Scott Galloway: How the US is destroying young people's future [video] | Hacker News Reader

Scott Galloway: How the US is destroying young people's future [video]

ted.com

105 pointsAnon84101 comments

One more "doable" for Scott - Campaign finance reform. It doesn't matter who you vote for if when they get to congress, they represent their donors rather than the voters. We could call our current system "free speech" or we could call it "legalized bribery." We made the wrong choice.

Donald Trump's only virtue is that what you see really is what you get.

He bluntly asked for $1 billion in campaign funding from oil companies in exchange for government policy that will benefit the oil business. Everything is transactional with Trump:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil...

People took his rhetoric figuratively when they should’ve taken it literally. Now we know!

transactional is preferable for many people.

to paraphrase Aristotle Onassis, never trust anyone who won't take a bribe

A system where you can buy politicians is not democracy.

But it's still the one we have...

The social contract of working hard and being able to own a home or start a family has been broken. This is especially true in Canada, where the government seems to be doing everything in its power to erase the middle class.

Ontario's conservative govt has made the entire state a third world country.

Just to clarify the current Ontario premier comes from a family of drug dealing and massive fraud. His govt has played a part in the largest education scam in the country. All the immigration stuff you hear about comes about as students to fake universities who have been granted licenses by his govt in exchange for money and they have no intent to study.

entire state? you sure you're from Ontario, mon ami? Cuz it's a province

shillbots be gettin lazy again

In the U.S., a lot of places I go seem to be run by skeleton crews with workers that are deeply dissatisfied. Something is fundamentally going awry.

As I was waiting in a long checkout line at the grocery store (one checkout line was open of the 8 available) I looked up the owners. Turns out it is a subsidiary of a regional grocery owned by private equity. No doubt there is some calculation of cost benefit.

I took the survey on the receipt I got and told them it was clear how their private equity ownership degraded my experience, and that they need to hire more cashiers.

I have been in Tokyo for the last 2 weeks and every place I go would be considered over-employed in the US. The only time I have seen less than 2 people staffing a convenience store was at 4am. It seems like every place I go there is at least 1 or 2 people cleaning, and still several people to handle customers. I went to this tiny ramen shop, with a ticket machine for ordering food and about 15 seats and there were 4 people working. There were more staff than people at that time, but the place does get busy at other times. Makes me wonder if eliminating all jobs in favor of automation isn't a great idea after all.

Want to give any evidence of your Boogeyman Trudeau's efforts to punish the middle class?

Anyone with eyes can see adding more than a million people since COVID began without laying the groundwork in terms of residential capacity or healthcare capacity can see the impact. It’s kept wages suppressed, house and rent prices inflated, and family docs MIA.

An odd take considering that a large percentage of family doctors in Canada are immigrants.

I am not sure the relevance of your point. Are you suggesting that we have imported as many family docs as we have non-family docs on a per capita basis to keep the ratios the same? If not, what’s your point?

I'm saying we have imported far more family docs than needed to keep the ratios the same. That without immigration we'd have an even greater shortage of family docs than we do now.

Well, about a year ago he put a 2 year ban on foreigners purchasing homes. But his reason for doing this was housing market fluctuations due to COVID. Due to COVID?!

The housing market has gone to insane levels. Certainly it's not all due to foreign buyers, but why as a citizen would I want to compete on the global market for our homes? The answer is I never want to complete globally for something that should sell locally. But government never wants to stand in the way of inflows of foreign money.

Anyone I know with a home in Canada expresses the sentiment, 'thank god I got in when I did or I'd never own a home.'. And they're right, they shouldn't be, but they are.

I'm trying to parse your comment. You approve of what Trudeau did, but are complaining because he did it for the wrong reasons?

Old comment now but I'll reply anyway. I approve of what Trudeau did in that he temporarily stopped foreign buyers. But not only do I call bullshit on his reasoning I think foreign buyers of homes should never be allowed.

