Future Generations Steal from Themselves | Hacker News Reader

Future Generations Steal from Themselves

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45 pointsalexandros25 comments

This is a point I've often wondered about. For most of history, "the people" have had more power collectively than the rulers. And yet the rulers had all the wealth, and consequently lived much better. Why did "the people" put up with this?

This is just as true today, by the way. Collectively, the people in most Western countries could do amazing things to help world hunger, world peace, and so on. And yet for the most part, not much is done.

I think this is the same reason most people don't even think of starting their own company. It just never occurs to them that they can chose what to do with their life; most people just "go with the flow" in a manner of speaking, and let the world around them choose for them.

Non-hierarchies are unstable because there are super-linear cumulative rewards to climbing towards the top of the pyramid, even if it's only a local pyramid, and even if that means the sum output of all the people put together is reduced because they are formed into a hierarchy.

But it's also more complicated. There are significant rewards for specialization, and leadership is also a specialization. A group, even a hierarchy, with a good distribution of specializations, will beat the loose affiliation of individualists any day of the week.

It is the same paradox that comes with the power of special interests. Special interests are small. They have shared objectives. They pool their resources. They are following Napoleon's dictum:

"In a battle, as in a siege, the art consists in concentrating very heavy fire on a particular point. The line of battle once established, the one who has the ability to concentrate an unlooked-for mass of artillery suddenly and unexpectedly on one of these points is sure to carry the day."

In contrast, the people, on average, want nothing. They believe that their efforts will be undone by those opposed, or not alter the ponderous inertia of the status quo, or that factions or (no surprise) special interests will be able to absorb the vast majority of legislative attention and resources. So the average is apathy.

It's not thought all the way through, though. If a special interest can do it... so can you.

It's not just that. The transactions costs of a truly popular movement are massive and difficult both to initiate and to sustain. That's why so many popular movements turn out, on further investigation, to be the false populism of a charismatic would-be dictator.

Human beings are incapable of deliberately solving coordination problems larger than 50-person hunter-gatherer tribes. Anything that happens on a larger scale is driven by mob physics and the decisions of individuals and small groups who aggregate power under those mob physics.

Read Rise and Decline of Nations by Mancur Olson. http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigid...

It explains this phenomenon. Basically, for a group of size n, members only get 1/n of the value they contribute towards any collective goal, so noone bothers, unless coerced, like with unions.

The rulers also generally prevented other rules from invading your land, taking your things, raping your wife, and killing your children.

>I would argue that the people who take the most physical and mental risks for the benefit of society should get the most pay. That seems perfectly reasonable and moral to me.

It shouldn't. Society should reward benefits, not costs.

Yes, but how do we decide how much society benefits from what you do? The military and police, keeping the mob rule at bay may be a great benefit, since it protects the rest of society and gives it the opportunity to invent and build things. Teaching people, healing people, motivating people. How should we value and reward all these things?

Paying for benefits and costs are both wrong.

You pay the minimum to get good-enough folks but you never pay more than the benefits.

Note that there are things other than money. For example, many good-enough people prefer teaching 1st grade to driving a garbage truck.

The way it works, ideally, is there's competition & people vote with their dollars according to how they like the benefits & the prices.

If something is very beneficial, but in great supply the price tends to be low, like clean water in Sweden, it will be very cheap, so I don't think somethings price on the market is enough to decide how much benefit it has. Somethings which are of great benefit to us, like air we can breath, are even free.

The Roman empire became like this later on in its history: people with muscles and swords made a lot of money off everyone else by taxing them.

--- and then it collapsed =)

> Arguably, the most important function of human > language is to protect the smart from the strong.

I understand what he means, though when defined like this, "the smart" include Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Idi Amin and a bunch of others, none of whom could have won a fist fight with their strongest soldiers. Yet the soldiers remained loyal to the rulers.

I was just reading a book about the fall of Berlin in 1945. One thing I've wondered about in the past is why the German soldiers kept fighting when it was clear that the war was lost. And one thing I just read was that any soldier that tried to desert, and was caught, was tortured and then killed. So the soldiers kept fighting since quitting seemed even more dangerous than fighting. Thus a hopeless cause was prolonged for several months.

Anyone who knows anything about World War I knows that a lot of very smart people died in the fighting. And language was used by all sides to rally people and get them excited about the war. So one function of language is to rally smart people into clusters where they can be killed in large numbers. If language really protected the smart from the strong then the Battle Of The Somme would never have happened.

We'll have to wait and see for the current generation 'steals from itself' but the baby boom generation have definitely screwed themselves. Other than the few unlucky souls who went to Vietnam the baby boomers lived through an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity and all they have to show for it is a mountain of debt.

