I have trouble predicting how public sentiment will evolve over time.
I'm not that young, and still and the last 10 years have left me with an absolutely blistering distrust of the 70+ crowd on any matter pertaining to positions of authority. I'd like to see ~67 and ~72 become the other 18 and 21: hard lines beyond which the law progressively rescinds the presumption of total competence.
It's not a pretty solution. There are certainly some 14 year olds who are more deserving of a drivers license than many of legal age. I would welcome a world where we can actually establish and enforce criteria that allow us to move beyond such crude numeric thresholds. But in the meantime, the bulk of us need protection from statistics. Desperately.
Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.
Venice was the longest lasting, most stable state in Europe.
It may have been stable and dominant in spite of that, like America, currently being run by senile old men. The human mind is a biological computer and it isn’t pretty the older it gets.
Average is probably not what you need to worry about: I'd bet David Attenborough and Mel Brooks still have IQs considerably higher than the average 25-year old. And I'm not convinced IQ is as important as that elusive factor called character.
But you may be right. Maybe what the US really needs is a lagoon.
Welcome to my rathole: Venetian history. To expand on your thesis, the Council of Ten was the executive power in Venice, but the Doge and minor council attended the Council of Ten meetings and the Doge often chaired those meetings. And even if he was powerless, the Council was made up of other old men. I don't want to push this whole argument, I'm not recommending we adopt the Venetian constitution. But I don't think you can blame current chaos on age.
Well at the times of Doges the world hardly revolutionized. Nowadays a person in their 80s has lived through the rise of at least three different medias (radio, TV, internet) and the world has never changed so fast.
The interactive challenges and the step-by-step mental models for recursive types and distributive conditionals are incredibly well-structured. It's cool to transform type gymnastics into a systematic engineering discipline.
Term limits are perhaps the dumbest idea that ever plagued democracy. The idea of mandatory firing your most qualified, experienced employees in an incredibly difficult job that can only be learned with on-the-job experience is literally insane. If not for term limits, the US would have had Obama in the presidency this entire time instead of the absolute garbage scraps that were left over when they fired the only person remotely competent enough to lead them.
No. Term limits have no bearing on the skill floor, only the skill ceiling. By capping employment at 8 years, you place a hard limit on how good your employees can become. However, removing that limit does not magically make all of your employees good. You are still responsible for choosing to employ competent employees. If, after 8 years, an employee is still not good at their job, you have the option to fire them. That American voters are currently not exercising the option to fire bad employees is its own problem, and not a problem that is reasonably solved by mandatory firings, because the underlying cause is still there and voters who are inclined to vote for bad employees will simply choose to employ new bad employees.
Back when USSR was a global superpower there was a trend in sci-fi to describe the communist societies of the future.
One of the distinctive features of such societies was the ability to switch jobs every few years, including changes from leadership positions to menial jobs, from engineering to humanities.
At that point, the blame lies with the electorate for choosing to re-elect somebody who has a proven track record of harming them. You can't realistically prevent people from making bad choices in a democracy, at some point the voters have to have accountability for who they choose to vote for. Restricting who they are allowed to vote for is liable to backfire if you're arbitrarily removing the best candidates from the pool, especially out of a misguided belief that term limits prevent elderly politicians from taking power (yet Trump was elected for his first term at 70, his second term at 78, and Biden for his first term at 78... because, allegedly, disqualifying 55-year-old Obama in 2016 was somehow meant to help prevent geriatric politicians from being in power).
> Our gerontocracy is not the result of a malevolent plan, .. Boomers aren't distinctively evil.. The fact that they are so numerous and the fact that they are aging in era when life has been extended make the syndrome endemic. .. America faces a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of society itself. The melodrama of succession—waiting for the old to make way for the new—defines not only our politics but also our economy and our culture writ large.
I'll be honest, everyone I know thinks cordial relations between the generations are over. Seems like the author knows it too but wants to be gentle. Let's just say it. America straight up looks Saturn devouring his children. Is he horrified? Sure, but mostly just horrified to be caught in the act. And now that he thinks about it, kind of disgusted with you that you'd want to be so judgemental about the whole thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son
We may continue to see generational wealth-pumps installed by the elderly to destroy the youth, but at some point soon it will be a kind of survival cannibalism. Boomers did it for fun and are still doubling down every chance they get.
