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Comment by raziel2701 | Hacker News Reader

The story we were telling young people that if they apply themselves, go to school and get a job they'll be able to afford family, house, vacations is moving further and further away for more and more people.

The turn towards financial nihilism will continue.

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This doesn't make any sense. The population has experienced massive uplift over the last few decades. Their parents weren't going on vacations with the family as kids, they were struggling to put food on the table. Houses are outpacing inflation, but the home ownership rate continues to climb.

Yeah, but it’s also plain greed, and it’d be hard to tell the ratio.

The threshold for greed is higher than the median net worth of an American. We tell people they need "generational" wealth to a make it in this country because housing, education, and healthcare are all so expensive

No need to tell. Just look at who can afford detached single family homes in tier1 cities: white-collar Dual-income and generational wealth families.

Governments have only managed to slow, not stop or reverse this trend.

While "financial nihilism" is part of it, I think we should be putting even more attention towards the forces that are trying to deliberately encourage it for profit.

Kind of like pathological gambling: Sure, some people are susceptible, but there's also an entire industry around finding them and making them succumb.

We live in a capitalist society, not a labor-oriented society. The way to make big money is through capital - ie: purchasing property and then selling it for (hopefully) profit.

Laboring in a capitalist economy is a loser's strategy because your capital is you body's ability to produce value and that has a maximum physical limit. Why participate in an economy using a strategy that has a natural upper bound? It makes no sense. You're not even playing the game poorly - you're not playing the game at all.

Did it never occur to you how the vast majority of people acquire initial capital is via labor?

The vast majority of lottery winners buy lottery tickets.

This is the logical end conclusion, but in reality, we live in a middle ground where plenty of people have and will live in a society where they can sell their labor for a perfectly content life.

This is becoming less and less true by the day. Salaries are dwindling while the stock market is roaring, and it's already the case that speculation brings more income in this country than work.

It's not sustainable, capitalist societies always degenerate into a society of owners who get the majority of the wealth while workers get scraps. This is what's to blame for the social unrest the West is experimenting.

A healthy and successful society can’t exist in combination with a winner takes all (or strongly leaning towards it) economic system.

While the pie is growing due to increasing productivity for the most part it’s still zero sum.

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