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Comment by TheFattestNinja | Hacker News Reader

The post is kind of all over the place, more like an internal reflection than a normal message to others, but it does resonate with me on one point specifically:

I am an "official" millennial, born 1989. One thing I have noticed (in an anectodical, personal and subjective way) is that my age bracket, especially those I would consider higher on an intelligence/success curve, appear to be so much more closet-nihilist than everyone else around.

What I mean by that is that, while of course we don't really want to see the world burn, we are secretly hoping, in the dark, when no one is watching, for things to always go tits up a bit. Like there is a subconscious fascination to the aesthetics of Nero playing the lire while Rome burns. And upon deep self-reflection that's always a bit unsettling.

I don't know if it's related to the generational trend, or maybe it's just selection bias over the people around me, but I think it's mostly the former rather than the second. Probably stems from the fact that we saw our beloved parents struggle in old age with health and finance, while we live in a more priviliged regime (remember that I mentioned this applies mostly to financially successfully peoples) where money seems more immaterial.

So I guess the author might be onto something about this whole financial nihilism thing.

View on HN

"we saw our beloved parents struggle in old age with health and finance", This would vary from country to country but absolutely isn't the case in the UK. Most millennial's parents didn't have their income crippled by rent (with little chance of buying) and student loans (tuition fees only came in in the late 90s), and lived most their lives with a public health service that wasn't being aggressively gutted. If anything it'd be a resentment over how easy their parents had it.

It's possibly a direct reaction to the global response to the banking crisis in 2008. We were told all these bailouts and austerity and artificially low interest rates were the way to solve things and while stock markets bounced back it never felt like a genuine recovery. The stock markets and bitcoin booming during the pandemic would've added fuel to the fire too. There'd be something somewhat comforting to see it all fall apart in a way that's undeniable and couldn't be patched over. Not a very rational response but it's understandable after the last 15 years (and the entirety of most their adult lives)

Sure.

Watching the world go to shit, watch everyone be worse off than their parents, watching billionaires play games with peoples lives and seeing everything getting worse while the markets are soaring ... of course that would make you think all the markets and money are not real and the world should burn.

The COVID was a cherry on top, "we are in this all together," says the dude on his yacht, while you lost your job and place to live. Now the inflation will deepen inequality and poverty.

I think the next crisis of this type, at least for US (and UK which is kind of similar), is going to be when all the millennials get no inheritance, because the healthcare costs for their parents will basically eat everything. That might be another nail in the coffin of the world possibly getting better for them.

In the Easter Europe, where I am, meanwhile, people are more nihilistic than ever. They were rescued from the Soviet command economies that worked badly, and there was a huge jump in living standards - in the 90s and early 2000s. But by now, the non-freedom of Real Socialism was replaced by non-freedom of being precariat that will never own even the commieblock apartment that people made fun of in the 90s - while all the wonderful inventions of the West like healthcare on for the rich and student loans get imported here.

No wonder people are genuinely thinking watching the world burn in nuclear fire might be cool. The climate change that was the cost of luxury of previous generations will destroy humanity anyway, why not go out with a bang?

"when all the millennials get no inheritance, because the healthcare costs for their parents will basically eat everything"

I wonder if this one will be even worse in the US. Much of the market going up and up is because index funds have become the default retirement vehicle. So every month billions flow into the market no matter what. What will happen when the largest generation stops contributing and instead starts withdrawing. If you are right and many elderly will deplete their funds entirely, the value of everyone's retirement investments will drop dramatically in the process. How much of retirement nest eggs in places with terminal demographics like China, Germany and Japan are in international stocks as well? IMO demographics are gonna fuck over millennials yet again. I hope I'll be wrong.

Younger generations are offsetting this with their own retirement savings.

I've seen it argued that millennials are under-saving compared to their parents, but I remember seeing some data recently that contradicted this assertion. I would not be surprised if it were less evenly-distributed across the economy than prior generations.

I don't think we are going to see net outflow from the stock market, maybe just a decrease in inflow.

However I do think "worker shortages" will continue to grow as older people retire from undesirable jobs and aren't replaced by younger people, pushing up wages outside of white-collar and tech jobs and thereby leading to more inflation. I think this is a good thing in the long term and a price adjustment that has been a long time coming, but it needs to be managed properly or things could get really ugly.