This is likely the worst issue humanity will be facing over the next 50 years, even more than climate change.
An increasingly old demographic will sabatoge the future of humanity as they drain enormous resources and abuse democratic processes to reroute resources to their preservation of life over young people and familes.
Young people and families will choke to death under the strain of elders who demand unlimited services, money, support while outvoting them, staying in jobs and houses and giving little to nothing back to society.
Innovation will grind to a halt, families will continue to shrink, work hours will get longer and longer as taxes get higher and higher to pay for and increasingly super old leadership and voting base.
Society will begin to lose hope to solve problems like going into space or fixing climate change as increasingly the elderly population will obsess over themselves and continued life.
It is one of the hardest moral problems we will face in our era.
I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money, which in this case is the boomers votes with the younger generations money. This will continue until nothing is left.
This already happened with the triple pension lock in GB, mathematically ensuring the bankruptcy of the state.
>...I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money,
In the last few decades both political parties in the USA have tried to outdo each other in reckless over-spending, but for the first couple hundred years that wasn't the case. Something changed.
I know of a senior couple where the husband recently retired after forty years of working in a professional field. They live in a house worth over $750k that is paid off. They have three new or late-model vehicles. Both the husband and wife could, if necessary, work for an income.
They also collect Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance checks after enrolling for them. The common name for this is Social Security.
Why the hell are they able to collect on that? They have the ability to work and assets that could readily be made liquid to fund living expenses.
Because they were promised it - fundamentally leaving the rich out of the social safety net doesn't even get us much and administrating the distinction costs money, and I am no fan of the wealthiest get additional benefits.
I think solving inequality will not be about reducing access to said safety nets but increasing them for all.
The problem with "solving inequality" is there is no incentive for one to do better. If one can live as well as everyone else, with no effort, why should one make the effort?
Kind of a strawman though, innit? If "civilization will stagnate and humans will be unmotivated blobs" is one extreme, then the other is something like "condoning economic genocide".
In reality, few are concerned that Alice has a much nicer car than Bob, compared to concerns that Bob will die without insulin. Get Bob his insulin, and he will still be motivated to have a nicer car.
I think it's important to emphasize that much of the in/out money asymmetry in SS is not rich versus poor ... but old versus dead.
Which, incidentally, is good and proper! OASDI is an insurance policy to cover an (alive) person faced with starvation or living in a ditch. That's a very different set of tradeoffs from an investment account that can pass to children who don't need it.
Like all insurance, it depends on a portion of people who pay in and then don't need it, even if sometimes that's because they've, er, passed beyond all material needs.
They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect.
Social Security as an insurance product is fiction, but playing into the fiction helps it survive to do the thing it was built for: keep the elderly out of the poor houses / off the street.
Payout rates drop at higher income, and portions of the payout are taxable at higher income, so it's not like it's completely income/wealth blind.
> They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect.
That's just it: they're not old. Not in the way a 65-year-old was old in the 1930s.
If they had to farm, mine, log, or work in a factory, yeah, they'd be too old to work. That was most of the work available when OASDI was created, and that's what it's for: to keep you from becoming destitute as an elderly person when there is no ability to work.
But they don't have to do those things. We're a service economy now and most of that involves sitting at a desk or very light office labor. They can still do that to sustain their lifestyle. Failing that, they could liquidate assets.
We're handing out money to people as a treat for their 65th b-day while the national debt is continuing to rise and their kids are crushed under loan debt, medical debt, and further revenue extraction to keep the shares backing retirement accounts increasing in value.
If you work for 40 years, chances are you will have accumulated some assets. I'm not sure that "sell your house and cars to pay for food" is a policy that will be popular.
Equally those same people have paid taxes for 40 years, paid into social security (to the benefit of their elders) and so on.
Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable. A job occupied by a 70 year old is a job not occupied by someone younger. If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math).
