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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?
The Promised argument makes it seem as if our society actually honors or cares about promises whatsoever. Social Security was Promised to never be spent on anything else. Income tax was Promised to never go above 2%.
Don't go on about Promises as if they actually mean anything when it comes to political decisions in the U.S.
I would recommend looking up how social security and trust funds work cause the funds for it have never been spent on anything else.
The funds were “invested” in Treasury bonds which means that they were spent more or less immediately on whatever the government at the time wanted. The return on that investment will ultimately come from taxing future generations, or inflating away the debt, so it’s really just an intergenerational Ponzi scheme with extra steps.
But I agree with you that this was the plan from Day 1, so strictly speaking it’s not a broken promise per se (at least not yet).
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Ok, the issue with the protection money argument for welfare- and I'm 100% willing to believe that certain programs reduce the crime rate- is that most of that welfare goes to criminally-uninclined demographics. Old people who can't maintain a normal standard of living are a known phenomenon, we know what it looks like, and they're not mugging people with their walkers. They're living in squalor and dying of malnutrition-worsened diseases. Sure, that's bad, but the argument for avoiding it isn't 'well it's worse when they rob a liquor store' because they won't rob liquor stores.
Again, I'm 100% willing to believe that, say, TANF reduces shoplifting and prostitution rates. But that's a completely separate argument.
Like I covered before, in modern societies you don't have to do crime for basic survival and needs anymore. It's imperfect and has some wait times obviously, but people in need like my crazy aunt can get the food and shelter and clean water they need. Modern crime in modern first world nations is a choice. Now I'm a big arguer that criminals are mostly idiots with poor reasoning and self control skills before they are particularly "evil", but the point remains that crime isn't necessary in the first world and anyone being rational wouldn't resort to it for their basic needs. The diminishing returns hit really hard when it comes to aid. People will steal and fight and mug to go from 0 meals to 1 meal. Most won't to go from 3 to 4.
"Old people who can't maintain a normal standard of living are a known phenomenon," isn't really a thing in the US and most other developed nations, at least not at all how it used to be. But regardless the welfare for old people isn't from the "protection" scheme logic anyway, social security and pensions are from the "promise" logic. Like Ayn Rand wasn't gonna go around stabbing people, but she still collected on what was promised to her.
Yes, it's not a thing in the US. There's nowhere in the world, ever in human history, where the elderly committed lots of crime to survive. They just died. The logic for taking care of the elderly is compassion, not crime prevention. There are places right now where senior citizens need to eat dog food to survive. They're not stealing better food(potatoes and shit, not steak). 'Old people suffering from malnutrition until they get knocked out by flu season' happened because they'll just suffer rather than steal/rob.
My argument for the elderly isn't crime prevention, crime prevention is for people like my crazy aunt. The argument for the elderly is that they were promised pensions or social security either explicitly or implicitly and I don't think it's right for governments to rug pull on that. They were stupid promises, but you still should keep stupid promises.
I think it's more just for the government to rug pull than to commit to a civilizational suicide pact even if the boomers and whoever preceded them promised themselves riches 3000 years ago off the expense of future generations. What obligation does the younger generation have to a policy where they're robbed during their youth and left with ruins when they're old? And to finish the civilizational KO, we're being replaced en masse where we have 3% of newborns being named Mohammed. We have a pincer maneuver of a labor shortage of short-supplied generations who can't support pensioners and a Boomertopia which is so rotten that you can't even find a job as a new grad.
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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.
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...
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.
Right. Besides, what do we do to functional people who don't pay their protection money? We send men with guns to drag them off to jail. Why not skip the extra step and send the men with guns to drag any rioters off to jail? The men with guns have to be paid either way, but the rioters don't.
Actually people do have to be paid, jail is extremely expensive and even at the minimal level you still have to provide the main basics in that of shelter, food and clean water. You're just spending it in a crueler and less direct manner.
And no, "just kill them then" doesn't work because like before, they are our families and loved ones. My crazy aunt when given a little bit of support is fine enough, she's not a danger who needs to be locked up for our safety. So why would my family we want to do that to her?
My father would be appalled if the solution was to lock his sister up in jail, he still loves her as family. We would much prefer that she can get the basic needs without such cruelty, because we are not psychopaths who want to lock up our family and concentration camp our elderly.
