Life Is a Ponzi Scheme (2009)
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The reason it doesn't happen of course is that you run into resource crises. Any species that keeps doubling at their natural rate will run out of food, or it becomes food for others.
Coming back to society, it's as if we just aren't prepared for a shrinking population. It's hard to make preditions against a variable that's always gone one way, but is showing sign of turning. How much of the economy is really just size? What's gonna happen when that reverses?
This will probably be a major political theme that lingers in many advanced nations. Fewer young people to work, but also fewer votes than the people who benefit. Immigration as a potential cure, but for how long, and at what cost? I tend to think it's already a kind of underlying dynamic, just not the one that appears in the headlines so often.
I think the answer is somewhere in wealth taxes, which are much harder to implement effectively than income taxes, but will be necessary for redistribution in a world with static or declining incomes.
To put that into context with population pyramids, to support the old people, young people will need to get a bigger slice of the pie. That means less wealth being locked into untaxed distribution schemes that pass down generationally, whether it's trusts or corporations.
In every society where some people are working ("the young") and some people are not ("the old"), and everybody is consuming, the young people have to work for the old. There is no way around that. There are not much goods or services that you can store for more than a year. They young always have to do the work. You can think of different schemes how you transfer the buying power to the old (taxes, dividends, interests, rent, ...) but in the end of the day, some are working, some are not and the young always have to do the work for the old.
Citation needed.
Productivity has been rising decade after decade - the younger generation produces more than enough to sustain even a larger older generation. Much of that wealth production is re-routed to those at the top of the wealth pyramid. Moving even some of that back downwards would do a lot to resolve these problems.
The plight of the American worker tracks very well with how many of them there are (modulo globalization, which makes the plight of the worker track with how many there are globally). The golden years of the 1950s coincided with the depopulation and destruction of capital stock following WW2; this made America the only country that still had productive industry, which brought in a good deal of global money that could be shared with the G.I. and Silent generations. 70s stagflation and 80s malaise coincided with the entry of baby boomers into the workforce and household-forming years: with more laborers, wages fell, and with more consumers for a fixed number of goods, prices rose. The late 80s recovery and 90s boom coincided with Gen-X and the retirement of the G.I. Generation: with few incoming workers and lots of outgoing ones, wages rose. The post-2000 malaise coincides with the entry of Millenials into the workforce: the world population has grown from 4.5 billion in the early 80s to 7.7 billion today, and all those young people are entering the workforce now.
It's likely that as the Boomers die off and the Homelander generation (post-2001 & tiny) enters the workforce, wages will rise naturally and capital prices will fall significantly.
Also, most of the wealth held by the top of the wealth pyramid is not what has already been produced, but merely claims on future production. I doubt people at the top of the wealth pyramid consume all that much as a fraction of the society's productive capacity - either they are holding onto existing claims or creating new claims by making investments that would increase the future productive capacity.
So if there was a production gap and the youth is not able to support the older generation due to the lack of productive capacity, moving the wealth downwards would exacerbate the gap, because you'd be redirecting some of the productive capacity towards consumption rather than investment.
“Dependency Ratio” is an iron law.
Well, we're forgetting the very young (0-18) who the older work for them, to house, nurture, feed, educate, and usually spoil them...
So there's that. It's not like the young come from nowhere and suddenly have some responsibility to work for the old when nobody never did anything for them...
Of course somebody has to work for them as well. But does not really change anything, this is why I left it out.
> It's not like the young come from nowhere and suddenly have some responsibility to work for the old when nobody never did anything for them...
This is not about responsibility or morale, but just about the pure economics of life.
Well, the "pure economics of life" for humans include that for human life to be sustainable, we should tend to the young (for a culturally adjusted 18 years or so), and that we should tend to the older (65+) too.
Being framed as a "ponzi scheme" targeting the young at the point they enter the workplace, hides that fact that a lots of money and parental energy (and even more time unaccounted for as money) were given to said young before that point...
It's not exactly a "ponzi scheme" if Ponzi and his money, time, and effort is the only reason you're alive and working now...
Resource consumption per capita of youth is less than elderly (especially healthcare), and generally reduces with time (excepting education). Youth lasts only 15-20 years before gainful employment can begin. Old age stretches from 65 onwards. Early retirees may spend 50 years or more "retired".
Which with average life expectancy is close to 15-20 years of remaining life. E.g tons don't make it to 70 even.
>Early retirees may spend 50 years or more "retired"
Early retirees are usually people who saved money / hit the business jackpot, not people who expect some others to work to pay them a pension.
We're also forgetting that (at least in civilized pension systems) retirees at 65 had 30-40 years of paying taxes (along with the employers part) for their pension scheme.
At 45 (early retirement under many systems), 36.1 additional years.
Look at what’s happened to California under prop 13 [1]. What was supposed to protect little old ladies from losing their homes due to rising property taxes has turned into a commercial real estate bonanza. People are making money hand over fist renting rooms at exorbitant prices to young people, and paying next to nothing in property taxes for the privilege. Meanwhile, a young person needs a large six to seven figure income just to afford a home in the Bay Area, and then their property taxes are insanely high, forcing them to subsidize their commercial real estate neighbours. It’s ridiculously unfair.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-14/californ...
I agree that it is ‘unfair’ but making it more ‘fair’ would just harm all the people who have actually made it work for them.
Most people who own property in the Bay Area are not predatory landlords.
No it wouldn't; if you've recently brought, your property taxes would go down. What it would mean is that the people who bought in the '80s who would have to step up so that you both paid the same, rather than you carrying them.
> and do nothing to make real estate more available.
Of course it would: it would force a lot of people (particularly older non-working people) to sell up, making a lot more housing available to those who have a greater need/desire to live there now but aren't fortunate enough to have moved in decades ago.
> I agree that it is ‘unfair’ but making it more ‘fair’ would just harm all the people who have actually made it work for them.
The first-order effect would be zero-sum, but the current market distortion leads to inefficient allocation at second order. So levelling the playing field would be a net gain.
> Most people who own property in the Bay Area are not predatory landlords.
People who benefit from prop 13 are at best getting an unearned windfall.
At least you are being honest that the goal here is to force people out of their homes so that people with tech jobs can buy them.
Assuming we want the total tax take to stay the same (changing that is a separate question), people who currently have a higher-than-average tax:property value ratio (which is people who bought recently) would have their tax bill go down (and people who currently have a lower-than-average tax:property value ratio would have their tax bill go up).
> At least you are being honest that the goal here is to force people out of their homes so that people with tech jobs can buy them.
In the same sense that other people are currently "forced" to rent forever and pay extra taxes to support idle homeowners, sure. Saying that I'm not allowed to own a house in San Francisco is just as cruel as saying that you're not allowed to own a house in San Francisco, whether or not you happen to have lived there for some number of years already.
Property taxes are a percentage of the assessed value.
Repealing prop 13 would definitely make them go up.
Nobody is saying you aren’t allowed to own a house in San Francisco.
You are saying that people who do own them should be forced out so that you can have them.
‘It’s just as cruel for me not to have it as for you not to have it’ is literally the logic of a thief.
You're saying that I should pay twice as much property tax or more as someone else living in an equally valuable house. That's unjust.
> You are saying that people who do own them should be forced out so that you can have them.
So charging me taxes is "no-one is saying you're not allowed", but charging them taxes is "force"? It's the same mechanism either way.
> ‘It’s just as cruel for me not to have it as for you not to have it’ is literally the logic of a thief.
"I took it years ago so it's mine now" is thief logic too.
But of course nobody is saying this because nobody took anything years ago.
They bought it from someone who wanted to sell it to them.
The only one suggesting forcing people out of their property here is you.
I am not saying you should pay twice as much property tax as someone living in an equally valuable house.
I am saying that increasing property taxes as prices go up is confiscatory and immoral.
I am saying that anyone who wants to use this mechanism to displace people so that they can acquire their property is a thief.
My personal view is that property taxes are the problem here. Not prop 13.
If the city needs to raise revenue it should be via income, or a per person charge for services. Other countries do this and it works just fine.
> They bought it from someone who wanted to sell it to them.
I'm not proposing to take anyone else's house either. They are more than welcome to keep their house (as long as they keep paying their fair share of taxes, obeying the law, and doing all the other things that we expect of decent citizens). They still have a free choice over whether to sell their house or not. Once we remove the unfair subsidy they get because they happened to buy it a long time ago, a lot of them are likely to decide that the house is worth less to them than what they could sell it for, that's all.
> I am not saying you should pay twice as much property tax as someone living in an equally valuable house.
