Why are millennials burned out? Capitalism | Hacker News Reader

Why are millennials burned out? Capitalism

vox.com

21 pointsminikites17 comments

Young people have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things - and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: Their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning - all their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They overdo everything - they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else.

– Aristotle

Aristotle didn't even have avocado toast, what does he know?

The theoretical safety valve of capitalism is that workers can invest in capital and become capitalists. They have the technical know-how. This allows the sort of bloodless revolution that maintains stability.

We have a problem in recent history because "inflation" has been defined as "consumer prices rising for basically no reason", and I'm not sure if there is a well known word for "price of assets rising for no reason", which appears to be happening (the amount of money in the economy is rising, but inflation is low).

This is distorting decision making power (and resources) away from competent people towards people who happen to own assets (who tend not to be young). It should be that assets are diverted to competent people; because incompetence should be punished with bankruptcy.

There is nothing stopping anyone from buying assets with their savings. I'd argue it's actually easier than ever. The problem is people have no savings. There is an underclass of people who legitimately have no ability to build savings. For the rest, they just have a broken view of the world that causes them to spend more than they bring in and build debt rather than assets.

The original naming of inflation meant inflating the money supply, but of course this is something.the central banks don't want people to talk about (and central banks arw tightly controlling what's taught in macroeconomy).

From Wikipedia: Historically, rapid increases in the quantity of money or in the overall money supply have occurred in many different societies throughout history, changing with different forms of money used. For instance, when gold was used as currency, the government could collect gold coins, melt them down, mix them with other metals such as silver, copper, or lead, and reissue them at the same nominal value. By diluting the gold with other metals, the government could issue more coins without increasing the amount of gold used to make them.

How do you invest in capital? You invest capital itself.

Capitalism is one allowed me to start my own business and discover what true freedom is. No other form of economics or government in history can hold a candle to the benefits and possibilities of capitalism. It’s not perfect, but I live a pretty good life and make a good living.

Maybe this article should start with "defined as people born between 1980 and 2000 in western countries". I think a deeper discussion would be why are millennials burned out while same generation in other regions do not have any expectation of improvement.

Probably because we can see how easy it would be to bridge the gap.

We also see it getting wider though, so in a little while we might be just as well off as those outside of western countries.

> Maybe this article should start with "defined as people born between 1980 and 2000 in western countries"

I've lived in both east and west and I can tell you that millennials have similar issues everywhere when it comes to the scope of this article. I can also tell how wrong are both sides about each other's cultures which is indeed a different discussion.

Capitalism? Are we really going to continue bashing capitalism for what is not its fault, but people's? Seriously?

I recommend:

https://mises.org/library/left-right-and-state-0

and

https://mises.org/library/anti-capitalistic-mentality

Should clear up the misconceptions, that is, if you really want to have them cleared up. :)

Ugh, I am so sick of this grouping of "millenials". Didn't Time Magazine run a story about how Gen X is the "lost generation" like thirty years ago?

Maybe we shouldn't group entire groups of people entirely by the year they were born.

As a semi-socialist myself, I get annoyed when people just look for artificial reasons to crap all over capitalism.

"Capitalists" here seems to be defined as "people who are doing well economically". I would guess the vast majority of people who read HN fall into that category.

I have a narrower interpretation of the word "capitalist": a person who invests money into an enterprise where others do the majority of the real work. That is, a mostly passive form of income generation.

By "real work" I mean all activity that creates tangible value. Managing rarely adds value and in some cases destroys the value produced by others. In its most benign form, managing is a form of assisting communication and possibly actually fostering a motivated workforce.

Yes, "capitalism" and definitely not the press and media influences selling a "broken world" crisis every 72 hours.

Let's not forget the broken promise from our University system that if ignorant students take out a 250k loan for school, they will get a great job.

Government prevents bankruptcy, the normal mechanism that requires institutions to evaluate risk before making a loan. There's plenty of blame and alternatives all around, but I question whether any alternative is viable without fixing this first.

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