Debt? What they have are assets (real estate priced out of the range of their kids) and pensions (gold-plated final salary, paid for by their kids taxes). The Boomers are unbelievably good at running this kind of generational heist.

Probably the kids of Gen X and the Millenials will still be working off the Boomer's debt (i.e. government deficit here in the UK).

If things get bad, many productive young people will be finding a country with less debt and moving there. If you stay behind to pay it off, you're a sucker. If you buy government bonds from a government in lots of debt, you're a sucker if you lose and a cheater if you win. If you accept pension promises you're acting in bad faith (letting present officials make promises to you using future generations' money, which is more convenient for them) and hoping that no one notices, and I don't feel an obligation to pay you off. There was a time when pension promises were honorable, but that time is not now. It's sad - you should have noticed that small little feeling of something being wrong, but realistically, most people have no sense of morality apart from what their friends think is wrong. But it's not any happier if the victims get screwed instead of the cheaters.

"The Boomers are unbelievably good at running this kind of generational heist."

I agree. But, it caught up with them. Now they are embittered, their house "investments" are worth nearly nothing and, in the current market, almost unsellable; and they've leveraged every possession they "bought" on 15+% credit. On top of that, the sole means of most of their retirement (Social Security) is being debated by their "betters" as impractical, and thus the betters are finding ways to take that away from them and use media outlets to make them think that it's good for them that they'll not have that income.

"the kids of Gen X and the Millenials will still be working off the Boomer's debt"

Welcome to the New World Order. We love you, too.

It does make me wonder whether Gen X and Millenials will become pro-inflation. After all, that is one way for a group to get out of paying a debt. Most debts are fixed in nominal terms, and the burden of debt could therefore be reduced, in real terms, with a bout of inflation. The Boomers tended to be anti-inflation because they remember the hyper-inflation of the 1970s, but neither Gen X nor Millenials remember the 1970s.

For the most part, a bout of strong of inflation could be regarded as a form of cheating, a form of welching on a debt. The public (at least in the US) hasn't favored that kind of policy, partly because I think a lot of people feel it would be unethical to get out of a debt that way. But then, avoiding unethical behavior depends on a notion of fairness, and that goes both ways. The Gen Xers and the Millenials might ask themselves, "Was it fair for the Boomers to run up a few trillion in debt and then leave it to us?" If a substantial portion of those generations come to believe that the debt was unfairly incurred, then they may think it is fair to use unfair tactics to get out of paying the unfair debt.

The Boomers need to foot the bill for environmental damage and geopolitical instability too remember. It's not just financial debt.

It's too bad that Scott Adams has no idea what he's talking about.

What makes him think that A: The youth of today agree with how things are going B: They are NOT trying to change things C: The people in charge ARE NOT trying to maintain the status quo.

It's not so simple as just using a gun or muscle is it? We have laws, ones to do with economics and even criminality that can keep the youths marginalized. The older generation run the companies that pick and choose who to hire. In general, the real power of society is with the old.

I don't even see the middle-class (and old) majority having much sway over the rich who control politics in so many senses. Business interests have squelched a lot of progress for the current and last generation.

I find that Adams is pretty aloof to these sorts of ideas.

He also seems to be recommending a revolution of sorts.

"Society's founding geniuses engineered a social system that encourages the young people who have guns to shoot at each other instead of robbing old people. Forgive me for calling that awesome."

I'm not sure if this is a racially motivated statement.

It's also interesting how he uses "smarts" as a term when "manipulation" and "control" would do better to describe the way society works. I'm guessing he's a hard-core Rand follower. Great.

The key quotation from this piece is "the most important function of human language is to protect the smart from the strong". He's talking (in a very tongue-in-cheek manner) about how ethics very often override self-interest. Seriously, I think you're over-analyzing.

When he talks about "young people with guns" I think that he is talking about the US military. I don't know if I agree with him, but I'm positive his statements aren't racially motivated. I'm also positive that this has nothing to do with Randianism.

That quote or statement just shows that an individual living a "thug life" or succumbing to the tremendous peer pressure of youth basically is completely out of touch with the larger mechanics at play, such as congressional decisions and corporatocracy.

"One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country."

That's a quote dug up from a (spam?) comment, article or forwarding at reddit.

I agree about the manipulation and control terminology, to a point. Perhaps some people consider that "smarts" but mostly I reserve "smarts" to be a term for people sort of half way in and half way out of the system. It's a compromise of sorts to be nimble and not get run over. The cumulative effect of that might still be bad, though.

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