Bob Dylan, most of the musicians/cultural forces of the 60s), and 1955-60 get their asses reamed by the economy of the late 70s/early 80s and never quite find the comfort/success of their older siblings.
Cultural genX from 1960-80 works a lot better than various shrunken definitions in current use (which would notably exclude Douglas Copeland!), and I think it's fair to say that 1985-95 was "peak Millenial", with 1980-85 being "Millenial with genX overtones" and 1995-2000 sharing some characteristics with the Zoomers.
Well, they're literally adjacent to the beginning of the conventional Boomer generation. And the vanguard of any generation will always mainly be entertained by members of the previous one. It's interesting that you're making GenX longer, rather than shorter, than other generations as people sometimes do.
>the vanguard of any generation will always mainly be entertained by members of the previous one.
I don't think it makes sense -- we are talking about the literal core identity of these generations; why would it be defined by the one before?
This is particularly prominent for the boomers -- I think if you start looking at birthdays you will struggle to name very many prominent musicians of the late sixties born much after 1945 -- some cursory looking has Dylan, all the Beatles, most of CCR, both of Simon & Garfunkel, not to mention Hendrix and Joplin all born between 1940 and 1945. (Neil Young does squeak in there in Nov 45; that's all I tried)
If the early 90s are the late 60s of GenX, a 1965 start is not *so* egregious -- Kurt Cobain wasn't born until 1967. However this makes Eddie Vedder, Flea, Les Claypool, Kim Deal (plus Kurt's old lady!) a bunch of Boomers -- in addition to (as I mentioned) the guy who coined the damn term as reflective of his own experience *during the 90s*.
>you're making GenX longer, rather than shorter, than other generations as people sometimes do.
No? Done my way, all the generations of the 20th century are 20 years (+/- around the edges, of course).
It would be a deeper cultural dive to fill out the earlier ones, but seems to fit pretty well with what I know of my grandparents, older relatives, and famous people:
1900-1920: Greatest -- (largely) missed the first war, in charge of the second one
1920-1940: Silent -- Kerouac, Plath, Elvis, Monroe -- Depression/war children
1940-1960: Boomers
1960-1980: X
1980-2000: Millenials
2000-too soon to say: Zoomers
It wasn't Boomers who "suffered" a high divorce rate, it was their kids. I'm an old Boomer (Trump's age) who didn't divorce (didn't marry till we'd been together 21 years) and doesn't have kids (I married an older, Soviet labor camp survivor who was afraid to have kids because he thought humanity would go crazy again ... and whaddaya know!) but I watched what some of my siblings' kids went through, and I have many GenX friends, who could be my kids, who suffered greatly from the self-fulfillment quest of their boomer parents.
I am a young boomer who "suffered" my "silent generation" parents divorcing. More like I suffered the consequences, since I was too young to remember them ever having lived together.
Ironically I am in a stable marriage and will probably never divorce. But I am glad that Americans have the right to no-fault divorce, the alternative is far worse.
The right is important. Many older boomers, though, tended to marry in a 1950s way (convention, romance, not really knowing themselves or each other), have kids, and then start “finding themselves,” highly prioritized then, and the kids were collateral damage.
My millennial nieces and nephews have pretty much spent their twenties “finding themselves” personally and professionally and living in one or more relationships, ending up in one that proved to have legs after several years. Around 30 this extended adolescence glided to an end and they got married and started having kids. (We are overrun with toddlers.) They don’t want to put their kids through what they went through, and they appear to have high intentions and odds of staying married. This life pattern makes a lot of sense to me, though it isn’t biologically optimal.
If you want to encourage old people in California to move down to smaller homes, being punitive with the property tax wouldn't be nearly as effective as getting rid of the capital gains tax on home sales. (Yes, I know that's Federal, so there's zero chance of that.)
You buy a house as a young person for 300K-500K, live in it for forty or fifty years, and magically it's worth 4.5M. Jackpot! At this point you might be inclined to sell it and move someplace smaller. But that gives you a cap gain of, say 4 *million* dollars. If you're married you get an exemption of 500K, but that still gives you a cap gain of 3.5M, on which you pay 25% Federally and (since California humorously calls that "income") something like 11% in state tax, for a total of 1.26M.
So you net something like 3.24M. The smaller house next door to you, which is run-down and cramped, is nevertheless on the same size lot as yours and cannot be purchased for 3.24M. So you're not just losing your house, you're losing your neighborhood, your city, your friends, your doctors, and moving to Stockton or something. My father-in-law did that after my mother-in-law passed, and he was dead not long after. Probably unrelated...
Capital gains, on houses at least, should be indexed to inflation.
If I buy my house for 200K and generic inflation over 40 years takes it up to 1.6 million, I haven't really had a gain of 1.4 million. I may even have *lost* money if it's only worth 1.1 million now.
Personally I think it's shameful that we don't index *all* capital gains. The tax brackets rise every year so you aren't punished for getting an inflation adjustment in your salary.
But then I think taxing cap gains is a bad idea anyway.
Why do think it is a bad idea to tax capital gains? I'm a firm believer that there should be no distinction whatsover between types of income in terms of taxation.
Because we would all be better off if we encouraged savings and investments rather then penalizing them.
Consider looking at it as being penalized for working. Tax deferment into retirement accounts encourages saving. That works. But why should someone owning stocks or crypto, simply sitting on a gamble that wins, pay a lower rate than someone working? If the bulk of passive income was taxed to the same degree as wages, then it's a level playing field. At the very least, set limits. There are no capital gains on primary residence, unless profit is greater than $250K -- but what's the logic of allowing that every two years (or doubling it for filing jointly)? Roth IRA gains are tax free, but why was Peter Thiel allowed billions tax free? Incentives with limits. My bottom line is that it's nuts to have workers foot the entire bill for Social Security when there's loads of income generated other ways.
Well, you've convinced me; taxes on income are bad too!
My parents bought a run down home in Palo Alto in the late 70s, it is now worth $4M+. They thought about cashing out, but then would have to buy another house somewhere, and the math didn't work out.
Of course, if they were forced to pay the full property tax rate, they might have moved out long ago.
What prevents them from renting instead of buying? They should be able to rent for a very long time with the 3.24 million dollar cushion
Rents in most places are closely correlated with mortgage payments.
Why isn't the young person who thinks he is entitled to buy my home satisfied to rent?
I don’t think the young person should be entitled to a home and should be fine renting, just like I don’t think the old person should be entitled to artificially low property taxes
They’re not artificially low. Everybody else’s are artificially high. Unless you think the state’s per capita need for funds has quadrupled in real dollars in the last thirty years.
I’m open to hearing the argument for that position, but it needs to be made before any other argument is productive.
I think that California is on track for a budget deficit, so they definitely need to find a way to increase tax revenue. Of course property taxes go to local governments, but if those revenues are increased, it lowers the amount of money the state needs to spend from its general fund to supplement local services.
The state probably also needs to cut some services, but I think an easy place to start on revenue generation is to make endemic home owners pay the same property taxes as newer home owners.
Well, of course they are on track for a deficit. That's what happens when you spend money like a drunken sailor.
My question is why they need to spend so much more per capita than they did thirty years ago.
If I were facing a deficit in my personal finances, an easy place to start is to knock over a liquor store.
...I think you and Hanania are a bit too quick to discount the likelihood of 'genocide' as a cure for old people holding up the recycling/redistribution of assets. One metric attracting increasing attention amongst us Boomers, is the escalation of the overall euthanasia numbers in Canada and elsewhere.
Maybe it's different over in Canada, but in France I have the feeling that it is the boomers that are pushing towards legalizing it, looking at the average age of people talking about it. Polls are still Assad-tier for every age group but the only age group where support is under 90% is the less than 35 years old! It would be the first genocide where the victims would actively campaign for.
Page 9 of https://www.admd.org/sites/default/files/2024-05/Sondage%20Ifop%20-%20mai%202024%20-%20Le%20regard%20des%20Franc%CC%A7ais%20sur%20la%20fin%20de%20vie_1.pdf
...Boomer support for euthanasia seems to be strong everywhere. Partly perhaps from the 'it's my choice' attitude which we've had about everything, but also from having to deal with our own aged parents, where the choice wasn't ours.
Being forced to go on when life is not worth living, not for your own sake and not for the sake of anyone you care about either, is a special kind of horror that has been greatly enabled by recent technological advances. Support for MAID tracks strongly with people's exposure to the cruel reality of the situation.
...but it is also true that people get pushed into it sometimes, and I expect this to increase as the population share of people no longer capable of productivity increases. Thorny issue, really.
...agreed.
Far right media talking point, isn't it? I'm skeptical.
...I've seen the tragedy of a painful life without relief, and an end to an elder because of convenience to a family member. It's a thorny issue alright. Best handled by doctors case by case, in terms of their hippocratic oath. When the state sets the rules, the convenience consideration, especially regarding the indigent who are a state burden, is liable to become dominant.
As I suspect many of the people commenting on these threads have boomer parents perhaps this quote from Oscar Wilde is worth reflecting on.
"Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely if ever do they forgive them."
I definitely forgive my (boomer) parents (who divorced).
May we all live long and prosper enough to be as envy-hated as Boomers
"Hanania argues that nobody will genocide the old"
Aren't they already doing that in Canada, where 5% of deaths are by MAID? (I presume the vast majority of these are the elderly, but I haven't been able to dig up proof.)
No, MAID is voluntary.
> (I presume the vast majority of these are the elderly, but I haven't been able to dig up proof.)
You would be right. Dying in old age, of a terminal illness, is not rare.
Health Canada publishes a MAiD report every year. The most recent numbers available are from 2023: https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications/health-system-services/annual-report-medical-assistance-dying-2023.html
> The median age [for MAiD under Track 1, for terminal illness] was 77.7 years and 59.7% were over 75 years of age.
> The median age [under Track 2, for chronic conditions where death is not "reasonably foreseeable" but the patient reports an intolerable quality of life] was 75.0 years and 50.2% were over 75 years of age.
In 2023, a majority of MAiD requests (64.1%) listed "cancer" on the request paperwork.
Meanwhile, in the same year, ~26% of Canadian deaths overall were from malignant cancer.
Comparing the number of cancer-related MAiD provisions to the total number of cancer-related deaths, we can estimate that about 11% of terminal cancer patients in 2023 chose MAiD instead of hospice. If, hypothetically, every Canadian who died from cancer used MAiD, the crude "MAiD usage rate" would be over 25%. And that's just for cancer, and not every other possible illness out there.
The publicly-available death statistics don't go into enough detail to show exactly how many overall Canadian deaths were from "any terminal illness"/dying while on hospice. However, if *every* person who died while on hospice chose MAiD instead, I wouldn't be surprised if that covered >50% of deaths.
I wrote a whole post going over the report in more detail, if you're interested: https://lettersfrombethlehem.substack.com/p/dying-of-a-terminal-illness-is-not
Good read, I subscribed.
Thanks! :-)
I feel the need to bang the drum for a bit of liberal orthodoxy here. I think it is almost always bad to seek out ways that one broad group is worse than other broad groups. It's bad for human cohesion and it leads to unfairness when people are judged by the purported properties of their group. With "generations" it's particularly silly because the divisions are completely arbitrary.
It's fine to criticize policies for favoring people at one stage of life over people at another. But I would encourage people not to treat those at that one stage as a group that has accumulated collective guilt.
Since I can't leave likes I'll just comment to say that I couldn't agree more.
+1
I completely agree but I don't think the divisions being arbitrary is very relevant. The clearest reason we shouldn't judge someone for being of a certain generation is that they never had a choice in the matter and so it reflects nothing about their character. Even when divisions are based off choices and not circumstances, I think we should be doing less judging than we currently are (for "walk a mile in their shoes" type reasons of not really understanding their choices as well as social cohesion reasons).
I think it got harder to keep up the social compact of taking care of elderly needs-care dad when elderly needs-care dad lived at most 1 or 2 years. When they can live for 20 or 30 years it involves someone else sacrificing their life for decades.
I've missed the boat but bugger it, I'll throw my hat in.
I think the boomer meme is a messy composite of issues, and it has a million ways to bolster itself as a memetic complex. An interesting aspect you touched on is conflating the experience in different countries.
In Australia housing is an overwhelming factor in boomer hate, inasmuch as it is their only real wealth vehicle and housing value has overwhelming political protection. It's the entire political reason behind mass immigration, tamping back is openly equivocated with crashing the housing market. We have no manufacturing or like to justify immigrants on productive grounds, we have a surplus of nurses. Mining pays the national bill with relatively little labour. It is literally discussed in Parliament how retirees savings have to come ahead of the prosperity of young people, therefore we need to bring in millions of people to suppress any market correction. Politicians also notoriously own multiple investment properties themselves.
I think Australia has this problem in an especially acute form, and we're disproportionately present in online discourse, so I can easily see us adding undue weight to analysis in other countries. Australians have a very limited number of viable population centres for simple reasons of water scarcity, bushfire risk, and a low population. That every state has a dominant city that won't allow challengers seals the deal. This means in practice most people who want to achieve anything, be near any cultural generation, enjoy the fruits of a city, are utterly trapped and extraction has no natural limit.
I don't think this is nearly as true in America, you have so many cities that young people can run ahead of gentrification, exploit more opportunities. In Europe there's deeper culture and history, so the hinterlands aren't so barron, and there's simply more people more densely packed and more places to go. Australia is at the far end of the world.
I think this is especially distorting to global western discourse because an Australian's complaint resembles and gives weight to complaints about not being able to afford NYC, London, etc. I don't think the two issues are the same, the boomers aren't obviously responsible for the rise of metropols. I think that stuff is cope.
I think your rebuttal of my comment is overcomplicated and in some places directly incorrect.
"Federal deficit spending is the clearest possible example" - I cannot find the words to express my disagreement sufficiently.
Voters do NOT reason about deficits at any level of macroeconomic coherence. "Deficit" is an abstraction that maps to political identity, not time-horizon reasoning. When people answer "should government spend more on X," they're answering "am I a Democrat" not "am I willing to mortgage the future."
Your climate spending argument is no better. The question "should we spend on climate" maps to tribal identity (like you yourself argue!) so cleanly that it swamps (heh) any underlying time-preference signal. Nobody's computing their personal exposure to 2065 sea levels.
if boomers (or anyone) were voting with long-run fiscal optimization in mind, you’d expect willingness to cut their own benefits, support for binding fiscal rules, acceptance of near-term pain. We observe none of that at scale. Instead we see “yes deficit and big government bad, no don’t touch my program.”
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2012/12/20/the-big-generation-gap-at-the-polls-is-echoed-in-attitudes-on-budget-tradeoffs/ - yes it's an older study, but shows directly the delta in priorities between old and young. First two questions are key.
https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/new-poll-most-americans-expect-social-security-benefit-cuts-third-believe-program#generational-divide-social-security - extremely directly relevant data, extremely obvious pattern.
People vote in their own interest as they see it.
Confounding the obvious by wrapping it in illegible and moralized and uncertain downstream effects does let us stick the whole discussion in the framing of your conflict theory post, yes, but the underlying truth is still correct.
I don't understand RH's comment. Can anyone help shed light?
"My SS tax rate went up itself, and has been well over 15% since the changes took effect"
There is no "SS tax rate" but maybe they meant FICA? But that's not "well over 15%"? So I'm a bit lost on this one.