So ideally he shouldn't have to give this bullshit reason as they never should have been for sale on the global market in the first place.

That he would use this bullshit excuse tells me what type of person he is. But that's politicians.

He is right, but the young can change things. The sad fact is they do not vote, and if they vote at all it is only in presidential. Even in those elections well less then 50% vote.

They are a big voting block, if they all start voting, including in local elections, in about 10 years you will see change. But seems people these days want instant change.

2024 will be a big tell for the young, depending on who wins, things could get far worse for them.

Right now, the corporations determine who runs the US, the young, if that have patience, can change things by voting in all elections.

doesn't this assume they all vote as single block? if their vote is diverse then it won't make much difference

No. Political parties change their behavior to capture voting demographics. Right now politicians aren't motivated to win the young vote because we vote less.

Great point

Is there actual evidence of this occurring or is it just a hypothesis? I can’t recall offhand significant policy changes to capture voting demographics.

Maybe because voting demographics change so slowly, policy changes slowly too. Thirty years ago, when I was still in K-12 school, Baby Boomers were the largest generational voting bloc in the USA, and they still are. With a few exceptions that the rest of us are grateful for, it's been politically status-quo for pretty much my entire life.

Right, but I think you are making my point. Despite the boomers dominating for decades, we’ve seen the GOP swing far right relative to the 70s/80s. For example, Nixon massively expanded the Clean Air Act and enacted the Clean Water Act, which never would never have happened with the GOP in the last 30 years.

Younger voters tend to blue.

Approximately half (53%) of young Americans indicate they will "definitely be voting" in the 2024 general election for president. Young Americans' interest in voting in 2024 is now on par with Harvard Youth Poll data from 2020, which indicated that 54% would likely vote.

If the presidential election were held today, President Biden would outperform former President Trump among both registered (50% Biden, 37% Trump) and likely young voters under 30 (56% Biden, 37% Trump). When there is no voter screen (i.e., all young adults 18-29), the race narrows to single digits, 45% for President Biden, 37% for former President Trump, with 16 percent undecided.

Among the 1,051 "likely voters" in our sample, we found significant differences in support levels based on gender, age, race/ethnicity, and education levels, among other subgroups. For example, among likely young voters:

    President Biden's lead among young men is six points; among young women his lead is 33 points;
    President Biden's lead among 18-24 year-olds is 14 points, and among 25-29 year-olds it is 26 points;
    President Biden's lead among white voters is 3 points; among non-white voters his lead is 43 points;
    President Biden's lead among college students is 23 points; he leads by 47 points among college graduates. The race is even among those not in college and without a four-year degree.

https://iop.harvard.edu/youth-poll/47th-edition-spring-2024

Those numbers show that while the half of young people who are likely voters favor democrats, the other half of young people who don’t plan to vote must be split evenly between Biden and Trump. (For the overall average to be 45% Biden, the half that doesn’t plan to vote must be under 40% Biden to 37% Trump, with a large share probably supporting RFK Jr.)

That seems to support OP’s point. If you got that other half of young people to vote, they’d have very little effect on the election because they’re evenly split. Neither party has any reason to try and turn out those young voters.

> they all start voting, including in local elections, in about 10 years you will see change.

Who would they vote for according to you to see this change in 10 years?

Both parties have been taking turn governing and yet, here we are. A cynic would point out that we've seen empirically that voting doesn't change anything.

Every individual with a Dollar in his/her pocket votes at every transaction. This may have more influence on powerful corpororations compared to voting for a party you have even less of a relationship with or stake in.

It's a difference of kind, not degree. A dollar is a vote within a marketplace; a vote determines the shape of the marketplace itself. The idea that the market can solve all things is core to neo-liberal capitalism, but has been widely discredited. In fact, Scott Galloway's excellent talk can be seen as the direct result of neo-liberal policies since the 90's.