Look, most all of us will get old and eventually claim on social security or whatever. Politically just "ending that" is pretty much a non-starter to anyone who has been contributing for any length of time. Even fiddling with the edges of it (raising the retirement age) will get you voted out of office.
> Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable.
That presumes there are a fixed number of jobs. Anyone can create a job, even doing simple things like going door to door and offering to mow the lawn.
Depends on geography of course, but it's not rare at all for boomers to have this many houses as a normal part of how they experienced middle-class life. As a group they are not only more likely to have rental/investment property, but also more likely to have multiple such properties. Why would they sell? They can get you to pay for all their services, and vote as a block to deny and remove services elsewhere.
Commentators: "America's young are addicted to their phones, hopelessly politically polarized, and socially illiterate. Test scores are dropping and critical thinking skills are at an all-time low. They hate and fear the other gender, mainline conspiracy theory podcasts, struggle with anxiety, were coddled from birth, etc. etc."
Also commentators: "The elderly have to go. We need fresh blood."
(Yes I acknowledge there is a middle position where you elect 45-year-olds who came of age before the internet yet are still reasonably sharp mentally. I just think it's interesting that the two narratives above seem to coexist so easily.)
Ah yes, the squeeze in the middle. My default assumption is that people outside ~35-45 range are often impatient to the point that they are, for practical purposes, functionally illiterate
Older side has those who invented and lived by powerpoints / the executive summary, and they are more executive than ever, preferring to leave early or not show up at all because it's time for golf. On the younger side, people who grew up on social media and twitter, very media literate in some respects but also often stuck at high-school level reading / writing at best. They are leaving early too, because it's not like staying will help them get ahead!
You know what these very diverse groups have in common? Shared disinterest in nuance, and the idea that no matter how subtle something is, 280 chars or 2 slides should just about cover it.
A Modest Proposal: Allow different tax rates for taxpayers who could vote, but don't. Perhaps if the pain was more personal, then few people would regularly vote straight-ticket for the Apathetic Party?
In Australia, mandatory voting is compelled real or virtual attendance.
You are required to cast or mail in an anonymous response, that response can be blank, a vote for someone not listed, a regular vote, a donkey vote, paper with many pictures of various genitalia, etc.
No speech is compelled, no pen to paper is compelled, just that registered voters are ticked off the rolls and those registered that don't respond provide at least a weak excuse (my grandmother was sick that day) or face a nominal fine (eventually).
Think of it a citizens part to play in a democracy, the commitment to at least pay attention to the government hired by and paid for by citizens.
Yeah, I've lived in Australia and the US. The fine isn't big, the attempts at suppressing voter turnout or inconvenience aren't there, and the privacy of the ballot box means that even if you turn up, and put a ballot in the box, no-one's stopping you writing "You all suck" and not casting any preferences.
But at that point you are choosing to explicitly express your non-support of the candidates. That is still more meaningful than simply not showing up IMO
Here’s a better proposal: add none of the above to every ballot. If a super majority (say 80%) pick that the election is an automatic do-over and the people on the ballot can’t run for a period of say five years.
A couple cycles of this will flush the crap out of the system.
9 hours, 5 serious HN users replying...and nobody noting that "A Modest Proposal" might flag satire.*
Or that my "proposed" solution, in many ways, describes the current status quo. Tricks like California's Prop. 13 have created enormous gaps between the taxes paid by the old and the young. Warren Buffet has criticized how much lower his own (income) tax rates are than his secretary's rates.
We could pay people to vote. Many states have unemployment insurance and that system could be repurposed to give people a wage for election day without making it political.
This would mostly end up punishing people who live in places where voting is deliberately made difficult due to having to skip an entire workday (and its pay, if you're paid hourly instead of salaried) to go to some out-of-the-way location to vote.
People in America die from preventable illnesses constantly because they cannot afford access to care but I guess they forgot to protect the ability to not die or whatever.
No, they're already being suppressed. They'll take the easiest action possible to ease the pain, which means voting for whoever does away with the fines.