"and the cap on earned income subject to that went up a lot. And I voted to accept all that because it was projected to be sufficient."
I assume this is referring to the 1977 Amendments to Social Security? But RH didn't "vote" on that in 1977, obviously, since we don't vote on any legislation. The most recent election was 1976 when Boomers were aged 14-30 years old and made up 18% of the electorate. And I'm pretty dubious that Social Security reform was a big issue in that election -- if RH's Senator was even up for election and if his incumbent didn't just win by a landslide like they usually do regardless of issues -- but I'm not going to bother looking it up.
And also...complaining that a legislative fix from 1977 ran out of steam in 2026 -- 50 years later -- does not feel like a good faith effort. Especially when the official Social Security Administration bulletin from 1978 says "with the signing of the Social Security Amendments of 1977 into law, the Congress and the President have assured the financial soundness of the social security program for the next 50 years".
Nobody was promising it was fixed forever. It's been 50 years. Sounds like we got exactly what was promised?
Between SS and Medicare, the employer pays 7.65% and the employee pays 7.65%. Economists largely say this is tax is paid by the employee since it affects what the employer can offer in wages. Added together is 15.3%.
I guess you could do that but then your argument looks either histrionic or sloppy when we can actually look up the Social Security tax rate, which is something different from Medicare. The Social Security portion of FICA is 12.4%, which is over 20% off from "over 15%". Over 20% is not a small error.
Thinking of FICA as just being for Social Security is a fairly common mistake and one which I find fairly understandable.
Adding together the employer and employee portion of the payroll tax might be a symptom of being self-employed or working as a 1099 contractor, since in those cases you pay the entire 15.3% yourself.
I want to point out that property tax deferral until death/sale is already the law of the land in at least some US states, such as Texas. Comptroller's form 50-126, if you're a qualifying senior, will defer your property taxes:
https://comptroller.texas.gov/forms/50-126.pdf
Whenever someone in Texas says "property taxes will force Grannie out of her home and that's the main objection I have, I just want her to be able to stay in her home," it's really interesting to point out Comptroller's form 50-126, and see what their response is and whether this satisfies them or not.
When someone says this about their granny, are they just not aware of Comptroller's form 10-526? Or are they jealousy eyeing the government's share of granny's inheritance?
Most people are indeed not aware of Comptroller's form 10-526! It's easily available but uptake is not huge. The two responses I usually get when I tell people about it are either:
1. Scott's response in the article -- "Oh cool! Looks like that solves the problem, how elegant."
2. Brief silence, then immediate goal post shifting: "Look, granny should be able to build generational wealth for her family."
I totally get the desire to pass on valuable assets to your kids, but the problem with that line of thinking is it's a fundamentally zero sum game to expect house prices to go up forever. House prices can only keep going as long as there's someone on the other side willing to take the deal. And if we just exempt large portions of property from taxation, that immediately capitalizes into their selling price. A huge windfall for those who already own property, and a massive barrier to getting on the housing ladder for everybody else.
This is also available in Illinois.
I think Scott is largely right in his comment on Vijla Kainu's comment on eldercare (ie, a major boomer transition point was the emergence of nursing homes vs family care), but I think that both Scott and Vijla miss some important aspects. I'm millennial and spent 2025 with a sister-in-law attempting in-home care for a loved one with dementia for as long as possible, and we had to give up about 4 months ago. After talking things over with older boomer and greatest-gen relatives, here are my thoughts:
1. Historically, nursing homes pre-date the boomers. My greatest-gen father-in-law and his brothers/sisters had to put *their* mom into a nursing home (despite there being 7 of them) because none of them could accommodate her needs in their homes. My boomer mother remembers her grandmother being sad when she and her sister had to put *their* mother into a home (my mom's great-grandmother) because no one could leave her alone around a stove. I don't know the history, but I'm guessing that nursing homes branched out of the 19th-century idea of sanitoriums and/or poorhouses for those who couldn't pay for care. Even if I'm wrong there, the idea for them (and the perceived need!) is definitely pre-boomer.
2. If anything changed with the boomers, it was the idea of women working outside the home -- which impacts eldercare as well as childcare. This was the thing that eventually tanked my sister-in-law and myself. We have to work. We have numerous other friends who are millennial / gen-x women, and it's the same complaint everywhere: we HAVE to work. What might have begun as a glamorous womens' lib flashpoint is now just a soul-grinding reality. We can't do homecare while working most types of professions. Nearly every woman I know would rather be at home with her family (whether her parents or children), but most of us have no choice: we have to work. For some reason, gen-x and millennial husbands really struggle to support their families alone in the same way that greatest-gen husbands did (and even many boomer husbands did). I think this is a more fundamental cultural change than just the eldercare issue, and I think most people who are not women-facing-childcare-and-eldercare haven't cottoned on to how frustrating it is.
3. The solution to the eldercare problem is not to tax the elderly. That just translates directly into a tax on their younger families, who often need their elders' resources to help provide care. In-home daycare with a professional nurse is at least $30/hr, and that adds up quickly if you need it every two hours for personal care and/or overnight so family members can sleep. (One agency quoted me $15,000 per month. Lol, we were already struggling to pay even 20% of that.) Financially punishing the elderly is like lopping a branch out from under your own feet. Thank God for our elders. I just wish we had better ways of keeping them with us for longer!
Eliminating Prop 13 is fine if rent control is also eliminated.
Another (possible) reason for divorce rates jumping in the 1970s is the rise of no-fault divorce. It was first legalized in California in 1970, signed into law by none other than Ronald Reagan. With it, either party could file to dissolve the marriage, with no requirement of proving infidelity, abandonment, etc. This is why conservatives complained about "drive-thru divorces" and the like in the 1970s and 80s.
I say (possible) because I have no statistics in hand to prove the correlation, but it seems pretty persuasive to me.
You'd have to have some explanation for why people thought no-fault divorce was a good idea. It didn't just happen.
Which people? The people who passed the laws, or the people who got no-fault divorces?
I don't think those categories are meaningfully distinct, but if you do, the people who got the divorces.
The laws there are only reflecting the practice.
Really, though, I'm talking about the people who see other people getting no-fault divorces and fail to apply social sanctions. This is what allowed the practice to exist.
> I can see your side of the argument - but I also can’t blame them for being against some hypothetical policy that would force them to move to a strange apartment in the nearest affordable town 50 miles away far away from their only family/caretakers so that some striver DINK couple could turn their spare bedroom into a gym.
This seems like entirely a false dichotomy. Why should the nearest smaller housing unit be far away? Most neighborhoods built before WW2 had a mix of housing at different sizes, styles, and price points. Most towns in the US have since banned doing so, through exactly the sort of NIMBY bullshit that most boomers support. And we especially don't need to *subsidize* "non-downsizing", especially at the cost of the next generation having the same opportunity. Actually, I think boomers tend to support immigration restrictions too, so in the previous paragraph, they're *also* the source of the problem.
In fact, there's a 3rd sense in which this is their fault (ok, we can blame prior generations for this too, since they were in charge when it started). You write, "but to me it does seem to make sense that rising house values shouldn’t be able to make your current home unaffordable." But single-family only, low density, car-dependent development is fundamentally expensive. There's no reason that property taxes would have to be so high, but everyone wants the government to provide lots of services in the most expensive possible manner and then acts shocked-pikachu-face when taxes are high.
Anyway, as angry as someone like Mariana Trench gets when they say " telling me to move on because I suddenly don’t have a right to my own house, because some younger person suddenly wants it.", well, my actual response might get me banned, but basically comes down to "right back at you." (Ok, I will feel bad if Trench is actually a YIMBY. But I do maintain that residential property rights have effectively not existed for many decades, and prop 13 is at best some people stealing others' property rights, and while I won't actively support infringements of rights, I am certainly less sympathetic of tyrants who complain about being oppressed). And yeah, saying that you're going to actively vote for "evil tyrants" to keep your house is, uh, pretty sociopathic and narcissistic (and short-sighted).
I'm very confused by a bunch of the "Boomers stopped doing social thing X" arguments. I've literally never heard anyone claim that Boomers are bad because they introduced free love and then settled down, or because they stopped taking care of their parents. It's almost exclusively economic (like the complaints about housing), personal (retail workers saying Boomers are the rudest), and political (Boomers staying in leadership positions). I do think that Boomers helped to create a world where it's not legal to raise children the way they were raised, with independence, but I rarely see complaints about that (or they're tangential, by people who don't even realize how fucked up modern child-rearing is, but just know that they're expected to spend more time and money on their kids than Boomers' parents were).
> Why is it bad that the Boomers won’t collapse the Ponzi? Because then we, the Millennials and Zoomers, will soon be in the unfair position of having paid into it, but not receiving benefits!
I think there has to be something in between "Boomers get nothing" and "Millenials and Zoomers get nothing" but most Boomers don't seem interested in any sort of compromise.
> Nor would a capitalist ideologue initiate even a one-time redistribution, or admit that the benefits of such a program would outweigh its moral hazards.
I guess I'll bite the bullet and say it was probably ok in colony-ending situations, where the previous "distribution" of land was the result of a military invasion (not that this being possibly justified means it will work out--see South Africa--but I'll give it a pass, once).
"Ok, I will feel bad if Trench is actually a YIMBY"
I am! You can usually find me over on Slow Boring nodding along with the rest of the technocrats. But no worries, I acknowledge my initial comment a few weeks ago was intemperate.
Ok, sorry for making assumptions.
I think that people who are mad about the Boomers are committing an off-by-one error, and they should be mad at the Greatest Generation instead. I'm aware that this is heresy, but I'm sticking with it.
The Greatest lived lives of traditional virtue, because that's how they had been raised. (Also they had lived through a world war and a great depression, so they were pretty tough about it.) However, they failed to pass this on to their children, so their children, upon reaching young adulthood, decided that virtue was bullshit and they were going to do something else instead. Thus, the 60s and the 70s. The Millenials, as the generation born to the Boomers, were the first generation to never know the old world of traditional virtue at all. They correctly identify their parents as the ones who went through the phase change, but they incorrectly assume that this is should be blamed on the Boomers themselves and not on the ones who raised them.
If you want to chase causality you can go even further back and point out that the anti-virtuous ideology (under various euphemisms like "progress" and "liberation") had been percolating through prestige institutions for a very long time, but without seriously disrupting things at a mass level. The Boomers unfortunately seem to have been the generation at which the anti-virtuous forces achieved critical mass, and intergenerational transmission of virtue actually collapsed.
By the same token I guess you can pin the blame on the parents of the Greatest Generation, who taught their kids to live virtuously, but didn't teach them to teach their kids to live virtuously...
Ultimately it is incoherent to transfer blame from kids to parents, since the parents are also themselves kids. Blame for generational moral failings isn't zero-sum.
The Boomers are like Walt Whitman—we contain multitudes. We have old hippies, old Dead Heads, old good 'ole boys. We have those who were sexually liberated in their youth who became disapproving deacons in their maturity. We have the culturally anarchic among the rigidly conformist. Our multitudes makes generalizing about us hazardous, and you've explored some of the reasons.
Even the class economic conflicts are nuanced. Yes, many Boomers are living in houses they bought when they were affordable long ago that are now worth a million bucks (sometimes literally). Some of that increase is due to general inflation (although there are markets in deteriorating neighborhoods where that didn't work) and some of it to market forces that changed the value placed on specific locations, such as in your grandparent's experience. But the unsung villain is the American Dream™️.
Economists the U.S. has over-concentrated middle-class wealth in a single, leveraged, illiquid asset compared with peer economies. This is due to tax subsidies (interest rate deductibility), policy favoring real estate as "savings" in substitution for pensions (either public or the almost extinct private variety). This is due to the socialization of default risk through FanFred and Ginnie Mae. This is due to refusal better to regulate the rental housing market. And this is due to a tolerance for the periodic bubble bust that goes along with financialized assets that become detached from the real economy.
These problems won't die with the Boomers. We didn't invent them. That was due to 15 years loss of new construction during the Depression and World War II that resulted in a housing unit deficit of 6 million units at the end of the war for a population of 134 million. That was due to our parents being able to leverage the United States' unique economic strength in the 50s to allow single-income families. It was due to the extension of the Interstate Highway System to become local freeways. It was due to white flight.
Finally, at least for the leading edge Boomers like me, there are contrasts in what could be considered a "good life" in, say, the 70s, than today. I didn't feel impoverished because I lived in a house with only one bath and no granite surfaces anywhere. I didn't feel impoverished because I didn't have cable or streaming or have a phone in my pocket that allowed me to call anyone in the country and talk as long as I liked. I didn't feel impoverished because I couldn't buy a car with air bags, antilock brakes that would reliably operate for 100,000 miles. I didn't feel inconvenienced by having to leave home to shop for most of what I needed. I didn't know what I was missing by able to catch a cheap flight at the last minute for a long weekend getaway. I didn't know that clothes and many, many other products were disposable. A nice Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand wasn't a frequent dinner wine. Beer was beer and there wasn't much to choose from among them.
I _would_ feel that way today. My needs for food and shelter—the necessities—haven't. But my wants have expanded. The closest equivalents to the common expenditures of today were out of reach, far out of reach, in the 70s. Fortunately, I didn't know what I was missing.
Finally, the thing about the past is that it's a package deal. If, generationally, it were possible to book a Boomer retirement, how many would be willing to have a 70s lifestyle as part of the deal?
Wouldn't reverse mortgages solve the general problem of house rich cash poor people being forced out of their homes? If the polity accepts thats its fair that more of the upside on housing/land gets taxed, the market does have a solution to the liquidity constraints
Yeah, this seems like the obvious solution.
They would, but they weren't much of a thing yet in 1978 when Prop 13 passed. They apparently existed as bespoke one-off arrangements in the 60s and 70s, but didn't become a regular bank offering until the 80s and I think they only really became widely known in the 90s.
Deferral by the taxing authority is probably more efficient than having property owners take out reverse mortgages, since the latter come with fairly steep transaction costs especially if the amount borrowed is relatively small.
Thanks, that would explain the history. I agree that relative efficiencies should be considered. Another consideration is the cognitive capacity of the elderly in particular to navigate a complex financial product. I am open to tax solutions but wanted to point out its not absolutely necessary, though I do have some skepticism of it actually being more efficient in implementation.
Efficiency also depends on how many ppl actually need to do something here. If its a small minority who would actually get squeezed out, then its probably better to rely on reverse mortgage financing for those individuals, than introducing some tax complexity for everyone. Overall I would lean into the benefits of federalism here.
I worked my ass off to pay off my mortgage. Don't bust my chops telling me it's my duty to go back into debt.
Good news. You wouldnt be in debt. Basically you sell your house but continue to live in it. I can understand why you might not want to do that. But if you think its everyone elses duty to pay more taxes than you, you can imagine why some consider you the enemy even if our beloved blogger comes to your defense.
If there’s a lien on my property then I’m in debt.
I think everyone should pay the same taxes I do. I don’t believe the state’s need for funds has octupled in four decades.
I was dissatisfied with Scott's response to my post.
On the substantive point… I dunno man, my argument is that sex (3), love, and babies are good and we have a wide variety of statistics showing those all declining in the generations after the Baby Boomers. I can buy an argument that the Baby Boomers weren’t responsible but the idea that it’s good or not that bad and probably inevitable anyway is…not terribly emotionally appealing.