> I am saying that increasing property taxes as prices go up is confiscatory and immoral.
How do you reconcile those two statements? If you're saying that people should be taxed based on the price they purchased that then you're saying exactly that I should pay twice as much as certain other people living in houses that have the same value. Of course property prices change; taxing everyone based on their current house value is equitable and nondiscriminatory. Taxing based on the price when they happened to buy is neither.
> I am saying that anyone who wants to use this mechanism to displace people so that they can acquire their property is a thief.
We live in a society, it's everyone's responsibility to pay their taxes. The thieves are the people who want to avoid paying their fair share so that they can keep living above their means.
> If the city needs to raise revenue it should be via income, or a per person charge for services. Other countries do this and it works just fine.
They do not work "just fine". Poll taxes are immensely regressive. Income taxes disincentivize productive work. Land is the one thing we can't produce more of when prices rise - those hoarding it should absolutely be shouldering a corresponding tax bill.
You are proposing that the taxes of someone who owns a house should be based on the ability of other people to buy it.
Nothing could be more regressive than that. It is absolutely discriminatory and in no way equitable.
Living in the house you bought for yourself is clearly not ‘hoarding’. It seems like you are getting emotional now.
There is nothing discriminatory about basing taxes on the purchase price. If you buy now, you will benefit from prop 13 the same as anyone else.
Also, using taxes to force people out of their houses as you propose, is a terrible idea for the development of the economy since it disincentivizes the development of productive industry in other less developed areas.
> Nothing could be more regressive than that. It is absolutely discriminatory and in no way equitable.
How so? The tax rate on a given house should be independent of who is living in it. Two people living in identical houses (in equivalent locations) should be paying identical taxes. That's obviously the fair approach.
> Living in the house you bought for yourself is clearly not ‘hoarding’.
It easily can be, if you're living in a bigger house than you need, or living in a prime job area when you're not working. Hoarding always means keeping hold of something you bought for yourself so there's no contradiction there.
> There is nothing discriminatory about basing taxes on the purchase price. If you buy now, you will benefit from prop 13 the same as anyone else.
I didn't have the opportunity to buy 40 years ago because I wasn't alive then. I didn't have the opportunity to buy 10 years ago because my parents weren't rich enough to pay my deposit. Prop 13 is very much age/class discrimination in practice.
> is a terrible idea for the development of the economy since it disincentivizes the development of productive industry in other less developed areas.
Subsidising development in cheap areas is just as distortionary and counterproductive as subsidizing development in expensive areas. The best taxes - and land value tax is well known among economists as the perfect tax - don't distort in either direction, leaving the free market to get on with efficient allocation.
“If you are living in a bigger house than you ‘need’ or if you are living in a prime job area and not working”
I see, so you have decided that homes should temporarily allocated to those who are working in the area, and should be sized according to a political opinion about what they ‘need’.
A segregated society where we have worker only zones and industry is more and more concentrated in the places it is already established is a grotesque, quasi-fascist dystopia.
This is what you are advocating for? At least your position is consistent.
If you buy now, over time you will benefit from prop 13 in the same way that everyone else has. In 40 years you’ll have the benefit that people who bought 40 years ago now have.
How is it discriminatory? It has nothing to do with who you are (indeed one doesn't have to know anything about you to figure it out), which is the opposite of discriminatory.
> I see, so you have decided that homes should temporarily allocated to those who are working in the area, and should be sized according to a political opinion about what they ‘need’.
Better that than allocating them by whoever first called dibs. There's a reason we believe most goods should be brought and sold at a market price that's the same for everyone, not different prices for different people.
Do you acknowledge that there's such a thing as a luxury home? I would rather people who just want somewhere to live near where they work had a level playing field with people who want to live in a mansion they don't need. (I'm not even arguing for favouring the workers, just for stopping subsidising the mansion-owners). There's nothing wrong with spending your honestly-earned money on luxuries, but you shouldn't get a tax break for it, particularly when your luxury is someone else's necessity.
> A segregated society where we have worker only zones and industry is more and more concentrated in the places it is already established is a grotesque, quasi-fascist dystopia.
A society where people can't move into the places where the jobs are is far more all of those things (not being able to move freely was one of the biggest criticisms of the Soviet Union; we called ourselves a free country in contrast, precisely because people were free to move wherever they wanted) - and that's what we have at the moment by subsidising the lucky few who happen to live in those places at present.
> If you buy now, over time you will benefit from prop 13 in the same way that everyone else has. In 40 years you’ll have the benefit that people who bought 40 years ago now have.
By that logic it's fine to refuse to hire over-50s because 30 years ago they had the same benefit that people who are currently 20 have. But actually we still consider that age discrimination, because it is.
You are free to benefit in exactly the same way, and just like any investment it will take 40 years to reap.
40 years ago these people were in the same position as you are. There is no difference.
As to defending the allocation of housing to workers and displacement of the non-working, I applaud you for being honest about your position.
Of course you use a false dichotomy.
People are in fact free to move wherever they want. They just can’t force others out of their homes because they think they deserve them more.
If it is not economical for more workers to come to where the jobs are, then the jobs will come to the workers because corporations need to expand.
You have the same opportunity as those 40 years ago did - go and live somewhere that is cheaper and where industry is going to develop because the economic conditions are right.
That way you too can benefit from economic growth over the next 40 years the way the people you envy have.
No, that's in addition. No-one is saying that if someone bought a $400k house for $50k 40 years ago they should have to pay back the unearned $350k; they get to keep their investment gains and be just as well off as someone who buys a $400k house today. They just shouldn't get an extra tax break on top of that.
> People are in fact free to move wherever they want. They just can’t force others out of their homes because they think they deserve them more.
If charging a market price is "force" then people are being forced to not move to places where they want. Again, the mechanism that would move people out is exactly the same mechanism that currently stops other people moving in.
> You have the same opportunity as those 40 years ago did - go and live somewhere that is cheaper and where industry is going to develop because the economic conditions are right.
That's the opposite of what happened. 40 years ago those people moved into the very centre of the city, not to somewhere cheap. And they had that opportunity because the city wasn't filled up with 40 years' worth of moochers with tax breaks.
Why? Because the city wasn’t considered attractive because the economy hadn’t created a huge demand for housing and a lot of rich people to compete for it.
It wasn’t tax breaks that made the city cheap. It was that the tech boom hadn’t happened yet.
If you )o somewhere where the economic growth is at an earlier stage, and you can benefit in the same way, while helping to improve the economic health of the country.
It wasn't filled with moochers then, it is now. That's my point.
> It wasn’t tax breaks that made the city cheap. It was that the tech boom hadn’t happened yet.
SF wasn't especially cheap, and in any case there's nothing particularly virtuous about moving in or out of somewhere at fair market price (if you move somewhere because it's cheap, you already got your reward for that: it was cheap). The people who happened to move in at a particular time got lucky that the tech boom happened to happen in a particular place, and raked in a massive unearned windfall on their property values. But apparently that isn't enough for them; they continue to massively underpay their property taxes as well.
> If you )o somewhere where the economic growth is at an earlier stage, and you can benefit in the same way, while helping to improve the economic health of the country.
I can benefit from house prices going up as they normally do, sure. I probably can't benefit from a substantial extra subsidy to my property taxes on top of that, because most of the country (rightly) does not have a Prop 13.
If you want to benefit from prop 13 you can buy in California, just like anyone else can.
When you describe the rise in property prices as a result of the tech boom as an ‘unearned windfall’, it sounds like you are opposed to the appreciation of assets altogether.
What would count as ‘earned’ in your estimation?
Not in the age of Prop 13, sadly.
> When you describe the rise in property prices as a result of the tech boom as an ‘unearned windfall’, it sounds like you are opposed to the appreciation of assets altogether.
It's not a question of opposed or not. Sometimes some people get lucky and others don't, that's a fact of life. Houses appreciating at a normal rate is one thing, but SF has gone up massively, and the vast majority of those who benefited from that didn't do anything smart or virtuous to earn it, they just happened to pick a city that happened to become a lot more valuable. (Maybe some people genuinely did economic analysis and decided that SF was a smart place to invest in, but realistically they're a tiny minority).
All of which is fine. Some people picked one city and their houses have gone up 4x, others picked another city and their houses have gone up 10x, even though neither group of people worked more or less hard or are more or less deserving. That's life, that's fine. But we shouldn't be giving a tax subsidy to the people who were already lucky enough to have their houses go up 10x. (Indeed, if anyone should get a discount on their property taxes, it should be people whose land values haven't gone up much - the ones who've been unlucky).