Old people are organized and more social. I see it in my community. They run the newsletters and they host community events. "Oh that's because they're retired!" No, many of them are not. Many still work.
I want the gerontocracy to end, but I'm also worried what takes its place. Gen Xers like me seem to lack some of the abilities present in our older generations.
We'll probably be more equitable and fair, but will we be as politically effective and organized towards achieving our goals? I sort of doubt it.
Organization is a skill that can be passed on, and to the degree that old people are still doing it themselves they’re depriving us of opportunities to learn and to practice and to benefit from their experience. That’s why we’re not as good at it.
Sure, and if I was so inclined I could go rub noses with them. They're eager to find young folks who are community minded. But I don't want that. I'm gen x and full of cynicism and antisocial attitudes. The only people I know who aren't that way in my generation are churchgoing types and a few influencers.
I think we're talking about different things then.
Nobody is asking for equal result. Equity means sharing the rewards of productivity, instead of allowing a group of people who do nothing get rich off of other people's hard work. That's fair.
> Nobody is asking for equal result. Equity means sharing the rewards of productivity, instead of allowing a group of people who do nothing get rich off of other people's hard work.
Equality: starting out at the same position, for example we have equal rights under the law
Equity: winding up at the same position, for example when everybody in a race wins the same medal, regardless of how hard they trained or how talented they are.
They've had decades to save up the money that allows them to do the things alongside work.
They also came up in a time and place that allowed them to build social relationships outside of work. Many Gen Xers and Millennials just... don't have that kind of personal time. I know several people in my circle of friends who don't want to do anything after work because they're exhausted. Bills gotta be paid, and there's more pressure to squeeze more productivity and consumption out of individuals than there was in 1980-1995. A lot of that pressure, oddly enough, comes from the necessity to keep shareholder returns high to keep the retirement accounts of the Boomers flush with cash.
Gen X and Millennials are also less likely to have had kids than the Boomers, so the socialization that came along with having a child (extracurriculars, PTA meetings, etc.) just never happened.
We incentivized, and eventually started requiring, economic output and consumption over building in-person social networks and hosting events outside of work. It was what we considered important.
I have trouble predicting how public sentiment will evolve over time.
I'm not that young, and still and the last 10 years have left me with an absolutely blistering distrust of the 70+ crowd on any matter pertaining to positions of authority. I'd like to see ~67 and ~72 become the other 18 and 21: hard lines beyond which the law progressively rescinds the presumption of total competence.
It's not a pretty solution. There are certainly some 14 year olds who are more deserving of a drivers license than many of legal age. I would welcome a world where we can actually establish and enforce criteria that allow us to move beyond such crude numeric thresholds. But in the meantime, the bulk of us need protection from statistics. Desperately.
Go look at the demographics of the last election and then tell me which groups shouldn't be allowed to vote.
While I mostly agree...
Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.
Venice was the longest lasting, most stable state in Europe.
It may have been stable and dominant in spite of that, like America, currently being run by senile old men. The human mind is a biological computer and it isn’t pretty the older it gets.
https://medium.com/psyc-406-2015/how-fast-does-iq-decline-ca...
Average is probably not what you need to worry about: I'd bet David Attenborough and Mel Brooks still have IQs considerably higher than the average 25-year old. And I'm not convinced IQ is as important as that elusive factor called character.
But you may be right. Maybe what the US really needs is a lagoon.
The Doge had no power.
Welcome to my rathole: Venetian history. To expand on your thesis, the Council of Ten was the executive power in Venice, but the Doge and minor council attended the Council of Ten meetings and the Doge often chaired those meetings. And even if he was powerless, the Council was made up of other old men. I don't want to push this whole argument, I'm not recommending we adopt the Venetian constitution. But I don't think you can blame current chaos on age.
Well at the times of Doges the world hardly revolutionized. Nowadays a person in their 80s has lived through the rise of at least three different medias (radio, TV, internet) and the world has never changed so fast.
Being ruled by Generation Lead doesn’t seem like a great improvement.
Venetian Republic wasn't big on lead piping. not what you'd expect for an Italian entity..
lead-ership
Its right there in the damn name!
