IdiocyInAction
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User ID: 695
IdiocyInAction
20hr ago
First of all, having no or very controlled family reunification and discerning permanent residency and citizenship does not preclude getting geniuses. Singapore, which, if it weren't well run, would be a much worse place to migrate to than the US, manages to attract very good people just fine.
Secondly, while I admire what Jensen Huang built to an extent, it's not trivially true that in his absence there wouldn't be an equal or marginally worse Nvidia equivalent. Indeed, many GPU manufacturers exist and it does not follow that a more restrictionist US would not be at the technological frontier.
Thirdly, this is ultimately a values question. You seem to find having "Asian Grinders" as a good thing. Many White Americans pre mass-migration, if told that their kids would have to compete in school and participate in the habits and mores of "Asian grinders", would have recoiled in horror. Not that they got a say anyway, no western country in history ever voted for mass migration.
Also, take Australia. Australia gets far more Asian grinders than the US ever did, indeed, it has some of the most elite immigration in the world measured by your system. And yet, it has stagnated against the US in the last decade in GDP terms and is facing heavy anti-immigrant backlash.
Immigrants actually have a pretty pro western selection effect overall. Some of the proudest most patriotic free market loving freedom desiring American dream appreciating people I know are immigrants.
If you look at actual polling you'll see that Asians are extremely happy to jump on the whole anti-white anti-western culture bus and that they often bring things like speech norms from their places of origin.
Here's Ronald Reagan saying this same thing.
Immigration in his time was from very different places than it is now.
Ultimately it gets down to whether nations should be economic zones or actual coherent nations.
If you only believe in short-term GDPmaxxing (which is a valid position I suppose), sure. View people as fungible, import the best according to some metrics.
The truth about the US immigration system is that most green cards are family-based and that cultures and people are not fungible. Even if Chinese people and Indians increase your GDP they also change your culture, make use of family reunification (which can often negate economic advantages), bring grievances from the old world with them and often promote ideologies that go against the host population (white people). Not to mention that things like IQ =/= social trust, "western" morality, etc.
People have pointed out that Asians are importing things like Childhood-destroying striverism (see the whole Vivek thing), Caste-like dynamics, etc.
I am not nearly as reactionary as a lot of posters here but I do not believe in the fungibility of people. I think the US was smart to consider demographics in immigration policy, not just due to economic reasons, but much more because of cultural cohesion. Just like places like Singapore or the UAE (to a lesser extent) do. That doesn’t mean "no Asians" but maybe being very discerning about to whom you grant permanent residency to is not a bad idea. And it's not like you could just move to India or China either.
IdiocyInAction
1d ago
I am not necessarily a "believer" in the strong sense, but I guess I believe in a weaker sense that genetic differences can cause some group differences in intelligence. The extent and magnitude of that is debatable. I guess I simply don't believe group differences can be ruled out a priori and I also don't see why they should be especially unlikely. They are definitely not the sole explanatory variable but they seem to be a pretty good one for some cases.
I think for Indians the party line among strong proponents is that India is genetically very diverse and most immigrants are from higher-functioning sub populations. Hispanics are a mix, between blacks and whites and Arabs I don’t know what the party line is.
IdiocyInAction
8d ago
IIRC Aspergers and the like are uncorrelated. Smart people are generally functional.
Do they make her a good wife? Doctors often have to move and she might care more about her patients than you. I can see this with other girlboss office jobs though. (Full disclosure: I am a guy dating one. I do love her but the job comes with a lot of negatives for relationships and well, the money angle isn't compelling for me for various reasons. A lot of my GFs female colleagues are single, none of the male ones are).
IdiocyInAction
8d ago
After a certain age you also get adverse selection (on both sexes). Can concur with the bossbitch thing. Some women try hard to cultivate disagreeability which while maybe adaptive in their careers make her a pretty bad partner (especially if paired with being neurotic, which women are on average more than men). For men this kind of works (though only to a point, I'm not fully aligned with the manosphere people here) but for women it's generally quite off-putting.
Also as a higher earner myself I always felt like having a high earning partner raises expectations rather than providing any security. Some people would call me insecure for thinking this but I've not yet met a woman who contradicts this idea (I'm sure they are out there but most women want to be provided for).
IdiocyInAction
8d ago
Intelligence and autism are probably anticorrelated.
