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Notes -
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.
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.
A typical leftist claim is that crime comes from poverty and need. I agree that a lot of crime would come from that, but one issue is that poverty, true deep poverty does not exist in the US anymore. The only people who do not get help are the ones who explicitly choose to forego it. There are no hungry orphans left needing to steal bread, our poorest children if anything get too much food now. Crime and antisocial behavior has been reduced only to those who want to do it, not those who are forced into it. And that is at least in part because of our redistribution. I have an aunt who went crazy in her early 50s (I presume in part from the severe abuse that my own father as the oldest was just barely able to escape albeit it with multiple scars, + her possibly being sexually abused) and for some reason in the past five years she somehow just got better? She's not great, but she went from not wanting to do better and living on the streets> wanting to do better, and now she has a shared apartment, a bus pass, clean clothes, food, etc other basics despite not having a job. She is on SSI now and lives in subsidized housing, with other programs like SNAP supporting her. When you want it, help is there. It is not perfect, bureaucracy would never see to that no matter the best intentions but it is there. Similarly I think that's part of why UBI studies seem to do much better in the poor countries and flop hard in the west, I. America we already have the floor available to anyone willing to stand up and work.
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.
Do keep in mind a few things.
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?
We're all going to be old and everyone knows it. A lot of the worries about social security right now I see even among young people is often that they're scared they won't be getting it. Their complaints are the same as the old people, they're just not in the fold yet. But they expect it too, so they're not willing to dissolve things and give up on their share of the promise either. Anything done to the old now is likely to be done with you too and people understand this. Like seriously, how could anyone expect concentration camps for the old unless they were delusional enough to think they'd stay young forever? What 50 year old is gonna be happy with "in 15 years we lock you up and murder you". And that's ignoring that the old are our loved ones and we don't want to hurt our loved ones. What psychopath would want to concentration camp his own parents?
1 is somewhat absurd when a huge chunk of people aren't meaningfully paying for themselves, and as a younger person I've got the full expectation that whatever current plans for funding the elderly will be nuked from orbit by the time I'm in any position to get hold of them. People simply aren't working enough years in comparison to an extended dotage of consuming insane amounts of medical spending. Something has to give.
Plus the current state of effective years of healthy living added to the end of people's lives versus 'we have continued the heartbeat at massive expensive' is not good calculus. MAID is unfortunate but to a certain degree the calculus of these efforts would work a lot better if palliative medical science hadn't responded so effectively to the gigantic pool of money on offer to squeeze another year or two out at the very end.
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Regarding point 2, I'm obviously not endorsing concentration camps for the old, but you're overlooking an element of vague generational moral culpability in this. The current and soon-to-be recipients of elder welfare grew up in demographically healthy or at least stable societies, and the problems with the systems that are now slowly breaking apart have been known for their entire lives, and this has been discussed at nauseam out in the open for decades!
Yes, theoretically current young people will be in a similar position themselves later on, especially considering their even worse birth rates, but given that they already grew up in a heavily demographically imbalanced society they have much less economic slack to maneuver and a ton more social inertia to fight against to meaningfully reform these systems, with the numbers being the way they are in a democracy it's a coup-complete problem. Either you wait until you yourself can benefit marginally or you hope the eventual collapse will bring an opportunity for improvement. Meanwhile, current old people had fewer elderly people to take care of (thanks to two world wars) and fewer children to raise, they were in an historically uniquely ideal position to set up the system in a way that is more sustainable. But across the entire West they didn't, they went into a socio-economic disaster with open eyes.
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Why do you think MAID is being pushed so hard? We won't "murder" you, we'll just convince you life isn't worth living and let you murder yourself. Conveniently, we've already been abusing this method of avoiding the costs of helping certain demographics for years by ignoring the causes of elevated rates of suicide...
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You have to think in the context of the fact that most people aren't exactly "Nick, 30 ans, big net taxpayer" and of generationally falling fertility. Old people welfare and healthcare are beneficial to the old, yes, and maybe too generous, but the government subsidizing the polite fiction of most retired people being financially independent is also an implicit subsidy toward working people in that they are generally spared having to feed/house/care for their elderly relatives.