Is the idea that a modern incel is actually happier than someone in a mediocre 1950s marriage? ‘Cuz…‘cuz it doesn’t seem like it. And there’s been something like a 40% decrease in the number of households headed by married couples (2), sure a few of those were probably abusive but the overwhelming majority were probably just mediocre and dull.
Like, ‘no spouse, no kid, no sex’ == people angy is just the most basic take ever.
Second, a technical quibble, which seemed more like an afterthought in your response.. Divorce rates did peak in 1980 but the overall decline of marriage continued and the divorce peak is a statistical artifact because declining marriage rates "artificially" decrease as the number of marriages decline, which they did, and the divorce rate is per 1000 people.
Toy example using "Share of households headed by married couples, 1940–2024" (1) (2) and 1000 imaginary people.
In 1980, out of 1000 people, 608 of them are married and ~50 of them get divorced.
~8% of marriages terminate in divorce that year.
In 2020, out of 1000 people, 485 of them are married and ~35 of them get divorced.
~7.2% of marriages terminate in divorce that year.
Yeah, the "real" divorce rate did decline slightly but there was not, really, a sharp decline following the 1980s, just a decline in marriage as well.
(1) https://usafacts.org/articles/state-relationships-marriages-and-living-alone-us/
(2) Alright, technically the link uses households, the underlying relationship still stands. This is a toy example of a well understood phenomenon.
(3) Yeah, the sex decline didn’t really hit until the Zoomers.
TFR declined below replacement across most of the OECD around the mid-80s, which was about the same time that the boomers moved out of college and into the workforce. (Yes, the same generation who overran the fence at Woodstock voted for Reagan's greed-is-good conservatism in the 80s and yes, this says something about their priorities in life.)
In other words, the boomers came into their financial and institutional prime at the precise moment that the western world began lurching into a demographic suicide spiral and sat on their hands and did nothing about it for around 40 years. We are living in the world that they created, and younger people are appropriately furious that the generation which should have been our wise and generous elders turned out to be so incredibly blinkered and stupid.
(There are, obviously, honourable exceptions to this prevailing stereotype, but stereotypes usually have a statistical basis, and this is no different.)
There's also like...if the Boomers were going to be so goddamn stupid about things they could've just left the Greatest Generation in charge. While they were certainly not perfect, beating Hitler and experiencing the Great Depression are a better entitlement to near-eternal power than your parents doing that and deciding to celebrate by banging a lot.
Well, I think the Greatest Generation would be pretty-much phased out by now, but I get the sentiment.
I know, consciously, in the abstract that it's not like the boomers were genetically sociopathic (if anything subsequent generations have been a little worse-endowed by nature), so presumably later generations would have done the same in their position. But the fact remains that the demographic jenga stack is what it is, and that has implications for how sustainable the welfare state will be, and if no-one is held to account for poor decision-making then poor decision-making will continue indefinitely.
I'm not ideologically opposed to taxing the wealthy to subsidise pro-natal policies either, but if you tax wealthy DINKs then in practice that's going to hit the boomers hardest anyway.
> Is the idea that a modern incel is actually happier than someone in a mediocre 1950s marriage?
I'm sure the answer to that will change a lot depending on the sex of the subject. Not that it's relevant, seeing as men will get what they want in the end.
The median woman has certainly gotten less happy over the past fifty years, whereas men's happiness has been relatively stable. According to self-report at least.
I agree, Scott didn't really address the substance of your comment. Very dodge-y, unlike him. Particularly odd to claim that GenX didn't "suffer from" divorce when they're the children of the divorcing cohort. That's almost the whole ballgame! That's a big part of why people say looser divorce culture is bad. And I took your comment to stand in for all sorts of high-trust cultural habits and institutions that Boomers generally tanked, most of which weren't addressed by Scott. Boomers ate the institutional seed corn.
It is always interesting how younger generations interpret how older generations functioned and what life was like before they were born as it obviously is directly responsible for all the maladies they have to endure. I have to smile at the discussions of what marriage and divorce was like (or what caused it to explode in the 70s-I was there and a product of it) and how their opinions were formed by media, whether TV, movies, or, one hopes, through literature. There seems to be little discussion about why the sexual revolution happened in the first place and the social repression and isolation that divorce created-to those divorced and their children-before it became more acceptable.
The irony within this is that all successive generations will, at some point, face the same problems boomers faced once they aged out of their willful youth. And while I know nothing I say about how little I had in my early 20s will matter, it doesn't change that I inevitably faced the same challenges my parents, grandparents, et all, and that my children will face. All problems have solutions. Housing? Build more. Taxes? Work out a better system, whether based on usage, value, service, etc. They do not need to be remain some rigid, unchangeable monster. Politics? Get involved and run and elect people you feel better represent your generation.
Whining and lecturing me about the moral failures of my generation is as affective as my doing the same to my depression era grandparents, or my silent generation parents (who are the progenitors of the divorce age), or my hectoring Xers, millennials, Zers about how they should save more and live more frugally like people did back in the day (I hear this a lot from my mother!)
I've lived long enough to know it's a waste of time and effort.
I'll never afford that $2 million house if you tax the boomer out of it. And you'll never tax a boomer out of a $200K house I want. It costs them $167/month fully paid off. If you tax a boomer out of the $2 mil house, they'll try to buy the $200K house I want.
The net number of people buying homes would remain the same so it seems unlikely that boomers would outcompete you for a 200k house. More likely is that the people who are currently high income low assets who would be looking to buy those houses now are buying the more valuable houses the boomers vacate and it evens out. You'd also expect the overall cost of property relative to income to go down as of becomes less a good investment vehicle.
People who buy $2 mil houses can satisfy that demand by buying a third yacht, or undeveloped property in Alaska, or by living in an STR if they need to be local. They are not desperately looking to get out of renting, and they don't have to be within walking distance to the bus.
If you create new demand at the $200K level, those people don't have a wealth of choices. Price will go up, availability down.
And you're right in theory about expecting property values to go down. However, prices are sticky. People choose to rent out, STR, or not move, rather than take a numerical loss. Few places are seeing slight decreases in property values, driven by higher interest rates, but nowhere near 2019 price levels. Market softness seems to be absorbed by not increasing supply (or even decreasing supply) rather than by prices going down.
There are many portions of this article that I find tooth-grindingly frustrating, but let's open with the worst passage:
> "So do we want affirmative action for the young? Why is this better than other forms of affirmative action? .... Why is this a more natural way to think of things than white people being evil and selfish by not voluntarily underemploying themselves so black people can get more of the good jobs... I think there are some weak arguments for why it’s better for young people to have resources than old people, but these don’t seem strong enough to justify the level of Boomer hatred, and I’d like to see people make them explicit."
I think people haven't made these reasons explicit because they're blindingly obvious and I'm frankly stunned that the very big-brained Scott Alexander needs this explained to him:
Parenting literally consists of transferring resources from older generations to younger generations. It's necessary for the youngest generations to exist and survive at all, and if they don't, then your civilisation simply dies. (Guess which generation/s are currently raising young kids? Not-the-boomers.)
Blacks also do not, generally speaking, deserve the high-paying jobs in our society, because their comparative mental incompetence would make them quite bad at running elite institutions or performing complex labour, which means that affirmative action in their favour is (A) totally non-essential to maintaining your civilisation and (B) actually makes your civilisation function *worse*. Scott knows more than enough about race and IQ that this should also not have to be pointed out. What a ludicrous analogy.
> "I kind of want to disagree with this by reiterating the graph showing that Millennials are richer than Boomers (at the same age)"
If you paid four times more for a house, on paper you will be four times richer because of it, but this doesn't mean you weren't fleeced.
> "It’s pretty funny that a gigantic boom in robots is about to save us from this right when it starts becoming a noticeable problem"
Presumably this economic miracle occurs after the AI bubble collapsing wipes the stock exchange and forces a decade-long global recession, so I don't know why Scott is talking this up as some perfectly-timed deus ex machina. (There's also the minor problem that robots don't create consumption, and that none of this intrinsically fixes the birthrates situation. Sam Altman is Not A Blithering Idiot might be worth looking at here.)
The strange thing about much of this discussion for me is the attribution to “boomers“ as if cultural and socio-economic distinctions played no role, and that all boomers were equally empowered to make these societal changes.
It seems to me that much of what a tribute to “boomers“ is actually more a consequence of large economic changes, which shifted the tendency of people to stay in the same location where they grew up. The other big piece is that it was an error that was, in my opinion, the first huge social hinge to a more open society, probably is a consequence of mass media and ownership of automobiles, along with wide described above.
I think this is a fairly balanced take, while I found the previous post to feel quite biased in boomers' favor.
However, I still feel emotionally completely unpersuaded, and I don't think further discussion in this style is likely to change my mind. Ultimately it always ends up sounding like "Things are basically already as good as we can make them, and at best we can slowly do some small tweaks".
This kind of message tends to lose elections. If we really want to improve things, I think we need to consider what would be more effective.
In regards to older leaders having more experience, there is probably an age at which cognitive decline matters more than experience.
It is possible that with better healthcare that age is reached more often nowadays, so there is a world in which a rule that says that the 60 year old boomers who preside universities should be encouraged to retire is perfectly fair even though the previous generation of 50 year old people who presided universities were not encouraged to retire.
We already saw a catastrophically senile US president, in the sense that he was either awful himself or caused an awful successor to be elected after him. There are probably lots of old people like him who are fucking things up in a more subtle way, away from public scrutiny.
You completely omitted a couple of points:
1) It is stupid, irrational and just plain ugly to hate ANY group whose members did not choose to join that group and cannot opt out of it.
2) It is stupid and irrational to make an enemy of any group that has, by your own argument, more people AND more power AND more money than you do. Put yourself in the boomers shoes - Why would they care for people who hate them? You are just going to make them want to keep MORE for themselves. Peoples natural reaction to being attacked by people weaker than themselves is to fight back. Boomers may want to keep stuff for themselves but, it's better for you if they think "I want to be comfortable" than "F*** you, you ungrateful Sh**s"
Boomers would lose a physical fight with younger generations, so it's not quite so irrational to pick a fight with them.
Ah yes but if you really want to win an intergenerational fight you should beat up babies.
Perhaps if you REALLY want to steal their candy.
What part of Boomers having more power did you not get? Boomers control the police and the armed forces. They won't have a physical fight with you because they don't have to.
Boomers are of retirement age now. The current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was born in 1968, when the Boomers were adults. The NYPD's commissioner was born in 1981.
Maybe I missed something but didn't your president, the commander in chief of your armed forces just order an act of war against Venezuela and isn't he 79?
The conversation is about the present not the future and, in any case, in the real world there is no hard cut-off between boomers and the next generation
We're talking about a hypothetical conflict between generations. Trump can only exercise power as long as younger generations obey.
So you are advocating insurrection and treason?
> don’t think it’s especially worth “blaming” the Boomers for this. If you look at the secular trend …it long predates them, and they’re just reverting to the pre-Baby-Boom mean.
First google result suggests a child mortality rate as high as 40% at the left-hand side of that graph, so this chart exaggerates the effect of TFR on population pyramid dynamics over time.
(eg, a TFR of 4 with 50% mortality and a TFR of 2 with 1% mortality produce the same number young adults)
Strikes me that much of anti-Boomer anger has been essentially the same in Boomer-bashing for the entire duration of Boomers as an teenage-adult-senior generation. "Boomers are arrogant and entitled" was what the generations preceeding the Boomers said about them in the 60s and is now what their children and grandchildren have been saying about them. I don't think it's an imported European meme as such, might be a temporally imported meme though.
>Does Little Ephraim Robin John have the right to hate the hand that holds the whip?
Well, yes.
We as anachronistic outside observers might not take his plight as seriously as the plight of other slaves who were not themselves slave traders. We might even smugly consider it a fitting punishment for his own crimes.
But I think that's more an evolutionary adaptation towards enjoying fitting revenge narratives, than it is a principled moral stance.
For being a slave trader, he deserves whatever punishment we would legislate for all slave traders, including the due process we would place in front of such punishment.
From being a slave, he deserves the same protections we would apply to any slave, and has the same right to anger at his circumstances and captors.
I understand the intuition to let these 'cancel each other out', or to say that as a slaver he waives all rights to human dignity and deserves whatever happens. But I think this is mostly moral laziness, a convenient excuse to call the situation 'just' and wash our hands of any duty to change it. I think we need to actually judge the two situations separately, and act appropriately in each case.
Focusing more on the question of counterfactual evil versions of current victims: I think this does let you undermine the claim that the oppressed are a genetically morally superior type of person to their oppressors, and I agree that some people make arguments that sound like that, but I think those arguments are generally stupid to begin with and not very important to how we judge the situation.
Yes, if the older and younger generations counterfactually swapped places, the younger generation would commit the same crimes the older are now. Yes, we counterfactually expect the younger generation to commit those same crimes when they become the older generation in the future, if nothing is done to change the situation into something better before then.
But the point of discussing problems and crimes isn't to determine which set of people is innately superior across all possible counterfactuals.
The point is to gather the will and the urgency necessary to *change the situation into something better*.
I don't think you gather that will by saying 'The victim is hypocritical to admonish her rapist, since if they counterfactually swapped bodies and upbringings she might have done the same to him.'
I think you focus on 'this is monstrous, and we need to change it'.
(That's the utilitarian part, I suppose. The non-utilitarian part is, I guess, saying that the standard of 'add up all of a person's expected behaviors under every imaginable counterfactual and compare their score to other people to see who is morally better' is a standard that's not only impossible to calculate, but would also be likely to dismiss the majority of atrocities and crimes that we think of as 'bad' and don't want to happen to us. I think this brushes up against 'the universe is probably deterministic so there's no free will so no one is morally culpable for anything they do ever', to which my response is 'you could come up with a definition of moral culpability by which that is true, and that definition would communicate zero information because it would have zero discriminatory power to judge people in reality, so instead I think I'll use a more common-sense morality where I can make useful moral judgements and I get to be mad at rapists.)
> I can make useful moral judgements and I get to be mad at rapists.
Is... having a personal vendetta against rapists really useful? Seems like a waste of energy for something that doesn't really affect you. You can say that rapists deserve to get shot without actually having a grudge against them. At the very least, it seems no more productive than saying that the morally bankrupt deserve to be victims. That at least serves the purpose of making sure resources don't get allocated towards helping liabilities.
>Federal deficit spending is the clearest possible example of trading off long-term prosperity for short-term gain,
Strong disagree, this is only true if you think all federal spending is by definition valueless.
When successful businesses take out big loans, it's usually to fuel expansion and growth. They believe they can invest that money in themselves and realize a higher return than the interest payments. This is reasonable and rational and normal.
Ideally, governments do the same thing. Spending today doesn't disappear into the void, you are investing in human capital, infrastructure, research, security, networking, marketing, and etc. to fuel long-term growth and prosperity.
Whether the next marginal dollar of deficit spending creates more or less economic growth than the interest that will ultimately be paid on it is a difficult question to answer, and I won't claim that politicians are always consciously and carefully weighing this calculation when they pass a new bill.
But in principle that's what is supposed to be happening, and I think the system by-and-large trends towards that arrangement as a general principle. Even if it's far from perfect and we're not in the ideal equilibrium, it's certainly not 'the clearest possible example'.