I think you have to either be talking to a pretty high decoupler or approach this stuff in a sensitive and safe way. One reliable, evidence-backed thing is that women score about 0.5 SD or similar higher on neuroticism (OCEAN trait) than men - meaning the average woman has a bit of a more sensitive trigger for threats. Someone talking about this stuff can both trigger insecurities (bad for higher neuroticism) and also, as mentioned, make you look like someone who generally has a bit of zero-sum mindset.
Also female dating is and has never been grounded in cultivation of resources and positive traits. I find a lot of women get this wrong and are surprised in a kind of female nice-guy-ism, like I read about a female doctor that expected to be a hot commodity but was then surprised most men cared about looks, agreeableness, etc. over her career and that all her hard work didn't make her good prospect. So it might be hard for women to empathise with what this means to be a man (a common trope for men is that non-parental love is always conditional). As a man this stuff sounds like acknowledgment of a tough (shared) reality, as a woman you might sound like someone who sees things as being an eternal competition and who can't care/love unconditionally which looks bad even for a platonic friend.
IdiocyInAction
8d ago
A lot of women would discuss some of these if put using different terms.
Also, it doesn't just produce a negative female reaction. It produces a negative reaction in a lot of humans because you are signalling a lot of things by discussing these:
- Commoditising people ("SMV")
- Instrumentalising and dehumanising women for their fertility (even if everyone does that to an extent, signalling you do makes you look bad)
- Being superficial (everyone is to an extent, acknowledging and leaning into it is however again a negative signal)
You are probably also opening wounds and triggering insecurity about where they would stand in "SMV" or whatever. A lot of people find the Darwinian nature of early dating bad.
I think as humans a lot of us have an ideal of (unrealistic) somewhat unconditional care and of being loved for things we influence, for our deeds and words. Entire religions are founded on this. A big part of later-stage dating and relationships is about trust, kindness, reciprocity and related things.
The manosphere gets some regrettable aspects of dating and early relationship formation right but there is actual evidence that being a decent person is pretty important for actually having quality long-term relationships. If you are signalling early that you instrumentalise and commoditise people that is a pretty negative signal and will rightfully put people off. Not everyone would be of course, package this stuff in the right language and I'm sure you could discuss it with some women.
I honestly get put off when people enthusiastically talk about having a zero-sum mindset about these things even if I think they have a point. It's just a signal that this person is probably not very kind. And why would you want to talk about this enthusiastically and with a partner? It's honestly inherently quite an awkward topic.
I think it's important to first identify who the principal opposition to age gap relationships is and at least in my experience, it's almost always women. "Dirty Old Man" and the like. In particular, it's older women. (Not absolutely old but older than the younger age gap partner). Which makes sense. Men famously have a rather constant age of women they find attractive. IIRC in practice age gap relationships are actually rather rare but if an average guy got to choose an idealized partner she'd probably be about 20-25 in age. Which is usually just biology. Just like an idealised female would pick a 6'3 billionaire.
Women are on average better at things like using emotive language and at enforcing and creating social norms ("the longhouse"). Indeed, I can think of no real social norms that have recently been created by men. Women excel in doing things like creating social legitimisation for personal bugbears (see the proliferation of female-centered therapy language). Since we live in a post-violent, heavily language and discourse centered world and since the discourse creators are now all female, you should expect "the discourse" to reflect the issues and wishes of the women forging the discourse.
So that's something to keep in mind with age gap discourse, a lot of it's probably the collective grievance of older women in terms of not wanting to compete with younger women for higher-value mates.
IIRC actual research finds that large age-gap relationships aren't that common but also that they tend to produce slightly better and more durable relationships. I think that 18 is a reasonable Shelling point for these things. People are allowed far more destructive things from that age than dating someone older than them.
Ask Sahaj: Isn’t it racist to insist your kids marry within their race?
This article posits it's OK to demand your kids marry another Indian (or South Asian), due to, uh, racism or something, while it's not OK for whites to do this.
Cultural context matters here, too. In many collectivist cultures, where the group is prioritized over the individual, the norm around marriage is that it’s a family affair. Love is not between two individuals but a joining of families, so things such as what the partner’s parents do, or social standing, can matter more because each family is inheriting the other family’s reputation. The first questions my parents asked when I told them about my now-husband was what did his parents and brothers do, how did they spend their time. What they were really asking was: Can they protect you? Will they be able to provide for you? Will they tarnish your name? When a daughter gets married to someone else’s son, tangible proof of stability, or security, can matter in a way that may not be as relevant here. It took time to challenge this narrative and given the context in which they grew up — with their gendered roles and marriage norms — I can understand their concern.
