IdiocyInAction
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User ID: 695
The division of societal surplus in the gerontocracy
One oft-repeated epithet on the left is that we ought to be working 10-20 hours a week due to productivity increases. I always found that this is kind of funny or misguided, as we have kind of done just that - we just decided to give the surplus of productivity to the old (30+ year boomer retirements with eye-watering healthcare costs and redistributive transfers) and the young (10+ years of schooling and an adolescence that now almost lasts until you are 30).
I often think about how societal surplus is spent. If you look at the fastest growing sectors in most western countries, it's almost always healthcare and related professions. This is probably due to a whole host of factors but a big one is something akin to the median voter theorem; the median voter is most western countries is now very old and wants a lot of money spent on healthcare. Hence you get 10% to almost 20% of GDP (in the US!) going to that. As someone in their late 20s who hasn't seen a healthcare professional in more than a decade, that's wild. Healthcare has a low fiscal multiplier and is often purely a consumptive good, but people rarely think we spend too much on it per se - critiques are often made at nebulous administrative bloat (which when examined is often less of a good narrative than people think it is).
Another thing is immigration. Looking at it at face value, all western democracies are addicted to it. Even though right-wing culture warriors often single out Japan or SK, even these places have seen significant immigration (and concomitant pushback) in the past decade. Even places like Russia or Belarus do it. Again very often in service of aging populations - in order to stem inflation, keep asset prices high, etc.
Many western countries now how a U-shaped happiness curve - happy when young, happy when old, relatively miserable in old age. The meme "Nick 30 ans", perhaps not so common in the US, embodies this. If you are Nick (male), 30 years old and working, you are paying into a system that benefits everyone but you, chiefly the old, the the young, then women and then maybe the unemployed. I am one of these Nicks, I am 28 years old and I pay, for the country I reside in, a massive tax bill (probably 5-6x the median) and see nothing for it.
If the purpose of a system is what it does, the the purpose of modern western democracies is to drain young people (chiefly but not exclusively young men) and give the surplus to the old, the infirm, the antisocial. There is some rebellion or exit (people moving to Dubai etc.) though it's often hard to effectuate and sometimes punished by the system.
The striking thing is that when polled, most Nick 30 ans type people think old people are something like hard done to, think they deserve their pensions, think that the issues are not structural or redistributive but something to do with greedy corporations and the rich. I think some economists, Stiglitz or Friedmann or such, predicated concentration camps for the old due to accumulation of wealth and power, but young people do not rebel, they mostly submit and place the blame on other things as the system or the rich.
I sometimes wonder what the optimal thing is for someone who is the target of redistribution is to do. NEETdom is probably rational in many cases if you are not exceptional. I also wonder how various kinds of nationalists square the fact that their elders are quite happy to sell out their country, culture etc. for yet another cruise.
IdiocyInAction
6mo ago
Well, do women in Afghanistan all kill themselves? They do at elevated rates, but apparently life is still worth living for them.
IdiocyInAction
6mo ago
Even though there has also never been a kingdom of men enslaving all women
Some muslim societies could be argued to fall into this category as can some other places. With an extended definition of slavery I don't think that's even controversial.
it’s widely considered to be as contemptible as jihadi terrorism or white supremacism
Yeah, in 21st century WEIRD countries.
I think there's a few things going on, personally.
One is that men aren't really a group, in a sense that they defend themselves or have social legitimisation to fall back on, qua being men. Even when "the patriarchy" was a thing, "men" weren't a group, "old powerful fathers" were. Young men have historically always been shafted. Because men don't really constitute a group (in the sense of banding together or defending each other's interests, purely based on their sex), they don't and can't defend themselves very well (or at all) against being tarred like that. Women are a group, women see each other as a (weak) collective, they advocate for group interests and repudiate attacks against women-as-identity. Even when masculinity was more of a thing it was never really a thing for men for themselves (rather for family, nation, etc.)
Also, women are better at advocating their positions through appealing to social consensus. That's again because they form a meaningful group but also because they are better at some interpersonal stuff (not all of it). So they are better at making "men suck" be a social consensus thing.
Black people very much are a group. I think the study showing that black people show great in-group solidarity, greater than other ethnicities, has been shared a lot here. Black identity is something that's cared about, it's high status, it has social legitimisation, etc. Black people argue as a collective, men don't.
Muslims also are a group that strongly defends its honour, sometimes to the point of violence (cf. Quran burning). And, well, sadly that works. Politicians would rather introduce blasphemy laws than piss them off.
But black men aren't a group qua being men - only qua being black. So black women saying men suck being OK is not surprising.
Of course this all pre-supposes you don't buy into the tenets of modern liberalism at face value - that it's about people being treated equally rather than power between people (the often repeated "Who, whom?"). But I think at this point even ardent liberals don't pretend the movement is about actual equality anymore.
IdiocyInAction
4yr ago
I think a big effect that happened over the last 10-20 years is that niche, "nerdy" media like video games have become more mainstream and thus reviewers are targeting a different demographic. No longer are they targeting weird, mostly male nerds, but more like Joe Average, which means their content is less useful to people like me. That also explains why I find most modern AAA games boring and why I still find useful information from people and creators who are more like me.
I really notice that when playing older games from the "golden age" of PC gaming in the late 90s to mid 2000s; they are often more mechanically complex and have much more complex plots than modern titles, simply because that is something players appreciated at the time and appreciate less now.
So yeah, I think it's mostly demographic shifts in who consumes this kind of media which drive this.
IdiocyInAction
4yr ago
Most of my thoughts on this are driven by the practicalities of things we can do right now; I see no reason, assuming all technological restraints were lifted, that anyone shouldn't be able to do anything they want with their bodies.
I honestly think outside of a small (mostly religious) minority, most people feel that way. The issue is mostly about societal acceptance of trans people and about what others think of them.
IdiocyInAction
4yr ago
I am unconvinced targeted ads are worse for humanity than untargeted ads. (Cf. freedom torches). I watched some legacy TV a couple of years back and I was struck by how manipulative the ads were - ads for car companies weren't espousing the car's superior features, but making people feel bad for not having a nice car, ads for cosmetic products showing beautiful people, making people associate the product with beauty and making them feel bad for their own inadequacy, etc.
Not to mention faux-sponsorships and influencers and the like.
Targeted ads I received felt better than this, though I mostly browse with AdBlock on, so I don't get a lot of them. A friend of mine owns a small business and he says Google Ads are great, if a bit of a zero-sum game.
IdiocyInAction
4yr ago
Do you not think animals have moral worth?
Varies by animal/species. Most people ascribe no to negative worth to bacteria, little to negative worth to insects and more worth to higher animals like birds, mammals, reptiles and humans. I think the amount of moral worth ascribed to animals is proportional to how much they can elicit empathy responses from us and how similar they are to us (e.g. intelligence), hence the fervent hate on sites like Reddit et al. to anyone who hurts dogs, cats, etc (who evolved to look like human babies through domestication).
I personally ascribe some moral worth to animals, but it's not enough to make me feel bad about eating meat. I place them closer to the ants and bacteria than to humans.
The freedom is not something given, but taken away.
I am aware of the concept of a social contract. But the contract here is drafted almost solely by those benefitting at this point - that's not a contract, that's coercive extraction of resources from those with power from those with none, with most people being unaware where the money is flowing and who is paying for whom.
The social contract being boomer UBI is also something somewhat unprecedented in a democracy. Maybe not in history.
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