> What would count as ‘earned’ in your estimation?
Labour income. Things that require active involvement. It's fairly standard terminology, no?
I.e. It enables people who have normal labor income from active involvement to keep the houses they were able to afford rather than being penalized simply because a nearby industry booming.
It impacts these people far more beneficially than any negative that comes from not penalizing the people for whom the tax would not be a problem.
You give the appearance of to preferring labor involvement over passive investment, and yet your entire argument is based on how unfair it is that you didn’t get to benefit from a passive investment. It seems like you would actually like that for yourself, no?
If you want to buy a home and your income comes from labor in the Bay Area, then Prop 13 is the only thing protecting you from being displaced if prices continue to rise.
Working the same job you've always worked even as (relative) demand for your industry drops is the opposite of active involvement. No-one should be entitled to unearned money for life, or excess wages for life, or low property taxes for life, just because they got there first. They're blocking out other people who work harder or need it more; it should be a level playing field for everyone, which means fair market rate for the job you're doing, fair market prices for the things you buy, and nondiscriminatory taxation.
> It impacts these people far more beneficially than any negative that comes from not penalizing the people for whom the tax would not be a problem.
But you're not accounting for the people who can't move in because of people sitting on undertaxed properties. Once you add up everyone, prop 13 does a lot more harm than good.
> You give the appearance of to preferring labor involvement over passive investment, and yet your entire argument is based on how unfair it is that you didn’t get to benefit from a passive investment. It seems like you would actually like that for yourself, no?
I mean of course I'd like a pile of free cash. But it's unjust to be giving out public money (which is ultimately everyone else's tax dollars) arbitrarily, and it's doubly unjust to be giving it out to the people who already won big on passive investment.
> If you want to buy a home and your income comes from labor in the Bay Area, then Prop 13 is the only thing protecting you from being displaced if prices continue to rise.
Sure, but for everyone who's displaced there's another person who's now able to afford a better place to live. Likely more than one person actually, since in practice it's more often a case of empty-nesters in a big house that could be subdivided for several working people. (If people want to stop themselves being displaced in a fair way, the right answer is to allow more homebuilding - unfortunately homeowners are incentivised to pull up the ladder behind them so as to increase their own home price, and prop 13 just makes that worse). If I can't pay my fair share of property taxes, I'll sell my place on to people who can - and given how much money I'd be pocketing from price appreciation for that to happen, I wouldn't be particularly sad about it.
You make the assumption that I’m some kind of boomer who’s somehow benefitted from buying decades ago.
Repealing prop 13 in order to take peoples homes away through confiscatory taxation so that people with high incomes can buy them is not a correction. It is theft.
Why not work somewhere else where you can afford a home? That is the real ‘correction’.
You own a home. Your housing payments aren't being thrown into a void.
>Repealing prop 13 in order to take peoples homes away through confiscatory taxation so that people with high incomes can buy them is not a correction. It is theft.
So is rent-seeking, if we have such a low bar for "theft." Really, it's just society deciding where its priorities lay: people who need housing for practical reasons, or the people privileged enough to use their housing as an investment vehicle?
>Why not work somewhere else where you can afford a home? That is the real ‘correction’.
Now you're getting emotional. That's not a market correction at all.
There is nothing emotional about suggesting that people choose to live and work in places they can afford to.
The solution to the Bay Area housing crisis is for employers to establish operations in places where housing is cheaper - not for housing to be confiscated from earlier purchasers through confiscatory taxation.
It's actually both.
>There is nothing emotional about suggesting that people choose to live and work in places they can afford to.
It is, within context. The proposal in question might have a net negative outcome for you, but be positive for the community. Further, while the status quo has full-time workers living on the street, readjusting this regulation and allowing a market correction to take place would presumably not ruin you, but simply force you to move. (Hey, you suggested it for others, should be good enough for you too.) In the end, though, you're against something that would ultimately be a boon for the area and is at least tenable for you. That's an emotional argument.
I did not suggest forcing anyone to move. I suggest that if you cannot afford a home, you should go somewhere you can, rather than stealing homes from people who have bought them already through confiscatory taxation.
There is no reason why people need to be displaced from their homes if jobs are created elsewhere.
If people in full time employment are unable to afford housing, they are being paid too little, and should not have accepted the job, thus forcing employers to offer more.
You have stated that you think people should be driven out of their homes even if work can be moved elsewhere. (“The solution is both”).
That seems pretty reprehensible, and I’m curious why you think it?
The point is, the young would have a higher quality of life if they did not have to support the old. If one young person has to support two old, their quality of life will decline no matter what the fiscal arrangements are. Sure, technology improves efficiency, but not 300%
And, um...I don't wish to worry you, but efficiency has improved a whole hell of a lot more than 300% over the last 40 years or so.
The problem is that the gains have gone almost entirely to the people at the very top of the pyramid.
Gains have been marginal in air travel,, oil extraction, heating, steel, food and concrete production. Many of these are near the physical limits of possible efficiency.
It's just over 250% increase in productivity since 1979, while real wages have risen a fraction of that.
So, if we were to reduce the ability of the people at the very top to siphon away 99% of the productivity gains we've seen over the past 40 years, we would have more than enough food, clothing, and shelter for everyone, with enough margin that people could also work shorter hours without losing the ability to provide for everyone.
The cost of that is that a very small percentage of the population can no longer have massively extravagant lifestyles.
i miss my grandmother a great deal.
The older two, if they didn't have to support the young, e.g. not have babies, or just send them to work on farms at 6 years old...
Are the "young" supposed to get raised for free from 0 to 18 or even 0-25 or more in these days, and then coast along, with no responsibility of paying back to society for that?
If you have 4 siblings, supporting your ageing parents is quite easy
If you are a single child, supporting two ageing parents can be challenging
If you alone had to support 4 ageing people (like someone who decided not to have kids), while also having to meet your work commitments, that would probably be very difficult.
You are missing one big thing: productivity increasing. Since I'm born in 1988, the GDP of my country (France) doubled (adjusted for inflation), assuming GDP is not totally meaninglessness, that means that we need much less «young» to sustain the entire society with the standard of living we had in 1988 (which was a pretty decent one by all standards).
That argument might have seemed less ridiculous before the invention of money. It's this amazing thing: a medium of exchange that can be stored indefinitely and then used to purchase almost any good or service. Quite a few people even tout money as the solution to every problem of incentives or matching supply to demand, though I think that's taking the idea a bit too far.
In the real economy, what matters is production, investment and consumption - money is just a social construct designed to incentivize people to do consume/invest/produce the right amounts of the right things.
But this analogy fails at a larger scale - an entire generation can't just save up enough while they work and expect to be provided for in retirement because what they saved up are just claims on future production - their consumption still has to come from the production provided by future generations. Their claims cannot and will not automatically cause the excess production to occur.
Now this is a purely hypothetical problem and we're arguably in a world with the opposite problem (too much productive capacity, too many people trying to save and not enough demand). Though arguably even this problem is due to too many people to save up to prepare for the other scenario, decades before it happens.
How can we model the spoilage of goods and therefore of the loss of value of money that represents a claim to these goods? With inflation. How can we encourage manufacturers to maintain production capacity even in the future? With inflation.
The idea seems that if one has coupons there will always be a sucker to do the work for you, in exchange for the coupons. There will eventually be a final sucker holding onto the coupons: No fiat-currency ever survived.
To head off the main critique. I think either tax could be equally gamed by the rich.
I don’t necessarily support either but I’ve been wondering why Inheritance taxes aren’t really being considered.
I forget the exact time period, but basically in pre-modern times Islamic law said that you weren't allowed to pass wealth onto your children. To get around this, the wealthy would found charities and give their kids cushy jobs running them. Even though a lot of the charity's money was presumably routed to giving the kids a lavish lifestyle, this system still resulted in the Middle East having the best social welfare system of the time period.
That is not the main critique. The main critique (IMO at least) is that people earn money to, among other things, give it to their children. Taxing that is, in some people's view of the world, a) a disincentive to work and b) morally wrong.
Why do we see inherited titles as plainly unjust and undemocratic, but entertain inherited fortunes as just and compatible with democratic ideals?
By the way there is a reason why my answer is so extreme: inheritance starts as soon as you are born, not just when your parents die
Of course I don't really stand to inherit anything significant, so it's super easy for me to support.
Inheritance is one of those areas where people's values and what they'd support in practice tend to diverge, according to their incentives. (Same goes for California Proposition 13, incidentally).