Well, but the point is you left your collectivist culture. Marriage in the modern west is an individualist thing. Also note the shameless promotion of family honour ("tarnish your name")
In the process of immigration, a lot is lost that cannot be seen. Things such as family roles that are left behind, access to general and family support, cultural norms from how to get money from a bank to the social etiquette at the park or school. Because so many strands are broken along the journey, the ones that remain — such as cultural traditions/rituals and language — are held on to even tighter. There’s often a fear that a culture will end with the next generation, and even an anxiety around being misunderstood or even isolated within one’s own family. Add to this a historical expectation that immigrants will assimilate, and, in order to challenge this, many may hold on even tighter to parts of their identity and culture to maintain a semblance of who they are.
I mean I get that it sucks that you don't get to keep your culture as such, but it's a good deal. You get to often 10-20x your resources after all. I guess the presupposition is that you should keep your culture and all it entails. Which is a bit disrespectful to the host country in my opinion. Do they not get a say at all about all this?
I don't care too much about the article or the premise itself, but I work with a lot of Indians. I don't generally dislike them at all. But I do notice certain behavioural patterns. I have also been to the place. I know people who spent a lot of time there. One thing that came up is that they can be very racist themselves. Almost fractally so in fact, it's quite incredible. Casteism is also still a thing, though less so in the big cities.
I guess it's also notable how they act as immigrants. Indians care a lot about honour. They are quite irredentist, think they are heirs to a great civilisation state, if only it weren't for the pernicious English they'd split the world in two with China or something. Many a time when I spent time with one I was lectured about how the west is in decline, how it's going to be an Indian century, etc. (insert 2025 superpower meme) They are quite protective of their culture, they don't change their names when they emigrate, don't outmarry as much (though WMIF is a thing) and are generally quite quick to jump on the whole AA grift.
Even as a tourist, when I'm in a foreign country, I generally try to be polite, I certainly don't serenade people with some weird nationalist screed about how my civilisation used to better than theirs etc. So this is quite foreign to me. Hindu nationalism can be very funny though as an outsider. It's a bit whimsical, a bit like Balkan nationalism.
There are a lot of allegations that they like hiring their own and well, I have seen this more or less first hand. Though Russians and others also do that (viz. "thick" vs. thin cultures, I think people from "thin" cultures make better immigrants). They generally don't want to assimilate. Assimilation is out now anyway I guess. You can contrast this with East Asians. They generally still tend to have more of a 2000s classroom globalism view, where everyone ought to work together etc., they change their names and they often try to intermarry. Even though China is irredentist even recent Chinese immigrants tend to shut up about this while IME Indian ones generally don't.
They may be very good for GDP etc. but I am not sure that mass Indian immigration is a good thing in the long term. Do you want a group in your country that will quite openly have split loyalties? People used to fuss about this in the US with Catholics. I guess we have a natural experiment with Canada and Australia to a lesser extent. We shall see. Indian emigration is continuing apace anyway, they have dreadful youth unemployment rates.
IdiocyInAction
22d ago
Yeah and they won't be shut as a lot of immigrant groups form blocks and demand entry routes for their brethren (which you see in many Anglosphere countries these days).
IdiocyInAction
22d ago
A warehouse worker makes £26k a year.
Just for context, due to inane minimum wage laws and similar these sort of positions are some of the highest paid in the world in the UK, normalized to median wage and price levels. It's not a great place to be a nuclear engineer or surgeon but it is a pretty good deal if you are a cashier, store clerk, warehouse worker, etc.
Which is, funnily enough, broadly what people like Phoebe O'Brien want. Unfortunately it does have some pretty severe second-order effects.
IdiocyInAction
22d ago
I think minorities actually converge to native (low) birthrates remarkably fast IIRC. This has been one thing that right-wing commentators of the 2000s got wrong.
IdiocyInAction
22d ago
And are they spent on anything that benefits Phoebe in any way?
Yes. Her education is subsidised, a lot of the jobs she could get are probably a result of legislation passed by the state and subsidised by it, in the unlikely event she has kids that is heavily subsidised, as is her aged pension, her healthcare, of which she will consume a lot more statistically over a lifetime than if she were a male, is subsidised. Taxes overwhelmingly go to the old, women and the infirm. The purpose of the system is partly to take money away from people she hates to people like her.