Likewise I have an uncle (well great uncle) on my mom's side who is developmentally disabled. When left alone during the day while his caretaker (another extended family member) is at work he is fine. He can press the button on the TV to turn it on which is kept on his favorite channel. He can take a frozen meal from the fridge and use the microwave by pushing the +30 seconds button a few times but is forbidden from using the other buttons cause he'll set the time wrong and leave the microwave on for hours cause he inputted wrong and won't think about it, and he can use the bathroom on his own. But he is a man who needs great support. And it is helped immensely that he is on SSI, SNAP and has a housing voucher for shared rent despite his inability to work. It's an immense drain on the family member still, but it makes life far better off than it would have been before. We've diffused the responsibility for my uncle, and many people like him, throughout society.
And just like before, we are not psychopaths. I like my uncle, he's slow and dimwitted and can't hold a good conversation but he's one of those types who is lighthearted and cheerful anyway. I don't want him in a concentration camp or a jail because I am not a sicko. And yet if it wasn't for our family and the support systems from society, I don't know what would happen with him. He'd probably be exploited and used by criminals and end up clumsily going around trying to steal food or something until he did get locked up. Which again, is something I do not want if it can be helped cause I love the guy. And I do not want that for other people like him.
I want people like my crazy aunt and dimwitted disabled uncle to have a free life without torture if it can be helped. So does most of society, modern nations all around the world have welfare programs to help support people like them. And it can be helped, and it has been helped.
It is scaling incredibly poorly and proving a considerable dead weight. Especially when any milquetoast charitable gesture like expanding Disability coverage or refugee status inevitably ends up getting abused to the enth degree as it naturally snowballs.
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For almost all societies, there was always some form of welfare for the poor. The amount varied, but the only time I can think of when a society either showed complete indifference or actual facilitation of harming the poor was when the poor was an outgroup. St. Domingue being an example.
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There's tons of violent crime throughout history, the US itself started as a violent crime. There have been civil wars and revolutions across the world regarding civil and fiscal inequalities, and that's still putting aside that crime is down significantly since the past too.. And keep in mind, a lot of things we would deem as violent crime nowadays wouldn't have even counted in the past like capturing and enslaving others, beating children hard for not working enough in the field, dueling being a primary way to settle disputes, the honor killings. Or things that might have been technically crimes but were overlooked, like the lynchings. When 11 Italians were mass lynched future president Teddy Roosevelt referred to it as "rather a good thing" and journalist editorials while many might have hem and hawed a little often would openly support the lynchers. Or how about the many many many violent strikes and riots by worker unions. It's extremely rare for an American union to beat up the scabs nowaday isn't it? Mass widespread violence was pretty normal of the past.
Also of course one big issue here is in the inequality itself. People who don't know there can be a better life are going to be more content with what they have. There's a reason why North Korea goes to extreme extents to prevent the average citizen from seeing western wealth, because even they understand their regime is rockier and less stable if people know there is better if a revolution happens. The more people can improve their situation, the more likely they are to take action. North Korea has to constantly suppress the people to prevent revolution, meanwhile the idea of another revolution now in the US is laughable because there's not much to earn and a lot to lose. They don't have to suppress it with force, most Americans just don't want to revolt.
Imagine you get offered a service, you pay 100k now and in 40 years they'll pay you 50k a year. If in 40 years they change their mind and don't pay, they scammed you. They broke their promise. While pension services don't work exactly like that, it's a similar logic. Workers are essentially promised their pension schemes in exchange for the money stolen from their paychecks, so when the time comes they have in fact earned it. It is a scam if they are not able to collect.
Normally when this happens you get to sue them for breach of contract and you win, that gets you a piece of paper and if they have money left over you get it taken from them and given to you. However if they are out of money you just end up with a piece of paper and nothing else, the government doesn't then increase taxation on everyone else in society just to fund your agreement and make sure you are made whole. The fact that there was a promise by the other side and they broke their promise doesn't mean shit.