"Younger generations are offsetting this with their own retirement savings."

The problem is that the generationd after the boomers are smaller, especially in countries like Germany, China and Japan which have been economic power houses.

> Younger generations are offsetting this with their own retirement savings.

Sounds like a Ponzi scheme, just like Social Security and pensions.

Does it? Is a lake with an inflow river and an outflow river a Ponzi lake?

"Social pension system is a Ponzi scheme" is argument I've heard from people with certain political leaning often enough I wondered if Reagan or Thatcher said it or something.

It never made sense to me. As long as the number of people is relatively stable, there's nothing Ponzi on it. Even with the number of people changing, there are other important inputs into the equation - automation, efficiency, etc.

All of these systems rely on working people to pay the tab for retired people because of demographic shifts and inflation causing outputs to exceed inputs. At least Social Security is definitely a Ponzi that per the SSA will only be able to guarantee me 65% of what I am owed when I hit the (continually increasing) payout age.

I align with neither Reagan or Thatcher, but I did pass my math classes.

But it's not inherently a Ponzi scheme, it's just been mismanaged.

Is taxes paying for education Ponzi scheme as well?

If not, why is current workers paying future workers (now kids) education different from current workers paying past workers (now retirees) pensions?

> why is current workers paying future workers (now kids) education different from current workers paying past workers (now retirees) pensions?

Well for one thing, education scales with demographic shifts and pensions don't. If less people are being born, at a roughly similar cost/student (administrative bloat aside), educational costs go down as the population growth shrinks. Pensions on the other don't, they only go down on the other end (people dying) and reductions in the birth rate negatively impact the ability of successive generations to pay for prior generation's pensions. Education costs are also strictly bounded per person, as they aren't for life, only for K-12.

I'm not trying to be coy, but it's pretty shocking to me there's multiple respondents that don't seem to understand that the basic premise of public pensions/social security are literally ponzi schemes that are unsustainable with demographic shifts. They utterly rely on continued economic and population growth in order to have enough inflows to meet their outflow obligations, which I would suggest is nearly identically equivalent to a ponzi scheme, where you are paying old investors with new investors money...

I don't think anything you said explains why it would be a Ponzi scheme.

Ponzi scheme isn't a scheme because you pay old people with new people's money, but because there is promise of exponential growth that is unsustainable and often literally impossible.

For this to be true of pensions, they would have to (inflation adjusted) grow, which they don't. Yes, if there's less productive people and more non-productive people, that changes the balance but it is a balance, not unlimited growth of a Ponzi scheme.

"A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors." [1]

The only thing there that is arguably untrue about social security / public pensions is "investors". Depending on whether or not you consider contributions to social security / public pensions as an investment or not, it falls on one side or the other of the literal line of what a Ponzi scheme is. Even if you don't consider it an investment, in /every other aspect/ it is effectively the same as a Ponzi scheme.

That is not to say that public pensions are a bad thing. I'm merely pointing out that they carry a demographic risk that is unaccounted for, just as a Ponzi scheme carries significant investment risks that are unaccounted for due to faked returns.

There is no requirement that you promise exponential growth that is literally impossible for something to be a Ponzi scheme. The key element is that you use money from new participants to pay out "returns" to older participants, thus fraudulently claiming/faking said returns. That is it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme

Ask all the lakes that have shrunk or dried up because their outflows exceed their inflows.

I'm not familiar with China or Japan, but in Germany, most people don't have large amounts of savings they could withdraw from. The middle class might own the house or flat they live in, for the upper middle class that house doesn't need 100k€ to be brought to up date, but most people don't expect large inheritances.

For German employees, the public pension system is their wealth, and that's not based on stocks etc, but on the next generations contribution + some tax subsidies. Millenials and Zoomers will have fun shouldering that.

So I talk about him a lot but one of the things Petar Zeihan points out is that we are rushing head long towards the greatest contraction of capital that will be seen in our lifetimes, our parents lifetimes, and our children's lifetimes. Basically the boomers are retiring cashing out their 401ks causing that money to no longer to be available for investment and contracting the money supply at the same time the younger generation can't offset it, as you noted.