Who is her real enemy, who should she be angry at?
The real enemy is, well, herself. Pre-2008 the UK had some of the highest growth rates in the developed world. A big reason it's gone to shit and is on managed decline is that its slowly changing into a weird social market economy with pay rates set by fiat at the behest of people that think like her.
Or would you tell her to chill, stop GAF about anything and be content with her lot of life?
I would ask her to think about what exactly makes modern industrial life possible in the first place and how precarious it is.
What does she really want? I am not going to try and psychoanalyse the people that think differently to me as that would just lead to a lot of unfair characterisations. What I can say is that what she wants, would, historically and practically speaking, generally lead to very bad things if fully implemented, if you believe empirical observations about econometrics and history.
IdiocyInAction
22d ago
We get a few of those too, but they also don't seem to enjoy this sort of job too much (and they are generally not that well liked). Unlike Google et al. you get fired pretty quickly for doing anything but your job and it's a much more pragmatic environment than big tech of old used to be.
IdiocyInAction
22d ago
I don't personally care that much about the victim complex per se. That's eternal. What I care about is real politics being done according to those grievances and the downstream societal damage. And that's hard to deny. Though that's kind of been the story of the entire 21st century so far I suppose.
It's important to remember that this is a particular, peculiar subculture/mental illness being reported on. It gets a whole lot of attention, because many members of the media class are also afflicted with it. But it's not at all representative: we're being presented with a deeply warped carnival mirror style representation of reality. One that's optimized toward creating an emotional reaction and us-vs-them dynamic, which is ideal for engagement.
I'd like to believe this but more and more data points corroborate the fact that people do sincerly believe this stuff.
Her friend group can almost certainly be assumed to be nearly entirely college educated men
Why? Probably it's all neurotic women.
But, my takeaway: you're imagining things. I direct this at both you and the interview subject.
Women radicalizing to the left is a real phenomenon. For example this. It's trivially researchable.
Men are on social media much less than women, and they spend much less time on it when they do.
The average man and woman spends something like 2-4h a day plus on social media.
And a reasonable bet for the modal number of times they had engaged with a misogynistic reel is 0.
Yeah probably, as mentioned, the whole Tate thing is more moral panic and partially driven by immigrants and immigrant-descendant men (for whom this whole thing like acting like Tate is much more de rigeur)
Feminism in the YooKay
This is an article that popped up on my feed and has been making the rounds.
It's about young women in the UK. The UK, for context, has been stagnating on a GDP per-capita basis since 2008 and is facing funding problems amid a large social spending bill. It's hardly a Randian capitalist paradise.
O’Brien grew up in Leicester, in what she calls a working-class family. (She defined this in the Marxist sense, meaning anybody who works for a wage, unlike the “asset class” and what she calls the billionaire “Epstein class”.) She had always been progressive. But while studying for her master’s degree at Bristol University, she started going to Black Lives Matter protests on College Green and felt inspired by the collective energy she saw there. She already had a TikTok following from sharing “random content”, but her audience rapidly grew as her posts got more political. Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, and Israel’s response in Gaza, was a “catalytic moment” for her. “I had been talking about immigration issues before, like Marxism, like philosophy,” she said. “Then it all just became the war.”
I don't have a problem with her in particular. There are odious people in every generation, in either sex. There will always be people that demand more even in the face of the state being bankrupt, nobody ever thinks they live in a good economy (not to say the UK has one).
The problem is that the movement here has become utterly unmoored from reality. In the case of the UK, the left broadly got what it wanted. There are sweeping laws against almost every leftist bugbear, there are gender equality rulings that means female cashiers have to be paid the same as male warehouse workers, taxes are incredibly punitive at the top end, the UK has worse pay compression than the Soviet Union (!!!).
While Adolescence was filmed about incels (an utterly fabricated moral panic, as involuntary celibate men are both more likely to be non-white, less likely to rape and less likely to be violent against women than their sexually more successful counterparts), there is no societal feedback mechanism against the wishes of women. When the (western) world chafes against women's preferences, the world gets sanded, even if it shouldn't. There is no accountability or feedback mechanism against female preferences, they are assumed to be true. While this is unpleasant, one could stoically accept this for a while. But when it starts intersecting with politics at large and with the functioning of the economy, well, that's a different story. I don't live in the UK but I have strong ties there, so this story did feel sad.