Put another way, have you ever had to pay your single mom's rent, or gotten a crying phone call from her saying "I'm about to be homeless."? For most 28 year olds, the cost of paying mom’s rent would exceed their entire tax burden. Worse, imagine the case of an only child with two parents requiring something expensive like memory care, or some other chronic illness. In that case it’s almost impossible to lose as a non-exceptional taxpayer when accounting for that implicit subsidy.
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. Likely, this bargain will require subsidizing the not so needy as well. Upper middle class people want their expected inheritances, after all.
There's a substantive difference here in that Nick would have much more agency in deciding his mom's living standard and consequently the hit to his own if he had to take care of her by himself. The state is going to send thugs to collect his money regardless of whether voters, who increasingly consist of the beneficiaries of this, decide to be reasonable or to utterly drain the remaining workers.
Then there's an argument to be made that socializing these sort of costs is part of the reason why there won't be enough workers in the first place. If socialized retirement systems only covered hard and sympathetic edge cases and otherwise you'd have to rely on relations to sustain you in your old age, maybe the idea that you can forego reproduction and just stack green paper in the expectation of having your consumption needs fulfilled in the far future would be less seductive to the masses.
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Mom is overwhelmingly likely to be a homeowner and be able to indefinitely defer property taxes.
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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.
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.
Probably and that might mean even more immigration and at some point sovereign defaults.
Until the bond vigilantes say otherwise, this empirically hasn't been the case, as evidenced by G7 sovereign debt levels since 2000. Unfortunately, since the Silent Generation RJ Reynolds and Phillip Morris (aka. cigarettes) haven't been utilized to their full potential, and those pesky doctors have gotten better at keeping people alive, so balancing the books is getting harder even before we take falling fertility into account.
I did pay my mom's rent, because she was poorly paid, exited the divorce with no property, and, shocker, the man she divorced for being bad at paying the bills defaulted on the alimony as soon as their child was off to college and out of the blast radius. I was the only kid who wasn't still in college or flat broke ("Lying flat" is absolutely the winning strategy when it comes to avoiding familial obligations. No one expects any help from the broke fuckup sibling, but is that really how you want to live?). If not for some dubious VA disability (Semper-Fi!) my mother would presently be begging me for money. Boomer UBI just stops this from happening to a potentially large amount of people at ~65. It's easy to say "They'll just have to accept a lower standard of living.", but do you want to have to tell Mom to eat shit or move her into your house?
Maybe I'm missing something and my family are filled with an atypically large amount of fuckups (This is definitely the case for my father's side; on mom's side at least the Gen X men have their shit together.), but I'm pretty sure that Boomer welfare is the only thing sparing large amounts of the working and middle class from dealing with this sort of stuff until Mom becomes too old to live independently for medical reasons.
I'm not even endorsing fiscal gerontocracy, necessarily. I'm just giving a reason why people support it, and we haven't even gotten into how many people's jobs rely on the government subsidizing retirees' bills.
Having moved from a Western country to an Asian country where 'elderly are taken care of by their children and tend to cohabit houses' is the norm. The latter seems verymuch more functional than the current metagame of the West? I'm admittedly fortunate in that nobody in either of my families is a high-grade fuckup and I could see how that'd cause issues with the current state of things.
I've got small children, I much prefer having access to elderly members of my wife's family within a 3 minute walk versus my parents having fucked off to Australia's equivalent of Florida that's a 2 hour flight away. There's a ton of issues created by allowing the elderly to do luxury space communism.
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Who did you think the welfare state was for? Yes, you have to pay into the system, but you have freedom not afforded to the young and physical and mental ability not afforded to the old. That's the social contract. The theoretical benefit of immigration is that you bring in people who haven't spent 18 years consuming resources and are putting money into the system immediately; of course it doesn't always work out that way.
And people here absolutely complain about the spiraling healthcare spending growth (though in the past few decades the US has grown more slowly than comparable countries). It's pretty clear that medicare/SSI are going to fuck the budget soon, and it's politically impossible to seriously cut them.
The social contract is whatever society's representative (the state) says it is, and nothing more or less.
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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.
Exactly. Plus the current boundaries of the amount of Boomer UBI, the age it's received and what it can be spent on (Endless arm-wrestling with the grim reaper to claw a month at a time is just not useful for anybody) can all be shifted without killing 'the social contract'. Most people are effectively not covering their own costs, retirement is a privilege.
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