The interactive challenges and the step-by-step mental models for recursive types and distributive conditionals are incredibly well-structured. It's cool to transform type gymnastics into a systematic engineering discipline.
Term limits would fix it
Demographics in most developed countries make catering to old people the strategy to win elections.
Term limits are perhaps the dumbest idea that ever plagued democracy. The idea of mandatory firing your most qualified, experienced employees in an incredibly difficult job that can only be learned with on-the-job experience is literally insane. If not for term limits, the US would have had Obama in the presidency this entire time instead of the absolute garbage scraps that were left over when they fired the only person remotely competent enough to lead them.
If your hypothesis had any merit, shouldn’t Congress work far better than it does?
No. Term limits have no bearing on the skill floor, only the skill ceiling. By capping employment at 8 years, you place a hard limit on how good your employees can become. However, removing that limit does not magically make all of your employees good. You are still responsible for choosing to employ competent employees. If, after 8 years, an employee is still not good at their job, you have the option to fire them. That American voters are currently not exercising the option to fire bad employees is its own problem, and not a problem that is reasonably solved by mandatory firings, because the underlying cause is still there and voters who are inclined to vote for bad employees will simply choose to employ new bad employees.
Back when USSR was a global superpower there was a trend in sci-fi to describe the communist societies of the future.
One of the distinctive features of such societies was the ability to switch jobs every few years, including changes from leadership positions to menial jobs, from engineering to humanities.
P.S. See Ivan Yefremov works for instance.
Except in many cases the experience isn't benefiting the electorate.
At that point, the blame lies with the electorate for choosing to re-elect somebody who has a proven track record of harming them. You can't realistically prevent people from making bad choices in a democracy, at some point the voters have to have accountability for who they choose to vote for. Restricting who they are allowed to vote for is liable to backfire if you're arbitrarily removing the best candidates from the pool, especially out of a misguided belief that term limits prevent elderly politicians from taking power (yet Trump was elected for his first term at 70, his second term at 78, and Biden for his first term at 78... because, allegedly, disqualifying 55-year-old Obama in 2016 was somehow meant to help prevent geriatric politicians from being in power).
> Our gerontocracy is not the result of a malevolent plan, .. Boomers aren't distinctively evil.. The fact that they are so numerous and the fact that they are aging in era when life has been extended make the syndrome endemic. .. America faces a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of society itself. The melodrama of succession—waiting for the old to make way for the new—defines not only our politics but also our economy and our culture writ large.
I'll be honest, everyone I know thinks cordial relations between the generations are over. Seems like the author knows it too but wants to be gentle. Let's just say it. America straight up looks Saturn devouring his children. Is he horrified? Sure, but mostly just horrified to be caught in the act. And now that he thinks about it, kind of disgusted with you that you'd want to be so judgemental about the whole thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son
We may continue to see generational wealth-pumps installed by the elderly to destroy the youth, but at some point soon it will be a kind of survival cannibalism. Boomers did it for fun and are still doubling down every chance they get.
Sounds dramatic, but what are we talking about here?
Are you planning to work through democratic processes or do you mean revolution?
by law, then by unrest, then by revolution.
Wait...aren't you quoting the Boomers from the 60s?
“The world is run by old men in a hurry”
https://www.ft.com/content/1d41a591-940d-4936-b79f-4c7857138...
This is likely the worst issue humanity will be facing over the next 50 years, even more than climate change.
An increasingly old demographic will sabatoge the future of humanity as they drain enormous resources and abuse democratic processes to reroute resources to their preservation of life over young people and familes.
Young people and families will choke to death under the strain of elders who demand unlimited services, money, support while outvoting them, staying in jobs and houses and giving little to nothing back to society.
Innovation will grind to a halt, families will continue to shrink, work hours will get longer and longer as taxes get higher and higher to pay for and increasingly super old leadership and voting base.
Society will begin to lose hope to solve problems like going into space or fixing climate change as increasingly the elderly population will obsess over themselves and continued life.
It is one of the hardest moral problems we will face in our era.