Online divides have also bled into real life. Exclusive polling by Merlin Strategy for the New Statesman reveals that young women, aged between 18 and 30, are by far the most progressive demographic in the UK. This polling found that young women are 26 percentage points less likely to feel positively about capitalism than young men, and much less likely to feel the economy works in their favour. They are also much more pessimistic about the future – their own, and everyone else’s. They also feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them.
Again, beliefs utterly unmoored from reality. Young women outearn men and the economy bends over backwards to an absurd degree to make that happen. I work in quantitative finance, in a field where there is an incredibly tight feedback loop between performance and PnL. It's really not that possible for us to do affirmative action or similar. And yet every year, HR tries to force teams (sometimes successfully) to hire subpar women. I am sure there are some women who could do the job, but most very intelligent women eschew quant finance. And yet.
O’Brien told me she considers herself a revolutionary rather than an activist. “Revolutionary is more, ‘I want systemic change. I don’t want to exist within these same systems. I want to be an instrument of the revolution.’” She said she felt anxious seeing injustice and doing nothing. It was a physical sensation in the centre of her body. Perhaps this was why women were more likely to be progressive than men, she speculated. “Women tend to be a little bit more connected to their bodies and their physical sensations and emotions.” It seemed like an essentialist, even reactionary view of gender: the idea that women are emotional, physical beings, in a way men aren’t.
Women are more agreeable and more neurotic than men, in a big five sense. Both qualities that are not necessarily adaptive. Women are good at steering and enforcing social consensus, at language games, etc. What is described here is just women's greater emotional reactivity, as measured by the big five personality scores. This is not new information or anything; variants of these tendencies have been known to societies across the ages.
Anna’s politics had become more radical during the long process of getting personal independence payments for her disability. She felt the whole system was set up against her. The experience made her feel dehumanised.
I grew up in a European country with a large welfare state. It's quite funny how quickly people start taking welfare payments for granted. I guess if you believe in the whole Marxist system as such you are just taking what you are owed and any obstacles to that are just signs of reactionary resistance.
When I asked women what specifically had radicalised them, the war in Gaza was the most common answer.
Gaza as the omnicause. Many words have been spilled about this already; suffice to say that the Gazans would have none of this.
These women weren’t outliers. According to the New Statesman’s polling, young women are twice as likely not to want children as young men. All the Leeds women told me they feared a Reform government pressuring them to have babies. One woman mentioned Suella Braverman’s pledge to scrap the Equality Act and repeal other human rights laws. “It just feels… out of control.”
Their growing isolation could also have profound long-term consequences for British society. It will almost certainly make relationships harder: fewer than half of young women feel men understand them. Young women are much less likely than men to date people who disagree with their politics. People will get lonelier, and angrier. And it’s getting worse. Among those under-30, younger women feel the bleakest: women under 25 are most likely to believe things are “stacked against me, no matter how hard I try”.
The UK's current TFR is 1.41 and recent research suggests TFR is heavily downstream from relationship formation. It making relationships harder is one thing; if the Zoomettes mass opt-out of having children then it's very possible (and I'm generally no doomer!) that the UK as its current society no longer exists in 50 years. Maybe reality has to be the escape valve that forces women's beliefs to become moored to reality again.
Is this what it's like to be in Latin American country seeing decline, like Argentina? Blame everything on capitalism, ignore the fact that you are getting your preferences (as much as the state finances and bond markets can bear it year over year) and continue advocating for a system that guarantees you'll be worse off in 20-30 years?
IdiocyInAction
26d ago
The problem here is that there are 3 sides: Israel, Iran and the US. The US would like to walk away with something (like destroying the Iranian nuclear program or getting money from Hormuz) but needs Iran's cooperation. Iran was just decapitated, has rationally no trust in the other two parties (trust in the Trumpian US is stupid, viz. the tariff saga and Israel is out for blood) and has leverage over Hormuz, whether the US likes that or not. Israel really likes this war and is seemingly not that bothered about the energy thing. I know a few Israelis quite well, it's a very martial society (and controversially, starts to resemble its neighbours more and more as it becomes less Ashkenazi).
There not being war and there being a negotiated settlement would require both the US (doubtful) and Israel (extremely doubtful) to back off. Iran would need credible guarantees that they aren't in for another decapitation strike etc.
