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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?
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.
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.
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".
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