As a result capital is going to contract and if you want a loan get it right now as fast as you can.

I'm definitely a Zeihan acolyte as well. His analysis usually seems very logical and entirely based in indisputable facts. I do sometimes wonder though given the significance of his predictions why I'm not hearing more arguments against his forecast.

> We were told all these bailouts and austerity and artificially low interest rates were the way to solve things and while stock markets bounced back it never felt like a genuine recovery.

Maybe it's because I'm not in the US, but do people actually feel this way?

Sure, the GFC was a big deal at the time, but as a millennial, who grew up upper-middle-class and is now in his mid-thirties, I don't feel it has impacted me much at all.

Absolutely. I felt this way at the time and I never stopped feeling this way. 2008-2020 always felt to me like an economic recovery for some (homeowners, investors, white-collar and tech workers), but stagnation or regression for others.

> I don't feel it has impacted me much at all.

Your post exemplifies exactly the problem I am describing.

Below you, everyone felt it and felt it hard, everywhere.

I've been staring at your comment trying to decide if it's intentional smugness or ignorance. I'm going to assume good faith.

There were multiple countries with little to no impact from the GFC[1]. These countries include billions of people, and significant portions of the worlds GDP. Most western economies had recovered in 3-5 years[2].

Not everyone felt it and felt it hard, nor was this everywhere. I'm not arguing semantics, for billions of people it was effectively a non issue.

1. https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/go... 2. https://bigeconomics.org/the-countries-most-and-least-affect...

Yeah, certainly from a UK perspective that part of the GP didn't ring true. While my parent isn't one of the boomer generation that will be extremely well off and I personally worry for their retirement, across the generation in general I think they might have experienced the peak retirement experience.

I personally don't think retirement as exists today will be a thing by the time I reach the same age. I haven't really looked much into the history so I could be way off base here. My impression is pensions, state provided and private, only really came into being post WW2. While the age distribution was able to support it there was something of a golden age for the older cohort of the boomer generation with final salary pension schemes, retirement at 50, etc. As the population pyramid continues to invert the pyramid scheme begins to collapse.

Whatever the answer to old age ends up being I don't think it will be particularly recognizable relative to schemes today. Certainly there seems to be no answer to what happens when the next generation of retirees has no housing security or wealth, thanks to the growth of real estate speculation worldwide and rentier capitalism draining younger generations of all wealth.

I often joke that my retirement plan is to rob a bank, either you get the money and run away to somewhere with no extradition, or you go to jail and get bed and board.

To tie into the original post, we joke that our retirement plan is a good backpack for the post-apocalypse wasteland (you get to choose your flavor between war, climate, or many others) trekking, so I like your scenario better.

I have a different take on why we want to see the world burn: we can see the world on fire, but seemingly lots of people don't (at least, not enough to do anything about it). We hope that if the burn increases a little bit now, people will notice before it starts burn uncontrollably in a few years, so start working to stop the fire.

I too have a different take on why we want to see the world burn. We’re watching as we get trapped into the void, the proverbial rat race. We have a specific vantage point, dead smack in the middle. We see both ends of the race clearly, with boomers in retirement at the end, and GenZ/Y at the beginning. All racing.

At the beginning of the race we see the incessant vain jockeying of a group trying to socially manipulate constantly and fit in, and on the other end (the actual end of the race), you see a group constantly trying to justify and protect what scraps the race allowed them to keep.

And in the middle you run as fast as you can, hoping you escaped the beginning of the race, hoping you make it to the end with some scraps you can call treasure. You run away from the beginning of race, disgusted at what you once were, and disgusted at what you need to become to survive until the end.

It’s in that moment of realization you wish the universe imploded. All that running kills the soul.

It as always like that, so it doesn’t explain why more people want to see the world burn now.

I think this is a good challenge. But also nobody here really proves or argued that millennials are uniquely nihilistic either.

It can’t be proven, but common sense would say GenZ are the most nihilistic because they have to work the hardest to even get to the middle, let alone the end.

I’d say the people in the beginning and end have a tangible resentment, and not necessarily an existential crisis. In other words, GenZ would be resentful of having to start fresh against the barbarian Millenial/Boomer horde, and Boomers would be resentful of any attempt at reformation where their scraps from the race would be worth less.