> Ideally, governments do the same thing.
Actually existing governments don't match that ideal at all. Most of the federal budget goes to the elderly these days, which is the opposite of an investment!
First of all, eh. Having professionals care for the elderly and having the government pay for it means the young don't have to do it themselves and can invest those resources in themselves and their children instead.
Second of all, even if the government wasted half it's budget, that doesn't mean the next marginal dollar couldn't be spent on a good investment. The waste is suggestive of what we can expect from them, but it's not actually dispositive here.
Having government spend money at all rather than consumers directing funds toward their most valued ends is generally wasteful. Social Security is a pure transfer of money, but Medicare is devoting healthcare resources toward those with the least in the way of QALYs to be saved.
You can make an argument for Logan's Run if you think that's the proper way to run a society, but until you convince enough people, we're going to spend money on old people's healthcare one way or another. The government can use its power and centralization to do it cheaper and more efficiently than every individual old person or their child trying to arrange care for them individually.
If the government stopped allocating all that money to elderly healthcare, people would individually spend less. The elderly themselves might prioritize their own healthcare, but the children will have other options for that money and would try to minimize how much they have to spend on that. I am not trying to claim the total amount of services would be the same at lower prices, I am claiming less healthcare would be consumed.
Sure, there will be some marginal effect towards less healthcare with less government funding. Just like there will be some marginal effect towards cheaper healthcare with a single-buyer government program.
And there will be a hundred other marginal effects in either direction, which are hard for us to predict ahead of time. Very difficult to know which way it trends when you add everything up. especially when you start considering different levels of funding and different implementations of the program.
I'm not the one claiming that one method is obviously massively better than the other. I'm the one objecting to somebody making a one-sided blanket claim like that.
I'm perfectly happy to say it's complicated and contingent and hard to say how it shakes out.
> Federal deficit spending is the clearest possible example of trading off long-term prosperity for short-term gain, but the young are more likely to support it than the old.
The purpose of deficit spending is to make investments that pay off in the long term (e.g. we borrow $1m today to build a bridge, we get $100m increased economic growth and $10m tax revenue over the next 10 years). So it makes perfect sense for young people, who are likely to benefit from those investments, to support it.
As I told "darwin" directly above you, we spend MUCH more of our budget on entitlements for the elderly than on bridges.
>Climate change is another place where people are being asked to sacrifice now to prevent future disaster, and the generation gap is miniscule.
But the younger generation has much less wealth at the moment, as we've seen, so it's not really apples to apples.
Saying 'I asked a rich man and a poor man each to give $1000 to charity, and they both refused' doesn't necessarily imply that they are both equally greedy.
> I find this pretty interesting. We all know stories of American opinions infecting Europeans, like how they’re obsessed about anti-black racism, but rarely worry about anti-Roma racism which is much more prevalent there. I’d never heard anyone argue the opposite - that the European discourse is infecting Americans with ideas that don’t apply to our context - but it makes sense that this should happen. I might write a post on this.
It wouldn't be the first, I've seen the idea that the American right's current (not 9/11 era, the two are distinct) dislike of Muslim immigration and integration is mostly an import from Europe which faces far higher amounts of immigration from the Islamic world.
Just because something is a bigger problem somewhere else doesn't make it not a problem in a given place.
Yes, but it is worth noticing when the first examples that come to your mind are all from other places. Because in theory, people should be *more* sensitive about things that happen closer to home. So, the question (for Americans, I am not one) is, are they?
My impression from internet is that the typical online complaints about Muslims were previously about Sweden, and more recently about Rotherham. Can you give me similarly known examples from USA?
Thanks to all the dynamics outlined in this post, we live in a world, by your own example, designed by and for people who would be able to buy "literal farmland" in their 20s at neglible costs and effortlessly become inflation adjusted multi-millionaires in their old age.
Of course there are details omitted from this broad strokes narrative.
In any case, that is not a particularly nice world to live in, if step one "buy literal farmland cheap" is no longer available. And my generation (Millenials) feel that it is indeed no longer available.
Again, details omitted.
---
Covid disproportionally killed old people. Negative implications of various degrees of "social distancing" disproportionally affected young people. Young people correctly feel they got the short end of this deal.
If you are going to argue that boomers have no moral obligation to leave a better world for generations to come, what moral obligations did young people have to waste their youth on stopping the "boomer remover"? (https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/111922/1/Elliott_the_boomer_remover_published.pdf)
Here's 160 acres for only $3000 per year: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/County-Road-22-Haswell-CO-81045/458715508_zpid/.
Have fun!
We're discussing farmland that can plausibly turn into valuable housing, which was available to boomers, but such "equivalents" like you post are almost certainly not going to be equivalent at all, as the economic trends and tailwinds (pop growth, two income transition, globalization) are no longer there.
It's a very typical boomer response to say "just buy a house like I did, and you can also expect it to 10x in 30 years" but I question whether this is made in good faith. Is this the honest advice you will give to your kids?
No, because my kids aren't angry about how Boomers could buy farmland and they can't.
Why do you think that there was a trend of farmland turning into valuable housing in Boomer times, but not now?
My guess is that you're thinking of some specific case of this happening, but that most of the farmland stayed farmland and a few people got lucky and bought farmland which was underpriced because it happened to be where new towns would get built, and that the same is true now (but you can't directly select into being one of the few people who gets lucky).
The housing values are based on the value of the economies powering them. The modern economy gained massive value from globalization (sending jobs to other countries) and the two income transition. Workers (of all ages) are making lots of money and so they drive up prices. Boomers are part of this, they also worked, and deserve "credit" for improving the economy. But as for the increase in land prices, they didn't work for that, it was a free windfall that cannot be expected for future generations. The workers of today (largely not boomers) are paying for that gain.
We can have genuine hope for AI to perhaps deliver a similar windfall, but this is far from a sure thing.
Thanks for engaging. To clarify, I am not "angry" that boomer could win the farmland lottery and I can't, I am observing that I live in a world shaped by and optimised for people who have won the farmland lottery and since I can't plausibly do that, this world is not optimised for me.
>No Marxist ideologue would admit that a one-time redistribution was the only necessary Marxist policy.
Oh, it's not one time. I mean, yeah, there's a period of time over which markets just work as advertised - precisely when actors participating in them are relatively equal and own their, ahem, means of production (not sure how well this translates to post-agrarian societies, but giving people control over their plots of land has always worked wonders for productivity). This is how rich developed societies historically tend to arise - before squandering their wealth by letting capitalist rent-seekers capture their institutions. And capital concentration is a core feature of a market property system, preventing it is a hard problem, impossible to solve with market mechanism alone - especially if you believe there must be a better way than repeatedly resetting society with wars (including revolutions) or plagues.
But I've got to appreciate how easy it is to sell radical socialist ideas by framing them as anti-Marxist. Supercapitalism, ahoy!
>before squandering their wealth by letting capitalist rent-seekers capture their institutions
At least they have wealth to squander, unlike any Marxist society ever.
Cute.
Only, well, we've had a natural experiment in the last 30-something years and it turned out there was in fact plenty to squander in the USSR, and its newly liberal elite has demonstrated exactly how it's done.
Well, sure, instead of wasting petrodollars on nukes they transitioned to wasting them on other nonsense. Just because Marxism sucks, getting rid of it doesn't guarantee substantial improvement.
I kind of agree with this , without being a Marxist
I agree that a.one-off forced leveling followed by free market forever doesn't work, because the free market forever will amplify differences untill it reproduces the degree of inequality that you were trying to solve with the first levelling.
I notice that some ancient societies built in regular levelings in the form of jubilees..not just a celebration, but mandatory release of prisoners and forgiveness of debts. A built in, predictable sawtooth.
I notice that others attempt a steady state with stringent ongoing redistribution, the northwestern European model.
I notice that others still do neither and are shocked when the revolution happens.
> Old people staying in their old house and neighborhood is good for their health.
Not always. And giving them a tax break if-and-only-if they stay put is as unfair to them as the rest of us. Let them take their tax break to their new house if they downsize, or convert it into an annual check from the state. Or ban tax shelters in the state constitution while paying off the current beneficiaries with the value of their tax shelter. Then they can decide if they'd rather keep the house or the money. Their discount rate is high. A windfall doesn't have to be that many years' worth of tax shelter to be worth it to them. A deal's waiting to be struck.
The Ethiopian "smash the landowners then have capitalism" is actually a repeatedly successful formula. It worked in South Korea (with the Japanese instead of the Marxists) and in Europe (places that had the landed gentry dispossessed and replaced with the Napoleonic code civil grew faster for a century afterwards than closely comparable places in e.g. Germany). Adam Smith was right, landlords are the bad guys!
If even Adam Smith doesn't like landlords, then one could argue that land redistribution is perfectly capitalistic. How nice of his manifesto to include an actual roadmap.
It also worked in the US, Canada, Australia etc if you buy the idea that the natives actually owned the land
I'd argue technology did most of the work here; in most aboriginal societies in Canada there wasn't an individual/familial concept of land ownership (there are exceptions on the north west coast of canada where sufficient natural wealth allowed the emergence of pseudo feudalism
Agreed. Also add Japan, post WW2, and Taiwan when the Chinese government in exile settled there and enforced land reform on the locals. Interestingly, the Philippines tried it, but for political reasons they weren't able to make it stick, so we didn't see similar gains there as you might expect.
Of note, many revolutionary movements don't begin by demanding socialism/communism. They begin with the peasantry demanding land reform and socialist/communist movements signal-boosting those demands to coopt the broader movement toward their wider message. E.g. the Russian revolution. There is also a rich history of anger throughout Central America against outside fruit companies with large land holdings, etc.
Meanwhile, the USA dispossessed large numbers of people (and buffalo) to allow radical land distribution - often to newly-arrived immigrants. Contrast this with the Coal Wars in West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, where large landholders effectively reinvented serfdom inside the USA itself as recently as a century ago. This doesn't exactly satisfy Koch's postulates, but it rhymes with them.
Crazy to think that the Old Economy Steven meme is 14 years old.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/old-economy-steven
> This hasn’t been my experience; I’m curious whether it’s Charles or I who is the atypical one. I don’t know how you’d even start investigating this though.
fwiw this is also how I interpret all the rhetoric
it's not the stats, it's that boomers are very often assholes in an especially status/wealth-obsessed "new rich" way.
> Suppose RH is right (I haven’t checked), and that Social Security would be sustainable with lots of immigration.
If so it would only be sustainable with infinite immigration, increasing with every generation. The other way of maintaining the dependency ratio - absent higher fertility - is increasing the retirement age. That’s the one I support, and I speak as someone who will hopefully get to be retired. To be honest RH is coming across as an entitled boomer there.
And when it comes to the cost of someone to the state across his life, in European countries at least, low paid workers and even median income workers are a lifetime tax loss to the state. Many low paid workers are a cost to the state even when working (think rent subsidies and free health care in Europe).
The economic argument for immigrants as tax sources breaks down there, if you waned an economic argument then migrants could be on temporary visas - like the H1B - with no tax benefits or pension rights.
You might not know this, but we effectively have affirmative action for old people. Age Discrimination is illegal, but only for people over 40. It’s perfectly legal to discriminate against young people, but you can be sued for discriminating against the elderly.
The most significant result of this law is that it outlawed mandatory retirement ages. Organizations knew it was suboptimal to have old people in high level positions but that individual managers suck at firing people, especially ones that have been there longer than you have. So they had mandatory retiring ages to force the better talent to replace them.
Without mandatory retirement ages, you have to individually get evidence that the person who has doing the job the longest, has all the connections, and knows how the system works, is doing slight worse than the 55 year old you want to replace him in. And if you ever said something bad about being old in an email or even a social media post, you can be sued that the firing was a pretext for discrimination.
I’ve walked managers through this, and the uniform response I get is, “well I’ll just wait until they retire. In the meantime their lowered level subordinate can just do all the work that requires a computer while never getting promoted. That person is worse off, but at least I won’t get sued.” I don’t want affirmative action for young people, I want to go back to the state of nature without this artificial protection.
You seem to be overlooking that mandatory retirement is ALSO a legal distortion, for all that I concur that it is a good thing.
I mentioned mandatory retirements as an organizational policy. I would not support them as a regulation imposed by the government. Honestly, with good HR and a managers, they are not necessary, but repealing age discrimination laws would help a lot with making them freer to act.
I generally agree, and would add that your reasons for opposing age discrimination laws apply equally to race and sex discrimination laws.
Yes, especially disparate impact
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but this doesn’t make sense. If the older person can’t even use a computer and needs a younger person to do all the computer stuff, would it not be a valid justification to fire them for not being able to use one?
It is, but you have to be careful. The way the legal test is, management can articulate a legitimate, no discriminatory reason. But then the employee is allowed to present evidence that this reason is a pretext for discrimination. What kind of evidence? Well if I posted this under my own name, it could be used as evidence. If a manager ever used an aged based slur at work or on social media, such as boomer, that is evidence of age discrimination. If the person that replaces them is younger, that is evidence. If your staff is disproportionately younger than the qualified population in your city, that is evidence.
At the end of the day, it is up to a jury of 12 people too stupid to get out of jury duty to decide whether you discriminated against age, and how much money they should award the former employee. Because of this uncertainty, lawyers will always recommend either a severance package or just waiting until they voluntarily retire. And as I said elsewhere, losing one of these cases is a career killer for managers. Any future employee is allowed to use the fact that you previously discriminated based on age as evidence that you are currently discriminating based on age. People often get demoted after a lose on discrimination.
That graph: "Divorce rate per 1000 population" - what?
> The ultra-rich could reasonably say they didn’t create this problem and it’s unfair to tax them for it. But so could the Boomers and the young! So whose “fair share” is it?
The Boomers most, then slightly less for the younger generations, and the ultra-rich last, because they are fewest! Greatest good for the greatest number!
(Extremely oversimplified, obviously. We do need the potential to get rich as an incentive to spur economic growth. But iirc the main practical application of utilitarianism is tax policy. I've lost track of a paper I read from the 1950s-60s arguing that we should redistribute using utilitarian calculus - maybe it was Harsanyi? Will see if I can dig it up later)
edit: The paper I read was Vickrey (1945), "Measuring Marginal Utility by Reactions to Risk".
Naturally, the field has developed considerably since then; Claude pointed me to Mirrlees (1971), "An Exploration in the Theory of Optimal Income Taxation", which takes into account effects of redistribution on production (but is also extremely dense; on a limited time budget, I've only been able to get through simplified secondary sources, in particular: https://stantcheva.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum7746/files/stantcheva/files/section_3-4.pdf). The end result incorporating follow-up work by Diamond (1998) is apparently a U-shaped tax curve, but with a 0 marginal rate for the single richest person(!).
Charles UF captures my feelings on this (though of course #notallBoomers).
Regarding nuclear, I didn't realize until fairly recently how much of a generational divide there is around thinking of "fallout" as something that causes you to vomit and die (as would happen if you're a hundred miles downwind of a few megaton range ground bursts) versus something that might slightly increases your lifetime cancer risk (as I grew up understanding it). I wrote more here: https://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2019/06/sometimes-you-need-new-word.html
Disparate incidence of property taxes seems like one of the more legitimate intergenerational disputes. One aspect that I don't see getting enough discussion though is what is happening with property tax revenue in areas where house prices have skyrocketed. Just because housing prices 10x, it's not clear that the municipality's expenses for services must increase 10x. As a small example, my home in Tennessee is worth double what I bought it for in 2019 -- there is no way the county's marginal expenditures for my property have doubled (although I assume they have gone up due to inflation).