That's why we should not try to solve problems using it, but power and influence it has; perhaps even more than only going to vote. Point in case: Democracy does not end at the vote boot, it's not even remotely where it begins. Policy and politicians don't spawn from a vacuum, and we are all part of their environment; some choose to be part of their environment more than others ~ by various means. This helps shape the society everyone shares.

But if you don't have very many dollars in your pocket, you don't have very much say.

Votes and Money are overrated. It's possible to change legislation without being in office and on a 0 budget. I don't have the t-shirt, but i've been there and have done it. Everyone can. The focus on votes and money makes people feel more powerless than they really are, this in turn, harms democracy ~ actually is at the expense of civil/individual power&influence.

People with lots of money vote. So even if money is more powerful, dollars are a supplement for voting, not a replacement. If you don't have enough money to lobby an elected official, that makes voting that much more important.

> the young can change things

It depends on who you’re calling young and which country you’re talking about. Millennials in the US will be the largest eligible voting block for the next 30 years at least, and maybe longer if they don’t have kids at a greater rate. Gen Z [edit: typo] is the smallest generation as a percentage of the total in US history so they’ll be out voted by older voters for the rest of their lives. In most other western/developed countries even the millennials are hopelessly outnumbered by older voters.

I thought Millennials and Gen Y were the same? Did you mean to say Gen Z?

Yes I did, edited, thank you.

There is no voting solution to this.

They can. The media will do everything in their power to distract people and prevent them from identifying the things truly causing their problems. As long as people think the main problems in America are immigrants or trans people or racists, they won’t look at who is picking their pockets.

(This isn’t even to say there aren’t real problems. But they have enormously outsized influence.)

Any politician who correctly identifies these issues will be labeled as fringe. So likely the only solution will be local politics.

> The sad fact is they do not vote,

Vote for who? Like, legitimately, who?

> 2024 will be a big tell for the young, depending on who wins, things could get far worse for them.

Will it though? The current state is decades of shitty politics from both sides of the aisle leading us here.

> the young, if that have patience, can change things by voting in all elections.

Every major, positive, change in the US has come from direct action in the form of withholding labor, violent (yes, violent) protests, and other forms of action that would get you put on a list.

We are living in a society where the President is saying we're a free country while in the backdrop, people are being arrested for protesting our involvement in a war.

Voting has never, and will never, solve anything. There are examples of this over, and over again. Neither party represents the views of the majority of Americans, are extremely susceptible to bribery, and have generally no reason to care about what the average voter wants.

Beyond that, corporations also control the majority of media we consume. To the point that when there is a corporation that's not immediately acting in the self interest of the US government, we lobby to ban that (TikTok).

How exactly is voting between D and R going to actually change anything for the future generation?

Well, it may preserve democracy for another round. It’s not glamorous but the alternative is horrible.

What happens when neither candidate is your ideal candidate? In my country, it has been decades that people have had to choose between bad and worse. All handpicked by the "system" and not a single one being an ideal candidate for the "people".

this is one of my pet peeves about our so called democratic systems. how can we have a democracy if we can't choose who gets to be a candidate?

I live I the US (so I'll speak to that situation), where it certainly is difficult to influence who is on the ballot for the major parties, but we do pretty much have open ballot access, where anyone that follows the process can stand for an election, and write in votes are at least very widely accepted.

the likelihood of a write-in candidate are small. i could not find any actual statistics but this article which points out that write-in candidates do win occasionaly:

http://www.virginiaplaces.org/government/writein.html

but the article also shows that some write-in wins are based on a technicality, like when there are more seats than nominated candidates.

in other words, this is not a level playing field. write-in candidates are not on equal footing with candidates nominated by established parties. even alternative parties usually have little chance.

in a truly democratic system write-in candidates would have an equal chance to get elected compared to those nominated by major parties. i don't know what the solution here is. in the current systems, those with more funds can do more campaigning. so do we need to eliminate campaigning entirely?

Why would the chances be equal? If we ban campaigning, should we also make it illegal to be gregarious and likeable?