It’s only Millenials who would neither resent GenZ or Boomers because they were already GenZ once upon a time, and know they have to become Boomers to survive.

That would be my best argument for why Millennials are in some deep psychological shit.

I think GenZ is less nihilistic, because they are younger - they are not as burned and scarred as millennials yet, and they still believe that things can be changed, that world can be saved.

Millennials already tried, found it didn't work, found it was for nothing, found it will never work because the systems of humanity don't allow for it.

I think one thing to note about generations prior to GenZ is that when those generations gave up, they mostly gave up on the system (too big to be changed). The cynic comes from the death of the idealist, so at some point these people believed in evolving the system.

GenZ believes in people. When they give up, they won’t give up on the system, they will give up on people. I’d keep a watchful eye on that development.

> Millennials already tried, found it didn't work, found it was for nothing, found it will never work because the systems of humanity don't allow for it.

speak for yourself. I'm changing the world, one kind gesture at a time ^_^

I'm always astounded when lengthy generational analyses invalidate themselves by neglecting even the briefest mention of Gen X.

Haven't Gen X, so used to being the overlooked generation, who dropped out and laid flat decades ago as the slacker generation, already invalidated themselves?

> nobody here really proves or argued that millennials are uniquely nihilistic either.

The comment starting this thread had:

I am an "official" millennial, born 1989. One thing I have noticed (in an anectodical, personal and subjective way) is that my age bracket, especially those I would consider higher on an intelligence/success curve, appear to be so much more closet-nihilist than everyone else around.

In the 60s you could buy a median home with 2.1x the median income. In 2019, the ratio is 3.5x.

https://themreport.com/news/data/02-02-2021/pressing-housing...

I think this here is the key. Automation (not globalisation) has removed many entry level and low so jobs. At the same time we have artificial scarcity through regulations in the housing market to keep neighborhood character and see the cost of required services that cannot be automated easily like health care and education go up and up. Instead of increasing wealth redistribution to compensate for the wealth centralization from automation, we reduce mechanisms that transfer wealth to supposedly cut cost and because regulation is local but capital is global.

> education

I argue it can be automated. I have learned more from ML MOOCs than from my Romanian college.

100% agree that we could, but social dynamics seem to prevent it from happening.

I'd argue it's the other way all of the things you listed, healthcare, education, and housing are hugely subsidized by the governemnt. Healthcare through medica(r|d)e, education through pell grants and loans, and homes through the tax breaks associated. These things all together result in the massive increase in cost of these things, because the government is redistributing wealth from others to those industries.

It's an interesting dynamic. Because of rising cost, consumption of the services gets subsidized in ways that distort the market. In addition lots of regulations and controls are put in place which further drive up cost. Interesting paper on this: https://www.niskanencenter.org/cost-disease-socialism-how-su...

I agree with you 100%, and its seems very difficult to explain this to people in terms of politics.

The intuition is that grants and loans make education more affordable, but in the medium to long term they just inflate the cost of tuition for everyone.

Similarly for healthcare and housing.

Feel like we either need to socialize these sectors of the economy, or go full free market. But a system half way in between doesn't work.

(My personal preference would be to largely socialize healthcare and education, while pushing for more free market reforms for housing, to encourage new development and increase the housing supply.)

Median house in the 60s is not the same as median house in 2022. You could probably buy a median house from the 60s (i.e. 1000 sqft, no air condition, in a polluted area (this was pre-EPA time, so almost everywhere was polluted) etc.) right now for way below current median.

I hear this every time. It doesn't effing matter if i don't have the option to buy a 1960s size house, let alone the newer larger home, die to price increases and high interest rates.

Your analysis does not explain away decades of mediocre wage growth in the face of inflation in healthcare, education and housing costs.

> I hear this every time. It doesn't effing matter if i don't have the option to buy a 1960s size house, let alone the newer larger home, die to price increases and high interest rates.

I mean, you could, either in the form of apartments (which are essentially smaller houses) or houses in less desirable areas (shittier houses).

But you do have an option to buy an 1960s house. They weren't all demolished - they're still here and naturally some are for sale.