In somewhere like the Bay Area, I can see why Boomers wouldn't want to pay the new sticker price for property taxes -- but if Prop 13 were repealed, the rate for property taxes could go down and keep overall revenue constant. If that amount is still much higher than seniors/Boomers/long-time-residents find tractable, are the property taxes just generally too high? Is it that there are more services provided by government than when they bought their house? Is it that property taxes were too low for a long time and debts or lack of infrastructure investments are becoming a problem? Is it that people are bad with inflation math and misjudge how much their property taxes should have increased in nominal terms for constant real value?
Property taxes with fixed rates seem to be an issue when house price increases are decoupled from inflation in service expenses. Here in Tennessee the law automatically shifts the rates people pay based on total property tax revenue. Changes in property value may rebalance where taxes come from, but without a separate vote to increase property tax revenue average rates shift down as property values increase. Is there a reason this isn't more common?
A lot of places have to publish a "no new revenue rate," and voters are getting increasingly conscious of what that is. The real danger with rising property values and tax revolts is if people pick *appraisal caps* as the solution rather than *revenue caps*. With a revenue cap, all property is still treated equally, you just set limits on how much the budget can increase year over year. If property values go up by 10x in one year, the budget is still only allowed to grow Y%. I think both are suboptimal policies, but revenue caps are the least worst solution of the two by far.
"the rate for property taxes could go down"
But they wouldn't. Prop 13 was a black swan event. Eliminate it and California would drool over the new revenue so much it would slip and break its jaw.
>We all know stories of American opinions infecting Europeans, like how they’re obsessed about anti-black racism, but rarely worry about anti-Roma racism which is much more prevalent there.
Thats because we dont worry about it either. Roma and racism against them arent really a prominent political topic anywhere outside the eastern block from what I can tell, and no surprise those dont diffuse into the US.
In Slovakia, all woke companies and organizations would be happy to hire any of the dozen black people who live in this country... but although Roma are maybe 10% of the population, the middle-class jobs are simply not offered to them. (Unless it is an organization specifically fighting against the discrimination of the Roma, in which case they might get 1 token job.)
In response to my earlier comment, Scott gently pointed out "But Proposition 13 was only passed in 1978."
I know! I was there! It was my first election after turning 18 and I voted AGAINST it! So did my parents, though they were more conflicted and their Palo Alto house ultimately benefitted enormously from Prop 13. But we all wanted more money for education. I had a screaming fight in AP English with a girl who was triumphantly yelling "The people have spoken!!" "Yeah, we've said we don't care about education or public services!!"
I'm not at all married to Prop 13. My most recent home purchase in California was in 2016, so I'm paying what feels like a lot of property taxes, and I'm okay with that.
Scott, can you write a post about Georgism and its modern applications? Seems like that line of thought could gain renewed popularity.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really
Of course it exists. There's an Astral Codex post for everything at this point.
The Boomers were the generation that gave you all the things you like about life today: free love, contraception, co-habitation was normalised, Fight Da Man, legalise drugs, and of course rock'n'roll. So it's a little ungrateful to accuse them of selfishness; without their selfishness as young adults (we want fun, high-paying jobs, and no commitments!) you all would probably be living in the conservative, traditional society of we right-wingers 😁
"Repealing it, and making everyone pay property taxes based on the current price of their house, would incentivize (in some cases, force) old people to move to cheaper houses."
The problem there is yeah, this frees up housing. For those who can afford to pay the new, market-rate, higher property taxes. For the generations groaning under the vibecession about how they can't afford anything, this doesn't help. Either those houses will be empty, or bought up by commercial management companies to rent out at the high market rates, or they'll be bought by individuals who can afford those property taxes, and the "married with one kid" Millennial couple who can't afford those taxes are left still looking for somewhere to live.
There's no model of repealing Prop 13 which makes it more expensive for a new person to move in.
Most models would have taxes go down on the new person moving in, because they are no longer having to make up the taxes not being paid by others.
What I took away from this was "The Boomers are paying artificially low taxes. Repeal the law which gives them that and charge what are market rates. Those market rates would be higher, which means people who can't pay them will have to sell their houses and thus free up housing for younger couples with kids".
But if the taxes are high enough that you can't pay them and have to sell up, that affects what new people come in: the incomers have to be able to afford those taxes. If you can't afford them, then you can't move in. And if the taxes then go down *after* making people sell up, isn't that also unfairly low property tax?
I get what you're saying: Grampa Boomer is only paying 200 instead of what would be the fair rate of 500. Meanwhile Kid Millie or Grandkid Zooey have to pay 700 to make up for Grampa. If he had to pay his fair share, everyone would be paying 500 and that would be a *decrease* for Millie and Zooey.
But what about Billie and Zeke who can only afford to pay 400? They can't move into Grampa's newly-vacated house because they can't afford the 500, so they're still stuck living in rented accommodation or somewhere smaller than they'd like, particularly if they want to have kids.
Making new supply available lowers prices for all.
If my budget is 500 in a tight market, and someone builds or otherwise puts onto the market a whole bunch of units selling for 550, that will reduce prices for me, because it's reduced competition from all the people with 550+ budgets.
> The Boomers were the generation that gave you all the things you like about life today: free love, contraception, co-habitation was normalised, Fight Da Man, legalise drugs, and of course rock'n'roll. So it's a little ungrateful to accuse them of selfishness; without their selfishness as young adults (we want fun, high-paying jobs, and no commitments!) you all would probably be living in the conservative, traditional society of we right-wingers 😁
I think you're assuming a lot about the audience here. I've already read a lot of comments saying that boomers are terrible specifically because they normalized those things.
"Drugs" have not been legalized. One drug, the one that was already least enforced, the one that anyone could already grow in their basement, has finally in the past decade or so been legalized in about half the US (but is still illegal in Holland and the UK), and I bet it was mainly the Millennials who've pushed for that anyway.
All the other drugs are still illegal and we are still destroying our society keeping it that way.
"the one that anyone could already grow in their basement"
Some of us don't have basements, Nadav. Did you even consider that? Check your privilege!
Ha, okay. Grow in the bathtub, the kitchen sink, the window sill….
Arguing anecdotes seems fairly pointless, but I will chime in to say that my GenX experience is pretty much the exact opposite of Charles UF's.
My boomer parents had a fraught relationship with their greatest generation parents (my grandparents), who embodied many of the emotionally distant, socially climbing, materialistic stereotypes of the 1950s. My grandparents absolutely did move away (to Florida), and I don't recall them offering tons of help to my parents. They were very passionate about golf. (In fairness, they were affectionate grandparents to their grandkids, and they did help financially with certain expenses. I don't think they were monsters or anything, but they were hardly a kindly neighborhood presence either.)
My boomer parents, on the other hand, are kind, generous, and extremely devoted to their grandchildren. In general they are as supportive of me as they reasonably can be. I don't live in the same city as them (my choice) and they are much older than my grandparents were (because I had kids so late), so there are limits on exactly how involved they can be.
But, no, boomers are not assholes. Not all of them, anyway.
I think you're dismissing the Social Security angle a little too easily. Yes, fixing the unsustainable growth in Social Security spending would require the Boomers voting for lower benefits for themselves, but the longer the trend goes unfixed, the larger the eventual drop in benefits will have to be for future generations. So the choice was "should I take a worse deal than my parents so the next generation can get ~the same deal as me, or should I take the same/better deal than my parents and leave the next generation with an even worse deal than the one I'd get otherwise?" Obviously humans are imperfect and I don't expect any set of voters to vote for the former, but it is still a bad choice.
I spent most of my young life begging for SS to be modified, even if it meant that benefit reductions would kick in decades later. Decades later is now and nothing has happened.
The 1977 deal was fine -- I have issues with the SSTF but whatever, it got everyone on the same page and knowing what the future would be.
This whole discussion seems to boil down to: Individual boomers don't necessarily suck, it's society, our governmental structure, financial incentives and capitalism that sucks. Agreed.
"A Boomer is nice -- *Boomers* are dumb, panicky dangerous animals"?
Of all the problems described here, none can be attributed to capitalism.
To say 'none' is a fascinating take given that 'financial incentives' were explicitly listed as the driver. Capitalism is literally the structure of those incentives.
If you agree that rational market behaviors (like protecting asset values through scarcity or prioritizing short-term yields) are causing the friction described above, you are criticizing the specific mechanism capitalism uses to allocate resources. Claiming the economic engine has zero attribution to the exhaust it produces is the ultimate 'No True Scotsman' fallacy—accepting all the credit for growth while insisting every negative externality is just 'government' or 'society' getting in the way.
The modern economy is a grotesque hybrid of capitalism & feudalism (land is not capital).
This leads a lot of people to inaccurately blame capitalism for the harms of residual feudal dynamics.
Just tax land.
Claiming "no true capitalism" has got to be the most hilarious thing I've ever read on the internet.
With higher property taxes on older people, a 'compromise' solution is normalize tenants and/or make it easier to add separate entrances to properties. Then for older people who really wanted to stay for sentimental reasons, they could afford to do so if they rented out one of their spare rooms... of course, this market solution would probably happen naturally if you just raised property taxes and housing regulation permitted adding second entrances without requiring kitchenettes in them.
Homeownership in the 19th century used to mean 'you turn the place into rental accommodations as your retirement plan' for a pretty large chunk of people. Renters got food and lodging, people kept their houses. While obviously nowhere near a perfect system, every time I cook a meal for one I reflect that it was probably more efficient in a lot of ways.
> So do we want affirmative action for the young? Why is this better than other forms of affirmative action?
I think the argument is utilitarian: allowing the old to accumulate and retain power indefinitely causes societal stagnation and resistance to new ideas.
But, to be clear, we are asking for affirmative action specifically for millennials. Definitely not for zoomers.
> if someone upzones your area, that increases the value of your land, and therefore your property taxes
Is this true?
I understand if a neighborhood becomes high density and desirable for its amenities that it will have higher land costs. But in a neighborhood full of single family homes I'd guess that the immediate effect of adding a single 4 plex would actually lower nearby costs, because part of what is desirable about the neighborhood is the charm of a single family home neighborhood.
When I think of neighborhoods that are mixed single family and multifamily I mostly think of them as being lower value areas.
Admittedly this is all vibes, but I'd guess that the relationship between small increases in density and land prices are not linear.
Let me make an assertion that I don't know if I actually believe, but might be fruitful:
Isn't it relatively easy to distinguish between the marked and unmarked policy preference? The option that involves somebody leaving their house and doing something to somebody else is the marked option. The one that involves leaving each other alone is the unmarked option.
Government does concrete things; people generally don't like those things. Decent, empathetic people don't enjoy arresting their neighbors or taking their money against their will. People often like the abstract ideas government hides their concrete actions behind: "borders", "Social Security", "laws", "courts" etc. These ideas can be extremely abstract, but if they're not enforced by concrete police officers, who could stay home if they wanted, the ideas are nothing.
Another way to put it is: whoever's advocating for something to be done to somebody non-consensually has the burden of proof. Advocating for a higher cigarette tax is advocating for some police officers to leave their houses and go and confront Eric Garner. You didn't know it was going to be Eric Garner specifically when you voted for Spitzer in 2006, but you knew it would be somebody; so it's your job to make the case why the cigarette tax is worth it. The default is, let the dude buy and sell what he wants, leave him alone.
On the other side of the aisle, closing the US border is obviously the marked option. The default is to leave people alone, let them come and go as they please. The ICE agents can just stay home. That's totally possible. So it's the job of Republicans to make the case why they should be out there arresting people. It's emphatically not the job of Democrats to make the case why people should be left alone.
You can set up a lot of tricky abstract illusions about what the law used to be, or what it is elsewhere, or which policy treats which identity group as an enemy... but at the end of the day, you're either advocating for somebody to do something non-consensual to somebody else, or against it. The boomers who don't want to be forced out of their houses can just say, "I don't want to pay this tax, I would have to live in a crappy apartment" and that's already, by itself, a strong argument; they don't need statistics and projections and economic theories for us to take that seriously. The people who want to repeal Prop 13 are the ones who we should require to produce rigorous statistics and projections and economic theories; their arguments should start at "must I believe this?" and they have to drag us to their conclusion, resisting every step of the way.
Under your analysis, is repealing prop 13 the marked option, or enacting it?
Your general principle is sound, but your application of it to Prop 13 is not.
Disproportionate boomers, in addition to longer useful lifespan, must also be attributed to the fact that "boomers" are a 20 year span (sometimes split into Boomers I and Boomers II), whereas the following generations are 15 year spans.
> like how they’re obsessed about anti-black racism, but rarely worry about anti-Roma racism which is much more prevalent there
It's precisely because they don't like the Roma that they don't "worry" about other Europeans also disliking the Roma.
> to a new regime of unromantically optimizing for a compatible partner no matter how long it takes
There's a lower percentage being partnered at all, and below-replacement fertility rates so there aren't kids to stick it out for.
> So do we want affirmative action for the young? Why is this better than other forms of affirmative action?
It's recognizing that certain kinds of institutions (non-profits/government) don't act as efficiently as others (profit-maximizing corporations).
> It doesn’t seem like a mystery why institutions would hire older leaders: they have more experience. Probably in the past this was kept in check by the tendency of old people to die (or forcibly retire due to poor health) at a young age, plus a shortage of old people since each generation was larger than the last.
Joe Biden wasn't benefiting from his great amount of experience. He had diminished capacity, which others around him were trying to hide. The same thing is happening with Trump now, and in the Senate.
> Why is this a more natural way to think of things than white people being evil and selfish by not voluntarily underemploying themselves so black people can get more of the good jobs?
Younger white people don't have the diminished capacity of elderly Boomers.
> I’m not sure who invented it. I just think this seems like a good time to stop.
Who has ever claimed any other generation invented it?
> The most important thing I got from these interactions was learning about the proposal to keep property taxes high, but delay them until death/sale of property. This relieves some of my tension around Prop 13 and related issues.
That's basically supporting high inheritance tax (except inheritance tax is better as it affects other forms of inheritance).
This is something that I see as obviously good, but has very poor support in most places on earth. In the same way that Scott here talks about how his grandparents built their homes and should be allowed to live there, both such parents and their children see it as fair that homes, businesses and other wealth built by the parents will pass to the children.
Inheritance taxes tend to raise very little money because people can take actions to avoid them by transferring property ahead of time.
Which should be taxed in exactly same way, and is opposed in exactly same way (or stronger).
Technicalities obviously matter in tax policy for this exact reason.
I guess therefore the suggested property tax is a good realistic proposition as it has higher chances of passing than some taxes that are more general.
Conflicting anecdata on the Charles UF point...
My boomer parents were great parents to me - I can only muster the most minor of complaints. But they're really not great grandparents. They moved to the sunbelt once I had kids myself. I recently brought my kids to visit them there for the first time this year, and once I arrived, they let me know that they'd arranged an Airbnb for us to stay in.
On the other hand, my wife's boomer parents were not very good to her when she was growing up. But they have turned into wonderful, helpful, doting grandparents.