My point is more that you are bemoaning your lack of influence and power, not pointing out some glaring unfairness in the system

likeability and eg integrity of character are much better indicators of a good candidate than the amount of money they can spend to get their name promoted.

equal chance refers to the awareness and knowledge about each candidate among the voting population. that can be achieved by promoting all candidates equally.

for other qualities, we need to get a better understanding what makes good candidates, and educate voters to choose candidates based on that.

Vote when all the choices are oldies? Senate is the oldest it’s ever been. Many over retirement age.

We’ll be voting on two ~80 year olds as presidents who both can’t run a 100m sprint.

There are less young every year.

Screw voting, they need to run for office. I am Gen X and one of the things that bug me is that we (GenX) haven't had a President from our cohort. Bill Clinton right now is younger than both candidates and he was first president 32 years ago... Our generation has been missing from politics and it may be too late for us: Millennials should step up and run for office.

"If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting.

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote."

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, Up, Simba!

I've been hearing a lot about how the latest generations have a lot less wealth than their parents. SonI was surprised to read The Economist reporting the opposite: https://archive.is/lwKKk

That article shows millennials doing poorly though. I don’t think that article tells the full story. It uses inflation adjusted numbers but almost everyone believes real inflation is higher than government figures. The numbers are also averages- it would be great to look at different percentiles.

If we assume the article is true, that’s still not a great outcome – a younger generation achieving the same amount of wealth as much older generation. Younger generations should be achieving greater levels of wealth in an economy that’s growing and with larger amounts of deflationary technology.

The article mentions this, but housing is so much more expensive now that it's by far the largest cost for some people depending on where they live. For example, my father's first house was less than 2x his annual income. Now, in the same city, a similar house is about 17x the annual income of someone working a similar job. Even a small condo is about 8.5x.

I'm not convinced that Scott's suggestions will move the needle. Most are good ideas (e.g. term limits, more vocational training opportunities), but some I find distasteful (e.g. forced identity verification for internet services, not being entitled to social security if you've accumulated too much, etc.). We've made too many terrible decisions for too long as a nation, to the point now I feel like the spiritual malaise for the young can only be cured by hard asset prices collapsing by 30% or more.

His end slide recap is below.

Economics:

  // Increase minimum wage to $25/hr
  // AMT for high income and corporations
  // Re-fund the IRS
  // Negative income tax (i.e. UBI)
  // Eliminate capital gains exemption

Technology:

  // Remove 230 protection for algorithmically-elevated content
  // Identity verification
  // Break up Big Tech
  // Age-gating

Social Policy:

  // Universal pre-K
  // Reinstate expanded child tax credit
  // Term limits
  // Income-based affirmative action
  // Expand college enrollment & vocational programs

Mental Health:

  // Ban phones in schools
  // Invest in 3rd places
  // Big Brothers/Sisters programs
  // National service requirement

I don't know how anyone can look at what's going on with AI and think that now is a great time to make it illegal for people to work for less than 50K a year. It would be absolutely devastating for young people especially.

Same for UK. Salaries and house prices diverged so sharply that it’s a complete farce for anyone coming at this now without generational wealth

The whole world nearly is ruining young folks and couples by letting housing be so expensive. It's ridiculous given the amazing tech we have for comfortable shelter, but prices are still sky high. There's no excuse. Forget coastal California, lots of cheap land is available.

Been a fan of Scott’s for awhile. Don’t agree about everything but I think this video calls out the most important systemic problems.

I agree on all his diagnostics. The solution part is the part I'm not totally on-board.

I agree, and it's sad to feel the need to say this, but it's so important in this inflammatory era to respond positively to ideas and opinions despite not agreeing 100% or even 80%, because too often the baby is thrown out with the bathwater (especially online)

God yes, let’s bring this back. 80% agreement or even 50% is a foundation for progress.

Insistence on 100% agreement is a recipe for fragmentation.

Interesting that Scott mentions NIMBY as an issue early in the video, but doesn't list it in his final slide on the prescription to our societies ails.