It strikes at the heart of what it is to be alive, and the relationship of the individual and the state.
You can ask people to transcend those, but don't be surprised when you find people object on an emotional level.
And the level of state ownership of the individual that such a tax implies is very uncomfortable too. I am happy to contribute to the state, but it neither owns me, nor is more important than my own family.
Not really in the context of the post I replied to up-thread -
> "I would love an inheritance tax. Even a 100% inheritance tax, on anything more than zero dollars"
I know that wasn't you, but the subject of 100% inheritance tax was definitely raised.
> Do you feel that inheritance taxation implies a greater form of “state ownership” than the compulsory taxes on labour imposed during your lifetime?
Yes, very much. I pay my way during my life, but what I build with what's left should be mine to disperse to my heirs, if any.
I'm not completely opposed to all inheritance taxes either, I think there's probably a balance somewhere, and it's in society's interest to (for example) break multi-generational acquisition of vast amounts of land that result in effective aristocracy.
It's just the 100% crew I object to.
Is this some kind of joke? Who on earth inherits nothing? You've received a body and genetic material from your parents. You have inherited a geographic location from your parents. You have most likely inherited food from your parents. You have most likely inherited an education from your parents. Your parents have passed on so many things onto you before they have died and you call that nothing? Your views are clearly inhuman because they are considering some sort of pseudo life form that exists in a vacuum with no support from anything. The reality is that you start inheriting things from your parents the moment you are born.
If you are truly worried about someone inheriting money while others get nothing why are you complaining about something that usually happens when people are in their 40s and 50s and have already received a substantial advantage from their parents during childhood? You can't undo that injustice after the fact. It's too late, the rich kids who are now middle aged are already ahead of you with 100% inheritance tax or without.
It’s my theory that the less words you can use to make an argument, the more powerful it is.
We live in a democracy, but elites still have enough say that something like an 100% inheritance tax is effectively off the table.
I think you might also need to write the law so that people could choose to inherit debt on the same terms as their parents. Otherwise, couldn't the bank demand a higher interest rate as a way to force someone off of their property? How does this sort of thing work currently?
> I think you might also need to write the law so that people could choose to inherit debt on the same terms as their parents.
I assumed that this was already the case.
quick e: Yeah, seems like this is already law "Under federal law, lenders must allow family members to take over a mortgage when they inherit residential property"
[0] https://www.thebalance.com/what-happens-to-your-mortgage-whe...
We could see large scale technological unemployment despite a shortage of labour in a set of ever-changing, highly specialized fields that people only end up in by an extremely lucky guess at the time they declare a major.
But to answer your question: Technical "disruption" is every instance of a thing making your job easier. It will require less skill/training and come with lower pay. Jobs with few, sometimes hard, decisions will benefit from technology. At some point the hard stuff is gone.
Perhaps your job was affected 0.1% in the last decade and the average is 5%. It would be just like 1 in 20 "jobs" vanished without anyone noticing it.
It’s not the only system of distributing goods and services to the populace. In theory, a centralized authority could evaluate everyone’s current need and provide it to them directly. This has gone disastrously wrong whenever it’s been tried in practice, though.
There is no lack of food in the world; there might be a lack of beef, but not everyone needs to get to eat beef. There is no lack of land; there is more than enough land for everyone; it's just scarce in places that have high demand. The problem is distribution.
Legitimately baffled to see so many people in this thread asserting that this is not the case.
You need to look into how production is actually done in each market to understand how quickly producers can respond to changes in demand.
(I'm not going to worry about beef, though, since there are good substitutes.)
However, although land itself may not be limited in the near term, land that people want is limited. Even if you have the same number of acres of land as the previous generation, if that land is less valuable, then your wealth and quality of life have gone down.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...
Wealthy people control resources. You can take control from them, but it will not create more resources. One, fundamental resource is human labor. This resource will decline in proportion to the total human population whether it will be controlled by wealthy people or not.
Someone will need to physically do the work that needs to be done around old people. And there will be more old people, than there will be young people.
Your example is less extreme, but it is still about redistributing control. Redistributing dollars redistributes control of what people do, and how other resources are allocated.
This is related to the article, because moving control of people does not create more people. As population will be getting older, there will be more old people that less young people will need to take care of. This is a fact.
You could argue that redistributing wealth will lead to more efficient control of resources, and so it will make it easier to provide care. But it is still fundamentally about control of diminishing resources and increasing needs.
BTW - I'm Polish and my government tries to literally pay people for having children. Around 30 000$ spread across childhood (take into account that Poles earn a lot less than Americans), and while it put a small dent in fertility rate, the number of children born in Poland is currently lower than before introducing that program.
Yes, it turns out that resources are actually the thing we need to sustain older people.
> Someone will need to physically do the work that needs to be done around old people.
Someone literally is already doing the work that needs to be done for old people. It's just that most of the wealth produced from that work goes to already wealthy people.
Exactly that work (social support, and healthcare for seniors) in total numbers consumes resources, not produces them. If it wouldn't be so there would be no need to fund it from taxes.
Frankly, it sounds like you rushed with a randomly chosen slogan to this thead.
Also we do not require people to pull startup hours, and only a minority of the population ever does that. I dont see how that comes into this conversation.
"The wealthy kind of are an endless source of loot because the definition of wealthy is one relative to a median, so you'll either end up with everyone roughly equal in wealth (is that a bad thing?) "
In the world advocated for in that comment, with aggressively averaged out income/wealth, there is no incentive to produce value above what is required to reach the average income.
Now, the metric for "everybody is better off" is still an open problem, but there seem to be near pareto optimal steps we can take, like a high threshold wealth tax.
I'm sure that gimmick-y things to avoid wealth redistribution can be legislated on as they have been in the past.
One owner of a yacht was on the board of his alma mater. The school was required by law to spend equally on women's sports as men't sports. The school had to invest in sports fields which were expensive. He complained about it. Later I worked on a yacht of a person who grew grass. During this time when the schools were required to increase the size of their fields he made a fortune. There are just winners and losers.
But cooking for 40 or 4 are pretty much the same from a labor perspective at that size because recipes scale to 10x easily.
True. But that's how they've been treating folks with less advantage since time immemorial. Which tends to work until the exploitation becomes too egregious and lower classes implement a head tax on the wealthy.
Much of investing common wisdom is based on the assumption of a steadily growing population. The reason land prices generally rise is because there is a growing number of property buyers chasing a fixed amount of land; this means that the higher-income buyers buy up the land and the overall price rises. The reason stock prices rise is that there are a fixed number of oligopolist markets in the economy (competitive markets like restaurants & hairdressers rarely take investment), and an ever-increasing number of savers looking to earn a return on their money. If you start shrinking the working-age population, the price of land falls dramatically (most people end up inheriting a house from their parents; if they don't, there are several people that inherited multiple houses that they have no use for and are looking to convert into cash). The bargaining power of labor increases dramatically, pushing down corporate profits, but it also means fewer buyers for capital stock and more people trying to sell it to meet their daily existence needs.
The last time this happened (in the wake of Black Death, where 30% of the world's population died), the social system that had been in existence for a millenia collapsed. Serfs were able to demand better wages and working conditions for their labor. Increased bargaining power led to the guild system of the early Rennaissance. Increased saving power led to systems to manage pooled capital (like fractional-reserve banking and the corporation) and to the rise of the mercantile and capitalist classes. The big losers were the landed aristocracy, who found that the land they owned just wasn't worth as much in this new world.
What? That makes no sense as an exponential process. It'd be at least unfathomably larger than the universe by now, not just solar system sized. Or were they assuming it'd expand constantly only from the surface in all directions?
(Pro Physics Tip: This is not allowed.)
For starters, anything that large wo ui pd collapse into a black hole.
It's very accessible and shows, what will happen if we don't take action now, based on this graph [3].
[1] https://www.graememaxton.com/gpm/2018/03/30/change/
The metrics don't reflect that reality. Most old people (who have dealt with the healthcare system while caring for their parents in old age) know quite well "about the staggering 52% in the last 2 months, and 40% in the last month". Why is anyone paying that cost? For what?
I have a Cardiologist buddy who likes to say performing surgery and treating old people is like keeping a Windows 95 system alive and kicking just because its possible. And most of his patients know it and want easy ways to checkout, but either the Doc is obligated by family/incentivized by the hospital to perform some kind of elaborate treatment. Obviously yhis will change for the simple reason a majority of the Docs and the Patients want the change to happen. On top of that there is the ongoing shift of focus from treatment to prevention.