My synthesis is: as a millennial, it's annoying that the Boomers in my life lectured me about how things were in their day, but I'm too much of an individualist to paint the whole generation with a broad brush. We should praise individual Boomers when they behave well and condemn them when they behave badly.
The biggest issue with boomers being uniquely powerful and influential for a long time is just that they're inevitably going to overcorrect in whatever direction they're biased in. For example, social security is a tradeoff between spending public money and making sure old people don't starve. If when boomers were young the problem was old people starving, they'd be pro more social security, and (because of inertia) keep being pro social security even when the tradeoff starts getting bad. This isn't an issue of boomers being motivated by selfishness: even a boomer who doesn't himself benefit from social security is going to be biased in its favor, because that bias was reasonable when he was young and forming his opinions about it.
(Similar for e.g. nuclear power, housing policy or sexual mores).
So it's mostly just a special case of the principle that you don't want any one group/bias to have too much power, because of the tendency to overcorrect. If zoomers got the kind of power boomers have now we'd see similar (or worse) issues overall, but the specific complaints would be pretty different.
(I wrote something on this principle a few months ago here
https://open.substack.com/pub/shakeddown/p/generalizing-the-concept-of-term?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=f8id0 )
"Ethiopia was an economic basket case in the early 80s. Thanks to warfare, their economy is again doing poorly. But in between, they had a miraculous recovery."
That it's going so poorly for them now suggests that the recovery was not too miraculous and that past performance is no guarantee of future success. I for one do not wish to try that here.
I think the reason why people say the old should give up resources for the young, rather than vice versa, is because the current old were able to start accumulating resources in their youth, as this was the norm in their time. The norm then shifted to less accumulation in youth and more accumulation later on, and so they are now able to continue accumulating resources throughout their entire lifespan, which disproportionately advantages them and disadvantages everyone else, who has to wait until they die but won't live longer in compensation. So the Boomers are getting a longer span of accumulative years than anyone else, therefore ending up more powerful and richer, and this causes resentment. They lived through a norm shift about accumulation and therefore reaped the benefits of both sides with the drawbacks of neither, in contrast to all other generations.
It also doesn't help that the common attitude among the Boomer generation and those near to it in age is that their children, grandchildren, etc. should accumulate resources themselves as the Boomers did, and that everything the Boomers have acquired rightly belongs to them and they have no responsibility to pass it down, so we see a lot of spending on luxurious retirements, elder care that extends lifespans far beyond what makes sense or is even good for the person in question (though I would argue this is more a combination of the social norm that it is noble to do everything possible to extend your lifespan and almost unthinkable not to, and regulations that make assisted suicide difficult and illegal and require high personal agency to either not enter the healthcare system or leave it once you have entered it, and not really the Boomers' fault), etc.- that is, forms of spending that concentrate wealth at the very top of society and leave younger generations with both little to no inheritance and (because of the accumulation pattern shift) much less of an avenue to accumulate wealth themselves.
Further, I think a lot of the frustration is that the pattern of accumulating wealth when old is dysfunctional compared to the pattern of accumulating wealth when young, because it means that people have to put off marriage, family, stability, and many things that are enjoyable in life until they are old enough that having or enjoying these things becomes much more difficult.
These things are not necessarily directly the fault of the Boomers, nor is it the Boomers' fault that even were things more fair, the Boomers would be better off for having been born into the post-WW2 boom and golden age, but put together they produce for a lot of people the impression and practical effects of selfishness and not caring about the welfare of their children and grandchildren.
What's the average lifespan of the boomer compared to previous generations? Is this intergenerational conflict just a natural response to boomers being the first generation with long lifespans and relative good health and functioning well into those long lifespans?
"Nobody will genocide the old."
This seems obvious and intuitively correct to me. However, I'm Canadian and observing our roll out of 'MAID' (Medical Assistance in Dying) has given me a massive dose of pause on that intuition.
A close parallel to the Ethiopia situation was perhaps the Land Acts in Ireland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Acts_(Ireland)
In Ireland under the British. Quite radical reform that - changing the nature of land ownership from the 3% to 97%. From wiki “in 1870 3% of Irish farmers owned their own land while 97% were tenants. By 1929, this ratio had been reversed with 97.4% of farmers holding their farms in freehold.”
What was once a revolutionary class of landless peasants became the backbone of one of the most conservative democracies in Europe.
Lessons from this have not been learned.
I live in the ""peoples Republic of Massachusetts." My towns residential tax rate is just over 1% and the town adjusts property values annually - based in part on neighborhood sales. The taxes I pay are consistent with how Zillow evaluates my house (Zestimate).
This seems to be the case in most towns in MA.
Are the long time housing owners that primarily profit from prop 13 usually living in neighbourhoods that contain a lot of the same people or are they more interwoven in the landscape? If it is the former you might should handle any infrastructure improvements and repair priorities based on how much that area pays in property taxes. Afterall arent they collected for that? Meaning if the neighbourhood only pays 1/6th of the usual property taxes they have to wait longer for repairs and improvements in a corresponding fashion - a bit of mercy such that they dont fall in utter disrepair. Or is this already the case? I dont know how much money gets shufted around to compensate for this if it is an issue
This is more a reference to the economic post that the Boomers aren't actually that different from previous generations in terms of income. Would be interested to see if anyone has studied pricing model evolution across the generations. I'm not sure the vibe economy debate is looking at things correctly... have companies over time perfected the art of "how much you got" vs sustainable margins? For example, is cell phone plan pricing based on what they think they average household can reasonably be expected to scrape together or priced based covering cost + profit? If the former, was this true in the 1950's? I think the concern isn't income, it's that it takes over 100% of your income to get the basics needed in modern life.
It seems that you correctly identified much of the perceived/real injustice as being caused by the boomers just happening to be the right age as longevity increased. Given that most of us here are highly hopeful of an imminent longevity explosion, there's probably lessons learned about the need to structure institutions such that being slightly older doesn't create near-permanent first-mover power imbalance that will otherwise come from being the first immortal generation.
Most obvious would be finally getting around to term limits for public office... but it wouldn't surprise me if there's agitation to extend that to private offices like CEOs as well. Land ownership that's never diluted by multiple inheritances will start feeling unfair, much like primogeniture at first increased the power of aristocracy as it concentrated power... until that concentrated power eventually birthed liberalism and democratic reforms that ended the aristocracy; we may need to find a (hopefully in the spirit of liberalism) solution. Although some would probably say a land tax would fix this :D
Regarding space colonization, I think that sadly that boat had sailed, regardless of whether or not AI improves dramatically -- unless of course it improves all the way to the science-fictional Singularity, in which case you'd have Von Neumann probes made out of computronium powered by nano-pixies or whatever so all bets are off.
But assuming we stick to the laws of physics, it looks to me like colonizing even the Solar System -- indeed, even one planet such as e.g. Mars -- would take the resources of the entire planet Earth. Granted, the actual rockets and supply caches and genetic engineering and whatnot will be cheaper in absolute terms, but it will still take the entire planet to sustain the effort (similarly to how it takes the resources of an entire state or even a small country to keep a modern chip fab working, even though the fab itself employs mere thousands of workers at most).
But at present no organization exists that would be willing and able to afford such expenditures, and I see none developing in the near to medium future. China is perhaps the closest candidate, but they've got their own problems. Once they finally take over the West (assuming they manage to pull this off), they will have no more targets for their one-upmanship and thus no need to launch deep-space missions; and until then, there are cheaper ways for them to signal their superiority.
AI is not going to help much, because you can't just think and/or wish your way to Mars. The AI can come up with a brilliant plan for space colonization, guaranteed to work and even yield profits in the next 50 years... And this plan will sit on the shelf somewhere, while the people in charge ask for more attractive plans such as "increase our corporate profits another 5% next year" or "dominate Canada already" or whatever. And if the AI goes rogue and starts building rockets instead of maximizing shareholder value, then it will be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch, like any other malfunctioning machine.
> But assuming we stick to the laws of physics, it looks to me like colonizing even the Solar System -- indeed, even one planet such as e.g. Mars -- would take the resources of the entire planet Earth.
A consistent and predictable budget of $100 B per year would be more than enough to colonize Mars, unless you have some extreme definition of colonization.
I guess that perhaps I do; when I say "colonize", I don't mean just "establish a small research outpost a la the ISS". Rather, I mean a sizeable colony, housing at least as many people as a small town (so, around 100,000). That is enough to produce something useful (including the product of "more people"), and thus to make the colony economically viable if not entirely self-sustaining.
And when I say "people" I do mean "humans", and physical ones at that. A fully automated robotic or teleoperated factory that stripmines Mars for resources (or whatever) would not count as a "colony" in my book.
P.S. I should also point out that I don't know of any organization presently operating on Earth that is ready, willing, and able to commit even $100B/year to Mars colonization, for decades if not for longer. Of course the gross incomes of governments and mega-corporations dwarf this expenditure, but there's a difference between raw income, and money one can afford to spend on long-term projects that involve high risk and no immediate reward.
> I don't know of any organization presently operating on Earth that is ready, willing, and able to commit even $100B/year to Mars
The $100B number was because someone said it would take the resources of the entire planet Earth to colonize Mars.
By comparison, the budget of the state government of California is over $200B.
That person was off by a few orders of magnitude.
That someone was me ! And I stand by my statement. As I'd said in my comment above, even assuming that Mars colonization would only cost $100B/year (for however many years), no organization on Earth can currently afford it. As I'd also said, having a $200B budget does *not* mean that you can afford to spend half of it on speculative projects like colonizing Mars.
Of course, if we wanted to colonize Mars in a reasonable amount of time (e.g. a few decades), it would take a lot more than $100B/year, but that's another story...
At $100B we are talking at least net 100 Starship launches per year. This is a massive amount of stuff. The first year of such a program, by itself, would get more payload to the surface of Mars than all the payload SpaceX has launched into LEO, to date. You can even save up your pennies and roll some nuclear reactors into your initial launches.
The ISS needs constant energy to not burn up in orbit. It's a really bad model for anything in space. Launch 100T of material to the ISS, wait 20 years, and it will all be gone. Launch 100T of material onto the surface of Mars, wait 20 years, and more-or-less it will all still be there.
Every molecule of matter on the ISS has to be launched from Earth. Mars is full of molecules. As the joke goes, people can be made there using local resources and unskilled labor.
There are valid questions about 3/8 g and long-term radiation, but those wouldn't matter even if it was the entire planet Earth behind it.
> if not entirely self-sustaining
Even the United States of America isn't an autarky. Fortunately, we're talking about $100B a year, which is easily enough to keep launching whatever
advanced computer chips and precision scientific instruments Mars needs, but the planet has the resources needed to produce plastic and glass and steel and concrete.
This program keeps 100 people alive for 10 years as a bunch of things are tested out and we keep on dumping in habs and quonsets and digging machinery and food and farm equipment and solar panel and computers and chemical reactors. It supports 1000 in the next decade, some of them produced locally, and 10,000 by the end of the third. Growth will slow for a while here, because we are past the point where a wave of immigrants could double your population, and we fall to the task of exponential growth from the locals. It's possible that after 50 years we'd hit your 100K number, but maybe 60 or 70 years.
$100B is a fucking lot of money.
SpaceX Starships can barely get to low Earth orbit. They cannot get to Mars. And the "stuff" they can get to LEO is all robotic, with no life support and much higher acceleration tolerance than live humans. Realistically, getting even a handful of humans to Mars would require at least a year in transit, which in turn necessitates seeding supply caches along the way. Once the first handful of humans get to Mars, they will require continuous additional deliveries of supplies (notably air and water) just to survive -- and that's assuming that everything goes swimmingly with no complications. Yes, Mars has lots of "molecules", but these molecules are presently being used to form rocks. There's a lot you can do with rocks, but not enough to sustain a colony.
Note that SpaceX has a budget of about $15B, and they cannot afford to spend any of it on Mars, lest they go out of business pretty much immediately. NASA has a budget of about $25B, and since they are not expected to make any revenue, they are capable of launching relatively small robotic probes to Mars about once a decade. They are no longer capable of launching live humans to the Moon. They are barely capable of launching humans to the ISS (with outside help). China's space program has a comparable budget, and while they talk a big game about Moon colonies etc., they haven't done much on that front thus far.
At present, even your relatively modest plan of keeping 100 people alive on Mars for 10 years is simply unachievable, as no country nor corporation on Earth is capable of launching even a single human to Mars. As if that wasn't bad enough, your plan calls for sustained expenditures of $100B for *several decades*. No organization on Earth -- not even China ! -- is capable of making that kind of commitment.
You also bring up a good point:
> There are valid questions about 3/8 g and long-term radiation...
Thus far I've been focusing on budgetary constraints, but low gravity and high radiation are physical constraints that cannot be solved merely by flipping an org chart. I don't see how you can handwave it away by simply stating that it "doesn't matter". You can't solve challenges by ignoring them. Space is unforgiving.
> Realistically, getting even a handful of humans to Mars would require at least a year in transit, which in turn necessitates seeding supply caches along the way.
WTF.
This isn't a thing.
You don't know what you're talking about.
> they will require continuous additional deliveries of supplies (notably air and water) just to survive
Oxygen can be manufactured locally using solar power.
This is really really trivial knowledge. Like if you audited a college seminar about living on Mars they would cover this on the very first day, and probably in less than 10 minutes. High-school chemistry is sufficient to explain it. They might even have a high-school student demonstrate it.
It has already been done. Not just on Earth, but on Mars.
Sorry-not-sorry. But you truly don't know what you're talking about. Like, the absolute most basic parts.
> your plan calls for sustained expenditures of $100B for *several decades*. No organization on Earth -- not even China ! -- is capable of making that kind of commitment.
Hey.
Hey.
Listen.
You keep on trying to say I'm claiming that people would do this.
But it was never my claim that people *would* spend $100B/year to fund a colony.
It was my claim that a $100B budget is **WAY LESS** than the "total resources of earth."
It is indeed a fuckton of money. One reason I chose the number was because it was, both, a fuckton of money, **AND** a few orders of magnitude below the resources of the entire planet earth.
> This isn't a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mission_to_Mars
> Oxygen can be manufactured locally using solar power.
From what ? Water ? Which comes from where ? Or regolith, maybe ? How much solar power will you need, and where are you getting it, on a planet significantly farther away from the Sun ?
> It was my claim that a $100B budget is **WAY LESS** than the "total resources of earth."
Agreed, and I addressed this point explicitly in my original comment. Once again, imagine a modern chip fab. It employs about 100K people, with the annual budget of about $10B. But the actual cost and manpower needed to operate the fab is significantly larger. All those 100K workers need a place to live. They need food to eat, and air to breathe (fortunately air is free on Earth, for now). All the trucks bringing in supplies need fuel, and roads, and porta-potties, etc. etc. On Earth, we take all of this infrastructure for granted; none of it exists on Mars.
Also, not to put too fine of a point on it, but you kind of pulled that $100B figure out of your, ah, imagination. $100B is only about 4x larger than NASA's annual budget, and 6x (to be generous) larger than SpaceX. But Mars is much, much, much farther away than LEO -- about 180K times farther away -- and that's not even counting the fact that we want to ship humans, not machinery.
Having the theoretical knowledge is one thing, having the actual on the ground resources to do it is another.