Something similar can be said to apply to pensions, now you may say that as long as the government itself isn't bankrupt you should get your money because pensions come from a government subsidiary and the government can always increase tax to get enough money to pay for its obligation (or just turn on the printer), but that's not how contracts work either, if you have a contract with B which is a subsidiary of A and then B goes bankrupt in normal situations you don't get to recover from A, you're just out of luck. Similarly with pensions. A government can very easily go "Our pensions department will have X% of government earnings each year, funded from general taxation, if the total liabilities are higher than this then everyone takes a haircut, end of".
In this case though it is the government itself that made the promise. And it made that promise while taxing you, but then it tries to say it can't tax others later? It's perfectly fair to call BS on that. We don't expect government to fulfill the private promises of a private person, but we should be able to expect it to fulfill its own promises. Who wants a country where the main dominant power structure keeps rug pulling its own citizens?
Which promise are you talking about? In most countries the payouts from state run pension schemes have some hard lower boundaries but are otherwise subject to the whims of the legislature and the courts. Few systems keep a personalized account that creates concrete contractual financial claims.
Even disregarding that, the promise you're asking the state to keep is not the same promise that was in effect when the Boomers were young. You can look up how much of an average worker's wage bill went to elderly welfare in e.g. 1950, 1980 or today and notice a steep increase, the idea that what's being asked of today's workers is somehow equivalent to what the current recipients paid in is ludicrous.
The legal technicalities surrounding what beneficiaries are actually entitled to and the financial realities of what they're getting compared with what they paid in aren't relevant to the discussion. Bring that argument up to conservative retirees who will bitch endlessly about all the handouts "the blacks" get and you'll see them get defensive about their Social Security checks. "That's different; I paid into that for 40 years!" Same with Medicaid.
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Which is why I said there's room to negotiate the terms. The UK's triple lock is stupid. Retirement ages need to be upped around the world as people are healthier and able to work at older ages (the general promise at least for social security was an insurance for old age, so only when old age is crippling to most should it apply). Etc other examples of ways we could better the system without having to break the promise.
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If a subsidiary of a government department or a contractor that's 100% owned by the government (we have this in the UK for certain IT and Software development functions) makes a promise and then the subsidiary fails due to lack of cash that doesn't leave the rest of the government liable and you may very well end up out of luck.
Plus we already have the government rug pulling its citizens literally every year every budget. This is something that isn't unique to a specific country or situation.
The tax collector can't count as an unrelated branch of government that doesn't have to pay you because when the government was making the promise, the government claimed that the tax collector was closely related enough to fulfill the promise. If the government now says "it's just the subsidiary who has to pay you, and the tax collector is not related to the subsidiary", the government is contradicting what it originally said about the relationship.
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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.
Already being done. They're talking about means-testing Social Security and Medicare, and proposals to tax away the houses of those older people who have paid for them are a dime a dozen.
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They did pay for themselves, they paid taxes for 40-50 years (some began working at 15 and didn't stop till 65!) to "buy into" the system.
See exactly, your complaint is theirs. "I'm afraid I won't get the due I've been told I'll get in exchange for my taxes now". It's just that you personally don't want that potential risk so you want the rug pull to happen earlier to your parents generations.
Which is why really, we should have been ratcheting up the retirement age more as people have been able to work into old age more often. The US is able to get away with this way easier than the typical pension countries even since the idea of social security was always a buy in into an insurance for people who can not work any longer whether that be from infirmity or seniority. But the latter especially is far less crippling nowadays so it's far less of a rug pull to ratchet the age requirements up. But pushing up age requirements upsets the current workers too! The 50 year old is thinking "I gotta work for 18 more years and not 15? That's bullshit" and gets angry because again everyone knows they gonna get old
Not really in most cases. The average person's tax burden is barely covering their normal consumption of government largesse, especially if they're low enough income to receive governmental support. This whole shambolic 'but I put my $10k a year in for 30 years, gimme $50k a year from 55 till 90' side of things doesn't balance, especially when a large chunk of people are immediately getting most of their contributions back in other social spending.
I know that the current system is a gigantic unsustainable ball of stupidity that's only semi-tenable since pensioners have huge power in Democracies due to lack of else to do with their time. That goes for both senior generations and my own. It needs to be cut down to stop literally collapsing most social democracies.
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No, they paid for the people receiving benefits when they were working. They didn't pay for themselves. Now workers are paying for them.
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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 ad 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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