If only the olds would die we could build more datacenters!
More seriously, why wouldn't older, longer-lived people be more likely to address long-term problems like climate change?
When 250 years old you reach, look as good, you will not!
I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money, which in this case is the boomers votes with the younger generations money. This will continue until nothing is left.
This already happened with the triple pension lock in GB, mathematically ensuring the bankruptcy of the state.
>...I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money,
In the last few decades both political parties in the USA have tried to outdo each other in reckless over-spending, but for the first couple hundred years that wasn't the case. Something changed.
It's happening in the US, too.
I know of a senior couple where the husband recently retired after forty years of working in a professional field. They live in a house worth over $750k that is paid off. They have three new or late-model vehicles. Both the husband and wife could, if necessary, work for an income.
They also collect Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance checks after enrolling for them. The common name for this is Social Security.
Why the hell are they able to collect on that? They have the ability to work and assets that could readily be made liquid to fund living expenses.
Because they were promised it - fundamentally leaving the rich out of the social safety net doesn't even get us much and administrating the distinction costs money, and I am no fan of the wealthiest get additional benefits.
I think solving inequality will not be about reducing access to said safety nets but increasing them for all.
The problem with "solving inequality" is there is no incentive for one to do better. If one can live as well as everyone else, with no effort, why should one make the effort?
Kind of a strawman though, innit? If "civilization will stagnate and humans will be unmotivated blobs" is one extreme, then the other is something like "condoning economic genocide".
In reality, few are concerned that Alice has a much nicer car than Bob, compared to concerns that Bob will die without insulin. Get Bob his insulin, and he will still be motivated to have a nicer car.
> Kind of a strawman though, innit?
Not at all. It's the primary reason why communes fail.
I think there's likely a steel man version of "solving inequality" that's a little less radical than "establish a commune".
Something like "arrest the trend towards upward accumulation which also reduces incentives to excel", maybe.
> Why the hell are they able to collect on that?
People in the higher income brackets get far less back on SS than they paid in.
I think it's important to emphasize that much of the in/out money asymmetry in SS is not rich versus poor ... but old versus dead.
Which, incidentally, is good and proper! OASDI is an insurance policy to cover an (alive) person faced with starvation or living in a ditch. That's a very different set of tradeoffs from an investment account that can pass to children who don't need it.
Like all insurance, it depends on a portion of people who pay in and then don't need it, even if sometimes that's because they've, er, passed beyond all material needs.
Yeah, because they aren’t in need of a social safety net.
They shouldn't get any.
This is a fund for widows, orphans, and those who are simply unable to earn any sort of money to fund their survival. They're none of the above.
They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect.
Social Security as an insurance product is fiction, but playing into the fiction helps it survive to do the thing it was built for: keep the elderly out of the poor houses / off the street.
Payout rates drop at higher income, and portions of the payout are taxable at higher income, so it's not like it's completely income/wealth blind.
> They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect.
That's just it: they're not old. Not in the way a 65-year-old was old in the 1930s.
If they had to farm, mine, log, or work in a factory, yeah, they'd be too old to work. That was most of the work available when OASDI was created, and that's what it's for: to keep you from becoming destitute as an elderly person when there is no ability to work.
But they don't have to do those things. We're a service economy now and most of that involves sitting at a desk or very light office labor. They can still do that to sustain their lifestyle. Failing that, they could liquidate assets.
We're handing out money to people as a treat for their 65th b-day while the national debt is continuing to rise and their kids are crushed under loan debt, medical debt, and further revenue extraction to keep the shares backing retirement accounts increasing in value.
They get much more out of it than they paid in. The younger cohorts get much less out of it than they paid in.
Thats not insurance, that’s generational fraud. It’s a ponzi scheme.
If you work for 40 years, chances are you will have accumulated some assets. I'm not sure that "sell your house and cars to pay for food" is a policy that will be popular.
Equally those same people have paid taxes for 40 years, paid into social security (to the benefit of their elders) and so on.
Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable. A job occupied by a 70 year old is a job not occupied by someone younger. If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math).