My larger point is there are always countervailing forces to any trend that is building up. A good case study is the Population Bomb predictions in the 70s - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
It's good to know why it didnt play out.
97yo neighbor had hip locked due to arthritis. Dr was scared of full hip replacement risks so neighbor lived a year without moving much. He and his wife degraded a bit due to this. Last month they insisted in trying. The man survived the operation, just a week later you can see how more lively he is.
Now, the reason you're reading about this here, is that I just realized that life itself is basically a gigantic Ponzi scheme, and the pyramid is dangerously close to collapsing. In the developed world, we have evolved a society in which a relatively small number of old people have many of their needs cared for through the financial contributions of a larger number of much younger people. And that made sense, because for over 12,000 years the age distribution of the human population was, in fact, in the shape of a pyramid, with a huge base of young children rising to a smaller number of teenagers and a still smaller number of young adults, and so on up to a tiny tip of the elderly. But sometime in the 1950s, as the birthrate declined and life expectancy continued to increase, the pyramid started to be shaped more like a column. Within the next 40 years it will become one, and then it will slowly invert.
I can recommend a full read, it’s worth the time.
You can sort of already see it happening. Productivity is greater than ever. But wages have decoupled from productivity, because it's not human labour, but rather technological inputs that have become the drivers of productivity.
I won't sit here and predict that we'll have healthcare, food & beverage and cleaning robots within a decade and we'll only have leisure left. But we're definitely moving in many small ways to singular superpowered humans, who use tech, that can replace entire shifts of employees.
Take machines like these: https://www.tennantco.com/content/dam/tennant/tennantco/prod...
Replacing half a dozen people doing the same manually.
I mean who am I kidding, there's a billion examples like this. Yes, we still have to do our laundry clean, but we have washing machines that do 95% of the work. We still have to drive our busses, but 95% of bus ticket sales are now automated. At some point we'll probably get to that last 5%, too.
I'm pretty confident that the demographic age inversion will not be as catastrophic as a ponzi scheme falling apart. Because we the productivity of young (and hell, old) people has a technology multiplier that's ever increasing.
Imagine what you could have written around 1700 when the share of farmers dropped below 50% if you had ignored productivity growth.
Global warming, economic inequality (like property prices), post-truth era, surveillance state and unsustainable social welfare (as explained in OP)?
It really can't get out of my mind.
Future you may live through hard times, suffer, and die - it will be terrible. But that doesn't mean present you should live a life of preoccupation and anxiety. Good people are not (at least in my book) grim ascetic saints. Good people help those around them materially, and they also spread happiness, connection, and pleasure - things that you can only grant to others if you yourself are happy. So, be a happy warrior. If it all ends in disaster and you know you've done your best, you will exit in peace.
- Ian McEwan
Thank you.
This:
> Arthur: All my life I've had this strange feeling that there's something big and sinister going on in the world.
> Slartibartfast: No, that's perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the universe gets that.
...isn't a logical argument against the (fictional) fact that Arthur's home planet did explode.
Additionally, it's only been within the last century where we've been technologically capable of causing a mass-extinction level event via nuclear weapons. Here's a fun list of close-calls [0]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
Citation needed
Times of stress are exactly the right time for people to stand up and say "wait a minute, I don't see how this can end well - lets try something different" and "if we keep doing this, eventually it will end badly - lets pick a different route". Or even "what exactly are we relying on and what are our options if something happens"; which can be surprisingly useful as a conversation starter. If people can't answer that one in the good times they certainly don't have a plan for when there is a crisis.
We've entered a really dangerous period where the people who remember WWII and the aftermath are dead or dying. A lot of quiet actors were shepherding the post WWII era - the last era of relative peace - and just assuming it works out from now going forward is not a strategy. And that is before even starting on the resources questions about how much of society can be sustained for 3 generations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck
EDIT
> People have been writing about how the world is going to shit since they could write
The first person I know to complain like that in writing was Socrates who lived to see the fall of Athens/Athenian hegemony in 404BC. He wasn't exactly wrong.
But, Plato wrote. Plato wrote about Socrates.
What? Wasn't he completely, utterly wrong though?
Isn't life today incomparably better in general?
Now, of course, you could argue that for one particular group of people life will never be as good as it used to be at one particular point in history ... but that misses the point - overall humanity is much better off.
People in developed world retiring in 20 years from now however will heave zero support from state. Zero return on their investment. Will have to work full-time till they are dead basically to get healthcaretthey need.
That is definitely not end of the world, but neither was original ponzi scheme collapse.
I am still figuring out my retirement and "invest more" might not be the best answer
Yes, but they've mostly been writing about how the world's going to shit because of those crazy young people, who didn't actually have all that much power (yet). I think it actually is a bit different when the people whose generational mores have messed things up are already in just about every seat in Washington DC and Wall Street (and equivalents elsewhere), and likely to remain so for a while yet. Also, various forms of environmental degradation - including but not limited to climate change - are more objectively harmful and more likely to be permanent than any effects of younger people not going to church (for example). True perspective requires seeing larger things as larger, not just assuming they're a trick of perception.
I think we should expect that the previous generation won't help us to build the world we would like to see, and we should use all the tools and knowledge we have to change the world, even if it's against the will, interests and "happiness" of the previous generation.
We must organize ourselves, vote, protest, communicate and build towards what we would like to see happening.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to "make the world better". It only means we have to think about what we are doing and stop believing that we know the solutions (or even the problems). Guess-and-check is the only way to learn things and all parts of that process (the guessing, the implementation, and the checking) are unreliable because of the unlimited contingency of the world. How can you measure the current if you can't step into the same river twice?
Anyway, the kind of utopian protest culture you're talking about is the exact opposite of what is called for. That culture is creating a generation of people who are shockingly easy to manipulate. And they will be manipulated.
I trust the younger generation to force us to change.
In any way for sure an alternative will be found because else we are condemning a incredible big part of the population (and the voters) to die with nothing and that's not a viable political solution
What makes you think this is untenable? For most of human history, most of the population have been peasants, slaves and serfs who died with nothing or less than nothing, leaving their children indebted to the same masters.
It's entirely possible that the last 200 or so years of relative freedom and prosperity are the unsustainable anomaly.
That's the only reasonable thing to do. There are too many humans.
The one thing you should console yourself with is that people are terrible at predicting the future. It will be nothing like you expect or fear. Admittedly, this could be good or bad.
This is a funny prediction :-)
> The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, "Keep to-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Napoleon_of_Notting_Hill/...
Do what feels right and take care of yourself.
Look at AOC. People will be vile, they will mock you and attack you, but you can inch the world in the direction you think it should go.
In any given situation, it may not be clear how an individual can start to effect change. But we certainly, absolutely can.
My own belief is to do as little as possible unless a lot of factors are known. Taking travel as an example, doing the least and cheapest is a good bet, it took me considerable research decide to pay more for trains than planes. Where is the additional money going? Even if trains vs planes are environmentally better there's a high risk of financing a military with the energy taxes only the train systems pay. A military can do more environmental damage with 10¢ than you can do with a dollar and then there is what they do with intention.
Governments are trying to game the world to maximum GDP all the time, but what on offer is mostly garbage and enough people turning down all offers forces them to rethink the total economy or (since they are simple folk,) go into recession. Recession is supposed to be terrible, but isn't it actually better than the fast road to a life in an inescapable mall?
That the bad actors of the 1980s are still attacking us and often seem to be back on track for their dream of shitting on the world is bad, but has not been as bad as getting there in 1990 and that is thanks to the path we took with lots of economic upsets.
We are like children who dream of a life of eating only cake and it is our good fortune that keeps us from the world we want long enough to understand a little about what is wrong with it and build some marginally better dreams.
/Ramble
Agreed. I like your viewpoint. Time to opt out?
Stop spinning your wheels on this. Count your blessings and be thankful what you currently have, learn to live in the moment, turn off the news and social media (important step), and go on with your life and do the best you can.
Things can be hard enough as it is frankly, putting the weight of the world and it’s future possibilities on your shoulders like you are Atlas typically just leads to insane anxiety, depression, and burnout.
Invest in tangibles, don't expect any pension funds to exist 50 years later. Your generation is lucky enough to have deflationary cryptocurrencies.
You will not be screwed, and avoid making choices out of FUD. You 're living the most advanced technological age ever. Remember that technology is before politics.
Do you expect cryptocurrencies to be relevant 50 years (5 times their current age) later?
And the benefit of their network effect will contaminate any pocket of freedom that may form.
