Hacker News Reader

Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

It's painful to see that younger people are worse off - poorer and life expectancy I see is down again. I thought we were trying to give our children a better life? How did we become so narcissistic that we don't even want to make future generations better off?

View on HN

Everyone is trying to give their children a better life, not everyone else's children a better life.

Propping up housing prices and NIMBYism isn't trying to give your offspring a better life.

I guess by some math they would leave the house to the kids, but that will be when the Boomers are ideally 80 and their kids are already grandparents. Assuming the wealth isn't spent on end of life care (it will be).

A lot of people seem to think that withholding vaccines and using low fuel efficiency SUVs to transport their kids is giving them a better life, I don't have much hope of them considering broader economic outcomes. But they will sacrifice others' outcome (not to their face though) if they think it will further theirs even a little bit.

Yes, many boomers in my family always moan "Why do I have to pay for someone else's kid to go to college? Why do I have to pay for someone else to get health insurance?"

I think it's largely related to the housing bubble. House prices have risen sharply in the last few decades and more people buy houses as investment.

Why would you not buy a house as an investment? If you aren't looking to get a return you might as well rent and have your hands away from the duties and risks of property ownership.

> If you aren't looking to get a return you might as well rent and have your hands away from the duties and risks of property ownership.

A couple moves forced by landlords deciding to move in or sell the property to people looking to remodel and flip and you might discover non-investment value to owning your residence.

(Renting comes with those and many other risks; essentially all the duties of ownership are risks—risk that the landlord will fail the duty—for renters. Unless the lease terms transferred to the duty to the renter, then they are just duties.)

I guess it comes down to what considerations you value more. Personally, I'd still take the instability because I value the flexibility much more at this point in my life.

Sure, people have different priorities; I'm just saying that the idea that the only reason one might prefer ownership is investment value is missing a lot.

Current life expectancy data is plagued by the recent increase in drug overdoses and suicides. Not saying that there isn't a problem or that we don't need to fix those issues, but aside from those life expectancy is doing fine

I wouldn't say that. Per TFA on the subject that also reached the front page the decrease is 0.3yr. I wouldn't call that "plagued".

> life expectancy I see is down again

Is the part I was responding to.

IMO:

* Capitalism naturally leads to growing wealth concentration/inequality over time, especially when combined with automation and globalization

* People say “one person being richer doesn’t make you poorer”, but that’s BS. When people compete for scarce resources, i.e. homes in cities, the wealthy can outbid the middle class constantly

* I think that home ownership in cities becoming unaffordable for the middle class is mostly a result of the wealthy gobbling up property

I don’t think there was an intentional “fuck our kids” push from boomers, this is just the natural result of unchecked capitalism and growing wealth inequality. It won’t be reversed until we do something to REDUCE wealth inequality, which I don’t see happening any time soon. If wealth inequality keeps increasing, of course desirable scarce resources will be increasingly owned by the ever-wealthier upper class.

Who is "we"? "we" do, but the people in power - the government, the big corporations, shareholders - don't have those priorities. And I won't claim to be better than them, because I don't have their perspective on the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com