Look, most all of us will get old and eventually claim on social security or whatever. Politically just "ending that" is pretty much a non-starter to anyone who has been contributing for any length of time. Even fiddling with the edges of it (raising the retirement age) will get you voted out of office.
>... If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math).
Economists refer to this idea as the lump of labour fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
> Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable.
That presumes there are a fixed number of jobs. Anyone can create a job, even doing simple things like going door to door and offering to mow the lawn.
SS has to pay everyone to be viable. If you make it more complicated the politics turn into a nightmare.
Social security is already a redistribution scheme, it already is more complicated.
> They have three new or late-model vehicles.
Depends on geography of course, but it's not rare at all for boomers to have this many houses as a normal part of how they experienced middle-class life. As a group they are not only more likely to have rental/investment property, but also more likely to have multiple such properties. Why would they sell? They can get you to pay for all their services, and vote as a block to deny and remove services elsewhere.
Commentators: "America's young are addicted to their phones, hopelessly politically polarized, and socially illiterate. Test scores are dropping and critical thinking skills are at an all-time low. They hate and fear the other gender, mainline conspiracy theory podcasts, struggle with anxiety, were coddled from birth, etc. etc."
Also commentators: "The elderly have to go. We need fresh blood."
(Yes I acknowledge there is a middle position where you elect 45-year-olds who came of age before the internet yet are still reasonably sharp mentally. I just think it's interesting that the two narratives above seem to coexist so easily.)
But are they the same commentators each time?
I didn't claim they were. Just claimed that those two narratives have been coexisting for a while and I've never seen them duke it out.
Honestly, 45 year olds will probably have some of the most objective views across that reality.
Ah yes, the squeeze in the middle. My default assumption is that people outside ~35-45 range are often impatient to the point that they are, for practical purposes, functionally illiterate
Older side has those who invented and lived by powerpoints / the executive summary, and they are more executive than ever, preferring to leave early or not show up at all because it's time for golf. On the younger side, people who grew up on social media and twitter, very media literate in some respects but also often stuck at high-school level reading / writing at best. They are leaving early too, because it's not like staying will help them get ahead!
You know what these very diverse groups have in common? Shared disinterest in nuance, and the idea that no matter how subtle something is, 280 chars or 2 slides should just about cover it.
It's almost like there are different people out there with different ideas about things.
A Modest Proposal: Allow different tax rates for taxpayers who could vote, but don't. Perhaps if the pain was more personal, then few people would regularly vote straight-ticket for the Apathetic Party?
Penalizing people who don't vote will not result in carefully considered votes. Voting rights include the choice to not vote.
Beyond "what superficially sounds best for me", I don't see much evidence of "carefully considered" voting now. :(
Mandatory voting would be nice to have, but it is a form of compelled speech.
Wrong.
In Australia, mandatory voting is compelled real or virtual attendance.
You are required to cast or mail in an anonymous response, that response can be blank, a vote for someone not listed, a regular vote, a donkey vote, paper with many pictures of various genitalia, etc.
No speech is compelled, no pen to paper is compelled, just that registered voters are ticked off the rolls and those registered that don't respond provide at least a weak excuse (my grandmother was sick that day) or face a nominal fine (eventually).
Think of it a citizens part to play in a democracy, the commitment to at least pay attention to the government hired by and paid for by citizens.
That's just mandatory voting.
The fine for not voting in Australia is about $30.
This is...nothing in the grand scheme of things.
But it's enough.
And you don't even have to vote: you have to turn up, that's it.
Yeah, I've lived in Australia and the US. The fine isn't big, the attempts at suppressing voter turnout or inconvenience aren't there, and the privacy of the ballot box means that even if you turn up, and put a ballot in the box, no-one's stopping you writing "You all suck" and not casting any preferences.
But at that point you are choosing to explicitly express your non-support of the candidates. That is still more meaningful than simply not showing up IMO
Here’s a better proposal: add none of the above to every ballot. If a super majority (say 80%) pick that the election is an automatic do-over and the people on the ballot can’t run for a period of say five years.