So, while their relevancy may fade and fluctuate, it seems inevitable that one day, there will be a gap to fill and they'll "permanently" overtake centralized forms of money.
The only positive scenario I can conjure that also sees cryptocurrencies fade in relevance would be a shift to some kind of global "additive only" economy as Mark Nadal blurrily tries to imagine[1]. That seems farther off than 50 years, and even then some parts of the economy would always be better served by traditional cryptocurrency (maybe only the parts machines are left to handle).
[1]: https://medium.com/hackernoon/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-...
Cryptocurrencies are currently technology-oriented but in the future, they will be community-oriented (based more on human principles) and coins will periodically upgrade the underlying technology to improve performance (so long as the wallet address system and account balances are the same).
Different cryptocurrencies will fluctuate in value relative to each other depending on the economic input and output of their communities. The input and output of a crypto-community will vary depending on the appeal of its human/social/political principles; the means of production will bind to cryptocurrencies which follow the principles of those who control them. A cryptocurrency which has an aging community and whose value is supported by legacy systems will slowly lose value.
A person will always have to keep moving their wealth between different cryptocurrencies in order to maintain it. They will have to know and adapt to all the economic trends and changing societal values in order to know which cryptocurrency/communities to invest in.
Staying rich will become difficult; it will require a deep understanding of changing social trends and principles.
I think the whole crypto market is pretty speculative. Either the ultimate Bitcoin replacement will be a nice fork or airdrop off of Bitcoin or the ultimate Bitcoin replacement will be something completely separate and will gradually render Bitcoin worthless.
Cash is also a pretty underrated asset class too.
Doesn't sound totally unrealistic to me. Also, maybe the only way to evade extinction through bio/AI tech proliferation. Not sure about the "crimeless" part, the big powers probably don't care too much about most crimes.
I deal with it through a weird faith the coming issues will be impredictable, and the solutions too. Mostly due to reading about old techniques and science/engineering evolution. So often we don't see new options coming.
In any case, thinking too early is a waste of energy. Unless it's fun and productive (like ecology classes, farming etc).
Cheers
Basically
In almost every age of history that we can see, if you had put yourself in that time period, you would have been able to come up with plenty of plausible reasons to ask your question. But what happened? Sometimes, things got worse. Sometimes much worse! But often, things turned out far differently than you would have supposed.
I've observed two things in my relatively brief life: people in every age tend to think their problems are unique, and people in every age tend to be really bad at predicting the future.
In many cases, they died.
There's a real survivorship bias among old people telling young folks to relax and everything will work out somehow because it did in the past.
Obviously, it did for the people telling us this, or else they wouldn't even be here to pat us on the head. The first time things go really really badly for the whole human species might also the be the last time.
> don't worry about that incoming asteroid; back in the 1970s they used to tell us about the overpopulation crisis
> surprised_pikachu.jpg
- - - -
I've been an "apocalyptic" since I was about twelve years old: I believe these are the end times, and that our global civilization is about to experience some kind of drastic upheaval.
That was about thirty years ago. Before the weather went strange. Things have only gotten worse since then.
- - - -
These are the main scenarios to consider:
Apocalypse: civilization crashes and we are in a "Mad Max" world, if we survive at all.
Techno-utopia: science and technology save the day. Star-trek (if human nature is good) or N. Korea (if human nature is bad.)
Gaia: apply e.g. Permaculture to create an eco-uptopia. This is both science-flavored and Spiritual.
Spiritual transformation: e.g. what the "Mayan Apocalypse" of 2013 was supposed to be, or the Christian Rapture.
- - - -
Personally, I hope for the Eco-utopian version of the Gaia transformation -or- the Spiritual transformation (we all go to space-heaven.)
If you're interested in bio-mimetic economics, go watch Toby Hemenway's (RIP) videos: http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/ esp. "How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Planet – But Not Civilization" and "Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture"
If you're interested in the Spiritual transformation pick a religion and practice it. Or meditate. Or use the Core Transformation process (a simple algorithm. https://www.coretransformation.org/ )
If the crash scares you the best thing you can do is move to the remote mountains, "three days further out than a hungry person can walk." Move now while you still can.
Last but not least, if you place your faith in technology then you should... Hmm, i don't know what you do then. Get involved in politics? To make sure the tech is applied in human-values-enhancing ways?
- - - -
Regardless of the external circumstances, the most efficient and effective thing to do is cultivate Self-awareness. It's the only true panacea and it helps both on the personal and societal levels.
I'd recommend turning the news off and buckling down to work at making your own life better. Firstly, things are not as bad as they are made out to be. Secondly, there are a lot of people trying to gain by inflating this sense of hopelessness and helplessness. Thirdly, if you take care of yourself and keep your shit in order, you'll be better setup to deal with anything that does come.
From where I sit, activists have been trying to spur movement on major environmental and social problems for decades now, and getting basically nowhere. The people who are getting rich are the ones who have been doing well under the status quo.
Politicians - if you can pump up a crisis, and present yourself as the solution to that crisis, gold and power flows into your hands.
Have any politicians in the West in the last three decades run successfully on a hard-environmentalism and anti-poverty campaign?
The crisis that's been political gold recently has been human migration, but it doesn't seem to me that the voters animated by that issue are feeling anxious and despondent. (Maybe they are, it's a little hard for me to relate to that mindset) They seem absolutely furious and enjoying their revanchist political power.
Turns out it wasn’t.
The real problem is that the Eurocentric civilization has gone through periodic episodes of general warfare, starting with the Wars of the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, the French Revolution/Napoleonic Wars, and World War I&II. The last interval from Waterloo to the Guns of August was 100 years. Thus, the next now-global general war is scheduled to begin in the 2040 to 2060 time frame. Note that the geographic scope and the casualty counts have gone up markedly with each episode. The total death toll from 1914 through the 1949 end of the Chinese Revolution was probably over 200 million from war, famine (Ukraine, India), disease (flu, tuberculosis, etc) and genocide (Armenia, Jews, etc.).
And you sketching some wars on a timeline and prediction time and scope of another just based on that is totally not a real problem.
Current events are paralleling the late 1800s. Interest rates are very low, just as British Consol bonds were earning 2.75% in the late 1800s. The dominant British Empire was shifting from free trade to protectionism within the Commonwealth system as Germany rose, just as the dominant US is shifting from free trade to protectionism as China rises.
Don't worry. Save money so you can move if necessary. Its beyond your control.
>> economic inequality (like property prices),
Save your money. Read Ramsey. Take charge of your own situation.
>> post-truth era, surveillance state
Stay grounded in reality. Not sure about the later..
>> and unsustainable social welfare
It's not as unsustainable as some people think. Social Security is funded, Congress just doesnt want to pay back all the money they borrowed from it.
These issues are all beyond your personal control. Do what you can, but stop thinking the worlds problems are entirely on your shoulders. Take care of your own life first and the rest won't matter so much. Evolution did not stop just because we became aware of it.
For a modest expense, you can purchase a supercomputer capable of fitting almost every book, major production movie, and TV show ever made on its storage and you can download it with your internet connection over months or years. More than enough to last you a life time.
You can fit enough knowledge to educate yourself for the rest of your life on a piece of equipment the size of a bottle cap.
You can, tomorrow, go to an airport, sign up for a passport, and fly almost anywhere on earth.
You can call almost anyone on earth.
And, on that internet connection, you can find out about the myriad of challenges we humans face, including global warming and alternate forms of pollution like deforestation.
I'm in my 30's and I've come to the conclusion that the youth needs to begin investing in government en masse (special interest groups and also investing in their own livelihoods), but more importantly, moving to places that are younger or have a good balance of people. That requires passion and a lot of work, but its doable and if you do it, you can largely ignore all of the things you've stated. Furthermore, as more people realize this, a cultural change will happen, and that is inevitable.
You can already see that with the "OK Boomer" crowd; the problem has been recognized and that is the most important piece of dealing with it.
Consider that late-teenagers and 20-somethings successfully "dealt with the fear" of the Great War, the Great Depression, WW2, the Cold War incl the Cuban Missile Crisis and others, assorted oil crises, acid rain, holes in the ozone layer, Chernobyl, more economic crashes in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000's... And every time, the world didn't end, and most of them lived to a ripe old age and life itself generally improved. I get that the things on your list seem terrifying but that's because it's the first time you've seen anything, in a few years you'll look back and realise that there's always some ongoing "end of the world" panic and when it doesn't happen, they'll dream up another one, either to sell you something or trick you into voting for them.