> Your analysis does not explain away decades of mediocre wage growth in the face of inflation in healthcare, education and housing costs.

Wages are typically computed per household. In the late 1960, a tsunami of divorces and single-parent households started occuring (something that wasn't widely culturally accepted before then), which makes comparisons of household wages before and after an apples to oranges comparison. It's basically bad stats.

Re: rising costs of (higher) education and healthcare. It's partially similar to the housing situation. The standard of service people get (and expect to get) today is dramatically higher than in 1960s. In 1960s, we didn't even have MRIs... Nowadays medicine is packed with expensive technology and drugs - that has to inflate the price. Similarly, today's university environment is a combination of an university of the past with a high-class resort (the student facilities are basically on the level of good hotels in many cases) - that's gotta inflate the price too. Add extractionary practices of the medicine insurance companies cartel and university administrators on top of that, and that pretty much explains current prices.

If the median quality of these goods and services goes up, and so does the median price, then why hasn't the median affordability risen proportionally along with this? You're blaming the lack of wage growth on bad stats, which sounds like a just-so story.

A 1950s or 1960s 1200-1400 sq ft rambler on 0.15-0.25 acres goes for 4x the median income in my metro area in the middle of the road suburbs, 3x in more impoverished areas for a comparable house from the 1920s and 5x for a comparable 1970s-1980s home in nicer areas.

To top it off, mortgage interest rates doubled and prices have not dropped.

But why wouldn't disenchantment towards the rat race lead us more towards a "I'm just not going to play the game and enjoy myself doing art or whatever" rather than a "maybe the current conflicts will explode spectacularly and destroy the status quo" mindset?

As mentioned, this seems to be more prevalent in people who are, objectively, well-off in the financial department, so it's not like they "hate" the system per se and could afford degrees of financial independence that many others will never be allowed to.

You have to play the game to understand how weird it is, even if the weirdness benefits you.

There are financial constraints to being off the grid of the game.

Even if I wanted to run off into the woods and live in a cabin, I don’t know if I could live off the current amount I have.

So back to the grid, hence the resentment.

That may accurately explain how many people are feeling, but it's a very stupid take in my opinion.

I don't know that there is much historical precedent for a "controlled burn". When things go tits up, there's generally a big increase in suffering that comes along with it, and still no guarantee things will get fundamentally better after that.

Agreed. Things always fail slowly, then suddenly. And then people get hurt.

But otoh the only "real" traction we are getting for issues like, in this case, climate change seem to be relatively recent and caused by more and more catastrophic, tangible effects (80% of Pakistan under water, heatwaves, tropical storms becoming a regular occurrence in the coastal US, you name it)

Most millennial parents are not even in old age yet and are statistically more affluent than they are.

I don’t think your analysis is correct.

Plus my own experience as someone born in 1989 doesn’t really mesh with yours. Most of my friends are both what I would call more frugal and more down to earth than their parents were because they had to live through multiple economic crashes.

There is little nihilism but people are disillusioned with the system because they feel it’s setup to favour an older age bracket at their expense and failing to address the most pressing issues like climate change.

> it’s setup to favour an older age bracket at their expense and failing to address the most pressing issues like climate change

nailed it. born '88, this summarizes my current world view so much, it's almost scary.

I turned to solarpunk and try to decide every day decisions in a way that make this future more possible. I may not succeed, it may never happen, but after lots of reflection, this is the only future setting we can achieve and allows our (esp.: my) children to be better off than we are.

Other ways simply lead to more pain/suffering/destruction/... no matter if they are philosophical more just or whatever. If you are leaning towards socialism, liberalism or are conservative, it all ultimately doesn't matter - green/sustainability is the only way to not destroy our planet too much in the next decades.

Back in the 70's and 80's people were pretty frugal. The average person was experienced with Lay-away, balancing checkbooks and not a lot of people had credit (high interest rates). What you're witnessing now are just older people that have a lifetime of work accrued and are just trying to enjoy what they have while they can. You'll probably do the same... But in no way shape or form are millennial's in a worse place than people were in the late 70's early 80's. I'd argue thins are considerably better thanks to the wide availability of tech jobs.