Theoretically, if I dumped your college students into the middle of the Borneo jungle with a Swiss army knife, they would be able to get, from a standing start, from 'construct someplace to live' to 'get a solar plant up and running' to manufacture the glass, plastics and so on that you so blithely hand wave the Martian colony could do.
The Martian colony starts off with the advantage that we could send all the parts to construct factories to them over time, but that still means going from "arrived here with nothing but the clothes on my back, and some Quonset huts" to "now we have the cement factory up and running" in a relatively short period of time.
Theory is great, right until it runs up against "damn, the sandstorm wiped out all our housing and we died" or "we got sick in the jungle and died" or "we ran out of food and starved to death".
Scott of the Antarctic had it all worked out in theory, but it didn't work out in practice. And Mars is a hell of a lot more unreachable than the Antarctic.
"Every molecule of matter on the ISS has to be launched from Earth. Mars is full of molecules. As the joke goes, people can be made there using local resources and unskilled labor."
People are imagining the Martian colony will have the same living conditions as a large city on Earth, complete with maternity hospitals.
No. Any early Martian colony is going to be like living in the wilderness of North America or in the newly discovered by Europeans parts of Africa. You're on your own in a hut with no midwives or the likes. Except even on Earth in those conditions, you're not also having to deal with "the atmosphere is unbreathable, the temperatures are extreme, there's high radiation, and the merest leak in our habitat is going to be fatal".
You won't make very many babies if the mothers are all dying in childbirth.
We think because this is a SF idea, it will be the shiny SF TV show version of what living there is like. Think rather of going back to "Little House on the Prairie" novels for early colonisation/settlement conditions.
OK, sorry, I leave the group for a couple days (to practice launching spacecraft and to resolve production issues with spacecraft parts), and I find that Edward Scizorhands has had to tackle all this on his own. So, kudos to ES for that, but to add a few points:
Based on some back-of-the-envelope calculations I did a few years ago, establishing a no-frills but economically self-sufficient civilization of 10,000 people at a suitable location in Near-Earth Space should be possible for about $400 billion spent over twenty years or $600 billion over ten years. That could be the surface of Mars, Luna, Phobos, Deimos, a suitable asteroid, or in high Earth orbit; one of the early steps would be spamming the area with probes to figure out which gets the colony and which just get mining/logistics outposts.
This assumes billionaire money spent by entrepreneurial corporations like SpaceX; there will be a substantial multiplier if it's government money spent by traditional government contractors. It also assumes SpaceX gets Starship working at ~$20 million per launch, or the equivalent in smaller chunks from other contenders. If you want 100,000 people instead of 10,000, it will cost more but not ten times more because a lot of the cost is technology and infrastructure development.
SpaceX's Starship can barely get to LEO *without refueling*. It is specifically designed to be refueled in LEO, by other Starships, and a refueled Starship in LEO does have the performance to take ~100 tons of payload to Mars. It's not the most efficient way to do the job, and I'd rather use Starship itself as just a LEO ferry, but it is designed to go to Mars itself and that design is credible. Starship does not presently have a life-support system, but SpaceX has built life support systems for Dragon and others are working on systems better suited for long-duration missions.
It doesn't take a year to get to Mars. It basically *can't* take a year unless you're being really perverse about it. The easiest, minimum-energy trajectories to Mars take 6-9 months depending on which launch window you use, and we can get that down to 4 months if you're willing to accept reduced payload. Note that the effective mass of one person in a modest habitat with long-duration life support and 9 months of supplies is ~3.5 tons. We don't need "supply caches" along the way, and as Edward has already explained, the concept is astrodynamically nonsensical.
Mars has polar ice caps with more water ice than Greenland, and has an unknown but substantial permafrost layer at lower latitudes. There is plenty of water. Luna has only a few large lakes' worth, but still enough for a colony. Deimos and Phobos are unknown, asteroids are varied but some are quite water-rich. And turning Martian permafrost + atmosphere into breathable air, potable water, high-grade rocket fuel, and a decent assortment of plastics, is basic chemical engineering that we've been doing on an industrial scale for a century or more.
Low gravity is something you can probably mitigate by living on anything resembling a planet and doing some extra exercise, and definitely something you can mitigate by spinning your habitat. High radiation can be effectively mitigated by bulldozing a few meters of dirt over your habitat.
Anything more I should talk about?
It's a big project. Almost certainly too big for Elon Musk alone. But Musk, and Bezos, and a couple dozen smaller players, and latecomers joining the bandwagon when it begins to roll might well be enough. And we do know how to do this. We can't order all the specific hardware we'd need from a catalog tomorrow, but only in the sense that we couldn't order a Saturn V in 1961. We have the technology, and we have the resources, and we might have the will.
When we get a lunar base going (if we get a lunar base going), I'll be a lot more sanguine about Martian colonies. If we can't even manage getting to the Moon and establishing something there, with a regular schedule of deliveries to the Moon and rockets taking off from there for the return journey to Earth, then we can't manage something on Mars.
Fortunately, sensible proposals for settling Mars (or anyplace else) generally have a moon base fairly early in the plan, to provide the rocket fuel you'll need to go anywhere else. So we should have the moonbase experience before we commit to Mars in a big way.
Not if we let Elon Musk run the whole show, but as noted he can't afford that. And AFIK he's the only major player with a "launch everything from Earth in Ginormous Rocket Ships" fetish. Still, if we're in a tearing hurry, we might let him send a few Starships to Mars to set up the advance camp. I won't be volunteering for that part.
We don't have the lunar bases (though allegedly the new Artemis mission will start this). We're certainly a good way away from having Martian colonies. To settle Mars, this will take, basically, throwing money down a well that you will never get back, as we would need to keep sending people, matériel, and support on a one-way trip until any colony is established, successful, and people can survive.
Getting the colonists to the point of "now we can send rocket ships back to Earth so it's a two-way trip" will be the big obstacle after that. Even for things like "we're mining Mars and here are the useful minerals we can sell to Earth to pay for our keep", well - how are they going to build a launch facility given that they're still on the level of "get a roof over our heads that won't fall down"?
The brave new "AI will help us colonise the light cone" fantasy is just that. It's SF dreams still being dreamed. The hope and hype of the 60s was "hey, we got to the Moon, now surely the lunar bases and space exploration can't be far behind! we've done the hard part!"
Well, our moon bases didn't happen. The space shuttle seems to have been a dead end. We're only now talking about going back to the moon. Now that we have people in space (e.g. on the space station), we're discovering the problems and difficulties associated with that. It won't even be like being on a ship going to Australia in the 18th century where that really was pretty much one-way and never return, because space is not the same thing as being on Earth in an environment we evolved in and that won't kill us just by being in it.
Same with all the "whee, we can colonise the planets and then move on to other star systems and be like all the great stuff in the SF novels!" hopes and dreams here about AI and the Singularity.
> The brave new "AI will help us colonise the light cone" fantasy is just that
I know you love to find people discussing technical topics, jump in the middle, and then laugh at them for being oh-so-dumb with their technical degrees while you oh-shucks, I'm-just-a-simple-Irish-girl, even-I-can-see-the-flaws takes.
But I made no comments whatsoever about AI or colonizing the light cone.
You should at least find people making those comments to make your non-sequitur responses to.
Yes, exactly. Space colonization is the kind of project that would consume tremendous amounts of resources for absolutely zero short-to-medium term gain. There's nothing useful on the Moon or on Mars that anyone on Earth would want; sure, there are some minerals, but you can get them cheaper on Earth. In the long term, colonizing other planets would yield tremendous benefits -- of having an entirely new *world* to live on ! -- but I don't think humanity is capable of such long-term endeavours. It's much more likely that we'll remain a one-planet species until we finally destroy ourselves.
This is exactly right in my opinion. We will never leave the solar system in any significant fashion.
Yeah. Even with magic AI, physical reality remains. Radiation, vacuum, human limitations, speed of light, it takes time to get from A to B and things like the communications gap between Earth and whatever spaceship we send out will all still remain.
But shucks, what do I know, I'm only old enough to remember the Moon landing and all the optimism about "now space colonisation!" and how that never happened in the fifty-plus years of my life between then and now. Edward Scizorhands has pwned me good, right?
No, Edward. I'm not technically educated. I just lived the time to see all the shiny optimism having the chrome wear off and how it never happened like expected. That's why I don't have shiny optimism about "but we won't even need fifty years, if AI goes ZOOM! in the next five years, the Fairy Godmother will solve all those pesky reality problems for us and magic pixie dust will get us to Mars and mushrooming colonies there, just like we saw the settled, industrial Mars on Babylon 5!"
“People have this sense that Boomers are being evil and selfish by not retiring so that young people can get more of the good jobs. Why is this a more natural way to think of things than white people being evil and selfish by not voluntarily underemploying themselves so black people can get more of the good jobs?”
But what if they are keeping jobs and staying in power when they don’t actually need to financially? I think that’s the argument about congress and university presidents. These people can retire. They have plenty to live on. But their sense of worth or their greed keeps them from doing so and holds back younger people from progressing.
Why not blame the people who choose university presidents and congressmen for not forcing them out?
Just to be clear, I don’t blame Boomers. I agree with Scott’s original article. But it felt like a hole in his response I quoted.
You can blame voters for Congress composition kind of. But mostly the people that fund their campaigns I think. I don’t really feel like I have a lot of options when I vote that would turn over Congress. Not sure the pool of people to blame for uni presidents is a big enough one for me to say much on.
Thing is, if you're a university president (say) and you hit seventy years of age. Your physical health is probably still pretty good (yes, you're slowing down, less active, all the rest of it, but you're in much better shape than a fifty year old in 1930) and you feel that you are still well able to do the job.
In fact, you've got all this experience, these connections, this knowledge. You're not losing your mental faculties (yet). Why quit just on an arbitrary date on the calendar? You can still do the job tomorrow that you were doing yesterday. You have another, say, ten years of life (at a minimum). You can surely be capable for another five years.
"Quit because dead men's shoes isn't working fast enough for the fifty-five year old guys coming up behind you" isn't a convincing message.
Besides, we're already complaining about pensions and social security for retirees who are living longer, would pushing out someone who can expect to claim a hefty pension really be a better swap than keeping them working in the job?
Yeah absolutely. I could see myself in that same situation. I’m 51 now and could see not wanting to leave a job you love and stimulates you and you feel you still have a lot to contribute. But if there’s truly an argument to be made about not doing that I’d be open to it.
Do many states have the property tax locked in at time of purchase? I live in PA, and that seems crazy to me. I’ve owned my home since 1993 and have been reassessed every 10 years. I hate it, and I can contest or negotiate the value, but it seems like a fact of life. Maybe the boomer-hatred on housing is a CA-specific thing?
"I’d never heard anyone argue the opposite - that the European discourse is infecting Americans with ideas that don’t apply to our context "
Just as an aside I'd like to point out that this is also the case with immigration and culture. The entire notion of "failure to assimilate" as a widespread social problem is rhetorically borrowed wholesale from the Europeans.
I'm sympathetic to the Boomers that want to keep their houses. Apart from all the reasons mentioned in the article, people gotta live somewhere, and have a place to call their own. I think it's a fundamental value that no one is truly free without their own land, and the ability to say "git off mah land" to a hostile intruder, ideally thru clenched teeth while pointing a firearm at them.
To this end, the idea of deferring property taxes until death is very intriguing. I also want to ban REITs and heavily tax people's houses after the second house.
Not going to weigh in on the boomer issue but just throw into doubt that story about the two slaves returning to slaving at the end..
Review of The Two Princes of Calabar on goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1134085.The_Two_Princes_of_Calabar
‘Despite some very intriguing information that it contains and some helpful information as it pertains to the history of Calabar, the Efiks and some of their institutions like the Ekpe, the book has minor and major faults. In the book, there are typos, for instance, he spells efik as ekif in some paragraphs. Additionally, he keeps flirting with the idea that after the two princes returned to Calabar, "evidence suggests, resumed their business of slave trading." However, the so-called evidence is not presented in the body of the book, except I missed or maybe it is presented in the notes section I need to thoroughly read through. Furthermore, it would be surprising if the evidence Sparks has in mind is the question Little Ephraim asked Charles Wesley as it pertains to how he is going to pay back Thomas Jones, since that is surely not some positive evidence for the claim that they "resumed their business of slave trading."‘
> I’m saying there’s no way my retired and slightly-demented grandfather-in-law could afford normal property taxes on his house he bought in what was basically farmland in 1970 but which has now grown into a desirable California college town.
The way property taxes work in New Jersey, and I assume in most other places, is that the tax rate is computed by dividing the desired revenue by the tax base. If a township performs a reassessment and determines that property values have doubled, the tax rate is automatically cut in half in order to keep the tax revenue the same.
So if your grandfather in law couldn’t afford normal property taxes, it wasn’t due to rising property values per se; there would have to be some other mechanism at work. I’m not questioning whether such a mechanism exists, just saying I don’t know what it is. Perhaps if you live in the middle of nowhere your municipal government doesn’t do much of anything, but when it sees the opportunity to become a nice college town, it starts providing, and raising taxes to pay for, the municipal services that a nice college town typically provides.
California is one of the oddball jurisdictions where the rate is fixed rather than the target revenue. Before Prop 13, if property values doubled, then the dollars you own in property taxes doubled unless the city/county/state actively cut the tax rate. Sometime they did, but in the years leading up to Prop 13 they mostly collected and spent the extra money instead of cutting the rate.
One key point and one anecdote.
Key point: That Prop 13 applies to primary residences is suboptimal, but not exceptional. Florida has a similar policy, and the strategy of deferring taxation until death is applied in Texas if I’m not mistaken. The reason every right minded person hates Prop 13 is that it applies to commercial and rental properties as well. For this there is truly no justification, especially since property sales can be structured to avoid resetting tax rates. This is the version that absolutely must be abolished for California to thrive.
Anecdote: a boomer friend of my dad was complaining about his directionless kid who just wants to play in bands and work at Trader Joe’s instead of finding a career. This is the same person who tells every single person he ever meets about how cool his high school band was, and how big of a deal they were. I asked him if he saw the connection. He’d never considered it. I think about this often.
Boomer generation's lack of ambition and risk-aversion stifled innovation and destroyed the promise of nuclear energy; they took the flying car away from us and gave us global warming. And they did not start a nuclear war*. The smartest people on earth (von Neumann, Einstein, Feynman) expected eminent nuclear war and it didn't happen. I do not know how much in social security benefits this is worth. But the fact is that humanity was on a default trajectory to have thermonuclear ww3 and they skirted it. There is nothing I want more than for my kids to be able to say something like that about my generation.
* with a small caveat that two of them still might.
Scott said:
[“Well, their actions were just the inevitable product of the social/cultural/economic stresses they were under”. Even if this is true, it’s probably true of everyone, including slaveowners and Nazis. It doesn’t seem entirely correct either to blame them or to not blame them under these circumstances...]
Maybe the answer is to bite the bullet and radically forgive all of the worst people in history? Who knows, maybe if we get in the habit of forgiving the dead, we can eventually learn not to hate and kill the living.
"Suppose RH is right (I haven’t checked), and that Social Security would be sustainable with lots of immigration."
This is almost certainly false for immigration from areas with higher-than-replacement birthrates. The Danish study back in 2018 showed that immigrants from the MENAPT countries were a net financial cost (as were their children) due to high welfare costs.