And focusing more on preventative healthcare doesn't address the problem, either. As the author points out, 50% of healthcare spending is spent on people with less than 30 days to live. If you "prevent liver failure" or whatever, people live a year longer and die of heart failure instead. There isn't a realistic direction for medical research that prevents all diseases requiring care, and leaves everyone 100% healthy until one day they are dead.
In any case, this may have a significant effect on the last months of healthcare costs. However I still agree with the premise of the article, but it may slow the inevitable.
This isn't biology. It's economics - amateur economics. There's a whole field on the public economics of social security systems. The amazing insight this guy is touting has been common knowledge for, oh, twenty years. You don't even need to be an academic. Just read The Economist once in a while.
Sheesh.
Life on Earth also seems to have solved this problem with predation, where the greedily growing organism becomes a resource for another, newer organism.
If life on Earth were a pyramid scheme, then blue-green algae would be the rulers of the world because they were the early adopters in the scheme. Except there is no legal system that would consider the blue-green algae first in line for payout. It's a free-for-all.
Instead a very late entrant, humans, are the apex predator and are taking resources from every other organism that came before. It's the opposite of a pyramid scheme.
Our social systems make a noble effort to recognize the contributions of those who came before and support them, and increasingly we are extending this support to the larger biome upon which our civilization is built. However that's a fragile conceit of the current age, and will go away if the civilization itself is threatened.
Who is enforcing the laws which transfer wealth from the young to the old? Elderly police officers?
Life will find a way.
A ponzi scheme treats it as if it is at best that, in that it does nothing to grow it. Economies can grow it, however, as shown by the history of the last six centuries, in which global wealth grew even on a per-capita basis, dispite all the dumb things we did during that time to destroy it.
What we need to do is to give people more wealth-generating and wealth-preserving work to do (which includes educating them to their full potential at sociey's cost.) There's plenty of scope for that just in ameliorating and preparing for the coming climate crisis.
The biggest obstacles to this (and they are very big) are the difficulty of doing this without having projects subverted to enrich a tiny minority, and the unwillingness of those with some wealth to support such projects on the grounds that they will take away what little they have.
There are scenarios - albeit on the Trekkie optimistic side - where we will achieve longer, healthy, productive, sustainable and fulfilling lives through technical and social ingenuity.
Implying lots of messy politics for which we as a species really haven't shown to have a good handling of, historically and currently.
Well at least giving people the choice to terminate their lives in those circumstances should be permitted and doesn't seem too problematic.
"I believe that it is pointless to increase the human lifespan unless the quality of life for the elderly is also increased."
This is not very worrying because people working on these approaches seem convinced that it's not possible to increase lifespan without increasing quality.
That's a lot worse than I thought.
The inverted pyramid age distribution mentioned in his article is already happening in some countries
Last 6 month end of life care 170 billion.
We are so desensitized to figures in billions because we regularly hear about companies market cap approaching 1 trillion and people with wealth of 100 billion.
But entire tax revenue is only 3.3 tril.
"The Myth Regarding the High Cost of End-of-Life Care" from 2015
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4638261/
they report that 13% is spent during the last year(!) of life.
Also, just like with retirement benefits, the real question, did beneficiary paid for it nor not? Frequently these numbers are tossed around as these were "free handouts" - but we do pay for these all the time - and of course since it is insurance there will be people that get out more of it than others.
That makes either neither unfair nor something that should be fixed. It is working as intended.
It says 13% but the dollar figure still says over 200 billion, and that's 2011 figure.
It's difference between total health expenditure vs. medicare.
Are you saying the research paper got their conclusion and with that title wrong?
In my opinion, for anyone that cares about the scientific accuracy content of the paper titled "The Myth Regarding the High Cost of End-of-Life Care" should be more credible than that "comment"/"blog post"/opinion piece "Life is a Ponzi Scheme".
This is what is so wrong with this original post - it a not a curated, reviewed article. Just a subjective and superficial opinion - but because it was published in an otherwise selective journal it gets more credibility.
[0 The rate of return on everything, 1870-2015]: https://economics.harvard.edu/files/economics/files/ms28533....
[1 HN discussion of it]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817584
In the Irish folk music world, 2/3 of the musicians I play with will be gone within 20 years. We as the younger generations must inherit and pass on their knowledge and skills, lest we lose many things of beauty and tradition. Thankfully, we have YT and audio recorders and books upon books, but we also must keep the face to face, aural tradition alive.
The millennials now complaining about inequality, will become conservatives as they age and acquire wealth.
As a gen-X (who’s generation just put their nose down and worked), I hope the millennials grow out of their mentality of victim hood, as they have a larger voting block.
Wealth acquisition among millenials is not tracking the rate of boomers in the 60s.
The trend today has been towards increased consolidation of large companies and an associated decrease in economic mobility, decrease in wealth share of those not in the top echelons, the repeal of common-sense regulatory frameworks like Glass–Steagall.
It seems short-sighted to say that all generations are bound to follow the same path as the boomers, when economic conditions today are radically different from those in the 60s.
We need to make the pie bigger, or at least retain its size, with fewer people working. A silver lining is that most people's strengths tend to be complementary to robot's and software's.
2. The author assumes in his calculus that each human produces approximately the same productive output with his labor; with automation, that is not the case.
3. The pyramid inversion is a transient phenomenon in that, eventually, we can expect the age population graph will even out to become columnar or only slightly inverted. It will not be a problem forever.
That's almost a tautology, right? Pretty much the inverse of the survivorship bias.
Life-saving procedures are expensive because they are difficult and risky and almost by definition likely to fail, since once medical science is able to "manage" one kind of medical challenge, they immediately have to deal with the next one that would kill the person who was saved. In that sense, it should be obvious that most money is spent just ahead of people finally dying. It's almost that cliche of how you always find your keys in the last place you looked.
So I suggest people should mainly invest in research on how to keep people young and functional as they age and let lifespan prolongation emerge just as a bonus.
> (For those of you thinking of funding your research this way, forget it: the cost of collecting and transporting the cans eliminates the profit. However, about $10 million worth of empty bottles and cans do get smuggled into Michigan from neighboring Ohio and Indiana, which do not require a deposit on beverage containers. Returning those out-of-state bottles and cans in Michigan does make a small profit. Michigan lawmakers have proposed requiring that beverage manufacturers put a code on all bottles and cans that are sold in Michigan, and that automated bottle return machines be programmed to read the code so they accept only containers originally sold in Michigan.)
The relevant industry term used more frequently lately is "healthspan".
That'll just have people live longer. The big thing which may help a lot is AI. It's quite possible we'll have robocarers by the time I go gaga.
While I don’t disagree with the author’s intentions, I do find his rhetoric and writing style pretty disappointing. Mentioning a general 12,000 year old trend of population growth as a supporting argument, and using a title that vague feels clickbaitey and loses credibility in the message to me.
No, "rapidly develop[ing]" anything is not a solution. We need to get humans as a species to shift our (subconscious) thinking away from the goal of an ever-increasing number of humans with an ever-increasing "standard of living", enabled by ever-rising "productivity".
We're living in what is essentially a closed system with limited resources and carrying capacity. If we think we can always overcome the limits of one resource by more development of another, we're deluding ourselves and likely on track to make the crash worse when it finally comes.
Exactly what the long-term, sustainable capacity of the Earth may be is of course unknown, but I think there's a strong possibility that we are currently exceeding it.
If you more closely analyze my post, I think you’d see we may agree.
Maybe full retirement is too strong, and should be obvious only in physically tough jobs, but for others a semi retirement, as a wise/consultant in their company could be a good compromise.
Turchin, following up on many precious writers who’ve noticed certain cycles or repeating themes in history, has posited that there is an ebb-flow to history that is about 80 years, about the lifespan of a human.
What drives this flow, in this theory, is majority one force. The rise in birth rates during good times, followed by the trouble of environments and economies to absorb the new individuals, eventually leading to some sort of new adjustment among all players.
You first buddy.
For example, product innovation may slow down because older people adopt new technology slower.
We enter adulthood and realize that life is without meaning or worth, but remain in emotional debt to those who raised us, our families, our friends, or anyone else who made an emotional investment in us, and who would feel sorrow if we were to kill ourselves. Thus we cannot kill ourselves if we wish to bring no sorrow upon those who invested in us, even if we think life not worth it for ourselves – we must live to repay our emotional debts, and to justify and satisfy others’ investments.
Most then address their emotional debt by starting families and having children in whom to make emotional investments of their own. They make themselves emotionally solvent by creating emotional equity in another human being, who will in time come to realize the meaninglessness of his own life, but who will himself be indebted to his parents. Individuals thus satisfy their emotional debt by drawing down on the emotional debt of their children, who must then address their own emotional debts in turn. And the process repeats itself.