> What you're witnessing now are just older people that have a lifetime of work accrued and are just trying to enjoy what they have while they can. You'll probably do the same...

That’s simply extremely untrue. You can delude yourself if it helps you sleep but this is factually false.

People born in the 60s were the beneficiaries of policies which just don’t exist anymore. They grew in a context of full employment at any qualification level and with career paths towards higher pay which simply don’t exist anymore. Education costs and especially habitation costs both outpaced inflation widely. Tech jobs are such a niche it’s barely worth mentioning.

The situation is even worse where I’m from in Europe with social systems having been utterly mismanaged for decades and a total refusal to equitably address the situation nowadays.

And let’s not talk about the brain dead decisions taken by this generation when it comes to sustainability which millennials and gen z will now have to solve.

> Most of my friends are both what I would call more frugal and more down to earth than their parents were because they had to live through multiple economic crashes.

Is it because they had to live through multiple economic crashes, or because their own prospects are worse than those of their parents and they know it?

I was a born in 1987, and I think I'm onto something similar.

Older folk believe more deeply in the legitimacy of financial abstractions because they were adults before the cracks started to show. They have a stake in continuing the fiction that hard work == rewards.

Younger folk see the abstractions as a farce that we don't really believe but that we bring out whenever we feel the need to justify an injustice that we're participating in--particularly injustices that give young people the short end of the stick.

Poorer folk are too desperate to entertain the notion that the system is fundamentally unsound. They need status in that system badly enough that anything else is just a distraction.

But if you're in the middle, you see the power that comes with a shared belief in the system and you want to live in that again, but you also see that it will never be legitimate until certain critical bugs in its design are fixed.

Then you look around and see that the people in positions to fix those bugs are exploiting them instead.

You want to build something meaningful on the ashes, to fix the critical bugs and have a just system that everyone can believe in, but it's not ashes. It's just kind of carrying on... on fire.

And you realize that you might be quite old before fixing those bugs becomes a priority. That is, unless something happens to it first. So at least for me, nihilism is a compromise. I say that it's meaningless because that's easier than explaining that it's an enemy.

Nobody who is counting the days until they retire wants to hear me explain why I want to show up at the grocery store with a dollar and have the kid tell me:

> Sorry sir, we're not doing that anymore

So I back off on the rooting-for-the apocalypse mindset and let people think that it's just nihilism.

Maybe it is a matter of being aware of "injustice" (for lack of a better word) too intensely, and then just becoming jaded to it to carry on. But it feels a bit too self-justifying to me, I'm wary of explanations that are too charitable to oneself. I hope we can find a way to channel that into self (and external) improvements instead.

I think we've always been aware of injustice. The new awareness is that injustice, left to fester, is a threat to the stability of systems that we rely on.

I'd love to take a moral view of the situation, but people dismiss those. Everybody speaks threat. And having acknowledged a threat isn't exactly a high bar.

We can worry about being too self congratulatory once we've done anything about it.

Lots of people our age feel like the world is bad and unjust and destroying current civilization through revolution will result in a just and good society.

These people are idiots who aren’t aware of the death and destruction this will cause and things will likely be much worse after.

As are the people who assume revolution means killing or taking.

I can easily imagine a revolution where people merely stop selling their time and instead start demanding to be included in the decision making processes and have an equal share of outcomes.

I can’t imagine that. It would require tremendous amounts of global voluntart coordination and discipline, all happening in a bottom-up fashion. Humanity is hopelessly bad at this, that’s why all significant revolutions were imposed via force and not peacefully.

The answer to that could be as simple as "no", after which those people would either need to re-start selling their time, starve, or resort to the killing and taking that is usually associated with revolutions.

Either that, or they're history buffs. What precipitates the redistribution of wealth, historically? Some kind of gigantic disaster -- war, famine, plague, social collapse. There's never been a time when the oligarchs/monarchy/landed-gentry just calmly gave up their temporal power after listening to reasoned socioeconomic arguments. It's always been some sort of calamity. You might find that those idiots are indeed aware of the consequences, but perhaps they look at a longer sequence of consequences.