However the markets seem to be pricing in at least a decent chance of some resolution and the Iranians also want the oil to flow eventually. The US can probably save face by just fucking off, but Israel is a different kettle of fish.
IdiocyInAction
27d ago
I'm generally against welfare but I do think it does have some actual value even to us who pay for most of it, a more stable and protected society. The default of the world is not modern peace, but more something like a third world country where gangs rule and government is basically just the biggest gang around. It's not perfect in the US, but for the average American crime is not actually that meaningful of issue anymore. Like as Cremieux covered on X, even things like murders are extremely hyperlocal, focused down to specific streets. Unless you go looking for trouble, you'll rarely ever get into it.
Ah, the protection money argument. The thing is, the west didn't use to have to handout masses of money to people to keep them from rioting. Crime and poverty are not as connected as is often made out.
But what if it wasn't there for people like her? Well, I don't think she could have escaped her situation then. She's old and still somewhat unstable, I doubt she would have long term employement. Most likely she'd be either a direct parasite off of us or other family, or have to turn to crime now. The welfare services I pay into help to diffuse these costs, sure I pay a little bit to help other people's crazy aunts/brothers/parents/children/whatever relation, but other people pay a little for my family and my father is not left feeling responsible for her through the bad luck that my grandfather was a horrible piece of shit.
That is not "Boomer UBI". Disability pensions and the like also get abused but are the far smaller evil.
There are infinitely many options between "total boomer luxury communism" and "concentration camps for the olds". Though politically we seem to tend towards the former...
They do "deserve" their pensions. Either formally through pension systems or informally like the social security system, our current old people were promised their benefits back in their working years. Maybe the right thing to do is to renege on society's promise to them, or at the very least negotiate the terms better like the UK's stupid "triple lock" but it's not like I can't understand where the olds are coming from. Even Ayn Rand famously took her social security, because being against the program doesn't mean you can't ask the government to at least fulfill the promise it made when it took your money from you. She didn't think it should be stolen to begin with, but it's not hypocritical to say "then at least do what you said you would" right?
What does "deserve" mean? Pensions (and even things like 410k) are a fiction, they are redistribution from working people to pensioners. Money is a neat abstraction that allows expression of deferring consumption but if you look at the flow of goods and services it's always working -> non-working, barring AI and general (non-healthcare/welfare) capital infrastructure investment.
Of course I understand the boomers. Were I a boomer I'd have a massive incentive to believe I'm entitled to relief on property taxes, blocking development, fat pensions that grow faster than inflation, labour markets being propped up by mass immigration of "carers" without care for externalities, etc.
The social contract (as it even exists) when the boomers were working was markedly different from the one now. The boomers reneged on it already by not reproducing and offloading the resultant externalities on the next generation.
IdiocyInAction
28d ago
Mathematically someone has to balance the books here. The total cost is the same whether it's concentrated or diffused, the difference is who pays for it.
Sure, some people benefit by having their parent's care socialised, but I think that's rarely Nick 30 ans - his parents are generally not that far gone yet and if he had to subsidize them he would at least get a say over how much, what extent, how much healthcare, etc.
You wouldn't pay Mom's rent anyway, Mom is more likely to have property, which she then might have to liquidate. Some people would have to pay Mom's rent. Mom might live a lot less well than under boomer UBI.
Upper middle class people want their expected inheritances, after all.
Most people get their inheritance in their 50s. I think on average it'd be better for UMC people to not subsidize old people for hope of a diffuse future payout but to rather get to steer the economy now.
The implication of this is that as working age people are facing an ever more impossible expected task in terms of eldercare they will only become more desperate to socialize the cost of preventing this.
Probably and that might mean even more immigration and at some point sovereign defaults.
IdiocyInAction
28d ago
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.
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.
At least in Europe, mass migration on the scale that it's a noticeable and negative thing for most people is actually shockingly recent. And if you dig into when it hit various countries, there absolutely was backlash, pre-2010s included. German guest workers were promised to be temporary. Asian migration to Australia was promised to be modest. The US had such backlash that until 1965ish there was a law on the books to basically freeze their demographics.
I would also argue that the idea that restrictions = nazism and racism post 1945 was used in the west to push it heavily. Also, usually populist parties that actually stopped migration also bundled rather odious populist policies and/or nationalist stuff with the whole thing. Why that is can be discussed at another time.
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