All of these problems seem downstream of housing affordability. It appears more wealth can be accumulated from young people having expanded access to more housing to build equity with. With more wealth, the young people can start sorting the mess out themselves.

I'm hesitant to support many of his proposals because they seem much smaller in magnitude to NIMBY and many could have civil liberty concerns.

The most amazing thing I've seen all week ... and of course this gets "flagged".

Yes, it's discouraging that HNers aren't resilient enough to handle differing opinions. I hope it's a vocal minority and not truly representative of the userbase.

I'd love to hear a flagger's justification on this one. Does this video really violate the site's guidelines, or do you just not like the content and are using your flag as a "mega downvote"?

I find it interesting to think you can socially engineer a society. It's such a unfathomable complex system that most the time, I imagine we're probably only 'right' by accident. Like one of scott's prescriptions is higher taxes - sure maybe that could be good if paired with wiser government spending but realistically that may just get poured into unproductive subsidies, regulations, or healthcare and military-complexes. So maybe you just tax less and accept this will lead to wealth inequality but maybe a benevolent billionaire class will be more likely to 'fix' society more than our 'elected' representatives can.

You know, your proposals are also engineering society. It’s just a society of the 1800s and before. It sucked. It sucked for the vast majority of people. Life may still suck, but it sucked a lot worse then.

To be completely clear here. When you say, “ accept this will lead to wealth inequality but maybe a benevolent billionaire class will be more likely to 'fix' society more than our 'elected' representatives can.” You’re advocating for authoritarian oligarchy.

Fuck. That. Shit. Fuck that in whatever they find the least desirable.

Edit: Jesus. I really the above comment. It’s not even internally consistent logic. It’s just dumb.

Do you use twitter? The rhetoric in this post has the exact cadence of someone who spends a lot of time on social media.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that a social media company owned by a billionaire would amplify such convenient talking points. He amplifies his own account there as well.

If you read through his retweets and “original” content it is a litany of things which don’t matter and are meant to invoke an emotional response to distract you from the things that do.

> I find it interesting to think you can socially engineer a society.

That's certainly not a new from of arrogance, people without the WIS to match their INT have been trying to construct utopias for quite a while.

Yet psyops/marketing proof to be very effective, thus it does work to a certain extend. Both are currently engineering society at above cold war levels. How effective it is might even be relatively simple to measure because of various methods of the past being reintroduced.

This feels like a non sequitur apropos the parent comment. Could you elaborate?

The following ancient cold war era video will probably make you understand what i mean and more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gnpCqsXE8g History is repeating itself.

>maybe a benevolent billionaire class will be more likely to 'fix' society more than our 'elected' representatives can

1. they're literally not

2. theoretically, representatives are representative

if you're concerned about someone's choices, i think you have a better chance at influencing the choices of someone who is at least nominally and maybe actually accountable to you.

the talk is about material allocations. it's actually pretty easy to just deliberately change material allocations, we're doing it all the time. having an opinion on how we do that is not some kind of engineering.

the accountability within our current power structure is quite debatable, but you can change that too.

There's no modern eqivalent of Carnegie libraries. I'll take my chances with the government, at least we have some control of what they do

Khan Academy?

There’s a ton of kids in Africa who are not dead because the Gates Foundation made it so.

> I find it interesting to think you can socially engineer a society.

It’s not really a secret. That’s the entire purpose of our tax code, social security, Pell grants, and pretty much every government program out there.

> a benevolent billionaire class

This is called oligarchy. For the vast majority of people, an oligarchy is not a very nice place to live. Just look at Russia.

I should add there’s nothing about tax breaks for billionaires that will make them “benevolent”. Typically that kind of wishful thinking metastasizes as a trickle down economics myth, but time has shown that to be a myth.

This is correct on the symptoms (it's harder to make a living now) but still missing a full understanding of the causes.