Unrelatedly, have you ever heard about the way pre-colonization Natives handled forest fires? [0] They, thanks to oral tradition, understood the necessity of allowing -- ensuring -- that smaller, controlled forest fires happened regularly. Not only to provide resources for their society, but also to ensure that the inevitability of a fire didn't bring outsize consequences. Our deployment of modern monetary theory, [1] I mean modern forestry management, isn't actually supported by the long view that the Natives took, but does make briefly-considered sense to the layperson. "Fire's bad, right? Everybody knows what a house looks like after it's been on fire, and that's bad, so we should stop all the fires." I don't think those people are idiots, but perhaps they should reconsider their position regarding fire's rejuvenation properties.

[0] https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/indigenous-fire-management-and-tr...

[1] Huh, I don't know why I typed that at all. After all, we're talking about forestry

Modern forestry thrives where controlled burns are allowed to repeatedly impact the same forests for the benefit of those never burned. The burned forests never fully recover, and the thriving forests grow taller by comparison. Perhaps, the old ways are better, but the oral tradition that spoke of the unity of man and the imposition of serfdom as sinful has been ignored, forgotten, and derided. Hopefully, no one sets those tall trees alight out of spite.

> Either that, or they're history buffs. What precipitates the redistribution of wealth, historically? Some kind of gigantic disaster -- war, famine, plague, social collapse.

You're mistaking redistribution for destruction...

Sure, things are technically more equal if everyone becomes homeless. But there wasn't really a redistribution...

A lot of people who think along these lines, especially younger people, don't think of wealth as something that can be created or destroyed at all. They just believe that there's some fixed amount out there, and that if ordinary people don't have enough that must be because the super-rich have stolen their fair share and need to be brought down a peg. The very idea of wealth that can be created is seen as a lie spread by the super rich to conceal their theft. (I do wonder if part of this is that a lot of people are too young to have seen their societies become substantially better of as a whole, unlike previous generations.)

I think you can in theory believe that wealth can be created - but also at the same time be convinced that modern heavily financialized[1] economy does very little of that.

Add to that how a lot of people have seen their societies become substantially worse of as a whole - yes, iPhones are awesome and modern cars are safer and so on, but instead of having a union job you pee in bottles in Amazon warehouse, and instead of buying a home you are forever renting a studio apartment.

The Simpsons titular family of one high school educated guy with house and three kids on single income went from "typical boring dude" to "impossible dream" over the course of one or two generations, after all.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization

>You're mistaking redistribution for destruction...

No, you are. With respect, you should consider reading some history. Try reading about the conditions of the peasantry after the black plague, or postwar Europe, or even the various falls of the various iterations of Rome. Fire destroys the previous order, yes, but it also sows the seeds for growth.

But fire bad! Yes, yes, I know; but this forest isn't the only forest, nor is it the only possible forest. Fire bad, but fire is the only way to fix this situation, because of the way "we" have "managed" our "forests" for as long as I've been alive. Maybe I need to be a Boomer to properly "understand". If there's another solution, I'm all ears, but history suggests that fire is the only solution.

Ok, so if we destroy the current order, how many people will die or suffer?

How long until the growth occurs, and how fast will it take to get back to the current state of things?

> Fire destroys the previous order, yes, but it also sows the seeds for growth.

You're ignoring base effects.

Of course peasants are going to "prosper" (on paper) if agriculture goes from 1% of the economy to 100%.

And, again, this isn't a "wealth redistribution". You've taken out 99% of the economy and left the remaining 1% in tact. It didn't grow. But it did grow relative to the rest that was destroyed.

Controlled burns are part of modern forestry, for exactly the reasons you describe.

As recent years show, the central banks are willing to cause ecenomic downturns to promote long term health. See most central banks increasing rates in response to inflation. It is worth noting that, in (oversimplified) MMT, inflation is the downside of over supporting the economy, and the signal to pull back. This past cycle has been weird because inflation has stayed stubbornly low despite massive ammounts of fiscal stimulus, which was then taken as a sign that it was not yet time for a controlled burn.

There us definantly a problem here, but it is a more subtle issue of ouf understanding the economy. Even that flawed understanding knows the importance of the business cycle.