It may be Pareto optimal to escape the continual process of debt repayment and painlessly destroy the human race.
Given you acted to write something, what does it show you care about?
In "thinking about thinking", it is very easy to drift from observations to speculations and from insights to overgeneralizations. A variation on that is something Bertrand Russel suggested, that every philosopher at some point makes an (usually unacknowledged) assumption and then proceeds from there.
Your observation (generalized) that a person's feelings about other people's feelings affect our behavior seems true (especially for parents and children). That is perhaps a variation of the theme in "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain" by Antonio Damasio that all reason rests on emotion (with emotion giving us a reason to reason)?
Albert Einstein says something similar in "Religion and Science": https://sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm "For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capable, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence. But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly."
Depending on feelings and assumptions about the possibility of moral progress and the nature of the universe, were the human race to vanish, perhaps a long process of growth would just begin all over again for it or something like it eventually? And would such a possibility change the presumed optimum you outline?
Also, on reducing suffering as an optimization criterion, always remember the motivation triad (as explained well by Douglas J. Lisle such as in "The Pleasure Trap") of maximizing pleasure, minimizing pain, and minimizing effort -- where our brains try to optimize all three simultaneously (along with other objectives).
On the general topic of suicide prevention, you may find of interest some resources I collected here: https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations...
Especially the point here from David Conroy: "Suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain. That's all it's about. You are not a bad person, or crazy, or weak, or flawed, because you feel suicidal. It doesn't even mean that you really want to die - it only means that you have more pain than you can cope with right now. If I start piling weights on your shoulders, you will eventually collapse if I add enough weights... no matter how much you want to remain standing. Willpower has nothing to do with it. Of course you would cheer yourself up, if you could. Don't accept it if someone tells you, "That's not enough to be suicidal about." There are many kinds of pain that may lead to suicide. Whether or not the pain is bearable may differ from person to person. What might be bearable to someone else, may not be bearable to you. The point at which the pain becomes unbearable depends on what kinds of coping resources you have. Individuals vary greatly in their capacity to withstand pain. When pain exceeds pain-coping resources, suicidal feelings are the result. Suicide is neither wrong nor right; it is not a defect of character; it is morally neutral. It is simply an imbalance of pain versus coping resources. You can survive suicidal feelings if you do either of two things: (1) find a way to reduce your pain, or (2) find a way to increase your coping resources. Both are possible."
Here is a summary of key ideas from Mayeroff's book in more blunt language: https://thoughtcatalog.com/kyle-eschenroeder/2016/11/this-is... "In 1971 a philosopher named Milton Mayeroff wrote the manifesto on giving a shit. It’s titled On Caring (for us, On Giving a Shit) and we’ll pull from it to help understand how giving a shit can change our lives and how we might learn to give higher quality shits."
As mentioned there, Mayeroff also wrote: "No one else can give me the meaning of my life; it is something I alone can make. The meaning is not something predetermined which simply unfolds; I help both to create it and to discover it, and this is a continuing process, not a once-and-for-all. "
Also related: https://www.wikihow.com/Find-Meaning-in-Life
Or, as Richard P. Feynman said: "Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all."
For example, your post shows you care about philosophy as well as reducing suffering -- and there are a lot more ideas and actions you can explore starting from those two areas. If you do so, please keep in mind the extra complexity of the motivational triad and other possible human objectives. And along with "The Pleasure Trap", please also perhaps reflect on the book "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose" by Deirdre Barrett and the essay "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" by Paul Graham as they explore the dark side of modern society and technology relative to human inclinations adapted for a more tribal culture within an environment with different abundances and scarcities. As Stephen Ilardi writes about in "The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs": "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life."
All the best in discovering and/or making meanings in your life -- including from loving caring.
He's not describing a property of life or even human life, but of an economic system shortsightedly based on economic and population growth and externalizing costs.
Human societies have lived without growth in many places and times for hundreds of thousands of years (and collapsed after growth many places and times).
Change the system's underlying goals and you change the outcomes. I'm working to replace the beliefs from growth to enjoying what you have and from externalizing costs to stewardship.
We can change those goals. If we don't, we're only forestalling the inevitable result of any Ponzi scheme.
Are they then supposed to coast along with no responsibility to helping support anyone but their own?
With a retirement age at 65, 65+18 = 83 or around the life expectancy (and in many cases lower).
Shouldn't that be in the calculations? Or young people just came from Mars and never had anyone do anything for them?
Yes, animals don't have to help their parent animals. But animals are ready to walk in a few days, and sent off to their own in a couple of months or so...
The concern in this conversation is that with declining birth rates and increased life expectancy there either needs to be an increase in worker productivity or a drop in living standards. In 1950 there were 16+ workers contributing to social security per beneficiary, in 2013 there are less than 3 [1].
I'm not sure what to think about measures of our productivity gains in that time. Is worker productivity measured based on GDP? Does that account for the difference between food and entertainment? Maybe young people in the future will not have the money for as many toys. What about crumbling infrastructure? And increased government debt? The young of today live in an world that is economically and demographically quite different than a couple of generations ago.
Your argument that everyone got a free ride for their first 18 years doesn't account for the above concerns.
It was very interesting to read, thanks for sharing!
Medicare and Social Security are just a tax. Collectively we've decided we'll all take care of our old and infirm. We spend the money we take in every year, and besides the occasional Congress deciding to raid the Social Security trust fund, we just take care of people. As a percentage, are the number of people paying in decreasing, sure, but there's a number of quick solutions: either move the age at which you can collect, or keep the benefits fixed (or even shrink them). Solvency returned.
HN: Don't fall in to the trap. People are trying to convince you that SS and Medicare are insolvent, doomed to fail, etc. They are not. They are some of the most successful, and helpful programs the US has ever created. They are a simple wealth distribution model, where we've decided there's a basic level of livability that humans can't fall beneath. Don't fall into the trap of believing oligarchs and libertarians. The two programs have ushered in the boom since the great depression, and allowed access to healthcare for people who otherwise would just die.
It's been calculated that for certain groups with particularly low life expectancies (for instance, African American men), social security is actually a net loss for them, as they pay in more to the system than they take out, on average.
Allowing for special classes is the problem, not a solution. It is the collective good we are striving for. Otherwise, we end up in a situation of the tragedy of the commons, and no one wins.
Perhaps, instead, we should also focus on extending life expectancies for African American men, rather than allowing them to not contribute to Social Security.
It makes no sense to redistribute wealth from those poor in years to those rich in years. You can require everyone to pay in without also having a backwards redistribution program.
Just replace the word "annuity" in your plan, with "public trust" and you have social security.
Calling things by different names changes nothing. The generic point is that an ever increasing group of people call upon contributions from a shrinking set of people to get paid(Pensions, SS, Medicare etc). Note this is not an investment. It's not like the older people invested in better schools, colleges and healthcare, that the people passing out will spin new methods of making more money with less people.
Once you arrive here. You can even call it tax or whatever and it changes nothing in terms of basic math. The only reason something like SS/pensions has not collapsed yet is because they use increasing percentage of taxes to pay for it, than spend it on college or infrastructure or something else.
Its not very surprising that people are in awe of Chinese infrastructure or the British healthcare or German education system. You get what you invest in. The US invests in elderly people.
I have re-read your comment several times. You are papering over the facts with wishes. Your comment is agist propoganda.
I proposed solutions that are one possible answer, there are others: perhaps removing the income cap, or upping the contributions from employers who recently won a 40% reduction in taxes with the tax cuts? Maybe decreasing benefits now is also a possible solution (again, as I proposed).
The point being, Social Security and Medicare ARE NOT (by definition) Ponzi or Pyramid schemes. Ponzi schemes are INVESTMENT vehicles. There is no investment in this case. Pyramid schemes are (again by definition) structures where recruitment and growing the organization are requirements. Social Security doesn't require this, and to argue otherwise is arguing in bad faith.
It's also more profitable to treat a long term condition than to cure or prevent it.
Just sayin'.
/ping dang
The GOOD NEWS: The healthy part of our economy:
* GDP grows 5.5% YoY (Yay! for population and productity growth)
* US Government revenues grow 5.5% YoY
THE PROBLEM:
* US National Debt increases 8.5% YoY (average over the last 40 years)
* US Money printing increases 8.5% YoY (averaged over the last 40 years. by Monetary base)
8.5% problem increases YoY > 5.5% growth of health