Much of this comes down to debt. After the GFC, US government debt went from 60% of GDP to 100%. After the pandemic it shot up and settled at 120%. [1]

Countries don't function well with this level of debt. Inflation is a way of dealing with debt without explicitly raising taxes. But it's the most regressive possible way of taxing people.

If we talk about loving our children- non-functional government debt is simply stealing from them- our children have to pay it back. That's 25 trillion of public debt. The debt to revenue ratio is almost 7- that's 7 years we want our children to work to pay for the things we are doing now. [2]

Debt is useful when it creates more value long-term than was otherwise possible. However, much of our government spending produces less than one useful dollar of value for every dollar spent. The most obvious being the trillions of dollars spent on most of the recent wars. I am not a libertarian- choosing between big or small government is still a mistaken line of thinking. The government should be doing things for us, but doing them well (productively, a dollar in produces more than a dollar of value). If they can't do them well then its probably better to do less until they can figure out how to do them well again.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_St...

He did mention debt towards the end. Debt is certainly part of it, but not the entire picture. I don’t think the substantial increase in teen girl suicide is because they spend too much time reading up on debt numbers.

The single biggest opportunity equalizer for the young generations come from 2 unlikely sources: COVID (mandatory WFH) and Musk (ubiquitous internet access). This opens doors for anyone who is hard working and can follow though a long term plan. No generation wealth needed. Study hard, get remote work, buy a cheap piece of land in the middle of nowhere, get married, get a mortgate, get kids.

Focus on your own stuff. Avoid politics, avoid social media, avoid HCOL cities, avoid career ladder. Do your 9-5 each day, log off and invest time in a hobby, family, farm etc.

Is there any large country that has not utterly destroyed their young people’s future?

global ocean temperature has broken records every single day for more than a year running now

What does that have to do with anything?

It seems off topic but yea I get what he’s saying, all countries are basically in this mess together because of climate change.

It’s a bit reductive. It doesn’t explain the discrepancies between countries. Every country is going to be negatively impacted, that doesn’t mean the problems we are already seeing are the result of climate change.

On the other hand it does speak to the fact that governments can’t seem to get their shit together even when a problem is so clearly carved up and served on a silver platter as climate change.

Climate change is not a clear problem, much less one that is clearly due to humans. There are no clear solutions either if it is real. Everyone needs fossil fuels until some actual alternatives make sense, regardless of what hysterical "experts" have to say about it. These same "experts" are probably secretly plotting to kill off or imprison billions of people to reduce emissions.

Climate change, if it's even real and worth worrying about, is a different mess from prevailing economic conditions. That is, unless you think elites are sabotaging our economies and lives to advance some climate agenda. I don't put it past them but I think the economy is more likely screwed for other reasons.

exactly!!

It would be a bit reductive to say all countries are the same. For example infant mortality, the United States is nowhere close to the best.

Checking other metrics Scott Galloway mentioned, it’s not surprising they are all highly correlated.

This isn't really what happened. All financial systems were built on the assumption of massive (native) population growth, including of course job growth. When this failed, next up was mass-immigration to attempt to make up for the fact that the numbers coming out of schools can't make up for people "leaving the workforce". Of course, now we find out immigration ALSO cannot cover the people leaving the workforce. Some of it works, to be fair, but too much doesn't, and people don't like the culture being imported.

The issue is, by the way, not that growth stops but that we're currently committed to about a halving of population in most of the developed world. But if nothing changes that could easily become an 80% or more drop.

There is no way in hell our financial system survives the next 20 years without MAJOR changes. Not going to happen.

Is Norway large enough for you? A big part comes down to building up debt that children pay for or in Norway’s case building up reserves that are given to children.

Did anyone else get served at ad for visiting Canada after finishing this video?

Australia too.

With a "little" bit of help from China.

How so?

Looking forward to learning how a sub 1% rate of foreign property purchases is really the problem in Australia

https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/overseas-investors-are-... https://foreigninvestment.gov.au/sites/foreigninvestment.gov...

Yes - I question whether his statement that the US has the highest housing costs in the world. Australia is out of control.

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