Well, no. Controlled burns were suppressed for decades on end [0]. It's one of the reasons for the absolutely unforgettable fires (cf. "gigafire"[1]) various places on Earth have been experiencing for the past few years straight. "Modern forestry" is getting its act together, slowly, but I don't think it's particularly controversial to suggest that the historical prevent-fires-at-all-costs thing is because of a reflexive, unexamined "fire bad" -- nor to notice that the historical thing was prevent-fires-at-all-costs.

Maybe I'm an economic illiterate, but I think saying that "most central banks [have been] increasing rates in response to inflation" is something similar. It seems to me that, if the actual intent was to combat inflation, the rates' rise would have to be a little more aggressive than it's been.

If one understands "modern forestry" to have been mostly about a reflexive, individualistic "fire bad", then the seemingly-irrational departure from the thoughtful Native controlled-burn-style management makes sense. If one understands "MMT", or maybe just "neoliberalism", as a fig-leaf to cover whatever economic activity and behaviour and model-making is most profitable to the players of the modern Great Game, then the ways and means of "governmental" "macroeconomic" activity make sense, too.

Put another way, from the perspective of an adherent of steady-state economics, the "business cycle" looks like the wobble of a wheel spinning out of true. What is a wheel for?

[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Complex_fire

> [1] Huh, I don't know why I typed that at all. After all, we're talking about forestry

No, I don't know why you typed that either, but you seem to have repeated a common trope that somehow MMT is responsible for something (inflation? general badness?). Given that no country is making policy decisions based on what MMT economics prescribes, that trope is of course complete nonsense, since responsibility would at least imply some level of influence.

Edit: FWIW, I actually get your point about revolutions generally precipitating improvements (eventually).

Yes. Destroying the world will kill me. But it will kill Elon Musk as well. Perhaps even in a gruesome and funny way. If I was considering existence not worth it, it might look like a good trade.

What a revolting comment.

> What I mean by that is that, while of course we don't really want to see the world burn, we are secretly hoping, in the dark, when no one is watching, for things to always go tits up a bit. Like there is a subconscious fascination to the aesthetics of Nero playing the lire while Rome burns. And upon deep self-reflection that's always a bit unsettling.

I'm officially on the cusp of Gen X and Millennial and feel the same thing, even with two young kids that will have to grow up and, as young adults, navigate the ashes of this imagined world.

The charitable view I take of this (for myself) is the idea of creative destruction. Yes there will be great pain for very many people, perhaps including myself and those close to me, but there's little I can do to stop the runaway freight train, so I can only hope that out of all the pain and destruction something new and better can emerge from the void it leaves.

Agreed with your take on nihilism. But gen Z is 10x moreso. On average they are so Jaded. Theyve seen everything shocking under the sun (woman fucking horse? Check. Nun eating shit out of a priests ass. Sure. Eels in a vagina. Yep. Man beheaded by terrorists. Uh huh). And then with this over exposure to all the worst the world has to offer comes a sort of paradoxical closed mindedness. Where everything is "been there done that, ur idea sucks moving on."

So the result is this strange combination of extreme worldlyness and also naivete.

Maybe. But I don't think that being desensitized equals being nihilist, nor I believe genZ has had more exposure to "shocking" content than millenials. Things like 2girls1cup and rotten.com existed before genZ was even a commonly used word.

Yeah I think the difference is that to gen z all that shock shit is like old hat.

Hahaha, perhaps we are all waiting for the shit to actually get real for a change. After decades of being squeezed out from all relevant games.

Come on, make zombies... Or something.

Zombies, as in stupid resilient slow moving half-dead aggressive humanoids operating in loosely coordinated herds? I think we created those... with social networks.

Perhaps it's anxiety caused by people who want power. "Vote for us because things are getting worse"

Maybe, but is that new? I suppose the tone of political discourse has been going down over time. Not sure how that would cause this though: anxiety is kind of the opposite of "I want to see the world burn".

We also lived through 9/11 at a very formative time, which didn't help matters.

True, but not sure it's a leading cause: I think many of us were way too young for it to "matter" (as defined as <= 14yo), as we didn't quite understand yet how shattering of the established world order that was. Like, we knew it was a big deal because of our elders reactions, but I feel it might have happened a tad too soon to be a root cause.

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