See: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRH3J6U1eAgshUl55bseL4096IjnNspyyingQ2icVWK-g&s=10
A practical note and proposal about Prop 13:
Prop 13 caps the property tax increase to 2% per year. Average inflation is 2.6% so the real tax rate actually goes down, even as property values skyrocket!
Straight up repealing Prop 13 would be a huge shock to the system. Many would have 10x higher taxes. This can't happen.
But changing it to cap at "inflation + 2%" should be perfectly doable. This would shrink the problem each year instead of growing it, and no one would get a sudden equivalent of an eviction notice from the property taxman.
Is it weird that the idea of a elderly couple living alone in a large house strikes me as weird?
Anecdote: My parents were born in 42(father) and 48(mother), my siblings in 68(older brother), and 72(sister) and myself in 86... I understand this makes my father a young silent generation member, my mother an old boomer, my brother a young boomer, Joneser, or old gen Xer depending on where you put the fuzzy boundaries and whether you consider Generation Jones distinct from Boomers, my sister a mid to old Gen Xer and myself a very young Xer or an old millenial...
I never knew my grandparents, my paternal grandparents dying well before I was born, my maternal grandmother dying while my mom was pregnant with me and my maternal grandfather dying when I was around 2.
I've lived most of my life in a 3 generation household and at one point, 4 generations, and if not for death leaving me as the eldest of my non-estranged family, I'd probably still be living in a 4 generation household and find the fact I currently live with only one other family member unsettling when I think about it too much even though this has been the case for nearly 9 years.
My mother took care of her parents in their twilight years, my sister never really moved out, my brother did move out, though my parents would have never begrudged him coming home and I'm sure my mother would have preferred having all of her children at home. My sister had two children, born in 92 and 94, and my parents practically raised their grandchildren as none of my sister's marriges ever worked out and work never really left her with the energy to be an attentive mother. My brother never saw any great success and died in a car crash in 2002, a lost my mother never really recovered from... she spent the last few years of her life wheelchair bound, but was fortunate enough to be mostly there until the end(she had some memory issues attributed to a series of strokes, but could do mental arithmetic faster than I could type things into a calculator) and even helped prepare supper for the family the night before the heart attack that took her in 08 or 09... my father welcomed his first, and so far only, great grand child in 2013, and even when my nibling was being absolutely insufferable, my father wouldn't kick the nibling out of the house for the sake of the great grandchild. My parents never asked me, my siblings, or my niblings for rent as adults and we all had a live in significant other at one point or another... lost my sister to drunk driving in 2014, and lost my father in 2017... While my father was alive, all of his descendants enjoyed a fairly comfortable lifestyle under his roof and he never asked for anything in return beyond a basic level of respect. Because of his support, I was able to complete Associates and Bachelor's degrees without going into massive debt or have to work full time on top of going to class, and for the parts of my college years spent at home, he never took issue with driving me to and from campus since I've never been able to drive due to visual impairment(and went fully blind around 2012)... Sadly, his death came just months after graduation from a Bachelor's program and in the process of me and his other survivors adapting to no longer having the safety net he provided, I went from debt free to 5 digit debt... and just as things where stablizing and it seemed like division of service for the blind was making progress in helping me find employment, the pandemic hit... today, I, one of my niblings, and a friend we met through the niblign's ex-spouse are barely making ends meet on my SSDI and their food service wages living in a in a trailer park and I'm pretty much homebound becasue there's no pedestrian access, no mass transit, the local para-transit is borderline useless, and the only days of the week my housemates could possibly give me a ride anywhere are Sunday(when a lot of places are closed) and Monday(also their only day to run errands to places closed on Sunday that can't be done quickly before their evening shifts at the closest thing this small town has to fine dining... and its a struggle just to stand still on the debt I've been carrying since my father's death... and even if I were debt free, I couldn't afford to move somewhere with better prospects even if my housemates where willing to come with(even if we could find somewhere local with affordable rent and better amendities, we couldn't afford any of the extra charges beyond the first month's rent to move into a better place.
So yeah, at least in my case, I had a good life thanks to parents born a few years either side of when the Baby Boom began and have been struggling since they died. Oh, and my father was fully independant up to the very end(He went to his 3 times a week cardiac rehab Monday morning, went to the bingo game he help run Monday night, left Bingo early to go to the ER, was admitted, died in hospital Thursday, not as sudden as my Mother dying of a heart attack on the way to a regular doctor's appointment, but by all appearances, he was about as functional as a 75 year old with his health issues could be.
I don’t have strong feelings about the boomer theory of everything but I have very strong feelings about the Housing Theory of Everything and I blame the boomers for that 110%.
My grandparents bought their house in SoCal in 1965 and it cost about 3x the median income. My parents bought their house in 1996 for about 5x the median income. Their home today is worth about 10x the median income. This could be at least partially mitigated through building more housing. Guess who opposes that? Oh I’m sorry, they don’t oppose building more housing. Just building more housing *here.* It’s okay to build more housing “over there.” Where “over there” is and why the people over there wouldn’t also oppose housing is just silently ignored.
Whether it results in delayed home purchasing/delayed family formation, living in lower quality housing, or the financial strain of paying an outsized amount of one’s income in housing costs, this lack of construction has many negative consequences on non-Boomers. This is quite aside from them benefiting from things like Prop 13. That the single most expensive thing in the average person’s life has gotten 3x more expensive relative to income in 70 years is a big problem. That it also comes alongside massive increases in things like education and healthcare costs just makes it even worse.
| Much of anti-Boomerism seems to be about how Boomers are selfish because they’re taking up resources, and those resources could go to young people instead. But every group is taking up resources that could go to other groups! This only justifies anti-Boomerism if you start with the assumption that old people are less worthy of having good things than young people, and so if you can’t redistribute old people’s resources to young people, then this is prima facie unfair. |
I will make the explicit argument that it is better for society to redistribute old people's resources to young people.
1) Young people (especially those in their 20s) have less financial resources to start off with, having not had the chance to work much and accumulate wealth. Even if they've started saving and investing compound interest is unlikely to have had enough time to generate benefits. They are more likely to be in debt due to student loans. They usually only have access to entry-level jobs which are lower-paying.
2) At the same time, young people have the most dependents. If they start families, they have very young children who are wholly dependent on them. As their parents retire, they may also have to start supporting their parents in both financial and non-financial ways. In contrast, old people generally have no dependents as their children are grown.
3) The young are more likely to use their financial resources in productive ways, like making investments and raising children, and are also more likely to be engaging in economically productive activities. They also have the highest need to make major purchases like houses, cars, and household goods. In contrast, old people have generally made all their major life purchases. Their expenditure generally goes towards non-productive goods like tourism and healthcare (note that this is not the same as saying that healthcare is unimportant).
4) The goal of society should be to *help young people thrive*. We should want young people to establish independent households, have children, and be the least stressed about finances so that they can focus on starting out their life. Or put another way, society is great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. What we have today is a society where old people insist on sitting under the shade and refuse to plant trees for the next generation.
I accept that elder poverty is bad and should be addressed, but it can be addressed through welfare schemes that aim to alleviate all poverty. But to me this idea that we should be taxing the young to provide benefits specifically to the old is absurd. Taxation is good when it supports the provision of public goods. What is happening now is the robbing of the productive members of our society to support the unproductive.
My anti-boomerism also stems from my observation of city council meetings. Its always the boomers who show up to whine about retail stores in neighbourhoods or a 4-storey apartment next to their house that they bought in 1975 for $10,000. Their entitlement and selfishness directly make my life and that of the city worse.
> Federal deficit spending is the clearest possible example of trading off long-term prosperity for short-term gain, but the young are more likely to support it than the old.
Old people are more likely to oppose deficits in theory, but on the issue that matters most to the deficit - entitlements - they're overwhelmingly in favor of increased spending.
> > Another transformation that hurt people who weren’t able to plan for it nor did they have time to pivot: the boomers shipped their parents off to old people’s homes and defected from the compact where your parents take care of you when you’re young and you do the same when they get old and frail.
> So . . . since you’re so against this, you’re going to reverse it by taking great care of your own elderly parents, in your house, attending to their every need, right?
Scott's counterargument here is bad. Even if post-boomer generations don't fix the issue and restart the tradition of caring for their parents, this complaint (assuming the historical description is correct) is rightly pointing out somewhere that the Boomers were exceptionally bad.
Generations long ago: took care of their parents, and were cared for by their children
Generation right before the Boomers: took care of their parents, were abandoned by the Boomers
Boomers: raised by their parents who paid it forward, then abandoned them
Post-boomer generations: won't care for their parents and won't receive care from their children
So the long-ago generations and the post-boomer generations are neutral, giving and receiving the same amount of care. The Boomers were exceptionally bad, benefiting from the system while not paying it back. (However, if this is true, it's different from most anti-boomer complaints, which usually allege that Boomers screwed over younger generations, whereas the people most hurt here are *parents* of Boomers.)
Additionally, if you think that caring for your parents is less costly than being cared for by your children is beneficial, you can further blame the Boomers for shifting society to a worse equilibrium where no one cares for anyone. (I don't think this is correct due to the issue of increasing lifespans pointed out later, but the complaint makes sense if you believe this.)
I think this chunk of the post:
>I don’t think it’s especially worth “blaming” the Boomers for this. If you look at the secular trend . . .
>…it long predates them, and they’re just reverting to the pre-Baby-Boom mean.
...is very load-bearing. For much of the rest of the post, I noticed that I kept thinking "except it is their fault if you think the inverted population pyramid is itself their fault".
"it to me it does seem to make sense that rising house values shouldn’t be able to make your current home unaffordable"
This is precisely the reason that I support some form of rent regulation/stabilization. It seems that YIMBY's and conservatives have decided that rent control is evil. But it is conservative in the same sense that you have explained - eliminating rent stabilization is a "recipe for constant forced upheaval, stress, and destruction of families/community".
I wish more people would understand this view.
Do you understand that rent control raises rents and constricts supply? That's the academic economic consensus.
https://chatgpt.com/share/69604c51-c17c-8013-ac73-fa1241e6a3ba
Do you understand that policy choices often have both positive and negative effects and that an important component of political choice is determining the appropriate balance between those effects?
Yes. Do you?
Yes.
I am a bit suspicious of much of the class based analysis I am reading here. Many comments read as if the boomers as a class were agents of history. Individual boomers made individual decisions. What is the evidence that they did not optimize their lives according to the same utility maximizing criteria that were used before and after? Shouldn't we focus on the changing economic parameters instead of inventing an imaginary agent, the Boomer class?
Do you really think “there is an argument for *forced* downsizing”?
I suspect you are being hyperbolic or mean there is an argument for structuring incentives that would mean more downsizing occurs.
Do you really mean forced?
> Even if this is true, it’s probably true of everyone, including slaveowners and Nazis.
It was true for them as well and it doesn't make sense to hate them but you can kill without hate or anger. And the hate or anger might stop one from finding the same faults in oneself etc...
https://heynadeem.substack.com/p/the-tale-of-the-samurai-and-the-thief
> The man came to the Samurai and once again spit in his face.
The Samurai drew his blade, took position to strike, and the man threw up his arms in fear of being cut down and said, “Why today do you not turn around and leave like before?”
The Samurai replied, “Yesterday I was angry,” and cut the thief’s head off.
"Why is it bad that the Boomers won’t collapse the Ponzi? Because then we, the Millennials and Zoomers, will soon be in the unfair position of having paid into it, but not receiving benefits!"
Literally this, actually. Either we ease it now while Boomers are rich or it ends instantly in three decades when we run out of money.
It's been pointed out that there's a problem where when retired people can't pay their property taxes anymore due to their home value skyrocketing, they are forced to sell and leave their neighborhood. Why do they have to leave? Well, because surrounding homes have also massively increased in value. So whatever cushion they have left over from the home sale also wouldn't be able to cover the new house, even if they are downsizing.
In this situation, wouldn't the solution be to just ... rent? I mean, I know that a lot of Americans have a complex around owning a home, but it isn't actually necessary to own a home to live in a community. And the cushion that they built from selling their very expensive home should allow them to live in that neighborhood for a while.
Boomers were handed the greatest set of economic circumstances known to the human race and they still managed to screw it up for the rest of us. But was drives the rest of us insane is the fact they’re willfully blind to their schizophrenic reasoning.
They engineered a housing bubble through decades of inappropriately low Fed rates and increasingly onerous zoning laws….yet they emerged wealthier and now refuse to downsize like normal person…and for some godforsaken reason they’re reeeeeeally into the concept of HOAs.
They pushed a generation of CHILDREN into college while voting away state tax support for tuition AND federalized student loans THAT CAN’T BE DISCHARGED IF YOU HAVE A PULSE.
They pissed away $1T leveling the Middle East and voted for Medicare Part D specifically *without* granting CMS the ability to negotiate drug prices. And then they had a little Tea Party because “socialism is bad”.
They are either too stubborn or dumb to realize the governments and policies they’ve supported their entire adult lives are, in fact, socialist. Only instead of taxing themselves to pay for all this shit, they elected to run the government on a credit card.
Western Boomers, particularly those in the US, are the most entitled humans to have ever walked the earth.
As people pointed out, but apparently not here (I could not find it in the comments), the California tax system differs from most other states. Usually, the tax rate is set to create a specific amount of tax. If everyone's property rises in value, the tax rate decreases correspondingly, so taxes don't go up. California doesn't work that way; if everyone's property value goes up, everyone's taxes go up. That was why Proposition 13 became a thing.
(Of course, if an individual's property goes up but everyone else's doesn't, he's screwed under either system.)
If I were a boomer who left this economic mess to younger generations while enriching myself and staying silent—never advocating for saving or reform—I would be deeply ashamed.
Some actions are hindsight, yes, but much was obvious all along.
The difference is that half the people who knew better simply cashed in, and there was no incentive to change course.
Over the next 20 years, as boomers die out, they'll attempt to preserve their legacy, insisting "things aren't so bad," dismissing concerns, questioning whether young people's struggles are even real, claiming "things are better than they've ever been."
But increasingly, that legacy is one of cashing out and staying silent as this country enters deep, real decline—moving faster, becoming more obvious each year. It's shameful.
Change is coming because younger generations have experienced the harshest forces of capitalism in full force. Whether boomers decide to do anything bold and brave before they die of old age is their choice, but as a whole I have little respect or admiration for the generation. A generation that leaves things much worse for the young is a terrible generation.
"Much of anti-Boomerism seems to be about how Boomers are selfish because they’re taking up resources, and those resources could go to young people instead. But every group is taking up resources that could go to other groups!"
I think there's a pro-social reason that we should prefer resources directed to the young: they are the ones having and raising and educating kids. I think Marx almost had it right, the purpose of society is to reproduce itself. (Not create the conditions of it's reproduction, he was still dancing around child raising being real labor. Too much a bachelor.)
So we do want resources to flow towards making families easier and better for both kids and parents, in preference to those in supporting roles. (The childless and the empty nesters, basically. I say this as a childless lefty queer: A bunch of my long term friends are a few years into having families and it's scary from the outside how high the expectations are and how low the infrastructural/financial support is. More please.)
Oh, forget to mention: I think you might be able to correlate the relative wealth concentration into the older generation with the fall in fertility rates. Fit could be used to judge potential benefits to moving backwards?