A couple cycles of this will flush the crap out of the system.
Ranked choice voting allows for instant run off elections. Should have a similar effect without requiring a full redo of the election.
9 hours, 5 serious HN users replying...and nobody noting that "A Modest Proposal" might flag satire.*
Or that my "proposed" solution, in many ways, describes the current status quo. Tricks like California's Prop. 13 have created enormous gaps between the taxes paid by the old and the young. Warren Buffet has criticized how much lower his own (income) tax rates are than his secretary's rates.
Some days I feel really, really old.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
We could pay people to vote. Many states have unemployment insurance and that system could be repurposed to give people a wage for election day without making it political.
This would mostly end up punishing people who live in places where voting is deliberately made difficult due to having to skip an entire workday (and its pay, if you're paid hourly instead of salaried) to go to some out-of-the-way location to vote.
A not thoroughly thought out response:
Those people would heavily incentivized to protect their ability to vote.
People in America die from preventable illnesses constantly because they cannot afford access to care but I guess they forgot to protect the ability to not die or whatever.
No, they're already being suppressed. They'll take the easiest action possible to ease the pain, which means voting for whoever does away with the fines.
Old people are organized and more social. I see it in my community. They run the newsletters and they host community events. "Oh that's because they're retired!" No, many of them are not. Many still work.
I want the gerontocracy to end, but I'm also worried what takes its place. Gen Xers like me seem to lack some of the abilities present in our older generations.
We'll probably be more equitable and fair, but will we be as politically effective and organized towards achieving our goals? I sort of doubt it.
Organization is a skill that can be passed on, and to the degree that old people are still doing it themselves they’re depriving us of opportunities to learn and to practice and to benefit from their experience. That’s why we’re not as good at it.
Sure, and if I was so inclined I could go rub noses with them. They're eager to find young folks who are community minded. But I don't want that. I'm gen x and full of cynicism and antisocial attitudes. The only people I know who aren't that way in my generation are churchgoing types and a few influencers.
Relatedly, it's a skill that goes with positions that are clung to such that nobody else gets to practice and learn said skill.
An awful lot of young people are starting businesses. Look at all the people under 30 becoming billionaires. This just didn't happen when I was young.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2025/12/22/why-there-...
Equity and fairness are at odds with each other.
Could you expand on that? My concept of fairness is pretty congruent with equity.
Equity means equal results.
If you work harder than I, for the same pay, that is equitable but it isn't fair.
I think we're talking about different things then.
Nobody is asking for equal result. Equity means sharing the rewards of productivity, instead of allowing a group of people who do nothing get rich off of other people's hard work. That's fair.
Doing good work should be rewarded!
> Nobody is asking for equal result. Equity means sharing the rewards of productivity, instead of allowing a group of people who do nothing get rich off of other people's hard work.
Your two sentences contradict each other.
Yeah I guess we're talking about different things. Thanks for clarifying.
Equity? You mean equality (and that's still about rights, not pay.) Equity is just a stake in the outcome at all.
Equality: starting out at the same position, for example we have equal rights under the law
Equity: winding up at the same position, for example when everybody in a race wins the same medal, regardless of how hard they trained or how talented they are.
An apocryphal story about equity:
https://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
They've had decades to save up the money that allows them to do the things alongside work.
They also came up in a time and place that allowed them to build social relationships outside of work. Many Gen Xers and Millennials just... don't have that kind of personal time. I know several people in my circle of friends who don't want to do anything after work because they're exhausted. Bills gotta be paid, and there's more pressure to squeeze more productivity and consumption out of individuals than there was in 1980-1995. A lot of that pressure, oddly enough, comes from the necessity to keep shareholder returns high to keep the retirement accounts of the Boomers flush with cash.
Gen X and Millennials are also less likely to have had kids than the Boomers, so the socialization that came along with having a child (extracurriculars, PTA meetings, etc.) just never happened.
We incentivized, and eventually started requiring, economic output and consumption over building in-person social networks and hosting events outside of work. It was what we considered important.
I'm curious how you figure that pressure to increase profits has increased?